One More Cup of Coffee for the Road

September 19, 2007 by djackson.

Michael Gates Gill has gone from calling the shots for big bucks to slingin’ shots at Starbucks. He says he definitely prefers the latte to the former. Is his plunge from the pinnacle a fall from grace? No, simply because grace is not something you fall from - it is something you fall into. The geriatric barrista lives a parable which proves that principle.

Gill tells his story in his new book, How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else. He recently spoke about his transformation to Joyce Wadler of the New York Times.

In a former life, he was a six-figure ad exec, the son of a critic for New Yorker magazine who remembers hearing John Updike and Ernest Hemingway hold forth in the living room of his parents’ Bronxville mansion. As a Yalee with a high-dollar gig in advertising Mr. Gates burned his way through two marriages, one job, a start-up company and a gentrified farmhouse in Connecticut. His company fired him, his mistress left him, and he developed a brain tumor while on hiatus from health insurance. As he sat swathed in a dark suit and staring into space at his local Starbucks, the waitress asked if he wanted a job. Well, it offered health care.

Having swapped his power tie for a green apron, Gill discovered a work environment which was extra-terrestrial in terms of the corporate shooting gallery he’d come to know. Employees were “partners” and customers were “guests” and his boss actually referred to a dirty bathroom as “a grout opportunity.” People were nice, and he was happy. He now inhabits bachelor digs in a converted Victorian relic near the train tracks in the same town as his ancestral homestead. He has no third spouse warming up in the bullpen. Starbucks, he explains, “offers an affectionate, nurturing environment so I don’t feel lonely in that sense.”

Gill is not by himself in tracing the success of Starbucks more to culture than coffee. In his new book The Gospel According to Starbucks, Leonard Sweet argues that the church could learn a thing or two from the Seattle java-naut. Coffee, Sweet suggests, is a “conversation drink.” Starbucks has positioned its outlets as “third places” - not work and not home - where such talk can thrive. He points out the social superiority of coffee to other caffeine delivery systems such as soda because “coffee is a hospitality drink, a sign of welcome and openness to sharing.”

When John Steinbeck roamed America in a pickup truck with a converted camper-rig, he noticed the same thing about truckers. “The great get-together symbol,” he writes in Travels With Charley, “is the cup of coffee.” In fact, Steinbeck keeps a stash of java-juice and a hotplate in his primitive Winnebago and many of the stories he tells begin when he invites a stranger to share a mug. At one point a ranch hand confronts the writer. The hired man’s boss has deputized him to chase away trespassers. “Well,” Steinbeck replies, “that sounds as if it means business. If it’s your job to throw me off, you’ve got to throw me off. But I’ve just made a pot of coffee. Do you think your boss would mind if I finished it? Would he mind if I offered you a cup? Then you could kick me off quicker.” The story ends with the hired man helping the novelist find a clump of trees that will hide his rig from sight.

In the end, Michael Gates Gill chose this coffee-conversation-closeness milieu over the fortress mentality of a corner office. He decided he’d rather work for hourly wages within an ethnic kaleidoscope than make serious money in a monochrome corporate meat grinder. He prefers scrubbing toilets for someone who asks nicely to licking the Gucci loafers of people who pay well but don’t ask at all. He seems to feel that sharing beats profit sharing and that community trumps commuting. He describes himself as “a reluctant witness to my own sense of humiliation.”

So we end where we began - with a fall. But what did Michael Gill fall off of, and what did he fall onto? I’ve never liked the phrase “fall from grace” because it inverts the geometry of the gospel. True enough, the apostle Paul coined the term, but modern parlance stands his wording on its head. What Paul told the Galatians was that they had fallen from grace when they bought into the lie of self-service salvation. Galatians 5.4 insists that we cut ourselves off from Christ when we see our faith as a high-wire act where solo performers soar above the amazed mob. Jesus, it appears, hangs out in the net, ready to receive the reluctant witnesses to their own humiliation. Or, to mix the metaphor, he stands behind the counter at Starbucks, ready to receive us as “guests” when we’re kicked out of the country clubs of success, and then to embrace us as “partners” when we find we’re facing eternity with no insurance. And we’ll sit together forever - a miscegenated amalgam of mongrel souls with nothing in common but a cup of coffee - and the cup of mutual sharing in the shed blood of Our Lord.

“Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He had come forth from God and was going back to God, got up from supper, and laid aside His garments; and taking a green apron, He girded Himself. Then He poured coffee into vente cups, and began to wash the disciples’ table and to wipe it with the towel which he carried in his apron.”

Then He’ll call us home to Heaven,
At His table we’ll sit down.
Christ will gird himself and serve us
With sweet lattes all around.

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