a barista story

Wasup everyone, it's been a very slow summer for me and I have really struggled to keep things moving. Better days are coming and I feel positive about what's ahead of me; hoping to update here more frequently.

I think it's around the one year anniversary of my opening this blog, so I will take this sentence right here to celebrate! I haven't yet posted any fiction, but there's a first time for everything. This is a short story kinda thing I put together, heavily influenced by my first job in the specialty coffee industry. Enjoy :^)

5:40 am, Wednesday morning

I awake with the all-too-familiar sound of my alarm. Too tired to feel excited, but something like a tranquil acceptance is radiating from my innermost self. Flick the light on; can't risk falling back asleep. I let out a groan, checking my phone. goodnight text from her. love react. send a good morning message back. Flip back over onto my stomach, arm dangling off the bed, fingers brushing the floor. Gotta get vertical. This has always been my problem.

6:19 am

I grab a banana and speed out of my apartment, keeping a brisk pace to catch the bus on time. I know it's actually going to be four minutes late, but today could be the day the schedule isn't lying. The city is still grey with the residue of nightfall. The air is brisk, the traffic is sparse, lights on as a warning sign to potential prey. Perhaps the roads are waking up too, preparing themselves for the scores of commuters soon to come.

I'm doubled over at the bus stop, breathing deeply and grasping both my Achilles tendons with my palms. gotta stay limber. feet spread wide, push from the hips. feel that tension. exhale. arm circles. neck circles. I enter my body and activate the systems check protocol. All seems to be okay. Hungry, but that's nothing new. That banana only seemed to make it more apparent. Here comes the bus.

7:07 am

I punch in the elevator code without thinking. I wrote it down on day one, as if I wouldn't download it to my memory after four uses that very day. Now I’m in the basement. It smells like sewage; must be cleaning the grease traps again. Crack open the chest freezer. Frozen biscuits and scones, sorted into trays for bake-off. I fill a huge bucket with ice. It’s starting to get warmer outside; lots of iced lattes are going to be carried out of the door today. I’ll have to come back down here for more ice. Listening to the hum of the machinery, I revel in the underbelly of our beautiful beast. Our beast which I have helped to raise with care and intention. 

8:53 am

“Every last appliance needs Bluetooth connectivity and a touch screen,” chuckles Erin. “How else would you want your vibrator to function?” She is standing at the counter to my side, taking in her cappuccino and coyly passing her tongue across her upper lip between sips. Just about every morning, Erin passes ten or so minutes chatting with whoever is on the bar as she waits for her breakfast sandwich to heat up. Some might find it distracting, but she has delicately worked her way into trust with all of us. The fact that she’s the handywoman around the building and a pleasant conversationalist helps as well. “Yeah, it’s like we don’t even want to understand how our tools work for us anymore. At least with physical parts, you might accidentally learn something when you’re troubleshooting or repairing,” I reply.

For the last thirty minutes I've been in a groove pulling shots, measuring syrups, icing drinks, pouring onion hearts into cortados. I remember being intimidated by the espresso machine when I first began. Now I am piloting this $15,000 machine like it’s the sedan I learned to drive on in high school. Order after order comes through, and I am able to dispatch one after the next without any noticeable change in my demeanor. I used to get so panicked. Gotta head back into the commissary for more milk. Dave is in there with five giant mixing bowls, each filled with flour and buttermilk. It’s biscuit day, and a metal album by Gojira is playing from his speaker. It’s always a nice respite to get away from the bar and out of the public eye, even if just for a moment. We exchange:

“Hey”
“What’s up”
“I’m going milk mode”
“Nice”

and just like that I am back into the fray. 

11:29 am

I’m waiting for the smell. That’s how you know the sugar is done caramelizing. Color can be deceiving, but the smell will never lie. A timer goes off: someone’s biscuit is warm. Plate, knife, napkin, butter, jam. Walk it. New customer at the front. Quad-shot iced vanilla latte for the road. It’s just me and Hunter today, so for the last hour I have been buzzing around the workspace while she takes the lead on espresso.

“I’ll prep the shots, you take syrup.”
“Heard. I need a run on this featured spro. . . they’re uhhh . . . window seat on the portside, green hoodie.”
“On it.”

This is the flow of the day. Heating up pastries, stacking up saucers, restocking to-go cups, all while new people stream in through the door and that which will become the caramel syrup simmers on the hot plate. Managing three or four or five objectives, keeping tabs open, receiving new tasks, being patient, finding your moment to drink some water. It’s a miracle we can keep this up from 8 until 4. Must be the caffeine.

The caramel is cooling on the counter now, and I take a moment to scan the room and appraise the customers. A family that’s clearly on vacation sips on the couch. A handful of med students and remote-worker regulars have their laptops and notebooks sprawled out over the study tables. Some of the office workers from upstairs are meeting by the window. These people dress well, adorn themselves with jewelry and designer glasses, have new airpods and macbooks. They appear to know exactly what they're doing, where they’re going, and are being rewarded by the world for it. Could I ever be like them? Day by day, it’s hard not to feel like I am barely skating by. I’m tired of buying canned goods at Aldi, of turning down travel plans with friends, of having to tell myself no in a thousand small ways. On some level, it must be a personal shortcoming; I clearly am not organized well enough. I don’t have a plan for the next two years of my life, let alone five or ten. Our lives are the cumulative sum of our decisions, after all.

1:02 pm

The spotify playlist named ‘soft bossa nova piano’ twinkles throughout the back seating area. Since it remains sparsely populated throughout the day, this is a great spot to go while on break. As usual, I’ve brought a meager lunch today. A simple turkey sandwich, an apple and some pretzels. Something that will give me energy to finish the day, but certainly nothing to fill me up entirely. I suppose it’s better to avoid that groggy full stomach feeling on the job.

I spend essentially all of my thirty minutes cycling between bluesky and discord, mixing in a couple games of pokemon pocket. These apps have a hold on me; during this short window of freedom it’s all I can think to do. The latent anxiety in my mind, usually suppressed by more immediate needs, creeps to the fore: Is this what a social life is meant to look like? Will I look back on these moments as time well spent? But what else am I supposed to do? Perhaps in this era of self-optimization I have placed too much pressure upon myself to ‘deliver’ a meaningful break. Perhaps it’s fine to just zone out and like some shitposts for a bit. Why am I so stressed about the long-bending arc of my life at this one particular lunch? Then again, it’s hard to argue with the screen time data.

2:49 pm

Jesse is coming to visit for the last hour or so today. He’s gonna check our espresso recipe and talk to us about dialing the new coffees for this season. It’s been a pretty tiring day, but it’s always a treat to joke around with him now that things are slower. Today he won’t stop gushing about how much he loves Cyberpunk 2077: “Yeah, it’s riddled with bugs and will shit its pants once in a while, but the story and the setting really draws me in and scratches a certain itch. I was so devastated with the ending my character got; it was gorgeous.” I’ll never play it and frankly don’t really care, but I like to encourage his enthusiasm. 

During our conversation I’m jotting down some notes that read more like seminar titles than anything actionable:

intention in each cup
what is the bean’s purpose?
evoking the beauty of a roast

As woo-woo as it sounds, I can’t shake the feeling I get nerding out about brewing coffee. Maybe it’s because it gives me something new to become an insufferable snob about. Anyone can pull a shot of espresso, but a true craftsman will meticulously hone one. Grading varietals, processing, extraction ratios. This world goes so much deeper than most give it credit for. Does stressing about any of these minutiae really matter in the end? Probably not. Jesse tells us that all coffees taste 90 percent the same; all of our work is just to optimize the final ten percent of the flavor profile. Maybe it doesn’t matter, but I’d like to think that there’s something worth doing within that ten percent.

4:22 pm

I’m finishing today the same as always, mopping the floors. I find it’s a really useful way to wind down and prepare the cafe anew for tomorrow morning. After we cut the music and lights, I snag a small brown bag I’ve set aside: within it is a day-old blueberry scone we had to pull from the pastry case. It’s a small consolation for a nine hour shift on my feet, but even so it brings me a quiet sense of satisfaction. On the bus home, I catch up with the posts and texts I missed from friends and stare aimlessly with my fellow citizens. Depleted, I arrive at my bed, collapsing to take a moment to breathe.