I’m not entirely sure when it was that I started drinking coffee, but I do know that it represented a quiet victory for my friend Dave, who was early to every trend from high tech to grunge, and tried to get me to be, too.
As Seattle was undergoing its coffee house revolution at the behest of marketing juggernaut Starbucks, over in sleepy Spokane Dave somehow picked up on it and started dragging us to coffee shops where he would order frou frou drinks with funny names like “Americano” and “Cappucino.”
I took my caffeine cold in those days and held no truck with frou frou drinks; I wouldn’t even say cappucino, which caused Dave no end of projected grief. It became a running gag, a weak one… Dave trying to get me to say cappucino, me refusing to do so.
To tweak him, in one of the ways that we constantly tweaking one another, I finally deigned to say it to him once, in private… and then refused to repeat it in front of others and denied that it had ever happened, which was possibly even worse to him than my not saying it to anyone, ever.
For weeks, this went on, my gleefully dropping “cappucino” in conversation when only Dave was around, and strenuously denying I had done so when anyone else was within earshot. I’m sure it bugged no one other than him, but it bugged him a lot, which gave me great joy.
It bugged him so much he set up a sting operation, procuring a tiny tape recorder and surreptitiously capturing me on the record one day as we were just the two of us driving out to school.
I was defeated, but it was in a game of low value by a move that was over the top, the best way, and one that I was required to honor according to our code. It was years before I actually started drinking the stuff myself, after we’d both moved to Seattle and coffee culture was suddenly inescapable, but it could be traced in some degree to that moment.
I was sitting yesterday morning in a cafe along the Mekong River in Luang Prabang in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, sipping a cappucino and about to tuck in to a good-looking chunk of carrot cake when I suddenly realized that it was perhaps the perfect Dave meal. A man of large appetites (and, eventually, quite a large man generally from enjoying them), Dave had been known to purchase and devour an entire half a carrot cake from Safeway in one sitting.
I took a bite. It wasn’t Safeway, but it wasn’t bad.
I hadn’t ordered the combination with him in mind, but I retroactively christened it the 2019 Dave Beauchamp Southeast Asia Memorial Coffee Tour.
A man who smokes, drinks, and eats half a carrot cake at a time is lucky to make it past 40, and Dave wasn’t lucky. He’s been gone for seven years now but I still think of him often. It’s hard not to; he enjoyed so many things in life, it’s difficult to go very long without running across one of them and imagining things differently, a world in which he was still around enjoying them.
He would have enjoyed Luang Prabang quite a lot, from the way the name rolls off the tongue, to the coffee, to the wonderful bakeries, to the big, cool villa rooms, to the way they serve you breakfast on your private balcony, to the 10-year-old in monk’s robes that just walked by softly singing a Beyonce song to himself. I’m sad he’s not here to see it.