Strange but True by John Searles Page B

a hotel or buying a train ticket in a Spanish-speaking country, but if he ever wants to tell someone off, he knows all the right words. And since the next thing Gumaro says is, “Bien. Pero tu mamá no vino anoche a mamarme mi pinga como siempre,” which means, I’m good, but your mother didn’t show up to suck my dick last night the way she always does, Philip takes a breath and lets it rip: “Qué pena, porque tu mamá, tu hermana, tu tía, tu abuela , y tu abuelo vinieron a mi casa para mamarme mi pinga y a doscientos de mis mejores amigos ayer. Y lo hicieron gratis esta vez. Fue excelente. Tengo el video si lo quieres rentar.” Translation: That’s too bad, because your mother, your sister, your aunt, your grandmother, and your grandfather showed up at my house last night to suck my dick and two hundred of my closest friends. They did it for free this time. It was great. I have the video if you want to rent it.
    Gumaro drops the empty bus bin and makes a beeline toward the car. Even though it’s a cool, cloudy autumn day, he is wearing nothing but a thin white T-shirt and the same kind of black-and-white checkered pants that all the guys in the kitchen wear, only his pair is cut off unevenly and frayed at the knees. When he reaches the car, Philip notices a thin layer of sweat glistening on his dark skin from the heat of kitchen. Gumaro grins, big and wide. “You are getting good, my friend,” he says in a low voice, leaning one of his beefy arms on the roof of the car. “See what happens when you study with the best profesor in town?”
    â€œGracias, profesor,” Philip tells him.
    Gumaro motions toward the passenger seat with his chin. “What’s that?”
    â€œJust some school stuff.” Philip wishes he had thought to put his portfolio away, since he doesn’t want to be teased about it from now into eternity.
    â€œIt looks like poetry,” Gumaro says. “Te gusta poetry?”
    Philip asks him how to say “You are a nosy bastard” in Spanish, but Gumaro doesn’t answer. Finally, Philip surrenders to the moment and nods. Yes, he likes poetry. He braces himself for a crack about only maricónes going for that sort of thing. He even prepares a comeback about what Gumaro’s mother likes to do with the sheep in the barn late at night while his father sleeps. But all Gumaro says is, “In my country, we have peoples who know how to paint the most beautiful pictures with words. Do you know José Emilio Pacheco?”
    Philip shakes his head, grateful he’s not being teased, but also embarrassed because he himself cannot paint a picture with words. Whenever he tries, for example, to make the sky bluer by describing it in writing, his poems end up reading like a combined listing from Webster’s Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus (“The azure, cerulean celestial regions as seen from earth…”). One more reason to believe that Conorton had probably said those things simply out of pity. “So how’s it going inside the old Olive Pit today?” Philip asks to change the subject.
    Gumaro casts his dark eyes toward the restaurant then back at Philip. “We got hit with an early rush. The boss is doing The Robot for almost one hour now.”
    The Robot is what the staff calls it whenever Walter—a self-proclaimed “top graduate” from hotel and restaurant management school—starts waving his arms around like the robot in those Lost in Space reruns used to do whenever there was danger. In this case, the danger is that Walter can’t handle more than a few tables at a time if he’s stuck on the floor alone. “There’s no one on the floor to help him?”
    Gumaro shakes his head. “He cut them loose because we were dead before. Big mistake.”
    Philip figures he should get in there and save him, not that Walter will act the least bit appreciative. He