Penny and me

by Melanie on 03/01/08 at 11:42 pm

When I lived on the beach in Santa Monica in a hotel in a room next to Penny, we used to go buy a pound of vanilla coffee at a shop nearby. It was one of those coffee and sundries shops — sort of like Starbucks of today, but with more stuff — they had a lot of nice places like that in Santa Monica in the ‘80s.

We’d take the coffee back to the hotel and I would boil some up on a hot plate (or maybe I had a small gas oven, can’t remember) in a coffee can. Yes, a can. I didn’t have a coffee pot. But I knew how to boil perfect coffee from my years in Norway. That’s how they make coffee there: they have special coffee pots, but they just bring it to a boil – just barely, so the grounds froth and bubble across the top, and then turn off the heat and let the grounds sink to the bottom. It’s done when you can pour the coffee without getting many grounds in your cup. It’s delicious. Ever so slightly acrid because of the boiling, but it’s clear and strong. I had a potholder to hold the can with.

That vanilla coffee was our favorite. Penny must have suggested it. I remember us walking through the aisles of the store, and odd but not unusual couple by Santa Monica standards. No one paid us any mind. It smelled so good, and living like that on the beach with the morning sun streaming in, the light glancing off the Pacific ocean and the smell of the salt and roar of the breakers permeating the air, was like being in heaven. I had nothing except my electric typewriter and not even a blanket except one crummy, green, cheap hotel cigarette-holed cover –the kind made out of the very cheapest synthetic material–, but I felt like a millionaire. I was happier with nothing then than I have been many other times with plenty.

I’ve tried many times to recreate that smell and feeling by buying vanilla coffee beans and making coffee, but it never tastes just the same. Like Adrienne Rich says, you can’t go back to those same fountains tossed in light, but they live in your memory, and perhaps in a poem or story.

The other thing I had then was a tv and Miami Vice. Every Wednesday. I practically lived to watch that show. More TK.