Carnegie wore royal blue and Rockefeller wore strawberry red and they danced. I watched them from across the road. My customers ignored them but I could not. Soon Henry Ford would arrive in electric lemon yellow with a bright neon lime green J.P. Morgan completing the quartet. A deep bass beat and swirling ringing high pitched accompaniment provided their techno background.
Our restaurant buzzed with the wonders of modern technology. I could feel it, the glow from the lights and various appliances assaulted me and traveled up my spine. Bright and translucent turn of the century Robber Barons glared at me, and I shuddered. I was waitering in a Washington D.C. restaurant favored by K Street politicos and fortunately overlooked by tourists. My section was outdoors, allowing me to lackadaisically watch the show across the street when I should have been working.
A new client entered and was seated in my section. He was a tall bald Filipino type with a thick goatee. He had been here before. All of a sudden I felt a pressing urge to unhinge my jaw and swallow up the whole restaurant, every table, all the clients but one, then the whole street, and all the other restaurants, and all the other streets in the town, and all the other towns and states and countries and planets and stars until the universe was reduced to a singularity, a field of no texture or distinction but a solitary color, perhaps Rockefeller's red, where we would float, he and I, me and the Filipino, and meet each other and duel.
This crazy stardream choked my good senses as I maneuvered through the restaurant and I was bumping people and stumbling. I looked into their eyes and wondered if they saw my red universe and wanted in, I doubted it. They seemed content here on Pennsylvania Avenue, discussing the Energy Bill and watching protesters. But when I got to him it was different, he had seen it.
Dangerous hallucinations, products of desire, disrupted my schedule often. I had tried various strategies of fighting and ignoring them before learning to find happiness in acceptance. I couldn't show the outside world, however. That aspect remained to be fought.
I returned home from work and greeted my roommate Phillip who was listening to music. He was perpetually out of work and divided his time between music, drinking, and his hippie girlfriend. She served effectively as our third roommate but didn't contribute to the rent. He and I had been friends in college and were friends still. His father liked me. We had parted ways only briefly when he left for six months without explanation a year after graduation. His abrupt departure came in the summer months, following an altercation we had had. I thought that was the cause and agonized and relived our fight for the six months before he returned, trying to imagine how he could have taken so seriously what I considered a trivial matter. I spent those months unsettled. Despite feeling correct and self-righteous throughout, always lingering in the nether-regions of my consciousness was a sense of underlying guilt and depression.
He came back in winter and told me of a Mexican girl. He had seen her from his location of temporary employment at a dock six months prior and felt compelled to follow. In a manner most surprising to himself, he followed her not with the intention of speaking with her or even making himself known, but merely in order to resolve with himself a question regarding her enigmatic qualities and "what mystery she held." As he described this I rolled my eyes at his romantic tendencies but something tugged at me. After watching her for several minutes he approached her and introduced himself. She was twenty-two years old and named Alejandra. She was on her way to a bus station where she would travel to Plano, Texas, and he joined her.
As he told it to me, the decision to do so was not the spontaneous and impulsive youthful turn it is often portrayed as. It didn't feel like a decision at all, but the natural course of events. He knew without thinking that it was the right time in his life to go to Plano, Texas. The bus ride was smooth and went quickly. By the time they arrived he claimed a connection had developed between them where little needed to be said. Arriving there, they were met by her brother, a short man, poorly dressed and kept, he was a couple years older than his sister, but it didn't show. She introduced the two and said some words in Spanish and they got in the brother's truck to drive to their home outside the city. During the ride Alejandra narrated the countryside and Phillip stared at the pattern made by the dirt on the windshield against the blue sky backdrop.
At the house they met her father, a tall man with a thick black moustache and an imposing gut. He was steely-eyed and silent. She talked to him in Spanish and set up living arrangements for Phillip. He would stay at their house and go to work with her brothers at a farm a short drive away. The father barely acknowledged him, giving only a stern glance and exchanging no words. The Rosa family consisted of Alejandra's father and mother, her sister and three brothers and grandmother. They lived fairly well relative to other immigrants, and the addition of Phillip was met with a surprising sort of non-reaction, as if they too considered these events to be natural.
On Monday, Phillip was awakened by the same brother that had met him at the station. He borrowed work clothes from another and they got in the truck to go. He didn't speak Spanish but they got along well enough. They arrived and soon he was doing shovel work, digging out a clearing beside the farms main drainage ditch. By 7:30 AM he had a thin coating of sweat on his arms, face and neck. He thought of her as he worked and felt satisfaction in what he did.
Two weeks after his arrival came a holiday. He and Alejandra hadn't spent as much time together as he would have liked, he was still far from discovering a clue to that enigmatic quality that attracted him. On this holiday night she took him someplace new. They went to one of the lesser neighborhoods in town and approached a decrepit old theatre. Though it may have at one point, this theatre had no visible name. A pair of orphaned brothers from Mexico ran it partly as a brothel featuring fresh-faced illegals, partly as a safe location for drug deals, and partly to stage cockfights. Live music could be heard on special occasions. This is what brought them. He could tell all week she was excited for it.
They entered unnoticed. The musicians were playing some type of part mariachi part metal that drew them both in. He was watching her and saw a strange light begin to come off her. The band was all Mexican, including the singer, though he looked different. There was something Byzantine, almost Asiatic about him. He had curled eyebrows and raised cheeks, and when he sang it was like he was in a trance. The crowd gathered nearer and was moving in unison. The strange light from Alejandra burned brighter. The singer began to improvise, the Spanish words sounded like gibberish to Phillip but it didn't matter. He lost Alejandra in the crowd and struggled to find her as his attention was rapt in the music. Finally he laid eyes upon her, the light guided him and rested above her head. She looked just as she did on the docks weeks earlier. The music grew in intensity as the band found a groove. He approached her, and as she looked up at him the music neared its fiery climax, drowning out all thought. He stared into her eyes and she stared back, understanding. The music peaked and the light grew so strong and bright the whole world disappeared.
Four months went by, and Phillip grew into the work schedule. Eventually he would wake up before the others. In the pre-dawn light he looked at Alejandra sleeping. The light she gave off that night was gone now, everything he saw on the dock was. She was just a Mexican girl who he slept with and, as he learned the language more and more, he found she had little to say worth hearing. That time before dawn was made for depression and loneliness, and as Phillip slept less and less he saw more of it. Eventually he missed home and in the middle of the night left the Rosa family and Alejandra and returned to me in Washington.
Phillip and I really had parted ways only briefly, but it wasn't when he was gone that we did so. Upon his return he told me about her and his life in Texas and I burned. Being an empathetic sort, I saw all that he saw and felt all that he felt. I had been trapped in the city for those six months, surrounded by the traffic and buzzing appliances and electronic entertainment. I had worked in a restaurant serving lobbyists as he dug ditches and hauled seed in the sun. We shared a romantic nature, and thus shared an attraction to this type of lifestyle. He was the one who led it though. Jealousy's a hell of a drug, and it got me.
My resentment led to unhealthy desires for failure and pain in his life, until eventually a new incident came along that evened us out. As the tensions eased both our lives seemed to improve immeasurably.
Our relationship has been strong ever since. About the time I got home to him I had forgotten the Filipino and what had happened.
