The Terror at Rick’s Burgers

For mi primo Tony: what’s inside must be let out.

It was a miasma of human activity, like one of those cameras they put on a fiber optic finger and shove into someone’s aorta or up their ass: a  shit ton of cellular activity rushing around pell mell and crimson, but from that vantage point it looks too complex and ordered in a colorfully chaotic way for you to realize that it’s actually the miracle of life, as seen through the electric snake eye.

Rick’s Burgers in Sweet Home Alhambra was an unlikely place for the surreal circus spread out before me: A band of retired, geriatric hippies well into retirement all torqued out on high grade cannabinoids; a plump, pirouetting bespectacled Trisomy 21 chromsomed cherub;  one family consisting of three generations of cheeseburgers, Domestic Violence, GED level vocabulary & bad Television sitcoms (a ménage a trios of redundancy, I know), and, last but not least, a miserable dry drunk who was the bona fide NRA Poster Child and most definite example of what NOT to do in Alcoholics Anonymous. This is what I saw and intuited inside of 5 minutes, I mean I’m that fucked up. I hadn’t even begun to avoid the discomfort by shoving a chiliburger and fries down my throat…and let’s not even begin to get into just what that’s about for me in the way of emotional avoidance, family of origin, learned coping behaviors and how I probably had no business even ordering dinner that day. Such are the hazards of human-hood: as I heard in a film penned by a writer who is obviously paid more to scribble than I ever will be, “But we want what we want.”

Indeed, we do. And usually when I get that much humanity thrown at me when I get somewhere, I’m usually just fucking DONE. Time to go. Manufacture a reason to leave; get the fuck out of dodge. Feign illness. Run. Blow the taco stand. Vacate. Vaya con Dios. But not that night. I was there for my cousin. Because love is an act. And so, I navigated the crowd for a second and located my cousin and sat down in a sticky ass plastic molded single piece outdoor picnic table.

The truth was that I was also having uncomfortable flashbacks of childhood. Don’t believe the inspirational ass clowns that populate the net these days. One does not, as we are oft implored by inspirational photos of perfect bodies doing yoga twisties on their beachfront property, just let shit go. Although I’m well past childhood, it often yielded its infinite, unyielding vortex upon me and this happened whether I wanted it to or not. Happens when you’re least expecting it and the awareness of it all was a curse, I’m telling you. So, the vortex was much like the whirlpool me and my brother Mark had created on summer day in someone’s backyard DOUGHBOY pool in 1977. It was in 4+feet of water that I’d slipped and damn near drowned in, had my brother not rescued me from it. I started thinking about Sweet Home Alhambra; the house where I was born and razed; I was having flashbacks about the time I was arrested and charged with Armed Robbery PC 211 not 2 blocks from said house and singled out by the victim whose reality testing and eyewitness identification skills were seriously askew to say the least; I was having flashbacks about the one time I was in love with this brown eyed girl and she took me to meet her family and friends on the veranda of some night club. It was a cold, memorable rainswept night. And I’d given her this watch for her birthday (and so did her brother, it turns out) and I held her under the stars. Then I watched her drink too many fancy martinis and cry like a high school girl having her first blackout and stood there all pocho and uncomfortable while everyone did the mariachi Mexican family thing. But I was in love with her and taking her home, putting her to bed and waking up next to her was a whole lifetime of dreams all wrapped up in one and if I died that night, it wouldn’t matter: Having lived my whole life up to that point just to be with her that would’ve been worth it.

The place where that happened was right by Rick’s. My cousin Tony was seated outside with his family. He was a patient, lumbering tree of a human whose quiet, towering presence placed all in his purview under the calming shade of his presence. He sat studying the love of his life and their son with a mixture of awe, horror and realization. I was smiling and nodding to the music talking to him about this, that and the other with all those moments rushing back at me. Just being in the same city, a stone’s throw from that veranda; to know you’d loved someone that deeply and hadn’t since then, it was a heavy living thing. And looking at my cousin all covered in cancer with his wife and newborn son. There at Rick’s Burgers, a foreign, foreboding, sinking thing as I relinquished back to the here and now, this thuggish, graying, balding, still uncomfortable adult standing there visually painting the scene and trying to push all this shit out of his brain and just be there, you know. A fuckin part time job.  

We talked for a while and then went to survey the scene and take in the band. They were situated near the sidewalk while this epileptic strobe light bathed the star speckled mimosa & piss smelling brick atrium area. Bob’s Garage belted out tune after tune of cover music from eras fraught with stimulants, hallucinogens, shitty pot, protests, consumerism, Yuppie Freak Fat Cats & insurrection. It was the soundtrack to my childhood, really. 8 Track. LP’s. Cassette tapes. Radio on loop. And that’s when Larry Petersen walked by my peripheral vision. He was the obligatory cowboy you barely notice in this truly Lynchian nightmare as the band churned out an identically accurate cover of “Born on the Bayou.”  The crowd was undulating under the bougainvillea trellis while others were eating all manner of burgers while dipping fries absently in rat-dropping ketchup (I mean at least that’s what I’ve been told, you see; that certain food products have  a baseline or acceptable limit—a statistical margin of error—of insect filth, vermin, fecal matter, human hair and arsenic, stuff like that that the corporation is allowed to have in the finished product, be that ketchup, mustard, meat, apple pies or whatever) and sipping crushed ice sludge from Styrofoam cups, the cheap kind with graphic art sworl and not emblazoned with a logo. This chubby lady with the wild-eyed stare and curly-permd hair would approach newcomers and grab them by the hand and implore that they come with her “To meet my husband. He’s dead.” And then she’s showing you this cardboard foldout display with all these film pictures glued to it: most of them were from the 80’s and 90’s and all of them depicted a man who was clearly a regular customer at Rick’s Drive In and Out burger palace: a rotund, jolly, bearded beast of man and nary a smile graced his walrus mustache- covered mouth in any of those Polaroid/4×6” 35mm prints. He was mountainous and had the kind of overhanging belly that spilled over the size 48 plus size BIG MAN jeans. He wore dark prescription glasses that hid the eyes, making any interaction with him indoors a kind of suspect interaction. My PC 290 alarms went off, but the guy was dead, so what could I do or say?  Every picture had this glittery writing of a child’s introduction.

And the woman, she implored you take some candy with you; under the collage sat a bowl of candy like a Halloween cornucopia, you had no choice but to oblige her.  That impulsive, sugar-addled act of unwrapping, stuffing candy into my mouth was reminiscent of so many things as a child: orally induced comfort. I navigated my discomfort about engaging the small child I had agreed to baptize and my cousin, who was recently diagnosed with a form of horrific leprotic cancer sat there patient, stoic, and loving despite the apparent sentence God had read him from the judge’s seat, delivered fresh from some universal jury keeping score. When the cancer got bad that year, when it surfaced onto his skin and eyelids and ears and manifested in burning horrific pustules that burned and itched and never healed, he used to chuckle, “I won the cancer lottery, Cuz.” Comes a time when you ask yourself just what the fuck do you say to that? What isthe answer to that? The most hopeful thing I eked out in the whole time it was going on was something like, Hey man. I don’t know how you do it. I woulda ate my gun a long time ago. I’m too vain for that. But that didn’t faze him. He cited his son. Told me how that was the happiest day of his life. There was no happiness greater than that.

He sat in front of me under the jaundiced glow of phosphorene lights cast down on you from the confines of a fast food patio. He would just smile and look at his son. Admonish him to eat something other than fries or soda. Insisted he eat meat and vegetables. “To Grow Big and Strong like your Nino.” How weak and ineffectual I always feel around fathers and family men. How insignificant and selfish I feel around them.  We talked about this, that and the other. My job. How he was holding up under the iatrogenic lash of chemotherapy and MD’s who don’t have the answers. Under the guise and specter of some impending evil that has you in its claws. I kept going back to the candy dish, not being sneaky or guilty about it, but what I was really interested in were those pictures.

The thing about pictures that had recently occurred to me was this: We are surrounded by images. We are digitally mindfucked from birth to picture and post everything we do, say, eat, and love—all the things we wind up regretting and hating, the things that first define us and then kill us. Wonder why there aren’t more funeral check ins and photospreads on social media. We use images to interface with others; to engage and attach. But the thing about pictures in this post-apocalyptic world (no trust me, it ended when social networking and the ubiquity of digital devices became the norm; we died then, I’m convinced–we are the living breathing detached zombies that we warned ourselves about from science fiction writers long gone) is that we can amend them, enhance, fool, fiddle, clarify, clone crop, cut out, filter, saturate, constrain, meme, enhance, improve or delineate people and things away from there. Our very perception has become this filtered grainy misshapen voyeur comedy thing for the masses to view, judge and comment upon. But we are not what was intended; photographs are moments in time captured, frozen and saved. They are for cherishing—even in the imperfections. Out of the 100 shots you took, maybe only 2 make the cut. But now everything’s a shot, everything’s a potential fucking masterpiece—or not, and that’s what I’m getting at. There are just too many images and more importantly and tellingly there are images of the images themselves. Even news stories show the subject of the story and show people taking a picture of it—so that in and of itself becomes part of the experience–or lack thereof, because we’re not paying attention to the thing, we’re paying attention to capturing the thing, even though we never will. Hence the term “Porn” being attached to everything in Imageworld: “Food porn, mom porn, fashion porn,” ad nauseum: porn (per se) is a problem when it becomes the thing someone is attached to rather than living, breathing thinking feeling humans. And that’s the crux of bullet.

           So anyways, the pictures: They were from an era long dead and buried. It was one of bell bottom jeans and big afros and prescription aviator glasses and sideburns and tire track Jesus Sandals and chest hair and LPs and velvet posters and black lights and obnoxious pubic hair and behemoth cars made from steel and with big belching multi cylindrical engines. An era of polaroid photographs comprised of carcinogenic ink and paper and pigment and flammable, dangerous materials. A time when the top of a beer can was a disposable razor blade that you left lying on the beach or tossed into the Coors-ad pristine stream you were going to fish soon. They had slight dog ears and the color was fading. They were imperfect, shot from the hip, and not staged. The kind of pictures someone with a finite number of chances at getting a decent shot would make: most were bad with the intended subjects all askew and all these random objects and people haunted them; the lighting was harsh, the expressions were natural, half smiles and grimaces caught in the act of being human and unstaged and posed and there were no second chances or multiple poses; it was smile for the camera and then maybe someday you’d see yourself, maybe someday you wouldn’t. And everyone in the pictures was asleep or getting there soon. They were beautiful pictures. Reality stamped onto paper the way it was never intended; photographs to instill fear in all the decimated tribes America wiped off the face of the map.

            I stared at them for a few minutes, just kind of lost there while the patio began to fill up with people.

And then the burgers came. I gave the pictures another glance and made a mental note of the black light posters in them. This made me yearn for all the time that had passed and all the missed opportunities I’d squandered. I’d still not written the book Tony implored me to write. Not even close. The ass never actually made it into the chair the way writers do what they do. I stood frozen, firmly ensconced in the vortex of a life less lived because no matter how much I want to do things to ensure all of it gets written down, I still find myself out of time or wherewithal to do anything about it.

So, I ate. Watched the glimmer in his eye for that boy, that woman, that simple mixed family that was far from the mixed message family from whence he came. Maybe I should have told him, hey cousin you’re more of a man than I could ever hope to be. No, I mean it. It’s not that having a family and making babies makes you more than me; lord knows that so many people procreate only because it’s what was expected, or they’re supposed to do. But I’m thinking that what I mean to say is that not only are you doing it but you’re doing it and maintaining the semblance of a role model. You’re not lording over these humans under your watch as minions and subordinates who need to repay you any favors. You’re not wielding that macho club over your beloved’s head. You’re not instilling fear in this boy by threat of violence. You have this family and you’re taking care of it the way your pops didn’t.

That’s what I wanted to say, but didn’t. That’s intimacy in a crowded world, where attention is sucked out and diminished in a nanosecond. Again—no one but myself to blame though. We can’t take back what we said, but the terrible flip side is we can’t say what we never did.

What I did tell him was this: I was trapped in a David Lynch flick. Primo laughed. The chromosomal cherub was on the dance floor as they belted out a Creedence Clearwater Revival tune. My mind wandered to the old folk’s home down the way from Rick’s Burgers and I   wondered absently if the man I called my father would end up there—or a place like it?

Later on the dance floor, under the bougainvillea and the trellis situated between the sticky, stained stone tables, the band played on. The burgers kept flowing. Various and sundry bodies danced. The Down syndrome kid pirouetted as the band belted out a Roy Orbison ode to lost love.

There’s something adoringly wondrous about watching the mentally challenged dance. Their whole bodies undulate to the tune; facial expressions follow suit with an akimbo placement of extremities; they almost pause visibly for every break in the music. There’s a reverence and respect for music the so called developmentally able lack. Sure, there’s physical finesse where those of normal intelligence have an advantage. But the tards. Oh, the re re’s. They’re top notch. Stellar dance partners. No filter, just let it all hang out. There’s no judgment to be meted out. The rest of us only wish and give lip service to those who “dance like no one’s watching” when the reality is the whole world cares about who’s watching and does everything accordingly.

And maybe the terror of it all was that not only my cousin was dying but that he was dying more quickly than the rest of us and he knew it. That all of us were the irritating old lady imploring some superstitious toehold on a past we could never quite recapture, for to own the present would breathe life into the handicap of now. The terror was that I felt myself feeling more like Larry Peterson every day; I was turning day by day inch by angry inch into this desiccated shadow of a man: A surly, bitter, forlorn sumbitch full of resentment and ire.  The terror was that I would never be able to fulfill the role in my godson’s life, whatever that was. The terror was that burger places and candy and an overload of food have always terrified me for reasons that remain preverbal and well hashed out in the therapy room but have always remained elusive front and center with the rest of the world when I’m in the middle of it trying to maintain as a grown man.  The terror of it all was that I haven’t been able to fathom life without my creature comfort addictions and that the shame of being mired in them has prevented me from being truly lovable or loving.  The terror was that death had come to rescue my cousin’s perception, robbed his son of a father and was leaving me the pieces to attempt to salvage in my own inept hands and abilities. The terror was that I envied the mongoloid cherub, my godson’s angelic infancy, my cousin’s impeding death and everyone else’s ignorance. The terror was within.

Maybe I’ll write about it one day, Cuz.

Maybe.