The Blue Label


Johnnie Walker Black brings a picture of a soft-squared bottle filled with amber fluid. It has notes of caramel and sweet oak on the nose. In the throat, it burns and suffuses into the stomach tissues with a soft glow. It has a black strip label running at angle upwards from left to right ending a point two-thirds of the way up the bottle.

Gold letters intaglio the label.

There is a lesser-known Johnnie Walker. It is the select brand. It has a blue label. It is noticeably different on the palate. It is smoother, softer and more complex at first taste. The faintest hint of the peat and bogs remain as the flavor explodes in finishing. On a good night you can also taste vanilla, toasted almond, sherry, oak, spice, chocolate and smoke. It is also damn expensive and released only in numbered bottles.

Gold letters intaglio the label.

We were more than halfway finished with the bottle of the blue label. We hunched lower into the bar with every drink. We looked like we were telling each other dark secrets as the upright bustle went over and around and through us. To pull the heavy rocks glass to the lips and watch was to see a little exhaling puff of condensation coming out of the mouth and roll across the ice as a fog over the sea.

It was one of those uselessly fascinating things you notice when you’re drunk.

At first glance, we were typical drinking strangers early on a Saturday night. The kind of companionship that alcohol will start: sending small spinning worlds to collide without care for class or color. It was a long bar, finished with a granite top that was cool to the touch, even on this humid August evening. A paneled wall of glass separated us from the sticky heat. The sidewalk sat just beyond, with gleaming meters standing at attention in the electrified air.

Louis Vuitton purses marched up and down past the windows leading silk floral print shirts.

Johnny is small and dark. He has dark features and perfect black hair combed for a cameo in American Graffiti. I have a good sixty pounds and six inches on him. I have curly dark hair and skin paled by years of the vampire life you inherit while working in restaurants. He is convinced he can out-drink me.

“Mexicanos can drink more than gringos,” he punctuates his statement with a violently macho gesture, slugs his drink and suddenly puts his arm around my shoulders. Well he tries, finds it a difficult reach for all the alcohol and size disparity, and ends up sliding close against my shoulder; nestling into my armpit. He reeks of machismo, melancholy, and scotch whiskey.

His face has turned dark. “America is a great country.” He looks at his drink and shakes his head, bird-like. “America,” he sighs. “You know, when I have my own restaurant in Mexico,” another attempt at a sweeping gesture, “You can be a Capitan for me.”

“Maybe I can be a gringo busboy for you. Then people will say ‘look how good Johnny did in America, he comes back and the gringos bus tables for him.’” I liked saying “gringo.” It was one of the few Spanish words I had complete mastery over.

No, no. You are a Capitan.”

“I hope you won’t have the blue label.”

“I will have many tequilas. Hundreds. The food will be good. It will be clean,” he grimaced, as he tasted his next words, “In Mexico, so many places are not clean.” His dream filled the space without words as we waited for another round to magically appear. For a moment, it was already real and we were there. At his bar.

He was writing on a napkin, very precisely in capital letters. He was using a black Pilot G-2 pen. It was a pen type that I had started using some months ago. Restaurant people tended to be very particular about their writing instruments and this relatively new pen had swept through the staff from Capitan to kitchen in weeks. It’s dark ink would lay and glisten wetly on a white page for what seemed like ages but would barely be the time it took to walk into the loud heated kitchen, full of French and anger.

“You know why I went home for four months?” He was intent on the forming of the letters and fell further over the napkin. “You lost a child,” I said carefully.
“She was five. Five-and-a-half. She was beautiful, man. She was everything.” He finished with the napkin and started nodding to himself. He looked around the bar. He looked at the bottom of his glass. He looked out the window as ribbons of light played over it.

We are on a dusty street on a bright mid-day. The row houses have a sweep of laundry in the open windows. Grey t-shirts flap in the window above a box of marigolds. A nominally silver bus vomits a trail of dark fumes as it hunches around a corner. The steps to the apartments are worn and soft and lack handrails. The smell is industrial and wafting garbage mingles with manzanita. Half-sized cars lurch into quarter-sized spaces and stop. Others break around them like birds in flight, open windows hissing and humming.

Everywhere people. Rings burst open like slow-moving fireworks and fade onto the street, between cars and into doorways lined with handwritten signs. A large woman walks along the sidewalk carefully holding a plastic bag. The bag is thin and worn. The light blue is transparent in places and only a single letter “a” remains legible from the label.

An old man sits on a stoop making paper flowers to sell to tourists. He wears a black-banded Panama hat with one of his red flowers stuck into it. His skinny arms rest on the knees of his charcoal pleated trousers. His hands work automatically while his eyes watch the street. A gold crucifix hangs outside his white wife-beater t-shirt. Black, scuffed wing-tips tap without rhythm as he puts another finished bloom in the plastic bucket next to him.

And then there is the girl. She is beautiful and dark and angular. She has the face of a grinning fox and eyes of polished onyx. She runs likes she’s been doing it her whole life, joyfully. If there is music, we cannot hear it as we watch her. The bustle of the street and the unmufflered roar of the passing cars and mopeds takes up all the space in our heads for a moment. She slips away from the crowds and into traffic. A taxi comes hard and fast at a dancing triangle of white. It is a linen dress cut off sharply over skipping legs.

There is a hard moment as the black hair bunches up all around the face and settles in a dark cloud over her eyes. The dirty bare feet sit at an unfamiliar angle to the sky.

It is perhaps the first time that they both lay still, untouched by the dust and noise.

The large woman kneels at the girl’s side and carefully puts her thin bag close to her own hammy legs. The “a” is still visible. She brushes hair from a forehead with a stranger’s awkwardness. She does not know the line of the cheek or the proud nose, but she is a mother and she does what she can as the cars and people gather.

A bright light and rumble fill the bar. It is just some guy in a Porsche pulling into a parking spot outside. The guy getting out of it is clearly trolling for a new trophy wife or one night of relief from his semi-arranged marriage. His eyes dart around and mark every cocktail waitress and hostess in the place as he comes up to the door.

The roar made both of us look because it reminds us of the guy who drives the midnight black GT500 Shelby Mustang. A broad New York accent and heavy gold rings break up the cultivated Easternese of the Main Line when he stops in for Jacopo Poli Moscato brandy at the Italian restaurant next door. He would tip one of the aimless rebels hanging out on the wooden corner benches $50 to watch his car while he drank.

Small darts of silver flashed from the pierced and baby fat faces in the dark as the world of their parents continued to pull at them despite their best efforts.

A puff of heat follows the Porsche guy into the bar and quickly dissipates in the air-conditioning.
He walks securely up to the bar in penny loafers, shorts and a soft green flowered silk shirt. He makes eye contact with the bartender who comes over with a nod to the man. The bartender has a way of placing both his hands on the bar top and leaning into to a customer with direct eye contact. It is smart psychologically. It gives the customer attention without ceding control to them.

A Grey Goose martini is ordered and Johnny and I begin to ignore him.

“How long until you go back to open your place?” I ask him. He shrugs again and looks at me.
“Another two years, maybe,” he answers. “But this place. Sometimes I don’t want to leave it. Maybe I think I can get my wife to come here.” He shakes his head at the two ice cubes in the glass. “She can’t. She doesn’t know this place. She would not be happy.”

The martini guy twists in his seat to stare at a passing waitress. He does not even bother to use the wall mirror to watch her as she shoulders a rack of wine glasses over the counter top.

“There is no market here,” decides Johnny. He makes a small gesture and his fingers sweep across the cool stone in front of me, a tentative caress. He takes his hand back and a napkin sits folded on the bar.

“My daughter,” he says. He jerks his head towards it as I stare at the white splotch on granite. The black ink sits in bold and practiced angles as I open it. “America.”

America Lizeth Sandoval Ventura.