Drive-Thru Espresso

Here’s an interesting commercial phenomenon of the West (maybe it exists in the East and I just never noticed before): Everywhere you go, you can get “drive-through espresso.”

I mean, everywhere. The meanest, lowest, crummiest truckstops—places where, if you pull into the driveway just to turn around, you’d want to decontaminate the tires--have curly pink neon in the window spelling out the word “Espresso.”

We’re in a working-class little town in Oregon this morning, and on the main drag, in front of a clapboard shack with peeling yellow paint, there's one of those signs on wheels, outlined in flashing lightbulbs, advertising Blue Razzberry Slurpees, and leaning against THAT, on the ground, there's a handpainted sign made from a single whitewashed board, with quivery red handpainted lettering that reads, "Drive-thru espresso.”

Of course, you can also get espresso in kinda tony places. And I am not talking Starbucks, although yes the borg were everywhere in Portland, but I am noticing all kinds of intriguing off-brand coffee chains, something like “Polar Bear” (that was on the Idaho border), spiffy black and white tile floors, BIG posters of polar bears doing improbably cute things, slicked up real-estate guy flirting with the barista, and a drive-up lane, just like Mickey D’s, where you punch a button and order your fix with a biscotti or maybe a peanut butter cookie the size of your head.

Now this leads me to wonder. Being an effete Easterner who has only ever experienced espresso as the stuff that comes two oz.-worth, rationed out lovingly, gritty grounds on the bottom, in a teeny tiny, adorable little china cup the size of half an eggshell, with an equally cute teeny tiny silver spoon, delivered by a white-aproned waiter in a sidewalk café where you can people-watch, yes, I have to wonder: Drive-through espresso? Hmmm. Do they hand it to you in a teeny tiny foam cup, the size of the Dixie cup the dentist gives you to rinse with, only with a teeny tiny lid?

Do they hand it to you sans lid and you toss it off, then and there, to show your machismo? Let it burn your throat!

Maybe there’s a nozzle and they just jet it in your mouth?

Or is it Americanized? Do you get a honking big cup, supersized like everything else in America? And if that is the case, WHAT DOES ALL THAT CAFFEINE DO TO YOU?

Or is “drive-through Espresso” just an expression? (An espresso-ion?) Do they give you, like, some pretty strong coffee, in a smallish cup, or even a pretty big cup . . . stuff that is almost but not completely unlike actual espresso?

And WHO is drinking all this espresso? Guys on Harleys? ("Gimme an espresso, man.") Travelling salesmen? ("I’ll take a triple espresso with half-and-half and three sugars, defintely to go.") Blue-haired ladies in RVs? (ouch, close to home.)

Stand by as I conduct important research.

TRAGIC SIDEBAR/CAUTIONARY TALE

While we were in Portland, headline news: A man got out of his RV and was mowed down, run over, and killed by his woman passenger who jumped behind the wheel . . . in the parking lot of a drive-thru espresso place. (This is true. In the words of the immortal Dave Barry, "I am not making this up.")

Now, you've seen those refrigerator magnets? The ones that show the smilng 1950's housewife eyeing a cuppa java and warning, "I haven't had my coffee yet, don't make me kill you."

Be careful out there!