Jeff Johnson's Blog: Will Fight Evil 4 Food, page 20

Hot Food 4 Cool People- Roasted Chicken with Green Chili Stuffing

Lucky Supreme, A Novel Of Many Crimes is coming out in paperback soon. The Italian translation is doing well. Incredibly lucrative new audiobook deal. Only a matter of time before the companion cookbook comes together. I have lots of people to thank on that. Editor Lilly Golden came up with the idea after so many people asked about the food in the books. Super cool guy and excellent author Ace Atkins has a keen eye for food on the page and in life, encouraging in every way, and I have my circle of foodie pals. Darby and Delia eat the food I eat for the most part, a hand-to-mouth-combat punk interpretation of New Mexico classics. My understanding of how to make all this comes from my early years working in kitchens, and from the noted local chef Mike Martinez. Mike named many of the items years ago- Cretin Sauce, Heathen Pie, Mean Fucker French Dude Soup. Etc. Here is the roasted chicken with green chili stuffing I served over the holidays last year and TWICE the year before. I skipped the entire holiday season while I was in Philadelphia finishing Deadbomb Bingo Ray, oddly enough, so the first year back in Portland I think I ate this three times in one week in late December with friends and adopted family, making up for lost cheer. Truth is, you could eat this one almost every day.

This massively good fuckin’ thing is ridiculous. Easy to make, incredibly good, and it might even be good for you. No butter, for instance. Green chilies, which are good for you. No crap in it, as in Disney’s Cream of Shit Soup. If this does not get you laid, well…

Small to medium sized chicken. Remove neck and liver, etc, and rinse. In pan, sprinkle with salt, pepper, cumin, smoked paprika.

The stuffing!

Cube half a baguette. Place in bowl. Sauté maybe ten quartered button mushrooms and some garlic in olive oil, add to bowl. Add as many green chilies as looks sane to bowl (maybe half a cup). Then add oregano, cumin, salt, rosemary, pepper. Dash of olive oil. Stir and then stuff that into the bird. Don’t be shy, pack it in there. DO NOT RINSE BOWL. Next, add to bowl quartered small red or yellow potatoes, carrot, green beans. Touch more olive oil, salt, and paprika, stir, then surround chicken.

Bake at 350 for 1 and 1/2 hours, basting at 20 minute intervals after first 30 minutes. Depending on the size of the bird, the time here might not be right, but you know your shit so there we go!

Green Chili Gravy- This part is easy. 1 cup cold milk in small mixing bowl. Whisking with fork, slowly add 1/4 cup flour. Using baster, take all juices from roasting pan and put in sauce pot. Add small amount of green chili, maybe a tablespoon. Apply heat, and whisking with same fork, slowly pour in the milk/flour mix when the juices are hot. It will thicken right away. Salt and pepper to taste.

Plexergon

via Plexergon

International Nothing Day

Today I sent this big project to my agent and discovered he was preparing to fast. Then he was going to atone for his sins, and there was something about the Book of Life. Yum Kippur! I wished him well. He’s a great guy. It got me thinking.

Like many Americans, I don’t believe in anything at all. No gods, devils, what have you. So, nothing. But what is nothing? It is big. It is everywhere. Nothing is all around us. I read somewhere that if you were to compress the nuclei of our constituent atoms, we’d be made of something the size of a grain of salt. So we’re waves, or in other words- nothing.

What a cool thing then! But nothing, or Nothing, has no holiday. I’m thinking tomorrow sounds like a good one. Maybe Thursday. But what to do? Hmm. What do do…

Steak. Maybe tacos. Cherry pie. We should all make something on International Nothing Day, too. Art, music. Something for the house. One of my favorite books from a couple years ago was The Etched City, by KJ Bishop. In it she wrote-

“Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena. Many objects are just objects – inert, merely utilitarian. Many events are inconsequential, too banal to add anything to our experience of life. This is unfortunate, as one cannot grow except by having one’s spirit greatly stirred; and the spirit cannot be greatly stirred by spiritless things. Much of our very life is dead. For primitive man, this was not so. He made his own possessions, and shaped and decorated them with the aim of making them not merely useful, but powerful. He tried to infuse his weapons with the nature of the tiger, his cooking pots with the life of growing things; and he succeeded. Appearance, material, history, context, rarity – perhaps rarity most of all – combine to create, magically, the quality of soul. But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of painting. You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury – one of which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously. You adorn yourself with the same instincts as the primitive who puts a frightening mask of clay and feathers on his head, and you comport yourself in an uncommonly calculated way – as do I. We thus make numinous phenomena of ourselves. No mean trick – to make oneself a rarity, in this overpopulated age.” 

How magnificent. International Nothing Day should have something to do with the numinous. I’m just throwing that out there, into the… Nothing.

Ghost of Olga

Everyone has a ghost story. Even if you don’t believe in them. The night that crazy witch Olga jumped off the bridge, well, shit. And this is a true ghost story.

I was working at this tattoo shop, and the next door neighbor was this rich Armenian guy named Eddie. In the beginning, we didn’t like each other much, but Eddie got divorced and fell on hard times. He was depressed for a year or two before I finally tried to make friends with him. I did, which is how I got sucked into so many of the utterly bizarre twist and turns on his road through life. I was just getting ready to go home on the night Olga died when he called, stricken with grief.

“Jeff, Jeff, you must come.” He choked a little. His voice was hoarse and torn up, like he’d been screaming. “Something terrible has happened…”

I went right over and knocked on the door. He answered without a word and walked back inside in a daze. I followed him in. His office was dark. It smelled like hot dogs. He crashed down in the chair behind his desk and stared at the phone.

“The police just called.”

I waited. That couldn’t be good, but the number of ways it could be bad-

“They found the Jeep I loaned to Olga on the bridge. We broke up last week. I- I dumped her. I could not stand her anymore. So- so crazy.”

Eddie was in his early sixties. Olga was in her late twenties and weird, tacky Russian, with 80’s hair and big nails. It seemed like she was angry at everyone, all the time, and that it was her natural resting state.

“The police found your Jeep,” I began. “Do we need to go get it? I can-“

“She jumped.” It came out of him in a strangled whisper. He looked up at me then, and there in his eyes was a kind of emptiness that reminded me of the blank look on an antelope’s face when its being eaten by a tiger on Nature. “There were witnesses. She left a note…”

“Holy shit.”

The note said that she’d warned him not to break it off, that she’d told him what would happen, and that she was going to haunt him until the end of his days. He recounted it in a broken, stumbling, stuttering way that was hard to listen to. He kept a bottle of expensive cognac on top of the file cabinet outside the restroom, so I went and got it and we drank straight from it without glasses. The booze was just a way to give me a moment to think. What the hell was I going to do? Eddie was a superstitious man. This had ruined him. Why had he called me? What did he expect me to do? Why wasn’t I doing it? I was racing along these lines when the situation abruptly went from bad to impossible. We made ghost contact.

The phone rang.

We both jumped. Eddie’s eyes watered and he reached out with a trembling hand. The hair on the back of my neck went up. He picked it up and pressed the button. First, there was the sound of wind, and then-

“Eeeeeddie…. Eeeeeddie…” Long, drawn out. Horrifying. Eddie smasmed and I recoiled into a crouch in my office chair. “Eeeedie… come….”

I had never seen a human turn white as milk, but Eddie did. He dropped the phone and howled in terror, then ran in a small, tight circle. Then he stopped and we stared at each other.

“Olga’s ghost!” He was shaking. “Olga’s ghost- Ahhhhh!” He lost the ability to speak English then. I realized in that instant that I knew what to do.

“Dude!” I yelled. “Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

He stopped and stared. In that instant of quiet, the phone rang again.

“Don’t!” I yelled. He reached out and picked it up, drawn by some unseen force, unable to stop himself.

“Hello?” he whispered.

“Ah, hi, my name is Ron, I was jogging on the waterfront and this woman came up the banks. I called the paramedics. She’s fine, but it looks like she fell in the river and got pretty cold. She, ah, you know her? She borrowed my phone and called you just now. Says her name is Olga.”

Olga lost one disco boot on her epic leap. Other than that, she was fine. Eddie let her keep the Jeep.

Funny in hindsight, but for one terrifying moment, I watched a guy talking to a ghost on the phone. I don’t know how that changed me, or even if it did, but I know how it changed Eddie. His post divorce blues were over, the rebound relationship supernaturally complete. He got married a couple years later and opened an auto body shop.

With A Snap!

Today, in the course of normal human business, I talked to a person who very much reminds me of Riley, a character from The Animals After Midnight, book three in the Darby Holland Crime Series, due out this January. For all the bad guys of the world, there’s good news!

With the snap of your fingers you can become a better person. More wholesome. Better. Healthier. It really is that easy. The future is the only direction we’re going in. You might say that with a snap of your fingers you can be a bad one too, but that just means you haven’t snapped them yet.

The Mightiest Cinnamon Rolls On Earth

I’ll be damned. According to Wikipedia, cinnamon was used in Ancient Egypt to embalm mutherfuckin’ mummies. Herodotus, that acid head of antiquity, named Arabia as the fabled source of the stuff, and claimed gigantic cinnamon birds collected it from an unknown land and brought it back as nesting material. Pliny the Elder didn’t believe him, but had little to add. Even Marco Polo was circumspect. Cinnamon floated on rafts without sails, riding the trade currents from Indonesia to Africa. As cinnamon floated through time, it gave rise to many magnificent things. I’ll be focusing on the cinnamon roll. Here are my three picks for the greatest.

#3 The Frontier, Albuquerque New Mexico

Located in the UNM student ghetto in Albuquerque, NM, the Frontier Restaurant is home to a cinnamon roll so good that if you eat one, it is possible to ignore your surroundings. Imagine a Denny’s. Then imagine you are inside, but you’ve just had a peyote yogurt enema. The place is fixed in my memory. When I was 16, I used to haunt the place. Late on a winter night, with a quarter refill coffee and one of those big, calorie bonanza rolls steaming in front of you while the New Mexico styrofoam bead snow falls, well. The roll is big. It is soft. The icing is a thick, buttery fluid. The smell is a huge part of it. Imagine sweet, cinnamon movie theater popcorn butter and you’ll have it.

#2 The Cardinal Lemoine Metro Stop, Paris France

Its on line 10, in the 5th arrondissement. I think it may be called Le Petit Cardinal. But its right there. An old man and his old wife run the place and they look like owls. They mostly sell chocolate, but early in the morning, they have these little palm sized cinnamon rolls with GOLD raisins. No frosting but a kind of floral honey. I will say no more.

#1 The Fresh Sourdough Express, Homer Alaska

The croissant style cinnamon roll they had may have changed with the name. It was once called the Sourdough Bakery. The cinnamon roll was rich, flaky, buttery, even light, and it had raisins. I remember eating them on dark mornings before the sun came up and the wind howled down the Homer Spit. Somehow food tastes different when you’re at the edge of the wilderness. Really great food, in a place like that, can make even the hardest rebel lunatic feel connected to something bigger. Chewing a mouthful of that and staring out to sea, well. All of human history carried you to that moment. It carried all kinds of other people to all sorts of different places, but you? You’re there, right then.

 

A Light For The Cave I Didn’t Enter

Recently, a literary agent I dealt with came under fire. He will go unnamed here. Because I save every email, I have in my possession damning evidence of ethical breach, costly ineptitude, gross financial misconduct, fraud, breach, and much, much more. This is an incredibly greasy human being and a terrible agent, one it would be a mistake for any writer to deal with. This person’s career now hangs in the balance, and I have the hard evidence that would break his crooked back.

I will do nothing. Slander, most clearly understood, is the sharing of darkness. I come from a family that enjoys it. My estranged mother, for instance, would tiptoe around in people’s lives, sprinkling poison for her own gain. Many Baby Boomers have this in common. I have a lost sibling who inherited this same illness. It destroyed them both. I will do no such thing, or engage in behavior that even hints of this ‘sharing of darkness’, and I feel more strongly about it than ever. This right here, with no names and no faces, is as dark as I’ll go, and I’ll only go this far, this once, so I can share this ray of light.

Recently, an old friend asked me to help out at his tattoo shop, and while I was at first reluctant, I’m glad I agreed. It’s a street shop, and it put me back in touch with a part of myself that has been resting for more than a decade, a part of me that I’ve been uncertain about for years. No longer. It is the aspect of my psyche I needed to resolve this. My inner thug.

The root of my problem here is that I want to remain clean. Clean. I can’t tattle on some douchebag. Its small. Unclean. It is a behavior that ruins the mouth it comes from. I would be diminished in some way. The ugly satisfaction of repeating this miscreants crimes to his end would not be a wholesome thing. The Rat in Prisoner’s Dilemma has no true friends. Only a fool would trust him. What then? My inner thug has the answer. Did the wad in question cross the line and inspire me to find him, drag him into the open, and deliver a gentlemanly beating? That’s clean behavior. Read a book. Heroes beat up shitheads all the time. The answer in this case is not quite. Almost, but no. And the dude would just cry, and then I’d feel bad in a different way. In my heart I believe that we all get what we deserve, and the agent in question is no exception. Stepping down into anyone’s gutter to fight them on their home turf will just get you dirty. I feel like I deserve to be clean. And I am. And I feel good about it, too.

My point, dear reader, is that if you take a moment, or even a long week, to wrestle with a conundrum like this one, there will often be a way to shine some positive light on it. And its worth it to figure out how. I didn’t like how this ugly, petty little boy-man reminded me of the dark, stunted people from a past I’d rather forget. I do like that it brought on a fruitful period of introspection. We are all in the process of becoming, all the time. Become more, not less. Be good. Right now.

Be clean. Good stuff will happen to you.

The Five Greatest Cheeseburgers On Earth

Oh that American classic. If you go somewhere far away, far enough that you get homesick, the cheeseburger is one of the things you begin to dream about. What makes a great one? Ingredients, and one of the key ingredients is ambience. The what of an extraordinary cheeseburger is, in the end, equally as important as the where.

The Trailer Burger at Bebop in Idaho

It was mid winter. I was driving an Alfa Romeo 151 Milano, a supremely shitty choice for a cross country venture in January, but I got the car for a song from my Armenian neighbor, so the Alfa it was. The heat didn’t work very well, but it had seat warmers, so strange when you think about it. Road salt had formed a ghostly rime on the windshield and I would wipe at it now and then with one of my socks, which I’d soaked with lukewarm 7-11 coffee. Just shy of midnight, several times through my only Johnny Cash CD, I knew it was time to eat, drink and be merry or I was gonna go way fuckin’ crazy.

Bebop appeared out of the gloom like a UFO. It was a short, bulbous trailer, modified with a kind of after market plexiglas server window. Neon, blinking lights, winking bulbs, rotating pinwheels of blue and green and gold, it was designed to capture anyone exiting the highway, and I was captured immediately. The parking lot was small, with a tiny courtyard with two snow covered picnic tables. I pulled in and walked up to the window and waited. There was a line. The people in front of me seemed like they were in a good mood. We chatted. They were older than me, in their late 60’s, on vacation. The guy though my car was funny. I agreed that it was.

As they ordered I got my first good look at the inside of the place. Bebop was kicking ass, it appeared. They had every piece of kitchen equipment I could imagine, all of it clean and bright. Three people were working at top speed, smiling and laughing as they did. I don’t remember what the music was, only that it was loud. Then it was my turn to order. Double jalapeno cheeseburger, Tabasco onion rings and a deep fried Twinkie. The powerful Mexican woman who took my order smiled.

“You skinny little man! Where you gonna put all that food!”

“In a toilet tomorrow morning.” Rudeish, but she laughed.

I ate in the parking lot as the snow fell, sipping the last half frozen beer I’d bought in Wyoming as I did. The cheeseburger was a splattery, perfect mess. The jalapenos were smoked, the onions caramelized, the iceberg lettuce so crunchy it was a kind of water cabbage, the tomatoes sliced thick, with black pepper, the long slices of pickle homemade with garlic and ginger, the cheese molten and fried hard on the edges from where it melted onto the flat top. The Tabasco onion rings were mouth watering, almost like crackers, and it felt like they were burning my fingernails as I ate them. The deep fried Twinkie did burn me, and I used the last of that crappy beer to keep my mouth from blistering.

Bebop was at the edge of a small town. Right across from it was a residential street, with twin rows of old white houses and towering trees. One of them had a For Rent sign on the side and a phone number. For maybe ten minutes, I thought about moving there. The food was that good. And if it was, what the hell was the rest of this sleepy little town like?

I still think about that place, and the road not taken as it were. That, dear reader, is a cheeseburger.

Blake’s Lotaburger 1640 Gibson Blvd SE, Albuquerque, NM

This is a desperately fucked up place. So desolate that you can hear a crackling sound in your head, like Rice Crispies in a bowl that just got hit with 2% milk. The crackling is the sound of your brain cells dying as your soul tries to tear it’s way out of the top of your skull. Across the street from the sitting area is one of Albuquerque’s countless empty sandlots. It’s beige, almost an orthopedic fawn, dappled with poisoned weeds and the odd scraps of trash. The sky is crisscrossed with contrails, and sitting there eating your green chili double with cheese, you can’t help but practice contrailomancy in an attempt to divine your future. This is a city where bad shit happens to bad people.

It is proof of Sheckley’s Scales of Cosmic Irony that the Blake’s double green chili with cheese is the 4th finest cheeseburger on Earth, and it should come as no surprise to you, dear reader, that I have found the best of Blake’s many locations to enjoy one. I was there not long ago, inspecting haunted houses, digging into the past, measuring this and that for creative purposes, and I found something startling. Eating there, just past 2 in the afternoon, well. See paragraph one.

The burger is a fast food masterpiece. Compositionally, it is different than many cheeseburgers. The guts are below the beef patties. Yes. It stacks like this. The bottom bun (white, standard), then mayo, pickles, tomato, iceberg, white onion, then beef #1, then cheese and green chili, then beef #2, then the top bun. The beef chili cheese juice saturates the rest of it and kind of runs down your hand while you eat and marvel at where you are.

Here I must add that Blake’s also has Frito Pie.

If you look hard, you can find the bright side of anything. This gets more important as the years go by and you realize you only have one life. One. And you better get it right. You get to choose. Will you be a dark shit smear, forever sailing on those shallow waters? Or a Mabden? No. You have to be like a Blake’s double green chili with cheese, the island in the madness, the bright doorway in the darkness, the welcome vessel in the abyss. It isn’t hard to be good. Even a cheeseburger can do it.

The Pimento Cheeseburger at The Rialto Poolroom, Portland Oregon

Hearty artisan bacon, made by earnest beardos with suspenders and the newest Apple products, from free range pigs fed only the finest organic acorns, has consistently fucked up the burgers in this city. It’s too thick, too bacony, to be used in this context. Sorry, but it’s true. A breakfast oriented artisan bacon can overpower everything, leaving you with a bacon sandwich.

The Pimento Bacon Cheeseburger at the Rialto Poolroom is different. The bacon is thinner than the cured pork surfboards common here. It sums up the approach quite well. There’s an understated gracefulness to this cheeseburger, and the crack of the pool balls, the smell of the chalk and talcum, the shitty hustler vibe of the off track betting going down, well, such a strange place to find anything understated. It ramps a really good cheeseburger right into the stratosphere. The Rialto Poolroom is in my novel Knottspeed, A Love Story. It’s where Knottspeed and Fencepost discover their mutual desire to kill horse jockeys. Portland is a food town. Though I have lived here for almost three decades, I do not consider myself a Portlander. Even though 5 of my books take place here, I most certainly do not consider myself a Portland writer. I write because I love to read and it makes me a better reader. I also make a shit ton of money at it and I consider it a good job. For now. But that does not make me a writer. I don’t know what I am and I’m not meant to find out. Identity as occupation is a disgusting idea anyway, right? For better or worse, I also don’t have a hometown and I’ve never been inspired to claim one either. I never will. But at the end of my life, I will look fondly on this city, which treated me so well. Far, far more good times than bad. Sorry then, good City of Roses, to have mentioned you only once in this list of miracles.

The Bizarre Tahini Moo Cow Cheese Goatmeat in Chefchaouen, Morocco

Holy shit I have no idea what I was doing there. Do not, dear reader, believe for an instant that this was my idea. It was not. The woman I was dating at the time, who will not enter the story again, thought it was a good idea.

It was 1989. I was 19. Chefchaouen is pronounced Shouwn. The hotel I was staying in was a four story thing inside the medina. It looked like it was made out of a mud plaster and irregular stones dragged out of the hills. On the roof were several rounded hut shaped rooms and a sprawling terrace, and that’s where I hung out, smoking hash with these English dudes. I called them The Blokes, and most of them thought that was pretty fun, except this one guy Nigel, the handsome one, who came from a different, higher class than the rest of them. I picked on Nigel because of it.

The Blokes had mundane taste in food, made all the worse by what Kim Stanley Robinson refers to as ‘prophylactic eating’, meaning in this case peeled potatoes. Anything peeled was safe. Grain was safe. That was about it. For reasons I’ll never understand, I was able to eat almost anything, but I had my own superstitions, based on an understanding of biology gleaned from science fiction books, one semester of biology, and poorly understood culinary rumors. Cooked meat was safe. Safer than the half cooked peeled things. Anything that came from a jar or a can, anything pickled or high in acid. Salty things. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, but The Blokes and I ate differently. And I ate the better.

Right down the street from the Unstable Hotel was a hole in the wall restaurant with outdoor tables, and we all ate there everyday we were in that town. The cook was a silent guy, Berber maybe, but the waiter was this kid, maybe 10 or 11, possibly 12, and what a wizard level hustler. He spoke 5 languages easy. The working class Blokes got their cues from the dickhead snob Nigel about being kind to the help, but I was downright chummy with that little guy. I would have been nice to the kid anyway, I mean why not, he could sabotage the food, but it also rubbed Nigel the wrong way so… This is why they began letting me order off the menu. Friendliness. That is how I assembled a unique cheeseburger facsimile based on the ingredients found in a tiny shithole in the mountains of North Africa.

The Bread- it was like pita bread, but not. Better. It had a crackery crust.

The Meat- it was goat meat. Heavily seasoned, almost like sausage.

The Guts- white onion, sautéed peppers, strange gherkinesque pickles.

The Cheese- that processed French cheese that comes in a pizza wheel.

The Sauce- mayo, something like tahini, spicy English mustard.

I sometimes at that three times a day. The Blokes began to envy that. We did a lot of hiking, and I was fueled by better food, so to this day those poor pancake eaters probably think Americans are insanely tough. But it was the cheeseburgers.

Some nights, eating and jabbering with those guys, way up there in the mountains, you could see so many stars. When you’re tired, food tastes better. When you’re outside and you’re exhausted, it tasted especially good. But when you’re in the company of strangers, so far from where you were born, with yesterday and tomorrow blending into the seamless now, well, even a suspect cheeseburger is extraordinary.

The Jalapeno Cheeseburger at Nameless Gas Station Diner in South Dakota

There was a fuckin’ heat wave that summer. A bad one. South Dakota, if you don’t know, is a flat place. Flat is a word stolen from somewhere, because all words are stolen (borrowed would imply we gave it back). In geometry, flat is the generalization of lines and planes in an n-dimensional Euclidean space. Flat can sometimes refer to an apartment, usually to my mind an English one with exposed brick, no hot running water, and three day drunk models on X that look cold while they chain smoke. In music, it just means wrong wrong wrong. In South Dakota, it means something else.

Everything stands out in that kind of flat. A solitary, suicidal cow. A weathered fencepost listing to one side. A lone crow wheeling in a sky that has been empty since the dawn of creation. When the gas station with a ‘DINER’ sign came into view, my heart almost exploded. I was stopping. I was going in. I was going to buy something. Maybe talk to a human being.

The building had been aging double time since the 1950’s. Even the gas pumps were old, which struck me as potentially dangerous. My car was almost on fire when I pulled into the shade of the place next to a beat to shit Ford pick up. I got out and stood there in a breeze that smelled like a rock furnace and dry grass and reheated tar. But that breeze felt good, so I smoked a cigarette. That’s when I caught it- food, the aromatic hydrocarbons associated with cheap bacon and dog meat, mixed with the flashback intense peach cobbler from the cafeteria of a farm school I went to for a year when I was a kid. So I went in.

Junk food, motor oil, a rack of birthday cards, and a sweating cooler of beer and soda to the right, and to the left, the diner, which was three booths and a counter with a register. Food came through the window behind the old waitress, a small, thin, wizened creature with tall hair. She flashed me a quick look and then turned back to the two old cowboys at the counter, the guys who caught my attention right when I came through the door.

These were real cowboys, but the kind that didn’t call themselves anything to do with cows or boys. Hard, weather blasted, worn. The back of the one guy’s neck is what struck me, and I can still see it. It looked like leather in a way you don’t see in cities. They never looked my way once. I ordered a jalapeno cheeseburger mostly to voyeuristically inspect them.

What the hell did they do out there? The three of them knew each other. They talked quietly, and there was a musical quality to it. They were gentle people, but both of the men had guns. They stuck me as the kind of people who would feel bad about killing me. The food came and I got a six pack of beer and carried it outside and ate in the parking lot at the old metal card table by the door.

The beef patty was thin, the kind that came pre made out of a box and was frozen when it hit the flat top. The white onion was thick and raw. The canned jalapenos were fried in bacon grease, and the bacon itself was thin and salty. The bun was white, a picnic bun, from all the picnics I’d ever gone to. Yellow mustard, American cheese. But as I ate it, staring out at the heat mirage on the road from that table in the shade, I thought about what I might have been if I’d been born at the same time as those two old ranchers, or ranch hands, or whatever the hell those guys were. Something is wrong with me. I know it. I gravitate to the edge of everything because the center seems sterile and unpalatable and unhealthy, like a Stepford potato, or a big box of sugar from Chernobyl. Those guys were the same way. They were as old as the gas station diner and in their time they could have been bankers, or ad men like the abominations in that TV show. They could have worked the line in Detroit all their lives and then retired in Hell. They could have assembled aircraft in LA, and lived in little two bedroom places with their wives, who had the newest vacuum cleaners and prescription drug problems. They could have lived the American Dream of their era, but here they were, in the middle of nowhere, at the end of the show, at the very edge of it all.

That cheeseburger tasted different than any of the other cheeseburgers I’ve ever eaten. I still don’t know why. But more than all the others, it’s the one I want to eat one more time.

 

Short Bus

Last week I finished the script for what will likely be my directorial debut. The working title is Short Bus. Here’s part of the one page-

On a desert work detail, the kids from D Block juvenile detention are framed for a heist and use their collective criminal insight to turn the tables and take a shot at freedom.

When a mining operation hits gold unexpectedly, the technicians split into two groups. Both sides want to hide the fortune from their employer, a selenium prospecting firm, and independently approach Cunningham, the head of security. Cunningham decides to kill them all and take the gold, but he needs to cover his tracks. A small group of inmates, the hard cases from D Block, are sent out into the nearby desert on a work detail as part of the plan. The dead technicians will look like casualties in an escape gone wrong. Everything is planned with military precision, but the junior criminals from D Block are far more resourceful than anticipated. While they attempt to reverse the set-up, they tell their origin stories and come to an empowering new understanding of who they are, what they are supposed to be, and what they might become instead.

Writer Jeff Johnson was on D Block in the Albuquerque Juvenile Detention Center in 1985. Shot entirely in New Mexico with a cast that is primarily Hispanic, Short Bus is a noir designed to showcase emerging talent while making the most of film incentives.

“Jeff Johnson is a gifted and natural storyteller, and he knows about things you don’t know.”–John Irving, Academy Award Winning author of Cider House Rules

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Life is funny. I write about circles in life often enough, and one of them just came to the surface. Before I was on D Block al those years ago, I was in a foster home in Springfield, Missouri. I was 15, and the State was kind enough to subsidies my employment do I could buy weed and save up enough money to make a break for it. And I loved that job. I look back on it fondly at the oddest times, too.

It was a the University day care center. The place where all the staff teaching summer school dropped off their kids. My boss was this cool hippy dude named Tom. Guy was a character, and I learned a great deal from him. He was educated. Wise. And he was a rebel, all the way down in the marrow, where things don’t change. We took the kids on field trips, but what I remember most of them was this kid named Simon. He always got bummed out at nap time on the days when we weren’t out anywhere. I felt compelled to sit with him, poor little guy, and he always wanted me to tell him a story. Over the course of the summer, I told him a garbled version of the Hobbit and the entire Lord of The Rings, and that kid must have thought I was the greatest storyteller of all time until those movies came out. Fun to think back on.

But I think back on Tom the most. The guy knew I was in a foster home. He knew I was saving to make a run for it. He never knew what happened after that. About the long run, the strange splatter of New Mexico, the characters I met and now use in stories. When I knew him, before all that, Tom peppered me with odd advice that came in handy, and he had a cheerful quality I often emulated, so often that it became a part of me, and eventually, over the years between then and now, I became a cheerful guy.

I just found Tom on Facebook. Hey dude. Thanks for everything.

-Jeff

 

 

The Birdcan of Santa Gertrudis de Fruitera – Story Of The Month on greatpinkskeleton.com

“Your phone is pregnant,” Lencio finished. “That’s why it is always warm. Maybe now it will have a chance. Different possibilities, anyway.”

Read how Lencio rolls at GreatPinkSkeleton.com