“I don’t know nothing about them, and if you know what’s good for you, you don’t either,” he said.
“I’m just trying to find out if they’re good guys or not.”
“You’re a pretty girl,” Sal said. “You like your life?”
“It’s been a good ride so far.”
“You want to keep your life, or you wanna get dead?” He said ‘dead’ like it was something other—like a status, like an intransigent state of being instead of the final cold reality of being trapped in a coffin and losing all sense of self as the worms eat you.
“I like my life just fine,” I said.
“Just drop it,” Tamara hissed, tapping my ankle under the table.
I glanced at her for a second and then looked back at Sal. He pursed his lips, saw he had my attention, and then shook his head.
“You like your life, and you’re here, where you think there’s a place called Night Market. Sweetheart. The only people who come here hate their life, and they wanna get dead. If you are not with that crowd, then you’re in the wrong place. And that’s as much as I’m gonna say about that. You want to know more about the Night Market, or biker gangs, or old bats, you ask the kook that runs that antique shop across the street. You two finished?”
“Yes,” Tamara said.
I shot her a nasty look across the table.
“Then get out of here. Meals’ on me for the mistake earlier. Don’t come back. Not if you’re gonna ask questions about that.”
“Umm, actually, this ravioli is really great,” Tamara said. “Can I get a box?”
Sal rolled his eyes—this was something indescribable, the way they rolled—and staggered off into the backroom and back out. He had a serving tray in one hand—a paper fold-out box in his other was deposited at our table.
I could not help but turn and stare at the silver tray delivered to an earlier patron, whose demeanor seemed to take the whole display in with something akin to erotic fascination.
The customer’s eyes shifted from the silver tray to mine, and soon Sal’s eyes were staring hard at me. And then I realized everyone else in the room was staring at us. A horrible feeling in my throat was catching, a lump that told me to ask, ‘What the fuck is under that silver platter?’ But Tamara hissed ‘You’re being rude’ across the table, and got up with a sigh. I followed her. I could feel a thousand pinpricks of attention stabbing into my skin from all around me as we left…
I had a mental image of a pulsating pile of beef brains, raw, revealed under that silver serving dome…
* * *
“Alright, phone’s charged. You got time for one more stop?” I asked.
“Girl, don’t do that to me again. You have no idea how to read a room, do you?”
“You know that was weird in there.”
“I know you were making it weirder,” Tamara said.
“I don’t think Italians eat raw veal brains.”
“I don’t think the menu said they were raw,” Tamara said. “You went full white panic in there. You have to understand, there are older people that live in this city, sweetheart. Cultures that don’t come from a Hamburger Helper dinner every night in the suburbs.”
“But didn’t you see how everyone was looking at us?”
“Your girl here is black. You are white. The two of us together in public spaces in an urban environment is more than enough to turn heads. You ever went into a black-owned beauty shop by yourself?”
“Well, no…”
“You saw Beauty Shop, though.”
“Queen Latifah was amazing in that. One of my favorites. Or that one where she has cancer and spends her life savings—”
“Save it for a movie article. What you experienced in there was an othered culture in their own safe space, annoyed at the intrusion and questions from a dominant culture. I don’t know how they function, how they operate, even who they are to know enough about it, but I could feel the tension in the air as soon as we walked in. Just. You have got to be more chill going forward.”
