Western Avenue and Other Fictions

A Case of Consolation

3 A Case of Consolation Boogaloo lived in a small quarter of the city, an indistinct district bordered by certain streets he never liked to cross, and where no one asked his name. Boogaloo—born Manuel Perez—lived in an old brownstone on the top floor, almost level with the El, where in the spring he watched for the tops of the trees suddenly to bud green, the bowl of sky above Chicago slowly bluing with a vast space that mirrored his anonymity. The high beige walls of his room held no pictures, and the clean and shiny wood floors caused the room to shimmer on bright sunny days like an undiscovered sea. He sometimes sat on a folding chair in the sunlight, strips of light falling through the blinds, and when the train rumbled overhead passing by, he leaned back a little and turned his head, as if listening to something very important. Braced on the wall was a single bookshelf, and on the shelf he had placed a few seashells, a copy of M.F.K. Fisher’s Letters, the well-traveled Comida Criollas, a cracked, leather-bound volume from the late eighteenth century on new Hispanio vegetation and foodstuffs, Fruiticas Paradisio, Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, and the three volumes that make up Seneca’s Moral Essays. In these essays some passages were starred, a few sentences underlined. A particular passage had exclamations along its edges, which Boogaloo had copied by hand in blue ink on a three-by-five card; with a few small pieces of tape, he had placed it in the middle of the wall next to his shelf. He would reread the passage often when his room filled with the incomprehensible weight of shadows. In the corner of the room, on the edge of the shelf and below the passage, Boogaloo had a small folding table of wood. On the table were sheets of butcher paper he had cut as close as possible to ten by ten, a white paper cup from a coffee shop holding black and red wax pencils and a few number two cedar pencils , some gold clips and an orange barrel-shaped sharpener on a 4 shallow, clear dish, and a stack of three-by-five cards next to the cup. In the center of the table there was a recent recipe he had composed, the wax cursive script working through intricacies of the mangoes and smoked Spanish pepper, a rice dish Boogaloo was striving to master. There were several sheets with drawings of a simple, ideal kitchen he dreamed of working in, the majority of the space dominated by a thick butcher-block table (he could see how in the future it would be oily and rich with colors—saffron , oregano, cilantro, garlic, and olive oil—that became a part of the wood’s nature), a six-burner stove with a flat grill, and a small stone oven. He drew a small alcove in one of the kitchen’s walls, where he sketched in a chair and a desk with a small goosenecked lamp. He set his pencil down. He listened to the robins chirping outside his window. He picked up his pencil and wrote 10 and 15 on a card, then totaled them. Direction: Soak rice in 1/4 cup of coconut milk for 30 minutes before cooking. He had not taken a drink in ten years and had not seen his daughter in over fifteen. Most of Boogaloo’s life was held, during the somewhat good times, in a suitcase, and, during the not-so-good times, in a paper bag. He moved from job to job, although work was always defined for him not by the specific task but by the places he experienced: a kitchen dishroom in a squat, steam-shrouded basement where his eyelashes collected little silver flecks of water and soap bubbles; the long and thin red rows of dirt between tobacco plants, his shoes caked with dirt, and his socks never seeming to lose the red ring of dust just below his ankle; the deep and endless blue sky over a beet field; the low and dim light of his helmet, his hands black with manure and dirt in a mushroom cannery; and the brief space—a bubble of musical time shaped by the rhythm of a knife—between a cutting board, prep table, and stove. New York, Connecticut, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois—the slow movement of sweat coursing down the...