GUESTWORDS: By Francis Levy
The Metamorphosis
(10/03/2007) I awakened this morning and my wife had turned into a Starbucks. I have been all over the world and I’ve found Starbucks in the most improbable of locations. But I had never expected to find a Starbucks in my own bed.
Usually I will put my arms around her in the spooning position that we favor. I like to cuddle one last time before I go out into the cruel, hard world, but this time when I reached out from my sleep, all I felt was a hard counter.
To be honest, it wasn’t one of those full-service Starbucks that you find at the busy intersections. It was more the kind that appears the minute you get through security at most airports.
I had been getting used to Starbucks, it was like a familiar face, almost like an extended relative, or someone from the branch office who is sent out to make sure that I’m settled when I arrive, but this was going too far.
I started to call out, “Isme? Isme? Are you there?” In all honesty the Starbucks that had been built on the site of Isme’s spot was even smaller than the kind you find in airports. It was more like a model. There were customers and latte machines, but they had all been constructed to fit into our queen-size bed. So when I started to bellow, the other customers and servers cowered.
In any case, the young girl behind the counter must have thought that I was aggravated about the service. Starbucks attracts quite a few people who are addicted to caffeine and who can get quite agitated when they don’t get their morning fix.
“Can I help you, sir?” she asked. She didn’t try to make any excuses. As you may have noticed, Starbucks servers never talk about their problems. They always exhibit the same mixture of impersonality and politeness and they are careful not to recognize faces or show favoritism. I have never heard a Starbucks employee say something like, “Here’s your iced latte just the way you like it.”
“I’m looking for my wife, Isme. She was lying right here in bed next to me.” The young girl could see I was upset, but it was as if we were talking a different language. She was only used to people asking for different kinds of teas and coffees. She was like a computer who displayed no voice recognition for the data — “wife,” “Isme” — it was receiving.
I’m not one of those people who hates Starbucks. I feel things become successful because they satisfy people’s needs and desires, and while I was concerned about my wife’s disappearance, I didn’t see anything wrong with ordering a latte from a surrogate.
I even thought that seeing how much pain I was in they might even offer up a freebie.
“Maybe I’ll have a latte. How long does it take? If my wife shows up and you go out of business, can I get a credit at one of your other locations?”
I knew since it was Starbucks there might even be another Starbucks on the same premises — in this case, under my bed, or in the wall, or perhaps in our kitchen. I had actually heard about people who went away on vacation and returned to find a thriving Starbucks operation to be running in private residences — maybe not in their marital beds (as had happened to me), but in a living room or den. Starbucks was an aggressive operation whose management was under constant pressure from its stockholders.
I had a lump in my throat. I swallowed hard, realizing that it was likely that it was just business as usual for the Starbucks people. Starbucks was aggressively buying up leases. My wife was simply another location that had been added to the list. I might never see her again.
I looked into my latte thinking that maybe some memory of her might appear in the foam. I was going through a life-changing experience, like so many of the ones that had already occurred in my neighborhood, where Starbucks took over a beloved diner, shoemaker, independent bookseller, or bakery. I used to look forward to crawling into bed with my wife all those years; now I was climbing into bed with a representative of the world’s largest chain of coffee shops.
My wife had disappeared, but she’d been replaced by something new, and like so many of the changes that occur in modern life, that something new was Starbucks.