Irish Coffees

There are certain friendships you are certain will last a lifetime.

Until, they don't.

I think of one such friendship every time someone orders an Irish coffee.

There was a season of my life when San Francisco appeared on my calendar the way a good habit does, reliably, regularly, something to look forward to. I was there for work, but the real reason I didn't mind the trips was one of my best friends lived there, and those visits were the best of times.

On one such trip, he mentioned that a friend of his, from Zurich, was passing through. Did I want to do drinks and dinner one evening, the three of us?

This was before reservations became a personality trait, before you needed to plan a spontaneous evening three weeks in advance. You could simply go somewhere. And so we went, to the Buena Vista Cafe. The plan was modest and sensible: a couple of drinks, then dinner.

The plan did not survive the Buena Vista.

What followed was, by any measure, an evening. Twenty-something Irish coffees materialised between the three of us. I say materialised because at some point individual drinks stop being ordered and simply begin appearing, as if the bar itself has made a decision about your night. The receipt from a restaurant called Frascati suggests we did, technically, have dinner. I'll take the receipt's word for it.

What I remember more vividly, with a clarity that has only sharpened with time, is walking up one of San Francisco's more aggressively vertical hills. Backwards. In heels. As one does. 

After that: nothing. The evening folds into itself like a secret.

The next morning arrived the way next mornings do after nights like that: blunt and merciless. The hangover was, without exaggeration, epic. The kind that every fibre in your body wants to forget but can’t.

We were young. A hangover was not going to keep us down. Someone suggested a fitness class.

And that is how three people, still looking and feeling worse for wear from the previous evening, ended up in an intensive Krav Maga class. Combat fitness. Full contact. The class did what we needed it to do, burned through the Irish coffee and the hill-walking and whatever Frascati had served us.

The friendship ran its course, as some do. No single moment where things broke, just the gradual drift that takes good people in different directions, until one day the distance is just the distance.

But the memories? Every last one of them, good. The kind I'll carry forever, tucked somewhere warm, next to the taste of Irish coffee and the specific absurdity of walking backwards up a San Francisco hill in heels at some unknowable hour, laughing, probably, at nothing and everything all at once.