By Patrick Joseph Caoile
I was reminded of my father at the coffee shop the other day. Three old Filipino men gathered around a table next to mine, taking turns to talk and sip from paper cups. I imagined it would have been liquor had they been in the homeland, like how my uncles offered me a plastic cup of rum when I was twelve years old. “Don’t tell Mama,” my father said, allowing me the single shot before shooing me back into the tin-can shanty. My father sat outside with his brothers, not minding the mosquitoes swirling around their heads. They were roasting a pig on a spit, embers blistering against its skin, a greasy caramel brown. They drank like men at war, exchanging stories of childhood and then of their adult lives. My father had missed much in between, when he moved with his wife and child to a country not their own. He had missed his brothers.
At the cafe, the three old men looked like them, sipping cups of coffee that emboldened them, a picturesque tableau of a memory halfway around the world. “Pare!” The three men jostled each other around the coffee table laughing, “I swear it happened!” One of their longwinded stories had finally reached its punchline. One of them even resembled my father — a rotund man with beefy arms shaped by decades of farm work and a stomach swollen by beer. His porous, sunbaked face was as hardened as the land he had toiled. His caffeine-shot leg stirred the air beneath the table.
When we left the Philippines for suburban New Jersey, my farmer-father came with us. If he couldn’t work the land with his own hands, he put his labor into the house. A small backyard garden, the laundry, the cooking, the dishes. When the toilet wouldn’t flush, he argued with my mother about calling a plumber: “Ako na! I’ll do it myself!” When the old coffeemaker had brewed its last cup, he showed me how to make poor man’s coffee out of rice. “A farmer works for every grain,” he reminded me. “Not one grain wasted.” In a skillet, he toasted spoonfuls of rice, then steeped the darkened grains in warm water. A few minutes later, he drained the liquid into a cup. He let me take the first sip — my eyes widened, mesmerized by the curious concoction. But my childish excitement quickly turned sour. “This tastes like dirt!” I spewed. My father drank the rest. It was enough to last him for the day.
And yet I’ve since grown to love coffee, the only acceptable adult drug consumed in broad daylight, in plain sight. Black and bitter, closer to the earth. It keeps me awake and away from the dreams that make others lost boys — perhaps my father was one of them; America had been his Neverland. But when I found myself in a coffee shop in the company of three old Filipino men, I was reminded of him and where he came from. I thought of the farmer harvesting coffee in the homeland, the beans exported elsewhere and enjoyed by someone else. Light, medium, or dark roast, like my father’s changing complexion alongside the seasons, because a farmer’s tan doesn’t last forever. Then I was reminded of myself, the farmer’s son, who never learned how to tame the carabao. As those old men finished their drinks and left with arms around each other’s shoulders, I thought of how memory, like coffee, stains us all.
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Patrick Joseph Caoile was born in the Philippines and grew up in northern New Jersey. His work is featured in storySouth, Porter House Review, the anthology Growing Up Filipino 3, and elsewhere. He has received support from Roots.Wounds.Words and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. He holds a BA in English from Saint Peter’s University, MA in English from Seton Hall University, and PhD in English with a creative writing concentration from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Currently, he is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Hamilton College.