American English, Italian Chocolate

by Rick Bailey

  The first person said, “He is dead.” One after another, going around the circle, we took turns repeating that line and those that followed.

  Gone from the earth.

  Stiff as a board.

  Light as a feather.

  At this point we bent down and slipped two fingers of each hand under the person’s body. The leader said, “Let’s pick him up.”

  And we did.

  It worked every time. The dead person, no matter how big, would practically fly up to the ceiling, where we held him for a split second before lowering him back down to the floor. We would gasp and scream for a minute or two, terrified and amazed by this mystery in the dark, and then ask for another volunteer. No one tried to understand what was happening. We didn’t want to understand it. It was pure joy. It was like direct contact with the supernatural.

  When there were no more volunteers, we switched the lights back on, put the furniture back in place, and turned on Cat Stevens. If there was a scary movie on TV, we’d watch that.

  There’s a reference to levitation as a party trick in The Magician’s Own Book, or the Whole Art of Conjuring by George Arnold and Frank Cahill, published in 1862. The authors describe it as “one of the most remarkable and inexplicable experiments relative to the strength of the human frame.” In their description, they emphasize that it is a “heavy man” who is lifted when his lungs and the lungs of those lifting are fully inflated with air. The authors trace this magic back to an American navy captain doing a demonstration in Venice. The critical detail, according to Arnold and Cahill, is the breathing: “On several occasions [we] have observed that when one of the bearers performs his part ill, by making the inhalation out of time, the part of the body which he tries to raise is left, as it were, behind.”

  Two centuries earlier, Samuel Pepys refers to levitation in his diary entry on July 31, 1665. He provides an account of leaving London to attend a wedding, noting in that week alone, some seventeen or eighteen hundred people had died of plague (one-tenth of the London population died that year). Pepys and his party arrive too late for the ceremony but in time for dinner, cards, talk, and prayers. After helping put the newlyweds to bed (“I kissed the bride in bed, and so the curtaines drawne with the greatest gravity that could be, and so good night”), he goes to a bed which, consistent with customs of the time, he shares with another guest.

  Before sleep, the two men have a chat. “We did here all get good beds, and I lay in the same I did before with Mr. Brisband, who is a good scholler and sober man; and we lay in bed, getting him to give me an account of home, which is the most delightfull talke a man can have of any traveller.” In the course of their conversation, Mr. Brisband speaks of “enchantments and spells” he has recently witnessed in Bourdeaux, France. “He saw four little girles,” Pepys writes, “very young ones, all kneeling, each of them, upon one knee; and one begun the first line, whispering in the eare of the next, and the second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and she to the first.” They whisper these words:

  Voyci un Corps mort (Behold, a dead body),

  Royde comme un Baston (Still as a stone),

  Froid comme Marbre (Cold as marble),

  Leger comme un esprit (Light as a spirit),

  Levons te au nom de Jesus Christ (We lift you in the name of Jesus Christ).

  With one finger each, they raise the boy as high as they can reach. Brisband is “afeard to see it” and—disbelieving—calls for the cook, “a very lusty fellow,” meaning large, to come, and in like manner, the girls lift him as well.

  For a while, every time that group of friends got together, at Sandra Bremer’s or wherever, we shut off the lights and played dead, picking each other up. We reveled in the mystery of levitation. Like those little French girls, what we were enjoying was essentially child’s play, like telling ghost stories, though in our case, we didn’t have bubonic plague adding spice to the experience. Looking back now, I marvel at the fact that we never dropped anyone. What were the chances? But no one banged his head on an end table. No one fell and broke an arm.

  My preferred role in the game was the dead guy. Lying on the floor, eyes closed, listening to the chant—to feel myself lifted into the air was a rush, not so much an out-of-body as an in-body experience. Some nights, along with levitation, there was talk of séances and hypnosis. I remember seeing kids bent over a Ouija board. “Wouldn’t it be freaky,” someone said, “to see into the future?”

  Sure, but what if you had to see all of it?

  If there’s any wisdom in becoming an adult, it’s knowing that you don’t want to know. We grow up. We marry and have children. We divorce and find ourselves alone again. In search of ourselves we fly off to faraway places and then come back home, still searching. Our parents, spouses, and friends, sometimes even our children, sicken and die. Between these events, there are the levitations, moments of genuine sweetness and mystery you share with other people. Lying in bed with Mr. Brisband, Pepys observes, “I have spent the greatest part of my life with abundance of joy, and honour, and pleasant journeys, and brave entertainments,” calling the wedding and his time with friends the “greatest glut of content that ever [he] had; only under some difficulty because of the plague.”

  Seeing Donna in class, reading and thinking and sharing, was like witnessing a levitation.

  A week passed before I heard from her. She called me to apologize for being absent. She was in a shelter. She said she couldn’t talk long. She said he didn’t know where she was and that her safety, and the safety of her children, depended on keeping her whereabouts a secret. I told her to take care of herself, that we were just finishing Ghosts, and that she could come back anytime and write the paper, pick up where she left off.

  When we hung up, I had an idea she wouldn’t be back. A week passed, then another. In class we moved along to the next works on the syllabus—The Crucible, Wise Blood, Go Tell It on the Mountain—works Donna would have loved. I never saw her again.

  14

  The Soft Imperative

  I ask my wife, “What language do they speak in Macedonia?”

  It’s a Friday morning. This is our pre-breakfast quiet time. Usually we don’t say much early in the morning. What is there to always say? She’s reading a book about the Spanish Civil War and drinking her first cup of coffee. I’ve just clicked off the New Yorker, which I’m partially reading online these days. Anthony Lane has yawned at Black Mass, the new Johnny Depp movie, comparing it and Depp unfavorably to Taxi! and James Cagney. I’m about to spread fig jam on a slice of toast.

  She turns a page. “Macedonian? Or maybe Greek.” She looks up. “You really should read this book. You never read the books I suggest.”

  “I read The Swerve,” I say. “I started to read The Skin.”

  “Started.”

  It’s a new jar of jam. The jar pops when I twist the cap off. “Brian’s Fig Marmalade,” I read aloud. “From Macedonia. You wouldn’t think there would be a guy named Brian in Macedonia.”

  She picks up the jar, squints at the fine print, and hands it back.

  Between slices of toast, I borrow her iPad. “You’re right, Macedonian. It says the Macedonians are slavophones.”

  She nods.

  “Slavophones,” I say, waiting for her to make eye contact. “I would hate to be called a slavophone.” Another pregnant pause. “How about you?”

  She taps her spoon against her cup. It’s code: more coffee. I’ve told her she should just say, “Coffee me!” when she wants more, the way guys back in my college days would shout, “Beer me!” That was fun. Verbing the noun added to the casual derangement you felt on a beerful afternoon.

  I make her a second cappuccino. This morning, thanks to “coffee me,” which my wife refuses to say, and thanks to Mount Everest and the New Yorker, I’m thinking about verbs. Anthony Lane also reviewed the new movie Everest. Too many characters, he writes, most of them underdeveloped. “The one thing they have in common,” he observes, “
is the indomitable urge to use the word ‘summit’ as an intransitive verb. That takes guts.”

  “Here you go.” I set her coffee down, admiring the foam. “Enjoy.”

  “You know I hate that.”

  I know she hates it, that universal server-ism you hear in restaurants these days. The plates are all delivered, the wine glasses filled, we’re ready to eat, and the server says, “Enjoy.” Not “Enjoy your dinner.” Not “Enjoy yourselves.” Just “Enjoy.” The locution irks her no end.

  It irks me too, but not no end.

  Later in the day I’m driving over to the blood depot, a couple of miles from the house. Every eight weeks I shed a pint. I do it both for the common good and for my personal benefit. (Back in college, the old beer-me days, I learned to call this psychological egoism. There’s no such thing as a selfless act. You beered your friends knowing they would beer you back. It was a social contract.) According to the American Journal of Epidemiology, blood donors are 88 percent less likely to suffer heart attack. Old blood has higher viscosity than the new stuff you make. So bleed me. I’m happy to give.

  On the drive over there, I stop at a light behind a car with a personalized license plate: “Be Well.” The phrase reminds me of an old friend, David Marvin Cooper, a laid-back guy who always used to say, “Be cool.” He meant go with the flow, be open to the universe, or sometimes, a little more sternly, don’t be bogue (dude). “Be well” says much the same thing, maybe more. Roll down your window and smell the roses. Dial down the Rush Limbaugh and turn up the Mozart. Accept road work as a part of life. It’s a philosophical concept. It gentles us, reminding strangers to be mindful. This driver is concerned, in his or her generalized and impersonal way, with way more than my well-being or my wellness.

  A physician I saw for a short time, whenever I left her office, would touch me on the shoulder and say: “Feel better.” She also said apply ice, take your pain meds, no stairs. But then she capped it off with a holistic prescription that went beyond mere better-getting.

  These are the soft state-of-being imperatives available to us today, helping us to be well and good.

  The blood center is packed. I’ve made an appointment, but I still have to wait. I pretend to read the Red Cross book for a few minutes, picking out some diseases I might want to check up on (babesiosis, filariasis, spondylosis), and then look at old news in used magazines, too many of which are about golf. During the interview and Q and A, the nurse takes my temperature and blood pressure, examines my arms. She asks me if I had a good breakfast, if I’ve had plenty of liquids. I tell her about Brian’s Fig Marmalade, trying to remember as I do if Macedonia is on the list of places the Red Cross has associated with disease and dubious blood.

  “Right or left?” she asks, meaning, Which arm?

  I tell her I’m left leaning. For me, it’s part of being well.

  On the table, I make a fist. She inflates the blood pressure cuff and says I have nice veins. When the bleeding starts, she eases the cuff. I relax and roll the thingie in my hand. I watch local news on TV and try to dislodge a few fig seeds from my teeth. At one time, giving blood made me light-headed. Donating at work one day, I sat up too fast and felt a radical wobble in my legs. A blue shirt sat me back down and made me put my head between my knees. Another time I got the paper bag treatment. That was then. These days I’m manning up. I can give and give.

  The nurse comes by again to check on me and my bag of blood. “Almost done,” she says. “You doing okay?”

  I tell her I’m good. And well as well.

  Wrapping my arm when it’s finished, she points to the juice and cookie table. “No strenuous activity today,” she says. “Watch a little TV. Do a little reading.”

  On the way home I see the usual guy on the usual corner, holding a cardboard sign. In black felt pen he has written “PLEASE HELP.” Word has it there’s a meth ring in town, and this guy might be an affiliate. Wouldn’t you know it, I come to a full stop right next to him. “Look at their teeth,” I’ve been told. But I can’t. I just sit. Between me and him, a few feet, a universe. Somewhere in between the two categoricals—Get a job! Feed the poor!—is the soft imperative, an intransitive zone. Be well. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him wave his little sign. There’s no telling what help is, what’s good for both of us.

  The light changes.

  Go.

  15

  Third-Wave Coffee

  Next to me at the counter, this girl and her phone are having a sandwich. The sandwich is made with thick artisanal bread. I see tomato, sprouts, and white goo that, if she’s not careful, might splop on her phone, which is strategically positioned between her plate and her coffee cup. When the phone lights up every minute or so, she left-hands the sandwich, smiles down at the screen, and taps it with her right forefinger. She takes a sip of coffee.

  Me too. I’m here for some coffee.

  I mean Coffee.

  It’s my fourth visit to this coffee bar, Astro, on Michigan Avenue, down the street from what’s left of Detroit’s train station, up the street from the vacant lot that was Tiger Stadium. Astro is in Corktown, one of those places that’s happening in Detroit. It’s old made new, it’s Detroit waking up. At Astro you can get a tight espresso, a perfect macchiato, and a respectable cappuccino. They also serve pour-overs made from the coffees listed on the board behind the bar. Today they’re pour-overing Montecarlos (El Salvador), El Prado (Columbia), La Folie (Guatemala), Karinga (Kenya), and Chorongi (Kenya).

  According to 2010 Census data, the average Detroiter (a person sixteen years or older living in the city limits) travels twenty-six miles to get to work. How far does a Detroiter have to travel to get a good cup of coffee? Of course there’s coffee just about everywhere, and by coffee I mean the thin, steaming swill you get at lunch stands, breakfast shacks, convenience stores, and gas stations. Want that to go? Our Styrofoam cups come in two sizes.

  But what about Coffee? I checked. Inside the Detroit city limits, 138 square miles, there are tentatively four Starbucks. When I Google “a good espresso in Detroit,” a foursquare.com link takes me to “The 13 Best Places for Espresso in Detroit.” At that page I find the headline has been downgraded to “The 9 Best Places for Espresso in Detroit” (hence “tentatively” above). Another link lists forty-three spots, a few of which I’d certainly try, just because I like their names: Tongues Coffee, Café 1923, Zanie Janie, Ugly Mug. Most of these places are not in Detroit (Wyandotte, Ferndale, Northville, Plymouth, Brighton, Ypsilanti). I like the sound of Conga Coffee until I see this: Mount Clemens. And this: “Now features an Acoustic Guitar Circle for Adult Beginners.”

  And many of these forty-three are arguably not legitimate Coffee contenders because they are chains—Biggby, Caribou, Coffee Beanery, Panera, and, alas, Starbucks. These are PC (paper cup) second-wave providers.

  Coffee—and I mean Coffee in its espresso incarnation, first-wave Coffee—begins in Italy, in 1901, when Luigi Bezzera invents an apparatus, essentially a boiler, that forces (expresses) hot water through compressed coffee. The machine makes it possible to produce individual servings of coffee in forty-five seconds, “expressly” for each individual. In 1947, Achille Gaggia refines the technology and process, activating, as Jonathon Morris reports, “essential oils and colloids from the coffee, creating a mousse or crema on top of the resultant beverage.” First-wave espresso came to the United States in 1921 (Tosca Caffe, San Francisco) or maybe it was 1927 (Caffe Reggio, New York); first cappuccino came in 1957 (Caffe Trieste, San Francisco).

  Years later came PC second-wave coffee. Only it wasn’t a wave. It was a tsunami. Suddenly it became common to see people taking their Grande, “small” in PC speak, for a walk down the street or driving down the road holding a Venti, the twenty-ounce container, probably with stuff in the coffee. A lot of stuff. Suddenly sentences such as these, heretofore unimaginable in English, became common:

  I’ll have Tazo berry with cream, plus a shot of mocha.

  I’d
like an iced mocha cappuccino with an extra shot of chocolate, skim milk, decaf. I can’t stand the taste of coffee . . . it has to taste like hot cocoa instead.

  I’m in the mood for a tall nonfat caramel and honey half-decaf/half-regular latte with a little whipped cream on top.

  Frappuccino.

  Some of this stuff you can’t even say in Italian.

  We’re well into the third wave now. Independent providers like Astro, for whom coffee is a business but also very much an art, science, and religion, are coming on strong, growing by 20 percent a year, making up 8 percent of the yearly $18 billion coffee market. We can be thankful.

  We can be thankful, for example, for real ceramic cups. Drinking espresso, or worse, cappuccino from a paper cup is like eating steak with a spork. Give me a cup, with a handle, with a saucer, with a miniature spoon. At independents they grind (Astro calls it “shredding”), they weigh coffee shots (an Astro shot weighs a whopping nineteen grams), they monitor water temperature (around two hundred degrees Fahrenheit), they warm the cups. When the independents do it right, they serve a Coffee so dense, with a crema so thick, you can almost spread it on toast.

  Astro does it right.

  One Saturday morning my wife and I order coffee at Astro. Her cappuccino comes with a Christmas tree in the foam.

  I point at the sign. “Miranda, from Columbia,” I say to the barista. “Is that your usual espresso?”

  She says no, the coffees come in twenty-pound bags. When Miranda’s gone, they’ll rotate. She hands me my macchiato. There’s a heart in the foam.

  “So if we come back next week, or the week after?”

  “It probably won’t be Miranda,” she says.

  Hmm.

  Ten days later, I’m back. She’s right. They’re shredding Owl’s Howl. And it tastes . . . different.