You Can't Eat Burritos Here

There’s a kid next door who lives with his mom and wears black hoodies every day to hide his belly. The cargo shorts are too big and he grabs for the pockets when he hurries.

The past couple years we’ve seen them stand together in the driveway at dawn waiting for the school bus. She putzes at his hair and he twists away.

She works til dark and so from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. the neighbor kid and a few of his friends will sometimes hang out in the driveway or they’ll skate up and down the street while he paces the sidewalk, talking with an adversary on Facetime, saying he’ll fuck this kid’s face up, reciting his own home address, inviting this kid on the phone to ride over here, to this Miami Beach suburb, and collect his beating. Demanding it.

The neighbor kid figured out the lock mechanism on our building’s gate and so he comes into our lawn sometimes and sits on the metal furniture and Facetimes a girl named Erika. If our windows are cracked we’ll hear his loud wherefore’ing: “Yo, no, Erika. Erika. Erika. Erika? Erika: nobody fucks with me. People know. And if they don’t know they find out quick: weed, cars, guns—I’m into all that shit…”

Back in May I was getting ready for work and saw that his mom had been standing out on the second-floor landing for a long time with both wrists folded on the railing and her phone in-hand.

Two cop cars rolled up slowly and parked crosswise to block the exit and one cop got out from each. Men in their thirties. One white, the other Hispanic.

They climbed the stairs and she talked to them for a moment and then led them inside and closed the door.

The kid was sobbing when they brought him out in handcuffs. He was shouting that he didn’t do nothing. The white cop held him by an elbow and pushed him along and but the neighbor kid was twisting and saying this was “bullshit” and asking, “What’d I do? No but what’d I even do?” His voice cracked as he twisted around, opposite from where the white cop was pushing him, and said, “Bro you’re squeezing my arm like I’m a fuckin grown-ass man, I’m a fuckin kid, please, you’re hurting me, why you squeezing—” he twisted toward the other cop, “can you please take me down there sir please he’s squeezing me right now…”

The Hispanic officer went and took the kid’s opposite elbow. Not visibly gentler but when he walked away the white cop stood back with his thumbs in his vest like he’d been caught in something.

He started looking at the windows in the neighboring building which is when he saw me in my underwear and workshirt and nametag eating blue corn tortilla chips and I ducked.

I saw the badge-cam footage of that kid who got arrested after his mom found a rancid trashbag in his closet and called them in tears. Cops met him out on the lawn when he got home that afternoon.

They tell him, “Your mom called us cuz she found something upsetting in your closet. Do you know what that was?”

The kid takes a deep breath and looks directly at the sun and then turns back squinty and says with total composure, “A human head and hands.”

The cops tell him yes that’s it.

They proceed to put cuffs on him and lead him gently into the backseat of a cruiser.

Every adult on the scene has a tone in their voice like, Let’s just see what he has to say.

The kid is tall, articulate, friendly. He never cries through the confession but his mother’s inconsolable.

Neighbor kid was back home that weekend. His mom went to work on Saturday night and he was hanging out with friends in the driveway. Monitor on his ankle. Talking with his chest out. Saying loud things about his prowess with women and physical strength. The fear he inspires.

His friends with their skateboards and sweaty heads all nodding and “ha ha yes”ing.

When they took selfies with him they held the camera high, angling down, neighbor kid’s leg extended prison-Fosse so the monitor shows.

One of the best people I’ve known is a college roommate who at age sixteen was standing in a Taco Bell parking lot at midnight with friends, eating a burrito, when cops pulled up and said he was loitering.

He said, “I’m eating my Taco Bell burrito at Taco Bell. How is that loitering?”

The cops pointed out that Taco Bell’s dining room was closed. Only the drive thru window was open. Customers are supposed to drive thru. And leave.

My roommate said he would stand here until he finished his burrito.

Cops told him to leave and that they wouldn’t say it again.

He started eating slower.

They slapped his food away and cuffed him.

Third arrest in three years.

He spent six months at a juvie camp.

Two year later he graduated high school with a 4.0 and got accepted to FIU. He was adopted by his one-handed stepfather who bought him a suit and then drove him to court to see about getting his record expunged before orientation.

There was a long line of teenagers waiting outside the courtroom. He waited more than an hour. When it was his turn at the podium the judge read his name to the court as well as his offenses which culminated in latenight petulant burrito-eating. He read aloud my roommate’s length of time in detention and then looked up, over tiny glasses. “Now that you’ve graduated high school, what do you plan to do?”

Roommate said, “I’m going to college in the fall, I got into—”

The courtroom broke into chuckles.

He thought, How’d I fuck this up so quick?

The judge said, “Expunged. Good luck in school.”

The chuckles turned to laughs.

He said the other kids stared at him as he left. Seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. Baby Ebenezers looking at some ghostly alternate self.

The neighbor kid annoys me and there’s an impulse to believe, when he’s sitting on the lawn furniture directly beneath our bedroom window at 3 a.m., Facetiming with Erika, or threatening his nemesis, that he’s an asshole and wishing his ankle monitor had some tighter radius to his own apartment.

Then I fall back asleep. Cuz in truth he’s loud enough to make me annoyed at the audacity of sitting on a stranger’s lawn at 3 a.m. for a phone call but he’s not actually loud enough to keep me awake. And in the morning I sober up about it. Wonder how many times, in high school or college, I was being obnoxious at 3 a.m. Eating a burrito where I shouldn’t. The consequences I’ve been spared because someone saw I was young and went back to bed.

• If you’re looking to get some thorough line-edits on your short fiction or nonfiction, I’ve got plenty of slots open for editing at a flat rate: $100 for anything up to 2,500 words; then $150 up to 5,000 words. Anything larger than that, we can scale up to settle on something commensurate to the task.

• I’m nearing the end of Cairo Smith’s latest novel, A Cancellation, and I need to write something about this book, in conjunction with the novel he wrote before it, Current Affairs, because they’re two of my favorite reads of the year, breezy and smart and carefully-plotted. I think Cairo’s got three things working against him when it comes to first-glance assessments of whether his work is serious: he’s prolific, the prose doesn’t draw attention to itself, and the work is absolutely sopped to its ears with internet culture—but without doing the whole chin-stroking “internet novel” thing. The web is just integrated into the author’s/characters’ reality from the start. Same as it is for the rest of us.

• I knew about Meaghan Garvey prior to reading her book Midwestern Death Trip, but it made me a locked-in fan of her newsletter, which is back into regular programing with carousel-style glimpses of her book tour.