Dance of the Madmen by Jennifer Austin
“And after, we drink”
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Together, we dance. We slide next to, in front of, and behind each other in the cramped Mexican cafe. It is a tiny room filled with Day of the Dead posters, a skeleton that looks like it’s vomiting into a basket of tortilla chips, and a Frida Kahlo print of the artist on her wedding day— a tiny Diego Rivera face painted in the middle of her forehead. We high-five as we pass each other in the skinny lanes between tables and booths. We follow each other with food lined up our arms after the cooks scream to “Get it out of the window!”We sing happy birthday in unison. We clap. We serve others. We do not serve ourselves this well.
And after, we drink.
We sling burritos, tacos, enchiladas, and scurry to get to our tables in a timely fashion. We recite the same words all night long. “You can have rice and beans, guacamole salad, or blue corn bread.” And, “You want a chimichanga, L.A. Mex?” L.A. Mex— the uninspired name for adding a spattering of lettuce, tomato, and sour cream.
We watch a forty-five year old woman straddle her husband after five margaritas, spit sliding between their slippery lips; a fifty year old man in a wife-beater struggling to eat nachos while he holds a cold compress against his eye full of crazy glue after one too many brewskis at Albany’s annual Tulip Festival. We work around a college student, dressed all in green and wearing a headband with antennae, after the annual St. Patty’s Day parade. We watch him vomit on the floor after choking down his burrito, taco combo. His girlfriend, for the day, slides in the vomit and lands on her face. Tomorrow, he’ll call her a slut to his friends. We tell concerned patrons who stare at the drunk girl on the floor: “They don’t call it El Loco for nothing!”
We sell our imagination, sense of humor, and intellect for twenty percent.
And after, we drink.
When the dining is finally over, we sit with friends and slurp down margaritas because the thought of not doing so is incomprehensible. The frozen delight gives us brain freeze and we both love and hate the sweet spell it places on us. We think about how singular we feel, sitting together, after serving the masses.
We puzzle over credit card receipts, over shitty tippers, and we laugh when a co-worker recalls earlier in the evening, in the middle of the chaos, when one of us told the cook to L.A. Mex her snatch. And in that collision of shared space, we laugh, and almost weep, because our feet throb, our legs and ass tingle, our throats scratch, and any inspiration or hope of promise for the day is gone, thwarted by too many strange and familiar faces, mouths moving simultaneously. Finally, there is booze to comfort us.
It is late at night, or early in the morning, however we like to think of it it is the same, and there is no food left to get out of the window. There is only us and this place, this moment in time, and the drinks that flow too freely.
Together, we dance on table tops in the empty Mexican cafe.
And we continue to drink.
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Header Photo courtesy of artist David De La Mano. To view a gallery of his street art, go here.
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Jennifer Austin's work has appeared in Metroland, and her one-act plays, Bitter Brunch and Exit, have been produced as staged readings at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.