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92 My america Coffee These were the days when we carried coffee. We’d carry it to our car and we had cupholders . We drove coffee around. seriously, coffee was driven for miles: cross town, out of town, around the block. We were driving the coffee and then after parking, we walked the coffee over there. Mostly we took it to buildings and up the elevator and this was a hot beverage. We all walked with our arms out holding the coffee. even people who before had walked, swinging their arms or with just their purse or valise, these people carried coffee. We wanted to be connected to our coffee. We had something in our hands and it was coffee. Very little coffee stayed in one place. every day you could see coffee being transported by individuals walking. sometimes we spilled the coffee, almost always we spilled it. not the whole cup, but a good spill on our shirt or levis or just in the car somewhere, coffee. spilling it on our levis was not a problem because these were the days when we bought stressed levis. They were the thing. They were blue jeans which had been stressed. stress was part of the value. They looked like they’d been worn all over the place and not washed which is a kind of stress. They looked greasy and sometimes there were holes in the leg or around the pocket, little frayed gashes which made them expensive. In the stores these pants in their piles looked like the castoffs from some great mining disaster, but that was what we wanted. They looked like someone had folded laundry after the oil well explosion. We had all stopped working some years before and we were now buying blue jeans that looked like they’d been at work under something rough and greasy. We hadn’t thought that pants that were stressed in this way, being torn and stained and almost worn through revealed that whoever had worn the pants before hadn’t been a particularly careful or effective worker. In fact the stress marks on the pants looked like these pants had been worn by the most careless idiot at the factory, some guy who kept falling down and catching his pants on the little sprockets or some guy who sat down the whole shift and faded the bottom of his pants almost to white. We wanted careless idiot pants to go out to the party. We walked up to each other in feckless, crazy pants and we said, How’s your coffee. did you get room for cream? If possible we made room for cream. It was one of the last things there was room for. ...

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