Making coffee from inside a VW Beetle is a normal day’s work for Denver’s Matthew Pendleton, who, like so many millennials, is grinding to make his dreams come true. In this case, literally.
The dark, 4 a.m. sky is a familiar sight to Pendleton. He starts his day by loading his 1968 Volkswagen Beetle with bags of coffee beans, disposable cups and a giant cooler full of other supplies. All of this is vital for his short trek to the downtown street corner that he will occupy for the next six hours in his coffee shop on wheels, On The Road Coffee.
His setup is simple, but noticeable from the street. He has a small barista table that has long replaced the passenger seat, an attachable counter to hold his Jack Kerouac books and succulent plant, and a giant homemade coffee cup that sits on the roof of the Beetle.
Being a mobile barista is not Pendleton’s primary source of income though; he’s working toward leaving his full-time job at a local record store so he can focus on his artwork and On The Road Coffee.
Thinly spread between his two jobs, Pendleton often works between 60 and 70 hours a week, leaving little time or energy for him to work on his art (a common problem for enterprising millennials).
He is still holding on to his regular full-time job to keep his bills paid during the seasons that are too cold or rainy to take the Beetle out.
“The long-term goal is for On The Road Coffee to take over the daytime job,” he said.
Pendleton’s artwork is easily identified by its hundreds of concentric lines and shapes, like the life lines on a tree stump. This particular set of rings is more like the life of a human, he said, swirling and changing with little notice or predictable direction.
“(The human life) is not going to be in a circular pattern, it’s going to go in all directions…every piece is a different life,” he said.
Looking down on the twisting tree rings drawn on the paper lying on the desk, it isn’t hard to see the parallels between the lines’ shifting directions and the new direction that he’s taking in his life.
You can follow each line with your finger around and around until it’s stopped dead in its tracks by a competing ring. Only the center ring is uninterrupted. For Pendleton, that’s him — “just some little weirdo, sitting in this bug,” as he said — serving coffee.
