Coffee and Coke

Mike showed up at just the right time in my life. I had been in a string of short, meaningless flings for a few months after leaving my boyfriend of one year. At 17, that had seemed like an eternity. I played house and was somehow surprised when he left me for a woman his age. I had a hard time moving on at first; sleeping in my truck, hanging out anywhere I could in our neighborhood, crashing on random couches, just because I couldn't stand to be back at my parents' house.

A couple of weeks after the breakup, a new coffee shop opened up and they were very welcoming to the throngs of teen runaways, junkies, slackers, and night kids. The owner had transformed an old 3 bedroom bungalow into an inviting hangout. Inside, it was dark, smokey, and comfortable. The scent of the espresso was relaxing yet invigorating. The patio outside was spacious and always crowded. When I close my eyes, I can still remember the summer nights with the busy street and crowded sidewalks, where I watched the world go by, my sense of time only marked by the coffee cup.

As expected, I became friends with the employees. We were the same kind of people. When the place closed down at 3 AM, we'd go over to the burned-out restaurant next door, sit on the porch all night and drink 32 ounce bottles of Bud. We were always the same crowd but then, one night, we had a newcomer: Mike. His roommate and one of our regulars, Todd, introduced us. Mike had just moved in with Todd into a seedy fully-furnished, rent-by-the-week apartment complex.

Mike came from a damned good family but was a typical rebel: he was all about "screw conformity, money's evil, I'm embarrassed of my family because they sold their souls to be rich," so on and so forth. He was tall, average build with biceps that just begged to be caressed. Mike's eyes were deep, inky blue lakes in the midnight, sprinkled with glints of stars reflected on their surface. That's what I remember most. His hair was close-cut, so blond it was almost clear. He would get a 5 o'clock shadow (of course, it was 5 in the morning) that showed only the slightest hint of Irish descent when the occasional whisker caught the glow of the sunrise. I loved watching his lips as he took long drags off his cigarettes, gently pursed as he exhaled the smoke.

We had really long talks sitting on the covered porch of the charred, charcoal-scented pizzeria. The buzz from the caffeine and beer made for mellow evenings of shared laughs, one-upping our stories and, sometimes, just sitting and staring at the empty streets, hiding in the shadows from the homeless and the hookers. We were forming a very special bond, and we both felt the chemistry brewing.

Mike didn't seem to sleep very much and Todd confided in me that Mike had diabetes and Addison's disease. In a way, it endeared him to me even more. He was one of those nice guys that seemed to have everything and, at my age, I deeply respected him for walking away from a privileged life for the sake of being true to himself. Knowing his medical history made me admire him even more for his willingness to handle it all on his own.

I asked him about his family once. He said, "They call me Drew. My first name is Andrew, and I've always hated it. I've gone by my middle name my entire life to everyone else, but they always call me Drew. They don't even care enough to use the name I prefer."

I met his mother once. He was right. She called him Drew and seemed to be extremely pretentious, uptight, and very condescending to him. I can understand a little about why she was less than cheery - she had to check up on her boy - but I tried being nice to her and it didn't work. I know now that she blamed me - and all his friends - for the way everything went down.

Eventually I got a job working in a nightclub and worked from 8 in the evening until 3 in the morning. It still worked out quite well for hanging out with the coffee crowd. Despite my new support system, I was still self-destructive in my drinking and, admittedly, I had a pretty strong addiction to ephedrine. The club had the type of crowd that threw money around. It was the new, hip place to be. Celebrities came to our club when they were in town. Local celebrities spent their evenings at our bar. Most of them had more money than sense and thrived off their flamboyancy and image. I was tipped well, but not always with cash. As we accumulated regulars, I began accumulating customers that preferred to tip me with coke instead of cash. I was all too willing to accept.

I began to see characteristics in Mike that I recognized in myself. The all-day coke rush to stay awake, the drinking at night during the come-down. One night after work, as we were baring our souls, I confessed to the coke use. He did too. We never did it together; neither of us was proud. We wanted our time together to be different; to be a more innocent form of connection, rather than one bound by controlled substances. We kept that part of our lives out of our friendship. For a girl who gave herself away to anyone who wanted it, just to feel like someone cared, even if it was for just a few hours, this was different. I knew I wanted him, but I also knew I didn't want to ruin it. I had a pretty sneaking suspicion the feeling was mutual, but I wasn't going to be the one to take the chance and find out I might be wrong. To me, he was worth waiting for. For once, I felt like it was okay to let him come to me, if that was the way it was supposed to work out. Regardless of my feelings for him, the friendship I had with Mike had kept me from going crazy at a time I was just about ready to give up on everything. It was never spoken, but I'm fairly sure he knew.

After a particularly busy Sunday night for me at the club and a rather low-key night for him at the shop, we were doing our front-porch sitting. The weather was turning colder and the evening sky was clear. The neon and the streetlights obscured all but the moon, which was full with a silvery glow. Years later, the words still echo in my head. "You know, Angie...I've been thinking. We spend a lot of really good time together, but maybe we should, you know...go out somewhere. Would you want to go out with me? Like, on a date or something?"

Back to the present, for one moment. For many years, I could remember exactly how it sounded when he said those words. The tone, the inflection, the sound of his voice. Somewhere through the years, Mike's actual voice has slipped out of my mind, and that makes me very sad. Okay. Back to 1994.

Todd approached me the next day, beaming from ear to ear. Mike told him about our date for that Wednesday. He was just as excited as I was, I think. I'd known Todd for quite some time and he was thrilled that his two friends decided to finally get together. "I just knew it would happen! From the moment I introduced you two! What took you so fucking long?!"

Monday evening I went to the shop to meet up with Mike when he got off work, but the shop was closed. All the lights were off, but I could see Todd sitting inside at a table, all by himself. When he saw my silhouette in the door, he got up, slowly, and shuffled to the door and opened it. His expression was one of emptiness. I knew immediately that something was horribly, horribly wrong.

"What happened, Todd? WHAT HAPPENED!?"

"Where have you been?" His voice was so low and hoarse I could barely make out his words. "I couldn't find you. You never called me back. Where did you sleep last night?"

I told him where I had been and explained that my pager battery had died. I asked him several times what had happened before he finally said the words I feared he'd say: "Mike died this morning."

He OD'd in their apartment and his failure to monitor his diabetes that day contributed to his death. He'd locked the door when Todd went to the store. When he got back, Mike wasn't coming to the door. Todd saw what was going on from outside, looking in through the window. He broke out the window but couldn't fit through it, so he sat there, wedged in the window, watching the whole thing happen while waiting for the ambulance. By the time the EMTs arrived, it was too late.

"But...we were going to go out," was the only thing I could say. "We had a date." Todd just stood there, arms limp by his side, and stared at me.

There's more to the story after that, but it doesn't matter much. Our group pretty much just fell apart after that. The owner renamed the coffee shop "Mike's Place," but it only stayed in business about another six months and went under. A tattoo shop now occupies the building. I haven't spoken to any of the guys since the funeral.

And in all the eulogies, they called him Drew.
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