I Loved The Java Jive, And It Loved Me

This is the story of why I gave up caffeine.

A few years ago I worked for a large media management company. The words ‘media management’ summon images of power-suited moguls deciding which movies would be made, which singers would be stars, which television shows would be ratings toppers, all done while surrounded by hip young gunslingers firing dum-dum rounds of creative genius into the flailing body of the zeitgeist.

The reality was that the company supplied press cuttings to corporate clients.

My job – or part of it, the part that didn’t involve chasing other departments to do their job, or phoning clients to either apologise for the terrible service they’d been getting or cajole them into accepting a slight but important difference in the service they’d originally bought – was to manage Production.

Production occupied about a third of one floor of open-plan office space. The other two-thirds were either IT (lurking down one end, their windows obscured by haphazard piles of obsolete computer junk, light squeezing through the cracks in the beige plastic barricade and exposing motes of dandruff dancing their crippled quadrille as they fell) or Client Services (brighter; many jokey pictures, photoshopped by the group humourist, of employees’ heads imposed onto movie posters. An occasional air of despair, usually just after somebody’s birthday had been briefly but noisily celebrated).

Our job in Production was to get physical copies of cuttings from newspapers and magazines to the client. A team of people, mostly young first- or second-jobbers but with the odd older, haunted, gaunt, somebody whose former trade had been made obsolete by modern technology or just by modern life, and the odder, possibly disturbed, larger gentleman who may have been a genuine homosexual but may have just decided to accept other people’s opinion that he was.

At this time, I drank a lot of coffee. It was part of the culture. My own line manager was a man of Greek extraction, nattily goateed, possessor of many suits cut to fit the man he wanted to be - a little taller, slightly thinner. He drank coffee all day, but he took his white, with sugar.

I considered that to be wimping out.

My own intake was geared solely around getting and keeping a buzz. I didn’t realise this at the time; I thought the continual low-level excitement in my head and the twice-a-day fluttering in my chest was adrenalin-powered, part of the heady non-stop excitement of modern business.

It wasn’t. It was caffeine-powered. Just as an aside: I had a friend, more an acquaintance, more a friend-of-a-friend who I disliked intensely. I disliked his Guardian liberalism, his over-designed spectacles, his intense sense of being right all the time about everything. I especially despised his habit of turning up, whether it was at someone’s home, or the theatre, or anywhere, with a Starbucks cup of green tea. It riled me more than anything else about him because our social circle would meet, most times, in places that had no Starbucks anywhere near. He’d lug his little paper cup of self-righteousness all the way from South London, then sip at it through the evening, making sure he told us at least once that we had no idea how much our bodies were affected by caffeine, how it stopped us from thinking rationally. I’d smile, nod, all the time looking around for something sharp enough to go through his eye and into his brain.

This was my routine: get up, have a chef’s breakfast of black coffee, no sugar, and a Marlboro (Red. I flirted with the milder varieties, the Golds and the Blacks, sometimes even with other brands, but always I came back to the Red). Have a proper breakfast. Another mug of coffee. Shower, dress, leave. Eleven minutes by bike.

Our offices were on the upper two floors of a three-floor building. The ground floor was retail; a jeweller, a clothes shop, a greasy spoon café, a newsagents, a coffee shop. I’d lock the bike up, walk around to the newsagents and buy cigarettes, then into the coffee shop for a double espresso. That would be sipped at while another Marlboro was greedily sucked down in the hundred-yard walk back to the office entrance, and finished as I went up the stairs. Then another mug of black instant to take to my desk, and so on through the day. Always a mug, there by my right hand, a constant in the day’s shifting sand.

It was around this time that I discovered a small but satisfying link between myself and one of my team. She and I shared a love of the television programme Desperate Housewives. We’d talk about each episode on the morning after transmission, share guesses about who the mystery villain actually was or what exactly made that season’s guest-star so obviously, transparently evil.

I’d wrap my own delight in the programme up in a subterfuge swaddling of admiration for Felicity Huffman or in a faux-macho fancying of Teri Hatcher, but I’ll admit there was an underlying enjoyment of the camp factor involved. Nothing wrong with that.

It was Thursday morning. I was standing, mug of black, no sugar in my hand. Desperate Housewives had returned the night before for a new season. She and I were talking about it. I had the familiar caffeine buzz inside my head. Talking quickly, thinking quicker, throwing out quips, ideas, asides, eyes darting from side to side, taking in everything all at once all the time. The noise of the office, the one-sided telephone conversations, the idle drawls, the click of scissor and the rustle of newsprint.

“It’s a different Carlos”, she said. It wasn’t.

“It’s not, it’s the same guy.”

“No, it’s a different Carlos”. I looked at her, mentally cataloguing the fine dark hairs on her cheeks and upper lip, the crude tattoos on her fleshy arms, the shoulders straining to burst free from her sleeveless top.

“It’s not a different guy, it’s the same guy. Looks a bit different, that’s all, had a makeover.”

“I’m telling you it’s a different guy!”

I knew that what I was going to say was wrong. I was saying it as I thought that. I was saying it as I was formulating it inside my speeding, unfocussed, grasshopper brain.

“He’s just lost weight and had a shave.”

A beat, to consider whether to go on. And then, the commitment:

“You ever thought about doing that?”

Silence. All across the room. Flakes of dust and skin stopped in their paths through the sullen air. Heads turned.

She sat down, turned away from me. Others looked. Slowly, the background office hubbub faded back up and in.

Nothing more was said. She laughed it off. I went out to the local supermarket and bought a bundle of herbal teas. They all taste like old dishrags wrung out into a stale puddle.

These days I still drink black coffee, but it’s decaf now. The Marlboro has been replaced with a vitamin tablet. I miss the caffeine buzz; not as much as I do the sensuality of the cigarette, but enough to make me think twice about my order when I’m in a café, in the same way that I want to order the full English breakfast that I enjoyed on at least one Saturday morning per month, but instead ask for a croissant or a bowl of porridge.

I’m calmer, more focussed these days. I can see the effect caffeine had on me, and I’m glad it’s not there anymore. But if you ever see me with a Starbucks cup of green tea, feel free to dash it from my hands and punch me, as hard as you can. It’d be what I deserve.