French Press
- Liz
- Aug 11
- 3 min read
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It’s autumn when I move into a Brooklyn apartment with two dudes from California who wear tight pants and smoke Lucky Strike cigarettes. They ask if I’ve ever had French press coffee — I reckon they think people from the Ozarks drink Folgers and McDonald’s coffee exclusively; I will gladly drink both, and I walk around the apartment barefoot and I listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd and sometimes I can’t keep the Missouri out of my mouth, so I don’t fuss over their ignorance.
It’s winter when we’re sitting in the living room and I raise a shot of whiskey in the air as I’m chewing the cheesy bean and rice burrito I always grab on my way home from the gym; my gesture makes them giggle, and in between giggles one of them says something about Chipotle, and after I swallow the whiskey I hit them with: “Taco Bell is Chipotle for poor people,” and I’m not kidding but they laugh anyway, so I laugh too, and then the one who didn’t say something about Chipotle asks me if I ever make cocktails, and when I shake my head, “no,” he grins a little.
It’s later that winter when he comes home to a candle-lit living room and thinks I’m trying to seduce him. “It’s not what it looks like,” he tells the other Californian when he walks in a little bit later; but I’m not trying to seduce anyone — I just dig low lighting, and as a kid I pretended acres of cotton bolls were acres of snowflakes, so after sunset I turn off all the lights, spark some wicks, and watch flurries fall.
It’s spring when I hear the Californians’ friend making fun of me, and they know I can hear their friend making fun of me so they stand up for me. It’s later that spring when I decide to go home for a couple weeks and the roommate who thought I was trying to seduce him is disappointed: “I was hoping we could all get pizza on my birthday,” he texts me. It’s even later that spring when I start going up to the rooftop every afternoon to get high — the Californians know a guy — and I realize New York City is depressing if you love nature but you can’t afford to live near greenery.
It’s years later when I realize getting drunk and high to read The Bell Jar in Central Park is something a depressed person does, and that living with strangers in one of the biggest cities in the world after leaving an abusive boyfriend probably heightened my PTSD symptoms; but I didn’t know I was dealing with PTSD back then, and giving NYC a shot is something I’ll never regret.
It’s nearly a decade later now, and even though I lived with the Californians for only six months and I haven’t seen them since I moved out, occasionally I imagine them all dressed up and drinking cocktails or really expensive wine at some swanky dinner party. I see them enjoying a night of cocaine and carousing with Ivy-educated millennials who’ve never changed their own oil or seriously considered stripping as a side hustle or comforted a dying animal; I hear them entertaining with colorful tales of the hillbilly they rented a room to when they first moved to New York.
Sometimes, I wonder how the Californians might react if I told them it took me a while to suss out the nature of their relationship — they didn’t dress like any heterosexual men I’d ever known, and one of them didn’t eat meat and both of them would only fry cage-free eggs; they didn’t try to have sex with me either, and all I knew of men then was sex and violence. Straight or not, though, they had something special to move across the country together.
I wish we could sit down for a long chat — perhaps over a steaming mug of French press coffee — and share all we’ve learned since parting ways. Or, in lieu of that, I hope they read this someday; but I’m guessing guys with Lord of the Flies tattoos don’t read many women writers.
