"The Flamenco Academy" (7 page)

That morning Daddy had seemed good. There
wasn’t much he liked to eat anymore, but I’d discovered the perfect
mixture of Cream of Wheat and butter and melted ice cream and had
helped him eat five spoonfuls before he fell back, exhausted. Then,
huffing out one word on each breath, he asked, “How. Is. Old.
Sometimes. Y?”

It had been a while since he’d teased me
about my imaginary boyfriend with the last name full of vowels and
I laughed too loud and too much when he did. Still, it made him
happy and I joked back, “Oh, Sometimes Y and I are through. I’m
dating a Hawaiian boy now. Ahahkahluauluau.”

He wheezed out a laugh that was the
equivalent of hysterics for him. The effort wore him out and he
slid back into sleep. He was snoozing when the church van pulled up
in front and dropped my mom off. I slipped out the back before she
came in and walked to work.

At Puppy Taco, I clocked in for me and Didi
and did the prep work, shredding the pale iceberg lettuce, slicing
pulpy tomatoes, crying over the onions I had to chop up for the
burgers. In addition to all the regular stuff, on Sundays it was
Alejandro’s tradition to add a few New Mexican specialties to the
menu. He shopped the night before and left everything in the
refrigerator. Nothing microwaved. On Sunday we actually cooked. I
pulled out a couple of fifty-count bags of blue corn tortillas and
dragged them through the red chile that Alejandro’s mother made by
soaking dried red chiles until she could scrape the pulp off the
skins and cook that with pork shoulder.

I rolled up a batch of pork enchiladas,
another of beef, some with just asadero cheese, covered them with
sauce and cheese, and slid the pans into the industrial oven. I
made another batch with green chile sauce. On Sundays Alejandro
banished fries and tots in favor of sopaipillas. I had just lowered
the first batch into the fryer and the shop was filling with the
heavenly smell of yeast and flour they made as they puffed up when
the high-pitched shriek of a transmission in its final days alerted
me that the Skankmobile approached. I glanced out through the
drive-up window in time to see Didi run the red light at Central
and Monroe before cutting into the parking lot.

She squealed up in the ’Stang and jumped
out, grabbing the hideous striped uniform shirt we were supposed to
wear, and which Didi might occasionally drape over her real
clothes. Her real clothes that day were the Japanese schoolgirl
drag she’d been wearing last night when I’d left her at the Hilton.
That morning, watching her dance through the parking lot, I was
struck by how spindly, how vulnerable she looked. Her short skirt
showed off the speed freak figure she attributed to ADD. Didi
maintained that her attention deficit disorder kept her distracted
from food. My theory was that she didn’t have ADD. She only claimed
to so she could get prescriptions for the Ritalin that kept her too
speeded up to eat. Or sleep. Sleeping was something she clearly
hadn’t done much of last night.

She jerked the back door open, stepped in,
and threw her arms open. “Ah, the smell of five-month-old fryer
grease on a Sunday morning. Who needs church when we have Puppy
Taco?” Didi grabbed a handful of the slurpy tomatoes I’d just
sliced up, slid them into her mouth like oysters, and closed her
eyes against what was obviously a monster hangover.

“Somewhere in the depths of my bowels
today’s tomatoes will meet last night’s Stoli and create the
perfect Bloody Mary.”

“So did he show?”

She played it cool. “Who?”

“Who! Julie, of course.”

“Ah, Julie.” She imported a look of fond
remembrance. “Dear, sweet, naughty Julie.”

“Tell! Tell! Tell!”

“Hydrate! Hydrate! Hydrate!” She turned on
the water in the giant, industrial-sized sink, stuck her hand under
the flow, siphoned about a gallon into her mouth, then collapsed
onto the upturned mop bucket, her skinny rear fitting perfectly
between the wheels on the bottom, legs straight out in front with
that Bambi-on-the-ice kind of sexy cuteness. She heaved a big sigh
and leaned her head back against the wall. Being Didi Steinberg,
Queen of Albuquerque Groupies, took a lot out of a person.

“So?” I prompted.

“So our Julie learned more than Swiss at
that fancy boarding school, if you know what I mean. And I think
you do.”

“Uh, they don’t actually speak Swiss in
Switzerland. I mean, there isn’t actually a Swiss language. They
speak French and German and—”

“Don’t nerd out on me, Rae, okay?”

“Sorry. Just keeping the details straight.”
That was my job in our friendship. Keeping the details
straight.

“So he came back to the hotel? You met
him?”

“Met him? Uh, yeah, I ‘met’ him.” Didi
rolled onto her right hip and hiked up her skirt to show me the
bottom half of her left cheek. A red hickey, purpling at the edges,
floated across it like an end-of-the-world sunset. Above the hickey
were penned the initials J.C.

“No effing way?” I shrieked.

“Yes, fucking way.”

“And...”

“You know how sublime and divine and scrumpo
he is in videos?”

I nodded wildly to affirm the intense
Casablancas scrumphood.

“Times, like, a thousand in person.”

I was too engrossed to pay any attention to
the pinging that signaled the arrival of our first customer of the
day. Didi was singing a song about the dimples at the top of Julian
Casablancas’s butt in what she told me was the Strokes’ New
York/Velvet Underground style when Alejandro strolled in, fresh
from Mass at Our Lady of Fatima.

“You gonna open anytime soon?” he asked,
nodding toward the car waiting at the take-out window as he
carefully hung up his brown suit jacket.

The reason Alejandro was so casual about us
not working was that he knew Didi was our star. Her hours during
the week were sporadic, but she was guaranteed to be there on
Sunday. Over the months Didi had been in his employ, she’d built up
a following until Sunday was the busiest day of the week for Puppy
Taco. And Alejandro knew it wasn’t all because of his
enchiladas
verdes
. That day was no exception. I peeked out the window. The
cars were already lined up around the store and spilling out onto
Central. There was some form of male behind the wheel of every
vehicle. Old geezer males getting lunch burgers for wifey back at
home; young horny males yucking it up in Dad’s borrowed Explorer;
sad, lonely males who told themselves there was something special
about Pup y Taco’s tater tots and that was why they had to make a
special trip there every Sunday, only to be reminded that Sunday
was the one day we didn’t sell tots. Just sopaipillas.

I spun around and pushed up the big,
old-fashioned take-out window. I wished that Alejandro would
install a high-tech speaker system so that customers could order
into a scratchy box. But, if Pup y Taco had that instead of a
window, Didi wouldn’t have had a stage and Sunday morning was all
about Didi being onstage.

The fryer dinged.

“Uh, Cyndi Rae...”

“Rae,” I corrected him.

Alejandro still called me by the name he’d
copied off my driver’s license when he’d first hired us. My old
name. The name I used to go by before Didi dubbed me Rae and I
stopped answering to anything else. Even Daddy called me Rae. Mom
was the only one who called me Cyndi Rae anymore. I liked it that
she identified me as someone I had stopped being. That she was
still calling a number that had been disconnected.

“Right, Rae, sorry. Listen, would you
mind...?” Alejandro’s question trailed off as he nodded toward the
fryer. What he didn’t have to say was
Rae, you wanna get the
fryer so Didi’s fans can catch a glimpse of their queen and we can
sell more hot dogs and chile cheeseburgers on Sunday morning than
we do any other three days put together?

“Didi? You ready?” he asked, sounding like a
celebrity handler coaxing a star onstage.

Didi heaved herself to her feet, then paused
a second, turning away from the window. When she turned back
around, she’d done that thing she did where one second she looks
completely beat to shit; then she gathers herself and uncorks some
mysterious inner light and she’s beaming a thousand watts. That was
the face the males making their Sunday pilgrimage saw. The face of
a girl who had something they only glimpsed on television, in
movies. Not beauty, exactly, but something more exciting, more
alive. Something that made them want to keep looking, keep coming
back to a not-so-great taco place every Sunday morning.

“Hey, Key Biscayne,” Didi greeted her first
regular, an old guy still in his Sunday suit, smelling of Old
Spice, ear hairs all nicely clipped, getting the lunch burgers.
“Three number sevens, hold the green chile, right?”

“That’s right, Didi,” he chirped back.

“Hey, come on, man, what’s a Fiesta Burger
without the green chile? Live a little, try the green chile. My
boss’s mom makes it herself. You look like you could use a little
spice in your life.”

“Twist my arm,” he said, holding a spindly
limb out, which Didi pretended to wring. And so, Key Biscayne got
the green chile along with the biggest thrill he would have all
week.

“You got it under control, Cyndi Rae?”
Alejandro asked, as I assembled the three Fiestas, all the way.

I nodded, already moving on to the next
order that Didi had stuck on the clip in front of me. “Under
control, Alejandro,” I said, as he headed out the back door,
smiling at the line of cars circling his business.

He stopped at the door and gestured for me
to come closer. “Make her do
some
of the work.”

“Yeah, that’ll be the day.”

Alejandro and I glanced at Didi who was
leaning over so that a load of guys from Pueblo Heights High
School, the driver with a newly minted learner’s permit and his
mom’s Subaru Forester, could get a nice peek at the Steinberg
mammaries.

“Hello, you wacky Whore-nuts.” The guys’
pimples flared red in excitement. “How many rocks of crack can I
get you gentlemen today?”

One especially twerpy kid with the hair at
the front of his head waxed into a fin yelled out of the back
window. “Hey, where’s the other Skankette?”

That was my signal to step forward and put
my arm around Didi’s shoulders while we yelled, “The hos are in the
house!”

“Yo! Yo! Yo! Skankettes!” the boys shouted
as I waved my greasy spatula.

I loved the psychological jujitsu Didi did
on her bad-girl reputation, turning the snickers behind her back,
the whispered “ho” and “skank,” into our badges of honor. So that’s
who we were, the Skankettes in Didi’s Scarlet Letter-red
Skankmobile.

Alejandro snorted, shook his head, and
walked out. Maybe neither Alejandro nor I was wearing a black
T-shirt with thirty tour dates printed on it, but in our own way we
were both happy to be carrying the amps, happy to be part of the
show.

For the next few hours, I fried sopaipillas
and boxed up enchiladas. I assembled tacos, burritos, and Mexi-dogs
while Didi applied lip liner, tweezed her eyebrows, restyled her
hair into a couple dozen twisted tufts of mini-dreadlocks,
scribbled a few orders, raved about Julian Casablancas, whom she
may or may not have actually met, and, mostly, worked the crowd.
Like groupieing, working the crowd was also something Didi
considered practice for when she became famous. She kept score of
how many return fans she lured back to Puppy, giving herself extra
bonus points for females.

After the initial rush of backed-up cars
subsided, Didi handed the order pad to me and flopped back down on
the mop bucket where she exhibited her extraterrestrial ability to
fall asleep instantly, anywhere, any time.

I got into a steady rhythm of taking orders
and slamming out the grub, not wasting any time playing up to
latecomers who were disappointed because they’d missed Didi. After
I told the last lonely loser who pulled up and asked if, by any
chance, “that other girl” was working today that Didi was
indisposed and would be appearing next Sunday as usual, I slid the
drive-up window closed. I had snapped on the yellow latex gloves
and was squirting bleach solution on the counters when Didi woke
up.

“We almost through here?”

“Uh, yeah,
we’re
almost through,
bitch.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Whore.”

“Skank.”

“Trollop.”

“Strumpet.”

“Harlot.”

“Pox-ridden doxie.”

“Doxie! All right, Hunker! The Hunker Woman
goes Shakespearean on my ass! Doxie? You are one wild woman!”

I grinned. When I was with Didi I
was
one wild woman. She tugged on a pair of gloves and actually helped
me clean the counters for a while but ended up pretending she was a
proctologist and had to perform an emergency exam on me. I was
swatting and threatening to squirt bleach all over her anime outfit
when the phone rang. Didi answered the phone with one hand, “Allô!
Allô! Le Poop ay La Taco ici!” while she dipped the index finger of
the other hand in Crisco and poked it my way.

The yellow latex finger with a white glob of
Crisco on the end froze, stuck out, pointing at me for a long
moment, while she listened. Then she handed the phone to me and
said, “It’s your mom.”

It’s your mom.

That was all I needed to hear. My mother
never called me at work and there was only one reason why she would
have done it that day.

As Didi said later, the funeral was
“psychedically surreal” in its awfulness. The only thing that got
me through it was having her by my side. My mother tiptoed close to
full-on hysteria when she found out Didi was coming. But I just
blanked out her face turning red and repeated over and over, “No
Didi, no me.” Mom and her cult hadn’t totally given up on me at
that time so, after lengthy consultations with her pastor and the
sisters, who were directing her every move in life by that time,
she agreed to allow my best friend to attend.