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To kick off this first edition, let's get back to basics...

Waitresses and Mugs

I don’t have a son. If I did, I only have one piece of useful advice to pass on. One single thought that would make his life simpler and happier. If I had a son, I’d take him, as he approached manhood, to a diner or bar and impart this great pearl.

‘Son’, I’d say, a manly tear, misting the fond paternal eye. ‘Always date waitresses’.

The world is full of beautiful, intelligent single women but finding them is a long and pain filled process. Dating waitresses reduces the odds.

Waitresses have been through a rigorous pre-selection which favours the charming and gregarious. They are usually working their way through college or around the world or filling in time before their first book/screenplay/poem/painting sells. They are not so intimidatingly beautiful that they’re doing modelling assignments or being receptionists at ad agencies, but they’re self-sufficient, bursting with confidence and won’t take crap from anyone. They like late nights and strong drink and are unlikely to be screwed up about food. Most importantly, overcoming the most terrifying barrier for the hesitant youth, for the price of a cup of coffee they automatically engage in conversation.

Of course, dating a waitress also means you never have to pay for china.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to my strangely obsessive relationship with my coffee mug. Most people have a favourite mug. Few have four identical ones in case of breakages.

Mine is a US diner coffee mug, off-white with a single green band around the lip. You have seen it countless times, in the strong hand of Joan Crawford in ‘Mildred Pierce’; Lana Turner or Jessica Lange in ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’; Madchen Amick in ‘Twin Peaks’ or Susan Sarandon in ‘White Castle’, ‘Atlantic City’ or ‘Thelma and Louise’. (Sarandon is a bewildering goddess to waitress fanciers ). Her other hand holds a bottomless pot of execrable drip-filter coffee that could probably strip the chrome off a ball hitch in the ageless pose of a hospitality industry Statue of Liberty.

My mug was made by the, now defunct, Buffalo China Inc. of New York, manufacturers of institutional china since 1901. By the time it came into my hands it may have spent years in the San Francisco diner where I worked as a grill cook. Tucked beneath the handlebar moustaches of numberless brunchers, pressed to the lips of thousands truck drivers and endlessly refilled. A million trips through the Hobart, through the giant hands of Reggie the dishwasher yet still as unmarked as the day it was first slammed onto the stainless steel bartop.

What strikes you first is the weight. The sides are incredibly thick and, even in such a hefty, man-sized mug, the actual space for fluids is quite small. It’s designed to work in beautiful symbiosis with the pot. With each topping up the ceramic mass rises in temperature, keeping the coffee warmer longer and encouraging you to linger, thawing your hands around it as the snow piles up outside. You gaze dreamily at the waitress and plan your next volume of Beat poetry.

A Buffalo mug can’t be used for tea it holds too little to be satisfying. In a diner, of course this wouldn’t matter. Tea either comes iced or in kit form - a mug of tepid water, a bag of Lipton’s export-grade tea dust and a sneer. I don’t have a big Cona drip rig on my kitchen counter but I’ve found that my mug is the perfect size for a cappuccino. I know this is a sort of heresy but I find it a perfect match. By preheating the mug with the steam wand I can keep the coffee à point while I make breakfast for my daughter. And as I lace my fingers around its reassuring bulk I can quietly drift into a simpler world wheel where orders spun on the wheel, where the griddle was the fiery heart of a dizzying ballet and where nothing mattered but the food.

My mug and its three replacements were stolen for me by the waitress I later married. In the intervening fifteen years, one of the mugs, after being dropped dozens of times, fell to the pavement from the top of a ladder. The slab was cracked across but the mug just lost a handle and now sits on my desk holding the 12 sharp pencils that Hemingway recommended. That marriage too, after ten years of poor treatment, finally took a terminal knock. I hope I’ve learned to be more careful.

I now have a daughter. I’ve been told that women often seek men who remind them of their Father so perhaps I’ll still be able to use my one great piece of advice. One day I’ll take her to a diner and, with tears in my eyes I’ll say, ‘Travel the world, write a great book, be a waitress and always date the customers’.

 

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