By Diego Arias

I sat at a Taco Bell reading a book about cultural marxists, contraception, and immigration. Someone gave me this book and told me it would define the election, but all I could gather was the author yap on and on about country clubs and labor unions and working-class business practices and shoestring budgets. I very much wanted to dump the book in a garbage can and never read anything about it again, but I was waiting for someone and had nothing else to do. I looked up from my carne asada steak taco and watched a man in the corner enjoy a soccer game on his phone and take savage bites out of a large, engorged chalupa. As he bit into the fried casing’s manila envelope colored flesh, a bright red sauce squirted out and spread across the table. Holy Cucamonga, this was a wild, satanic place. Men with the legs of flamingos and heads like snakes from Central American jungles rummaged through middle American taco concoctions like a teenager in a 1950’s drive-in theater parking lot. They fondled these damn tacos and burritos in uncomfortable, godless ways. What sort of place was this? What kind of man visits a Taco Bell in the middle of the afternoon and orders twelve of these grease torpedoes only to consume them in one twenty-minute sitting? What sort of liver processes that kind of modern nutritional content?  

I saw Nando park his car and step out of his red sedan. He wore a black coat too big for his small body and gray earmuffs. He walked up to the front door, made his way across the room, and slid right into the red leather booth seat in front of me.

“Hey,” he said. He sat down and took his jacket off, draping it over the chair.

“How is it?”

“You know, could be better.”

“Yea, it could be.”

“Where is Beto? I thought he was coming,” I asked.

“He had a job interview.”

Beto was two years younger than us and had two children. The mother, a Puerto-Rican girl in her early twenties fully tatted up from her feet to the tear drops beneath her right eye, had left him and now lived with a hustler in the Elizabeth projects who sold fentanyl out of a chicken and beans restaurante he opened with his grandmother, a seventy-three-year-old woman named Go Time Bienvenida. Apparently, they called her that because if ever she was triggered into some sort of violent altercation, friends, family, and customers alike would bear witness to her wild, unsavory street fights.

Beto lived by the waterfront in a district named Elizabethport. Earlier in the year, he had made an entrepreneurial attempt and started a small computer repair business with my younger cousin Jossimar. But he never answered his phone. He was very much into the weed scene and saw no essential purpose to the concept of exchanging human labor for a biweekly check in his often overdrafted bank account. Jossimar secured clients but Beto missed out on appointments. One afternoon, laughing wildly, he informed me that he was genetically lazy. I told him he was saying racist shit. “How am I gonna be racist against myself? Motherfucker, you eat at Taco Bell. You ain’t got no authority on me. Fuck you and that brown pride shit. Fuck I gotta be proud about for being half Colombian and half Paraguayan? That shit don’t do nothing for me. What do you get out of it? You get like some check or something out of it? Someone comes along and greases your balls for you just because you were born in some mountain in South America?”

At the diner, Nando and I met to toss chisme around like two abuelas in downtown Paterson with nothing better to do than compare vintage dick pics and spread flat out lies about unsuspecting, innocent civilians.  

“How is everything by the way, you know, with the break-up?” I asked.

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Fair enough.”

Nando lived with his mother, Bertha Moreno. She had been a middle school Spanish teacher in Elizabeth. Nando told me that she quit because a student yelled in her ear. “That kid damaged her ear, he yelled and tore something open in there,” he said. She was ineligible for unemployment, and the teachers’ union refused to protect her. Beto added more to the story. His mother, also a teacher for the Elizabeth Public Schools, told him that Nando’s mother was fucking a seventeen-year-old. Nando’s mother, still grieving over her alcoholic ex-husband’s twenty-something year-old wife, had been fired for the inappropriate sexual relationship. “But why wasn’t she charged?” I asked. “I don’t know, but that’s the rumor with the teachers. That’s what my mom told me,” Beto said. “It’s all they talk about. They won’t stop. Every time they’re over my mom’s house, they just start back up and talk about the relationship. I think they wake up and go to sleep thinking about this shit, it’s like a thing they can’t stop bringing up. It’s the gossip to end all gossips, like it’s the moment they had all be waiting for since chisme got invented, bro. It’s now just something everyone does, everyone thinks about. ‘Bertha Moreno fucking the town guap?’ ‘You hear Bertha was getting smashed by the Martinez kid?’ ‘The church lady?’ ‘Oh yea, oh yea. She be fucking bro, she be fucking.’”

Nando’s relationship with his mother was something out of a Catholic nightmare. No women in the house. No sex in the house. A devout and fire-breathing Christian, she condemned Nando as a fornicator, a sinner, a man corrupted by the evils of human meat and glistening genitals. “Why are you trying to live the life of a married man? In my house! You’re not a man, you think you’re a man, but you’re not a man.” One time she chased a woman out of the house after she caught Nando with his arm around the young girl’s shoulder. They were watching a movie in the living room. Chased her out of the house, a chancla in hand, as the girl ran into her car and locked the door. His mother banged on the driver’s side window. “Stay away from my son! He’s a good boy, a good boy!” The car sped off. Nando’s mother stood in the middle of the street, a lonesome warrior against the crusades of the flesh, with a torn plastic sandal in her right hand, a saint of sorts worthy of eternal salvation and unlimited coffee refills at her local church La Palabra del Profeta on 2^nd Street and Broad in Elizabeth. The young woman, chased away by Christ and one of his fiercest hypocrites, never called Nando again. She refused to see him. “Good,” his mother said. “She was a two-bit floozy with no sense of morality looking for another man and another home to wreck. It’s a drug to these women, like eating a heroin or a marijuana.  All for what? For a measly orgasm? Have you ever had an orgasm? Have you?! You ever see one up close? Holy father!”

Bertha once told Marcelo, Nando’s twin brother, that he was envious of him. “He’s always hated you. He never had your smarts, him and his master’s degree in Human Resources. Ha! What kind of man studies Human Resources? You know what kind of man studies that, oh you know it! My own son, a fornicator sinning his life away before the very eyes of Jesus! His own sacred eyes! And all I can do is pray. I pray for his soul, he needs Jesus. Jesus, save him! Salvelo Jesus! He’s here and waiting to bathe in your sacred blood!” She threw her hand up in front of her and shook it wildly into the air, closing her eyes and shimmying her body like a bushel of celery sticks crammed into a blender.

Marcelo, the fortunate son and Nando’s constant point of familial comparison, attended Syracuse University on a full scholarship, studied biomechanical engineering and graduated summa cum laude. However, despite his achievements, he was denied admission to medical school. He blamed it on a low MCAT score. He turned down a doctorate program at Duke to retake the MCAT and reapply to medical school once again after a series of catastrophic rejections. But when he retook the exam, the results were unexpectedly lower, and he was again denied admission, even at two institutions in the Caribbean he had deemed loser schools. The day he received his score, he called Nando and cried on the phone. I could hear him howling on the other line. Nando tried to move the phone closer to his ear, but I could still make out his wails and squeals. Marcelo even threatened the admissions counselors at Yale and Harvard for violating his constitutional rights. “What rights?” I asked Nando. “They’re discriminating him because of a test score, that’s flat-out discrimination.” “Look, I’m no Erwin Chemerinsky, but I’m pretty sure they have the right to do that.” “What do you know? You’re not in law school. He has rights.”

Now, after four years, Marcelo lived with Beto in a two-floor apartment in Elizabethport. He spent most of his free time visiting online dating sites, listing himself as an accomplished doctor. He even had a picture in a white coat, arms folded, the very pinnacle of intellectual and capitalist success. In another shot, he stood next to a BMW and had applied some sort of whitening filter to his teeth. His narcissism was pure American beef, an unbridled lust for power and money served alongside carnival fried Oreos and honey-flavored bacon enchiladas. “El doctor,” Beto called him. “El doctor is down there scamming bitches, bro.”

Later that evening, after meeting with Nando and trying to cheer him up over his relationship woes, I stopped by Beto’s place. We drank and played video games. He talked about the army.

“I miss it. But sometimes I can’t sleep.”

“Why’s that?”

We were playing a soccer game on his medium-sized flatscreen. He lay on his bed, stomach down, and I sat on the carpet.

“Sometimes. Well, sometimes I miss the army, but I killed a lot of people man. I go to sleep, and I think about it, keeps me up.”

We had this conversation often, whenever he consumed too many gummies or had a severe bout of clinical depression. He looked to the past the way one would look down an open manhole in the street, full of wonder and disgust, asking himself quietly if he should just jump into the rabbit tunnel and lose himself in an endless plethora of self-hatred and disillusionment. One night when we sat in his car and perspiration formed on the windshield, he wrote out messages in Arabic with his index finger. “That means ‘Caution, keep back from vehicle’. If they got too close, we had to shoot them. We shot at a guy once, right through his window, right through his face. Motherfucker wouldn’t stop.” 

We heard some noises coming from downstairs. Plates were being stuffed violently into the dishwasher. Its door closed, and the machine started. 

“What’s he doing down there?”

“I don’t know, probably on some dating website.”

“He’s washing dishes. And making fritos, I can smell’em from up here. Can’t you?”

“Doesn’t matter. Probably a break from his dating sites. He had a girl come here the other day, and he paid me to stay in my room and not come out until 10:30 am in the morning.”

There were several reasons why Marcelo hated me. After all, I encouraged his brother to force him to pay rent, and when he didn’t, I suggested he evict him. And once, I made fun of his laugh. Marcelo had a patented laugh. Sometimes it was high-pitched like a series of shrieks from a medium-sized monkey, and other times it was deep and hard. He would break into this laugh without a build-up, just a loud, sudden noise that caught you off guard. Then, realizing people were staring at him, he would immediately cease laughing. There were no gradations in the laugh, just one sudden punch to the ears.  I teased him about it once, before I knew how sensitive he could be about his strange behavior. “Oh, is this the correct way to laugh?” Marcelo asked his brother after I left.  He made a mocking, feminine laugh. One day, Nando and I went to the mall, and I helped him buy clothes. He wore white gym socks with black dress shoes and jeans two inches too long for his height. Marcelo approached him after he came home. “So, he’s changing you huh? Molding you in his image? Has he become your creator?” He leaned against the door frame and turned his eyes towards me.  “Oh, you don’t like my white socks? You taught him the correct way to wear socks, is this how you do it? Is this it?” He violently tugged at his long white tube socks, pulling them up all the way to the edge of his thighs. “Is this the way your master makes you dress?” he asked Nando.

Marcelo had instructed Beto that he didn’t want to see me. When I used the bathroom or followed him to the kitchen to get more beer, Beto would walk down the stairs and check if Marcelo was in the living room. If Marcelo was there, I was to wait until he left the area. Marcelo had been very clear about this. “I do not, I repeat, I do not want to see him,” he had said to Beto. Later in the day, Marcelo took a nap in his room. Beto told me that he slept with a bone saw on the nightstand next to his bed.

“We should put a pillow over his face and suffocate him,” Beto said.

I paused.

“Maybe next week. Let’s go to the kitchen and eat his patacones.”

“He’ll fucking kill you bro.”

“I’m so hungry. Tengo hambre pendejo y esa vaina huele muy buena.”

We went down into the kitchen and served ourselves a heap of fried plaintains, cocoyams and yuccas, piling them up high on the plate like blasphemous towers of tubers and musas. covered in salt and ketchup, delicious and crunchy and full of all the color and taste and sunsets and downpours of Caribbean monsoons. We ate ferociously, chomping down on the fritos like two hungry sugarcane workers. We also knew the consequences of our unholy act. Marcelo would be angry when he woke from his slumber, a break from his dating site secret identity, where he played a sexy brown doctor with impeccable credit and an accomplished list of publications in respected medical journals.  He would be angry and ready to face our betrayal head on with full, naked intensity. He could strike at any minute, a wild, fevered cobra backed up into a corner with nowhere to go.

“Taco Bell ain’t got shit on these platanos, my brother,” Beto said.  

“It’s Fritura Sunday, live más motherfucker, live más,” I replied.

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Diego Arias was born in Colombia and raised in New Jersey. He has been published in Another Chicago Magazine, Revista Cronopio, and Acentos Reviews, among others. His work has also placed as a finalist in River Stix’s Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for The Masters’ Review Short Story Award for New Writers. A former U.S. diplomat, he owns a media company based out of Medellin, Colombia where he lives with his wife and family.