Order Up
Order Up
Jordan Bazyar-Catalano
Benjamin always asked the same first question to the waiter. “Look, it’s not you,” he’d say. “Don’t take this personally. But can I get a new menu, hold the grape jelly?”
Mama’s Cafe was our regular diner, and our waiter, Felix, was a regular too. Felix could have brought a menu fresh from the laminator, and Benjamin would have still asked that question. It wasn’t about the cleanliness of the restaurant, which was no paragon of spickness or spanness. It was habit. Benjamin’s habit. The same habit that brought us together the first Sunday of every month for over a decade now.
“Sure you don’t want to find a new breakfast spot?” I asked, knowing the answer before asking.
“What new breakfast spot?” he asked, spreading his arms open like a condor gliding over the Mojave. “This is the last breakfast spot left in Los Angeles. They’ve been taken over by brunch joints, the invasive bamboo of the restaurant scene. Poof — the honest diner is now a dishonest house of hash horrors. Overpriced, overhyped, oversauced.”
“Over it,” I said, pouring a third thimble of cream into my coffee. “I’ll stop into Our Lady of the Angeles and light a candle for the perpetual financial wellbeing of Mama’s Cafe.”
“Long may she scramble,” he said, surveying the restaurant with the kind of pride a parent projects walking into their child’s first home. In my estimation, Mama’s Cafe had settled into a comfortable familiarity with its customers, a state that dispensed with the niceties. The plates were chipped and the chrome trim around the bar was peeling. But the coffee was good, and the food was reliable.
Felix returned with another menu, which Benjamin accepted and gave a cursory read before ordering what he always orders, the number four, sunny-side up with sausage links. I asked for something out of the ordinary, a mushroom omelet and a fruit cup.
“I went to the Chromatic’s show at the Echoplex last night,” Benjamin said as he tore the top off a packet of sugar and poured it into his coffee. “I promised myself I’d never go to another concert where I don’t have a seat. I’m getting too old to stand around gazing at my shoes.”
“My arches ache in solidarity.”
“I would have passed, but I was meeting someone.” He stopped, set his coffee down and looked at me. “I met someone.”
It took an uncomfortable amount of time for me to register what he just said, and just as uncomfortable an interval to reply. “That’s good news,” I said finally. “Isn’t it? I mean, how’d you meet?”
“Tinder, naturally.” He picked up his mug, blew cooling ripples across the coffee and took a sip. “We met about nine months ago, actually. Which is crazy for me to even think about. I mean, you know my history. But, look. It didn’t start all fireworks and rose petals. We texted for a while, and once we agreed we weren’t maniacs, we met up. Our dates were pretty formulaic. We’d pick a bar, have exactly two drinks then walk. And talk. About the most nothing of nothings, but it was easy. And we could be open, you know? Our shitty pasts somehow canceled each other out, like multiplying negatives.”
I held my coffee cup in both hands as I looked at Benjamin and listened as he trickled out the details of a relationship he’d nursed in secret for months. I blinked and his features seemed to shift — chin growing softer and cheekbones sinking deeper. I blinked again, and Benjamin was Benjamin again.
“How can you top easy?” I said and immediately regretted it. Something between us was changing, had changed, and I was feeling petulant.
Benjamin set down his coffee and cleared his throat. “What I wanted to tell you is, we’re moving. A job opened up for her in Pittsburgh, and my gig is fully remote, so we decided to head east. And really, friend, is there anything more depressing than growing old in Los Angeles?”
Felix arrived at the table and set our plates down. “Want a top off?” he asked, but I waved my hand over my mug. There was nothing I wanted that Felix could give me.
Driving to Our Lady of the Angels from Mama’s Cafe took forty-five minutes by way of the 101. Mass was over, so there was plenty of parking. Inside, it was nothing like what I had expected. There were no towering stone facades, no allegorical stained glass, no bursts of gold. The walls were plated in warm wood with tapestries of pilgrims marching towards the altar. Looking up, the ceiling was a crisscross of wood planks punctuated by trumpet-shaped chandeliers — a cathedral revering carpenters.
Not wanting to look like a tourist, I walked contemplatively with my hands behind my back until I found a round alcove where the prayer candles burned in front of a statue of some saint. I dropped a dollar into the collection box and placed a votive next to the already burning candles. Fishing a lighter out of my pocket, I lit the candle and closed my eyes. I wasn’t praying in any conventional sense, nor was I thinking of any god. Rather, I reached out to the universe with a single wish, that Benjamin and his interloping love never make it to Pittsburg. I visualized hasty lane change, a crushing accident, a heroic effort by first responders, a declaration of death and the signing of certificates. I conjured Benjamin’s burial at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and me visiting him every Sunday. I would bring his favorite breakfast and a thermos of coffee, and we would talk about the most nothing of nothings. We would grow old together in Los Angeles, complaining about the end of breakfast and the infestation of brunch.
