Bo's Café (7 page)

I yell louder. “You’re not taking me seriously!”

He glances over again. “You are aware you’re yelling really loud, right?”

I kind of want to punch him at this point. “Are you hearing what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, I get it,” he says. “You could go postal on me at any minute.” Andy rests his hand on the steering wheel. “So what
sounds good for lunch?”

“I mean it, Andy. Something is wrong. I explode at my wife, my associates, sometimes even my daughter, Jennifer. It’s a real
thing. I’ve done it for a long time.”

“I believe you,” he says. “Do you want to rage right now? I could pull over.”

I look back at him blankly.

“Otherwise, I need lunch. What do you say we head out to one of my favorite places? They serve a shrimp cocktail that’ll cure
rickets. This is not conventional shrimp cocktail. This puppy’s got huge purple onions, cucumbers, and big fresh shrimp. They
serve it on a plate.
On a plate
, for crying out loud!”

“What is with you, Andy?”

“What’s with
me
?” he asks. “I’m not the loud, angry guy.”

He looks over long enough to see that I’m not smiling. Then slowly and clearly he says, “Steven, I understand that you have
an anger issue. I get it. I understand it’s a big deal. It hurts people you care about. I believe you. I also believe you
don’t have much confidence that I, or anyone else, can help you. And so you’re playing it like a trump card so I won’t get
too close. You threw that out in hopes of ending our times together.”

He continues looking ahead as he speaks. “Look, Steven, I have no desire to be your fixer. I want to be your friend. And friends
learn to trust each other with their stuff so they can stand together. That and they borrow tools. So the more you can let
me know the real Steven and the more I can let you know the real Andy, the sooner we can begin to sort things out. That’s
it. That’s my angle. Period. I’m not scared off by your arrogance, your anger, or your rudeness. Now, you start ripping up
my upholstery with a box cutter and that might freak me out a bit.

“If you want, we can turn this car around and be done with the whole thing. Or a guy with a real anger issue, sitting next
to an equally flawed man, can go have some lunch. Angry people eat, don’t they?”

I stare at the floorboard and sigh. “Yeah, angry people eat.”

“Good,” he says with a nod, and the Electra seems to pick up speed a little. “I’m telling you, it doesn’t come in one of those
little parfait cups. But on a
plate
.”

Once I resolve that I’m trapped, I actually find myself relaxing a little. I put my phone on vibrate and allow myself to calm
down… as much as I can without a shoulder harness. I fold my arms and lean back against the Cary Grant upholstery. Behind
the oversized sunglasses, I close my eyes and try to let the sound of the wind block out everything.

I must have nodded off for a few minutes because when I open my eyes Andy is parking the Electra across from what looks like
some kind of impromptu street market.

Where are we?

Makeshift booths and little trailers with rolled-out cloth awnings line the street. The people inside are selling flowers,
fruit, vegetables. It’s like a throwback to an earlier era. Locals are out walking dogs, riding bicycles, and buying zucchini.
It’s like this market is giving the neighborhood an occasion to get out and introduce itself. It must be a regular thing because
the people in the booths call out to customers as if they’re old friends.

Andy’s not saying a word. He’s allowing me to figure out the scene for myself.

The folks look like working people, chatting, laughing, yelling loudly. A smiling guy in a flannel shirt heaves a crate of
nectarines up onto a counter. Behind the counter, a woman with her hair covered in a bandanna and wearing dirty bib overalls
and a very stained apron is chiding him about the quality of the fruit he brought her last week.

In the center of all the activity, a delivery truck is unloading fish into the side door of a restaurant. They’re taking the
occasion to make their fresh catches available to the locals. Two men are hauling huge, bloody cuts onto several nearby tables
covered with newspaper. Two teenage girls are shouting, laughing, and throwing around what appears to be yellowtail tuna like
bags of sand. The guy’s daughters, I imagine. I think about Jenny. I can’t picture the two of us slinging fish together. She’d
never relax around me enough to keep from dropping them.

The smell of fish is heavy but not bad. It’s kind of nice. Something real. I’m struck that not much of my life is like this.
When was the last time I walked through a street market? When was the last time I walked around without my laptop on a Thursday
afternoon?

Suddenly someone begins to yell in our direction from across the street. An immense, bearded, dark-skinned man is approaching
us, and he’s not smiling. “Andy Monroe! What the deal is? You bring the suit down here to audit us?” He’s signing for the
fish delivered into his restaurant.

“No!” Andy yells back. “You have to actually make money for someone to audit you. The suit’s here to foreclose on you.”

The immense bearded man leans back and laughs hard. “Git on in here now. Tell the suit lunch is on me.”

Immediately we’re ushered through the front doors of a seafood restaurant called Pacific Bayou, which Andy tells me everyone
calls Bo’s. The large man is Bo. He is as loud as he is intimidating. We’re whisked through the dining room and out onto a
patio, where several tables and some standing heaters sit on a deck.

Bo, with a firm grip on my arm, guides me to a nearby table. “Your friend, he sits right here at this table every Thursday,
summer, winter, rain or shine. What the deal is with that? Don’t ask me,
cher
. Git you a seat. You need a menu?”

But Andy’s at my side again. “Bo, this is my friend Steven. He has an anger issue.”

“Like I
don’t
?” Bo says, fixing me with a devastating stare.

“We need a bucket of clams,” Andy says. “I’ll have the jambalaya and a glass of ice. My friend needs your shrimp cocktail.”

“We got us none of dat,” Bo bellows. “We got us carp. You git you some six-day-old carp, and you’ll like it.”

With that Bo disappears back into the restaurant, barking out orders, insults, and greetings in every direction.

“He says that almost every time, no matter what I order. One day I’m gonna order six-day-old carp and see what he does.”

I shake my head a little. “The guy’s pretty intimidating. I guess he’s kidding, but he sure doesn’t look like it.”

“He’s a pussycat, trust me,” Andy says, grinning. “He came out here about twelve years ago from New Orleans with two thousand
dollars and a headful of recipes. And he’s done well.”

“Yeah, Cajun was catching on about then. Who ever heard of the stuff before that? He caught a good wave apparently.”

“Not just a wave,” he says. “A guy like Bo will do well no matter what the current rage is. Sorry about the word
rage
,” he mumbles under his breath. “I know it’s a sensitive area for you.”

I smile. “Good one,” I say.

“But really,” he continues, “he loves what he does and loves seeing people smile when they taste his food. He’s the kind of
guy who takes care of his customers. When you do the job for the love of it, it’s hard to go wrong.”

“So where does a name like Bo come from?” I ask.

“Bodinet LaCombe,” a booming voice returns just behind my ear. I about jump out of my skin. Bo is there with a glass of water
and a glass of ice. “Now who gonna go around with a name like
Bo-din-day
?” he says, mocking the pronunciation. “Not dis Creole!”

Bo disappears again and Andy leans in toward me. “Steven, a lot of my friends come here on Thursdays. Sort of a regularly
scheduled meeting you don’t have to show up for. So usually everybody does. I wanted to introduce you to some of my world.
There’s someone here I’d really like you to meet. The person who helped me through a lot.”

Over the next fifteen minutes or so, the deck begins to fill with dozens of people who all seem to know Andy. The interactions
are so fast and fun, I’m almost afraid to speak. Andy smiles and whispers, “Relax. Just be you. They’re all mostly harmless.”

I’m so overwhelmed at first that I fail to notice that the deck is in front of an ocean. And the restaurant marks the entrance
to a pier. I suddenly know exactly where we are. This used to be my world. We’re at Washington between Marina del Rey and
Venice Beach. This cul-de-sac has been home to impromptu farmers markets all the way back to my childhood. There’s nothing
like this stretch. The pier has always separated Southern California wealth and opulence from maybe the most bizarre strand
of post-hippie culture anywhere in the world.

Wow! I haven’t been here in a long time.

As Andy works the deck, I replay memories of riding bikes down here with childhood friends.

My gaze is interrupted as I notice a striking and stylishly dressed middle-aged woman at the table next to me. She is beautiful
in the way all women should be when they get to their fifties. Her hair is as wild as her colorfully flowing peasant dress.
On both arms she wears a bundle of thin silver bracelets, which make light clinking sounds as she moves. She isn’t trying
to hide the gray that has crept in, which makes her even more cool and beautiful. I want to take a picture and tell Lindsey,
“Remember this. This is what you must look like twenty years from now.”

Maybe I’ll wait on that for a bit.

She looks so totally at peace and comfortable with herself in the midst of a noticeably younger crowd. She is tapping away
at a laptop. She glances over and gives me a kind smile and nod. Andy notices my staring as he returns to the table.

“That’s Cynthia. I wanted you to meet her first. She’s working on a book. Something about first-generation immigrants in America.”

“Working, as in laboring, as in plodding… ,” she adds, drifting effortlessly from her table to ours. “Forgive my rudeness,
but I have a flair for overhearing conversations.”

Andy stands. “Cynthia, this is—”

“Steven,” she finishes without missing a beat.

Great. Another mind reader.

She reaches for my hand, her bracelets making that jingling sound. Cynthia looks as if she could be my sixty-two-year-old
mother—if my mother were a lot hipper, flamboyant, and attractive.

Cynthia is at once incredibly disarming and overwhelming. She’s one of those rare people who can sit too closely (as she is
at this moment), without you minding much. She seems to be studying your eyes, reading your personal history while casually
mulling among any of seven different thoughts that might come out of her mouth.

Andy interrupts. “I’ve got to wash up. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Suddenly the moment is broken.
What have I gotten myself into? I’ve got to get back to work.

There is an awkward silence for a few moments. Cynthia is very content to just smile and stare at me.

“So you’re writing a book?” I ask, mostly to stop the silence and the staring.

She rolls her eyes. “Ohh!” she says. “I’m never going to survive it.”

“It’s about immigrants?”

“Refugees, mostly. Dear, there are rather consistent characteristics to every people group that most easily adapt into a new
culture. Did you know that?”

Before I can answer she continues, “Of course you didn’t. That’s why I’m writing the book, isn’t it? Somehow I convinced the
publisher there’s a market.” Her eyes twinkle a little. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll get rich. More likely they’ll make nice Christmas
gifts. It’s really just something I enjoy doing.”

More silence…

“My dear, have you noticed you’re not saying anything? One of the primary requisites for a conversation is the back-and-forth
part. I can’t do that on my own. I would if I could, as my husband will tell you. But right now you’re going to have to step
to the plate.”

“Right,” I mutter. “Sorry, I’m a little new here.”

She laughs out loud and jumps up to smother me in a hug. “Well, if you aren’t the most precious thing in the world. ‘I’m a
little new here.’ Honey, that’s like being a little engulfed in flames. No, you’re completely and utterly new here. And in
a ridiculously nice suit, I might add!”

She laughs some more. Then she sits back down, gathers herself, and looks into my eyes again with great sincerity. “Steven,
you were new seconds ago. But now you’ve been willing to let a silly old woman laugh at you and hug you. From this moment
on you are no longer new. You’re a regular. Welcome to Bo’s, young man.” She hugs me again, jingling all over.

I mumble something back to her, but I am stunned. Less than an hour ago, I was trying to end the ride that brought me here.
Now I’m taking in ocean air fused with the smell of shrimp and corn on the cob, smiling at this woman who is completely delighted
at my awkwardness. She’s staring again, contentedly waiting for me to catch up. I’m not used to catching up. I’m also not
used to noticing the way the waves crash against pylons on the pier. But that’s what I’m doing.

“Steven,” she eventually calls out.

My eyes come back into focus. “I’m sorry, Cynthia. I grew up around here. I’m just taking it all in.”

She pats my hand. “Forgive me, Steven. I can be a little much all at once. You don’t know me and I don’t know you. But my
friend Andy… he cares about you. So now you’re important to me. It’s kind of that simple. I don’t know if what I’m about to
say will make any sense, but here goes.”

She is sitting too close again as she says, “Don’t miss what is being offered to you. It would be easy for you to miss it.
You’ve got deadlines and quotas. When life is moving fast and in a straight line, it’s easy to discount anything slow and
circular.”

“Miss what?” I ask.

“Forgive me again. I’m rushing ahead. It’s just that I wanted to get this out while Andy wasn’t at the table.” Cynthia’s smile
and the way she puts her hand on my arm is reassuring.