Two Having Pornography and One Watching

Psychology Department

Q33 NY

The Doctor & The Cure

Ted Hernandez

It had rained a bit the night before. There were still clouds covering the sun, though none was releasing its rain. The city streets shined like oil on a face, but the highway was dry from the trucks and cars always keeping the concrete active with their tires. The blacktop bike path didn’t shine but it was wet and when Heliodoro Hernandez’s foot happened to hit the ground on one of the many cracks in the path a splash of mud and water came up onto his pants and dampened his sock. His walk lasted twenty-five minutes from his house on Second Avenue in the northeast quarter of Rochester, MN to where he worked, the restaurant in the strip mall along South Broadway in the southwest quarter. He used to ride a bicycle along the bike path until a group of black children stole first the seat and then the front wheel. Then after seeing the body of the bike locked to the lamppost of the parking lot of the strip mall for three days, they came with an older kid who brought a bolt cutter and took the rest of Heliodoro’s bicycle.

Oxxxxxx’s Pizza Pub required Heliodoro to arrive five minutes before he was scheduled in order to change into his dishwasher’s shirt and clean his hands. Upon his first day at the restaurant Sxxxxxx Oxxxxxx explained to him in plain English how to wash his hands. He watched her wash under her nails and between her fingers and all the way up to her elbows, not rinsing until everything was covered in fresh suds and popping with soap bubbles. He mimicked her and nodded to her as she watched him.

“Good,” she said to him.

“Gracias,” he said and looked to her face. “A thank a you.” He said in English and smiled under his thin bigote.

“You’re welcome,” she replied slowly and emphasizing each sound. “Ted, this is America. You need to speak English to work here. No more Spanish.”

“Yes,” he said.

Save for the other Mexicans, everyone at work called him Ted. On Heliodoro’s first day Sxxxxxx had seen his name written out and decided that it looked enough like Theodore to call him Ted for short. She took him around and introduced him as the new dishwasher Ted. Ted said hello to the cooks, and to them his name was Ted; and Ted said hello to the bartenders and to the hosts and to Exxx & Bxxxx Oxxxxxx. Only the Mexican’s and the Oxxxxxxs themselves knew that the name Heliodoro existed.

Theodore comes from Greek, as does Heliodoro. Doron is the Greek pronunciation of gift. Theos is for God and Helio is for Sun. Thus, respectively Theodore and Heliodoro originally mean “gift from God” and “gift from the sun.” Yet in Olmsted County, Minnesota, Sxxxxxx Oxxxxxx was explaining to one of the cooks, “His name is Mexican for Theodore, so we’re just going to call him Ted. Ted’s a nice American name for him.”

“What’s his Mexican name?” the cook asked.

“Heliodoro,” she said in plain English pronouncing the H and giving the vowels a similar sound to helicopter.

“That doesn’t sound much like Theodore.”

“Well you have to see it written out,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. His name is Ted. Just call him Ted.”

Oxxxxxx’s Pizza Pub had an open kitchen. The kitchen was at the front of the restaurant against the storefront windows and enclosed in Plexiglas like a hockey rink, so that the customers as well as passersby could hang around and watch the art of flattening dough and placing pepperonis. The dish room was behind the kitchen and had no windows. There used to be a radio for the dishwashers to hear music as they pushed the racks of plates into the dishwashing machine and then out of the machine. That was back when the restaurant was still in the old bank building downtown, before moving there to the strip mall.

Downtown there was only one Mexican working called Hilario. He knew enough English to work on the pizza line in the kitchen. He could read the words: small, medium, large, XL, cheese, pep, sausage, G.P., black olive, green olive, well-done, thick and thin. He, like Heliodoro later, worked without legal identity.

“I need to go home,” he told the Oxxxxxxs one day during December.

“To Mexico?” Sxxxxxx asked.

He nodded, and she asked why.

“I need to go home to see my wife and my family,” he said slowly but correctly. “I am going to come back mayo.”

“In May, you will come back?” Exxx Oxxxxxx asked. She had studied Spanish and Russian at the College of Saint Catherine a catholic college for women in the Twin Cities. Sxxxxxx explained once that her sister attended St. Kate’s back before the whole lesbian thing. Exxx had studied Russian there because of the Cold War, but she was speaking in Spanish to Hilario at the pizza pub.

“¿Por qué tu familia no está contigo aquí?” she asked.

“My family is in Mexico because there is no money for to come here,” he said back to her in English.

“¿Y a tu familia vas a darle tu dinero? ¿A ellos, está enviandoles tu dinero actualmente?”

“I am giving my money to my family with the Oestern Union.”

“The Western Union? And, ¿Va a venir contigo tu familia?”

“No, my family is staying in Mexico.”

Helario left, and a kid from the high school took his spot on the pizza line, until he came late too many days in a row. An ex-con named Don out on the work release program replaced him, and in February Hilario returned. The Oxxxxxxs gave him back his job along the pizza line.

“Welcome back to America,” the employees of Oxxxxxx’s shouted at the small party that had been thrown after work on his first night back. There was an American Flag birthday cake and a baseball hat with a ribbon on it for Hilario. He said thank you and looked at the hat, which had an embroidered on it a bald eagle clutching an American Flag in its talons. On the back in gold floss, there read “U.S.A. United We Stand!”

“Thank you very much,” he said.

Hilario explained later to Exxx in very quick Spanish that he had come back early because his wife had left him before he arrived in his pueblo outside of Mexico City. She took all of the money he had been sending home and drove to Guatemala with another man leaving the three children alone in the small house. They all had no money now so he left them with an amigo in another pueblo and returned to Olmsted County to work making pizzas again.

When the restaurant moved to the strip mall, Hilario helped to move the ovens and equipment. He worked at the new location for a few months before saying the same thing to Exxx about returning to Mexico and to his family to give them his money. He would be back he said to her.

While he was gone, Heliodoro a roommate of Hilario’s at their house on Second Avenue NE, Rochester, MN came to the Oxxxxxxs and asked for a job with Hilario’s name as recommendation. All of the other Mexican dishwashers had come on the behalf of Hilario. There were Paco, Santos, and Juan Carlos.

Paco only lasted two nights. He was always sad-faced and saying to himself, “Qué lástima.” Exxx told Sxxxxxx that this was Spanish for “What hurts?” Paco kept saying it all the time, and Sxxxxxx kept asking him in English, “ ‘What hurts?’ What you are talking about Paco? Tell me what you are talking about in English. Hilario, tell me what Paco is saying all the time. What is Qué lástima?”

“It means that Paco is sad,” Hilario said.

“Paco is sad to be working here?” Sxxxxxx asked. She turned to Paco, who was caring a brown tub of dirty dishes past the sink into the dish room. “Are you sad to be working here in America, Paco?”

“¿Qué?” he asked and looked at Hilario. “Hilario, ¿Qué me dijo la jefe?”

“She asked if you are sad to be in America as a worker,” Hilario said to him in Spanish.

“What did you say to him Hilario?” she asked. “Don’t speak Spanish to each other in front of me. This is America. We speak English here. What did you say to Paco, Hilario?”

“I said that what you said to him about if he is sad to be in America.”

“And what does he have to say?” she asked and turned to Paco. “Are you Qué lástima to be in America?”

“No, Señora,” Paco said and said something else to Hilario. “¿Por qué está enojada conmigo? Y ¿Qué me dijo ahora?”

“What did he say, Hilario? Tell me what he said in English.”

“He said, ‘Why is she mad with me?’”

“Well, you can tell him that I won’t have slimy Mexicans working for me who don’t even want to be in America. If he is so sad to be here, then he should go straight back to Mexico because there are plenty of people who would be glad to have a job here. Tell him that, Hilario, and then tell him to take off that Oxxxxxx’s shirt because he doesn’t work here anymore,” she took a quick breath. “You run home now, Paco. Now who’s so sad?”

Hilario and Paco stood in front of the dish room while Sxxxxxx turned around and walked to the back of the restaurant. Hilario told Paco what had happened. Paco removed his Oxxxxxx’s t-shirt and left. Hilario explained to Juan Carlos what had happened in Spanish and then he explained it in English to one of the cooks, who then explained it in English to the rest of the staff.

Juan Carlos told Heliodoro not to speak Spanish around the female bosses, but that it was okay to speak it when in front of el jefe, the male boss, and any time when no boss was around to hear it.

Jay Fox, the only white dishwasher hated to hear the Mexicans speak in Spanish, but he was always outnumbered by them in the dish room, and the Oxxxxxx’s did not take his complaints or anything about him seriously.

Heliodoro and Juan Carlos sang and joked in Spanish while they worked in the dish room. They spoke to each other in Spanish during their dinner break. Sometimes, they spoke in Spanish to one of the cooks, Andrew, a high school student, who was taking second-year Spanish.

“¿Cómo están amigos?” he said to Juan Carlos and Heliodoro.

They each said they were well, and Heliodoro asked, “¿Tú sabes mucho español?”

Andrew said in Spanish that he was only in Spanish Level Two at the high school and he knew very little Spanish.

“No, hablas español muy bien,” Juan Carlos said. “Es muy bueño hablar dos idiomas. Sabes dos.” Juan Carlos said that he was sad that he only knew Spanish and that he wished that he knew English.

Sxxxxxx walked past everyone on dinner break and looked at the three of them speaking Spanish. They looked up at her. She looked away.

After the dinner break was over and the plates were all cleared, everyone had to scrub their hands. Sxxxxxx stood by the kitchen and watched the two Mexican dishwashers return to the dish room without washing their hands. At the moment that Juan Carlos seized a tray of dishes, Sxxxxxx yelled to them.

“Juan Carlos get over here,” she said. “Put down those plates. Those are all dirty now. You came in there with your filthy hands after you stuffed your face and touched the clean plates with them.”

Juan Carlos apologized and started to explain in Spanish that the dishes were dirty and he was trying to put them into the machine.

“Boogadee boogadee boo,” she said. “Speak English. Andrew, get over here. You think it’s so funny to sit there and speak their language with them, so until they work perfectly you going to be in there doing dishes with them. You can tell them how to do it right. And if you don’t know how to do it right then you better ask somebody because otherwise all three of you are going to out of here. That means you, too, Ted. I’ve seen you putting the pots into the sanitizer without letting them soak in the rinse water. I know that I explained this all to you before. You both are lazy and if you think that I’m going to keep you around you’re wrong. Get to work, and Juan Carlos, put those dishes in the machine.”

Andrew quit before the next weekend. The cooks later talked about how he had a job making $10 an hour working for the city repainting fire hydrants orange.

Juan Carlos and Heliodoro worked in mostly silence for weeks after Andrew left. There was no Spanish in the dish room for a while. Soon things fell into routine again, and the Spanish songs and jokes returned. Jay complained to Sxxxxxx that the Mexicans were speaking Mexican again.

“They’re working right now, Jay,” she said to him. “That’s something you’re not doing when you’re whining to me. Let us worry about the Mexicans, and you worry about getting the silverware cleaned before we run out of forks out here again.”

Hilario returned from Mexico a couple weeks later. He told Heliodoro that his wife had come and taken his three children away with her to Guatemala while he was in America. He had spent all his money trying to find where they were in Guatemala. Only he found out that they hadn’t gone to Guatemala at all. They had gone to a place called Birmingham, but he was broke so he returned to Olmsted County to work making pizzas. The Oxxxxxxs told him that there was nothing good in Mexico for him and he should stop trying to go back there and that he should bring his family to America. They hired him back, and he walked along the bike path with Heliodoro from their house to work until Heliodoro bought a five-year-old Mazda. Then each day Heliodoro drove two other Mexicans to their jobs at the car wash before taking Hilario and himself to work at the restaurant.

Strip Malls

The restaurant was part of a chain of businesses stretched along the main roadway in Olmsted County, Minnesota. Chains of pharmacies, hardware stores, pet shops and places that sold furniture & baskets of potpourri and maybe few restaurants were commonly known as strip malls and sometimes as mini malls. As the world or the American part of the world grew, it spread sideways rather than up, so when driving along a highway a driver could see a strip mall with a Home Depot, a Target, a Barnes & Noble, a Michael’s, an Old Navy, a Bed Bath & Beyond and probably an Applebee’s or if not Applebee’s then a T.G.I. Friday’s. Later along the same highway in the next town or maybe just on the other side of the same town, there would be another strip mall. This one had a Home Depot, a Target, a Barnes & Noble, a Michael’s, an Old Navy, a Bed Bath & Beyond and a Blockbuster. The strip malls were still strip malls though most people didn’t call them that. The business just became the place where people parked their cars and traded their money for things. They had names like South Oakwood Tree Bluff View Shopping Center, but no real way to distinguish them against any other type of shopping because for most people this was the only type of shopping they would do all year. The strip mall in Olmsted County, along Broadway Avenue the busiest road in the area, was more of a traditional strip mall. Not that there was anything especially noble about being a traditional strip mall. For the most part it just meant that the businesses were a little smaller, less colorful and more nationally unknown. There were those nationally popular stores in Olmsted County, but just not as many along this particular strip of storefronts.
Olmsted County, the only county in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes without a natural lake, is situated near the Southeast corner of Minnesota, which is not a small state but not quite a big one either. The famous twin cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis float a good two-hour drive along Interstate 90 up north out of Olmsted County.
Referring to a place by its county usually hints that there is going to be some talk about farming or ranching and that sort of thing. Olmsted County would be a picturesque example of a community connected by dirt rounds and a post office where the men talk about crops and the women talk about the men and the children go to church socials and picnics and the bad children smoke cigarettes and use curse words. But Olmsted County’s county seat is Rochester, MN, a town named after its founder’s hometown, Rochester, NY. The Rochester of Minnesota is in no way a pathetic city, and out of the 16 places named Rochester in the United States of America, only the original Rochester, NY has a greater population.
Rochester once was pathetic city or just another small town, a place where it wouldn’t have seemed as silly to be named after another city in the same country because every place had to be named after something and wouldn’t you have to say it was silly then that Rochester, NY used to be called Rochesterville and silly that that name came from Colonel Nathaniel Rochester’s last name and wasn’t it so damn silly that a town be named after a man from the same country.
It had been a long time since Rochester, MN was pathetic, and now Rochester wasn’t pathetic anymore because years before the turn of the 20th century a tornado had ruined most of the town, the crops and barns were knocked over. A doctor and the local nunnery set up a hospital to care for the injured. The hospital stuck around after the tornado injuries had passed through, and by now the whole city of 100,000 people has in someway something to do with the hospital or the clinic or the research facilities. And if somebody didn’t end up on the Mayo Clinic’s payroll, then they owned a shop or a restaurant where most of the money came from people who did. So Rochester had a downtown or something like it. Most of the buildings were Clinic buildings or hotels and few bar & grill type restaurants huddled around the hotels. The restaurant that is now part of a strip mall used to be one of these hotel-side restaurants in the downtown of Rochester. Doctors in neat suit coats had jogged in for a quick lunch. Three dollars got two slices of pizza and a can of pop, a word Minnesotans use instead of soda. Though they would have said everybody else used the word soda instead of pop. The pop cans were in a big salad bowl of ice and it was one of the restaurant worker’s jobs to keep the bowl filled with five Coca Cola Classics, five Diet Cokes, two Sprites, two Orange Crushes, two Dr. Peppers and one Schweppes ginger ale. He didn’t have to worry about filling the bowl with ice because the lunch rush only lasted thirty minutes or so. They left the bowl with the drinks out for an hour after the lunch crowd and when the restaurant emptied out there were usually a few drinks floating belly up in the cold water of the salad bowl. Nearby a few stiff looking slices baked in the heated pizza case.
At night the restaurant was a family dining area and a bar constantly lined with doctors, loosening their ties and emptying their beer pints while talking in loud voices about their committee meetings and staffing problems. There were regulars at the bar who came each night to drink more than the others and often more than they ought to have. By 10:00 p.m. on weekdays and 11:00 p.m. on Friday and Saturday the place was empty again except for a few at the bar refusing to leave without another beer. And if they couldn’t have another beer could they have a taxi called or could they just have a shot of something hard so they could straighten out their mind enough to locate their car keys.
Three months before the restaurant left for the strip mall, the four-year lease on their building downtown ran out. The owners of Oxxxxxx’s Pizza Pub, Sxxxxxx, Exxx and their brother Bxxxx Oxxxxxx, had originally planed on simply extending the lease for another four years. The owner of the building, Fred Garner (a owner of many buildings downtown: the Red Lobster, the North Star Bar, the Eagle Drug Store were a few) thought things were going well enough downtown for him to raise the rent by 50 percent. The building, a marble and stone bank building, was emptied out of everything over a period of two weeks. The Oxxxxxx’s found a cheaper lease of a larger space on a strip mall where the last local record store had just closed down. The new location had plaster walls and storefront dress code. Everything on the outside of any shop along the strip had to be approved by the landlord and had to fit with the color scheme of the neighbors. The ovens and the tables and chairs were all loaded onto trucks and carried down the street for half a mile to the new location. The four 50-light chandeliers that used to hang from the old bank building downtown suddenly disappeared sometime during those two weeks.
Bxxxx Oxxxxxx had told Mr. Garner, “I didn’t have anything to do with your missing chandeliers and it’s such a goddamn shame you don’t have them anymore.”
“I hope you haven’t done something very stupid,” said Mr. Garner. “I’ve gone to the police about this and don’t expect me to give you any pardon just because you used to rent my building.”
“I never wanted your pardon and I certainly don’t want your building anymore now that it doesn’t even have four great big chandeliers hanging in it. If you want to talk to me ever again you can write me a letter and mail it to me because I’m sick of seeing your ugly face and smelling your ugly smelly breathe.” Only he didn’t say ugly and he often said words that weren’t the word ugly but were considered ugly. He said them to men often and to women too often.
Bxxxx never said anything to anybody again in Rochester about the chandeliers because most people didn’t ask. But most people in Rochester had never been to his house in Lake City, along the Mississippi River 45 miles east of Olmsted County. Most people had never been inside Bxxxx’s three-car garage that was lit like the Grand Ballroom at the Waldorf=Astoria.
Bxxxx drove to Rochester from his house in Lake City six days out of seven to spin the pizza dough at the restaurant and occasionally pour beers when the bartender, John, Chad or Kory had to, as Bxxxx like to call it, “go and make a mess in the bathroom.” Each time he substituted as the bartender he leaned on the bar and waited for him to return and when he did he always said something nasty to the bartender while winking at whoever might be seating at the bar close enough to hear him.
“Did you leave a mess again?” he said once. “Am I going to have to send one of the dish boys down there with a bucket and mop? Are they going to have to pull their shirts over their noses because you left such a stink in the bowl again?”
“Oh you know me Bxxxx,” said the bartender. He made himself laugh and watched Bxxxx laugh and watched Bxxxx slap his knee, laughing loud all the time.
“I am funny aren’t I?” He winked again at the bar and said, “And good looking.”
The bathrooms used to be in the basement when the restaurant was downtown. When the bartender came back he usually had just ran up the stairs.
“Boy that took a lot out you didn’t it?” Bxxxx said when the bartender came back breathing heavily from the stairs. “You look like you just lost twenty pounds. Did you give birth down there? Are you crying or just sweating? Was it hard work down there all alone?”
“Oh you know me Bxxxx,” he said that time again and watched Bxxxx slap his knee, laugh and wink at the bar. Then Bxxxx returned to the kitchen to roll out the pizza dough. He did it all day long for the six days a week he was at the restaurant. When the business was not too fast he threw the flat disc of dough around on his hand. If there were children waiting for their family to be seated he rolled out small pieces of dough and walked to the front. He kneeled by them and talked at their eye level.
“Are you ready to learn how to throw pizza dough?” He asked them.
“Yes. No. Mom is it okay if I learn how to throw?” one of the little girls asked. It was okay and she reached out for the dough, but Bxxxx held the dough and spoke to her.
“Hold out your hands,” he said. “Put your thumbs in and make fists on top of your thumbs. Now when you have the dough on top of your fists you twist them like this. Yes, then you untwist at the same time as you throw the dough in the air. If you don’t have your thumbs in they’re going to catch on the dough and rip it.”
He tossed it once for himself then gave dough to each of the girls and watched the girls throw the dough. If they ripped the dough he pinched it together, but he let the girls pick up the dough off the ground if they dropped it. He smiled at the girls’ mother and shook hands with the father. They both thanked him and he said goodbye to the girls asking them to throw the dough in the garbage when they were done.
When he returned to the kitchen he said to the cook leaning against the prep table, “Did you see the those?”
“The little girls? Yes, they’re cute aren’t they,” he said.
“No, not the girls,” Bxxxx said. He leaned forward with his chin pushing on his big chest. “You mean to tell me that you were looking at the little bastards running around when their mom was standing right there with tits the size of your head?”
“Oh yes, those. Sure I saw those,” he said.
“Are you a faggot, Dylan?” He asked. “If you are, you know, I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t have a problem with faggots. Only if you’re a faggot then you shouldn’t be carrying on like you’re not a faggot. If you’re a faggot then be a faggot and that’s that.”
“I’m not gay, Bxxxx,” Dylan said to his boss. “I just wasn’t looking. That’s all.”
“I’d sure like to play around with those for an hour or two,” Bxxxx said not to the cook anymore, but not really to himself. “Watch them stick out through her shirt like nails when she walks passed the air conditioner. The cold air hits them and the turkey’s done.”
The mother, her husband and the two girls were seated at a both in the middle of the dining area. Bxxxx could see them under the florescent rectangle of light from the low ceiling above them. As they finished their pizza and pitcher of root beer, the sun was past the horizon and the lights on all the businesses of the strip mall turned on together at once.

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Maybe that's obvious

Bio-Hazard at Butter

The other arms or legs or whatever are behind the head, you can't see them, but they're there trust me