Black Diamonds

I started drinking coffee in high school. I drank it with milk and sugar, like my grandmother. My early associations with coffee were not positive: when my grandmother and mother took the kids out to eat and ordered coffee at the end of the meal, it meant we had to sit at the table and not interrupt.

But I probably started drinking coffee because it was there, and because of books, and because I was a nighthawk. I used to sit at the Drum Hill Dunkin Donuts when it was just an L-shaped bar and it was still legal to smoke inside. I would sit quietly in the corner and read Jean Genet and smoke cigarettes and listen to the people around me talk. I used to write down snatches of what they said and would use them as lines in short stories. Even in high school, as soon as I could drive, I would drink coffee late into the night.

A cafe opened up in Westford called Browse and Beans. I wanted to the place to be great. Books and coffee were already associated in my mind when I was a teenager. But they kept a small shelf of junky romance novels in the corner, and the cafe was usually cluttered up with baby strollers. It was decorated like a woman's dress from the nineteenth century. I wanted bearded old men reading Gogol. I didn't want Christmas ornaments and plastic letters of the alphabet. I was young then, you see. But it seemed to be the only place around. And, on cold autumn nights when there was no place else to go, and it was nearly empty inside, it really wasn't so bad. I drank a lot of mugs there and probably had crushes on some of the girls working behind the counter.

*

In college, I'm almost certain it was my friend Dan Moran who got me to start drinking coffee black. In the fog of my memory, the conversation went something like this: he explained that there are milk type drinks, which are thick, and water type drinks, and coffee was a water type drink. It was pure, like a crystal. It didn't need milk. I doubt this is what he actually said to me, but that's how I remembered it. I don't think I'd known anyone who drank black coffee then, and, the way he explained it to me, he made coffee seem very "of the earth" -- diamond-like and primitive.

Perhaps I drank a few more cups after that with milk and sugar, but only a few.

*

I went to a liberal college called Goddard. It's located in Vermont and we had no grades. I remember one winter, bringing a hot thermos of black coffee into the library and gently pouring myself a cup after pushing a sofa chair up to a window in the back corner of the building. It was snowing out. I opened up Moby-Dick and read it, with full attention, for the first time, and I never wanted that afternoon to end, or the snow to stop, or the book to finish, or the cup to run dry. Ever since then, whales show up in the limits of my dreams: white fire on black fire. And that corner of the building shows up in my dreams, too, where I once sank peacefully into the cushions and meditated on the blood of the whale.