Cooking With Ice

If you asked, I couldn’t tell you what an ICE agent actually looks like—but I can tell you what they feel like. ICE never had to barge into my kitchens for me to know they were always there. Their omnipresence oozed through every story my coworkers told me. 

I arrived in Los Angeles, knife kit in hand, and my life quickly tangled up with those of my immigrant compas. Most came from south of the border—or south of that—and damn near all of them had families they supported both here and at home. They punched in earliest, left latest, and complained the least. Sometimes I think about how ungrateful I must’ve sounded, bitching about low wages in my twenties, while they wouldn’t dare demand their worth—even in their fifties. 

In that world, asking for a raise is ballsy—almost instigative. For those of us expecting one just for another year of annual mediocrity, we must look entitled. I worked with a guy who rolled over 500 pizza dough balls a day, every day, for over five years—forearms of a god. When I got hired, I was already making more than him. But he never asked for more. Instead, he found solace in being able to pay rent and date the pastry chef from his neighboring country—with her husband’s blessing. She and her husband both had second families—a choice they’d made long ago to stay happy after splitting countries to support their three kids in Mexico. The kind of compromises that are made to survive immigration to the world's hardest gated cities are things that would cause our fragile American soft spots to cave in. 

It was my second month in LA and I was still half-looking for a sugar daddy to take away the sting of manual labor when I landed at Hutchinson Bar & Grill, an Indonesian spot. After the expected kitchen hazing, nasi rice and satay skewers filled my days as me and the crew bonded, and finally one day Manny asked if I wanted to smoke after work. 

In restaurant life, getting offered to hang out post-shift is the highest honor; you basically live with everyone you work with, so you gotta really like someone to want to spend any unpaid time with them. We wrapped up closing duties, walked my bike around the corner, and posted up on a quiet residential street near La Cienega. Manny pulled out a well-used bowl and packed a pathetic pinch of parched weed in it before singeing it with a torch lighter. He passed it and apologized about the cleanliness as I ripped it and waved off his concerns, beating my chest to show I was a real smoker. “Yeah, iss just old. I used to hit the tina in there.” I almost threw up, panic-sweeping my system to check if I’d just hit some three-year-old meth. 

“You fuck with that?” I asked coolly, trying not to sound judgy.

“Used to,” he said, repacking it. “Issa gay thing,” he said matter-of-factly. I hit it again. 

Manny was an out and obvious member of the community, the latter enforcing the former, and he was coming up on his 5th year in the City of Angels. When he arrived, the vast underground web of Mexican Angelenos had helped him secure fake papers on Alvarado and grab some gogo dancing gigs to stay afloat. Someone plugged him at the Hutch and he’d been there since. 

I asked if he’d ever been home. 

“What home?” he coughed, then looked out into the warm night. “I can’t be this, there.” I got it. His family ties vanished when it became undeniable he wasn’t machismo, that he favored the softer sides of the male experience. It was an immediate street sentence. 

He’d found kin among the other ostracized beauties dotting Tijuana’s alleys, exchanging favors for hope. “Iss not that bad,” he mused into the dark. He told stories about the types of men that would visit the alleys—how they were mostly straight, mostly married, mostly fathers. He told me how the cartel would drop in every now and then asking for him because he was the girliest of the girls. He gave me a demonstrative twirl. 

But the streets couldn’t cradle him forever. Manny said he knew he had to leave when doing tina only on Saturdays turned into tina every day; the drug use to assault ratio tends to follow a pretty linear path. America still felt impossibly far—until one night he was laid up with a cartel regular who said he traveled frequently and with ease between borders. The man talked of wealth to be had, the men to be had, the freedom. He must’ve seen the glitter in Manny’s eyes—tantalizing thoughts of sovereignty in the bright lights of a big American city. He asked how bad Manny wanted it. More than anything. 

And since Manny had nothing to his name, he offered Manny a trade that at first seemed stakeless: Be mine, and I’ll take you. “But he took all of me,” and this he said with a different voice—not the confident Spanish sass I had come to know. He was stuck somewhere between here and there. Manny had traded his move to America for one session of unprotected sex with an HIV-positive individual. Manny had traded the only thing he had left, his health, for a chance to live.

He walked an imaginary tightrope in the empty, palm-lined lane while I ignorantly wiped my mouth of any remaining HIV particles. I knew better, but instinct took over and I instantly felt ashamed. He didn’t chastise me—rather, offered another bowl, which I gratefully accepted as a chance to redeem myself.

I gently asked if he ever had flare-ups, thinking back to that time he got a cut over the vat of brunch egg scramble. “Not really. But it keeps me skinny,” he taunted, showing off his slightly gaunt figure again. I looked at his collarbones and the little round bones protruding from the sides of his kneecaps under the twitching street light. He was young—and the most alive he’d ever been—here, in America, with the disease of false promises eating him in the shadows. 

Suddenly, he shoved his hand in his pocket and pulled out a shiny silver ring. “Wanna hold it?” he asked, dropping it in my hand. It was heavy. 

“You carry a napkin holder?” 

He burst out laughing, nearly choking. “That’s a cock ring, foo.” I recoiled, handing it back like a soiled linen. 

“Iss not dirty, girl!... It was his.” He paused. “You can keep it.” 

To this day, I don’t know why I accepted, but I still have it. It lives in my medicine cabinet. I can’t throw away the memory—his or mine.

The kitchen has always been a haven for the displaced. For immigrants, it’s often the first “home” in the States. I think about the family I’ve made there, the stories I’ve heard, the survival it took to get here, and I wonder if they aren’t more American—more full of grit—than the average citizen who complains from the couch. I think the concept of “they’re taking our jobs” is a copout slogan for someone thinking they’re above dishwashing or custodial work; if you’re mad that you’re underqualified, just say that. 

The U.S. government decided to militarize against its most hardworking inhabitants in one of our biggest cities. ICE has forced LA to burn—because that’s the only way to answer an attempted dictatorship. You must defend the people you love—especially when the powers that be say and act as though they don’t deserve protection. 

The fear of being snatched up, deported, erased—that’s something my kitchen family breathes in daily, and my lungs cannot help but lie heavy with theirs. I’ve seen what they’ve given to get what most of us take for granted. 

Manny hit the bowl again, twirling to the rhythm of his own high while I thumbed at the stickers on my bike. 

“Do you hate him?” I asked softly. He paused, smiled. “I miss him.” 

“Even with…?” He spun again, like the sky was calling him. “I’d rather be dying here, than living there.”