I learned to drink coffee at the Denny’s on Noland Road, just off I-70. We’d close down the McDonald’s where I worked, take our meager paychecks plus the money we skimmed from the registers, and congregate in a circle booth drinking endless cups of coffee under a lenticular cloud of cigarette smoke. There was nothing else to do at two in the morning in suburban Kansas City besides chip in on a basket of seasoned fries, wet compressed straw wrappers to watch them writhe in ashtrays, and drink hot, black motor oil.
I refused to drink coffee with sugar or cream; if I was going to learn to enjoy coffee, I’d drink it on its own terms—besides, people who put sugar in their coffee were pussies. (Now, in my amasculine turpitude, I often enjoy a splash of milk.) Back in those days every other guy at the table, too shy or ugly to coax any tail out of our grease-stained female coworkers, would while away the pre-dawn with a pen and notebook pursuing capital-T Truth. Invariably, the writers among us—which didn’t include me, as I was going to change the world by stealing the graphical style of Yoshitaka Amano and reproduce it with less talent—would write about coffee and cigarettes, imbuing them with some sort of cultural significance beyond the fact that they are two carriers of drugs that facilitate both wakefulness and the desire to be chatty.
Which means somewhere out there in an alternate reality is a leather-bound notebook that should have held my assault on Fortress Meaning of Coffee (next to a stick figure humping a goat). Let me tell you why coffee—even the scalding devil’s spunk of truck stop pots—is a precious, positive force.
No one without hope ever drinks coffee. If you put a cup to your lips, you’ve made a tacit acknowledgment that you expect life to get just a little bit better. If you’re hung over, coffee is the first, scrambling step towards level. On the long road, coffee is the assumption that you’ll make a few more miles. Coffee is the signal to an antagonist world that you’re ready to stand up for one more day.
No other liquid, not even our Dread Lord Beer, carries with it so much implicit optimism. If beer is heaven, coffee is faith.
The next time you’re forced to choke back swill in lieu of a proper cup of hand-wrought coffee in full bouquet, try not to think of what you’re missing; instead appreciate the unadorned truth in your hand, a molten, metallic distillation of hope.
14 Responses to “The Truth of Diner Coffee”
- 1 Trackback on Dec 16th, 2006 at 3:16 am
- 2 Trackback on Dec 17th, 2006 at 3:31 pm
we did the same thing as KC high-schoolers, except at Sanderson’s, near the Osco on Main st. 24 hour good times. Giant cinnamon rolls & black coffee after band practice.
Truly philosophical, Joel. Perhaps even modestly existential!
Man, great post….the way it started, I feared it was going to be one of those “when I worked at Denny’s, guess what we used to do to the coffee?” posts.
Love this line…you could/should literally put it on a t-shirt and sell those puppies:
No one without hope ever drinks coffee. If you put a cup to your lips, you’ve made a tacit acknowledgment that you expect life to get just a little bit better.
holy shit, it’s like your talking -to me-
Laureate
Here’s a post that really hit home.
For a year and a half, 5 nights a week, my friends and I found ourselves at Denny’s drinking coffee, smoking, and talking for about 3-6 hours a night.
I say a year and a half because after that I started working there and was there everyday for at least 8 hours. That Denny’s was my proverbial home, and I still feel most comfortable, anytime things aren’t going well, in my booth with my former co-workers having coffee.
And for the love of all things holy, make that into a shirt.
Along with:
“If beer is heaven, coffee is faith.”
I don’t drink a lot of coffee or even drink it every day. But I’ve always had a similar philosophy about drinking it on its own terms. If I can’t handle it straight out of the pot, then I don’t want to drink it. From time to time I might enjoy a fancy pants coffee-based drink at a coffee shop but by and large, I don’t see the point of frou frouing it up as standard practice.
After reading this post, all I can say is wow. Never have truer words been spoken:
“If beer is heaven, coffee is faith.”
I have nothing to say, but “Yay! A KC reference!”
“If beer is heaven, coffee is faith.”
I fifth that one.
I’ve put some time in at a Denny’s as well. At one point, I couldn’t remember a single day in the past 5 years (Except for the rare xmas when they closed) that I didn’t spend at least a few hours in that place. I had figured the number of cups of coffee I had consumed in the 20,000’s. I knew the employees, they knew me. They preferred me and my crew to most of the drunken slobs because we tipped relatively well and weren’t as obnoxious as the drunken idiots.
After I got married (and moved out of my parents house /sheepish), I spent a lot less time there. I learned a bit about the “finer” coffees of the world. Since then, I’ve been back a few times to partake in the Denny’s coffee I once loved and let me tell you, it is fucking awful. But as Joel points out – it is still coffee and the blood of life.
Here is a hell yeah for KC. joel, i know exactly where the denny’s you talk about, i drive by there often and most of the time wherenever me and my friend done partying we get ourselves a booth and drink coffee there.