"Grande Caramel Macchiato" by Mark Bessen
You can tell a lot about a person by their Starbucks order. Asking for a “medium” instead of a “grande” betrays an intentional obtuseness. Using too many modifiers reveals a tendency toward the frivolous. Extra pumps of syrup, a saccharine affectation. And ordering a macchiato, of course, announces an arbiter of good taste.
My father, for example, kept it relatively simple: a grande nonfat latte, extra hot. An indulgence for him, saved only for road trips, when the drink doubled as a meal. Extra hot, because he said they never made their drinks hot enough in the first place—but, to my mind, a masochistic request: asking to be burned.
At home he made a point of drinking only black coffee, as though even cutting it with a splash of milk was a sign of weakness. My mother took hers with enough half-and-half to produce a rich caramel brown. Somehow this difference anchored in my mind as a key distinction between genders, which I then believed mattered. Femininity was enjoyment, pleasure. Masculinity, an acid ache in your gut and a bitter taste on the back of your tongue.
During the fall of my freshman year at Stanford, I’m walking up University Avenue in Palo Alto with my new friends Julia and Gustavo. Bundled in her hip canvas jacket, Julia strolls with an easy confidence. Gustavo strides languidly, his curly brown hair bouncing above a ruminative gaze. He will soon come out and become my boyfriend. Together we amble along the rich red brick sidewalks, past perfectly manicured streetscaping and thin women pushing strollers with their perfectly manicured nails.
I’m battling an exhaustion brought on by months of insomnia and years of self-abnegation, so I suggest a stop at Starbucks. “Want anything?” I ask. They don’t. Julia is already nursing a thermos, the tea tag lolling over the side like a tongue; Gustavo is not inclined to caffeine (one of his few character flaws).
They wait outside while I order my go-to: a grande caramel macchiato with soy milk and an extra shot. (The world hasn’t yet collectively decided to switch over to almond, then oat.) I realize I’m ordering it in a hushed tone, leaning in to the barista, harboring some lingering shame at such a flamboyant order. As though someone in downtown Palo Alto might gay-bash me for it.
Outside, I joke with my friends that I ordered the faggiest drink in America.
The only words I remember from the note my father wrote me after I came out to him (also via a note) are “swishy” and “effeminate.” These words mattered, because in my family, specificity of language was prized. Many a family dinner had been interrupted by a trip to consult the dictionary. My father still remembers the word that won him the high school spelling bee: “sacrilegious.” A well-crafted email, we were taught, was the most powerful weapon; a carefully selected word, the most penetrating bullet.
This logic ran counter to another core tenet of our family philosophy: the old “sticks and stones” adage. Any degree of physical violence was verboten, ascribed a staunch wrongness that didn’t apply to harsh language. So I felt foolish that words often hurt me much worse than sticks could, their splinters deeper.
The rest of the note, which I can’t recount specifically, felt like a begrudging acceptance of my identity, laced with some disappointment that I wouldn’t live a “normal” life, and punctuated by those offhand flourishes that stick with me. After I came out, we hardly spoke; we certainly never hugged it out; we settled into cold silences broken only by the occasional hot flare of my temper. Yet because my father’s begrudging acceptance and disappointment echoed my own feelings, his words—swishy, effeminate—played into my fear that I would transform into one of the flaming homosexuals that I had learned to disdain. Like I disdained my own incipient flamboyance.
My drink in hand, Gustavo, Julia, and I traipse on, en route to Crepe Vine or some equally overpriced and insipid establishment. Steam wisps up from the vent in my cup; I scald my tongue with my impatience. There’s a chill in the air. Orange leaves crunch on the sidewalk. A faint dew makes everything glisten. It’s Pumpkin Spice season.
A protester on the street, a rarity in Palo Alto, begins to approach me. He’s tall and wiry, with greasy brown hair combed flat. He singles me out, like he knows I’m bad at avoiding conversation when addressed. I angle my body to my friends and pretend we’re chatting intently, but the man has locked on his target. I brace to hear him out: I figure I’ll sign his petition to plant trees or reduce emissions, and be on my merry way.
“Can you spare a minute of your time?” he asks.
I slurp at my macchiato, and then the man turns his sign towards me. “Protect Marriage,” it says, and at the bottom, in smaller font, “Westboro Baptist Church,” along with their URL: godhatesfags.com. I’ve heard of this hate group and its protests at the funerals of gay soldiers, but I figured it was limited to the South, or Texas, or somewhere else. Not Palo Alto.
I groan, feeling my body tense. I’m not looking for conflict during one of my rare trips off campus. “Sorry, man,” I say, defensively deepening my voice, reining in the rainbow streamers usually fluttering from my mouth, then resenting myself for code-switching. “Not interested.”
“Are you a Christian?” he asks.
“A Jew,” I reply, hoping this will be the end.
“God loves the Jews, too.”
“That’s great,” I say, backing away, but feeling magnetically stuck.
“Do you believe in God?” he continues, unabated. “Do you believe in the sanctity of marriage?”
My friends take a step closer, which gives me the courage to feign calm, to play off my anger and fear with a bit of snide humor. In a tone I hope balances pride with impertinence, I say, “Actually, sir, I’m a gay homosexual.”
Julia snickers. Gustavo takes a few paces away. Briefly, I feel proud of my insult, like I’ve given the middle finger to this irredeemable twat. I start to walk away, when the man turns to me and says, straight-faced and serious: “Well, then you should be stoned to death.”
His words dig into my flesh. I know as he speaks that they will stay with me, that I’ll never be able to forget them. They will lodge themselves in company with “swishy” and “effeminate,” reopen that unhealed wound.
I turn back to him, shaking. I have to fight not to crush the hot cup in my hand. “What the fuck did you just say?” I ask.
“You should be stoned to death,” he says. He sounds so calm, like he’s informing me of a practical legal matter.
I notice myself futzing with the lid of my macchiato, busying my hands to prevent them curling into fists. Stoned to death? It’s so medieval, so comically physical, I can only think of that Shirley Jackson story. Not only should I die. Not only be killed. I should be stoned to death. Slowly murdered by a crowd, a painful and public execution. One stone, one word, at a time.
Gustavo is calling me to go, but my feet are planted. Before I can think, in one smooth motion, I pop the lid off my coffee and hurl the steaming liquid into the man’s face. He drops his sign and falls backwards onto the ground, letting out a scream of shock and anguish. The faggiest drink in America drips from his beard.
I wish that had been the end: my climactic triumph. A caramel macchiato my stone when language failed me.
I stood over him for a moment, and then I ran, sprinting down University Avenue towards campus. I spent the rest of the night crouched in my dorm room, waiting for the flashing red and blue lights to take me in for the assault.
“He fucking deserved it,” Julia said. “Plus, you could say it was self-defense. He basically threatened you.”
I wasn’t sure whether I was more upset by the man’s words or my inability to control my reaction, but I trembled and sobbed quietly into my pillow.
The difference between the two sets of words, you should be stoned to death and swishy, effeminate, feels infinite and also trivial. The obvious vitriol of the man on the street, the jagged edges of my father’s words. Yet both held power over me; both wounded me deeply. Both were stated so matter-of-factly: to the protestor, gays should be killed; to my father, they were flamers. Two distinct flavors of homophobia: one bold and violent, the other subtle and insidious. Both with notes of disgust and disapprobation. One representing the random, chaotic hate of the world; the other razor-sharp because of how much it mattered to me.
The difference, of course, is as stark as clumsy love versus precise hate.
My reactions in each case differed, too, though both were wordless. In response to my dad, a contraction: I suppressed my voice and flamboyant gestures and avoided speaking with him; my stomach clenched while making a stupid Starbucks order. In Palo Alto, a detonation: those years spent reducing myself ignited by a sudden spark. In both cases, I was able to react only physically, without language.
Over the years, I have developed a vocabulary for understanding what I felt in each of these instances, and the unfortunate others like them. I have learned to voice formerly unspeakable anger and fear. With regard to the actors involved in subsequent events—strangers versus family—the volatility of my responses has flipped. When chased out of a shop by an ignorant patron or walking past a muttered “faggot” in a parking lot, I allow for a suppressed flare of ire, an underwater explosion, letting only pitying bubbles make way to the surface. But with people I care about, I clap back. After a call from an uncle when he meets any other gay person, I am more apt to explain my offense (after an audible groan); I don’t hesitate to fulminate against an offhand homophobic comment at a family dinner.
After plenty of therapy on both sides, my father and I have repaired our relationship. He is now much gentler with words; I, better able to moderate my reactions. He has become a staunch ally and a loving supporter. When I hear someone speaking with “gay voice,” I no longer recoil, but instead feel comforted. I’m sure if you asked him when I was a teenager, my father wouldn’t have known my go-to coffee order, or wouldn’t have admitted it. But, a decade later, when I visit my dad, he offers me some of his personal stash of Starbucks caramel macchiato concentrate. Iced.
Mark Bessen (he/him) is a queer writer based in Austin, Texas, originally from Southern California. He holds a BA in English from Stanford, and his fiction and essays have been featured in The Offing, Taco Bell Quarterly, New South, Tahoma Literary Review, After Dinner Conversation, and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter @MarkBessen.
