Michael Gill - How Starbucks Saved My Life

This coffee business clearly was not a casual one to anybody—on either side of the bar. There was a frantic pace and much focused noise, like being part of a race against time. I had never been good at sports, and this store had that athletic atmosphere of people operating with peak adrenaline. With all the calling and re-calling of drinks, it seemed that I might be auditioning for a role in a kind of noisy Italian opera.

Suddenly I was very worried. Not just about race or class or age. Now I had an even more basic concern. I had originally thought that a job at Starbucks might be below my abilities. But now I realized it might be beyond them. This job could be a real challenge for me—mentally, emotionally, and physically.

I had never been good at handling money—it was a major reason I needed a job so badly now. Math was a subject I had never mastered at school. I had vivid memories of many math teachers claiming, “But this is so easy,” as they scratched out some equation on the blackboard. I hated those teachers for their superiority. Even the simplest additions and subtractions were a challenge for me. Now the reality of all that money changing hands so rapidly at the Starbucks registers terrified me.

I had lost hearing in one ear due to my brain tumor. Hearing the complicated drink orders could be a serious problem for me. I was also scared by the idea that I had to understand tricky orders and call them out correctly in a matter of split seconds. Languages had never been my skill. My French professor at Yale had said, “I will pass you on one condition: You never inflict your accent on anyone else in this university.” Yet it was clear I was now expected to master the exotic language of Starbucks Speak.

In that first instant, I realized with humiliation that my new job might be a test I could easily fail. I had worn the black pants with a white shirt, no tie. I was feeling lonely and afraid. Then Crystal appeared in a swirl of positive energy.

“Let’s share a cup of coffee,” she said, guiding me over to a little table in the corner. “Sit here, I will bring you a sample.”

Maybe this was just Crystal’s public, professional attitude, but I was grateful for it. She seemed much friendlier than on the phone. Perhaps, I thought, she had come to terms with hiring me and did not hate herself or me for taking this chance.

Soon I was sitting down in a small corner with Crystal and sipping a delicious cup of Sumatra. “This is a coffee that is known as having an ‘earthy’ taste … but I call it dirty.” Crystal laughed, and I laughed too. Today Crystal had her hair up under a Starbucks cap, making her look very sophisticated, even glamorous. Two bright diamond earrings caught the light.

Maybe it was the coffee, more likely it was Crystal’s ability to put me at my ease, but I was feeling a lot better.

Still, I was a long way from being comfortable . Out of nowhere, I had a sudden image of myself in a long past life, basking in the comfort of family and friends on a dock on a lake in Connecticut. Now that image of laughing and lounging so comfortably beneath a warming sun seemed like several lifetimes ago. The lake I had grown up on was protected by thousands of acres of private forest. It kept out the reality of a harsher world and surrounded me with fun and privilege.

I remembered as a young boy throwing apples at the poet Ezra Pound. Jay Laughlin, Pound’s publisher, owned the camp next door and had brought Pound down to the lake for the day. Pound sat like a kind of statue at the end of the dock. At one point he rolled up his suit pants and dangled his white legs into the water, still not speaking. His legs looked like the white underbelly of a frog. There was something about Pound’s proud strangeness that got to my young cousins and me. We picked up some apples we had been eating and started throwing them at him, missing him but sending up water to splash against his dark, foreign clothes.

Ezra Pound did not move or speak. My father laughed and kind of encouraged us in our behavior. My father had written a bestselling book, Here at The New Yorker , about his years at the magazine. In the opening, he had stated his philosophy: “The first rule of life is to have a good time. There is no second rule.” Having a good time for my father meant upsetting apple carts. He had no love for Pound’s politics and enjoyed the scene.

My father had won his place on this lake by marrying into my mother’s family, who had vacationed there for a hundred years. My father brought new money, earned by his Irish immigrant father, into her Mayflower ancestry. At the lake there was a powerful combustion of gentle Wasp politeness meeting up with my father’s purposefully provocative Celtic rebel style. With a kind of self-righteous abandon my father joyously spent the money his father had worked so hard to earn.

“It is better to spend your money while you are still alive,” my father would declare, his black eyes flashing with a kind of devil-may-care enthusiasm, seeming to mock his own father’s hard-won acquisition and those uptight Yankees around the lake who pinched every penny.

My father loved to speak, he loved to write, and he loved, above all, to be the center of attention at parties. “Everything happens at parties,” he would say. So there was a constant party on our dock at this exclusive, rustic lake.

My father was a spendthrift with his time as with all his many talents. He gave himself away to so many that there was never enough time at home for me . Never enough time for one-on-one, for father and son. When I was grown, and I moved away from home, he invited me to his parties, and that is the only way we saw each other. When he died, my need to go to parties died as well.

Now I found myself sipping coffee with Crystal—worlds away from the parties during those summers on that exclusive lake—yet as I laughed with her, I could actually feel my heart become a little lighter and my spirits rise a bit. This reality surprised me. Maybe it was the caffeine in this powerful coffee. But I also had to admit that I felt at ease in this totally new scene—having coffee in a crowded, upbeat bar as a way of beginning a new job. It was all so bizarre and foreign, like Alice through the looking glass. Or Michael Gates Gill breaking through to another place and class to find it wasn’t so scary after all. I was stepping out from my old status quo, and as a direct result, I felt better than I had in days. Or weeks. Or months.

It was crazy … but maybe, I hoped, there was a method in this madness.

Crystal’s voice broke through my daydream. “Mike, it is important you learn the differences in these coffees.” I no longer had the luxury of time for philosophical self-concern. The bell had rung. I was in the ring. It was time to get involved in minute-by-minute efforts rather than heavy contemplation. Keeping up with customers’ orders was my new job. I had to give up spending so much time thinking about the past and what I had lost. It was going to be a big challenge just to keep up with the present.

I was about to discover that at Starbucks it was not about me—it was about serving others .

Crystal had a serious look on her face and launched into a lecture as though I were some eager student of coffee lore: “Sumatra coffee is from Indonesia; the Dutch brought it there hundreds of years ago, and it’s part of a whole category of coffees we call ‘bold.’”

“We” again, I noticed, thinking back to Linda White and her “we” when she had fired me. Crystal could do the same.

“This is the way we welcome all new Partners,” Crystal explained, leaning forward toward me as though to confide a great personal secret. “We believe that coffee is our business. Starbucks Coffee is our name. So we welcome all new Partners with coffee sampling and coffee stories.”