Through The Grinder

Blend, she did.

Still…it was five in the a.m.

“Madame, tell me again why you called?”

“The Blend has been mentioned in the papers, dear, all of them.”

“In connection to what?”

“A suicide.”

“What is it with New York 1, running the same stories, like, twenty-four times in twenty-four hours?”

My Jersey Girl daughter, Joy, was still adjusting to the array of trivialities that characterized Manhattan life. Just before eleven o’clock, she crossed the Blend’s sun-washed, wood-plank floor on her stacked black boots and ordered her usual double tall vanilla latte.

Current conversation topic at the coffeehouse counter — Basic Cable’s Channel 1.

I must have heard thousands of these discussions in my time managing the coffeehouse — the eccentricities of cabbies, bad Broadway shows, sucky bands at CBGB, Time Out’s cover stories, film crews that close down entire blocks, trying to sleep through relentless ambulance sirens, kicking cars that block pedestrian crosswalks, the best slice below Fourteenth, Barney’s warehouse sales, the end of porno on Forty- Second, kamikaze bike messengers, the real meaning of some Yiddish word, the difference — if any — among the Indian restaurants lining East Sixth, the New York Post’s Page Six, the precise contents of an egg cream. And, of course, rents, rents, apartments, and rents.

One of my best baristas and assistant managers, Tucker Burton, a lanky, floppy haired, gay playwright and actor, who also happened to believe he was the illegitimate son of Richard Burton, slid Joy’s drink across the slab of blueberry marble.

“Sweetie, don’t knock New York 1. What other town’s got a cable channel devoted to twenty-four hours of local coverage? Okay, so the stories repeat a lot, but you haven’t yawned till you’ve heard the fisherman’s weather in rural Louisiana. Lemme tell ya, swamp humidity levels aren’t pretty — or in the least interesting. Give me a ‘Subway Surfer Falls to His Death’ story repeated ten times any day.”

“That’s sort of morbid, Tucker,” I pointed out behind the coffee bar’s efficient, low-slung silver espresso machine.

(We actually had a three-foot-tall, bullet-shaped La Victoria Arduino espresso machine behind the counter, too. Strewn with dials and valves, the thing had been imported from Italy in the 1920s; but, like the eclectic array of coffee antiques decorating the shelves and fireplace mantel — including a cast iron two-wheeled grinding mill, copper English coffee pots, side-handled Turkish ibriks, a Russian samovar, and a French lacquered coffee urn — it was for show only.)

“Get over it, Clare,” said Kira Kirk, the eight-pound Sunday edition of the New York Times cradled in her slender arm like a newsprint infant. “What do you expect from a city of aberrant people?”

“Aberrant?” said Joy.

“Devious. Wayward. Offending. Sinning — if you will.” Kira was a crossword puzzle freak. “Where else would goofball kids think surfing on top of a subway car is something to do for kicks? If you ask me, they deserve to get squashed like bugs.”

As a coffeehouse manager, I’d seen many flavors of urban humanity pour through our front door. Kira was one of that group who embodied those lines from the poem “To the Coffeehouse”:

“You hate and despise human beings, and at the same time you can not be happy without them…”

A consultant of some sort, Kira was recently divorced, living alone, and approaching fifty. She’d started coming by the Blend pretty frequently about six weeks ago. When I first saw her, I thought she was a striking woman with refined features, beautiful cheekbones, and an admirable head of long dark hair. Lately, however, I noticed she’d started letting herself go. Her usually creamy skin looked blotchy and wind burned, her body looked far too thin, like she wasn’t eating enough, and she’d even stopped dyeing her hair. It now hung in a long gray braid down her oversized blue sweater.

Kira’s usual Sunday ritual was the Travel and Leisure section, then the crossword puzzle, accompanied by a grande cappuccino and a butter croissant. As a regular, she didn’t need to tell me her order. She just needed to appear.

I half-filled the stainless steel pitcher with whole milk, then opened the valve on the steam wand, warming the milk on the bottom and foaming it on top. Then I set aside the pitcher, ran the ravishingly oily espresso roast beans through the grinder, dosed the ground coffee into the portafilter cup, tamped it tightly down, and, after sweeping excess grinds from the rim, clamped its handle into place.

With the start of the extraction process, I checked the espresso’s viscosity, making sure it was oozing out of the machine (yes, it should ooze like warm honey — if it gushes out, the machine’s temperature and pressure is off, and it’s not espresso but a brewed beverage).

Our machine is semi-automatic, which means the barista (that’s me) must manually stop the water flow between eighteen and twenty-four seconds. Any longer and the beverage is over-extracted (bitter and burnt-tasting because the sugars have deteriorated). Any shorter and its under-extracted (weak, insipid, and completely uninspiring). Like a lot of things in life, making a great espresso depended on a number of variables — and timing was certainly one of them.

“It’s not a real channel anyway, is it — New York 1?” asked Joy. “I mean, it’s one of those community service deals, right?”

“Right. A tax write-off for Time Warner,” said one of my part-timers, Esther Best (shortened from Bestovasky by her grandfather), an NYU student with wild dark hair currently stuffed into a backward baseball cap. She was swabbing one of the few empty coral-colored marble tables with a wet towel. “I’ve got a friend whose sister works there. Apparently, they have a saying in the newsroom — you can get on New York 1, but you can’t get off.”

“What does that mean?” asked Joy.

Esther shrugged. “It’s because they run the stories so often. But you can’t blame them. Because of their budget, their staff is, like, miniscule, I mean compared to an outfit like CNN.”

Joy shrugged. “All I know is, my favorite segment is that one they repeat every hour in the morning, the one where they read you the headlines. It really rocks.”

“True,” said Esther. “I myself can’t get out of bed in the morning till I hear Weather on the Ones, and that hottie anchor Pat Kiernan reads me the headlines from all the New York papers.”

“Word,” said Joy.

(Eavesdropping on the college crowd, I’d long ago assumed, contextually, that word was vernacular hip-hop for “right on” or “and how” — or something along those lines.)

Tucker made a sour face. “You ladies think Kiernan’s a hottie? With that baby face and those insurance salesmen suits?”

“Sure,” said Joy. “He’s nerd hot.”

“Yeah, like Clark Kent or something,” agreed Esther, adjusting her trendy black-framed glasses.

My eyebrow rose. Joy’s last boyfriend was anything but “nerd hot.” With his long dark ponytail, olive complexion, barbed-wire tattoo, and flashing arrogant eyes, Mario Forte looked more like Antonio Banderas’s younger brother. My ex-husband, who shared many of these features, had hated him on sight.

So what happened to Mario? I was dying to ask my daughter. But I’d already read The 101 Ways to Embarrass Your Daughter and Piss Her Off for Decades handbook — and I figured it was better left unasked…for now.

Instead, I poured Kira’s freshly drawn espresso shots into a grande-size cup, slid in the steamed milk, topped it with foamed milk — and changed the subject. “So did Clark Kent Kiernan cover that suicide story this morning?”

“Are you kidding?” said Esther. “He was totally all over it. Pat doesn’t usually do the weekend anchor thing. He’s the weekday guy, but I got lucky this morning. And lemme tell you, my pulse was on overdrive. It felt like he was talking about me.”

“Excuse me, Miss Six Feet Under,” said Tucker, “but since when do you identify yourself as a corpse on the