CASUAL
Caldwell, Christopher
Casual JAVA JIVE When my friend Ivan came to visit from Moscow last week, we sat on the back porch, drinking coffee in the 85-degree heat until 1:30 in the morning. Much of our conversation...
...And that's a relatively innocuous yearning...
...I said...
...The Age of Espresso won't last forever, of course...
...Now she has a 250-pound frame to heave up the stairs to the office every morning...
...Hence the elevation of coffee to Top Beverage, along with a paranoia over the effects of even paltry little caffeine, which have reached the point where cafes don't pour coffee any more so much as titrate it...
...In the old days, there was a healthy balance between the constriction of the Russian economy and the implacability of the Russian appetite...
...But those were about the only intoxicants anybody had ever heard of—and none of them, not even the tea, could be procured in volume...
...He remains a firm believer in Russia's pre-glasnost intoxicant monoculture...
...A year later, as evidence that we were emerging from recession became incontrovertible, three Starbucks popped up in my Washington neighborhood...
...Imagine that...
...Same with tea...
...It tracks almost week-for-week with the decade's prosperity...
...Horn & Hardart "automat" restaurants that used to pepper Manhattan before the Second World War were long ago reduced to a single redoubt in Mid-town—a museum piece, more than anything else—and it has become incomprehensible to us that anyone would ever have wanted to get his lunch by sticking a quarter into a machine...
...An American airport where you can get espresso...
...Most eras have a signature toxin—gin in Hogarth's London and negus in Boswell's, absinthe in Toulouse-Lautrec's Paris and Pernod in Hemingway's, the martini in Eisenhower's America, LSD in Abbie Hoffman's...
...By 1995, my wife and I were drinking cappuccino at a roadside grocery store south of Flagstaff, Arizona...
...Ivan has the theory that Russia's opening to the West since Gorbachev has given it a real intoxicant problem—or to be euphemistic about it, a "stimulant" problem...
...So instead of relaxing after work with a few belts of vodka, he's taken to mixing his nightcap with Dilaudid—a pain-killer so strong that westerners usually make its acquaintance only in the painful throes of terminal cancer...
...Ivan drinks coffee with a slurping, sweating, tie-spattering, saucer-sloshing, and (as my wife has remarked) carpet-staining abandon...
...There was, in retrospect, something inevitable about the coffee craze...
...And then, eyes brimming with nostalgia, we'll tell our grandchildren about how wonderful it was to walk into a coffee bar for an extra-tall cappuccino on a cold day or an extra-skim de-caf iced Americano on a hot one...
...A Starbucks extra-tall-half-decaf-mocha-skim-latte...
...I remember flying into Miami airport with my wife-to-be in 1992, unable to contain my excitement that there was an espresso stand in the airport...
...The problem in this economy, unlike Russia's, is that an obscene number of people could quite easily afford to drink a magnum of champagne with every meal...
...The results of the Soviet collapse for Russian continence have thus been grimmest for the classes with dollars at their disposal—among them my friend's journalistic colleagues...
...The glass-half-empty view is that scarcity left Russians with an absence of self-control...
...And our grandchildren will just nod uncomprehend-ingly from across the table in the corner Dilaud-o-Mat...
...One journalist of Ivan's acquaintance has married his typically Russian oral compulsion to the American insistence on bigger-better-stronger that he's absorbed from the television...
...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL...
...Someday, America will be poor enough to unwind again...
...And in the 1990s...
...Starbucks may go the same route...
...To my eyes, this makes him a representative man...
...Khhhhhlerp...
...I recently heard an order for a "three-quarters decaf, one-quarter caf...
...If there were cigarettes around, a Russian would smoke them...
...The glass-half-full way of looking at it is that scarcity was the ally of temperance...
...The mousy little lady literary journalist who used to save her kopecks for a twice-yearly "treat" of crummy Russian chocolates has discovered that she can afford a liter-sized McDonald's chocolate milkshake every day at lunchtime...
...Much of our conversation concerned coffee...
...Ivan is one of the rare Muscovites who got the best of both worlds...
...If there was vodka around, a Russian would drink it...
...An America that's rich enough not just to buy but to drink, snort, or smoke virtually anything has got to set sharp cultural limits on what it can consume...
...No one ever had to limit his consumption of anything," Ivan said...
...We had the economy to do that for us...
...And since he doesn't like vodka, he's settled on coffee...
Vol. 4 • June 1999 • No. 38
