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Magic Realism Non-Fiction: Thick White Crust - HAUNT

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The magic realism had already started. Sugar skull ghosts and sparks of firework lightning bolts. It was September 10, 2001, Las Vegas. I just had a summer of dreams: airplanes, white tunics, exploding casinos. I left my girlfriend that day. I was going to hitchhike to California across the Mojave Desert the next morning, September 11th. Somehow, as the story will say, I got to California. Over the next several months I scribbled “Thick White Crust.” I could barely stay ahead of it as it chased me. I ran down flights of stairs into a university to let it out and then ran back out into the daylight, enveloped once again in drowning literary moments. The story is magic realism non-fiction. It’s a bite of a sugar skull. It’s the moment fireworks burst. It’s whatever you need it to be as you dream while asleep or awake. - n.l. belardes

H A U N T “There will be strong memories, my brother,” smiled Bonifacio.

He held his arm around me and hovered there in the room like an archangel. Still dressed as he was while waiting tables at the local bistro, his white waiter’s uniform had big round buttons that dotted a double-breasted waistcoat. His arm was a seraphim wing that held me securely, while his wide, downturned face, as kind as it ever was, hung close to mine. Thick shiny black hair, normally bushy and unkempt, had been trimmed short and wavy against his head.

His full lips parted a little but he said nothing more. And then his image faded.

Yet, he was there.

Dark and olive-skinned, Bonifacio stood next to me, a strangely Arabian-looking Chicano with brown small-set eyes and strong square features. He smiled handsomely even though he had added a few pounds since I last saw him wandering drunk on downtown Bakersfield’s bar alley streets.

It was late April, 2001. We had both seen my mother lying in her funeral casket just the day before. Her eyes had sunk as if two black coals had been placed over them, then lit and burned away to reveal the deep pit of death that hangs above the face of the dead.

Her skeleton no longer danced beneath her skin with movement and life. It was held still by an unseen hand, hung silent and no longer brooded over the passing of things. She had begun death’s dance in the spirit underworld, perhaps even smiled again. Spirit-skeletons smile, move beneath fiery sparks of the living. Ghosts dance among them. Devils and angels too. They sanctify the under-realm of mankind. They flood the spirit darkness. They wave their hands and suddenly there are bright glistening waterfalls of red-lit Roman candle rain falling into infinity.

Later in Bonifacio’s house on Elm Street we ate jalapeños with beef smothered in cabbage, green onions, and green salsa all wrapped in hot flour tortillas.

“Those memories,” I said. “They will haunt me.”

“Your father, I understand. But your mother—she will be no ghost.”

“No? You can’t be sure of that. Like all writers’ dreams, they will haunt like a curse. I am surrounded by visions, Bonifacio.”
 
“Eat. The food is good, right? Fill yourself up before your crying soul takes too much of you.”

Bonifacio was as good of a cook as he was at waiting tables of wealthy businesswomen, politicians, salesmen and ag-brokers. His delightful method of cooking—as he explained his every move in the kitchen, politely, with fondness for those he served—made him very much like his migrant mother who had recently fallen ill. Her polite smile and command over a kitchen was more than the enduring love of a migrant over pinto beans properly taken from sorrowful fields and cooked to perfection. It was pure Mexican culture driven into the heart of the Southern San Joaquin Valley. The slow transformation of a people, to see, through a meal, through a mountain of refried beans, cooked and mashed from a long night’s soaking, to become washed clean through the love of a migrant mother. I could tell Bonifacio saw himself, like other sons of migrants, transformed into an educated generation of cultural wanderers.

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