I took this picture at one of my favorite little inner city diners.
WINNERS:
Saint Mandy of the Short Stack
by
Jan Bottiglieri
It must have been a Monday, that first time. Yes it must have been, Mandy thinks, because that first time there was no one else in this whole place which never happens, seriously never, because you know this rat-hole is open six frickin’ days a week, around the clock, and it’s mostly mobbed with people 24-7 except for Mondays, so it must have been Monday, I’m pretty positive, she thinks, and waits.
Even if Jesus were the type to correct Mandy’s think-grammar – which He is not – He says nothing about it now. His blue neon halo pulses faintly, as it does when the juke is playing something loud, and Mandy assumes that this signifies agreement. Then she thinks, not a rat-hole, you know I don’t mean it, so please-Lord-forgive-me and of course, He does.
Anyway I guess it was that Monday Carl had me come in alone to clean the grease trap when I first heard You talk to me – I mean, really heard You, like I wasn’t just imagining it but I knew it was You and You had something you needed me to do and I wasn’t crazy I was just real, real lucky that You picked me. And I just want to say that since that first day, I hope I’ve been doing good, Mandy thinks. With the Miracle and all. ’Cause I love you, Lord, and I’m doing my best. She pauses again in her thinking and looks at Jesus, at His fine, carved face, His body torqueing slightly on His cross, which is nailed to a spot of honor high up on the wall, the jukebox below Him casting up its holy light.
And in the pause Mandy more than hears, she knows. Her chest falls and rises beneath her ketchup-stained apron, and with each breath she senses that the Lord looks upon her from that particular vantage point and is pleased.
“You all finished, guys?” Mandy says now, leaning to clear the sticky plates from a four-top of young drunks. One of them had shredded his paper napkin into a miniature mountain of snow and stabbed a chewed red coffee stirrer straight into its center, as if he had discovered the North Pole of Portland and claimed it as the seat of his own sad kingdom. King Jerry the Sad, Mandy had thought. King Jerry the Heartbroken, Monarch of Misery and Woe. It had been almost an hour since she’d watched him do it, resting his chin on the table and staring forward with baleful eyes while his comrades ordered up piles of eggs and toast, reveling in the obvious hilarity of their own impressive wits. Mandy knew his name was Jerry by the way they kept saying things like “fuck it, Jerry, forget her,” and “Jerry, man, lighten the fuck up,” and “fuck her, Jerry, she was a whore and her friends are bitches and fuckin’ whatever, stop being such a drag.”
And that’s how Mandy had known that tonight, Jerry should receive the Miracle. She’d run the thought by Jesus and he had nodded, it seemed to her. Barely the idea of a nod, really just a gesture of the light, certainly invisible to anyone else in the joint; but for Mandy, it was plenty. When Jerry ordered a short stack instead of his toast – she knew he would, of course, for verily the Lord works in mysterious ways, she’d read that in the Bible – Mandy began it.
She slipped one of the tiny silver syrup pitchers under her apron bib and ducked into the walk-in. The cold made her shoulders hunch, but she liked the vegetable smell of it, its frost and bounty. At first, the tears had required coaxing; Mandy would think of the day Whiskers was hit by a car, or about how much she missed her Nana, and eventually a drop would squeeze from her eye and she’d scrape it from her cheek with the pitcher’s edge to get it into the maple syrup. Now, after so many Miracles, the tears came as an easy gift. She’d catch them in mid-air, swinging the pitcher out from under her apron and then back under again in one curved motion, swirling the tears into the syrup to infuse it with their secret, healing grace. Getting the syrup “Miracle’d up,” Mandy called it. That was the pitcher she’d bring to whatever soul needed it most. So had saidith the Lord, and so, once each shift, she did. Tonight, that soul was Jerry.
So now, here she is, clearing his table and looking at his snowpile of despair, a familiar hitch in her heart that makes her almost afraid.
And Jerry speaks. “Yeah, we’re done, right guys?” At the sound of his voice Mandy’s heart unclenches and blooms, a wild iris of gratitude opening inside her. For surely, this is the voice of a Changed Man: a Jerry healed of sorrow, washed clean. He sighs expansively, pats his stomach, and leans back into the booth, grinning. “Those pancakes were freakin’ amazing. GUYS! Those pancakes were fan-frickin’-amazing, right? Jesus. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you. Fuck. Amazing.”
His friends whoop in agreement: “JERRY! Hells yeah. Jerry. You’re right man, so right.” They pound the table and slap his back, their prodigal brother returned to them whole.
“Well I’m just glad you liked ’em,” Mandy says out loud, stacking dirty plates onto the length of her arm, more than seems humanly possible. But inside, she’s thinking to Jesus no, thank YOU, Lord, thank you. Thank you for the Miracle. Thank you for picking me, for telling me what to do. I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.
On her way to the bus tray she pauses beneath His feet, leaning for a moment against the juke’s hot glass. Through the din of the crowded diner Mandy hears the neon halo buzz like the wings of a summer cicada. Yes, it is enough.
Jukebox Jesus
by C. Wallace Walker
I left Cuba long before the Pope visited, when priests were still jailed for serving hot breakfast and prayer to preschoolers. My father had been a physician, Castro’s physician, until Papa refused to take a political stance. The authorities decided the unsupervised time Papa spent making house calls made him dangerous and powerful. He was sentenced to a reeducation camp where he died of Dengue.
The state had little work for the son of a political prisoner, save janitorial jobs for pesos enough to cover bread and fish caught by the neighbor boy and mangoes picked by his mother. My mother grew plantains and beseeched Jesus for passage to Florida. In her garden she buried bottles behind our bungalow. One day she thought they’d be the floats for our boat to America, but Jesus delivered us differently.
On a windy day some trash got away from me at work at the government offices. As I plucked the papers off the bougainvillea, I noticed the forms I hauled to the curb in cans were different from the ones on the desk of the official in charge of travel abroad. The discarded documents claimed each traveling Cuban owed $500 in foreign travel fees. The receipts showed rich American relatives had paid, but the sum the official sent to the State Security Department was only $300. Mama said the revelation was a sign from God and buried the evidence in bottles in the back yard.
I went into work early one evening while the official was still at his desk.
He waved me away from his office when I opened the door, but I stepped in and closed it behind me.
“You take in $200 more dollars than you pay to the government,” I said the way Mama and I had rehearsed.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. But the ledger he slammed shut spoke louder. “Besides, no one will listen to you.” he tried to convince himself more than me.
“For my mother and me I want passports and “cartas blancas,” the final approval to travel abroad.
“Impossible.”
“I took evidence home.”
“Even if I could get you the passports, the bank has to stamp the cartas blancas.”
“Have you ever been to prison? My father died in one… We’re not paying the exit fee either. We don’t have rich American relatives.”
“Impossible.”
“Your choice.” The broom shook in my hands as I swept the hall outside his office.
I told Mama the official had said no. She lit candles and prayed.
One night a boy on a bicycle brought the stamped passports to our house and tickets for a plane that left for Mexico in the morning. With our new passports came new names, and photographs that looked little like us, although Mama liked being 12 years younger. We picked over our belongings taking what was precious, like Abuela’s rosary, but leaving our family’s photographs for fear that the guards at the airport would suspect our intent not to return.
Mama fretted that the fake names on our passports would be found out in Miami where too many people knew us. We feared that American immigration might deport us because my father had once treated Castro.
In Mexico a priest we’d trusted with our troubles sent us to a friend in Laredo who hired hard workers for his diner. Texas was America so we took the jobs for more dollars than we’d ever seen and a room in the back, so in our sleep we’d double as night watchmen. We shared that room, with its two cots, and washed at the restroom sinks, but we didn’t mind because we could return bottles instead of burying them. There was no place we wanted to go other than to take the bus to Our Lady Guadalupe on the other side of town, where my mother lit candles of thanks and prayed that I would find a wife.
We saved our earnings, except to buy bus fare and clothes enough for church and work. We learned English from the factory workers who loved Mama’s plantains. Fried plantains made up Mama’s last meal. The doctor said it was her heart, but he did not know that her heart had died with my father. I buried her under a tombstone with a different name than the one she was christened and prayed that St Peter would recognize her when she arrived at heaven’s gate.
With our savings I bought the diner in the name on my passport. The first change I made was to hang the Jesus. The locals call the crucifix Jukebox Jesus, but Jukebox Jesus is no joke. Jesus delivered me to this land where in a week at the diner I throw out more bits of uneaten beef than I’d eaten in my lifetime in Cuba.
Jesus is the only one who knows who I am.
