Leith, William (25 page)

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chevron links all the packs together, so you get a wave effect.' As I left, he said, 'I get more kicks out of seeing a pack in a bin than on a shelf.'

I pick up and fiddle with my phone and sip my coffee and cast my eyes around the Starbucks. I look at the easy chairs, the blond-wood tables, the cheerful mugs on shelves. Everybody I know professes to hate Starbucks, although most of them still come here and drink the coffee, which is not great, and sit in the easy chairs. I think Starbucks makes us uneasy because it tells us something important about the world we live in; it tells us that we need somewhere like Starbucks. When I interviewed him in 2000, Howard Schultz said, 'The environment that we create has given people a respite for themselves, or a sense of gathering and community with people at a time in their lives when there's no human connection. The PC, the hand-held wireless devices facilitate levels of communication that are singular, that are not based on communicating with a human.'

We were in Seattle, attending the annual Starbucks Employees' conference. In the conference hall that morning, people had been buzzing with corporate pride and near-religious zeal. One manager of a Starbucks outlet said, `Howard will tell you that it's not just about coffee. It's about People.' Another employee looked me in the eye,

and said, with quiet intensity, 'It's not only about enjoying the beverage, but also the service, the aroma, the comfortable chairs.'

At the time, Starbucks was worth $7.2 billion, but had tangible assets of only $1.2 billion it was rich in extrinsics, or, as one executive put it, 'what's parked between your ears'. In other words, the value of Starbucks consisted mostly of the consumer's need. Starbucks, it might be said, was a billion dollars' worth of real estate and coffee products, and six billion dollars' worth of human need. Scott Bedbury, Starbucks' vice president of marketing at the time, has said that, `Consumers don't truly believe there's a huge difference between products.' A former head of marketing at Nike, Bedbury has also said, 'With Starbucks, we see how coffee has woven itself into the fabric of people's lives, and that's our opportunity for emotional leverage.'

We took our seats in the conference hall. A man arrived on stage and unveiled a number 46.38. Everybody cheered. Starbucks stock had just gone up, and, since most people in the room owned Starbucks stock, they were now a little bit richer than they had been a short while ago.

One after the other, Starbucks executives took the stage, and made speeches. The first guy told us that Starbucks was the 'most preferred' restaurant in Tokyo, that Koreans loved it, that, for the first time in UK history, the consumption of coffee had exceeded that of tea.

`Take a moment to congratulate yourselves,' said the executive.

Later, he quoted Winston Churchill (`Success is never final') and Tom Hanks. 'I don't often quote Tom Hanks,'

he said, 'but he did get it in A League of Our Own when he said, "If winning were easy, then everybody would be doin' it. It's the hard that makes it great."'

Another exectutive said, 'Our stores really are theatres. The store manager is the director.'

Schultz arrived on stage. Like the self-help guru Anthony Robbins, he has the air of Ted Danson from Cheers. He wore a black shirt, no tie, black suit. Halfway through his speech, he told us that, as he watched the conference proceedings, he shed tears, thinking of his dead father, who would have been proud. People in the audience began to cry. Schultz defined the Starbucks concept as 'something that is true, that is authentic, that is relevant, that enriches people's lives. We've touched their heart. You've touched their heart with the things that you do.'

He said, 'We have changed the landscape of America! Not only have we changed it we have enhanced id'

He said, 'People said there would never be a time when the Japanese walked down the street holding a cup of coffee! But now, you can't walk down the street without seeing it

He said, 'What they can't copy, what they can't take away, is the heart and soul of what makes this company great. Don't allow this moment to be dismissed!'

He said, 'I believe and I hope this is not coming across in some soppy way take the moment! Seize id'

Later, in the penthouse of the Westin Hotel, with views all the way across Puget Sound, Schultz described the experience of being in a Starbucks outlet: 'You hear the music, you smell the coffee, you see the people. The lighting and the design have been put in place to almost take you away.'

I sip my coffee. I cast my eye around the Starbucks, at the easy chairs, the blond-wood tables, the cheerful mugs on shelves.

At last! Some progress with my headache. The painkillers I have taken are beginning to deactivate a chemical in my brain called prostaglandin H synthetase, the catalyst that turns a chemical called arachidonic acid into messengers of pain called prostaglandins.

My brain has bad news: I am in pain.

My solution: shoot the messenger!

And, finally, my phone lights up, and rings, and the man sitting in an easy chair a few feet away from me, whose phone has the same ringtone, snaps his head towards his own phone, as if waking from a dream, and turns away again, disappointed, and I pick up my phone and put it to my ear.

`Leroy,' I say, and then, 'When?' and then 'Yes', and then, `Good.'

On the way out, I toss my Nurofen packet into the bin, where it nestles brightly against the beiges and browns and coffee-stained whites of the lava-jackets, the napkins, the waxed paper cups that Japanese people are now more willing to hold as they walk down the street.

Don Williams would get a kick out of it, if he happened to be passing.

A Net Loss

You know you shouldn't do it, you know it's not good for you, you know that, even if snorting coke will make you

happier than you are now for a brief period, it will make you more miserable than you are now for a longer period; you know that, with coke, the economics are not good, that you'll end up with a net loss.

You know that coke works by fooling the brain, by telling the brain to release large amounts of feel-good chemicals, and you also know that, when these chemicals, dopamine and serotonin, are released, the brain neutralizes them with brutal efficiency, leaving you with lower levels than before, and a raging hunger for more coke.

And you know that, when you snort more coke, you will not feel as good as you did the first time, and, soon afterwards, you will feel much, much worse, with disastrously low levels of serotonin and dopamine, and a raging hunger for yet more coke, and a bitter, twisted gleam in your eye.

One thing that irks me is that, if you have problems with alcohol or drugs, some people think that you're just bunking off for a while, having a great time. Just like some people look at a fat person stuffing pizza into their face, and think it's all about enjoyment. People think greed is all about enjoyment. But it's not. Greed, as any self-help guru will tell you, is a compensation for pain. Greed is about deprivation. I was talking to a compulsive eater the other day, the one who didn't want to be identified, and I asked him or her to tell me what he or she had eaten during a binge the night before, and he or she listed the items the two small frozen pizzas blitzed in the microwave, the sandwiches with avocados and cheese, the single doughnut, the chocolate bar. All this after having dinner a salad. And I asked him or her if any of these things had given him or her any pleasure, and for a moment he or

she looked shocked. The very idea! No, this was pure masochism, pure self-harm, every mouthful a self-administered laceration.

You know you shouldn't do it, but you go ahead, you soldier on. The mind of a coke fiend, pre-binge, is like the babble of an unpopular government leading a nation into war there are evasions, omissions, calculated abuses of intelligence, outright lies.

It will make you feel bad, but that doesn't matter, because you will feel good first.

It will cost you money, but that doesn't matter, because it will also save you money. How? We'll come to that point later.

When you walk into the bar to meet Leroy, you will have the briefest and most formulaic of conversations, and soon you will find yourself in a dank, smelly toilet, scraping some powder on to the toilet lid, snorting the powder up your nose through a rolled up banknote, fretting about germs. But that doesn't matter, because cocaine is an appetite suppressant, and you will not eat any more food today.

And, before you leave the cubicle, you'll have a nasty moment of clarity. For a second, you will see yourself. And you won't look good. But that doesn't matter, because very soon, you will forget about all these things. You will forget about the suspicious crusting on the toilet lid, the mulch of wet tissue on the floor, the fuzz of lichen on the grouting between the tiles, the money you have spent, the Faustian pact you have set into motion.

None of these things matter, in any case, because the decision has already been made, was in fact made a long

time ago, for reasons that are obscure, classified, confidential. You never had a chance to put it to the vote. Some kind of Rumsfeld or Cheney figure deep in your brain took your Prime Minister to a quiet location and held a gun to his head, and that was it.

I hail a taxi, meet Leroy, lock myself in a smelly cubicle, snort a line, and then I'm talking to some people I don't, or at least didn't, know, and what I'm saying is mostly the word, 'Yeah'. As the drug takes hold, as my brain is filled with ersatz pleasure, the word shortens to 'Yeh'. I am pure assent. Everything says 'yes' to me. Everybody looks good. The man I am talking to looks good. The barmaid looks sensational. I don't exactly want to have sex with the barmaid. I just want to look at her. Exciting thoughts come to me. I should have rum and a mixer! Rum is known as Cron' in Spain! And the man is talking to me about ferries, ferries versus trains, or of course you can fly, and I'm saying that I agree with ferries, the best, or not quite best, but certainly a good way to travel, or possibly not, or even probably not, not with all the accidents you get with ferries, but then again, flying is more dangerous than ever before, with the flight paths so crowded, now that everybody wants to be somewhere else all the time.

And I snort two more lines in the toilet cubicle, just in case MY friends arrive and ask to share my drugs and take my drugs away from me, and now my nose is running, and I look at myself in the mirror, and I have absolutely no negative emotions, no real emotions at all, and I'm not worried about what will happen later, about feeling depressed and paranoid after the coke wears off, or even about stuff like death, which

I can now quite happily think about, the fact that I'll die and probably be cremated and there will be a funeral and some of the people attending, my future children I suppose, have not been born yet, and neither is it too scary to think about all the bad things in my past life, my broken childhood, being shuffled about and locked up in nasty, violent boarding schools, the fact that my family always seemed to be moving outwards, everybody moving away from each other, almost from the beginning, certainly not something I normally want to think about. Well. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I dab my nose and look at myself in the mirror, and this toilet, I decide, is not so bad after all. It has character.

A few minutes later, or maybe more than a few minutes later, it's hard to tell, I'm sitting at a table with a couple of my friends, they've got drugs of their own, are settling in for a binge, and I'm still feeling fine, maybe not as exhilarated as I was, back there in the toilet, but still fine, and one of my friends is saying something about a lap-dancing club, something about knowing the owner, and the girls would give him a private show, on account of the fact that he knew the owner, and this particular girl

`The tits!'

`The tits?'

`They were . .

`Yeh.'

`You know.'

`Yeh.'

`Just . .

And the other guy is saying that he was walking through some nightclub or bar and he saw a woman, short skirt, legs

open, nothing on underneath, he swears this is the truth, actually thinks she was flashing him ...

`What was it like?'

`Perfect.'

`Perfect?'

`Absolute perfection. She knew it as well.'

Patrolling her channel, the barmaid looks fine, no longer sensational but fine, and my train of thought drifts around, trying to focus on stories about lap-dancing bars and strip clubs. I remember being invited to some kind of escort bar, this was years ago, possibly decades, I was with some people from the City, people who were, compared to me, very rich indeed, and when I'd run out of money, one guy just opened his wallet and offered me a chunk of money, which I pulled out and waved at him. He nodded. It was about �200. Anyway, by the end of the evening it was gone, spent on three bottles of champagne, which I drank with a girl who would let me put my hand up her skirt, and touch her through her underwear, but no more. People who wanted to do more had to pay more money, a lot more money.

My mind alights on a time when I went to this place with a friend of mine, he'd had an operation and the operation had not, he felt, been a success, something to do with the nerves on one side of his face, and he'd retreated into himself. One day, I suggested we go to a strip club; vaguely, he assented. I remember walking down some narrow stairs, and paying a nominal sum, a tiny sum, and sitting down on a sofa in the dark in this nasty basement room, it might almost have been a garage or workshop, and I drank a warm glass of lager, followed by a glass of sparkling wine, and I thought that one

of the last things I wanted to see, right at that moment, was a strange naked woman. I sat on the sofa, and when a woman did arrive, she was small and middle aged, and she presented me with a bill for �245.

I said, 'What?'

I said, 'Look, I didn't think . .

I said, 'Look, I'll just pay for the drinks and we'll go.'

The woman, quite nasty I now saw, said, 'You can't do that. You've already undertaken a legal obligation to be hostessed.'