COFFEE'S MORE THAN JUST A DRUG -- IT'S A LIFELONG COMPANION
By Josh Kornbluth

When I was 4, my mother started giving me double espressos every morning. She said it would put hair on my chest. As I entered puberty and began growing hair not only on my chest but also on my back, ears and toes, she thought of switching me over to decaf -- but by then, it was too late. I was always going to be hairy, and I was always going to drink coffee.

She didn't seem to mind too much. In hooking me on caffeine so early, she knew she had provided her socially maladroit son with a lifelong companion of complexity and depth. And perhaps even more important, now her pot stash was safe. I mean, what could any outlaw high offer that could come close to my coffee buzz? Why take a trip when you could sip?

My father's friend Marshall Garcia had a fondness for Medaglia D'Oro brand coffee, and would spoon three, four, five teaspoons of sugar into my cup while advising me to be more relaxed. "Don't be so high-strung," he'd say, alternating big gulps of grounds-choked coffee with hearty puffs from an unfiltered cigarette. "You worry too much. That's why you're already growing a beard at 12."

As a college freshman -- now fully bearded in the manner of Grizzly Adams or one of the many Bulgarian terrorists of that period -- I staked out a table near the entrance to the Student Center, hopeful that my hirsuteness and my styrofoam cup of coffee would mark me as an incoming bohemian and draw to me all the poets and revolutionaries on campus. The plan succeeded. Unfortunately, in 1976 there were only two other bohemians at Princeton -- and one of them was a closet neoconservative. Throughout the school year, the three of us spent many hours sipping our coffee at the Student Center and bemoaning our isolation at this bastion of privilege.

"Did you know," said Pierre one day, "that Ralph Nader used to have to get his coffee here because they didn't allow Jews into the eating clubs in those days?"

"I thought he was Lebanese," Edie said.

"Close enough," Pierre said bitterly. He said most things bitterly.

I nodded thoughtfully and took another sip of cold coffee. From early in the semester, I took to drinking my coffees with excruciating slowness, to the point where people would actually remark on it. Pierre once suggested that it wasn't the coffee I loved, it was its proximity -- the kind of razor-thin distinction that a philosophy major is wont to make before finally giving in to his parents and going pre-business.

"Josh's dilemma," Edie said, "is that he wants to possess the coffee but at the same time doesn't want to lose it." (She would stay in philosophy.)

The truth is, I wanted transcendence -- and I got it several times a day in that tingly caffeine high, starting on my tongue and then spreading through my chest before somehow arriving at my flaccid eyelids and snapping them wide open. Coffee was the only drug I needed -- the end-all and be-all of pick-me-ups, as far as I was concerned.

My roommate, Raoul, felt differently. A double major in comp lit and religion (he's now a corporate attorney), Raoul was a speed freak who felt about coffee the way Greg Lemond might feel about tricycles. To put it plainly, he thought I was a wuss.

"Ten cups of coffee in this tiny pill!" he'd admonish, popping one.

But it was like those "thick, nutritious" diet shakes that you were supposed to substitute for a full meal. I didn't just want the high -- I wanted the experience. A single cup of coffee -- especially at the rate I drank it -- promised hours and hours of ... well, not much activity, perhaps, but definitely lots of time spent in what I liked to think of as contemplation.

And besides, I had another reason to avoid speed: My father had been hooked on it for years, and though he had eventually quit, that addiction had been held accountable for his numerous health problems in later life. One beautiful thing about coffee was that it wasn't really bad for you! It tasted so good, and worked so well, that it seemed it should be bad for you -- if not as a carcinogen, then at least as a mild killer of sperm or something -- but study after study (probably designed and carried out by lab workers jazzed on coffee) showed this simply not to be the case. A coffee-drinking mouse was a happy, healthy, punctual mouse.

The tension between me and Raoul reached a crescendo one weekend when, after weeks of research on the various pros and cons involved, he dropped acid. By now his speed habit had pushed him so far ahead in his schoolwork (he'd written papers that hadn't been assigned yet) that he needed to fill the long days with a totally new level of experience. He pleaded with me to join him -- if not as a fellow acid-dropper, then at least as his straight Boswell. When I demurred, he angrily accused me of timidity -- of being Bohemian Lite, quick to grow a beard but afraid to explore.

I tried to laugh it off, but I could tell he had a point. I had settled into a routine and was loath to depart from it. I wasn't just centered; I was Student Centered. As I mulled over my lifestyle that weekend, it struck me that I wanted to get high but not too high -- that I had a terror, especially, of going so far away in my mind that I'd lose myself. Having abandoned my family and -- increasingly -- my classes, I was in danger of losing faith in my own existence. And yet, by the end of each day, with the setting sun streaming in and six or seven half-filled styrofoam cups arranged in front of me on the table, I could almost imagine this cold-coffee cluster to be my own personal Stonehenge -- a mystical configuration that connected me with the eternal.

They say college doesn't prepare you for adulthood, but in my case -- though, OK, I didn't quite graduate -- I think it did. During those nearly four years, I transformed a previously haphazard approach to coffee-drinking into a solid routine. In the process, I unconsciously prepared myself for a sedentary life in which most of my adventures would be internal -- and, just as important, reversible. I would rarely fly off the handle or go over the edge. I would never quite reach the astral plane. What I would do -- each day, several times a day -- is wake up.

Right now, as I type this, a San Francisco Giants mug half-filled with cold coffee sits at my right elbow. In a few hours, there will be another. And then another. It's one of the happy constants that sustain me.

And all that body hair keeps me warm in the winter.

Source: Salon.com