Publishing: Love
The Day Everything Changed
Human beans
I was just a kid but you always remember the first time. I’ll never forget that day. So much to think about and I never had the leisure to sit down and turn it over in my mind. Not at the time, anyway.
Marie had charge of the coffee machine, and she was careful who touched it. Big and silver and gold with knobs and spouts and dials and an eagle on top, sneering down at the likes of me trying to pull a decent cup of coffee out of it. The eagle, I mean, not Marie, though she did her share of sneering.
She was a coloured girl, as they said in those days. Born sometime before the war, I supposed, because she was twenty-something and I spent a lot of time imagining what she might look like without her uniform on. Pretty darned good, was my guess. Ahem.
You wouldn’t think a bus station would have a cantankerous old Italian steam-driven coffee maker but there it was dominating the hall across from the ticket counter with the row of clocks on the wall; the wide space between regimented alleys of uncomfortable seating, each long unit with a grey cloth cover that could be pulled off and washed to draw away the body grease, the coffee puddles, the ground-in remnants of hamburger and fried chicken sandwiches and the odd red or brown stains we didn’t like to think about too much.
Old Pete took care of the cleaning. Every morning he’d remove two of the most rancid covers, add them to the laundry basket in the kitchen with the towels and the wipes and the tablecloths in red and white check, and take out two fresh covers from the linen nook, greyer and grimmer and cleaner than before.
The seats were uncomfortable because they were tall and had room beneath for your bags. Pete would sweep underneath and every now and then he’d pull out a treasure apart from all the stuff that wasn’t: a suitcase or a box tied up with string that someone had forgotten. One of the ticket clerks would look it over for tags or labels to maybe match it up with a passenger and ship it off on the next bus to Dallas or Little Rock or Springfield, else stow it in the lost and found room until it got hauled away by a contractor to auction off as unclaimed.
They all demanded coffee. Pete, the clerks, the passengers, the cooks, Marie, and me. If I ever got a moment to myself.
Four in the morning, mostly. The place would be calm until the buses began rolling in again. People waiting, slumped and wan. One clerk yawning as he sorted yesterday’s ticket stubs, Marie checking her watch, likely wondering if she had time for a bathroom break. Go, I mentally told her. I can look after things here.
One thing I never thought about at the time but the smoke would settle in the early hours. Nobody went outside for a cigarette in those days unless they were a kid trying to avoid their parents’ gaze. Sometimes it was hard to see from one side of the hall to another.
Nobody wanting coffee but me. Check the water level, check the steam pressure, fill the little metal basket, tamp down the grounds nice and flat and level, twist it into position, slide a cup underneath, open the valve and watch as the coffee came out, thick and golden brown.
Marie was observing as I twisted the group free, emptied the grounds with a slap on the bucket rim, rinsed and replaced the components.
“Good work, Tiger,” she said. “Don’t forget to empty the bucket before the breakfast rush.”
“You want one?”
“No, I’m good.” She checked her watch again, turned to lift a tray of cups onto the shelf. I watched as her legs stretched and her body tightened underneath that loose blue uniform.
“Easy on the eyes, ain’t she?”
There was a customer at the counter and his gaze was following mine. White fellow, old wrinkled suit — like his face — but his eyes were smiling and making creases. He winked at me.
“Oh, Joseph,” Marie said, not turning around. “You hush now.”
“Hey,” the old guy said. “I was talking to the kid, not you. Eyes glued to your butt. Need to shake them off when you sit down, I reckon.”
He winked at me again. “Like mine,” he said, a little softer.
“Fix the man a coffee, Honey,” Marie said, still carefully stacking the cups, but now that I lifted my eyes up I could see that she was watching us both in the mirror. “The good beans. No cream, and most definitely no sugar.”
I looked at myself in the polished chrome of the coffee machine. Yes, there was a delicate flush of pink in my face. Just about the same shade as a stop sign.
For once I didn’t have Marie’s judging eyes on my coffee-making. She had given me no more than a glance as she returned the tray to its place, lifted the counter flap, and walked out into the hall. I reached down to the shelf under the counter where we kept the African beans, poured a dose into the grinder, filled the group, took down one of the fresh cups hot from the washer, slid it under the spout, and watched as the coffee flowed out. Put a saucer under it, turn round to the counter and oh my sweet Jesus there was Marie and the old man locked in a close embrace.
He broke the hug, looked at his coffee, and took an appreciative sip of the scalding java.
“Hot, black, and tasty,” he said appreciatively. “Just the way I like my women.”
When I said “coloured” before, that was me being polite. Black was Marie’s colour, the same dark as the coffee. The same sheen and glow.
“It’s okay, Sugar,” she said, probably noticing that I was now pretty much purple. “We’re …ah… family.”
She turned to the old guy, just one big grin by now, looking him fair in the eye as if she were about to dive in. “I gotta go do my thing, Joseph. Be right back.”
“Before you go,” he said, “where’s Joey?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Long time ago, Em. I’m getting forgetful in my dotage.”
Now there was a word I didn’t hear regular. I made a note inside. The act of doting on someone? Smitten by affection?
“Huh!” Marie pointed with her sweet chin. “Two rows across, third on the left.”
The man and I both looked at the bench she indicated.
“I see him now.”
His old eyes must have been sharper than mine. I couldn't spot anyone at all. Was this some sort of prank?
Well, I wasn’t going to be any part of this nonsense. I picked up my own coffee: cream and sugar like I’d had it since my mom let me have my first Folgers.
Marie walked through the hall and out into the dark street. Where was she going? The restrooms were in back, especially the ones she could use.
“It’s okay,” the old guy said. “She’ll be fine. Any man that takes her on will wind up chewing on his own testickles.”
“As,” he went on, “we’ve all done from time to time.”
He glanced at me. My cheeks weren’t going back to their normal colour any time soon.
“Joseph,” he said, sticking out his hand. “I hear you want to be a writer.”
Jesus, Joseph, and Marie. I took his hand for a beat. “How’s the coffee?”
He smiled. Again. He was all smiles, this fellow.
“Good coffee. You’re wasted here. Hey, I have my sources. I’ve read some of your stuff.”
This seemed unlikely unless he worked at Fantastic Stories of Imagination and was the author of the polite rejection slips I was collecting. Or maybe he had somehow peeped into my notebook under the counter, where I intended to write down “dotage” so I could look it up later. I made notes of incidents and characters that stood out. This guy was absolutely going in.
“You want to know how to make good money from writing?”
“Yes. Write Doctor Zhivago.”
“Funny. I like that.”
Maybe I wouldn’t make the bestseller lists immediately, but hey, everyone had to start somewhere. It took a while to get a start, build a rep…
He took a sip of the coffee. “You could start a chain of coffee shops. This stuff is really good. No, seriously, you heard about the Gold Rush days? All those miners getting rich picking up nuggets? For every miner who made a fortune, there were thousands who didn’t. There’s one surefire way to get rich in a gold rush, and it ain’t digging.”
“Put on makeup and stand under a red light.”
“Yeah, you could try that but you ain’t the type. Nothing personal. Nah, the way to get rich in a gold rush is to sell shovels to the diggers. And tents and buckets and bacon and rope and whiskey.”
I got it. “I should sell typewriters door to door?” That would have to be a crappy job, just one step up from hefting anvils.
“Now you’re talking. Typewriters and ribbons and paper. Lots of paper. Carbon paper as well, triple your sales right there. Nope, get into publishing. Writers need publishers. Editors and readers and illustrators and clerks. The publishers make the money whether it’s your stories in the magazine or someone else’s. Plus you got the inside running on getting your own stuff published.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. Start by making the coffee.”
And just like that…
Well, it took years, to be honest. I never wrote a bestseller — not for want of trying, mind — and my own stories about this and that were just fillers when nothing better was on the table — but publishing was something that got into my blood. Like ink. I guess Joseph’s advice was my first inkling.
I wrote down “dotage” and “inkle” in my notebook, slid it back under the counter. The bus station was beginning to wake up. Pete was up from his “rest” and brooming by the doors, a second and third clerk had appeared behind the ticket desks opposite and were arranging their work areas.
The newspaper guy thumped a stack of papers down on the counter, leered at me, turned on his heel, and headed back out. Like always. The old papers went under the counter and the new ones took their space in the rack.
Joseph handed over a nickel and took one, taking in the headlines with his coffee. I hauled out a cloth and began wiping down my work area. Marie was a demon for clean; every day had to start with all surfaces shining and stay that way. If there was a grain of sugar on the counter and I wasn’t attending to it she had a way of saying my name that made me feel small.
“What about this Cuba thing, kid? Is Kennedy weak or what?”
Oh great. Politics. The new president was no Eisenhower, that’s for sure. I wondered how many were reconsidering their vote after the disaster.
“I think we did the right thing. Cuba’s affairs are up to the Cubans.”
“Well, ain’t you a breath of fresh air. Everyone else in this whole state wants to do another Omaha Beach and wipe out the godless Commies. You don’t think that Americans should have a say in their own affairs, keep the communists on the other side of the ocean?”
“I can’t vote, and when I can, I’ll think about these things then. Until then, why worry?”
“Fair enough. Let me put it another way. You’ve read War and Peace?”
I nodded.
“You read that horseshit at the end, the inevitable forces of history and so on?”
You lay out six bits for a book, you make sure you get full value out of every word. I nodded again.
“So why didn’t Tolstoy follow his own theory? He didn’t write about the mass of Russian people drifting with the tide of history, did he? He wrote about one person and everything else is just fancy dress.”
One man in that big doorstop of a book? Which of the hundreds of characters, each of them described in detail: Prince Bolkonsky, Natasha, Napoleon, Nikolai, Tsar Alexander?
Oh. Right. Pierre, the rich bastard, never quite understanding what was happening around him but somehow coming out ahead every time.
“Because he wanted to write a story that people would enjoy reading.”
“Right. Nobody reads history books if they aren’t in school. If you want to get your writing published, make it about one person and their struggle.”
“Like Mein Kampf?”
“Another bestseller.”
“And what does this have to do with Cuba?”
He took a long pull on his coffee. “Nothing. It has to do with you. Find the story, find the key character, find the critical moment. Everything builds up to that. Do it right, you’ll pump out bestsellers.”
“And you’re a publisher or something?”
“Naw. I spend a lot of time in situations where there’s only two things to do.” He winked. “And the other one’s reading. Sometimes I think about what I read. My job, you might say, is to find the man and the moment.”
I thought about what I heard. I wouldn’t mind spending a lot of time in a good library with the right person.
And right now here was Marie back to supervise the morning’s coffee and doughnuts, hand in hand with an older version of herself. Twenty years or so on, a few more pounds here and there, hair not so full of life. Mother? Sister? Sparkling with sauce, both of them.
“I’d pay good money,” the man at the counter said, draining his coffee and tapping the cup down, “to see those two making a bit of girl on girl action, you know what I’m sayin’?”
If he was trying to make me blush again, he knew how to push my buttons.
“Joseph, my love,” the lady said, taking his hand and offering her cheek to be kissed.
“Marjorie, you look better every time I see you,” he replied.
She rolled her eyes. “Yes. The last time I was covered in mud and hadn’t slept for a week. Not a high bar. At least I’ve got my hair done and a nice dress on now.”
“And it looks stunning on you.” he said, giving me a wink. “But, you know, you don’t need to put on something special to look fabulous.”
She snorted, caught sight of me and smiled. “Hello, Tiger! How are you?”
“Fine, Ma’am,” I stammered. “Can I get you anything?”
“A cup of your famous coffee, please,” she said.
“The good stuff, on the house,” Marie said, scooping up a nickel from the tip jar and handing it to me.
She stayed on the customer side of the counter, eyes alight, the three of them exchanging looks. I turned back to that cantankerous eagle coffee maker, staring it fair in the dials, cracking the steam a nudge or two, making it behave for me.
I could hear them talking behind me as I tamped the grounds down firm, clicked the group into place, gave the valve a short twist, and let the grounds bloom for a few seconds before cranking the full shot through.
“So long since I saw this place,” the older lady said. She had a deeper, richer voice than Marie’s, but they shared that little catch in her words that I loved. Guess it was in the genes or something. “Hasn’t changed a bit.”
“Funny ‘bout that,” said the old man. “Coffee’s good, though.”
“Had a good teacher,” the lady said.
That was the truth. There was no nonsense about Marie. She made sure I understood how things worked. Every key on the big cash register. Every item on the menu, how to serve it with a dollop of cream or a swirl of mustard, depending. And how to clean and polish and wipe every blessed fitting on that grand old coffeemaker. Long before I was allowed to draw my first coffee I knew every quirk of the brute.
I knew it and I loved it. Not the same way I secretly loved Marie but they both made my eyes light up when I began my shift at midnight.
I turned with the coffee, and she held up one finger and flattened her palm side to side. One lump, no cream. Right.
The lady took a sip.
“Just right. You can run this java joint all by yourself, I think.”
Marie glared at her. Right. It wasn’t much of a job but she owned it.
The older lady — Marjorie, if I believed that Joseph guy who had also called Marie Em — glanced out into the hall and the rows of seating.
“Our man’s awake.”
They all followed her gaze. So did I.
“Not seeing him,” Joseph said.
Nor was I.
“He stirred. I think that woman with the green hat might have kicked him,” she said, indicating with her chin.
“Huh. You wouldn’t kick him out of bed, now would you?”
Marjorie’s eyes sparkled. “Thinking of it right now, mister. You watch your tongue.”
Marie spoke up. “Quit it, you two. We need the Colonel here. What’s keeping him?”
“Probably admiring himself in the mirror,” Joseph said. “You know what he’s like.”
“We’ve got two key individuals and we don’t know what they are doing,” Marjorie said, an edge in her voice. “Why didn’t we slip a snake in there when we had the chance?”
“The guy needs his privacy. I know exactly what he’s doing. He’s young, awake, alone, in a dark place, dreaming about women. He doesn’t need people spying on him.”
“I’d watch that show,” Marie said, looking out into the hall.
“We don’t have much time then,” the lady said. “We want him surprised and receptive. This has got to go like clockwork if we want to pull it off.”
Marie shrugged, walked around the older pair, lifted the counter flap, and joined me on the business side.
Her eyes regarded mine. “Doing well, kid. I think you might have that coffee machine under control. What’s the first thing you do in the morning?”
I knew this one. “Run the solution through it and then flush with hot water.”
She kept looking at me.
“Ah,” I went on, “and polish up the metalwork while I’m waiting.”
“I do like a man in uniform.”
The old man in the rumpled suit, looking out at a trim army officer picking his way through the growing crowd. Marie and I were both busy with orders, she working the coffee machine, me on the register serving out the bacon and biscuits coming from the kitchen.
This guy was getting a page, maybe two, in my writing journal. He had depth to him.
Marie looked up, and clearly she liked a man in uniform too. That was more like it.
He came to a military halt and saluted Marjorie, who twinkled back at him.
“Colonel Joe, good to see you.”
“You too, Marjorie, though it’s Major Joe right now. How do I look?”
He spread out his arms, displaying a neat set of greens.
“Get dressed in the dark, didja?” the old man said.
“Good to see you too, Joseph,” the major said. “I’ve got some fresh jokes to tell you.”
“Heard ’em before. Hey, check your medals.”
The officer looked down at his left breast, where two rows of ribbons were displayed. “What’s wrong? Is my Medal of Honour missing?”
“Huh. Funny. Nah, that red and yellow one.”
“Awww nuts. My goof. I’ll go back and swap it out, shall I?”
“No time. And he’ll never notice. Not until it’s too late.”
“I seem to remember there was coffee involved.”
“I’m on it.” Marjorie, the older coloured woman, climbed down from her stool, raised the counter flap, and joined us on the working side.
I had another flurry of orders to deal with. Everyone had it in their mind that getting a good solid greasy breakfast washed down with coffee and sugar before climbing onto a long-distance bus for hours was a rattling good idea.
“Marie,” I hissed. Having the customers help themselves was never a good idea. For one thing, they might be wanting their share of the tip jar that Marie had been so quick to take an “on the house” nickel from. A penny out of that nickel was rightfully mine, and as much as I loved her when she wasn’t looking, that penny was slicing the edge off my love.
Marie looked up, smiled, and made way for the older woman.
That beast of a machine had chewed me up and spat me out covered in coffee grounds a dozen times before I’d managed to make a cup Marie pronounced tolerable.
“Marie,” I hissed again, “you’ll get our asses fired.”
“It’s all right, Sweetie,” she said. “You just tend to your own business, hear?”
I did, but I took a sideways glance at the coffee machine. Marjorie reached for the Kenyan beans, scooped out a dose, fed them into the grinder and tamped out a double.
She looked up at her controls, smiled, cracked the valve for a second, counted to five and then unloaded the steam for real.
The next time I looked up, she was setting down two takeout cups of our best coffee on the counter. And no money coming into the register I was tending.
Marie intercepted my gaze, picked a dime out of the tip jar and slid it across the counter. “On the house.”
Oh joy.
Now a commotion out in the seating area. The army officer was shouting.
“Wakey, wakey! Hands off snakey! On your feet, soldier!”
He was kicking at the coverings on an empty seat.
The grey fabric jiggled and swayed for a few seconds and then a young soldier, a corporal with stripes on his sleeves, crawled out and sprang to his feet, snapping out a crisp salute well at odds with his rumpled uniform.
The two stood like statues for a moment, the focus of attention inside the hall, and then the officer returned the salute before reaching inside his jacket and withdrawing a folded sheet of paper.
He handed it to the soldier who looked at it, read it slowly, glanced at the officer, and sat down.
The major looked towards us and Marjorie nudged Marie.
“You’re on, girl.”
Marie picked up the fresh coffees in their cardboard takeout cups, eased through the counter flap that Marjorie held open for her, and walked towards the two army men.
She handed one to each man, nodded at something the major said to her and walked back towards us.
I could see the eyes of both soldiers on her rear end.
“Oh-kay,” Joseph said, his gaze — like mine — fixed on Marie’s front. “We’ve hooked him.”
“He’s ours,” breathed Marjorie.
They caught me looking on. Joseph winked. “Right man, right moment.”
Marie was all smiles as she slid back through the counter flap. “He’s taking it all in. Every word of Joe’s bull.”
“He’s just glad to get out of two years recording the wind chill in Alaska, that’s all,” Joseph said.
“Kind of cute with his hair all mussed up like that, don’t you think?” Marjorie said.
“Oh yeah.” Marie wasn’t going to stop smiling for a bit. “He’s been working out, too. He’s so skinny!”
“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Joseph said.
There were orders for coffee coming in. I gave Marie the slips but she passed them on to Marjorie.
“Hey.” She crooked her finger at me. “I’ve got something to tell you.”
She led me through the kitchen, where the cooks were working on their orders. Pancake mix, strips of bacon, eggs being cracked into a bowl. She drew me into the pantry and closed the door.
My heart was beating and the colour rising in my cheeks. I moved to kiss her.
“Not so fast, Tiger,” she said. “Hear me out.”
There were questions in my eyes and my mind was keeping track with my heart.
“There’s something you need to know. It’s important.”
She took my hand and laid it on her arm. I could feel her skin smooth and soft beneath my fingers, the dark brown skin that I had yearned to touch for so long. This was really happening.
“This is my skin,” she whispered, “and it doesn’t define who I am as a person. How can it?”
Well, it had a lot to do with what was going on in my mind, but I nodded.
“No, really think about it. Is the person looking out through your eyes in any way affected by the colour of those eyes?”
I’d never really thought about that. My eyes were kind of greeney-browney. Did they make any difference to the way I thought?
She looked me square in those eyes and moved her hand, my own still attached to her arm, down between my legs. Not caressing or probing, just enough to cup what was there.
I squeaked, readers. I didn’t know what was happening to me.
“Everyone has love and desire within them. These bits of skin don’t matter. They don’t make you a person or an animal or a piece of fruit. They don’t define who you are.”
She gave me a squeeze and withdrew her hand.
“I’ve got to go away now. That man out there is going to marry me. You’ll get over it. Your life isn’t defined or limited or completed by me or anyone else.”
I looked at her. Was there anything I could say, anything I could do to change her mind? It didn’t seem possible.
She looked back. Her lips parted and she whispered, “You can kiss me now. If you want.”
Eventually, she pulled away from me. “Goodbye, Honey. Don’t forget me, now. You get my share of the tip jar today.”
So that was the first time my heart was broken. And I never forgot her. Funny, I thought I saw her a dozen times after that, and my heart would jump up and I’d begin to call out and there would be a stranger looking at me, one eyebrow up.
Until the time, years later, when I did see her once more. But that’s another story and not one I’m ready to tell. Nobody would believe me, for starters.
When I went out to the counter again, they had all gone and there were a dozen strangers waiting to place their orders. I called in Pete to help me — as he did once or twice a month — and we made it through the rush without anyone yelling at us.
For once, I owned that eagle coffee maker.
I took off my apron at eight when the day crew came on, tossed it in the kitchen basket, retrieved my notebook, and took the trolley home.
Marie had been right. Life didn’t stop. My life had changed, for sure, but I wasn’t sure in which way. The ground had slipped from under my feet.
The chatter of the other passengers, the headlines in the papers, the dry commentary of the radio news; there was nothing stable there. Cuba, the new moon program, flying saucers, Freedom Riders. Was everything solid turning to water?
It took me a while to wind down. It took me a while every morning, for there was no sleep with children running, mothers calling, fathers on their way to work, but today there was a lot to think about and I had a lot to put down in my notebook.
There was something fresh there. I hadn’t written it, but in a flowing, feminine hand, someone had written a poem in free verse:
I am not bound within my skin
I am more than my thoughts
I have wisdom within me
I am love beyond touch.
All things pass
And I remain.
That morning was bright and clear. Sixty years ago now and you’d think it would be black and white and faded but I still have all my old notebooks and they bring it back, every look, every hiss of the coffee machine, every sunbeam into my heart.
Some things you just don’t forget. Ever.
Duncan Klein
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