No Good Deed. Or something.

I was making coffee this morning when my mind drifted way back to the nineties, a simpler time when I had shoulder-length, post-grunge hair and all my own teeth (I still have all my own teeth but hopefully you see my point). At the time, I was working at a homeless shelter on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a job I’ve written about before in my first book Tasteful Nudes and talked about here, but will talk about again today anyway.

Part of my job at the shelter was to help serve meals, which also involved brewing gallons and gallons of black coffee each day. On weekends that also usually involved baking a sheet cake big enough to feed 200 people too.

There was a large stash of industrial-sized yellow cake mix in the shelter’s pantry that was usually used for this purpose, but it was middling at best, so at one point I convinced my boss at the shelter to let me have a little petty case each week to buy a few extra ingredients at the grocery store to make the cake taste a little better. Usually, I’d grab a box of carrot cake mix, a box of banana cake mix, some raisins, walnuts, carrots, chocolate chips, and whatever else I could possibly think of putting in a cake, throw it all in with the yellow cake mix, pop it in the oven, and hope for the best. The end result was one massive, heaving cake reminiscent of the ones they used make on Little Rascals, minus the saw and mouse trap, of course/unfortunately. It tasted pretty good too.

Before long, I started to get a bit of a reputation at the shelter as word spread of the relatively delicious and unpredictable-bordering-on-dangerous nature of my kitchen sink cakes.

“Are we gonna have cake today?” a resident would ask me with a hopeful smile as soon as I walked through the door to start my shift on weekends.

“You know it!” I’d reply.

It felt good.

On one of my trips to the grocery to buy extra cake ingredients, one of the boxes of cake mix came with a free, single-serving packet of General Foods International Coffee, the kind of they used to have TV commercials for that would make it seem like the coffee of the gods and also the people of Europe.

Since the residents at the shelter seemed to really appreciate the liberties I was taking with the cakes, I figured they’d love it if I had my way with the coffee too, so that night I dumped the free packet of General Foods International Coffee into the massive pot of coffee I’d just brewed.

“They’re really gonna love this!” I thought.

I can’t remember what flavor the General Foods International Coffee was, but even a single packet of the stuff was enough to change of the color of an entire gallon-plus of black coffee to a murky light brown, which ruined my original plan of surprising the residents with this “delicious” new coffee. Instead they were onto to me right away. And they were pissed.

“What’s this bullshit?” one resident asked as I presented him with a cup to enjoy alongside a slice of my shelter-famous cake.

“Coffee,” I told him.

“No, it isn’t,” he said, pushing it back toward me. “I can’t eat cake with this bullshit!”

I figured it was an isolated incident, but one after another the residents complained to me in similar fashion the second I presented them with a cup of the General Foods International Coffee-tainted coffee.

“I’m gonna kill whoever did this!” I finally said, shifting the blame to an imaginary co-worker in the interest of self-preservation after taking a sip myself. “This is undrinkable!”

Then I dumped all the tainted coffee into the sink and got to work on brewing some fresh coffee with no surprise ingredients whatsoever.

Order was restored.

Later that evening, I proceeded to the shelter’s top floor to carry out another one of my weekend duties- collecting the various feces samples one of the residents would collect as he walked the city streets that day like some sort of shit-obsessed mad scientist. Rat shit, dog shit, squirrel shit, cat shit, even human shit on occasion, it was rumored- it was all in his backpack in individually labeled sandwich bags. And it was my job to get him to hand over the goods before he had a chance to do whatever he’d planned on doing next with the stuff.

To his credit, the shit aficionado never put up a fight when I asked him to hand over the little, turd-filled baggies. Instead, he’d just politely offer them to me with an unmistakable “Welp- it was worth a shot” look on his face.

“Hey, what was up with that coffee tonight?” he asked me as I headed for the door, bags of shit in hand, a few moments later.

“I tried to make it different by adding a packet of flavored coffee to it,” I told him. “I thought it would be good but I was wrong.”

“That’s messed up,” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed before heading out the door.

Then I went back down to the kitchen to see if there might be any of that cake left.