Through the Grinder - By Cleo Coyle Page 0,3

like, twenty-four times in twenty-four hours?”

My Jersey Girl daughter, Joy, was still adjusting to the array of trivialities that characterized Manhattan life. Just before eleven o’clock, she crossed the Blend’s sun-washed, wood-plank floor on her stacked black boots and ordered her usual double tall vanilla latte.

Current conversation topic at the coffeehouse counter—Basic Cable’s Channel 1.

I must have heard thousands of these discussions in my time managing the coffeehouse—the eccentricities of cabbies, bad Broadway shows, sucky bands at CBGB, Time Out’s cover stories, film crews that close down entire blocks, trying to sleep through relentless ambulance sirens, kicking cars that block pedestrian crosswalks, the best slice below Fourteenth, Barney’s warehouse sales, the end of porno on Forty-Second, kamikaze bike messengers, the real meaning of some Yiddish word, the difference—if any—among the Indian restaurants lining East Sixth, the New York Post’s Page Six, the precise contents of an egg cream. And, of course, rents, rents, apartments, and rents.

One of my best baristas and assistant managers, Tucker Burton, a lanky, floppy haired, gay playwright and actor, who also happened to believe he was the illegitimate son of Richard Burton, slid Joy’s drink across the slab of blueberry marble.

“Sweetie, don’t knock New York 1. What other town’s got a cable channel devoted to twenty-four hours of local coverage? Okay, so the stories repeat a lot, but you haven’t yawned till you’ve heard the fisherman’s weather in rural Louisiana. Lemme tell ya, swamp humidity levels aren’t pretty—or in the least interesting. Give me a ‘Subway Surfer Falls to His Death’ story repeated ten times any day.”

“That’s sort of morbid, Tucker,” I pointed out behind the coffee bar’s efficient, low-slung silver espresso machine.

(We actually had a three-foot-tall, bullet-shaped La Victoria Arduino espresso machine behind the counter, too. Strewn with dials and valves, the thing had been imported from Italy in the 1920s; but, like the eclectic array of coffee antiques decorating the shelves and fireplace mantel—including a cast iron two-wheeled grinding mill, copper English coffee pots, side-handled Turkish ibriks, a Russian samovar, and a French lacquered coffee urn—it was for show only.)

“Get over it, Clare,” said Kira Kirk, the eight-pound Sunday edition of the New York Times cradled in her slender arm like a newsprint infant. “What do you expect from a city of aberrant people?”

“Aberrant?” said Joy.

“Devious. Wayward. Offending. Sinning—if you will.” Kira was a crossword puzzle freak. “Where else would goofball kids think surfing on top of a subway car is something to do for kicks? If you ask me, they deserve to get squashed like bugs.”

As a coffeehouse manager, I’d seen many flavors of urban humanity pour through our front door. Kira was one of that group who embodied those lines from the poem “To the Coffeehouse”:

“You hate and despise human beings, and at the same time you can not be happy without them…”

A consultant of some sort, Kira was recently divorced, living alone, and approaching fifty. She’d started coming by the Blend pretty frequently about six weeks ago. When I first saw her, I thought she was a striking woman with refined features, beautiful cheekbones, and an admirable head of long dark hair. Lately, however, I noticed she’d started letting herself go. Her usually creamy skin looked blotchy and wind burned, her body looked far too thin, like she wasn’t eating enough, and she’d even stopped dyeing her hair. It now hung in a long gray braid down her oversized blue sweater.

Kira’s usual Sunday ritual was the Travel and Leisure section, then the crossword puzzle, accompanied by a grande cappuccino and a butter croissant. As a regular, she didn’t need to tell me her order. She just needed to appear.

I half-filled the stainless steel pitcher with whole milk, then opened the valve on the steam wand, warming the milk on the bottom and foaming it on top. Then I set aside the pitcher, ran the ravishingly oily espresso roast beans through the grinder, dosed the ground coffee into the portafilter cup, tamped it tightly down, and, after sweeping excess grinds from the rim, clamped its handle into place.

With the start of the extraction process, I checked the espresso’s viscosity, making sure it was oozing out of the machine (yes, it should ooze like warm honey—if it gushes out, the machine’s temperature and pressure is off, and it’s not espresso but a brewed beverage).

Our machine is semi-automatic, which means the barista (that’s me) must manually stop the water flow between eighteen and twenty-four seconds. Any longer and the beverage is over-extracted (bitter and