Work Text:
1992: C.W. is finally clean off coke. Rehab was hard, but he made it through in June of 1992. His biggest fear going into rehab was that he wouldn’t be able to write without the coke. He had written eight novels in half as many years. How was he going to match that productivity without it? The first weeks clean were just a daze. He’s started to get his bearings under him though and he’s ready to put pen to paper again. Two minutes in the microwave gets his water to the perfect temperature for stirring in the Folgers Instant Coffee grounds. In the first couple of days, there is comfort in wrapping his hands around the warm cup of coffee. Slowly sipping it and enjoying the warm feeling down his throat and into his stomach. That comfort quickly turns to frustration as he hasn’t written a single usable page in his first week back on the grind. He’s stirring in three scoops per cup at this point and it’s only making him more worried - the ideas just aren’t flowing. He convinces himself to have a glass of wine to help spark the creative juices. The creativity isn’t really what he needs from that wine; he needs escape from the crippling reality of his extreme ambition colliding with his extreme ineptitude. It is Wednesday. It’s been eight days since C.W. started sitting at his writing desk at 9 am every morning. He’s had three cups of instant coffee, and by 4 pm he decides this formula isn’t working. He pours himself a tiny grappa glass of port. By 6 pm he’s finished the bottle, one tiny grappa glass at a time. It’s another Wednesday before he gives up on the grappa cups and moves on to the classic wine-in-coffee-mug. He tries to make it 'til noon before he starts on the port, still pounding Folgers all throughout the day. He likes his Folgers sweet, three full teaspoons of sugar. It helps counteract the extreme bitterness of putting three scoops in each mug of coffee. By the time it’s been a month and he has only five pages on the paper, it’s a shock that he is still fooling himself into thinking the coffee and port are going to get those creative juices flowing. He’s been starting on the port first thing in the morning for only two days when he thinks he might as well save on dishes and just pour the port into the coffee mug. It’s another decade before C.W. transitions from instant Folgers into drip coffee. He decides in his late 60s that it's no longer becoming of a Nebula-winning author to be drinking instant coffee.