The Music of What Happens, page 9
I want to say something else, but I know I’m already way too much. Out on the edge of a cliff. Like the precipice, where you teeter before falling off and breaking your neck.
We go silent as we clean up, and I begin to feel like I have fallen. I said those sappy “I like you” things, and he left me hanging. And that fucking sucks. Maybe I need to cut my losses. We’ll work together. We don’t actually have to be friends, and it’s not like he makes friendship even possible. I can’t say anything without him taking it personally. It’s exhausting. Too much drama.
He wants to go home right away after, but I insist that we should take the time to prep for tomorrow, which means buying more eggs and also actual ingredients for lemonade. And when he rolls his eyes, it takes everything I have not to yell at him. I mean, I’m saving his freakin’ family. You’d think he’d be a little nicer about stuff. Jesus.
“I gotta tinkle,” he says, and he jumps out the back of the truck.
“I’ll miss you very much,” I say under my breath. “You’re a real pleasure.”
I take a tray over to the sink to clean it, and Jordan’s notebook is there.
I can’t help it. Call me curious. What was he writing last week when the truck was so dead?
At the top of the first page, it reads,
Under are three entries:
The last one cracks me up. Jordan doesn’t always show it, but he’s funny. When I first met him, he said something like “We do Italian things with chicken,” which isn’t funny ha ha, but funny like a unique way of speaking. I wonder if he’s holding back? Like not comfortable being himself with me?
I turn the page, and the next page says,
Under is a poem.
I stare at the poem, focusing in on the line about Guy Smiley, and my stomach twists.
I think about me, at eight, with Skeeter and those guys. How they left me all alone, and I smiled.
I think about me, last year, when Marquez from the baseball team made a fag joke when we were in the dugout at San Marcos, and I smiled.
And after, when Betts lingered by my locker, and he put his arm on my shoulder and he asked, “You okay, dude?” And I smiled. Of course I was.
I always am.
The morning after with Kevin. “You enjoy yourself?” His face looks seedy, like slimy almost, a film of grease around his lips like he’s just eaten hash browns from McDonald’s.
I smile. “Yeah,” I say.
Jordan hops back up on the truck and I turn to him, the notebook still in my hand.
“Hey,” he says, forceful, angrier than I’ve ever seen him. “Did I say you could read that? You have no right —” He comes and grabs it out of my hand. It is still open to the poem. He looks and he reads, and a look of something else comes over his face, which turns white.
“Max,” he says. “Sorry. I mean. Sorry you read that, and sorry I wrote that. You should ask before —” he exhales. “You shouldn’t have read my private stuff. But also I wrote that last week and I didn’t mean it even then, and definitely not now.”
I smile. I don’t know what else to do.
“Dude,” I say. “It’s all good, dude. Sorry I snooped. Not cool. I won’t do that again.”
We finish cleaning up and head off to the market and the energy between us is all messed up. Jordan is suddenly very talkative, like overly, like he’s trying to make up for writing the shitty thing he wrote about me in his journal, and I’m over smiley, I guess, and over laugh-y, guffawing at every little thing he says as if I’m a freakin’ idiot. I can’t help it. I don’t know what else to do.
On Sunday we go to the Ahwatukee Farmers’ Market, the scene of our awful first day, when we sold twenty-eight dollars’ worth of food.
But that was a week ago, when we were Coq Au Vinny and clueless. Now we are either Coq Au Vinny, if you look at the truck, or Savory and Sweet — Max’s name — if you look at our whiteboard.
That was also a week ago, when Max and I hated each other. Now we — I don’t know. I really don’t. I think maybe Max thinks I hate him, because of this poem I wrote that he read when I was off the truck yesterday at Gilbert. And yeah, that was a total invasion of my privacy, but it’s hard to be mad at him when I know he thinks I hate him. My clumsy attempts at making him understand that are not exactly a rousing success.
“We’re gonna break a thousand today,” I say as Max is prepping his cloud eggs and I am chopping lemons. We went to Safeway yesterday and I bought fifty pounds of lemons for seventy-five dollars, and forty pounds of sugar for twenty-four bucks. Add ice to that, and I basically put out a hundred and twenty bucks for ingredients. I don’t know how long it will take, but we have enough supplies for two hundred frozen lemonades. At five bucks a pop, we’d make a thousand dollars out of our hundred-and-twenty-dollar investment.
In other words, we’re a bunch of geniuses. If people buy it.
“That would be awesome,” he says, and I wish I could figure out whether we’re good or not. It’s so hard knowing, and it sucks not to know.
I am psyched as I write Homemade Frozen Lemonade under Cloud Eggs and Max’s new item, Breakfast Grilled Cheese, on the whiteboard in blue Magic Marker. I stand back and regard it, and then, feeling ballsy, I erase it and write: Jordan’s World-Famous Homemade Frozen Lemonade.
After I write it, I beckon Max out to see it. He comes out and stands next to me and crosses his arms.
“It’s … long,” he says.
“There’s room.”
“It’s … not necessarily, um, true.”
“Since when do advertisements need to be true?”
“True ’nuff. I like it.”
We open for business, and fairly quickly I find the fly in the ointment of my lemonade boast.
“What’s so special about the lemonade?” a burly guy with curly black hair and a mole on his chin asks.
“Homemade,” I say.
“Yeah, but you say world-famous. What’s in it that’s so special for five bucks?”
Dang it. I hadn’t thought about that.
“Well, it’s … organic.”
“Cool,” he says. “Organic lemons and sugar, both?”
“Yep,” I say, swallowing.
“Okay.”
I nod. This is not exactly true, but there’s really no way he’ll find that out unless he comes on the truck and roots through our trash.
“Is that it?”
“Um. Well, there is usually a special … ingredient,” I say.
“Sure. I know Bruce’s truck down the way has pomegranate and that stuff is great.”
“Ours is prickly pear,” I say without thinking.
“Hmm,” he says. “Okay. I’d try that.”
“Well, it’s not quite ready,” I say, backing up and smacking into Max, who is standing at the grill.
“Did you forget the prickly pear again?” he asks.
I say, “Dang it.”
The guy says, “When do you think you’ll have it? Would love to try. Frozen prickly pear lemonade sounds off the hook.”
“An hour,” I say, and he smiles, salutes, and walks away.
So that’s how I wind up in an Uber, heading to the closest grocery store, Bashas’. It’s only half a mile away, but in this heat? I don’t think so.
I ask the Uber to hang when we get there. He takes that as an opportunity to drive away when I close the door, and I think, Well, there goes your five-star rating. Bashas’ doesn’t have prickly pear in any form, of course, so I make an executive decision that probably won’t win me a place in heaven but should get us through today.
Max is busy doing two jobs when I get back, and there’s an actual line. Impressively, I see he’s actually sold some frozen lemonades, and I remind myself to keep trying to get back into his good graces. The dude is a machine, and a nice one, to boot. I decide if we do make a ton of money today, I’m gonna give him a percentage on top of his salary. He’ll like that.
“What’d you get?” he asks when he sees that the bag I’ve brought back could not hold even a single prickly pear.
I beckon him over, hiding from the view of those in line. I show him what I have. He laughs.
“Seriously, dude?”
“Hey. It’ll be like a psychology experiment.”
He shakes his head, but at least he has a smile on his face, and I feel like maybe we’re back, past the trouble from yesterday. And I haven’t even unveiled my secret weapon yet. I might not either. Depends how I feel, I guess.
I cross out my menu item and write it again. It’s even longer now: Jordan and Max’s World-Famous Organic Homemade Prickly Pear Frozen Lemonade.
I turn the sign toward Max, and he squints as he reads it. He grins, and when I get back on the truck, he whispers, “Leave me out of this, dude.”
I mumble, “Too late. You’re in. If I go down, you’re going down with me.”
Something about the sentence sounds vaguely sexual to me, and when Max’s eyes don’t leave mine, I feel this jolt of energy climb up my spine and look away. It’s super weird.
I find that a drop of the red food coloring does a nice job of turning the lemonade a pleasing, light shade of electric pink. My heart is pulsing as I pour our first lemonade for our first victim, a girl maybe in her twenties who barely looks up from her cell phone while ordering, waiting, or receiving her drink. I watch as she takes a sip.
“Mmm,” she mumbles, licking her lips, and as she walks away, I turn to Max. He’s watching too.
“One down,” he says.
The next one goes to a hipster guy, who scares the shit out of me when he starts talking about prickly pear, and how it’s one of his favorite flavors.
“I’ve never had it in lemonade, let alone frozen,” he says. “I’m actually a little excited about this.”
I’ve already taken his money, and I kind of want to give it back to him, because surely someone with great prickly pear knowledge will be able to tell that his favorite flavor is absent from our drink. But instead I make change for him and walk the figurative plank, back to the Vitamix in the back of the truck. My heart pulses as the blender buzzes, and when I hand him the light pink frozen concoction, I keep my eyes averted from his.
He isn’t going away, however. He inserts the straw, sucks in a worthy sip, and gives us his report.
“Mmm,” he says. “Taste that prickly pear tang. Wow. It’s actually even better than I thought it would be.”
I smile, and Max comes up to the window. “That’s why we call it ‘Jordan and Max’s World-Famous Organic Homemade Prickly Pear Frozen Lemonade.’ ”
“Amen, amigo,” he says, and I wonder how often Max gets spoken to in Spanish, and whether it bugs him. I’ve never heard him speak in Spanish, not even once.
My success leads Max to get a little more brash too, and when we have a lull in service, he goes out to the whiteboard, erases something, and writes more. He turns the sign to show me.
Coq Au Vinny uses all organic and locally sourced ingredients, he has written. I laugh.
“We are so going to hell, aren’t we?” I say.
“Probably,” he says. “But we’ll go there a lot richer. Just watch.”
Max wasn’t lying. The lines grow and grow, and suddenly we’re this incredible moneymaking machine. At one point, our line is more than ten people long, and what I notice is that when people stand in line, others tend to take notice and come investigate. From about ten until twelve fifteen, when we close up, we are swamped, and I barely notice that the oven and grill have heated the truck to a level that makes it just about impossible to breathe. My body begins to feel chilly, with sweat soaking through my red T-shirt and white shorts, and Max, who is even closer to the flame, is even more drenched. He also looks radiant. Like he was meant to do this. And the amazing thing is this pang of something that goes through me as I watch him in action, speeding around the grill, spritzing water next to the grilled cheese sandwiches to make the grill sizzle, going through plastic glove after plastic glove, lifting tray after tray of cloud eggs out of the oven and spatula-ing them into red-and-white checked paper dishes with the grace of a pro.
He’s magnificent. Max the Magnificent.
He’s a food truck deity. I feel my heart pulse as I watch his broad shoulder muscles glisten sweat, and I have to look away because parts of me are beginning to tingle, and those things should not happen on a busy food truck.
By the time we close up, we are swimming in sweat, cash, and credit card receipts. I have no idea how much we made, but a ton, and I can’t wait to count. But first I make sure to spend the very last bit of energy I have on cleanup, because I want Max to notice my effort. I really do. I want him to see that I can work hard too, that I’m not a total waste case.
He doesn’t say anything, but I see something in his eyes as we clean up that tells me he appreciates my hard work. He turns off the grill and oven, and an ever-so-slight breeze blows through the truck when I open the back door. It’s not cool, but anything is cooler than what we’ve just worked through, and we catch each other’s eyes, dramatically wipe the sweat from our brows, and smile.
I melt inside. If only I could make Max feel half of what I feel right now, which is more alive than alive. More real than I’ve ever felt. Like I want to dance and jump in a pool and sing and giggle simultaneously, even though I’m not really one to do any one of those things singularly.
When we’re done, I decide I have to do it. Share what had felt like a secret weapon, like maybe I was trying to manipulate him a bit into liking me again, but after today, now that we have bonded as brothers-in-arms on this food truck, it feels like something I just want to share. It’s out there, but somehow it feels right.
He’s leaning against the grill, which is no longer exuding waves of heat, looking at his phone. I walk over, my journal in front of me. He looks up. I hand it to him.
“What’s this?” he asks.
“Duh,” I say. “You know what it is.”
“I don’t need to — why are you handing it to me?”
I look away as momentarily this new confidence in me wavers. I breathe through it.
“I’m a writer,” I say. “I wrote something last night. I want to share it with you, because. Well, because you’re becoming a friend, and I know it’s weird, but I wanted you to know that the shit you saw yesterday is not, um. About you, I guess. It’s more about this. This is who I really am.”
He stares at me, not harshly, and I can’t believe I am about to share my innermost thoughts with a dude bro. But I feel drunk with closeness. Maybe it’s a kind of heatstroke? I don’t know. I just … I want Max to know who I am.
It feels dangerous. Like he could laugh after reading it, and I would melt into a humiliated puddle.
He opens it, and I help him flip to the poem I wrote last night. I swallow deeply, a mixture of dread and something foreign — pride? Realness? — mixing in my throat.
I swallow again as his eyes stop moving and I realize he’s gotten to the end. The oxygen has been sucked out of the truck, it feels like. He stares down at the page, motionless.
“Well? Please say something. I know it’s not that great.” His next words hold far too much power, and I hate the feeling and also I love it.
“Wow,” he says. He closes the book and looks up at me, his dark eyes soft and warm. I am utterly covered in sweat, tired, cold, and needing more.
“I don’t know anything about lyrics or poems or whatever, but I think it’s cool. Really cool. I like that he needs a steel shovel underground to dig up.”
“Thanks,” I mumble, my eyes mostly averted, every few seconds sneaking back to look at his. His are focused on the poem still. It’s unbearable, how much I need. Unbearable and stupid.
He hoists himself up on the grill, goes “Ow!” and hops back down. He says, “I feel bad that the oxygen is running out. That kinda sucks.”
I swallow and keep my eyes trained on the floor beneath me. More. I need more. Anything please. Just more.
He reaches over and hands me back the poem. “You’re an amazing writer,” he says. “I admire that.”
“Thanks,” I repeat, and I chance looking back into his eyes. He’s smiling at me. They’re smiling at me, and I’m petrified, and grateful, and hooked. On Max. Which is such a deeply bad idea. But I can’t help it.
He showed me his poem.
No one has ever entrusted me with something that delicate before.
It’s weird and I don’t want to get all corny, but it’s like I saw Jordan today for the first time. Like with the funny movies he wrote I saw his humor, and I saw his snark with the rude poem about the food truck from hell. But this was different. This was real.
I don’t have people in my life who write poetry. Zay-Rod writes slam poetry, but it’s political stuff, and that’s fine. It’s just not — personal. Like it flies off into anger without ever revealing the soul.
It made me wonder: Could a guy like Jordan, a guy that graceful, a guy whose walk looks like a dance, could he like someone as thick and clunky as me?
Could he look past my rough exterior to see that I have a heart too?
When you’re like me, when you’re a dude who plays baseball and hangs with his bros, you aren’t supposed to have a heart.
But here’s the secret: I like tender. Maybe more than I should.
I wish I could show him my heart. That’s dangerous, though. You show it and people laugh. Nothing is worse than people laughing at your open heart, which is why I think guys don’t do that so much. Which is why I can’t believe Jordan trusted me enough to show me that.
I want to be worth that.
So when I get home, I close my door and make sure it’s locked. I don’t know why. I just don’t want Mom walking in and seeing this. Not that she’d mind, but this feels … private.
I sit down at my desk, and I close my eyes and think about Jordan’s lonely poem.
A shovel, digging upward. Wow. And the oxygen is running out. Wow. I close my eyes and I picture Jordan digging up, and suddenly I’m hoping someone is digging down to meet him.
