Category: Issue 6 Non-Fiction

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Issue 6 Issue 6 Non-Fiction

QUESO PEOPLE

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By Nathan Willis

Our game was hide and seek, and the best place to hide in the whole house was the front closet. That’s where mom kept the dress coat she wore to school concerts, family holidays, and nice restaurants. It was long and black and if you pulled it around your shoulders, only your legs and feet were visible.

My sister would check behind, under, and inside of everywhere else first. This was something we did for each other, even though we always knew where the other would ultimately be found.

There were even times we’d pretend not to see each other’s legs sticking out from under the coat, to start the cycle over again, to keep the game going for as long as we could.  

The nicest restaurant we went to as a family was Chi-Chi’s. The waiting area was always packed with other families in their dress coats, all straining to hear the hostess over the giddy din of middle-class splurging, and the dopplering sizzle of fajita hot plates.

The dining area was divided into four open-concept sections, creating the illusion of simultaneous separation and inclusion. The overhead lights were never on. There was a lit candle on every table. The walls were painted to look like there were patches of plaster missing, exposing brick underneath. Sombreros and serapes were tacked up on any surface that would support them.

At some point, we asked our parents, “What does Chi-Chi mean?” They told us Chi-Chi is a person. A professional golfer. This is the food he likes and he wants to share it with the people of Ohio.

There was a golf course close by so we had no reason to doubt them.

We went often enough that we had our order locked in. Chicken fajita. Cheese enchiladas. Steak burrito. Chicken enchiladas, no onions. Two Cokes, an unsweetened iced tea, and a Diet Coke. The only unknown was chili con queso.

The queso came in a tray specially designed to sit over the candle. The tray had a wide lip to hold chips. It was a whole situation, big enough that the people at surrounding tables could see. Ordering queso was a very public statement.

Our parents argued at night when they thought we were asleep. Money was a recurring theme. As was my dad’s expense account. And lunches. And the company he kept. And the incidentals on his business trips.

My room was next to the stairs. I heard everything. I didn’t understand the math or the accusations, but it was clear we were on the verge of collapse.

It was by no means definitive, but getting queso became a kind of barometer. If we got queso we were still stable. We had enough money, and no one was preparing to leave or for things to fall apart. It meant we loved each other, and the game would keep going.

If queso wasn’t mentioned by the time we ordered our drinks, I would ask for it.  Sometimes my parents said no right away. Other times, they gave each other looks. Plaintive, angry, bitter looks that didn’t have anything to do with the queso. In these instances, us getting queso or not depended on which of them felt bold enough to make some larger point to the other by withholding or requesting queso when the server came back.

There was a movie of the week that aired back then called “A Place at the Table.” The film follows a family who donates their time and money to feed the unhoused and less fortunate. Mom had told us that grandma used to do the same thing. But it was a different time then. The unhoused went door-to-door and grandma would invite them inside while she made them a sandwich.

Mom said she would never do that with us in the house. She knows better. She’s learned the hard way that you can’t trust anyone.

In the movie, the dad loses his job and has to leave town to look for work. While he’s gone, the family relies on the generosity of the community for food and for monetary donations to pay their bills. Not a whole lot of people come through for them.

In the end, the dad is still out there looking for a job. The family is at home sitting before a sparse dinner. The room is dark except for a candle on the table. They glance at the dad’s empty chair. The credits roll as they eat the meal.

Recently, I learned that the restaurant was not, in fact, named for, or owned by, professional golfer Chi-Chi Rodriguez.

“Chi-Chi” was the nickname of the wife of the restaurateur who started the chain.

I tried this once, what my grandma had done. At least a version of it. One of the years that I lived in Los Angeles, on Thanksgiving, my girlfriend at the time and I cooked a turkey and made it into sandwiches that we packed into brown paper bags. We loaded them into the car and drove around looking for the unhoused and less fortunate. We couldn’t find anyone. There were usually people on nearly every street. Then we realized they were probably at all the shelters and churches that were also having Thanksgiving.

We did find one guy on our way back. I gave him a bag and he asked if the sandwich had mustard. It did. He handed it back to me.

We drove home and put the bags in the refrigerator and still felt pretty good about ourselves seeing all that food in one place and knowing it wasn’t for us. Then we got busy and didn’t take them back out again before the turkey went bad. It stunk up the whole apartment. We had to throw all of it away. For the next month, everything that went into that refrigerator came out tasting like spoiled turkey.

There was a weekend when one of the neighbors came over to see if we were sick. He asked if we had gone to Chi-Chi’s the night before. We hadn’t. He said everyone who had gone got food poisoning from bad onions. There would be a story about it in the paper. The neighbor said his whole family got sick. They were still trying to shake it off. He seemed fine.

I thought it was just our Chi-Chi’s that got the bad onions and maybe it was. Maybe the onion thing happened twice. Because this was before my parents got divorced, which would have put it at around 1990. But if you look it up online, the largest Hepatitis A outbreak in the history of the United States was caused by bad onions served at Chi-Chi’s restaurants in 1994—after the divorce, and after the trial.

Back in Ohio ca.1990, after that first, localized round of food poisoning, people stopped going to our Chi-Chi’s. My parents would talk about how Chi-Chi’s was going to shut down any time now. Think of the overhead. The location. They made guesses on when it would happen. First, it was a matter of weeks. Then maybe a couple of months. Then dad moved out and there was no more guessing. They were both wrong anyway.

Chi-Chi’s held on for at least another year. I am sure of this because they stayed open long enough for us to go there one more time, after our last day in court.

We knew it was going to be a hard day no matter what. This would be the first time we had seen our dad since he left, but we knew the lawyers and counselors had met in advance and agreed that none of them were going to put either of us, the children, on the stand.  Then dad’s team switched it up at the last minute and said, On the other hand, let’s go ahead and make this as painful as humanly fucking possible for everyone involved, except the Defendant.

So, we got through that and we needed a light at the end of the tunnel.

We’d never been to Chi-Chi’s during the day. The overhead lights were on. There was no sizzle. The bricks on the walls were just paint. We were the only customers. We could hear the staff in the kitchen complaining about employees from the other shifts.

Mom’s sister, our Aunt Charlene, was with us. She was supposed to make us stronger. She had agreed to co-sign on a loan that would allow mom to keep the house.

When the waitress came for our order, we did not get queso and I did not ask for it. I knew who we were at that point and we were not queso people.

Mom wanted to talk about the house but every time she brought it up, Aunt Charlene changed the subject. When we were done eating, mom and Aunt Charlene talked in the parking lot while my sister and I waited in the car. We watched them wave their arms and shake their heads.

My aunt drove off in her cream-colored sedan. Mom got into our old Camry. She slammed the door to seal us in and she punished the world with an open-throated yell. The world did not care.

She cried and punched the steering wheel. She punched harder than I’ll ever be able to. I marveled at her power and the miracle that none of her bones broke.

Aunt Charlene had changed her mind about the loan. Now, mom didn’t know where we were going to live but she knew she was going to have to figure that out on her own and she would have to juggle multiple jobs and odd hours and we were going to have to budget some of our meals out to a dollar fifty each at the Taco Bell drive-thru that we would then drive across the street and park to eat in the car at the Drug Mart parking lot because they had thirty-five cent soda machines out front.

As she thought all of that through, I like to think that back inside of Chi-Chi’s, the General Manager got the call from Chi-Chi Rodriguez or the wife of the restauranteur, and whichever of them it was, they would say, “We’ve had a good run but it’s time to shut this shit down.” And the General Manager would pull a switch and the place would go dark. The employees would gather their things, go to their cars and drive away and we would still be there in the parking lot trying to figure out how we were going to make it. We would be the last to leave.

Thirty years later, as part of a naive and admirably masochistic effort at reconciliation, mom arranged for us to have Thanksgiving at Aunt Charlene’s house.

Mom’s car was in the driveway when my partner and I got there. We pulled up to the curb and took in the three very large crosses in the front yard. They were solid wood, and they were not seasonal.

Inside, the kitchen counters were crowded with Thanksgiving staples in plastic containers and takeout boxes from homestyle restaurants. Everyone else who came, except for us, brought store bought pies. There was more pie that actual food. I thought of all the times we ate in the Drug Mart parking lot.

The flatware was gold-plated and the dinnerware was ornate bone china, and as we ate, Aunt Charlene told us about all the joys and challenges of training dachshunds.

The three of us left shortly after dinner. Our coats were in a pile on the hall tree. My mom had a nice coat that was fashionable at the time. Her black special occasion coat was long gone. It, along with virtually everything else from our lives back then had been sold or otherwise lost.

Our local grocery store carries jars of Chi-Chi’s chili con queso. I had been walking past it without noticing for years. As I put a jar in my cart, I remembered about the onions, and Thanksgiving, and the trial and the credits rolling, and eating queso by candlelight, as though everything was fine.

I called my sister to ask if queso ever meant more to her than just queso. It didn’t. She never really liked any of the food at Chi-Chi’s and if she had to pick, Taco Bell was much better.

I knew she was right. I put the jar back on the shelf.

Nathan Willis is a writer from Ohio. His work has appeared in Split Lip, HAD, hex, matchbook, Swamp Pink, Pithead Chapel, Moon City Review, and elsewhere. His stories have been nominated for Best Small Fictions and appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist. He can be found online at nathan-willis.com.

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Issue 6 Issue 6 Non-Fiction

POST MAN

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By Ryan Bradford

Been having a lot of violent thoughts these days. Smashing faces, breaking skulls, popping eyeballs. Covered in blood, knee-deep in viscera, screaming victory.

Kind of dig it.

This is what the job does to you.

There are 385 deliveries on Route 42 and six hours of allotted street time to complete them, minus thirty-or-so minutes for lunch if you’re into that sort of thing. Convert that into minutes and it gives about 1.16 minutes per delivery. This doesn’t include driving time. Five and a half hours to make 385 deliveries. I’m going to do it in four. The regs call it running.

Slide the door up in my mail truck and behold! Letters, envelopes, magazines, advertisements. Two trays of flats and three trays of machine-sequenced envelopes. The regs call it DPS, or delivery point system—the order you’re supposed to carry the route. Just follow the mail, they say.

There’s a musty smell in the metal truck, the culmination of paper and cardboard and envelope glue and spit. Try not to think of the love and emotion that went into these notes, just the biological sacrifices.

Twenty-two houses on this swing. I clamp the letters in my hand and tuck a pile of flats in the crook of my arm.

The regs hate it when I run the route. It’s a precarious relationship between the reg and the transitional letter carrier—they love foisting sections of their route on me when they’re running behind, but hate it when I prove I can do it faster than them. They tell me to take my time, all buddy-buddy-like, secreting the same comfort they give to Mrs. So-and-So when she worries about all the new people who keep showing up in her neighborhood.

Slam the truck door. Begin the swing.

Benjamin Franklin was the first postmaster general. Not many people remember this. I’m not sure during which portion of his life he took on the role. Was it after he called upon the sky to electrocute him? Hope so. Only a man with lightning running through his veins would be crazy enough to love this job.

The sun burns the tan of my neck no matter how much sunscreen I put on.

First house: unlatch the gate one-handed, fold a catalog (bulk mail) around two letters (presorted standard). All shit mail, not a first classer in the bunch. Just wastes of paper. Could throw this bundle in the trash and no one would know or care.

Use my knuckles to lift the lid of the mailbox and drop the rolled-up pulp in. Like putting your grandpa to bed. Slam the box closed, the sound makes two dogs inside go nuts. Route 42 is a dog route. Lots of orange cards tucked in between the flats. DOG WARNING CARD, they read. I don’t pay attention to the dog warning cards because I know these dogs, and they respect me. Game sees game. I pause to hold my fist close to the window where the dogs’ mouths are, and their barking fogs the glass. Close my eyes and imagine the heat of their breath gracing my knuckles. If this glass wasn’t here, would they attack? Would they chew me up, snarling, growling, with teeth bared and eyes rolled back? Probably. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was one of God’s four-legged beasts that puts an end to me. In many ways, that seems ideal.

Do the next four houses in two minutes. Traverse the borders that separate people’s lawns — lawnmower lines that convey one neighbor’s industriousness and the other’s laziness. You don’t have to live here to get a sense of the politics of the neighborhood at work. Think of myself as a free agent, unbeholden by whatever HOA rules that keep these people subservient. I’m the unifying force.

Fresh grass clippings stick to my shoes, black sneakers that I bought at a discount shoe warehouse where they call their customers “shoe lovers.” The shoes are not regulation, but because I’m a transitional employee they don’t give me a uniform allowance. If I trip and break something, management will blame my shoes and I’ll lose my job, at which point I’ll walk into the Pacific ocean and never return.

Takes five minutes to do the rest of the swing. Not my fastest, but nothing to sneeze at.

Back in the truck, I unscrew the top to my hydro flask and drink plastic-flavored water. The bottle was clear when I bought it, but now it’s taken on a cloudy translucence.

The Long Life Vehicle roars to life when I turn the key. Most of the LLVs  have been around since the Clinton Administration. Imagine: before Jane left me, before I even knew Jane, before everything went bad, before I even knew what LLVs and DPS and 3849s were, these very same vehicles were running.

Put the vehicle in gear, but hold my foot on the break. Briefly look out to the west and see the Pacific Ocean. Between, there are pawn shops, apartment complexes, pho restaurants, skyscrapers, houses, trailer parks and bars. All of them will get mail today. All of them.

***

Juan’s washing his hands in the restroom when I return to the station, lathering his arms up to the elbow. Letter-carrying is a dirty job. It turns you into a dirtbag. You come home at night with your skin sunburnt and your fingertips blackened and your armpits stiff from sweating and the crud of everybody’s homes trailing you.

I stand next to Juan and pull the soap dispenser until my hand’s overflowing with metallic pink.

“What route you do today?” Juan asks.

“Forty-two.”

“That’s good. Peanut route.”

“Elephants all over the place,” I say. Juan smiles at me in the mirror. I don’t know why they call the easy ones peanut routes. 

The water’s scalding. Pull it up my arm, mixing it with the soap. Lather until the pink turns white. Feels like a hygienic baptism. Washing my arms like this doesn’t really stop the breakouts, but it helps. Ever since I took the job, I’ve been getting acne in weird places. 

Juan finishes his scrub and pulls a wad of paper towels from the dispenser. Often wondered if Juan is the cleanest person I’ve ever known. He’s another transitional employee, and we sometimes use these moments to talk shit on the regs, but today we wash in silence. Juan might be my favorite letter carrier because he’s comfortable in silence.

He throws his massive ball of soggy paper towels away and stops halfway out of the door. “They’re sending me to Pacific Beach tomorrow,” he says. “Lots of hot chicks out there.”

“Aw, lucky,” I say, and then when that sounds too childish, I add, “Fuck yeah.”

“I used to deliver beer out there,” he says. Don’t think Juan is any older than me, but he’s told me about his distribution job before, and I still find it inconceivable that he’s already been successful in a different career in this lifetime. “Those white kids love to drink,” he says. “They love it.”

I make a sound that signifies I know exactly what he’s talking about.

“I’ll probably be back Monday,” he says.

“Su-weet.” I scour my brain for something to add. I almost ask him to give me a text if he’s bored on Sunday. Maybe we can get beers or something. But I say nothing. He probably has kids and likes to spend his day off with them, but what if he hates his kids and he’d actually relish the opportunity? Hate’s a strong word to use in this instance, I conclude, and then I realize that Juan is gone.

***

There are a few letter carriers hanging around the timeclock, waiting for the numbers to hit 1800. These are the few lucky enough to have been approved for overtime. They rub their hands together and talk about overtime like it was God’s personal gift. It’s an honor to work until 1800 for them, and their eyes whir like slot machines, cha-chinging with time-and-a-half pay. I don’t know much about the economy, but it feels like a perversion of the American Dream getting these folks excited to work for two extra hours.

I deliver until 1800 every day. Transitional employees, we are usually the last ones out on the street. If all the mail isn’t delivered by 1800, it’s our asses. Management can let us go with the snap of a finger, kick us back to the gutters from which we crawled out. Yes, we get our time and a half pay, but working six days a week gives you no time to spend it. The majority of my life is spent at the post office.

Sheryl, one of the regs, asks what route I did today. This is a common topic of discussion. That and sports, but I don’t know sports, so people have stopped asking me about it.

“Forty-two,” I say.

“Oh, that’s a nice one. Lot of dogs, though.”

“Yeah.” I don’t tell her that I ran Route 42 to dust. Sheryl’s nice, but her loyalty is with the regs, and if word got around that I was running routes, there would be trouble.

“Have any plans for the weekend?” Sheryl asks. Feel my shoulders involuntarily slump. I wonder if this job has numbed her to the body language of someone who doesn’t want to engage with small talk. I would guess Sheryl’s age is 55, and she can’t weigh more than 100 pounds. She’s a letter-carrying scarecrow who always looks afraid, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find that vulnerability kind of attractive.

“I have to work tomorrow,” I say.

“I’m taking my dog to the vet tomorrow,” she says, unprompted. She brings out her phone and shows me a blurry picture of a standard-issue brown dog. “He keeps crapping on the carpet.” I laugh at the word crap and then say sorry. “I just want to know if it’s medical or behavioral.”

“Dogs can be assholes,” I say. “Cats, too.”

Sheryl laughs in a way that sounds forced and it makes me uncomfortable. Feel bad for swearing in front of Sheryl. Oh, sweet Sheryl. Even if I did offend her, she’d never say anything. I give her a once over, but not, like, in a sexual way. Years of delivering mail in the San Diego sun has given her a permanent tan. Imagine cowboys in the Wild West sucking on pieces of Sheryl’s salty, dry skin to stave off their thirst. How can her frame support the weight of mail? Pretty sure all letter carriers are supposed to be able to lift 40 pounds, but I’ve never actually read the employee manual. Still, 40 pounds would be one third of her. That Sheryl manages to carry mail at all seems like a triumph of the human mind, body, and spirit.

The hours on the timeclock are divided into hundreds, a metric system of time. At 1790, slide my timecard out from the filthy plastic pouch hanging by a lanyard around my neck. It also holds my ID badge.

Supervisor Greg strolls up and down the cases, inspecting them for any undelivered mail. The regs give him a wide berth when he gets close. Would never tell him this, but I’ve had a lot of nightmares about Greg.

He passes by and I clench everything. It’s the feeling of standing too close to wild buffalo. He’s a mountain of a man, probably ex-Marine. Smooth and bald as a terrible baby, yet carries with him the scent of old-man aftershave even though he’s not yet old enough to smell like an old man. His eyes bulge from the intensity of his life experiences. Avert mine when he gets close. Pretty sure I’m his project, a little smear that he can infuse with old-fashioned values of hard work. Guess it’s worked in a way: if he hadn’t scared me so much in those first few days, perhaps I wouldn’t be as good as I am now.

We make eye-contact for a second and he tells me that I’m going to the Point Loma station tomorrow, and I say okay. I try to gauge the amount of respect that he’s showing me at that moment, and I conclude that it’s a fair amount.

The timeclock hits 1800 and the post office fills with the sound of letter carriers sliding their cards through the slot. We’re released by the rhythm of electrical beeps, and I immediately forget that I have a job. This is the best part of carrying letters. At the end of the day, it’s like I wake from a soft hypnosis. Supervisor Greg loses his power over me; station manager Old-As-Hell Bob loses his power over me. I reacquaint myself with the world where dogs are dogs and mail is junk.  

The sun is still out when I step out of the station, but it won’t be for long. When the time changes, we deliver in the dark. I push anxious thoughts about Daylight Savings down, down. There will be enough time to worry about that later.

I hear other letter carriers say goodbye to each other before scrambling to their respective vehicles, and it gives me worker-bee vibes. Detached from the hive, we’re so innocuous. A car peels out close behind me. I turn and it’s Juan in his Bronco. He gives me the finger and then waves. Feels strange to not have a cool-guy hand gesture in response to his middle finger. Someone should really come up with that. Ben Franklin should’ve invented that.

Unlock my new Toyota Corolla by pressing a button on the key. I’ve never had a new car in my life, and this one is as good as they get. She’s a stick shift and it feels like I’m driving a racecar when we’re cruising and yes I’ve started using female pronouns to refer to cars because that’s the kind of person this job has turned me into.

The San Diego highways are clogged on a Friday afternoon. Everyone’s trying to get home or go on a date or get to a show or meet up with friends or find somewhere nice to watch the sun go down, and for a minute I feel like I’m one of them, someone with somewhere to go.

Ryan Bradford is a former USPS letter carrier, writer, and educator living in San Diego. His writing has appeared in San Diego Union Tribune, San Diego Magazine, Little Engines, Vice, Monkeybicycle, New Dead Families, and Hobart. He also writes the newsletter awkwardsd.substack.com. He is the author of the novel Horror Business.

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Issue 6 Issue 6 Non-Fiction

MCDONALD’S DINER

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By Adam Shaw

The day the McDonald’s Diner opened in my hometown, Dad came home from his shift at the factory with his head shimmering and the pits of his shirt soaked and sagging. Isaac and I looked up from the TV; Sum 41’s video for “Fat Lip” had landed in the top spot on Total Request Live, and Deryck Whibley sang about lower-middle class brats while a girl I wanted to marry shaved her head in the middle of a halfpipe. Dad spoke over the music, said we were going to the new McDonald’s. I almost quipped it’s not new, just lipstick on a pig like I’d heard Nick Morgan say in the cafeteria that day, but Dad tossed his lunch box toward the sink, disappeared into his room to shower and change clothes.

Dad had been talking about the McDonald’s Diner for months. Our town had been selected for a pilot alongside a few others, an upscale renovation to the location by our mall complete with new signage, a dedicated hostess, phones at each table for ordering food and requesting refills. He’d come home from work only to load us into his Jeep so he could drive by it, monitor its progress, tell Isaac and me about the tiling, painting, repaving that had been done. He was the type of guy who could strip a house to its studs, rebuild it. I was the kind of kid who built a life in The Sims, locked myself in the family computer room and ate Doritos while it grew.

Isaac and I wore gym shorts that draped past our knees, Hawaiian shirts baggy enough to cover the ballooning of our waists that had started when we’d quit football the year before. Dad returned from his shower in a polo tucked into slacks and told us to stand up, get into church clothes, so we did.

A hostess greeted us at the McDonald’s Diner. Behind her, red pleather booths sat pristine, taut. The place was empty except for a man in a bleached Appetite for Destruction shirt dipping McNuggets into a sauce cup. Dad asked for a booth and we were taken to one, handed plastic-coated menus that read, It’s McDonald’s with a diner inside! Two classic restaurants in one great place. A bottle of ketchup rested in its carrier at the far end of the table, a thickened spurt sticking out from under the cap like a skin tag. Above it, mounted to the wall, hung a phone that the hostess said we could use to order straight from the kitchen.

Watch this, I told Isaac, and I picked up the phone, shouted whassuuuuuup? like the Budweiser commercials I’d seen on TV. Stuck my tongue out and everything. Dad grabbed the phone from my hand, muttered an apology into the receiver and hung up.

What’s wrong with you, he said. I wiped spit off my chin with the side of my hand, shrugged.

Dad asked what we wanted. My brother asked for a Big Mac and I said the same, but Dad said, no no no, that we were eating off the diner menu. Behind him, the man in the Appetite for Destruction shirt scraped a half-eaten McNugget around the edges of his sauce cup, popped it in his mouth.

But it’s the same menu, I said. Two classic restaurants in one great place.

Dad lowered his head, ran his thumbs across the cover of his menu. His tongue slipped out from between his lips, wet them, and he said, fine. He picked up the phone, ordered Big Macs for my brother and me, meatloaf with gravy for him, and when he hung up he exhaled and relaxed into the booth. It squeaked against his back in a way that reminded me of the beatboxing at the start of the Sum 41 video, and I exhaled, too, turned and stared out the window at girls walking into and out of the mall on the other side of the parking lot.

The food arrived slowly for McDonald’s but quickly for a diner. Our Big Macs were boxed, fries nestled into brown and red cartons, but Dad’s meatloaf had been plated, gravy cascading over its side, mushrooms shimmery. He said let’s eat and picked up his fork, cut into the meatloaf. There was a spurt of grease, maybe gravy, the clatter of his fork hitting the plate, and he took a bite, chewed, said, it is one great place. I flipped open my Big Mac box, slid my thumb underneath the sandwich to wedge it free. The back end fell limp and spilled lettuce, a pickle, some onion onto the table. I looked up at Dad. He cut another piece of meatloaf with the side of his fork, pierced it and slid it across the gravy pooled in the bottom of his plate.

My sandwich tasted as sweaty and tangy as I expected, and I pictured us coming back, back again, maybe after visits to the Circuit City that anchored the west side of the mall, an afternoon of arcade games at Aladdin’s Castle. I pictured us walking into the McDonald’s Diner with our arms around each other’s shoulders afterward, laughing with my brother about the aliens we’d picked up by the hair, punched into space in Battletoads, Dad slugging us on the shoulder, saying, you gave ’em a run for their money. The hostess would greet us and we’d sink into our booth, this booth, and Dad would pick up the phone to order us ice cream sundaes, caramel and hot fudge both. I pictured telling him about bands, showing him made-up logos I’d sketched between class notes even though the only instrument I’d ever played was the trombone. I pictured him nodding, smiling ear-to-ear, asking how’d you come up with that? and me shrugging while I ripped open a packet of peanuts, shook them onto my ice cream, shoveled a spoonful of it and caramel and fudge all into my mouth.

I finished the Big Mac, closed the box, said, can we get ice cream?

Dad set his utensils in what was left of his gravy. He grabbed his menu, and I stared at the cover as he flipped through it, two classic restaurants in one great place, and for a second, I believed it. He picked up the phone and I scooted forward, realized that my mouth had fallen open, that the drool had started to pool in the space beneath my tongue, and I searched his face for a sign that we would eat our desserts and talk and laugh even though our mouths were full and we’d have to press our palms against our temples to fight back brain freeze, but he asked for the check and I closed it, collapsed back into my seat.

I caught Dad’s eyes as he hung up the phone, set down the menu. Nobody brought our check, so Dad pulled a handful of bills out of his wallet and pinned them under the ketchup bottle. He grabbed a napkin and wiped at the glob that had been under the lid, tossed it on his plate and nodded toward the mall, said let’s go. Everything rushed forward like a kiss to the forehead, arms wrapping around my shoulders and pulling me close. But then a swell of adrenaline like that moment just before the razor meets your skin and shaves off your hair, that half-second of flight when you don’t know if you’ll stick the landing or crumble down the halfpipe: the world old but new, fresh and full of possibility.

Adam Shaw‘s work has previously appeared in Pithead Chapel, Autofocus, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter in Louisville, Kentucky, and can be found online at theshawspot.com.

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Issue 6 Issue 6 Non-Fiction

WEEHAWKEN

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By Andrea Georges Dolan

I moved to Weehawken on the evening of my 23rd birthday, celebrating in an unfurnished apartment with shitty boxed wine and a dozen stale donuts from Dunkin’. My roommate and I lived on the second floor of a triplex on 49th Street. The man who lived below us was a bassist who would play the same twangy seven notes on a bass that looked like it was fashioned out of plywood and scrap metal. Sometimes his girlfriend would be there, but they definitely hated each other. I once caught him kissing his girlfriend’s sister in the driveway and he glared at me as I quickly turned away from them and dashed to my car. It wasn’t my business, but at the same time I wasn’t going to plug my ears when I heard his girlfriend hiss you’re a FUCKING embarrassment before slamming the door behind her.

Above us lived a Tisch professor who would bring home his much younger female students. Most of them were obvious overperformers but all I could focus on was his silence while the bed squeaked loudly. I wondered if he really felt anything, but now I understand that it sometimes just feels nice to be next to a warm body, especially if she’s 21. On the nights during which he was alone, he would restlessly watch reruns of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on full blast in his living room. I can still hear his heavy footsteps pacing above me. I can still feel the loud DUNDUN rattling through my skull in the late hours of the night.

Weehawken is where I started running. I still can’t definitively say why, for I was cursed with flat feet and even walking has always been somewhat painful. I never quite got the runner’s high, but there was something profound in the struggle. A body can really push through anything. Perhaps it was boredom. Perhaps it was a way for me to outrun my thoughts.

There are two levels to Weehawken: the upper cliffside along JFK Boulevard East and the lower Waterfront along the Hudson River. To get from one end to the other, one must traverse what is locally called The Steps of Doom. Covered in chewed gum and graffiti, the rickety steps zigzag their way down from The Boulevard to the light-rail station at The Waterfront, where I would take the train to The City. Sometimes I would purposely torture myself and run up and down The Steps—not for any particular reason, just to say that I could do it. Just to say that I could run through anything, even pain. Especially pain.

The rusted steel squeaked and rattled with each step, and looking down gave me such intense vertigo that I vomited hard against the top railing, but descending was far better than its counter. The pointed heels that I often insisted on wearing on nights out got stuck in the janky slats of The Steps, so sometimes I would run up barefoot and pray I didn’t get tetanus. Sleazy men could get a good peek at my ass if they looked up. A slicked-back guido might menacingly wink at me as I breathlessly trudged my way up the twenty flights of Hell. Touch me, I dare you, I’d think. I’ll stomp your fucking brains in.

Sometimes when I’d run along The Boulevard, I’d think about how the luxury condominiums that lined The Waterfront would be the first to go in a climate catastrophe. I was thankful to live up top along the cliffside; I could see the entire expanse of Manhattan from there. If I looked close enough, I could see the hideous H&M advertisements flashing from Times Square. Sometimes I’d wonder if The City could agree on the irony, but I soon realized that Manhattan is far too self-absorbed for introspection. Narcissus beholds his dazzling reflection in the Hudson.

Upside: Weehawken has the best view of The City.

Downside: Weehawken has the best view of The City.

Every evening around seven or eight, two E-EXPRESS TOUR charter buses would pull up along The Boulevard and out would pour dozens of tourists, cameras in hand, all ready to snap away at the perfect view of The City. Didn’t they know this path was mine? Didn’t they know they were in my way? I’d grunt at them as I shoved my way between excited conversations in foreign languages. They stood tall with their arms outstretched to mimic the great and glowing island behind them. I wonder how many photographs of their smiling faces feature my blurry, heaving, and sweaty body running just out of the frame, like a ghost. I liked to think of myself that way anyway—invisible, fleeting, haunting.

On longer jogs I concentrated on the sound of my breath. When my thoughts would travel, I could bring myself back to focus by listening to my breath. Grad school got ya down? Just return to your breath. Heartbroken, again? Just return to your breath. About to jump off The Palisades Bluffs and hope the Hudson River swallows you whole? Just return to your breath. Sometimes I’d run until I couldn’t feel my limbs. My feet thumped hard on the concrete, a stubborn skeleton crumpling with every burdensome step. A nightly cold compress held close to swollen ankles felt more empowering than painful. Just breathe through it, I’d tell myself as I rubbed Tiger Balm on my splinted shins.

Sometimes on my jogs I’d think about all the bodies that have been scraped from the bottom of the Hudson. Sometimes I’d think about my friend’s older brother who jumped off the George Washington Bridge just a few years prior, and would wonder why he left his shoes behind. The police said that was common. He was a runner, too. A track star, really. I remember him running backwards with perfect form on our high school’s track, as if he had pressed rewind on himself. I’d stare in awe in my dirt-caked Converse as his knees drove higher into perfect 90 degree angles. We all thought he’d be an Olympian one day. Now he’s just a name on a banner hanging in the school’s gymnasium. Immortalized at 22.

I remember when he would walk his sister and me to Blockbuster when we were kids and buy us a bucket of Butter Lovers microwaveable popcorn. He was always so quiet and focused. Sometimes I’d think about how his mom didn’t initially believe he was dead and maintained that he was only missing, even though the last inquiries he searched on the internet were how tall is the George Washington Bridge and how many suicides on GWB. “Not my son,” I imagine her saying to the police knocking at her front door. “He wouldn’t do something like that.” I remember the look of denial in her eyes during his wake.

On one weekend morning jog, I saw a dead body washed ashore by the condos at The Waterfront. I remember the horrified screams of the wealthy middle-aged woman wrapped in a light gray robe, her phone in hand to call the police. She hovered over the pier where the feet of the body could be seen underneath her. It was a cold morning, too cold for spring. I listened for my breath.

“Don’t come over here!” she warned, but I was curious. This certainly was not the first dead person I’d seen, but I had never seen one quite like this. Bloated and blue, face down. The dead bodies I’ve seen lay peacefully in lacquered coffins, their arms posed gently over their chests, their faces caked with costume make-up. I wondered what had happened. Suicide? Murder? A drunken casualty from the ferry? I tried again to listen for my breath but all I could hear were her screams. I kept running until I got to Hoboken.

Once after a long night of drinking far too much free wine at an office party in The City, I opted to take a cab home. It was significantly quicker and more convenient than my usual MTA to NJ PATH to Steps of Doom running route. The cab driver was an older man, maybe mid-to-late fifties, with a thick gray mustache and even thicker bifocals. I had been particularly conversational this evening, asking him about his job, his life. He told me he had buried his granddaughter a week prior, and that life was unnecessarily cruel. I couldn’t muster anything to say other than a meek I’m sorry.

What I wanted to say was that grief is an unpredictable monster, and that sometimes its giant fist wraps itself around your body, constricting your blood flow. Grief takes your oxygen and replaces it with lead. Grief will demand that you punish yourself, for it should be the only thing you feel. Grief pulls at the loose ends and unravels you.

But I didn’t say any of that. I only looked at his eyes fixed to the road in the rearview mirror.

On the other end of the Lincoln Tunnel we took the first exit toward JFK Boulevard. Around the curve, The City skyline came into view. Bright, expansive, and silent.

“Do you mind if we stop for a minute?” the driver asked. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”

Andrea Georges Dolan is a writer from New Jersey, currently living in Los Angeles. You can read some of their other work at agdolan.com