The Soup and Sorrow Digest

Decisions

Elena's birria was a mud of goat meat and cumin. Rather unsurprising since she had prepared it in a kitchen hot-boxed in the smoke of searing capsicums and cannabis. Oregano may have been thyme, tomatoes may have been chipotle; what was what, Elena was too addled to say. Ricardo did not care to ask, instead disguised disappointment with compliments at her purple omnipresent hair, her mix-tapes of symphonic screeches, her bedbug-free couch peeling with polyester fiber.

Ricardo sank in the cimmerian cocoon of the couch and contemplated the straight and narrow way back to his father's graces. Benito had always hated what he admired, even though he thought Benito's mustached smile was to be prized and treasured. A silver gleam dusted the wall above the pelmet lining the balcony doors and twinkled very much like his old ceiling of glow-in-dark pasties. The cramped cozy bedroom came back to him, and the sotto voce back and forth between Marisol and Magdalena, and the croon of his father damning them all to an early bedtime. Ricardo supposed Benito would not approve his dispatching odd-shaped packages between Carlos and Julio on Celina Street, and would certainly not approve of his abysmal geometry test. Benito was the bulwark of hard and honest labor, ever chiding his lubberly aspirations to free food and free rent. Benito would not like either his chaperoning Elena to eerie clubs on the Sunset Strip either. Perhaps Benito would praise him for stupidly attacking a man three times bigger than himself just because Elena scampered tearfully away from him. Or not. At least, Carlos thanked him very much with Benjamins for his chivalric service.

One had to keep an eye on Elena especially during music shows. One minute she would be screaming about polka-dotted chupacabras; next minute she would be kissing a longhaired lothario. Ricardo liked her all the same because she was a star of good intentions and optimism. Maybe it was duty to Carlos or his own sense of what was left of his propriety that accommodated him to the wispy, fleshy-faced woman.

It was frightfully easy to find family with Carlos and his cabal. Certainly his underlings did not readily accept his being gay, but it did not matter because Carlos had deemed it so. Ricardo was appreciative as well as apprehensive about Carlos' largess. Carlos was cordial to friends and enemies, and cruel to friends and enemies. Sometimes he wished Carlos would be brashly vile against his predilections. Raging morons were predictable and therefore trite while gregarious drug dealers were unreadable and therefore frightening. Still Carlos was likable, and sexy especially when leaning back against a chair and puffing a gasconade about saving up for a mansion in Bel Air one crack cocaine sale at a time.

The couch sloshed under Ricardo's back, like a waterbed, and he nestled uncomfortably into the stony, bony objects hidden in the cushions. Perhaps it was Elena's long lost smoking pipe or an errant shard of the couch frame digging into his kidneys. But this tension felt foreign and decidedly not exciting. Elena was not family, Carlos was not family, and you did everything and anything for family. Just like Jésus fighting and almost dying for him ... He would have to visit him in the hospital and beg for his help. Promising him an everlasting supply of Conan comics should be payment enough.

Wide-eyed to the dark bleeding the corners of the ceiling, Ricardo anticipated the peace that came with resolve. The minutes ticked fitfully as his father's smile shimmered in his mind. A rumble banged from Elena's bedroom, then with a start in his pulse, the lulling smile of Benito's was whisked out of his mind's eye, and of his heart's reach.