How Starbucks Saved My Life. Michael Gill

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      Now, looking across my latte at this confident, smiling Starbucks employee, I felt sorry for myself. She seemed carefree to me, so young, so full of options. Later, I would learn that she had seen more hardship in her life than I could conceive of having seen in three lifetimes. Her mother, who died when she was just twelve, was a dope addict. She had never known a father. When her mother overdosed, she had been sent to live with an aunt, another single mother, who already had several of her own fatherless children to care for. Her aunt was an aunt from hell. She would later tell me of the horrifying time she had fallen down the cement stairs of the project in Brooklyn where she lived. Her hip was broken, but her harried aunt just screamed at her for being so clumsy and refused to send her to a hospital. The bone set, but in a terrible way that guaranteed constant pain. Despite the confidence that she projected to me that day, she was even then in pain, physical and emotional.

      But at that moment I was still at the center of my own universe, and my own problems were all-consuming.

      To me, this young woman had great power—the power to employ me. Yes, I would like a job. As soon as the words had come out of my mouth, I was horrified. What was I doing? Yet, at the same time, I knew I wanted a job. I needed a job. And, I presumed, I would easily get a job at this Starbucks store … or would I?

      The Starbucks employee arranged the papers in front of her, her smile disappeared, and she gave me a hard look. “So, you really want a job?” she said incredulously, shaking her head. She had clearly become more ambivalent about me as we got into the real possibility that I might work for her.

      It suddenly struck me: Her invitation to a job had been a kind of joke. Maybe she had just decided to pass a few minutes making fun of me, the boring, uptight guy who seemed so full of himself. Maybe she had acted on a dare from another employee. But to her surprise, I had taken her up on her invitation.

      She eyed me skeptically. “Would you be willing to work for me?”

      I could not miss the challenge in her question: Would I, an old white man, be willing to work for a young black woman?

      She later confided to me that her angry, bitter aunt had told her repeatedly as she was growing up, “White folks are the enemy.” From her point of view, she was taking a risk in even offering me a job. She was not willing to go an inch further until she was sure I would not give her any trouble.

      I too was ambivalent. The whole situation seemed backward to me. In the world I came from, I should have been the one being kind enough, philanthropic enough to offer her a job, not the one supplicating for the position. I knew that was a wrong sentiment to feel, terribly un-PC, but it was there nonetheless, buzzing under the surface of the situation. This young woman clearly didn’t care if I said yes or no to her job offer. How had she gotten to be such a winner? My world had turned upside down.

      New York City, 1945. My parents always seemed to be going out to cocktail parties and dinners. I was a lonely little boy. As usual, they were not home when I returned on the bus from Buckley School, but there was Nana, as always, waiting for me with arms outstretched and a big smile on her face. I rushed into her commodious bosom.

      This old woman who lived with us in our imposing brownstone on East Seventy-eighth Street was the love of my young life. She was my family’s cook and my closest companion. I spent all of my time with her in the warm and delicious-smelling basement kitchen, imitating Charlie Chaplin and making her laugh. She gave me delicious treats of nuts and raisins. When her father in Virginia was sick, I told her that she should go back to see him. Two weeks later, her father died. Nana thought I was “sent by God.” She told me I would be a man of God someday, a preacher. I had buck-teeth and big ears, but Nana said, “You are a handsome boy.” She told me I was going to be a real heartbreaker.

      Later, I overheard my parents talking in the library. Their voices were low. I crept up to the door to hear them better.

      “Nana is getting too old to climb the stairs,” Mother said.

      Our brownstone had four floors, with seventy-three steep stairs—I’d counted them many times to ease my boredom.

      “Yes, I think it is all becoming too much for her,” Father agreed.

      My heart dropped with dread. They must not let Nana go. I ran to her, crying, but couldn’t tell her what I’d heard.

      Weeks later, when I came back one afternoon from school, Nana wasn’t waiting for my bus. She was gone. Mother had hired a refugee from Latvia to be our cook. She was nineteen, and Mother told me she was doing a good deed in hiring her. The Latvian worked hard, but she barely spoke any English and didn’t talk to me, or even look at me. And she was scared to go near me, or anyone else, which I learned much later was because the Nazis and the Communists had raped her.

      But, as a young child, I only understood that Nana was gone, and I was alone again in the big house. The kitchen was cold and bare without her, yet I didn’t want to leave the room where she had been. I sat quietly on the kitchen windowsill and watched the raindrops racing down the glass. I picked one raindrop to beat another to the bottom of the glass. If I picked the right one, I told myself, I deserved to have a wish come true. Then I wished that Nana would come back.

      Less than a hundred yards from the brownstone I lived in from the ages of one to five, as I applied for a job at Starbucks, I was suddenly feeling the hole in my heart for a woman I hadn’t seen for almost sixty years. Nana had been much older than the Starbucks employee facing me today. Nana was loving and large and soft. This young woman was professional, small, with a great figure. Nana had several gaps in her warm smile. This young woman’s smile was a perfect, dazzling white. Nana was like a mother to me. This woman had already made clear she would relate to me as a boss to an employee.

      There was really nothing these two women had in common—except they were both African-Americans. Like so many white people I knew, I appreciated the idea of integration, and yet, the older I got, the more it seemed that in my Waspy social circle, white people stuck with white people, black people with black people. For me to relate to an African-American woman on a personal, honest level opened memories of the only truly close relationship I had ever had with an African-American woman.

      This young Starbucks employee did not realize that because of Nana, I was emotionally more than willing to work with her—I could not help but trust her. It was an irrational feeling, I told myself. How could a sixty-three-year-old man be influenced by an emotion from the heart of a four-year-old child—but there it was. Would you be willing to work for me? she had asked.

      “I would love to work for you.”

      “Good. We need people. That’s why we’re having an Open House today, and I’m here to interview people for jobs as baristas.” She barely looked at me as she told me these facts. It was as though she were reading me my Miranda rights instead of selling the job. “It’s just a starting position, but there are great opportunities. I never even finished high school, and now I’m running a major business. Every manager gets to run their own store and hire the people they want.”

      She handed me a paper.

      “Here is the application form. Now we will start a formal interview.”

      She reached out her hand.

      “My name is Crystal.”

      The whole time, I had still been sitting with my latte and papers at my corner table. My briefcase on СКАЧАТЬ