Tequila Tears
I’d been walking through La Paz for nine hours with little more than blisters to show for it. I was hungry. Sick of tacos, I wanted American food. I found a place, El Kabong, or something.
A sweaty, wrinkle encrusted waiter came suspiciously sideways from the kitchen like he was trying to hide a little hard-on. He looked vaguely familiar. I ordered a hamburger. He rolled his eyes like a straight man on The Lucy Show. “We don’t have hemburger.”
“I came in here because of the big HAMBURGER sign out front. You don’t have any hamburgers?”
“No.”
Frustrated, I ordered a Pacifico. He said, “We have Sprite, it’s like 7-Up.”
And I said, “I’m aware of the similarity, and although I’ve tried Sprite and think it’s delightfully refreshing, at this time I prefer drinking Pacifico.”
Two guys drank shots of tequila at a nearby table. One was giving me looks. The kind straight Gringos don’t want in a dark restaurant in Mexico. By the way, from now on, we want to be called Hetero-sensuals. I am aware that some heterosensuals imagine other guys want to fuck them, just like they imagine women want to fuck them too. This guy meant business. He was licking out his shot glass growling, sticking his tongue out and tickling his own earwax with it. He blew me kisses, waving a yellow feather boa for Christ sake, what was I supposed to think?
The waiter returned with a Pacifico and a Sprite, chips and salsa. The chips were burned black and the salsa looked like a steaming bowl of regurgitated pelican effluvia. I tried to order, but he said the kitchen was ‘out of food.’
“No food. No comida? You’re closing for dinner?”
“Si. We are closing for the dinner.”
There was some sort of singing or sobbing coming from the kitchen. Baffled, I got the hell out.
The next day as I left my hotel, the waiter stood outside my door. I remembered where I’d seen him before, at my hotel, The One Armed Woman, in his room on his bed in his shorts with the door open, smoking, staring into my room, where I sat on my bed in my shorts with the door open, smoking, staring back. We were neighbors!
He held out a bottle of tequila. I took it and allowed myself a formidable swallow. I said, “Jose! Jose Cuervo. I’ll have the hamburger and a Pacifico.”
He apologized in broken Spanglish for the shitty service. He said everyone had partied too hard the night before. The cooks had thrown up in the salsa, and they refused to work, so all the employees got drunk instead. “Didn’t you see them?” he asked, “the cooks were sitting right next to you.”
We took the bottle out onto the balcony, overlooking palm trees, the Sea of Cortez. Jose told me he’d been to Oregon once, years ago. Was arrested with five kilos of cocaine and was deported.
The tequila made me mention the eighth sign of the apocalypse at Clackamas Town Center mall: Hot Dog On A Stick, and how they employ young women with thin bodies and colossal breasts, force them to ram dynamite plungers up and down, bouncing dramatically in colorful tank tops, to create juice of some kind from citrus, while people stroll by wondering what on God’s green and blue marbleoid it’s all supposed to mean.
Misty, through tequila tears, Jose said to me, “Juan, one day I will return to Oregon I will go to the mall. I will go see this Hot Dog On A Stick of which you speak.”
“I’ll be there,” I laughed. And like the sun, the bottle set.