Tales from the Underpaid: Café Cryptids
In my generation, the quintessential underpaid lousy job to have was barista. So many served in the foam and whipped cream trenches that it became an easy punchline for aimless youth who had to pay rent, for college students and would-be artists, for anyone whose dignity could be displaced by an apron and a nametag for eight grueling hours of caffeine craving customers, coming and coming.
Among those customers were many whose faces I’ll never recall. Contrary to the SNLification of the complicated half-caf-skim-milk-no-foam kind of ordering, most people came in for something listed on the menu in normal words: mocha, latte, black coffee in a cup. Thousands breezed in and out of the café in a bookstore where I worked on the shore of the Willamette river. But a few I will never forget.
We called them our cryptids. A couple of them were regular enough that anyone who worked an opening shift would see them, and their orders were strange enough that we would pass the word as soon as we’d made it twice. I didn’t work at the one where they wrote your name on the cup, but even if we had I’m sure the nickname would have taken precedence. Here is the coffee cryptid hall of fame:
Lava Girl
Commuters sometimes asked for their drinks extra hot so that they could make a 45 minute drive or train trip and still have warm coffee upon arrival. Not that unusal; we’d just tip the finished drink beneath the slim steam nozzle and bring the temp up above 215F or so. However, Lava Girl wanted plain drip coffee, which was already served plenty hot.
Then she wanted it steamed to 250F.
Then she drank it in front of us, all in one go, showing no visible distress. She’d slam-dunk the cup in a trash can and head out, presumably to do or fight crime with her heat-resistant powers.
Shrek
This nickname tells you exactly when I was tending the java bar. Shrek was a tall woman, broad with large proportions not unlike the green fellow in his swamp. We wouldn’t have nicknamed her on body type alone; it was her order that really set us up to catalog this cryptid as an ogre.
I have great admiration for people who order a breve: a latte made with half-and-half instead of milk. It’s a richer experience, with a silky mouthfeel, and we all have to die of something someday. Shrek was our one and only customer who ordered her drink breve but asked for whole whipping cream instead of half-and-half. If there is a cute European name for that, I never learned it.
This large breve (14 oz of whole cream, 4oz of espresso) was also requested to contain 17 pumps of cinnamon syrup, which filled the bottom third of the cup and smelled like lube at a Christmas-themed orgy. The resulting drink was a horror of gastrononmic proportions that went far beyond my ability to admire, or even condemn. It was no mortal coffee. Shrek was clearly some other kind of creature.
Frappenstein
The first time this order came through, we thought we were perhaps being tested by our district manager. This is before mobile ordering: this aggressively normal-looking man in a sweater and jeans would come in and say to my actual face made of meat and fatigue that he wanted a vanilla frappucino. A lot of people used this word, even though we did not run a Starbucks and this was not the word for a blended coffee drink. We knew what he meant, we racked up the blender.
However, Frappenstein wanted a bakery item blended into his drink. Not that weird, you might say! A cinnamon roll or a cupcake would make for a cheeky cake-shake to jumpstart someone’s day with a sweet treat.
Sure, I’ve done it. I’ve got nothing against it.
Except Frappenstein’s Monster (that’s the real name, natually, as the mad scientist at the switch it was I who was the real Frappenstein) wanted a garlic and herb cream cheese stuffed pretzel dropped and blended into his misbegotten creature of a drink. When I did it, I watched the big grains of salt soaked off the pretzel by the wet ice, the savory cream cheese mixing with the sweet vanilla syrup, and I wept for the fallen angel of man’s nature. Truly, we are the monsters.
(Seattle’s Best Coffee/Borders Books, RIP, 2005-2007)