The following can also be found in the book Chicago Stories 1996. Click here to learn more, and to download a free electronic copy.

There are five different coffeehouses I go to. They are in five different places in the city, and serve five different functions. Three of them are Coffee Chicagos: one at Berwyn and Broadway that is five minutes from my house and where I go when I want to get some serious writing done; one at Clark and Wellington, which is where my writing workshop is; and one at North and Wells, for when my friend Steve and I are feeling bored and decide to take a journey to the Land of Beautiful Women and just drink coffee and loiter and take in the scenery. The fourth coffeehouse is a Seattle's Best Coffee, the one at Chicago and Rush, which I visit after I've spent six hours in Borders reading books because I'm too broke to buy any, which seems to be happening more and more, and I'm all vegged out and I need a little injection of caffeine to get me up and moving again. The fifth coffeehouse is at Wabash and Lake and is called "The Coffee Grounds," which I've never heard of, but is the only coffeehouse I've found in the Loop that has outdoor seating (thus, a smoking section). I go there when I get off work at rush hour and don't feel that particular day like being jostled and poked in the ribs by frat guys on the el while they wait for their precious Addison stop to arrive.

They must have a fixed work schedule for the employees of "The Coffee Grounds," because every time I go there, which is always between 4:30 and 5:15 pm on a weekday, I'm waited on by the same woman. She is maybe six inches shorter than me, with shoulder-length brown hair which appears to be curled and styled when she's off work, but is always pulled back and slightly messy when I see her. She is thin and pale and her eyes are a light, steely blue and her cheekbones slightly protrude, like those German students from the '70s you'd see in filmstrips in your foreign language classes in high school, filmstrips with names like "Our European Neighbors," filmstrips you would laugh at because everyone had atrocious, burlap-looking sweaters on and haircuts like Twiggy circa 1963.

I've been to "The Coffee Grounds" over a dozen times now and never really thought twice about this girl. But lately, maybe the last three or four times I've been here, I've been sitting in my little green plastic chair, watching people walk by and listening to the screeching noises the el makes as it rounds the corner from its northbound Wabash direction to its western Lake Street orientation, and almost involuntarily a waking fantasy will pop into my head about this girl and I slipping into the back room of the coffeehouse and having wild, uninhibited, nasty, sweaty sex, without ever saying a word, without ever asking each others' names or anything of the sort. I don't know why I have this fantasy about this particular girl, considering there are women I have a semi-regular contact with that are more attractive. Well, not more attractive, that's not what I mean. I mean they have a build or a wardrobe or an attitude that would more naturally inspire this kind of raw, unrefined sexual fantasy than this girl, who, admittedly, is at work and is wearing a uniform and whose dominating thoughts are probably not "Do I look sexy?" but rather "When the hell can I clean the espresso machine and get the fuck outta here?" I also don't know why this fantasy has come to me now, as opposed to when I first saw her. I do, however, have a clue.

Coincidentally, also the last three or four times I've been here, this woman has served me coffee, taken my money, given me a slight but nice smile, and then comes outside herself almost exactly ten minutes after I sit down. She sits on the other side of the patio, picks a chair that faces me, lights up a Marlboro Light 100 and takes a leisurely ten minutes to smoke it. Shielded from detection by my mirrored-lens sunglasses, I observe that she spends this ten-minute period glancing at me out of the corner of her eye, sometimes just for a moment, sometimes for five seconds or longer. It was when I first discovered these sly glances that the fantasy first appeared.

There's something undeniably sexy about observing someone under the light of a clear, bright summer day. The yellow tint of the sun tends to make people look healthy and tan, and the beads of sweat that form on their forehead gives you the pleasant mental connotations of exercise, well-being, and health. Not to mention that people's hair shine in the sun, and they tend to be wearing less clothes than in the winter.

The sexiest thing about watching someone on a summer day, however, is something that's just occurred to me now, sitting here at The Coffee Grounds, watching this girl watch me and wondering if she's wondering what I'm writing. The thing that occurs to me today is this:

If you're sitting outside in the unshaded sun on a hot July or August afternoon, like I've done the last three or four times I've been here, you're understandably going to start getting warm. And when you start getting warm you're going to start getting hot. And when you start getting hot, you start getting uncomfortable. Sweat starts rolling down your back and collecting at your belt line. Sweat rolls down your face and, if it's really hot, makes a small drip-drip-drip off the end of your chin. The sun is in your eyes and it makes you frown and squint. Your body temperature goes up and makes your face pink and flush. Your clothes hang heavy on you and it makes you squirm, it makes you fidget in your seat and not be able to find a comfortable position to save your life and you scratch your legs and wipe your face and take another drink of your iced coffee, hoping this is going to be the one that cools you down, swallow and realize it's not.

In other words, the physical characteristics of being outdoors on a hot summer day almost exactly mirror the physical characteristics of that magical, almost religious part of sex -- that time period after you've become aroused but before you've had your orgasm. True, the characteristics are achieved for entirely opposite reasons, but they mirror each other, nonetheless.

I never really stopped and thought about what my mood was like in the middle of sex -- not the beginning, no, I'm pretty clear about how I am then; and not the end, I always remember that. I guess I always assumed that I was in the middle of rapture or something, but the truth of the matter is that I'm slightly annoyed in the middle of sex. My muscles are all tensed and my back is starting to hurt and I'm sweating and I've gotten past the foreplay and all the other fun, slow parts and I'm in the middle now of trying to get to my orgasm, and I just... want... to... get... there, you know what I mean? Now, don't get me wrong -- this is undoubtedly the most exciting part of the entire sexual experience. Which would go a long way towards explaining why thousands of people pack up on hot August days and go down to the beach just to lay for hours on end in the unrelenting sun.

Even though this girl is not in the middle of sexual rapture, sitting at her table and hoping not to get caught by her boss, her body is giving off all the subconscious physical features of being so, which I think my brain is picking up on without me knowing and is what is producing these fantasies which are so crude yet not without their charms. Frankly, it makes me just a wee bit uncomfortable around her. But, ah, I guess that's the curse of August, and I will have to live with it.

I suppose I'll spend the remainder of the summer the same way I've spent the last two months, which is really the way all young males spend their summers -- sweating, chewing ice cubes, and making up for the lack of sex in my life with little fantasies designed solely to keep me amused while I wait patiently for sundown. For now, though, I see that I am out of iced coffee, the time is 7:04 pm and the rush hour traffic has undoubtedly dissipated by now. It's probably time for me to head home. Well, maybe I'll... uh... well, I... hmmph... Maybe I'll get one more refill.