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How to Gift on Easter

As everyone knows, Easter is a great time to give – and, even better – to receive gifts. Since gift-giving and gift-receiving can be a little fraught, even during such an ordinary gift-giving holiday as Easter, I thought it’d be helpful to share a few pointers for both you amazing givers and, maybe more importantly, all you givees out there.

First, a correction: Easter is not about ham. That is a lie perpetuated by the mass media.

It might be about lamb, though. (A professor once told me that the ham-lamb confusion is due to a mistranslation from Aramaic to Greek.)

Second: it’s always good to have a basic understanding for what exactly is going with Easter. Why? Because historical knowledge always makes for better gift-giving decisions (it’s her history of giving me a new keychain every year that helps my mom know what to get me next year). So a little historical background: Easter, as you certainly know, is a famously religious holiday. It’s all about how the physical son of the Lord, Jesus, came back from the dead in the form of a gigantic rabbit. In Irish parlance, this is known as a “pooka.”

Understandably, Pooka Rabbit Jesus was shy about coming back from the dead: it’s a little embarrassing to have to tell people who think you’re dead and who grieved over you and buried you that nope, nothing to worry about, everything’s fine. Plus: you’re a rabbit—rabbits are fundamentally shy. So Pooka Rabbit Jesus sort of shyly snuck around the cemetery, hiding hints and references both to his existence and to cultural texts, and anyone who found his clues received their choice of foil-wrapped chocolate in the shape of bunny or egg or, if they had a chocolate allergy, jelly beans.

So that’s Easter: that’s where Easter comes from.

Since Easter is such a famously religious holiday, it’s best to be careful not to be offensive about it. No snickering about religion, people. This disqualifies several gift-giving options:

No ham.
No Snickers.
No funny business.

Helpfully, there are two clear Easter gift-buying options:

Category 1: Religious Easter Gifts

Despite my historical knowledge, I’m actually not as religious as you might think, and I’m a little hesitant to make Easter-religious-gift suggestions. But only a little! Things that I think would make good Easter religious gifts include: Sea Peeps (like Sea Monkeys, only Peeps; they come back from the dead); emptied eggs re-filled with confetti and dyed, made to smash upon a loved one’s head; gold-leaf Bibles; amazing portraits of Jesus; prayer books; Amy Grant albums; and so on.

Did you know: Easter is a riff on Passover? That Jesus was culturally appropriating – but in a good way, of course?

Category 2: Commercial Easter Gifts

Did I mention my mom? She is really, really good at giving me commercial Easter presents. Each year, the postal delivery person brings us a huge cardboard box, and the box is filled with any variety of things—all, of course, Easter related. Many years there’s a basket, often dyed a bright color (the color washes off your fingers if you scrub hard enough). Usually inside and around the basket is a whole bunch of little strands of green plastic. This is a simulacrum of grass. But it’s plastic! It will last forever! In and around the grass are the aforementioned Easter presents: various chocolate eggs and jelly beans. Sometimes there are cards with rabbits. Sometimes there are stone eggs painted in various designs; these are for hiding in the yard. Sometimes there are stuffed animal rabbits, like a thing for kids, but which, even as an adult, a person should appreciate and cherish.

This year? Not only is there an Easter-themed door jangle, there’s also a huge ceramic bunny-shaped chip-and-dip!

So many commercial Easter presents! As long as the present embodies or at least nods toward the origin of the holiday, as long as there is some semblance of Jesus, or coming back to life, or a rabbit, or an egg, or chocolate, or other candy: it’s a perfect Easter gift.

All that said? The best Easter gift of all has to be, of course, the piñata. A piñata in the shape of enormous rabbit head—set, if, you so choose, upon the body of Jesus. This magical Easter piñata can be filled with whatever goods you want (but it’s probably best to stick with candy). Each year, a few days before the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, the postal delivery person rings the doorbell; each year, I go to the door, hoping that there will, in the doorway, the hanging rabbit-head-Jesus-body piñata I’ve always wanted. That perfect combination of all things Easter.

It hasn’t happened yet. A boy can dream.

So for now: I smile and lovingly open whatever gift I get, because that’s the main thing there: be grateful for any Easter present. The wind chimes. The plastic grass. The chip-and-dip. It’s all a celebration of that faraway day—and if you keep that in mind, you won’t feel any regret at all, you’ll just feel happy, thrumming through the day on a wave of sugar, faith, and love.

On Being Hacked Off, Judged by Authorial Spies, and a story by Manuel Muñoz

I went on a trip across Los Angeles last week/end and “realized” myself in a really nifty place where some – only some – of Gandhi’s ashes are scattered. Then I went to the Getty Villa, an amazing recreation of a Vesuvian something. Then a winery in Malibu. I was with two of my high school buddies, the plastic surgeon and the fire captain, and we were trying really hard to have fun, but it was all so tiring and boring. Like: even when you’re doing totally normal things like hanging out all day with your high school bros in the sun in Malibu, man, life, it’s just sorta . . . dull. I know lots of people have it hard and all but not having it hard is its own weird burden. Also I have no idea how strongly my sarcasm comes across and that makes me a little anxious.

After that difficult idyll, I got home and checked my new fancy webpage, and lo and behold: some A**HOLE had infiltrated the code and put in a Twitter feed. I have suspicions about who did this – I don’t care, I’ll name him here: Chris the Jervski Jerskeevilous – but now I don’t know how to get him off. (NPIBNTITILI: no pun intended but now that it’s there I like it – duh). The feed seems harmless but it isn’t. What if someone is offended by the impersonator me? Because I’m not taking the blame for “my” own actions, okay? Can we agree on that? It’s like when the fake Alice Waters Twitter thing was posted about how big a prick Anthony Bourdain – close enough to real but not, like, real?

(Sidenote: I tried to set up a real Twitter account while I was at the winery. Wow: wine, sand, sun, a day at a museum: not the best conditions!)

In other news, awhile back I wrote a story, which is less important than but directly related to getting along with Bryan Hurt, such a fantastic human being that we all call him the salted part of the earth. Bryan – well, he has a PhD – Doctor Hurt has edited a lovely looking and very timely (or damn close, anyway) collection of stories on the topic surveillance. The book, Watchlist, is going to be phenomenal – not only because one of my stories is in it but because the other authors included are all very much better writers/people than me, as you’ll see.

To kick off the anthology, apparently all the contributing authors (save me) got together for a weekend in Boise and filled out a judgment sheet – most presses have writers do this, right? – and now, below, you can see how they ranked each other. (I did not vote in this. Hence my crappy ranking.) To explain, though: the talent of the authors in the collection – as writers – is shown by the first digit; the second is their rank as human beings:

5/22 Robert Coover

15/10 Katherine Karlin

21/27 Randa Jarrar

7/20 T. Coraghessan Boyle

20/6 Cory Doctorow

42/31 Sean Bernard

9/17 Chanelle Benz

23/1 Miracle Jones

4/13 Alissa Nutting

16/12 Mark Irwin

10/16 Alexis Landau

6/24 Lucy Corin

22/2 Charles Yu

11/9 Juan Pablo Villalobos

14/27 Jim Shepard

12/14 Chika Unigwe

3/26 Bonnie Nadzam

26/3 Bryan Hurt

1/4 Lincoln Michel (congrats, Lincoln! Highest overall average!)

2/5 Dana Johnson

21/21 Mark Chiusano

13/27 Dale Peck

17/7 Kelly Luce

4/19 Zhang Ran

18/21 Miles Klee

12/18 Carmen Maria Machado

23/23 David Abrams

8/24 Etgar Keret

19/13 Steven Hayward

18/11 Deji Bryce Olukotun

14/8 Aimee Bender

25/15 Paul Di Filippo

My feelings are only slightly hurt. My story in the collection, “California,” is muchly inspired by the great Huell Howser. This guy:

Every time I see Huell on TV (he’s passed, sadly), I wonder: was he joking or was he also, like me, being sincere? And that’s the question which brings me to Manuel Muñoz and the notion of authenticity. I learned about Munoz’s first collection Zigzagger while glancing over the publications of current fiction faculty at UofA.* Ordered the book, read the book, and it’s very good for a few reasons I want to try to talk about. Zigzagger was published in 2003. It’s better than a whole lot of contemporary fiction. Maybe because there’s so much contemporary fiction. Maybe because it’s pre-HTMLGiant and lacks quippiness (I’m just guessing it’s pre-HTMLGiant, I have no idea; plus the writers over there are frequently splendid, so I’ll shut up now). Probably it just suits my tastes.

The story “Hombres” at first reads like a mini-travel writing portrait straight out of The New Yorker, mid-1950’s: describing a general type of New York men with a cascading series of comma splices, a rhythm calm but consciously created:

There’s not much to tell about them except they whistle Sondheim, they hum. They wear shirts that are not just white shirts, but Italian and expensive to the cuff.

The story then describes these generalized men – in flat detail, but with noticeable condescension – and then lightly mentions how they, when they go to their cafés, consider the thin-waisted brown server boy who “reminds them of vases they own.” The men began telling the boy their stories – empty and generic stories, as presented on the page. But rather than providing the boy’s response, the narrative shifts to first-person:

I can’t explain the men in the city who lived in rural towns and now seek out Italian shirts. I can’t explain the ones who stroke the softness of the cloth and ask me to do the same, before they tell me of the same father and uncle, the fists and the adolescence. But I envy the way in which the skyscrapers and the street bustle convinces their tone, that they speak like no one has stories and everyone should listen.

I watch how, bit by bit, it is their hands that become important . . . .

The story’s final paragraph returns to the vague boy, who is a plaything/audience for the vaguely predatorial (but more than anything else self-impressed and boring) men; Muñoz ends by considering the boy’s thoughts rather than continuing in the suddenly intrusive first-person. His narrator’s implied anger is kept at bay, which keeps the story’s conclusion calm, constructed, at arm’s length. I don’t think this last paragraph eschewing of the narrator’s voice ‘works’ as well as it could (by this I mean: it doesn’t ‘bring out’ the remarkably quick effects already achieved but rather shifts our attentions elsewhere) but the story, just two pages long, is entirely impressive in its prose, details, tone, structure, and overall effect.

Two things.

The fury – constructed, seething, almost silent – is wonderful. This is entirely preferential but I prefer strongly-toned stories. Sorrow. Anger. Ebullience. I find them more impactful – louder. Even melancholy – the louder it gets, the more wonderful (as in, say, Housekeeping, another literary work that feels steeped in authenticity).

The sudden shift in “Hombres” – from a distant drowsy third person into a thoughtful, observant, and angrily judgmental first person narration, and then back out again – isn’t only structurally impressive but, I’d say more importantly, creates an aura of authenticity. Third-person narration is a (perfectly fine) lie: it’s the stuff of fiction, to pretend there is no author. To begin with that narrative façade and then to suddenly strip it away, an author can (seemingly) step out of the narrative, revealing himself or herself and saying, This is my story. This, what I’m telling you here, is true. It doesn’t matter if it *is* actually true – not to me, anyway – but in the moment of reading, the stakes get raised, that vague authorial 3rd-person voice becomes a real face glaring in our, saying, Do you hear me? Do you?

Along with many other impressive things, Zigzagger is filled with such moments, moments in which – by craft or by authorial instinct or personal need, it doesn’t matter – the tale suddenly becomes truth, the hazy meaning sharpens and snaps into the (seemingly) real. This is not just meta fun, either – the narrative peeking out in Zigzagger isn’t gamesy or cute (and I do enjoy many stories that are gamesy/cute): it’s a more heightened style of ‘realism,’ actually, and it’s an impactful and interesting approach.

*Dear this year’s UofA fiction prof search committee: the story I wrote in my upcoming collection titled “Pistoleros,” in which the narrator applies to a fiction job at UofA, doesn’t get the job, and whines about it? I wrote that in 2012, long before your 2014-2015 opening. My story: absolutely a work of fiction. A good one, too, I think – but fiction.

Hilltop’s Jamaican Market & Restaurant | Pomona, CA

Friday, June 8th | Hilltop’s Jamaican Market & Restaurant | 1061 E. Holt Ave, Pomona, CA 91767

We are sad. We are sad. We are sad.

And, still, hungry. Today: comfort food. Early afternoon, we take White Avenue down to Holt (odd avenue-on-avenue action), and there hook eastward on Holt, passing many of the diverse, independent, and strange shops and restaurants Pomona has to offer. (Someone should really write up Holt, one block at a time, cataloging all its offerings, all the people to be seen.)

Past Reservoir, we flip a u-turn and park in front of Hilltop’s (parking in the back; learn from our mistakes). We walk into a hybrid market/restaurant: one half market, really an eight-foot-wide island of back-to-back shelves and four refrigerators fat with Jamaican cooking staples – curries, jerks, cornmeal, plantains, hot sauces. A cash register sits between the market and the other half, the restaurant, an indoor-thatched roof bar above a smoothie stand in the back and, in the front and middle, about eight tables seating 2-4 people each. Fans turn. The outside day is hot and oppressive; in here, the air is cool. Jamaican décor decorates on the walls (Usain Bolt, check; no bobsledding team: fine). An older couple is quietly finishing their meal. A talk show plays on a wall-mounted flatscreen TV. A woman at the register welcomes us, gives her recommendations, then takes our orders and directs us to sit.

We take turns browsing the market as we wait for our food. The wait isn’t long; the curried items at Hilltop’s are slow cooked, so they’re already prepared in the back kitchen. We’ve ordered a curry chicken pattie ($2.75), a small curry goat ($13; sides: plantains, bean/rice mix, cabbage and vegetables, goat, and a festival, essentially a free-form cornmeal donut), and a small jerk chicken ($12.95; same sides save steamed spinach in place of the cabbage mix).

First the pattie: we’ve had pot pies. We’ve had Welsh pasties. We’ve had meat pies, empanadas, samosas, and other types of stew-filled breads. The curry chicken pattie at Hilltop’s is the best we’ve ever had. The crust is beautifully layered despite its thinness, and the curry chicken stew, spread evenly throughout the pattie, is tender, spiced strongly, and delicious.

hilltop's jamaican market and restaurant.

It gets better from there. The curry goat comes in a dense, rich, clove-tinged broth and is fork-off-the-bone tender; there’s not a hint of gaminess. The festival is delightfully crunchy/soft/sweet, the plantains are cooked to their perfect dense gumminess, and the inoffensive bean/rice mix makes for a nice gravy-soak (the cabbage is … well, get the ethereal spinach). Then the jerk chicken. It’s unbelievable: peppery, spicy, sweet, and tangy, every bite a slow spread of complex and harmonized flavors. It is, honestly, one of the most flavorful dishes we’ve had.

The TV plays. Other customers come for groceries, for take-out. We eat. The woman checks in on us, takes care of us. The cook comes out and thanks us. We, of course, thank him.

And we feel grateful, nourished, and, at least a little, better.

Go Back <— Tearing into the Local Stew

Mariscos Jalisco | Pomona, CA

Tuesday, June 12th | Mariscos Jalisco | 753 E. Holt Ave, Pomona, CA 91767

We wonder if part of this recent sad poke fad* is that in eating fresh seafood, there’s a sense of nourishment, of eating (supposedly) tasty food, guilt-free. Maybe, too, there’s a feeling of being at one with Pacific Islanders and their cultural legacies in much the same racist way that early white Americans romanticized the noble savage. We wonder if possibly – bear with us – there is, as we (well, you) dip our (your) spoons into the bowl of poke, a slow unlidding within (y)our reptilian minds, old parts now awakening, that ancient limning of shore and sea, alert for a darting lunch of clean-flavored, palate-cleansing fish flesh. Perhaps lesser motives are involved: after all, a poke bowl is way cheaper than good sushi. Plus: ordering a poke bowl is like ordering at Chipotle! So many options, and, bro, you get to curate your meal! (Curation, after all, is very much what life is about in this country, this century.)
We do not, today, choose to dine at a poke bowl place. Instead we opt for what will certainly be the most risky of our let’s-eat-at-an-unknown-restaurant summer journey: Mariscos Jalisco. Just a few months’ old, this small-menued seafood place is on Holt in Pomona, a few blocks past our last stop, Hilltop’s.** This afternoon, we look at each other and think: should we go crazy and take a chance? Lunch at Mariscos Jalisco? Why not?
We fill our water bottles first (heads up: no free water), then make the drive to Pomona, using the La Verne–>San Antonio–>Holt route, faster if less interesting than White–>Holt (we’re hungry, is the thing). We pull in, park, step to the counter. A new menu greets as, and we see they’ve also recently added a credit card payment option (less than $10 incurs a 75¢ charge; even $10+, cash is the establishment-friendly way to go, folks). We daringly order four tacos dorados de camarones ($2.25 each). Not your average fish or shrimp taco, these tacos are filled with a mix of chopped shrimp, tomato, peppers, maybe a few things more, then fried so that the tortilla and the outer edge of the filling brown and crisp. The tacos are laid flat on a plate and spooned over with a simple but delicious salsa (tomato, chile, cilantro, chopped cabbage), and then the whole thing is overlaid with slices of avocado.

Q: Doesn’t that salsa make the crispy shell mushy?
A: The taco’s existence is too brief for such sorrows to take hold.
We also order the mixta ($6.50), a tostada piled with a fish ceviche, more slices of avocado, whole shrimp, and chunks of octopus that may have first been given a good roast, and the tower of seafood is then buried beneath a ladle of salsa. The shrimp is cooked, limey, oceanic; the octopus chunks are dense without being rubbery, and the sea they evoke is deeper, older (possibly just roastier); the ceviche is light, better with a squirt of lime, and, if you’re daring, a dash of the habanero hot sauce sitting in the enormous jar on the table. If you like your pulpo and camarón, the mixta is the clear choice; if you want lazier seas, stick to the ceviche.

Get the taco. One taco, two taco, three taco, four. The textural juxtaposition is as intense as the flavor, the hard boney crunch of the shell giving way to the soft savory/acidic/spice of the filling. Eating one-plus of these is overwhelmingly fulfilling in an animalistic way, a way in which all other tacos we’ve yet eaten very much failed to be. And as your reptile-self awakens, as you crunch through your taco, pausing at times to break off hunks of tortilla and pile them with ceviche, you’ll realize that here, in Pomona, you’re eating the ocean – and that Mariscos Jalisco is the best poke place around.

*poke in Hawaii: different story.

**and Mariscos Jalisco has also long been known as one of LA’s most beloved food trucks, winning multiple area taco competitions, landing on dozens of national best taco lists, not to mention Jonathan Gold’s famed 101 best list just last year, and it has been featured on the Netflix show Ugly Delicious, was ordered in by Chrissy Teigen for Oscars night this year, and, plus, we ate there already in April and have been dying to go back.

Go Back <— Tearing into the Local Stew

Pinnacle Peak Steakhouse

Thursday June 14th | Pinnacle Peak Steakhouse | 259 Foothill Blvd, San Dimas, CA 91773

I grew up in Tucson, where, as I understand it, Pinnacle Peak Steakhouse & Saloon came into existence. Quintessential Tucson institution: fake Old West, lots of grilled meats, tons of booze. (Sort of like Chase’s in La Verne, though with cheesy charm.) In Tucson, Pinnacle Peak is even set within “Trail Dust Town,” a series of faux-western shops (and both sit next to Golf’N’Stuff, the superior attraction: bumper boats!). After having lived in the La Verne/Claremont/Pomona area for something like eight years, one day we were driving around San Dimas (surely en route to tigertails) and, wait, what?! Behold: a local Pinnacle Peak!?

That was about five years ago. We’ve talked about eating there many times but never seriously … until this summer’s quest befell us. So: Pinnacle Peak. Weekday lunch. The food? Fine, actually, even good. (If a bit pricey: $12.99 Cowboy Cobb salad with grilled chicken and corn, plenty of ripe avocado; $14.99 Prime Rib Santa Fe sandwich with tomato, pepper jack, ortega chilies, and chipotle mayo; lunches come with bread and beans, so there’s that).

But Pinnacle Peak is about the vibe. Big interior space, low-ceilinged, wood beams. Twanging contemporary country music. One other diner in the whole restaurant, resolutely going to town on a t-bone. $2.75 margaritas. Faux-cowboy & racist decor. Listen: would we rather be at Big Nose Kate’s, watching Doc spitefully eat an actual paper plate slathered with ketchup? Of course we’d rather be at Big Nose Kate’s, watching Doc spitefully eat an actual paper plate slathered with ketchup. But Tombstone is hundreds of miles away, and that plate thing is a dream that only happens once. So when Westworld has you jonesin’ for a simulacrum of the fake version of what isn’t close to the real Old West, hit up Pinnacle Peak. (Did we mention the $2.75 margaritas?)

Go Back <— Tearing into the Local Stew

Donahoo’s Golden Chicken | Pomona, CA

Saturday June 16th |Donahoo’s Golden Chicken | 1074 N. Garey Ave, Pomona, CA 91767

Meh. It’s not a chain, at least.

Go Back <— Tearing into the Local Stew