Bitter Melodies, Turning Your Orbit Around

I drank my first cup of coffee when I was 13 years old, while volunteering in a long-term care facility across the street from the video store and the good Chinese takeout place. Like all lifelong obsessions, coffee was an idea introduced to me by someone with an imperceptible aura I was desperate to figure out. Someone who seemed like they had it all figured out, despite also being a 13-year-old volunteering by force as punishment for bad behaviour. Truth be told, I never minded going there. Old people played cards, and talked frankly about their feelings on all things, and it felt refreshing. I have always wanted to be many things, and one of them was old. I liked the simplicity of the life. Wheel out to the spot in the morning, with your mug of coffee and an itch to play. A crib board for every table, and for every table a crib board.

My first coffee was poured from the spout of a steel urn into a styrofoam cup, the kind that squeaks and crunches in your hand when you touch it that I’m certain was a little toxic. I followed the directions laid out by the child who gave them to me, hoping that if my hands followed the same routes as theirs, they would have an answer for me at the end. Two cubes of sugar from the white box in the cupboard, and enough creamer to turn the bitter blackness of the coffee into something smoother. You want it to look like caramel, they said, and I believed them more than I trusted my own taste.

That first cup was fucking terrible, but it was always going to be. There is no 13-year-old in the world who comes out the gate with a taste for coffee. The subtle tones of bittern beauty is an appreciation that accrues slowly over time. It was a bad cup, and I pretended it was the greatest thing in the world because I needed it to be. I needed something new and perfect to connect me to the world, and I watched as all the other kids around me pretended to like it too. A collective performance of age and taste, the bad kids sent to the old folks home who drank coffee and slung cards with old men who talked about old days, and old women who talked about old men.

I was a coffee drinker now, and I was 13 years old. An affectation I forced onto myself in a vanity-driven effort to seem taller and older than my stature. I was reverse engineering the idea of a self, sketched from the outline of some other kid's life. How well they must know themselves, I thought, they already knew how they take their coffee.

The next year, my uncle taught me to drink a proper coffee — bitter, sharp, and black — while he taught me how to play crib, and I’m no longer sure I liked that either. It still tasted terrible, but I was so young, and bitterness wasn’t meant to be comfortably at home in my body yet.

Regardless of how I forced coffee into my life, or how much I was confused about my feelings on the flavour, my body began to crave it. The jolt of that first sip, wincing at the sharpness on the tongue. The burnt and bitter flavours that emerged from the steel urns and styrofoam cups I poured it into. I thought coffee was supposed to taste a little bad. Like cigarettes. Like blood. I liked how it hurt, because I wanted the pain to be transformative.

Coffee, I believed, you could only buy in the lobbies and waiting rooms of the lower class. Gas stations and tire repair waiting rooms, or for a quarter in a vending machine in the hospital. I believed it always tasted a little bad because this is what we deserved. That because we couldn’t afford some nicer, bolder beverage, all we could do was drink our bitter notes. As if there were a price on everything, even flavour.

While it’s impossible to know if I ever liked coffee in my teen years, it’s true that I eventually learned to love it. I loved the sharpness of it, how even in my most languid state, a cup I bought at the gas station could heal me. I learned to love it black and dark and bitter, and I loved that it made me a little bitter too. Hardened and old before my time. I liked that it hurt a little because I always wanted it to be the thing that changed me. This is a warning sign, if there ever was one, in dazzling neon. But I didn’t know that yet.

In my later teens years, I drank the coffee at Tim Hortons because it was a place to gather and commune with people my age, the same the old folks home had been. Friends gathered there, drank shitty coffee and ate better donuts while we waited for the one kid we knew who looked old enough to buy alcohol to arrive. Their coffee is the worst I’ve ever had, and I thought that was by design.

In the years since, I have developed a taste for coffee that has grown alongside my perception of its station. The coffee shop was an idea that shifted in the 90s, and by the opening of the new millennium it became something new. Suddenly coffee had flavour notes, it could be rich and bold in one cup, sweet or tart in another. It came from foreign countries, picked raw by hands earning too low a wage, then roasted locally to perfection and a higher coast. The smell of this new, fresh coffee could light up the darkest room. I learned about espresso in my 20s, later than most, because I was still buying coffee at the gas station or the tire shop and all the other places people who looked and worked like me belonged.

Pausing only to say that if you are ever in my hometown of Whitehorse, Yukon, I will tell you to pop into the Midnight Sun Coffee Roasters. It’s my favourite place in town, a coffee shop and roaster owned by my dear friend, Katya McQueen. It’s tucked away now, on a side street across from the pet food store by the Walmart, close to the banks of the Yukon River, but that hasn’t always been the case. There was a time when the shop was right next to the glass shop my dad used to own and where I first learned the trade, but it burned down in the middle of the night. I was away at trade school the year it happened, and when I returned I could still smell the coffee in the air despite the source being ash on the ground.

I don’t smoke anymore, but I will indulge when I go home and visit Katya. We will sneak out back and blast darts in the back lot, where she’ll fill me in on all the good local gossip. Stories about familiar faces with less familiar names traded like currency in a small town. Then she’ll make me a coffee I’m not allowed to order or pay for, and I know that I just have to trust the process.

Years ago now, in a former life, she grew sick of making me the same Americano every day. At random intervals she added a compounding interest of espresso shots into my well-seasoned to-go mug, just to see if I would notice or become sickened by the sharp bitter taste. She hoped this would force me to want to try something new. Something that didn’t hurt so much when I drank it, that could change me in some new way. When it was up to six shots she asked if I was okay, and when I replied I was good enough she laughed and told me what had been happening. There’s enough espresso in there to kill a man, she said, and maybe it’s just that I was never supposed to be one that I didn’t die right then and there.

I have been addicted to coffee since I was 13, which makes this bitter dalliance a three decades long affair. I started drinking booze not long after I started drinking coffee, and in it, I found the obsessive need for something that would eventually try to kill me, or rather push me to the edge of wanting it to. It’s no surprise that my entrenched love of strong black coffee led me down the alleyways of whiskey and scotch. I learned at a young age how beautiful bitter can be, how delicious the blood on your lips can become when the blade is so expertly crafted.

The 7th anniversary of my sobriety is coming soon, and in those years my love of coffee has rooted deep into the soil of me. I bought a fancy drip machine when I had the money to treat myself, justifying every dollar as money not spent on booze and all the intoxicating ephemera of drinking. We have an espresso machine too, gifted by my parents, and a coffee bar set up with kettles and precise tools and preferred filters. I buy coffee bean with specific flavour profiles, grind them to specific textures for specific needs. I carefully weigh each scoop for our coffee machine, and rotate a gooseneck kettle in slow, steady movements when making pour overs. I watch videos on espresso techniques, write notes on draw times and weight calculations. It is an obsession, like all addictions are, that gives me a system to lose myself in. It can be so perfect, if only I find the elusive answers hidden in tasting notes and flavour profiles.

Sometimes, perfection is not what I need. Sometimes, coffee is not supposed to be this perfectly measured thing. It should still hurt a little from time to time, cause the body to recoil at first sip, and beg you to keep going. A cup poured with more need than desire from the spout of an urn on a counter that was brewed on some secret date in the mysterious past. It should taste fucking terrible, and cost a quarter or a song. It should taste like blood on your lips, beautiful and sharp. It should taste like the lobby of a tire repair shop, and it should sound like an impact drill removing rusted lug nuts in the distance somewhere. It should taste like a crib board by a window in the low morning sun, and it should smell so perfect simmering in a styrofoam cup that squeaks in your fingers.

Coffee is my longest addiction, and one that I am happy to still hold on to. I wanted it to make me into someone in the days that I was no one at all, and after all these years it worked. I wanted it to be something so perfect and beautiful, and I wanted it to hurt a little. It’s important that I hold on to both of these singular truths, that sometimes good things present as a challenge. I didn’t like coffee at first, but I did love it, and that was enough to cherish it forever. I wanted to know why drowning it in sugar and off-brand creamer wasn’t appealing, and why it appealed more in its base state of bitter darkness. I have grown in taste over time, and so too has my approach to coffee, but I have never forgotten that it doesn’t always need to be perfect. That sometimes life and all things are better, even just a little, when it hurts.

If you like this, consider checking out my book, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman.