A story from my friend, the barista

I enjoyed rooftop beers tonight with two old roommates and dear friends of mine. I don't see them much anymore because we have crazy jobs and wildly different lives, but whenever I see them I realize how much I miss crowding onto one of our beds late at night to watch Arrested Development. I love these girls.

One of them works for a reality show. The other works as a barista at an Upper West Side cafe that I've yet to visit. She told us this bizarre, uniquely New York-ly funny story tonight that I can't stop thinking about.

At this tiny cafe on 94th Street and Amsterdam, she usually works by herself. She opens at 8 o'clock in the morning, but hey, she gets to play her own music. The cafe shares a window with an art studio. Sometimes, people call out coffee orders from ceramic painting stations. She can make one mean latte, she boasts.

There's a customer who comes in quite frequently: a man, who's balding, or maybe he just shaves his head. She can't tell. He looks vaguely European. The first few times she made his drink, she thought it strange the way he loitered so close to the counter, watching her work. Now that she's grown more familiar with him, she finds him actually quite hot. One day, she passes him his drink and says, "What's your name?"

He looks taken aback at this question. He thinks for a moment. She wonders why he has to think so hard about his name, and begins to regret the spontaneous "Let's be more than barista and paying customer" gesture she just made. Rewind. Rewind. Abort, abort.

"Well," the vaguely European, balding, maybe just shaven, actually quite hot man replies. "People call me Bun."

She stares at his reflective head. "Your friends call you what?"

"My friends call me Bun." He has an accent, but she can't detect what it is.

"Bun," she repeated. "Your name is Bun?" He smiles.

"Bun!" she cried out to us on the rooftop. "I wanted to ask him what his real name was. But I didn't."

The three of us sat in giggly silence, brainstorming what "Bun" could possibly stand for, or be short for. She leaned back and titled her face toward the sky, puffed on a cigarette. I took a sip of beer. It was growing strangely cold.