Chapter Five
JUNIE
The concept was simple, which is the hardest thing a concept can be.
THE SAINT AND SUNSHINE brEAKFAST TACO CRAWL.
Three stops, south to north. A grumpy Minnesotan goalie encounters the holiest food in Texas while his alleged girlfriend films it, the city watches him fall for their tacos as a proxy for their team, and the whole thing costs the franchise forty dollars and my dignity.
Engagement gold. I’d have pitched it even without the fraud.
He looked at it for a while.
“Solange,” I said. “Beyoncé’s sister. The team replaced her. There was a card. Pickle drew a small memorial puck on it, it was extremely moving, you were the only one who didn’t sign.”
“I wasn’t going to sign the card for the thing I killed.”
“That’s exactly when you sign the card, Saint. That’s what the card is FOR.”
Stop one, Juanita’s on South First, a turquoise trailer with a line at 7:55 in the morning, which in Austin is how you know.
I’d cleared the filming with the owner, who’d asked only that we not block the salsa station, “because people get weird.” I mic’d Saint in the parking lot, and this time he watched me clip the pack on with an attention that felt pointed.
“Checking it’s off before I say anything,” he said. “I’ve been burned.”
“You’ve been FAMOUS. There’s a difference.”
“Is there.”
I ran the segment like this: he tastes, he rates, ten-point scale. My working assumption was that I’d be doing color commentary over a series of grunts, which honestly would have cut together fine, grumpy goalie content practically edits itself.
He took one bite of Juanita’s brisket taco, chewed, looked into the lens, and said, “The brisket has been on smoke since before I woke up, and I wake up at 6:15. Whoever made this salsa has a grudge against someone specific and I respect it. The tortilla is handmade, you can tell because it forgives you. Eight point five.”
I lowered the phone. The line at the trailer had gone quiet. Somewhere behind me a man whispered “the tortilla forgives you” like scripture.
“You can TALK?”
“You never asked me about anything worth sentences.”
“You did nine interviews last season. You said ‘yep’ in eight of them.”
“None of them were about brisket.”
“Cut,” I said, faintly. “Perfect. Don’t do anything different ever again.”
“The scale only goes to ten because nothing’s earned it,” he told the man in line, who nodded like he’d received counsel.
Behind the window, Juanita herself leaned out and asked what the brisket got, and when I said eight point five, she looked at Saint for a long moment and said, “Fair,” which from Juanita was a knighthood.
Stop two, El Búho on Manchaca, where the migas taco arrived crackling, and he gave a fried egg a seven and defended the score against a heckler in line (“the yolk was fully set. I don’t make the rules, I enforce them”), and between bites he asked the counter guy how long the salsa verde sat before service, and the counter guy told him, and they had a ninety-second conversation about tomatillos that I filmed in its entirety with tears of pure content joy in my eyes.
Grumpy goalie discovers he has opinions about produce.
You cannot write this. I had tried to write this, for two years, and the secret ingredient the whole time was apparently just asking him about food and standing back.
Stop three, Bandido’s up on Airport, where a breakfast taco the size of a forearm got a nine point five and the first documented public smile in Lars Lindell’s professional history. Two degrees, exactly as coached. The January thaw. I got it in 4K.
For the thumbnail I used the frame right after the nine point five, his two-degree smile next to my full unhinged delight, teal sky behind us, and I titled it THE GOALIE RATES AUSTIN, PART ONE, because a numbered part one is a promise, and promises are retention, and retention was going to keep this team out of Connecticut if I had to feed that man every tortilla in Travis County.
I posted it from the parking lot while he ate a second taco off-camera, hunched over the hood of my Corolla like a heron.
By the time we hit the highway, the video was doing numbers that made the wrist clip look like a soft open.
The comments were a stampede. HE RATES TACOS IN FULL PARAGRAPHS.
The tortilla forgives you is going on my HEADSTONE.
A local news account asked to license it.
Rich texted me a GIF of fireworks, then a screenshot of ticket sales, then just the word HARTFORD followed by a tombstone emoji, which I chose to find festive.
The committee weighed in at a red light, because Mason had added me to the group chat the day the arrangement went live, “per rule 1, sunshine, welcome to hell.”
Mason: he gave a taco a personality. bud talks to TACOS now Pickle: he’s never said that many words to me and i assist his hobby Noa: his hobby is stopping pucks, Pickle, you shoot them AT him Pickle: we all contribute Mason: junie what’s your secret.
we’ve been trying to make him talk since preseason Junie: brisket and spite. i’ll write it up for the coaching staff
Here’s the thing I want to say about the morning, for the record, before the part I didn’t post: it was fun.
Actually fun, not content-fun. He was funny in that delayed-flight way where the joke lands a beat after his face has already moved on, and I kept volleying, and he kept receiving, and somewhere around stop two I noticed I’d stopped narrating myself.
Usually there’s a Junie in my head with a clipboard going, warmer, brighter, less, careful, that laugh was too loud.
She’d gone quiet around the migas. I didn’t notice her missing until she came back at the third stop, when I caught myself being enjoyed and immediately checked the framing.
But that’s not the part either. The part happened at Bandido’s.
Between stops he’d asked about the content calendar, which no player had ever done, and I’d shown him the spreadsheet at a red light, and he’d studied it the way he studies game film and then said, “You do all this alone,” with no question mark on it, and I’d made a joke about Solange being staff and he hadn’t laughed, which somehow made it worse, or better. I was losing track of which was which.
I was at the back of the line answering Rich’s fireworks, half present, doing the thing where I run four conversations and am fully inside none of them, and Saint had drifted ahead to order because line-standing made him visibly itchy, a man built to guard one rectangle forever but not to queue.
And I heard him say, to the cashier, in his flat deposition voice:
“Migas, corn tortillas, double avocado, no onions. Hot sauce on the side. And whatever taco you’d defend in an argument, for me.”
I looked up from my phone.
He hadn’t asked me. I hadn’t told him. I’d ordered it once, five days ago, at Marge’s, mid-negotiation, at auctioneer speed, while he was allegedly reading Rule 3, and he’d said nothing, and here it came back out of him whole, casual, correct down to the side of hot sauce, like a puck he’d caught last week and calmly handed back.
“What,” he said, catching me staring.
“Nothing. You went off-script. There’s no script, but you went off it.”
“You get weird when you’re hungry. You’ve been weird since Manchaca. It’s a food-safety intervention.” He handed me the bag. “Eat, Bloom. Solange can’t fix everything.”
“Sure, but you got the ORDER off it. The whole order. The hot sauce was ON THE SIDE, Lindell.”
“Goalies track loose details. It’s the position.” He said it to the middle distance, already walking to the bench, subject closed, and I stood there holding a warm paper bag and a fact that would not fit in any of my folders.
So I ate my exact order in the morning sun on a bench outside a taco place, next to a man who was contractually obligated to be seen with me, and it was the best breakfast I’d had in eight months.
A grackle patrolled the parking lot like security.
The morning was already warm enough to promise a brutal afternoon, and I did not care even slightly.
Back at the arena I cut the footage into THE GOALIE RATES AUSTIN, PART ONE, and it did numbers that made Rich walk a lap of the office touching furniture, and I drafted captions the way I always draft captions, ten options, pick the safest. Somewhere around option seven my thumbs wrote “he listens.” and I looked at it for a long time.
You can’t post that. You can post brisket scores and January thaw smiles and a man buckling a ring light into a passenger seat like precious cargo. You cannot post the true thing.
I deleted it letter by letter, which took longer than typing it, and filed the feeling under equipment.
Eleven days in, and I was already writing things I couldn’t afford to publish.