A coffee thing.

This is a column about coffee - drinking it, buying it, using it for ulterior purposes. It's also about a kind of snootiness that quickly flips into reverse snobbery, which sooner or later flips again into reverse-reverse snobbery, leaving the snob exhausted and confused. I myself am exhausted and confused - as you can tell.

In the early Eighties I lived in a university town in the Midwest. Like all such communities it was an uneasy mixture of town and gown. On the main street the pickups cruised slowly past the Volvos; in the neighborhoods the "U.S. Out of El Salvador" lawn signs co-existed with the "U.S. Out of the U.N." stickers in the front window next door. You could get your hair cut for $3.50 (no tip) at Sam's Barber Shop, or get it styled for $10 at Shear Delites Unisex Cuttery.

And you could drink coffee at Carl's Coffee Cup, or you could drink coffee at the Calico Munchkin. At Carl's coffee was a quarter. At the Munchkin the "house blend" sold for 65 cents, although most customers would choose a purer brew from countries squirming in the grip of Western imperialism. At Carl's your coffee was brought by a post-menopausal waitress with a pencil stuck in her bouffant. At the Munchkin you were served by a bouncing sophomore in a tube top, who more often than not forgot to charge you.

I had just moved from San Francisco. There everyone was a coffee snob. While most Americans might use a Mr. Coffee, for example, none of my acquaintances owned one; most had espresso machines, or some black lacquer turbine spouting fearsome tubes and pressure valves designed by (who else?) Germans. Others used the Melita method, in which the specially ground coffee was arranged at a precisely measured angle relative to the incoming water so as to maximize the exposure of the grounds while slowing the filtering process . . . or something. In any case, I'd caught the bug - bad. By the time I arrived at the university my snobbery was intense and unremitting; my coffee had to be dark and rich, deeply aromatic, strong as a plow horse. Far more important, it had to mark me as a man above the herd.

By inclination, then, I was, so to say, a Munchkin man. Each morning for the first several months I would spread my New York Times before me and imbibe cup after cup of some Calico Munchkin specialty. On every side would sit professors in work shirts, turtlenecks, or woolen sweaters, their awestruck students miming their every move as they scraped chunks of banana-bran muffin from their beards. They would speak confidently of Nicaragua's rising literacy rates, Israeli barbarism, ketchup as a vegetable! Then one morning, I overheard a circle of grad students chortling over some witticism - no one told "jokes" in the Calico Munchkin - and the thought hit me with full force: "These people laugh through their noses." And I thought: "I can't stand these people." I thought: "I hate these people."

At once my snobbery did a one-and-a-half gainer and landed belly side up. Suddenly the thought of being a Munchkin man chilled me. In a matter of days I had decamped, permanently, to Carl's. It is difficult to describe the coffee at Carl's: as you sipped it words like "resin" and "road kill" suggested themselves. I didn't mind, for my coffee drinking was still serving its primary purpose, which was to set me apart from people I held in derision. I flattered myself that I remained above the herd; it was just a different, smaller, and more contemptible herd - the "herd of independent minds," in Harold Rosenberg's phrase. And besides, I really did prefer the company, if not the coffee, at Carl's. To most of the patrons the idea of ketchup as a vegetable seemed pretty damn common-sensical.

Coffee snobbery transcends coffee; its pull is stronger than the sternest double cappuccino. I have been a reverse coffee snob for almost a decade now, pretending to savor the prole aroma of Folgers and Maxwell House. I even own a Mr. Coffee, with which I horrify my San Francisco friends when they come to visit. But now what? Look around: walk through any city neighborhood or suburb; travel beyond the yuppie enclaves, into deepest Illinois or Idaho. Coffee snobbery is America's fastest growing business. The Starbucks chain of coffee houses has grown like cancer from its native Seattle; its imitators are everywhere. People - not professors, not grad students, not yuppies, but people - now buy Sumatran Boengie at $5.50 a half-pound, and order it ground to their specifications, and carry it home in little sacks, and gather round the Braun espresso machine in the kitchen to comment on the bean's earthy yet delicate balance of insouciant acidities.

All of America, in short, is turning into a giant Calico Munchkin. In the face of this new development, I am at a loss as to how to position myself. When the proles sip Ethiopian Harrar, profs and their legions will defect to Maxwell House. And I once again will be caught in the middle. The whipsaw effects of snobbery take their toll, and the only place for me may be the coffee snob's last refuge: to admit, once and for all, that I never much liked coffee in the first place.