Sahara’s Law

Part 1: I’m Oqueso — You’re Oqueso

I saw a billboard with the word queso on it and decided to move to Texas. Texas is a fucked up, reactionary helltopia but you can put queso on whatever you want down here.

I didn’t know a single person in Texas, which made it all the more appealing. There’s only two reasons anyone would choose to live in Texas: because you’re running away from someone—and queso. I read on the internet, meaning I made this up, that men think about sex more than six thousand times per day. I am a man for queso. I knew I would be safe in Texas because no one who was mad at me would be mad enough or care enough to look for me in Texas.

I figured I would feel at home in Amarillo because I’ve also mispronounced my own name. It was when I met Brad, dreamy, jut-jawed, abtastic Brad, the first time and he said, Hey. I’m Brad. And I did a pathetic little wave and said, Sarah, but because I was choking on my own nervousness it sounded more like Sahara. For eight months, all through our courtship and engagement, up until that last day when I snapped and said, Actually, Brad, it’s ‘Sarah.’ Not ‘Sahara,’ just ‘Sarah.’ Sair. Uh., he called me Sahara. I even changed my voicemail to Hey this is Sahara leave a message at the bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. I thought it was funny to say bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep like my voicemail was me swearing on the radio, but he was always saying I needed to change it so I’d sound more professional. Maybe, I always wanted to say, I could just say my real name. That would sound more professional.

I got a second-floor apartment with a balcony that looked over the Arbor Trail into the parking lot of a Red Roof Inn and beyond that was the big road, I-40, which runs all the way from wherever it starts out to Barstow, California. The apartment wasn’t great, but it had pool access and was a tenth of New York rent and I didn’t have to share it with the guy from American Psycho. Amarillo’s water tastes like if you find a half-empty bottle of water in your backpack and when you take a sip you remember that you bought it like nine months ago, drank half of it, dunked a half-smoked cigarette in it because Brad was about to catch you smoking, put the lid back on, shoved it in the darkest depths of your backpack, and forgot about it. I discovered by accident that it didn’t taste quite as foul if I brushed my teeth before taking a drink and now my teeth are shiny.

I didn’t socialize much, but that didn’t stop all the white women in Texas from asking me why I wasn’t married and pregnant. I would have run away again, but I didn’t want to break my lease. I wondered for a minute why only white women wanted me to get pregnant, and then I asked myself this question: if you weren’t white, would you give a shit if white people were having babies? The answer was I wouldn’t want very many of them to have babies. I don’t want babies and I don’t understand why anyone wants to have babies or why anyone wants other people, especially white people, to have babies. They’re cute, sure, but have you seen what happens to them? There’s too many humans on this planet anyway, and a third of all American babies born today are going to grow up thinking that whoever the future version of Tim Allen is is funny.

I got a job working in the shoe department of the local outlet of a regional sporting goods retailer called The Jock’s Trap. I was completely unqualified because I hate shoes, feet, and humans, but the manager hired me anyway because her daughter had just gone off to college and she wanted a lost victim to mother. She was always looking after me, checking in on me, calling me hon, saying what I really needed was a good man and unfortunately there just weren’t none to be had.

People would ask me about shoes, questions like what’s the difference between whatever shoes they were holding up as if trying to balance the scales of justice, and I would say, I unno or Them ones’re cheaper in my offensive approximation of Texas dialect. Occasionally I’d give a bullshit answer like These Adoodas got the patented turbo leather injected maxipad foam jumpstart soles, which usually impressed the customers. I was always supposed to promote the add-ons. Cleaning foam. Some wand thing that’s supposed to erase dirt and scuffmarks from the sides of the soles. This stupid protective waterproofing spray. They called these after-sales and I sucked at them and every day Claire, my boss, would remind me to push the add-ons, you’ve got to push the add-ons, but I never did, and I never got fired or disciplined, which I wouldn’t have minded because it would have at least mixed up my routine. After every shift I went to this fast-food Tex-Mex joint in the food court called the Americantina and ate queso like it was soup.

I was wrong. Someone was looking for me. I opened the balcony door and when I stepped outside a snake landed on my head. Welcome to Texas, home of table-sized steaks, putting creationist museums next to important paleontological sites, and snakes that fly but aren’t very good at it. I’m sure there’s a rational explanation for how a snake fell on my face but my version fits my motif. The lucky thing for me insofar as one is able to use the word lucky in relation to being snaked on from above is that it wasn’t a Western diamondback rattlesnake and if it had been it probably would have still been too discombobulated to bite me. Maybe not, since when I googled rattlesnakes of texas to find out what kinds of rattlesnakes live in Texas I found a story about the decapitated head of a Western diamondback rattlesnake that bit a man and nearly killed him, so clearly for rattlesnakes there’s no such thing as being too discombobulated to bite a stupid human. (I typed rattlesnack instead of rattlesnake just now, which is definitely a sign from the universe.) A man said my name. As if flailing on my balcony while trying to fling off a snake that had already bounced off my face, landed on my ratty lawn chair, and hurled itself to freedom in the landscaping rocks below wasn’t discombobulating enough, a strange man was calling my name.

Ms. Tassell? he said.

I stopped flailing and looked at him, blankly, trying to decide whether I should run inside and barricade the door or fling myself to my death.

Are you Ms. Sarah Tassell?

He checked the paper on his clipboard. He looked like a used-car salesman, dressed in an ill-fitting suit with a giant red tie, all Texaned up in cowboy boots and a black Stetson. I don’t really know if it was a Stetson; Stetson is just the only brand of cowboy hat I know. I believe the term for that is metonymy or something but I got a C in lit crit so I wouldn’t listen to me. Statistics were on the side of him being a used-car salesman, since aside from working in oil and/or gas all the jobs in Amarillo are mainly retail, food service, or being a used-car salesman, but there was something about him that suggested he wasn’t really a used-car salesman. Whatever he did for a living, whoever had sent him there looking for me, I didn’t want to talk to him.

I just want to ask you a few questions, he said. I won’t take up much of your time, he said.

When he went around the corner to walk up the stairs that led to my door I climbed over the railing and, mad snake in the rocks be damned, jumped into the juniper bush outside my downstairs neighbors’ balcony. I didn’t die or even break anything. I ran as fast and as far as I could, which was to a restaurant that used to be a gas station up on Wolflin, the nearest road to my apartment. To be fair, it’s a wonky road and it jogs away from my building so it wasn’t like I just ran for a hundred feet and stopped. More like a hundred yards.

And that’s when I discovered gravy. At a dirty-looking restaurant called Restaurant in West Amarillo. I said to the nine-hundred-year-old waitress, What is chicken-fried steak? Is it chicken or steak? She grabbed a plate of it off the neighboring table and showed me what it looks like.

It’s cow meat, she said. Chicken-fried.

OK, I said. Can I get that with queso?

Don’t got no queso, she said, very unTexanlike, but it come with gravy.

Oh, I said. Does gravy have cheese in it?

You a vegetarian? she said.

I just ordered the chicken-fried cow meat.

Just checking. You coulda been a vegan. Vegans don’t consume anything that come from a animal.

Not much time passed before she plopped a plate on the table before me. There on the plate were some disintegrating green beans, a turdpile-covered-in-snow-esque mound of mashed potatoes, and the aforementioned chicken-fried cow meat. She set down a bowl of gravy.

I put your gravy on the side, case you was a vegan.

So it does have cheese, I said excitedly.

Nah.

Humans are overrated, but gravy is not. Gravy is a gift from the gods. How had I lived my whole life without gravy? For the first time in my life I felt resentment toward my parents. They loved me, they cared for me, they read to me, sent me to good schools and didn’t burden me with a sibling, but I’ll never forgive them for depriving me of gravy.

I have a love-hate relationship with food: I love food and I hate myself and everyone else and pretty much everything except food.

I was vegetarian for about nine years, until I realized no one else really cares about animals or the planet or their bodies or anything, no one else is trying to be a good person, so why should I deny myself bacon? At any minute I might get shot dead in the street or the mall or at work or a party or a picnic or a school or a movie theater or a gas station or a bank or a fair or a restaurant or a concert or a sidewalk or a church or a parking lot or a public restroom or my home. At any minute I might get run down by a van or blown up at a community event or crushed by an out-of-control satellite, or something more mundane might happen like I could get strangled or beaten or trampled or stabbed or macheteed or raped and murdered, raped and murdered and raped again, or raped and decapitated like a discombobulated snake. I take the long view: I’ll be a vegetarian for trillions of years when I’m dead.

Even today, even with my new yen for gravy and queso, I could definitely be a vegan if cheese had never been invented. But cheese has been invented and if the government ever banned cheese, and there’s really no telling what the government’s going to do anymore, I would become a cheese outlaw, engaging in gruyèrilla warfare, milking cows and goats in underground dairies, learning secret knocks and handshakes as I bootleg brie to the oppressed cheese lovers of America. Brad and I were just back from a five-mile run when I decided to leave him. He wanted to make us a smoothie using something called kefir.

What’s kefir?

It’s the champagne of yogurt. It’s drinkable yogurt. It’s super good for you. Loads of probiotics.

I almost started crying. Instead I just said,