FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: STARBUCKS SET TO LAUNCH NEW SIZE COFFEE

Baristas, prepare to have the very foundation with which your world rests upon shaken, then poured over ice and sold for $9.95. Starbucks has announced they’ll be launching a fourth size at their stores come this summer — a 30 ounce beverage the company has dubbed the Trenta.

If only LeRoy Watkins had lived to see this day. LeRoy was a barista at our New Orleans flagship store, as some of you may already know. He joined Starbucks in the late 1990s and he began writing for the Barista Times soon after, first as a hard news reporter and later as a much-beloved columnist. 

LeRoy’s columns were often filled with a triple shot of humor, two pumps of insight and two cubes of heart and soul. And they were always warm, never served over ice… if you know what I mean.

A topic LeRoy seemed to set his sights on early was the issue of Starbucks’ drink sizes. The locals who stopped by LeRoy’s Starbucks every morning, noon and night seemed to always ask about when Starbucks was going to introduce a larger size, and LeRoy never failed in regaling us with their wonderful, humorous stories in his columns.

As LeRoy wrote in the July, 2002 issue of the Barista Times:

“WEN YALL MOTHAFUCKAZ GON GIT WIT DEM NEW SIZES? MY [n word]S, DIZ SHIT BE A FUCKIN’JOKE AND A HALF.

BITCHEZ BE ASKIN FO’ DEM BIGGA SIEZS SO THEY CAN BE STAYIN UP ON DA BLOCK, SLANGIN DAT ROCK. DA BLOCK IS HOT, LIKE MY LIL [n word] WAYNE SEYD. [N word]S NEED DAT 30 OUNCEZ SO THEY DONT BE DIPPIN IN DEM DEY OWN SUPPLY NOW.

BE EASY.”

LeRoy was killed by the Crips in the summer of 2005. He will be missed.

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• Fly to California
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• High
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A new short story by Lukas Kaiser

There’s a sink in Iowa that’s been running for nearly 75 years. Just two months shy of 75, actually. It’s an old, off-white porcelain sink from the 1920s — it was fairly new when it was turned on for good in 1935 — and it sits in the men’s restroom at an Amaco gas station in the middle of nowhere.

Back in the 20s, the sink was installed in the kitchen of the Grand Mariner Hotel’s first floor restaurant, The Lily Flower.

FDR had stayed at the Grand Mariner during the campaign and though he took his meals in his room, the dishes he ate off of were almost surely washed in the by-then constantly running sink.

So if you’re traipsing in the wilds of Iowa and you come across an Amaco station with a sink whose hot water dial is fused into the on position, you can revel in the fact that you’re washing your hands in the same stream of water that washed our 3rd greatest president’s dinner plates.

Sure, there are plenty of sinks and showers and other running water devices that FDR used that still exist — who among us hasn’t taken a sip from the drinking fountain on the 3rd floor of Manhattan’s PS 34, for example? But none of those sinks or fountains boast the same stream of water.

Conservationists would have you believe the sink is an abomination. “This sink is an abomination,” they’d say. “It wastes the equivalent of three lakes of water a year. Three lakes a year for 75 years? I don’t have my calculator on me, but that’s a lot of lakes!”

Oh, those conservationists. They never have their calculators handy. And they always seem to brush the facts under their hip, wine-colored carpets.

Yes, our protagonist sink sees the equivalent of three lakes pass through its pipes every year. But what conservationists don’t know — or don’t want to acknowledge — is where all that water goes after it falls down the sink’s drain.

No one has taken a full accounting of the plumbing system connected to our sink, but at least three pipes connected to it have been mapped. One heads eastward and breaks off into places like Maine, Toronto and Orlando, Florida. Another snakes its way westward and has sent water all the way to Vancouver and beyond.

The sink doesn’t waste three lakes-worth of water a year. It touches that much water and then it sends it on its way. It serves as a makeshift biologist, tagging its watery specimen with its 70-plus years worth of sediments.

It wouldn’t be a surprise to hear that water that’s been through the sink gets filtered and bottled somewhere along the way, maybe ending up in the Middle East or Ireland.

It’s an important sink, to say the least. I’d tell you where to go to find it, but I can’t seem to remember how to get there. If you end up coming across it, please let me know. And just holler if you’d like another cup of coffee.

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