Writing Creative Nonfiction in English
Tom Gally, October 17, 2007
Eats
The taco is a tasty, crispy tortilla filled with beef, lettuce, shredded cheese, and special sauce. It is a wildly popular fast-food item in California and places like that. In fact, the taco is one of the reasons people visit California.
The Taco Trolly, a taco stand, opened on April 17th at 103 West Forty-second Street. We really don’t think there’s anything else left now that New York needs—and there’s a new Baskin-Robbins right next door. (It opened five days later.)
Why “Trolly”? Because Peter Nash, one of the two guys who run the place, grew up in Brooklyn and took the Coney Island Avenue trolly to the beach when he was a kid. Just believes in trollys. “We almost called the place Taco the Town,” Peter told us. We talked with Peter over a burrito and a Tab on May Day. Burrito—soft tortilla rolled around beef, Mexican beans, cheese, and spices. Peter was inside the Trolly; we were outside. That’s because the Trolly measures thirteen feet by fifty-one inches and used to be a hallway. It’s painted a bright Mexican yellow and has an icebox; a freezer; a couple of ovens; a radio playing WHN, the all-country-and-Western station; a soft-drink dispenser; a fluorescent ceiling fixture; a color snap of Peter and his partner, Bob Williams, standing in the Trolly; a marionette of a Mexican bandido; and a poster of Mexico City. Peter was wearing a nickel-dime-and-quarter change holder at his belt. He drove a hack when he was a college student. Then he was in the water-bed business, but he sold out at a good time and became a free-lance exterminator, so he could travel around Mexico and other places on his motorcycle. “Ever get to Puerto Vallarta?” Peter asked us. “That’s where the Gulf of California meets the Pacific. One rainbow going one way and another going another way.”
“And now you’re on Forty-second street,” said a customer eating an enchilada.
Peter said, “We make all our own food every morning—have a kitchen on Tenth Avenue. Then we bring over our five dozen tacos, five dozen burritos, five dozen enchiladas to the Trolly and stay open from about eleven until ten. Forty-second has everything, from transvestites to mugwumps to pistachio nuts, and they all seem to like tacos. I spent my first Friday night here last week—it was like living in William Burroughs’ mind.”
Then a friend of Peter’s called Neil came by. He had a storefront-construction company and built the Trolly storefront, but he’s just sold the company to open a greeting-cards-and-ice-cream store on Seventh Avenue (the Fashion Gallery). “Hey, Neil,” said Peter. “Want to play some ball on Sunday?”
Then a fat fellow in a blue-denim jacket bearing a button that had Nixon’s face and the words “An American Tragedy” on it ordered a taco and a root beer. He ate the taco, turned to Peter, raised his left hand, and made a circle of his thumb and forefinger.
Source: Anthony Hiss, The New Yorker, May 13, 1974, pp. 32–34.