ABSTRACT

CHASING LIFE: A MEMOIR OF MOVEMENT, PEOPLE, COFFEE, AND FOOD

In these pages, the reader will find a work of creative non-fiction that is presented as a dual narrative. One narrative begins as a forward arcing return to my roots as a chef as I travel in search of food and coffee cultures. The second narrative points steadily backwards at the short but inspirational life of my nephew Arcadio Gomez, which was cut tragically short by cancer. In between, the wellspring of movement, as a force by which to make sense of life and my nephew’s death, takes center stage. I venture to Italy and Spain on numerous occasions in order live between these two unfolding narratives, searching out each country's iconic foods. A rich tapestry of characters and thought-provoking settings lights my way as I inch away from my past and find the spiritual balance to keep moving forward. In the United States, I continue to chase the adventurous spirit that made Arcadio’s life unique. My developing interest in learning about food and coffee leads me to investigate Third Wave Coffee as I travel to the far-flung places where the specialty coffee scene is unfolding. Along the way, my memories of Arcadio transform from grief-centered realities to moments of insights in places ranging from Tijuana to Minneapolis. In the end, I learn that studying food cultures has everything to do with the artisans who inhabit the spaces where food and community are practiced and the people I meet along the way.

Eduardo Palominos Gomez May 2017

CHASING LIFE: A MEMOIR OF MOVEMENT, PEOPLE, COFFEE, AND FOOD

by Eduardo Palominos Gomez

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in the College of Arts and Humanities California State University, Fresno May 2017

APPROVED For the Department of English:

We, the undersigned, certify that the thesis of the following student meets the required standards of scholarship, format, and style of the university and the student's graduate degree program for the awarding of the master's degree.

Eduardo Palominos Gomez Thesis Author

John Hales (Chair) English

Steven Church English

William Arce English

For the University Graduate Committee:

Dean, Division of Graduate Studies

AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION OF MASTER’S THESIS

I grant permission for the reproduction of this thesis in part or in its entirety without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorbs the cost and provides proper acknowledgment of authorship.

X Permission to reproduce this thesis in part or in its entirety must be obtained from me.

Signature of thesis author:

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Ascending to the Master of Fine Arts program at Fresno State University has involved one junior college, two universities, and the generosity of more individuals than can be accounted for here. From the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008, which initiated my return to Modesto Junior College and my transfer to UC Merced, to my three-year thesis project at Fresno State, I cannot begin to describe the gratitude that I feel for the individuals who gave of themselves in order to help me bring this project to a close. Primarily, I have to acknowledge my nephew Arcadio Gomez who succumbed to a four-year battle with Ewing's Sarcoma on December 10, 2010. Arcadio taught me the definitions of courage and love. In the following pages and in my everyday life, I try to emulate the spirit of living with which he colored the world. A reality in my life is that raising Arcadio gave me a second chance at life and owe him a great debt for the endless adventures we shared. I love you, Big Daddy. I would also like to acknowledge my mother, Gloria Vielma. Without her financial and moral support, my adventures across Europe and the United States would not have happened. I thank her for the many life lessons and the work ethic with which she raised us. I would also like to acknowledge the following groups and individuals at Fresno State for lighting the way as I studied at the craft of writing and professionalized as a teacher: John Hales, Connie Hales, Steven Church, William Arce, Lisa Weston, Lisa Galvez, Jefferson Beavers, Ginny Crisco, Bo Wang, Rueben Casas, and my peers in the program

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

CHAPTER ONE: MOMENTS OF CLARITY ...... 1

CHAPTER TWO: THE BATTLE AT DIAMOND HEAD ...... 20 CHAPTER THREE: BETWEEN THE CHEESE PLANT, THE HUMANITIES, AND ROME ...... 43

CHAPTER FOUR: DIAMONDS IN THE LIGHT ...... 63

CHAPTER FIVE: A TATTERED YELLOW NOTEBOOK ...... 89

CHAPTER SIX: THE ANGRY CREPES ...... 97

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE SNOWMAN OF MILWAUKEE ...... 111

CHAPTER EIGHT: LUNATIC FRINGE ...... 124

Pinchos in the Basque Country ...... 129

The Churro Lady of Salamanca ...... 131

The Paella Institute of Burgos ...... 134

The Museums of Ham ...... 137

Espresso at Yuri’s Café ...... 140

CHAPTER NINE: GRASS FED COWS ...... 147

CHAPTER TEN: THE MILLENNIUM FALCON MEETS ISHMAEL ...... 169

CHAPTER ELEVEN: TIJUANA TAXI CAB DRIVER’S LAMENT ...... 189 CHAPTER TWELVE: ON MINNEAPOLIS, COFFEE, DRUNKARDS, RAMEN AND THE LOVELY APOLLONIA ...... 204 CHAPTER THIRTEEN: IN SEARCH OF COMMUNITY WITH MEXICAN AHAB ...... 221

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: SYNTHESIS A LA PORTLANDIA ...... 241

The Road to Portland ...... 241

The Arrival ...... 244

The Day Dream ...... 244

vi vi Page

The Reality ...... 246

The Logistics ...... 248

The Ten Best Food Carts of Portland 2015 Eater Magazine ...... 249

Fear and Doubt ...... 249

The Synthesis ...... 252

Humboldt Reunion ...... 255

Top of the List ...... 256

The Reflection ...... 259

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: SEATTLE AS A LIMINAL PLACE ...... 260

The Space Needle ...... 262

A Local Guide ...... 265

Picnic at Green Lake ...... 267

Pioneer Square ...... 272

Lunch with Bruce Lee ...... 276 The International Coffeehouse Tour: Final Report on Seattle’s Top Five Coffee Drinks for Summer 2015 ...... 279

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE FALCON RISING ...... 281

CHAPTER ONE: MOMENTS OF CLARITY

San Andreas, California November 2003 I spent the morning in a basement office at New Horizons Rehabilitation Center in San Andreas, California. It was a nice enough place with a great staff. The nurse, however, couldn’t leave well enough alone. She obsessed over trivial things like my blood pressure, our family history of cancer, and my potentially carrying needles that might poke her. I had other concerns. My worries centered on the suggestion that I might be spending the afternoon without my regular fill of whisky and beer. The thought of going without booze made me extremely uncomfortable and manifested in what doctors call a physiological reaction. A horrible itch came over me, which seemed to radiate outward from deep within my liver. The sensation coursed through my veins, poking through the surface of my clammy skin like a dusting of needle pricks. A voice inside my head whispered that going to New Horizons had been a big mistake, that I didn’t belong there. United Logistics, my employer for the previous three years, had caught me drinking on the job and it was for the last and final time, according to them. The only reason that I had agreed to attend rehab stemmed from my genuine belief that my job with the warehouseman’s union in Modesto would be waiting for me upon my release if I did what the union suggested, which was go to New Horizons for a month. Going through the motions and pretending to get sober felt easy enough. However, the idea of spending the rest of my life without so much as a drop of alcohol, a horrible thought that the nurse kept throwing around irresponsibly as we filled out form

2 2 after form, really bothered me. It sounded like excessively much to ask of one person, one of the most ridiculously impossible things I’d ever heard. My strategic attempt to stay drunk during my stint in rehab involved Big Joe, one of my co-workers from the warehouse. The previous weekend, I had given him a large amount of money and orders to stash four bottles of whiskey in the woods near the road adjacent to New Horizons Rehabilitation Center. Big Joe could earn some much-needed cash and I would gain access to the contraband that could be retrieved later. The plan looked beautiful on paper. Everyone at New Horizons could get sober and go to those meeting until they were blue in the face for all I cared. I would be relaxing and enjoying a steady, undercover buzz. In the privacy of a wooded grove somewhere on the loop trail that ran along the perimeter of the property, I envisioned myself gulping down mouthfuls of whiskey at least a couple of times of day. Everything would work out fine thanks to Big Joe and superb planning. People would marvel at the discipline with which I took to getting in shape by hiking. I stepped out for a smoke in between filling out forms that morning and got my first look at my future home of twenty-eight days. New Horizons opened onto a large asphalt parking lot with several basketball courts at one end. The edges of the courts on the far end were carved out of a hill of scraggly brush oak and an occasional pine tree. The hill rose toward the gray November skies in the direction of an adjacent property in the distance that we later learned existed as a reserve for retired racehorses. I inhaled the mountain air deeply, deciding that New Horizons had great views. I'd been to worse places. To the east across the bottom of the narrow mountain valley where Step Station Road slowly wound its way towards the town of San Andreas, the parched yellow hills rose up in steep inclines, broken up by occasional patches of clustered pines, finally transforming into craggy peaks

3 3 of exposed granite near the ridge tops. On a terrace below the parking lot, a pool glimmered like a diamond against neutral colors of winter. I leaned up against a wrought iron fence near the smoking area. As I fished through my pockets for a lighter, a skinny kid with freckles and a beak nose came bouncing up the stairs that led to the pool. He reached the top of the staircase and turned in my direction as if he knew where to find me, offering me a light and asking, "Are you Eddie?" "That's me," I said, putting my cigarette over the flame, inhaling the first delicious puff of the day. "My name is Justin. They said we're gonna be roommates. Thought I'd come up and say hello," he said. "It’s nice to meet you, Justin. So, where are you from?" I asked exhaling slowly in order to get a good look at my future roommate as I extended my hand in his direction. Justin possessed the clearly identifiable tinges of a long-term meth addict who has gone twelve rounds with the devil himself. He bounced nervously from one position to another with quick, jerky movements. His head went from one shoulder to the other like a pendulum on a grandfather clock, twitching suddenly when it arrived at either end. He also spoke faster than anyone else I had ever heard. "I’m local, Calaveras County, born and raised. If you need anything, let me know. I got this clean and sober stuff down. I should. It's my fourth time here," Justin said with all the confidence of a man who doesn't entirely realize the implications of the words coming out of his mouth. "Thanks, I appreciate it," I responded.

4 4

Suddenly a group of about fifteen people came out from inside New Horizons and walked into the empty space in the parking lot. A wiry, bald man whom I would later find out was the owner of the treatment center - an esteemed spiritual guru - named Roland, led them. He wore the unassuming smile of peace that settles on the faces of those who have suffered and then found their place in the world. His ice blue eyes pierced the winter's grayness as he scanned the parking lot in the direction of Justin and me. His movements were fluid as he exerted a gentle control over the group when they assembled in a circle about ten yards from the front door. One of the girls who had been helping me fill out forms popped out of the entrance for long enough to deposit two suitcases just outside the door. The group, which had just finished a recovery meeting, began holding hands with one member standing alone in the center. All talking ceased as they turned their attention toward Roland who was standing in a deep meditative state, looking down at the asphalt and taking slow, measured breaths. When he finally lifted his head and looked directly into the faces of the individual members, Roland said, "All right everyone, this is a happy time. Another graduate is on her way home to a new life this morning, so let’s send Rose away with some positive energy and good thoughts." The farewell ceremony was already under way when I turned to Justin and asked, "What's that all about?" "Yeah, that's how the group says goodbye. Like so you won’t run straight to the connection's house or stop at the first liquor store you see," Justin said as he lit another cigarette and looked on with all the interest of someone who was watching the event unfold for the first time.

5 5

The group began to recite the Serenity Prayer, simultaneously raising their still joined hands to the sky as the prayer echoed across the parking lot. When the Serenity Prayer ended with "...to know the difference" they said "Amen" and broke into a chant, which they all seem to know from memory and which caused the whole circle to sway with energy. The members of the group shook the fingertips of their outstretched hands, simulating the flying motion of a just released bird as they chanted: Rise up, fly away and leave that shit alone! Rise up, fly away and leave that shit alone! Rise up, fly away and leave that shit alone! The sendoff reached its conclusion and the circle began breaking up. The recipient of the assembled mass of good vibrations, Rose, remained motionless in the middle of where the circle had been. She wiped at the steady flow of tears that ran down her cheeks. After a minute, she grabbed the suitcases as she was ushered to a waiting car by a group of girls to whom she had grown close during her four weeks of spiritual realignment at New Horizons. "What’s up with the hocus pocus stuff. Is that what they do here?" I asked Justin as I watched a blue minivan with Rose inside head down the driveway, towards her new, post-treatment life. "That's all Roland. He’s out there. He's gonna make us pray and meditate and do all kinds of weird shit. Wait until you channel your dead relatives. Don’t worry, though. You just got to fake it, make em think you’re interested. Works every time," Justin said as he loosened his outstretched hands and grabbed at a chunk of air, which he pretended to scrunch into a ball and release in the direction of my face while waving his fingers wildly in an attempt to describe the mystical world to which I now belonged. "So are you going to quit for good this time?" I asked, changing the subject.

6 6

"No. I might for a while, but only because my parents cut me off good this time. They do that when I get too spun out. So I gotta check in here and fatten up and everything goes good for a little bit,” he said, putting out his cigarette on the wrought iron fence and turning back towards the pool. **************************************************************** That evening I attended my first recovery meeting. The gathering got off to a good start until two staff members entered the room escorting a tall blue-eyed Mexican American cowboy. The cowboy wore shiny snakeskin boots and a full- length Denver Broncos trench coat, the kind Lyle Alzado used to wear along the sidelines when he played for Denver back in the 1970's. He towered over the meeting because he was naturally tall and the entrance to the meeting room sat a step above the floor. The cowboy looked obliterated, stumbling drunk. He scanned the crowd and cussed under his breath, resisting the tugs of the two staff members who were trying to coax him quietly through the meeting and toward his final destination. His belligerence made the task exceedingly difficult. What should have been a simple matter turned into high drama when the cowboy tripped over himself in the hallway and put his head through the sheetrock. The two staff members pulled at his shoulders trying to extract his head from the wall as he kicked backwards into the air and yelled “fucking bitches!” The commotion made its way into the meeting room, stopping the proceeding as everyone stared in astonishment at the scene that played out in front of us. I looked over at Justin who whispered, "Detoxification room, they're putting him to bed in the detox room." I nodded my head, signaling that I understood.

7 7

Halfway through the personal story of the guest speaker who had once been a patient but now enjoyed fifteen years of sobriety, everything went terribly wrong. Any sense of belonging that I might have felt toward this new, bewildering environment flew out the window when another melee started in the detox room. It was the cowboy again. We heard furniture breaking and the thud of heavy objects smashing against the walls and then the floor. The chairperson of the meeting motioned for the speaker to stop as everyone looked around at each other, nobody knowing quite what to do. The trench coat cowboy finally appeared in the hallway and ran back into the meeting room with three staff members in full pursuit. He made a break for the exit but when he got to the door, he stopped abruptly and turned around to face everyone in the meeting for the second time that evening. Wobbling, he stared hard in our direction and pointed his chin into the air. Without warning, his arms also shot into the air in gesture of victory. He screamed, "Fuck you Oakland Raiders. Denver Broncos, yeah, motherfuckers!" What happened, next, happened in slow motion. The cowboy lowered his head and broke into a full sprint, launching himself across the room like a WWF wrestler in full regalia toward the desk where the chairperson and speaker were sitting. The folding table and the two plastic chairs that held the guests exploded into shards, sending bodies tumbling to the floor. The cowboy, after riding the table to the floor and getting entangled with the speaker, got to his feet and bolted drunkenly toward the door with the staff and half of the patients following closely behind. Capturing the cowboy turned into an impossible task even after two Calaveras County Sheriff's deputies joined the chase. Justin and I watched the

8 8 scene unfold from the bedroom window of our dorm room where we had a bird’s eye view of the scene unfolding below. The cowboy ran from one end of the facility to the other, high stepping, and eventually stomping away in his tall boots. Whenever the cops or the staff cornered him, the cowboy simply lowered his shoulders and burst through their lines like a touchdown hungry fullback at the goal line, shouting “motherfucking punk" at anyone who tried to tackle him. He laughed hysterically as he plunged through bodies and disappeared into the woods, before re-appearing a short time later in some other part of the facility. His trench coat ended up ripped to shreds until it looked like nothing more than a raggedy dinner jacket. The chase lasted so long that I lost interest and began to unpack. Justin continued to stand by the windowsill, broadcasting play-by-play action of the scene below: "Oh fuck, the cops missed again. Damn! They just tore off half of his jacket, but he got away. Now, he's hiding in the woods again." “Let me know when the action heats up again,” I said, laughing to myself. Five minutes later, Justin started jumping up and down said, "Holy shit, they got him surrounded! He's climbing a tree. Come over here, come check this out." The cowboy was about twenty feet in the air. Two deputies at the base of the tree implored him to climb down and so they could get him the help he needed. They promised not to hurt him. The branches of the pine tree could no longer support the weight of the runaway cowboy. Suddenly, he tumbled out of the tree like an avalanche on the way down the side of a mountain. By then night had fallen, so it was the silhouette of the cowboy that we watched summersault through the canopy of trees. The cacophony of snapping tree limbs echoed in symphony with the cowboy's low

9 9 grunts and sudden shrieks every time a limb dug into him and then gave way. The final thud, which left Justin and me wide eyed just before we selfishly broke into our own spell of uncontrolled laughter, ended the chase for good. Two days later the cowboy returned from the county jail with two black eyes and dozens of bright red cuts all over his face and body. Our new roommate didn’t remember a thing. He just flopped himself on the bed under the window of the dorm room which looked like it hadn't been upgraded since the 80's. The sober version of the cowboy was gentle and quiet, nothing like the monster from two nights before. He was embarrassed, but even more upset because he had left home that afternoon with a large amount of cash on his person that never made it to the booking in Angels Camp. Looking out into the night about an hour after the cowboy had been loaded into the ambulance and Justin and I had finally stopped laughing, I felt confused about what being in rehab meant. I needed desperately to communicate with Big Joe who refused to answer his phone. It didn't occur to me at that moment that I would emerge on the other side of that experience with a new life, certainly not after the circus that I had just witnessed. ****************************************************************** By my third night at New Horizons, it had become apparent that I wouldn’t be hearing from Big Joe any time soon. His betrayal scared me because it meant getting sober on someone else’s terms. The lack of alcohol during the previous two days was making me sick. I lay in bed in the dorm room shaking and listening to my heart thump like a stampede of wild buffaloes. There wasn’t much to do but ride it out. To describe the process is to resort to the cliché, to say that it felt like I’d been run over by a freight train, my body split in half and left bloodied on the tracks. I pictured my entrails and chunks of brain matter splattered on the front end

10 10 of the imaginary locomotive, which hadn't even bothered to stop. I could hear it rumbling away with my life as I sat in the dark hour after hour with little chance of avoiding the physical anguish that lay in front of me. I tried to rock myself to sleep. But anybody who has ever been through detox knows that sleep is impossible, because the mind races with irrational fears and the heart thumps with relentless waves of guilt inducing self-pity as every mistake and every failure in what feels like a worthless life plays out on the big screen in the sufferer's head. A harrowing soundtrack screams and white noise echoes across scenes past, present and future. A fat moon and clear skies hung over the narrow valley that night. I could make out the outline of the cowboy curled up and sleeping like a baby under the same window where two days earlier Justin and I had been spellbound by his drunken antics. Across from him, Justin twitched and grunted his way through a series of drug dreams that he would later describe as typical and horrific, tossing and turning for hours on end. It was three thirty in the morning. Above Justin's bed, half way up the wall I could clearly see the famous image of Jimmy Hendrix’s head manifested onto the grain of the 1970's style wood paneling that covered the walls. The anomaly resulted from a knotting of the wood in quick swirls that mixed with dark spots in the stain. Whenever the central heating kicked on, it seemed that Jimmy’s head bobbed up and down, leaving his Afro to swirl in the shadows, a situation created more by my spinning head than any actual movement of the panels. A legend had it that whoever could make out the image on the wall would remain sober after their stint at New Horizons. The legend was a fantasy at best because statistics suggest that few of the people who pass through rehabs ever reach long-term sobriety. Nevertheless, the legend persisted, passed down from

11 11 patient to patient for generations. The folk tale resulted in a parade of gawkers stopping by the dorm in order to stare at the spot above Justin's bed. They cocked their heads, half closed one eye, usually aided by someone at their side who described where the Afro ended, and the forehead began, where they should see that the nose separated the cheekbones. I got out of bed still dripping sweat and dry heaving as quietly as possible in order not to wake up my roommates. At first, I sat at the edge of the bed, unable to do anything but sit there and try to stop the rumbling in my head. I made my way to a writing table and turned on the lamp. I sat and opened a magazine on the desk that told the story of a drunk who had gotten sober. The man described an unbearably demoralizing scenario, which would have seemed far-fetched if it wasn’t for the fact that I’d also experienced the same catastrophe not more than a month before. I’d been sure that something so pathetic could only happen to me. The randomness of my opening up the magazine to such a story seemed a strange sort of serendipity. I began to think of quitting for the first time in many years. They call those moments of clarity Roland would later claim as he explained what happened to me in the room that night. Within days, I found myself working the program of recovery. The staff and I began to unravel the mysteries of my condition and to examine the unlovely creature that stared back at me in the mirror. I met a counselor named Sandwich Rick who practiced Native American spirituality and helped me to work the program. Sandwich Rick was entertaining but dead serious about the work that getting sober entailed. I had a lot of fun purposely getting under his skin by calling him Rick the Sandwich. Whenever I pretended to call him Rick the Sandwich on accident, he became flustered and stopped me in my tracks, correcting me and telling me that Rick the Sandwich and Sandwich Rick were two completely

12 12 different ideas. He had owned a sandwich shop, hence the name, so he didn’t appreciate being called an actual sandwich. For most of my life, I’d been spoiled and had no real reason to drink other than I may have been predisposed. The habit just formed slowly through years of daily drinking. There was one thing, though, that kept me drinking. I’d never discussed it with anyone until that afternoon in Sandwich Rick's office. I explained to Sandwich Rick that six years’ prior my oldest brother had killed his wife and then himself in a domestic dispute and that he’d left behind a little boy. I told Rick how riddled I was with guilt because we fought over money and that I spent the following four years in a skid row hotel drinking away all conscious memory of it. Rick sat there shaking his head during the session and said, "Man, you got to get that stuff out and work on it. No wonder you're wound up tight and stay drunk all the time.” “How do I do that? “Brother, you need to forgive yourself. Ask for forgiveness. You don’t own that. You didn’t pull the trigger," he said. It was all there in black and white. Moments of clarity are complicated, so it took me a long time to understand what Rick meant. Rick was attempting to show me a new perspective, a place to begin where I could come to terms with the past and to forge a way out by staying sober one day at a time. Roland's classes on self-esteem were everybody’s favorites because they were animated and full of his off the wall antics. He bent thick steel rods and walked on red-hot coals. He talked about redesigning our lives and setting goals. He also gave practical advice. Roland would also act out the scenes of our future challenges by using voices and wild gestures to give emphasis to his lessons. One of my favorite characters was selfish, twenty something Roland, who didn’t give

13 13 too many fucks and never learned from his mistakes. The character spoke in the high voice and language of a five-year-old, but he walked through the world as an adult, carrying enough anger and hate to fuel a nuclear power plant. Once, after portraying the character, Roland came out of it somber, turning towards us in the same room where the cowboy had smashed the table and announced in a gentle voice, with tears in his eyes: “That that version of me actually existed - a long time ago.” The lessons in Roland's spiritual kindergarten were about the basics of life, the ones we never learned or never integrated into our daily lives because we were too busy drinking. They included paying our bills and learning to apologize when we had hurt others, and the ceasing of lying and cheating because it was how we’d ended up at New Horizons. Roland claimed that we lived in arrested development and blamed it for our lack of emotional sobriety. He explained that drinking on a daily basis had never allowed us to mature. He also taught us that religion did not have the market cornered when it came to God and that he was accessible to anyone who asked for help. When we asked him what that looked like, he taught us to stretch and do breathing exercises, threw a mat on the floor and said the first order of meditation was shutting down the noise of the outside world. Roland also emphasized talking to God as if he were right there in the room with us, nothing fancy. He implored us to develop our spiritual lives through prayer and meditation, no matter how silly that may have sounded at that moment - that we would need it in the real world. ****************************************************************** I was pulled from a class that first week - before I'd begun thinking in terms of actually getting sober - and taken to a small musty room in the basement next to

14 14 where I had been registered on my first day. A representative from the union named Matt wanted to speak with me. I pulled out the chair and sat down. Matt reached across the table, put out his hand said, “How are you doing. I'm Matt. Here to make sure they are treating you all right.” “Everything is good so far,” I said, shaking his hand. “Good, let’s talk about your problem,” Matt said. “You mean my job,” I responded. “No I mean your real problem, the reason you’re here," he answered. “Oh," I said, rolling my eyes. It was so dark in the room that it felt like an interrogation from some black and white detective movie from long ago. Matt pulled out a clipboard with a progress report with my name on it and began to check things off a list. He lined the table with a series of pamphlets and magazines related to getting sober. He pushed a couple of the pamphlets toward me, so I sized him up, deciding that he looked harmless, the type of retired guy who volunteers for the union because he has time on his hands. I pushed the pamphlets back. We small talked about things ranging from football to how the Sierra foothills were a world away, culturally and geographically, from the Central Valley below. Matt, nonetheless, kept bending the conversation back toward my lack of understanding of the program of recovery, so much so that his insistence was starting to irritate me. He wanted to know how much of the work I’d done. I asked about my job. He asked if I understood the point of the program. I asked if he understood that my financial future lay in the balance. He warned that I didn’t understand the hole I was in and that people like me died of ignorance. My response was that I would get around to the program of recovery when I got my job back, which caused him to sit silently for a minute and stare me down.

15 15

We were already on each other’s nerves. He moved towards the edge of his seat as we began to launch micro aggressions at each other. He cut me off in mid- sentence. I looked away when he spoke. Our rising tones did not go well with the ambience of the windowless room because it was decorated from top to bottom with posters and prints that emphasized the positive messages of recovery, each varying in their degree of cheesiness - Peace, Love, Serenity, Live and Let Live, Easy Does It, and Let Go and Let GOD! I could see the veins in Matt's neck begin to bulge every time I demanded to know about the investigation into my drinking on the job and whether he’d found an applicable loophole that would allow me to keep my job like the last time. Matt stood up, tossed his chair aside and started pacing back and forth, rubbing his forehead under the brim of his Oakland A’s hat. I started to say something, but Matt throwing his clipboard on the floor interrupted me. I thought about getting up and breaking his jaw with one good hit, but I was having too much fun pissing him off. Matt took a step towards the desk and stood there staring at me until, without warning, he wiped everything off the table in one quick fit of rage with such force that a clear glass vase shattered against one of the walls. We had a stare down. I thought about getting up again, but he was over sixty years old and I didn't want to rough up an old man. Matt leaned in so close to me that in the darkened room I could see the last shades of yellow on the white hair that hung from under the bill of his cap. “Nobody gives shit about your stupid job,” he said, pointing his finger at my face. "You’re an ungrateful punk! Do you have any idea how many people we bury in this line of work?" He paused, "Clean this shit up and go back to the meeting. I don’t want to ever see you again.”

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***************************************************************** I ended up in the kitchen of New Horizons because the regular cook was on vacation, and one Saturday, I inherited the job of making a very special dinner, which we were told was for our families to enjoy in our company when they visited the following Sunday afternoon. I jumped at the opportunity and began preparing my famous lasagna. I'd once had all the training and talent in the world in regard to being a chef, but I had pissed it away with my usual drinking inspired clowning around and subsequent fuck ups. In other words, that dream never fully materialized because of my disregard for the rules and my immature behavior in places where the utmost professionalism was required. I never lost my passion for food even as the Internet age and food movement after food movement revolutionized the planet’s relationship to food and eating. I watched from the sidelines and died a little each time the world discovered some new chef or another new cooking show emerged on television. According to Sandwich Rick, I needed to bury that dream or rebuild it. I found out later that the preparation of my famous lasagna was equivalent to making my own last meal, for the benefit of those attending the hanging. What they hadn’t told us was that a lasagna dinner with our family was a synonym for a confrontation where our loved ones, in full view of everyone else's family members, sat in a chair across from us and read letters that recalled in vivid detail the long list of resentments they held against us. The day of the event, families began to arrive in their luxury cars and their beat up clunkers. Dinner had to wait. The hangings would come first. One of the staff members started the ceremonies by announcing, to the surprise of many of the patients that there would in fact be a delicious lasagna dinner, cooked by the patient who had recently taken ownership of the kitchen, but first our families had

17 17 some important things to tell us. Someone dragged two chairs to the middle of the meeting room and the confrontations began. A Vietnam Veteran with a mean streak the size of a cattle ranch - he'd seen what nobody should ever have to see during his three tours, things he described in freakish detail once while we talked in the waiting room of a doctor’s office - got the worst of all the inventory readings. It makes me sad, even all these years later to think about how the event turned on him and how he sat alone afterwards, because his family didn’t bother to stay for dinner. One by one, his two sons sat in the chair and called him a son of a bitch and a piece of worthless shit, announced that they were only there out of respect for their mom. He’d given them plenty of wealth, they claimed, but little else in terms of love or support. They despised him. They had become as sick as he was. When his wife finally took the seat in front of him, she read him an impassioned letter that detailed a time when they had been young and in love with a bright future ahead of them. She thought they could one day relive some of those things, if he got better. Everyone in the room choked up. He didn’t flinch throughout the process except for a single solitary tear that rolled down his cheek after his wife read her letter. We could see in his eyes that he was moved, but we could see clearly that a part of him was livid with anger and that, if he could have gotten away with it, he would have slugged her across the face. My mom who traveled to the dinner with my brother and nephew did what every other mother did that afternoon. She read a letter and sobbed, recounting how cute it was the time that I got drunk on accident when I was six and my brother and step dad found me passed out in the bath tub, and what it made her feel when she saw me drunk as an adult. She begged me to quit drinking and told me she couldn’t take it anymore. I had the fortune of having my inventory read to me in Spanish so few people could understand the details of her complaints, but it

18 18 might as well have been in English because everybody understood the gestures of pain and the language of disappointment. My brother was more composed. He mentioned that it was time for the party to be over, that the days of drinking wildly at keg parties in someone’s almond orchard had long ago ended. There were consequences now, everybody had moved on, made regular lives for themselves, and that it was now my turn. The real surprise came when my nephew Arcadio whom my mom and I had been raising since the death of my brother and his wife came from out of the crowd and sat in the chair in front of me. He was eight and still possessed the chubby and angelic cuteness of his preschool and kindergarten years. He sat in the chair in front of me in a Shaquille O’Neal inspired basketball outfit which was a few sizes too small for him, but which he refused to stop wearing because he though it made him look cool. His big brown eyes stared in my direction as he settled into the chair but he didn’t say a word as he pulled out a folded up piece of paper onto which he had written me a letter. He’d been two at the time of his mom and dad’s death, but considered me like his dad and my mom like his mom, which was something that he’d announced in the car when my mom and I drove him away from the scene of the murder suicide where he had curled up all night with the bodies. He read the short letter, and disappeared into the dinner crowd just as fast as he had appeared. It read:

Dear Uncle Eddie, November 28, 2003 Mom and I pray for you every night that you quit drinking because we want you to be our family. Please stop drinking before you might catch a disease and die. Thank You.

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Your nephew, Arcadio Gomez I often pull out that yellowed piece of paper, look at it, and remember all that went into making it. I notice again the four stickers pasted in the corners of people in familial scenes, the three hand drawn figures below the text, which are in baby blue crayon and supposed to represent the three of us who were thrown together after the tragedy. I'm on the left. Arcadio and mom are holding hands next to me and there is a dog and a cat nearby, Uncle Eddie scrawled across the top in letters so jagged that they are hard to read. In the drawing, we are all smiling.

CHAPTER TWO: THE BATTLE AT DIAMOND HEAD

Honolulu Fall 2010 We risked the small window of opportunity because Arcadio, throughout his four-year battle with Ewing’ Sarcoma, had so strongly expressed the wish of visiting Hawaii. The doctors had decided against our going to Oahu the previous week, but they reconsidered because they ascribed Arcadio’s low blood counts and increased fever to a common cold. Everyone in the Oncology Department at Valley Children's Hospital felt a sense of relief because the short-lived virus didn’t signal the total collapse of his immune system. What followed was meeting after meeting with Arcadio's team of oncologist in order to formulate a plan in case he took a turn for the worst while in Hawaii. We were fortunate that a children’s hospital existed in Honolulu because it became a deciding factor. I rebooked our cancelled plans and we were off for a weeklong adventure on Oahu, taking a morning flight from San Francisco to Honolulu on Monday, October 10, 2010. From the back seat of the cab, Honolulu looked like a tropical paradise. Arcadio was having a good day, so we laughed and tried to live in the moment while mom sat in the front seat. She was quiet from the realization that we would have to portray a happy spectacle during what was little more than a farewell vacation. Things were about to change for the worse, whether we liked it or not. The child who had rescued us from the tragedy of his parent’s deaths and saw the world through a lens of happy possibilities didn't have much time to live. Despite the reality, we trudged forward and made the most of our time on the island, and for a few fleeting moments during that week, time stood still and we imagined that the cancer didn’t have the power to design our future lives.

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Skyscrapers poked at the atmosphere and the expansive blue sea floated on the horizon as pastel colored neighborhoods crowded the sides of emerald mountains in the opposite direction. Those distant landscapes gave way to packed urban scenes as we sped across the bridge to Waikiki. The streets scenes rolled by our windows, as if montages created for a promotional clip meant to sway the viewing public into visiting the island - limousines, a crowded beach in the distance, sidewalks teeming with young people, steakhouses with deliciously crafted names raced across the screen. The only thing missing was the theme song and the opening scenes from Magnum PI. The taxi stopped in front of the Aston, which sits directly across the street from the celebrated statue of Duke Kahanamoku, which commemorates the colorful life of modern surfing’s father figure. The bronze statue of the native Hawaiian, whose chiseled Polynesian features dominate a first glance, stands contrapposto in front his surfboard with outstretched arms on which colorful leis swing in the breeze. Kahanamoku welcomes visitors to Kuhio Beach as the Pacific Ocean stirs behind him and Diamond Head rises into the sky on the periphery, seemingly giving life to the ebb and flow of the sea. The streets of Waikiki stirred with people from all over the world. As we unloaded our suitcases from the minivan, two ambulances whizzed by with their lights and sirens screaming to the beat of a live band playing above the street in one of the hotel lounges. A warm breeze blew in the ocean’s scent. The island felt different to me because I hadn’t ever ventured from the West Coast except for childhood visits to Mexico. Arcadio and mom, on the other hand, had been all over the United States because of mom's cookware business. They were a successful sales duo for over a decade, grandmother and grandchild winning sales

22 22 awards and drawing the compliments of industry leaders who praised their teamwork and their ability to close a sale. Arcadio pointed to familiar faces from the show Dog the Bounty Hunter. They were the guys who spent long days gathered under the palm trees that shaded the public benches across the street from the Aston and had no intention in life other than to party and take it easy by watching the traffic go by at the edge of the beach. I had seen an episode or two, so I knew it was the place where Dog went to barter for information or to put the word on the street about some fugitive he was seeking. We settled into our suite on the sixth floor of the Aston, which overlooks Waikiki Beach. A warm breeze blew steadily through the suite's set of French doors. I stepped out and stood on the balcony, watching a tiny storm system form in the sky above Diamond Head. A few dark clouds huddled together, releasing their energy in the form of a quick shower that touched the entire southern tip of Waikiki. The quick deluge had been enough to wet the streets below. Within a few minutes, all traces of bad weather including any semblance of clouds had vanished. A colonial villa motif meets a newly remodeled Carl's Jr. with varying shades of red and yellow decorations greeted us in the suite. The place looked as though Paul Gauguin and Andy Warhol had come back from the dead to collaborate on its eclectic design. Mom and Arcadio lay down on the same king size bed while I attended to my homework from an online art history class, which I was taking in between twelve-hour shifts at the cheese plant. I sank into a plush red velvet chair and opened up my laptop, thinking more about the situation at hand than about the art class essay on Kandinsky that was due the following morning. I watched as sleep

23 23 overtook Arcadio. Before he fell into the deep slumber, induced by the dozen or so medications that he took on a daily basis, we had a fading conversation about his animals, one of his favorite subjects in the world. His eyelids fluttered and he asked, “You think Osito will be all right at the kennel?” “Yes, Big Daddy. I know the woman really well. We used to work together at Amtex. She is super cool and loves animals, just like you,” I said. "Is that the place that you got fired from for drinking on 9/11," he asked from somewhere closer to sleep than being present on a bed above Waikiki Beach. "Yup, that’s the place, but never mind all that," I said. "What about the cats?" he asked as his eyelids drooped further over his eyes. "They are fine, everything is fine. Go to sleep dude," I said. Arcadio turned towards mom who was staring into space and lying on the other side of him, near the French doors that led to the balcony and said, “I love you, mom. I love you too, Uncle Eddie.” "I love you back, Big Daddy." I said. We’d been repeating this type of exchange for years because Arcadio began to utter them from the moment he went to live with mom. Unexpectedly, he would just thank us and tell us he loved us. I came to know the gestures as Arcadio's way of fighting back against the abandonment he felt because of his parent’s death. He needed daily reassurance that we weren't going to disappear into thin air. He operated on the simple assumption that if we loved him we weren’t likely to leave him even though that had been the case with his real mom and dad. Arcadio finally fell asleep with a pillow tucked under his reconstructed leg, clutching the tattered Scooby Doo that I'd bought him the Christmas after he

24 24 turned seven. His sixteen-year-old body swallowed his half of the king size bed. He had continued to grow tall despite the removal of two vertebrae from the center of his back after a tumor left him paralyzed from the chest down two years earlier. I could see how incredibly contorted his body appeared after the four-year battle with Ewing’s Sarcoma as he lay in an awkward but comfortable position. He always found a way to sleep comfortably, although at that point he needed the help of morphine, THC pills, and a host of other medications that had made the trip possible. I continued to watch him sleep in his favorite undergarments, Sponge Bob boxer shorts and a wife beater t-shirt. The foot-long scar, which he had acquired in July after his shattered hip was replaced at Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno, crawled out from under his boxer shorts, running along the outside of his left thigh, still raw, still warm to the touch. The sight of Arcadio peacefully sleeping with the scar on his thigh and an equally long scar down his spine lessened my desire to inhabit the world of art history that had produced Kandinsky, the hippie who had been seven decades ahead of his time. My lack of interest was a good excuse to put away the homework. I thought a lot about fate that first day in the hotel room, particularly, the chances of an orphaned kid contracting a rare form of cancer with a 5% survival rate. I thought about how close we had come to remission as a long-term reality. Earlier in the year, we had counted the days on the calendar, knowing that important milestones were around the corner before an uncomfortable feeling in Arcadio's chest initiated the final diagnosis. I thought of the blessing inside the curse, the fact that I’d been given a second chance at life in order to raise the kid I

25 25 now had to watch suffer under the weight of a four year, progressive breaking down of the body. Arcadio was leaving, a little more each day, to rejoin his parents. Kandinsky and my life as a returning student in junior college felt like an insignificant hill of beans. Life was unfolding in front of me, not in some future life that an education promised to make better. The thought of having to return to the cheese plant while dealing with Arcadio's situation put me in an angry mood as did the reality that all my waking hours would continue to be spent bouncing back and forth from the cheese plant to Modesto Junior College to Valley Children's Hospital. I had no other choice. I could do it, though, because Arcadio inspired us and had taught us to stay positive even in our most tired and darkest moments. Hawaiian legend holds that Kuhio Beach is the home of mystical healing powers, so a part of me still held out hope that a miracle might cure Arcadio's cancer, even though the doctors had been clear about the progression of the disease. Although the prognosis was grim, somewhere deep inside, I wanted to believe in the miracles that are intrinsic to many of the world's religions even though I wanted to leave the rest of their ideologies behind. I was reaching for hope, for a place beyond the diagnosis and it didn't matter too much from where it came. I wanted the cure to come instantaneously from some miracle enabling spirit or saint or even God himself. We could then walk away into the rest of our lives, spending our days describing how hope and faith had moved mountains. The Wizard Stones of Kapaemahu tell the story of four powerful mystics who arrived on Oahu from Tahiti sometime before the 16th Century, each with a special ability to heal those afflicted with ailments. The healers eventually left the island but before leaving, they transferred their curative powers to four stones. The legend was almost lost to history with the withering away of the Hawaiian cultural

26 26 and oral traditions. The cultural rebirth of recent decades literally rescued the stones from a series of moves that at one point had them serving as foundation pieces in an old bowling alley, which succumbed to demolition in the 1960’s. They now serve as cultural artifacts watched over by a new generation of Hawaiians who practice their ancient customs. Today, the rocks adorn a closed off circular pedestal on Kunio Beach, watching over the beach, inviting the infirmed people of the world to swim in the placid waters over which they stand watch. Although we sometimes entertained the miracle healing narrative, deep inside mom and I knew that few kids diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma ever live past five years. We had also talked of visiting Orsansmichele in Florence a church also famous for healing miracles, but we ran out of time. It never happened. The ancient Hawaiian legend was the best we could do. As for Italy, that was far ahead into the future when Arcadio was no longer with us, when I would have to find my own healing experiences and make sense of his short life through traveling and learning about food. I put away my laptop and thought about the afternoon in July that produced the scar on Arcadio's left leg after an emergency surgery restored his ability to walk. The events leading up to the surgery renewed our faith in the long parade of people who’d been put on our path to help us deal with his long illness. The results of that emergency surgery and the emergence of various persons who made it possible allowed us, subsequently, the opportunity to take the trip to Oahu because it rendered Arcadio able to walk even though he had limited mobility and was often in pain. By July of 2010, Arcadio was well into his third bout with Ewing’s Sarcoma and we understood that his time with us was limited. He had chosen not to undergo a third round of chemo and radiation because he knew that it would

27 27 only prolong the inevitable. His original treatment, which consisted of six months of chemotherapy, had left him with a limp. The treatment concluded with a weeklong barrage of radiation to his left hip, so when his hip socket and femur collapsed during the first week of July, the situation wasn't entirely a surprise to anyone. From one day to the next, Arcadio’s hip ballooned to the size of a melon. We found ourselves rushing him to Valley Children's Hospital in the middle of the night as we so often had during the previous four years. Staring out at Waikiki Beach from the air-conditioned comfort of our suite, I continued to reflect on his surgery in July. A wave of guilt had passed over me that night in the hospital and again as I watched Arcadio sleeping next to Mom. We’d allowed Arcadio to walk to school the previous year, which undoubtedly put a lot of stress on his leg. It was his only full semester at Turlock High and we hoped that he could enjoy being a regular kid in high school. For a couple of weeks, it worked. Mom and I nervously watched him leave in the morning and return home beaming with pride, describing every detail of his day, including all the dogs he had seen on the way and how his friends at school had changed or not changed since he last saw them in junior high. Arcadio even started to pick up a friend on the way to school, enjoying the simplicity of what the long stretches in the hospital had previously denied him. We still had hope that fall. Letting him walk the half mile to high school felt like the right thing to do, as if we could ride the decision into a future that didn't include any setbacks. That small success, however, marked the high point of our temporary return to normalcy. We’d hoped that he would simply walk himself into the company of the five percent who beat Ewing's Sarcoma. A few months later, during the second half of his first year, our worst fears happened. Tests

28 28 revealed that his nagging cough was more serious than just a reoccurring cold. His lungs were filling with tumors. At the hospital that night, Arcadio's team of oncologist had all gone home, so a pediatric surgeon from another department who specialized in operating on children arrived in order to oversee the situation. He was the first to look at the results of the CAT scan and quite surprised when he realized that Arcadio was already the size of an adult. Doctor Morgan possessed a mid-western softness of manner that was comforting in a setting where the difference between doctors and God consisted of a thin line, where they often told us what we wanted to hear instead of the truth. Dr. Morgan stood about five and a half feet tall, had brown eyes, and wore a perpetual smile. He looked more like a graduate student than a capable surgeon. His approach to dealing with patients possessed a working class charm that came across as unrehearsed and friendly. The first time we met him he shared a piece of gum with us and told us about his wife and kids. He mentioned that it was his last week at the hospital because the following week he was leaving the hospital in order to fulfill his Christian mission of performing surgeries in third world countries. All three of us talked late into the night while behind the scenes a plan was put in place to help Arcadio. Doctor Morgan knew how to joke with Arcadio and got him to laugh through the pain even though all of us were scared of what might happen because of his swollen hip. When Dr. Morgan stepped out, Arcadio said, “Dude can you believe they are letting an eighth grade looking dude work on my leg?” "Shh! Here he comes," I said trying to act serious.

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Arcadio and I could barely contain ourselves when Dr. Morgan stepped back into the room because we’d been calling him Doogie Howser MD. The nurses used the lighthearted moment to bring us two bowls of Rocky Road ice cream, so we stuffed spoons of ice cream into our mouths in order to smother the laughs directed at Dr. Morgan's baby face and oversized white coat. We continued to poke fun of Dr. Morgan with roving glances. He suspected what was going on, so he indulged us by smiling quietly every time we burst into laughter after he walked back in the room. Meanwhile Arcadio's leg continued to swell. In private, Dr. Morgan explained the gravity of the situation. He said, “Look, this could be it. Things can deteriorate very quickly here. The head of Arcadio’s femur is shattered, so is the socket. It needs to be operated on now." "What about his regular surgeon? He'll be here in the morning," I said. "It’s beyond what we can do here, but I have a friend at Community Regional Hospital who is one of the best at this type of surgery. I have been trying to get a hold of him since I saw the CAT scans," he said as he punched numbers into the keyboard of his cell phone. "What I mean is that we don't have time to waste. I can try to schedule Arcadio for surgery at Community Regional first thing in the morning, but I need your permission." Mom arrived at one in the morning and together we agreed to transfer Arcadio to Community Regional Hospital in downtown Fresno. At four o’clock in the morning, they loaded mom, Arcadio, and me into an ambulance headed to Community Regional. We waved goodbye to Dr. Morgan and two of the nurses whom we’d come to know well over the course of previous years. I felt greatly indebted to Dr. Morgan for his having stayed with us all night and arranging Arcadio’s surgery. He was a genuinely nice person who we will

30 30 remember for a very long time because he responded in a very human way, helping us to make the best of a maddening situation. As I watched Arcadio sleep in the suite above Waikiki, I thought again of Dr. Morgan's kindness and his quick thinking, which allowed Arcadio access to the gifted surgeon who reconstructed his hip that morning in July. At Community Regional Hospital, a Korean American nurse named Sarah attended to Arcadio in our room on the third floor. She began the long process of admitting him and preparing him for surgery. Arcadio made quick friends with Sarah as he did with most people. His ability to recite the twelve medications that he needed to take throughout the day amazed Sarah. Sarah looked over Arcadio’s charts and said, “You are one brave kid, Arcadio. I hope you’re not nervous. Dr. Vashon does this all the time. You'll be in and out before you know it." Arcadio looked up at mom and me and said, “I’m not nervous. I'm used to the surgeries. I just need my leg to get better so I can play drums with my band. We haven't practiced in a week.” We looked at each other. Mom raised her eyebrows and said, "Que band ni que nada, Arcadio." I stepped around Arcadio's hospital bed and said, “Big Daddy, I'll be back in a minute. I am going to go find some coffee.” Arcadio motioned back and forth with his hand from where it sat on the railing of the bed and said as he always said, "Okay. I love you Uncle Eddie." "I love you too," I said, exchanging a glance with mom who was standing in the doorway. The sun had come up as I made my way from the old section of the hospital toward the new addition through a confusing set of narrow hallways in the

31 31 direction of the café Sarah had described. I stopped to comb my hair in the reflection of a window, happy to have gotten the opportunity to shower back at Valley Children's Hospital where I always kept an extra pair of clothes. When the elevator doors opened up, I stepped out, yielding the right of way to a one armed man with a crutch passing in front of me. Our eyes met and he stopped. We seemed to know each other, but I couldn't place him. He kept looking me over and finally said, “Que te paso a ti? You look different.” I remembered him clearly, when he spoke because of his thick accent. I had known him during my drinking days in Modesto, years earlier (I responded that I had quit drinking and that things had changed for the better in my life). He seemed satisfied with the answer and smiled warmly in acknowledgment of my claim. He kept looking me over and said, “Do you remember that time in Modesto when that tank gunner from Dessert Storm kicked your ass in the middle of the street in the Airport District?” I nodded remembering the sting of freezing asphalt on the back of my neck that day. I said, “He got the better of me, but I did some damage and anyway, I had it coming. No big deal, right?” He looked a lot older than I remembered him. The skin around his eyes was wrinkled like a prune. He had hunger in his eyes and his jet-black hair looked like pruning shears had cut it. He stuck his hand out and said, “Chavez, remember? How long ago was that, eight years ago, maybe? Whatever happened to that kid you used to run around with?”

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I shook his hand and said, "I saw Salvador driving a furniture truck in Patterson a couple of years ago, but he acted like he didn't know me." My firing from a Toyota subsidiary in Manteca on September 11, 2001, prompted me to leave my studio in the Raven’s Inn where I had spent the previous four years in an alcohol-induced fog. I stayed with an aunt of mine in Modesto that winter near downtown. She was away most of the week working in the Bay Area, so I became bored which led me to roam downtown Modesto. I met Salvador there. He had recently arrived from San Jose. Salvador and I had one thing in common. We were both in a holding pattern. I was waiting on a five thousand dollar check from a 401 K, which I had partially cashed out after my firing. Salvador was waiting for his girlfriend’s dad to like him so he could move into their apartment. We had nothing to do and all day to do it. We spent our days wandering the streets, going from park to park, meeting people and trying our best to have a decent time. On the day to which Chavez referred, a group of us stood under some trees near the Gospel Mission in the airport district. Some of us knew each other casually, occasionally running into one another for long enough to talk and share a sip from a pint. A few of the people talked about serving in Vietnam. A man named Frank, who looked like a Norman Rockwell version of Santa Claus because of his flowing white hair and a long beard that poured over the front of his shirt, said he had been in Vietnam but had seen no action. I had known Frank for several weeks and considered him a nice person, so I didn't blame him when he set in motion the events that led to getting my ass kicked.

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Frank turned to me and asked, “How about you Gomez, you ever been in the military, you see any action?” “I was a tank gunner in Desert Storm, during the initial wave," I said as naturally as if it had been true. "Had two kills that I know about.” I had spent years in the bars telling lies, so making stuff up on the street felt like the thing to do. As Frank and continued to speak, a homeless looking thirty something year old with gray, inset eyes, who had been sitting anonymously on the curb, rushed towards us in a burst of excitement. “I was a tank gunner with the 24th, on an Abrams M1A1," he said. "We fucked up the Republican Guard royally at Al Busayaah. We lit their shit on fire, quick. Who were you with?” Unable to produce an answer, I became defensive. “Why the fuck does that matter? That shit happened a long time ago,” I responded, which fixed everyone's attention on us. He stepped back, took off his jacket and said, “You're making shit up. You probably weren’t even there. Let’s settle that shit right here, motherfucker!” I took off my own jacket and walked to the middle of the street, waving him in with my left hand as everyone stood up and began to crowd in around us. He charged, so I stepped to the side and clipped him in the neck with a glancing blow that sent him sideways, tripping over the edge of the sidewalk. He caught himself, regained his balance and turned back towards me. His second approach was more guarded. Instead of a direct charge, he danced around like a boxer. When he got close, I missed with a wide left. In one quick motion, he stepped forward and hit me square in the nose with the full weight of his body behind it, which sent me sprawling to the ground.

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He jumped on top of me, so I grabbed his hair, pulling his head down toward my body, as I lay flat on my back, so that he couldn't measure the punches he was raining down on my face and the top of my head. He landed at least one more solid shot to my already bleeding nose. I could hear Salvador yelling instructions in my direction as I shook my head from side to side, trying to avoid direct hits to the face. "Come on Eddie, flip him over. Fuck him up!” Salvador screamed from somewhere on the sidewalk. With every punch, the tank gunner screamed out an accusation; “You're a fucking liar, stop fucking lying, you fucking weren't there!” The blood from my nose started to flow everywhere and started getting in my eyes, making it impossible for me to see. I continued to grab my opponent’s hair with both hands whenever I could, trying to bring him toward the side of my body so I could get out from under him. I was able to bring my right leg out from between his legs for long enough to knee him in the jaw, but he remained on top of me, landing blows until a hand full of people broke us up. He’d gotten the better of me, but I still called him a pussy as I spit out a mouth full of blood onto the asphalt. He called me a lying spic as some of our friends led him away. Salvador and a few others helped me up and sat me on the curb. I remember Chavez producing a towel from his backpack and some water for me to wash my face. My check came the next week, so my days of wandering aimlessly through the streets of Modesto ended. I moved to Turlock, where mom and Arcadio had resettled, and got a job in the Warehouseman's Union, only to encounter the same problems that had plagued me for years. I asked Chavez what brought him to the hospital.

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He tapped the crutch on the ground and said, “They let me have some rubber stoppers for my crutch for free. It is good to see you Gomez, all cleaned up. Do you work here?” “No, just passing through,” I said. I told him about Arcadio. He stared down and just shook his head. After realizing that our reunion had run its course, he came in close and said, “I need little push. Can you spare a couple of bucks for a cold one? You know I can’t work and it’s not easy out there. Tu sabes como es.” I gave him everything I had, which was not much, because of the favor he had done me eight years earlier and for reminding me from where I’d come. I went to the chapel in order to pray and meditate partly out of fear and partly out of gratitude, forgetting about the coffee. I did what Roland had showed us to do. I quieted my mind and talked to God, asking him to guide the surgeon through the surgery, emerging with a sense that the operation would work out for the best. It did. At about two in the afternoon, a tall surgeon with green eyes who looked like he belonged on the cover of a sports magazine, came into the waiting room and told us that Arcadio was out of surgery and that everything had gone well. He said, “Things went in smooth, so Arcadio should be able to use his leg once he heals up a bit.” My mom and I let out a simultaneous sigh of relief. The doctor was turning to leave when I stopped him and asked, “Doctor, could you see the sarcoma? Is it spreading?” He looked away and said, “Arcadio will be able to use his leg again and that is what we were shooting for. He’s incredibly strong. His vitals didn't skip a beat. You'll have to excuse me now. I have another surgery.”

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We took the first three days in Waikiki slow because Arcadio needed a lot of rest. Mom and Arcadio slept and watched television most of the time. I did homework and occupied myself with writing bad poetry. Arcadio sent me on missions to survey Waikiki and to report what I saw. When I got back, he was sitting up and asking questions. “Did you see something? Was Dog the Bounty Hunter out there?” he asked from atop the bed. Arcadio also looked up restaurants online and sent me for takeout. I went to Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant for take-out at least a half a dozen times during our first few days at the hotel because it was on the ground floor of the hotel. Every time I brought back food from Puck's restaurant, I had to retell Arcadio the same story, how when I’d left cooking fifteen years earlier Wolfgang Puck was well on his way to super stardom as a result of his coming to California and pioneering an early version of fusion cuisine in Los Angeles. I considered it a pleasure going for dinner because we had such a good time eating our meals in the suite, where we talked and enjoyed each other’s company. Eating together was a simple pleasure, considering the circumstances. Arcadio knew a lot about food, which made the situation better. He’d always demonstrated a deep interest in cooking and the social spaces that sharing meals enabled. He was a natural, a child gourmet whose interests in food were far ranging. He also loved cooking and delving into my past as a chef. Luckily, this life affirming aspect of our time together was something that the cancer was never able to take away. On my way out to pick up our food orders, he would inevitably stop me and say something like, “Don’t forget about mom; get her something good, better than our stuff. Get her some salad. She loves salad."

37 37

We made our way outside slowly. Arcadio could walk for short distances without getting too tired, so going across the street to the beach was easy. I sat reading in the sun as he put on his goggles and submerged himself slowly in the crystal blue water, turning himself around in the weightlessness created by the vast ocean. He swam underwater for short distances, keeping close to the shore, enamored by the timelessness of the long afternoon. Occasionally, he did what he’d been doing his entire life, venturing upon the ordinary and transforming it into something worthy of awe. He popped his head out of the water and yelled, “Whoa! Look at this rock. I think it used to be a dinosaur or something!” I looked up from Steinbeck’s East of Eden and responded, “That’s nice Arcadio. Now bring it over here and I’ll put it next to this pile of other rocks - I mean these rare geological artifacts that you’ve collected.” In the evenings, I put Arcadio in his wheelchair and we strolled the boulevard. Arcadio was easily entertained, fascinated by bright lights or any type of scene that might suggest a good party, which meant we were in the right place because the main drag in Waikiki possessed a circus like atmosphere at night. As a child, Arcadio lost sleep if we drove by a big top on the freeway without stopping. Inevitably, his sense of having missing something wonderful came pouring out, usually as we tucked him into bed. “What do you think was inside that tent, Uncle Eddie?” he would say. “Can we go see if it is still there tomorrow?” Magicians and street performers were on every corner in Waikiki at night. The streets felt like Vaudeville meets the Hollywood Strip, meets Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. It was easy to get lost in the crowd, watching the street performers or scanning the artwork of the many street vendors. We kept moving

38 38 along and every once in a while, I’d look down in order to make sure Arcadio was still smiling and he was. We came to the end of the strip and were ready to turn back when Arcadio’s arm shot into the air and he said, “Look, Uncle Eddie!” A set of drums sat at the edge of the sidewalk. Tourists could play them for a small fee. We paid a man with what sounded like a Russian accent five dollars so that Arcadio could bang around for a while. He played hard, seemingly unaffected by his deteriorating condition, smiling each time our eyes met. I took pictures of him playing under the glow of the yellow street lamps, limousines whizzing by in the background, full of gorgeous drunk girls in bikinis who hung out of the sunroof, yelling improbable things like, “Hey Ringo, you want to get lucky tonight?” We really wanted to do two things during our visit to Oahu. One was to visit Giovanni’s famous shrimp truck on North Shore and the other was to go snorkeling. After Arcadio got used to going outside, we piled into the rental car and drove the eastern route towards North Shore on our third to the last day in Hawaii. Giovanni’s proved a big disappointment for me compared to the experience promised by the Food Network. Arcadio loved it. He was high from the THC pills, so he ate a mountain of shrimp in every variety offered. It seemed to me surreal to sit across the table from Arcadio, in that famous corner of the island as giant waves filled up the panorama in the distance, while he sat there with the munchies, a degree or two from being fully present. As we sat peeling and eating shrimp, Arcadio did what he did occasionally during his last year, which was to talk about the future. He laid out plans for me as we talked on the picnic tables only yards away from the white graffiti marked

39 39 truck with red lettering announcing it as Giovanni’s- the Mecca of foodies and surfers alike. Out of nowhere, while stuffing shrimp into his mouth, Arcadio said, “You better become a famous chef again, like the guys on TV. You know much more than they do. All right, Uncle Eddie?” “Arcadio, I wasn't famous and that sounds like a lot of work. How about I open up a grilled cheese emporium. Would you settle for that?” “Ok, but you have to buy mom and Osito a huge house,” he said as a strong breeze moved through his closely cropped hair and garlic sauce dripped from both corners of his mouth. We drove back to Honolulu the same way we’d come, not risking the drive around the entire Island for fear of returning to the hotel at too late of an hour. Mom and Arcadio slept like logs in the back seat of the rental car as it meandered in and out of small towns with moonlit coves silhouetted against black palms. My mind raced around unavoidable realities. One minute I was okay in the world, remembering that God would meet us wherever this dark adventure took us. The next minute there was a voice in the back of my mind whispering to me that soon something would have to give. The following morning, we left the hotel early. I’d been scouting places to go snorkeling, but they were tourist traps with long lines and high prices. A local at the front desk told me to try Sunset Beach on the way down the western side of the Island around the corner from North Shore. A mile or two from Sunset Beach, there is a rock formation in the shape of a bowl that makes for perfect snorkeling when the weather permits. According to the surfer kid at a shack where I rented gear, that day was the first day in three weeks that the bowl was safe enough to snorkel.

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He said, “Dude, this is the last day of the season for sure. You got the place to yourself.” Arcadio had trouble climbing over the layers of volcanic rock, so I found the path of least resistance into the bowl. He put on the snorkel gear while lying down in the water. I towed him into the center of the bowl using a borrowed rope from the shack. Schools of fish with brightly colored bodies and other displays of sea life surrounded us, everywhere, in the sandy colored water. A yellow and purple fish attached itself to Arcadio for the entire two hours that we were in the bowl. It was the size of a credit card and it never left his side, keeping just out of his reach. When Arcadio first noticed that he had made a new friend, he rose out of the water, stood on his knees, and said, “Uncle Eddie there is a fish following me around. I think it wants me to take him home!” Arcadio occasionally tugged on the rope in order to remind me that it was time to stop and send a message to mom who was sitting along the edge of the rocks near the beach. He waved frantically and yelled in her direction trying to make himself heard over the roar of the waves that crashed against the exterior wall of the bowl. “I have a new pet! It's a yellow a fish. He wants to go home with us,” he yelled in mom’s direction as she waved back unable to hear the specifics of his excitement. "I love you, mom." Finally, the sun began to set. I watched Arcadio curl up in mom’s arms on a blanket on the beach as she whispered sweet thoughts into his sixteen-year-old ears. They rocked back and forth until the sun had gone down over the island. It reminded me that I was only a marginal part of what was happening. I was only a witness to the most incredible aspect of Arcadio’s short life, which was the love

41 41 that he and mom shared, which had taken place long before sobriety had allowed me to enter their lives more fully. The next day I took Arcadio to Kuhio Beach, which is famous in Hawaiian culture for its power to heal the sick. I rented Arcadio a giant inner tube on which he could stretch out and wave to me, every so often, as I relaxed on a beach towel near the water. I tried to sleep, but I had an uneasy feeling that something wasn't right. I finally fell asleep for a little while. Inside a dream, I awoke on the beach and looked over at Diamond Head, the ancient half of a volcano, which rose out of the water on the north end of Waikiki and whose last eruption left an indelible mark on Oahu’s landscape. The volcano looked dark and treacherous. The presence of evil was palpable. I made out a wicked face, patterned in the folds of the ancient lava rock formations. I felt the face breathing. Suddenly and quite slowly, the face transformed into a beast that resembled a Cyclops from one of the foundational texts of Western Literature. The monster rose from within Diamond Head until it stepped over the edge of the volcano and into the sea where it bounded away with giant strides, looking back in my direction, laughing, reminding me in the dream that the inescapable darkness of the enduring nightmare, which we faced in the real world, had various acts yet to reveal themselves. When I woke up, I turned my head and noticed a tattoo on the arm of the man next to me, four feet from my face. It had three sixes with the face of an evil creature in the middle, and below it read: Sons of Satan. The following day, I got up early, stretched on the beach, and took a swim in the ocean. Then I prayed and meditated as the sun came up over Waikiki. On the way back across the street, I stopped at one of the public showers that line the edge of the beach in order to wash the sand from my body. As I rinsed

42 42 off, I looked up to see two people standing at the edge of the water’s mist. They were an impeccably dressed black couple who had smiles on their faces and wore leather jackets and fancy hats. “I'm Donald and this is my wife Sheila. I told her this morning that there is somebody on the beach who needs a message which I am supposed to deliver to them," the man said, leaning in closer. "I think it's you.” “What kind of message?” “I have to ask you what brings you to Hawaii?” he responded, ignoring my question. “My nephew is dying of cancer and he wanted to visit,” I said. He gently grabbed me by the wrist, pulled me out away from under the showers, and said, “If you try to make sense this, you will go crazy. You do not have the capacity to understand why this is taking place. What you need to know is that God has a purpose for all of this and a plan for your life as well.” Donald explained that he had a ministry in South Carolina. The plan had been for him and his wife to sleep until noon but something had compelled him to come to the beach and share the message with me. We talked for a long time, eventually holding hands in order to pray on the sidewalk. I wore nothing more than swimming trunks while Donald and Sheila were dressed to the hilt, so people gawked at us as they drove by in their luxury cars. Our sidewalk meeting ended and I watched them disappear into the distance, not at all surprised by what had happened because those sorts of thing had been happening for a long time. An explanation wasn’t necessary. They had given me hope, which was what I needed in order to keep my sanity in the coming months.

CHAPTER THREE: BETWEEN THE CHEESE PLANT, THE HUMANITIES, AND ROME

Merced Spring 2013 I’m a forty-two-year-old undergraduate sitting in Lakireddy Auditorium on the campus of UC Merced. The time is 9pm on a Saturday night. An over the top play about abuse has just wrapped up. Dael Orlandersmith, the playwright and the play's only actor, has come back onto the stage. She is standing in a corner speaking with two professors from the English Department. Others are milling around, waiting to talk to her. She pumps her chest three times with her open palm, but I can’t tell what that means. She is at ease, laughing and smiling in tall, grey boots, leather pants and long braids running down her back. The performance has left her breathing heavily; the sheen of sweat on her face reflects under the glow of stage lights. Her dramatic work, a one-woman play, Black and Blue Boys/Broken Men, seems soul stirring, gritty, and necessarily vulgar at times. Orlandersmith has just stormed around the stage for more than an hour portraying five male characters, in various settings, mostly in New York City, all affected in some way by violence and abuse. The audience was just swept away by an unconventional topic and a mastery of craft. Orlandersmith has just detailed something sad but sweet, from deep within the American experience. She inhabited the characters with such veracity that the image and voice of a fifteen-year-old Nuyorican boy from Brooklyn on stage minutes ago is still reverberating through my head. The performer was, however, Olandersmith, a tall Black woman who is graceful and gritty like the city from which she hails. The play's personification still lingers around the auditorium, continuing to encircle those able to capture the

44 44 meaning: People are like cockroaches in their resiliency against the darkness of abuse. Life can beat them down and heap all sorts of injustices and tragedies on them, but they come back or refuse to go away. Meeting Orlandersmith twice in the past two days has helped me to reassess some things that have been troubling me during my second semester at the university. I've been thinking about leaving UC Merced for Portland or San Francisco in hopes of resurrecting my old life as a chef. I channel my past self a lot lately, the younger version of myself who by sheer force of will lodged himself into some wonderfully dynamic restaurants in the early 1990’s, talking to him like Morgan Freeman talks to his eighteen-year-old self at the end of Shawshank Redemption. I call out to him and ask him if he is still there, still resentful. I tell him that that this older version of me stands a better chance of being successful than he did. I ask him to consider coming joining me. Studying and working at the cheese plant is becoming increasingly difficult. I want a degree, but my ambition is to work in a vibrant food scene where my efforts will matter. Food culture is on life support in the Central Valley. Besides the fact that we supply the world with almonds, canned tomatoes, and millions of metric tons of methane gas from the thousands of dairies that barely make a living every year, we aren't on anyone's list of top food spots. We exist in the shadow of astonishing food scenes in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Leaving my home, here, for the city would be a gamble, especially since I worked so hard to get into UC Merced. Sadly, I'm no closer to working as a chef than when Arcadio was alive. I promised him that my return to cooking was a sure thing, but that is proving harder than anticipated. Maybe Dael was right when she spoke to me earlier today. Maybe I should quit the cheese plant and take my chances here.

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Conflict has defined my life at the cheese plant since Arcadio’s death. I've almost come to blows with at least three of my coworkers in the last couple of months. At a union plant, discord is expected, I suppose. It doesn't help that the labor versus management war has raged for over thirty years. Snitches and backstabbers lurk at every turn, which complicates an already difficult situation. The management dangles just enough security in front of us to keep us there. The years roll by and I realize that the price of that security was the best years of my life. That reality is enough to make anyone angry and there are many unhappy people at the cheese plant. One thing is for sure: they aren't about to change. The reason that we put up with it is that the money is good. The new owners have tried their best to instill a new, forward thinking philosophy at the plant. They have been successful for the most part. The whey plant, which is a five story Goliath of stainless steel and steam, is the exception. It’s as rough as it ever was, continuing to operate as an island of disharmony and personal animosities. The control room where I run the dryer is where union members go to hatch plans and coordinate revenge plots on each other and the management. Nice? It’s a foreign language in the whey plant. Nice is a liability. I have watched many good people dispatched over the years because they were politically asleep or unable to muster the courage to defend themselves with reckless if not physical abandon. Unless you learn to fight back, the system grinds you down until all that is left is a nervous shell of a worker with a target on his back. “Fuck you, motherfucker!” begins more exchanges than I can relate. You learn to keep your friends close and your enemies even closer. As much as that sounds like an exaggerated use of a worn out cliché, that’s exactly how things work there.

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The stress of keeping the whey plant running at all costs does something to people, makes them less able to care and quick to fight. Our personalities darken because we spend so much of our energy fighting each other and watching out for management. The days when I forget to meditate before work are usually the worst. I do all I can in order to stay near that place of peace where Roland told us we have to spend the rest of our lives. However, the bitterness seeps into every aspect of our lives. Unfortunately, I brought some of that dysfunction to the university. After transferring here from junior college, I arrived with the same mentality that it takes to survive at the cheese plant. This transfer of attitude is causing me problems. I’ve already told a few people around here to go fuck themselves. At first, it felt like the professors were talking down to me like the management at the cheese plant. It's taken me time to realize that people at UC Merced aren’t like the ones at the cheese plant, that this place is mostly full of nice people with decent intentions. Orlandersmith's play examines the life of a character named Ian who goes to New York from his native Ireland. In the first of two scenes, we meet Ian in his hometown as he describes the culture of violence and drinking in which he was raised. We begin to know that he will carry his father’s cycle of violence with him for the rest of his life, a dark trait inherited from his people, a twofold malady of whiskey and black eyes. Ian meets the perfect girl, but we have to stand by as he destroys the relationship with violence. It makes me wonder about my brother and sister-in-law and how little I knew of their private lives. How much of an abuser was he? Did we fail to see the signs? The play has ended, but I can’t stop thinking about what their lives might have been like in those last few months, on that day. Watching the play tonight also helps me to shed a new light on the death of my nephew. When Arcadio died at Valley Children's Hospital two years ago, I had

47 47 a lot of time to prepare. We knew for almost a year when the cancer returned for the third time that his time was short. My new attitude towards the universe had allowed me to be well enough to meet the difficulties of four years of cancer treatments. I had been sober for seven years and had continued to develop in me the approach to life that New Horizons taught us, albeit far from perfectly and never with the illusion that sainthood was something to be achieved. I did it roughly, without too much beauty. Fortunately, somewhere in the aftermath, there is a reward. I could die tomorrow and people will say that I finally did at least one thing right in my life. I raised a kid with the closest thing I knew to be love and I walked him to the edge when it was time for him to cross over to the other side. I identified another troubling aspect of my brother’s selfish act tonight. Not having a useful idea of what my brother's life was really like, I have often been overcome by the guilt relating to my sister in law having been sent home to Mexico in a box without so much as an explanation. It is all we could do for her at the time. Her name was Alma and my brother wooed her away from a small town in Michoacán. Alma had all the dreams of a good life in America after undergoing the lengthy process of immigrating legally, but he took that from her. She didn’t deserve what happened to her. We have never acknowledged that in my family and that is what bothers me. That epiphany is washing over me right now, even though it all happened so long ago. My brother Arcadio’s funeral was a mess compared to his son's. Nobody had the wherewithal to take the reins because we were all too devastated to act decisively in any direction. That week in late February 1997 still haunts me. I relive parts of it all over again and feel a deep sense of shame and embarrassment, and I'm realizing that the play helps me to come to terms with this. Abusers leave victims and themselves in body bags sometimes. Family members are left to clean

48 48 up the mess and are themselves traumatized. I see now that is what we've lived. Most importantly, the play showed me tonight that these tragedies sometimes help others and through the creation of art, new understandings can rise up from the wreckage of those tattered lives. In a sense, the play gives me a good reason to stay put and finish my bachelor’s degree. Yesterday Orlandersmith invited some English majors to workshop a piece of our writing with her. We only had a day's notice, so mine was a last minute memoirist piece that I had been thinking about writing for a long time. Like Orlandersmith's play, it was about hard times but takes a turn toward the kindness of strangers. My story was nonfiction but because I wrote it in the third person, everyone assumed the piece was fictional. It wasn't. The events of the story actually took place, but I never said anything because I was embarrassed and everyone fixed on exploring it from a fictional perspective. We spent over an hour on my story, never considering any of the other writer's work. The group discussed transforming it into a play, how to turn the main character's thoughts into dialogue instead of textual renderings from an omniscient narrator. Maybe my piece wasn't all that, but the attention really made me feel good, as if I wasn't wasting my time here. It felt like some sort of beginning. The workshop and being in the audience tonight have given me a lot to think about. I ran into Dael in the SSM Building on the far side of campus earlier today. Seeing her again was a pleasant surprise. She had quite an entourage, which included some higher ups from the administration. Nevertheless, she recognized me from the workshop and stepped away from the group long enough for us to have a short conversation.

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I thanked her for the feedback that I received for my short story and told her that it felt good that everyone understood and liked it. “You're welcome. Thanks for giving us something to work with," she said, brushing back a row of braids which had worked themselves over the left side of her face. "Something else happened," I said, noticing that the people from the classroom were anxiously peering into the hallway. "What's going on?" "I'm thinking about quitting the cheese plant, so that I can go to study in Italy. I just left the study abroad office and they say that it is a totally doable thing," I said with a tone of excitement because I’d just heard the news myself. "Eddie! That’s wonderful news, my man! Europe will make an artist out of you," she said, turning toward the department head who by that point had stepped into the hallway in order to retrieve her. "You'll love it there. Leave that cheese plant in the dust." I wrote that story about a period in my life in the early 90’s when I had thrown away a full ride scholarship to a four-year university and been fired from more than a few restaurants. My small inheritance was gone, so I came home. I didn’t have a car or much of anything else, in a material sense. What I did have was an unquenchable thirst, a head full of self-pity, and a broken heart. The tragic end to my brother and sister in law's lives was still three years into the future, but the long downward spiral was already in progress. The only thing going for me was a backbreaking job as a construction laborer, but it wasn't even enough to pay the bills or keep me drunk. ****************************************************************** Merciless Fountain of Fate Orlandersmith Workshop February 22, 2013

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An orange haze settled on the Central Valley, from the shadow of Mt. Diablo to the west, all the way across the valley floor to the rolling hills below Copperopolis. If the Delta breeze ever blew across Stockton in the hottest month in recorded history, nobody noticed. The thermometer downtown at the waterfront read 113 degrees by two o’clock in the afternoon. It was now four and it seemed only to be getting hotter. A lone figure made his way along the desolate stretch of tracks that connects French Camp to the southern edge of Stockton. He sauntered grudgingly. His shoulders drooped in the evening heat as he headed south towards Manteca, ten miles away. Larry Garcia knew he was in trouble. It had seemed to him that he could make the six-mile trip into Lathrop, the longest stretch, easily when the concrete finisher from Jalisco kicked him out of his truck half way to Interstate 5 because he was going in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, the task of walking home in the heat was proving an impossible ordeal. He was out of water and stuck in the middle of nowhere. The only shade came from the thick telephone poles that paralleled the railroad tracks where he stumbled along. Whenever he wiped his tongue across his lips, it felt like a giant sheet of sandpaper scraping against the inside of his head. He was parched and bloated from the previous night's drinking. He longed for the comfort of his dingy studio in Manteca, still four miles on the other side of Lathrop. At least there, he could take a cold shower, pop open the last of his beers, and forget his troubles. He thought of the crisp salad he could make from two heads of romaine he had kept in reserve, how he had been saving his last package of bacon for just such an occasion. He imagined the flavorful burst of the cherry tomatoes that grew wild along the edges of his garden. He may not have had a lot in the world, but he had an endless supply of cherry tomatoes,

51 51 and a bottle of extra virgin olive oil and some old bread end to make croutons, not to mention seven eggs. He would be all right, if he could make it home. At twenty-eight years old, Larry was as strong as he would ever be, but daily drinking had the better of him. The hangover robbed him of clear thoughts and brought him closer and closer to the lurking possibility of sunstroke. Working on construction sites that offered no shade had left the sun’s rays to work on him in a bad way since the early morning. He would always remember that day as the day when he would plumb the depths of his misfortune, pulled back from the edge by one miracle after another. The day started bad, beginning with the collapsed back rim on the bicycle he rode ten miles to the shop and continuing with the sack lunch he forgot on the first site they worked and proceeding into the afternoon when he returned late to the shop with the concrete finisher, after everyone headed in his direction had gone home. It seemed as if all the darkness of the world conspired against him in order to line up those events. As he walked along the tracks, they began to look as though they might be his ultimate undoing. His spirit found new lows in the procession of negative thoughts that filled him. The shakes were already on him. His boots, souvenirs from more prosperous times, weighed a thousand pounds each. They weren’t even construction boots but a worn out pair of military issue dress boots that he had acquired from a girl in Humboldt. She had been married to a marine, but she dispatched Larry Garcia as soon as his drinking revealed itself. He hated her for not understanding. He cursed the condition of the worn out boots which made him walk bow legged and hurt his hips. Garcia paused for a moment and looked down at his boots and his shabby clothes. For the first time in a long time, he realized how pathetic he must have looked to others. His once aquamarine tee shirt was crusty with rings of salt that

52 52 washed over the bottom and ran onto his black jeans. The front of the shirt had taken on a strange, canary yellow color from the repeated exposure of sun and sweat. His black jeans were clammy and stiff, an uncomfortable mix of wet and dry. More sweat rings of salt showed conspicuously on his thighs in target like shapes. He wondered if he could count the rings, like on a tree, and deduce when he last washed his only pair of work pants. His silhouette, as it fell onto the narrow strip of land that paralleled the tracks, reminded him that it had been a very long time since he had visited a barber. Larry Garcia decided that the best thing to do was to build a small cave out of tumbleweeds that he stomped into flat shapes and several pieces of cardboard he found drifting along a fence. He made a sort of lean to against one of the telephone poles. He planned to save his energy, waiting until the sun went down. However, when he lay in his tiny cave, it felt like an oven and the pounding in his head doubled. He realized then that it had been a bad idea to stop. He had to continue moving or they would only find a desiccated corpse when they went looking for him. As he walked along, a mile or two closer to Lathrop, images began to blur and he began to hear children playing in distant playgrounds, but he knew there weren’t any schools for miles around. He heard guitar riffs from his favorite bands as clearly, as if he was standing in the audience at a concert. He shook his head wildly when an old Rainbow song played note for note in his head: I'm a wheel, I'm a wheel I can roll, I can feel And you can't stop me turning Cause I'm the sun, I'm the sun I can move, I can run

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But you'll never stop me burning Come down with fire Lift my spirit higher Someone is screaming my name Come and make me holy again Larry Garcia knew that it was an illusion brought on by the heat, but he began to fear what might come next. Suddenly, he felt the rumbling of a train and felt its wind blow against his back before he realized that it was an actual train. Larry cursed the train for passing by at such a high rate of speed. If it traveled more slowly, he could at least try to jump onto a rail car like a hobo or hang on to something in order to be dragged a little closer to Lathrop. At that speed, though, they would find his body chopped in half instead of dried out in a tumbleweed and cardboard cave. He was about to give up and throw himself on the ground and cry out when the train began to slow down. When the train had nearly passed, it slowed down even more. Larry thought about launching himself onto the back deck of the caboose, but he knew his legs wouldn’t cooperate. They were jelly, by then, like the rest of him. The back door of the caboose opened up and a tall man wearing bifocals, a train engineer’s cap, and overalls stepped out onto the deck and spoke into a radio. He turned towards Larry and began to speak over the clanking of the train, which had started to speed up again. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled at Larry who was no more than fifteen yards away: "Be careful out here. We found two bodies along the tracks last week in Bakersfield. Here, take this and get out of the sun!" The man reached into a backpack he had carried from inside the train and threw a bag in the direction of Larry Garcia. A second bag followed. When Larry

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Garcia stretched out his hands in order to catch the first bag, he misjudged its trajectory and it smacked him in the face, nearly knocking him over, but he didn't care because it had felt hard and cold, like a bag full of chilled plastic water bottles, which it was. He watched the train ride into the distance. The kind man shook his head, waved goodbye and saluted, as he became dot on the horizon, finally disappearing back into the caboose. When Larry fetched the second bag from out of the dirt, he found two salami sandwiches, a container of yogurt, and a Kit Kat bar. ****************************************************************** Tonight will be a well-deserved time of rest and relaxation in the whey plant. It's a previously unplanned down night, which happens every once in a while when the dryer and the evaporator are both shut down - even though the cheese plant, across the way, is running at full bore, churning out mountains of smoked provolone. The reasoning behind idling the whey plant at a time when the price of whey powder is at an all-time high is overly complicated, so we’ll just say they are trucking away of our base ingredient to a sister plant. They don’t ever tell us why. Tonight is my last night on the job. I put in my notice two weeks ago, the night I saw Dael’s play. The production floor is still. The usual cacophony, a steady whirr of about 110 decibels, is shut off. Where clouds of steam usually pour out of machines and spread like fog into corners, there is nothing. Only the distant sound of auxiliary motors and the steady puff and push of air forced through one of the blowing systems can be heard. The absence of certain smells, primarily caustic acid and sanitizer, lets me know that management will not try to spring any washes on us. Maintenance is nowhere in sight.

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I push back the steel door to the control room with its thick pane of insulated glass. The control room, which is a blistering knot of technology, is uncharacteristically quiet. The control panel on the dryer side is a welcoming sight “All Systems Down” flashes from a blinking white square. The only green lights are from the number 6 and the number 12 fans on the third floor which Walter always leaves on when a shut-down of more than a couple of hours occurs. On the far right of the control panel, where a large glass window looks out over the production floor, a lonely, white square flashes a repeated warning about a lack of air pressure in the lines leading to the main spray chamber. This is also good news. It means that the product in those lines has been cleared. That means Walter ran caustic and sanitizer through the lines before he left. A note hangs on the computer screen that is closest to the door. It’s from Walter. It says something or other about washing silo number ten and changing the gaskets on the cream lines over the pasteurizer, followed by his usual threats about how management is spying on our every move. I click on the screen, which displays the level of our supply silos. They are bone dry. Startup is at least a day away. Fuck Walter. He can wash his own silos when he comes back tomorrow or whenever. It’s my last night. I crumble up the note and launch it across the control room towards the wastepaper basket. I don’t expect to see management tonight. They are preoccupied with the latest civil war that has broken out on the cheese production side of the plant. They are busy trying to pin the blame on someone because some plastic made its way into the cheese of some very important customers, so we are off the radar for now. Luckily, Jana from the lab mentioned that the sum of all of our fears, Big Z, our department manager, is away on vacation. He is a real prick

56 56 and always finds a way to sneak past our detection systems, showing up in the control room from out of nowhere. I saw my partner Ronnie pull up in the parking lot, so I know he’ll be here soon. At five foot nine and three hundred and thirty pounds, Ronnie is an imposing figure. He’s been my partner in the control room for two years. He shaves his head because he is mostly bald. He has deep blue eyes and a gentle manner, which hides his capacity to take care of business. Ronnie is thirty-seven and is a dedicated family man with a wife and two kids. Depending on whom you ask Ronnie is also a pathological liar, a thief, a backstabber extraordinaire, and a master manipulator, everything that it takes to be successful in an atmosphere that features an incessant colliding of egos, attitudes, and power trips. We hate what this place does to us; so every night we tell ourselves that we were catching the first train out of here as soon as possible. That means tonight for me. Ronnie is going home to Salinas for good in three weeks. Fuck Newman, California. The drama and the stress are not worth the twenty dollars an hour plus all the over time we could ever want, so we make up the difference by having a good time when the chance presents itself. Ronnie is incredibly smart and I trust him as a partner most of the time. Together, we are good at diagnosing the equipment and the myriad of processes involved in drying and evaporating whey. He runs the evaporator and I run the dryer. If we do our jobs right during the graveyard shift, we have a good chance of being left alone. The only people we deal with are maintenance and the workers from the bagging room. We don’t usually fall apart under pressure, which is an essential talent in a dangerous environment where one wrong move can send tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of product down the drain or cause life changing injuries in the time it takes to put on safety glasses.

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We have learned to be politically astute. Ronnie specializes in revenge tactics and silent, unsuspected paybacks. I’m the propaganda minister of all our defenses. My job is to remind people that messing with us has consequences. Unfortunately, my last three partners were useless in this regard. They never understood how this place works, so they didn't last. They got comfortable, got set up or messed up the whey powder by panicking and not following procedure, which is the ultimate sin around here. It's about the money. If we keep the whey plant running, we do what we want. Shut it down and the lights come on, followed by an army of managers who want answers and whose sole purpose becomes to find fault with the operators. We prefer the former. We are not gung-ho about the union, but we know to keep the Teamsters close. Often, we scurry under the union’s umbrella of protection on the various occasions when management has us in their sights or when some other department is trying to do us dirty. Otherwise, we mind our own business. Sometimes, it is difficult to keep a low profile because, despite his other sterling qualities, Ronnie is careless. His laziness and conniving are legendary and attract a lot of unwanted attention. Sometimes he puts the evaporator on autopilot and just wanders the plant, eating and talking to people. As a result, we have to keep a shop steward on retainer. “What up Gomez?” Ronnie asks as he steps into the control room, wearing his sparkling white uniform with its neatly trimmed red lettering. There is enough material in his uniform to canvas the sails of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. A giant lunch pail hangs from his shoulder. “How long are we down for?” he asks. “All night, no chance of starting up, either,” I tell him.

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We settle into our respective corners and pull out newspapers before we take up where we left off the previous night. “So did you write it?” he asks. “Write what?” I ask “Your play, the farewell performance that you were talking about writing," Ronnie answers as he sits in his stool and fishes a second sandwich out of his lunch pail. “Yeah, I got it. The play is in my head, mostly. We’ll do it later, once the guys from QC go home. You can be the director. We’ll get somebody from maintenance to record it on my phone." It’s one in the morning, half way through our shift. Ronnie returns to the control room with a small tub of fresh provolone, which is still steaming. He sets it on the counter and pushes it in my direction. "My wife put some strawberries in my bag, so you can put them in the log if you want," he says. "I’m a little hungry. Let me get the peppermill. The milk receivers borrowed it last night,” I shoot back, getting up to walk across the plant to the milk receiving station and retrieve the peppermill for the prosciutto, fruit, and cheese log we are about to make. I spread out a chunk of hot provolone using an impromptu rolling pin that we keep around, and then stuff the flattened cheese with meats and fruit, rolling it back up. Next, I add a fresh cracked pepper crust on what ends up looking like a small log. We do this mostly on slow nights like tonight. Nobody has said it, but Ronnie and I understand that this is our last meal together. We want it to be good. The log tastes good as is, but the cheese is still a little green so we put it through another cooking process. I discovered the method by accident a couple of

59 59 years ago. I take the roll and stuff it into a plastic cylinder that we use to take lab samples and pop it into the microwave. I watch as the fat begins to separate from the cheese in the see through cylinder. The contents of the cylinder begin to boil in a golden liquid. The result is that the exterior shell of the log transforms into a golden crust, crispy and crunchy throughout, like the underside and edges of a well-fried egg. Inside, complex flavors of buttery, smoked provolone swim around in a creamy goodness of prosciutto and strawberries. I pull the roll from the cylinder with a knife and let it cool on a platter, before I slice it up and offer some of it to Ronnie. The wedges are thick and round like silver dollars. I make sure to eat my share because Ronnie has never failed to finish everything offered to him. I sit on my stool, finishing my last provolone silver dollar and say, "Let’s do the play, Ronnie. It’s more like a rant, but let's do it anyway." Ronnie gets up and lowers his head into the plant wide intercom system: Manny Hernandez to the whey plant’s control room. Manny Hernandez to the whey plant control room. Manny is one of the mechanics that works the graveyard shift with us. He can barely handle his job and most of the time Ronnie and I will try to fix a problem before we let him touch anything. He is rough around the edges, rougher than we are. He is a working class Mexican from the streets of Modesto who, behind a rough exterior, has a genuinely big heart. In the whey plant, we affectionately call him “Gangster.” He can do some things really well, so he is actually helpful to have around, unless a serious maintenance problem occurs; then, he has to call for back up from the cheese side. “What the fuck do you fat slobs want? I know you don’t want me to fix nothing because you fucks ain’t even running," Manny says after kicking the door

60 60 open. "God dam, Ronnie! Slow down fat motherfucker before you choke on that shit. What is that? Let me get a piece." I say, “All right gangster we need you to record something on my cell phone." “Are you serious, you two fat fucks don’t have anything better to do than play around?" Manny says reaching for the last piece of cheese log. "This is a serious theatrical production. It’s my farewell soliloquy, so don’t hate on the arts," I tell him. “Is that the college bullshit they teach you?" he wants to know. "It’s going to be a spectacular show," I say "I’m calling Big Z," he responds as he fakes dialing a telephone number. “Yo, Big Z this is Manny from the whey plant," he says into the receiver of the phone. "Yeah, I need your permission to slap these two lazy ass operators. They haven’t done a thing in five hours. They are saying something about a soliliqualudes. What is that, Big Z? Bitch slap them both and kick Ronnie in his fat fucking stomach? All right, Big Z, you got it. Sorry to bother you." He hangs up the receiver and we all burst into laughter. Ronnie stands behind Manny who is holding my cell phone and about to record. Ronnie is a cross between a stage manager and the chorus. His job is to push the monologue forward by making comments from off stage. I try to explain to Manny the difference between the play as a live performance and what he is recording, which is something else entirely, a video everyone can laugh at when I’m long gone. Manny says that he doesn't really give a fuck because he has never even been to a play except for some bullshit his kids do at school every year. The camera begins to roll as the lights dim on the whey plant stage. I pace back and forth, stopping in front of the window that overlooks the production floor

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(In character). I remove my hard hat and take a deep breath, my chest bulging as I stand with confidence. Ronnie asks from around the corner, "Mr. Gomez what does your last night feel like?" I look into the audience, take a deep breath and say, "I died a thousand deaths of death here, but no longer is the ruin of my soul to be for sale. I stand as the victor in this battle, my enemies around me on the floor. Freedom is who I am and you my friend will soon enough, too, taste from this lovely cup!" Why are you leaving Mr. Gomez? "Because of you," I scream pointing to a specific coat on the rack by the door. You who? "You, Walter, You. Because of you. You did this to me, Walter. You snitch! You are a whorish animal. You did this to me!" Who else? "Sherry, because of you," I say turning towards the camera and running my hands wildly through my hair, breathing desperately. What did she do? "What did she do? You have the nerve to ask. Three caustic explosions last week. Weekends off! Because of you! Special treatment Sherry. Come so that I can look into your eyes one final time. Because of you! Imagine. My dream job. Turned to dust because of you!" What about the department manager? "Oh, blasphemous coward, son of a thousand wenches. Because of him. All this. Because of him. Recompense and sorrow, a thousand times. Because of him!”

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What about the motherfucking whey plant (Manny suddenly taking up Ronnie’s job)? "The inhumanity, the madness: This wretched tower of indignity shall float aflame in a river of mud and sorrow as I stand perched on the avenue of life, like my friend, Dante, looking into the inferno, into the faces of the damned, from out there, there where I can live," I say, pointing to the area beyond the glass that leads to the rear exit of the plant, finally collapsing onto the counter, next to the control panel, in exhaustion and ecstasy. The End

CHAPTER FOUR: DIAMONDS IN THE LIGHT

Florence Summer 2013 Somewhere over Spain, I am sitting between two fascinating young people on a plane ride home from Italy. I'd call them kids but they are both adults living in the real world to the best of their ability. All three of us struck up a conversation spontaneously on the tarmac as soon as the plane taxied toward the runway. We were laughing comfortably within minutes of meeting each other. We shared quick versions of our personal stories, in that uninhibited way strangers do when they know they will never see each other again. Anna is following her heart. Omar is learning how to fit into American society. I am a university student who finally found his niche in food and travel. I recounted how my time in Italy had allowed me to put away the loss that had defined my life for far too long. Anna and Omar are motionless like babies in a crib because they filled themselves with a staggering amount of booze as soon as the plane reached altitude. Anna, who has the aisle seat, looks like a porcelain doll with rosy red cheeks as her mouth hangs partially open, sighing a slow tune. Omar is to my right. He looks equally innocent, curled up facing the window in an awkward position. They are both twenty years old, which is the same age as Arcadio. They are flying toward their futures, separately, while I head home to my last year at the university. The difference is that I am forty-two years old and they aren’t. I have known Anna for only two hours, but her determination to make a go of it in San Francisco and to be a success in life impresses me. Before they both fell asleep, she described to Omar and me her motive for leaving Moscow. Ana is crazy in love. While visiting San Francisco last fall, she met an American boy who

64 64 is two years older than she is. This is her third trip to San Francisco since meeting Nick. She plans to stay with him forever this time, hoping to get married soon. Anna arrives with only a degree in hotel management and a year or so of experience in the business. According to her, it’s all she will need. Her boyfriend already has a management position at a posh hotel. “You’re not afraid to just up and move to San Francisco?” I asked earlier, pushing Omar back into his seat because he was nearly on top of me as he ogled and listened to Ana. "I'd be more afraid of not following my heart. The worst is that I'd have to crawl back to Russia,” Anna said with a barely discernible Russian accent as she took a huge swig of her third Heineken. “Anyone can crawl.” “Good for you. You’ll make it just fine in San Francisco. You’re already a champ,” I said. Omar is starting his second year at Oregon State next week where he studies political science. He comes from a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia. Meeting people at school was easy for Omar, which isn't hard to believe because he is extroverted and something of a comedian. The major hindrance to Omar navigating American society successfully centers on his wealth. He suspects some of his friends like him only because he has money. He described feeling used with sadness in his voice, which disappeared as soon as the flight attendant showed up and he began to flirt with her, telling her that she had eyes like Angelina Jolie. I told him that I’d trade his problem for mine, which was that I was old and still in school. He smiled softly and ordered a third Long Island iced tea in a can. He said, “You’re making fun of me aren’t you? You big, bully. I’m a poor little rich kid. I need sympathy here. Get that straight.”

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“You got it, Omar. Anna and I will help spend some of your family’s money,” I said as Anna peered, around me, towards Omar with raised eyebrows as she lifted her beer in the air, saluting my problem solving skills, taking an even bigger swig than before. The lights are dimming and the pilot announces that we have just crossed over the Azores. I lean my seat back and think about how different this year has been, compared to the previous years since Arcadio died. I want to stay here forever, absorbing the highlights of this eternal summer, absorbing the energy that radiates from these to two sleeping angels. ****************************************************************** In her book The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes about losing her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, after he dies of a massive heart attack in their New York City apartment, unexpectedly in 2004. We sit down to dinner and life changes in an instant - the question becomes self-pity. Didion adeptly investigates the phenomena of losing a loved one - a mother, a husband or a child. She traces the social history of grieving in American society from the Victorian Age to the present as she brings in expert after expert to tell us that it is okay to be human and make mistakes during the difficult period that follows. The days following the loss are full of shadows and cold, piercing winds. Her work also explores the difference between grief and mourning, one a consequence of the other and two things that she details as distinct experiences. She tells us that the latter has everything to do with a temporal progression towards healing and moving on with one's life. The former is a specter which haunts the afflicted in undulating waves of self-pity, inducing moments of doubt and fear. It is a great read for anyone who has experienced such loss, yet it makes most sense to the sufferer long after time has worked its miracles on these difficult parts of our lives.

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The question becomes one of time. How long we will stumble around in the fog and how much time has to tick off the clock before we can resume some amount of normalcy, some kind of reattachment to the world around us? People learn to operate within the fog sometimes for months or even years. Sadly, one of Didion’s main points is that nobody ever talks about the process that follows the death of a loved one. We are expected to keep the process of hurting and healing hidden behind our public personas, as if we are somehow supposed to magically get on with our lives. It’s not that way at all. Unfortunately, I can see how some people never come out of the fog. The fogbank on the periphery of my life began to lift during my second semester at UC Merced. Leaving the cheese plant became the catalyst that set my life moving forward. I suddenly woke up at the university; amazed that I’d actually gotten in, nearly overcome by the awkwardness of being a forty-two-year- old undergraduate. Everything came rushing at me in full color. The confusion regarding my future, which had filled in the crevices of my life, began to fade away as soon as I decided to concentrate on school. Consequently, knowing what to do felt easier than it had in a long time. When it came time to apply to study in Italy, I had to identify my motives. The committee that granted the scholarship that would eventually send me to Tuscany wanted to know this and much more. I thought of describing my three years at Gianni’s Restaurant. Gianni was man of exacting standards when it came to the ingredients and processes that were the cornerstone of his artisanal approach to food. Gianna set aside Saturday mornings so we could make raviolis and meatballs, often with the aid of contraptions that looked as if Brunelleschi or Leonardo da Vinci had designed them. The Parmesan shredder was a crudely put

67 67 together device with sixteen-penny nails protruding from a wooden wheel driven by a small electric motor. We made raviolis with a wooden lattice like gadget over which we spread a sheet of dough, stuffing its holes with fillings and then brushing egg wash over the exposed strips of dough between the squares. After adding the top layer of dough, a second section of the medieval looking machine sealed and cut the raviolis in one quick motion after it lowered and pressed down on the dough. Once the gadget was opened up, the excess pasta strips between the raviolis were pulled away in order to be recycled into the next batch, leaving forty-eight fat and delicious raviolis that needed a good boiling or deep frying. Shortcuts at Gianni's did not exist. We took pride in the final products because they were delectable executions of skill and experience. The intense aroma and flavor of a crusted over meatballs fresh from the oven or a ravioli tossed in the deep fryer were exquisite things, so my motive to visit Italy had its beginnings in wanting to taste the Italian version of some of the foods that were available here at home, a comparison of sorts. I had to illuminate the inner working of my attraction to food in order to move past generalizations on my application. The final answer went beyond Italian food, beyond food itself. My focus on food didn’t stem from a longing for prestige or security, but simply because I really enjoyed the process of putting together delicious meals that could be shared with friends and family. In my application, I attempted to place myself in the center in of an unfolding adventure based on my future travels to Italy and other far-flung places in order to learn more about food cultures. Food says something about who we are. Gianni and many others had helped me to appreciate that learning about food is an intimate affair and quality

68 68 always reveals itself - excellence strived for, results brought to bear by the best ingredients, foods rendered by hand, creations arrived at through painstaking diligence, guided by experience and passion; the perspective could be voiced a thousand ways. Food had been changing for a long time and I wanted to be part of it again. Italy would be a beginning. I stood on the curb of ambition, my thumb sticking out, needing desperately to catch a ride into the fray a second time around. I was ready to explore Tuscan artistry as it related to food, every crumb of it. In the end, the committee believed me and awarded me a scholarship. Good fortune stuck again that semester during a study session in my favorite computer lab at UC Merced. My proximity to food was about to change, again, when a burly undergraduate came into the lab. Randy Taylor approached me as I sat at a computer and said, "Sorry mister, but this room is reserved for a private meeting which starts in about two minutes,” he said, giving orders and quick to demand. “It’s time to move on. You'll have to go somewhere else." "What kind of meeting?" I asked looking up from my keyboard, answering in a harsh tone, which indicated that I wasn’t at all impressed by his demands. "The Prodigy Newspaper editorial staff meeting," he said. "Maybe I want to join The Prodigy Newspaper staff," I shot back because I had been planning to investigate the school newspaper at some point. "Can you write?" he asked. "Like a charm," I said. "You know anything about food?" "I was a chef a long time ago. I can hold my own. I was probably working in kitchens before you were a gleam in your daddy’s eye."

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"You’re very funny. Ha Ha. You interested in doing the restaurant reviews for the Prodigy or not?” he asked acknowledging my stab at his relative lack of experience. "You mean being a food critic? Maybe. How much does it pay?" He looked at the assistant editor who had just walked up and said, "Zero, zilch, nada, but your name will be on the cover of every issue; can’t really pay you. We’re flat broke." People enjoyed my reviews even though they were horrendous atrocities of written language. My articles, however, attempted to be honest and organic. Eventually, my writing style found its momentum. With every new assignment, I gained valuable experience, often taking along friends or ghost critics whose opinion about food I trusted. Rating restaurants became a simple task because most restaurants are asleep to the principles of quality. Many restaurateurs go through the motions exclusively to make a profit, driven by the romantic fantasy that by simply opening up shop, people will fall in love with their food and come rushing in to make them rich and famous. Lost in the equation is the intense amount of work that it takes to sustain the effort. They ignore passion as a key facilitator to making things grow from a place of love. Mediocre became my truest adjective. When I occasionally ran into artisans who put their all into a restaurant, the effort stood out and was impossible to miss, like a diamond in the light. Early on, I was fooled by the seeming sincerity of an anecdotal tale on the inside cover of a menu in a restaurant in Merced. A full page of text boasted of recipes having been handed down from generation to generation, passing from Sicily to New York, and finally to California. It described a grandmotherly concern for the essences of great food; practically suggesting that the spirit of a long departed elder ensured the homeliness of every entrée. When my raviolis

70 70 arrived, I was more than disappointed because I recognized them as the same frozen circles sold at the local Costco supermarket. The marinara that accompanied the raviolis was equally gross, a concoction that missed the complex subtleties and natural sweetness that the days long process of creating a marinara ensures. The sauce was simply that afternoon’s boiled down tomato paste with added garlic, onions, spices and pepper, lots and lots of pepper. It was very different from the real marinara that is basic to every chef’s repertoire. The words mock and bullshit kept running through my head as I wrote the review a couple of days later, after I had cooled off a bit.

****************************************************************** I arrived in Florence at the beginning of June. I was to share an apartment with an undergraduate named Sojian who was also in the University of California system. The neighborhood was ideal for someone wanting to know more about how Italians eat. Mercato Sant’ Ambroggio sat around the corner, a popular gelato shop stood a block away and Fabio Picci’s famous Il Cibreo restaurant, which I’d never heard of, was less than two hundred yards away. Our apartment was located on Via Dei Pilastri, a street leading to Piazza Sant’ Ambroggio, a small and wonderfully eclectic plaza, mostly away from the tourists, where handfuls of locals adorned with piercings and punk rock haircuts gathered well into the night on the steps of the ageless church. Others crowded the outdoor seating area of a café, drinking and eating. During the day, the area filled with a mix of locals and transitory tourists while a lamprodotta cart filled the neighborhood with the pungent smell of cooked cow intestines. In the opposite direction, the city center was a stone’s throw away. Brunelleschi’s Duomo, Piazza Della Signora, and the

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Ponte Vecchio were sites we came to know intimately and which we passed every day on our way to classes at the UC Study Center on the other side of the Arno. Raised in Los Angeles, Sojian was originally from Guatemala. He enrolled at UC Berkeley after high school where he majored in sociology. When I first met him, I noticed the prominence of his indigenous features. He carried himself with confidence and his genteel mannerisms seemed to attract devotees. His silky black hair fells to his shoulders, whipped to one side by quick thrusts of his head. By the end of the summer, I considered him another kind spirit in the long parade of individuals who helped me deal with the loss of Arcadio. Sojian was as cool a roommate as anyone could aspire to have, a blessing the entire summer except for the couple of times under the glaring sun in Rome when we began to get on each other’s nerves. Sojian seemed to understand, more than anybody else I met in Florence this past summer, my curiosity regarding food. He encouraged and joined my food explorations, becoming genuinely interested in my pursuit of food cultures as a way to come to terms with several of my pasts. Sojian worried a lot this summer about his younger brother who was in and out of jail in the San Pedro area of Los Angeles. They couldn’t have been more different. Sojian had secured a scholarship to attend Berkeley and by all outward appearances was exceeding everyone’s expectations of him as the first person in his family to attend college. His brother, on the other hand, lived on the streets, resisting the pull of the local street gang. His brother was spending the summer in the Los Angeles County Jail. His mom, like many other Latino women, worked a variety of jobs in order to keep her family together. His father came and went. Her struggles entangled within the larger struggle Central Americans face integrating into mainstream

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American life in a huge metropolis that often pits one disadvantaged group against another. Sojian had a clear vision of a better life for his family, but he needed to graduate from Berkeley in order to make it happen. I often thought that the universe had sent me a capable sidekick. As a result, I felt an even greater sense of gratitude for my adventure in Florence this past summer because I shared in a pivotal time in the lives of so many young people like Sojian. The big screen television mounted on the wall, which separates us from First Class shows that we are approaching landfall on a trajectory over New York and Massachusetts. The cabin is still dark. Most passengers are huddled under blankets. I recall details of the last three months and scribble notes. I burst into laughter remembering the one enduring memory that best captures Sojian. Anna and Omar are still dead asleep. On the way to school one morning, Sojian spotted some ridiculously ugly dress shoes in the window of a popular leather works. The shoes were made of yellow ostrich skin and resembled pointy-toed cockroach killers with bumps infecting their entire surface. Every day, we stopped to look at them as Sojian contemplated spending the three hundred Euros that the shop owner was asking for them. The wheels in his head churned with calculations. I never had the heart to tell him my real thoughts regarding the shoes because of the excitement that washed over his face when he peered at them through the shop’s window. Sojian donned his new shoes for the first time one Friday afternoon, making his way toward our apartment on Via dei Pilastri. It was Saturday Night Fever all over again; Latino heat met Italian high fashion on a sidewalk in Florence. A vortex had opened up. Sojian had the strut down, moving to a rhythm only he could hear, and possessing smoothness previously unavailable to him. In other words, the shoes gave him mojo.

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He glowed with enthusiasm as he ran across the street, jumped on the curb and said, “Ta Da! What do you think, Eddie?” “Amazing, simply amazing. I’m glad you finally did it. I might need to borrow those sometime,” I said. “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that,” he said as he ran upstairs and then disappeared for three days. I have always imagined that he generated some shoe driven adventure involving conquests and senoritas. On that first night in Florence, Sojian and I walked to the market and gathered the ingredients to make homemade pizza. Finding some local yeast, I hand tossed some dough and added fresh buffalo mozzarella, intermixed with an assortment of charcuterie and fresh herbs. The pizza, the first of many, was perfect. From that point on, Sojian trusted my skills regarding food and often paid for the ingredients that produced the meals that decorated our humble apartment’s table. The conversation that evening turned towards Arcadio as we dug into our pizza in the kitchen of the second floor apartment. I detailed the four years we spent hoping that one day we would emerge on the other side the cancer treatments, healthy and ready to go on with our lives. The summer of 2008 had been especially painful, I told Sojian, because our vacation to Santa Cruz was cut short, interrupted by Arcadio’s sudden chest pains. A week later, paralysis set in from the chest down. He had to undergo a ten-hour operation that required the removal of two of his vertebrae in order to scrape away the tumor from around his spinal cord. His chances of surviving the operation without long-term paralysis were fifty-fifty. Without the procedure, he had weeks to live. The prognosis, assuming that the procedure successfully removed the tumor, suggested that it

74 74 would take months of therapy in order for Arcadio to learn to walk again. He would also have to begin another six-month long regiment of chemotherapy. We stepped out after eating, wanting to see the city where we would be spending the next three months. I continued telling Sojian the story as we walked down via Giuseppe Verdi, heading toward the tower at Santa Croce, which stood beautifully in the distance as if photo shopped into the sky from some Renaissance painting. We watched the orange glow of the impending sunset wash beautifully over the giant alabaster colored statue of Dante that guards the entrance to the Chiesa Santa Croce. “Sounds like Arcadio had it pretty rough,” Sojian said as we sat on the steps of the church and watched immigrants selling trinkets to tourists in the piazza. “He did, but he was amazing that way, super tough. He walked right after the surgery,” I said, taking nibbles of my pistachio gelato. “How long?” Sojian asked. “Four days, it took less than four days. Mom and I left him by himself in his hospital room one morning and when we came back he was sitting on the edge of the bed,” I said. “He still looked like hell from the surgery, black circles under his eyes and pale skin sagging over his face.” “Poor kid," Sojian said. “Yeah, I know. It’s hard to forget how pathetic he looked sitting at the edge of the bed in his wife beater t-shirt, all rigid and unable to move his head, the iodine from the surgery still staining his shoulders," I said looking down at the ground. "I told him to lie down, but he wouldn’t listen. You know what he told me?” “What?”

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“He told me that he’d already walked to the sink to brush his teeth when we were gone.” Then he said, ‘Watch! Hold your hands out, Uncle Eddie. I’ll walk to you.’ ****************************************************************** After, we returned home from Piazza Santa Croce, Sojian went out with some other UC students to Michael Angelo Piazza in order to watch the last of the sunset in the intermittent rain. I stayed home and opened the double doors in my room, which overlooked a patio on the first floor where a family sat outside during the evening hours. The bell tower from Sant’ Ambroggio poked out from the roofline to the east and the voices of those gathered in the piazza drifted across the night into my room. I suddenly realized how far away from California we actually were. It began to rain. Florence's sky was eerily dark. Thunder crackled overhead as if God was wielding a fiery whip in anger against the city. I imagined scenes of burning towers with bodies dangling from them, which I’d read about in RWB Lewis's retelling of Florentine history, as the city is left smoldering during the wars between the Guelphs and Ghebillines in the days when the republic was establishing itself. I had trouble sleeping. In the distance, the muffled cries of a baby made their way through the thick plaster walls into my room. I thought about how strange it was to spend the summer in such close proximity to a baby whom I’d never meet. The family downstairs would live the rest of their lives in this neighborhood and I would go home, never knowing who had owned the cries or the cigarette smoke that made its way into my room from the patio below when the wind shifted directions. I would pass the baby on the street somewhere in Florence in some faraway future, but wouldn't recognize him because we'd never met. We were strangers caught in time, separated by over forty years. We only

76 76 shared a sleepless night together, accented by our parallel anxieties and the roar of thunder and lightning, which in my case illuminated the silhouette of the antique furniture that filled my room and whispered doubtful things, filling the air with negative energy. Arcadio appeared in my dreams when I finally fell asleep that first night. In the dream, he was five, the age he had been on a trip to San Francisco during his Kindergarten year in 2000. I woke up from the dream at three in the morning feeling angry. The night was clear and the rain had washed the streets during the storm, so I walked the lanes of the medieval city center unable to leave the shadow of the Duomo, which looms in the sky for miles around. I went round and round in circles, making my way through narrow streets as the moonlight followed me, passing through the outline of The Badia and then the Palazzo Vechio. What I wanted was someone to yell at or someone to fight, but I only encountered disinterested locals or boozed up tourists on their way home from drinking too much. I launched a half-filled liter bottle of soda into the air with one swift kick. The bottle lost its cap on impact and splattered against a yellow wall. The stain remained on the building the rest of the summer, reminding me of that first night's dream. I kicked at something else but fell on my ass in a narrow alley that leads to the house where Dante Alighieri supposedly lived and which sat across the lane where he first laid eyes on Beatrice. I didn’t know that then and nobody saw me fall because the streets were empty. When I got up, my back pockets were soaking wet, dripping water down the back of my legs, but I kept walking. Movement took the edge off. Eventually, my anger subsided, replaced by hunger and thirst. On a street behind Piazza Della Signore that leads in the direction of Sant' Ambroggio, I heard people talking and laughing in the shadows of a narrow street.

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When I approached a porch that held the rear entrance to a popular restaurant, conversations in English filled the air. Two young couples, probably students, were making out, talking, whispering, and breaking into an occasional laughter. They never saw me, so I turned around and went home. ****************************************************************** Piazza Santo Espiritu hides from the crowds of tourists in Florence, shadowed by Brunelleschi’s final work, La Chiesa Santo Espiritu. Inside the church is one of my favorite treasures of Italian art in Florence. A wooden Christ, sculpted by a young Michael Angelo many years before Rome stole him away, hangs quietly in a sacristy of the basilica. The sculpture is indescribably delicate and beautiful; Jesus’s face is alive with radiant skin and a despondent expression that stays with the observer long after he has exited the church. I spent my days there this past summer, writing and absorbing the artisan spirit that weaves itself into every corner of the neighborhood. I spent many hours standing at the railing, six feet from the five-foot sculpture, which hung from the rafters and floated above the small room. The toes are what I remember most about Michael Angelo's Jesus. They were gnarled. Rot had set in as if to remind us of Christ’s human half. The rest of the figure remained perfectly preserved, an aesthetic uprising in which it was possible to get lost. The same artistry that compelled the crucifix also animated much of the food commerce that took place in and around the piazza with an unmetered appreciation for the time and toil it takes to produce excellence. My favorite activity between classes was to grab a wedge of pizza from Il Forno Ristorante, as it came out of the oven, and wash it down with a cold orange Fanta. The pizza was nothing fancy, a sauce less and unsalted crust, fresh mozzarella, regular mozzarella, and lean ground sausage chunks. Drizzles of olive oil and herbs added

78 78 the final touches. A tattoo-covered woman whose hands moved a million miles an hour produced the edible works of art in a room next to the ovens. She didn’t like being spoken to in English or broken Italian. Spanish seemed to work, but mostly she just wanted to work alone, unmoved by my curiosity or my offer to help cut dough. After class, I often grabbed a piece of pizza and settled next to the fountain in the center of the piazza in order to watch the evening envelope the Altro Arno at the end of the business day. A tangerine light hovered over people and objects, like dust settling after a benevolent windstorm. Life happened slowly there. On Wednesdays nights, I waited there long after class had ended because I volunteered in the kitchen of a homeless shelter three blocks away. Life at the shelter was relaxed and dignified. The desperation that clings to the walls of such places in the United States was largely absent. On my first day, the kitchen staff gave me the task of preparing the anti-pasto for the fifteen or so guests. The residents, mostly older people, some with obvious mental health issues, received a good selection of cheeses, some of which I’d never seen, and fruits. I was asked to avoid being skimpy. A red-haired woman named Camila, walked me through my duties and introduced me, by name, to the residents who largely ignored me until weeks later when they had gotten used to my presence. I marveled at the charitable nature and tranquility of the place. I remember looking past Camila into a large living room after dinner had finished on that first night and watching as the guests gathered around a piano in order to listen to one of their fellows play, softly and brilliantly. Towards the end, I was allowed to sit with everyone and eat some of what we’d just cooked, usually a main course of pasta with one of many sauces.

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A pastry shop on the corner across from Palazzo Guadagni sold pastries topped with sliced peaches, blueberries and kiwi so pleasing to the eye that it felt like a crime to destroy them for the sake of complementing a cappuccino. On Tuesdays at the farmer’s market that took place every weekday along the edges of the piazza, an old man in a van sold homemade prosciuttos and finocchiona salami sandwiches served with the irrepressible Tuscan bread that the locals prefer. Listening to the old man in a beat up Indiana Jones hat and a flowing white beard describe his craft, one day, in his plaintive and flowing Italian was almost as big a treat as putting away one of his sandwiches with some peppers from the nearby fruit vendor’s stand. His eyes lit up when he described the preparation of his prosciuttos. He motioned his hands in the air, trying to simulate the way the prosciuttos hung from his ceiling at his barn or warehouse or wherever he aged them. I was never sure because I could only half understand him. Finally, he smacked his open palm onto the meaty shanks and guaranteed their quality until I cut the last morsel from the bone. He explained that for only one hundred and forty euros, a whole prosciutto could be mine. Piazza Santo Espiritu became my favorite place in Florence for various reasons. During the day, I took Italian classes and another course, The History of Italian Food and Culture, at the Palazzo Gaudagni. An old aristocratic family still occupied the top floor of the palazzo and leased the lower portions to Accent, a company that oversaw the UC Study Center. The place oozed the charm of a bygone Tuscany. Our classroom featured huge double door windows that opened under vaulted ceilings and provided us a bird’s eye view of the piazza. In a room where Professor Schmidt, a German who had spent most of his life in Italy, lectured about things ranging from the Etruscan influence on the region to the overly romanticized view of Italian cuisine in the world's imagination, antique

80 80 pieces of furniture decorated the margins. Tables and chairs as old as the United States, replete with painted heraldry and inlaid designs, sat behind a barrier that prevented their use. The classrooms provided a perfect backdrop for our community of aspiring foodies. Our group included future food scientists, students whose families owned restaurants back home, and members of the diaspora whom wanted to experience for themselves the intricacies of their cultural roots. Once, we tasted bread from the different regions of Italy as a summer storm raged outside in the piazza, lightening crackling and rain coming in sideways through the massive windows. In a staircase leading to the bottom floor, a nobleman dressed in all black from sometime in the family’s past watched over the second floor, looking in the portrait like a serious player in political affairs, a man deserving of a great deal of respect. The company that oversaw the summer courses for the University of California, Accent, employed the most wonderful Italians and some Americans, ensuring that we experienced Italy up close not at a distance as most tourists do. Our professors were everyday people who came from Italy's many regions. The kindness of the staff and their willingness to help us navigate daily living in a foreign country was the best. They took us to the opera, gave us badges to circumvent the long lines at the city's museums and literally walked us down the streets of the Altro Arno pointing out the palazzos of important Italian families or which ice cream shops to avoid. Maria Rosa and Miguel Angelo were especially warm people and in tune to the nuances of American culture, so they knew how to read and react to the kids who made up the bulk of the University of California's study abroad group.

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Once when a group of us walked across the Arno towards an appointment in the city center, escorted by the director Miguel Angelo, he stopped us as we neared our destination and asked me, "Did we just talk about pancetta for twenty minutes?" "I think so. Yeah, we did." I said. "That' strange. Why?" he asked. "I don't know; I guess I'm curious, just want to know more about it. We have bacon back home, but it’s different," I said. "You must be in Peter Schmidt’s class. Does he have you talking about pork bellies? Who would've thought my afternoon would consist of talking about pork bellies," he said turning his attention to the group and the Uffizi Gallery in whose foyer we stood. I felt comfortable at the Ricci Café. Peering out from behind a demitasse as scenes of everyday life floated by outside, made me feel like I was part of the culture. The cafe, situated a couple of doors down from the Palazzo Guadagni, became my introduction to Italian espresso cuisine, a place where theory met practice. After lunching in the cafe or sipping espresso at the bar, I rushed upstairs to the palazzo in order to take in lectures that contemplated the food cultures that had just played out in real life on the street below. Stepping through the door of the Ricci Café one day before class, the barista, a blonde haired man dressed in a black vest and a Three Musketeers style shirt, greeted me with a nod and the usual: “Bon giorno signore." I returned the salute and made my way to the back of the bar where an attractive woman of about thirty was sitting at the cashier’s stand. I felt a growing sense of confidence to participate in a real conversation outside of the classroom because of my promotion to Italian II earlier that morning.

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The cashier greeted me with another smile and big brown eyes. She said, "Ciao! Che cosa prendi?" “Come e la vita nella citta pui bella dal mondo, Signora?” I asked, stepping back to assess my newfound boldness. “Sta bene Signore. Che cosa prendi?” she asked again with her head half tilted in amusement. I continued, "Io prendo un caffe Americano y un cornetto." Relaying my order to the barista across the room, she unwittingly let out a laugh when she said, “Un caffe Americano e un cornetto." Raising my head after digging in my pocket for change, I saw, in the mirror's reflection, the two employees exchanging a glance of disdain regarding my order. I stepped back from the cash register and spun round to catch the barista still smirking, one corner of his mustache upturned in a recognizable grimace of contempt. I demanded my money back and stormed toward the door, turning around at the threshold with my right index finger pointed in the air, exclaiming in what I believed to be good Italian: “Il caffé Americano e il cafe pui giustoso nel mondo. Il caffe Italiano e oscuro e piccanti come ti e come Il Ricci Caffe!” They laughed again, outright the second time. When I explained later to Professor Schmidt what had happened, I learned that I’d actually praised the virtues of American coffee while claiming that the barista and the cashier were dark and flavorless like the Ricci Café or something to that effect. Professor Schmidt explained why they had laughed at me. Italians think that an Americano is a ridiculous drink, he told me. Publically watering down one

83 83 of the nation’s iconic drinks is a serious but laughable offense. He warned that I might have taken them too seriously. I skulked around the piazza for a couple of days and finally made amends to the barista. I really enjoyed the people watching, the bustle, and the pace of life at the Ricci Cafe, so the exercise in humility was worth the effort. Subsequently, the barista claimed that he never made fun of me, but I knew better because every time I walked through the door, the corner of his mustache upturned in the same manner it did on the day of our misunderstanding. The professor, luckily, took an interest in my experience as a former chef and we became fast friends. The interest in our respective cultures was the basis of many exchanges between the professor and I that resulted in an almost authentic Mexican dinner. By almost authentic, I mean that Mexican food ingredients were hard to come by in Florence. I chased a mysterious Chinese man for two days all over Florence looking for dried chilies in order to make an enchilada sauce, but I never found him because he kept moving from farmer’s market to farmer’s market. By the day of the dinner at Professor Schmidt's house, I had been trying to find ingredients for two days without any luck. The only things I had managed to gather were a jar of cumin seeds and some bunches of fresh oregano. Exhaustion also had me at the breaking point because I’d walked in the hot sun to the edge of Florence in search of a Mexican woman in whose restaurant we’d eaten. I was sure she could lend me some ingredients. The bartender in the front of the restaurant where she leased the kitchen, however, told me that I had missed her by hours and that she was gone for the summer. How could I make an authentic Mexican dinner or even plan a menu without ingredients? I thought about how stupid I was going to look at dinner that night. I already knew that Italians could

84 84 be tremendously judgmental with anything related to food, especially towards outsiders. During our orientation, the staff at the UC Study Center had warned us never to engage Italians regarding food or fashion. Still without ingredients, the professor picked me up and we whizzed through the streets of Florence on his scooter, like two lunatics out of some movie from the heyday of Italian cinema. We were on a mission called “Operation Mexican Dinner.” He was the head coach and I the supposed quarterback who would make it happen on the field. We rode up and over Piazza Michael Angela and towards the southeast corner of Florence to a grocery store where we bought some of the famous Chianina beef that I had introduced to Sojian on various occasions, Fontina and Mozzarella cheeses, some precooked white beans from the deli, and some mild peppers. I had to go back in because I forgot the tortillas. When we arrived, I went to work in the professor's kitchen, deciding that I would have two main courses and a side dish. Chilaquiles to start and a beef sauté along with some white beans refried in olive oil and finished off with sprigs of fresh oregano. I picked chilaquiles because I was sure that the Italians present had never tried them and because I’ve made them thousands of times. Chilaquiles is a popular Mexican dish of fried tortillas, eggs finished with a salsa, and topped with melted cheese. Although there are infinitely many versions in Mexican cooking, it is impossible to find a decent version in a restaurant. In order for them to be a work of artistry, the cook has to hand fry the tortilla pieces to a point of golden crispiness without burning them, which requires ten to fifteen minutes of constant tossing in a sauté pan. There are no shortcuts. In a restaurant, cooks don’t have the time to dedicate to a single dish that requires as much attention to details as do chilaquiles.

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Guests began to arrive as the professor and his wife, a lovely Neapolitan woman named Marianna, greeted them and escorted them outside toward the patio that sat next to a garden. As people walked by, the professor introduced me as the Mexican American chef who was his student. I looked up and said hello but offered that my hands were too wet to shake. The heat in the kitchen was beginning to rise, so the professor’s wife brought me some cold mineral water and a towel with which to wipe my brow. Time was of the essence so I doubled my efforts and let intuition guide me. I put the professor to crack eggs and to make a milder than mild salsa from tomatoes which he pulled from his garden. He was nervous. I was nervous too, but soon realized that the guests probably hadn’t ever tried an authentic Mexican dinner, so an approximation would do just fine. The professor helped me as much as he could while Marianna went out to attend to the guests, refilling water and wine glasses. I roasted the mild the peppers over the gas burners with a pair of tongs, deseeded them and sliced them. I cut the onions, the garlic, and the beef, preparing as much as I could in advance. I made the refried beans in olive oil first and put them away in the warm oven. Everything had to happen at once. We needed to serve the chilaquiles as soon as they came off the stove, so they could be eaten right away. I arranged things so that beef sauté began as soon as the chilaquiles went out the door. I melted mozzarella over the chilaquiles, drizzling each plate with fresh cream. I sent them out as a first course on small salad plates. The batch of chilaquiles came out nearly perfect in its balance of the tortilla’s crunchiness and the moisture provided by the salsa and cooked eggs, a difficult thing to achieve. There was no doubt in my mind that they were delicious.

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The professor returned and said, "They loves them. If you don’t mind I will sit with the guest and try some." "Go ahead. Give me about fifteen minutes and I’ll call you for the second course," I said, relieved and happy at the same time. I fired up the main course, browning the beef to the Maillard effect, adding the previously sautéed onions, roasted garlic, and mild peppers. I ground up some of the cumin seeds, throwing them in just before adding the hint of cayenne pepper and paprika mix. The best I could do was a sauce in the pan, a faux deglazing with water and then an addition of a roux. Fresh tomatoes and Oregano topped off the sauté, as did melted Fontina cheese. I transferred the sauté onto a serving platter trying my best to keep the cheese blanket intact. I gave it a final garnish of minced red onions and more Fontina cheese. Marianna took the platter out to the guests. On my way to join the guest, I realized how important the dinner had become to me. The sharing of a meal in such a unique setting was profound, an expression of humanness reaching across cultural lines. My cooking a dinner for my new friends was a way to give back to the Italians for treating me with such hospitality and allowing me to be a part of their community. I got to meet new, interesting people and gained some food culture experience that I could take into my future. I sat with the guests as Marianna brought out the beans as an accompaniment to the sauté, which I’d requested but was out of custom because usually one course at a time is served in Italy. There was still a little tension amongst the guest as if the first course hadn't convinced them of my abilities. A man sitting across from me named Alessandro, whom had been ill for a long time and was finally getting better, bent over his plate and took bird sized nibbles of the Chianina beef sauté. He rolled up a flour tortilla and used it to test the sauce.

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Everybody watched him. Something about the meal, the flavors and the way the ingredients mixed, he would later tell me, was foreign but very appetizing to him. The bites moved around slowly in his mouth, as he closed his eyes and shook his head up and down. Finally, he looked up at me and everyone else and announced that the main course was “deliziosissimo.” Everyone let out a collective sigh of relief and began digging into the meal. The mood lightened soon afterward and everyone kept repeating how delicious my authentic Mexican dinner had been. After the dinner, I sat around sipping espresso with Professor Schmidt and his friends under the stars in the backyard. To have been successful by relying on my skills from a long ago profession from which I’d been excluded for many years felt great as if I’d somehow made a comeback, an experience that I’ll cherish for a long time. Unprompted, the professor reached over and held Marianna’s hand, leaned back in his chair, looked through his wine glass, and in his German accent said, “I want to give you some more advice on the importance of food cultures in the new Millennium. There are things you must consider. Will you trust me? I have many years in this business. Get your notes. Write this down…” It is daylight outside. We are over the Sierras and Omar is finally beginning to stir. He’s been asleep for more than nine hours. Anna was up to use the restroom a few times and to engage with me in small talk, but she always fell right back to sleep. I haven’t sleep. I poured over my food notes for the entire flight, trying to make sense of my scribbling. Omar is stretching out in his seat, groggy and obviously confused about his present location. He looks at me, trying to remember how he knows me. After some time, he says, "I have to piss. Where are we?" "Almost home. About an hour away," I say.

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Looking down at my journal and my laptop he asks, "Have you been awake this whole time?" "Yeah" "Why?" he asks. "I made a list of my five best food adventures in Italy. You want to see it?" "You’re still talking about food? I have to use the bathroom. Maybe later," he says as he scoots by me into the aisle. It’s not Omar’s fault. I make the mistake of relating my adventures in terms of only food, which is boring to some people. My travels aren’t about the food. They are about the people, the communities that produce and enjoy great food.

CHAPTER FIVE: A TATTERED YELLOW NOTEBOOK

Tuscany Summer 2013 1. Food Notes - Chiaroscuro Coffeehouse June 26, 2013 I’m in my cubby hole inside the Duomo in Florence. This is my fourth time up here this summer. The view of Florence is incredible at the top. People look like little ants and everything below is red tiles and triangles. I’m in between the outer shell and the inner shell, just below the staircase to the lantern. A dead end with a locked door creates some space and a window the size of a shoebox lets in enough light for me to write as people come and go in the dark. The small window looks out over the city in the direction of our apartment to the northeast on Via Dei Pilastri. I’m unable to make out our apartment's roof. Our street runs below the oxidized aqua marine copper dome of the Great Synagogue of Florence, which is around the corner from us. The location of the synagogue explains why there are so many Sephardic Jews in our neighborhood. I’ve been fascinated by the story of how Brunelleschi built the dome. The story, in terms of the engineering, is more incredible than I can relate. Halfway up the dome, I caught a glimpse of the giant links of chain and tree trunks with which he girded the bottom of the dome, protruding from the curved ceiling above. It’s not even the architecture that fascinates me. It’s the part about how Brunelleschi battled adversity and dispensed with a chief rival to finally get the Duomo built according to his specifications. After all, nobody thought he could do it. He was a genius, though. And he was crazy, too. I’m looking over my notes from Chiaroscuro Coffeehouse in Florence. The professor took us last week for a tour and a lecture by one of the managers. The

90 90 trip was an enjoyable time, especially because a certain drink caught my attention. I’m not a huge fan of the espresso in Italy. I like the atmosphere and the culture, the polished brass and the dead serious baristas dressed in bow ties, dinner jackets, and all that, but it just tastes too burnt and bitter to me even though I drink it whenever the chance presents itself, which is all the time. The person at Chiaroscuro suggested that I try something called a shekerato. I fell in love. It is espresso with sweetener shaken in a tumbler with ice like a Martini and then served, foamy and delicious, in a chilled wine glass that is drizzled with chocolate. I’ve been back for a shekerato every day. Dozens of other espresso based drinks filled up the menus that hang on the walls, enough chocolate and cream to make anyone’s head spin. Except that today the barista had an attitude and said that, he wasn’t making a shekerato on a Saturday. What a control freak, like the man from Seinfeld with the soup. Jerk. He can make me three on Monday in order to make up for today and tomorrow (That is how delicious they are). 2. Food Notes - Cinque Terra Pesto June 28, 2013 I feel guilty sitting here above the beach with a plate full of green melon wrapped in prosciutto and a side of bomb pesto and focaccia, while the girls and Sojian sit on their towels eating egg salad sandwiches. I’m a horrible person. At least it’s the famous Cinque Terre pesto, not just any pesto. I can't help it. Prosciutto wrapped in melon and I have been crossing paths without actually meeting for a very long time. We used to serve melon and prosciutto at banquets all the time at a place in Eureka, but I've never tried it until right now. We've been like passing ships in the night. Once at a party I went to reach for a piece on a platter, but I was distracted by a conversation so that when I turned to reach again, I watched someone take the last piece. Another time, I stashed three pieces in a refrigerator of a hotel only to

91 91 have the dishwasher steal them, throwing away the prosciutto and proceeding to suck down the melon. I don’t feel too guilty. I did see a couple of the girls sneak off earlier and gorge themselves with gelato and pizza. The most amazing thing, though, is the pesto. The woman at the counter who is in charge of making it just told me what makes it so famous, but I could have guessed as much. The flavor is about the balance between the Parmesan and Pecorino cheeses and the basil. They like it on the white side here, which means they use more cheese than basil. That's where the tang comes from. It's not like the pine nuts, the olive oil, and the garlic are inert or anything, it’s just that the basil and the cheese are the things they play with in Cinque Terre. Delicious any way you look at it. We came in this morning on wonderfully slow regional train. We left Florence and rolled into the countryside, changing trains in Pisa and then going north past Carrera, in the direction of Genoa. Marble quarries left mountains with gaping holes in their sides along the way. When we finally got to the string of fishing villages along the coast in Cinque Terre, we were speechless because of blueness of the Liguria Sea and how gorgeously the little pastel houses along the fishing villages piled on top of each other. 3. Food Notes - Sienna, Tuscany-Dinner in a Castle July 2, 2013 The Palio di Sienna is a sporting event like no other in Italy or the world for that matter. The festival pays tribute to the Virgin Mary and features a 75-second horse race through the streets of the ancient city by jockeys representing some of the city's neighborhoods. The race ends at the medieval city center, Piazza Dei Campo, one of Tuscany's grand sights, which feature the Palazzo Publico and the Torre della Mangia, an ancient red and white stoned wonder of architecture that

92 92 spirals upward to phenomenal heights. We came to check out the pre-race excitement. After visiting San Gimignano in the morning, we arrived in Siena. The procession of one neighborhood's band as it paraded through the streets singing a spirited fight song, everyone dressed in medieval attire, trapped us in the parade. Flags flew and banners waved with a fury as a drum and horn section blasted a deafening call to arms, ensnarling us in their wake. The throngs of people and noise disoriented us. Sienna lies at the edge of Chianti. I arrived with Sojian and the same group of Mexican/American girls from Berkeley that invited me to Cinque Terre: Terri from Los Angeles, Epi from Paso Robles, Julia from Santa Barbara, Maria from Tulare, and Esther from some town called Ojai. It looked for a minute as if we were going back to Florence without having dinner. An open table anywhere in the city was impossible, but we lucked out. We found a place that let us have dinner in their old wine cellar, converted into an overflow dining room. It was like eating in the dungeon of a fancy castle. We were the only ones at first, which gave the place an eerie feel. I joked with the girls that the scene felt like something out of The Twilight Zone. "Wouldn't it be cool if Rod Serling showed up at the gated entrance to the cellar with his trademark monologue?" I asked, preparing to do my best impersonation of him. I hissed out the theme song and said, "Ladies and gentleman these young study abroad students from the United States (add a middle aged man who continues to antagonize an already tense situation by bringing up stuff to which nobody can relate) think they are having the time of their lives in Italy. And they

93 93 are. They have memories to last a lifetime. Until tonight. You see, what these young people don't know is that they have suddenly become the sacrifice in four- hundred-year old Tuscan ritual. They will be shown the time of their lives by their host, but when it comes time to leave; this gate will slam shut on their precious Italian summer." Unfortunately, the girls didn't find my performance interesting because they were too young to find any humor or horror in The Twilight Zone reference. We did agree that the dining room was as creepy as it was beautiful. What mattered, though, was the hospitality demonstrated by the owners. Despite having a room full of friends and family in the dining room above us, they took care of us impeccably as they walked us through each course - the anti-pasto, the chicken saltimboca, the contorno and a delicious gelato for dessert. Antonia, an older woman of about sixty made sure we felt at home and asked us plenty of questions while offering some tidbits about her and her husband’s lives as restaurateurs. The uninhibited scene at our table will stay with me for as long as I live. 4. Food Notes - Black Truffle Risotto in Rome- July 28 2013 Sojian is really getting on my nerves right now. He is all resentful and moody. We have both been that way since we left the Vatican an hour ago. He's acting like a little bitch. Maybe, I am too. I'm right, though. We started to argue after I was busted taking a picture of Michael Angelo's Creation in the Sistine Chapel and a police officer blew up at me, standing over me in such a state of rage that he showered me with spit as he yelled. Sojian tried to downplay the cop's anger when we ran into some of our friends from school later at St. Peter's Basilica and I described what happened. He said I was exaggerating, but Sojian is just jealous because he wanted a picture but didn't have the balls to break the law like me. What he doesn't know is that I never erased the pictures from my cell phone

94 94 even though the cop was standing right there making me do it. I just made him think I erased them. It’s fucking hot outside, a humid type of heat not anything like the dry California heat we are used to. We are sitting in some small cafe between Termini Station and the Coliseum. We've been all over today - the Coliseum, the Roman Forum, The Spanish Steps. It's our third full day in Rome and I'm pretty sure we're ready to head back to our breezy apartment in Florence. We don’t really have a reason to be mad except we are exhausted and hungry. I mean we were hungry, but we just ate. I can cross off another great meal from my bucket list. I splurged because I would've hated myself if I went home without trying the porcini and black truffle risotto. Yeah, I just paid over twenty-five dollars for a plate of rice and mushrooms, albeit a delicacy by anyone's standards. It was unplanned so I'm happy even though it wasn't the Piedmont region's white truffle, which are much more expensive and not for a student budget. The black truffles were shaved very thin, but that's all it took to flavor the creamy risotto with their pungent earthy smell. Twenty years have passed since I’ve had the pleasure, at least that how long ago I worked for Master Chef. It felt good, stirred my memories of that place. I know that once Sojian and I get over ourselves, we are going to look back at this trip with fondness. Last night we watched the most amazing scene at the Piazza Popoli when a musician played Stairway to Heaven on his guitar to an international crowd that began to sing along and sway back and forth together. Later we met two twin brothers who finished each other's sentences and spoke vividly about the Golden Age of Italian Cinema into which they inserted the young versions of themselves. They had been young and taken to the craft with passion. If only we could have seen it, they explained with tears in their eyes.

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They got upset, though, when I asked about Roberto Benigni. They never heard of such a Florentine. They huddled for a private conversation after I brought up his name. “Roberto Benigni di Milano? No! Roberto Beningni di Napoli? No! Roberti Benigni di Venezzia? No! Lui non essiste” they concluded, shaking their heads as they denied the existence of the 1999 Academy Award winner for best foreign language film while looking at Sojian and me, in a suddenly not as friendly way as we sat on the ledge of the fountain at the Spanish Steps. 5. Food notes - Prosciutto Di Parma, August 14, 2013 I’m sitting on a bench in the center of Parma, which feels a lot like an American city except that the benches in Italy face away from the street. I just woke from a nap. I've been sprawled on this bench snoring and probably looking unsightly to people walking by. I didn’t sleep last night from being in the airport all night in Bologna with Julia as she waited for her flight home to Oakland. I came to see Correggio’s Ascension of the Virgin. The trip was completely worth the effort, for the famous fresco and for what happened afterwards, a couple of hours ago. I walked by a shop down the street from the cathedral and noticed a woman was preparing to slice a prosciutto. It's been a couple of hours, but the sweet, nutty aroma of the deli is still with me. Each prosciutto wore a decorative suit made of colorful foil and bouncy ribbons that gave them distinct personalities. A branding iron applied to the dried skin of each amber colored ham read: PARMA DOP. I asked the woman behind the counter if I could watch her prepare the prosciutto for slicing. We managed a lesson on cutting prosciutto and a little bit of conversation. Afterwards, I bought enough of the dried ham to take back to Florence, but it’s all gone now. I couldn’t help it. It’s why I missed the train to

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Florence, because I'm going back for more. Despite the pageantry and the wonderful aroma, the delight was in the taste. The flavor was to die for. Sorry about the cliché. I wouldn’t really die for prosciutto, but I did miss my train for it. Anyway, I never tasted anything so wonderfully and subtly laced with notes of nuts and honey. The woman said the only thing needed was bread, if that. She was right. I bought some croissants and that's all it took. Wow! I can die now. Sorry. I mean that I can go back to United States now satisfied that I've had the real deal. Oops. Ciao, from a bench somewhere on a side street in Parma.

CHAPTER SIX: THE ANGRY CREPES

Paris Summer 2013 The overnight trip from Barcelona to Paris took more than eleven hours. I left most of my bags with the professor and his wife in Florence, planning to return nine days later in order to finally fly home to San Francisco. The eighty- mile an hour dash on toll roads, over the Pyrenees, and straight up the heart of France felt harrowing in the dark of an unknown country, a straight shot of nerves and excitement. After flying into Barcelona from Pisa, I argued with the car rental agent over the exorbitant price of enabling the GPS system, but I took her advice because she kept insisting that to visit Paris without a navigation system was a disaster waiting to happen. She was right. Even with a GPS system, the streets of Paris were difficult to manage because of their organization around a confusing system of roundabouts. I subsequently went round and round, getting near Belleville only to end up going in an opposite direction. On one occasion, I ended up driving the wrong way on a one-way street, narrowly avoiding collisions and caught in a flurry of honking cars and insults. I finally found Rue Julian Lecroix, which was located in the center of Belleville. When I pulled up to the boutique hostel where I had reserved a room for the next six nights, a young French African with a shaved head and big brown eyes ran across the narrow avenue and circled me as I unloaded my car. He smiled pleasantly and kept asking me questions, few of which I understood because I speak very little French. His English was, to say the least, pretty rough. I understood that he was in high school and lived on the corner somewhere down the street, near what I would later come to know as the lower terraces of the

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Parque de Belleville. The teen explained to me that he was currently on summer vacation from school but would be returning soon for the fall semester. As I locked the car and made my way towards the entrance of the hostel, the teenager walked briskly at my side, offering to carry my bags, jumping up and down with excitement. "Are you tourists?" he asked. "American, oui?” "I'm just here to work, like everybody else,” I said. “I'm Eddie. What’s your name?" His smile disappeared and his shoulders drooped as he let out a sigh and said, "I thought you are tourists, man. I'm Moskel." We shook hands and fist bumped before Moskel disappeared as fast as he had appeared, running off in the direction of the park after some kids with a basketball called out to him. On my way through the entrance to The Loft hostel, the shared kitchen caught my attention. A huge gas fired stove with large ovens awaited the guests, which was a great sign. The stove meant that I could make my own meals without depending on restaurants or street food. I put away my bags and looked around the lobby, unable to consider sleeping because of the big city buzz, even though I was exhausted from the long trip. I took a stroll later that evening along Rue de Belleville, downhill towards the Place de Republique. Crowds and traffic lumbered up the busy thoroughfare or coasted downhill toward the flatlands. The Eiffel Tower sat on the floor of the city center in the distance like a foot-tall child’s toy sitting on a living room floor. I passed the Belleville metro stop, which I would make great use of in the coming days. I had the strange sensation of having been there before, as if I somehow recognized the drab buildings that lined the avenues, the occasional pie slice

99 99 shaped building that pointed into the larger boulevard and into which its side streets poured. Definitely, there was something of the infrastructure that felt familiar resulting from an art and architecture class that I took at UC Merced the previous fall where we studied how Georges-Eugene Haussmann on orders of Napoleon III razed the city’s slums in the 1860s and designed progressive streetscapes anchored by wide boulevards that led to central plazas and roundabouts. I felt a closer connection than could be offered by blueprints or textbooks, something like a distant recollection from a time before the complications of adulthood. Some research, a couple days later, led me to the 1956 filming of the movie The Red Balloon in Belleville by Albert Lamorisse. My familiarity suddenly had actual roots. Anyone who grew up in California in the seventies and eighties remembers the movie, a reminder of the power of dreams and living adventurously, shown to us repeatedly. The movie intended to cultivate a sense of beauty in the world around us and to let us know something of its cruelty. It felt like coming home. Suddenly, I had one foot in Paris and another in the life that surrounded my first and second grade classrooms in California circa, 1977. The streets of Bellville, in this way, held an unfathomable charm even though they were dirty, crowded, and much of the quarter succumbed to demolition and rebuilding since the filming of The Red Balloon. It felt good to travel and travel in time on a warm August night. As I made my way further down Rue de Bellville, I noticed roasted meats on a spit in the window of a Middle Eastern butcher shop. I grabbed a box of beef short ribs and some potatoes, taking them back to the hostel and matching them with some vine-ripened tomatoes drizzled with extra virgin olive oil that I’d purchased near the airport in Pisa. I felt a little bit lonely while eating, probably

100 100 because I was tired. The possibility never crossed my mind that in that small dining space and from my perch at the stove a wide cast of characters from all over the world would reveal themselves to me in the coming days. I’d already met one interesting but contemptible character, outside, when I’d gone for the ribs. On the way back from the butcher shop, I had my first encounter with a Frenchman with whom I would fight on several occasions over the course of the next week. The man sold crepes on the street, dressed in a chef's uniform that attempted to add an element of showmanship to his act and augmented by his handling of two spatulas as if they were swords. I bought a crepe and enjoyed the scenery around the booth very much, washing down the jam stuffed crepes with a carton of milk and feeling insignificant in the hustle and bustle of the enormous intersection. What should have been an ordinary moment lingered when I noticed the street chef's negative reaction to my attempt at conversation. He became more uncomfortable when I inquired about his process for making crepes. It became immediately obvious that my presence bothered him. He acted as if crepe making was some high art of closely guarded secrets about which only he deserved to be knowledgeable. I knew better. Making crepes is a simple process and open to much greater efforts of creativity than his simple pairings with marmalade, chocolate, and Nutella. His reaction, in turn, gave me a little bit of an attitude because I'd only wanted to be friendly and talk about street food. I took the crepe maker's dismissal of my inquiries as an affront to my knowledge of food, causing me suddenly to want to antagonize an already worsening situation. After all, the situation had arisen simply from my need to take up oxygen in what the Frenchman perceived to be his private air space. I began to take up more oxygen by letting loose a barrage of chatter. I talked about

101 101 my summer in Italy; my getting stuck in a tollbooth the previous night, and my dog back in California. I held forth about how French cooking had its roots in the chefs that accompanied Catherine de Medici to the court of her future husband and king, Henry II. The man wilted and his face contorted with every turn in the one sided conversation. When I mentioned to the man that his crepe looked like a giant flour tortilla, the kind that my mom made back home in California - that by the way was as beautiful as its reputation and a place every French person should visit - he stopped what he was doing and came out from behind the three round grills in his booth and began to bang on a metal table with his spatula, the same spatula that he'd just used to flip and fold my crepe. He was livid, had obviously missed the part at chef school that regarded customer service. "It is not zee tortilla, it is zee French crepe,” he yelled in the most irritating nasal groan ever communicated in the history of the English language. “It is not zee Mexique. It is French!" He delivered the rest of his tirade in French, drowning out the passing traffic with his grunts and the smack of his spatulas against the metal table. I retaliated, again, by cupping my hands around my mouth and yelling, "It's a tortilla, bro." "It is not zee tortilla. It is zee French Crepe." Flustered by the reality that not everyone I'm going to meet in my travels will be friendly, I started walking up the hill, turning around when I was almost out of sight and yelling, “It’s a fucking tortilla, jerk!" The clanking of his spatula kept rattling the air until I crossed Boulevard de la Vilette, his dot of a white coat still fixed in my direction as I realized that I'd just fulfilled the stereotype of the ugly tourist. ******************************************************************

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At a farmer's market along the avenue, I bought a big bunch of beets that looked very healthy for a summer variety. Sojian and I had roasted beets in our apartment in Florence a few weeks earlier, and I wanted to continue learning how to cook them in diverse ways. Sticking to the same ingredient, produced a myriad of ways, is a good way to learn a wider range of cooking any vegetable. Familiarity breeds creativity. Sometimes the lesson simply comes out of necessity. We learn to master a single ingredient or a few in combinations, sometimes, because scarcity is all that we have. Master Chef, a Scotsman for whom I worked in the early nineties and who had a restaurant by the same name in the Central Valley, introduced me to the concept when I asked him about herbs one day. His suggestion was that if I wanted to learn about tarragon, for example, then I should use it exclusively to flavor all my foods until I was exhausted by its flavor, thereby experiencing its many nuances and the varied consequences of its use. Beets in Paris then felt like a natural extension of the exercise in reacquainting myself with the reddish bulbs, an exercise that had started in Florence. I settled into the kitchen after visiting the market, cleaned the beets, and put away the green tops, which I would add at the last minute to my sauté of pan- roasted carrots and garlic at dinner. I put the beets, which were about the size of baseballs, on a roasting pan and set the oven to the equivalent of 350 degrees, grabbing my gym clothes from upstairs in order to go for a workout in the park. Outside, Moskel came up to me and wanted to know if I still wasn't a tourist. He wanted to know here I was going and why I was working out in the Park. He walked with me along Rue Julien Lacroix until I took a staircase up to a terrace where I could stretch, do exercises, and meditate, which I found useful because it kept my emotional state in balance and away from the pressures of

103 103 being on the road. Moskel disappeared back in the direction of his apartment building saying that he would see me later. I found an ideal spot for working out on one of the top terraces with a stunning view of the Eiffel Tower, which sat below the park, beyond the haze of smog, even smaller than a child's toy on a living room floor. I did various sets of exercises broken up by session of shadow boxing against a lime green metal fence with spray painted graffiti. I stayed busy dancing around throwing punches and kicks. I turned around to find two police officers and a policewoman, applauding my efforts and murmuring something about “Le Rocky.” I'm still not sure why they were amused or why it was a spectacle for them other than I was dripping sweat and making loud, grunting noises. Back in the kitchen of The Loft, I donned some plastic gloves in order to cut the ends off the beets, peeling them before I cut them into squares the size of a die. A young woman with flowing black hair in her twenties walked into the kitchen as I was cleaning my roasted beets and set up shop next to me. She introduced herself as Kim and started to dish up some take away Chinese she had bought at a restaurant down the street, putting an egg roll on a salad plate and pushing it in my direction. Kim was Vietnamese and hailed from Quebec. We had plenty to talk about since she too was coming from studying in Florence. She wanted to know what I was doing with the beets that necessitated such a mess, so I told her about my current fascination with beet salads, invited her to have some later. Kim sat at one of the tables that occupied the area across from the stove and I joined her once my simple beet salad of croutons, bacon, bleu cheese crumbles, thin slices of red onions dressed with olive oil and a splash of balsamic vinegar was put together. We ate and talked.

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When Kim got up to leave she said, "You should come with me to the catacombs. I don't want to go alone.” "Yeah, I read about that place," I said. "It sounds kind of spooky. I’d like to check it out. See what the fuss is about." "We can go in the morning, I'll show you around the city afterward," she said. “You've been to Paris before?" I asked. "I studied here too, just like in Florence." We spent the following day riding the metro from one arrondissement of Paris to another. Kim spoke French, so at the Bellevue metro station, she jumped out from behind me in line, coming to my defense when a pit bull of a French women verbally assaulted me from behind the glass of a ticket booth for not knowing on what metro exit the Louvre was located. Kim and the ticket agent argued in French, hurling insults at each other and putting their snarling faces to the glass. I understood, then, why people hold spoken French in such high esteem. The scene was dreadful, but the passion with which the words flew in the air made them strangely attractive, with a cadence and a fat roundness that made them soft instead of their intended harshness. Kim said later that French people were even more obstinate than French Canadians were. She didn't actually use the word obstinate but something more judgmental. She claimed it was the same bullshit in Quebec, living under the attitudes of the dominant French Canadians. Her willingness to ward off their cultural harassment had to travel with her every time she visited Paris. She told me that she was taking zero crap from any French people who thought it their right to be arrogant at her expense. Later, we sipped espresso at a cafe and shopped for shoes. More accurately, she shopped for shoes while I stood by and went with the flow. I was happy that

105 105 the universe had sent me such an awesome friend. We did make it to the catacombs, but we were too late to go take the tour. We snacked on peach tarts instead, across the street on the sidewalk outside of a boulangerie. She told me the rest of her story, and I told her a little of mine. We resumed our conversation about the frustrations of living as minorities in communities where we were expected to speak the dominate culture's language and succumb to their norms. She was a Vietnamese who grew up in Canada and I was a Mexican American who grew up in the California, so we compared points of view and concluded that it was a positive experience to have a foot in two cultures, that it paid great dividends. The next day Kim drove off in a taxi to the airport on her way home to Quebec. I went back to watching the world go by from behind the stove at the hostel, adding new twists to my evolving rendition of the ages old beet salad. The day after Kim left, I experienced the French Salon. It was something I had read about in my English classes during our focus on the rise of the novel during the Enlightenment. A contemporary version sat at the intersection of Rue de Bellville and Rue Julien Lacroix. I found it thanks to Moskel. After exiting The Loft, headed in the direction of the metro station, I called him over and asked where I could find a coffee house, using mostly sign language, mimicking the act of drinking espresso. Moskel stood straight up with excitement and began to point towards the Boulevard. He walked me to a place called Culture Rapide that I’d been passing every day and where a crowd of people sat outdoors next to a brick wall, eating and drinking at tiny tables. A small plaza and a playground shared the space that eventually turned into the busy corner. I handed Moskel two Euros for his tour guide efforts and he ran away a happy kid, looking back to wave goodbye as he whizzed past The Loft.

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What I found inside at first glance was a dimly lit, ordinary place. I stood at the tiny espresso bar, looking around and talking to a very nice Indian man behind the counter who spoke English. The decorations were decades old knick-knacks, but the welcoming spirit of the place more than made up for what it lacked aesthetically. The barista and I engaged in small talk and landed on the conversation that always came up that summer in Europe when he asked, “So where are you from?” “California” “Oh, I thought you might be Mexican,” he said. “I am, but I am also American. It’s possible to be American and Mexican and live in California, my friend.” I said. “What?” “Never mind,” I said. “It’s a long story something about neighbors going to war, shifting borders, and all kinds of political bullshit.” “So you live in Mexico?” he asked, missing my point. “No.” A woman came into the lobby area from the seating area beyond the entrance and announced that the next reading would start in five minutes. I asked the barista, “What goes on here besides food and coffee?” “We have an early evening poetry reading about to start and later tonight people will read their short stories. Thursday is English, tomorrow readings are in French,” the barista said. “This is a community of artists. Stay. See for yourself.” In the back of the café, past the sea of velvet covered walls and poetry propaganda posters, a stage occupied a corner around which many seats organized the setting. Brave souls from diverse places took turns stepping onto the stage and pouring out the vivid details of their lives and the virtues of existing, under the

107 107 white glow of a single spotlight in the early evening. A Chinese woman talked about the pleasures of gardening, of watching an eggplant take the form of a tiny green shoot and transform into a large purple ball, relating it to her grandchildren growing up to tower over her. A tall, blonde Russian woman in a red dress and high heels recited a poem about rock n roll and bread lines before grabbing her business bag and scurrying back to her job. I fell in love with the sitting back and listening that the reading entailed, so I attended as many readings as I could before my short stay in Belleville came to an end. ****************************************************************** The day after discovering the coffee house, I put together the latest version of my beet salad. I had pulled the bleu cheese and olive oil and added candied walnuts, mandarin orange wedges, and arugula, trying to find a new taste for a new day. I tried to mind my own business, but the conversation of two people seated at a table about fifteen feet from the stove area distracted me. A stunning Australian woman, who by outward appearances possessed entirely too much class to be in a neighborhood like Belleville, and a tall reddish haired American with a baseball cap and freckles who came across as a Southern type were engaged in an increasingly complex conversation regarding gun violence in the United States. She was civil and he was aggressive. She asked about whether personal freedom was worth the price of the high murder rates and rampant violence. He said something about the second amendment. All along I wondered if he would resort to that ridiculous come back that I’d been hearing for years whenever this issue came up. Then, he did it. He invoked all stupidity after she asked if he considered the gun control side of the issue, objectively. He leaned back in his chair, looked around and said, “They’ll have to pry my guns from my cold dead hands.”

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It was over. She knew with whom she was dealing, so naturally things got cold and quiet. He finally got up and excused himself saying he had to meet some friends. After he left, she watched me make my salad and asked, “Are all Americans that difficult?” “I’m not sure,” I said. “I stick to the west coast. Florida and the South are world away, but yeah, people get all crazy about guns.” “Do you know what the scariest thing is?” she said. “What?” “He is a school teacher,” she said. “On a brighter note, I’ve been watching you make your salad. You look like you’re having fun.” I felt compelled to share the latest version of my beet salad with Natalie because she mentioned how hungry she was. During the next hour or so, I heard what life was like for a twenty-four-year-old daughter of a well to do couple who worked for the Australian version of the State Department, privileged people who besides owning several factories kept a house in London where they regularly attended important dinners with some of the world’s top leaders. I kiddingly told her that in my part of California, the least famous part, the part where all the fruits and vegetables are grown, we didn’t have any such high browed people, just Mexicans and Okies. Natalie smiled, catching my drift because, despite her station in life, she was aware of her advantages and curious about the people who inhabited the world around her. She wasn't just a regular girl, but she still seemed humble, and genuinely interested in other people's lives. Natalie asked me to describe my summer and that, of course, involved detailing my food adventures, what that had to do with putting Arcadio’s death behind me. She also let me in on her reason for being in Paris. She was another

109 109 hopeless romantic. She had met a French Professor in Germany and they were going to meet for the first time in three months later that night. Before we parted, she gave me a big hug, thanked me for the food, and dug through her purse in order to give me an Australian fifty-cent piece, which I've managed to hold onto for all these years. She gave it to me so I could always remember the hope and encouragement she was directing towards my future life at that moment. On my second to last day in Belleville, I accidently locked my keys in the trunk of my rental car when it looked as though I was about to be mugged. The muggers turned out to be the police trying to warn me about leaving valuables in my car. Unfortunately, the car rental agency in Spain said I was out of luck because they offered no services in France and I would have to break the tiny window next to the rear door window. I did. Afterwards, I failed to reach the door handle and was back to square one. I thought of Moskel and his long arms. At fifteen, he was already a half a foot taller than I was. When I finally found him and told him in sign language to come help me, he agreed and followed me to The Loft. He reached the door handle easily and opened the car door. I was so grateful that I reached into my pocket and grabbed all the change that I had collected, forgetting that I had been saving the two Euro coins for the toll roads on the drive back to Barcelona. I told Moskel to hold his hand out, and I poured the entire contents of my pockets into his hands. It had to be more than thirty Euros. Moskel looked at his outstretched palm and looked at me. His feet began to shuffle in excitement. Then he started jumping up and down, put the change into his pocket, did a victory dance right next to my car, and tore off towards his apartment building. He stopped about ten yards away, turned around and said, “Thank you, and man. Thank you. I know. I know. I know you tourists. I know.”

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On my last day in Paris, I saw Moskel standing in front of his apartment with his uncle perched in the doorway. They whispered to each other. His uncle waved me over, shook my hand, and let me know that if I ever needed help or had any trouble in Belleville, that I shouldn’t worry because he would straighten it out for me and that I would always be welcomed.

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE SNOWMAN OF MILWAUKEE

Central Valley Spring 2014 My critique of Kings Asian Cuisine in Merced for The Prodigy, UC Merced’s campus newspaper, was one of the first reviews that I wrote after returning from Italy for my final year at the university. The foray into sushi marked the first time that I took along friends, two undergraduates whom I’d met on campus during my first semester at UC Merced. Finding two Millennials who could guide me through a food culture with which I had little experience proved a great strategy. Consequently, Taehyung, Sarah Namjoon and I built a small community of gastro-adventurers whose job it was to pass judgment on the Merced restaurant scene. When they weren’t available, I talked other people into going with me, but those reviews weren’t as fun because they lacked the warm insights provided by Taehyung and Sara Namjoon. It’s not like I was writing for the New York Times, but I took my job seriously and soon fell in love with the effect produced by sharing meals with friends and writing subsequent articles that kept improving. The experience of seeing my words in print in relation to a business from which I’d more than once been unceremoniously removed added a measure of motivation to my final year at UC Merced because I was gaining in the type of skills that would ensure my escape from the clutches of my blue collar past. The insecurity of my first year at the university fell by the wayside, left in the same dust that kept the cheese plant in the rearview mirror; so did most of my previously fucked up attitude. Raised in the Fresno area, Taehyung is of Cambodian ancestry. Her knowledge of diverse foods impressed me from the first time we met. I found it

112 112 super cool that she knew about food from actual experience, unlike a lot of young people whose knowledge is synthetic, amassed from watching food show after food show. Sarah Namjoon is from the Bay Area. She is Chinese and self- possessed of the confidence in diverse food cultures that inhabits people raised in cosmopolitan places like San Francisco and Oakland. The three of us met in a nature writing class where Michael Pollen’s Omnivore’s Dilemma took up a lot of our time. A study group regarding the book cemented our friendship. In addition, I think they felt sorry for me because they were always helping me to traverse technological quagmires, the kind of academic rigors easily navigated by Millennials but that are problematic for someone returning to school after many years. They also loved to listen to my stories about my having lived in the real world, the world into which they were headed the following year. They especially liked the stories detailing my life in restaurants and my firing from a legion of them. The following semester, my two ghost critics and I were reviewing a Thai restaurant with which they were already well acquainted. Again, I had very little experience, with Thai food in that case, so Taehyung and Sarah Namjoon walked me through the menu by describing the entrees. I simultaneously took notes and bookmarked Google searches for later research. We engaged in our usual heavy dose of conversation, gossiping about the people we went to school with and wondering about the private lives of our professors. The universe lined up in a way that made my second year at the UC Merced the polar opposite of the first year. The two young women swooped out of nowhere, took me under their wings, and helped me to settle into a good groove, putting the waywardness of my drinking days and the cheese plant behind me.

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Our table was strewn with orange and lime green entrees that looked and smelled mouth-watering. Unknown flavors washed over my palate as I tried to match them with appropriately articulated sensory descriptors. We poured the entrees over rice. I tasted each item as my two friends provided play-by-play analysis of our food. In my review, I wrote what half the town already knew. This particular Thai restaurant was remarkable indeed - Da Bomb, according to Sarah Namjoon. The meal was excellent but the evening took an unexpected turn. I sensed Taehyung and Sarah Namjoon had something on their minds because they had been poking at each other, giving each other secret glances. I wasn't sure why. Sarah Namjoon got quiet, starring down into her lemon grass and bamboo shoot soup, hiding behind one those giant spoons they give to customers who order soup in Asian restaurants. She finally looked up and said, "Um, we were wondering about something." "What?" I asked. "Um, what happened to your nephew, Arcadio?" she asked. "Like how did he die?" asked Taehyung, finishing Sarah Namjoon's sentence as she often did. "Yeah, you told us a while back that you raised him but that he died three years ago. We were just wondering. Sorry.” "Arcadio died of cancer right after he turned sixteen. That's the bad part,” I said. “The other part is that he was the greatest thing to ever happen to me.” Sarah Namjoon came out from behind her giant spoon, realizing that I was comfortable with the questions and said, "What was he like? What did you guys do and stuff?" ******************************************************************

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I own, among many pieces of cookware, a ten-inch saucepan from American Made Cookware that serves as both a functional pan and a memento of the days when Arcadio filled our lives with his presence. Sometimes, I pull out the saucepan in order to cook in it. Other times, I pull it out to make sure the inscription is still intact, an act of reassurance that those four years actually transpired and we came out on the other side, able to go on with our lives without him. Etched into the bottom of the pan is an inscription that reads: Thank you Gloria and Arcadio for exceeding our sales goals for 2005 and for the many wonderful years of teamwork and service. The once glittering stainless steel pan was presented to mom and Arcadio in Milwaukee in February 2006 during one of the harshest winters on record. The functional trophy is identical to the saucepans that came standard in the full set of cookware that included 24 pieces and retailed for $2300. They presented this homage to their success at a national sales convention given by the West Bend Cookware Company of Wisconsin. Mom had worked for West Bend and a few of its subsidiaries for almost twenty years, after leaving her dead end job at a cold storage facility in Manteca where she performed mindless, backbreaking work for fifteen years. My mother has a third grade education, but she has never let that slow her down. She would have stayed in the laboring class like so many of the other Mexican immigrants with whom she worked at the plant except that she serendipitously stumbled upon her true vocation during the eighties. The scenario happened when a sales representative from American Made Cookware, came to our house on a sales call during my sixth grade year. The set of cookware glittered like the displays of sterling silver that are occasionally salvaged from sunken Spanish galleons, polished simulacra of the wealth that made its way across the

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Atlantic, up the Guadalquivir to the repositories of the crown that dotted the banks of the river in Seville. With the set of cookware shining in the background on a credenza in mom’s kitchen, the saleswoman made her pitch, affirming the virtues of the high priced cookware - twelve layers of Milwaukee steel, a lifetime of guarantees, and seared meats, which she claimed were to die for - that needed no oil. I also remember my mom's fascination with the details of the salesperson’s job. To mom, the shiny set of cookware that graced our kitchen that day held a simpler significance than the political retelling of Colonialism or faraway Spaniards. They became a symbol of something more practical, a business opportunity and an independence that would later serve as a pathway toward a middle class existence. Serving as translator for my mother that night, I watched as the impeccably dressed women from Sacramento closed the sale across the kitchen table with a handshake and a smile radiating out from behind her thick layers of makeup as she delineated the number of payments and the amount of interest that her extension of credit entailed. Mom kept directing the conversation toward the woman's career, putting me to inquire about the details of the woman’s work life. She sat with rapt attention as the representative from West Bend recounted how she never had to punch a time clock and that she could set her own hours, promising that anyone could be successful at selling cookware if they moved their feet and overcame the occasional waves of doubt that were brought on by natural downturns in sales. The hook was set when the woman mentioned that a person could make in one evening what someone made for an entire week working at a plant. She described having many such days, often including days with multiple sales.

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When Sarah Namjoon asked me in the spring of 2014 what had happened to Arcadio, I began with 2006 for a reason. It was a remarkable year, one of the best the three of us spent as a family. I didn’t want my reflections on Arcadio's life to focus exclusively on the time that he was sick and fighting cancer. Instead, I wanted them to reaffirm how happy he was and the unique perspective of gratitude through which he viewed the world. I wanted them to know that we were a family on the move and that Arcadio led us on one adventure after the other. I told them about the time Arcadio and mom weren’t home ten minutes from Disneyworld in Florida before he began asking if the Oakland A’s were playing at home the next day. Arcadio helped us to sort through our lives and concentrate on what mattered during the time he was sick. Much of that had to do with his rejecting hopelessness and refusing to wear a victim’s cloak. He seldom wilted in the face of adversity during that long parade of downward spirals. I wanted my friends to understand that Arcadio had always been a hopeful and loving kid. We’ve always felt that this unique perspective was cultivated in him because he knew that he’d been dealt a bad hand in regard to his parents, and then was again on the receiving end of an equally lethal hand when he contracted Ewing’s Sarcoma. He taught himself to walk through life with love and optimism. Arcadio’s persistence in the face of adversity resulted in my speaking frankly about his life to my two friends at the Thai restaurant that night. Arcadio and mom reached their zenith as a compelling tag team of cookware selling machines in the years surrounding 2006. They traveled extensively because of winning promotional trips offered by the company in recognition of their hard work. Their destinations included Disney World, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Another year it was Las Vegas and Memphis.

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Grandmother and grandson had been set loose on the Spanish speaking multitudes of the Central Valley that needed saving from cheap pots and caustic aluminum pans. Their customers loved them. They were willing to invest in a symbol of their becoming American, just as my mom had years earlier. Clients came back year after year in order to expand their sets of cookware through the acquisition of a paella pan or a turkey roaster. Subsequently, mom and Arcadio sold cookware to multiple generations of families. Sons and daughters bought sets for their significant others, once they had grown up and left the nests where American Made Cookware had been on display in their mothers' kitchens. In 2006, Arcadio turned twelve, which meant he was old enough to take on a greater role in mom’s business, moving beyond his former role as super cute kid whose primary objective was to set a buoyant mood in the homes into which they ventured. He graduated to loading and unloading the car and washing the dishes that resulted from the in house meals of vapor-fried chicken they prepared for potential clients. His ability to take on a greater responsibility was a leap forward for mom’s business because it meant that she could fully concentrate on delivering a top-notch presentation and closing sales as opposed to trying to highlight the finer points of American Made cookware while simultaneously washing dishes and cleaning the demonstration sample of cookware. Mom's unlikely voyage into the professional class helped us to give Arcadio a better life after the tragic passing of his parents. While I struggled to get my drinking under control, they traveled the endless back roads of the Central Valley to sleepy little towns with names like Planada, Gustine, and Acampo, making a solid living and growing closer to each other until the absence of Arcadio’s parents became less of a wound in our lives. (They might as well have

118 118 gotten busy with their pursuit of sales because they were inseparable after almost ten years together.) As his nearest uncle, I existed as a father figure in Arcadio’s life in the days after his parent’s death, but mom kept me at a distance because of my drinking during their early years together. It’s not too surprising that Arcadio's story has so much more to do with the love that I witnessed between him and mom than with anything I contributed to the situation. Perhaps, I was the proverbial third wheel, yet everything was as it should be because my sobriety, after all, was only three years old in 2006. Having Arcadio in my life, in the years following my stint in rehab in 2003, gave me a reason to maintain my sobriety and filled the hole in my heart that I had tried to medicate with booze. When I look at the inscription on the pan, I feel as though I was present in Milwaukee that week in in February 2006. Arcadio called me a half a dozen times one day in the middle of the week. He had left a message about noon, sounding worried and exasperated. I never understood the problem until we spoke later that evening, but I recognized the tone. Arcadio was having one of his existential crisis, which usually meant that mom wasn't giving in to one of his emotionally driven and half-baked schemes. These crises usually involved taking home stray dogs or filling up the gas tank of down-on-their-luck people who solicited him and mom or just him randomly at gas stations. In his message, Arcadio mentioned something about snow and that we never allowed him to have fun. I suspected that it would fall on me to convince mom all the way from California to let Arcadio go outside and play in the snow. He wanted me to take on my usual good cop role, expressing to her that millions of Midwesterners lived and played in the snow and did in fact survive as opposed to life in California where snow happened only in prearranged and well-bundled treks into the Sierra's.

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When I pulled into the driveway that afternoon, I got the full story when Arcadio called for what seemed like the tenth time. "Hi, Big Daddy. How's Milwaukee treating you?" I asked sitting in my truck. "It's awesome Uncle Eddie! They gave us an award yesterday and took us on a tour of the plant. It was cool. They also took us to dinner at a fancy restaurant and lit our dessert on fire. That was cool too. Mom had lobster," he said. "What did you order? I asked, gathering my lunch box and making my way towards the front door. "I had a New York steak with that yellow sauce you make at home from eggs yolks," he said. "It was so good, but not as good as yours. I mean the sauce. The steak was good." "You mean a béarnaise?" I asked. "Yeah, that stuff. And I got my steak like you showed me, medium rare. But that's not why I called," he said, with a pitch of desperation rising in his voice. "It’s mom. She's being mean." "Arcadio, stop it. You know that's not true. Do we have to have this conversation again?” I asked. "Do you mean that she won’t let you do whatever you want, because that was the problem last time and the time before that?” “No!” he moaned into the phone. “This time it’s for real. I want to build a snowman on the sidewalk in front of the hotel in the morning. She won’t let me. Do something, Uncle Eddie. A store is down the street. We can buy a carrot for his nose and something for his eyes. I don’t need a snow boots or any of that stuff. It’s not even cold out there. Tell her, Uncle Eddie.” Arcadio played little league baseball for the first time the following spring when he was still twelve. I remember watching him play right field from the

120 120 stands and getting the sense that he was heavily vested in the hope that the batter would strike out or that, if the ball was put into play, it wouldn't come anywhere near him. He was content to watch the game develop around him without actually involving him physically. He was more interested in the cars driving by or the birds flying overhead than in exerting the energy required to scoot under a pop fly or chase down a ball that might make its way into the outfield. Baseball was more of my dream than his was. He obliged me because we were in it together, an ever- unfolding adventure that required give and take. I brought experience and resources to the table and he provided a high level of excitement to our combined perspectives. He knew how to live by making the very best of the hand that we’d been dealt, which didn’t necessarily involve baseball or sports. Sometimes I would call out his name and make a spectacle of myself in the stands as I waved and called out his name. Other times, I would do a little dance and wave to him from the bleachers. He would turn to me, pucker his face and shoot me a sideways look of scorn as if to say: I can't believe I’m in right field while our lives our passing us by. We could be at the boardwalk in Santa Cruz or the State Fair or the County Fair or any fair. Uncle Eddie could at least stop embarrassing me. He needs to calm down before my friends see him. He would tell me as much, afterwards, always wanting to find redemption in the next adventure, one that didn't require a uniform or standing in the sun. “Can we do something fun, now?” he would ask as soon as we got in my truck, ready to recite a long list of potential undertakings which might make up for the six innings to which he had just sacrificed precious hours of his life. His suggestions included anything from buying fireworks in Chinatown to cruising for stray dogs that were cute enough to make for a convincing adoption case.

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“Wasn’t the game fun, Arcadio? I had a lot of fun watching you guys lose again.” “I mean real fun, Uncle Eddie,” he would say as he let out a sigh and his shoulders drooped and melted into the seat of my truck. That fall I accompanied Arcadio and mom to Las Vegas for another convention. We stayed at the Gold Coast, which at the time was the newest casino along the south end of the strip. It had opened the week before our arrival and still possessed the smell of fresh paint and new carpets. Arcadio’s diagnosis was five months into the future, making Las Vegas our last adventure before the cancer disrupted our futures. We were happy and uninhibited in the way that being Arcadio’s sidekick always meant that life existed as a series of bright lights to be pursued, tracked down, and consumed if possible. On our first night, we visited the lions at the MGM, snooped around a car museum, and took a ride on the canals of the faux Venice located in the Venetian, neither of us guessing that in the future he would be gone and I would make my way to the real Venice. The next night we sat in on a show featuring Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, and Bruce Springsteen impersonators who, when they weren’t busy singing, served drinks and dealt cards. I have a picture of Arcadio and I that second night in Las Vegas on a counter at home. A beautiful showgirl with a colorful array of plumage dancing above her head and dressed in a sequined blue and gold outfit is sandwiched between us. We took the picture in front of the Bellagio, I think. Arcadio is already as tall as I am in the picture. His cheeks are rosy red because he is shy and the showgirl had just whispered racy compliments into his ear. His black, gel spiked hair points into the night like sonic the hedgehog’s and a hooded white sweater helps to highlight his expression, frozen in time. He looks astonished with

122 122 wide-open eyes; as if he suddenly realized that, the future has all kinds of treats in store for him. He is standing straight up and facing forward, looking a lot like Forrest Gump when Jenny bared her chest to him. Minutes before the picture was taken, he began to blush, trying very hard not to look down at the showgirl’s ample breast, he would later reveal, which she kept grinding into his side as she rotated her hips in her skin tight dress, giving us a good old fashioned welcome to Las Vegas. ****************************************************************** My lifelong dream of finishing my education inched closer and closer to reality in the spring of 2014. Taehyung, Sarah Namjoon and I also continued our gastro adventures that by then hardly ever consisted of reviewing restaurants. We started expanding our range to include the Bay Area and places beyond the minor league food choices that Merced offered. We became adventurers in search of diamonds in the light, and we often did manage to find such places. In the weeks before graduation, something unexpected happened at The Prodigy's end-of-the-year celebration. The staff named me the writer of the year. I thought of my chance meeting with Randy Taylor two years earlier and of the new editor, Victoria, who had always encouraged me and let me pick my own assignments. I thought of Arcadio and my promise at North shore on Oahu, during our conversation at Giovanni’s Shrimp Truck. Winning the writer of the year at a small fledgling newspaper located at a new university that nobody has ever heard of wasn't exactly a life changing event. The award wasn’t the type of accomplishment that was going to bowl over potential employers on a CV. Realistically, nobody cared. I, however, was beside myself with delight. Their awarding me that recognition remains the first and only prize that I have ever won in my entire life. I felt like running through the streets

123 123 of my hometown and showing the award to each passerby, imploring them to understand that I had finally gotten off the barstool in order to do something with my life. Graduation day was even better. Two other projects also dominated my efforts at school that final spring. The first was my research into returning to Europe in order to study there again. I had to time it so that I could walk during graduation in May but still need a credit or two that I could obtain during summer school in Spain or Italy. After overcoming roadblock after roadblock, UC Davis accepted me as part of a group of students who would study Spanish art in Burgos and Madrid. The choice had been easy. I could stay in the Central Valley and study in Merced in order to receive the one credit needed to make my degree in English official or spend the summer in Spain chasing after the iconic foods of a culture that I’d only recently begun to know. The other thing that occupied my time was my applying to graduate schools. Fortunately, The MFA Program at Fresno State accepted my application. I would be taking courses in their creative writing program and teaching composition to freshman in the First Year Writing Program as soon as the fall semester began at the end of the year. I'm still not sure how all these things came to pass except that I was the last one in the library every night because the fear of returning to the cheese plant kept me moving forward. Of course, my promise to Arcadio always lingered below the surface, helping me along despite a mountain of obstacles.

CHAPTER EIGHT: LUNATIC FRINGE

Madrid/Burgos Summer 2014 A few weeks after walking across the stage at the UC Merced graduation in May 2014, I arrived in Madrid where one credit would make my bachelor's degree official. On my first morning a week later in Burgos, I climbed a small mountain around which the town spreads in order to visit the overlook that sat below the ruins of an old Visigoth castle that the French forces under the command of the Duke of Wellington blew up during the Napoleonic Wars. The staff at San Augustin School where I checked in the night before mentioned daybreak as the ideal time to visit. It was drizzling when I set out towards the castle, but I didn't care because it felt good to be out of the heat of Madrid and in a new environment. I made my way up a steep set of stairs near the western courtyard of the cathedral, past a famous restaurant called El Meson de Cid. Soon, I was looking down at the Gothic spires of the cathedral. The crisscross pattern of the spires as they pierced the sky and the sepia hues of the cathedral looked ominous from above in the grey light of a rainy day in June. The overlook was perfect. The views of the city and the surrounding hills felt like a postcard come to life despite the drizzle. At the edge of the overlook, a bronze railing in a crescent moon shape greeted visitors with a relief of the city etched onto the metal, which replicated the actual buildings and historical sites of the city below. The overlook was quiet except for a rustling of a few wayward pigeons. I could pinpoint prominent monasteries in the distance and other famous sites.

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I was alone except for a small group of Spanish teenagers sitting along a concrete precipice in the distance. Their half-filled bottle of vodka remained untouched for the entire time it took me to stretch and meditate; signaling that the group's long night of drinking had run its course. At the top of the hill, behind the overlook, sat the ruined castle, now a museum featuring a cistern and a labyrinth of tunnels into which visitors could climb, taking them deep into the mountain. I walked the perimeter of the castle, coming full circle and eventually seeing the teenagers ahead in the distance. Making my way through a scraggily forest with sickly pines that ran along the perimeter of the south wall of the castle, I noticed a man rustling around, some twenty yards to my right. Dressed in a tattered blue rain jacket, he stood over a garbage can, emptying it of its contents one item at time, sending newspapers and empty food packages flying into air around him. He occasionally found something of value that he stuffed into a dirty blue canvas bag. I stood still. The tone and intensity of his conversation sounded like the man was answering himself, although I could not make out the specifics of his words. I’ve read enough of Don Quixote de La Mancha to know that this man acted a lot like Cervantes's old hidalgo even though the thrashing figure in the woods was not the tall, iron clad image that is usually attached to the man and his misadventures. Even though we were in Castile and not in the fictional world of La Mancha, circa 1610, the images from the book were the first thing that came to mind. I inched forward in the light downpour, getting closer and closer to the man as garbage kept flying into the air. I was infinitely curious about hearing the details of the conversation, interested in knowing to what subject someone could possibly dedicate so much passion on a rainy morning.

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I stepped within ten yards of the man who had a hood pulled tightly over his head that prevented him from hearing my approach. As I took a few more steps, he stopped pulling items from the garbage can over which he was leaning. He looked only forward as he pulled himself up, lifting his left hand, which was wrapped in a dirty black leather glove with the finger tips removed, into the air. He swiped at his head pulling back his hood and finally looked in my direction, letting out a sigh as if he were relieved to know that the person who stood in front of him was not out to harm him. When he smiled, a drip of snot fell from his nose, adding a fresh layer to the dried up ball that had accumulated in his graying beard just above his chin. We looked each other for a moment before he began to move his head from side to side as if he knew what to say but did not know where to start. The man turned to face me, tugged at the tip of his wild beard, and said in Spanish, "Those sisters were cruel to us weren't they? I've always believed that if there was any justice in the universe they and that son of a bitch priest are somewhere paying for the eagerness with which they took to the belt." I shook my head no. "What were we, ten or eleven years old?" he asked. "You remember, by the river next to the mall, St. Thomas school for boys. I think it must have been the early seventies." "I think you have me mistaken for somebody else," I answered in Spanish. "This is my first day in Burgos." His eyes widened and he was still for a moment. He dropped the dirty canvas bag that he’d been holding in his right hand. His mouth opened in seeming bewilderment; he took a step forward and said, "Say that again, please."

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"I have never been to Burgos before last night," I said again. My reply seemed to make him extremely happy, although I couldn’t have guessed why. Sticking his hand out, he said, "A Mexican in Castile! To what do we owe this great pleasure?" "I'm here studying," I said, shaking the hand opposite the dirty glove. "You are a little old to be a student," he said. "My brother and I were in construction but that disappeared, so I had to work in a cheese plant which made me miserable. I returned to school because I couldn't take the politics and the negative environment at the plant anymore," I said. "Ah. We have a crisis of our own. Look how they have us. Those sons of bitch politicians sell us out and fatten themselves while you and I starve. I was a craftsman before the crisis," he yelled, with the gloved hand flailing angrily into the air as spit flew everywhere. He finally calmed himself, returned to speaking in a normal tone, and said, "No worries my friend. I was a student once, too. I studied political science at the National University in Mexico City. That bastard Franco had just died. We could go places and see the world. See America. Those, I must say, were my best years. The only time in this miserable life that I have ever been out of this God forsaken place." "You have to have been to Portugal. It's right there, on the other side of that plain." I said, pointing in the direction of Valladolid. "The Basque Country is even closer." "I've been to Madrid a half a dozen times and to Valladolid, Leon, and Salamanca a few more times than that. That's it. And Mexico City," he said, with a

128 128 wide smile. "My dream is to return to Mexico City one day and find my old friends. But how with this crisis?" "What years were you in Mexico City?" I asked. "1977, 1978 and 1979, but I never finished my studies. I had to come home because my father became ill," he said, scratching at his beard, looking around dejectedly as if he was contemplating the events of long ago catastrophe that still exerted a downward and negative pressure on his existence. "I was there too. When I was nine, my family spent part of the summer of 1979 there. In a hotel across from the Angel of Independence," I said. "Ah, yes, the Angel. I remember it well. Perhaps we are old friends," he said. "Let's go by the lookout and talk. There are things a Mexican should know about Castile before he settles in." "Like what?" I said. "Like the false rumor that we are an unfriendly people." he said, motioning towards the clearing in the forest where we could see the group of teenagers. "Let's avoid those nasty kids, though. They are the children of the bourgeoisie, unwilling to share even a small drink with Alberto.” Alberto proved to be a useful Virgil on my first day in Burgos, describing the nature of life in the region and sharing insights with me for over an hour. He possessed a certain brilliance in regards to history and politics, giving speeches about events ranging from the Spanish Civil War to the true motives of the monarchy during The Spanish Golden Age. He abhorred the wickedness at the center of colonialism. The same wickedness of the upper class that he claimed kept the two of us where we were, whether it was in Burgos or California. Alberto framed his arguments with a great sense of eloquence. Unfortunately, he would make sense but then lose control, going bananas with

129 129 rage and blaming everyone and everything for his condition and mine. His theatrics might have been more enjoyable if his condition hadn't been so obviously tragic. I however saw myself in him. My outlook might’ve been the same or worse if I hadn’t quit drinking. Like Alberto, I’d once felt that justice was out of reach and that it was everyone's fault for the years I spent trapped in that windowless hotel room. The good in people and the world had long ago escaped and remained an uncatchable dream. Before I turned to climb down toward the city, I handed Alberto my email address, telephone number, and told him that I would await his arrival and meet him in Mexico City whenever he returned, even if it meant dropping everything in California or waiting another thirty plus years.

Pinchos in the Basque Country The wind is blowing in from the Bay of Biscay and sweeping across the conch shaped inlet. A castle sits perched on a hill across the water. Weather systems darken the mid-summer sky beyond the inlet's tiny mouth, where the Atlantic thrashes in the distance. Basque separatists have erected a hillside monogram, next to the castle, but I can't make out what it says. I fidget with my phone trying to Google the name of the castle. To the east on a hill that towers over the wharf, a giant statue of Jesus patiently watches over the city. A hipster couple and their photographer are taking wedding portraits, twenty yards from me at the end of the pier. I take my own pictures of boats bobbing up and down in the water or scurrying past with passengers sipping wine and reaching for hors d'oeuvres. Anything goes when it comes to pinchos. Mostly, like tapas, they refer to snack sized foods that adorn a piece of bread or are served in small portions. They

130 130 are usually pleasing to the eye and incomparably tasty. A few of the girls from the program and I are coming from the old quarter where the narrow lanes form a grid of bar after bar of pinchos themed eateries. The pinchos that the girls and I devoured, just over an hour ago, lived up to their reputation. Jaden, a bubbly African American undergraduate from UC Santa Cruz whose smile and quiet charm are lovely to be around is trailing the other girls as they make their way towards me from the promenade. Kathy, who is Korean and studies at UC Davis, has a gift for photography. She and Kellie, a well to do type who is studying international business at Berkeley, are walking together on the pier towards me. Audrey a talented activist from the East Bay leads the group, rounding out the cast of wandering foodies. Audrey is my favorite because she inhabits a cosmopolitan universe that challenges everything. Our earlier introduction to pinchos culture was so delicious that we are going back for more once we are hungry again, in the evening. I never know with whom I'll end up adventuring with whenever we leave the Paella Institute in Burgos in order to visit the art and architecture of Spain. Audrey always ends up in my group. She's a wonderful friend. She shares my interest in food and has a special awareness in her Millennial heart for the fact that most of these study abroad kids would leave me in the dust if they could, which is fine because we make our own adventures. Audrey is the first one to reach me. She stops and takes a long look around as the turbulence created by the passing boats evaporates into the aqua marine horizon. Her eyes widen as if to acknowledge that she is sufficiently impressed with the picturesque seascapes. She reaches for my Samsung Galaxy V. Audrey starts backing up and says, “This is a killer spot for your video. I can pan around the bay and we can include the newlyweds in the background.”

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“Let me warm up," I say, stretching my throat and making noises from deep within my gut: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm your host Eddie Gomez. Welcome to International Foodie Reports Video Magazine. “Whoa! Take it easy,” Audrey says, setting my phone on the railing and turning towards me. “You sound like a ring announcer. Relax, use your hands and talk like a normal person.” “Sorry. I missed that day at journalism school,” I say, readying myself for what I hope will be a usable food blog video. The verdict is in. The pinchos scene in San Sebastian is on fire this afternoon. Preliminary scoring from round one is in. Veal cheeks in an espagnol sauce with piped potatoes are a runaway hit. Second place goes to savory goose liver pate and white chocolate pinchos, and rounding out our top spots is an anomaly of efficiency, an underdog of pinchos simplicity, a delicious baguette slice topped with a round of smoked goat cheese, pancetta, and orange marmalade.” The other girls are oblivious to what Audrey and I are doing, wrapped up in the scenery and talking about the bride and groom. They don't understand the purpose of the video or they couldn't care less about it. Audrey, however, understands that I am on a mission to get closer to food and that my goals don’t necessarily include art and architecture. She knows about Arcadio and that I want some kind of future in travel and food.

The Churro Lady of Salamanca It’s July 4, 2014 in Salamanca. Yesterday we toured Ieronimo’s Tower, which is a bell tower that floats above the city at such a height that cars and people look like ants crawling on the sidewalk below. It was hard to believe that those

132 132 structures are six centuries old, medieval equivalent of skyscrapers. I stayed in the tower for hours writing, taking pictures of the city below, and contemplating the graffiti. My favorite piece read: La muerte esta tan segura de vencernos que nos da toda una vida de ventaja - Death is so certain of our defeat that it gives us a lifetime advantage. The sun is coming up. I am about to leave the hotel in order to see the Roman Bridge that we studied in the architecture portion of our class last Thursday. My roommate Eric is in a deep sleep under the blankets, snoring away the booze and recovering from another all night binge of clubbing and exploring Salamanca. Most of my classmates do the same thing when we take our classroom on the road. I don't blame them. They are, after all, kids passing through a period that will light their memories for the rest of lives. I stop at a café that is bright inside. Everything is white on silver. The barista serves me a cappuccino and retreats to the back where I can hear the rustling of boxes. Two old men sit behind me, enthralled in their espressos and the morning paper. I take a still life photograph of my cappuccino surrounded by the receipt and change as a pile of oranges in a tall silver bowl stands out of focus next to the register in the background. The morning light somehow makes its way across the bar to the white counter and catches the edges of my cappuccino, adding texture to the composition and making for an incredible shot. Perhaps, this photograph will be part of my final project that will consist of food pictures. I've already shot hundreds. According to Google Maps, I’m less than a mile from the bridge, so I continue walking along Calle Vera Cruz, which is located below the hill where the cathedral and the old section of the city stand. The light is dazzling here, more

133 133 orange than yellow or white. I stop and admire the creamy orange hues that are falling on the dome of the massive cathedral as it juts into the sky above. I turn back toward the river, noticing a busy scene playing out near a storefront, less than a block away. The proceedings are what the professor described as a dying ritual in Spain - going for churros after staying out all night. Churros Valor is busy with early risers and people who have indeed stretched the limits of the night. I feel like a fly on a wall, seated in the corner of the churro shop, watching and dunking my churros into a piping hot cup of muddy chocolate. Delicious is an understatement that doesn’t begin to capture the flavors nor the aroma of the shop. The woman behind the counter also fascinates me. She is an automaton in a white uniform. Her lack of wasted movement is poetry in motion. Her hustle and precision remind me of my time as a chef where behind the stove there didn't exist time or space for lateral movements. Everything needed stood within an arm’s reach. The woman has an assistant who rings up customers and serves up the chocolate. Meanwhile, she works the corner of the kitchen like a twirling dervish, reaching for the paper in which she wraps the orders, handing them over the counter while simultaneously using the other hand to fish out the next order of churros from the hot oil with a customized spatula. When a customer walks through the door, she asks if they want a small or large order, chocolate or no chocolate, dine in or take out. She pushes a button on the wall. A pump starts a steady stream of dough over the oil as she grabs a pair scissors and chops at the stream, cutting perfectly lengthen pieces that cascade into the hot oil below. The fryer reservoir has a channel leading away from it so that before the next batch of churros falls into the

134 134 hot oil, the woman gives the current batch a quick tap which sends them down river where she will catch up to them minutes later. Her final product is spectacular, nutty and buttery tasting crisps that are the width of a hot dog but twice as long. Taking in her system is as culturally rewarding as accidently eavesdropping on the table of young Spaniards next to me while savoring the richness of the churros after soaking them in chocolate. My neighbors are talking about going to Majorca the following weekend and the thing that every other Spaniard has talked about this summer - whether or not the economic crisis has passed or is beginning to pass. I order two cups of chocolate and two dozen churros to go, thinking about Eric and Audrey at the hotel. I get close but never make it to the Roman Bridge, distracted by shops and a market. My good intentions don’t last either because the first order of churros is gone by time I make it to a park down the street where I stop to write. The second batch fails to make it past a thrift store where I almost buy a painting of the elusive Roman Bridge.

The Paella Institute of Burgos Audrey ordered paella at a lovely sidewalk cafe where we sat under the afternoon shadow of St. Ieronimo’s tower. She slid a few bites onto my plate, but the iconic dish tasted nasty and void of any redeeming qualities of artistry. It was just bad rice. I didn't want to kill her attachment to the idea that she was sampling an authentic version of paella, so I was mild in my criticism. The frozen vegetables were a first clue. The color and taste were off too, which meant they weren’t using saffron but a powdered imitation instead. We agreed that we were mostly paying for the view of the tower, the lovely breeze, and a front row seat

135 135 featuring a parade of elegantly dressed families strolling past us on their way to dinner. A Spaniard with a hard luck story about needing to go to Madrid for his dying brother's last days approached our group as we waited for our entrees. The Millennials fell for his act. They swallowed the hook, line, and sinker. And just like the cliché predicted, he reeled them in gently, placing his hand on his heart as he described how his brother must have felt all alone in that far off hospital room in Madrid. It was apparent that the man was a seasoned veteran of working over well-heeled university students. They, in return for his brilliant performance, filled his outstretched cap with Euros and expressed great concern for the dying brother, asking detailed question about his condition and if there was hope of his getting better. I took the opportunity to ask the man about the reputation of the Castilians in Burgos to be unfriendly towards outsiders. I figured he might as well do a little work for the great sum of money that he had just received, which would allow him to stay drunk for a few days. I stood up and pulled out a chair, asking him to sit down for a minute. I related to him in Spanish that our group of American students was curious about an aspect of Spanish life that he might know something about. He shook his head up and down, expressing his willingness to help, so I leaned nearer to him. Everyone at the table stopped talking and they too leaned in our direction. Sonny, a bearded kid from UC Davis who was about to enter medical school, came around from where he’d been sitting in order to do what he would do for the rest of the summer, which was to butcher the translations of my conversations with Spaniards. I wouldn't have minded, but he got the translations wrong every time and then insisted that I was mistaken about what the Spaniards had meant. Sonny

136 136 thought that his two years of Spanish uniquely qualified him to translate, rendering his efforts little more than obnoxious intrusions. "Is it true what they say about Burgos?” I asked the man. "That they don't like outsiders." The old man sank into his seat, seeming to acknowledge that it wasn’t the first time that he’d dealt with the topic. The nostrils of his Roman nose flared with each breath as his sixty-year-old eyes, glazed over by wine, closed. He rubbed his stubble filled chin, weighing the response he was about to set loose on our group. "It’s never good for a Spaniard to talk negatively about another Spaniard. We are very respectful towards each other in that regard. However, a cold wind does blows through Burgos. It's been blowing for thousands of years," he said. "Perhaps, they are not as warm as Californians or even people from Salamanca. Perhaps, the wind has blown into their hearts, but there are reasons for this I assure you." I smiled and thanked him, knowing that he had answered in the affirmative. I turned towards my classmates and nodded as a look of disappointment washed over their faces. Sonny, who had been standing behind the man, looked down at me and said, "No! That's not what he meant. He said they have good hearts. That's was corazon means." "Shut up Sonny. I know what he meant," I said. "The cold heart was a metaphor for their view of outsiders, dumbass." A couple of nights later, dining alone, I had my first real paella. The texture was perfect, not too sticky but held together by a moist creaminess. For the first time, I tasted saffron subtly working across the dish, complementing the rice base, adding something more than color. The roasted vegetables and seafood - mussels,

137 137 langoustines, and clams - occasional treats that played their own delicious notes in the ensemble. The real paella breakthrough came at San Agustin School where we took classes. The director, Felix, set up a paella cooking class for the UC students. Afterwards, I affectionately referred to the school as the Paella Institute of Burgos. The same women, who prepared our meals every day in the cafeteria, set up gas grills outside in a courtyard under the shade of some big trees. The event left us with the feeling that we had penetrated the touristy facade of Castile. The paella was mediocre but that was never the point. The event turned out to be a great afternoon of getting to know Felix’s wonderful staff. We stood around and watched the making of the paella as if we were at a barbeque on the beach in Santa Cruz or some other gathering spot in California. My favorite part was stirring the rice with giant spoons as it fried alongside previously roasted vegetables. I thought about what was unfolding around me. Cooking together gives people a chance to break barriers and celebrate the communal aspects of feasting. The previous year, a similar expression took place when Professor Schmidt dropped us off at chef's school for a couple of days in Florence. Twenty years before, every night of the week at the Eureka Inn where I worked in the Rib Room, a similar ritual took place. Instead of paella or Tuscan roasted pork loin as the sacred dish to which I apprenticed, people gathered for a good old-fashioned American favorite - prime rib.

The Museums of Ham I’m sitting in the dark watching a flamenco dancer's moves crescendo and then fall off into slow sweeping turns. She slides her feet across the floor, clapping only intermittently now. She isn’t the most beautiful woman in the world, but she

138 138 is made so by her rapid-fire moves and this slow fade toward the end her performance. She is holding nothing back. The row of guitarists that lines the stage behind her is silent as the last click clacks from her shoes sound and she stands motionless after a final thrust of her chin into the air. She bows as we go crazy with applause, finally taking her seat. The silhouettes of my classmates surrounds me. So does the smell of booze, but it doesn’t bother me. We are in the Triangle of Art section of Madrid at a club called Patas where the professor brought us to unwind on the first night of a three- night stay in the capital. We are in Madrid to study the works and lives of El Greco, Velazquez, and Goya. I’m lamenting a lost opportunity. I finally had some time to research Ibericos, which is a dried ham more commonly referred to in the states by their Italian name, prosciuttos. It seems I missed the opportunity to tour a renowned factory which produces the famed black foot variety and whose premium grade is known as bellota. It's a thing I’ve struggled with this summer. If it were up to me, I would just roam the countryside finding and tasting the iconic foods of Spain, but the professor has other ideas. She keeps us busy with assignments. The course ends in two weeks, and I still have to write a paper on Fable by El Greco and turn in a final project that is a painting of the Guggenheim that I've been working on back in Burgos. It's not the end of the world that I don't have time to fully pursue what really interests me the most. We are after all staying at a nice hotel near the high- class Salamanca district where the breakfasts and the brunches are something to behold. Who knew that you could eat charcuterie for breakfast, that you could stuff churros with bacon and exotic cheeses? The hotel is cool but I escape every chance I get because the crowd there is a little ritzy for me. I enjoy the regular

139 139 people at Plaza del Sol, the neurological center of Madrid. Earlier today, I toured several museums of ham, which aren’t really museums but shops and took away a half kilo of the famed Iberico Bellota that I ate with some crusty bread on a bench while watching some protests where people marched with Palestinian flags in hand and chanted while waving homemade signs in the air. Later, I met up with Audrey and our usual crowd which this time included Sondra, another artist type from UC Santa Cruz. We rode the subway up and down to different sections of the city and went for tapas in the La Latina section of Madrid. Afterwards, we watched madness overtake Plaza del Sol in the evening before we met the others at the Flamenco club. If ever there existed a many-ringed circus where the Spanish-speaking world converges, it is there. Mariachi's, musicians, magicians, and every imaginable form of entertainment unfurls itself slowly at night as people from all over the world go from spot to spot aiding and abetting the performances well into the morning hours. The flamenco show is over and I'm standing around outside in the narrow street. Audrey, Kellie, and Jaden are sitting on a curb outside the club waiting for our classmates to empty out into the street. "What do you think Eddie? Can you dance like that?" Audrey asks looking up at me. I take a deep breath expanding my chest, narrowing my focus toward the ground in front of me, and assume the Flamenco position. "For you, senoritas anything is possible," I say. "The great Eduardo is here for you. His heart and his feet are yours tonight." I look at the girls one more time. My feet start to thump, cheaply, against the asphalt of the street. My sloppy impersonation of the dancers that we have just finished watching for the last couple of hours is only a half a minute long. The

140 140 girls and several others in the vicinity burst into howls of approval. I think that they are laughing at my wit and my moves. What I don’t realize is that one of the real flamenco dancers, a svelte twenty something year old with bulging biceps and long flowing hair, has been standing behind me the whole time. I turn around as he looks me over and points to my paunch, telling me to keep practicing. Then the real laughter begins. "You are such a dork. What would we do without you, Eddie?" Audrey asks still laughing. "I don’t know. Stay lost in the subway, maybe. Probably stay in that atrocious hotel instead of roaming the streets with me," I say.

Espresso at Yuri’s Café Yuri and I met because of my curiosity. I concluded that his cafe couldn't possibly be as bad as the two next door. We’d visited the first cafe on the main strip in Burgos and had felt a little unwelcomed. The woman at that cafe who served us espressos and pastries did so without so much as saying hello or good- bye. We never went into the second cafe because the barista sat behind the bar with his arms folded on his chest and wore a big ugly scowl. We didn't have the courage to trespass the obvious sign of irreverence, so we made light of the situation by referring to the man from then on as scary clown face and moving on. Yuri’s cafe felt different. The cafe consisted of a bar that could fit about a dozen people and a few small tables that ran along the opposite wall. A couple of slot machines and a jukebox were at the end of the bar where two tables also occupied the tight space. The cafe felt modern, with knickknacks that let you know that the owners lived in the 21st century – unlike other eateries in Burgos.

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Yuri acted as if we were old friends. I ordered an espresso and noticed that in a glass case on top of the bar there sat an assortment of colorful tapas and other impeccably garnished snack foods. I saw stuffed mushrooms, baby asparagus, octopus in oil, and morcilla with goat cheese rounds on bread decorated with shredded arugula leaves. "Would you like to try some?” Yuri asked me in Spanish after serving a glass of wine to three of his regulars. “My wife and I take turns making tapas in our kitchen upstairs. These little jewels are our passion. Mine more than hers." I pointed to what I thought were cueritos, the Mexican name for the gelatinous pork skin squares made along with the pork shoulder and other meats in copper pots during a carnitas fry. Yuri served me a small portion but called them by some name I didn't recognize which happened a lot with food in Spain. "You marinated them in a dry white wine?" I asked after taking a few bits and washing them down with buttered bread. "You’re good with food, huh?” Yuri asked as he turned away to make an espresso for someone who’d just walked in. "I used to work as a chef a long time ago. Food is kind of a hobby of mine," I answered. "Where?” he asked. "In California.” “If you’re from California, then you must speak English,” he said, suddenly ignoring the espresso machine and all the other customers in order to give me his full attention. “Yes, of course.” “Good. I’ve been waiting for someone like you. I want you to meet my son and help him with his English. Will you do that for me?” Yuri asked.

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Back at the Paella Institute, I realized that my order to go of cueritos wasn't pork skins but something else. When I pulled back the batter on an unusually round piece of skin the size of a poker chip, I noticed two nostril holes starring back at me. Unbeknownst to me, I’d been wolfing down pig snouts all afternoon with all the abandon in the world. Yuri’s cafe became a refuge for Audrey and me. We had a place to sit back and people watch. I explained to Audrey that all the places in where we had felt unwelcomed were necessary experiences in order for us to find Yuri’s place. I was only beginning to understand the idea myself, that the universe would take care of us on our travels by always putting good people on our path. The only thing we had to do was to hustle a little bit and they would manifest. Yuri and his family, immigrants who had moved to Spain from Moldavia, treated us with a deep sense of hospitality for the entire summer. Yuri even stopped charging me for my espressos because he noticed that his son Nico spoke English in our presence. Nico was headed to Germany the following year to study international relations, so he needed to practice English as well as German as much as possible. Subsequently, Nico led us on tours of the best eateries in Burgos and took our group of foodies to bars to meet his friends and some of the locals. Some of my favorite memories included standing in front of the crowded bars where Nico took us and talking to the locals who dispelled some of the cultural stereotypes regarding Castilians in the same way we dispelled preconceived notions about Americans. On our last night in Burgos, a truck driver named Andres and his friends, at three in the morning in front of one of the local hot spots, offered to explain why it took Castilians from Burgos so long to warm up to outsiders. He claimed the misconceptions resulted from a more refined definition of friendship than the

143 143 world was accustomed to. Castilians, he claimed, would go to the ends of the Earth to cultivate and maintain a friendship. They just weren't in the habit of jumping into such a serious thing at the first opportunity. Andres walked me to the corner, pointed to a building in the distance, and said, “Eduardo Gomez, now that we've met a few times and I know a little about you, we are friends. That means that we are friends for a lifetime. Next time you are in Burgos, please come by my house for a visit with my family. Number twenty-three.” My favorite food adventure in Spain took place at our going away dinner in August at a restaurant with an outdoor seating area over which the silhouette of the Gothic cathedral towered in the main square. Everyone was dressed elegantly as the sun faded and the shadows of the cathedral washed over our tables. Everything was right, except for the fact that we were headed in different directions the following morning and would probably never see each other again. I ordered the leg of suckling lamb, served with French fries the size of hot dogs in a glazed earthenware dish that had yellow lettering with the name of the restaurant on it. The leg of lamb was greasy and delicious looking, still crackling when they brought it out. The aroma suggested herbs and only a mild gaminess. A taste confirmed the matter. The fries were so long and wide that I took a bite of one and then used the exposed end to swab the bottom of the dish in order to soak up the juices. The tiny leg looked primordial hanging over the edge of the platter as the origin of appellation tag dangled from the base of the leg of lamb. I headed to Italy for the rest of August until I had to fly back to California in order to start graduate school in Fresno. First, though, I spent a week in Madrid and got in the habit of going to The Prado Museum every night in order to stand in front of Velazquez's Las Meninas, which I’d seen many times during our trips to

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Madrid. I remained captivated by the famous painting. The painting is the size of a living room wall, but the details were indiscernible in the reproductions that I’d come to know through art history textbooks. I’ve always remembered that a German Sheppard sits looking down, sprawled out on the floor, in front of the dwarf woman whose job it is to dress the princess. What fascinated me and was responsible for my going back night after night to the Prado was the visible brush strokes that gave life and movement to the dog’s face. An effect that doesn't come across in a textbook. Another painting also interested me. The Caravaggio that is in the collection of the Prado moved me even more deeply, even though it isn’t at first sight as magnificent as some of his works on display in New York City, Rome or Florence. David with the Head of Goliath means something more to me than I can describe. During the four years that I spent obliterated in the dingy hotel room, a book on Caravaggio’s paintings came to symbolize hope for me. Sometimes, I would look through the pages of the book - an effect that worked best in mid-summer because it was the only time that natural light in the form of actual rays of sun made its way into the windowless room through the skylight above - and wonder if I had a future beyond that life of solitary confinement. Today, his works mean even more, because Arcadio gave me the book. When I was stuck for those four years in the hotel after the death of Arcadio's parents and he’d gone to live with my mom, he would occasionally stop by the hotel bearing gifts. Sometimes it was a something small like a box of candy or a couple of stickers that he had gotten at school. Other times it was something as big and wonderful as a roast that mom had made or a new pair of pants. One time it was a book on Caravaggio.

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During this time, which was around 1999, Arcadio was only five and had settled well into being a normal, happy kid. He was a picture of cuteness and full of life, so his short visits were like an oasis in a desert of isolation. I hardly ever let him into my room because I drank all day and the room remained littered with beer cans and empty bottles of Jack Daniels. Mom usually waited downstairs on the curb with the car running. One day in November, Arcadio came to visit, announcing form the hallway that he had something for me. I opened the door and noticed that he’d dragged a small bag of books up the stairs and down the hall to my room. Inside the bag there was a Spanish/English dictionary, a book on learning French, a book on the history of prisons in medieval London, a Mexican cookbook, and a very large art book featuring the paintings and personal history of Michael Angelo Caravaggio. I also remember my neighbors, two heroin addicts named Shorty and Nancy, fighting in the hallway outside of their room. They argued over who would get to shoot the last of the dope left in the cottons. When Arcadio passed by with the bag of books, they were nice enough to stop being violent towards each other. When I opened the door, they said that he was cute and seemed like a good kid. As I stood in the Prado those nights in Madrid, I felt a deep sense of gratitude for having had Arcadio for the years that I did and recognized that time and space were working their magic on that part of me that thinks about Arcadio every day. I thought also, of what else happened on that day in the hall outside my room. It was the first time Arcadio showed me his Tasmanian Devil impersonation that he would later perform without warning as a gesture that he was happy, that we were having a good time in our lives together. Arcadio had turned to leave when he suddenly swung back towards my still open door.

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He said, “Uncle Eddie, can I do a Tasmanian Devil for you? I learned it yesterday.” “Sure, Big Daddy. Let’s see it.” ‘Okay, but you got to come outside and stand at the end of the hall and catch me because I go really, really wild,” he said as ran to the opposite end of the hall, preparing to launch himself into my arms as mom began to honk from the street below.

CHAPTER NINE: GRASS FED COWS

Rome Summer 2014 When the last public bus from Ciampino Airport pulled into Termini Station at 1:30 in the morning, I was already exhausted from having spent two months traveling in Spain. The bus driver informed me that I’d unfortunately missed the last bus to Prima Porta where I’d reserved a shared cabin at an RV Park along the banks of the Tiber River. Exiting the bus, my bag felt like it weighed a hundred pounds as every step caused the strap of the overloaded man purse to dig deeper into my shoulder. It didn’t help that I was disoriented. I wasn’t sure on what side of the station the bus had deposited me. I stopped to take a couple of deep breaths, but bus exhaust and the loamy smell of rain in the middle of summer went straight to my head. I set my bag on the sidewalk and looked around as people and scooters moved in slow motion in the distance, like film noir scenes with tiny figures drifting in and out of the shadows along the colossal avenues. I stayed lost until the outline of a half constructed building that I remembered from the previous summer came into view. A row of homeless Indian men tightly wrapped in their dirty blankets and snuggled against the exterior of the church whose golden statue of St Paul looms over Via Cavour, helped me to remember that the front of the station stood only a block away. At least, the men were dry, which was more than I could say for myself. I headed toward a row of late night cafés directly across from the main entrance to the station, entering the first one that was still open. A cashier at the front counter met me unceremoniously by loudly protesting in Italian that I’d just trampled across the recently mopped floor. I didn't have the energy to tell him to

148 148 go screw himself, so my bag and I did a quick pirouette on a new section of his handiwork and quickly headed back into the night. The owner ran out from the back of the restaurant onto the sidewalk and implored me to return while simultaneously reprimanding the employee for his botched welcome. I shook my head and turned away, thinking that if I went back I might have to talk some sense into the cashier for being dumb enough to mop the entrance of a restaurant when it was both crowded with people and still raining outside. At the restaurant next door, I disappeared into a corner with a small pancetta, goat cheese, and red onion pizza along with a square of white lasagna. I leaned my head against the wall and closed my eyes for minutes at a time, blending into the scene while sitting in the mist of the last wave of locals who appeared to have been there for hours. Across from me, an elderly man was crumpled deep into his seat and didn’t seem to possess the status to be accepted by the large group of businesspersons from the neighborhood that crowded around the owner’s table. I nibbled on pizza and poured glasses of mineral water from a green and red bottle that went down like an oasis in the desert of a long night. Studying the people around me while hoping to catch snippets of their conversations, I had a moment of gratitude when I took a closer look at the man sitting next to me. His loose fitting clothes were ragged and his features worn down by a seeming inner sadness. Nobody noticed when he got up to leave, dragging his worn out slippers across the floor. His movements were slow and organized with difficulty, almost as if he were trying to walk a straight line after having been pulled over for being suspected of driving under the influence.

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As he crossed in front of me, I noticed that he stared down as he walked and that there were two very large humps below his zipper. His testicles were the size of cantaloupes, which caused him to totter along grudgingly. He supported them by holding tightly onto the front of his oversized brown trousers, slowly moving his hands in back and forth motions as he took forward steps. My problems of having to wait for my cell phone to charge and not wanting to pay the sixty Euro cab ride to Prima Porta all of a sudden felt like insignificant distractions. Next to me, a couple ordered a third bottle of wine and whispered things into each other's ears as they kissed over a plate of roasted artichokes hearts in olive oil which they stabbed with forks and fed to each other. Three candles lit their already glowing faces. I woke up when someone yelled and pounded on the owner's table, claiming that immigrants were bleeding the country dry. The owner, who wore a V-neck tee shirt and a spotless white apron into which his oversized belly was stuffed, shook his head in agreement, as he got up in order to scan the street in front of his restaurant. It looked as if he was trying to gauge how many stranded tourists might make their way into his shop that night. The owner’s wife, a petite woman who wore thick layers of makeup, sat in a corner near the entrance to the kitchen making herself a late dinner. She was alone at a small round table, her wrinkled hands cutting away at romaine leaves that she used to prepare a hand created Caesar Salad, one ingredient at a time in a giant bowl made of walnut wood. The owner's friends parted their chairs as he returned to the table in order to continue the conversations. His friends, who were all in suits, followed him with nods of approval as they methodically stirred their

150 150 forks around tiny plates of pasta, wiping at their chins with cloth napkins and stopping occasionally for long enough to pour red wine from a carafe. The owner had a striking resemblance to the character actor who played the lead role on the 1980's sitcom Mel’s Diner. Here was the Italian version of that American approximation of restaurant life, lost in time and space, but replete with wood paneling and the same basic human dramas. An occasional American stumbled in having had too much to drink and wanting something to fill his stomach before he marched off to his hotel room in order to pass out and do the same thing the following day. Occasionally, the immigrant worker behind the counter where hot dishes were offered a la carte would start to do one thing but was sent scurrying nervously in another direction by the owner who shouted orders from his table. The scene felt like a live television show where I was in both the action and watching from the comfort of a living room couch in California. I got up to order a scoop of gelato after dozing off a few more times and spotted a group of young people across the streets behind a group of men soundly sleeping in their makeshift beds along the avenue about fifty yards from the entrance to the station. The spot looked like a good place into which to settle until the station opened at 4:30 am. I exited Mel's Diner and made my way across the street, throwing my bag on a concrete ledge where it looked like I might be able to stretch out later. I eased up against the ledge and casually surveyed the scene. The owner’s friends at Mel’s Diner had left right after me, leaving the empty restaurant to look like an Edward Hopper painting with only the owner and the immigrant moving about slowly inside. A couple of minutes later, the shades lowered and the neon sign outside stopped flashing.

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The ledge along the exterior wall of the station contained sections divided by vertical columns into which people had settled. Three German students occupied the nook to my right. I found out later that they had Euro Rail passes and were heading to Barcelona. One of the students, a twenty-two-year-old kid named Max who spoke English, came over and introduced himself after I’d settled into my spot. He approached me; looking me over in order to make sure I was a tourist and said, “I like your Nikes. They are tight. I had a pair like those in Texas.” “You've been to the states?" I asked. "Yeah, I played football at Oklahoma State. I started out as a safety, but they moved me to linebacker my junior year," he said. Max and I talked for about ten minutes. It was nice to meet Max, but I wondered something about his story. Max must’ve been one of those football players who throw their bodies around like derailing freight trains, sacrificing themselves for the good of the team. Max stood about five feet seven inches and weighed no more than one hundred and sixty pounds, so it was hard to imagine him as a linebacker at Oklahoma State. He must have been born a natural hitter, I thought to myself, mastering the technique of unleashing an ass kicking on bigger opponents by using leverage to his advantage, getting under them in order to spring upward and drive them into the ground like falling Goliaths. Six students, three from Belgium and three from Japan filled the space on the wall to my left. I found out from Max that the Belgians were hosting the Japanese students in Rome as some sort of exchange program. It didn’t take long for Max to introduce himself to the Belgians who also spoke English. Initially, Max interacted with them while standing in my section of the wall, but he slowly gravitated towards the new arrivals as the conversation warmed up. One of the

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Belgians translated Max's words from English into Japanese. My temporary exclusion was something that I understood and was comfortable with because I’d learned in my years of studying with Millennials when to get close and when to exist on the margins. Most of the time twenty year olds clung to each other in the presence of older people like me, disavowing themselves of the scourge, subconsciously, by simply denying our existence. Other times, they were more accepting because they needed my help in some form or just felt abnormally inclusive, which they would express with something that translated along the lines of: Eddie, um we have decided that your oldness is temporarily like not that creepy, so you can move closer to us now. We mean that you can like hang out with us for a while and if you are a good old person and the situation merits consideration, we might even let you go out with us tonight. However, um, don’t get too comfortable. In addition, you can’t go to the club with us unless you say you are our uncle. I’d fined tuned the ability to spot the phenomena over the previous two summers of studying abroad, so I never took these repulses personally. Besides, Max was doing fine by bringing the two groups of students together with his bigger than life personality and ability to command an audience. I watched them having a good time and I didn't mind being excluded because I wanted to sleep more than be part of any conversation to which I probably wouldn’t relate. I jumped onto the ledge in an attempt to sleep for a bit, using my bag as a pillow and figuring that Max and the students could keep an eye on me. I drifted in and out of sleep, staring occasionally at the cantilevered ceiling above and into the street to see if it had stopped drizzling, listening as Max told incredible stories. The Belgians were impressed as Max recounted his American adventures in

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English. Once the hyperboles were translated into Japanese, the three students from Tokyo erupted into oohs, fawning over Max’s supposed accomplishments. Max claimed to have bungee jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and scaled El Capitan on the same epic road trip that he took with two of his American roommates who also played football at Oklahoma State. I wanted to burst out in laughter but kept silent because I didn't want Max to stop telling his wonderfully impossible tales. If Max would’ve continued, I’m sure that some daredevil story about going over Niagara Falls in a yellow barrel would have surfaced. A strange man who walked up and inserted himself into the middle of our fledgling society cut Max’s time on stage short. The stranger leaned up against the ledge, right next to me, as if it was nothing at all. The man, who was bald and appeared to be in his late fifties, mumbled softly to himself but never actually spoke, just flapped his jaw up and down, which made Max and the rest of the students noticeably uncomfortable. I figured he couldn’t be too much a ruffian because he carried a paperback novella and his clothes were new and impeccably pressed. I guessed that he was out for a stroll on a sleepless night or some other benefit-of-the-doubt conclusion that put his motives in an unsuspecting light. The man gazed deviously in the direction of the students, smiling to himself as if he knew something that the rest of us didn’t. He seemed to extract a sense of satisfaction from the fact that they huddled closer together every time he stirred. The combined movements of the bald man and the students orchestrated an ebb and flow whenever the man leaned forward on the ledge because it instigated the students to take quick steps back. Every once in a while, the bald man stood up in order to reach for something in his pocket and the students would take deep, sudden breaths, expecting him to pull out a revolver or a machete from his coat. It always turned out to be something harmless like a box of cough drops or a

154 154 handkerchief, causing him to look around and giggle as if he were really enjoying himself. Whenever the bald man got up, the group let out a collective sigh of relief that he devoured with pleasure. The bald man, however, was only pretending to leave in order to unnerve the group. He walked to the edge of the sidewalk, checked on something in the distance, and returned to his spot on the wall. He relished in antagonizing the already tense group of kids, which I thought was very hilarious. I wondered for how many years he had been toying with already nervous tourists in this manner. Every once in a while, one of the Belgian or Japanese students would peer in my direction from behind the group. They made eye contact with me, letting me know that my presence was appreciated and that my status had now been upgraded because I was unintimidated by the antics of the bald man, giving him the right to his own space but nevertheless, watching him closely. Another Italian who strolled onto the scene in a haggard pinstriped suit asking for cigarettes interrupted the bald man’s time on stage. The once sharp dressed man, who was thin and tall with prominent features, looked as if he had been on a drinking binge. The stubble on his face was a week old. The white shirt that poked out from under his jacket was untucked and half of its collar remained rolled up under itself. He had a vacant look in his eyes that signaled he needed one more cigarette in order to prolong his return to reality. The vacant stare was something that I remembered well from my own past but only through a foggy lens, something like a third person narration, a sort of estimate of how I must’ve looked during the worst of my own binges. When the students refused to share their cigarettes with him, the man erupted in anger. He turning toward the bald man and accused us, in Italian, of

155 155 being worthless tourists who visited Italy in order to steal away the culture without giving a damn about Italians. The bald man just smiled and nodded while the suited man looked down and rubbed his forehead and ran his fingers through his hair in seeming desperation. The suited man settled his arms onto his waist and then threw them into the air exclaiming, “I turisti sono pezza de merda!” I turned to the bald man and asked in Italian, “Why did he just call us pieces of shit?” The bald man lowered his head like a bull does when he is contemplating a charge at the matador, nodded gratifyingly, and smiled in admiration as if he’d been as much satisfied by the suited man’s assessment of us as tourist as by the dramatic performance with which the accusation was delivered. “What’s wrong with that guy? I asked again. The bald man answered by mimicking a wild swig from the bottle. The suited man wobbled away, cussing and kicking at the sidewalk. He repeated the drama twice more in the following hour, each time seeming more desperate and walking away in greater frustration. I thought about buying him a box of cigarettes in order to ease his pain, but everything was closed. I remembered how it felt to need and want a cigarette as if it were the only thing that mattered in the world, but there was nothing that could be done short of picking up discarded cigarette butts until there was enough tobacco to smoke. I made sure not to be critical of the suited man because nobody present understood from what, exactly, he was running away. When the suited man came around for the third and final time, the station was about to open and we'd grown comfortable with the presence of the bald man

156 156 who still hadn’t said a single word. He just stared and flapped his jaw, looking a lot like Lee Marvin. When the suited man stormed off for the last time, the bald man stood up and looked towards him with a mischievous look on his face that he made sure the rest of us noticed. The bald man followed the movements of the suited man in the distance and returned to the ledge where he reached into his pocket and pulled out a brand new pack of cigarettes, which caught us by surprise since he’d giving no indication that he smoked. He packed the box of cigarettes loudly with hard thrusts onto his outstretched palm. He lit a cigarette and took the longest most delicious looking puff in the history of smoking, savoring the moment by exaggeratingly smacking his lips and swiping his tongue across his mouth as he slowly exhaled. As the smoke of that first drag disappeared into the night air above him, the bald man stood up and revealed a side of himself that we’d yet to see. In one quick angry motion, he turned in the direction of the suited man and sent an angry “fuck you” gesture in his direction. He sat down, looked us over, and let out a sinister howl, which we all knew was in celebration of the lack of compassion that he’d demonstrated toward the suited man, the fact that he had a full pack of cigarettes all along. The group, this assemblage of people from all over the world, seemed to understand something about human nature and the intersection of suffering and economics at that moment because nobody spoke a word. After a moment of silence, however, everyone suddenly exploded into rip roaring laughter as the bald man continued to point in the direction of the beggar in order to further illustrate whatever point he’d been trying to make. I laughed because of the mastery with which the bald man had inserted himself into our group and willed the events of

157 157 the long night into something funny. Before standing up to leave, the bald man turned to me and winked, adding the final touch to an excellent performance. My weeklong stay in Rome was nothing like I imagined it would be. In my plans, I’d envisioned myself bouncing from one end of Rome to the other in search of food adventures. I expected to tap into the same spirit of exploration with which Sojian and I had ventured onto food scenes in places like Sienna, Cinque Terre, and Florence the previous summer. I was certain that I would return to the small café near the Trevi Fountain where I tasted black truffle risotto for the first time since I worked in restaurants twenty years before. My plan also included following in the footsteps of the trendy food lists that are everywhere on the Internet: The Ten Most Iconic Restaurants in Rome, The Hidden Gelato Palaces of the Jet Set in the Eternal City, Find The Old World Coffeehouses Where Shelley, Twain and, Melville Honed Their Craft and Discovered Beauty and Culture. I was getting good at moving from one place to another in Europe. Sure, my approach was somewhat clumsy with no identifiable purpose other than my wanting to learn more about food cultures and continue the movement that had allowed me to put Arcadio’s death into perspective. According to my loose schedule, I planned on spending my time in the coffeehouses of Rome or tracking down those last Caravaggio paintings that had eluded me the last time. I’d framed my plans around long hours of writing bad poetry and reflecting on the wonderful people that I expected to meet at farmer’s markets and sidewalk cafes. Instead, two very different and unexpected things happened in Italy. My stay in Rome turned into a weeklong spiritual realignment and my return to Florence and my first trip to Venice sparked my future explorations of the specialty coffee scene in the United States.

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Travelling successfully has a lot to do with the people met along the way. The concept wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to me that summer in Rome, but I had to reconcile the fact that having the universe dropping a parade of good hearted people onto my path had a lot to do with the maintenance of my spiritual condition, which at that time I’d been neglecting. It had always been that way since Sandwich Rick and Roland had taught me how to keep balance in my life and how to attract positivity through prayer and meditation, a fact proven repeatedly during Arcadio’s illness. Toward the end of Arcadio’s life, we would often talk about the positive things that had come out of our four-year battle with cancer, bringing up certain individuals whom had come into our lives, seemingly out of nowhere, in order to help us in one way or another. We often talked about people like Chatura, one of the nurse’s aides at Valley Children’s Hospital who many times wheeled Arcadio’s hospital bed from one floor of the massive hospital to another in the middle of the night and to whom we had become especially close. He made us laugh and inspired us, often in the worst of times. Chatura told us bits of his story at a time. We learned that he’d escaped the civil war in Sri Lanka after everyone in his family had been killed during the seventies, arriving in the United States in his early twenties with nothing more than a dream of becoming a doctor. His dream was never realized, yet he was a happy and an immensely positive person who’d trained himself to help people headed towards the worst that can happen at a children’s hospital. He beamed one night when he finally told us that one of his sons was already a doctor and the other one was not far behind. Other times, Arcadio and I would discuss the other side of the spectrum, the parade of miserable people who had crossed our path. The ones who had attempted to make life difficult for us. We often discussed a social worker at the

159 159 hospital who spoke to us with the soft and bouncy words of a kindergarten teacher in order to mask his ulterior motives, which usually centered on convincing Arcadio that his pain was imaginary and that he belonged at home and not in the hospital. He thought we were too stupid to recognize his intentions. Meeting one of these negative types in Rome sparked a rush of negative emotions and fear that derailed my original plans. When I arrived at the RV Park the morning after spending the night outside Termini Station, I could barely stand and went straight to my cabin after checking in. I opened the door and made my way toward the only unoccupied bed in the small room. A young American was seated at a small desk typing away diligently with several empty bottles of wine in front of him, the cheap but good kind that is available in Italy and Spain for a two or three Euros. He never looked up. I sat on the bed, took off my shoes, and collapsed into the bed, falling asleep for a few of hours. When I woke up, in the middle of the day, the man was still typing away, still drinking wine. I sat up in the bed and said, "My name is Eddie. I guess we’ll be roommates for a week or so. What did you say your name was?” The man, a skinny African American who I would later find out was from Baltimore, disliked my question as if my interruption came at the point that he most needed to concentrate. He said, "I never told you my name. I'm busy with this deadline so if you don't mind I’m going to try working without any more distraction. Try to not talk to me when I'm working.” I looked at him sideways and shook my head, letting him know that his rudeness upset me. The smell of wine was already an excuse not to like the person, but what bothered me was that I would have to share a cabin for the next six days

160 160 with someone who had just tried to punk me. My negative reaction meant that I was exhausted and hadn't meditated for a few days, which experience had taught me was a recipe for disaster. I already knew that not everyone who crosses my path during my travels is going to be nice and that conflict wasn't a luxury I could afford. My trips to Europe were never about finding God or myself. That wasn't something I ever struggled with because from the moment that I’d been introduced to certain concepts at New Horizons, my life began changing for the better. I’d gotten my shit together and stopped living in those demoralizing cycles. I tried to address negative emotions when they came up, like not getting into fights with people who were rude to me or hurt my feelings. I'd managed that place of balance for more than ten years, but it became elusive after Arcadio died, leaving me in a bad place that day because I was about to hit that guy, knowing very well that he might hit me back. I will never be as spiritual as I was during the time that Arcadio was sick. I'd settled into a routine in those years, stretching and praying before I meditated, clearing my mind of noise and distractions with one simple mantra - May God's will be done in my life and may I have the knowledge to carry it out. I made regular practice of starting my day in this manner and talking to God throughout the day. This simple approach had allowed me to keep my sanity as we navigated through four years of highs and lows. More importantly, it gave me the strength to forget about reaching for a drink during the years after Arcadio's death. Suddenly in Rome, that balance felt like it was slipping away. The next day proved equally frustrating. I realized that my pending transition into graduate school was suddenly a source of anxiety. My doubts regarding graduate school also began to cast doubtful shadows on my ambition to

161 161 learn more about food cultures, like tumbling dominoes of dysfunction crashing through the walls that separated the compartments of my life. I began to ask myself why I even bothered with my travels when in the end nobody would care about them or read anything written about food or the places that touched me. The voice of negativity told me that I was just a glorified cheese plant worker on temporary leave, an inmate from the working class zoo let loose for long enough to make a fool of himself at the university. I’d forgotten Roland's lessons on the battle between fear and faith and how to reverse an unhealthy trend. On my third day at the RV Park, the much-needed turn happened during a rare conversation with my roommate where I mentioned my recent graduation from UC Merced and that I was in Italy for the second time studying food cultures. Unsurprisingly, his response was antisocial. In a roundabout way, he took a shot at my having graduated from the college at such a late age. I felt, again, like decking the skinny little fuck. Instead, I grabbed my pillow and my blanket and went outside to sleep under the stars on a grassy knoll at the edge of the RV Park that sat under a series of giant shade trees and overlooked a quiet meadow where grass fed cows roamed during the day. The Tiber was a little beyond the meadow, but I didn’t know that then because I'd been too busy caught up in my emotional entanglements. Instead of going into the center of Rome, which was easily accomplished by jumping on the A line of the above ground metro a half mile up the road at Prima Porta, I stuck around the RV park, avoiding my negative roommate at all costs. On the fourth morning, I went to Piazza Popoli in order to look at the two Caravaggio’s which adorn two chapels in a small church and then to Cafe Antico to have some espresso, but the sun was too hot and I was soon as tired and demoralized as I’d been on that first day.

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I began to spend my mornings and afternoons on the grassy knoll atop a beach towel, shirtless, shoeless and wearing only some black gym shorts. The sight of me on the grassy knoll was probably an unsightly scene for passersby because, even though I spend a fair amount of time in the gym, I love tacos more than I like spending time exercising. Luckily, couples walked by in bikinis and speedos on their way to the pool drawing the heat off of my middle aged body. The pressures that had been weighing on me melted away in my spot under the trees. Occasionally, I caught glimpses of my roommate, outside on our porch pretending to read or clean up. A few times, he kept staring in my direction, probably wondering what I was doing sitting Indian style with my eyes closed on a beach towel. The stretching and meditation became a soothing investment in ending my summer on a positive note. My focus was to quiet the rattle in my head and to make the life changing move that Roland had suggested when he pointed at his head and then in an exaggerated motion extended his fingers and pounded the open palm of his hand on his heart, imploring us to move out of our heads and into our hearts. Soon, I made my way toward the river in order to sit on a log, my bare feet partially submerged in the brownish green Tiber. I spent my morning reading in a quite patio outside the restaurant near the center of the RV Park. Inside, a full bar adorned the entrance to an elegant dining room and the menu featured items from a wood fired oven. The staff consisted of young people from all over Europe. I particularly enjoyed talking to one young woman from Poland about food. She told me about a nearby farmer's market, and eventually, I talked her into asking the cooks to roast some vegetables on the grill so that the salads that I put together in the outdoor cooking area had some depth of

163 163 flavor. Life had slowed down at the park so much so that the center Rome seemed more of a distraction than an imperative destination. At night, a rock band played American music from the 1980's on the same patio where I read in the mornings. A fire pit near the small stage lit up the faces of people from diverse corners of Europe who sat at my table, drinking beer and describing their vacations while inquiring about life in faraway California. On my fifth day at the RV Park Sondra, a classmate of mine from the Spanish Arts program showed up to my rescue. Her arrival sent me further away from the negative thinking that had me in conflict with the man from Baltimore and myself. Sondra, an artist with freckles and sad distant eyes whose passions consisted of photography and living a free spirited lesbian existence, was in heaven in Rome because she had so many subjects to which she could dedicate her photography. We were an odd pair, even as friends. It was evident that she avoided any living thing that might be even loosely associated with men, yet our reunion worked well because it was as much coincidence as it was convenience. She had added a rebel perspective to our lively group of friends back in Spain, so I looked forward to getting to know her better in Italy. I was happy to have someone with whom to see the sights. What I remember most is eating dinner in the park's restaurant on our last night. Sondra introduced me to her new friend, a boyish looking girl from Lisbon who described her new life in London and how she had escaped Portugal when she was seventeen because she was trapped in a conservative family that wasn't able to accept her orientation. It was good to listen and learn about the struggles that LBGT people face on a daily basis and to meet somebody else who’d also made a solution out of movement and meeting people.

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The pizza was as memorable as the conversation, thin crusted with rich artisanal pepperoni and roasted artichokes swimming in three kinds of cheeses and olive oil. I took bites of the pizza and looked at Sondra and Katherine in the amber glow given off by candles and a nearby fire on the outside deck where we were sitting. They looked so young and seemed happy, which made me feel good and seemed to ease the tensions created by my interactions with the devil from Baltimore. Everything seemed to be well in the world again. In Florence, I toured Sondra around the museums and spent long hours in the Uffizi in the room where Botticelli’s Birth of Venus sits along with Primavera. The Zephyr’s toes entranced me as they dangled over the water, something that escapes most viewers when they crowd in to see Birth of Venus but which I feel highlights the paintings aesthetic uniqueness. I looked up old friends, but unfortunately, Professor Schmidt was out of town. The rest of my ten days in Florence were spent above the city at Piazza Michael Angelo, the Chiaroscuro coffeehouse, and the Orsansmichele Church that had proven a refuge the previous summer. I knew of the famous church long before my plans to study in Italy developed because Arcadio and I had researched miracle spots where healings supposedly occur. We never had the time nor the resources to take him to Orsansmichelle. I’d have some of my best prayer and meditation in the church during my first visit to Italy. The church is an old granary in the center of Florence where statues of the 14th century guild's patron saints adorn the outside (replicas), so it seemed logical to return there in order to search out the balance that had recently eluded me in Rome. After all, the ancient church was a peaceful place for me even though I'm not Catholic or hold too many religious views other than God is someone in whom to have faith. That is a big reason that I’ll return to Florence

165 165 every chance I get for the rest of my life. The church is a power spot for me and that has a lot to do with the feeling inspired by the painting of the Madonna and the gilded tabernacle that protects it. In other words, Orsansmichelle is one of those rare places where the flow of positive energy is undeniably present. One day after I’d taken Sondra to the Chiaroscuro Coffeehouse in order to introduce her to Italian coffee culture, I wrote three pages in my notebook at the church concerning a day in Arcadio's life that I’d not thought about since it had passed more than three years before. His sixteenth birthday, which took place on August 10, 2010, was a day full of family and love and one of the last times that that our lives resembled anything close to normal. We celebrated by roasting a tri tip and ordering Round Table Pizza. Arcadio spent most of the day in the garage with his rock band, A Day Late, playing standards like Iron Man by Black Sabbath and trying to figure out latest Five Finger Death Punch songs. His band consisted of two friends from church who both played guitar and a bassist he'd known since junior high. Playing music made Arcadio happy and soothed his difficult life. In the absence of his bandmates, when he was sick from the chemo or in pain from surgeries, the drums were his medicine. He would bang around for hours until he came inside dripping with sweat but always wearing a big smile. That night was also the last time all the members of his band played together. Jerry, my girlfriend Dana's son, a cherub looking eighth grader, joined the band in the garage. Mom, Dana and I passed the afternoon by cooking together and talking quietly about how much longer Arcadio could continue to enjoy life, because we knew the Ewing’s Sarcoma was coming on strong. The doctors had warned that he might only live another five months, but of course, we hoped for more.

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When I recall that day as being wonderful, the memory has a lot to do with Dana. My relationship with Dana was the first in the time that I raised Arcadio. Luckily, she proved incredibly adept at helping me handle the low points of his illness. Dana and I still laugh about that night for more reasons than anybody else knows about. The incident that gives rise to our laughable recollections started sometime after everyone sat down for dinner at five o’clock. We washed down the birthday meal with a giant chocolate and strawberry cake, accompanied by milk while Moses played Purple Haze on his electric guitar in the kitchen as Arcadio blew out the candles on his cake. Afterwards, all the kids packed into mom's car and went for a trip to the music store where they went to look at equipment. Dana and I found ourselves alone in mom's house, so we ended up having sex in the living room. Relationships that lasted for more than a few weeks were something that my drinking had prevented, so meeting Dana was another part of moving forward in my new life and something for which I was grateful. I’ll never forget the feeling as we embraced on the couch afterwards, that for once in my life I knew what it meant to be in love and to be entranced by someone as much as they were entranced by me. I’d wished the day lasted forever. Nevertheless, that's only one of the reasons that Dana and I still remember Arcadio's sixteenth birthday fondly. Mom had installed a new set of curtains in the preceding week and unbeknownst to us, they had a feature of which we were unaware as we romped around the living room. When I was taking Dana and Jerry home, Dana got excited after she got into my car. She pointed toward the front of the house and said, "Oh my God. Look!" "Look at what?" I asked.

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"The curtains are see through from the outside. You can see everything going on inside when it’s dark outside. “How embarrassing," she said. "Your mom's going to find out." "Do you think anybody saw us?" I asked. "Just everybody that walked or drove by,” Dana said. "Well, at least we gave them a good show," I said. "Mom doesn’t sweat stuff like that. I have to do something terrible in order for her to get mad at me. I think she's just glad that I didn’t get killed in a bar fight or blow out my liver or something worse.” After ten days in Florence, Sondra headed to Berlin and I went to Venice. Having a foot in Europe but a face pointed to the east, Venice doesn't feel like the rest of Italy, so my visit was full of new insights. The last thing that I did before I caught a train to Pisa and then a flight back to Madrid was to visit the famed Caffe Florian that Professor Schmidt made us promise we would someday do. The café is the epitome of refinement where Italian espresso cuisine is concerned. The waiters were naturally snobby and prices unreal. A shot of espresso cost 25 Euros, but at least the charge included a view of the gigantic tower that occupies St. Mark’s Square and the expansive plaza whose architecture reflects the eastern spirit that underlies Venice’s past and place in world history. Before I left, I made my way to the top of the tower, which gives a bird’s perspective of the Venetian lagoon and the artificial islands that make up Venice. During my time in the tower, it occurred to me that it would perhaps be sometime before I returned to Europe. Consequently, I also realized that my food and travel adventures would inevitably have to continue in California. Scoping out the coffee scene in San Francisco was a way to continue. I knew that coffee in the US had

168 168 recently gone through some radical changes because Professor Schmidt had told us so the year before and I’d seen as much in San Francisco’s Mission District

CHAPTER TEN: THE MILLENNIUM FALCON MEETS ISHMAEL

Eureka Winter 2015 Nobody could've convinced me in those first few days that teaching would become my favorite part of graduate school, a demanding but rewarding enough experience to bring balance to the other parts of the Master of Fine Arts program. The other half of the program consisted of taking creative writing classes that featured work-shopping essays. The classes weren't too difficult other than we had to learn how to crawl into thick, metaphorical suits of armor in order to deflect the blows to our egos and contempt for shitty writing that people hurled around with impunity. The hard part was finding meaningful things about which to write. Learning to navigate the ins and outs of graduate school with its overly demanding reading schedules and writing deadlines gobbled up my energies that first semester. I barely kept pace by writing rambling essays which nobody understood and seemed to raise antipathy in my classmates because of their length and convoluted language. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, I began to read about the history of coffee and "Third Wave Coffee" in books and magazines. Moreover, my plan of traveling across the United States in order to learn more about coffee was helped by two chance encounters that took place that autumn. The first had to do with a couple of my mom’s friends asking me to drive them to a funeral in Salinas which I thought would be a great opportunity to explore the coffee scene in a place other than the Central Valley, but something entirely else happened. When we stopped in San Juan Bautista to use the restroom of a grocery store, we saw a worker loading almond wood into a brick oven near the front patio of a coffee shop called

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Vertigo. This caused me to stop and turn the car around because I have a couple of rules concerning wood-fired ovens: One requires me to investigate what kinds of foods are cooked and the other requires me to eat some of them. Walking into the restaurant, the overpoweringly delicious smell of roasted coffee beans distracted me. The aroma came from a man in the corner who was filling the hopper of a tall, streamlined roaster with green coffee beans while another employee filled little brown bags with some of the beans that had finished cooling. The process was taking place out in the open in the same small space as the restaurant, which was something that fascinated me. I introduced myself to the roaster and told him I'd be back at a later date after ordering a pour over of Columbian Coffee which the girl behind the counter explained was a cup of coffee made to order by hand as opposed to the batch brewed coffee which had been sitting on the counter forever. The following week, I was in the Mission District in San Francisco trying to find a taco shop that I'd eaten at the previous year. As I walked up Valencia past the pirate shop toward Portrero Hill, I noticed a line snaking out of a place called Ritual Roasters. I’d read about Third Wave Coffee in Barista Magazine and this place seem to fit the description, with the hipster influence, modern aesthetics, and coffees from Central America, Africa, and Indonesia. Espresso and all of its attendant concoctions were also part of the menu as were pastries, just like in Italy. The place had urbane charm and so did the crowd of well-dressed young people that came and went. I went with my only previous experience regarding specialty coffee and ordered, "um, some Columbia in a pour over." I noticed a barista setting up a row of cups along a counter, some with roasted beans and others filled with hot water. He also brought out a small grinder

171 171 and some odd shaped spoons. I asked him what he was doing and, as easy as that, my first cupping got underway without much of a fuss except that I secretly laughed at the word cupping which reminded me of the word spooning, which is an altogether different idea. Ritchie explained that he'd been expecting a large group for the cupping but that they had cancelled, leaving me and a couple who'd just strolled in as the only participants. I found out that cupping is the process of getting to know a particular coffee. It is how professional tasters in the field are able to rate the beans on which green coffee buyers bid. In a public demonstration like the one I'd walked into at Ritual Roasters, cupping is meant to educate the coffee consuming public by giving them a chance to look at and smell a particular roasted coffee, capture the aroma once the beans have been ground, and taste the final product once it has been steeped in hot water. This helps build recognition along a wide spectrum of coffees and lets the palate explore a sensory overload. I left San Francisco that day buzzing with excitement as a result of cupping an heirloom Ethiopian coffee that had flavor notes of blueberries and strawberries and because Ritchie had also given us a quick a lesson on the differences in terms of taste among the world's different coffee growing regions. I wondered how many other coffees had such nuanced flavors, described on the label and brought to bear tastily in a final product that Ritchie claimed I could easily make at home. ****************************************************************** On the first day of the year, I set out on my International Coffeehouse Tour 2015, which is a term that I stopped using because it seemed to pissed people off, not to mention that it was an overly inflated way of describing my plans to keep traveling in order to learn more about food and coffee. Specifically, the first leg of

172 172 tour involved heading to Eureka for a week and then to Tijuana and San Diego where I hoped to visit the places were specialty coffee was unfolding. Eureka probably doesn't sound like the place to start any sort of international tour, but I really wanted to see my old friend Johnny and as they say, kill a few birds with one stone or in this case, drink as much coffee as possible in one of my old stomping grounds. I figured it was as good a place to start as any because the specialty coffee scene in my area consisted of one shop, Preservation Coffee in Modesto. After having a New Year's Day dinner with mom and my brother's family, I jumped into my 2004 Pontiac Grand Prix, which everyone in my family referred to as the Millennium Falcon because I had put nearly three hundred thousand miles on her. Fortunately, she still powered down the road like the fable of the squeaky spacecraft that I named her after. I took along an audio version of Moby Dick because everyone in graduate school claimed to have read it. I'd always avoided the book, believing it was like the rest of the catalog, full of old white dudes talking to and about other white dudes in places where the narrative seldom included people of color in positive roles. I was, however, pleasantly surprised after discovering that Melville’s book included an international cast of characters in a high seas drama who ranged from a Pacific Islander who shares Ismail’s adventures to a bevy of Africans, Spaniards and East Indians. Sometime after midnight, the Millennium Falcon climbed the Altamont hills and dropped into Oakland, crossed the San Rafael Bridge, and deposited us on the wide open stretches of Highway 101 that wind their way toward Humboldt County. I knew the stretch well, having made the trip dozens of times during my early twenties when I settled in Arcata and Eureka for long enough to flunk out of

173 173 college and be fired from four different restaurants. Even in the dark of night, I could make out familiar vistas in places where the fog and clouds cleared for long enough to let the moon light up the landscapes. I melted into the contours of my bucket seat in anticipation of the nearly five-hour trip and set the cruise control to eighty. Ishmael’s narration set a tranquil mood as he broke into the novel by describing man’s fascination with water on the Island of the Manhattos in warm, lyrical intonations. After a while, I was lulled into an introspective mood where I felt right alongside Ishmael on the docks of New Bedford and later in finding a room at the Sprouter Inn. The chapter where the plot is complicated by the hellfire and damnation of Father Mapple’s reading of the book of Jonah seemed to jump out of nowhere, an abrupt turn into the dark potential of human existence. It was, however, also incredibly intriguing, so I kept rewinding and listening to the chapter again and again in order to make sure that I didn't miss anything. After a while, I imagined myself in Father Mapple's little chapel, looking up at him as he delivered his sermon from the pulpit. Like Ishmael, I was setting out on an adventure but had the same ominous feelings of uncertainty and doubt. The morning of January 2, proved to be the coldest night of the winter on the north coast. The road conditions worsened the deeper I pushed into Mendocino County. The occasional patches of fog grew thicker and I began to wince at the increasingly hazy windshield. My eyes grew tired as inertia settled me deeper into my seat. Sometime after I passed Weaverville, the blower on my heater stopped working. The heat coming off the engine was pulled into the cab by the push of outside air as my car cut through the night at seventy miles per hour - spiraling down narrow two lane corridors which brushed up against giant redwoods on one

174 174 side and balanced precariously over black canyons on the other - but it wasn't enough. The inside of the cab kept getting colder. Father Mapple’s sermon stuck to the air thick in the cab of my car. The ice- cold wind that blew through New Bedford that afternoon in the novel also blew through me as the speakers pounded out a mesmerizing cadence whose weight seemed to settle in the recesses of my consciousness. The more that Father Mapple bellowed, the tenser and colder I became. A strange noise abruptly started coming from the back of my car, almost imperceptible at first, a backwards moving thud, left faintly in the distance. The sound grew in intensity. When I finally turned down the volume on stereo, the throbbing rhythm of Father Mapple’s speech disappeared, leaving the strange noise dangling underneath us. The mysterious sound grew in intensity and then disappeared, coming back even louder whenever the road's texture changed. Unfortunately, the noise sounded like it might be my transmission giving out. My first thought was that the last thing my project needed was untimely repairs to the Millennium Falcon. All of a sudden, the only thing I felt was doubt. For graduate students, life unfolds through a cost benefit analysis, meaning that any potential car problems would negatively affect my travel plans. It was unexpectedly about the money - the realization that my plans were subject to the whims of things unfolding according to plan. The price of a flight to Madrid, after all, was roughly equivalent to the price of new transmission. To make matters worse, I felt the ice pulling me off the road. I slowed to a crawl and settled behind a truck that was dumping sand on the road, but it was no use because with the defroster gone I couldn’t see a thing. The sound grew louder

175 175 and louder as did the idea that, I had a real problem on my hands. In the meantime, negativity took me for its own spin and spewed thoughts into my head. International Coffeehouse Tour? Who does this guy think he is? He's not even qualified. Ambition doesn't make for talent. Fool! As I passed Twin Bridges at Confusion Hill and began the ascent over the Eel River on the way toward the Avenue of the Giants, something happened. In a clearing illuminated by a series of street lamps that filtered light into my car, I realized that my right rear window was partially open and didn't respond to the control. The dawn was beginning to color the edges of the sky to the east as I pulled over in Garberville, in order to shake myself out and to see what I could do about the noise and the broken window. I jogged around the Millennium Falcon, jumped into the air a few times, and threw wild jabs into the last traces of night in an effort to get my blood flowing again. I stretched and stood still for long enough to say a prayer, before I rigged the window by jamming a screwdriver sheathed in cardboard into the window frame and took a peak under the carriage. Everything around the transmission looked fine. The noise disappeared and by the time I reached Fortuna where the southern tip of Humboldt Bay pushes in on the mountains, the morning had risen. I felt relieved, like Hans Solo sans Chewy, having just out run the evil empire of self-defeating thoughts and Melville encouraged blackness. The noise had always been present. The thud had only made itself heard when one rear window was open - an explainable phenomenon of which Pontiacs seem to have more than their share. At two hundred and eighty thousand miles, I needed the Millennium Falcon to stay alive for long enough to get me through my long commutes from

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Turlock to graduate school in Fresno and carry me through to the completion of my planned road trips without breaking down. At seven thirty, I pulled into the Blue Ox Millworks Historical Park and School of Traditional Arts, which is located on the marshy edges of Humboldt Bay near Old Town Eureka. I made my way into the office and asked for Johnny. The woman at the counter informed me that he was out in by the forge preparing to cast the ornamental metalwork that would adorn a replica of the hearse that carried President Lincoln on his final voyage from the state capitol in Springfield, Illinois to Oak Ridge Cemetery on May 4, 1865. On my way to find Johnny, I passed a decaying warehouse where four artisans occupied themselves with chisels and planes as they worked on the body of the carriage that was at that point nothing more than an unstained shell of various woods that needed assembly before the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s death. Along a row of buildings that existed as a recreated old-style village, I found Johnny in the blacksmith's shop. He was bent over attending to a small furnace. A young woman, who turned out to be an intern from nearby College of the Redwoods, was helping him melt down aluminum blocks recycled from old Hondas engines in order to form the bullion from which the metalwork for the hearse would later be cast. The heat coming from the furnace felt good, so I stepped into the shop. Johnny was dressed in a worn out blue jumpsuit. He was dirty with soot and grease smeared all over his face and white beard. When Johnny finally stood up, he asked, “How was the drive up?” “It was freezing and my damned heater went out," I said. "Also had a little scare when it sounded like my tranny was about to go out." “I hate it when that happens,” Johnny said.

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Johnny stopped throwing chunks of aluminum into a metal bucket and walked over to the door where I was standing in order to give me a bear hug. He set me down and introduced me to his assistant, Clara. Johnny pointed at the buildings and odd antiques that littered the yard in front of the shop and said, "Don't leave without taking the tour, so they can tell you what goes on around here. Afterwards, head over to the house and relax for a while. The key is under the boot where it always is.” "Thanks, Johnny. I could really use a nap after last night." "How long did you say you were staying for?” he asked. “Maybe a week. However long it takes me to check all the coffeehouses from Trinidad to Fortuna,” I responded. Johnny shook his head, looked at the glowing red furnace and facetiously said, “You are into some weird shit, dude. You know that?” “It’s an International Coffeehouse Tour. I'll tell you more about it tonight," I shot back turning away in the direction of a one room schoolhouse where a giant St. Bernard stood drooling all over the front porch. The sunroom at Johnny's house produced a marvelous effect later that morning. It was warm and the perfect place to research the local coffee scene on my laptop. Johnny had described his plans to build the sunroom in a phone conversation a couple of years before, so it was great to see it for myself. It helped that the weather was perfect that afternoon and the following five days, a rare treat for Humboldt County in the winter because the area inherits the tail end of the Pacific Northwest’s gloomy weather patterns. Johnny and I met during my time in the California Conservation Corps, so we go back more than twenty-five years. By a miracle that nobody can explain, I ended up on one of his backcountry crews, the single most coveted assignment in

178 178 the CCC's. To say that I was a long shot is an understatement. Fortunately, I managed to get myself interviewed and hired after a chance meeting with the director of the program, Peter Lewis. Peter took a chance and put me on Johnny’s Calkins 1990 Stanislaus Backcountry Crew, an adventure that consisted of spending seven months in the Sierras using dry rock masonry techniques to build trail for the US Forest Service. I was even more of a long shot to make it through the season because I had no actual field experience beyond the CCC Academy’s wild lands firefighting training which was mandatory for all young people going into the CCC, even cooks. The fact that I showed up terribly out of shape didn't help me or anyone else. Johnny and I had a rough start. When our crew rendezvoused at Prairie Creek State Park on a rainy day in March of 1990, it didn't take very long for us to clash. Johnny saw an inexperienced, smart-ass twenty-year-old kid who had trouble keeping up with the rest of the crew. His assessment of my abilities was adversely influenced by a storm that pounded the north coast as we attempted to set up camp in a grove of trees near the beach. Every task, no matter how little, felt exceedingly difficult in that drenched environment. I spent much of that morning trying to maintain my balance in the mud, hindered by heavy boots and useless rain gear. I could feel Johnny watching me from the margins, noticing every time I fell down while unloading equipment from one of the trucks or missed a spike with an errant blow of a sledgehammer. In a meadow not far from where Prairie Creek winds its way out of Fern Canyon, we finally had it out. Johnny was yelling at the top of his lungs, threatening to fire me on the spot for arguing with my coworkers who were all in great shape and seemed to be used to working in such miserable conditions. He

179 179 claimed that my coworkers could work circles around me and would eat me for lunch if I didn't move any faster. What Johnny had yet to find out was that I was raised on my step-dad's ranch and could handle myself outdoors. I just needed time to get in shape and acclimate, so I told Johnny to "get off my fucking back," and that I'd outwork him and his crew of hillbilly lumberjacks before the season was over, which came to pass and earned me his respect. More importantly, Johnny asked me to join one of his crews at the end of the season in Del Norte County working on salmon habitat restoration deep in the forests that run along the tributaries of the Klamath River. From that odd beginning, Johnny has remained a good friend and a mentor not only to me but also to a legion of corps members from throughout California. In essence, we are like the kids he never had. Our pictures - hundreds of them, both men and women- decorate his house. Johnny's living room is as utilitarian as it is cozy by design, featuring a small library and a wood burning stove. He has arranged it as a homespun version of the salon, a space where guests participate in conversations that deal with some of life's most compelling questions. As a result, Johnny’s friends regularly book a room in his house months in advance, specifically, for this ritual or they show up seeking his advice when life takes unexpected turns and important decisions are at a hand. I’m always grateful for my time in the recliner in front of the stove and across from this aging version of Ishmael’s Starbuck who shares with the character a sense of congeniality and wisdom. I sometimes feel guilty for taking up his time, but three years have passed since I last visited, so we have some catching up to do. It's my second night at Johnny's house in Mckinleyville and he has just returned home from what he described earlier as dinner with his girlfriend and a meeting in town. He walks into the living room, throws his notebook on his desk,

180 180 and puts more wood into the stove. He looks a little flustered as he sits in the chair next to the recliner where I am reading. I can see the veins in his neck are bulging even though he hasn't spoken yet. I, in turn, keep reading without saying anything. Finally, Johnny looks over at me and says, "Those privileged motherfuckers don't give a shit about the homeless. They can't see the dignity in the right to something as simple as a drink of water or a place to shower." "Let me guess, the city council turned down the Homeless Alliance's offer to build or subsidize housing for the homeless in Eureka, again?" I ask, remembering our last conversation and setting my book on a table. I bring up how Fresno and Manteca, two towns in the Central Valley, have enacted laws to criminalize homelessness, but he already knows. I mention that my students have just finished reading a section on poverty which included a piece by Bell Hooks that examines the role that media plays in teaching us to hate the poor even when we are one paycheck from being there ourselves. Johnny perks up. I am speaking his language when I tell him that Fresno State strives to have a racially and economically diverse student population, but he shoots me a look of contempt and shakes his head, no. "That's what they want you to believe. You know better," Johnny says. "Even if Fresno State is the exception, the reality throughout the United States is that the university is inaccessible to the poor and non-whites. That's what the numbers say, so don't let um tell you otherwise." Johnny tells me that he wants to build villages for the homeless, but that the process always becomes mired in politics. Pulling homeless people out of their dark worlds is only one of Johnny's vocations. His favorite kind of work since retiring from the CCC ten years ago has been counseling veterans returning from the Middle East. When he isn't down at the Blue Ox helping soldiers affected by

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PTSD return to the work force, he volunteers to keep the trails along Mad River Beach in top shape. On Friday nights, Johnny and several other Vietnam Veterans, calling themselves Veterans for Peace, protest past and future wars on the plaza in Arcata. Johnny isn’t impressed by my ambition to learn about coffee. He doesn’t say so, but I can tell. He never engages my plan or asks about details. Instead, we spend our time in the living room talking about issues that are more important. I already know that it isn't Johnny's style to get caught up in something as impractical as driving and flying around to learn about coffee. My project is too self-serving and wastes too many resources for him. He doesn't have to articulate his opinions. I've heard them before, usually in relation to some other of my bright ideas. I recognize Johnny’s angle. He is helping me to see the wider implications of my project. It’s something he’s good at. Over the years, he has modeled for his friends and family a lifestyle that opposes consumer culture’s tenets of instant gratification, material accumulation, and shopping as retail therapy. Johnny buys his goods at co-ops and other places because his money stays in the community, grows much of his own food, and never pays three dollars for a cup of coffee to a multi-national corporation like Starbucks. He thinks that I should be using my education to help illegal immigrants or underprivileged kids, but I tell him there will be time for that once I settle into a career, which he doesn't take well. Johnny's silence regarding my coffee tour speaks volumes because he has always been honest with me. As a result, a certain reality keeps resurfacing - much of what goes on in the world of coffee belongs to the global North’s command of resources, the ages old story of the first world nations dominating entire economies and peoples in order to extract sought after resources. In this light, my

182 182 plan has the potential to become a pointless construction of privilege and conspicuous consumption. Johnny has reminded me to search out my motives so that I can focus on meeting people, nourishing the collective spirit of those who cross my path and whose stories inform everyday life in a way that transcends the world of coffee with broad humanist strokes. ****************************************************************** I visited nearly twenty coffee shops or cafes in my week on the north coast and a couple of things stood out. The first had to do with customer service and how, as specialty coffee revealed itself to me on my journeys, I was never able to predict with any sort of certainty how my inquiries or the descriptions of my project would be received by the people working in coffee. Some baristas would drop what they were doing in order to come around the counter or from behind a desk in order to engage in long, meaningful conversations and others seemed repulsed by my attempts to immerse myself in their crafts. The other thing that stood out had to do with the aesthetics of the individual coffeehouses and cafes that I visited. People in coffee seemed to make aesthetic decisions that not only outlined their entrepreneurial dreams but also defined what kind of spaces their cafes brought to bear. In this way, every imaginable theme, motif or agenda - for lack of better terms - was demonstrated throughout my first road trip. I classified a couple of cafes as grunge factories left over from the nineties while others seemed to have some sort of literary intent, anachronistic references to a time in Europe when coffeehouses served as penny universities. One coffeehouse in Westwood Plaza adopted a Christian motif and a winning combination of friendliness and amazing signature drinks that caused me to feel suddenly blessed. A Finnish Spa that doubled as a coffeehouse thrived - a place I

183 183 remembered from my time in Arcata because it was down the street from a place we called the underground where we used to buy acid from a guy named Chad. In Eureka on a corner along Fifth Street, I found The Black Lightening Motorcycle Café for those who prefer a little pick me up before they ride, complete with a pro shop and people dressed in riding leathers. Los Bagels in Arcata - another shop around since the days I called Arcata home in the early nineties - operated as the culinary intersection of Jewish and Mexican cuisines and a juicy place to meet people. The Beachcomber Café in Trinidad offered visitors a few tables along the main strip that provided an incredible view of the harbor, a lighthouse, and Trinidad Head in the distance, a scene that looked more like the places in Massachusetts described in Moby Dick than California. On the second day of the year - the same day that I visited Johnny at the Blue Ox- I found a little bit of inspiration at Uptown Coffee in Arcata. The cafe possessed a great vibe and teemed with people. I ordered a cappuccino and sat down to read at a table between a guy with a blue Mohawk and more face piercings than was necessary to convey that he was really into poking holes into his face and a mom who was breast feeding her baby and doing homework at the same time. A laid-back barista named Lisa with pigtails and a personal style resembling something between hipster girl and hippy was extra nice. She reminded me that young people continue to flock to Arcata in order to study at Humboldt State and live alternative lifestyles, reassuring me that Arcata still held its charm and proximity to weirdness. She suggested a certain specialty drink, an Uptown con Panna. The drink was the café’s version of a Cubano style espresso with house-made, organic whipped cream.

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I returned to Uptown Coffee the following day, but I became sidetracked on the sunlit deck before ever venturing inside. I ran into what could be best described as a stoner couple about my age who never got the memo that it was all right to cut their hair and stop wearing 1980's concert t-shirts. Their friendliness reminded me of my first visits to Arcata two and a half decades earlier, when the town's eclectic atmosphere captured my imagination. Arcata was a fun town where anyone could buy good weed on the street from characters that looked like they belonged in a Haight Ashbury comic book, circa 1969. I remembered meeting cute dead head girls with unicorns painted on their faces. They announced their plans to go on tour with the Grateful Dead, meaning that they wanted me to buy some of their stash - something they would never ask a stranger to do if it weren’t for the fact that their bus was totally out of gas and stranded in the Safeway parking lot. In my new friends, I saw that Arcata continued to operate as its own tuned out universe, a world away from the parched and stuffy social landscapes of the conservative Central Valley, which was something that was as appealing to me in 2015 as it had been in 1990. Chris had long grey hair that hung nearly to his waist and a round face with a Fu Manchu moustache and a long beard. At first, I thought it weird that a stoner was wearing an NWA t-shirt, the kind that featured the faces of the rappers from Compton and announced THE WORLD'S MOST DANGEROUS GROUP across the front. Chris offered me a hit from his proto pipe, which I declined, in between introducing me to his girlfriend - who wore the same hair cut as Chris except that her hair was brown - and telling me that he’d been raised in an all-Black neighborhood in Cleveland. Hence, he was "down" with hip-hop because it lets people get past their differences and “all that other fucked up shit that divides us”.

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Donna's own refusal to let go of the eighties came in the form of a brand new looking Diary of a Madman T-shirt that featured Ozzy Osborne as a werewolf on the front and long black sleeves. Donna never quite came out from behind Chris as we stood around the deck talking except to take puffs from Chris’s pipe and disappear across the street every few minutes. Chris and Donna were excited about something I never clearly understood but that they kept describing as hydrocarbon technology. Halfway through talking about Guns and Roses and blaming Axel for the band's misfortunes like everyone from our generation does, Chris looked at me and asked, "You ever stop and realize just how many things they can do with water?" "Sometimes, who doesn't think about water?" I asked, half-jokingly. "I think about that every time I run out of ice cubes." "Yeah, man, like how on a molecular level it is the conduit through which life happens. Culturally, socially that's another dimension, and that's not to mention its therapeutic properties," Chris said, his head tilted sideways in deep, contemplative thought. "Got you, I went to the Finnish spa last night and I feel amazing," I said stretching out my arms and craning my neck, trying to follow his line of reasoning. Chris and Donna were apparently followers of the physics theory dujour, which was being propagated by some PhD from somewhere who claimed that the universal remedy for humankind’s problem had been found in what Chris kept describing as "hydro carbon technologies, man." According to Chris, gasoline could be made from something as simple as bacteria or enzymes or something to that effect. Chris's claims sounded interesting and somewhat plausible. Perhaps, he was right about the ability of this emerging

186 186 technology to equal a quantum leap forward for humanity, or maybe he and Donna were as they say "just high as fuck." I never knew which and it didn't matter too much. Whatever the case may have been, we listened to each other and it was a great way to pass a sunny morning in the middle of winter. I enjoyed talking to Chris because he was down to Earth and sincere in what he was attempting to describe, not to mention his wearing an NWA t-shirt and having a good, non-poser reason for having it on. I went inside of Uptown Coffee after promising them that I would watch the You Tube videos they had described. In turn, Chris and Donna promised to be die-hard followers of my travel blog just as soon as I drank enough coffee to get it up and running. Once inside, I ordered a Mocha Borgia because the combination of orange essence, chocolate and organic steamed milk added to an espresso base is not something anybody has to try too hard to convince me ends well. I made sure to ask Lisa who was working the cash register for a mug because paper cups make drinking coffee seem transient, fatal to the idea of a meaningful mid-morning pause. When Lisa relayed my drink order to the barista, a scraggly kid in a Rastafarian bonnet, he gave her a dirty look because the complicated drink order had been her idea. When the barista set my drink on the counter, it was in a paper cup, so I reminded him that my order involved a mug. Without ever looking at me, he snatched the paper cup from the counter and angrily dumped the contents into a baby blue mug and pushed it back toward me. In the process, he destroyed the order of the universe by mixing up the layered ingredients. The drink's distinctiveness was ruined because much of the appeal was contingent on the order in which the ingredients make their way across the palate. In other words, it was possible to nibble on the steamed milk and chocolate sprinkles long before getting

187 187 to the liquid center. The Rastafarian denied me the pleasure and was to trying to pass off a four-dollar mess as an artisanal drink. I looked down at the drink and shook my head, but the barista refused to notice and went back to making drinks behind the espresso machine. I was about to blow up and throw my own tantrum when Ishmael and Queequeg came riding through time and space in order to rescue me from the sticky situation. I’d just listened to Chapter 13 of Moby Dick on the way over from Johnny's house and Queequeg’s voice popped into my head, reminding me that the childish barista wasn't worth any emotional expenditure that might put in jeopardy the good vibes that I'd just encountered outside and throughout my inaugural trip. In the passage, a Vermont bumpkin gets caught red handed making fun of Queequeg behind his back and the giant Pacific Islander responds with civility and wit instead of the ignorance which would have removed all doubt as to the state of his perceived nature and which many people on hand might have expected from a rough and tumble harponeer. In Queequeg's own words: "Kill-e," cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly expression of disdain, "ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!" I decided to leave this particular “small-e fish-e” to himself. On my last night in Humboldt County, I made a stop at Because Coffee in Old Town Eureka since an earlier visit pointed to an emerging facet of the Third Wave Coffee Movement - young people opening coffeehouses and educating themselves about coffee, business and life. I loved the trendy coffeehouse meets Victorian décor fusion. The owner, a lively twenty something redhead with a mod haircut and a tight fitting Edwardian dress tailored to mid-thigh, hadn’t been engaging on my previous visit.

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Things were different on my second visit. Tina opened to and told me how exhausted she was because both of her employees had gone off and left her all alone - one to graduate school and the other back home. It was near closing time, so it was a good time to talk as she made me a pour over from a Kenyan light roast that the label described as having a floral bouquet and fruity notes. Tina admitted that she was only recently making it a priority to learn about the complexities of Specialty Coffee because it took all her time and energies to run the business, but that like me, she was learning more and more about coffee every day. My visit to Believe Coffee felt like a reordering of the universe that acted as a karmic buffer against the bad taste left in my mouth by the scraggly barista in Arcata. Tina told me she was making good money and that she was doing what she loved. She turned out to be a huge help and a very nice person, a great note on which to end the first leg of my first road trip. Before I left, Tina took a couple of pictures of me in a plush Victorian chair as I read a 1962 edition of Life Magazine with Mark Twain on the cover which my friends on Facebook had plenty to say about.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: TIJUANA TAXI CAB DRIVER’S LAMENT

San Diego/Tijuana Winter 2015 I've learned to be smart about movement and money, making the most of small opportunities. My arrival in San Diego on January 8, after pit stopping in Modesto to have the Millennium Falcon’s transmission checked because of our earlier scare in Mendocino County was actually part of some side work that I’d secured months earlier. A friend of the family - known simply as Lydia - swore me to secrecy and asked me to take her across the border in order to have something or other done to her face. It's not like I was going around interviewing with people who planned on going under the knife in Tijuana, but working as a teaching assistant in graduate school wasn't exactly paying the bills. Essentially, I agreed to act as both a driver and translator because it sounded like easy money and the trip had great potential as an opportunity to explore the specialty coffee scene at the border. Anyway, the choice was simple because nobody was throwing money or even a detectable trace of support in the direction of my ambitiously titled tour. Lydia and I checked into the Best Western on the American side of the border on our first night in San Diego. The next day a shuttle from the clinic picked us up and we crossed the border and made our way toward a high rise less than a mile from the border. A large window in the lobby of the doctor's office on the eighth floor gave us a prime view of Tijuana and San Diego, cities spread out along an invisible border. Below us in the distance, past a tangle of freeways, I could see the gigantic concrete canal where the Tijuana River once flowed and further out I could make out the Zona Centro neighborhood along which Avenida de la Revolucion runs. The area is famous as a tourist district from where

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Americans go home with arms full of cheap souvenirs and sordid adventures centered around twenty-four hour cantinas, strippers and mountains of cocaine. Our first day in Tijuana involved a final consultation with a puffy bodied little doctor whose face I recognized from a giant billboard on the highway that welcomed visitors to the city and announced it as a great place to "get a little work done - cheap." The doctor's office was decorated by replica statuary brought back from numerous trips to Florence and patients who were in the post operation phase of their new lives but still bandaged up like mummies. We were told that the procedure was to take place the following day, so we returned to San Diego where I spent the night researching the specialty coffee scene along the border region and preparing for my second semester of teaching English 5A, which would start in a couple of weeks. The following day they informed us that Lydia's procedure would require an overnight stay. The staff also mentioned that there was an extra room where I could sleep, but that I didn’t need to stick around for the procedure. They gave me a key and said that I was free to come and go. My plan was to stroll around Tijuana because I’d learned on recent trips that walking is one of the best ways to get the feel of a city. Outside of the clinic, a taxi driver named Miguel offered me a ride and looked at me with skeptical eyes when I mentioned taking a walk in order to find some coffeehouses. He gave me his card and said he'd wait for me to call. I punched coffeehouses into Google Maps and slowly made my way toward a street about a mile south of the clinic where three red coffee cup icons crowded around each other on the map. It didn't take very long to come face to face with some of the socioeconomic disparities that exist between the United States and the Mexican side of the border - scarcity and ordinariness set precariously next to

191 191 affluence and modernity. Three skyscrapers under construction in the distance did, however, signal that Tijuana was trying to keep up, that it wasn’t entirely out of sync with a Mexico that keeps promising to catch up to the rest of the world in the coming decades. Crossing the Tijuana River toward Avenida de la Revolucion on a pedestrian bridge turned into an eye opening experience that made me grateful to call Turlock, California home because poverty hides behind tree lined avenues and high median incomes. Scores of people in the homeless camps below yelled up at me, begging me to drop them some change. An elderly woman in a leather skirt called me GUAPO and asked if I was hungry and ready for a morning snack. On one section of the surrounding hills, which rise above the crowded metropolis, I could make out what looked like shantytowns. After finally heading south, I found a charming little cafe with two decent espresso machines and a good selection of pastries. The owners, a couple about twenty years old, also organized a pop up cafe on the sidewalk, which added another dimension to their brick and mortar business. I stayed longer than expected because part of the sitting area existed as a theatre that featured 1980’s music videos, which are something intricately tied to my generation's ability to see the world as a beautiful place and from which we seldom turn away voluntarily. A cappuccino turned into a cup of coffee and a second round of pastries as I studied the specialty coffee scene in Tijuana while The Human League, The Motels, Men without Hats and Michaels Jackson's Thriller gave me a reason to never leave. The Rincon Cafe was a jewel in the drab sea of urbanity that surrounded it, painted red with candy cane awnings and sharp swirling black letters adorning the exterior of the cafe, so I walked to the middle of the street when the traffic cleared in order take a few pictures on my cell phone. As soon as I'd taken the first picture,

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I noticed a man in the window of the restaurant next to the cafe come out from behind his breakfast and exit in my direction. He was still clutching the napkin that had been folded onto his lap as he passed through the front door. My having snapped pictures in which he appeared through the window obviously disturbed him. The man, who was very large, walked angrily across the sidewalk, dropping the napkin and putting one hand inside of his coat as if he was reaching for something. As he got closer to me, his face twisted in into a grimace. When he got to the edge of the sidewalk, he looked in my direction and asked, "A que le tomas photos?" "Soy escritor," I said, coming in from the middle of the street by walking backwards, away from where the man stood on the sidewalk. "Estoy esriviendo algo de la cuidad y sus encenas de cafe. Es todo, no hay problema." "Mas te vale. Bora las photos y largate de aqui," he said, finally pulling his hand from the inside of his coat and turning around in order to go inside and finish his breakfast, believing what I’d just told him about being a writer working on a human interest story related to entrepreneurs and coffee shops in Tijuana. I didn't get another two blocks on Avenida Quintana Roo before my tranquility took another shot to the chin. When a beat up 1980's Ford F-150 with three men inside pulled up to the stop light, the driver and I made eye contact. As a result, he proceeded to put the truck in neutral and began to rev the engine. After the signal turned green, I crossed in front of the F-150 and could hear the three men talking shit about me. I made sure not to look in their direction as the driver continued to put his foot on the accelerator and his two passengers called out to me with what felt like an increasing urgency.

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"Hey pendejo, a donde vas?" someone from inside the truck yelled as I passed them and got closer to the opposite side of the street. "We like your pants, PUTO! Es mejor que sigas caminando, BUEY." I was relieved when the transmission popped into drive causing the tires to screech before the truck lurched forward and sped across the intersection, leaving a trail of burning rubber in its wake. I understood something about the situation after looking at my reflection in the window of a store halfway down the next block. I had the United States written all over me, an obvious POCHO high profiling in the wrong part of town. Wearing white Levis with dress shoes, a purple sweater from Macy's and a brand new leather travel bag hanging from my shoulder wasn't the best way to proceed inconspicuously across a city that was still reeling from the worst days of the global recession and an unprecedented wave of drug war violence. Those were the realities that I’d just read about in a daily at the Rincon Cafe, so I stopped under the awning of a business and called Miguel the taxi driver who had given me his card earlier, essentially ending my walking tour while I could still avoid a random case of lead poisoning. Miguel pulled up ten minutes later. I jumped into his cab and told him what had just happened but he seemed unimpressed, so I described my plan to visit the city's best coffee houses. Lydia had insisted on also paying for my daily expenses, which meant that I could use the fifty dollars she gave me for lunch to subsidize Miguel's services for the next two afternoons. Miguel, only three years older than me, possessed a pensive but friendly disposition. He assured me that he knew the city like the back of his hand and that if it existed he could find it. I pointed to a coffee cup icon on my phone and said, "Esta. Let's go to this one."

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"That one, you want to go to that one?" he asked, shaking his head slightly and stepping on the gas. "It's as good as any place to start," I said. "Tell me again, what you're trying to do," Miguel said in Spanish as we whizzed by storefronts toward what ended up being a mini-mart with an old coffee maker in one corner. "I’m visiting coffeehouses in order to learn more about specialty coffee," I said underestimating the likelihood that Miguel knew something about the subject. Miguel and I fell into a routine which consisted of him pulling up to a potential coffeehouse and circling the block long enough for me to realize that our current approach to finding specialty coffee in Tijuana wasn't working. Most places into which I wandered were about as far away from Third Wave Coffee as you could get, the offerings consisting of little more that 7-11 style coffee. In the meantime, Miguel talked about Tijuana, how everyone in the city sat desperately at the edge of his or her seats, hoping to see the long recession finally end so that the tourist industry could begin to rebuild itself. Miguel had once had all the fares he could handle and made a relatively good living. He recalled a period ten years earlier when Europeans frequented the city and mentioned that German tourists were his favorite fares because they knew how to tip. He hadn't, however, seen a single German who didn't work in government nor had business interests in Tijuana in several years. Miguel also claimed driving cab had gotten worse, slowly, until it had become an economic catastrophe on a personal level because as he put it, "Sometimes at the end of the day, there isn’t even enough to buy milk and eggs for the kids."

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Miguel finally asked me if I was looking for the type of cafe where they served espresso with mineral water and coffees so well-crafted that it was considered bad manners to drink them with cream and sugar, the kind where they roast the beans on the lighter side. "Yes," I responded with a tone of annoyance in my voice. "How long were you going to let us drive around in circles?" "You know," he said, shrugging his shoulders in a way that indicated he was a cab driver and not a mind reader. "I thought you knew what you were doing." "Well, I don't. I mean, I do, but it's my first time here," I said. We sped off in another direction after Miguel mentioned the name of a coffeehouse that I recognized and had planned to visit the following day. As we wound our way through the snarling traffic toward the center of Tijuana, I tried not to laugh out loud at the fact that a Tijuana taxi cab driver knew as much about specialty coffee as me. All of a sudden, a statue of Abraham Lincoln erected at the center of a busy roundabout appeared as we got closer to Sospesso Coffee. I had Miguel pull over in order for me to take a couple of pictures and to Google the fact that one of Mexico's most revered presidents, Benito Juarez, was a good friend of Lincoln, going as far as arresting any Confederates who sought help in Mexico during the U.S. Civil War. I wondered if Honest Abe ever drank coffee, if his imagination had been sparked during the writing of the Gettysburg Address or The Emancipation Proclamation by an early morning cup of coffee. I decided, however, that any research on the matter needed leaving for another day since I was currently in over my head with what was in front of me. The Sospesso Coffee House had a great vibe. It was modern, yet it had something of a just in from the plantation feel. Empty burlap sacks from Costa

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Rican coffee beans doubled as table clothes and corrugated steel panels on one wall added a harmonizing industrial touch. An endless amount of information about coffee and the many processes that went into its production could be gathered from a plethora of graphic panels that hung everywhere on the walls. Outside the front door, a sign proclaimed - Una Experencia Total Con El Cafe... A plaque inside the door announced Sospesso Coffee as only non-American, non- Canadian member of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. The odor of freshly roasted coffee floated in the air as Jorge, the owner, stood at his desk in a back corner of the coffee house until a barista called him over in order to explain to me how a certain cool looking coffee maker worked. Jorge not only came over and explained how the vacuum pump system on a siphon worked, but he also indulged the situation long enough for me to tell him about my special trip all the way from Northern California in order to learn more about specialty coffee in Tijuana. I withheld mentioning my moonlighting or the fact that Lydia was getting pieces of her face snipped off at that very moment because it probably would have killed the student meets master vibe thing we had going on. I also mentioned reading about Sospesso Coffeehouse in a feature article printed in the New York Times a couple of years earlier that made Jorge bow his head in acknowledgement of his international standing. After my introduction, Jorge pointed to the row of diverse coffee making contraptions that lined the bar and had their names printed on small plaques in front of them: Chemex, Aeropress, Haro V 60 Pour Over, Siphon, and French Press. He described how over the course of the last ten years those implements had become some of the most popular extraction methods for making a great cup of coffee.

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After a little small talk, George proceeded to make me Sulawesi coffee in a siphon. The process involved placing a flame from a small butane tank under one of two round beakers that gave the siphon a slight resemblance to the microscopes that we used in our junior high science class. The process began to look similar to something out of a laboratory and Jorge like a mad scientist because he wore a lab coat and a notepad hung from the pocket as he bent over the counter and watched the water come to a boil while rattling off the characteristics of the Indonesian coffee that we were about to sample. His two baristas also watched intently as if they still needed a few lessons on the machine, which George claimed had lost its curiosity over the years but still made one of the best cups of coffee despite the complicated brewing process. “This Sulawesi coffee with this method produces a medium to light body that comes across a little bit silky as you swirl it around in your mouth," George said in English with a thick accent. "A light roast leaves an essence of vegetable with heavy wood notes.” The vegetable essence reminded me of the tomato and roasted pepper drink called Snap E Tom minus the citrus tang, and the woodnotes to which Jorge had alluded were incredibly distinctive. They came across as if I’d chewed into a fresh kilned two by four stud, a flavor that fell on the back of the palate and was brought to bear when I exhaled. The woodnotes also reminded me of the smell of charred wood that lingers in the air after a skill saw rips through a stud. Whatever coffee magic was working its way across my taste buds and sense of smell, the experience manifested memorably because Jorge was standing there guiding me along as this particular roast jumped into the cup and assumed a personality of its own.

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The following day, Miguel mentioned a cafe called La Stazione near where he originally picked me up. The hole in the wall cafe proved to be another gem where I sat back and watched a cadre of knowledgeable young people pour cups of coffee and push them across the counter to their regulars, embellishing the transaction with the catchy phrase, "Enjoy the best that Mexico has to offer." On the way back to the clinic, the conversation turned back to Miguel’s struggles as the cab moved at a snail's pace through the dense traffic. He explained that it was more than the economic difficulties of his job that pushed down on his spirits. An even more demoralizing aspect of driving cab in Tijuana existed. Every once in a while, he’d get told off in English or groups of drunken tourists piled into his cab along Avenida de la Revolucion and asked to be taken to where they could see the victims of the drug war. They wanted to see bodies hanging from bridges, severed heads placed strategically on overpasses as a warning, or some other form of carnage for which the city had recently become internationally notorious. Miguel didn't deny that the city had more than its share of violence but he also claimed that Tijuana hadn’t reached such a low point in the regard for human life that anyone could just set out and randomly find murder victims on the streets. "Those are the days when I feel like finding something that’s more rewarding," he said, as he tapped on the steering wheel, scanning the traffic in the distance. "I guess we all have our days, right?" "We all do," I said. "Mine revolve around my nephew Arcadio who is supposed to still be here, but he isn't. They pass, though, when I realize how much he helped to change my life." I spent the rest of the drive to the clinic describing how Arcadio’s fight with cancer had taught us a lot about pushing back against the uncertainties of life. As I

199 199 talked about Arcadio's illness, I began to envy Miguel because he had both of his kids at home in perfect health and they were living the life that we’d once enjoyed. I hoped our conversation might inspire him to realize how lucky he was even though he lived under some desperately tough circumstances. He got my point. After a while, Miguel turned from describing the economic hardships of working and living in Tijuana to telling me about the positive aspects of his family life. He described how much his kids loved soccer, mentioning that his fourteen-year-old was getting more and more attention for his on field talents. Hearing about Miguel's kids made me think about Arcadio's final days, how they were the polar opposite of the promise inherent in the ritual of passing from childhood into adulthood, the opposite of the happy life that was supposed to be the finale to his parents own sad story. Four days before Arcadio died, we'd been really concerned because he hadn't had a bowel movement in nearly a week. Everyone in the Oncology Department at Valley Children's Hospital encouraged him to go to the bathroom in his diapers, but he refused. His last act of bravery was also an act of defiance - the dignity of using the toilet for the final time. He was adamant and wouldn’t take no for an answer The doctors came and Arcadio flatly told them that despite the fact that his leg was again fractured and as swollen as it had been the previous summer, he was going to get up and walk to the bathroom that was about ten yards from his bed. When they suggested a wheelchair, Arcadio said, "No. I can still walk. I'm going to use my walker and Uncle Eddie is going to walk behind me with his arms around me in case I fall and everyone else can walk next to us." The following twenty minutes were some of the longest moments of my life; I can only imagine what it felt like for Arcadio. As a team of nurses helped Arcadio to his feet, I stood behind him and tightly wrapped one arm around his

200 200 bloated stomach, setting my other hand on his shoulder as he trembled and took tiny steps with the help of his walker until he finally reached the toilet after what felt like an eternity. Finally, the bunch of us then turned him around and guided him down toward the toilet seat as he winced in pain, let out an ear-curdling shriek, and began to sob uncontrollably from the pain. After using the toilet, Arcadio called me over and told me how much better he felt which made the trip back to his bed a lot easier since he no longer suffered from holding it in anymore. He was still in a great deal of pain, the kind that only tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of medicine could keep at bay, but he remained in a kind and loving mood. When we finally got back to his bed and everyone helped to put him and his barely one hundred and sixty-pound body into bed, he pulled me in close. Arcadio was sweating profusely and breathing heavily as he looked around at everyone in the room and said, "That was hard. They didn't think we could do it. Thanks." "You’re welcome. It was only like twenty feet." I said. "No, not the bathroom stuff," Arcadio said. "I mean for everything, for raising me since I was two.” "I love you too, Big Daddy." Arcadio showed me more about courage in those last few days of his life than I’d ever seen in my entire life. On my bad days, I only have to look back at how much Arcadio suffered in order to remember that most of my problems are of my own making. That day in the hospital was the last day we held each other, so the memory is something that comes up often. It helps me to realize that I still have a lot of good living to do and that it might as well be positive. It was also the last time I heard Miguel complain about being a taxi driver.

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When we returned to the clinic, Miguel and I had a long good-bye session. We realized that over the course of our two days together, a good time happened and somehow we influenced each other's lives in positive ways. The clinic's staff had placed Lydia in a wheel chair atop a ramp that led to the roundabout where taxis and ambulances loaded and unloaded their human cargo. They were waiting on me in order to load her into the shuttle so that we could make the short drive back to our hotel room on the other side of the border. As I looked down at Lydia, who was sitting in the wheel chair talking to one of the nurses about how the next few days might or might not pass without complications, I began to sense the real reason for my being so well paid and that the hardest part of the job was still in front of me. The situation called for me to play nurse until we got back to Northern California. The next morning, I went into Lydia's room in order to take her some mineral water and check on her. She looked worse than the day before. The blood on her bandaged head had dried up in hideous rust colored spots that made the new flows of blood look intensely red. Her face and head had swollen to even bigger dimensions. The swelling around her nose pushed outward on the bandages leaving her with what looked like a beak. I eased my way closer to her, bending down toward the bed and waving my hand in front of her face. "I can see you," she said. “They didn't take my eyes out, you know. Come closer, though. I need your help with something.” "What do you need?" I asked. “Put towels around my head and shoulders. We’re going to drain some of the liquid from under my cheeks,” she said. “I need you to steady my hand as I squeeze my palm across my cheek.”

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When I thought things couldn’t get any worse, she reached up and fished the point of some packing from underneath the bandages near a hole the doctor had left beneath her ear in order to drain the wounds. “Doesn't that hurt?" I asked. "Yes, but that's what the pills are for." Lydia responded, as I put my hand on top of hers and together we gently pressed down on her cheeks in the direction of the hole that was below each ear and just above the bandage line. "Is there supposed to be that much blood gushing out of your ears? I should just take you to the emergency room." I said, watching as the towels that I had put around her neck were quickly soaked in a torrent of white and red liquids. "I seriously don't think your face is supposed to be that big." "Stop making it worse. I'm fine. Just leave me some more pills and a couple of those protein drinks where I can reach them." Lydia said attempting to convince me that what had just happened was standard procedure and that it had happened just like the staff at the clinic had said it would. "Go do your coffee thing. I'll text you if I need anything. Bring me my purse so I can buy you some lunch. That way you’ll remember our deal - not a word, ever, to anyone.” I wanted more than one day to explore the San Diego coffee scene, but one day proved enough. I started early as the Millennium Falcon bounced from one end of San Diego to the other, visiting coffeehouses and meeting interesting people in every section of the city. I found a wide range of coffeehouses, some Third Wave and others that had their own vibe going on, places with names like Calabria, Dark Horse, Bird Rock Roasters, and Balsam Tea and Coffee. I checked on Lydia at lunchtime and then returned to exploring San Diego, making it to my final destination as the last traces of daylight were disappearing. Rebecca's in Northpark ended up perfectly grungy and looked like it had multiple

203 203 personalities - something like a book store meets an art gallery meets a garage sale. The barista, a sweet woman named Selena, mentioned that I looked more than tired and pointed to a recliner, ordering me to take a nap before I had any more caffeine, which I was more than happy to do. I woke up two hours later and described my coffee tour to Selena as she made me a mocha and a double espresso. Then I sat with my journal and wrote down that day’s coffee related highlights. In between, I texted Lydia who texted back, saying that she was sleeping comfortably and would be ready to make the trip home in the morning. As I reflected on the coffee scene in San Diego and Tijuana, an ambivalence settled over me. I was attracted to Selena's hospitality, especially her willingness to listen to the details of my project and my description of movement as a way to come to terms with Arcadio's death and a tribute to the way he'd lived his life. I felt warmed over by the innate human capacity to want to take care of those who are feeling down or wounded in some way, a virtuous part of ourselves that never ceases to amaze when it happens. I was also repulsed at the idea of having to take care of Lydia because she had risked a dangerous procedure for the sake of vanity. She had chanced her health for something as fickle as outward appearances and the illusion of beauty while Arcadio had been in a similar situation as a result of a short lifetime of being dealt bad hands. I was at fault too. I hadn't realized that accepting the job offer from Lydia entailed visiting a hospital setting for the first time since Arcadio's death and that meant reliving some of the worst days of our life together. Luckily, I would be returning to my regular life in the Central Valley the following day.

CHAPTER TWELVE: ON MINNEAPOLIS, COFFEE, DRUNKARDS, RAMEN AND THE LOVELY APOLLONIA

Minneapolis Spring 2015 I’m sitting in my warm bed in Turlock, California. The time is just after one in the morning on April 13, 2015. The time zones worked in my favor earlier tonight. At 6 pm, I dipped my hands into the water along the banks of the Mississippi River and gazed up at the Minneapolis skyline for the final time. By 11:30 pm, San Francisco was in my rearview mirror as the Millennium Falcon sped across the Bay Bridge into Oakland and headed east on Interstate 580 towards Stockton and the Central Valley. A long trip comes clearly into view only after distance separates the event from the reflection, so I’m thinking in abstractions right now. It feels good, however, to have finally visited the Midwest. Minneapolis’s specialty coffee scene was a pleasant surprise, rivaling any city on the west coast. When I found Peace Coffee, it was on a busy side street past some massive, grain silos that paralleled the metro line at a point where downtown Minneapolis was still a bluish outline on a distant panorama to the north. Two story, barn shaped houses lined the streets of the neighborhood. Their yards held rusted out Ninja Turtle swing sets and deflated playground balls, trapped for the late winter under piles of cracked limbs and leaves. As I made my way toward Peace Coffee, the exterior decorations of the houses told me that the occupants in this neighborhood lived in the same tax brackets as most of the people that I knew and had grown up with in California. The willingness of the people who passed me on the street to say hello and offer a smile reminded me that Midwesterners have a reputation for friendliness.

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I plugged my cell phone into an outlet, and set my bag next to the stool where I planned to sit. Standing in line, the potential of Peace Coffee began to open up. Two overhead placards, which were hand painted works of art that depicted colorful scenes, contained the café’s menu. The smell of fresh coffee and oven fresh pastries swirled in the air as I continued to study the offerings. I approached the counter where a preppy looking barista with stubble on his jaw and thick, black glasses staffed the cash register. He kept swiping at his brown hair, which he combed to one side and fell over one eye. His shoulders drooped down over his body, which gave him a non-threatening appearance and it was obvious that his late twenties beer belly had been forming for some time. He was quick witted, however, and possessed an undeniable ease to which the people in line responded favorably with their own displays of humor. When I stepped towards the register, the man caught me by surprise because he thrust a pointed finger into the air like John Travolta on the album cover of Saturday Night Fever and simultaneously jumped into the air, landing on the ground with a wide-open stance. He bobbed up and down as he rolled his hands in waves across his chest to the beat of the music broadcast over the café’s speaker system, which at that moment happened to be Depeche Mode. He dipped one last time and then jumped again, doing a full three sixty while letting out a small cry. His finger came within an inch of my chest as he blurted out, “Welcome to Minneapolis! I'm James and I know why you are here.” It was apparent that James had overdosed on the supply of the Alchemy Blend 13, so I took a step back not knowing what to make of his performativity. I wasn't complaining in the least because there is something inspiring about people who enjoy their work and seem to be living in the moment. Besides, James seemed

206 206 to embody the café’s free spirited motif, which I had gathered from the name of the café and the repeated hippy signage, had something to do with being chill and open to the universe in a way that applauded new comers. Peace Coffee proved to be a great venue because I was able to get a feel for the people of Minneapolis, which I only knew through books and television. I moved towards the counter and said, “I’m here for the Association of Writing Professionals Conference and because I want to check out the coffee scene.” “I knew it. You guys have been coming in all morning,” James said, still bouncing up and down to the beat of the music. “Where you coming from?” “The Central Valley - the part of California that nobody hears about,” I responded. “Your bag gives you away,” Patrick added with one last rhythmic clap to Depeche Mode. “You’ll like the conference. I'm in the MFA Program at Brocklin and we’re hosting, so I kinda know how much went into it. I’ll tell you where to find the killer coffee spots too.” “Thanks,” I said. “How about some of the Alchemy 13.” ****************************************************************** The sun had disappeared behind dark clouds on our last morning in Minneapolis. Ricardo, a friend from Fresno State who was about to earn an MA in English Studies, and I walked in the general direction of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and our final destination, Urban Bean which was located at 25th and Lyndale. I listened as Ricardo described his life and his family's humble background. He talked about his parents, how his dad was an immigrant from Mexico who had worked in the fields and spent all of his money on beer, suffering a lonely existence in California until he met his mom (A life that resembled my

207 207 former one but something that I chose not to bring up). Urban Bean was the last coffeehouse on some food writer named Molly Molgren’s list of top ten coffeehouse in the city, an article from Eater Magazine that I found on the Internet and decided to follow. I’d managed two previous visits to the museum, which held some excellent works. This time I aimed to spend time with my favorite piece, a work by El Greco titled Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple. Picasso, Monet, Renoir were all there and I wanted Ricardo to see them. I wanted him to watch the branches swirl in Van Gogh’s Olive Trees. I hoped that by inviting Ricardo to the museum he would learn that there is more to the world of art than the limited offerings in the Central Valley and Fresno. I wanted Ricardo to learn early what had taken me half a lifetime to learn, which was that art moves the spirit in powerful ways. I showed him the painting by El Greco and told him about some of the ghostlike individuals in the work. They had been El Greco’s patrons and real life historical figures of 16th Century Spain, which I recalled from studying the painter’s life in Madrid the previous summer. As we made our way down West 24th Ricardo told me about his plan to be a high school teacher and his feisty Portuguese girlfriend, whom he hoped to one day marry. We also inhabited the conversational space of ethnography. Mexico is home to a diverse collection of peoples including a rich heritage of Lebanese and Syrians, which we both knew was the reason Ricardo looked so exactingly Middle Eastern that if he were to don a thwab, he would look completely at home in the desserts of the Arabian Peninsula. I learned that Ricardo was much wiser than his twenty-four years. The fact that, unlike many of my friends who tended to roll their eyes when I went on about learning about coffee and food, he showed an interest in coffee gave us a sense of

208 208 purpose as we made our way through the icy Lyndale section of the city. I’d already been impressed by Ricardo back in Fresno because of his mastery of anything having to do with computers and sureness regarding his future ambitions. During our learning theory classes at the university, he always arrived to class with well-crafted lesson plans that the rest of us looked at with envy. I was glad to add another person to the list of capable and inspiring people who’ve crossed my path, models for the rest of us who stumble along, attempting to cobble together some semblance of vision through piece meal efforts. Walking down the street towards Urban Bean, I again realized that sharing a week in Minneapolis with three young people had helped to fill the empty hole created by Arcadio’s death - in a way that I hadn't anticipated, something I was beginning to understand had been happening for a long time with a rotating cast of characters. Urban Bean came in dead last in my re-ranking of Molly Mollgren’s list. I explained to Ricardo why it was the suckiest coffeehouse in Minneapolis. The barista had not even bothered to make eye contact after I’d repeatedly tried to engage him about the finer points of the coffee being offered. The coffeehouse was on life support in terms of aesthetic appeal, mostly because aesthetic appeal was non-existent except for the monotonous yellow hue coming from the oak furniture and the distressed wood flooring. The coffee menu, which consisted of badly pulled shots of espresso and mediocre pour overs - an effort of going through the motions without an ounce of passion for the craft - gave us a poor example. I made sure to relate to Ricardo that I wasn’t an expert on coffee, but that I could tell a bad shot of espresso from a good one and when people were being purposely unfriendly.

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I also felt obligated tell Ricardo about the magic which had transpired two days before at another coffeehouse from the list. I described why Five Watt Coffee had proved the coolest coffee house that I’d been to in Minneapolis and that the trendy cafe was thriving in all areas of Third Wave ambition - an incredible community space that felt diverse, offered remarkable drinks, and held an artisan spirit that was palpable the minute I walked through the door. I described how the manager Jill who, after finding out that I was in town partly to explore the coffee scene, came out from behind the counter and offered me a complimentary drink called a Busy Beaver followed by another signature drink called The Big Easy. The Big Easy was my favorite because it consisted of cold pressed coffee, chicory, nutmeg simple syrup, black walnut bitters, and cream and was so jaw dropping delicious somebody might appropriately try to describe it as (cheesy cliché filters momentarily disabled) to die for. I told Ricardo that it was seriously that good. Jill also walked me through the rest of the coffee menu that featured drinks with unflappable names like: The Hibernator, The Gin Bitters Basil Smash, The Holy Mole, The May Day, and The Kung Fu Generation. Jill was an artisan who cared enough about the craft that she was willing to share her passion with others. She had put everything aside in order to help me learn about this aspect of specialty coffee - signature drinks that are as much regional as they are individual expressions of coffee professionals who staff diverse cafes. “Compared to this,” I said to Ricardo, pointing to the dude who had just made our coffee and was still in his own world in the blasé surroundings. ****************************************************************** It is April 10 and big fluffy snowflakes are falling in between the skyscrapers onto Nicolette Ave in Downtown Minneapolis. Kyle, Ricardo, and Sam, three of my graduate school friends who are also attending the Association

210 210 of Professional Writers Conference, walk a few paces ahead of me toward the metro. It's not even 10 am and we've already had a good laugh, resulting from a video we just shot for my food and travel blog, which is supposed to feature diverse stops along my International Coffeehouse Tour 2015. My blog is two years old but doesn’t actually exist. My blog operates like a still coalescing device that sits out of reach on the technological horizon but comes in handy because people take my project more seriously when they think that it's tied to some tangible media production. The end result is that I’m always throwing around references to my blog even though it’s short lifespan consisted of two weeks and a couple of posts in Italy two years ago. In the video, I climbed up next to the famous statue of Mary Tyler Moore, put my arms around her as snow covered both of our heads, and implored my soon to be audience to follow us along - as we explore the amazing specialty coffee scene in America's heartland. The short video - complete with hand gestures and a drawn out final waving in of my fans toward unknown destinations behind me - went off without a hitch until I mistakenly finished by saying that it was great to be in Miami. I’m pretty sure it hardly ever snows in Miami and that there aren't too many statues of Mary Tyler Moore in any of their city centers - God Bless Floridians if there are but it's not likely, making the video a little more than an outtake. The scene, however, did produce enough goofiness and journalistic ineptitude for us to create our own blizzard of laughs right there on a busy sidewalk as people crowded by and snow continued to fall. I'd already been the focus of some grad school fun because my roommates decided to have a laugh at my expense last night on the twenty fifth floor of the Marriot City Center Hotel. The light mood probably had something to do with the fact that we were away from Fresno and the mid-semester pressures of graduate

211 211 school. Kyle, in between spasms of laughter, climbed off one of the beds in order to show me a video that was already getting a bunch of attention from our friends on social media. In an old man's gristly voice and wrinkling his face as he flapped his jaw up and down like old people sometimes do, Kyle looked into the camera and reported: “Um, this is Eddie Gomez of the, um, International Coffeehouse Tour, um, 2015. Um, we've been everywhere and there is no more coffee. We, um, drank it all. Um, I repeat, we're all out of coffee. There is no more. The tour is like, um, over and stuff." I tried hard not to get mad at my roommates for making fun of my ambition to learn more about coffee and food, despite the fact that the scene felt like it belonged on a playground rather than in a nice hotel. Twenty-three year olds who had their entire lives in front of them making fun of me did make me a little uncomfortable. The object of their joke concerned himself with precious time ticking off life’s master clock because he flushed his twenties and half of his thirties down the urinals of shabby bars with names like Ted’s Beer House and the 144 Club. Obviously, the urgency of my project as an attempt to make up for squandered time and even years was completely lost on them. I pick up my stride in order to catch up to my friends, as they get closer to the metro. I look up at the Capella Tower, barely able to see the top because swirls of snow hide its upper reaches, finally passing into the metro car and the warmth that feels, out of nowhere, good. I’m not sure why, but as I settle into my seat, a reflection takes me in an unexpected direction. I think of how these last three years of going from place to place in order to learn about people and food has consisted of learning to live in the moment. I wonder how much longer this movement will

212 212 continue since at the bottom of all my plans there is always a lingering notion; I’m still only on loan from my former life as a laborer at the cheese plant. Waves of gratitude hit me. The whole thing - my return to school and by default my interaction with people two generations younger - has been an example of the journey being greater than the destination. I don’t really know how to describe it except to say that I really feel lucky to have had a chance to make something of my life after living recklessly for years. After all, if school hadn’t happened, I’d be home in California driving away from the cheese plant after pulling a twelve-hour graveyard shift. Inevitably, my debt to Arcadio comes rushing to the surface - the moment extending itself so that we are now watching downtown fade into the distance as the metro heads in the direction of the Mall of America - because I often self-centeredly tell people about going back to school without mentioning that it was Arcadio’s idea at first. After my return, he regularly reminded not to quit because it would mean never leaving the cheese plant. Incredibly, I’m now in Minneapolis four years after the fact, overcome by the moment and also touched by a deep desire to reach out and thank Arcadio, but he’s nowhere in sight. The only thing I can do is talk to him as if he were here, which I do but never told anyone about. Under my breath, sitting across from Ricardo and Sam, I whisper: Come on Big Daddy it’s going to be a fun day. We are going to cross the Mississippi and go to the Groveland section of the city so that we can show these kids how to track down a good coffee house. My friends don’t know that I'd gone out this morning, before they woke up. One of my favorite things to do when exploring a new city is to walk the downtown streets before they get too busy. I ended up at a spot where the city is building a new stadium for the Vikings. It wasn’t snowing this morning, so I was

213 213 able to watch as steelworkers and laborers moved around like tiny ants in the time- consuming unison of a shared objective, drinking coffee and smoking in between stints of hard work. I took in the scene from near a chain link fence at the edge of the construction site. Concrete truck after concrete truck roared past as overhead cranes delivered materials to various sites in and around the half-built stadium. Crisp voices and the pop of hammers on steel and wood carried across the complex to where I stood, interrupted by the occasional noise of buses and cars. At first, I thought of how new Minneapolis felt to me. Then I realized it shouldn’t have felt that way at all because I’d been here before even though I’d never actually visited. Last semester my students and I spent a good chunk of our class analyzing the power of media to construct realities for us, including introducing us to geographic locations as characters in the American narrative, diverse cities we’ve never actually visited but to which we can relate because we’ve seen them repeatedly on television. I realized - staring at the orange outline of a frame that would later hold the retractable roof as the city’s giant skyscrapers loomed in the background - that most Americans have an idea what life is like in Minneapolis programmed into our imaginations, placed there by the far-reaching hand of media and popular culture. For some people, knowledge of Minneapolis results from having watched the Mary Tyler Moore Show decades ago. For a later generation, closeness to the city might be rooted in the football related antics of the popular television show Coach that aired two decades after the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Others have made an association to the state’s sports teams and figures synonymous with Minneapolis such as Fran Tarkenton, Harmon Killebrew, or Kirby Puckett. Purple People Eaters, Governor Jessie “The Body” Ventura or Cindy Nelson on a

214 214 downhill slope. For my generation, a connection to Minneapolis resulted from the ordinary row houses and streets scenes passing by in the background as Prince rode around on his motorcycle, during the early years of his career as depicted in the movie Purple Rain. We love that movie. As kids, we somehow understood the movies thick plot twists which included failure and redemption, a narrative beyond a fictionalized account of a rising star's yet to be realized dreams. Purple Rain felt real in a way the others didn't. We felt Prince's struggle and rooted for him. It also had something very much to do with what Prince represented. A person of color with the power to shape American culture was suddenly center stage and it had everything to do with his musical genius and the potential of art to tell stories and inspire. The storied movie made us feel like anything was possible even though we knew better. Prince possessed power over music and women. We admired his charm and his laid-back approach to life and his girlfriend Apollonia became our neo classical goddess clad in a black leather body suit and high heels. To junior high kids in 1984, Purple Rain came across as a precarious and erotic collection of stories that we couldn't quite bring into focus but whose subjects we would later understand with much more clarity - sex, personal politics, and substance abuse. We fell in love with the whole thing, casting Minneapolis into our collective memory as a real place with real people that existed outside the made up images of California and Hollywood’s manufactured social and political landscapes. ****************************************************************** At the Lake Street station, we exited the metro and prepared to take the number thirty- eight bus across the river in order to check out Dogwood Coffee and Kopplin Coffee which were both highly rated and proved to be capable

215 215 coffeehouse but not too terribly exciting - in the sort of way anything Midwestern seems unadorned to Californians. The excitement came from other sources. As we made our way down the metro platform and toward the street, I fell behind looking at a map on the wall, cross-referencing it with the notes in my journal, which was a fat, black book that resembled a Bible. Leafing through my journal in the warm room, I saw Sam shaking from the cold like a little Chihuahua as he talked to Kyle and Ricardo near the bus stop outside. At that moment, two men came barreling down a flight of stairs from the metro platform above. I don’t know how much of what followed had to do with my journal and the fact that I wore a black, long sleeved shirt that was buttoned up to the top and made me look priestly. The first of the two men - both were obviously drunk and reeked like they’d been at it for a couple of weeks - tripped on the last stair into the room and darted across the floor, bouncing off the wall next to me as he tried to stop himself from falling down. His friend’s entrance was not as grand. He only trudged over to the nearest wall and then held onto the bench over which he stood, never speaking, just rocking back and forth. The tall skinny one, whose face was full of gray stubble that covered up his pock marked cheeks, wore an old leather jacket that made him look like a criminal without any of coolness that leather sometimes imparts on its wearers and which ends most times with a respectable look. The man looked me up and down with one eye. He seemed to sober up, out of some newfound respect which he accorded me as he shook his chin in approval after looking at what he might have thought was a Bible in my hand. He leaned in close to me and I almost gagged because he

216 216 had breath so potent that it seemed to solidify into clouds of poisonous gas, which hung between us. He stuck his hands into his leather jacket, looked in my direction, again, with his one sober eye, and said, “Padre, I’m no good. I’m a sinner and a drunk, but you probably already figured that out. Haven’t you?” “It’s all right. No one is judging,” I responded. “I should be at home with my wife, but she kicked me out. Look at what kind of people I have resorted to hanging around,” he said as he motioned toward his friend who was standing silently over the bench, still wobbling. I nodded in recognition of the fact that the other man seemed to resemble the poor life choices that drinkers often make and the subsequent run down look they acquire. “What am I supposed to do?” he continued. “What do I do Padre? Tell me!” “You gotta put the bottle down," I said to him forcefully. "The bottle is poison for someone like you. Secondly, you must go back to your wife and the church, and go to rehab immediately,” I continued while making my way around him and out the door. I caught up with Kyle, Ricardo, and Sam and we began to make our way towards another bus stop further down Lake Street. I could hear the man’s voice trailing off to some even more hopeless place, as he called out to me, begging me to stay, “Padre, don’t leave me. What rehab?” Instead of finding coffee magic on the bus ride across the river, we ended up at White Castle, which doesn’t exist in California. The detour from the coffee tour was fine because it allowed my friends to enjoy themselves while still helping me to navigate through the unknown city. Not to mention that it would allow Kyle and me to continue a semi-serious food related conversation that we had been

217 217 having all semester - his love of fast food and my need to criticize him for it. I liked to study food cultures, and he liked to study fast food cultures and wolf down anything crafted in a deep fryer. My Facebook post consisted of serious contemplations on food and travel, while his posts were tributes to Taco Bell’s latest miracle creation or homages to Wendy’s and the universal respect that his generation held for the sacred institution which had created the junior bacon cheeseburger. We never debated, though, because it was all in good fun. Instead, I was happy that they had checked off an item from their foodie bucket list. While they kept ordering from every corner of the menu, I took a bus to explore Dogwood Coffee. After returning, the table at which they sat was nearly invisible from the pile of empty food containers that covered it, and they seemed to be in a satisfaction-induced coma. Actually, they looked like heroin addicts after they’ve had a good dose and are nodding off, until they came back to life when I offered to capture the moment for posterity. In the shot, they looked as if they had just scaled Mt. Everest, basking in the celebratory aftermath of the undertaking, with bits of food stuck to the corners of their mouths and glazed over, grease soaked eyes. Snow continued to fall as we waited for the bus in front of the famous burger joint and shot another video for my soon to be created blog, which we all took seriously because we knew that when that blog was up and running, it was going to be good. “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to The International Coffeehouse/ White Castle Tour 2015. This is Eddie Gomez reporting. I am in Minneapolis where we have breaking news. Three of the tour’s beloved support staff, graduate students from California, have overdosed on nasty ass cheeseburgers and chili cheese fucked everything at White Castle on Lake Street. The victims are said to be

218 218 recovering and heading to the Mall of America for the antidote - Hot dog on a Stick and some Italian Food from Sbarro.” The Angry Catfish Bicycle and Coffee Shop proved to be an excellent place where the smell of new rubber tires mixed with the scent of freshly roasted coffee (another first in terms of motifs - coffee and bicycles). The place had good vibes all around and served hand-made drinks with beans from Intelligentsia Coffee in Chicago. It didn’t matter that all three of my friends ordered sugary drinks like you find at Starbucks, because we had reached our objective - a real Third Wave coffee shop. I ordered a Columbian - San Jose Ruby - unique for its super balanced, intensely spiced aroma and tastes notes of allspice, plum, apricot, and baked apple. After that, we split up. They went to the Mall of America and I headed over to a coffeehouse named Five Watt that was located near a restaurant where our group would later meet with other conference attendees in order to have dinner and attend a reading hosted by several literary magazines. Kyle, who has a deep interest in Japanese culture and had studied in Japan, sat next to me at the Moto-I Ramen and Sake House where we gathered for dinner. I remembered my recent vow to learn more about ramen. Taehyung and Sarah Namjoom were always insisting that I expand my food repertoire by checking out Bay Area ramen houses. Although we graduated from UC Merced and went our separate directions, we still met up for dinner occasionally, and they always sent me a steady flow of food related information on social media, especially Whats App. Kyle knew a lot about Ramen. So did Sam. I had real ramen one time before and admittedly, when Taehyung and Sarah Namjoon first began to talk about it a couple of years before our graduate school trip to Minneapolis, I couldn’t understand why they were making such a big deal out of noodles. After

219 219 all, we’ve all had ramen in our cupboards, those pink and lime green packages with little aluminum squares of shrimp or beef flavor to which you can add fresh veggies or even an egg if you want to get fancy. Moto I was good timing because by now I was infinitely curious, especially since I had missed the bus on the ramen craze that had taken hold of the food culture over the course of the last ten years. Yelp and other sites let me know of Moto-I’s ranking as one of the top ramen houses in the US. We started with appetizers as Ricardo and Sam sat across from Kyle and me. First a flight of Sake came. I abstained but watched my friends. I watched Sam’s face distort through the clear liquid as he picked up the first of four Sake glasses set in front of him. In a few minutes, the effect washed over him. He spoke louder and a glassy finish covered his eyes. Sam reached out for the second cup, tilted his head back and announced to Ricardo and Kyle who were busy with their own flights of Sake: “Wow, this shit is really strong.” Kyle who hadn’t even finished his first glass laughed at Sam and said, “I told you, you’re a dumb fuck.” “Fuck you,” Sam said as he polished off the third cup and stabbed his fork in the direction of an appetizer. Everything was well in the world. Our appetizers featured deep fried calamari that was great but nothing special. Popcorn tossed in duck fat, which was tasty in that way that everything that meets rendered duck fat becomes tasty, followed. One Holy Grail of deliciousness - an appetizer of thick chunks of fried pork belly, marinated in a mixture of what I suspected to be something like rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, and a sweet wine resembling Madeira but probably sake proved over the top delicious. The pieces of pork bellies were blackened to

220 220 perfection. I tried to explain to my friends what blackening meant and how it is a spice blend with three parts Hungarian paprika but they mostly ignored me, choosing to focus on the sake menu’s description of the varieties they were throwing back. When my Classic Pork Ramen arrived, one look told me that whoever was in the kitchen was a well-trained artisan. The broth had a depth that only bone marrow can impart - light and minimally salted. The chef’s knife work had masterfully given life to the steaming bowl’s composition. The pieces of pork belly, meat from the shoulder, and even the scallions were all custom cut with a regard to the sum of the bowls parts and having everything to do with how the pieces would tumble across the palate. An egg sat quietly in its corner, the yoke ready to be punctured, ready to flow and add new dimensions to the other ingredients, which could be plucked at in infinite combinations. Underlying the flavors was a spice I didn’t necessarily recognize but later found was Togarashi. The noodles brought the whole thing together. They were fresh and added to the bowl a balance of textures, creamy and snappy, while anchoring the bowl to a stationary place on the flavor spectrum, away from the overwhelming pull of the savory side. I reached out for another piece of pork, realizing that I hadn’t thought about Arcadio since we boarded the Metro earlier in the day.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: IN SEARCH OF COMMUNITY WITH MEXICAN AHAB

West Coast Spring 2015 January: San Francisco, Noe Valley - My cousin Felix and I are relaxing at a table in front of Bernie's in Noe Valley. It’s nothing special, just another café where gorgeous professionals get their daily dose of caffeine and sun themselves and their expensive dogs on an outside patio. Felix and I reunited recently after almost twenty years of not speaking to each other over a disagreement on a hot, drunken afternoon in the mid-nineties. While my life played out against the booze soaked backdrop of a drug-infested hotel, he disappeared and became a singer in a heavy metal band and something of a rock star. Unfortunately, Felix was recently involved in an accident and had to find something else to do, which was to attend film school where he’s about to graduate. We are waiting on Jessie, a friend of ours from high school who shares a house in San Jose with Felix and his daughter. We’ve decided to let bygones be bygones. We are, after all, sorry for missing each other's lives, especially since we were like brothers growing up. I’m helping Felix edit the script for his short film, Ricky, which is a fictionalized account of a guy from our neighborhood in Manteca who used to get picked on but finally got mad enough to kick the shit out of anyone who fucked with him. Earlier, we canvased every coffeehouse in The Mission, which gave us a chance to talk about old times and fondly remember the fiestas his dad and mom used to throw when we were kids. I look up from Google Maps and Felix expresses his desire to help with my tour, an offer pushed along serendipitously by comparative advantage and the reality that somehow we are both now aspiring

222 222 artists. He knows the city well and tells me that our mid-life adventures are only getting underway. I tell him to let it roll and we toast with raised cappuccinos. February: San Francisco, North beach - Taehyung and Sarah Namjoon, my friends from UC Merced and former advisors to my restaurant reviews, are all grown up. They exist in the real world now, the one they used to love hearing about. Taehyung is slowly working her way toward graduate school in Vancouver by working at her mom’s store in Fresno. Sarah Namjoom works at a chic start up in the Silicon Valley. They thought it would be a good idea to channel the energies left behind by Francis Ford Coppola and other famous writers who’ve written seminal works at Cafe Trieste. We just came from City of Lights Bookstore where we took selfies and reminisced about our time at UC Merced. On the way here, we visited an Italian cafe where the cannoli were mediocre and the espresso horrible, which actually meant that it was in some way authentic. The stop gave us a chance to extend, for a minute, our short-lived careers as food critics. Sarah Namjoon asked what made the cannoli mediocre, so I told her that it tasted like refrigerator. They accused me of exaggerating, but we laughed at the description, anyway. North Beach cannoli and probably North Beach itself, which according to old timers is a sliver of its former Italian self, is a commodification of the romantic ideal, like the gondola rides through The Venetian in Las Vegas, I explained to my two friends. Our reunion feels good, an opportunity to explore this crowded, dirty epicenter of the world’s cuisines with a more mature version of my friends. Sarah Namjoon after we exhaust our conversations about neighborhoods in transition and our former lives as undergraduates (a topic worn down to dust because our lives are connected via What's App) says, "This place is for old people. Let’s go to The Mission. You can show us that place you’re always talking about, Four Barrel Coffee."

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Before we leave Café Trieste, my friends offer to help with my tour, which means what is it has meant since the day I met them, which is that they'll act as my technology liaisons and help me to relate to an increasingly youth centered world. March: Stockton, California - Empresso Coffee inhabits the lobby of a restored movie theatre on Pacific Avenue, a charismatic blend of throwback glamour and Stockton grunge. I came to check out the coffee scene and meet one of my oldest friends, but my attention splits between him and a Yama Cold Brew System that is towering over one of the counters. Brandon is telling me that his mom has failed to get better since her latest stroke. He is also updating me on his lawsuit, a matter bogged down in litigation for at least another two years. His lawsuit stems from tumbling off a four-story roof on a construction site in 2010, fracturing his skull and shattering an arm, an ankle, five ribs, and two discs in his lower back. Brandon’s survival is a miracle and had everything to do with his physical strength, which is something I know about because as kids we got into fights on a regular basis and I came up short just about every time. In high school, Brandon was a beast during football practice, so everyone scattered during hitting drills in an effort to avoid partnering with him. I wish Brandon had better news because the Burtons have been like a second family to me for nearly thirty-five years. My love for them stems partially from their not abandoning me during the darkest hours of my time drinking, always saving a place for me in their home, long after high school and well into my recovery when I attended Christmas dinner with Arcadio in tow. Brandon is going on about mounting bills and the effects on his wife and son. I see the anguish in his face, so I shoot him a prayer asking God to give him the strength to hang on while the lawyers attempt to starve him out. I pray for his mama too. Suzanne is also as tough they come and has always been a forceful presence in our

224 224 lives. Brandon tells me that my having turned my life around inspires him very much, that it’s something he thinks about a lot as he tries to reassemble his own life. Before we leave in order to visit Suzanne at a nearby rest home, Brandon convinces the barista to show us how the glass towered cold brew system works and let us try some samples, which are smooth and mellow as advertised. April: Oakland, California - I've known for some time that my investigation of the specialty coffee scene on the west coast will eventually have to transition from visiting coffeehouses to making friends with coffee insiders, which is a thing that is harder to pull off than it sounds. You get the door slammed in your face and then inspiration comes riding in out of nowhere. I just left the grand opening of Counter Cultures Coffee’s roasting facility and lab in Emeryville. Counter Culture Coffee is a long established coffee wholesaler with roots in North Carolina, known for its sustainable models, a pioneering version of the Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel, and the functionality of their roasting facilities, which double as training centers and social spaces for both professionals and regular people like me. I made great contacts in the Bay Area coffee scene and walked away with a ton of swag, (Whoop Whoop) which included a t-shirt, a mug, three pounds of Ethiopian Coffee and several sets of colorful post cards. I had a good feeling about making the trip to the Bay Area after seeing the event posted online. The trip was entirely justified because I got another chance to practice cupping and ended up in the same room with Counter Culture's President, Brett Smith. We had a remarkable conversation about coffee and he said my project sounded unique and that I should follow my dreams, which felt good because most people to whom I describe my tour usually start rolling their eyes after the word international. Brett, who despite being one of the most important people in coffee,

225 225 was engaging and the polar opposite of the some of the haters that I’ve been running into recently. He was a smooth businessperson too, convincing me to order my coffee online from his company, before some important looking people whisked him away. He presented an even deal, a low price to pay for some much needed encouragement. May: San Francisco, Haight Ashbury - Felix, Jesse, and I, our recently reassembled group consisting of my cousin, an old friend from high school, and me, engaged in the touristy things that people who aren’t from the neighborhood usually entertain themselves with. We attempted to meditate at the Eastern Spiritual Center, tried on Fonzi like leather jackets at the vintage shops, and ate gross ass Escape from New York Pizza. We also walked along Haight Street that first Friday in May and listened to junior musicians playing tired songs about going to San Francisco even though they were already in San Francisco. I’d hoped to run into Stanley who works at Stanza Coffee and whom I often visit in order to talk coffee, but he was off that Friday. As we finished our pour overs, a commotion started outside and we looked up to see several large groups of young people marching down the street, helped along by the beat of hip hop music and old jams. Felix opened the front door to Stanza Coffee and asked the first passerby, “What’s going on, my dude?” The rapper kid looked up and said, “Let’s go, man, It’s a flash mob, we’re gonna pop off some old school shit in the park!” The three of us looked at each other, nodded our heads, and darted for the door. Flash Mobs don’t happen in the Central Valley, so we eagerly settled into the procession of costumed people, Mc’s, and DJs who along with their entourages pushed portable turntables and speaker systems in the direction of Golden Gate

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Park. The crowd continue to swell until there were over a hundred and fifty people scattered on the grassy knolls around Hippy Hill. The event turned out to be a celebration of break dancing and its predecessor popping, two things that swept through our neighborhoods during successive summers as kids during the early 1980's in the Central Valley. Although, we were just going with the flow of things, I couldn’t help but think about how break dancing in the park suddenly represented a manifestation of another community into the center of which the three of us could jump, meeting new friends while recalling one of our favorite childhood phenomena. Dispersed among the crowds were professional dance troupes that came alive with the suave rhythms and whistling melodies that poured out of the impromptu DJ stands. The dancers performed impossible whirling contortions with their twenty-year-old bodies, which were intermixed with popping standards like the whaler or the vibrator man. I couldn’t help myself and jumped into one of the circles for about twenty seconds, sucking in my stomach and doing the tick while my feet attempted something robotic. I ended up looking like disabled person trying to break out of his shell, so I quickly fled into the anonymity of the crowd while Felix and Jesse recorded a video and laughed their heads off. On our way back toward Haight Street, Felix stopped on the sidewalk across from Whole Foods and pointed his cane into the air, making giant magic like swirls and said, “Where the hell else is something like that going to happen? God, I love this motherfucking city.” June: San Francisco, Soma - I see a little silhouette of a man Affogato, Affogato, will you do the Fandango Thunderbolt and lightning

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Very, very frightening me’ (Galileo) Galileo. (Galileo) Galileo, Galileo Figaro Magnifico-o-o-o-o. All right, you caught me. I changed the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody to include affogato, which is what I am eating and drinking right now at Sight Glass Coffee in the South of Market District. Yup, my blood orange and olive oil ice cream doused with a single origin espresso from Rwanda is so good that it caused me to burst into flames and start singing Bohemian Rhapsody. Just kidding, but it is a great version of the Italian after dinner classic. Google affogato. Google Sight Glass Coffee. It's a marvelous vibe and completely Third Wave. The affogato bar is upstairs on a mezzanine built into the rafters of the open ceiling that overlooks the café below and a roaster situated near the entrance of the wood and metal ornamented warehouse. I’ve been spending a lot of time here this summer because Felix has been editing Ricky up the street at the United Nations Plaza where the Art Institute of California has its studios. Felix was right when he said in January that we'd run into some good times in the city. In March during the Chinese New Year Celebrations Felix, Jessie, and I had a first world version of the movie The Warriors when Felix’s friend from San Jose joined the three of us. Bart was good to have around because he is a big, bodyguard type who looks like a young Dan Connor from the show Roseanne. We started walking near the Embarcadero and ended up in Chinatown where we bought roman candles and sent them up next to the moon that was hovering above the Trans America Building. I would use the word mayhem to describe that night because a thick layer of smoke hung in the air as fireworks of every kind exploded

228 228 around us as we made our way down the crowded streets. Every time a street shaking explosion stopped us in our tracks, a bigger one was set off in another direction as snaking dragons and drum ensembles rushed past us or darted in front of us. The cops, clustered at the end of the blocks, just sat there looking around, unable to do a thing about the disorder. The reason that I had joined up with Felix and Jessie was that I attended coffee classes that afternoon at Four Barrel Coffee, a place where the public gathers to sit around on coffee bags in a place called The Home Room as nice people give them history lessons on coffee and teach them how to cup coffee. The plan was for me to help Felix with script to Ricky, again, the following day. We ended up walking in circles for hours, though, trying to make it back to our hotel in Soma on foot, but we kept getting cut off by the parade detours, explosions, and real gangs. Felix couldn’t walk that fast and we were cut off from Uber, so by the time we made it back to the hotel and collapsed into bed it was two in the morning. Felix is over at the Whitcomb Hotel on Market Street right now at an Art Institute of California sponsored event where he’s trying to pitch his skills as a movie director. Felix, I should mention looks like what I imagine to be a burly Mexican American version of Captain Ahab. He also looks like Fidel Castro but without the black mark that runs down Ahab’s forehead - awash in a thick beard, dense glasses, a trench coat, and a cane which he uses as a prop and which looks like one of those hidden away shotguns. In other words, he looks every bit the part of movie director or...sea captain. An added bonus to the persona is a sideways limp resulting from his accident and the perpetual dissatisfaction with everything and everyone, especially Jessie.

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Talk about luck. They let me into the event early, confusing me for a soon to be graduate of the Art Institute of California, so I was not so accidently the first one to make it up to the second floor balcony where a buffet greeted the event’s guests. Talk about delicious ammonia smelling goat cheese and steaming roast beef pushed deep and thick into silver dollar rolls. I'm not trying to make sense of how great food always seems to find me, just happy to not dip into my budget for an expensive lunch somewhere in the city. Just now, walking over here, I saw a drug fight. It was a sad thing to witness and gave me a lot to think about in terms of how good the universe has been to me since I put the bottle down. This man and woman were yelling at each other on the corner of Howard and Seventh when the man started pulling on her purse. She refused to let go and the purse exploded, sending about forty syringes along with rubber straps and tablespoons tumbling onto the sidewalk. The woman bent over, fished out something form the pile of drug paraphernalia, and took off running. The man started walking around the circle of syringes, talking to himself, and calling out to random people and accusing them of helping to steal his dope until he finally walked over to the building on the corner and started to piss on the wall just as the cops pulled up. Sight Glass Coffee is worth the effort, though, even with constant big city buzz outside and the occasional human turd in the middle of the block. Sitting here in the affogato bar after having witnessed the ugly drug scene outside reminds me of how my project is possible only because that giant booze monkey has been gone for a decade and a half. The fact leaves me with a deep sense of gratitude and a feeling that life's energy can't in anyway be contained to just one day, one lifetime, or one coffeehouse. Last night lunacy prevailed. People from Felix’s film school and members of his old rock bands converged on the block of rooms that Felix rented at the

230 230 hotel. I’m pretty careful not to live vicariously through other people and usually end up as a designated driver anytime people are abusing themselves with booze or dope, but the topic of calamari caused me to let my guard down as a bunch of us stood around talking in the courtyard. The group collectively got the munchies for Fisherman's Wharf calamari. Everyone lamented the fact that the deep fried calamari place closed in less than a half an hour and that it would be impossible to get there from Soma in that short span of time. I thought of the Millennium Falcon in the basement-parking garage and spontaneously ordered everyone to cough up some cash. What followed wasn’t the most responsible thing I have ever done as a sober person. With everyone egging me on, I bolted for the parking garage, jumped into the Millennium Falcon, and drove across Market Street. I was pushed up Leavenworth towards Russian Hill by a series of green lights that seemed to understand the gravity of the situation, some really stoned out and drunk people desperately needed calamari in order to sober up a bit before they started in on the cocaine. I crested Russian Hill, but on the way down the universe decided to stop cooperating by giving me a series of red lights, all of which I foolishly ran, nearly colliding with a delivery truck but never easing off the gas until I had crossed Columbus Avenue and reached the bottoms. At Fisherman's Wharf, I pulled a Streets of San Francisco by doing a one hundred and eighty degree turning skid, parking illegally in front of the row of stalls where they sell seafood. It took me only a minute to buy the last four orders of calamari and three deep fried shrimp baskets minutes before they closed. I jumped back into my car and sped off under the threat of assault from the people boxed in by the Millennium Falcon who were calling me a stupid motherfucker. Back at the hotel, drunk and high people congratulated me and

231 231 toasted in honor of the seemingly once out of reach calamari. One of Felix's ex drummers kept shaking his head in my direction as he stuffed his face with deep fried shrimp and said, "Dude, I've lived in the city my whole life and I ain’t never seen anyone do something like that. How the fuck did you get there in time?" July: Modesto, California - Cory, a curly haired twenty something hipster bro dude and all around nice guy, just made me a pour over at Preservation Coffee and recommended some more books regarding coffee. He's a damn good barista, so I drop by to talk coffee every once in a while. We had a rough start, though, when I showed up last fall out of nowhere talking gibberish about an International Coffeehouse Tour and asking a million questions about Third Wave Coffee. I think it scared him. We've settled down to a sort of understanding. I'm a relatively good customer who is willing to spend money and he possesses coffee knowledge which I need. Cory is the nervous type who is always looking over his shoulder in order to check if the boss is there even when she’s gone, so I have to be gentle in my approach. I really appreciate him, however, for helping me know the difference between things like a single origin from Ethiopia and an espresso blend. He finally gets that I'm harmless but pushy. Besides, Preservation Coffee is the only specialty coffee venue in the county, so it's not like there is another place to go. After a while, Cory joined the magic and obliged me by suggesting some of the popular coffee reads from which he’d learned (I reeled him in by promising him that he would be the first feature on my soon to be created food and travel blog, which is a thing that will happen as soon as it’s up and running). Last time, he mentioned a book about the history of community spaces in America - Ray Oldham’s A Great Good Place. The time before that, he told me about an old article from the Barista's Guild Newsletter by Trish Rothgreb which seemed

232 232 outdated but was, in 2004, influential in articulating the principles of The Third Wave Coffee for the first time in the United States. August: Bend, Oregon - The Millennium Falcon and I are taking a road trip through the to the Pacific Northwest and right now we have only one question. How long are Oregonians going to keep Bend a secret from the rest of the country? My cousin Melissa and her husband Nick have been hosting me in Bend for a couple of days. I'm about to leave, but I can’t because every time the attempt is made their soon to be three-year-old, Nico, wraps himself around one of my legs and begs me not to go. Please! No. No. No. don’t go, Eddieeeeee! He is currently at that age just past the terrible twos where kids are the sweetest they will ever be, the same age as Arcadio when he went to live with mom after the tragedy. I am proud of Melissa and Nick because they seem to have carved out a good life for themselves here in Bend. Melissa is the youngest of all my cousins. When I see her as a thirty-five-year-old, I’m taken back to when she was a golden curled toddler in diapers roaming the parties hosted by my uncle Jess, Felix’s dad, who died last year at the age of ninety-five. Those food and drink fueled parties that lasted for days and had their roots in California's rancho culture of the 1800's from where that side of my family comes are today extinct. I think of how sad it is that those traditions died or are dying with my uncles just because the cousins don’t get along or are scattered away from the Central Valley. Four brothers, three of whom were veterans of WWII or Korea- Felix's dad, Jess, was the oldest and a veteran of Iwo Jima- married two sisters and their two cousins from Michoacán, therein setting the stage for the wonderful gatherings in halls, backyards and parks under whose spirit we grew up for a good part of the seventies and eighties. Sadly, I’m the only cousin in contact with the others.

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Earlier today we floated the Deschutes River, which cuts the little city at the edge of the desert in half, on inner tubes towards Drake Park, past narrow bends in the river where fashionable houses with rose gardens and terraces stand above the water line, teeming with people who waved hello as they barbequed and drank beer. We are having bananas fosters in the warm breeze of a restaurant named the Brick House with outside seating where time seems to stand still. Melissa is a foodie and an essential oil humidifying, kombucha making, happy gal of a home craftsperson who guides me along on my adventures through Facebook Messenger (a solid team member of my still forming support staff). Her man, Nick, is laid back and equally cool. The reason I came to Bend besides to reconnect with Nick and Melissa resulted because of a coffee tour offered by Wanderlust Tours. It was great because I met Stewart from BellaTazza Coffee who was open and friendly concerning his experience with roasting and owning a coffeehouse. When I asked him to articulate his definition of Third Wave Coffee, he got up from where the tour participants assembled in front of his coffeehouse eating biscotti and sipping on single origin espressos. Stewart went to his office in order to retrieve pictures of the family from whom he buys coffee in Nicaragua, explaining his views on sourcing and building direct trade relationships with farmers while finishing with an offer to take us long on his next trip. As I mop up the last of the rum syrup at the bottom of my Bananas Foster, seeing Nico roll around on his mom's lap reminds me again of Arcadio. A particular scene comes to mind from three weeks after his parents died. Mom had dressed him in a tuxedo because we were attending a terrible wedding in Tracy that permitted no alcohol on the premises. My mom and step dad were busy talking with family and friends, so it was my turn to watch Arcadio whose tiny body was stretched out as he slept on a two chairs that had been pushed together. I

234 234 picked him up and found that he fit perfectly into the nook of my upraised arm and that his tuxedoed, sleeping cuteness was a great conversation starter. I also noticed my suffering from an unfathomable thirst, so I slipped into the night and headed for a liquor store two blocks away with Arcadio still cradled in my arms. I fished out my wallet at the liquor store with one hand in order to pay for a pint of Jack Daniels while the cashier looked down at Arcadio and asked if his mom knew that I had him out that late as she hesitantly passed the pint across the counter. I told her that his mom was dead and to mind her own business. I remembered the feeling of Arcadio nestled into my arms as my dress shoes click clacked across the sidewalk. A feeling passed over me upon reentering the lit up hall, which was that I couldn't wait for the event to be over because the pint of Jack had barely made a dent in helping me to escape the consciousness of what had happened three weeks before. I needed a bigger diversion than one pint could provide. That night was the beginning of the fog from which I would wake up six years later. September: Santa Cruz - The days in Santa Cruz during September last forever and I wish time enough existed to keep writing in my journal everything that’s going through my head right now, to describe fully the scent of the breeze and the golden hue falling over the Pacific. Today has been one of those days in my coffee explorations were a sense of accomplishment prevails. A little progress was made in my learning how to approach people in the coffee business. I come across as working class. I know that about myself, not to mention that I have Central Valley tattooed to my forehead, which means that the hipster people apparatus that runs much of the coffee business in places like San Francisco and Oakland don't exactly stand in line in order to answer my questions. Honestly, they tend to avoid me when they see me coming.

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My learning people skills has ramifications beyond my tour because I'm trying to professionalize as a writer and as a teacher. I’m getting better at introducing myself and letting people know about my project and what I need from them, little by little as my earlier tour of the Verve Coffee roasting facility in the Seabright section of Santa Cruz seems to suggest. I’m also trusting in my belief that the universe will keep sending amazing people in my direction, which is something that experience tells me works best when I am well in a spiritual sense and doubt and confusion aren’t hovering over me, which gratefully is most of the time. It takes a dozen people dismissing me in order to run into a person like Cam, the roasting coordinator at Verve Coffee. I met Cam, who is tall, bears a small resemblance to Mark Fydrich, at a coffee event in San Francisco last spring, and described my project as well as my frustrations to him. His response was to invite me to Santa Cruz where he promised to treat me right. It was a good offer because Santa Cruz is one of California’s eccentric jewels concerning the arts and culture. The surfer lifestyle and the old California mystique makes it a special place for anyone who grew up Northern California because it was the place to be growing up in the eighties when we camped out on the beach, meeting people under the glow of campfires and wine cooler filled tubs. I’m sitting on the beach in Soquel with my eyes fixed on the pier that goes out to the wreckage of an old ship, trying to capture the moment, the day, the year. I’m also revising my notes on roasting profiles which came about as result of a mini lecture by Cam, but I’m overwhelmed by the feeling of gratitude because of the way I was received at Verve Coffee. That hardly ever happens. Cam greeted me with a big smile and a great attitude, walking me through Verve Coffee’s entire operation, which included some time in the lab where we made signature

236 236 drinks and talked to some knowledgeable people, before we met the roasters downstairs as they huddled together before their shift ended. Of course, I left with plenty of swag. October: Merced, California - I'm heartbroken to announce the passing of the legendary Millennium Falcon as a result of a tragic accident on the morning of October 5th in Merced, California just a few miles before her odometer was to turn 300,000 miles. Taehyung called me that morning because her truck had stalled, so I drove to Merced in order to pick her up from the repair shop and drive her to Fresno. We were driving down a quiet side street doing about forty miles an hour when the Millennium Falcon was t-boned on the driver's side by an uninsured motorist who ran a stop sign because she was blinded by the morning sun which was rising directly behind my car as it proceeded through the right of way. The impact sent the Millennium Falcon flying across an intersection where she came to rest on a sidewalk with the hood popped open and the engine sending up billows of smoke. She was pronounced dead at the scene. Taehyung and I received no major injuries, but we had to hitch a ride with the tow truck driver to the car rental agency, which was then and afterwards somewhat depressing. I was also sad because of the sudden difficulty of speculating what would become of my International Coffeehouse Tour 2015. I guessed that a replacement vehicle would have to be procured in order to finish the last leg of the tour that was to cover the Los Angeles area and a return trip to San Diego. November: Flagstaff, Arizona - Some of my classmate from graduate school and I have been in Flagstaff for the last couple of days attending a creative non-fiction conference which has been great so far except that I made a total jack ass of myself on Halloween. I was under the impression that the final conference session was a costumed affair. It wasn't. I was the only red painted devil in a room

237 237 full of uptight literary types. Fuck them. What could I do? I'd been dressing as a devil for the past three years and didn’t want to ruin my streak. Seriously, I’ve never felt more uncomfortable in my life. The old maxim about a whore in church came to mind. My sense of discomfort probably had more to do with the fact that I'm still precariously balanced between my old life and this new writing world than it did with my outfit which really only magnified what was already running through my mind from the minute we got off the airplane. We flew in from Fresno, so I had to rent a car in order to sneak away and checkout the coffee scene. Of course, who could go to Arizona without seeing the painted rocks of Sedona and the Grand Canyon? The afternoon trip to the Grand Canyon was incredible except that I was wearing dress shoes which made trespassing over a barricade and down a steep incline toward the perfect ledge with a couple from Philadelphia somewhat difficult. It felt awesome to take selfies and meditate on the edge of the world with a random couple. Besides checking the Grand Canyon off my bucket list, my week in Flagstaff also produced an epiphany concerning coffee. I spent most of my time at Macy’s Coffeehouse sitting around trying to figure the place out because it didn’t fit into any of the previous aesthetic orders that I’d witnessed. They roasted their own beans on the floor of the café like a lot of Third Wave shops do, but that was as far as any nouveau desires extended themselves. The ambience and the decorations were old school, like something out of the seventies, but there was something going on below the surface. On my third visit I realized, as I saw the same people of diverse backgrounds come together each day in order to practice community just as Ray Oldham described it, that Macy’s operated as a perfect Third Space, those wonderful places where gather when we are not at work or home. It finally dawned on me that Macy's was

238 238 another communal spot that radiated humanness in practice, a place that gave off an energy similar to other places I'd been to recently like the Spanish Steps in Rome, Jorge's coffeehouse in Tijuana, and the Plaza del Sol in Madrid. The highlight of my trip was a conversation with a starving artist named Dedric. One stimulating thing about my tour is that I never know when I will be on the receiving end of kindness and understanding or when I’ll be called upon to dish it out. It seems that Dedric and his girlfriend were fighting because they were stuck, financially and geographically. She wanted to make a break for Baltimore in order to make a fresh start, but he wanted to stay put in Arizona. It was obviously my time to listen, so I did it. It was a hard thing to do, though, because sometimes I'm so excited to meet people that I run my mouth forever and forget to allow people the space to tell their stories. What resulted was my telling Dedric about Arcadio and the cheese plant, and this impossibly difficult march through graduate school and half of the western states. I told him to aim high and go for it, trying to describe the situation as Anna had described it to me two years before on a flight home from Italy through her willingness to venture into an unknown future in San Francisco, seemingly unprepared but confidently filled with hope. Holding forth, I reminded him that if an escapee from the cheese plant with a background like mine could go back to school and orchestrate a coffeehouse tour while in grad school, someone as talented as him could pull off much greater things. In spite of my sermonizing, Dedric's eyes lit up as he thanked me profoundly and jumped out of his seat in order to go home and tell his girlfriend that they were leaving for Baltimore. December: Santa Monica, California - Dana, my ex-girlfriend who is a petite woman with incredibly light, baby blue eyes, and I are lying in bed in a hotel room in Los Angeles. We started the morning in San Francisco and spent the

239 239 day making our way down The Pacific Coast Highway in the White Falcon, where we stopped in order to have a picnic and walk within feet of elephant seal pups near Pismo Beach. We just had over the top, body slapping sex like we used to when we were together and it feels strangely like an attempt to hold onto the past, which it is but neither of us will admit to as much. We are on a road trip, headed into Los Angeles so that I can checkout Verve Coffee on Melrose, which Cam suggested is a good place to see famous people in their natural habitat, visit Intelligentsia Coffee in Venice Beach, and meet Danny, whom I met in Seattle, for dinner in Echo Park. We aren't trying to get back together or anything like that. I do need Dana for more than physical reasons, so I take what she will give me because she balances out the part of my life that eludes the spiritual. She always has. Dana couldn’t care less about studying food cultures or coffee, but she operates on intuition, knows a lot about forks in the road. She's better at ordering the lives of those around her than she is at fixing her own life. Sit her down for a cup of coffee and she reads my life like a tarot card, telling me what I should do next. She's witchy like that, in a real-world way that I’ve come to depend on and always appreciate. Dana likes to hear stories regarding my travels, but she doesn't get movement and meeting people the way it’s happening for me on the road. I tell her it has to do with learning about coffee on the surface but that it’s really about people and communities and coming to terms with Arcadio’s death, which is something she does understand because she was right there when it happened. Arcadio's fight will always connect us, but sadly, Dana and I have been growing apart in the last couple of years. This trip feels like the end of something. Finally, she pulls me in next to her and kisses my ear and whispers, “That kid was a fighter, just like you. Arcadio, would be proud of you for making it out of the

240 240 cheese plant and trying to do something with your life, so keep doing it. I won’t be around, but keep doing it"

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: SYNTHESIS A LA PORTLANDIA

Portland Summer 2015

The Road to Portland I am driving on the eastside of the Cascades across the Oregon dessert with the silhouette of Smith Rock in my rearview mirror. Mt Hood and an entirely different ecosystem lies ahead as I cross into the Warm Springs Indian Reservation on Highway 26. It is the first week in August. Short cacti litter the landscape, resembling stick figure armies as the midsummer heat colors the landscape with a palette of vibrant browns and intermittent yellows. I check Google Maps one more time and step on the gas. Canyons begin to form below the highway as I cross the Deschutes River. The sky darkens on a faraway horizon to the west. It is four in the evening. It feels good to be out of California with The Millennium Falcon speeding along at ninety miles per hour. The view from the top of Smith Rock still has me in its hold, so I don’t care, too much, about speed limits. The climb to the peaks and the sights leaves me with a good feeling. Places to stretch and meditate exist everywhere on The Misery Trail Loop, which presents a difficult march over rough terrain that ends up littered with out of shape tourists - the five-mile trail exacting a toll beyond the five-dollar hiking fee on unusually hot days like today. On one of the summits, an eagle’s gaze seared our consciousness when it flew impossibly close to a ledge where two soldiers and I stood gazing at the landscapes below, which looked westward and was high enough to make the farms below looks like green and brown squares on the patchwork of a quilt. The

242 242 parking lot was a good place for a final round of stretching and push-ups and a shower at a nearby campsite. The side trip to Smith Rock National Park resulted from an old friend’s suggestion on Facebook. I would have driven past it otherwise. Three years on the road has taught me to leave holes in my schedule for unplanned trips. I’ve met a lot of interesting folks that way. Sometimes meeting people on the road happens when you most need friends, new perspectives. In Rome, two elderly, identical twin filmmakers filled a map of the city with suggestions for Sojian and me on The Spanish Steps. In Paris, a Vietnamese girl from Quebec who spoke the language and wanted to go to the catacombs invited me along. In Castile, a homeless man waited for me on a rainy morning atop the ruins of the castle in Burgos. As the ascent towards Mt. Hood begins and the Millennium Falcon leaves the desert behind, I can only hope that a new set of characters will cross my path in Portland, a city in which I have only one friend. Four years have passed since Arcadio's death and movement seems at times like my only defense against the overwhelming and constant reminders of his short life. I should’ve taken notes during Arcadio's last weeks of life because we often talked about my future without him. I know we talked about traveling, but I can’t remember the specifics. I do know that he wanted my future to be full of good living and the types of adventures that we enjoyed together in the years before he got sick. If I had taken notes, I could have something closer to his own words than my scattered remembrances guiding my forward movements and the decisions that give rise to this impossible thing I call my tour. I keep moving in order to invest in a future that I can’t quite see but that I'm sure Arcadio would approve of, learning the things I missed during my squandered twenties. Movement teaches me about life and people, lessons far beyond food or

243 243 specialty coffee, which sometimes feels like a pretext and an ostensible reason to keep searching. Sometimes, pretending Arcadio is at my side is more than a way to make sense of a kid leaving this world at sixteen. It becomes a way to remind myself that I'm doing the things we spoke about in his final weeks. Movement has become the opposite of sadness, the opposite of giving up. Not pursuing a solution through movement, or sitting around feeling sorry for myself, would have meant more wasted years, more pain, and perhaps a drink to silence the rattle. I'm out of time for that. During a visit to Parma where I stood staring up at Correggio’s Ascension of the Virgin under the dome of the cathedral, I began to understand something new. My fully emerging from the fog had something to do with not standing still and what movement offered as opposed to staying put in the Central Valley where the energy zapping doldrums of daily life produce an effect that pushes down on the ability of people to dream past the burdens of their forty-hour work weeks. The fresco was an indescribable thing of beauty, which provided the thrill of arriving at a place I had only dreamt of visiting. A place, which transformed the lingering sting of Arcadio's loss into something less and less. The daylight is almost gone and it feels strange to be driving in the pouring rain at the beginning of August. Everything is gray along the top of Mt. Hood and down the other side in the direction of Portland. I revisit my plans. Things are about to happen, according to my research and plans - food carts, coffee, and all that I can squeeze into two weeks in Portland and more than a week in Seattle. I pull into the familiarity of a Seven Eleven in Sandy, meaning to stop only for some fresh air and a stretch, but sleep overtakes me. I ease my bucket seat as far back as it will go, waking up six hours later in the middle of the night, still twenty miles from the center of Portland.

244 244 The Arrival I pulled into Portland around 3am and settled into the South East Grind, an all-night coffeehouse across the river from downtown in Southeast Portland. A grungy place that conjured up that saying everyone repeats about Portland in the 90's (I am not exactly sure what that saying is other than it ends with a sigh and a nostalgic reverence for PORTLAND IN THE NINETIES). Hooded characters played chess on dingy furniture as the baristas pretended to clean to the beat of alternative music from the nineties (surprise surprise). This cafe existed as the Portland that people who watch a lot of television had tried to describe. The place felt ancient like a disco ball was about to drop from the sky or the Grateful Dead were going to take form on some imaginary stage that only those who had purchased the specially laced lattes would be able to see. The type of scene that Rod Sterling described from the relative safety of the sidewalk on the other side of the thick plate glass window to an audience just beyond the panorama, moments before he dropped the microphone, peering into the interior of the café and then disappearing off camera. I was both tired and sprung from my two cups of coffee in what felt like a liminal existence that gave rise to a skewed perception. When the sun rose, the light filtering in through the windows gave the place an entirely different look. The stoner zombies were replaced by the beautiful people of the world, dressed in business suits and designer clothes and ready for their morning perks. Whatever weird stuff was playing around in my mind at 4am disappeared, replaced by a sense of excitement.

The Day Dream The helicopter lands on a pad near the banks of the Willamette River. I step off the helicopter and am ushered by two of my assistants to an overlook near The

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Gantry, Portland’s newest food pod, which debuted in July. They greet me with armfuls of proposals for my travel show on The Food Network (Yes, I have assistants in my day dream and they are really well rounded people who are going places, good looking people, the sort of people that surround someone who has his own travel show and who has already gone places but is still wishing to go places). One of my assistants, a thirty-year-old woman named Sheila, who used to be a pole dancer before she went back to school to get her degree in food science, hands me a blue folder. The words - THE INTERNATIONAL FOODIE TOUR 2015 - adorn the top of the page just above the show's logo, which is a silhouette of the Millennium Falcon rimmed in gold against an orange landscape and a winding highway cleverly superimposed onto a map of the United States. I scan the contents of the folder and shake my head - No! I say, “I am tired of seafood themes - salmon, crab, and scallops. No more trips to Alaska. It's not my thing right now. I need something more terrestrial like beef and cheese - even lamb!” My other assistant, a girl named Peaches - a name she earned in some pie baking contest in home economics class in junior high - pushes Sheila out of the way and puts a second folder in my hands, option two. “I thought of this all by myself and the producers are really into it, like I mean they really like it. And I get to go with you," she says beaming with pride. "We're exploring the food carts in Portland. That’s your assignment. And you'll also be going back stage to chat with Anthony Bourdain while he is in town next Saturday night. He wants your opinion on a couple of projects he is working on. He told the producers that having you around makes him feel like his career in food has been worth it." “Sounds great. What’s my budget?” I ask.

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“The network is offering $50,000 for the two weeks on top of your contract. Oh, and I forgot - a thousand a day for your hotel.” I look down at Peaches whose hair is blowing around wildly because of wind gusts raised by the departing helicopter and say, “Tell them I need more. I don’t get out of bed for that kind of money. Tell them that the backstage thing with Anthony is extra.”

The Reality The details of my tour seem to line up perfectly at times, pushed along by a cosmic force, something more than I could pull off on my own. A case in point was my working at the Diamond Lumber Mill in Sonora in order to earn some additional cash for the five-week road trip to Portland and Seattle. I’d started working at the mill on the weekends during the final weeks of my first year of graduate school. Luckily, the management proved sympathetic to my funding needs and let me work on the weekends in order get some overtime, once the school year was over. The work was physically demanding, taking place outside during the hottest months of the year. I was hungry for physical work, so it only took a few days for the mill to call the temporary agency with a request. The management asked that I be the only one sent out, throwing in a thirty dollar per diem for gas because the drive from Turlock into the foothills was over an hour. The management acted a little spellbound by my mad man approach to laboring, a skill that that I had perfected to a science during my years in manufacturing plants and constructions sites. I cleaned up and reorganized the mill from one end to the other, doing what nobody else had been willing to do for years. I ate through various jungles with a weed eater and an ax, cleared out abandoned storage yards by taking trash to the dump or placing equipment where

247 247 it could be used again or sold. I also worked on the line in the mill occasionally. Some days, I cruised through the back roads of the property on an ATV doing repairperson work from a list my boss left on the handlebars each morning. It felt great to be working outdoors for the first time in years, but it wasn't without its difficulties or as the old cliché goes, blood, sweat and tears. What I mean by interjecting a static cliché is that I almost fucked up a good thing. One day when I was standing on the side of a small hill which led up to the yard where rows of giant logs were constantly being rearranged by massive front end loaders that bounced around like munching dinosaurs, I almost permanently hurt myself while weed eating. I lost my footing and tumbled backwards down a hill towards a drainage basin, covered over by a thick layer of tall, yellow grass and dead bushes. Catapulting through the air, I figured that the landing wouldn't be too bad because the dried up bushes would probably break my fall. When I reached the bottom, however, my body made dust of the bushes, stopped in its tracks by something terribly hard. My back had smashed violently against a concrete pipe, and my body curled up and wedged itself into the hole where a man hole cover should have been. I felt like Joe Montana when Jim Burt destroyed him with a vicious hit during the 1986 NFC Championship Game in what one ESPN broadcaster once called “One of The Most Resounding Hits the Game Has Ever Seen.” I sat motionless, wondering if my back was broken and whether I should move my extremities, but unlike Montana, I failed to get up. When I tried to move, I became even more wedged in the pipe and began slipping deeper into the abyss. Panic set in. The only reason I managed to turn myself around and extricate my body from the pipe resulted from fear induced by the sound of running water at the bottom of the black hole.

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Twenty minutes later, I was using a chain saw to cut through a log that littered the side of the same hill when a spark from a rock ignited a fire that started racing up the hill. Within minutes, the fire raged out of control, causing me to run to a nearby machine shop in order to sound a fire alarm, which summoned the plant's firefighting team. Unfortunately, no matter how many fire extinguishers we emptied into the fire, it kept growing and working its way toward the logs above. Then, in one of the most miraculous incidents of good timing in the history of firefighting, a water truck happened to be going by on the road above. Someone waved it down and told the driver to unload his cargo over the side of the hill. The water came down the side of the hill like a biblical torrent, putting out most of the fire, leaving everyone exhausted and gasping for air and the area littered with dozens of empty fire extinguishers. For reasons having to do with a fire at a nearby sister plant a week previous, the management spun my accidental fire into an evaluation of their fire response program and declared the impromptu exercise a resounding success. They awarded everyone present at the scene of the fire, except for me, a twenty- five-dollar gift card to Subway Sandwiches. They did let me keep my job for another month, which meant that the plant got a little more organized and my bank account accumulated a necessary emergency fund. The millwrights and laborers that I met at the plant were great people and as far as I know, nobody ever knew about my tumble down the hill. On my last day, some of us gathered around in the office as the friends that I'd made wished me well in Portland.

The Logistics A five-week road trip takes a lot of planning, so part of the summer was spent researching budgets, routes, and destinations. I studied the history of food

249 249 carts, not only in Portland but also throughout the United States. I also studied the specialty coffee scene in Portland and Seattle, figuring I had enough time to look at aspects of both crafts. I'll admit that it felt a little gluttonous at times, but I was beginning to learn that it wasn't always about the food and the coffee. I also arrived with my well-honed hotel to Air B&B to hostel dynamic that I had mastered in Spain - hotels to rest up, Air B&B to know a particular neighborhood, and hostels to meet the people with whom I'd hopefully share food and coffee adventures. I also armed myself with two lists from Eater Magazine as I had in Minneapolis - “The Ten Best New Food Carts of Portland 2015” and “The Twenty Best Coffeehouses in the Fabled City of Portland 2015.”

The Ten Best Food Carts of Portland 2015 Eater Magazine 1. Bing Mi! - Downtown Pod at10th and Alder 2. Buki- 28th and Division Pod 3. Chickens and Guns- Cartopia Pod 4. Holy Mole- Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard @ 33rd Avenue 5 Hot Box Barbecue- The Gantry Pod @ Southwest Waterfront 6. Kim Jon Grillin- 4606 Southeast Division @ 42nd Avenue- Trailer 7. Kingsland Kitchen- Southwest Oak Street between 4th and 5th 8. Pollo Tico- Southwest 3rd Avenue between Oak and Pine Streets 9. Pyro's Wicked Wiches- 28th and Division Pod 10. The Nine Food and Drink- 510 S.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

Fear and Doubt One of the hardest things to anticipate when traveling is how and where you will meet other people. Hostels solve this difficulty more than any other place

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I know. Something organic about the living in the moment, which is fostered in the culture moves me. That is why after getting a hotel on my first night I headed over to Hawthorne Hostel. After checking in, I roasted some carrots and kale and added some cherry tomatoes, drizzling the plate with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. My only plan was to relax and watch life go by along busy Hawthorne Blvd, enjoying my creation and the dazzling weather. A young couple sat at my table. They were two Latinas whom I found out later were named Carmen and Vicky and were visiting from Dallas. They appeared to be in a contemplative mood and a little bit sad. The nature of their troubles soon came pouring out. They were on their way to the airport convinced that Portland was the whitest city in America, that they had been marginalized everywhere they went. “It sucked to be ignored, nobody willing to make eye contact. Texas isn’t like this. I can’t wait to get home,” said Carmen. “Darn it. I'm sorry," I said, thinking about this uncomfortable reality of life in the United States. I didn’t doubt their experience, having had similar experiences myself. My personality isn’t always charming, and my magnetism never just draws people toward me. I’ve had to learn that meeting people has a lot to do with my own perspective. Whenever I’m reeling with some personal dysfunction or am just in a plain rotten mood, the chances of attracting people into my sphere are slim. People avoid me like they do a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman. I tried to share my experience based on this universal concept with the two women, but it came out as me articulating how I wished Portland had put them in the midst of the same delightful crowds of people that had been crossing my path for a long time.

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“Half the time my own head is making trouble too.” I said to Carmen who was sitting across the table from me. “What do you mean?” she asked. Mentioning my successes at that time would have been insensitive, a way to victim blame, so I changed the subject. The conversation brought to mind something about gender equity and travel. It’s different for men than it is for women. If I doubted the distance between the genders before graduate school taught me to view life through the diverse lenses of gender and class, all doubt has been removed on the road. Women aren’t always afforded the same travel adventures as men - not in practice nor in the ages old travel narrative - which is as unfair as it is disheartening. A single woman might have remained in the safety of her hotel room when I was tramping across Paris in the middle of the night or walking the Tenderloin in San Francisco during the early hours of the morning with Felix and Jessie. Out of fear, she might have given the conmen gladiators in Rome all the money their frauds demanded instead of telling them to go fuck themselves. I did tell them that part of my plan included finding adventure in Portland and that involved finding the people who would guide me through coffee and food. They didn’t believe in me. They wanted proof, for me to be honest. They left me their email so that I could write them after my trip was over and confirm that Portland was indeed an unsympathetic place. In my own skewed way, however, I didn’t have time to slow down in order to contemplate other people’s position on race and culture. My primary focus was to experience the food carts and immerse myself in the area’s coffee culture. Portland could burn to the ground, the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate could unleash the great Cascadian earthquake, and it wouldn’t matter to me as long my project went forward. Portland may very well lack

252 252 diversity, but that was not my concern now. I had bigger fears to contend with than what people thought of my presence or my opinions on food and coffee. There are too many variables on the road. What if the Millennium Falcon broke down or there were problems at home with Arcadio’s animals?

The Synthesis Despite an occasional doubt, a parade of wonderful strangers finally showed up to rescue me from Carmen and Vicky’s dark prediction. I’d been thinking about our conversation because three days had passed and I still hadn’t met anyone in Portland. Things changed unexpectedly when a man named Mike, whom I’d met in the kitchen on the previous night, came out to the patio and sat in the same chair which Vicky had occupied three days earlier. I learned he was in town for a technology conference and that, together with his wife, he owned a technology-consulting firm in Florida. I described my coffeehouse tour to him. Mike leaned in, listened to my every word with interest, and then began rattling off the names of coffeehouses, which he recommended visiting in Seattle, a city he knew well. Out of nowhere Mike said, “A couple of us are going up to see Multnomah Falls in the morning if you want to go.” He paused, “There’s an extra seat in Suzanne’s rental car.” “Who’s Suzanne?” I asked. “I’m not really sure, but I met her at the technology conference and she’s also staying here. She seems nice.” “Sounds cool. Count me in,” I said. I thought it was fortuitous that three voyagers found each other for a road trip within a road trip, so I went with the flow. We weighed down a picnic basket

253 253 with great food - chilled fruit, vegetarian lasagna, cheeses, custard and mineral water. Suzanne drove the three of us to the falls where we lugged the picnic basket up the trail for two miles, but it was worth it because we had to walk slow, getting to know each other in the process. Along the way, friendships resulted from the candidness with which strangers deal with each other, often including bits of their lives that they normally keep to themselves. We discussed Portland, food, and us as non-travelers, telling one another what our lives were like back home, including the good and the bad. Mike was a software engineer from Florida who was raised in Texas and was launching a social media site. He missed his wife. She usually travelled with him, but something happened this time. Suzanne was a single mother who handled the technology aspects of a production plant in San Diego. She loved the laid-back San Diego lifestyle and worked hard to enjoy the leisure of beach life and provide for her son. On the way to the top, we stopped at a dark and ancient looking waterfall. The forest’s canopy blocked out the sunlight, producing a green, mossy world. I was the first to dive into the roaring abyss, which was ice cold and delicious on a rare one-hundred-degree day along the Columbia River Gorge. We tried in vain to touch the bottom of the pool, but nobody ever could. People passing by told us that there were some even better falls up the trail so we grabbed our basket and continued. At the top of the trail, we found a small pool carved into the granite where we sat around and filled in the details of our half told biographies. We also kept talking about Portland. I had the least experience with the city, but was helped very much by the pointers regarding food and coffee in Portland mentioned by both Mike and Suzanne. Long moments of silence followed where talking didn’t

254 254 feel necessary, eventually broken by a spontaneous return to previously discarded topics. We shared moments of laughter that erupted suddenly and faded away into the forest. I got out of the pool and added the finishes touches to a cairn by topping it with a golden cracker goldfish leftover from lunch. Suzanne left for a minute in order to perform ballerina exercises on a huge, toppled over spruce. From where Mike and I sat, it looked dangerously like Suzanne and the whole spruce where about to tumble over the falls. Once Suzanne had returned, Mike contemplated the setting and broke the silence. “You know; it doesn’t get any better than this. Thanks for coming along, both of you,” Mike said as he reached over and grabbed a nectarine from the edge of the pool. I also thanked them both for thinking about me and letting me tag along. Dawn was a dread-locked Jewish physical therapist with an infectious smile and a great attitude who grew up in Orange County. I met her through Mike. She was my guide to many of the food carts that made up the middle portion of the list. The part I am skipping. The part I am forsaking in order to focus on the story of the three best food carts because although food carts are a thing of infinite wonder and glory, they do have their limits. Dawn had done her undergraduate work at Lewis and Clark, so she knew every corner of the city. Her input made my crisscrossing Portland in the Millennium Falcon easy. On the night after the trip to the waterfalls, Dawn accompanied me to Cartlandia where an array of food carts is located. The plan was also to reunite with Tom, my roommate from twenty years before, at the celebrated deadhead meeting spot, the Blue Room. Dawn was returning to

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Portland for graduate school and had a few days to kill, so she was into going with me. At the Blue Room, for the first time in my life, I danced the night away to the sound of Grateful Dead covers, carelessly, sober, and without a care in the world. It was something I had wanted to since my days in Humboldt County because the culture was everywhere but somehow inaccessible to me. I finally fulfilled a missed opportunity from decades ago in Humboldt County. Tom and his wife, Tanya, met us there. Under the loud pitches of a live band and clanking cocktail glasses, Tom and I leaned in and discussed how strange it was to be at life’s midpoint, how we had been just kids at Humboldt State, oddly matched and from different worlds. Dawn danced every dance, looking as if she were in a trance, happy and in the moment. Every few moments, Tom would mention people we had known in Humboldt, declared whether or not he had kept in contact with them, and made predictions about what they might be like today.

Humboldt Reunion I am listening to Tom tell me the history of the food carts in Portland at the 28th and Division Pod. He knows a lot about Portland’s politics, says there is a report the city published in 2011 that I need to read in order to understand the inner workings of the deal, which binds the city’s vibrant street food scene to the local government. Tom used to have a great big head of hair. He has half the golden locks from twenty-five years ago. Think Peter Frampton, then and now. He is, however, the same philosophy major who handed people their egos if they were stupid enough to engage him intellectually on an issue on which he had a strong opinion. I follow him on Facebook where he provides his friends with many

256 256 laughs because ultra-liberal doesn’t begin to describe him. Tom pretty much slays the fuck out of conservative ideology with comical rebuttals and a love for a community centered life of political activism. A couple from Tennessee fills the air with folk music as Tom and I talk construction and food. He is on his lunchtime, dressed in a painter’s outfit with splotches of white paint running up his arms. He is Virgil to a whacky Portland lifestyle that I had to come experience for myself. We discuss, amongst other things, the one idea that is everywhere present in Portland - the intersection of community and craft, coffee and food carts. We also talk about our time in Arcata, remembering when I was a line cook at a microbrewery and a lot of the production of beer ended up supplying our house parties. “I have been in Portland so long that I don’t think I have any friends left in Humboldt anymore,” Tom says. “I’m down to one or two myself,” I respond. “I did hear from Hippy Pete two years ago.”

Top of the List 3. I am on my second helping of Takoyaki from the newly famous Buki Food Cart. Bob is wolfing down tri-tip from the Love Belize Food Cart and an IPA from the beer gardens. I have never tasted anything like Takoyaki. It is crispy then creamy, wheat flour balls with chunks of chewy octopus floating in the middle. The condiments of Takoyaki sauce, Japanese flavored mayo, and shaved Bonita bring on greatness; not a bad deal at seven balls on a skewer for nine dollars. They aren’t deep-fried but brought to distinction by a special pan which is a cavity lined electrical skillet like a one sided, face up waffle iron. Takoyaki is particularly fishy at first due to the bonita, yet a bite navigates a wide transverse of

257 257 flavors that end up, unforgettably, with the mild and creamy octopus in the middle breaking through its crunchy shell. I found a friend and willing accomplice to my adventure at Buki - serendipity. An assistant to the owner and a transplant from Chico, Jake practically let me into the trailer. Throughout my many visits to 28th and Division we discussed everything food cart. We dissected the Buki menu and he gave me an inside look at the processes for making the varied items such as Tea Eggs and Taiyaki, cookies filled with Nutella. Jake went out on a limb for me and gave me the run down on every cart, which he could see from his perch inside the front of the trailer where orders were taken. His boss did not like me and chased me away, secretive and uninterested in the adventure at hand. 2. Kim Jong Grillin #2 is not much to look at but a small trailer parked at the edge of a field on Division near Stumptown Coffee’s original location. What lurks inside is the real deal, a Korean Barbecue based menu of artisanal proportions. I kept it simple and ordered a Bibim Box for $10, which featured barbecued beef over a bed of rice and Japchae, which are sweet potato noodles, and topped by an over easy egg. It looked out of this world, so I quickly headed to Hawthorne Hostel where I could enjoy it on my patio seat. I can’t begin to describe the complexity of flavor and texture, enhanced by a power trio of condiments: sesame bean sprouts, daikon kimchee, and a marinated carrot slaw. On top, an over easy egg and ribbons of flavored mayo made for a portrait quality up load to Facebook. The magic happened toward the bottom, where flavors mixed with each other. An example of purposeful artisanship, just as the stoner hipster behind the counter in the Judas Priest 1977 t-shirt promised. Those last bites were anchored by the tangy sweet dominance of the barbecued beef, preceded by a fungal bouquet from the kimchee. They were brought back

258 258 down to earth by the crunch and snap of the unpretentious beans sprouts and carrots, all swimming in a velvety sauce of egg yolk and mayo, mixing with flavors released by the various liquids that had collected at the bottom of the box. I was ready to declare a winner. Kim Jong Grillin had risen to the occasion. That food cart in the empty field was the Portland street food scene’s undisputed champion for the year, or so I thought. On a flat stretch of land below the only high rise near the Burnside Bridge, the last food cart on the list waited. I’d visited two times before, only to find it sold out of their famous chicken curry and roti, a flour tortilla like bread popular in Indian cuisine. I made friends with the owner my first visit. He sold me some boba and we discussed the business, his having been in San Francisco previously and my intent to rate his food. I was one my way out of town and thought that my personal top ten list was settled, but I returned for a third time. The Nine Food and Drink Cart has a very narrow menu of only two items. The one that caught my attention was the chicken biryani. Chunks of chicken breast, onion, and potatoes, floated in a cream based pool of lemon grass and multiple curry flavors, some sweet and others spicy. The balance of flavors was unique. Its complex softness washed gently across my palate. It was late in the day, so I got very little chicken. I didn’t care. The potatoes and curry sauce were enough to render a decision without mentioning the buttery nuttiness of the roti that I dunked in the sauce and rolled up like a taquito. That wasn’t all, though. The dish also came with a refreshing side dish of cucumbers, chilled in a thin rice wine vinegar with chili flakes that was something extra-ordinarily sweet and sour. These three items taken in a one, two, and three fashion ended up as the most spectacular flavors in Portland, easily, in my opinion.

259 259 The Reflection Three weeks later, I was on the last leg of the road trip, in Del Norte County, living in a lean to for two days and grilling on the beach, reflecting on Portland and Seattle. Although I mentioned my investigation of the food carts in Portland, I left out important details regarding my visit. I visited every coffeehouse on the list, took a coffee tour of the city, and went to various cuppings at Stumptown. The result, just as the food carts tour brought to light an indisputable truth, was this: Portland with one hand tied behind its back is the undisputed champion of specialty coffee scene on the west coast according to my notes. Nothing comes close, not even Seattle. Hidden beach is a Yurok power spot, tucked away from view below Requa Mountain, which overlooks the Klamath River. I have returned to for sustenance to the mouth of the Klamath River ever since I worked for Johnny and the CCC, in the years before I moved to Arcata to go to school. After more than a month on the road, it felt good to be back to familiar territory. I had some good days on the beach writing and trying to put my project into perspective while fondly recalling how my friends from the CCC and I partied there in the early nineties and how Arcadio and I visited twice. Whenever I cooked on the beach, I remembered Arcadio, as he was, then - a chubby nine-year-old - running towards the campfire with two crabs dangling from his hands: “Uncle Eddie, look, look, what I found for dinner!”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: SEATTLE AS A LIMINAL PLACE

Seattle Summer 2015

Seattle reminded me of the forbidden-city in the bonus round of my favorite slot machine, the Wizard of Oz. The skyline in the distance looked ominous in the middle of summer, caught in a vapor of dark clouds. Google Maps faded out at the worst possible moment, so we sped into the unknown. The Millennium Falcon mistakenly caught an express lane toward North Seattle that didn’t have any exits. By the time we made it back to the city, the evening had already started to form. On the way to my hotel in Chinatown, I followed my usual pattern of scoping things out on foot. Chinatown felt a little rough, as if it had seen better days. I strolled the avenues, peered into alleys, and stopped at a small square on King Street where a red and gold dragon festooned the gate of the International District two blocks away. Old men and women practiced Tai Chi on the grass. Some people talked to themselves or imaginary figures, lost in the routines of mental illness. Others passed little plastic bags amongst themselves and then scattered in different directions. I witnessed an unlucky man get beaten down by two thug security guards who worked for Uwajimaya Market. They accused him of stealing, but they were wrong. The man had been in front of me in line inside the store where I went to buy some water. I saw him pay for his items and that he had plenty of money. The guards flew past me just outside the door and caught him in the corner of the parking lot. I waited on the outskirts, anonymously. When the cops arrived, I described what had happened. Afterwards, the two giant Samoans stared hard at

261 261 me, angry that I had witnessed their recklessness. Fuck them both, I thought, for picking on a person half their size. Standing in the lobby of the hotel, people came and went in every direction. I tried to make conversation, but everyone was busy crowding around the front desk or rushing to dinner. Waiting in line to check in, I noticed a man who threw open the front door and hurried past me into a corner of the lobby, flopping himself on a couch which was hidden away by a row of fake plants. The man never looked up from running his hands through his hair. He just sat at the edge of the sofa staring at the floor. Curiosity got the better of me, so I slid in his direction, slowly and nonchalantly. "You going to be all right or what?" I asked. The man looked up with watery eyes and said, "No, probably not.” “Yeah you will,” I shot back. “It just doesn’t feel like it right now.” “Man, I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve all been there. Life is hard sometimes,” I replied. “Anyway, what happened?” “Nothing I want to talk about.” “You sure?” I asked. “No, not really.” “By the way, my name is Eddie,” I said sticking out my hand. “I’m Danny,” offered the man as he reached out and shook my hand. I didn’t know it at the time, but Danny Chang was an expert on many of the world’s cuisines. His knowledge didn’t stem from working in food or restaurants in a professional capacity but in a foodie whose been everywhere sort of way. The universe lines up that way some times. Meeting Danny eventually changed the

262 262 course of my time in Seattle, unexpectedly, redirecting me to explore both food and coffee, especially charcuterie.

The Space Needle The light is perfect outside, tinted in a creamy orange hue that only early August brings. I distinctly remember Anthony mentioning that Angela is super outgoing when he offered to set me up on a blind date in Seattle. We are spinning in the sky, suspended in the moment. I am telling Angela about how when I was twenty- two years old my job was to roast the nightly batch of prime rib on a mirepoix base at a swanky place called The Rib Room, how I would gorge myself, washing down the flavorful chunks of beef with bottles of Merlot, which was newly popular at the time. Angela throws her head back and laughs. I leave out the part regarding my firings and how my career as a chef ended before I was twenty- six. Every twenty minutes or so, the skyscrapers spin into view. The concrete and steel fortresses below look like sections of the Death Star from our seats at the table. The patchwork of black and grey buildings is surrounded everywhere by the vivid blues of the sky and nearby Puget Sound, which is itself is aglow with the sun’s reflections. I savor every syrupy spoonful of the brown sugar, butter and rum sauce that a minute ago flowed over my Bananas Foster. I ordered smoked Prime Rib. They used almond wood which I tell Angela used to be strictly a California thing. Angela ordered grilled salmon in a caper and white wine sauce. We both agree that the food is excellent at Sky City. The sun catches the highlights in Angela’s chestnut hair and shoots across the glassware on the empty table next to us as she chats away in a loud nasal drawl

263 263 that holds and bursts into rapid-fire syllables. Angela is fun to be around and a little bit older than me. Angela points to interior of the narrow restaurant and says, “My cousin Judy got married up here. Oh Gawd. What a mess. The reception was an absolute disaster. People were fighting and security had to show up. They just kept fighting. It was just like the Jerry Springer Show.” The details make for another good laugh. Earlier, the Space Needle towered against the afternoon sky. This testament to the space age stood over the pavilion below as a strikingly balanced design of form and fluidity. It embodied motion rising to a crescendo, elegantly dressed in white and trimmed in black. The iconic turret still looks futuristic fifty years after it went up for the World’s Fair. I never imagined that the two of us would have dinner in the Sky City dining room. The event was unplanned but it has given me a lot to think about in terms of my food and coffee explorations, how lucky I am to run into guides during my adventures. Sometimes I make detailed plans only to have better things happen. At the top, we could see the Olympic Range in the distance on the other side of Puget Sound, the famous silhouette of Mt Rainier, and Bellevue with its own mini skyline off in another direction. Our plan had been to go to the top for the great view, but then I saw an advertisement for Sky City’s prime rib and the idea of leaving without trying some was too much to bear. As I hand my credit card to the waiter and Angela continues to chat away the details of her past, I think again about of movement and the search for community, how well it’s happening today. Earlier in the day, my third in Seattle, Angela showed me around Pike’s Place Market. We did all the touristy things. We watched fishmongers toss fish to each other and rubbed the nose of the famous

264 264 brass pig that adorns the entrance to the market. People marched slowly and careened off each other in the crowded sea of humanity. A famous wall of chewed gum stood on the margins, supposed to bring good fortune to anyone who pasted his or her used gum onto it. Angela tried to find her gum from previous years, but her pieces were covered up by other peoples’ hopes. At the original Starbucks, I told Angela about how Howard Schultz, in his moments of doubt, goes down to the café and lets himself in during the middle of the night. Luckily, a spot cleared near the front door where we could look out onto the busy scene outside. We enjoyed the comforts of the tiny coffeehouse with its long golden-topped counters and endless decorative memorabilia on the walls. The collectables are meant to inform the customers of Starbuck’s place as one of the progenitors of Second Wave coffee, a movement in the 1970’s and 80’s which began with specialty coffee offering an alternative to the corporate aesthetic of tasteless, low quality, blends. “How do you know all that?” asked Angela. “I’ve read most of his books,” I shot back. “Watch. Let’s have a little fun with the barista.” “How?” Angela asked. “Let’s convince him that Howard is a personal friend of ours.” I said. “We’ll tell him that we spoke to Howard earlier and that he’s dead worried about slumping sales in South America, so he’s probably showing up tonight.” As we left the iconic Starbucks number one and walked around the corner, a man played guitar through an amplifier and sung James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James into the intersection of First Street and Pike. Traffic whizzed by. A sea breeze hung in the air as the man wailed a throaty rendition into the crowd. The

265 265 world stood still. We stood still. Our backs melted into the brick façade of an old building as we watched the throngs of people go by. I thought of how captivating street musicians have been during the course of my project, how much courage and talent it takes to live that kind of lifestyle. Diverse snapshots filled my head of musicians trying to make a living. The moment took me away to three years before when a man played Stairway to Heaven at Piazza Popoli in Rome and a crowd of about one hundred, gathered from all the corners of the Earth, lip synced in tune as the warm evening breeze brought relief from the heat of the sweltering day. There had been no other place in the world to be that night. The waiter interrupts my reflection as he returns my credit card, leaving two mint chocolates with which to wash down the experience of having had dinner in the iconic Seattle structure. A scene I want to hold onto forever. I look at the buildings downtown one last time before we get up to leave as they slowly spin out of sight, the reflections from their black glass facades becoming less and less with the setting sun. Angela finally breaks the silence by suggesting we go to Ballard where they have great coffee.

A Local Guide The coffee scene in Portland is part of a much broader tableau that influences how people think about food in general. People know that eating well is a part of contemporary American life over which they can exercise some control. Good eating is not a theory but a right that comes to fruition because the food landscape consists of venues that are innovative, economical, and alive with the artisan spirit. Mediocrity has a short shelf life. From coffee to donuts, Portland is a food destination. I already know that the coffee scene in Portland can’t be topped

266 266 despite the fact that in the American imagination, Seattle is the top coffee city. In Seattle, my plan is to just go with the flow and check out the coffee scene anyway. I’m sitting at Trabant coffee in downtown Seattle a few blocks from Pioneer Square. It is my fifth day in town. So far, my look at specialty coffee in Seattle consists of distractions. I need to make more connections. My efforts have been little more than scattered visits to Googled coffeehouses with Angela or Danny in tow. The Millennium Falcon has covered every corner of the city, from midnight runs to Capitol Hill to morning excursions to Fremont or Ballard. There is a Starbucks on every corner, but that’s not what I am after. Starbucks is the antithesis of specialty coffee. Except for one thing. Starbuck’s recently built a giant roasting headquarters atop Capitol Hill for its Starbucks Reserve locations. I’ve scheduled a visit on my last day. My main goal, however, remains searching out coffee at the local level. My International Coffeehouse tour 2015 has had its difficulties. The more that I practice this approach to searching out community and meeting people, however, the more it feels like movement is teaching to look forward and forget the damages of my past. Every new friend and personal story becomes a way to celebrate the present. I’ve entertained worse notions in my life, so movement ends up feeling like the thing to do. Every new city seems to have something to reveal beyond food and coffee, vast lessons on people and human nature. Lately, many people have been thrown onto my path in order to teach me about coffee or I’ve sought them out. Tom at Trabant Coffee is one of those persons. Tom gets it. Two days ago, I walked in and announced that I was hoping to learn more about coffee and his reaction couldn’t have been more positive. Today is my first time back. On my first visit, Tom gave me the story of the Clover Machine, which is the method of production at his shop. It seems

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Starbucks bought the company to keep its technologic under wraps but they exist here and there, mostly at Starbuck’s. “Ours is a tired dinosaur,” Tom said ten minutes after meeting him. “They stopped making these, but man do they make for a good cup of coffee, something like an inverted French Press. When you are done with your Columbian, you can try our fog lifter, which is our house espresso chased by a shot of lavender flavored steamed milk.” Tom, who is well known in the Seattle coffee scene, finally got a chance and came back once I’d finished my fog lifter and said, “So what do you want to know about coffee in Seattle, how can I help you?” “I want to sample some signature drinks, non- alcoholic though,” I said. “A million coffeehouses exist in Seattle, so I pretty much just need to know which ones to hit up.” Tom left to attend to some customers but came back later with a pen and paper in his hand and said, “Start with these four. Milstead & Company and Ada’s serve up incredible drinks all the way around, the real deal. Milstead is hard to find but worth it. You can check out what I told you about the Areopress there. That’s how they make their coffee.” “Thanks for going out of your way,” I responded. “I wish everybody greeted me like this.” “It’s all good, my friend. Come back,” Tom, said. “I’ll make you another list.”

Picnic at Green Lake I open my eyes and Angela is still talking.

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“The is the first full week of good weather that we’ve had in a while,” she says as she reaches for her cup of fruit while looking in the direction of the lake where people are paddling boats and jumping off a pier which is no more than fifty yards from us. It’s my ninth day in Seattle. We’re stretched out on a beach blanket. We brought plenty of cold sandwiches and fresh fruit, so the picnic basket remains full. Angela talks about her friends who are fifty somethings who never grew up. I have heard a lot about them in the last few days. Their lives remind me of the decade I spent in the bars before the death of Arcadio’s parents rearranged my priorities. “I’m not even going to answer my phone this weekend because I know they’ll call trying to get me to pay for their booze,” Angela says. Their stories remind me that alcoholism is one drama after another, that those who survive are lucky to have escaped their dance with life’s dark side. Angela hardly drinks. She does have trouble making friends, so she settles for what she can get. Mostly, she wants to get back to doing what she loves, which is running a beauty salon. She wants to be back at the center of her family’s life. I reach for my San Pellegrino blood orange soda as Angela explains why she is at Green Lake with me rather than with Rosemary and Roy who are on their way to Portland. “And then one time they invited me to a hot springs resort in Idaho. I’m glad I didn’t go. When it came time to pay the bill, none of them had any money,” Angela says. “And then they had a huge bar tab. And Rosemary she had to fuck the manager but that was for only part of the bill. Roy, he’s a douchebag, he had to drive back to Seattle and pull money out of his 401k before the manager would let them go.”

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“Your friends are too much,” I say. “I know. When I get my new place next year none of them are invited over,” Angela responds, unwrapping a sandwich and handing it to me. “You need new friends,” I say. “Sometimes making new friends helps people move forward.” I can hear the water lapping up against the shore from where we sit. Three little kids in blue life jackets splash around at the water’s edge. The weather is gorgeous this afternoon, eighty-six degrees and climbing. The edges of today feels like a benevolent haze has tinted my perceptions, instinctively fine-tuned to soothing frequencies. Our time relaxing in the shade makes me feel like I have known Angela and Seattle for a lifetime. The textures of life have sounds and shapes and they are flowing over and around us. The singing of the birds is an arm’s length away in the branches above, and I can taste the scent of algae given off by the lake. Days like today can’t be planned and set to an itinerary. The break from bouncing around the city like a pinball in search of the Seattle coffee scene melts away the accumulated stress of being on the road for over a month. Sometimes strangers manifest in order to help us. They appear unexpectedly. The inner workings of our perfunctory lives are thrown open for someone else to reach in and tug at the loose connections. These strangers become friends because they are temporarily charged with handling the raw materials of our lives. This is who Angela and I are becoming. I’ve learned in the last three years of traveling that the world of the spirit is a broad highway in this regard. Unpredictable encounters with people who end up as long-term friends makes movement last long after any particular trip fades into the past. I’ve come to realize that these interactions are at the basis of how I have dealt with the loss of Arcadio. Angela’s story is one of many - all very interesting, all paying the

270 270 dividends that the art of listening engenders. Angela’s life has pieces of everyone else’s story. Her mom died prematurely. Her dad worked for Boeing. Her brother is a remarkably successful attorney. Her three sons are intensely different from each other. Her youngest son was sixteen when he died in a car accident, the same age as Arcadio. I had never told anyone about what happened in the hours after Arcadio’s death until Angela and I had our picnic, not even my mom who was also in the room holding him as he took his last breath at 6:54 pm on December 10, 2010. Arcadio managed one last sigh and then let go. I had been whispering in his ear for hours that it was all right to do so, but he seemed afraid. My mom left to attend to the roomful of friends and family that had poured into the neighboring suite at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera. In the orange and green glow of the lights and the darkness of the cold night that pressed inward from the wall length panel of windows, visitors stepped in one by one in order to say their goodbyes. They rubbed Arcadio’s still warm hands and said sweet things, pressing their cheeks to his face. Some sobbed while others just wiped at their eyes. The aftermath began to unfold. We were in a liminal place. One chapter was closing and others beginning. We possessed no control. I could hear my mom in the suite next door talking with the social workers in a distraught tone as she gathered our belongings. I stayed alone with Arcadio for an hour, draping myself over the body of the child who had reversed the course of my life. It would soon be time to walk into the fog. I turned the lights on and told the nurses to proceed even though I had no idea what that meant. Dreamlike is the only way to describe the two hours that followed. The warmth of Arcadio’s life hung in the air. Time slowed to a crawl. I felt an

271 271 overwhelming sadness, but a part of me was relieved. Arcadio was finally free of physical pain, finally freed from the unfathomable realities that had ruled over his short life. In the soft light and tone of baby blue walls, Arcadio looked like his father, Arcadio, had in his coffin, who in turn looked like his father, Arcadio, had in his coffin. The three of them gone prematurely, all many years short of a full life. They asked me if I wanted a set of rhinestone encrusted pillows adorned with Arcadio’s handprints as a last memento. The paint into which we dipped Arcadio’s open palms was baby blue like the walls. Afterwards, we scrubbed his hands free of paint. My mom and I washed his face and neck with a warm towel so that no one at the funeral home could wonder if he’d been loved. We also washed his hair in a pink tub. I combed it and set it with Gorilla Glue as he had always done, dressing him in a new set of undergarments - his all-time favorites - a wife beater t-shirt and Sponge Bob Square Pants boxers. Arcadio went to the funeral home wrapped in fine linen. The two male nurses had done this many times. The ritual consisted of a strange mix of standard procedure and letting the family be part of this first but not final act of preparing the body. It felt biblical. The only thing missing was oil for the anointing of the body. The two attendants knew how to lift, where the folds on the linen should go, and what creases needed tugging. They worked quietly at times. They were also engaging but respectful, like automatons sent from some reservoir of human kindness in order to officiate over the proceedings in the wake of a new, impossible reality. Before the last piece folded over Arcadio’s face, mom and I kissed his forehead one last time. The two men stepped back and handed me a length of the gold twine that they had used to secure the shroud in three other places, below the chest, so that I could tie the last knots around his shoulders. We

272 272 lifted him onto a special cart, which was decorated with happy scenes of children at play, onto which they placed a - toy box themed - cover so that other kids wouldn’t know there was a body inside as they wheeled Arcadio to the waiting Hearst.

Pioneer Square Danny Chang and I walked past skid row and headed toward Pioneer Square. We sat inside Zeitgeist Coffee, a coffeehouse with wood everything and great pastries. We ate them under a high ceiling and the smell of fresh baked bread wafting in the air, that first night and the next morning as well. That second morning, Danny felt better than he had the previous night. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m twice her age. I thought that if I came to Seattle and told her how I felt, she would stay,” Danny said looking down at his cappuccino. “I feel like an idiot.” “Don’t sweat it,” I said, looking up from Google Maps where I had typed in coffeehouses. “Happens to the best of us. We’ve all done stuff like that.” Danny and I sat for a long time not saying a word, watching the traffic go by while I waited for Angela to call. It seemed that Danny’s having poured his heart out to some Polish beauty the day before, failed to produce the desired effect. That’s why he’d been all teary eyed at the hotel. His love interest had boarded a ferry and headed to Victoria despite his pleas. The pathetic, useless but ultimately true fact that time does works miracles on a broken heart was all I could offer. Subsequently, we ended up encouraging each other to look on the bright side of things because that morning, August 9, would have been Arcadio's twenty-first birthday. I told Jimmy our story, how we pretty much grew up together despite the fact that he was my nephew and twenty-five years younger than I was.

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Danny was an accountant originally from Chicago and about ten years older than I was. Currently, he lived in Los Angeles. One thing stood out clearly, as we sat in the corner of the café eating pastries and watching the locals starting their day. Danny knew a lot about food, having traveled around the world a few times. I detailed my project to him, describing how movement and meeting people while studying things like specialty coffee put some much needed distance between the past and myself. Danny had an interesting way of listening. He would stare down at the table and processed my words while lightly tapping a pen on the table. He would then suddenly put forth some obscure nugget of food information as if it was something everyone was supposed to know. When I described my two trips to Spain and that I was planning to return in order to keep moving, he drew a map of Spain on a napkin, touching the tip of the pen on the various points on which he had scored a mark “Your plans make sense to me. I can see what you are trying to do, Danny said. “Can I offer some suggestions?” “Yeah, go ahead, shoot,” I responded. “You’re missing some stuff,” he said. “What stuff?” “Stuff like the south of Spain, like Andalusia, Seville. It’s where tapas are the best, where they deep fry everything in the local olive oil, and you can buy almond cookies from cloistered nuns,” Danny said. “I'm sure you know that you can also get to Morocco easily from there.” “What else?” I asked. “What about Cochinillo in Segovia. Have you heard of that?”

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“Yeah, the fire roasted, suckling pig that the waiter cuts with a salad plate because the meat is so soft, right?” I asked. “It’s on my list.” “What about Paella?” Danny asked. “I had some good Paella in Burgos and Madrid,” I said. “You have to go to Valencia and Catalonia,” he said, shaking his head. “When I get back to Los Angeles, I’ll send you the name of some places.” Danny then finished his lesson by telling me about a famous chef named Victor Arguinzonis and his restaurant called Asador Etxebarri. “You should see for yourself how he uses different types of wood coals to cook,” Danny suggested. “His technique has revolutionized cooking. Are you are interested in charcuterie? If you are, I’ll take you to Rain Shadow Meats here in Seattle. You have to see this place.” Danny and I went to Rain Shadow Meats and ate sandwiches nearly every day after that. Eventually, Danny returned to Los Angeles and I explored Seattle with Angela who liked art more than chasing food. The selections at Rain Shadow Meats enthralled me. I spent my afternoons tasting things like pates, pork rillettes, duck confit, and acorn fed pork, butchered and finished in a hundred different ways. I knew that exploring charcuterie was now part of my future ambitions concerning my travels because it reminded me of my long ago life as a chef, something that I was trying to reassemble in one form or another. On my walks to and from Rain Shadow Meats, I would often think of my time at Master Chef's Restaurant in Manteca in the early 1990's. I recalled the passion that learning and producing hand designed foods brought into my life during my early twenties. I was the sous chef and an Englishman named Thomas Dryer was the executive chef. There wasn't anybody in between. Master Chef was economical like that. Thomas and I were the last apprentices to that larger than life

275 275 figure named Stanley Hill, a Scotsman who claimed to have worked at Kensington Palace and who had been a personal chef to many Hollywood stars of the 40’s and 50’s. We hated and loved him at the same time. Stanley was an old fox with whom Thomas and I could never keep up even though he was eighty years old. Stanley was a master at pitting Thomas and me against each other. We never realized it in the moment, only later after we hadn’t spoken to each other for hours, days, sometimes weeks without ever knowing why. Stanley also had a kind side and lived for teaching us things that were lost arts like tableside service and his arsenal of bygone recipes. Stanley was also a charcuterie expert. I would sit in awe at the Garde Manger creations he created into masterpieces such as ice sculptures, terrines, homemade sausages and things whose names I can’t remember. It felt good to remember Stanley’s old, liver spotted hands cutting through cooked off veal shanks from which he would make terrines as I made my way past the crowds of homeless people on skid row, through the heart of another major city, in search of something worth learning more about. I always ordered an extra sandwich at Rain Shadow Meats because on the way back to the hotel, inevitably, someone would see the boutique style bag in my hand and ask me if I intended to share. I gave the sandwich to whoever asked first, sometimes stopping for long enough to have a conversations and to offer some encouragement in a form beyond a sandwich. Those experiences with Stanley and Thomas were a lifetime ago. I don’t know how to get back there except to move my feet in the present. Even though I have remained on the sidelines as the world’s relationship to food transforms, because of food movement after food movement, the onset of Internet, and a

276 276 multitude of food related programming on television, my heart has not. I want to be near food in some capacity or other, perhaps professionally as a writer this second time around. I’m inching in from the margins with every new adventure. There are no food and travel writing schools, so I’ve had to create my own curriculum as I invest in the future through movement as a way to escape the past.

Lunch with Bruce Lee Visiting Bruce Lee’s gravesite didn’t exist on my original list of things to do in Seattle. That’s something I imagine my brother German doing. After all, it was his room where Enter the Dragon and Game of Death posters hung in the 1970’s. He also used to walk around the backyard carrying a set of numchakas, throwing wild kicks into the air, and making that terrible little shriek that Bruce Lee made just before he kicked the holy living shit out of someone. I couldn’t wait to tell him how Bruce Lee’s tomb was decorated by all kinds of interesting things and the following two inscriptions: Bruce Lee, Nov. 27, 1940-July 27, 1973: Founder of Jeet Kune Do. Your inspiration continues to guide us toward our personal liberation. What caught my attention were the dozens and dozens of bouquets of fresh flowers, the multiple offerings, and mini Shinto like decorations that littered the gravesite. I was beginning to tire after more than a month on the road, so the thought of meditation in an interesting spot came to mind. I found some shade under a pine tree and stretched. I sat with my legs crossed, practicing deep breaths, and clearing my mind with a simple mantra. The sunlight beyond the pine tree’s shade disappeared and an old friend showed up. Dancing across the back of my eyelids was the little spot of yellow that looked like the sunshine emoji wearing

277 277 shades, bobbing up and down, helping me to focus and keep out unnecessary thoughts. The same spot of energy that had always been there when I meditated in the chapel at Valley Children’s Hospital appeared. Again, the mark transformed into red and blue butterflies that danced with each other across the blank screen of my consciousness. They had swirled in the sky and erupted into a kaleidoscope of colors that shot off in every direction like fireworks on July 4. That meditative vision had happened on a day when Arcadio had one of his major surgeries. It was in 2008. Paralysis resulted from the neck down by a fast growing tumor on his spine. He’d been in surgery for ten hours, in order for doctors to remove two vertebrae so that the tumor could be scraped from around his spinal cord. The entire time he was in surgery I was in the chapel in deep meditation with the emoji and the butterflies helping me along, knowing the whole time that Arcadio would be all right. The team of surgeons had warned us that Arcadio had good chance of dying during surgery but he was strong, then, and so was my meditation. The chapel at Valley Children’s Hospital, which was available to people of all faiths and stocked with the literature of many religions, became a safe harbor away from the tempest of doubt and fear that raged around us. After my meditation at the cemetery, I pulled out my lunch, some rye bread and headcheese that I had bought at Rain Shadow Meats and watched nothing at all but the stillness of an empty scene. Nobody ever showed up. In that moment, the future felt possible. Savoring the headcheese, I recalled Stanley and I making small terrines of headcheese from one hog’s head. That was how I first learned to clarify consommés. At first, Stanley’s headcheese wasn’t half as good as what was in my hands, but it got better with practice, as we learned to cut the face meat into the right proportions and balance the vinegar with spices. I realized, then, how

278 278 much I wanted to do those things again even though Stanley died years ago and Thomas was off cooking somewhere near Prague. One thing was for sure: Rain Shadow Meat’s pork was incomparable in taste and quality to anything I had ever tasted before. I am sitting in Victrola coffee across the street from the Starbucks roaster. It’s my 15th day in Seattle. Last night I said goodbye to Angela. We’d watched rich people pass their yachts through the channel locks into Lake Union as sea lions plucked salmon from the gates. After that, we watched a purple and orange sunset on Puget Sound near some open pit fires. In an hour, I will drive down to the docks, park the Millennium Falcon, and take a jet boat to Victoria for a week. My notebook is thick with information, with pieces of people’s lives and notes from the world of coffee, which doesn’t feel as far away as it once did. Just now, when I asked the barista about their espresso roasts, she called someone from the back to take her place at the crowded bar and came around the bar and sat with me until all my questions were answered. I have been at Victrola Coffee for fifteen minutes and already the sense of this cafe working as an astonishing community space is overpowering. I want to stay here, maybe invent new coffee drinks for these people, like an orange, persimmon and pomegranate nitro cold brew, a summer slam of varied tastes on ice or something like that.

279 279 The International Coffeehouse Tour: Final Report on Seattle’s Top Five Coffee Drinks for summer 2015

After much searching and copious guidance by local professionals and aficionados, we present the drinks that launched a thousand directions of taste, representing the best signature drinks that specialty coffee has to offer as it continues to explore the limits of innovation

Cold Brew Nitro- Nitrogen Cold Brew is the best in ubiquity and panache this summer in the PNW. Stumptown Coffee has taken the toddy style of cold brewing and injected it with the spirit moving effervescence of nitrogen! A sure fire thirst quencher for people on the move who want to cool down before they rev up. Where: Capitol Hill 1115 12th Ave. Seattle, WA 98122

The Shekarato- A sensory explosion that fuses the Italian Coffeehouse standard with the latest flavor enhancers. This exacting formula begins as two shots of espresso shaken over ice until a foamy phenomenon erupts with a splash of cream and a hops reduction syrup whose bouquet lingers with the bountiful aromas of nature. Served in a double whiskey shot glass, it comes chilled and ready to float you away. Where: Ada’s Technical Books East Seattle 425 15th Ave. Seattle WA 98112

Espresso Flight- The “Fog Lifter” as this pairing is known at Trabant Coffee promises the best of both worlds. It is Beauty and the Beast: Coffee and Milk. Savor the complexity of a single origin espresso and then pucker up for a sip of double steamed milk flavored by Earl Grey Tea concentrate that is deliciously finished with cinnamon sprinkles. Where: Trabant Coffee Downtown 602 2nd Ave Seattle, WA 98213

The Aeropress Guatemala La Belle Supersonic- Just a new-fashioned love song in the form of a twelve-ounce cup of coffee made simply. The aeropress will give your coffee the most control over the diverse variables involved in handcrafting an individual cup of coffee. The flavor notes come across as a less bitter, a cosmopolitan splash of clarity and sweetness. Where: Milstead & Company Fremont District 770 N. 34th St. Seattle, WA

A Double Shot of Espresso- Move over single origin espresso. The iconic Empire blend leaves no doubt that great tasting espresso can still be blended to exacting and delicious standards. In Victrola’s own words: “We chose three Latin

280 280 American coffees that would complement each other well in body, acidity and mouth-feel and the results are delightful: tobacco, dried fruit and toasted marshmallow followed by a clean, balanced cup full of sweet chocolate and linear acidity.” Where: Victrola Coffee Capitol Hill 310 E. Pike St. Seattle, WA 98211

1. All rights reserved. Information and intellectual properties inherent in this report belong to the committees that comprise the International Coffeehouse Tour 2015 and its partners. 2. This category does not include “coffee cocktails” that include alcohol or concoctions whose sugary or milky nature ignore coffee as the primary ingredient.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE FALCON RISING

Northern California October 2015 The woman who ran a stop sign and destroyed the Millennium Falcon really made a mess of my plans. The accident couldn’t have come at a worse time, financially or in terms of my ambition to keep moving forward as a way of learning more about the world and its people. In a moment of panic, I decided to scrap my entire project during the course of a few black days earlier this month. I figured it would be easier to commit myself to writing childhood stories about paper routes and other coming of age experiences like those that everyone else does in MFA programs. I was a fool to believe that anything cohesive could have resulted from my bouncing around Europe and the United States in search of something that I could only loosely articulate as my attempt to search out coffee and food. My dream of having a career that would transcend graduate school, as I had promised Arcadio on Oahu, felt further away than ever in the days following the accident. The attempt to make sense of my experience suddenly loomed overly ambitious, beyond the scope of my ability to guide it to a conclusion. The efforts would have to linger as memories and a sequence of journal entries that were contained in a half dozen notebooks, nothing more than personal stories, unconnected as splayed ends at best. My hopes that my three years on the road and my reflections of Arcadio’s life in faraway places would one-day result in a coherent sense of purpose felt like it died alongside the Millennium Falcon on that sidewalk in Merced.

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However, things have taken a turn for the better in the last couple of days. I’m not angry anymore. I’m not angry in the big scheme of things either - that Arcadio died, that I threw away the best years of my life, or whatever else, including the accident. Time has worked as everyone said that it would. It’s been almost five years since Arcadio passed away. I’m halfway through graduate school and a little bit farther along in the process of finding meaning. I’m also really uplifted by the small victories that I’ve achieved, like earning my bachelor’s degree and leaving the cheese plant two years ago. Some days it feels like Aerosmith’s song Back in the Saddle Again is playing in the background, suddenly framing in the rest of my time in grad school and beyond. The post Millennium Falcon malaise lasted about three weeks until a renewed perspective convinced me not to focus so much on my childhood adventures as a project but to look forward by concentrating on finishing what I’d started. The inspiration resulted from an afternoon in the backyard. The Indian summer in early October provided us with stunning weather, so being outside felt good. I’d gone outside to play with the dog and put my face in the sun, paying attention to Arcadio’s pets because our giving his animals a good life was one of his final requests. My epiphany just happened in the stillness of the warm afternoon outside. I used to meditate all the time when Arcadio was sick, but the truth these days is that I don’t go around meditating every chance I get, like I used to when the circumstances left me with no other choice. I noticed how tense my body was and began to stretch in between tossing Osito his squeaky toy, bending over to touch my toes and squatting like a duck. Before long, I was sitting Indian style on a blanket, partially in the sun.

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I don’t claim to have a great deal of intuition or the clairvoyance with which some of those amongst us see into other dimensions. I’m not even sure that if the opportunity was somehow possible that I’d choose to communicate with Arcadio. I just know that he is not here anymore and that his animals are an incredible blessing that enrich our lives in his absence. That they are still with us five years after his passing, however, makes it feel like a part of him is still with us. I also know that mediation, or at least what I call meditation, works to settle the hum of a noisy world that keeps trying to convince me that my life is in the past. I’m grateful for Roland’s simple lessons from all those years ago. They are still paying dividends and occasionally meditation provides me with insights that I can’t otherwise find. Arcadio’s animals - his dog Osito and a momma cat named Mary Lou and her two daughters, Zuli and Fat Face - cuddled up against me that day three weeks ago as Fat Face poked at my side during my meditation. I felt Arcadio’s presence through the companionship of his animals, which I took as a reminder that his story and the love he demonstrated in his short life are worthy of sharing with others. That day of meditation in the backyard was the beginning of my waking up. Even though the accident had plunged me into a deeper financial uncertainty related to the costs of graduate school, my project was very much still alive, only because most the work was finished and the only thing necessary to bring it to its conclusion was to sit down and connect the dots by starting on drafts. I would trust in the universe to bring me the resources in order to finish and to keep practicing movement as a way to heal, bringing me closer to food and coffee. As I meditated with Arcadio’s animals stirring around me, Osito nearly in my lap, I thought of the joy that he experienced when we finally relented and

284 284 agreed to let him have the dog that he’d been asking about for years. He carried around the seven-week old pup, a Border collie and Husky mix that we’ve never been able to train and whom I described in Arcadio’s obituary as his long awaited mischievous sidekick, around the house and everywhere else he went. In turn, Osito and his three cat sisters loved Arcadio, knowing when he was sick from chemo or radiation. They often refused to leave his side and took turns comforting him, especially towards the end, until he felt better. Mary Lou used to perch herself on his chest, massaging him as he slept. I remembered the day in 2006 when Arcadio burst through the door with a baby Mary Lou whom he had brought home from a sales trip to Medford, Oregon. I remembered, years later, how he stayed up all night hoping to see his new pets in the making when she hid herself away in the doghouse to give birth to Zuli and Fatface. Mostly, though, I remember the way he loved his pets, his energy and zest for life. Today one of my favorite things to do is to take Osito to the dog park, and occasionally the cemetery where his master rests in peace, always leaving for Arcadio a couple of his favorite chocolates, The Big Cherry. I talk to him, detailing my most recent adventures and sharing with him the dramas of graduate school because he used to love hearing about the cheese plant and the insanity that went on there when he was locked away in a hospital somewhere. ****************************************************************** It’s 11:30 pm on October 24, 2015 and I’m crossing the Alfred Zampa Memorial Bridge over the Carquinez Straights on Interstate 80 between the Bay Area and Sacramento for the first time in my life. I’m in the White Falcon, another Pontiac Grand Prix that I bought used with fifty thousand miles but which sadly lacks the options that made The Millennium Falcon a great ride. I’m on my way

285 285 home from the Vallejo Yacht Club where one of the girls from the UC Davis Spanish Arts program got married earlier today. The reception was fancy and well organized which gave me a chance to catch up with my friends as we sat around eating in a memorable setting with nautical themes as the bride and groom, Carl and Evelyn, toasted their friends and family as a Big Band played in the background. We ate items from a menu crafted to resemble those we experienced in our time together in Castile. For the few moments that we stood around watching the caterers make pans of Paella on a deck that overlooked a sunset beyond the marina, it felt like we were in Spain again at the Paella Institute. I marvel at how the bridge is lit up in an orange glow that contrasts with the sea of darkness below and think about how today ended up as one of those days where time enough didn’t exist to enjoy all the things that life has to offer. I left the house this morning knowing there were various places, scattered throughout Northern California, where I needed to be, doubting if time and distance would allow me to be present at all of them, so I’m suddenly reminded of all the people that I’ve met in my travels and the improbable places where my project has taken me. I took the back way from Turlock to Santa Cruz, heading over Pacheco Pass in order to stop and visit Vertigo Coffee in San Juan Bautista. Taking the shortcut through San Juan Road into Watsonville and up Highway One, I arrived in Santa Cruz with barely enough time to find parking and run into the arena where Gabby’s Jiu Jitsu match was about to begin. My niece Gabby is a bright, smiley-faced fourteen-year-old with flowing brown hair, which she puts in a bun when she fights. She is also a little badass, so I try not to miss any of her matches. It’s easy to see why she took first place at the World’s competition a couple years ago or usually finishes in one of the top spots

286 286 every time. She’s been training at Brazilian Jiu Jitsu since she was seven. Gabby and her older brother, Baby German, were very close to Arcadio. Gabby was nine when he died, and in a sense, she lost one of her heroes. We don’t talk about it too much, but that’s what happened. I had to take cuts in the line outside the arena and then run through the packed bleachers in order to find the area where Gabby’s match was taking place. I was still making my way through the crowds that gather at the edges when I looked up to see Gabby and her opponent bow to each other as the match got underway while my brother and small crowd of Brazilian fighters who are affiliated with her trainer (a five-time world champion) yelled instructions in her direction. It didn’t take long before Gabby twisted up her opponent, put her in a hold and then toyed with her like a cat does with a mouse. I eased up next to my brother and began to yell out my own set of instructions. I jumped up and down along with the others and shouted, “Come on Gabby! Body slam her!” That was obviously the wrong thing to say. My brother and the Brazilians all stopped what they were doing and looked at me with contempt. I felt my cheeks turning red from embarrassment as my brother German poked me in the ribs and shouted, “What the hell are talking about? Don’t say anything else. Just watch the match.” Gabby won seven to nothing and afterwards we took pictures with her on the winner’s podium so that I could show all my friends on Facebook how much progress she is making. I’m pretty sure that she tries her best out of an awareness that her cousin Arcadio never had the opportunity to enjoy being a teenager without the specter of Ewing’s sarcoma hovering over his life. It’s another thing we don’t talk too much about. She’s told me so, once or twice.

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“Are you going to lunch with us Uncle Eddie?” Gabby asked after I told her what a great job she was doing. “No,” I said. “I have to meet Felix and Jessie in San Jose and then go to a wedding in Vallejo.” “You’re all over the place,” Gabby said. “I thought you were also going to that coffee shop you like, here in Santa Cruz.” “I’m headed to Verve Coffee right now, before I head out to San Jose,” I responded. “And, yes, I’m all over the place, which is a good thing. It hasn’t always been that way.” I got to San Jose after stopping to people watch and have a pour over at Verve Coffee, parking along the freeway and jumping into Felix and Jessie’s car. They whisked me away to a wonderful Greek drive-in near Campbell named Falafel’s that has a cult like following among locals and which was featured on Diners, Drive ins and Dives. They again proved worthy advance scouts because the Tabbouleh, Baba Ganoush, and the falafel balls left the three of us convinced that movement and food explorations are worth the effort, that perhaps we could keep doing it forever. After eating, we sat around and talked about what a great year it had been in San Francisco. We also mentioned meeting up in Madrid the following summer. I didn’t know if Felix and Jessie were serious about going to Europe, but I knew that the following summer consisted of a return trip on my part. I planned on studying in Seville which would also give me the opportunity to make my way back to Florence for a third time. I’d already made the down payment. I also knew that I would be volunteering for the Specialty Coffee Association of America in San Francisco in January at the Taster’s Cup, in Atlanta at the US Barista

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Championship, and in Dublin, Ireland the following June where the World Barista Championships would take place. As I come off the bridge and make my way south on the 680, the silhouette of Mt. Diablo hangs in the sky, a sight that is familiar to anyone who grew up anywhere between Stockton and Modesto. We, however, know it from the other side because it frames in the westward view from the floor of the Central Valley as seen from the Stockton area. The happiness that ran through today events is suddenly matched by the realization that I have more than my promise to Arcadio pushing me forward toward some unknown future. Some days I’m haunted by pulling against the weight of my past. My head fills with the voices of those who’ve hindered my efforts instead of offering help. There is one in voice particular that I hear from time to time. During my first semester in junior college when Arcadio was still alive and when I still thought that economics was my calling, I used to study in the break room of the cheese plant. Twelve hours shifts and full days at school in between helping mom with Arcadio made finding the time to study pre-calculus difficult at best. One day out of nowhere a coworker named Sergio started fucking with me for no reason. He’d been at the cheese plant forever and seemed to embody the chaos and unhappiness that gripped the majority of people who worked there. Standing over my shoulder and looking down into my math book, he said “Don’t tell me you’re going to school. You ain’t never getting out of here, just like the rest of us.” “Why would you say something like that?” I asked. “You know how many people I’ve watched take classes and then drop out? Besides, you’re too old and dumb already. They don’t want people like us at the university,” he said. “Watch, I give you two semesters before you drop out.”

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“That’s your story, asshole,” I responded, picking up my math book and homework so that I could leave before his bullshit got the better of me. Sergio was the last person I spoke to during my last night at the cheese plant, the night that Ronnie and I recorded my one-man play. I found him in the packing room, where they sent the misfits and anyone else who had fucked up and cost the company money. He knew what was coming. At first. he never said a word. I’d gone into the packing room in order to say good bye to some of the friends that I had made during my five plus years at the cheese plant and who were working alongside Sergio, which took a long time because some of them had to be rounded up from the cooling room. I was blown away by how my coworkers gathered around to see me off and the expressions they made, wishing me well at the university. Sergio pretended not to notice the commotion as he kept throwing blocks of cheese into empty cardboard boxes with a scowl on his face. When I got to the door, I saw that Sergio had been following my movements as he checked the boxes of cheese that flowed along the production line. I turned around and said, “Go fuck yourself, you little bitch. I’ll invite you to my graduation.” Sergio stopped what he was doing, waved two middle fingers across his chest, and said, “You’ll be back, you dumb fuck.”

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