The Music of What Happens - Bill Konigsberg Page 0,36
sounds vaguely sexual to me, and when Max’s eyes don’t leave mine, I feel this jolt of energy climb up my spine and look away. It’s super weird.
I find that a drop of the red food coloring does a nice job of turning the lemonade a pleasing, light shade of electric pink. My heart is pulsing as I pour our first lemonade for our first victim, a girl maybe in her twenties who barely looks up from her cell phone while ordering, waiting, or receiving her drink. I watch as she takes a sip.
“Mmm,” she mumbles, licking her lips, and as she walks away, I turn to Max. He’s watching too.
“One down,” he says.
The next one goes to a hipster guy, who scares the shit out of me when he starts talking about prickly pear, and how it’s one of his favorite flavors.
“I’ve never had it in lemonade, let alone frozen,” he says. “I’m actually a little excited about this.”
I’ve already taken his money, and I kind of want to give it back to him, because surely someone with great prickly pear knowledge will be able to tell that his favorite flavor is absent from our drink. But instead I make change for him and walk the figurative plank, back to the Vitamix in the back of the truck. My heart pulses as the blender buzzes, and when I hand him the light pink frozen concoction, I keep my eyes averted from his.
He isn’t going away, however. He inserts the straw, sucks in a worthy sip, and gives us his report.
“Mmm,” he says. “Taste that prickly pear tang. Wow. It’s actually even better than I thought it would be.”
I smile, and Max comes up to the window. “That’s why we call it ‘Jordan and Max’s World-Famous Organic Homemade Prickly Pear Frozen Lemonade.’ ”
“Amen, amigo,” he says, and I wonder how often Max gets spoken to in Spanish, and whether it bugs him. I’ve never heard him speak in Spanish, not even once.
My success leads Max to get a little more brash too, and when we have a lull in service, he goes out to the whiteboard, erases something, and writes more. He turns the sign to show me.
Coq Au Vinny uses all organic and locally sourced ingredients, he has written. I laugh.
“We are so going to hell, aren’t we?” I say.
“Probably,” he says. “But we’ll go there a lot richer. Just watch.”
Max wasn’t lying. The lines grow and grow, and suddenly we’re this incredible moneymaking machine. At one point, our line is more than ten people long, and what I notice is that when people stand in line, others tend to take notice and come investigate. From about ten until twelve fifteen, when we close up, we are swamped, and I barely notice that the oven and grill have heated the truck to a level that makes it just about impossible to breathe. My body begins to feel chilly, with sweat soaking through my red T-shirt and white shorts, and Max, who is even closer to the flame, is even more drenched. He also looks radiant. Like he was meant to do this. And the amazing thing is this pang of something that goes through me as I watch him in action, speeding around the grill, spritzing water next to the grilled cheese sandwiches to make the grill sizzle, going through plastic glove after plastic glove, lifting tray after tray of cloud eggs out of the oven and spatula-ing them into red-and-white checked paper dishes with the grace of a pro.
He’s magnificent. Max the Magnificent.
He’s a food truck deity. I feel my heart pulse as I watch his broad shoulder muscles glisten sweat, and I have to look away because parts of me are beginning to tingle, and those things should not happen on a busy food truck.
By the time we close up, we are swimming in sweat, cash, and credit card receipts. I have no idea how much we made, but a ton, and I can’t wait to count. But first I make sure to spend the very last bit of energy I have on cleanup, because I want Max to notice my effort. I really do. I want him to see that I can work hard too, that I’m not a total waste case.
He doesn’t say anything, but I see something in his eyes as we clean up that tells me he appreciates my hard work. He turns off the grill and oven, and an ever-so-slight breeze blows