Set ‘em up, Joe…
By Joel Deutsch
Having inhaled the first of his two chicken tacos, Daniel slowed down and was disposing of the second one less voraciously. His host, grateful for the unexpected company, remained perched behind the service window, smoking, sipping coffee, and chatting, now that he was no longer half asleep after being rousted from his single-wide by the ringing of the bell on the lunch-truck counter. Looking for a topic of mutual interest, the two men had hit on the movies. The great American social leveler, Daniel thought gratefully.
“I used to love going to those big old theaters downtown, on Broadway,” said Miguel. “They get a lot of movies from Mexico, you know? But now I just rent the videos in Santa Barbara. I have my TV in there (nodding in the direction of the trailer), and the DVD player, and the satellite dish, everything I need.”
On Daniel’s side of the counter were lined up four red Naugahyde-upholstered bar stools with chrome legs, but Daniel remained standing. This was how he had been taking his meals in his own kitchen, all summer. he didn’t yet have a table to eat at. He had still not found the will to drop by one of the home furnishing stores on Venice or La Brea and get himself a couch, either, or a coffee table. All he had for furnishings were the new mattress and box spring set from a bedding place off La Cienega and the black leather recliner he had persuaded Sheila to let him salvage from the den. Now the big chair sat alone on the thin beige living room carpet, amidst unpacked boxes, facing the flat panel high def monitor and Surround Sound setup he had bought at circuit City. Although let him crank up the audio to a decent level, let the ancient Karnovskys down in 2B hear something through their ceiling, and he’d be getting a visit from the building manager, a formidable, shaven-skulled African American man who had introduced himself as Dr. Daddy doc when Daniel came to see the vacant unit, and then never mind about getting the air conditioner replaced.
“I prefer the Spanish movies, mostly,” Miguel said. “You know. Sylvester Stallone. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Bruce Lee. Bruce Willis. the first Terminator. That’s the best. They shoot him and shoot him until he’s just bones, metal bones, like a skeleton dancing in a cementario on el dia de Los Muertos. And still they can’t kill the dude. I’ve watched it five, six times. I like it so much ,I bought the DVD.”
“but Terminator isn’t in Spanish,” objected Daniel.”
At the Million Dollar Theater they’re in English , amigo,” insisted Miguel, mirth crinkling the crow’s feet of his Indian eyes. And the same thing on these videos I buy at the swap meet. Arnold speaks Spanish. Stallone speaks Spanish. And both of the Bruces, they speak Spanish, too. The chino Bruce and the gringo Bruce. Perfect Mexico City Spanish, like real chilangos.”
Daniel, getting it, laughed. This wasn’t turning out too badly.
“Speaking of movies,” segued Miguel, with a glance in the direction of the table, “you see that guy over there?”
“yeah,” said Daniel. “Why?”
“that’s Nick. Nick likes movies, too. In fact, he’s writing a script, he tells me. Every night, he sits there and drinks coffee and types on the little computadora he brings with him. Sometimes his battery dies, so I let him plug the machine into this long extension cord I have in the trailer.
“One night, I asked him, ‘Nick, why do you come here? Why don’t you do this work at home, where it’s nice and warm?’ The fog inspires him, he says. Me, I’m thinking maybe he’s a little crazy. Or maybe he’s a homeless. I mean, sleeping in that van of his, the red one with the wheelchair lift. Who can tell, these days? But he’s really interesting. A smart guy. He was a soldier back in Viet Nam and something happened to his legs. want to meet him?”
“No,” said Daniel, quickly, stiffening. “That’s okay. Don’t bother him.” There was something strange about the man at the table, something damaged or unwholesome or just plain wrong. “Seriously,” he underscored. “don’t.”
“Okay,” agreed Miguel, taking a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaling a rich blue plume of smoke. “ Time slipped by, coffee cups got refilled. When the two men fell silent, the only sounds were the clicking of the wheelchair man’s computer keys accompanied by an occasional smoker’s cough, and the infrequent whoosh of traffic passing by. From time to time, a car or truck pulled into the station, gased up, and left again. In this otherworldly space, Daniel found himself Telling Miguel his life, or at least the tellable parts of it. Such as how, in high school, he had dreamed of becoming a musician. Funky Laurel Canyon, one cleft in the Santa Monica mountains west of his family’s tony enclave with its regimented rows of Italian cypresses, had started filling up with bluejeaned and gypsy-skirted singer-songwriters and rock groups. Everybody lived there. The Buffalo Springfield, Joni Mitchell, Cass Elliot, Jim Morrison, Frank Zappa, Crosby, Stills and Nash. On weekends, he would prowl the canyon's winding lanes on foot past a mmotley array of dilapidated cottages, nondescript stucco apartments and rustic bungalows, listening for the sound of a band in rehearsal or even just somebody’s stereo speakers blasting the music out an open front window. If he should stumble across some actual, recognizable rock star driving by or rummaging around the cold case at the Canyon country store for a six-pack or three, so much the better. Back home, he would repair to the sanctuary of his room, inspired, and spend hours hunched on the edge of his bed with his guitar. And then there was the Dylan concert that December night in Santa Monica. He'd gone with Norm Waxman and Norm's girlfriend Susie in the red GTO convertible Susie's dad had bought her when she turned 16. Daniel and Norm both wore the standard faded Levis and blue chambray work shirts. Susie had on a denim miniskirt topped off with an embroidered white mexican peasant blouse and a handmade silver necklace she'd picked up at a crafts booth on the Venice boardwalk. Dylan had played the first set all acoustic, sitting alone on a stool dressed in his familiar old Charlie Chaplin-as-Woody Guthrie railroad hobo threads, strumming a Martin or Gibson, Daniel couldn't tell which, that made him look like a scale model of himself, puffing punctuation into a harmonica that was held up in front of him by a neck brace. The second set blew all that familiar, comfortable folkiness away. It wasn't as if Daniel was unprepared. He'd bought both of the last two Dylan albums the day they were delivered to the record store, and played them until the needle's gouging had made them sound as scratchy as if they were ten years old. He'd heard the new songs with their blues band backup, noted Dylan's hair getting longer and wilder and the outfits morphing from faux hillbilly to tough-kid rocker. Still, neither he, nor norm and Susie, nor most of the other fans in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium that night had taken in the transformation up close. Back then, you couldn't follow every step of a performer's evolution in his music videos on MTV or on the internet. So when the house plunged into darkness after intermission, and all that could be seen were the amplifiers' glowing red pilot lamps and the shadows of the players picking their way, wraith-like, over a tangle of floor cables and taking up their stations at the organ and the drums, strapping on the electric bass and the lead guitar, there was something like a collective holding of breath in the house. Then came the crack of the snare shot and the eruption of the opening organ riff, and there stood Dylan in the spotlight, sideways to his microphone, no more the rumpled back-porch bumpkin but a stiletto-threat of midnight boogie, leather-jacketed, tousle-haired, the neck of a black solid-body Stratocaster thrust out at the audience like a loaded rifle, snarling how does it feel, ah how does it feel, to be on your own, no direction home, and Daniel, his perfectly conventional plans for college notwithstanding, heard himself called to the making of such music, felt the die of his future irretrievably cast. He had gone up to Berkeley the following September and gradually managed to misplace that ambition like a tight, skinny joint of Thai stick that disappears between the Goodwill Industries couch cushions. Whereupon he had come home to L.A., chastened, a mediocre scholar and a rock dream failure,to register at the only law school that would have him, a third tier institution that had turned out more than its share of Los Angeles public defenders, County prosecutors, Superior Court judges and local politicians, as opposed to partnership-track corporate lawyers or Con Law professors at one of the more prestigious university law schools. He told Miguel he practiced at a small Beverly Hills law firm, though he didn’t say that it handled whiplashes and fender-benders instead of transnational corporate contract disputes and entertainment industry litigation , that its hallways were covered with threadbare carpet runners, how lunch meant a Cobb salad at Hamburger Hamlet or Sichuan takeout instead of haute cuisine. Certainly, he mentioned Sheila and their marriage, and that it was over, now. Why shouldn’t he? Although beyond that bare fact, he didn’t venture, didn’t disclose. Not so much out of prudence, which seemed to have flown out the window on this strange occasion, but more because, as Sheila would have put it, he was still processing the exsperience, still trying to make sense of it and figure out his feelings, which were anything but simple. About Melanie, however, who was just starting her second year at UCLA, Daniel was more forthcoming, at least to a point. Proudly, he told Miguel how his brilliant daughter, his only child, gifted since early on with imagination, the storytelling urge, and a fluent way with language, had gotten herself admitted to an upper division creative writing program for this, only her sophomore year, on the strength of a trio of precocious one-act plays. What he didn't mention was that all three of the plays were about her fraught experience of coming out as a butch lesbian in high school. Daniel, for his part, had not been exactly shocked. Melanie's manifestly unfeminine ways, her skinny body bereft of even a hint of feminine topography, and her rooster-strut gait had prepared him, and he had been as supportive as humanly possible, or so he thought . But Sheila, to Daniel's surprise and Melanie's anguish,, had withdrawn first into denial and then into a state of brittle perturbation, nearly unable to speak to her daughter, let alone nurture her. Some new mental health theory she had fallen prey to had confirmed her maternal disappointment and displeasure, insisting as it did that homosexuality was a grievous warpage of the normal order and that gays, with proper therapy, could be cured of their sexual disorientation. The thing that perplexed Daniel was that this theory had emerged not from the fundamentalist bible belt of American culture or from the walled-off Medieval world of Ultra Orthodox Judaism, but from the teachings of a well-respected, quite secular psychiatrist in London. For Daniel, loving father and committed liberal though he was, the period had not been without its tribulations. There had been long months of relentless feminist email invectives and, when Melanie still came home from Berkeley between quarters her freshgman year, more than a few fierce lectures about how it was men who had, far from creating civilization out of wilderness, as his kind liked to congratulate themselves for doing, had poisoned everything to the bone with their distorted patriarchal social structures, their gory schoolyard-mentality warfare, and the thoughtless way they had allowed their technologies to spew lethal and irreversible toxicity into the body, into the poisoned earth, into the suffering sky. There were times he had felt as if he'd been dropped by time warp into a rural Chinese village square during the cultural Revolution, bound hand and foot, sat on a rickety stool, and exhorted to self-criticize. In any case, his fatherly support had been all Melanie had had to count on, ironic as that may have seemed. It was at the next and very unanticipated step in Melanie's evolution that Daniel began to fall behind, to feel his father's heart breaking, to see his only child drawing farther and farther away into an inscrutable distance. . Spring break, before heading off to Costa Rica with a girlfriend Daniel had never seen in person but who looked, in digital snapshots Melanie sent him online, like a painted human pincushion, a haloed grinning dragon on one bicep, a rainbow arcing above the word Gaia, for the Greek earth mother on the other bicep,, a spiked black leather collar around her neck and body piercings flashing everywhere, from eyelids to nostrils to tongue and God knew where else beneath her black t-shirts and jeans, which matched the shoe polish-color of the narrow Mohawk ridge that ran down the center of her shaven skull. She was not, his daughter informed him, merely a lesbian. That had been a transitory delusion,a way station along the route to self-discovery. What she was, Melanie explained, was a man, a male born mistakenly, wretchedly, into the body of a female. From now on, she had explained among many other things in a very long email, the nickname Mel was henceforth to point not to her girlie name, but to Melvin. The correct pronouns were now to be not she and her but he, his and him. The half-octave lower voice Daniel had noticed and inquired about with concern in their last few middle-of-the-night phone calls over the lonely summer had been the result of biweekly testosterone shots, not an inexplicably lingering, unseasonable chest cold, as she had pretended. Her big-breasted girlfriend, she explained, was, in her heart of hearts, also a boy. "Fags with vaginas," is what the two of them liked to call themselves. As for going the rest of the physical way down the road to sexual reassignment surgery, the double mastectomy and the possibly functional, but more likely just cosmetic penis constructed out of the tissues of her (or his, Daniel had thought wryly)female privates, this his relentlessly transforming progeny couldn't say. Maybe yes, maybe no. One thing at a time. Daniel had confessed that he was having trouble getting his mind around all this. That he couldn't start thinking of he as him, couldn't help missing the girl he thought she'd been. That he felt, he admitted, despite himself, more than a bit repelled by the whole thing, like the father of an Indian bride who is more than ready to pay off a cadre of hermaphrodite extortionists who have crashed the Mumbai wedding party and threatened to expose their ambiguous genitalia to all present, possibly causing more than one celebrant to upchuck his or her chutney. Since that confession, the emails had been few and far between, and her cell number had gone straight to voice mail whenever he called, his messages never eliciting a response. Finally he had simply stoppped trying. None of this did he tell the swarthy, affable dwarf into whose company he had fallen, but that ommission still left more than enough for him to talk about. Hearing his autobiographical monologue spill out of him like small change escaping a torn pocket, as if someone else were speaking, Daniel, fascinated, watched Miguel smoke. The little man's stubby fingers were permanently splayed apart in the middle, the index and second, which grasped the cigarette, jutting off from the ring finger and pinkie to form a permanent V, in a way that reminded Daniel of how Rabbi Shapiro would hold up both his hands at the conclusion of the Saturday morning Sabbath service, palms outward. fingers spread just like that, in benediction. may the Lord bless you and keep you, may the Lord cause His countenance to shine upon you and bring you peace, before college and the Sixties, before all the ancient Hebraic myths, commandments and taboos had sunk beneath his coming of age like stones. The cigarettes looked so huge in Miguel’s hand that, each time Miguel put a fresh one to his lips to light up, Daniel felt an absurd urge to confiscate it,, as if from a delinquent child. Periodically, Miguel tapped the ash into a heavy-looking pewter ashtray on whose broad rim was poised a cloaked figure Daniel at first took to be a strangely wasted-looking, brooding Virgin of Guadalupe, the ubiquitous Mexican patron saint, although the more he looked, the less sure he was of this. Maybe it wasn’t la Virgen, Daniel considered. He’d never seen one anything like this. Instead of the usual benign, beatific countenance, the colorful robe, and the compassionate, open arms he remembered from the usual representations, this hooded female was Hollow-cheeked and spectral. Her hair, or what could be seen of it beneath the robe’s cowl, was a fierce, braided tangle of Rastafarian dreadlocks. Her facial expression was a thin-lipped grimace. And in one upraised bony hand, she clutched the shaft of an agricultural scythe planted butt-first beside the bare, gnarled feet of a crone twice her apparent age. Pausing for a swallow of coffee after the Melanie story,, Daniel realized how one-sided their conversation had been, to this point. When did he become so goddam narcissistic, he wondered. All those years of interviewing clients,, conducting courtroom testimony, taking depositions. If there was one thing he knew how to do, or used to know how to do, it was drawing people out, whether or not that was even what they wanted. Sheila complained it was as if he were interrogating her all the time. And how Getting any kind of disclosure out of him, by comparison, was like squeezing water from a stone. Had just a scant three months of living on his own turned him semi-autistic? “what?” asked Miguel. “Something the matter?” The thought must have made him frown, Daniel realized. “No,” he said, emerging from his reverie determined to be a more generous interlocutor. “Nothing. I was just wondering what this thing of yours is doing out here in the middle of nowhere. This lunch truck. Down in L.A., you see them all over the place. But up here?” He waved his hand as if to signify a fast emptiness. “I used to do this in Los Angeles too,” said Miguel, “ same as everybody else. I even had my own location. My own exclusive territory . right downtown, in front of the Ronald Reagan State office Building. Breakfast. Lunch. Supper. No competition. Not bad for a little enano from the streets of Tepito, you know?” “Where’s that?” asked Daniel. “Mexico City. A poor barrio. The poorest. Anyway, here’s what happened. After September 11th, it’s five years now, they put barricades in front of all those government buildings to protect against the terroristas. I had to park around the corner, or down the street, which means all of a sudden, I’m desaparicido. Poof! Gone! If the people look out the window, or they walk out the door, and you’re not there, they go and eat somewhere else. “So again I was running around, like before I got the Reagan Building. The Valley, East L.A., South Central. I went to high schools. I went to factories. I parked outside bail bond offices across from court buildings. I even drove down to Torrance every day when they were building that new medical clinic near the big hospital. ¡Hijole! every place I went, it was like a lonchería parking lot. You can’t make any money that way. For almost two years I did this, and things just got worse. “And then I was talking to this man I knew from the Evangelical church. Rigoberto. Not Mexican. Hondureño. A good guy. Rigoberto was working in a restaurant in Santa Barbara. One of the fancy ones by the ocean. Bring the truck up here, he tells me. No way, I tell him. I’ve been there. I know they have Taco Bell, they have Mexican restaurants. They don’t need me. “but Rigoberto says where I have to go is not in Santa Barbara. He says I have to go outside, at the door of the city. At the border. He says every day Latinos come to work here, from Ventura, from Oxnard, even all the way up from Los Angeles, and every night they drive back home, the same way, on the 101. They don’t want to eat that Taco Bell basura, he says, and they can’t afford those nice restaurants with the water fountains and the mariachis. All they want is some real, normal Mexican food. La cucina auténtica. “it still sounded crazy. I asked Rigoberto where am I going to live? where am I going to park this thing? who am I going to have for conversation, besides my wife? “’I’m giving you an idea for your success, compadre,’ he says, ‘take it or leave it. But if you stay here, who’s gonna buy your gas and your insurance for this thing? Who’s gonna pay your rent? The Department of Homeland Security?’” “Hell of a salesman,” this friend of yours,laughed Daniel. “It’s the Evangelical church. That’s where he gets the power. The Catholic priests, all they talk about is sin and repentance and how you have to accept everything. You let life kick you like a dog, and then you go to heaven if you don’t bite back. But the evangelicals, they preach success. They tell you that Jesus loves you and He wants you to be brave and get ahead. Which is a big improvement, in my opinion. “I thought about it. I talked to my wife. And then I called this immigration lawyer I know, Guzman, and we drove up here to look. You remember, these gas stations, they used to have a tienda de abarrotes, you know, a little convenience store, where you could walk in and buy something to eat, a cafecito, a pack of cigarettes? And now all you’ve got is that booth that’s like an ATM machine with a person inside.” “yeah,” said Daniel. “I remember free air, full serve, and clean bathrooms, too. Any kind of bathrooms.” “Well,” said Miguel, “this one has a bathroom, in the back. But that’s it.” “Good to know, “ said Daniel, imagining the coffee running through him, feeling the beginning of fullness in his bladder. “So I call the lawyer and the lawyer calls somebody at the oil company, and the oil company puts me on a lease. it’s almost like having a real restaurant. “Why can’t you just get yourself a restaurant?” asked Daniel. “I mean, if that’s what you really want?” “Without papers?” laughed Miguel. “Oh,” saidDaniel. “Yeah. Even for this, we had to put everything in my wife’s name, because she has citizenship. I work for her. I’m her employee. For a restaurant it would be even more complicated. And that’s okay. But I still miss my friends. I miss the city. I miss the futbol games on the weekend, in the park. they let me play on the teams with the little niños, up to 12 years old. I’m always the captain. I even missed driving around the damn freeways. “But the customers came, and then the baby, and, pues, AQUí me quedo. Still here.” “the sign?” Daniel asked. Miguel nodded. “Before, it only said ‘El Diablito.’ If you look, you can see the paint is different.” Out on the highway, something large backfired, exploding like military ordnance, loud enough that both men flinched. From the trailer came a baby’s crying, joined within seconds by a woman’s soothing Spanish murmur, the words indistinguishable. The kind of nocturnal call and response Daniel hadn’t heard under his own roof for a very long time, and nostalgia slinked through his heart like a tiny, unexpected animal. “¿Que pasó, mi vida?” Miguel called across toward the trailer’s nearest window. But the baby’s crying died down, and its fading whimpers merged with a woman crooning something in Spanish, in a voice a register lower than Daniel would have expected, had he thought about it. “guess it’s okay,” he said, dad to dad. “Better go check,” said Miguel, climbing down off his stool. “Be right back.” He came out of the rear of the truck down the stepladder and disappeared inside the house trailer, and Daniel decided to visit the rest room. This time, going and coming back, he got a curt nod of acknowledgement from Nick. When he returned, Miguel was at his station again. “Aren’t you ever afraid?” asked Daniel. “I mean, being open like this all night? with the cashier locked inside that bulletproof box, and no one to help you if something happens?” “Maybe I’m not the smartest man in California,” Miguel smiled, “ but I am not the most stupid one, either.” He reached under the counter and produced a massive-looking, long-barreled revolver, which he slid across to Daniel. Daniel put out a hand, hesitated. “go ahead,” urged Miguel. “Check it out. It won’t shoot you. I don’t keep a round in the chamber.” The grip was cushioned with textured black rubber pads, giving it a dense, sensuous heft. Daniel gingerly turned the colt over — the name was embossed along the barrel—inspecting first one side, then the other, as Miguel looked on in amusement. Daniel’s only previous contact with real firearms was target practice at the Arizona camp where his parents sent him for two miserable summers. he still remembered the shooting instructor, a crew-cut Korean War vet from Texas named Buford Hibbin, the mere mention of whose impossibly provincial moniker was enough to drive a barracks tent full of teenage Jewish boys from Westside Los Angeles into paroxysms of hilarity after lights out. “Byoofuhrd! Byoofuhrd Hib-bin! Y’all come in for dinner right this minute, y’hear?” they would call out across the darkened rows of cots in bad falsetto generic Southern accents, each new rendition setting off a fresh eruption of giggles and guffaws. “Elbows out!” Mr. Hibbin would again bark at them the next day, as they wriggled into Prone firing position on the parched August ground of the Mesa Roja target range, making tripod points of their bare, bent arms to steady Camp Pueblo’s arsenal of bolt-action Remington and Marlin .22’s. “I want to see those nipples pushing dirt! I want those asses flat as pancakes! ” Since then, Daniel had never again fired live ammunition, just shot ducks revolving on target wheels or pop-up arcade-game gangsters with mechanical rifles on dates at the Santa Monica pier, nights of greasy fish and chips and watery Cokes, cool beach breezes, copped feels and kisses he had thought he was stealing. Even so, he knew enough from TV police dramas to turn the Colt around and present it to Miguel butt first. “It’s big,” was all he could think of to say. And so it was . In Miguel’s Lilliputian grasp, the oversized six-shooter looked as huge as the shoulder-fired missile launchers Daniel had seen Islamist guerrillas brandishing for the cameras in Afghanistan or Chechnya or Iraq, he couldn’t remember exactly. “it’s a .357,” said Miguel. “I’ve never had to fire it. If I did,I would have to stand with my back against the refrigerator so the recoil won’t knock me down.” “then why don’t you get yourself something smaller?” asked Daniel, reasonably. “Because, amigo, if I just point this at some crazy pendejo who thinks he’s gonna rob me, he takes one look and the gun is all he’s going to think about then, know what I mean?” “Hope you’re right,” said Daniel, glancing at his watch as Miguel slipped the Colt back into its hiding place. 5:15 A.M. Finally, he was getting tired. Although not sleepy, exactly. He’d ingested too much coffee to be sleepy. But tired, yes. Definitely tired. Exhausted. “Well, Miguel,” he said, pushing away his paper plate and crumpled napkin, “I think it’s time for me to start heading home now.” Which was when a black-gloved hand thrust itself up beside him, holding aloft an empty white coffee cup as if it were the Olympic torch.