Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou Read Online Free Page B

not be remarkable on the surface of it, but somehow, it seems striking that that particular memory escapes me. I remember my first drink (back porch, Teen Canteen, Quanah, Texas, 1963—a sip from a half-pint of Thunderbird wine, shared by five guys, one of whom was immediately sick and never drank again). I remember my first “real” steak (Fort Worth, Farmer’s Daughter, 1966—until then, I thought all steak was served beaten, battered, and fried); my first tailor-made cigarette (back seat, Billy Hugh Price’s 1964 GTO—white vinyl, 8-track cassette, 428 cubic inches, bored and stroked, four-barrel carb and twin glass packs, Hurst Shifter and a posi-track rear end—“There’s nothing like a Lark,” I said). I also remember my first sexual encounter (none of your business—let’s not get carried away). But I don’t remember my first cup of coffee. It seems that I’ve always drunk coffee.
    Coffee is my best friend, my early morning companion, my late night sentry. Some days, I drink it constantly, and I’ve started no day without it for as long as I can remember. It has staid me on birth nights, on death watches; it has been my sole companion in lonely bus terminals, crowded train stations, and distant airports. It has seen me safely down ribbons of slick, winding highway when sleep nagged my eyes from the road. I have drunk it from china, porcelain, and tin, glass, plastic, Styrofoam and stainless steel. I’ve had it perked, brewed, dripped, and boiled. I’ve sat at a table in New Orleans and sipped bitter chickory while loutishly dressed fools paraded in front of St. Louis Cathedral. I’ve shouldered with it beside a diner’s counter in New York’s Time Square on a frigid New Year’s morning when traffic snarled and crowds pressed against each other like Eliot’s dead undone. I’ve sipped it with truckers along interstates in greasy cafes where the food was always good, and I’ve stood with stamping feet at concession stands and blown a cooling breath over its steamy ebony while my children played their games beneath a blue norther’s sky. It’s skated the black-iced glaze of Philadelphia with me, taught me the wonders of Canada’s Rockies, and helped me hold at bay the pounding memory of last night’s fiesta in the desert mountains of Mexico. I’ve savored its inky richness while contemplating a placid lake, and nervously slurped it while hurricane clouds boiled overhead. I’ve drunk it while sailing and hiking, while fishing and hunting, while studying theatre notices in London and while rocking across the storm-tossed Irish Sea. I’ve sipped it in the fanciest of hotels and the crudest of campsites.
    I’ve paid as much as five dollars for a cup in a big city restaurant, and as little as a nickel in a roadside diner. I’ve accepted free coffee from the thermoses of strangers, and I’ve shared a half a cup with a friend when that’s all there was and all there was going to be.
    I’ve read the best newspapers of the world while sipping coffee, written reams with a smoking cup beside my keys, talked with the best of my friends, fenced with the worst of my enemies, celebrated victory, mourned failure, pondered accomplishment, nursed regret, all in the gentle steam of a coffee cup. I can’t imagine a day without it.
    It seems odd, then, that I can’t recall my first cup.
    I do recall when I was very young my mother prepared coffee for me. She would dump in about half a cup of cream, two or three teaspoons of sugar, and fill the rest of the mug with her strong brew. Eventually, the coffee outweighed the cream; soon, the cream disappeared altogether when granulated substitutes started replacing it on coffee bar counters. I never could get the powder to dissolve. Nothing’s worse than lumpy coffee.
    I still like a “little sugar,” about half a teaspoon, in my coffee—and only in the first cup—but truthfully, I do that more out of habit than need. Coffee requires tradition. But when