By Angus Stump
The RailRunner makes the 58-mile, 1,800-foot climb from Albuquerque to Santa Fe in about 90 minutes. It does this many times each day, and that is a significant achievment. It did not, however, invent the breakfast burrito. Tia Sophia’s did that in 1975. It says so on the menu.
It was a four-seater counter. Seat 3 was already occupied by a sixty-ish man, Mookie. He was bulky but not fat, easy in his body. An old goat like me. Mookie was working through a breakfast burrito with fried bologna. The fried bologna is a real menu item, added sometime in the early 2000s by the current owner. Most people don’t order it, but Mookie did today.
I plopped down in seat 1. I ended up ordering blueberry blue corn pancakes at the restaurant that invented the breakfast burrito. I can’t apologize for it. I haven’t ordered pancakes in 20 years, but the spirit moved in me, ane they were the best damn pancakes in a full stack of evers.
Seat 2 dropped in just after I ordered: thirty-ish, dark hair, swarthy, Middle Eastern features I thought, until he addressed the staff in Spanish so fluent it sounded native. The young buck, sitting between two old goats. He, too, ordered the bologna breakfast burrito.
(For those of you scoring at home, Seat 4 sat quietly and kept his own counsel. I formed no opinions. I doubt Seat 4 would say the same.)
We established our occupations. Nezami is an engineer, I am a science fiction writer and Mookie is blissfully retired. We established geography. I told them to picture the US map and stick your finger dead center. That’s my house. Nezami said if it weren’t for the curvature of the Earth, he could see it from Illinois. Mookie told me Palo Duro Canyon was in Texas, not New Mexico. He was right. I’d been wrong about that my entire life. Thanks, Mookie. This is what diner counters are for.
Mookie is from the Llano Estacado. Eastern New Mexico, or the part of it that bleeds into the Texas panhandle. His deadpan flat-land line: I can watch my dog run away for five days.
Mookie lit up when he heard I was a science fiction writer. He knew Jack Williamson personally. Williamson was a true heavyweight. The Dean of Science Fiction and SFWA Grand Master, he coined the term genetic engineering. He died in 2006 in Portales, right there on the Llano.
Twenty-five years ago, on an Air Force trip at the satellite-tracking base outside Colorado Springs, Mookie and Jack worked through the security layers together, checkpoint by checkpoint. The last one is a retina scan. Jack got scanned, then poked Mookie in the leg and said, “I wrote about that thirty years ago.”
I let out a low whistle and we, the engineer and the science fiction writer, sat with that for a moment.
I told them to look up everything Gene Roddenberry invented by writing Star Trek. It’s the same principle. You start with the story, and the future takes notes. Nezami agreed. “You know, that’s my job.”
There’s a piece of Turn Left about exactly technology getting ahead of the organizations trying to use it, outrunning the people in charge of it. Nezami nodded like a man who was watching that rodeo from the back of a bull.
Then I gave them books.
Mookie accepted his politely, as if nobly enduring a brief but undeniable fate. He was an absolute gentleman about being given a thing he hadn’t asked for. Set it down next to his coffee. He thanked me. Done.
Nezami, on the other hand, was wide-eyed. “Oh, no way,” he said.
“Yeah, way,” I said. “My rule is if you’re unfortunate enough to ask about it, or about me, or express anything short of disdain, you’re in the hot seat.
I had to fight a little for fake names, by the way. Mookie was automatic, but Nezami took some push and pull. But he finally chose it with certainty: Nezami. It’s a good name. You can look it up.
He’s not wrong. Nezami Ganjavi was a twelfth-century Persian poet, the greatest romantic epic writer in the language, known specifically for his nature poetry and his gift for landscape.
So Miss Bossypants went to live with Mookie, and Uncle Gary went to live with Nezami while they ate breakfast sort of together at Tia Sophia’s in Santa Fe. Two men from opposite ends of some cultural map I can’t fully read, eating the same strange specific protein at the home of the OG breakfast burrito restaurant without consulting each other.
“Brotherhood of the burrito,” I said. Nezami laughed heartily. Mookie forced a polite smile and hoisted a fork.
I asked Nezami to surprise me, and he told a story about a backpacking trip. Two days, and he forgot the insulated sleeve for his napkins. It was the first time, he said, he’d gone two days without a shit. He offered this with great earnestness. I’m still not entirely sure what the moral was. Something about preparedness, or vulnerability. Or maybe napkins.
He also writes poetry. Nature poetry, mostly. He said, “I love to go hiking and write, and I mostly write about nature. But on this trip, I decided to be funny.”
But he saw a snake and freaked out, and it wasn’t funny. There were holes in the ground everywhere. He panicked, figuring these are probably terrible venomous snake holes.
They turned out, he said, to be chipmunk holes.
So he wrote this haiku-ish:
With more holes than a woman, I call this spot Chipmunkville.
The poem has no title. He invoked Bashō: adding a title would be like adding a sixth finger to a hand. I didn’t argue.
Mookie thanked me and left.
Bye, Mookie.
As I prepared to leave, I thanked Nezami for playing along. “This was about as much fun as I can have with my clothes on,” I told him. Nezami laughed loudly enough to turn heads.
Nezami turned and gave me full eye contact. “Thank you so much. Angus. I can never forget that name.”
I told him Angus is my fake name.
He smiled broadly. “I knew it!”
I had only a short walk in front of me, but owing to the unique conspiracy of 7,200-foot altitude and a short stack of blue corn pancakes I was in no hurry.
Beastly Books occupies a prominent corner in the Railyard District. Its shelves are exclusive, offering only speculative fiction, rare and signed first editions, and (I checked) no copies of Turn Left.
“How many of the people who walk through your door are on a pilgrimage?” I asked.
The Pallid Bard behind the counter went wide-eyed, nodded from the waist, mouthed the words “A LOT.” Tall, maybe, but possibly just slight. Dark-haired, pale, thin and willowy with loads of eye contact.
PB has met GRRM a few times, but never had a real conversation with the man. Had overheard him, though. Thoughts? “He’s pretty cool. He’s interesting. Has a good sense of humor, which I think is important.” A little awed, and wielding understatement like a sword.
Seeking some sort of social lubricant, I asked: “What’s your superpower?” The pondering was brief. “Sometimes I think I’m too self-aware.”
“Wow,” I said. “That is one terrible superpower. I always thought the worst superpower would be really sticky hands. But that’s second place now.” PB accepted all this openly, but didn’t offer much in return.
PB pledged to start reading it now, and then promptly did so. I was pretty sure that was my cue to leave, so I did.
I never asked for a fake name, and I still don’t know why. I bestowed instead a GRRM-worthy title. I hope The Pallid Bard reads this.
I walked around Santa Fe for a while. It was lovely, but it seems I kept walking in an ever-widening circle, circling back by Beastly Books a couple of times. A few times. Entirely too many times. The Pallid Bard saw me the first time. And the second. After that we worked at not making eye contact. We were not altogether successful.
Again, a lesson I continue not to learn: Proper mystery requires actually leaving. I was managing it imperfectly.
Chocolate + Cashmere (as seen in The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal and Martha freakin’ Stewart, so wipe that smirk off your face) splits in two: coffee side and cashmere side. I went to the coffee side first and ordered a mocha.
Somebody aced mocha school, because this mocha was the real thing.The barista solemnly intoned, “Chocolate milk for grownups.” She was not entirely wrong.
Chocolate milk, we observed, is the original gateway drug. You’re a kid. Cafeteria line. The person behind the counter says white or chocolate? You say chocolate and they just give it to you. And the next day you’re back. Can I have two?
“And then you’re selling them to friends in class,” I said.
“You’re messed up,” she said. Again, not entirely wrong.
Walked around a bit more, sticking close to the railyard. Decided to drop one more book and returned to Cashmere + Chocolate, the cashmere side this time.
One book left. Ella, who volunteered her fake name easily, was warm and all in. I told her to think of someone kind and funny and smart, but who also laughed at all the wrong places. She knew exactly who I meant before I finished the sentence.
The book was Agatha. I praised Agatha as a good citizen, saying she gets along with everybody.
Ella said had been talking to a young writer the day before and they both said they craved something readable. No weight of the world. No politics or religion. Just something to read. This sounded like that to her.
Ella grinned. “I’m just so happy you’re doing this,” she said.
“It might the stupidest marketing plan anyone has ever come up with,” I said. Ella disagreed. “No. This book covers all the bases. There’s something here for everyone.”
I made my way back to the depot to wait for the #515 train to Albuquerque. I struck up a conversation with the train station counter clerk but said nothing of my mission. She said, “I love it here. It gets really busy and it gets really dead and when it’s dead I read. I read so many books. I just finished one so I need another one.”
“What do you read?,” I asked, bracing myself.
“Pretty much everything. I love science fiction, and I love funny stuff. I like finding new authors and off the wall stuff,” she said, unaware of my breaking heart.
Of course, I had just given away the last of my books. Of course.
All of them went to good homes. No regrets about that. But here was one soul who practically asked for this book by name, and I had nothing for her.
I did what I could do. I gave her a business card and told her there was a book she’d like at the other end.
Note to self: Always have one more book.
