Book Read Free

The Madonnas of Echo Park

Page 4

by Brando Skyhorse


  There are no windows in the restaurant, no way to keep track of the time passing outside. The light in here is thick and dark like rye bread. We’re seated at a booth and given oversize menus with gold tassels and the prices written in pen.

  “Want a drink?” Tenant asks.

  “No thank you, sir.”

  “Service can be a little slow in here,” he says and walks to the bar. It’s a short distance between our booth and the front door. If I were twenty years younger, I could run. I would run. Felicia said I’d made a pretty good life by running away. I could try my luck at a different parking lot, or another town, and leave this life behind. But where would I go? How would I get there? What else can I do?

  A pair of brown hands sets a large basket of cold sourdough slices on the table, making me jump. I’m amazed because I didn’t see the man approach, and because of how dark it is, I don’t see him leave.

  These are my hands, asking a guest with a simple gesture whether he is done with his meal. These hands stack the silverware and the bread plate atop the congealed demi-glace and uneaten vegetables on her dish, whisking them away with the swift, unobtrusive movements learned through years of steady repetition. These hands have bused tables of famous actors and actresses, producers and directors, mayors and councilmen, diplomats, and a former President of the United States. These hands collect fat wineglasses, red plastic drink stirrers, cocktail napkins with the restaurant’s logo emblazoned in gold type, and produce a silver bread-crumb comb that with no more than four broad sweeps across a laundered tablecloth collects any remaining food—in under thirty seconds (these hands have been timed with a stopwatch). Then these hands disappear, leaving time for coffee, dessert, liqueur, or a relaxed after-dinner conversation, creating an illusion that the table was bused on its own by a set of unseen hands, invisible hands that mother a city of infants.

  The Option was one of Hollywood’s oldest and most prestigious eateries. I brought Aurora there on the bus every Christmas Day when she was a child. She hated that my hands smelled like offal and wasn’t impressed with the grand, oak-and-glass-paneled front entrance where pen-and-ink caricatures of famous celebrities (my favorite was Rita Hayworth’s) looked down at customers from either side of a long, haunted corridor that appeared to expand as you walked along it.

  How I wished I could have eaten at a fancy American restaurant when I was a boy! The upholstered booths were as big as a Cadillac’s backseat. The prime seating tables had thousand-dollar centerpieces, some of which, when their bloom and scent faded, I’d set outside Felicia’s apartment, then, as the years passed and our separation grew longer and longer, on the front porch of the small house she bought with money she made as a cleaning lady. And the meal itself: big American-size portions of steak, potatoes, creamed spinach, and the house specialty, macaroni and cheese, an “off the menu” dish made one late evening a hundred seasons ago for a famished Humphrey Bogart and available to those “in the know” enough to ask for it (except those “in the know” had stopped coming years ago).

  Did my daughter imagine that every staff member was granted special privileges? How could she know that the holiday dinner (which took place in two separate dining rooms—one near the bar for aging celebrities, friends, and relatives of the head staff, and a second for the Mexican junior staff in a musty storage area) was a perk for those management considered important men, men with responsibilities who were valued and appreciated, and whose input was sought and respected?

  Aurora learned her lack of enthusiasm for my work from her mother. We had separated, but I’d hoped my dedication to a single job instead of a string of temporary, trashy new ones would impress her (“Your penis could learn a thing or two from your work ethic,” Felicia said). I wanted Felicia to marvel at how my peers in the restaurant respected and admired me, yet she cared nothing for my job, thought nothing of me clearing drinks from the mayor of Los Angeles Tom Bradley’s table, where he’d enjoyed the house’s signature martini (“A real Mexican would have spit in it,” she said). She had not one word of praise when I was promoted to head busboy because Aurora told her busboys are addressed by their first names, while waiters and senior staff are addressed with an honorific Mr. Aurora, who was tending to her own simmering cauldron of anger, didn’t understand busboy was one step away from waiter, though The Option had never hired (and with its closing, never would) a Mexican waiter. How could I explain to someone who never worked in a restaurant that this fixed hierarchy was not a symptom of prejudice? From how I described my workday, Aurora found a hundred perceived slights a week I didn’t have the pride to correct.

  Rarer still were Felicia’s visits to the restaurant. I made sure the busboys who reported to me were on their toes and showed me respect. She felt I mistook their obedience for loyalty, their briskness for a sense of purpose or direction (“I see where you get that from,” she said). These men and my bosses, she said, were conspiring against me, ridiculing my imperceptible accent, shortchanging my fair share of tips, and loading my sommelier’s tests (one could not become a waiter without passing one) with obscure European wines the restaurant didn’t serve, relegating me to the restaurant’s bottom caste. Of course she’d never heard anything terrible; neither had I. Whispers were extinguished whenever I turned a corner into the kitchen. But she believed the taste of some offensive conversation lingered in the air, dangling on the edge of a testy comment I recounted about the junior staff not “understanding clear instructions” or how any requests to amend a work schedule had to be made “in writing and in English.” Her life, in which she had always believed in the transcendence of fury, set an example for her daughter to turn against her father, excommunicating me to a nether region of the living dead, a place where the deceased form new families, creating and inventing new histories and biographies, while the ones left behind announce their demise with the ripping of mailbox labels and pictures in two.

  Then the building craze came and The Option lost its lease. The land was to be razed for a multimillion-dollar apartment complex and parking garage that was never built after the craze found its senses. Aurora, now a beautiful, angry young girl of nineteen, accepted my invite to our closing night party. My special job was to help garnish slices of a five-tier cake with caviar, costing seventeen thousand dollars. Our self-anointed sous chef (he received neither the title nor the money), Felix, had brought from home a boom box and set it in the kitchen. A wiry Central Valley–born Mexican, he turned it to a Spanish station for the Mexican junior staff, who weren’t invited into the main dining room for the restaurant’s senior-staff finale celebration.

  The head sommelier came to supervise while I bent over the cake like a sinner doing penance. He asked the waiter and sous chef to lean close so he could share something with them. I couldn’t make out most of their conversation, save the ending, where the sommelier said aloud, “Guess what his nickname is?” The group exploded in laughter, repeating that odd punch line as if they were speaking their own language in a room of foreigners. I was unperturbed, my hands placing spoonfuls of caviar in gentle dollops along the cake’s ridges.

  “They’re talking about you,” Aurora said. She was standing against a wall, arms folded, looking severe and disappointed—an identical image of her mother.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” I said.

  “You never do. Excuse me,” she asked, “what is his nickname?”

  The three men either ignored her or couldn’t hear her over the radio, so she repeated her question.

  “What are you asking?” the sommelier said.

  “His nickname,” she said. “My father. What is his nickname?”

  “Oh, we weren’t talking about him,” the sommelier said.

  “It was a restaurant joke, chica,” Felix said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “What is his nickname?” she asked again, louder.

  “We don’t have time for this,” the waiter said. “They’re waiting for the cake.”

  “Auror
a,” I said. “Don’t.”

  “What is his nickname!” she demanded.

  My hand felt the slap on her face before my brain did. The waiter rushed to wheel the cake out of the kitchen, followed by the sommelier, his head bent down in shame. Felix turned back to his station.

  Aurora said nothing. She picked up the radio and carried it out of the kitchen. I watched her walk away, mesmerized, the boisterous ranchera music echoing through the tight corridors that led to the dining room.

  Atop an unused busing station, amid a maze of tables garnished with fine silver and crystal, the rows of extravagant buffet trays and carving stations, the hundreds of guests (many of whose youthful and now almost unrecognizable caricatures graced the front entrance) talking, laughing, and reminiscing in various states of drunkenness, sat the boom box, playing ranchera music at top volume. Aurora was cutting through the crowd to the front door, the curls of her long black hair cascading down her back like steam. That was the last time I saw her.

  Felix raced to turn off the music, yet the crush of revelers made a short trip across the room a series of complicated dips, elbowings, and double-backs. The Mexican staff filed out to watch him juggle his limbs through the dining room. Some of them laughed, craning their necks, but continued working in the kitchen. Others were bolder, wading out into the room as if they were entering the deep end of a pool.

  I straddled some invisible line between the two. I debated whether to rush in and tackle the boom box or retreat into the kitchen, humiliated, and leave out the back door before I could be scolded and denied a reference for another restaurant. A decision had to be made. I stood fixed in my spot, paralyzed, and clasped my coarse hands together, wondering if they were strong enough for outdoor work. I hadn’t noticed one of the busboys tapping me on the shoulder, asking, “¿Porqué estas orando?” (Why are you praying?)

  Tenant sits down with a loud plumph and slides into the booth with a drink.

  “Tough work out there today, wasn’t it?” he says, not waiting for my answer. He drains his glass in two gulps. His face has deep but smooth crevasses, scrubbed free from guilt, fear, or shame. “You know that behind every American worker are a couple of Mexicans doing his job? Course, you can’t see them because they’re so goddamned short.”

  Tenant clinks the ice in his drink, eyeing me to see whether it’s okay to laugh. It’s strange he needs this permission.

  “I’m sorry. That’s a bad joke.” He chuckles. “Came out an insult. You Mexicans are the new niggers in this country, which is a real shame ’cause nobody in this damn country realizes how hard all you guys work. No offense meant. I like you. I like you because I can trust you. In fact, I want to give you something.”

  He pulls five one-hundred-dollar bills from his wallet. “That’s for today. That’s for you.”

  “I get eighty-five dollars for the time I worked,” I say.

  “No, that’s the pay for the other men. You’re more of a manager. This is manager pay.”

  “I’m not a manager,” I say.

  “Sure you are. See, a work site is a dangerous place. Accidents happen every day. We almost had one on the way over here with that bus, right? That’s why we need someone to manage things for us. You know what a manager does, don’t you? He makes sure everything runs smooth, and if there’s a problem, he takes care of it. We have a problem, and because I trust you, I want you to take care of it.”

  Adam walks into the restaurant and heads straight to our booth. He’s changed clothes, and his arms and hands have been scrubbed with soap; there’s not a sliver of dirt under his fingernails.

  “Hec here’s going to help ‘manage’ the problem you created earlier this afternoon,” Tenant says.

  “Fine with me,” Adam says and motions a waiter I don’t see for a drink. “As long as he knows how to keep his fucking spic mouth shut. One call to La Migra and he’s headed back to Mexico.”

  I know this, and it terrifies me. It terrifies me because Mexico doesn’t exist for me. I have no memory of it. I was a few months old when my mother brought us to Los Angeles from my birth home in Guanajuato. We settled in a Mexican neighborhood called Chavez Ravine but were evicted when the city took back the land to build Dodger Stadium. Mexico is as foreign to me as Mars, Paris, or Florida. I have no heartbreaking story of the journey here; the heartbreaking story is here, in this small couple of square miles of land called Echo Park. Running through the desert, trying to stay ahead of the border patrol or the Minutemen or the coyotes or the rats isn’t the story. It isn’t the getting here, it’s the staying here.

  “Accidents happen every day, don’t they, Hector?” Tenant asks, sliding the money over to me. “Now let’s have a few drinks, a nice meal, then you’ll manage our problem and that will be that. Okay?” I pocket the money while Tenant and Adam discuss the Victorian job.

  It’s night outside when we’re done eating. Tenant opens up one of the side compartments on the pickup truck.

  “Your first managerial duty is to get rid of this thing,” he says, looking at me from the corner of his eye. “The lake’s right down the road. I’ll leave the details up to you.”

  The sledgehammer lies atop a thick sheet of black tarp. Small clumps of black hair are matted to the hammer’s tip with blood and a hardened, gelatinous membrane that looks like skin.

  “Go ahead,” Adam says. “Pick it up.” I reach for the hammer and then pull my hands away.

  “Do you have gloves?” I ask.

  “Fuck you,” Adam says. “Wipe it down before you ditch it.”

  While I tie the sledgehammer in the tarp with some frayed twine, Tenant whispers something into Adam’s ear. They look at me and laugh.

  “What did you say?” I ask.

  “Don’t worry,” Tenant says. “Bad joke. You wouldn’t understand.”

  A short walk down a hill from the restaurant is Echo Park Lake, where the annual Lotus Festival is being held this weekend. Every July, thousands of people from across the city sample Polynesian, Filipino, Malaysian, and Hawaiian foods, most of which are served grilled with pineapple and on wooden skewers, along with the assortment of offerings from Mexican taco stands and cotton candy, popcorn, and funnel cake stands. Wandering amid throngs of people flitting back and forth in front of me like fireflies, I see dozens of inconspicuous places I can leave the sledgehammer. A foul-smelling stall in the public men’s room; a battalion of Dumpsters lined up near Glendale Boulevard; any of a hundred trash piles collecting behind the food stalls. The most brazen approach would be to walk up to the lake, lay it on the ground, and kick it into the water. Yet whenever I think of leaving it somewhere, the conditions don’t seem right. I catch someone talking on their cell phone looking at me strange, or I see several open spots in a trash pile—where someone could nose around and stumble across it.

  I wander from the spinning buckets to the jerking buckets to the thrashing buckets to the Ferris wheel, whose neon lights sizzle and pop into brightness. Basking in this light is a young woman feeling her way through the crowd, like a blind person searching for her misplaced sight—lost but determined. She’s about my daughter’s age and has a sweaty, radiant glow, the kind you get from spending your day in the sun or being in the sudden presence of the miraculous. That’s what I felt watching her. She could very well be what my daughter would look like now, bursting with courage, desire, and pain of her own instead of the hurt and longing she inherited from me. That day at The Option was fifteen years ago. What would she think of her father wandering around a park filled with happy families on a summer night, trying to dispose of a murder weapon? I had five hundred dollars in my pocket, enough to get me as far north as San Francisco, and I hadn’t even made a pathetic attempt to run. Was I too exhausted to act a coward?

  A cluster of fireworks explode in the sky, lighting my path to a large trailer serving as the LAPD’s portable drunk tank. Several cops are standing on the trailer’s steps enjoying the display. I stand with them and bask in the flickerin
g lights until one of the cops notices me.

  “What you got there, pops?” a Mexican cop asks.

  “It’s a murder weapon.” He takes a step forward, unsure if I’m drunk, his hand falling to his holster. “I’ve been paid to dispose of it.” I hand the sledgehammer over.

  “Okay, why don’t we come inside and talk about it?”

  The drunk tank is lit with fluorescent lights, loud as humming-birds. He scrapes a metal folding chair across the floor and sets it next to his desk.

  “Okay. Are you a citizen? ¿Es usted ciudadano de los Estados Unidos de América?”

  “A citizen?”

  “Sí, Americano, de dónde eres. You speak English okay, but I need to ask anyway.”

  Anyone who works on the street knows there’s a rule in L.A. the cops have: Special Order 40, or what the trabajadores call “santo cuarenta.” The cops can’t stop you if they think you’re an illegal, only if they think you’re an illegal about to commit a crime. This is to encourage illegals to come forward if they have information about a crime. They also can’t hold you for more than twenty-four hours if the one thing they’ve got on you is that you’re an alien. It’s tougher in L.A. for illegals now, meaning cops have to ask you where you’re from no matter what. But as long as you lie and tell them you’re from here, they won’t check your background or report you to immigration. As long as you lie.

  “¿Es usted ciudadano de los Estados Unidos de América?” he asks again.

 

‹ Prev