Brad Walsh

Where Have All the Lattes Gone?

If you follow this blog, you’ll know that I have been in love from afar with a Starbucks barista for the better part of a year now, and that he’s been absent from the corner oasis for the last couple of months. Where did he go?, I’ve wondered every day. He’s been replaced by a gaggle of wonderful (and more efficient) ladies – one of whom insisted on going out of her way on her break to make a special order drink for me while I was at the very end of the line, and then didn’t even charge me for it! – but each morning I can’t help but miss his shamelessly beautiful, calm, suave and dirty-clean, green-aproned presence behind the counter. He liked my gloves.

This afternoon, after months of tundra and several manuscripts sent to production, I saw him. FUCKER WAS HEADHUNTED. At least, I can only assume he was. Let me explain.

On the left side of my office building is Starbucks. The Starbucks in which my barista boyfriend from afar worked maybe three mornings a week. On the right is an Aveda salon, one in which it appears that hair students practice and learn for a semester at a time. The Aveda façade is all windows, and you can see the entire space from the outside. On my way to lunch today I peered inside and saw him – dressed all in black and looking better than ever – sitting at what appeared to be a reception desk.

Now, it’s been suggested that perhaps he had always been affiliated with Aveda, and, tragically hip as he is, needed a second job at Starbucks to pay the bills. But I don’t buy that. What I think went on can best be described in an imagined dialogue:

Barista At the ‘Bucks Everyday (BABE): Good morning, how can I make your life a little more magical today?

Aveda Scumbag Scout (ASS): I’d like a grande half-caf white light mocha with cinnamon jimmies served in a clean, glazed terra cotta elephant whose trunk I can drink out of.

BABE: No problem! I’m amazing!

ASS: Say, you are amazing. If people saw you sitting in our window over at Aveda in a black button-down shirt and black pants with your possibly eyelined eyes and divinely tousled pillow hair, we’d double, maybe triple revenue!

BABE: Really? Well, I love my job here. I get to serve people from all over the neighborhood and show them all my perfect smile!

ASS: It’s settled. You’re going to work for me starting now, and if you don’t, I will kill each and every one of your beloved customers.

At this point things got weird and there were some bystander injuries and I think a woman dressed in a habit who may or may not have been an actual nun got burned by Cynthia Nixon’s girlfriend’s tall (“small”) Komodo Dragon blend. But it’s clear, based on my happenstance discovery this afternoon, that Starbucks Barista Boyfriend has been stolen.

Rise, all ye who pay $5 daily for hot filtered dishwater at the corner of Spring and Varick; our sunrise prince has been kidnapped! Aveda will pay dearly for what they have done. I know someone who knows someone who knows Reverend Sharpton, and we will absolutely get him in there to start a ruckus about those suburban white kids with blue reverse-mullets not knowing black hair from grape nuts.