Breakfast at Sally's

by Richard LeMieux

  “Good. Very good!” I replied.

  “He’s my hero,” said C. “I’ve learned so much from him.” C flipped through the pages of the book. “Here! Here!” he said. “Here’s a good part. May I read?”

  “Of course.”

  “Campbell and Moyers are discussing man’s relationship to the planet,” he said, “and that we, mankind, are part of the earth, not the masters of the earth. Let’s jump in here. Campbell is talking.”

  Again, C read; and again he was soon rocking back and forth, reading louder and louder, accentuating the passages he liked best.

  I had been driving for about ten minutes, listening to C read passionately. We were coming to the end of town. “Are we getting close?” I asked, interrupting him.

  C squinted as he looked at the street sign. “What’s that sign say?” he asked.

  “88th Northeast.”

  “We’ve gone too far. Turn around and go back,” he directed. It was then I realized that C could not see very well. But he was reading the book without missing a comma, like he knew it by heart. He poured himself another cup of wine and asked, “Should I continue?”

  “That’s great,” I said.

  “If I get carried away, turn left on 30th Street,” he said and then cleared his throat again and read boldly on, this time conveying the beliefs of Chief Seattle: “We are brothers, after all.”

  “Here’s 30th,” I said, turning left as instructed.

  C lowered his book and peered forward. “Go two blocks and take a left,” he said, taking a marker and placing it in the book. “Now, pull down that alley,” he said, pointing. “It’s the green duplex with a bunch of trash cans by the door.”

  We pulled up in front. The green paint was peeling, and the five dented aluminum trash cans were filled to the brim.

  “I’ll be just a minute,” said C, grabbing his duffel bag and swinging the door open.

  I turned on NPR. Car Talk was on, and the Tappet brothers were yukking it up, making broken-car sounds and speculating as to why a caller’s Mazda was sputtering when it reached forty miles per hour.

  C came out of the apartment with a small wad of bills in his hand and climbed back into the van. He counted the money. “Twelve one-dollar bills and seventy-six cents in change,” he said, stuffing the money in his pocket. “If you don’t mind, could we make another stop? It’s nearby.”

  “I’ve got no particular place to go,” I said, and I backed away from the duplex.

  “Turn right,” C said.

  C reached into his bag and pulled out his bong. Then he retrieved a small plastic bag he had rolled up and stashed in his sock, and took out a marijuana bud. “This is why they call them ‘glad bags’!” He reached out and took the cup of water I always keep in the van for Willow and poured some in his tool. Then he put the cup back and set the bud on his knee for a moment as he dug into his pocket for a lighter. Willow, always the curious creature that she is, sniffed at the bud and then promptly ate it.

  “Hey!” C yelled. “You ate my stuff!”

  “Oh, no!” I cried. “Will it hurt her?”

  C laughed. “Might make her high, but I don’t think it will hurt her. She eats grass like all dogs do, doesn’t she?”

  C reached for the glad bag again. “Take a right here,” he said, as he filled his bong and flicked his lighter on.

  As I turned right, we saw two police cars with lights flashing. “Oops! We may just want to keep on going here,” he said, sliding down in his seat. When we had passed the police, he straightened up, flicked his Bic again, and inhaled.

  “It appears that my friend Randy is having a visit from some of Bremerton’s finest,” he said.

  I checked the rearview mirror for three blocks and then pulled over. “I think I’ll take a cup of that wine now,” I said. “A big one.”

  C handed me a cup, unscrewed the top, and poured. “Let’s go to the library,” he said.

  I had not been in a library since I was in college, some thirty-seven years ago. I hadn’t had time. I was too busy making enough money to buy cars, homes, and all my dreamed-up creature comforts. I bought food for my body, but I had forgotten to feed my mind.

  The grand buffet for the brain was spread out before us as C and I passed through the metal detectors at the Bremerton Public Library. The new chefs of literature had been working overtime, mixing similes, puns, metaphors, and aphorisms to produce their offerings. There was Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie, John Grisham’s The Summons, and Tom Clancy’s Red Rabbit. The master chefs were still there, too—John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

  If the hungry mind wanted spice, there were O. Henry and James Joyce; for soul food, there was James Baldwin; for meat and potatoes, Thomas Wolfe; and for dessert, George Bernard Shaw. There was always something fresh and hot, and you could get it to go.

  The library was another sanctuary for the homeless. There was always plenty for everyone, rich and poor. Those without a roof over their heads could escape with Wolfe, Kafka, or Robert Louis Stevenson and have shelter from the heat and the cold, the rain and the pain. It was somehow fitting that writers were often poor—sometimes beggars, in fact—until someone discovered their gift.

  I cruised through the stacks, pulling a book from its place from time to time and opening to a passage.

  Stephen Crane wrote in War is Kind:

  A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!”

  “However,” replied the universe, “the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.”

  John Heywood fashioned:

  The loss of wealth is loss of dirt,

  As sages in all times assert;

  The happy man’s without a shirt.

  I thought about how much I enjoyed C reading to me in the van, though it may just have been the sound of his voice, since I didn’t absorb much of the content. I continued to cruise. I picked up a copy of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn next and read the first couple of pages, just standing there. Twain started his book with a notice:

  Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

  It had been probably forty-five years since I had read those words. I drifted to a soft chair in the corner and sat down, kicking off my wet shoes.

  It was three hours later when C called me back from my trip down the muddy Mississippi with Huck and Jim. “Find a good book?” he asked, standing before me.

  “Yeah. Still good after all these years,” I said, holding up the well-worn edition.

  “Are you hungry?” C asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “but I’m totally broke.”

  “Do you like Chinese food?”

  “Of course!” said I.

  “Well, let’s go then. It’s on me,” said C. “There’s a place just four blocks away. The Golden Dragon. It’s very good.”

  With our minds now fed, we headed for the Golden Dragon. We entered and slipped into a booth in the bar, lit delicately with a hanging Chinese lantern.

  The waitress recognized C right off and came to serve our table. “Hello, mister,” she said, bowing slightly at the waist.

  “Ni hao, darlin’,” C responded in Chinese, as he got up from the booth, bowed at the waist, and gave her a hug. “Ni hao piaoliang.”

  “Xiexie,” she said. “Wo hao gaoxing ni ken lal.”

  C then sat down. “Sandi, zhe she wo pengyou, Richard,” he said, nodding at me. “Richard, this is Sandi.”

  Sandi bowed at the waist again and smiled at me, saying “Wanan, Richard.”

  “Drinks?” Sandi asked, in what sounded like a chirp.

  “Two Flaming Mai Tais,” C said. “It’s my birthday! I’m thirty-three today—the age Christ was when he died. I’m a member of the Thirty-three Club—me and Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson.

  “You always say it’s your birthday w
hen you come in here,” Sandi laughed, and then she rushed off to pour and blend.

  “I’m impressed you speak Chinese,” I said. “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Hello, darlin’. You’re looking very attractive.’ She said, ‘Thank you. I’m delighted you could come.’ I said, ‘Sandi, this is my friend, Richard.’ And she said, ‘Good evening, Richard.’

  “I know a little of the language,” C added. “I respect the Chinese people. It is a shame that they don’t use their Chinese names—their real names—here in this country. They’ve changed them to fit in. Chinese people named Al, Mark, David, Bill, or Steve? Come on! Many have such beautiful names, too. Sandi’s real name is Yee Wong Chin. Her husband is named Hai. He’s the cook. Their son is Jian, who is a junior at Stanford University. I admire the way the Chinese children respect their parents and their grandparents. The lack of respect American children show for their parents may be the worst byproduct of our capitalistic, throwaway society. You won’t see Chinese people standing in line to get food at Sally’s. The Chinese take care of their own!”

  “I was surprised to see so many people at the Salvation Army,” I said. “I never knew there were so many poor and homeless people around here.”

  “Ah, the homeless.” C sighed. “They should all just die. But they are too afraid to die. They just keep on living like weeds growing between rocks. You can pull them, you can spray them, and you can walk all over them, but somehow, some way, they keep on coming back,” he said.

  “And like those weeds growing between the rocks, they can be beautiful for a day, a week, maybe two weeks. I have seen them in Los Angeles, Houston, Detroit, and Seattle. Some places are tougher than others to live in, you know.”

  Sandi held two flaming concoctions far from her body as she steered her way back toward our table. “Drinks!” she announced as she set them down. “Ready to order?”

  C blew out his fire and took a drink. “You choose,” he said, motioning to me.

  “Oh, let’s get some pot stickers and some barbecued pork,” I said. “Do you like egg rolls?” I asked, looking at C.

  “Sure!” he said.

  “Okay then, egg rolls, and—ah—ah—lemon chicken and Mongolian beef.”

  “Good!” Sandi said.

  We sipped our drinks, letting the liquor warm our beings. It felt strange but very good to just be sitting there, anticipating a real meal. It seemed like only moments until Sandi was back; she bustled to our table, pushing a cart of food for our first course of the evening. “Pot stickers, fried egg rolls, and barbecued pork,” she said, smiling, as she placed each dish on the table. “Would you like another drink?” she asked.

  “Yes, please,” C replied, smiling. “I need more fire!” he exclaimed. Sandi giggled and dashed off to get our refills.

  We loaded up our plates, savoring samples of one delicious dish after another. C shortly sat back and gave me one of his penetrating looks. His mind was rarely idle for long. “Are you a historian, Richard?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “But you’ve read The Grapes of Wrath, right?”

  “Oh yeah, that was quite a book,” I said.

  “Well, Steinbeck had a great sense of history, and I think he would be appalled to see what’s happening here and now. Because once again history is being ignored—ninety percent of the wealth in this country is controlled by ten percent of the people. Steinbeck wrote about it.” C reached for his duffel bag and fished around in it, pulling out his own dog-eared copy. “You know, even this great writer had to tiptoe around accusations of being a revolutionary,” C said. “He could have been put in jail in a different time and place. Steinbeck believed that people belong together and are part of one another and of a greater whole.”

  C laid the book down and picked up his drink, aiming the red plastic straw at his mouth, then sucking down the final ounces of his second Mai Tai. He held up his glass, and the ever-vigilant Sandi was quick to acknowledge his call for more.

  “People are afraid poverty can happen to them,” C said. “And they should be. An illness, a car accident, loss of a job, loss of a business, loss of a loved one—many things can start the process. Weeks, months, then years go by, and the money goes out and none comes in. There are about thirty-one million people living in poverty in the United States.

  “It would be so, so, so easy to fix poverty in this country. Just give each of those people a hundred thousand dollars. That’s three-point-one trillion dollars. That’s how much the IRS estimates is stashed away in offshore accounts by American businesses to avoid taxes. Hello? Hello? Is anybody listening? And at what point, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, does the man stop turning his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?

  “But that’s too easy an answer. Instead, we have dozens of agencies with thousands of bureaucrats spending billions of dollars slowly portioning out five hundred to eight hundred a month so the poor remain living in substandard housing, driving junker cars with no insurance, until all the pride and dignity, if they ever had any, has been permanently squeezed from every organ and blood vessel of every poor person.

  “Then, when the poor are down and out, crawling around the streets, hoping to get enough drugs and alcohol to anaesthetize themselves from their anguish and worry for a few hours, there are many who enjoy pointing their fingers and calling out, ‘Nay, nay! Look at these worthless, lazy, drunken, irresponsible people! If they would just be like me, the world would be wonderful!’”

  C took a deep breath and shook his head. He took another sip of his Mai Tai. “Dr. Martin Luther King said something like, ‘We all have a task and let us do it with a sense of divine dissatisfaction. Let us be dissatisfied as long as we have a wealth of creeds and poverty of deeds.’

  “Ah, the wonderful capitalistic system at work,” he continued. “It is a great system, indeed, in the hands of men with hearts. But it is a system like all systems, where men can enslave men. That’s what slavery is all about: men selling men for capital to do work to produce more capital.

  “The Civil War didn’t end slavery in the United States. In fact, there is more slavery today in this country than ever before. Each week, containers of Chinese men, women, and children are landing in San Francisco, San Diego, New York, and Seattle. They have been sold into slavery and must pay off their debt by working in sweatshops making clothing, or selling their bodies in prostitution.”

  C paused briefly and looked at me intently. “Take a deep breath,” he said. I put down my drink and did as he said, sucking the air into my lungs. “Do it again,” he said. I complied. “Felt good, didn’t it?” I nodded. “That is a gift! It was free—a gift from God, if you will, or a gift from the universe. So far, no king, socialist, communist, or capitalist has been able to capture, bottle, or control the air. But you can be assured that if someone could, he would capture it, price it, market it, and sell it. Those who had the money to buy it, would; and those who did not have the money would die.”

  The rattling of the serving dishes on Sandi’s food cart as she steered it our way interrupted C’s impassioned monologue. “Mongolian beef,” she said, lifting the lid and placing the metal serving dish on the table. “Lemon chicken. It is very good! Very good! And fried rice!” She expertly laid out our culinary experience. She handed C chopsticks and then asked me, “Chopsticks?”

  “No, thank you,” I replied. “I have not perfected that art form yet.”

  “Enjoy!” she chimed and was off again.

  I was still hungry, so I quickly dished up a plate of food.

  “What do you think Jesus would do if he came back to earth tonight in Bremerton?” C asked, as he spooned some rice onto his plate.

  “I don’t know,” I said, savoring a mouthful of Mongolian beef.

  “Would he come in a white robe and sandals, or the dress of this time?” C pressed on. I shrugged my shoulders, forking in the fried rice. “Would he be white, black, Asian, or maybe look like Saddam Hussein instead of Kevin Costne
r or Tom Cruise? What if he didn’t fit our image of him? What if he was bald? Or, for God’s sake, what if he was gay?

  “He wouldn’t have any cash, no MasterCard, Visa, Discover Card, or portfolio of any kind. If he went to a bank and said, ‘Hello. I’m Jesus, the son of God. I need some of those green things that say “In God We Trust” on them to buy some food and get a place to stay,’ the bank manager would say, ‘I’m sorry, but I looked in my computer and without a social security number, local address, and credit history, I can’t do anything for you. Maybe if you show me a miracle or two, I might lend you fifty dollars.’

  “Where would he stay? The state park charges sixteen dollars a night. Could he go to a church and ask, ‘May I stay here? I am Jesus’? Would they believe him?”

  As I took a sip of my drink, I wondered just who this character was sitting across from me. Was he some angel sent to save me? Or was he, as the Rolling Stones warned in their song, Satan himself here to claim me for some sin of this life or a past life of which I had no recollection? Or was he an alien? Or was he Jesus, the Christ himself, just “messing” with me? Was I in the presence of a prophet, or just some hopped-up druggie?

  “‘Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.’ That’s what Jesus said. What doors would be opened to him?” he asked.

  “The Salvation Army—Sally’s?” I guessed.

  “That’s about all,” C said. “Unless he saw Tony Robbins’ TV formula to become a millionaire and started selling miracles to the rich at twenty-thousand dollars a pop. He could go on Regis, Oprah, maybe get an interview with Bill Moyers, or go on Nightline. Or joust with the nonbelievers on Jerry Springer! Think of the book deals! He could write a book titled I’m Baaaaack!

  “He could have his own television show: ‘Jesus—I just cured the sick and made the blind see, and now I’m going to Disneyland.’ Would he have to live in a bastion surrounded by a large electric fence with roundthe-clock security guards to protect him from those who wished to do him harm, or to keep the press and the paparazzi at bay?”