I was a kid working in a garage with manly mechanic men and two cute older girls. Maybe I was trying to man up with the mechanics, or maybe I was trying to impress the girls. Maybe it was a combination of both. All I know is that it was that summer that I first tried coffee.
I’m not sure how old I was exactly, I think maybe around 14. I worked during holidays scrubbing school buses. If you can believe it, that’s not even the worst job I’ve ever worked. It certainly was close. School kids are disgusting! You don’t realize how much so when you’re riding the bus. Enlightenment doesn’t come until you’re on your back, on the floor of the bus with a putty knife, scraping off a couple months worth of hardened Bubblicious!
March Break, Christmas, Summer, whenever the buses were off the road for a few days, I was the guy that got to come in and make them shine. I scrubbed the floors, the walls and the ceiling. I scraped and scrubbed the seats. I washed the windows. It was military. There were inspections.
During one of the breaks I was working with a couple of “older girls.” If I was 14, I would guess they were around 18. So certainly I wanted to impress them. They were cute! And really, what kid doesn’t want to impress older girls? Being in the garage with the mechanics, with their dirty, calloused hands, I certainly didn’t want to look like a cream puff in front of them either. All that said, maybe it’s just that coffee was free and I never had money for the vending machine. I suppose that could be a legitimate explanation as well.
All I know is that it was the first time I ever tried coffee. I remember going into the lunchroom and being clueless as to what was supposed to happen next. A foam cup. I figured that out. A pot with coffee in it. That seemed straight forward enough. But then there was a container of sugar. There was milk. There was cream. And there was some other mysterious product called “Coffee-mate.” I had no clue what that was.
All the milk and sugar in the world couldn’t stop the coffee from being one of the most vile smelling substances I had ever experienced. And, as I would soon find out… all the Coffee-mate, milk and sugar in the world couldn’t make it taste good either. My attempt to man up and impress the girls lasted for 1 sip. A coffee drinker, I was not!
In 1995 I started working towards my dream of being on the radio. Phase 1 involved a cooperative education placement at (then) 1470 C-HOW in Welland. The morning team of Brian Salmon and Pete Morena taught me much of what I know about radio to this day. But there is one lesson I refused to learn. Both informed me very early in my co-op placement that I would not survive 5 minutes in radio if I didn’t start drinking coffee. Well, here I am nearly 14 years later… still on the air… and still coffee free.
Last night, an intriguing young lady with sparkling eyes and a heart-melting smile granted me the happy privilege of taking her for coffee. She spoke few words, but one smile from her could say more than the most eloquent sentence I could ever form. As we said our goodbyes and I began my journey home, all I could think was, I would start drinking coffee this very minute, should she agree to let me take her again.
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