Opioid, Indiana Read online

  Geese that probably should have flown south for winter dawdled on the courthouse lawn in weird little packs. They had black heads and white cheeks and they spread their wings at passersby, squawking at everyone like a bully would.

  That day was only sort of gray. There are different levels to the grayness. I mean, back home there are different levels to the sunshine too, but you can’t contemplate the differences or else you’ll go blind. You can stare at gray for forever. You can look up at the sky and widen your eyes like you do with those 3D posters and start seeing the secret shit God puts in there.

  I was thinking up a metaphor to decide how to best explain it, and I decided it worked best to use coffee, because at the grocery store where I had worked, there was a coffee bar that shoppers stopped at before moving through their lists, and I learned about all the different ways coffee could be served to you.

  Here’s what I came up with:

  Creamy - That’s when the clouds are kind of white. You can’t see any blue. Can’t see the sun, but you know it isn’t gonna start raining. And every so often, you spot a shadow on the ground. You could even make Remote and talk to him if you got real lonely.

  Decaf - You can’t see the sun. Can’t see the blue. And you might catch a sprinkle. Who knew? No shadows at all. All the colors look like they’ve been made from clay.

  Half caf - Gray. Dark. Maybe gonna be raining in a minute. Colors look like they are covered in film.

  Coffee - The clouds look like they are annihilating the color blue. And it’s not raining, but there is just water in the air. I guess you could call it misting. But that doesn’t seem right. Because I feel like when it’s misting it seems like mist is falling. But when Indiana weather is coffee, there is a drop of rain dispersed in every breath you take.

  Espresso - It feels like you can chew the gray. Like if you moved your hand fast enough, you could grab a patch of gray and put it in an envelope and mail it off to a pen pal so they could always have a piece of Indiana. You can’t tell if the air is wet or not, because that would imply some kind of dryness in the air to measure it against. If you stay outside long enough, you have to change your clothes or dry them by a fire.

  I sat in the decaf day amongst the geese watching the Bicycling Confederate do circles around the courthouse, his flag whipping mildly behind him, the off-red and blue of it like something a kid would design in art class. And I sort of pondered the way other people considered him, watching the people in cars look at him as he did his left turns, and I didn’t see anyone really furious at his flag and that kind of boggled me.

  I tried to contemplate other symbols that would be comparable and what reactions they might get, but it’s complicated.

  Lots of people compare the Confederate flag to the Nazi flag, but that’s not quite right. The Nazis did things for the first time. They set up shop in a country and did murderous things that had never been done before, but the Confederates just wanted to do what the country had always done. I mean, they were wrong, but at a point in time, so was everybody.

  Because, here’s something, New York had slavery longer than Texas did. Did you know that? New York had slavery from the time it was founded in 1624 to 1830. I saw some dood on Twitter who lived in New York calling some states “slave states.” And I was like: Well what were the slave states?

  And I think these are the only states that never had slavery: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nevada, California, Oregon and Kansas. But I read for a long time and I really couldn’t tell. I mean, not all the other states were proud about having slavery.

  When you’re a kid from Texas, you try to figure these things out. The adults can’t explain it to you. The adults can’t explain shit.

  In a few months, when I turn eighteen, I have to register for the military draft. But the military draft is illegal. You can get way more fucked up on alcohol than you can on weed, and only one of those is legal. These days, when you go see a doctor, there’s a decent chance you’ll leave pain-free but addicted. And Coca-Cola still has coca leaf in it.

  That shit is for real. I know Coca-Cola’s whole history.

  The drink that it’s based on was from Europe. It had red wine and cocaine. People drank it to get their swerve on. The guy who made up Sherlock Holmes was a fan of the old kind of Coke, and the guy who wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth imbibed it too. So, I guess the stuff was good for writing on and fucking on, and Pope Leo XIII used it to talk to God.

  The guy who started Coca-Cola was a morphine addict. He had been a Confederate soldier and got wounded and hooked on painkillers they gave him. But he didn’t want to be a morphine addict anymore.

  Listen, I’ve seen opioid addicts. They can’t do shit but get fucked up. They lie in heaps just thinning their eyes at the universe. Their faces look to be contemplating heaps of ash. Like they’re sleepy around a campfire.

  So, this guy figured out a new drug to do. A drug that made him more zippy than loopy but that still made him feel good. He drank wine mixed with coca leaves. Then, in the county where they made it, alcohol was made illegal. So they took the wine out and replaced it with sugar water.

  At first, you could only buy Coke in a pharmacy. When they learned how to bottle it, black people, who couldn’t go inside the pharmacy because of Jim Crow laws, started drinking the stuff. This made people worried that black doods would start getting coked up and raping white girls. Coca-Cola decided to pull the coca out to make the racist customers happy.

  Except, they didn’t really. To this day Coca-Cola ships in millions and millions of dollars’ worth of coca leaves every year and they turn it into something called “Merchandise Number 5,” and that’s a secret ingredient in the formula.

  I think they’re the only company in the US that sells illegal drugs in some modified form AND sponsors the Olympics.

  But, right, if you get busted with a dime bag of cocaine, you can’t tell the cops that it’s for homemade Coke that you make at the house. Like artisanal pickles. Shit, you’d just go to jail.

  Unless maybe you’re white. Because in our society whites get away with more shit, but it’s not like whites get away with everything, like you read on the internet. I mean, maybe the rich ones. Poor whites with tattoos and bad hair, the police fuck with them all the time. But it’s probably still different. I mean, you can be a rich black and I bet cops still treat you like you just stole a pack of chewing gum. Poor blacks probably always get treated like they just stole a car.

  And maybe that’s why people don’t get mad at the Bicycling Confederate circling the courthouse. Because if you get mad at him you have to be mad at so many things.

  Or maybe I’m overthinking it.

  I asked Bennet one time what he thought of him, and Bennet was like, “That dood’s hysterical.”

  “Huh?”

  “He’s fucking crazy, man.”

  “He doesn’t worry you? Like the flag.”

  “Nah, man. That corn-dick’s on a bicycle.”

  That’s what he called him. A corn-dick. We didn’t have that term in Texas.

  So, I was listening to the courthouse geese go honk, hoot, hutta and watching that corn-dick circle the square. Passing in front of the shops and restaurants. Disappearing behind the courthouse every so often. Reappearing in front of this restaurant called Broth that opened a few months before. I hadn’t eaten there. It was the kind of restaurant my uncle called “faggy” but that really meant “nice.”

  It’s always funny to me how if something seems like it’s for rich people, overly straight men think it’s “gay.” At the same time, a man is more manly if he can pay for things. Like, how does that even work?

  But as I sat there thinking about that, it occurred to me that maybe Broth was the type of place that would hire you for being able to cook an omelette, and I decided that the Bicycling Confederate wasn’t going an
ywhere anytime soon, so I jumped off the bench and moseyed around to the back of Broth to kind of see if I could get a peek in the kitchen.

  The alleys behind restaurants are some of the grossest places on earth. Gray water stands in slippery crags, and the bouquet of decaying food hangs like heat in the air. Bits of this and that lie scattered. Flies buzz and swirl. Cardboard rots in wet heaps. Steam heaves from the warmth of rotting, drags like poison mist in the cold air.

  I hadn’t been behind a ton of restaurants, but anytime I’d ever been behind a restaurant, I’d known it. Most businesses aren’t like that. Most businesses can’t be identified by their alleyways.

  In fact, what other businesses can?

  Anyhow, I stood there in the yuck of the alley watching the back door of Broth, and it was a screen door, and the kitchen was better lit than the decaf day, and I could see, every so often, cooks and dishwashers and waiters moving back and forth behind the screen, and you could tell that the lunch rush must’ve been over, because the waiters had their shirts untucked and the dishwashers were smiling and cussing.

  And I was sort of drawn in closer toward that screen door, the way you accidentally move toward what you’re paying attention to, and the closer I got the more I could smell herbs and oil and fire and soap, and I could hear all the hum and hiss and clank and clang.

  And then there was a woman in the door holding a towel, and she dabbed at her nose with the back of a hand. “Need something?” she asked.

  I said, “You think the chef would give me a job if I could make an omelette?”

  She pushed open the screen door and I could see her face better and I could tell she was important. “I’m the chef. Women can be chefs, you know.”

  “Well would you?”

  “Your people skills are shit,” she said. She made to let go of the screen door, but I said, “Cooks gotta be good with people?”

  She folded up her towel and draped it on the waist-rope of her apron. “No. But they can’t be assholes. Not and work in my kitchen.”

  “I’m not an asshole though. My mom taught me to make omelettes, and my aunt told me that if I could make one well enough I could probably get a kitchen job.”

  “Well go home and tell your mom that she needs to teach you how to make an omelette and how not to be an asshole.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Ha,” the chef said.

  “Nine years in April.”

  “Then tell your daddy.”

  “He died eleven years ago in November.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Kids can not have parents, you know.”

  She didn’t soften at that, but you could tell she didn’t hate me anymore. “I’m not looking for cooks.”

  “I changed my mind anyhow.”

  “Wait,” she said, because I was about to walk away, to trudge through the grimy alleyway and go back to watching the Bicycling Confederate with the geese. “Come make me an omelette.”

  “What for? You’re not hiring and I’m an asshole.”

  “Because I’m hungry and I don’t feel like cooking.”

  It was the most logical thing I’d heard in forever.

  Restaurant kitchens after a service look tragic. That’s what Chef told me anyhow.

  She said lots of things to me as she showed me around. It was like she gave me a tour before the omelette cooking even began. She wanted me to know where everything was, I guessed, but every time she showed me anything she told me about it too.

  We moved in zigzags through the place. “Dish station,” Chef said and pointed to the little man standing in front of the three sinks. He had a red do-rag on and smiled a wonky-tooth mouth at me. “Homer’s what we call him, but just ’cause his last name’s Simpson. What’s your first name again?” You could tell it was a sort of joke they had.

  “I keep forgetting,” the dishwasher said. “It’s tattooed on my dick if you wanna check.”

  Chef rolled her eyes. “Must be a one-letter name.”

  The dishwasher smiled. “That’s it,” he said. “It’s DJ!”

  “This way’s the reach-in,” Chef said, and we moved across this kind of orange and damp floor to a refrigerator with sliding doors, and she grabbed a black handle and tugged the door open on its tracks, and I was hit with the smell of a million springtimes. “All the herbs we have you’ll find in here. Parsley. Thyme. Rosemary. Some chives. And green onion.” As she named the herbs she pulled them forward so I could identify each and smell each individually in the catastrophe of their scents. So much odor, it felt like my brain did a belly flop. “We source most everything from Indiana. Michigan. Kentucky. When we can. This time of year though, these come up from Mexico.”

  “I’m from the border,” I told her.

  “Which one?”

  “Texas-Mexico.”

  “Speak Spanish?”

  “Not really.”

  She closed the reach-in. “We keep the eggs in the walk-in.” She motioned for me to follow her to the back of the kitchen, and we went through a big metal door, passing through a curtain of slippery plastic. We stepped into a cold closet where we could see our breath, and again my mind went weird at all there was to sniff.

  In my English class once, I had to learn the word melopoeia, which means when words are like music, so the language doesn’t mean what it means, it means how it sounds.

  You couldn’t explain the smell of the walk-in with meaning, but you could get at it with melopoeia.

  So: It was a raucous bundle of caramelized clutter and broke open iced death for sweet gagging funk plow. It was shiver fog berg odor. Rambunctious heaving raggle knuckles.

  “The lady I get my eggs from tells me the names of her chickens, but I forget them all except for Ollie so I just call these Ollie’s eggs.” Chef showed me a few flats of eggs. She pointed to a shelf labeled dairy with big letters. “We have a few different cheeses,” she said, but most of them I’d never heard of before. “We have a three-year cheddar from Fair Oaks Farms. We have unpasteurized Camembert. Parmesan.”

  “My omelettes are just eggs.”

  “Old-school,” said Chef. “Grab some of Ollie’s eggs then.”

  Chef led me to the line, and there was a huge vent hood over everything that huffed and buzzed, and the stovetop put off so much heat, I thought the meat on my arms would cook off.

  “Ever been in a professional kitchen?”

  My eyes bulged at the heat, but I couldn’t really say anything.

  “Hot as hell, huh?”

  I kind of answered with my eyes.

  Chef reached over to a rack above the line and plucked a non-stick pan from a hook. “This is MY egg pan. I usually don’t let anyone use it but me. I won’t cook eggs on anything but non-stick, but I know you’re old-school.” She smiled at me. “Would you rather cast iron?”

  I took the pan from her. “Nah this’ll do.”

  “What else you want?”

  I looked around. “A bowl. A fork. A spatula. Salt. Pepper. Butter.”

  “Butter not oil?”

  “Butter’s better.”

  She rounded me up the things I needed, and y’all, I killed that omelette. I broke my eggs, and forked them fluffy, and I spilled them into the pan at the perfect temp, and I made Ollie’s eggs dance out that pan shaped like a football that was pale yellow as Sunday-school light, and Chef looked at my work and said, “Pretty impressive.” The kitchen hissed. The smell of steam. The heat held everything still. Chef took a bite. “That’s an omelette,” she said.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Do I get the job?”

  “I’m not hiring.”

  The kitchen seemed to tighten.

  “You’re skipping school, right?” Chef said. “You scared of what happened in Florida?”

 
“Florida?”

  “The shooting?”

  “Oh, shit, I forgot about that. Nah, I’m suspended.”

  “Oh,” Chef said. The omelette just kind of set on the plate between us, and she sort of stood there with her fork in her hand, and then one of the waiters came up, and he had a ponytail.

  “Front of house is good. I’m gonna run to the bank and,” he paused and looked at me, tilted his head and squinted his eyes. “You look familiar.”

  “He’s a suspended high school kid,” Chef said. “So he probably shouldn’t.” She set her fork down.

  “Well, hell, people see people in this town,” said the waiter. And he was right. Every face in Opioid, Indiana, seemed familiar.

  “I don’t think I know you,” I said.

  He lifted a finger at me. “You’re Joe Riggle’s nephew. I met you at the apartment once. What’s your name?”

  “Riggle.”

  “Nah, your first name.”

  “First name is Riggle.”

  “Riggle Riggle?” said the waiter.

  “Nah, Riggle Quick. My first name is my mom’s last name. It’s a thing we do back home. My momma and my uncle are brother and sister.”

  “Your dead mother?”

  “Jesus, Chef,” said the waiter.

  “Well, they were brother and sister,” I said.

  “Shit,” said Chef. “I thought you were fucking around. Your father too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What you doing back here?” the waiter asked me.

  “Nothing,” I said. “You seen my Uncle Joe?”

  “Couple weeks ago. He drop off again? That boy’s always falling off.”

  Chef threw away what was left of her eggs. “I got some stuff to do in the office. Will you show him out when you’re done?”

  “Sure,” the waiter said.

  “It’s cool,” I said. “I’m leaving. I’m done.”

  Chef held out her hand. “It was nice meeting you. Come back around. Maybe one of my cooks or dishwashers will get arrested or quit or OD or something. I’m sure I’ll need somebody eventually. It’s the nature of the industry. Pirates can’t keep a ship beneath them too long.”