The Fruits of Flipping Bitches
One sunny day in December 2022, almost exactly a year after getting discharged from the hospital for a bum ailment, I was barreling down the main road that runs through my neighborhood and zipped by a fellow smoking a cigar outside of his garage in a thoroughly 1990s windbreaker. A glint caught my eye, I slammed the brakes, flipped a bitch, and pulled up to his driveway hollering, “Is that a coffee roaster?!”
The man sauntered over and leaned into my passenger side window, cigar still in hand. It could have easily been a gun and he could have easily blown my head off because this is, after all, a quiet suburb in America. Instead he cracked a smile and said, “Sure is.”
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His name was Ronald and he was a retired copper. Coffee roasting was a hobby he was eager to gab about with a stranger. So I asked him a bunch of questions about the shiny contraption he had in his garage, throwing my long-held secret desire to be a coffee tycoon a lifeline.
Ron had bought his tabletop drum roaster 11 years ago. He had little intention of ever pursuing coffee roasting as a business. He just enjoyed the delicate art of roasting, brewing, and sipping specialty coffee, something I can now relate to every time I fire up the machine after long days at work, slipping into that golden hour flow state.
He used to roast often with his friend Camille who worked at the DA’s office. They dove headlong into the geekery of specialty coffee, joining online coffee forums and entering small-time roasting competitions. Camille would come over with whatever she wanted to roast and together they’d whip up batches of beans for friends and family during holidays.
She passed away a few years ago of cancer and Ron's interest in the endeavor dwindled. He only occasionally used the roaster after that when he was craving something special. I was touched by how open he was with me, a complete stranger, about how the loss of his friend affected him. Still sitting in the driver seat, my engine going, I suddenly became a friend. Ron asked me how I got into coffee and I told him: from the movie, Out of Africa.
I asked Ron if he would ever consider selling his roaster and he leaned his head to one side and scrunched his face. I could tell he had thought about it, but that it would mean the end of some small thing. Yet here I was, this serendipitous heiress for his interest. I told Ron about my work at the alternative high school and how I had aspirations to teach my students about small business. I needed a real life example though, a business they could interact with, to serve as a vehicle for the lessons because people, young or old, don’t learn through abstraction. They learn through context.
I’ve seen a lot of TikTok videos lately of bitter Gen X folks complaining that they (people like me) don’t teach kids in school how to do taxes. Hey idiots — you know when people take an interest in learning about taxes? When they have something to calculate and pay taxes on. You don’t becoming interested in fixing up classic cars from a book. You become interested through the car, either by having one or possessing the means to acquire one.
Ron said he’d think about selling and we exchanged numbers. I felt so hopeful driving off because never in my wildest dreams did I think it was possible to acquire a roaster. Regardless of the outcome, our meeting felt providential, partly ordained by the universe, but also partly by me. I think that’s what we want the best stories of our lives to feel like. That there was some higher power gently patting us forward, showing us flashes of our dreams, but that we also had a hand in things because we stopped and looked.
We want to feel that our volition is blessed and that our intuition matters.
I texted Ron a few times over the next couple of weeks and he finally agreed to sell me his roaster. We settled on a date for me to come over and learn how to use it before unhooking and hauling it away, something I had no idea how I was going to accomplish. It’s one of the few times in my life I had no plan. I arrived at Ron’s house a couple of weeks later, notebook and camera in hand.
Ron clanked about in the garage, fitting the hopper onto the roaster, turning on his kitchen scale, and arranging various utensils on a countertop. We hadn’t even started and I was already overwhelmed. Was I too dumb to figure this out? What was I thinking taking this on?
A littany of questions, the daily concerns of my students, further contextualizing my learning experience. Turns out, the doubts of our younger selves are never vanquished. They emerge like goblins whenever we take on something new, which is why continuous learning on the part of adults is integral to successfully working with young people. The shared vulnerability of not knowing how to do something, the chance to figure it out together, is fertile meeting ground.
As Ron pointed out the major components of the machine — the motors that powered the drum and cyclone for exhaust, the ignition switch, the gas valve — my anxiety began to dissipate. It hearkened back to my days growing up and working at the business with my dad and his guys on the production floor. They were always modifying equipment to fit their processes, Mickey Mousing homemade spouts and nozzles onto machinery, their tenacity colliding with scarcity. I loved the sense of possibility that emerged from their jerry rigging, a tradition they thankfully included me in.
I videotaped Ron roasting four pounds of Colombian Narino Fiesta coffee, a washed bean with taste notes of apple, tangerine, brown sugar, and marshmallow. The machine was old school through and through, completely manual and sensory, and loud as hell. You had to pay attention. So we did the roast twice, once while I recorded, and a second time Ron made me run through on my own. Ron made small talk the entire time as if we were doing nothing at all, combining smart teaching with good bedside manner.
While our beans cooled in the agitator tray, he gave me a tour of his garage and spaces in it dedicated to other hobbies, which included cigar humidor construction and golf club shaft modification. He also told me a little more about his life. His first marriage was a disaster, but he was still close to his ex-wife’s son. His second wife, who I had the pleasure of meeting later that day, was a hilarious Italian-American woman from The Bronx. Ron adored her and she was so thrilled that I was getting the roaster.
I still had to make arrangements to move the roaster to my garage with the help of my buddy with a truck, a person no single woman can do without. I had some time to make the arrangements because the roaster had to cool down anyway. Before I took off to recruit my friend, Ron loaded up my car with a bunch of extra goodies: some packaging materials, various measuring pails, a timer, and an impulse sealer. He wasn’t just selling me a machine, he was passing something on.
When I say my life is one of abundance, these are the moments I’m talking about. I experienced this once before when I started to learn how to sew years ago. I took a night class through local Adult Education. It was a bizarre introduction to garment sewing because I did virtually no sewing at all. I had a broken machine I found in my parents’ garage and listened to a bunch of older women talk about their cats while I tinkered with the timing, or when the top thread catches the bottom thread, on this piece-of-shit Singer.
I eventually gave up on the damn thing and started practicing on one of the classroom machines, constructing a small, palm-sized cushion before the term was up. On the last night of class, Esther, an older Black woman who worked at the school for the deaf in Riverside and spoke nary a word all semester, walked in lugging a hard case. She had been watching me struggle for months. She came up to me. “I have this spare machine I have used maybe twice.” She gifted it to me. I never saw Esther again, but I used the hell out of that machine through three years of garment sewing classes at this other local school. And while I can barely tell a selvedge from a buttcrack now, the timing of the gift was right. Just like now.
My friend-with-truck and I almost dropped the roaster as we were loading it up, but it all worked out. Thankfully Ron had it on a table with wheels so, once we got to my house, the hardest part was getting it onto the driveway floor. I had cleared a space for the thing and we rolled it in. I gabbed with my friend for a while, thanked him, and the sun set.
