Dec. 23, 2009

I’m sitting here drinking a cup of coffee, which isn’t too great a shock. If I’m sitting anywhere, I’d estimate the chances are 100% that my ass will be touching a chair or some sort of cushion and about 50% that I’ll be drinking a cup of coffee. It wasn’t always like this, at least as far as coffee is concerned. But once I got into the world of java, I took to it the way Kitty Winn takes to smack in "The Panic in Needle Park" (Good 70's movie you may not have seen yet. Hit Netflix.)

I actually didn’t start drinking coffee until around 1999, when I was working on a screenplay for 20th Century Fox and had to find a way to repeatedly provoke my brain so I could keep coming up with new and improved ideas that the Los Angeles dick-wad producers I was writing for would then convert into old and not-improved ideas, the better to keep the screenplay from ever getting filmed.

There was a Starbucks directly across the street from my apartment at the time - in New York, if you aren’t within spitting distance of a Starbucks, you’re either a shockingly lousy spitter or live on a barge in the middle of the river - so I would wander over two or three times a day to purchase a very reasonably priced no-whip Venti mocha. Once, I saw “Little Steven” Van Zandt, the esteemed rhythm guitarist of the E. Street Band, walking a tiny fuzzy dog in front of the Starbucks. That has no bearing whatsoever on the coffee, but I just thought you should know.

Anyway, now that I have kids and do most of my writing between the highly productive “golden hours” of 11 p.m. and 2 a.m., coffee is an integral part of my morning wake-up. But, just like one of those country singers who’s always bragging that he don’t eat no fancy food and don’t ride in no Cadillac, don’t go thinkin’ I’m some kind of coffee snob. No sir. Although I appreciate the good stuff - if you’re after a first-rate cup, get yourself a can of Illy medium roast and a French press - I’m in it for the caffeine, baby.

Thus, when you see me imbibing a chalice of chicory, it’s almost certainly because I’m bone tired, and I need to get it in gear. And the best way to do that, outside of a hit of crystal meth out at the trailer park, is to chug some coffee. Pretty much any coffee.

I’m absolutely cool, for instance, with a cheap cup of Chock Full o Nuts, even though the name makes not a fuck-bit of sense. And I’m even cooler with two cups of it! The only thing I refuse to drink is instant coffee, like Taster’s Choice, which is vile. I’d sure like to know who their “taster” was; if he chose that cup of brown cat piss over literally anything else on the market, he seriously needs to rethink his priorities. A better name for this coffee would be “Not Bad, If You’re in Jail.”

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There are, of course, two significant drawbacks to drinking coffee. For whatever reason, the Lord God Almighty blessed me with decent teeth.

I do nothing special to keep them this way, but, I tell you what, coffee sure wreaks hell on them. Now, roughly once a year, I break out the Crest Strips and de-scale my choppers of brownish residue. Anyone who’s ever used a Crest Strip understands the self-humiliation involved in such a procedure, so if I’m willing to keep going through it, it stands to reason that coffee is now an irreplaceable element of my personal dissipation.

The other downside of having a coffee monkey on your back is that, quite frankly, coffee makes you pee a lot. Not to disappoint anyone, but I won’t be pointing at any parts of my anatomy to illustrate this concept. However, since it’s the holidays, I’m more than happy to show you the following festive commode.

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In closing, not that a piece this rambling requires a sophisticated dénouement, I’d like you to hear the greatest coffee tune of all time, Rick Danko’s “Java Blues.” Unfortunately, the album it’s on is so thoroughly - and inappropriately - out of print, you can’t even find the goddamn song on Limewire, and I seem to have misplaced my cd copy. Also, the video of Danko performing it that I managed to locate on YouTube looks and sounds like it was broadcast from the moon shortly after World War I. So we’ll have to settle for the second greatest coffee song of all time, “Java Jive” by the Ink Spots.

I have no idea who Mr. Moto is, but he must have been astonished that the man singing the song had accidentally become a coffee pot. "Whoops," indeed. Who says you need acid to write a surreal pop song?

Paul Tatara