Winter got the idea for his project in 1997 after hanging out, sometimes for six or seven hours a day, at two Starbucks cafes in Plano, Tex. Just before then, he was creating order forms for online catalogues 60 to 70 hours a week. The work stressed him out. Over an 18-month stretch, he was often mired in depression. "I felt trapped," he said. "I just wanted to lie in bed all the time. I just wanted to feel better. I had no energy." But sometimes, suddenly, a burst of energy would come on, and, for a month, Winter would be manic. Then, he devised schemes for all sorts of hypothetical businesses (an online dating service was one) and also pestered his boss at a small Texas software firm called with myriad wild ideas for fixing the bugs in troublesome code. He had heart palpitations; he had trouble sleeping.
Winter says a psychiatrist diagnosed mild hypomania and mild depression. His moods swung radically, the doctor speculated, partly because Winter was drinking six to eight shots of espresso a day. The shifts were scary. "Once," Winter told me, "I was driving to Houston. I wasn't particularly sad, but then a song came on the radio -- 'The End of My Pirate Days,' by Mary Chapin Carpenter. I started crying uncontrollably. I didn't know why. When you feel that bad, you will do anything to make yourself feel better."
Winter sips his java outside the Starbucks at 16th and K streets NW.
(Photograph by D.A. Peterson)
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Winter started his Starbucks project, and then the darkness subsided. "For the past seven years," he said, "I haven't been tied down. I'm free. I'm happy."
WE KEPT VISITING STARBUCKS cafes. Winter flicked on his laptop at nearly every one. He checked his e-mail, using the store's wireless internet connection, and he updated his Web log, documenting his every move, including his latest underwear purchase. He told store managers about his project, and they said things like, "Cool, "No way" and, in one case, "Wait, you're that guy?"
Winter was polite -- meek, even -- with the baristas. He was careful not to cause irritation. "I don't want Starbucks to make me a personanon grata," he said. "I want to keep bringing TV crews into the stores."
Winter wore the same outfit every day: jeans and a black T-shirt whose tasteful white type read, "Starbucks Coffee Company" and "Estd 1971." When I asked him how many such shirts he had cached in his car, he was wry. "I have to keep some secrets," he quipped, but then added that back in Houston, at his parents, he had dozens of Starbucks T-shirts of other designs. "That's my retirement fund," he said.
From time to time, Winter's cell phone would bleep, and he'd start speaking Spanish into the mouthpiece. His father is from Colombia, his mother from Panama. He was east, in part, to meet up with them for a cousin's wedding, and he seemed indifferent about the impending encounter. "We're not a close family," he said. "A lot of people value relationships primarily. I don't. I value goals."
When Winter was a child, he spent summers in his grandmother's Panamanian village of La Palma, where he frolicked in the woods and streams and played marbles and kickball with the local kids. He found more solace later, as a teen, when he sequestered himself in his bedroom to catalogue and curate his 20,000 comic books, a collection that consisted primarily of Spider-Man and X-Men adventure stories. "I read the comics," Winter explained. "I put them in plastic sleeves. I put cardboard backing boards inside the sleeves. I put the sleeved comic books inside special comic book storage boxes. I shelved them in a dry environment."
Winter was a loner growing up, his mother said: "He didn't have many friends. We live in a mostly white neighborhood, and the kids -- three or four of them -- would always gang up and try to beat him. They called him 'wetback.' One time he came home from school very sad, and he told me, 'I want to spray my hair white.' . . . He was a very hyperactive kid. He always had a project. He painted. He played Legos; he built up a collection of toilet paper rolls. He always wanted to do something different from the other kids."
Winter felt ill at ease around his dad, who is a chemical engineer for oil companies. "My father is the kind of person who is never satisfied," Winter told me.
When Winter's parents flew into Washington for the wedding, Rafael Antonio Lozano Sr. would not discuss Winter, except to say, "What my son is doing is a total waste of time."
I rode back to Winter's aunt's house in Bethesda with Georgina Lozano. "He looks tired," said Lozano, a stately woman who wore an immaculate blue dress and pumps. "He is so thin; his clothes are ragged. We have asked him to stop. He is depriving himself of everything; he is wasting his potential." She mentioned hopefully that Winter had spoken of pursuing a master's degree in philosophy. "We have told him you don't have to be successful in the way that you have a nice car and a nice house," she continued. "We've said, As long as you can pay your own living expenses, without your car breaking down, we are happy.
"We have helped him with money sometimes," Lozano said of Winter, who acknowledges that he owes his parents about $10,000. "When he is stranded, we help. But we will help no more. We don't want to encourage him."
WHAT WINTER LIKES BEST about Starbucking is the freedom it affords. "I'll be driving along," he said, "and I'll think, 'I could go anywhere.' In most cities, I could spend an entire month going around from one Starbucks to another using the WiFi. I could stay at each place for a few hours and not a single barista would know that I was basically living at Starbucks."
