Absurdistan

36 Comidas Criollas

As I sent out my Holocaust proposal to the members of the new SCROD listserv, I was shocked to discover an electronic message from rsales@hunter.cuny.edu parked in my mailbox.

I don’t usually feel revulsion (everything in my world is kind of revolting in its own way), but Rouenna’s message brought me to the brink. A lifetime on the streets of the Bronx, and after all that pain and horseshit, she gets pregnant by Jerry fucking Shteynfarb. Who the hell had sex with a Russian writer without using a condom? What was she thinking? But in the end I couldn’t help myself: I felt sorry for her. For the sad goateed presence in her belly, yes, but mostly for the beaten-down tone, the way she had been stripped of everything vital in just under two months. What could I tell her? Was it still my duty to comfort her? I responded with two messages. First:

And then:

I looked out the window of my office. It was raining for the first time in days. With the loathsome sun finally extinguished, the city appeared nearly as glamorous as Hong Kong, its shortish row of skyscrapers rising above an anthill of government buildings, its port studded with idled cargo containers. Only the oil fields filling the bay, their singular ghostly luminosity, reminded me of my location.

But I wasn’t there.

I was on that stretch of East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, our stretch, which starts from the El Batey Restaurant near Marmion Avenue and then swelters down to the Blimpie franchise on Hughes, where, back in ’98, Rouenna’s favorite cousin was busted by the cops for some complicated, non-sandwich-related offense.

East Tremont Avenue, solid purveyor of attainable dreams, where stores will sell you todo para 99¢ y menos, 79¢ gets you a whole chicken at Fine Fare, and $79 will land you a flowery upright mattress with a “five-year warrenty”; where a 325-pound Russian man with a hot mamita on his arm is respected and accepted by all; where dudes wheeling by on bicycles and young mothers languidly window-shopping at She-She Juniors & Ladies will subject me to the same breathless local query: “Yo, Misha, ¿qué ongo, a-ai?”

At El Batey Restaurant, specializing in comidas criollas, the phallic jukebox is playing a phallic song, and everyone has their attention fixed on each other’s asses, and Rouenna is gossiping with some friend about which of the waitresses is pregnant and whose boyfrien’ has just been sent upstate for ten years, but all I can see in front of me is a plate of glistening limes, a little red prick of Tabasco sauce, and a bottle of Presidente beer, the top of which comes perfectly wrapped in a sweaty napkin—the small pleasures of a beleaguered world. And I’m waiting, waiting, waiting for the metal pot filled with asopao de camarones, or “soupy shrimps,” as the menu calls them, waiting to surrender to ajillo, for there is more garlic in the pot than water or rice or shrimp even. And soon I am filled with cold Presidente, hot Tabasco, and the basso profundo reverberations of garlic in my estómago. I rise from my chair, grab the gossiping Rouenna, and carry her to the impromptu dance floor in back, beneath the television set perpetually tuned to the exploits of the local baseball team, the Jankees. We try to dance, the slowest dance in history, but mostly we just stand there and stare at each other, making little animal noises, the purrs of set-upon cats, the steady whine of basset hounds, which the jukebox all but drowns out with its thick salsa beats. And we kiss. Garlic and sweat and pure love, we kiss.

I’m a little drunk as Rouenna helps me back to her place on 173rd Street and Vyse, past the senior-citizen troublemaker in the Chicago Bulls wife-beater who always threatens to kill Mister Softee, the rather innocuous mobile ice-cream vendor, and past the Jehovah’s Witnesses Hall, now being reverently approached by women with tinfoil-covered platters of pigeon peas and rice. There’s a wedding on, and Rouenna winks at me, meaning When, already?, and she smiles at me with just the hint of gentle mockery that I’ve always appreciated, that in and of itself manages to reduce me a little, manages to cut out the shrimp and rice and boil me down to my essential desires—a girl, a city, a libertine but tender way of life.

Oh, my poor sweet baby.