Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

  THEY DON’T HAVE TACOS IN THE SUCK

  By Katharine Shilcutt

  From Houston Press

  In June 2010, blogger and web editor Katharine Shilcutt inherited Robb Walsh’s mantle as food critic for the alternative weekly Houston Press. Since then, Shilcutt rarely has time to update her original blog SheEats, but she makes up for that on the Press’s blog Eating our Words.

  “Can I have the hot dog, please?” I asked the woman inside the bright green Tacos D.F. truck on Long Point at Witte.

  “You’re ordering a hot dog?” teased my friend Ryan with a chuckle. He’d already placed his order for a pastor taco and a can of Coke at the window. “I thought we were doing a taco truck crawl.”

  “I’m getting a taco, too!” I grinned sheepishly, before placing an additional order for a taco de cabeza.

  “Is that what I think it is?” asked Ryan as he eyed the cabeza. Shreds of fine beef from a cow’s head a la barbacoa filled the double corn tortilla that the woman handed through the window, topped with a handful of raw white onions and cilantro leaves. Despite his initial misgivings over its provenance, he ate his half of the taco with relish—pronouncing it “great” when he was finished—and I remembered why I’d missed him so much.

  Ryan was my best friend in college, where we fancied ourselves a couple of misfits at a highly conservative university that made both of us itchy and desperate with discomfort. We met on the first day of school our freshman year, both of us shunted into an off-campus apartment complex because the dorms were overflowing in the late ’90s and, somehow, releasing 17-year-olds into the wild seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Ryan couldn’t cook. I had roommates that I hated. We bonded over shared meals in his apartment and nights spent commiserating with each other about the limited kinds of politics and religious dogma that teenagers understand while the other kids rushed sororities or went to Bible study. Until last week, I hadn’t seen him in ten years.

  After a few minutes, the woman in the Tacos D.F. truck handed over my hot dog. It was a small frank inside a small bun, but the whole thing was topped with a confetti blast of ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, diced tomatoes, raw onions and pickled jalapeños that packed remarkably little heat. While I mused over the surprisingly sweet peppers, Ryan finished his other taco with gusto.

  “Where else can you get real meat that someone bought themselves for $1?” he mused rhetorically. “Where else can you get real meat that someone bought and then cooked right in front of you and handed to you for $1? You can’t do that at Taco Bell.”

  When he’d emailed me that he was coming to Houston for the day, I assumed that it was to visit some of his Texas family he’d left behind after joining the Air Force one day out of the blue during college.

  Ryan had been attracted to EOD—explosives ordnance disposal—upon enlisting and quickly advanced to Tech Sergeant as he discovered within himself a serious and previously unknown talent for defusing bombs. He’d done four tours since 2002, in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He married a lovely German girl in between and finally settled in Florida when he wasn’t in some far-flung region with a terp at his side, sweeping for mines in vast deserts.

  But the trip to Houston was for the tacos.

  “What is the planned criteria/theme of our hunt?” Ryan wrote me in an email a few weeks before he came to town. “Keep an eye out for goat tacos.”

  We didn’t find any goat tacos on Thursday afternoon, but it didn’t matter. It was as though a decade hadn’t passed, and we fell into the same easy rhythms of bullshitting and storytelling that we always had.

  “So, you’re really a food critic?” he asked as we finished our cans of Coke outside Tacos D.F.

  “Yeah,” I responded, with a little elaboration after some prompting on his part. Yes, it’s my full-time job. Yes, I really do get paid to eat. No, I’m not anonymous. “But I want to hear about your job.”

  “Most of my friends are dead,” Ryan responded immediately, point-blank. “My boss was killed last year.” His faced darkened briefly. I didn’t know what to say and stammered softly until he started talking again.

  “Let’s go hit the next one.”

  We climbed back into my SUV and drove until he pointed another taco truck out, his eyes scanning both sides of the road in a practiced motion. “Tacos Arcelia. Let’s try them next.”

  Tacos Arcelia has two things going for it: The first thing is the 99-cent tacos that it advertises in bold black letters on the side of its second thing, a school bus that’s been painted bright red and silver. There was already a line forming around noon on Thursday, so Ryan and I figured it was a sure bet.

  We ordered a taco each—lengua for me, chicharrones for him—and stepped back to await our orders. Even working in the larger-than-average confines of a school bus, the crew was moving at a slow clip.

  “You know that part in Black Hawk Down where an RPG gets lodged in a guy’s chest but it doesn’t go off?” asked Ryan idly while we waited.

  “Uh, yeah. Although I hadn’t thought of that movie—or that scene in years.” I didn’t ask why he asked me, wary of the answer. He told me anyway.

  “That really happens.”

  I thought back to the time when Ryan and I were making dinner at his apartment one night, both 18 years old, and I’d stupidly thrown a handful of frozen okra into a deep pan of hot grease to fry, not knowing any better. I started a minor grease fire which we quickly put out, but my face and hands were pockmarked with grease burns that took a few years to fade. The burns hurt terribly and I avoided frying anything at all for at least another five years, scared to death by such a minor injury.

  “Have you considered moving out of EOD?” I asked finally. “I know there are other areas of the Air Force you could go into,” I added with a little laugh, hoping he wouldn’t be offended by the suggestion that he leave an area which poses clear and constant danger to his life every single day that he’s on duty.

  “No way,” Ryan replied. “If I stick it out another 10 years, I can retire on a full pension. Retired at 42. Can you imagine?”

  I chuckled. “No, I definitely can’t.” Just then, our orders came up.

  The corn tortillas were listless and anemic-looking, a pale color that was closer in hue to flour tortillas. My pile of diced lengua was equally pallid, and a bite of the tongue confirmed that it tasted as bland as it looked.

  Ryan’s taco, on the other hand, was filled with more vibrant-looking pieces of chicharron. The fatty skin was puffy and thick with a spicy red sauce that made me mourn the terrible lengua even more. Ryan was clearly proud of his choice, too, grinning as he finished the rest of the tortilla off.

  The grin never left his face as he told me about his EOD training, about the dozens of minute tactical decisions and assessments that have to be made before even approaching a bomb or a mine or an IED. He also told me about how he rarely wears the 90-pound bombsuit meant to protect him from the 132 explosive devices he’s defused in his decade with the Air Force.

  “Everyone knows the bombsuit and everyone associates it with EOD,” he said. “It’s like everyone knows a firefighter’s jacket and helmet. But it also weighs 90 pounds. So we make the choice: Carry around 90 pounds worth of equipment all day long, or be better and faster without it.”

  “And if I can be better and faster,” he finished, “that means a bunch of 18-year-old kids can go home safely from the war. I’d rather sacrifice one of me than a bunch of them. At least, that’s the way I look at it.”

  We stood in silence for a few seconds after that. I contemplated the ways in which one makes a decision like this every day, and the ways in which so many of my own memories of Ryan are tied to us being 18-year-old kids ourselves. I balled up our trash to throw it away, then we walked quietly back to my SUV to continue the tour.

  “What will you do when you retire then?” I asked as we headed out. Would he and his wife enjoy their home in Florida, the new boat he just bought? He was briefly co
ntemplative before answering.

  “I want to do something quiet,” he said. “You know, like become a firefighter.”

  We both laughed, although I knew he was quite serious. And suddenly the conversation had turned back again to our old favorite subject.

  “I ate at this crazy Puerto Rican buffet up in Dallas recently,” Ryan began as we drove on.

  “Let’s get a palate cleanser,” I told Ryan as we pulled into the parking lot of the New Flea Market on Long Point at Pech. On the weekends, you can’t find a space to park in the asphalt lot. But today, on an overcast Thursday afternoon, it was empty except for a few trucks parked haphazardly around Refresqueria Rio Verde.

  “What are we getting here?” asked Ryan as we climbed out. “Do they have tacos?”

  “Sure, they have tacos,” I said. “But I thought we’d get something different in between. Do you like elotes?”

  Elote, as I explained to Ryan, is basically corn on the cob. But instead of serving it with butter and salt, as us white folks tend to do, elote is served with crema, chile powder, lime juice and a host of other condiments that only seem foreign until you taste them all mixed together. Elote in a cup, the shaved kernels topped with a thick dollop of cream and a rough shake of chile powder, is mystifyingly comforting even if you’ve never had it before.

  I ordered a cup for myself and a giant glass of tamarindo for us to split, while Ryan went whole hog and got an elote-on-the-cob. “I have corn on a stick!” he called out to me like a little kid. And between swigs of the sweet, apple-like tamarind juice, Ryan bluntly asked: “So, what happened? You were married for, like, a second.”

  Ryan himself has been married for six years. As so often happens with Air Force men, he met a pretty German girl while stationed at the Rammstein Air Base in southwestern Germany on the edge of the hilly, green Pfälzerwald forest. They were married in a castle. She is beautiful, with expressive blue eyes and a kind face.

  I gave Ryan a brief rundown of my own fumbling attempt at marriage, the millions of tiny ways in which my ex-husband and I both failed at the institution every single day until we were both relieved to finally call it quits a year and a half later. Ryan listened with a playful smirk on his face as I explained how I fell into the trap of being pursued by a good-looking athletic-type—the weak spot of too many nerdy wallflowers the world over, men and women alike—and refuted at least one point.

  “You’re not really a nerd,” he laughed. “You’re more of a pop culture dork. You’re a female Chuck Klosterman.”

  “I don’t know that being a female Chuck Klosterman is such a great thing!” I replied. The smirk was still on his face. He was waiting for his turn; I could tell. I promptly shut my mouth and let him have it.

  “Well, the missus and I,” he began grandly, “have been together since day one.” He told me the story of their brief courtship and the mutually agreed-upon eventuality that they were destined to be together, so why spend useless years dating? It was sweeping and romantic and beautiful and everything you could want for your best friend, or for anyone with a good heart who deserves to meet another good-hearted soul in this world.

  “When we got married,” he told me, “I asked her: ‘How much of what happens over there do you want me to tell you?’” It suddenly occurred to me that I wouldn’t know the answer to that question were I married to a military man myself. But Ryan’s wife knew the answer immediately: She wanted to know everything.

  Those shared experiences became a bond between them, and Ryan grew even closer to her over time than he imagined possible. One day he told her: “You’re my reason.”

  “My reason?” she wanted to know.

  “You’re the reason I want to come home after every deployment,” he told her. “When I’m sent away on a six-month deployment, I just picture myself walking home to you. It’s what gets me through. I picture myself walking over a huge mountain for six months until I see you again.”

  We sat and grinned goofily at the mountain Ryan had traced in the air with his hands. His corn-on-a-stick was gone, my cup was empty.

  “My palate is cleansed,” he announced happily. It was time to move on.

  Ryan and I had been driving for a while, for many blocks since our “palate cleanser” of elotes at Refresqueria Rio Verde. I knew he was wondering why I passed other taco trucks and failed to pull up to them, but I had a plan.

  In my mind, I knew this stop would be our last taco truck of the day. I had to pick my cousin up from the airport soon, and Ryan had to get back on the road.

  I pulled into our final destination: El Ultimo, a brightly decorated taco truck near Long Point and Wirt. Its parking lot was already busy, a line had already formed outside that was composed entirely of blue collar workers off for lunch, equal parts white, black and Hispanic. I’ve made no secret of the fact that El Ultimo is my favorite taco truck in town, and I have followed it over the years as it moves a few blocks up and down Long Point.

  “On the weekends,” I told an impressed Ryan, “it has a waitress who takes your order, since the line gets so long.”

  “So this is your favorite, huh?” he said, eying the simple menu and wondering what exactly made this spot so special.

  “Yes. You’ll see.”

  The wait at El Ultimo was the longest of the afternoon, and Ryan and I had run out of polite conversation. He told me about the few phrases he’s learned working in Afghanistan, about how Pashto and Dari only sound alike on the surface. Once you get to know them, he said, you can immediately spot the differences when you hear them spoken, intermingled, on the streets.

  He tried to teach me a few phrases in Pashto. “Move it, asshole!” was one of them. I couldn’t pick it up. I was too busy laughing absurdly, thinking of Ryan in a wholly foreign country, yelling out practiced Pashto phrases like these to his terp in what must now seem like a completely normal occurrence to him.

  We commiserated about how rusty our Spanish had gotten over the years, useful these days only for ordering food at taco trucks. Ryan was even more out of practice, blaming it on the sad dearth of taco trucks back home in Florida. “There are only, like, two where I live,” he grumbled. And he told me about how his German wife was startled one morning by the realization that she had started to dream in English.

  When our tacos came out, Ryan finally saw what I did in El Ultimo: The tacos here are on soft, homemade flour tortillas—not corn, interestingly—and come with more than just the standard handful of cilantro and onions. Green slices of avocado and white crumbles of queso fresco fill the tacos, too, along with our chosen meats: fatty shreds of barbacoa and annatto-hued pastor.

  Ryan gulped his taco down, pausing only briefly to admire the avocado and cheese on top. Then he ordered three more.

  “This is your favorite, huh?” he asked again.

  I nodded once more, pleased.

  “Well, it’s my favorite too.” He smiled. And then: “I don’t think I can eat any more tacos.”

  “Neither can I,” I laughed back. We went back to the car with his extra tacos, and were nearly ready to go when Ryan said: “Katie, aren’t you forgetting something?”

  Only a few people call me Katie anymore; I thrilled to the sound of hearing the adolescent version of my name, as if time hadn’t passed at all and I was still Katie, still 17-years-old and big-eyed and strong.

  I was forgetting something: I hadn’t taken his photo in front of the truck, as I’d done with all the others. I dug my camera back out of my purse as Ryan posed, hand out and thumb up, grinning. I snapped one final picture, and we packed it in.

  The car ride back to Ryan’s truck seemed to last almost as long as the crawl itself had. I listened hard to every last one of Ryan’s words, even the awful ones and the cruel ones that involved horror stories of friends killed in battle. I listened as he told me about watching as weeping fathers carried their children into makeshift hospitals, limbs absent and blood reeling out of charred wounds. I listened as he told me about father
s who strapped bombs to their children’s thin chests and sent them out to fight the battles their cowardly parents could not. I listened as he told me about watching a young girl’s leg blown off by a crudely designed IED that he had not seen, was not able to defuse.

  I listened as he told me about being blown up twice himself. He stared forward the entire time as he spoke, and I noticed for the first time what looked to be shrapnel wounds on his head. The curved wounds were barely noticeable except where the hair had stubbornly refused to grow back. I didn’t ask about them. My chest burned as he spoke about being lucky enough to survive both times he was attacked. He’d never shot anyone, he assured me. But he’d shot at them.

  I thought back to something he’d said earlier that day: “I’m happy to get bad guys and help people,” he’d put it, simply and succinctly. This terrifying job makes him happy. This job that could wipe him out of existence in one trembling second makes him happy. Instead of happy thoughts, my mind was filled with horrific visions of Ryan dying in battle. I was ashamed of myself for thinking such a thing.

  Before I could get a word out, we were back at his truck. Ryan was unstrapping his seat belt. Here was 10 years, gone in an afternoon.

  “You know, I looked for you,” he said, suddenly and without warning. Ryan had entered the Air Force on a whim between our junior and senior years of college, finally disillusioned enough with college after three years to make the leap. And although we kept in touch for a while, we never saw each other again. We finally lost contact entirely after his first deployment.

  “I looked for you everywhere. I looked on Facebook and even MySpace, back in the day, and Googled you and then one day I found you. It was totally by accident. I was reading an article, and you had written it.” He had sent me a message on Facebook later that day. I had been thrilled to hear from him, with no idea of how long he’d searched for me.