The Truth of Diner Coffee

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.