FOOD
Getting a Good Cup of Coffee
Some days Jeff Ferguson feels like he’s been talking coffee
since he woke up. Maybe even living coffee. Hands plunged into
the smoking beans, just now turned out of a monster, gas-fed
roaster which sits in the cento- of the room, he gives them an
expert examination and decides they’re done.
And he’s just in time to tell a stubborn customer who’s looking
for “coffee like the Butternut coffee they had in the forties,’’ that
he bets he has one of the best blends in town. But it’s House
Blend, not Butternut.
The Coffee Bean opened its doors on 32nd and Willamette four
months ago and the fragrant, sweetish smell of roasting beans
has been hanging over the neighborhood ever since.
“In fact, I’m thinking of building a pollution device,” says
Jeff, wiping off his hands and sitting down for—what else?—his
morning cup of coffee.
He could be the only roaster proprietor in town. He’s certainly
the only store owner that’s going along on coffee alone (with teas
promised for the end of the month).
Business has been uneven, but coffee fanatics have a way of
smelling out the kind of store which will cater to their coffee
peculiarities and a loyal, if eccentric, clientele is slowly building
up. The only real crisis 'Rie Coffee Bean has suffered through so
far was a small fire which flared up in the roaster one morning.
“As I was trying to put a dark, dark roast on it,” Jeff explains,
“you know-like an expresso?” He gazes at the roaster as if
expecting it to speak for itself. “Guess it got too dark and that’s
how the fire began.”
He paces out the scene. “Before I knew it the fire department
was in here and there was smoke everywhere. Finally I got the
firemen to concentrate on the fire in the roaster and the rest of
the beans, in bags all over the place, survived oJt.
“But I watch those dark roasts carefully now.
“One of the things about this business is you have to know
what you’re doing.” Jeff shakes his head with the concern of a
businessman new in the field. “Your mistake is their dollar.”
“Some people just come in to look. You know? There’s one
guy who just comes in to talk to my coffee plant. That’s right.
He comes in and gets a free cup of coffee—the coffee ova- there
in the pot is free-and then he sort of tries to make the plant feel
better.” Jeff points to the brown tips on some of the leaves.
“About the weather and everything. Eugene just isn’t Brazil.”
Some of Jeffs 'niurberesque customers just want to know how
to make a good cup of coffee, once they’ve purchased custom
ground, freshly roasted moka, Kenya, Guatemalan, Colombian,
or Ethiopian beans.
“We filter here,” Jeff tells inquisitive novices, but, be adds
philosophically, “the way you like your coffee is the best way to
make it.”
Far those who insist, be suggests a very dean glass pot with a
cone shaped top. A paper filter goes into the cone, the coffee
goes into the filter, and the coffee drips through the grinds and
into the pot.
Photo by Peter Grant
Start with cold water and barely bring it to a boil. Pour
enough over the grinds to make them foam and swell. One
fanatic calls this process “breaking down the woody in
frastructure.” After the grinds begin to “relax” add the rest of
the water all at once.
Proportions depend on taste. Some start at a tablespoon of
grounds per 6 oz. cup of coffee. But you have to experiment
some before you can qualify as a fanatic and after that it’s just a
matter of lemming the language.
Mailer Converts-Almost
BOOKS
Review by Barry Mitzman
Someday Norman Mailer will convert to Catholicism. The
signs have been around awhile: his declaration in “The White
Negro” that “To be a real existentialist one must be religious”;
his appalled fascination at the triumph of the Wasp in the moon
shot, and his concomitant sense of dread at man’d meddling in
the universe; his denunciation in The Prisoner of Sex of con
and permanently sets in, but if he doesn’t then take
Hemingway’s way out, it seems inevitable; only Catholicism
could accommodate Mailer’s love of mystery, the elegance of
his eschatology, and his demonism.
Mailer’s incipient Catholicism is the source of the am
bivalence that runs through his new book on the Democratic and
Republican conventions, St. George and the Godfather. With as
acute a sense of outrage as can be managed against the num
bing, ineffable evil of American actions in Vietnam, Mailer
comes to the Democratic convention prepared to view the
McGovern candidacy as “a rare and blithe watershed in the
civil affairs of men.” This benediction presents some dif
ficulties for Aquarius, Mailer’s journalistic embodiment, for
“The convention was obliged to be boring. There was in
sufficient evil in the room.”
But that is a small matter. It is Mailer the Catholic who
cannot be completely pleased with McGovern. If Hubert
Humphrey is “a Renaissance priest of the Vatican who could not
even cross a marble floor without pieties issuing from his skirt,”
still Mailer finds “a flatness of affect in McGovern which
depresses, and the muted sing-song of his conversational voice
might lead one to divine he grew up in a rectory, if indeed one
did not know it already.” In fact, asks Mailer, “If there was a
man in America who was more of a Wasp than Richard Nixon
did it not have to be George McGovern?”
McGovern is too much the Methodist minister for Mailer’s
liking; McGovern reminds Mailer of an astronaut in “the sense
he gave off of Christian endeavor,” and of course the astronaut,
as Mailer declared in Of A Fire On The Moon, is the sterile
apotheosis of the Wasp. Mailer’s complaints against McGovern
occasionally even sound like an attack on the Reformation:
/
“There is a poverty of spirit in the air. While it is certainly not a
poverty of moral principle ...it is perhaps a paucity of pomp and
pleasure which those very moral principles forbid.”
Aquarius confesses to Gene McCarthy, the ex-novitiate, a
wish that it was McCarthy who would be nominated. “I like
McGovern,” Aquarius says, “BUT I just wish he spoke with a
little metaphor from time to time.’
“ ‘Methcdists are not much on metaphor,’ says McCarthy.”
In a spirit of ecumenicalism Mailer finally accepts the new
parson, but he still must wrestle with a more difficult am
bivalence toward Richard Nixon. Here all of Mailer’s con
siderable spleen might be vented, for Nixon is both a monstrous
war criminal and the candidate, as in Miami and the Siege of
Chicago in 1968, of “Puritanism, Calvinism, conservatism and
golf.” But the last four years suggest something more. Mailer
must admit that Nixon has genius, for Nixon has demonstrated
that a thoroughly dislikeable man, “a man who does not even
know how to move his body,” can be President. Moreover, as the
ingeniously staged pseudo-event called the Republican con
vention proved, Nixon is an artist, “the Eisenstein of the
mediocre and the inert,” “the first social engineer to hariw^
and then employ the near to illimitable totalitarian resources of
television.” With the amazing success of this artistry, Aquarius
is even forced to consider how, among theories of the American
experience, “Nixon’s vision might be conceivably more com
prehensive than his own.”
So Nixon cannot be dismissed as the stupid creep he appears
to be. He is the Godfather, or perhaps the Grand Inquisitor, and
we are his family, his flock; the Catholic images re-emerge, and
are a measure of Mailer’s respect.
Mailer remains convinced of Nixon’s depravity, of course, but
the ambivalence, McGovern’s decency and Nixon’s lack of it,
Nixon’s artistry and McGovern’s lack of that, deprives Aquarius
and the book of the depth of insight we ha ve come to expect from
Norman Mailer. Ambivalence turns Aquarius into a self
avowed “face-watcher.” And though the descriptions that
emerge from his face-watching, whether of Wilbur Mills or
Mary Ann Mobley, are each a superb tour de force, they don’t
(Continued on Page 10)