Hotel Habitue 12: Coffee
It’s not going to be good. I know this because it never is, and my sample size is fifty hotels from Texas to Pennsylvania and everywhere in between.
It’s probably grown in some questionable region of Asia, where it’s roasted to the point of almost being charcoal, just to be shipped and stored and sold in 55 gallon drums. And yet. I’m gonna get up an hour and a half before I have to leave and stumble down the hall and elevator, my eyes panicked from the eternal fluorescence, and pour the boot water into a paper cup. i’ll drown it with sugar to mask the bitterness and shuffle back to my room, rubbing my eyes, scratching my ass, and frowning at yesterday’s sore muscles which are beginning to wake up.
I’ll sit on the edge of the (ever unmade) bed when I take the first mouthful. The only thing that can be said about it is that it’s hot. Again, I know I shouldn’t expect any more from it. It’s not my french press at home, and it’s not a latte from my favorite cafe in Tampa. But goddammit. The old woman (which, God bless her) who made it probably either thinks it’s fine, or doesn’t particularly give a damn. I’d not hold either possibility against her. She looks seventy, like she was just easing into retirement in this vacation town before her husband died and she got fucked out of his pension. She looks like the type of tired only the service industry can offer and overdeliver on. Dealing with shitheels who talk the way I think. I hope no one tells her the coffee is awful, but it is. When she’s not looking, I want to carry the carafe outside and throw it in the hedges. The immaculately trimmed hedges. No wonder they didn’t have any money left for secondhand Folgers.
All I’m looking for at the bottom of the paper cup is enough momentum to push me down the ungreased slide of the day, but all I find are grounds. Probably reused one, two, ten times. Maybe they finally found the bottom of the coffee barrel after purchasing it seven years ago, and they had to collect up all the bits that fall on the ground and get pushed under the counter to make do in the meantime. Extra flavor, complimentary with your stay. I feel like there has to be some middle ground (not from a drum at Costco) between the cocaine motor oil I want and the swamp puddle I am offered. I could travel with a small kettle and a french press, but that would make me feel like an asshole in a way I can’t really articulate.
I’d pay five dollars a night extra just for a damn keurig. I’d pay ten dollars for them to have a barista on staff. Even just one of those shitty ones from Starbucks. But I’ll keep drinking it on the edge of of the bed in the cold darkness while I wait for the sun to rise.