It's three in the morning but there are a lot of people in here. The place is long and thin, a long counter down the middle, the grill and fry vats and hot bins and cold bins and drink dispensers behind it, round stools on the customer side. Along the front wall are booths with vinyl padded benches and linoleum top tables. A dark-haired waitress built like a fireplug and a blond Nordic-looking cook are behind the counter. The cook is tall and has to lean to the side to see under the fume hood over the grill. The waitress looks at me as I sit down at the chipped linoleum counter. Everyone, including the cook, looks at me. Looks at me like I'm an alien. I remember that I am.
The waitress waddles over and snaps her gum. She hands me a menu and smiles, but not like a real smile, more like just showing her teeth.
“¿Como Esta?” I say. My Spanish is pretty limited, but I do the accent good.
“Eh, bien, bien,...” the waitress says. She says a lot more stuff, but I don't understand it. I nod and humph and open up the menu. It is half in Spanish, half English, but I can tell by the structure that the items on the English half aren't exactly the same as the items on the Spanish half. The waitress stops talking. She's just looking at me like she wants me to say something.
That look where her eyebrows are up.
“Burrito con pollo, caliente, por favor.” I say.
She looks at me another moment. Her mouth quirks off to the side and a little air comes out her nose like a horse does sometimes.
"You mean 'picante', " she says, in English, "Not 'caliente'. Caliente is hot like temperature.
Picante is hot like spicy. You want it spicy, right? That's what you meant?"
She's looking at me, her face down a little, eyes looking out from under her brows. She is being very patient with me. I am a slow, stupid Turista trying to fool the locals. She is not fooled, but she will take pity. That's what I see in her eyes.
"Si," I say.
She nods and goes over to the cook. Says something I can't hear to him. The cook reaches into a stainless steel bin and pulls out a handful of stuff that could be chunks of chicken in sauce. He drops the handful on the grill. The grill hisses and sends up a cloud of steam or smoke. He uses the spatula in his other hand to stir the little pile around on the grill. He wipes the first hand on his apron.
Some change in lighting makes me glance to the right. A large man with a huge belly is coming up the aisle toward me. One of his eyes is swollen shut and his lips look puffed under his drooping mustache, but he is smiling. His Grateful Dead T-shirt doesn’t quite cover his enormous stomach. Looks like it takes great concentration for him to move his feet. He keeps moving one hand from booth back to booth back as he comes up the aisle.
“Hey, Amigo,” he says. He's walking toward me, talking in Spanish or maybe even English but his voice is so full of whatever he's been drinking or smoking or ingesting that I can't understand any of it. He comes closer. Leans on the counter. And against my shoulder. I nod at him and try to smile. Try to push against him, to push him away, but he is heavier than Barney was.
"¿Eh?" he says, "¿Eh?"
I don't know what he was saying. Don't know how to answer him. Look around for the waitress. She's down at the other end of the counter taking an order, but she sees me looking for her. She nods in my direction.
I've got my left arm out, braced against the counter. Hand holding the edge of the counter really tight. Right hand holding the counter in front of my chest, holding really tight. Left leg braced out to the side, all trying to hold this guy up. All trying to keep this guy from pushing me off my stool. Afraid if I don't hold him up he'll fall down and he'll be mad, or everyone else will be mad.
The waitress comes back, not walking fast.
"Tonio!" she says. "Ay, Tonio!"
Tonio is not paying attention. Tonio is still leaning on me and talking in my face, his breath like the dog's breath. Like Barney's breath.
"Tonio!" the waitress says again and grabs his arm and shakes.
Tonio's head rocks back and forth on his round shoulders and his eyes go out of focus. He turns to look at the waitress.
"¡Vamonos!" she said. "¡Basta ya!"
Did she just call him a bastard? I don't know. Tonio looks at her, head still waving back and forth.
"Pero," Tonio says.
"No pero," the waitress says, "Vamanos. Ahora mismo, Tonio."
Tonio shifts one leg and braces himself up off my shoulder. I relax my grip on the counter. Tonio turns, one hand on the counter. He pushes himself off in the direction of the door. He takes two steps and stops. He lets out a huge combination belch and fart. He wipes his sleeve across his face, takes three steps like he's trying to keep from falling face down. He goes out the door.
The waitress makes some kind of aside to me that only later I came to realize contained the word loco. Spanish is like that for me; a lot of it takes a while to sink in.
She brings my food and I eat. It is both caliente and picante.
* * *
I step out into the four in the morning darkness heat and dust of Mexican border towns, cars growling by on the main drag a block away and shouts and music going up from the bars and strip joints. Two drunken soldiers stumble up to me on leave from Fort Fuckin' Irwin and they'd already been through the naval base in Sandy Yago. San D. Eggo. Beat the shit out of some of those sissified sailors up there and then escaped on down cross the border into Tijuana. One leans heavily on the arm of the other who looks ahead into a future of darkness so grim and sobering that he isn't quite drunk enough yet, not quite blasted enough, still having some sense of the enormity of the horror which he had faced every day. Every day back in the Gulf War, the Line In The Sand, buster, that war, Operation Desert Fucking Storm, y'know! We buried 'em! We just brought up the big old armored bulldozers after the fuckin' air force'd bombed the shit out of 'em and strafed 'em and sent those fuckin' rockets in. We just rolled on up to the trenches in our huge steamrolling bulldozers and buried 'em fuckin' alive and they begged and pleaded and ran and we shot them yellow fuckers in the backs since they wouldn't stand 'n fight! And then I got wounded in the knee and ended up at that field hospital y'know the one where the goddam Scud fell out of the sky and blew away my best buddy just blew him the fuck away he was hangin' there, y'know, he was hangin' off the edge of his fuckin' cot, just blood pumpin' out of his heart right onto the floor like a fuckin' fountain and he looked at me. Right into my eyes like No Way, Man, Fuck! He was dyin' No Doubt, and I go "Dude!" and he goes "Shit!" and he tries to put his hand up over that big humonguos hole in his chest but it's like he's got no control... No fuckin' control...
His eyes slide off of mine; they had never really seen me, but he shifts his grip on his passed out pal and lets his eyes go down the street. Eyes like hollow steel bearings, pinballs, dull from years of misuse, they skip down the buildings on the calle until they find the neon name blinking of the bar he'd heard about where they serve the most wicked concoction ever brewed and called it Soldier's Amnesia. He mumbles something and shuffles off, dragging his comatose friend like an albatross.
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