A Contemporary Classic Turns Twenty-One
On the staying power of ZZ Packer's "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere"
Going out on a limb here, but I’d say a lot of my friends read current books, meaning books published within the last five years. There is nothing wrong with that. Most of the books I read are current, too. But I’d venture to say that, because of this, we don’t yet have a full view of the context—political, cultural, historical—in which the book was born. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, as they say. So, let’s take a trip back to 2003.
I was the ripe age of eighteen. I had just begun undergrad. I wore tight jeans, band t-shirts, and was growing my hair long. (Ah, the days of having hair.) I became instant friends with three guys on my dorm floor, and we played music together, talked books and art and held hands and had tickle fights. Though I don’t remember exactly buying flowers for our room, we were the kinds of guys who bought flowers. The following year, when we roomed together, we kept our three-bunked room tidy and smelling good. We were very comfortable expressing ourselves and displaying our love for one another, which, I’m learning, was rare. We got called and “metrosexual” and “femmy” other words I don’t care to put in writing. I can’t speak for the others, but I personally relished poking the great bear of masculine insecurity.
2003. George W. Bush straddled rockets like bucking broncos, saying he was going to, “Smoke them [terrorists] out of their fox holes.” The Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon its re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. The Dixie Chicks announced they were “ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” Bush also declared February as Black history month and signed the National Museum of African American History and Culture Act, which authorized the Smithsonian to devote a museum “exclusively to the documentation of African American life, history, and culture.” (Weird that that needed authorization, but hey, that’s where the country stood at the time.)
It is within this context that ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, a much-celebrated—and increasingly mysterious—story collection was born. I’m not going to wax speculative about what happened to ZZ Packer and why we never saw a second book (many others have done that), but instead I want to celebrate the staying power of her stories. Specifically, one story, because, as I’ve done before, it’s always easier to talk about a single story in this short space than it is to talk about an entire collection—and this is not an MFA program, nor an undergraduate workshop, so I’ll spare you gushing about the miracles of POV and voice and intimacy and character, and I’ll just tell you about a single story.
“Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” the title story, was originally published in 2000, but likely it was written just before prior to the above historical events. More likely, it was drafted around 1998 or 1999, in the middle of or at the tail end of Packer’s enrollment in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. So, to back up a little: Columbine, Monica Lewinsky gets scarlet-lettered, smoking bans, Fleetwood Mac is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, The Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland is passed, “Dawson’s Creek” explodes in popularity, and the MP3 player revolutionizes the way we consume music. I might also add that, due to two recent damning documentaries, we know that Woodstock ’99 was a major disaster—for women, especially—and a nauseating display of rampant sexism and white male rage. That was 1999.1
So: 1998, 1999, 2000. Enter: ZZ Packer, a young Black woman writing about young Black womanhood, girlhood, and childhood. Her protagonists often grate against white establishments, patriarchy, racist structures, etc.
“Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” is a story of dislocation, grief, new beginnings, friendship, homophobia, coming out, the idealism of youth, imposter syndrome, and groping toward a new, expansive view of the world and gender. It is about what it feels like to be young and to bear the roiling anxieties of a future that is too constricted by grief and a past of food-stamp-scraping to see clearly and even begin to grope toward. It is about falling in love with friends but not knowing how to express that love. It is about how we put up our guard and hurt the people we love the most, the people who may or may not become our chosen family.
To put it into a clearer view, Dina’s mother has passed away somewhat recently, and the story charts her first year at Yale. Ultimately, she decides to drop out, but not before bucking against microaggressions and corny ice-breakers—when asked what object she would be, she says she would be a revolver so she could wipe out all of mankind—and mouth-breathing campus counselors. She’s brusque, brash, and a self-identifying misanthrope. She pokes the RA’s and dorm-room visitors who she perceives as “suburban mothers in training” by sitting naked in her room with the door wide open.
Dina befriends Heidi, a loving, fragile, earnest, closeted lesbian, who is self-conscious about her weight.
She was Canadian and her name was Heidi, although she said she wanted people to call her Henrik. "That's a guy's name," I said. "What do you want? A sex change?"
She looked at me with so little surprise that I suspected she hadn't discounted this as an option. Then her story came out in teary, hiccup-like bursts. She had sucked some "cute guy's dick" and he'd told everybody and now people thought she was "a slut."
"Why'd you suck his dick? Aren't you a lesbian?"
Dina, from the onset, begs Heidi to come to terms, but her own emotional arc shows pushing people and experiences away in order to keep herself from coming to terms. So, she’s grieving her mother, and she’s sworn off contact with her father, has been forced to undergo counseling for the revolver comment with a creepy old white dude (who actually winds up doling out some powerful insights), and can’t—or doesn’t know how to—make friends beyond Heidi. She is dually alienated from the other Black students on campus, saying, “There was something pitiful in how cool they were. Occasionally one would reach out to me with missionary zeal, but I'd rebuff that person with haughty silence.”
She holds everyone at arm’s length, building herself a house made of bricks—and the bricks are made of suspicion and cynicism. Her and Heidi’s friendship is sweetly described here: “We spent the winter and some of the spring in my room—never hers—missing tests, listening to music, looking out my window to comment on people who wouldn't have given us a second thought.” Dina reads Chomsky and Malcolm X. She dreams of opening a library in the desert where nobody ever comes in to check out books. In response to this? Heidi says she’s going to, “‘Open up a psych clinic. In a desert. And my only patient will be some wacko who runs a library.’"
There is an awkward, tense, revealing, and fantastic scene—storywriters: study this one—of Heidi and Dina stripping naked after working a grimy dishwashing shift in the cafeteria, lathering up with hand soap and spraying each other down. Dina initiates. “Then I had an idea,” she says. “I unbuckled my belt.” She strips matter-of-factly and demands that Heidi spray her. She does, and then Dina says, “You’re up next.”
Brief aside: “There’s something I want you to do” is a powerful phrase for one character to say to the next. So powerful that Charles Baxter named an entire story collection after it and later wrote an essay about “the request moment” in Wonderlands. The trick can be found all over Shakespeare, film, and modern fiction. The stakes are always relational, and what are humans if not social animals? We want to please, to pine, to connect, to enmesh and commune.
So, Dina’s request pushes Heidi—and herself—into a zone of unforeseen intimacy. Heidi says she is fat and doesn’t want to take her clothes off.
"You goddam right." She always said she was fat. One time, I'd told her that she should shut up about it, that large black women wore their fat like mink coats.
In her own way, Dina is saying Heidi is beautiful. If you’ve got it, flaunt it. (At least, that’s how I read this.) Heidi obliges because it feels dangerous and fun, although she needs Dina’s beseeching.
I think I began to love Heidi that night in the dish room, but who is to say that I hadn't begun to love her the first time I met her? I sprayed her and sprayed her, and she turned over and over like a large beautiful dolphin, lolling about in the sun.
A few flashbacks reveal just how class-conscious Dina is and how uncomfortable she remains among the moneyed and the prep-school elite. Spring comes, and a group of students organize a “Coming Out Day.” Dina watches from her dorm-room window.
And then there was Heidi. She was proud that she liked girls, she said when she reached the microphone. She loved them, wanted to sleep with them. She was a dyke, she said repeatedly, stabbing her finger to her chest in case anyone was unsure to whom she was referring. She could not have seen me. I was across the street, three stories up. And yet, when everyone clapped for her, she seemed to be looking straight at me.
Tragically, Dina begins to keep her distance. They stop spending their nights in Dina’s room, and they don’t see each other for two weeks. Eventually, Heidi comes to Dina’s room and says her mother has cancer. Dina coldly says it “wasn’t a big deal.”
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“Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” pulls off a tricky feat. How do you write from the point of view of a homophobe/transphobe without the story itself becoming homophobic/transphobic? And how do you write a delusional character who puts true intimacy at arm’s length without risking readerly exasperation? How do you ask the audience to stick with her as she betrays her own best interests? How do you write yearning — the main ingredient to any story, so the adage goes— when the character herself claims she wants nothing but solitary existence?
You do it in action. Every major escalation of plot shows the reader who Dina is — or who she not-so-secretly wants to be. Moments of connection — allowing Heidi to burst into her dorm room, crying; reading together; skipping class together; sleeping head-to-foot in Dina’s bed; burrowing in her room through the winter—shows us that Dina actually does love Heidi, and vice versa. When Dina snaps at Heidi for denigrating herself, for being self-conscious, and for melodramatic outbursts, we read it as care because we’ve witnessed the moments of connection. In this way, the story seesaws between connection and disconnection. She loves Heidi, and when the love gets too close, she pushes her away.
When the counselor tells Dina, “ ‘You construct stories about yourself and dish them out…’” it acts as a grand thematic announcement that throws Dina’s actions into relief. Did we need that? ZZ Packer has already shown us this fact. Some readers might feel like this scene is a little obvious—astute observation is part of the job of being a reader of literary fiction in the first place, so we might not need an astute observer within the story—but I certainly needed the scene when I read this story for the first time sixteen years ago. And now? I could go either way. I understand its importance. (Storywriters: take note here, too. How far will you go to hold the reader’s hand?)
The writer’s decisions are many. Draft, scrub, rinse, repeat. Do that until every sentence gleams. This story moves quickly. Packer’s care is evident throughout—giving just enough backstory to win us over for Dina and understand where she’s coming from, however delusional she may be. This is my favorite kind of story: Voice- and character-driven, textured, subtle, even, in its own way, wherein the greatest tension is found in the lie the character tells herself.
This story could be read as a reaction to the cultural moment, where the prevailing patriarchy feels long overdo for a shake up. Or, it could be read as Dina’s “realization of her possible queerness,” as Marie Bradley says in her eloquent analysis. Dina is hemmed in, clearly wants nothing to do with men, especially white men, and even makes up a lie about kissing a boy for the counselor. He sees through her bullshit, though.
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“Show my tits?” Sheryl Crow says from the middle of her set during Woodstock 1999. Audience members—the same audience members who will “break some shit” the next day at Fred Durst’s insistence2 —fling literal shit from vandalized porta-potties onto the stage. “You’d have to pay way more than you paid to get in to see my tits.” Which isn’t quite the snapback you’d hope for. You want Crow to sound more like ZZ Packer’s Dina. But that was the climate. Even a snapbacks were mild and abasing. Thank god we (or some of us) have moved on from all that.
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For more Packer unpacking, check out this Ursa Story podcast episode from Deesha Philyaw and Dawnie Walton. Please spread the love to your local libraries, independent booksellers if you can, or shop online at Bookshop. Thanks, as always, for reading.
I might also add that 1999 was a landmark year for indie rock. Sleater-Kinney’s The Hot Rock; The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs; The Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I; Le Tigre’s self-titled album; Built to Spill’s Keep it Like a Secret; Low’s Secret Name and the Christmas EP; Smog’s Knock Knock; Jim O'Rourke’s Eureka; and Wilco’s Summerteeth (though I love Wilco, there’s some unfortunate domestic abuse imagery on that record; Tweedy says it’s his least favorite; his wife, Susie, says she can’t listen to it). And then there were releases from White Stripes, Jimmy Eat World, and My Morning Jacket, all bound for mega stardom. (What a year, indeed.) Popular music told a different story, though: Christina Aguilara released “Genie in a Bottle” (cringe); Britney Spears sang, “I was born to make you happy” (oh, boy); NSYNC sang, “You’re all I ever wanted” from the pulpit of white male obsession; Mariah Carey sang “Heartbreaker,” a song, essentially, about staying in a abusive relationship. All this makes it seem like the only sane pop singer at the time was Lauryn Hill, who sang, as if speaking directly to our protagonist, Dina, “How you gonna win, when you ain't right within?”
It’s kind of remarkable how much of a parallel you could draw between Limp Bizkit’s Woodstock ‘99 set and the January 6th insurrection. In both cases, you see insecure strongmen urging on the crowd, riling them up, saying, “It’s time to reach deep down inside and let all that negative energy out of your fucking system” (Durst) and “fight like hell” (Trump). No, Trump didn’t crowd surf on plywood ripped from a sound stage, but imagining it isn’t so far fetched. Both men claimed, in the aftermath, “I didn’t do anything.”