One time one of my coworkers came in to open and somebody had broken into the patio and moved all the furniture to the perimeter to better frame the giant stinking shit they’d taken in the middle of the floor.
This coffee shop was the only place I’ve ever had to come in and clean tampons off the ceiling.
At some point our coffee maker just stopped working so one of the shift leads brought in his grandma’s Mr. Coffee.
That same shift lead once randomly shut down the coffee shop all day because he needed help editing his chapbook because he’d gotten a contract with Crown Publishing. That same dude skipped out on paying rent for his apartment for like three months because every time the owner came by to ask him for his rent his answer was “Fuck you, I saved a baby” because he’d saved a baby from a fire. Eventually that was his answer to every criticism and it was still relentlessly charming until he became the night manager of a Denny’s and then it was just kind of sad.
My elementary school DARE officer came in at one point because of “suspicious activity” because cops were always coming in for suspicious activity to see if the regulars had left paraphernalia out because one time somebody literally left a three-foot-tall bong set up next to one of the potted plants on the patio. I was like “oh shit, you were the DARE officer at my school, sorry for smoking” and she was like “don’t worry about it, I’ve been an alcoholic since my girlfriend left me.”
I went to a school TWENTY FOUR MILES away from this coffee shop. This was a SMALL shop. In a stupid, shitty suburb that nobody goes to. This wasn’t a coffee shop that had ever been on California’s Gold or made the news or been featured in a “Best Coffee Shops You’ve Never Heard Of” article. So I’m at my school TWENTY FOUR MILES away, in a totally different county, and I mention to one of my classmates that I work at this coffee shop and he just goes “Holy shit, so you know where to get good drugs?” And I was kind of offended but he wasn’t wrong and I had actually blown a guy in the back seat of the Good Drug Dealer’s car. (Unrelated to drugs, it was basically pity oral) (and not that the Good Drug Dealer was a good guy compared to the shouty meth dealer, just that he was the one who sold the Good Drugs)
There were twelve WLW who hung out there regularly and we all had the worst lesbian sheep problem and somehow the fact that none of us could get our shit together and fuck each other did NOTHING to prevent the kind of “I’ve slept with all your exes” drama that you expect out of insular queer scenes which culminated in a confrontation that ended like six friendships. Turns out Debbie had told the manager about my adventure with the body because Debbie thought I was cute and that worked out well for me because I thought Debbie was cute and we made out, like, twice but her girlfriend lived with her literally less than a hundred yards away and wasn’t open to a poly arrangement so instead me and Debbie were just cuddle buddies and we’d nap in the lounge in the back of the shop where everyone else either fucked or did unimaginable amounts of blow.
When the coffee shop finally shut down the owners just told everyone that it was closing for four days for earthquake renovations and when we all met up to hang out in front of the shop the next day (because we were all fucking losers and had literally nothing else going on) we found out that the owners had changed the locks and thrown all the shit we’d left inside (CDs, a couple backpacks, paintings, ashtrays, board games) into the dumpster along with the broken coffee machine and they’d shattered every single bottle of torani syrup in the place on top of the pile. The only Chumbawamba album I’ve ever owned came out of that dumpster covered in butterscotch because fuck it, I wanted a souvenir and I wasn’t about to take Sheryl Crow.
I miss that coffee shop like you’d miss a lover you left behind.
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