BULLET BOB’S COFFEE

by Matt Baker

After my third failed engagement, my life resumed to its normal free fall pattern. My employment path took another bumpy turn into short lived jobs that ended by getting fired or by my simple refusal to return for various and completely logical reasons. Onstage I came to the conclusion that audiences showed up to hear someone else talk about their sexual anatomy and nothing else; to hear words they were too shy to say themselves. People need their dick jokes more than they need truth. This, I discovered.

One night, while intoxicated on wheat beer from the local brewpub, I instructed a middle aged woman who had been booing me the entire show to pull down her husband’s pants if she wanted a dick joke. I got my ass whooped for that one. The woman’s husband and an unidentified man surprised me in the parking lot after the show. While throwing half throttle punches - he threw three or four before getting too winded to even stand up - he proclaimed that I was getting my ass kicked by Mr. Little Dick himself.

The downhill slalom continued. Comedy wasn’t paying any longer. I’d checklisted my way through a variety of jobs and burned every professional relationship I’d ever had. I just needed a job, any job. And I got that “any” job.

Overpriced coffee concoctions were beginning to be all the rage; coffee shops were being built everywhere and they were always looking for help. So I accepted a job offer from Bullet Bob’s Coffee Company, an Arkansas based chain that got its name from a secondary character in Donald Hays’ novel, The Dixie Association.

In the interview, they asked if reporting to work at 4:30am was a problem.

I said, “I don’t believe so.”

The truth was I typically went to bed at that time, after a marathon night consuming 12 ounce cans of beer. I privately saw no foreseeable way in which I was going to meet this obligation. But to be fair, I gave it my best shot. And to be one hundred percent honest, it wasn’t the early hours or the nature of the job itself, it was the same problem I carried with me from one situation to the next, from one day to the next day, from each and every single god damn moment to the next. But I hadn’t yet figured out what that problem was.

The first week I was scheduled afternoons and evenings for my training. This gave me an opportunity to hone my coffee drink-making skills without the high pressure morning crowd that I would be soon experiencing. I solidified my talents in steaming milk, aerating the top layer to produce a heavenly plume of white, silky foam for cappuccinos. I was indoctrinated with the correct number of espresso shots, pumps of chocolate and syrup flavorings for each available size. I was also schooled in the various milk options; whole, 2%, non-fat, organic, soy, rice, breast, etc. There was a distinct protocol for which drinks received whipped cream and which drinks it had to be requested. If Clark, our manager, was standing nearby we had to proactively “educate” our customers about our non-coffee based beverage options; Banana Splitaccinos, Strawberry Shortcakacinos, Bluberry Shakacinos, and what other god awful mixture of sugar and gunk to put in a cup for the sole sake of a god damn sale. Cha-ching.

Clark trained me on the cash register. He was more concerned with charging for each additional shot of espresso or extra whipped cream than he was with the quality of the drink itself. I was instructed to charge additional fees for anyone who uttered the word, “extra” for any drink condiment.

“What if they want it extra hot?” I asked him.

“Unfortunately we can’t charge extra for that,” he answered sadly, wiping away a coffee ground off the register screen.

I found running the register to be boring; and I often felt bad about charging people all the pure profit add-on charges. I felt uncomfortable muttering, “Four dollars and eighteen cents,” for a cup of coffee.

There were always the purposely difficult types that came waltzing in the doors at Bullet Bob’s; the ones who aggressively approached the counter and listed their drink with ten modifiers as fast as they could, delighted in being cosmopolitanly difficult. Their belief that in having a tongue rehearsed enough to say, “quad, half calf, two percent, extra hot, two inches of foam, one and and half pump sugar free vanilla, two raw sugar and half a Sweet n Low latte, in a double cup” was a sure sign of metropolitan savvy, a pretentious checkmark on their very own, “Why I Kick Ass” chart.

After all the training, I was marked on the schedule to work my first opening shift, the morning rush, the high time of the coffee business.

Upon successfully completing exactly forty seven minutes of sleep, I made my way to the coffee shop that first morning. I was immediately greeted by a loud and enthusiastic fellow barista I’d never met before. “I’m Pauline!”

“Hi Pauline.”

“You ready?” She kept asking me.

“Sure, I guess,” I said constantly yawning, rubbing my eyes and trying to work the morning gummy beer taste out of my mouth. “Party hard last night,” she asked.

“Sort of,” I said, although I chose not to divulge my tale of a night of topless beer guzzling in my living room by myself. Then as if the crowd had been secretly congregating in the parking lot beforehand, just for the evil sake of bombarding me on my first morning, a swarm of eager junkies filed into the shop seconds after unlocking the door. At each passing minute a steady of stream of lattes, cappuccinos, half cafers, quad mochas, extra hot and one and a half raw sugar dipshits continued to pour inside. There was no break in sight. I struggled to keep up with the pace, one after another. Pauline was relentless, shouting out the orders, identifying drinks by customer’s names, “I got a Mary mocha latte.”

“What is a Mary mocha latte,” I yelled back.

“Oh, my oops! It’s like a regular mocha latte except Mary doesn’t like it quite so hot and a little sweeter than normal.” Mary smiled at Pauline and then they both looked at me.

Two hours into this nightmare, I asked Pauline when the next Bullet Bob’s employee was coming in.

“Why?”

“I need a break,” I said.

“Oh, are you a smoker?” she said.

“No, I’m a drinker.”

Although I did my best to tune out the voices from the customers, my mind was filled nonetheless with their sighs and complaints, “You call this extra hot?” “There’s no chocolate in my drink!” “You got a six shot latte back there?” “Where’s the normal guy that works mornings?” “Are you deaf? I said vanilla, not hazelnut!”

“No,” I replied, “I’m not deaf, just mildly retarded, if that’s a problem for you?”

“I didn’t know,” the customer said, stepping back.

Everyone has their breaking point; for different situations, it may differ greatly. My breaking point typically involves a simple mathematical formula that correlates the importance of a particular event with the net emotional output. When that threshold becomes ridiculously out of whack, I break down. In other words, when a patron yells, curses or attempts to humiliate me over a simple cup of coffee, the threshold is obviously crossed, the entire system is thrown off and I no longer care whatsoever about anything.

I began purposely using caffeinated espresso when decaf was requested and vice versa. I made sure extra hot drinks were lukewarm in the hope that the additional time they had to wait for me to redo it would cause them more stress and disruption in their calculated and mechanized lifestyles. Even better, they would reluctantly take the baby warm mocha with them because, “I don’t have time for this shit!” and be disgusted and upset for the remainder of their day. I added too much vanilla syrup, not enough mocha. I “accidentally” miscalculated the correct number of espresso shots. Sometimes I forgot to put them in altogether. I took delicious fun in scribing bad words with caramel sauce on top of whipped cream. “Fuck” and “shit” and other four letter explititives were easily placed along the top of a healthy helping of whipped cream. One woman actually asked me, “What does this say?” I told her, “It says Fuck. I tried to write the letter U underneath it but you can see I kind of ran out of room.”

“Oh, okay,” she said walking off, completely clueless to the fact that a world outside of hers existed.

When it became obvious I was getting too far behind, Pauline “re-deployed” me to the cash register. I undercharged, overcharged, whatever I felt like doing. I wrote drinks incorrectly on the cups. I was a man crumbling, piece by piece, falling apart during a morning rush at a suburban coffee shop in the middle of nowhere America, with no concern, no care for anyone, no thought other than the fact that my mind was losing the glue that was needed to keep it together. I think my mind’s disintegration was the result of disappointment; disappointment in my compatriots, my fellow human beings who looked at me as nothing more than a lever, or a button, a mechanism to satisfy themselves. I was saddened more than anything.

The entire coffee shop was falling apart too. People were yelling, cursing, and pounding the counters. No one was getting a drink that in any way resembled what they had ordered. Customers needed voids and credits to their credit cards. I punched in $3,890.00 on one man’s card, instead of $3.89.

Pauline frantically handed out free drink coupons.

“Sorry,” she said to her regular customers. “I’m really sorry about this.”

“I’m never coming back here again.”

“Mary Mocha Latte, please come back.”

“Never again,” I heard repeatedly as disgruntled patrons marched to the door. I left too, taking off my apron and letting it drop to the floor in front of the cash register; I placed my hands in my pockets and walked to the parking lot, found my car, got in and drove away.

________________________________________________________________________________________________ Matt Baker's work has appeared in The Saint Ann's Review, Philadelphia Inquirer, Permafrost, FRiGG, and elsewhere. His novel, Drag the Darkness Down, will be published in 2008. He lives in Little Rock where he's the Circulation Director at The Oxford American.