Latte My Arse

I hate coffeehouses. Not the real ones, just the ones the ones you see everywhere, full of people talking straight ahead and listening to their hands, oblivious to the loud and awful music, the cost of the coffee; those in which you have to work your way through board after board to find anything that’s made primarily or substantially from coffee beans.

The haggling when you want a small coffee is a factor:

“Small, regular coffee, please.”

“Tall coffee?”

“Just make it an ‘alto.’”

Having to put in the milk or cream yourself is a further irritant: your skin and the coffeehouse so far well-protected against burns and litigation, respectively, you now have to risk charring of the epidermis by pouring boiling coffee into a plastic bag to make room for your preferred pasteurized product. Worse, to get to this stage, you first have to wait behind others who ponder the whole, skimmed or half-and-half thing as though it were the riddle of the sphinx.

Bars have this advantage: a pint is a pint, whether American or Imperial; a pint is what you ask for. You don’t have to ask for an Amazonian to satisfy your taste in the petite. Another plus is that, while people don’t have to talk to one another, compulsory listening to half a conversation is rarer, because cell phone use is more of a challenge: after a certain hour the bar is too boisterous, and during office hours the unhindered noise of a bar can rarely sound like anything else, a deterrent to calling colleagues and loved ones. (I like it when Montgomery Clift does it in The Misfits, but it’s far less gratifying to overhear the guy with the hoppy beer and pasta special tell his half of the meaning of life: “Pale Rider … Kinda hoppy … the special … primavera … five bucks …”)

These prejudices are borne only partially of genuine reflection. You can be as solitary over beer as over coffee; bar music is louder and so, when bad, worse; and now, at least with the microbreweries, you can find yourself working through board after board to find something approximating your taste in lager, ale, or stout. So it’s arguable that I have developed a dislike of coffeehouses on account of the simple fact that they don’t stock beer.

But there’s more to it than that. Take Starbucks, today, noon, for example. Having bought a short-tall special-regular coffee, I joined the short-long line of those contemplating changing their faith from whole milk to skim milk. Distracted by the tedium, I didn’t see a young woman place her cup of coffee, with tremendous sleight of hand, behind the half-and-half container, the cup quite invisible from all perceivable angles and to all but fellow members of the magic circle. It was a trick of tremendous cunning, and foolishly I reached for and lifted the thermos as vertically as any human being would and watched it unfold, or spill (over the counter, over the floor, over the jeans of a third party), in slow motion. For no good reason, I offered to buy the magician another, and for no better reason, instead of apologizing, or at least politely declining, she uttered the following words, so full of presumption, entitlement, of all that is wrong with these establishments; five dollar words worthy of infamy – “Venti Skinny Cinnamon Dolce Latte.”