The Music of What Happens, page 8
“I’m Maximo. I’m a Romeo. I make the boys all …”
I give him the finger. “You need a rhyming dictionary?”
“I was gonna go with ‘grow-me-o.’ ”
“Glad you didn’t,” I say.
“Do you like him?” Zay-Rod asks.
I laugh, but the guys don’t laugh back. “No. I don’t know. Not really,” I say.
The truth is he’s got a lot of shit going on. I’m not like in the market for drama. And at the same time, he’s so damn cute. I say, “I hope my mom is doing tamales.”
“Maximo always changes the subject when he likes a dude,” Betts says.
“Betts always talks about me in the third person because he can’t conjugate a verb,” I say back.
Zay-Rod is still stuck on Betts’s imitation. “Frogs in shells. Why in Jesus do I continue to hang out with you? You’re too stupid to live.”
As we go in through the open side fence to my backyard, Zay-Rod turns his trash-talking assault on me. “You’re the least Mexican Mexican, dude. You think you so fly because you dark and shit, but you a big old Klondike. Brown on the outside, white as shit inside.”
“Go write a poem about frogs,” I say. My mom is in the backyard, starting up the propane grill. I hear the two clicks and then the roar of the flame as she hits the lever.
“You want hot dogs?” Mom asks.
“What? No tamales?” I say back, and she frowns at me.
“Ungrateful,” she says, and she starts scraping off the grill.
“Zay-Rod says you and Dad are brother and sister,” I tell her.
She laughs. “Xavier. You were always my favorite but now I don’t know.”
Zay-Rod laughs. “Sorry, Ms. Gutierrez.” She smiles at him to show she’s kidding.
I strip off my shirt and jump into the pool. The water is still cool enough that it’s somewhat refreshing. When I go under, my head spins crazy. I like to think the heat doesn’t bug me, but it’s like 114 out and we just walked a mile. It gets to me some.
As I find my equilibrium and come up for air, Betts jumps in just about right on top of me, knocking me back underwater. My head spins again and for a second I feel like I’m going to drown.
I thrash my arms, and my brain goes somewhere weird.
“I’m gonna jet,” I say. Kevin’s dorm room.
He smirks, and he sits on my legs. “Nah,” he says. He’s smaller than me, but something about this move is so brash that I don’t even counter it. He sits on my calves and pushes down, and I am stuck. I have to laugh. What else can you do but laugh?
And suddenly I’m at the bottom of the pool and I cannot move. Time slows. I open my eyes. I feel like nothing can touch me. Like if I screamed, no one would hear. And they wouldn’t. For some reason, this terrifies me, and I don’t know why.
Then I feel a pull on the bottom of my red swim shorts. That unfreezes me. I struggle to the surface, swat Betts in the neck, and grab my shorts away from him before he can get them off.
“Why do you want me naked so bad?” I ask, trying to catch my breath.
Zay-Rod jumps just about right in between us, and this time, while we are under, Zay-Rod succeeds in pulling down my suit.
“What the hell, dude?” I say when my face once again emerges from the salt water. “When in the world has there ever been two gayer straight dudes than you two? You can’t keep your hands off me.” I bend over and pull up my shorts. I can hear my mom laughing at the grill.
“You do have a nice butt,” Betts says, kicking his legs up and floating on his back for a second. “For a dude,” he says to the sky.
I wince and think about how straight dudes are all caught up in gay sex stuff. Like when I came out to my dad down in Colorado Springs over spring break. It’s okay to be gay, but real men don’t take things into their bodies. That’s what girls and women do; it’s what separates us. So when Betts does his whole “You got a nice butt” thing, I kinda want to strangle him a little. It’s straight supremacy.
Instead I grab a yellow noodle, submerge it in water, put my mouth on one end, and blow. Water soaks Betts, who interrupts his float, grabs the noodle from me, and beats me over the head with it.
“So when do we get to meet this new boyfriend of yours? You never introduce us to your boyfriends,” Betts says.
“You blame me?”
Zay-Rod laughs. “Truth.”
My mom approaches the pool. “First I’ve heard of this. New boyfriend?”
“The kid from the food truck,” Betts says.
My mother nods, like, That’s some information. I want to tell her no, like, Don’t worry, Ma. We aren’t dating. Guys like Jordan don’t date guys who hang with guys like Betts and Zay-Rod. This other part of me wants her — and them — to butt the hell out.
“Are the hot dogs ready?” I ask, and my mother rolls her eyes.
“You need to teach this boy how to communicate,” she says to my friends.
“Yeah, ask these guys for help. Good thinking,” I say.
The worst thing about Coq Au Vinny’s re-boot is the truck’s design. It would be so much better if we could just change the name so that people know what we are. As it stands, it’s Saturday morning at the Gilbert Farmers’ Market, and I’m concerned that no one in the world is going to come close enough to see our whiteboard, which contradicts the angry bird logo on the side of the truck.
How are they going to know about the frozen drinks and cloud eggs?
Cloud eggs are this thing we saw on Instagram, where you create like a baked meringue circle, put the egg yolk in the middle, and then bake it. I haven’t tasted one, but I’m intrigued. Someone online said it tasted like egg-flavored marshmallow. I can’t really imagine that.
“So here goes nothing,” Max says, cracking the first egg. He separates the whites from the yolks, putting the yolks in a small bowl. Then he starts whisking the whites to within an inch of their lives, and I stare at the whites as they slowly stiffen and form peaks.
“You’re amazing,” I say, and he snorts.
“That’s me. Max the Amazing Egg Whisker.”
“I couldn’t do it.”
“That’s something you should probably deal with. Who can’t whisk an egg?”
I ignore his dig and start in on my contribution. We convinced Max’s mom to part with her Vitamix, and I’m going to have two frozen drink offerings: frozen mango lemonade and frozen cherry lemonade. I have enough lemonade concentrate and frozen fruit to make a hundred lemonades. At five bucks a pop, that’s five hundred dollars net if we sell out, and it cost me just under a hundred bucks for the ingredients at Safeway. Not bad for a day’s work, and I figure if we sell out, maybe we can streamline the process and sell even more on days in the future.
I place my notebook down by the sink, aware that for the first time, I’m not likely to get much writing done today. I actually wrote some funny stuff and some poems last week. Then I start with the first can of concentrate, combining it with water to create sixty-four ounces of lemonade. I shake and shake and shake, and then pour myself a little bit. Real tart, real sweet. Not too bad. Then I pour eight ounces into the Vitamix, tear open a package of frozen mangos, and pour a quarter of it into the blender. I hit the button and watch the machine whir to life. I didn’t actually try it at home; it seemed simple enough, but as I watch the ingredients combine, I realize maybe I should have experimented. My lemonade looks frothy but watery.
“Hmm,” I say, stopping the blender for a moment.
Max walks over. “How did it work at home?”
I press the button again as an answer. He presses it off.
“Jordan. Tell me you tried this at home. I was doing cloud eggs all night last night.”
“Sounds like a real party,” I say, and I press the button again.
“Dude,” he says, shaking his head and moving away. “Dude.”
We’re falling into this routine, where Max is awesome and I’m a screwup. I can’t say I love it. I purse my lips and try to put it out of my mind.
I find that if I do half the packet of mango instead of a quarter and some ice — yes, I didn’t even think of ice, I’m that dense — my drink thickens up in about a minute on high blend. I wait until it looks sufficiently thick, stop the blender, and pour myself a cup. It’s bright orange-yellow, a color that would definitely catch my eye if I were walking by and thirsty.
The taste is, well, it’s pretty good. Mango-y. Sweet. Refreshing. Super cold. Max watches as I drink and I make an exaggerated show of enjoying it.
“Ahh,” I say dramatically. “Perfection. Imagine: I was able to blend lemonade and fruit all by myself, without testing it out at home!”
He gives me a dirty look, and I assuage him by offering him a sip from my cup. He pauses for a moment, and I realize that there is a sort of intimacy to sharing a cup. But finally he takes it, and I have to admit my arms tingle as I watch his Adam’s apple go up and down while he tastes it.
“That is some sweet shit, dude. How much sugar is in that lemonade?”
I shrug. “Frozen.”
“You know, we could have actually done real lemonade.”
I swallow, tighten my jaw, and — remembering how much I need Max — I try to keep things light. “We could do lots of things. At this point I’m just looking to make some money.”
I set things up so that we have a blender full of mango lemonade, ready to go. A real food truck would probably have two Vitamixes, one for each fruit. As it stands, I realize I’m going to have to hope people want the same one over and over, or else there’s gonna be lots of Vitamix washing.
Once I’m set up, I watch him tenderly place the egg yolks in the center of the white clouds, which look like marshmallow fluff circles. I have to admit that I’d totally order one of those. Max is a talented guy. Too bad he’s stuck with a slack ass.
“I told my friends that my truck mate is gay,” I say, after Max puts the tray of twelve cloud eggs into the oven.
He looks over his shoulder as he shuts the oven door. “How did that go?”
“They started to play matchmaker,” I say.
He laughs. “That’s so funny. Same as my friends. It’s like, what if every time two straight people met, we went around saying, ‘You guys are both straight! You should date!’ ”
I laugh too, even though I realize that this argument isn’t exactly fair. Straight people meet all the time. By the numbers, it’s rarer for two gay people to meet. Also I guess I kind of was asking Pam and Kayla, so it’s not like they overstepped. Still, I say, “Exactly. Of course, one of my friends was all ‘Don’t shit where you eat,’ which is a disgusting image.”
“True,” he says. “As if we’re a bunch of sex-starved pervs just looking for a willing hole.”
I laugh and blush at his use of “hole.” And also because, well, I am sort of a sex-starved perv looking for a willing whatever. But Max doesn’t need to know that.
When the eggs are ready, we put up our awning and open for business.
“Cloud eggs. Frozen lemonade!” Max calls, and even though being loud is way out of my comfort zone, I recognize that this is basically it. That my family’s future depends on the success of this food truck re-boot. So I start yelling too, and then I start coming up with clever slogans.
“Got frozen lemons? Learn to make frozen lemonade!” I yell, and Max snorts.
“Cheesy,” he says.
I shrug.
“Mango lemonade. Round the corner cloud eggs are made,” I yell, and this one just makes him say, “Stop. Please. Stop.”
“Hey, at least I’m trying,” I say.
We’re quiet for a while, and then Max surprises me.
“Our cloud eggs will make your dreams come true,” he says. “Come on and give a cloud egg a try, and tell me it didn’t change your life. It doesn’t change your life, it’s on the house.”
It’s not catchy, exactly, but onlookers stop and approach.
“Cloud egg? Okay. I’ll bite,” a woman says. “How much?”
“Seven,” Max says. “Get it with a frozen mango lemonade for ten instead of twelve.”
She raises an eyebrow and reaches for her pocketbook. “Sold.”
Max smiles that golden grin of his. “You won’t be sorry. One cloud egg coming up!”
I take the woman’s credit card, charge her ten, and then go back to the blender and prepare her a drink. The sugar smell of the concentrate is so strong that I momentarily worry. It was one thing when I was imagining feeding someone my creation; actually giving the woman a frozen mango lemonade brings out all sorts of butterflies in my chest and stomach.
Max hands her a small, red-and-white checked paper dish with the cloud egg regally sitting in the exact center, a fork lying at its side. I hurry up and hand her a see-through-plastic sixteen-ounce cup of mango lemonade.
“Lovely,” she says, and we stand at the window and watch for her reaction. She forks in some of the egg white, and her eyes go wide. “Oh my! The consistency is more marshmallow than meringue,” she says. “I wasn’t sure. And is that Parmesan I’m tasting in there?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Max says.
“I kind of love it!”
A line begins to form, and my heart soars. We have a hit! This is happening.
She takes a sip of the lemonade, and her expression changes in a different way.
“Is this … lemonade mix?”
“Um,” I say, my heart crashing into my shoe.
She shakes her head. “Now that is not quite so special,” she says, and she takes off the lid and pours the contents of the drink on the ground. A poodle pulls on its leash and comes to lick it up, much to the chagrin of its owner.
“Warren!” the owner yells, yanking the dog away.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and the woman half smiles.
“Fifty percent,” she says. “I’ll come by next week, and I fully expect a free fresh-squeezed frozen lemonade.”
“And you’ll get it,” Max says, and I feel about two inches tall.
We spend the next two hours serving up mostly cloud eggs and the occasional frozen lemonade. The cherry is a big hit with kids, who don’t seem to have much of a sense of the difference between store-bought mix and fresh lemonade, thank God.
A few times we have to make people wait five minutes as Max makes another tray of cloud eggs, but mostly we get into a pretty good rhythm of me taking orders and him serving, and soon we’re even able to talk a bit between us, which is kinda nice, actually.
Until he goes back to our topic from before.
“My buddy Betts is on my jock to meet a boyfriend of mine. I don’t know why he cares so much.”
“Have you ever introduced anyone?”
He shakes his head. “None of his business. They’re too up in my stuff all the time.”
“I hear you,” I say, not really knowing what it would be like to want to hide boyfriend stuff from Pam and Kayla.
“And anyway, it’s not like anyone’s even been that close to being my boyfriend. It’s like, When someone interesting shows up, I’ll let you know, okay? Leave me alone, right?”
Max hands me a cloud egg, and I take it and look away, feeling like barely a person. Of course he’s not interested in zit boy, the skinny kid who can’t even make lemonade. What was I even thinking?
“Right,” I say. “As if we’re all attracted to each other. As if we see some gross gay dude and we’re like, I want that. I must have that.”
He laughs, I laugh, and I wonder about what it would take to get a full body and personality transplant.
We take in nine hundred dollars our first day with cloud eggs, thank you very much, and you better believe I feel like a freakin’ superhero.
In a world in which some deign to simply scramble their eggs, Chef Max saves an area family with his delectable cloud eggs! Story at eleven!
And that nine hundred bucks was without much in terms of drink sales, as Jordan decided that frozen lemonade concentrate would get the job done. Really, dude? Your life is on the line, and you went with Minute Maid? I don’t know, man.
He’s quiet as he hands me my ten bucks per hour plus half the tips, which turns out to be a hundred and five dollars. Then he hands me an extra two hundred for my work last week.
“Thanks,” I say, and Jordan mumbles, “Don’t mention it.” He’s back to being spacey, and it’s driving me crazy.
I go over in my mind what I could have said that would make him act that way. We were talking about our friends, and how they are all up in our business about who we’re dating, or in my case, not dating. I said I hated that. He agreed. I said I’d let them know if and when I found someone even close to my type.
My throat tightens. Shit. Why am I such an ass? I told Jordan, who is gay and available, that I hadn’t met anyone even close to my type? Why would I say that? I mean, he was all “Don’t shit where you eat,” and I guess I was just being defensive? I thought that took me out of the equation. I don’t know.
How can Jordan not know he’s adorable? I mean, this thing where he doesn’t like himself is kinda written all over him. And I guess I want to fix him, make him understand he’s better than he thinks, and maybe I have from the start. But I didn’t really think it would be that hard, because, I mean, his lines. Delicate and perfect. His limbs, moving like a dance. His fine features, like they could be on a doll. Minus the zits, yeah, but that doesn’t really bug me. I can see underneath. His thin, almost slight nose and lips. Those light green eyes filled with mystery. I don’t look at rugged guys like me. It’s just not my thing, which is why it’s so funny when Betts is all flirty. He’d be like my last choice. Jordan? A bad idea, because all we do is fight. But yeah, cute as all hell. And thoughtful. The stuff he says makes me think. I like that. I want more of that in my life.
“You were great today,” I say, and he laughs, almost like a snort.
“Yeah, I’m a real food truck mogul.”
“No, really. You and I? We’re a great team. I’m glad I took this job. I like working with you, Jordan. I like you.”
He looks at the floor and doesn’t respond.
