A Persian Gem

by Jeff Isaacson

  At the front of the restaurant was the buffet. It was covered by the familiar plastic tent, like a little greenhouse roof. Underneath that sneeze guard were heat lights. And underneath the heat lights were silver pans that stood out as much as the bright red vinyl seats because the rest of the place was so drab, the lighting was muted, and there appeared to be no windows, like a casino.

  Over near the buffet was a guy that I was worried was Nez.

  Why was I worried? Yeah, he was short. But he was no longer thin. He was doughy in an especially unhealthy way. He was asymmetrically doughy. It looked like if you pushed a bit of his belly fat, it would seem to disappear only to reappear by his lowest pairs of ribs and stay there. Also, he was only brownish. He was a little jaundiced. So he looked yellow brown, almost like proper dal.

  He didn’t look good.

  He certainly didn’t look like a man who was capable of orchestrating, or even participating in, a sophisticated jewel theft.

  “What should we do?” Thad asked. “You’re the expert.”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m not an expert. I just realized now that we should’ve gotten Nez’s full name when we had the chance. I thought that I had learned last time, but I’m still a terrible journalist/investigator.”

  “Let’s be real, you’re one for one,” Thad pointed out.

  “Even a blind sow finds an acorn every once in a while. Let’s get pizza and form a plan. You see, Thad, we should’ve come in with a plan. This is why I’m a lousy journalist.”

  We went up and got pizza. The pizza had pools of orangish oil all over them. The meat toppings looked like they had been rehydrated from pepperoni and sausage jerky. I decided to grab one piece of veggie and take my chances.

  Thad and I returned to our bright red seats and tried the pizza.

  After my first bite, I said, “I had low expectations for a pizza place run by a drug addicted, white collar criminal, Lebanese American, but somehow this pizza exceeded my expectations. This is without question the single worst piece of pizza that I’ve ever had in my life. It’s beginning to sink in that I just spent fourteen dollars for one bite of horrid pizza. How does this guy stay in business?”

  “I don’t remember there being a pizza place back when I used to spend more time on the island. Maybe this is the only one,” Thad said between bites. He certainly wasn’t stopping at one bite.

  “Even if that’s the case, why are all these people eating pizza on an island with a thousand good seafood places?” I wondered.

  “This is my guess,” Thad took a drink of water. “All of these people besides you are from Europe or gay…”

  “How can you tell?” I snickered.

  “Look at how well dressed they are,” Thad nodded. “Obviously European or gay.”

  “Maybe they’re European AND gay,” I suggested.

  “Oh no,” Thad shook his head.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Gay Europeans are the full Oscar Wilde. Unmistakable dandies,” Thad stated. “Now gay people have better taste than to eat here. So obviously the other people in here are all European. And I’m guessing that Europeans are coming in here to experience some quintessential Americana on their vacation, the American pizza buffet.”

  I looked around. Thad’s hypothesis was a good one. I could hear people speaking in German and French.

  “You see that guy over there?” Thad asked gesturing over toward the guy who I believed was Nez.

  “Yeah, I fear that he’s Nez too,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Thad nodded surprised. “But I was talking about the other guy, kind of by him, over by the buffet too.”

  “That kid?” I asked.

  “He’s got the hots for you,” Thad said.

  “Thad, he’s a teenager,” I hissed.

  “I bet he’s nineteen. Definitely legal, plus every time you look away from him he stares at you,” Thad insisted.

  “I’m not some Mrs. Robinson style sex object,” I declared in a whisper even though the guy was a long ways away.

  “To him you are,” Thad laughed.

  “Except that he probably doesn’t know who Mrs. Robinson is,” Thad added.

  “Just no,” I said.

  “I would,” Thad declared.

  “Thad!” I protested with a snicker.

  “He’s young, dumb, and hung,” Thad noted.

  “We’re having lunch, Thad. Can we have some appropriate conversation,” I suggested.

  “I think that we should use it to our advantage,” Thad nodded.

  “How?” I asked.

  “I think that he’s the bus boy. So when you finish a plate, just set it next to you, and we’ll wait until he comes over. Then you’ll grill him about Nez,” Thad beamed.

  “Why me?” I shook my head.

  “Look, I wish that he was infatuated with me too, but he’s not. These are the cards that we’ve been dealt,” Thad pointed out.

  “Well, I’ll just set my pizza aside then. I’m already done with it,” I decided.

  “He probably won’t come over unless you’re a member of the clean plate club,” Thad said.

  “Do you want to eat it?” I asked. “If you made this in Italy, you’d be arrested it’s so bad.”

  Thad sighed. “Okay, I’ll eat it.”

  He took one bite.

  “Why did you have to get veggie?” Thad demanded.

  “Because the meats looked so bad. Worst. Pizza. Ever.”

  “No, it’s not the worst,” Thad insisted.

  “Where in the world could you possibly have had worse pizza?” I demanded.

  “In the cafeterias of the Minneapolis Public School system,” Thad replied. “They served us this pizza with fake pepperoni. I think it was actually dog treat pepperoni. Cheese that I think was made in a lab out of either corn or petroleum by products, and this spongy crust. The cooks used to cut that pizza with a scissors…”

  “I believe that they’re called kitchen shears,” I pointed out.

  “Girl, when Miss Julia Child uses them, they’re called kitchen shears. When some school cook who looks like a parolee in a prison kitchen uniform and a hairnet uses them, they’re called scissors,” Thad insisted.

  “I see your point,” I chuckled.

  “God, that pizza was bad. You grew up in Minneapolis. Didn’t you eat that stuff?” Thad asked.

  “No,” I shook my head.

  “Were you home schooled or something? Didn’t you go to public schools?” Thad wondered.

  I cringed. I never like to talk about growing up. Only my best girlfriends and three ex-boyfriends really know my history. But Thad was a good friend and getting better all the time. I decided it was time to let him in.

  “I went to the Blake school,” I replied.

  “Ooooo, fancy! Someone grew up rich,” Thad observed.

  “We really didn’t grow up that rich. My parents just both thought that education was the most important thing in the world. They met at Harvard, Thad,” I said.

  “Yeah, so they both must have had some pretty impressive jobs,” Thad nodded. “It’s okay if you’re loaded. There’s no shame in it. Just own it. What did your parents do?”

  “I was raised mostly by my dad, and he ostensibly works at the University of Minnesota,” I stated.

  “Did your parents divorce?” Thad asked.

  “My mom committed suicide when I was six years old,” I declared.

  Thad’s jaw dropped. “Are you serious?” he asked in a voice completely absent of his usual slight affectation.

  “Yep, she killed herself when I was six,” I replied.

  “Damn,” Thad noted. “I’m sorry.”

  “Wasn’t your fault,” I joked.

  “Well at least you took it well,” Thad observed.

  “Yeah, it may have taken twenty-seven years, but at least I’ve moved on. My dad unfortunately hasn’t. And I don’t know that he ever will,” I pointed out.

  “Well, he has a good job,�
� Thad observed. “The University of Minnesota is a great place to work.”

  “He has a place to work only because he was so successful as a young man. He’s internationally known in his field. The University of Minnesota just lets him go there and read and write poetry because the University of Minnesota gets to brag that they have him whether or not he does any work for the rest of his natural life,” I said. “And it’s not looking like he’s going to.”

  “I take it he’s not a poet in residence?” Thad laughed.

  “He is a poet in residence, just not officially,” I pointed out. “He’s actually in the anthropology department.”

  “Is his poetry any good?” Thad wondered.

  “No, it’s as pitiful and ghostly as everything else about him,” I said.

  “Do you think that he’ll ever get better?” Thad wondered.

  I felt a tear roll down my cheek. “No,” I said.

  Thad nodded solemnly.

  “Growing up, my brother and I had to raise ourselves. We had to take care of the mail. We had to see that bills got paid. We had to arrange to transport ourselves to school and soccer for me and baseball for my brother. We lived in constant fear that my dad would follow my mom to the grave and we’d be orphans. My brother and I hid knives and other possible weapons from my dad on several occasions. At least until my brother started down the path of bipolar depression and alcoholism. And then it was everyone for themselves.

  So you can imagine how different my life was from the rest of the kids at the Blake school. There were kids that had limos waiting for them every day after school. My brother and I rode the city bus. Everyone at the Blake school had great expectations. Everyone was looking Ivy League and then on to great jobs.

  I had no friends. I remember riding the Blake school bus alone to and from most of our away soccer games. It was terrible,” I confessed.

  “Wow!” Thad observed. “And here I imagined that you had led this high rolling, freewheeling, fun, rich girl’s, little teenage life, and my school days were so much better than yours…no offense.”

  “None taken,” I said. “What were yours like?”

  “Well,” Thad decided. “My dad was an auto mechanic and my mom was a clerk at an auto parts warehouse. My brother and I were raised to work with our hands and look down on book learning. I could change the oil on a car by the time I was seven. We lived in a very old house right by Roosevelt High School that required constant maintenance. So my dad, my brother, and I sheetrocked, put in a new furnace, replaced a leaky pipe, installed a new toilet, and fixed our old refrigerator more times than I can count before I was even twelve.

  Our house was weird at the time because the TV was almost never on. What was almost always on was MPR talk radio. My brother and I were weirdos because our favorite show wasn’t Jerry Springer or something. It was Car Talk. In fact, my brother and I would do our own version of Car Talk for my parents where we were Tick and Tack. (Because the guys on Car Talk were Click and Clack.) And our dad would pretend to phone in and ask us tough diagnostic questions about car problems which we were supposed to come up with serious, plausible solutions for.”

  “Ah, that’s so cute, Thad,” I smiled.

  “I never did all that well at school. But no one ever expected me to either. I did the bare minimum to get by. I was the class clown all the way through,” Thad stated.

  “No surprise,” I said.

  “The best though was high school,” Thad rubbed his hands together. “Dave would get me out of class because he wrote for the school paper, and the person in charge of the school paper just basically gave the reporters a pre signed book of blank passes for the reporter to fill out. So in the first year of high school, when Jace was still with us...”

  “What did Jace move or something?” I asked.

  “Jace was brilliant,” Thad replied. “She went to one year of high school at Roosevelt with Dave and me. Then she went to college at MCTC and then to the University of Minnesota. She got her high school degree and her Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts that same spring. She was in grad school already that summer.”

  “Wow,” I observed.

  “So the first year Dave would pull out me and Jace. We’d go to my house and smoke a joint. Then maybe we’d go out for Chinese food. Or we’d go to this donut shop with a cow out front…”

  “See, this is why you love the kitschy cows so much, Thad,” I laughed.

  “Maybe,” Thad nodded. “Then on the weekends we’d…Dave had a brilliant idea. You see, he wrote a music column for the school newspaper where he reviewed albums and concerts. He was really good.

  So anyway, he used to get all these back issues of fly by night music magazines, back then there were a lot of them. Dave had a deal with the manager of Shinder’s that once a music magazine was out of date, and if none of the staff wanted it, and the manager couldn’t send it back for some credit or a refund, then Dave had first dibs. So in one of these fly by night magazines Dave found an ad for a music journalist in Minneapolis. The magazine had named fifty famous venues in fifty states, and they were looking for a local writer and photojournalist for each venue. In Minnesota, they had selected First Avenue as the venue.

  Dave applied for the job, and he applied for me as his photojournalist. Dave’s writing was so good that they didn’t even demand to see examples of my photography. Dave had described me as his trusty photographer. Fortunately, I was pretty good at photography.

  Then, to get Jace in too, Dave had the stones to say that his girlfriend wouldn’t let him spend so many weekend evenings at First Avenue without her. So he said that we needed a press pass for her too. And they said yes!

  So I spent high school fixing stuff, doing the bare minimum to pass, getting stoned, eating Chinese food and donuts, drinking Boone’s Farm wine, and partying at First Avenue every weekend. It was pretty awesome! If I traveled in time from back then and saw myself now, I’d probably kick my own ass.”

  I smiled at that. What would that have been like? Thad’s youth was everything that the Blake school would’ve frowned on. But at that moment, it sounded like heaven.

  “I’ve finally choked down this nasty veggie and schmear of tomato paste on cardboard toast that they call pizza,” Thad observed. “Let’s lure your suitor.”

  I was deeply skeptical about Thad’s plan for two reasons. First, I have found that men are generally really bad at determining who is attracted to who. Among the engineers that I work with, I can tell you that the average male engineer believes that if he’s attracted to you then it logically follows that you are attracted to him too. And some men just believe that every woman is attracted to them. There is no man who is attractive to every woman. Guarantee you there is some woman out there who thinks that Idris Elba is not her type. Second, he was just a kid, so new to and unschooled in the ways of love. And of course you can’t judge a book by its cover, but he didn’t look particularly bright. And I had been surreptitiously paying attention to him out of the corner of my eye after Thad accused him of looking at me every time that I looked away from him. And I had not caught him trying to look at me even once since I had been paying attention to him. I doubted his ability to be that subtle.

  But as soon as I set that empty plate next to me, and I saw him react to it like he had just seen a one hundred dollar tip that he had to grab before he ended up in a knife fight with a potential thief or co-worker, I knew. And I felt terrible. Thad was probably right. He probably was of age. But I knew going into it that this was going to feel like some type of child, maybe not abuse, but certainly maltreatment.

  “Hi,” I said as he almost dove on my plate like a soccer goalie on a loose ball. “I’m Angie.”

  “Braden,” he beamed shaking my hand.

  His handshake was weak, shaky, and his hand was cold.

  “Can we talk for a moment?” I asked.

  He nodded the way a happy, but not excited dog wags its tail.

  “Is that short, portly, guy up at the
head of the buffet the owner, Nez?” I gestured toward him.

  “Yes,” Braden replied.

  His eyes fixated on my eyes in the way that I imagine the eyes of a devoted follower would fixate on their cult leader. I felt worse.

  “Do you have any idea what he’s been up to around this time all week?” I asked.

  “Oh, he’s been here,” Braden insisted.

  “How do you know that?” I demanded.

  “I don’t think that I should say,” Braden protested.

  “Why not?” I demanded.

  “Look, Nez is an on again off again alcoholic. Please don’t tell him that I told you this. But he’s not drinking right now. And he lives at this restaurant when he’s not drinking. I can personally tell you that he’s been here all of the times that I’ve been here and I’ve worked the ten to three every day this week. I’ve heard he sometimes even sleeps in his office,” Braden said.

  “Thank you,” I replied. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell Nez anything. This is just between us. Do you have any idea why Nez is quitting drinking?”

  “I shouldn’t say,” Braden hemmed.

  “It’s just between us,” I repeated.

  “He has liver problems. He may need a transplant,” Braden stated.

  “Sounds expensive,” I noted.

  “He has a plan,” Braden replied.

  “Which is?” I leaned toward him.

  “I really can’t say,” Braden shook his head.

  “Braden,” I egged him.

  “I’ll never tell,” Braden shook his head.

  “Braden,” I repeated.

  “Okay, he’s going to go back to running grass,” Braden said.

  “Running grass?” I asked.

  “I really shouldn’t have said anything,” Braden grimaced.

  “It’s too late now, Braden,” I observed. “What if I were to go have a little talk with Nez?”

  “You said that this was just between us!” he gasped.

  “And it is. If you don’t withhold stuff from me,” I declared.

  “I am out of my depths with you,” he sighed.

  “Not at all,” I smiled. “You’ll be right back in them if you tell me what you mean by running grass.”

  “Nez has an oceangoing boat. He used to transport a large amount of…” Braden looked around wildly. “Marijuana from Mexico to the United States. That’s how he got the money to open this restaurant.”