office workers, management types. Ice cream was joyous, coffee was grim. Ice cream was celebratory, coffee was no-nonsense. Ice cream was of the people, for the people and coffee was strictly for grownups — medicinal, even — a kind of businessman’s brain-lubricant.
Coffee’s not what we’re about in this here town, insisted Gord.
The town hasn’t exactly boomed since then — they always said it would and it never did. Last I heard, however, Gord’s Icy Dream is still in operation, still doling drippy soft-serve and flaccid burgers poking like tongues from out between two spongy, seed-flecked buns. Under new management since Gord retired. But of course you and I both know what did end up booming in the past twenty years. Coffee. JJ’s. My dad’s lone ID is currently surrounded by no less than six JJ’s coffee outlets — there’s the one on the highway leading north, and the one on the southbound route. There’s the one in the mall near the industrial park, and the one in the strip mall downtown. There’s the counter attached to the gas station and finally, there’s the freestanding JJ’s directly across the street from the ID. All of them thriving. No one in this town of 7,500 hardworking souls need go without JJ’s mudwater for even five minutes, and clearly no one does.
“I never claimed to be a prophet,” shrugs Gord when the topic of the Great ID Wrong Decision of 1981 comes up.
The weird thing is the pleasure he still takes in that epic failure of foresight. To him it proves his independence — his maverick spirit. Gord was never one to follow the herd, even if the herd was making truckloads of money.
“Coffee is for assholes,” Gord will explain. His Last Word where Java Joe’s is concerned.
It was a class thing, frankly. He associated coffee, in those days, with Management, and Dad has never done well with men of managerial timber. He planted Sylvie and himself into that particular small-town soil on the coast where he was born because of rumours of the any-day-now industrial boom. Soon, jobs would be given out hand over fist, the story went; Gord just had to get in line. So Gord got in line. And what did he do, once he was at the front of the line? Once he found himself sitting in the manager’s office awaiting the just-a-formality, five-minute labourer’s-job interview?
Gord called the manager an asshole, is what he did. The manager of SeaFare Packers, the only industry, thus far, in town. The reason why is lost to the ages, but Gord assures us his judgement was true and just and to have held his tongue would have constituted a serious moral lapse.
Thus began his career as an independent businessman, while the town, nurtured by SeaFare, built itself up around him. Gord established himself as a parasite of sorts. “I was a barnacle on the ass of SeaFare,” he likes to say these days, always able to take pride somehow.
But he’d be damned if he was going to spend the best years of his life brewing coffee for those assholes.
Here’s the irony — to this day I never go to JJ’s. Not because of some kind of misguided loyalty to Gord, but the opposite. Surely you’ve been, Adam? Even a latte-sucker like yourself couldn’t have avoided the occasional last-ditch caffeination stop at Joe’s, right? So you’ll know a patron doesn’t exactly come across managerial timber stacked there in the booths.
You find parkas. Checked shirts and baggy pants — wife-bought. Fake leather shoes. Rubber boots. Work boots. Toques, ball caps. Bloated wallets in permanently deformed back pockets. Squints. Grizzle.
What you find hunched and huddled in the identical orange booths of Java Joe’s are endless variations — young, old; fat, thin — of my father Gord.
05/25/09, 8:43 p.m.
I’ll tell you what sucks about being almost forty, if you’re me. Lots of men are angry at their fathers, yes, well into their forties and beyond, but at the same time, a lot of men aren’t — or if they are, they manage to keep it in check. Lots of men go to see their fathers on the weekend, or call their fathers on the phone every once in a while, or take them to a hockey game, or out to Ponderosa for a steak. And the two of them are able to somehow be men together. They’ve arrived at that place through some mysterious process of maturation and tacit agreement.