friday (entre aromas)
When I got to my therapist’s office her chair was busted. It was one of those deep giant reclining chairs that also leans forward so you can get out, like it has an eject button, you know? The chair was stuck in eject. There’s a metaphor there about about therapy, the work of a therapist, the work of therapy, permanent ejection…
Anyway I was going to get BBQ with Todd after at Pinche Gringo, this great Texas-style barbecue place near my house. The Metrobus was messed up by teacher’s protests or flooding or the influx of tourists for the world cup or all three so I started walking. Todd texted me to say he’d be late, then texted me to say he wasn’t going to come at all. Reforma was closed, probably for the teacher’s strike or for the families searching for their disappeared relatives or I don’t know, both. Elon Musk becomes a trillionaire as teachers get the shit kicked out of them for asking to make the equivalent of $1000/month. I keep thinking to myself, this is the perfect World Cup. Such grand cynicism.
I kept walking up Universidad and walked by a place called Entre Aromas. They had the Bosnia-Canada game on and a pozole special. The place is small, rectangular, two tvs facing each other in opposite corners. The broadcasts were via the same service, ViX, but they weren’t synced. Canada scored a goal to my left and the table there cheered. Then they scored a goal on the tv I was watching and the people in front of me, a father and son, the son with Turrets who kept yelling “up,” cheered. I wondered why they were such fervent Canada fans.
The chef was wearing sunglasses. He looked related to the waiter, who looked related to some of the guys at the table to my left. What I mean is that everybody looked a little Italian, like I had walked into a little neighborhood restaurant in southern Brooklyn. The lighting even felt a little Brooklyn-y, maybe more Bay Ridge than Dyker Heights. The pozole was thick with cabbage and a little sweet, probably from the cabbage, or was it lettuce? Pozole sometimes comes with shredded iceberg lettuce, maybe instead of using lettuce as a topping they put straight into the soup. It tasted like borscht. I like borscht, but I’m not sure I like borscht pozole. At one point a man walked in with a cigarette and started asking everyone for food and/or money. Give me some of that, he said, pointing to my soup. Give me some of that, he said to the men next to me, pointing at their beers.
When I was 20-something and working at Think Coffee on the corner of Bowery and Bleecker, across the street from a methadone clinic, I would take it upon myself to gently or not-so-gently ask people like this to leave. I’m glad this part of my personality has withered away with time.