The Flamenco Academy

by Sarah Bird

  Our boss and the owner of Puppy, Alejandro Trujillo, just shook his head when he found Didi slacking or sleeping. He was a good guy, always telling me I should look out for myself more. But Alejandro and everyone who thought Didi was using me were not getting the whole picture. The whole picture was that I was out of my house and I wasn’t thinking about Daddy. The whole picture was that when I was with Didi I could breathe.

  The highlight of senior year was the night the Strokes came to town. Through her Internet sources, Didi found out they were coming before the tour dates were even set. That gave her a long lead time to consult with other groupies online, like the Kumfort Gurlz in Phoenix, who told her that Julie had a thing for Japanese anime. With that information, she put together a killer Japanese schoolgirl outfit complete with pigtails, sailor-collared middy blouse, chunky Mary Janes, kneesocks, and a pleated skirt so short she had to bikini wax.

  We already knew from chatting up the Hertz Rent-a-Car guy that the band was staying at the Hilton on University. My job when we got to the Hilton was to stand guard and watch for managerial types. Didi, holding the red vinyl zippered Domino’s Pizza delivery case that she’d stolen for just such occasions, went up to the reception desk. Her Japanese schoolgirl pigtails were tucked under a red, gold, green, and black Rasta cap. Jeans and a schlubby T-shirt covered the rest.

  As always, Deeds had done her homework and had the name of a roadie written on the Domino’s order slip. Deeds gave the front desk clerk the guy’s name, checking the order slip as if she couldn’t remember what it was.

  The clerk, who’d no doubt already parried teams of hyperventilating teen girls, balked. “The Strokes put a hold on all deliveries.”

  “Strobes?” Didi acted like she didn’t recognize the name. “I don’t know from Strobes.” Maybe because of the pizza, maybe because the Strokes were from New York, Didi slipped into her best Goodfellas goombah impersonation. “This”—she paused to check the order slip where she’d written the roadie’s name—“Justin Patterson, he ordered a pie. I’m delivering a pie. End of story.” She rapped the reception desk with her knuckles. “You explain to him why he didn’t get his pie, okay, pal?”

  As she was pivoting away, the clerk, half realizing he was being tooled, but also half not wanting to risk infuriating a hungry roadie, called after her, “Five-twenty-six.”

  Didi never finagled the room number of the famous guys, the ones she was really after, which was anyone who got onstage. The clerks knew better than that. They might give her the number of a roadie or the chiropractor traveling with the band. But that small opening was always enough for Didi, who, once she got into fame’s orbit, could always manage to home in on the celestial body with the heaviest gravity.

  I casually joined Didi on the elevator. As soon as the doors closed and we were hidden from the clerk’s view, we jumped up and down squealing a few times before she handed me the Domino’s box, Rasta cap, and the jeans and T-shirt she stripped off. We got off at the fifth floor. Didi stopped at the mirror above a dried flower arrangement, fluffed up her pigtails, spritzed on some CK One, and spit her gum into the sand of the ashtray imprinted with the hotel’s logo. We found room 526 and Didi collected herself before knocking.

  As usual, a lank-haired roadie who looked as if he’d just gotten up answered the door. The room behind him was filled with roadies and sound-men who had the same stunned, hungover look. It was like the day room at a mental ward with everyone smoking—cigarettes, joints—and the room littered with hamburger wrappers and Big Gulp cups. Someone was watching Reservoir Dogs on cable. As always, it amazed me to see Didi turn on her high-wattage charm for these losers, angling for backstage passes and access to someone higher on the rock ‘n’ roll food chain. The guys beamed big as troops at a USO show as Didi stepped into the room.

  “Where’s Julie?” was her first question. She never had any problems getting what she wanted. I handed the princess to the rock plebeians who would deliver her to their aristocrats and then I left.

  I remember everything about the next morning. Sunday morning when Mom went to worship services at the HeartLand compound was my only time to be alone with Daddy and I looked forward to it all week. Even though she never said it, my mom was punishing me for being friends with Didi by banning me from the sickroom. She shooed me out, saying that it upset Daddy for me to see how bad off he was. It didn’t. She was the only who was upset. If I objected, though, she’d get even more twitchy and weird. She’d make her tiny hands into tiny fists that she’d shake beside her pink head until it turned red while she shrieked, “I can’t take it! I can’t take it!” louder and louder. I knew she was wrong, but what difference did that make? I’d tell her I was sorry and to, please, calm down. Then she would blubber and tell me I had to stop being so difficult, that she couldn’t take any more. She told me that I was lucky, I had inherited Daddy’s strong nerves and I had no idea what she was enduring. I had to be strong the way Daddy always had been or else.

  Or else what? I wanted to ask because I didn’t want to imagine how things could get worse than they were.

  When Daddy and I were alone on Sunday, he tried to tell me not to let my mother bother me, but it was getting harder and harder for him to talk. I’d heard her on the phone the week before saying, “No! No hospice. We don’t need hospice here and we don’t need talk like that.” I knew what hospice meant and it scared me. I was scared all the time except for when I was with Didi. Not that we ever talked much about our fathers. But, at odd times, like when we were in the middle of a burnfest on what goobers the Pueblo Heights Whore-nuts were, she’d stop, catch my eye, and ask, “You doing okay?” I never did much more than nod, but I didn’t have to. That question was everything I needed. It said that she understood that about 99 percent of the time I was putting up a front and if I didn’t, I’d start crying and never stop. That my life was horrible and we both knew it was going to get a lot worse.

  That morning Daddy had seemed good. There wasn’t much he liked to eat anymore, but I’d discovered the perfect mixture of Cream of Wheat and butter and melted ice cream and had helped him eat five spoonfuls before he fell back, exhausted. Then, huffing out one word on each breath, he asked, “How. Is. Old. Sometimes. Y?”

  It had been a while since he’d teased me about my imaginary boyfriend with the last name full of vowels and I laughed too loud and too much when he did. Still, it made him happy and I joked back, “Oh, Sometimes Y and I are through. I’m dating a Hawaiian boy now. Ahahkahluauluau.”

  He wheezed out a laugh that was the equivalent of hysterics for him. The effort wore him out and he slid back into sleep. He was snoozing when the church van pulled up in front and dropped my mom off. I slipped out the back before she came in and walked to work.

  At Puppy Taco, I clocked in for me and Didi and did the prep work, shredding the pale iceberg lettuce, slicing pulpy tomatoes, crying over the onions I had to chop up for the burgers. In addition to all the regular stuff, on Sundays it was Alejandro’s tradition to add a few New Mexican specialties to the menu. He shopped the night before and left everything in the refrigerator. Nothing microwaved. On Sunday we actually cooked. I pulled out a couple of fifty-count bags of blue corn tortillas and dragged them through the red chile that Alejandro’s mother made by soaking dried red chiles until she could scrape the pulp off the skins and cook that with pork shoulder.

  I rolled up a batch of pork enchiladas, another of beef, some with just asadero cheese, covered them with sauce and cheese, and slid the pans into the industrial oven. I made another batch with green chile sauce. On Sundays Alejandro banished fries and tots in favor of sopaipillas. I had just lowered the first batch into the fryer and the shop was filling with the heavenly smell of yeast and flour they made as they puffed up when the high-pitched shriek of a transmission in its final days alerted me that the Skankmobile approached. I glanced out through the drive-up window in time to see Didi run the red light at Central and Monroe before cutting into the parking
lot.

  She squealed up in the ’Stang and jumped out, grabbing the hideous striped uniform shirt we were supposed to wear, and which Didi might occasionally drape over her real clothes. Her real clothes that day were the Japanese schoolgirl drag she’d been wearing last night when I’d left her at the Hilton. That morning, watching her dance through the parking lot, I was struck by how spindly, how vulnerable she looked. Her short skirt showed off the speed freak figure she attributed to ADD. Didi maintained that her attention deficit disorder kept her distracted from food. My theory was that she didn’t have ADD. She only claimed to so she could get prescriptions for the Ritalin that kept her too speeded up to eat. Or sleep. Sleeping was something she clearly hadn’t done much of last night.

  She jerked the back door open, stepped in, and threw her arms open. “Ah, the smell of five-month-old fryer grease on a Sunday morning. Who needs church when we have Puppy Taco?” Didi grabbed a handful of the slurpy tomatoes I’d just sliced up, slid them into her mouth like oysters, and closed her eyes against what was obviously a monster hangover.

  “Somewhere in the depths of my bowels today’s tomatoes will meet last night’s Stoli and create the perfect Bloody Mary.”

  “So did he show?”

  She played it cool. “Who?”

  “Who! Julie, of course.”

  “Ah, Julie.” She imported a look of fond remembrance. “Dear, sweet, naughty Julie.”

  “Tell! Tell! Tell!”

  “Hydrate! Hydrate! Hydrate!” She turned on the water in the giant, industrial-sized sink, stuck her hand under the flow, siphoned about a gallon into her mouth, then collapsed onto the upturned mop bucket, her skinny rear fitting perfectly between the wheels on the bottom, legs straight out in front with that Bambi-on-the-ice kind of sexy cuteness. She heaved a big sigh and leaned her head back against the wall. Being Didi Steinberg, Queen of Albuquerque Groupies, took a lot out of a person.

  “So?” I prompted.

  “So our Julie learned more than Swiss at that fancy boarding school, if you know what I mean. And I think you do.”

  “Uh, they don’t actually speak Swiss in Switzerland. I mean, there isn’t actually a Swiss language. They speak French and German and—”

  “Don’t nerd out on me, Rae, okay?”

  “Sorry. Just keeping the details straight.” That was my job in our friendship. Keeping the details straight.

  “So he came back to the hotel? You met him?”

  “Met him? Uh, yeah, I ‘met’ him.” Didi rolled onto her right hip and hiked up her skirt to show me the bottom half of her left cheek. A red hickey, purpling at the edges, floated across it like an end-of-the-world sunset. Above the hickey were penned the initials J.C.

  “No effing way?” I shrieked.

  “Yes, fucking way.”

  “And...”

  “You know how sublime and divine and scrumpo he is in videos?”

  I nodded wildly to affirm the intense Casablancas scrumphood.

  “Times, like, a thousand in person.”

  I was too engrossed to pay any attention to the pinging that signaled the arrival of our first customer of the day. Didi was singing a song about the dimples at the top of Julian Casablancas’s butt in what she told me was the Strokes’ New York/Velvet Underground style when Alejandro strolled in, fresh from Mass at Our Lady of Fatima.

  “You gonna open anytime soon?” he asked, nodding toward the car waiting at the take-out window as he carefully hung up his brown suit jacket.

  The reason Alejandro was so casual about us not working was that he knew Didi was our star. Her hours during the week were sporadic, but she was guaranteed to be there on Sunday. Over the months Didi had been in his employ, she’d built up a following until Sunday was the busiest day of the week for Puppy Taco. And Alejandro knew it wasn’t all because of his enchiladas verdes. That day was no exception. I peeked out the window. The cars were already lined up around the store and spilling out onto Central. There was some form of male behind the wheel of every vehicle. Old geezer males getting lunch burgers for wifey back at home; young horny males yucking it up in Dad’s borrowed Explorer; sad, lonely males who told themselves there was something special about Pup y Taco’s tater tots and that was why they had to make a special trip there every Sunday, only to be reminded that Sunday was the one day we didn’t sell tots. Just sopaipillas.

  I spun around and pushed up the big, old-fashioned take-out window. I wished that Alejandro would install a high-tech speaker system so that customers could order into a scratchy box. But, if Pup y Taco had that instead of a window, Didi wouldn’t have had a stage and Sunday morning was all about Didi being onstage.

  The fryer dinged.

  “Uh, Cyndi Rae...”

  “Rae,” I corrected him.

  Alejandro still called me by the name he’d copied off my driver’s license when he’d first hired us. My old name. The name I used to go by before Didi dubbed me Rae and I stopped answering to anything else. Even Daddy called me Rae. Mom was the only one who called me Cyndi Rae anymore. I liked it that she identified me as someone I had stopped being. That she was still calling a number that had been disconnected.

  “Right, Rae, sorry. Listen, would you mind...?” Alejandro’s question trailed off as he nodded toward the fryer. What he didn’t have to say was Rae, you wanna get the fryer so Didi’s fans can catch a glimpse of their queen and we can sell more hot dogs and chile cheeseburgers on Sunday morning than we do any other three days put together?

  “Didi? You ready?” he asked, sounding like a celebrity handler coaxing a star onstage.

  Didi heaved herself to her feet, then paused a second, turning away from the window. When she turned back around, she’d done that thing she did where one second she looks completely beat to shit; then she gathers herself and uncorks some mysterious inner light and she’s beaming a thousand watts. That was the face the males making their Sunday pilgrimage saw. The face of a girl who had something they only glimpsed on television, in movies. Not beauty, exactly, but something more exciting, more alive. Something that made them want to keep looking, keep coming back to a not-so-great taco place every Sunday morning.

  “Hey, Key Biscayne,” Didi greeted her first regular, an old guy still in his Sunday suit, smelling of Old Spice, ear hairs all nicely clipped, getting the lunch burgers. “Three number sevens, hold the green chile, right?”

  “That’s right, Didi,” he chirped back.

  “Hey, come on, man, what’s a Fiesta Burger without the green chile? Live a little, try the green chile. My boss’s mom makes it herself. You look like you could use a little spice in your life.”

  “Twist my arm,” he said, holding a spindly limb out, which Didi pretended to wring. And so, Key Biscayne got the green chile along with the biggest thrill he would have all week.

  “You got it under control, Cyndi Rae?” Alejandro asked, as I assembled the three Fiestas, all the way.

  I nodded, already moving on to the next order that Didi had stuck on the clip in front of me. “Under control, Alejandro,” I said, as he headed out the back door, smiling at the line of cars circling his business.

  He stopped at the door and gestured for me to come closer. “Make her do some of the work.”

  “Yeah, that’ll be the day.”

  Alejandro and I glanced at Didi who was leaning over so that a load of guys from Pueblo Heights High School, the driver with a newly minted learner’s permit and his mom’s Subaru Forester, could get a nice peek at the Steinberg mammaries.

  “Hello, you wacky Whore-nuts.” The guys’ pimples flared red in excitement. “How many rocks of crack can I get you gentlemen today?”

  One especially twerpy kid with the hair at the front of his head waxed into a fin yelled out of the back window. “Hey, where’s the other Skankette?”

  That was my signal to step forward and put my arm around Didi’s shoulders while we yelled, “The hos are in the house!”

  “Yo! Yo! Yo! Skankettes!” the
boys shouted as I waved my greasy spatula.

  I loved the psychological jujitsu Didi did on her bad-girl reputation, turning the snickers behind her back, the whispered “ho” and “skank,” into our badges of honor. So that’s who we were, the Skankettes in Didi’s Scarlet Letter-red Skankmobile.

  Alejandro snorted, shook his head, and walked out. Maybe neither Alejandro nor I was wearing a black T-shirt with thirty tour dates printed on it, but in our own way we were both happy to be carrying the amps, happy to be part of the show.

  For the next few hours, I fried sopaipillas and boxed up enchiladas. I assembled tacos, burritos, and Mexi-dogs while Didi applied lip liner, tweezed her eyebrows, restyled her hair into a couple dozen twisted tufts of mini-dreadlocks, scribbled a few orders, raved about Julian Casablancas, whom she may or may not have actually met, and, mostly, worked the crowd. Like groupieing, working the crowd was also something Didi considered practice for when she became famous. She kept score of how many return fans she lured back to Puppy, giving herself extra bonus points for females.

  After the initial rush of backed-up cars subsided, Didi handed the order pad to me and flopped back down on the mop bucket where she exhibited her extraterrestrial ability to fall asleep instantly, anywhere, any time.

  I got into a steady rhythm of taking orders and slamming out the grub, not wasting any time playing up to latecomers who were disappointed because they’d missed Didi. After I told the last lonely loser who pulled up and asked if, by any chance, “that other girl” was working today that Didi was indisposed and would be appearing next Sunday as usual, I slid the drive-up window closed. I had snapped on the yellow latex gloves and was squirting bleach solution on the counters when Didi woke up.