By Michael Gates Gill
(Gotham Books, 265 pages $23)
It could be the plot off an uplifting movie starring say, Tom Hanks. The fortunes of a man from a privileged background take a sharp downward turn when he loses a high-powered corporate position and destroys his marriage in middle age.
Unemployed and unhappy he has a chance encounter with a young black manager at a coffee bar and a job offer follows. The result? Our hero, now in his 60’s, finds happiness while toiling at Starbucks with people far younger than himself.
In fact, Mr. Hanks is slated to star in the screen version of “How Starbucks Saved my life.” But the story is not the caffein-fueled invention of a Hollywood screenwriter. It was actually lived by Michael Gates Gill, whose memoir is largely a chronicle of his working at a Starbucks on West 93rd Street and Broadway in Manhattan.
But we also learn, in evocative flashbacks, that Mr. Gill spent his childhood as the loved but achingly lonely son of Brendan Gill, the bon vivant and longtime staff writer at “The New Yorker.”
The contrast between Michael Gill’s upper-crust background and his current circumstances is striking, of course, but it is his own errors and hard- won life lessons that give his
story a bittersweet piquancy and save it from self-pity or self-congratulation.
At Yale, Mr. Gill was inducted into Skull & Bones. A fellow member of that secret society used his pull to get his friend Michael a much-coveted slot in the training program at J. Walter Thompson ad agency. Over the next decades at JWT, Mr. Gill put in long hours, winning promotions and handling major accounts. He married and had four children too, but, he tells us with regret, his career always came first.
Then the agency was acquired by a man with his eye on the bottom line. Mr. Gill, a creative director, was now in his 50s earning four times the salary of his juniors. One day he was summoned to breakfast, not a good sign, and was fired by a woman he had once mentored. She then walked out of the restaurant sticking Mr. Gill with the check.
Suddenly his path in life is no longer smooth. His new consulting business dwindles to nothing. He drifts into an affair with a woman in her mid-forties; she becomes pregnant. When the child is born, Mr. Gill feels he has to tell his wife, who ends the marriage. As for his lover, she quickly tires of Mr. Gill.
And so, a decade after the JWT firing Mr. Gill finds himself a divorced, nearly broke, uninsured, 63-year-old father of five. He is then diagnosed with a brain tumor that while not life threatening, robs him of some hearing in one ear. That’s when Mr. Gill has the lucky accident that opens the book.
On a rainy March day, he is feeling sorry for himself and wants to recapture some sense of “the favored place I had once occupied in the universe” so he revisits the upper east side block where he had lived as a child — and he stops at a Starbucks.
He doesn’t notice the sign announcing a regional hiring open house, so he is startled when the young woman in a Starbucks uniform seated at the next table asks, “Would you like a job?”
Dressed in a Brooks Bothers suit and feeling every bit the unemployed executive, Mr. Gill is stunned by the question. And, he figures out later, Crystal, his future boss at a branch across town is less than serious. But “I could not think of a polite lie or any answer but the truth.” When he finds out about Starbuck’s generous health benefits, he sweats out the weeks before he receives his job offer.
The next year proves a revelation for Mr. Gill who as a loyal customer turned devoted employee learns just what effort it takes to make a Starbucks run and run smoothly. Never a math whiz, Mr. Gill is so fearful of the cash register — and of keeping those complicated orders straight — that he becomes a crackerjack cleaner.
“I wanted to win Crystal’s respect,” he recalls, so he attacked his cleaning job with “manic energy.” Even his co-workers are impressed. “I guess they hadn’t expected this old white guy to enjoy digging out grout so much.”
Editor’s note: In the interest of space and not giving away the rest of the story, let me interrupt Ms. Phillips’ excellent review here and suggest that you go out and buy the book like I did. Trust me. It’s a truly great read!
