The Caffeinated Chronicles: Unjaded Account of Coffee House Life as Seen By 21st Century Pessoptimists

Interlude A: The Second Happiest Thing I Have Done With My Lips

A better body than my ex’s, and that’s a lot to say, came out of Amanda’s lips.

I felt a tingling at the tip of my tongue and that hasn’t happened before, Brian sighed.

I tried it, and I would have kept it in a couple of minutes longer if I had known what kind of body I was dealing with, Al declared.

So it’s settled, this is our Christmas Coffee pick for this year, yes? said Amanda as she used the spittoon strategically located right next to the rotating cupping table.

(Slurp) Sweet Mama! said Al.

(Slurp) I concur, and may I add that I don’t recall having come to a consensus on our most important pick of the year on the first try ever before. Either we were too tired after a mere four years of breathing the same air or this coffee truly knocked our socks off, offered Brian as his face contorted in the shape of a question mark.

This is no time to sugarcoat it, so I am going to come out and just say it. Are we getting soft just because we must make the other decision? suggested Al.

I can’t believe this is the last time we will be able to sit around the cupping table for a long while. We still have to decide who is to stay and who is to go. Guys, our Chinese partners need an answer by tomorrow morning. Which one of us will open our first coffee shop in Beijing? I don’t like this idea of being separated. I don’t like it at all. shared the watery-eyed Amanda as both male partners carefully avoided eye contact so as to ensure they would not follow suit.

Amanda, this triad is eternal and you very well know it, said Al after a long pause.

Eternal? One of us is going to be a million miles away and you can’t roast via Skype and Brian can’t do his thing with the bank manager via e-mail. I already lost a family to geography. I know what I am saying. I don’t care how much money this may mean.

And with that, Amanda Heart, the tough-as-nails co-proprietor of the Sereno Coffee House & Roaster, burst into tears at the thought of breaking up the triumvirate that had meant the world to her for the last four years. Amanda, the barista loved by all who had set the Sereno mantra, every cup is worth a smile, remembered every name of the ninety-eight employees running their nine stores. At 27, she was a mother to employees twice her age as she not only gave them a job and a sensible health plan, but had also figured out a way to make their lives meaningful in a way that they wouldn’t find working as Wal-Mart greeters or Burger King French fry operations engineers.

Amanda was the one who put the placard on each and every door that lead from the back office to the barista stage in all nine stores. It read: THOUSANDS OF MILES AWAY THERE ARE FARMERS WHO DEPEND ON YOUR WORK FOR THEIR LIVELIHOOD. WELCOME TO THE SHOW. IT’S TIME TO SHINE! To date, all employees high five the sign as they get ready to start their shifts. No joke. Thus far, everyone had bought into the mantra, at least those who made it beyond the grueling training week and passed the coffee-cupping test. Those who couldn’t figure out that the use of the term acidity in coffee lingo is about brightness and great body, about the tongue wearing a comfortable sweater at the sight of the brown liquid, Sereno was not for them.

The employees had all feared this moment in the business despite its positive consequences for Sereno and its people. As expected, there had been less talk about this hanging sword than in a dugout in the 8th inning of a pitcher’s no-hit bid. The extended family of ninety-eight were aware of the tension that company growth was bringing. To release some steam, a resourceful barista had come up with a $5 a chance pool, betting on who would go and who would stay. To win you had to not only guess which of the top three would be the one to open Sereno’s first overseas store, but also who would take up the vacancy .

Sereno had become famous as a tightly run ship. It was also known to demand creativity from its employees. Somehow, this overachieving threesome had determined that it was better to demand freethinking from their employees than to simply allow it. Brian Thinkalot always remarked that if they could recruit at hospital neonatal units, they wouldn’t have to include free-thinking creative expressionism as part of the job description. In a simple homage to Herman Melville, he called his hiring philosophy a proactive plan to reverse the ‘Curse of the Jaded Bartlebys’. One of the many quirky rules that give Sereno its corporate counter culture involves job titles. Every employee who survives training week, aka Pledge Week, has the right to create his own title on a business card. The triumvirate has veto power, but it has rarely needed to enforce it.

Amanda, whose card read Duchess of the Hypercaffeinated Juggling Troupe, ran Operations. She made sure that every store had its well-trained crew, cups, supplies, holiday decorations, 4th of July party, and singles night running at 99.9% efficiency. Without her, Sereno would have none of its character and consistency.

Al Gutsenberg was the roastmaster, and as such spent most of his time, tasting new samples from origin at the cupping table. His card title was unique even in this most unconventional human resources gumbo. Al. or ‘Guts’ as he has been known since 8th grade, had chosen ‘No Guts, No Coffee’ under his name. Truth is powerful; without Al, there would be no fresh batch of Full City Ethiopian Sidamo at 6:00 am on a Monday morning. His job title has become a popular t-shirt sold in every store and often seen at jazz concerts and sports stadiums.

Brian was the planner, the builder, and the financial mind. He chose Human Bean for his business card title and took great pride in knowing how many cups of a rare origin espresso were sold yesterday at store #7 between the hours of 4:00 and 6:00 pm.

The three respected each other’s areas of expertise and rarely fought about their borderlines, at least not in public. Their board meetings were never held in a store or at headquarters, so if they had dirty laundry to air, it was nowhere near any witnesses. The ninety-eight children lived as if there were a perfect ménage a trois, or German-style work council living and running the show in perfect harmony. Losing one of the parents was cause of concern for all, but growing beyond Sereno’s East Coast territory also meant growth opportunities for the ninety-eight. Amanda, Brian, and Al knew that if the world was really getting flatter, they had to get their espresso cart across oceans, or risk someone else rolling theirs’ closer to Sereno’s neighborhood.

Guys, we have been through this many times. Anyone in our shoes would be celebrating. promoted Brian.

I know it’s an honor and all that, but it doesn’t make it any easier, sniffled Amanda.

Well, we’ve certainly have endured a severe constipation around this one, haven’t we? And with that, Al suggested a methodology to decide who would venture and who would stay. He proceeded to talk about what he thought was truly important in ensuring their success beyond their Mare Nostrum. Morphing the Sereno culture in a new place was not going to be easy, but it was certainly going to be an adventure. They all were ambivalent about what to do and equally scared about what was to come. Al felt that if they were going to transmit the Sereno DNA to a new set of employees, a fair test to determine who would be best qualified would be one in which each one of them would retell two memorable stories of the people they had encountered in their coffee journey. Whoever seemed to have gained the most, should take the Sereno name to Beijing. This, Al thought, would be the best test of their individual ability to carry their mantra overseas.

Brian quietly assented. He knew that there was no perfect way to decide this and Al’s solution certainly had more character than a simple game of spin the bottle, choosing sticks, or putting three papers in a bag and seeing who picks the one with the Forbidden City imprinted on it.

Amanda sat quietly while Brian supported the idea with his logical explanation that in a statistical dead heat, this way seemed as adequate as any to give some semblance of order to the emotions of the moment. After his three-minute speech was over, she grabbed herself a cortado, added two packets of raw sugar and said, Remember those months when we were opening in South Beach and I was commuting every other week to Miami?

How can we forget, it was the one and only time that I have seen you with tan lines. said Brian.

All I remember is that goddess from Miami Beach that came to visit afterwards. Oh, Mya! Why don’t you have more friends that look like her? added Al.

Or dress like her?

You mean, as little as her? Don’t you, pig? I’ll lie on that shrinks’ couch any day.

"There is so much more to Mya than what you see. In our time in the business, I have seen many lives unfolding and my share of soap operas being played out in the middle of our stores. Mya, Jules, and Mercedes were our first customers the day we opened the store. I liked them from the get go.

I like them too.

Stop it. Don’t be an idiot."

All right, go on.

Anyway, it had been a week since they had come back from a weekend in Seattle. They hadn’t seen each other since then, and needed to tell someone else what they had gone through. If there is one thing I love about my job is that, for some reason, baristas and bartenders are the depositories of stories that need to be told Their story is chiseled in my memory. Why don’t we start there?

CHAPTER ONE Babes In Cropland

Leaving the baby was the hardest thing I had contemplated since refusing the epidural during little Molly’s delivery. I hoped it was not also the stupidest. It had been eighteen months, and I had no idea of where the days had gone or what was playing in the artsy movie theatre around the corner. No complaints. After twelve years on the corporate track, I had been afraid of what a life of diapers and play dates would be like. Who knew that working with extremely immature adults would be a great prep course for handling motherhood? There were enough crybabies, hissy fits, and stare downs at my banking job to train me in handling Molly so far. I had also had piled through enough B.S. at the office to make changing a severely pooped diaper, one of those that leaves a track mark on the baby half way up her back, a more sanitary and better smelling experience than some of my more memorable strategic planning meetings. Yet I trembled at the thought of leaving her.

All I knew was that Mya had the convincing power of a preacher and the relentlessness of a horny fly. After hanging up with her, I returned to the computer, pressed that click button and found myself with an airplane ticket to Seattle. The next day, I kissed Mike good-bye, having left plenty of written directions for him to make the next seventy-two hours of solo flying an exercise in execution rather than improvisation. As men go, I thought he was helpful enough, but I had given Mom a bcc: copy of everything just in case. Her being only ten minutes away had already made the difference in this whole Mommy experience. Funny enough, after spending all my teenage years trying to be as different from her as possible, I find myself more and more treasuring her tidbits of knowledge. She is too careful at times. She had endured a mother-in-law who wanted to make her own honeymoon an extended family trip and had dished out plenty of deconstructive criticism during our growing up years about her Dr. Spock-inspired methods, so mother now lives by the rule of ‘call me anytime but be prepared to live with the consequences’.

Mike’s insistence on a Father & Kid poker night while I was gone scared me. I kept hoping he was only joking. I also feared that Molly would get macaroni and cheese for breakfast and that he might forget that diapers are not underwear and they need to be changed more than once a day. My distrust was not based on anything he had shown me as a dad, but rather on my glimpse of his bachelor pad in days gone by. The first time I had gone there for dinner, I ordered take out and spent the night cleaning the place. Good thing that I knew enough about him by then or I would have given him a pink slip on the spot. If the Health Department had shown up, his kitchen’s rating would have been lower than his freezer’s temperature. He has been broken in by now, so the thought of his potential regression to his Cro-Magnon ways made me weary and concerned. Too much road covered to start all over again.

The horn in Mya’s car was loud when she pulled up to the house at 6:00 am to pick me up for our long flight to the West Coast. Her obliviousness about her rudeness towards others is normally tolerated, because no one has a bigger heart than Mya. She even jokes about it as she tells anyone within an earshot, Honey, I am not rude, I am just a bigger Frank than Sinatra. It took me a while to understand her double analogy, but her love for old American Standards oozes through in her everyday life. When a few of us gained some weight, she started calling us the Fat Pack. People may be taken back when she talks about French kissing some ‘cat’ or about not wasting anytime being a broad and fretting about men in general or Ed specifically, but after one of us now slimmed-down former Fat Pack members, brooms out her comments with an explanation that she is not into some feline fetish and nor did she did come to us through some time warp, people start to enjoy her joie de vivre. Frankly, sometimes I wonder if she is channeling Mae West, but it all could just be Mya being Mya.

Honk! Honk! Honk! sounded Mya’s convertible as she barely missed hitting my suitcase and carry on case neatly stacked under the still lit street light in front of my Coral Gables home.

Come on, come on, and come on! We are going to be late, and the next thing after being late is pregnant, and I am not doing that yet, screamed my friend as she fixed her retro 1950s librarian sunglasses in the rear view mirror. The light above must have hit their sparkles in a way that brought back some great memory, for she grinned and blew herself a kiss without a care in the world. Their polka dot design matched the red and white dress she was wearing so tightly that a blind man could tell she was wearing a thong.

Mya, the only one who signed up for boot camp was yours truly. Cut the crap! My neighbors and little Molly don’t need to be awakened before the roosters. Besides, only movie stars wear sunglasses while driving with their headlights on, I yawned, while putting my carry on in the back of her convertible.

There are roosters in Coral Gables? I can only guess that making your own butter will be next. Oh my! It’s been five minutes since I landed in suburbia and I already miss my cosmopolitan life in Miami Beach.

Yes, I am a suburbanite and that doesn’t sit to well with Mya. My transition from Jules, her ’burn the candles at both ends’ co-conspirator to Molly’s mom who can’t go out after 9:00 pm even to evacuate to safer ground in the case of a hurricane has been hard for her. I love her for not dropping the Me that lives inside the Mommy and Me t-shirt-wearing mother for some new gal pal.

After taking a second look at her, I could not help but comment, What? Were you trying to save time by not buttoning your dress beyond the navel?

Don’t mess with my bait. You never know whom might we meet, grinned Mya as she grunted one of her mock tigress roars.

Oh, please. You can see so much of your breasts, Mya, that if they were the Moon, you would be giving some sicko astronaut a peak at the dark side without even having to know your name. came out of me.

Somehow, the ease with which she pulled off the outfit made my ‘relaxed fit’ beige khakis and serene pink polo shirt fit as uncomfortably as a 19th century hourglass corset. Did I look too much like some software store sales person? Am I in need of a makeover and no one has the guts to tell me?

Don’t worry. No one is landing in my Oceanus Procellarum without my permission and there will be no radio silence when a lucky one does. By the way, with that getup, you are one step closer to becoming one of those old ladies who wear track suits when they go cruising in the Caribbean, retorted Mya as she accelerated through a yellow light.

And Jules… one slight change of plans. Mercedes is coming, delivered Mya.

Mya, are you kidding me? was all I could say. I had honestly thought that Mercedes was doomed to another six months of post-breakup hibernation. Men roam the prairie within two hours of causing a breakup, while we women spend months ruminating every bit of data to figure out how to blame ourselves for our worse half’s nomad loins. Someone should pass a memo or something at every wedding reception. Brides must know coming in that they are not responsible for more than giving it their all. Beyond that, their only mistake is choosing the wrong guy.

No, she says she can handle it.

But who’s taking care of the kids?

Idiot Carl, as she now calls him; first court ordered weekend starts today, frowned Mya.

And his hygienist paramour?

Oh, no. The kids are off limits to her. No way! I do think, though, that since this will be the first time she can actually be just Mercedes, and not Marinita’s and Chuck’s mom, or Dr. Slyme’s wife, we have to show her a good time, insisted Mya.

Mya quickly noticed my raised eyebrow as she proceeded to calm me down by defining good time as girls going out for some wine and great salmon. I gently reminded her that we indeed had a mission, and wine could not be #1 on the priority list.

M comes before S in the alphabet. Therefore, merlot is destined to always come ahead of scrapbooking. It’s what the nation’s forefathers wanted when they organized the alphabet, joked Mya.

"The forefathers were too busy working on the Constitution to worry about the 4,000 year-old alphabet. I retorted.

I know, but they could have changed it. Aren’t we still stuck with the decimal system while the rest of the world chimes along with more civilized metric measures? Merlot before scrapbooking, that was their intention. And don’t worry; this is going to be better than a bachelorette party. You will see. Oh, there’s Mercedes at the curve,.

Mercedes looked a bit lost and frightened, but her outfit was encouraging. She had the innocence of a six-year-old waiting for the bus on her first day of school, but gone was the omnipresent circus tent of her post-breakup days that made her look like a size 18 matron rather than the curvaceous size 8 Cuban fireball that lives inside her shell. Her auburn hair was in a ponytail and her flowery dress spoke volumes about her intentions for a brighter disposition. She looked ten years younger than the third of a century that we all must confess to. Mercedes, the former cheerleader, part-time model, and one time Spanish soap opera minor celebrity, was signaling to us a change in the tide, and this made me smile as we pulled her into the car. I could only hope that it was more than just an act or an attempt at fooling herself or us into thinking that she was better.

Hi guys. I don’t know about this. What if they need me? I am four hours away by plane! pleaded Mercedes to a compassionate but unflinching jury of her closest peers who have stuck together like coral in a reef, since our days at Lasalle High. Were they breathing? deadpanned Mya.

What? teared up Mercedes.

We have learned to disregard her tears since she was an actress and all. If you can tear up on cue, it kind of loses its weight. Mercedes debuted in the Los Encantos de la Deliciosa Jamona soap opera where she played Serafina, the youngest sibling of a well-to-do family, who left the family empire to pursue her passion as a chef and Formula One driver. No easy double duty for a skilled professional, but certainly harder for the not so well traveled daughter of a hacienda owner in remote Patagonia.

Were they breathing when you kissed them good bye? If so, Mercedes, give yourself these three days as a gift and trust that Idiot Carl remembers that he should be a good father.

Clearly, Mya’s day job as a psychologist to the stars and the models that make Miami their winter home has given her a tough love vocabulary that rarely misses the point.

I am just so anxious.

True to her words, Mercedes skulked her way to the airport. We quickly realized that her flowery dress did not bring with it any additional spring in her step or even gift her with a monosyllabic preposition to break her sad silence.

As we began our airport security clearance, Mya took one look at Mercedes and said, Relax, broad, you are with me. Such bravado gave our fragile flower as much hope as fear. This was clearly evident in her face. Her naturally full lips succumbed to a smile as she gained some life, but her light brown eyes still held a gallon of tears ready to flood without advance notice. Much work in store ahead.

The long plane ride gave us time to be as supportive and understanding as Mercedes had been to the two of us when we had faced our own crises. She is what people call a good egg, and it truly frustrated me to see her beaten down. I must admit it touched that element of fear deep inside that on any given day it could be me or one of my sisters. Marriage is such a lottery. Why are there so few winning tickets? I am happy now. I don’t want it to change. I could also put myself in her shoes and think about all that she had given up to be with that idiot. Mercedes is so smart. Carl is marginally funny and has the sex appeal of a power tool. I remember him after her torrid love affair with Antonio as the rebound guy who had merely managed to stick around longer than we all thought he would. What five years can do! Idiot Carl drilling at the office while Mercedes cries her eyes out. I wonder where Antonio might be? Is he married?

I went to college with Carl and I