Where This Is Leading (Read This After)

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Grammer / Taco Belle /

Dear Readers: Partial submission of a much longer story. Tenses travel; sorry about that. I have not successfully captured the tension that my eating at Taco Bell caused between Dave Carter and me, or the frequency of my eating there, but both are important. Sharpen your pencils and have some fun. I don’t know what the final form will be, and I don’t really hear the best way to break up my sections, so I apologize for any awkwardness there.

Where this is leading (read this after):

Eventually, Dave Carter will let me know he wishes to pursue a gender change. This is agony for us personally and professionally and signals the beginning of the end of our traditional romantic relationship. We discuss children. We had always talked about them and he still wishes to have them. He can preserve sperm but he’d have to quit the hormones briefly to do that. I give up hopes of marrying him but remain excited about the prospect of children. On a bright day in May of 2002, he changes his mind. He hands me a bag of taco bell as he delivers the news. I eat one burrito, he eats the other. It’s the only time he ever brought me Taco Bell. And I feel doubly weird about it because I already ate there that day.

Two months later, he dies of a heart attack. I eat at Taco Bell every day, sometimes twice a day, after his death. It’s strange mourning ritual that ends promptly at the one-year mark. Done. Just like that.

I don’t really eat there anymore and if I do, I don’t get the soda. That diet Pepsi will scramble your brain waves, baby. ~tg

Working Title: Taco Belle

By Tracy Grammer

Put two folksingers in a Dodge Grand Caravan the color of a bullet, pack it full with luggage, instruments, merchandise and gear, and send them down a highway—it doesn’t matter which one.Watch for the blue information signs on the right side of the road. Find one with the word FOOD. Do you see the logo for Taco Bell under the broad white line? It doesn’t matter what mile marker, it doesn’t matter what season, daytime, nighttime, mountains or coastal route. If you see the logo I’m talking about, that’s where this story began, and began, and began again, till one day, finally, it didn’t.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Picture us on any highway, speeding down the fast lane in the van we called “silver bullet.”He is sitting straight and tall in the driver’s seat, wearing a dark blue corduroy button-down with the sleeves rolled up, exposing long, muscular forearms. Underneath is his favorite grey short-sleeved T-shirt tucked into his jeans. It was always jeans back then; apparently,Texas men are too tough and proud to wear shorts, even in the high summer heat. He has his strong right hand on the wheel, his pale blue eyes on the road ahead. He pressesthe knuckles of his left hand into his thigh. My bangs have grown long and graze the top of my cat-eye glasses. I’m cross-legged in the passenger seat in khaki shorts and one of my famous white T-shirts, with my lower half covered in a truck stop Indian blanket. It’s not that I was cold; I just didn’t like to look at my legs.

Contrary to all musician stereotypes, neither of us drank, smoked, or used drugs. We lifted weights and ran the treadmills in hotel fitness centers, practiced hot yoga (me) and tai chi (him), ate vegetarian diets, managed eight glasses of water daily and took our vitamins. We looked like less like a band and more like family with our matching pale skin, our matching dirty brown hair, our conservative dress and our wide, innocent grins. Called ourselves Portlanders but we didn’t even have tattoos. It’s true that we succumbed to some late-night snacking now and then—our trips to the upscale all-night grocery in our neighborhood were epic—but let’s face it, we were the cleanest musicians you’d ever meet, with no appreciable vices, and no real conflicts between us, save one: I liked to eat at Taco Bell. A lot. And David most decidedly did not.

You wouldn’t think such a little thing could matter so much, but it did. And it does. Even though Dave is twelve years gone now, Taco Bell remains a thing between us: a reminder of conflict, a metaphor for endings, a method of managing sorrow, and the road back to the road I still love.

Let me show you.

BERKELEY

The story between Dave and me starts on the highways and byways of this glorious country but my affair with Taco Bell begins years before our meeting, in Berkeley, where I attended the University of California. At some point during my eight-and-a-half-year pursuit of a Bachelor’s degree in English, when finances were thin but the fast-food urge was strong and vegetarians options were scarce, I chanced upon the ‘Bell in that sketchy section of University Avenue just below all the sari shops, pastel-colored hourly motels, and the social services office. It was the middle of the afternoon. There was no drive-thru so I parked at a meter, locked the car, checked the locks again, and hurried past the stinking homeless and the hooded suspects, holding my breath and clutching my wallet so tightly my fingers went white.

Inside, I waited in a long cluster resembling a line. Everyone in the place seemed to know one another, high fiving and hanging close, whispering words in a slang I couldn’t quite catch. I felt I was in a foreign land, with rules I did not understand. I looked at no one. I kept my head down but my awareness wide. Bills exchanged and order in hand, I ducked back into my beat-up white Nissan Sentra, locked the doors, and continued along the avenue, away from the university to the marina at the end of the road, to the bay. I found a space along on the water’s edge and parked where the sun reflected off the water and into my eyes. I pushed the seat back and brought the visor down and, with burritos on the passenger seat and blank book in my lap, atewhile sketching the city and the Berkeley pier. I got drowsy; I fell intoa dream. Poetry, colors, music, conversations. When I woke, new sets of birds were cutting wakes across the choppy water, different couples were returning from their windy walks, and the fog was beginning to soften the silhouette of San Francisco.Iraised the seat and started the car and returned, refreshed, to my studies, my roommate, and the ongoing collision of student life with the intellectuals and the impoverished who call Berkeley home.

This became my routine and my escape. These Taco Bell sketch sessions became an important retreat for me, a solace in stressful times. Little did I know I was setting in motion a practice that would endure, in one form or another, for nearly twenty years.

FOOD

Whenever the blue sign came into view with the word FOOD and the Taco Bell logo, I’d start watching his face.

“Did you see that?” I asked.

His eyes barely flickered as we passed it. “See what?”

Faker. He often pretended not to see the sign. It’s why I used to watch his face. I caught him looking, and pretending not to see, more than once.

“Someone in this car might want to make a run for the border in two miles,” I say, all singsong,knowing that sometimes,he’ll yield to cuteness.

I wait and watch, but his jaw is set, his eyes unwavering. The face never changes. He’s either lost in a song or he saw the sign for real and ispretending not to hear me. I always guess the latter. I shift in my seat, give it a minute, and try a different tack.

“Hey baby, you hungry?”

Without turning to me, he says, “I think we have some cheese.”

“Pretty sure it’s bad,” I say, pretending to bend over the cooler and investigate.

“Oh. Really?” He takes his eyes off the road for a second and looks in my direction, expecting to see evidence. I don’t produce any. I do, however, give him my best hopeless look and shrug my shoulders.

“Okay,” he says. “Well,I guess I’m good. Thanks baby.”

So cute isn’t working.

I crane my neck, exaggerating as we pass the exit, but he never notices.

Miles pass. Another blue sign. The word FOOD. And … bingo.

I try again.

“Whoa, baby, look at that!” I say, pushing myself up on the armrests and spinning in my seat.

“What?” he says, jumping a bit. Sometimes when he drives he works on lyrics, and this takes him into a dreamy dimension. I know he’s there because he gets a glazed look in his eye and wears a slight grin on his face. “One foot in the dream world at all times,” is what he tells his songwriting students. Honoring this, I try not to bother him except when I have to pee or eat. But now that I’ve called him out of his trance, he’s expecting something interesting, like a herd of buffalo on the horizon or a sequin-studded Volkswagen or maybe a corgi in somebody’s back seat. He scans the highway and then looks at my face for an explanation or a clue. I point my eyes toward the approaching FOOD sign and nod in its general direction. I watch his eyes track the logo and then he sits back, annoyed to have been disturbed.

He doesn’t want any Taco Bell. And he doesn’t want me eating at Taco Bell either. Older than me by sixteen years, David takes a paternal tone when it comes to my little vice and I, for reasons still unknown to myself, don’t push back. Not directly at least. To get what I want, I resort to light manipulation and sweetness. Failing that, I suffer in pitiful, frustrated silence.

I know what his arguments will be and I know he’s probably right. Maybe Taco Bell isn’t that good for anybody. Maybe it’s loaded with preservatives and lard and other unmentionables. Nevertheless, I get these cravings. I can’t do anything about them. By the time I hit the road with Dave Carter in nineteen ninety-six, I’ve been maintaining a Taco Bell practice for a good five years. Sometimes I think that the fact that he doesn’t want me eating Taco Bell makes me want it all the more. But anyway, the cheese of which he speaks? It’s gone to shit. We’re out of pretzels. I’m getting sleepy and it’ll be my turn to drive soon. Desperate times, desperate measures. Pitiful tactics.

“Baby,” I say, my voice thin and whining, my hands folded underneath my blanket, like begging. “Could we please stop? I also have to pee.”

I don’t, really, but he can’t not stop for that.

The driver sighs and the silver bullet sways late into the exit. It’s an exit like any exit along any major highway in America, leading to some sort of commercial strip with gas stations, dingy bars, and worn-out malls. Maybe it’s a turnpike respite, a truck stop, or any business route. For the sake of the story, let’s call it Tulsa.

TULSA

Tulsa is one of the few towns in America where we have some real roots. As a boy, David split his time between Tulsa and his grandmother's house in Grand Prairie, Texas, and the rivers and plains, washed-out characters, and rebel lore from both places figure prominently in the songs we play together. It’s where his mother preached and taught science before succumbing to the grey haze of Alzheimer’s. His father, Mr. Carter, lives in the old house still, but with a new Mrs. Carter on his arm. Little is known about Mrs. Carter-number-two aside from the fact that, with her deep brown hair, dark eyes, and slight build, she bears an uncanny resemblance to the first Mrs. Carter, whose photos, all but one, have mysteriously disappeared from the family home.

Tulsa is where I laughed until tears rolled down my face as David told me about the time his little sister Elise got hit in the neck with a flaming chestnut that popped out of the fireplace while Nat King Cole’s “Christmas Song” went round and round on the family’s turntable. And I laughed like that again when, in that same den decades later, on the very same turntable and against the earnest protestations of his son, Mr. Carter played David’s first record for me.

The college trio was calledBlue Cliff Ensembleand as the flutes began to soar and the classical guitar echoed deeply, David blushed and collapsed on the floor, curling his lanky, six-foot-one frame into a ball on the shag and burying his head under crossed arms. Rocking and groaning, he beggedhis father to make it stop, imploredme not to listen, apologized for the cheesy production choices and that line about the old chimpanzee. But the problem with the record wasn’t the compassionate, conservation-oriented lyrics or the swirling, psychedelic soundscapes—it wasthe 1970’s, after all.It’s that over a thick southern accent, David attempted to conjure his inner Donovan. The sound of this young Oklahoman-as-Britcaught me so off guard that I couldn’tcontain my cackling. While I contracted in stitches on the loveseat,David, utterly shamed now, pounded his head on the floor. Mr. Carter never seemed to notice the vocal affection at all; he sat grinning in his rocking chair, a proud father with his ear attuned to the poetry. But David was humiliated and I was undone and before the night was over,David cornered me and asked me to promise that I’d never mention this night, or this album, to anyone, ever. I kept that promise till I overheard him retelling the story to friends back in Portland. I figured all bets were off then.

Tulsa also is home to the Spotlight Theatre—one of two hundred tour stops we’ll memorialize with a red ballpoint circle on the pages of our jumbo Rand McNally Road Atlas, 2001 Edition.Tulsa is a line on the tour postcard, a contract in the file, another five o’clock sound check followed by late hotel check-in and an eleven o’clock checkout, which we always try to stretch to one if we can get it.

We like Tulsa but we never stay long. Partly that’s because we don’t like visiting with the new Mrs. Carter very much, but partly, it’s because we never stay long anywhere, home included. The life of a busy folk duo doesn’t allow for that. Nevertheless, the story has to playout somewhere, so –

Tulsa it is.

But really, thenext part happened everywhere.

David slows to a stop, hangs a long left arm out the driver’s side window and squints in the Tulsa summer sun. A voice squawks through the speaker, belonging to someone of indeterminate gender who is likely bespectacled, acne-pocked, overweight, and no more than twenty years of age. David points his face toward the drive-thru speaker, leans out, takes a breath, but then looks back at me, making sure.

“The usual?” he whispers.

He’s only asking because he hopes I’ll reconsider. When I nod and smile, his shoulder sag and he sighs. With the patience of a monk,he turns back toward the speakerand I pretend to look out the passenger window. Really, I’m listening to make sure he gets the order right.

“Hi. Yes. We’d like two bean burritos, no red sauce, no onions, and a medium diet Pepsi with just a little ice, please.”By “we” he means me. He’s not ordering anything for himself. Never does. Wouldn’t dare.

David turns to me, eyebrows raised to see if he got it right. It is the same meal I have been ordering for years, ordered like a pro. I grin and nod my thanks and approval. Then of course the monkey in me notices his brows have gone wily again, withlong, curled, rogue hairs poking out from the rest, giving him a professorly and unkempt appearance. He doesn’t like it when I point such things out, and likes it even less when I reach over and try to tame them with a spit-wet thumb, and I can’t say I blame him. One time, I tried to pluck one without warning him, and when it didn’t come out easily I kept on tugging at it, reassuring him it would come if he’d just stop squirming. Ashis blue eyes teared up, I finally prevailed, producing a plump follicle for his inspection. But he was not impressed. I apologized profusely and expected to be forgiven,but his trust in me was probably compromised from that moment forward.

I wish he could see I was only trying to help.

Anyway, when henotices me focusing north of his eyes, he puts his hand up and I know I’m not to touch the wily brows. Not right now. But I’m already thinking that maybe I can get in there and fix them later.

I press the button in the door and my window drops with a whir. It is a gorgeous day. Not a cloud in the sky. The wind is kicking up a little dust in the parking lot. The trees are full with green and every hand-shaped leaf seems to be waving and shimmering at us. I wave back. Now if only we could get over this awkward whole fast-food charade.