How Starbucks Saved My Life

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 the table fell to the ground as I rose awkwardly partway out of my seat, shook her hand, and said, “My name is Mike.”

I had called my business Michael Gates Gill & Friends because I was in love with the sonorous sounds of my full name. But here I felt that “Mike” was the better way to go. The only way to go.

“Mike,” Crystal said, once again shuffling the papers at the table before her, still not looking at me, “all Partners at Starbucks go by their first names, and all get excellent benefits.”

She handed me a large brochure.

“Look through this and you will see all the health benefits.”

I grabbed the brochure eagerly. I hadn’t realized the position offered health insurance. Rates had gotten too high for me to afford my health insurance, and I had let it go, a mistake that I had recently found out might have serious repercussions for me. Any remaining ambivalence I had about the job went out the window.

Just a week before I had had my annual physical with my doctor. Usually, he gave me a clean bill of health. But this time he shook his head slightly and said, “It is probably nothing, but I want you to have an MRI.”

“Why?”

“I just want to make sure. You said you had a buzzing in your ear?”

“A slight buzzing,” I hastily replied. I never gave Dr. Cohen any reason to suspect my ill health. I never even told him if I was feeling ill. He was a great practitioner of tough love—which meant that he was relentless in finding anything wrong with me.

“Slight buzzing. Buzzing!” he said in his usual, exasperated way. He was impatient with my artful dodging. “Get an MRI, and then go see Dr. Lalwani.”

“Dr. Lalwani?” That did not sound encouraging.

“Michael, you are a snob,” Dr. Cohen told me, “and that could kill you someday. Dr. Lalwani is a top ear doctor. He got his doctorate at Stanford. That make you happy?”

After a lifetime of treating me, Dr. Cohen knew me too well.

I had the MRI. Dr. Cohen had told me that it would only take a “few minutes.”

I lay there for at least half an hour. And I also did not like the fact that I heard other doctors come in and out of the room.

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” the young orderly told me. “We will send the MRI up to Dr. Lalwani. He wants to see you.”

I was angry. Angry with Dr. Cohen for insisting on this stupid MRI. I had been healthy all my life. And I was not about to stop now. I could not afford any ill health.

Dr. Lalwani kept me waiting for most of the afternoon. I saw people go in and out of his office. Finally, Dr. Lalwani appeared, smiling from ear to ear. Was that a hopeful sign? Lalwani gestured me into his office. It was small and cramped and piled with papers. Not reassuring. I would have preferred a large corner office, with a comfortable couch. He was obviously not doing that well in his profession.

“Mr. Gill,” he said.

“Michael,” I told him, trying to be kind.

But he was insistent, smiling harder. “Mr. Gill, I have some bad news for you … but then you knew something must be wrong … am I correct?”

I knew something must be wrong? Was he crazy? I thought everything was all right.

“What are you saying?” I could barely contain my anxiety and my rage at his calm demeanor.

“You have a rare condition. Fortunately, it is in an area that is a specialty of mine.”

“What is it?” I almost shouted, but Dr. Lalwani was not to be rushed.

“Something very, very rare.” He smiled again. “Only one in ten million Americans.”

I waited, filled with anger, but also with an animal sense I had to let the good doctor do it his way. I was already scared enough to yield to his academic style.

“You have what is called an acoustic neuroma. My specialty. But very rare. It is a small tumor on the base of your brain … that affects your hearing.”

For a second I could not see or hear anything. It was as though I had been given a blow directly to my head and heart. I think I might have stopped breathing.

Dr. Lalwani, sensing my extreme distress, hurried on.

“This condition is not fatal,” he said. “I can operate. But I must tell you the operation is very serious.”

I recovered sight and sound just in time to hear those ominous words. “Serious” coming from a surgeon was not something I wanted to hear.

“What do you mean?”

“We bore into the skull, and it is an operation on the brain. Literally, I am a brain surgeon … this is brain surgery.”

He was so confident in himself. I hated him for being so willing to operate.

“Your hearing may not be restored. The tumor is causing the buzzing. It will take one or two weeks before you can leave the hospital,” he said.

“Before I can leave the hospital,” I repeated numbly.

“And several months before you will be fully recovered. But the rate of recovery is very high. Fatalities are very rare. Only a few actually die.”

A few … die? Was he mad?

“When do I have to have the operation?” I stammered out. My mouth was dry.

“I would do it right away … but you might wish to wait several months, come back, we will have another MRI, see if the tumor has grown. You might have a very slow-growing tumor.”

Finally, a ray of hope. Like everyone, I hated the idea of hospitals. Friends had died in hospitals. Not to mention I was broke. Any postponement was a gift from God.

I got up quickly, shook his hand, left his office, and immediately called Dr. Cohen.

He was not reassuring.

“Sounds like you should have the operation,” he told me.

“Yes,” I said, faking agreement, “but I will wait a few months for another MRI.”

I was buying time.

Giving up health insurance for myself was bad enough, but not to be able to afford health insurance for my children was much worse. I wondered if the tumor was in some karmic way a punishment for my behavior.

Now, sitting across from Crystal, I read the Starbucks brochure about the insurance benefits with particular interest They seemed extensive, and even covered dental and hearing—something I had never been given as a senior executive at JWT.

I looked up at Crystal, hopeful, “Does this cover children?”

“How many kids do you have?”

“Five,” I said, thinking about how I was used to saying “four.” Five.

Crystal laughed. Then she smiled, almost kindly.

“You’ve been busy,” she said.

“Yes.”

I did not want to say any more; it was way too complicated to explain in a job interview.

“Well,” she went on, still with a positive tone, “your five kids can all be covered for just one small added deduction.”

What a relief. My youngest child, Jonathan, was the main reason I was so eager for work. It wasn’t his fault. It was all my fault.

I had met Susan, Jonathan’s mother, at the gym, where I had started to go shortly after I was fired. I needed a reason to get out of the house every day, and exercise became my new reason for getting up and out.

One morning I had been lying down on a mat resting. I was in a room that happened to be empty at the moment and was occasionally used for yoga classes. Susan had come in. It was clear she did not notice me and thought the room was empty. She was crying as she moved over to lean against the wall.

“Are you okay?” I asked. I was uncomfortable around emotional people.

She was startled, but did not stop crying.

“My brother is dying of cancer … just days to live …”

“That’s tough,” I said, sitting up on my blue mat, getting ready to leave.

“And just last year I lost my father to lung cancer.”

“Tough,” I repeated, standing up. I should have continued my progress out of the door, but I did not feel I could just leave her with her sorrow.

I moved closer to her.

“Don’t worry,” I said, not knowing where these words came from. “You will soon be happier than you ever have been before.”

She looked up at me. Susan was small, barely more than five feet, with lots of dark hair and brown eyes. I am over six feet tall, with little hair and blue eyes. We were a study in contrasts, an odd couple for sure.

Susan rubbed her tears away, but more kept flowing.

“What?” she said, not quite believing that she had heard correctly.

I could not believe what I had said. Where had those crazy words come from?

But I repeated them.

“You will be happier than ever.”

She nodded, as though understanding at some level.

I turned to go.

“I like a man who does yoga,” she said. “It shows flexibility.”

Susan and I started our relationship on totally false assumptions. She had taken me for someone interested in yoga. I had no interest in yoga. I did not like to stretch: It made me feel even more inflexible. I was rigid about many things. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. I liked old songs, old ways. Until now, my past had worked well for me. Susan had no idea about what I was really like. Meeting me in the yoga room, she thought I was a flexible, perceptive person who could understand the deeper, more positive profundities of life. Like I was some wise guru.

It is funny, sometimes, how wrong people can be.

Susan was so wrong about me, and I was so wrong about Susan. I took her for a sad waif, a person who needed comfort and protection. Yet I learned later that she was an accomplished doctor of psychiatry with a large group of enthusiastic patients.

I thought she needed me.

She thought I could help her.

We were both so wrong.

Yet there was an immediate attraction between us. Was our powerful chemistry proof of the saying that opposites attract? Especially early morning in a gym. I had nothing better to do. And she had two hours free before she had to see her next patient.

Since I had been fired, I had found it impossible to make love to my wife, not that we tried that often. Like many married couples, we made love only occasionally. Still, it had scared me when I had tried to perform last time and failed. That physical failure compounded my recent professional failure. I had always counted on sex as a joyous release. Now it was one more sign of my seemingly irreversible decline.

Until I met Susan.

Yet, despite the attraction, I moved to the door. I was inflexible, and did not have affairs … especially with people I met at a less-than-exclusive gym.

“Would you like to have a cup of coffee?” Susan asked gently as I moved toward the exit. I almost did not hear her. She spoke so softly.

I found myself saying, “Sure, let’s have a cup of coffee.”

What could be the harm in having a cup of coffee with a sorrowful little person? We could get a latte at Starbucks and I could cheer her up.

But instead of Starbucks, she suggested her apartment. I went with her, and I was hooked. After that, I saw Susan almost every morning when she was free—which was two or three times a week.

Susan was not that young. In her mid-forties. She told me that her gynecologist had told her she could not have babies. So she said she saw no point in getting married.

“Marriage is for having kids,” she said. “Sex is better without the bonds.”

“Not to mention you already are married,” she reminded me, glancing at my ring to confirm the fact.

I acknowledged her point with a significant amount of guilt. I loved how Susan made me feel, but I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I loved my wife and wanted my four kids to live in a stable family environment.

Then one morning Susan called me at home—something she had never done before.

“I have to see you.”

“When?” It was seven-thirty A.M. I had not even had breakfast.

“Now.”

She was standing naked in her apartment; the curtains open to the East River. It was a March morning, but the sun was bouncing off the water.

“Michael,” she whispered, “I’m pregnant. And God has told me I should have this baby.”

My heart stopped. This was not on my agenda. I had lost my job and was struggling just to support my own family. I did not need another child.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“You have got to decide,” I said.

“Tell me.”

“No,” I said, getting up. I was not going to tell her to have an abortion. This might be her only chance for a child.

“It’s a miracle, Michael, but I need your support.”

“I’m broke.”

She laughed. Susan had another misapprehension: She thought because I dressed well and seemed well off that I was rich. She had no idea that behind my Ruling Class attitude I was getting poorer every day.

I had kept my relationship with Susan secret, but when Jonathan was born, I told my wife. She could not stand it.

“An affair is one thing,” she said. “A child is another.”

Betsy is very clearheaded.

“I just can’t do it,” she told me. “I’m not made for this kind of thing.”

So we got an “amicable” divorce, although she was rightly furious with me for being so stupid.

“I thought we would spend the rest of our lives together,” she said. I felt terrible.

My kids, now practically grown-ups, were understanding in a grown-up way, but hurt and angry too. I had given Betsy our big house, and she had enough family money to be okay, but I knew it wasn’t just about money. I had ruined her life.

And ruined my own life as well.

I took a small apartment in a New York City suburb. Desperately wanting to do the right thing after doing all the wrong things, I resolved to try to be there for Susan and my new child, Jonathan. I would come by around four or five A.M. and play with Jonathan so Susan could have a little sleep.

I was doing it out of a sense of obligation. But an unexpected thing happened. I became more and more attached to Jonathan. And he to me. Together, Jonathan and I would watch the dawn. When my other children were young, I did not have the time to watch them catch the wonder of each new moment. I was working twelve-hour days at JWT.

Here, I was being given another chance to be a father—in many ways, an opportunity I didn’t deserve. I loved to see Jonathan grow before my eyes; to watch as he waved his little hand as though conducting when I would sing a gentle song, or hear him laugh with such uninhibited delight when I threw a stuffed animal up in the air.

One day, when I was putting my sleeping baby back in his crib, Jonathan opened his eyes and smiled at me. He opened his mouth and out came the beautiful sounds “Da da.” Two simple, heartbreaking syllables. Thinking back to how I had missed such magical moments with my other children caused a physical pain in my chest. And for what? For a company that rewarded my loyalty with a pink slip. I wanted to sit each of my children down and instruct them: You only live one life; take it from me, live it wisely. Weigh your priorities.

I spent less and less time chasing new clients, and more and more time with Jonathan. He loved me and he needed me. I was somebody wonderful in his eyes.

Jonathan seemed to be the only one who felt that way these days. Susan had gradually lost interest in me, first as a conversationalist. She told me I was “boring.” I was not open to new ideas. And then she lost interest in me as a lover. She told me I was “too routine.” In a peculiar way, the more available I became to her—after divorcing my wife, and having fewer clients and work to do, more time on my hands—the less appealing I was to her. She imagined me as a man at the top of America, fulfilled, productive, successful, and happy. She got to know me as I was: an insecure little boy not that good at dealing with reality.

Jonathan was my last fan, and my best pal. But now he had started spending his days in school, so I was left with more time on my hands, fewer excuses for not finding work, and a greater need for a job just for bare survival. Hell, I wasn’t even providing my little boy with health insurance.

How had I managed to be so incompetent in all of my personal and professional relationships? I tried to clear my mind of all my guilty, negative thoughts and focus on Crystal and this surprising interview. By luck or on a whim, Crystal had given me a chance—maybe my last chance—to stop my downward spiral. I did not want to blow it.

I looked up at Crystal and tried to give her a confident smile.

She wasn’t buying it. It was clear that Crystal was balancing a personal dislike for me with her commitment to being a professional. Her store was in desperate need of new workers. And I was desperate for work. Convince her, I told myself. Convince her that this is a match made in heaven. I willed myself to be positive.

“Now I want to ask you some questions about your work experience,” Crystal said in a cool professional tone.

I was suddenly very worried. After finding out about the health benefits that Starbucks offered, I really wanted this job. Was Crystal going to be another young woman like Linda White who would end up cutting off my balls? I didn’t care, so long as she hired me.

“Have you ever worked in retail?”

Her question startled me.

I tried desperately to think…. Quick, what is retail?

“Like a Wal-Mart?” she helped. I sensed, for the first time in the interview, that Crystal might have decided to be on my side. This whole thing had started as a joke or a dare with her, but maybe, just maybe, she had come to see me as a person who really needed some help.

It suddenly struck me how much a life of entitlement had protected me from the reality everyone else knew so well. Maybe Crystal could help me get a grip, yet I could not even grab the saving rope she had tossed me in this job interview: I had never even been inside a Wal-Mart.

Crystal made a little mark on her paper and moved on. I felt very nervous. This was not going well.

“Have you ever dealt with customers in tough situations?” Crystal read the question from the form and then looked up at me. But her eyes were softer; now she seemed to be willing me to answer this question correctly.

Yet I was still at a loss. Was it tough to talk to the CEO of Ford? Yes, but that wasn’t what was going to get me this job. I remembered that I had done advertising for Burger King and had worked at a store one morning to get a feeling for the business.

“I worked at Burger King,” I said.

Crystal gave me a big smile.

“Good,” she said. “And how did you handle a customer when things went bad?”

“I listened very carefully to what they were saying, then I tried to correct what was wrong, and then I asked them if I could do anything more.” I spouted gibberish from some forgotten brochure I had written on how to handle bad situations.

Crystal smiled again and made a mark on the paper.

“Have you worked with lots of people under tough time pressures?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, keeping it vague. Working late on an advertising campaign for Christian Dior was different from serving lattes to hundreds of people on their way to work.