pigeon

I’d like a bean burrahto, please.

You asshole. I’m gonna call you Muir.

I’ve felt kinship with you, sorry for you, jealous of you, intimidated by you, curious about you —

When I worked at Taco Bell, you definitely did not, although I don’t know what else you were doing. Why were you at Mizzou, a state school? Weren’t you supposed to be some kind of genius? There, the schadenfreude kicks in, a pallid antibody to the jealousy.

I’d rather eat the keycaps off this keyboard, chew ’em up like stale Chiclets, than type this right now. I’m so tired. Some of these pigeons when they come up make me smile, crack my knuckles, and go “I’m gonna enjoy this.” Some of them make my back hurt, my brain squirm, my four-alarm avoidance circuits kick into overdrive. It’s so weird how such a small thing can be such a burr in my sock. I’m just so tired. And Muir’s asshole-ish Taco Bell order ain’t helping, right about now.

I liked my job. Most nights, it wasn’t that bad. Yeah, there were rush periods when too many scathing-faced frat boys piled in, drunk on their own obliviousness, and made a mess and were generally loud and demoralizing. One of them even threw a tray carrying a three-quarters-full Pepsi into my face. But most of the time, it was just hanging out with some relatively cool people, talking shit, cracking wise, steaming the Meximelts, sloppin’ on the reconstituted beans, taking orders while wearing the goofy headsets —

That’s what I was doing — taking orders — think about that phrase for a minute — taking orders — when the tone sounded and the speaker crackled to life: “I’d like a bean burrahto, please.”

“A bean burrito?”

“Yes, a bean bur-ah-toe.”

OK fine, whatever, be weird, I don’t care. “That’ll be [...], please pull around.”

And when the car pulled up and I slid the glass open and the car window rolled down, it was Muir. Looking straight faced, blank, maybe a tad mortified? But you would never be able to prove it. Homeopathic levels of facial expression, at best.

I didn’t know what he was thinking, but I felt like I had been caught being normal. I had played the role of the conformist employee, the dullard that didn’t play along, that insisted on saying the word correctly. What had I become?

Understand, this kid had been in my car the first time he played his new Public Image Limited cassette — and instead of saying Turn it up! like everybody else, said Turn it down quiet enough so you really have to listen. Had said the faux pas (in front of a guy who wasn’t supposed to know yet that he was about to get dumped) that turned out to be my clue that I was about to get a new girlfriend. Had been the only other person to get what was so fun about creating soundscapes of noise by manipulating the various bands of the graphic equalizer in my car—they hissed at different frequencies because whoever had installed it had done a crappy job. This kid had been over to my house, more than once, had hung out in the living room, still playing the “take turns saying the next word to make absurd sentences” game, long after everyone else had gotten bored and moved on to something else. “It’s better than TV,” he said, and I agreed. He kept using the word destruction. “I keep coming back to “destruction,” he said, and we laughed about that.

In an Honors English class discussion about what “living a full life” meant, he and I had agreed, contrary to everyone else’s comforting homilies about fulfillment and relationships and contribution, that it basically boiled down to survival.

Was all that enough to have formed some kind of bond?

Everyone in our high school knew Muir was some kind of genius. Laconic, dry, cynical. Distant but not detached — one time he wrote really big on the chalkboard in that same English class, “Shed no tears for the bleeding cop, for he once held the gun.” (It was the 80s, punk was still a thing, we were teenagers.) He got a 35 on the ACT. I only got a 31, so it was no small relief when I heard from someone I trusted that he had told someone else that I was a genius too. “Really?” the someone else had reportedly asked. “Well, he’s as smart as I am,” Muir had reportedly answered.

Didn’t believe it, loved hearing it.

So here I was, in regular old COLLEGE, not doing anything amazing, bound up in my emasculating fast-food apron, taking orders with a headset on, and I opened the glass to get the handful of change and hand over the burrah— the fucking burrito, for fuck’s sake, and Muir rolled down his car window, and we —

— acted like we didn’t know each other.

I saw him around campus a couple times after that — we never spoke. Obviously this being pre-social-media the rumor mill was ages slower and orders of magnitude less prolific, but I heard a few things. He had gone to some fancy-schmancy college, maybe? Had dropped out for some reason? Was an art major? Was kind of bumming around?

Did he not talk to me because he was embarrassed about not living up to his implied great expectations? OK, maybe, but why didn’t I talk to him? My 3.barely GPA and taking a year off and general lack of scholastic ambition meant there was never gonna be any ivy in my league anyway, I shouldn’t have had anything to rationalize. Then again, I kind of had a “you talk first” problem in most social situations. Still do, most of the time, really. But I was even worse at processing awkwardness then.

Perhaps the larger question is, why would you say “burrahto” at a Taco Bell drive thru in the first place?

Because you’re bored, you like to fuck with stuff, words are a weird thing you can fuck with, break down, break apart. Chaos and destruction are intrinsic to creativity. Social expectations are a thing you can fuck with too.

Because you harbor deep-seated resentment about being in a car, being in a drive-thru line, eating reconstituted beans, having to lower yourself to communicating with a server drone wearing a stupid apron and a cheap plastic headset with an antenna sticking out the top. Because all of this is so inane, so pointless.

I’m speculating, here.

Because you just got slapped in the psychic face with the reality that the server drone is as real a person as you — haha, maybe even as “smart” as you? And if you’re both so smart, what are you both doing here?

Be smart. Fuck with words. Take turns saying the next word. Seems like you should be able to build a sentence that way that’s not a prison. Seems like you should be able to make something brilliant out of the absurdity.

In the meantime, though — welcome to Taco Bell. Can I take your order?

PS: the nouns associated with each pigeon's little text file have been assigned randomly; sometimes I see some kind of connection, other times not. But there's something almost too perfect about aperient being the filename for one that features Taco Bell's reconstituted beans!