Tinged with yellow. Basement stairs. Orange-ish. One window. I am too short to see the beige counter above me, but I can see and feel the pale-grey tiles beneath me which always glean a cool, refreshing aura against my skin whenever I press my face against them. Tia always washes them with a grey rag, rubbing into the dark grout in the between. Junior is in the basement playing SNES and Tia is wearing a sky-blue dress with white flowers. She is cooking up pale red noodles that are slippery wet and wormy but when she finally serves them up in a bowl, I feel like slurping them down with the little flecks of chili peppers and tomatoes that are flecked in the orange sauce served with the dish. The cabinet is next to the counter top on the left side and is easily 4 to 5 times my size at the age of five. Then there is this gargantuan cast iron stove—black as the grill marks charred on the tortillas she flops right down on the burners. She pulls them out of a plastic baggie littered with bits of Spanish.
Tio is at the grill in the square green back lawn back in Cicero, grilling to the backdrop of the zooming cars at the racetrack and mariachi bands over the radio. Screaming tires moving at 200 miles-per-hour partnered with rich horns and, at the time indecipherable, Spanish in hearty tones.
I know the beef is outside. Tio lets the meat age in raw mounds of salt—sealed away in clear Tupperware containers with oak green and mauve tops. He does the same with hot dogs, except he prepares them differently before placing them on his propane grill. He slits the hot dogs down the sides—not vertically as if you were about to stuff them with cheese or other such Northern nonsense such as that—but three times on one side, and three times on the other. This way, they sear and pucker on the outside, becoming nice and crispy without the meat bursting and losing the crunchy flavor and consistency of the skin. I don’t remember needing a bun, or any sauces.
White smoke billows out of the grill spilling through and over the grey chain-link fence to the neighbor’s yard. I walk through it on my way to Tia. I ask for a sip from her teal colored water bottle with a little nozzle and – with a smile—she hands it over to me. It is (as always) Diet Coke, but so infused with ice that there is a watery, slick after taste that keeps the bubbly carbonation from building up in my mouth or stomach.
Sometimes, on those summer days where you hear the electricity humming in telephone wires, yellow-jackets try to climb down the nozzle and their little black and yellow butts stick out the top. While Tia would shoo them away, and like many kids I was naturally afraid of the stingy buggers, I was always curious to see what would happen if I sipped them up too—maybe it would leave a buzz in my stomach in its attempts to fly out.
Early morning meals are different than the back yard grill-fests. With its dazzling array of salted hot dogs, bistec, and beef tongue, dinner was a bit more of an event, usually with neighbors and extraneous family members. Breakfasts are reserved. Usually Tia cooks up some eggs for the whole family—that family being Junior, Julie, Tio— and to a certain extent me. Junior and Julie are brother and sisters from the same father---Esperanza had been their foster mother since they were little. She had been babysitting just as long---so long that my mom called her my Godmother. But Esperanza preferred Tia.
The eggs are cooked to a slimy consistency similar to…well, snot. Not saying it sounded delicious, and you can be sure I had my own apprehensions at the time, but the only other eggs I could remember eating when I was that young were my Aunt Liz’s. Rubberized scrambled eggs that were paired with eradiated bacon, both bombarded in enough salt to give my cousin enough cholesterol and sodium problems until he was 24. So while drippy, watery, eggs that cling together with the consistency of glue may sound disgusting to most anyone else, but the difference to me was one between the Sahara and the Atlantic, and I was in for swimmin’.
Appropriately goopified, Tia poured the bright yellow eggs onto several corn tortillas, occasionally chopping up some green peppers and frying up some chorizo sausage to be mixed into the concoction. Once the cooking was done, Tio sits me up on his lap— there is only three chairs at the small, yellow, semi-circle table that occupy the kitchen—and illustrates to me how to wrap the little breakfast burrito before us. What ensues is a simple--yet perplexing--maneuver of folds that elude me to this very day, leading to a perfectly wrapped meal; egg goop securely trapped within for maximum gooey deliciousness. Did I mention there was cheese in these too? Well, there is cheese, and it only adds to the warm brew of goo waiting to be devoured.
So this was all quite a lot to take in for this gringito to take, and my poor little pallet hadn’t even tasted the thing yet. Tio takes the first bite, somehow managing not to spill any of it on the plate or himself, and then hands it to me. Oh boy, here it goes, I think. Handle properly, one hand on each side—wait what? Interruption! What is that green sauce you are squirting on to the burrito? Something about jalapenos? What is that? Don’t worry, you say? Well…okay…
My taste buds were never the same. A spicy, sour, and earthy bombastic combination of flavors carpet bombed my tongue in an assertive militaristic conquest of my future desires in food. Chorizo layered an exotic, tangy, hot grease on my tongue and cheeks while the eggs—runny and barely salted—cut through, providing the sensation of eating a cross between meatloaf and fatty bits of a pork-chop. And while, at the time, I was terrified over the feeling of what I now know are Scovilles (units of ‘hotness’ or ‘spiciness’) and their scorched earth-policy of my mouth, I have had an obsession with hot sauces ever since. It would be a few years from that point until I could buy my own hot-sauces, and a few years more until I would attempt to make my own, but it kept lingering on. During high-school I would skip out on the school lunches, hop off campus, and go to the local burrito den so I could order chorizo con heuvos (eggs and chorizo). Each time I take a bite of Mexican cuisine, or whenever I drop a splash of Tabasco on something, I think of the kitchen away from home in which I spent many of my first years. I see flower print dresses and texas ties, hear mariachi and Catholic mass, smell clean tiles and grilled hot-dogs, and taste a little piece of a world which I haven’t been a part of since.
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