by T. C. Boyle
His only employee was a sour woman named Sepideh, an Iranian (or, as she preferred it, Persian) immigrant who had escaped her native country after the regime change and was between forty-five and sixty, depending on what time of day you asked her. In the mornings she was unconquerably old, but by closing time her age had dropped, though she dragged her feet, her shoulders slumped and her makeup grew increasingly tragic. She was dark-skinned and dark-eyed and she dyed her once-black hair black all over again. People took her for a Mexican, which was really a matter of indifference to him—he didn’t care whether his waitress was from Chapultepec or Hokkaido, as long as she did her job and took some of the pressure off him. And she did. And had for some twenty years now and counting.
On this particular day, mid-week, dreary, the downtown skyline obliterated by fog or smog or whatever they wanted to call it, Sepideh was late because the bus she took from the section of town known as Little Persia, where she lived with her mother and an equally sour-faced brother he’d met once or twice, had broken down. As luck would have it, there was a line outside the door when at eleven o’clock on the dot he shuffled across the floor and flipped the sign from Closed to Open. In came the customers, most of them wearing familiar faces, and as they crowded in at the counter and unfolded their newspapers and propped up their tablets and laptops on the six tables arranged in a narrow line along the far wall that featured the framed black-and-white photo of a dead president, he began taking orders.
First in line was Scott, a student from the university who had the same thing five days a week, black coffee and the chorizo and scrambled egg burrito he lathered with jalapeños, Just to wake up, as he put it on the mornings when he was capable of speech. Next to him were Humberto and Baltasar, two baggy-pants old men from the neighborhood who would slurp heavily sugared coffee for the next three hours and try to talk him to death as he hustled from grill to griddle to the refrigerator and back, and here were two others easing onto the stools beside them, new faces, more students—but big, all head and neck, shoulder and belly, footballers, no doubt, who would devour everything in a two-foot radius, complain that the portions were too small and the burritos like prisoners’ rations, and try to suck the glaze off the plates in the process. Of course, he should be happy because the students had discovered him yet again—and how many generations had made the same discovery only to fade away in the lean months when he could have used their business?
He dealt out a stack of plastic menus as if he were flipping cards like the dealer at the blackjack table at Caesars, where he liked to spend his two weeks off every February, bathed in the little spotlight that illuminated the table, a gratis rum and coke sizzling at his elbow. Then he leaned over the counter and announced in the voice that was dying in his throat a little more each day as he groped toward old age and infirmity, “No table service today. You people back there got to come up to the counter if you want to get fed.” That was it. He didn’t need to give an explanation—if they wanted Michelin stars, let them line up over in Beverly Hills or Pacific Palisades—but he couldn’t help adding, “She’s late today, Sepideh.”
And so it began: breakfast, then the lunch rush, furious work in a hot cramped kitchen, and all he could see was people’s mouths opening and closing and the great wads of beans and rice and marinated pork, chicken and beef swelling their throats. It was past noon before he could catch his breath—he didn’t even have time for a cigarette, and that put him in a foul mood, the lack of nicotine—and when he saw the face in the tortilla that provided the foundation for the burrito he was just then constructing, he ignored it. It was nobody’s face, eyes, nose, cheekbones, brow, and it meant nothing except that he was exhausted, already exhausted, and he still had six and a half hours to go. And sure, he’d seen faces before—Mohammed, the Buddha, Sandy Koufax once, but Jesus? Never. The woman over on Broadway had seen Jesus, exactly as He was in the Shroud of Turin, only the shroud in this case was made of unleavened flour, lard and water. He could have used Jesus himself, because that woman got rich and the lines for her place went around a whole city block. If he only had Jesus, he could hire somebody more competent—and dependable—than Sepideh and sit back and take a load off. That was what he was thinking as he smeared refritos over the face of the tortilla and piled up rice and meat and guacamole and crema, cheese, shredded lettuce, pico de gallo, the works—and why not?—for yet another pair of footballers who were sitting there at the back table like statues come to life. Call it whimsy, or maybe revenge, but he mounded the ingredients up till the burrito was as big as a stuffed pillowcase. Let them complain about this one.
That was when he had his moment of inspiration, divine or otherwise. He would weigh it. Actually weigh it, and that would be his ammunition and his pride too, the biggest burrito in town. If he didn’t have Jesus, at least he would have that.
We each live through our time on earth in an accumulation of milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years, and life is a path we must follow, invariably, until the end. Is there change—or the hope of it? Yes, but change is wearing and bad for the nerves and almost always for the worse. So it was with Sal, the American-born son of Mexican immigrants who’d opened Salvador’s Café with a loan from his uncle James when he was still in his twenties, and now, nearly forty years later, saw his business take off like a rocket on the fuel of the five-pound burrito. Suddenly his homely café was a destination not only for his regulars and the famished and greedy of the neighborhood, but for the educated classes from the West Side who pulled up out front in their shining new German automobiles and stepped through the door as if they expected the floor to fall away beneath the soles of their running shoes and suck them down to some deeper, darker place.
This was change, positive change, at least at first. He hired a man to help with the dishes and the sweeping up and a second waitress, a young girl studying for her nursing degree who gave everybody in the place something to look at. And on the counter, raised at eye level on a cloth-covered pedestal, was the big butcher’s scale on which he ceremoniously weighed each dripping pork, chicken or beef burrito before Sepideh—or the new girl, Marta—made a show of hefting the supersized plate and setting it down laboriously in front of the customer who had ordered it. A man from the newspaper came. And then another. The line went around the block, and never mind Jesus.
Sal was there one early morning—typically he arose at five and was in the kitchen by six, preparing things ahead of time, and, of course, with success came the need for yet more preparation—when he felt a numinous shift in the atmosphere, as if those timid first-timers from the West Side had been right after all. The floor didn’t open up beneath him, of course, but as he cut meat from the bone and shucked avocados for guacamole, he felt the atmosphere permeated by a new presence, and no ordinary presence but the kind that makes a dog’s hackles rise when it sniffs at the shadows. For a moment he felt dizzy and wondered if he was having some sort of attack, the inevitable myocardial infarction or stroke that would bring him down for good, but the dizziness passed and he found himself in the kitchen still, the knife clenched in his hand and the cubes of pork gently oozing on the chopping block before him. He shook his head to clear it. Something was different, but he couldn’t say what.
The morning wore on in a fugue of chopping, dicing and tearing up over the emanations of habaneros and jalapeños, his back aching and his hands dripping with the juice of the hundred-millionth tomato of his resuscitated life, and he forgot all about it till the knock came at the alley door. This was the knock of Stanford Wong, who delivered produce to the restaurants of the neighborhood and was as punctual as the great clock in Greenwich, England, that kept time for the world. Sal wiped his hands on his apron and hurried to the door because Stanford, understandably, didn’t like to be delayed. There might have been a noise outside the door, a furtive scratching as of some animal trying to get in, but it didn’t register until he pulled back the door and saw that it wasn’t Stanford station
ed there at all but an erect five-and-a-half-foot rooster dressed in Stanford Wong’s khaki shorts and khaki shirt with the black plastic nameplate—Stanford—fixed over the breast.
Was he taken aback? Was he seeing things? He’d had his breakfast, hadn’t he? Yes, yes, of course: eggs. Chicken embryos. Fried in butter, topped with a sprinkle of Cotija cheese and served up on toast. He just stood there, blinking, but the bird, which somehow seemed to have hands as well as wings, was impatient and brushed by him with a crate of lettuce and half a dozen clear plastic bags of tomatillos, peppers and the like balanced against his—its?—chest, setting the load down on the counter and swinging round abruptly with Stanford’s receipt book in hand. But there were words now, the bird saying something out of a beak that snapped and glistened to show off a pink wedge of tongue, and yet the words made no sense unless you were to interpret them in the usual way, as in, Same order tomorrow? and You take care now.
The door swung shut. The crate sat astride the counter, just as it had yesterday and the day before and the day before that. It took him a moment—and maybe he’d better have another cup of coffee—before he went to the crate and began shoving heads of lettuce into the refrigerator, all the while thinking that there were two possibilities here. The first and most obvious was that he was hallucinating. The second and more disturbing was that Stanford Wong had been transformed into a giant rooster. Either way, the prospects could hardly be called favorable, and if he was losing his mind in the uproar over the five-pound burrito, who could blame him?
Next it was Sepideh, dressed in black skirt and white blouse, but with her head covered in feathers and her nose replaced by a dull puce beak and no shoes on her feet because her legs, her scaly yellow legs, supported not phalanges and painted toenails but the splayed naked claws of an antediluvian hen. She was never talkative, especially in the morning, but whatever she had to say to him came in a series of irritable clucks and gabbles, and he just—well, he just blew her off. Then came Marta and she was a hen too and by the time Oscar Martí, the cleanup man, showed his face, it was no surprise at all that he should be a rooster just like Stanford Wong—and, for that matter, once the door opened for business, that all the male customers should be crowing and flapping their wings, while their female counterparts clucked and brooded and held their own counsel over pocketbooks stuffed with eyeliner, compacts and lipstick that had no discernible purpose. Something was wrong here, desperately wrong, but work was work and whether he could understand what anybody was saying, customers or staff, really didn’t seem to matter, as everything by this juncture had been reduced to routine: spread the tortilla, crown it with toppings, fold it, dip the ladle in the salsa verde and serve it up on the big white scale.
That was Monday. Mondays were always a trial, what with forcing yourself back into the routine after the day of rest, the Lord’s day, when people went to church to wet their fingers with holy water and count their blessings. Sal locked up after work that night and if he noticed that everyone, every living man, woman and child on the streets and sealed behind the windows of their cars, was a member of a different species—poultry, that is—he didn’t let it affect him. Even so, the minute he came in the door of his apartment he went straight to the mirror in the bathroom and was relieved to see his own human face staring back at him out of drooping eyes. He poured himself a drink that night, a practice he found himself engaging in less and less as he got older, heated up a burrito (regular size) in the microwave, and watched reality TV till he couldn’t hold his eyes open anymore. It would be one thing to say that his dreams were populated with hens, roosters and bobbing chicks, but the fact was that he dreamed of nothing—or nothing he could remember on wakening. He was a blank canvas, tabula rasa. Mechanically, he shaved. Mechanically, he broke two eggs in a pan and laid three strips of bacon beside them, and he drove mechanically to work. In the dark.
When Stanford Wong’s knock came precisely at eight, Sal moved briskly to the door, his mood soaring on his second cup of coffee—with a shot of espresso to top it off—and the prospect of yet another record-setting day. If things kept up like this, he’d soon be sitting in a chair all day long watching the world come and go while the new grillman he’d hire and train himself did the dirty work. And it was all due to the inspiration of that day six months back when he’d brought out the scale and piled up the burrito and made his statement to the world. The five-pound burrito. It was a concept, an innovation unmatched by anybody in the city, whether they had a sit-down place or a lunch cart or even one of those eateries with the white tablecloths and the waiters who looked at you as if you belonged on the plate instead of sitting upright in a chair and putting in an order. People just couldn’t understand what it took to consume a burrito of that caliber—no individual, not even the greediest, most swollen footballer, could ever hope to get it all down in a single sitting. Though people placed bets and Sal had agreed to advertise that if you could manage to eat the whole thing, it was on the house. Very few could. In fact, only one man—skinny, Asian, the size of a child—was able to accomplish the feat incontrovertibly, and it turned out later that he was world famous as a competitive eater who’d won the Nathan’s hot dog–eating contest three years running.
But here was Stanford Wong’s knock, and as he opened the door, he didn’t know what to expect, least of all what he saw standing there before him on its hind legs—his hind legs. This wasn’t Stanford Wong and it wasn’t a chicken either—no, this was a hog, with pinched little hog’s eyes and a bristling inflamed snout, but it was dressed in Stanford Wong’s khaki shorts and khaki shirt with the black plastic nameplate fixed over the breast. It—he—trotted brusquely into the kitchen and set the crate of lettuce and plastic bags of vegetables on the counter, then swung round with Stanford Wong’s accounts ledger clutched under one arm and grunted and snuffled out a sentence or two that could only have meant, How they hangin’? and See you tomorrow, same order, right?
Right. So he chopped peppers and grilled pork and made a pot of albondigas soup, shredded lettuce and stirred up yesterday’s steam trays of rice and refritos and thought nothing of it when Sepideh appeared as a grunting old sow in her black skirt and white blouse and then Marta, resplendent in red shorts and a clinging top, in her guise as a smooth pink young shoat who nonetheless stood five feet seven inches tall on her cloven hoofs and managed to wield her tray and heft the big burritos as if she’d been born to it. As on the previous day, work consumed him, and if his customers vocalized in a cascade of snorts and aspirated grunts, it was all the same to him. Back at home that night he passed on the burrito left over from work, though he hated waste, and instead slipped a package of frozen meatless lasagna into the oven and poured himself not one but two drinks before he let the TV lull him into a dreamless sleep.
He found himself on edge the next morning and drank a cup of tea instead of coffee and had toast only instead of his usual fried eggs with bacon, ham or chorizo. It was dark as he drove to work and if his headlights happened to catch a figure walking along a shadowy street or spot a face behind an oncoming windshield, he made himself look away. What next? That was all he could think. Cattle, no doubt. Huge stinking lowing steers speaking their own arcane language and demanding big burritos, the biggest in town. When Stanford Wong’s knock came this time, he was prepared, or thought he was, but oh, how mistaken he turned out to be. This wasn’t Stanford Wong and it wasn’t a rooster or a hog or a steer either—it was an alien, and not one of the indocumentados of which his late sainted parents were representatives, but one of the true aliens, with their lizard skin, razor teeth and eyeballs like ashtrays. Of course, this one was wearing Stanford Wong’s clothing and was carrying his crate of lettuce, but its claws were wicked and long and scraped mercilessly at the linoleum, and when it spoke—How’s business? and That five-pounder’s going to make you rich—it could only hiss.
All day, as the aliens crowded the café and his own aliens, Sepideh and Marta, served them their big drippi
ng chile verde–drenched burritos, he kept wondering about their spaceship and if it was like the ones in the movies, all silver and gleaming and silent, and, more to the point, where they’d parked it. No matter. The aliens lashed at their food with a snap of their gleaming teeth and a quick release of their forked tongues and the cash register rang and the line went round the block.
It was around then, on that day, the third day, almost at closing time, that Sal saw a new face in the tortilla he laid on the grill for the burrito he was preparing for a big square-shouldered footballer alien. This face—the brow, the blind eyes and moving lips that swelled against the pressure of his tongs—was one that leapt out at him in its familiarity. And who was it? Not Jesus, no, but someone . . . someone more important even, if only to him. It was his father, the man who’d held him in his arms and pushed him on the swing and showed him how to grip a baseball and figure his equations in algebra—his father, dead these thirty years and more. The lips moved—and here Sal felt himself lifted into the arena of the fantastic—moved and spoke.
