I called my friend up one night and said, “Hacienda.”
He said, “Ok,” back, sort of half-obediently.
I said, “Bet,” and hung up the phone. It was 5:30 in the afternoon on a Monday in December, faint glimmers of masquerading light left in the grey evening sky.
I was there in 20 minutes, with a tall Sam Adams in front of me, and chips and salsa. It took him about 30 but he finally labored in, looking out-of-place and nervous, like he always did. I had a high forehead and always had the look and aura of a sort of social worker who’d just returned from Senegal, if you will. The problem was, Hacienda was really fancy dining for me. So I was like a social worker, in total, you might say.
My friend liked me ok because I didn’t dip the same chip into the ranch sauce and then into the salsa, like my mom and sister used to back in the day. We’d inevitably find some common ground.
“The Rockets are doing better than I thought they would,” I barked, looking at the 18-inch TV that was situated down, on the wall, toward the end of the bar, that was showing PTI. It was Hacienda, but I was treating it like B-Dubs, anyway, talking real loud, and stuff.
“Hmm,” he said. “I haven’t been watching it too much.”
“Playing Halo and sh**?” I asked.
“Mostly Minecraft,” he answered. “And yeah a little Halo.”
I couldn’t stand any of those video games he played.
My friend got a tall Bud Light and sat there playing a game on his phone. He was dressed in this flannel jacket thing, looking kind of like a 12-year-old who was into NASCAR, roughly.
We ended up ordering and I got chicken chimichangas, my friend opting for the steak fajitas.
“What’s a chimichanga?” my friend asked. “I always forget.”
“A deep-fried burrito,” I replied.
My friend just nodded, visibly underwhelmed.
“It’s better than it sounds like,” I added. “I figured, if there’s any place to sidestep pretense, it’s Hacienda.”
My friend chuckled a little bit.
“That would be correct,” he agreed. “Remember back in the day when Stevie started throwing those chips at that random server?”
“I certainly do,” I replied. “Par for the course. Actually, that was considered pretty good behavior by ’90s standards.”
“Indeed.”
Our food came and I wolfed mine down, toot suite, ordering another tall Sammy, to put me at the perfect buzz. People always made fun of how fast I ate. I ate like somebody who’d spent a lot of time locked up.
“Da**,” said my friend. “You annihilated that thing.”
I just nodded, kind of frowning. It was kind of a drag being quirky for how fast I ate. I didn’t mean to eat fast. It just happened. I did everything fast. I didn’t even have time for a girlfriend, actually. I was constantly on a time frame. I thought back to the time it was me and two other Whole Foods buyer new-hires, in training in Orland Park, Ill., a suburb 10 miles south of Chicago. The girl, a few years younger than me, had whizzed into the parking lot at Chipotle, all of us getting out of the car in timely fashion, like Sonic the Hedgehogs, for me to hear them doing all this elaborate math, deciding who would pay what, over the next couple of days, all right at the Chipotle counter, in front of everyone and amidst the din of customers.
Eventually, the time came and we paid our bills.
“What are you gettin’ into later?” I asked my friend.
“Probably playing more Minecraft,” he said.
“I gotcha,” I replied. “I’m probably gonna walk around the 100 Center a little bit and check out all the Christmas lights.”
“That sounds good,” he replied. “Well, see ya later. Go Rockets.”
“Go Rockets,” I replied.
He slowly bounded out the door. All of our gaits kept getting slower every year. And it seemed we talked more slowly, too, like Adam Duritz said in that song “A Long December.” But that’s just the way it goes, I thought. It shows you how foolish that loud, cocky behavior is, when you’re young, the emptiness of that blind ambition, the foolishness of that callous rage.
I looked around the restaurant. There were various professional-looking people, eating and looking very serious, in plaid and in ugly blouses, there was a young couple down the way from me at the other end of the bar, and there was a woman with too much makeup on, who looked like she’d just come from her job, a few seats down from me in the other direction. I eventually paid and got up to leave. But I thought I’d use the restroom first. I didn’t have to go to the restroom but it was where the ghost that inhabited the building allegedly hung out, so I just thought I’d go and get a sense of the vibe. I immediately, in getting into the corridor, got a sense of the homicidal, like the natural annihilation the summer does to the winter, every year, and vice versa, on this bipolar planet. I got a sense of complete desolation, of nothing, per the request of the very metaphysical powers that be that constantly rule our universe in complete chaos and emotional shrapnel. I found a window to look out at, in the snowy night, and my daze was thwarted in expedited fashion by a hurried, angry woman, in a long, black coat, attempting to get to the bus stop on time. In looking out the window, I realized that my friend hadn’t even been there, at all, on this dinner night at Hacienda. It was just me, by myself. Is it possible I ate all those chimis and fajitas myself? I thought about the innards of the bathroom and I remembered the spirit voice I’d heard one time at the country club I’d worked at around town. It reminded me of that hot dog in Seinfeld at that movie theater that had been sitting on the burner for 100 years. I thought about what to do later, about the bar down the street, where the same dude hung out every day, a dude who had been to prison and had been raped a bunch of times. In my mind, in continuing to stare out the window at the endless, ephemeral nothing, I sidestepped him, metaphysically, as if avoiding a sinister spirit or malevolent sort of demon, bound to tortured consciousness, all physicality subservient to Minecraft.