The Coffee Achiever

I had a friend back in high school…Colleen Armstrong. I would’ve made up some fictitious name there, changing names to protect the innocent and whatnot, but I haven’t heard from the lady in many, many years, and besides, this is a good story, not one of those disparaging ones about a Catholic high school girl who gets knocked up behind the tennis courts, that gets turned into an after-school special, with Anne Hathaway as Colleen and Danny Bonaduce as Andrew. Yeah, Colleen was pretty cute. And I’m a fan of the semi-insane buff gingers in showbiz…Carrot Top, Danny, et all. It’s definitely a niche market. But I digress.

Every morning, a small but hard-core group of breakfast devotees would meet in Stillman dining hall, and gorge on the oft-overlooked morning meal. Most students chose the extra few minutes of sleep over the food; not us. Seven days a week, eggs, bacon, butter and bread flowed freely from their respective taps into our youthful veins.

Looking back on it, we were a bit like a culinary circus freak show, with everyone having a certain abnormal penchant for a specific type of sunrise sustenance. But now, given my current food habits, I realize that those are just the kind of people I want to keep camp with. Pat Walters would truly conquer the school’s bacon supply via bacon-and-butter sandwiches on a regular basis. Had I known I would be going to a university where bacon was considered an instrument of the hell they didn’t believe in, I would’ve girded my pork loins a bit better in high school. I may bitch about it now, but the truth is that four years of a bacon-free lifestyle probably helped guarantee my existence well into my 30’s.

Me? I liked the sauce….orange juice, that is. To this day, I still love tasting the dripping lifeblood of sacrificed citrus globes. They never die in vain, and they’re dead sexy as well. They’re also simply the perfect size to hold in your hands…like breasts. C’mon, you know you were thinking it.

But Colleen…well, she was the coffee achiever. As a day student, she’d drive in to school every day, clutching a 36-ounce Dunkin Donuts coffee. Apparently Dunkin Donuts sees a quart of coffee as just a tad too small. It’s sad, really, the American desire to just have bigger everything, often at the cost of quality. I’ve stepped foot on five continents in my three decades of existence, and the only one where I wasn’t exposed to the liquid filth that is Nescafe was Africa. God bless Ethiopia…they actually keep all of their good coffee for internal distribution, unlike so many other countries.

What gave Colleen the undisputed title of “coffee achiever” was the devotion she showed to that coffee. She technically lived in a different state. She drove a standard. She has a small bladder (ok, that’s a generalization, but I think most women do. Have a problem with that statement? You know where to find me.) But more importantly, a 36-ounce Dunkin Donuts coffee will simply NOT fit into the cup holder of her car, or any car, for that matter. But despite all of that, there she’d be, clutching that giant styrofoam cup…EVERY DAY. That’s a bigger commitment than I’ve probably given anything in my life. If you ask me, all beverages should be able to fit in the cup holder of your car. Cup holders are proportional to your bladder…you need to respect their limitations, which were imposed by the car gods. Without them, libation anarchy would ensue. We’d have kids “experimenting” with those gallon jugs of neon blue fruit juice you see in supermarkets, out of their minds on some blue juice chemical/sugar high. Drinking and driving: bad. Drinking artificial blue juice and driving: worse. Look at all those car companies now…they obviously know what they were doing. Wait a minute…no they didn’t.

Thinking back on it, I can’t remember if the cafeteria actually offered coffee to the students. They probably shouldn’t have, because it’s not like anyone actually needs it at that age. Although after the occasional, ahem, nocturnal libation gatherings that we’d have when the teachers were fast asleep, coffee would’ve been the miracle drug the following morning. But hell, half of jocks couldn’t even spell hangover, let alone know how to effectively get rid of one.

I wasn’t a jock. I was a dork. Still am, in fact.

And besides, I didn’t even really drink coffee until the end of my college career. I guess Colleen was just a tad higher up on the scale of caffeine maturity. For me, the acidic sugar rush of my OJ was all I needed jumpstart my morning. Forbes and I would persuade one of the teachers to drive us to Dunkin Donuts for donuts, not coffee. That was because donuts, like any food from the outside, were worth their weight in gold back on campus. This was also way before Red Bull, Rock Star, or those other crazy drinks that give Andrew more shakes than when he was cooking for the Dalai Lama. Oh, watch out now…name drop. I can’t imagine what a high school campus is like nowadays, with kids hyped up on energy drinks. Security guards roaming the campus with tranquilizer guns, to put down the rowdier ones that moved in packs and were foaming at the mouth.

But not Colleen. Despite a rather maniacal laugh that paired perfectly with a coffee-fueled existence, she kept the classic cool that make her the ultimate coffee achiever.