Of Torn Fatigues, Late Night Howlings, Narcorridos, Beautiful Losers, and Chicken Fried Steaks

When I talk to my therapist, he gets the bad memories. When I talk to my assistant, she gets the good ones. Today, I was telling her about my friend, Billy P.
Billy, myself, and Rosemary L , met in our remedial math classroom at the beginning of he new year of 1985. I was recently kicked out of my last high school because we no longer lived in the neighborhood of MacArthur HS. Why the hell I chose to commute all the way to a hick-assed High School with tobacco chawin' rednecks, country-assed black folks and Chicanos who acted like it was still the 50s is beyond me. Maybe it was the two hour trek before the sun came up, maybe it was the friends I made the year before when we still lived on Aldine Mail Route, or maybe it was the fact that I just wanted to be the cool Afropunk amongst dorks and Fundamental Christians that fueled me to put myself through the torture of getting to MacArthur every morning while at the school that I was supposed to be zoned to, Robert E Lee, had all the makings of a John Houston movie. It was a greener pasture there, with a smoking area outside the cafeteria, featuring a diverse cast of Molly Ringwold lookalikes, young brothers trying their beat-box skills at the invisible mic, skaters wearing Minor Threat t-shirts, and Proto-goth girls in Siouxsie t-shirts. Yeah, I should have saw the signs in myself then taht I was a glutton for punishment; always wanting to take the hard way out.
Anyway, one day at MacArthur after a fight between two rednecks over who was going to fuck the barnyard cow that night, our Assistant Principal looked over at me and asked me, "Where the hell do you live?" I told him across the street from the school, but he shook his head deftly. "Naw, naw, son. I see you getting off the bus late on some mornings. We need to talk."
After his going through my fake records of residency, I was told to go to the school of "wherever the hell you really live". So Christmas came and went, then I started at Robert E Lee in January of '85.

Billy had a hay-stacked mullet, was wearing a gray flannel shirt, torn jeans, and black converse. Before dudes shaped their eyebrows Billy's was naturally shaped, giving him that pretty-boy villain look like from a telanovella. I'd say he looked a little like a mix between Speedy Ortiz from Love and Rockets and Sid Vicious (without the pockmarks). But at first, I just thought he looked like a dick metal-head. I ignored him until I saw his notebook. Bands like TSOL, Suicidal Tendencies, Dead Kennedys, and Black Flag were scrawled all over. We started talking about music right then.
The next day, our trio was complete when Rosemary joined us. Actually, I can't remember if we all met on that same day or not or if I was the one who came late, but it didn't matter. Each day in class was shit-shooting sessions instead of dealing with math. We talked about movies, music, whatever. Meeting these two opened up alot of thought and ideas about people in general. I was an introvert back then and didn't have a great deal of stock in people; I just didn't know who I could sit down and talk to or relate to. Billy changed all that just by meeting him ,because after whining about never having any money, he got me a gig at Dirty's restaurant on Richmond and Chimney Rock.

I'll leave a separate post dedicated to the cast of characters of Dirty's bar, but there were no characters in Dirty's kitchen where Billy and I worked. These were people. At that time, being young, you're either blissfully happy with your surroundings, or deathly miserable. I moaned and belly-ached at the fact that I was working in a kitchen surrounded by people who spoke Spanish only and who always bitched at my slow-moving ass. Because I was new to the crew, I was stuck with prep work getting in and then for the rest of the night, I was stuck pressing chicken fried steaks.

Let me tell you, that at that time, I truly understood how vegetarians are made. Although I wasn't even about to claim myself vegan, I was fucking grossed the fuck out, by the following Chicken Fried Steak making process:

1. Take a round piece of cubed beef patty. Sometimes red (thanks to red dye # 386) or sometimes that brown-grayish color that meat gets.

2. Take round patty and dip it in a bowl of flour.

3. Press down on the patty a little, then

4. Dip it in another bowl of a buttermilk, eggs, and paprika mix.

5. Press down on the patty again, this time to press out the mushy, sodden, patty to three times its original size.

6. Dip the shit in flour again, pressing the patty until it is a discus of meat, now torn, but held together by egg and flour.

7. Throw that shit in the deep fryer. Ummm, yummy heart attack!

Did I mention that the steak had to be almost a big as the plate it was served on and smothered in this white biscuit gravy? Well, now you know.

As I said I was not a happy hippo then. But when I look back on that time of my life meeting people who risked their lives to work here for shit money, yet carved a life here nonetheless, and the waitresses I met - some of them college students, or global travelers like Elspeth, the Brit chick who worked with us for three summers all the while traveling and working in other countries when she wasn't with us, and new friends like Asela, who turned out to be one of Billy's many heart-struck casualties at Dirty's but who I would come to know as a smart, shrewed and intelligent woman - all of these people were a wealth of life experiences I wouldn't trade for anything. After my first six months at Dirty's, Billy decides to quit. I tell him I wouldn't last that long myself. Yeah, that proclamation turned into five years.

As time went on, I got bored with listening to hardcore. One of my coworkers introduced me to Tigres Del Norte and I was like, cool with listening to them with the rest of the crew from the kitchen radio. Until then, I always had my walkman on blasting D.R.I or MDC.

Then in '87, Billy came back. He finally got rid of the mullet, and then became the male whore of the both the kitchen and the bar. After work, we'd hang out at the bar where I developed my new found love for Heineken and it was always some 70's burn-out rocker chick who wanted her some piece of Billy. There was this one waitress who was married and figured her only way to get some was to just fuck Billy in the family car. After getting sick of seeing bar fly girls sneaking out of their house at nine in the morning, Billy's parents finally expressed their disgust. He was so guilty and shamed, that he felt that he should join the Navy. After seeing Oliver Stone's Platoon, I went with him to the recruiting office out of support.

For another year or so, Billy was gone. But came back unfortunately due to his mental break down over the death of his brother who was killed on the night that his child was born. It seems that he surprised robbers in his own home. Of course Billy came back to Dirty's from the Navy with a honorable discharge and a growing coke habit. But this time, he wouldn't be working in the kitchen; he was now a waiter. Asela was over him now that she had a full house with her own kids coming up from Mexico and her two sisters. Me, I was out of the door myself now trying to earn my Associates in Electronics. The last time I saw Billy was when I took my-soon-to-be-Wifey to Dirty's and he was there bartending. By this time, the rock that he and I used to listen to had found its way into million dollar studios and was being regurgitated by bands like Nirvana. It was 1994, I never saw him again after that.