Jonny Smelter is one of my best friends, I grew up with him in Hinton. He moved to New York to become an actor and was an extra in yesterday's episode of One Life to Live. So he is well on his way. We often send poetry to each other. Here is a fine offering he sent me a few years ago now. It's called Hot Dogs.
Totally tubular,
Straight like as ruler,
But round like the perfect play on words.
Stand at the Barbeque,
Patiently wait for you,
Singing like the wind through lungs of birds.
Noble dog of butts and lips,
Of hide and pride and finger tips,
Ensure the buffalo is never wasted.,
When hands swing round to dinner time,
You're the grind I like to find,
The bunwich that's the bestest ever tasted..
So that was fine by me, I love hot dogs too. But I had to pen my own ode, and I chose for my subject the hamburger.
Hot dogs are a noble lunch
One on which I like to munch
But Yoda said "there is another"
(referring to a sister-brother)
And this applies here as well
To me the food that is the chief
Is nothing other than lean ground beef
Malleable like the finest clay
I can dream of it all day
And the taste is really swell
A hearty meal prepared with ease
Is big ole burgers topped with cheese
They're what I like most to make
(Excluding donuts, since I can't bake)
And I make them really well
I have no quarrel with the dog
My arteries like 'em cause they don't clog
But nothing can compare to cow
In fact I think I'll have some now!
Tortilla La Unica
When I was in high school, I had a friend named Dalbir. Back in the day, being from a small town before moving to Edmonton, I was fairly new to ethnic names. We had guys with exotic names like Guiseppe (which I still don’t really know how to spell) and Dominic, but mostly we were named Jon. Or Doug. So, Dalbir became Delber, rather than the actual Dal-BEER. He put up with it, never saying anything to the contrary, even when I would correct teachers who would say his name the right way. As you can tell, he was a pretty easy going guy.
Although I have long since forgotten the reason, at some point in our high school careers, we decided that we would stick the word “tortilla” in the title of every essay we wrote. It started off simply, calling a work on Nazis “Tortilla Fascists”, but gradually and relentlessly grew more ornate with each essay, culminating in “A Truckload of Tortilla Shells in Trinidad”. That one was about the Vietnam War.
Our teachers generally accepted this without comment, though they would usually pencil in a small question mark by the title (something which I would grow accustomed to in University- I called an essay on Jane Eyre “Matters of Singular Density and Infinite Mass”, and would often include a cheery poem for the professors’ reading delight). I suppose as long as we handed them in on time they didn’t really care what they were called.
One day at lunch Dalbir and I were walking outside our school, along the edge of the campus across from a business district, when we had the unique privilege of experiencing a dimensional vortex in the form of a tiny little shop. The shop had always been there, of course, but it hadn’t always been called . . . Tortilla La Unica! I could hardly believe my eyes, and I pointed it out to Dalbir. He nodded sagely. All was as it should be.
Among my group of friends, inexplicable occurrences were commonplace and taken in stride. Once, in Grade 10, I arrived at my locker from class to find my friend Jason gazing up at the exit sign. I asked him what he was doing, and he said, “It was written that I will get a lunch.” Before long an acquaintance opened his locker, saw the contents of his brown bag, decided they were unappealing, and offered his lunch to whoever would take it. Jason reached out and accepted it, and sat down to eat without a word.
Another time, our daily football game at lunchtime was interrupted by the fact that our football was stuck high in a tree. I and a friend went to the gym to sign out another one, and were told that all the balls were out. I went down on my knees and prayed to a God I only vaguely believed in at the time, asking that He would go so far as to send us a ball from the sky. A second later, a football fell, literally, from the bleachers raised up above our gym surface. “Thanks!” we yelled, and ran out to play. That ball got stuck in a tree, too. In fact I was using it to try and dislodge our original ball when it was taken prisoner as well. But we got them down eventually.
Accustomed to the unknown, we were unafraid to venture into the source of this dimensional vortex. We quickly crossed the street and went inside. I can honestly say I’ve never seen a shop quite like it. It consisted of four walls and a concrete floor (orange, if I recall correctly), in the center of which stood a single fridge. Next to it sat a young Mexican guy. He did not seem at all surprised to see us, though I’m quite sure we were his first customers ever.
“Do you have any tortillas?” I asked.
“Si, Senor.” Okay, to be honest he actually said something like, “yes”, but it sounds better this way, no? He opened the fridge, and inside were packages of tortillas. Many packages of tortillas. Nothing else.
“How much for a package of tortillas?”
They had two options: a small bag for three dollars and a jumbo one for five. Since we didn’t really need any tortillas at all, we bought the smaller bag, though the jumbo was clearly the better deal. Victorious, we headed back to school to show our friends our bounty, munching on a tortilla along the way. For some reason, no one was all that impressed. So we passed tortillas all around, and as they ate, they continued to be unimpressed. They were a little dry, and without anything to add, like meat or salsa, kind of plain. And we still had quite a few left. So we decided to try and sell them.
Although at any given time there is not much of a market for single tortilla shells, we managed to sell a few, for about ten cents each. We were asking a dollar but ten cents was all anyone was willing to pay so we took it. Pretty soon the hallways were filled with tortilla frisbees, which would have made an excellent title for an essay. I seem to recall a teacher getting mad at us for this, but we simply explained the principles of capitalism that we had been learning in our Social Studies class (and could have written about, in an essay entitled “Tortilla-faire”), namely that a producer is not responsible for the way a consumer uses his products.
We went back to Tortilla La Unica from time to time, mainly to convince ourselves that it was real. Once there was even some customers there who weren’t us. Dalbir and I devoted considerable thought to what it all meant. We theorized that this little store must surely have had some other, more sinister purpose. Perhaps it was a front for a gun smuggling operation. If so, however, they were far too clever for us, for when we sent two spies named Jason and Colin to inquire about purchasing firearms they were told that they had no weapons for sale, only tortillas. So, we had no choice but to conclude that this was indeed its sole purpose.
The proprietors eventually added a counter and placed the fridge behind it, removing that pleasant feeling of unity (Unica?) between us and the owners. This may have been the beginning of the end, for after a while Tortilla La Unica was no more. The dimensional vortex was closed forever.
I guess it’s no surprise that a tortilla store wouldn’t last long in Canada, but I still feel bad for the people who had the sheer guts to come all the way from Mexico to open such an establishment. In a better world, they would have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, starting a nation-wide franchise of Tortilla La Unicas, more ubiquitous than Tim Horton’s (I asked my sister, who lives in Mexico, what La Unica means, and she told me it means “the one and only”).
Back in the early nineties when they opened for business, no one would have dreamed that in a few years bagel stores would pop up everywhere. The first time I saw a Great Canadian Bagel I laughed and said to myself, “Bagels are just unflavored donuts, who on earth would want one?” Lots of people, turns out. But it could have been, and dammit, it should have been, tortillas that took over the world.
But I guess it’s just as well that they didn’t, since everyone knows tortillas are fascists.
