Scooter Guy

Back when I worked at Blue Bottle in Downtown Los Angeles, there was this one guy who would come in on his electric scooter and would order,
1 quad shot latte

1 avocado toast with 2 poached eggs.
And this was

every.

day.

The total would be like $25 every day. And I’m not joking, 7 days a week. And there I was 20 year old broke Adrian, thinking, “how could anyone afford this?!?!”

We never talked to him and it seemed like he didn't wanna talk. He would always sit in the same back spot of the coffee shop and would always have his iPad and Keyboard out (Funny cus this was before Blue Bottle had Wi-Fi, so I’m assuming he hot spotted) and would work for a few hours and then leave. I made up in my mind he was probably a med student at UCLA and just liked how quiet our coffee shop was in the midst of the downtown chaos.

Our coffee shop was inspired from Japanese Minimalism, so it felt quite nice just sipping delicious coffee, listenting to nice lo-fi, reading a book on self-improvement, while looking outside and seeing a live GTA server happen. It was for an unnecessary but cool environment.
Sounds pretentious, but Blue Bottle was a place I was finding opportunity at, as a young profession in my career. I do love Starbucks (whole entire blog I’ll write you can disagree about) but I wasn’t getting any business from the drive thru Mom’s picking up their kids from school.

- Anywho, back to the maybe Med Student -

No one knew what he did. Every attempt we’d try and learn about him he was quiet and would shut us down with the simpliest answers. I guess he didn’t really want to be known.

I thought that was always weird until recently. I’ve been going to Pax & Beneficia (a local coffee shop here in Texas) for like 4 years now.

And as much as I would love to know the baristas and for them to know me. They really don’t care too. Now I’m not calling them out or anything, there were 2 bros who were awesome out of the 4 years, but it’s weird how I kind’ve naturally became that quad latte scooter dude.

I order the same thing almost everyday, Black Coffee or Spanish Latte, with an egg sandwich, add beef bacon. With my sickkkk neighbor discount, it totals roughly $15. And yeah I’m on my laptop, I’ll bring friends and family to the shop, and for sure have probably spent over $1K there in my 4 years here (Sorry Kevin O Leary), but it’s still one of the peaceful places I go-to, in the Chaos of life. Now Grapevine isn't chaotic at all, far from it actually, but it’s definitely one of my homes away from the constant noise of business.

I don’t know how, but sometimes mysteries we experience in our youth, carry on to be our modern day norms. Like the Scooter Guy. Whoever the hell he was, and is doing today, he left such a stain in my brain as one of the few guests I never really had a chance to talk to who has impacted me, not the most, but more than the average customer.

Maybe all I need to do is buy a scooter to complete the full arc.

This was me probably at like 20-22

This is the coffee shop where I met my mentor in Photography, David (story for another day). But yeah as you can see, I had fans.