Hooked!! By Charles R. Bucklin

Me: “Hello, my name is Charles and I’m an Addict.”

Group Members: (warmly) “Hello Charles!”

Standing in front of a group of seated  strangers in a dimly lit room, I wondered what the fuck I was doing.

Well then, I might as well get started, I thought, feeling slightly silly.

Wiping the sweat from my forehead, I take a breath and begin:

***

Damn me it all started innocently enough.

My dark obsession started when I was very young and has stayed with me ever since.

God help me I can’t shake it. I’ve tried to quit or cut down many times but for the life of me, I just can’t.

I guess if the truth be told – I just don’t want to quit. 

Nowadays everybody is into the stuff. There are magazines, shops, and online Clubs that promote it now.

Which is funny cause at one time it was viewed as a necessary evil. A guilty pleasure that if taken to excess would lead to health problems.

And since I don’t want to be out of step with John Q Public –  I’ll probably keep on doing what I’ve been doing.

Which is…

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. So let me start from the beginning and tell you how it all started.

It was 1974 and I was a seventeen-year-old kid  living in Santa Clara County.

There wasn’t much to do back then.  On weekends you had to get your kicks from doing simple stuff on the cheap.

You cruised El Camino with your pals for a few hours gawping at high school chicks and when that got old you’d park and hit the local Bob’s Big Boy diner.

The stink of gasoline, cigarettes and cheap Brut cologne seemed to stick on our bodies as me and my buddy, Shane and my kid brother Matt would clamber out of Shane’s parent’s Oldsmobile and head into the diner. 

We’d grab a booth by the window so we could look at all the cars that drove up and down the strip.

There was something very zen about sitting and watching vehicles drive by. The passing car lights seemed to add to the atmosphere of the joint.

Somnambulism descends upon the diner as the hour grows late. The waitresses and the cook move like they are on autopilot as they quietly move through their stations. At times it felt like you were in church.

We didn’t have a lot of dough but we did have smokes and a desire to chill out much to the chagrin of the poor staff that were forced to serve us for hours on end.

You see, Bob’s Big Boy had a policy that allowed us to practically camp out there for hours on end.

If you ordered coffee they had to keep your cup constantly filled. A bottomless cup that was continuously tended to by waitresses with names like Trixie or Dottie.

All for the unheard-of price of twenty-five cents a cup. None of that refill costs ya more crap. You paid your quarter and that was that.

You’d smoke, drink coffee and talk shit. If a cute chick happened to enter the diner, we’d shut up and not be obvious by gawking too intently. Once the focus of our attention was safely out of earshot we’d resume our idle chit-chatting. 

Followed by more smoking and more coffee.

God, we felt so grown up back then.

Occasionally I’d see some older person shake his or her listening to us talk. Sometimes they might laugh and shake their heads before tossing a few crumpled bills on the counter before leaving.

Well, we didn’t give a damn about what the old farts thought, it was just all part of being young and having little responsibility.

Bathed in greasy fumes of burgers, fries, and steaming  coffee pots that had sat too long on their burners, we’d talk or sit quietly like young bulls under shady trees after grazing.

Ah, did I say we sat quietly? Well, not for long. Ya, see in a matter of hours a human body can only handle so much caffeine and nicotine before it becomes completely lit. And while the overall effect was not as stimulating as say coke or speed you could get a helluva a nice buzz going after drinking six cups of Joe and inhaling half of a pack of Marlboros. 

Needless to say, after an hour or so we were all pretty jacked and loud.

“Good thing you guys are cute. But ya need to keep it down,” said Dottie, our waitress as she topped off our mugs with steaming brew.

“Yeah, no problemo, Dot,” we said, lowering our voices.

“Try using a little less sugar,” she cautioned. “You Boys are positively wired. And you’re gonna rot the teeth out of your heads using all that crap. Why don’t you try drinking it black?”

“Yeach! Black coffee is gross,” I said, pouring a generous amount of sugar into my mug followed by an oceanic splash of cream.

“You’ll be surprised how your taste buds change when you get older,” said Dottie walking away from our table.

Yep, there were many nights after we got home where I could hear Matty thrash about in his bunk unable to sleep, while I stared like a zombie at my ceiling counting the cracks.

Often my Mom wondered why we couldn’t go to sleep after we got home.

She probably suspected the worst as drugs were pretty ubiquitous back in the day. 

She needn’t have worried though.  Matt and I pretty much eschewed the hard-core party scene and street drugs just weren’t our thing.

But back to my addiction, if you haven’t guessed it by now. My newfound drug of choice was coffee.

***

Now to give you some perspective, this was way before Starbucks.  Heck, even specialty coffees wouldn’t arrive on the scene till many years after I started drinking jitter juice.

Dear Lord, I remember the first time I tried French Roast coffee. This was back in 1978 and I was home on leave from Camp Pendleton. I had thirty days to blow, so I spent a lot of time in my old stomping ground which was Mountain View, California.  

Mountain View was just as dull as Cupertino,  my hometown, but they had a Mall, a Town n’ Country Shopping Center, and a small Disco Club for kids. 

Poor Cupertino didn’t even have a pulse back in the 70s. So if you ever meet someone who says they’re from Cupertino or grew up there – tell ’em you’re sorry. It was dead as a doornail, a Snoresville Capital of the World. Now it’s different with the Tech industry located there but before the 1980s –  forget about it.

Anyway, I was killing time one day in this Mall bookshop called The Upstart Crow when the store owner asks me  if I’d like a complimentary cup of coffee while I was browsing through the stacks.

“Sure, I’ll take a cup,” I said.

So he reverently hands me this porcelain cup filled with black coffee like a priest offering the holy eucharist and whispers “It’s French Roast.”

“How about some cream and sugar?”

“You won’t need it,” he says.

So, I take a sip, and BAM! My entire mouth comes alive. And for a few seconds I have a strange compulsion to go out and buy a beret and discuss the philosophical merits of Jean-Paul Sartre with fellow bohemians.

Which was totally weird.

But it was an eye opener to say the least.

And in that moment I realized that coffee no longer tasted like drain cleaner that needed gobs of sugar or milk to make it palatable. 

I could drink it black.

I had graduated so to speak, and after that singular experience, it became my mission to seek out great-tasting coffee no matter where my travels took me.

Which unfortunately was easier said than done. You have to remember that back then no one took coffee seriously.  If you asked for gourmet coffee most people thought you were talking about “flavored” coffees like International House of Coffee in a can which was just cheap coffee with dairy creamer and cinnamon in it.

For the most part it was slim pickens no matter where I went. Still that didn’t stop me from drinking at least six cups a day on a regular basis.

Which sometimes had a downside. 

I remember one night while living in Brooklyn I was sitting on a couch with a gal I had recently started seeing. 

Girlfriend: (passionately) I was thinking about you all day and how your kisses taste sweet like coffee.”

Me: “That’s nice. Come here.”

A month later 

Girlfriend: “I think we should break up.”

Me: “What?! Why?”

Girlfriend: “Cause you’re a self centered asshole and your breath stinks like old coffee!!”

Me: ?!!

***

Times change thank God. The general public has become more savvy and nowadays we live in a Country where delicious coffee can be found no matter where you go.

In my case, I dunno if that is necessarily a good thing since I’m pretty much a coffee junkie 

Oh, I have one more thing to add,  and it’s more of a pet peeve…To me coffee tastes like coffee and that’s the wonderful thing about it. 

But, have you ever noticed how the “Tasting Notes” on bags of really expensive coffee always say yummy things like –  Chocolate or Stone Fruit or Fudge? 

You know, in all the years I have been drinking coffee I have never tasted anything remotely like “Chocolate” or “Stone Fruit” in my cup of joe. Coffee can taste acidic, bitter, and sometimes like dog shit, so maybe they should print those descriptors on the bags? Probably not a great marketing strategy, but at least it would be honest.

Anyway,  that’s it. Thanks for listening. 

***

After I had finished speaking and had sat down, the group leader saw me gazing wistfully at the coffee pot in the refreshments stand at the back of the hall.

“Don’t worry,  it’s decaf,” he said.

“DECAF?!!”

“No! No! Not Decaf! Dear God, anything but that,” I moaned as I abruptly jerked awake from a deep sleep.

“Are you okay, honey? You were moaning and thrashing about in your sleep,” said wifey, poking me in my arm.

“Huh, huh, huh …Yeah,” I panted. “What’s that smell?”

“Pop in fresh Cinnabon rolls, right out of the oven.”

“Did you make coffee?” I said, grabbing my Snoopy slippers.

“Yesss, there’s a fresh pot of coffee on the counter.”

“French Roast?”

“No, it’s Half Caf from Ralph’s Market. “

I gasped as if I had been sucker punched in the gut.

“Ha! Ha! It’s French Roast silly. You’re such an “addict,” Charlie,” she said.

Well, what could I say?

She’d get no arguments out of me.