tacotopia

“It’s coming on Christmas.
They’re cuttin’ down trees.
They’re putting up reindeer
and singing songs of joy and peace.
I wish I had a river I could skate away on.”

– Joni Mitchell, ‘River’

Someone upstairs was taking this deliciously depressing Christmas song a bit too literally when they tried to turn Corpus Christi into a river and decided to deluge us with a solid week or two of cold rain and drizzle.  And no, that’s not hip-hop for drill it’s the unending and freezing water that’s been falling from the sky.  I thought it wouldn’t ever let up, but this morning I got up ready to brave the wet day and get tacos I saw a beautiful thing – The sun.  See, here in South Texas we get snow once every 20-25 years.  It rarely even freezes, but it does get miserable.  The cold is worse than you’d think here because of the rain and the wind, plus the drivers here are some of the worst in the nation falling just behind Mississippi and New Jersey respectively imho.

This is a beautiful example of the dying craft of hand painted signage

2561 Agnes St.
Corpus Christi, TX 78405
361-884-7596

As I pass through the familiar patterns and practiced routine of my day I am scarcely aware of an entirely different world that occupies the same space.  Move one block to the west, drive an hour earlier, focus on the roofline instead of the sidewalk, and you’ll see it.  The Hat and I agreed to meet at Toñia’s #2 this morning and I took the Morgan exit, one exit too late.  I cut back a block into the neighborhood, and kept my eyes keen for new taquerias.  There were many old boarded up businesses, at least one had been a taqueria at one point based on it’s signage but it was fenced in and chest deep in weeds, looking as if Andrew Wyeth had painted the barrio – lonely and haunted by emptiness.  I made it to the destination, and the parking lot was thick with workers in their trucks.  These guys have their own little world too.  They go to their own bars, have their own family events on weekends and hang out at their own section of the beach.  I thrive on repetition.  I find something works and I’ll work it that way until it doesn’t, and get better at it.  Time passes too quickly, though, when you’re doing the same thing over again, and it’s nice to see things you don’t, especially when they’re right in front of you.

Toñia’s might be one of these places, if you regularly drive down Agnes – though I get the impression many people who do might not be big readers of blogs. I make it out that way when I need some unusual piece of wood, or a weird fastener, or some angle iron and 16 gauge plate – meaning not that often. Not like people who live and work there, whose families lived and worked there, who have a rich history and stories to tell about every street in the neighborhood like I once did about the place I grew up… One of the places I grew up.

I’d been here before, back when I would put these things up as posts on facebook to mock the people I went to school with who’d moved to California and mistakenly thought they had good breakfast tacos. It was still there though the giant mulberry tree was bare this time, not like before when the sidewalk was dappled with thousands of impossibly deep purple stains. I didn’t see the pretty cross-eyed server this time, but the hairnets were still on all the employees as they dished out the business from their cafeteria steam tray. I served my own coffee and Kevin paid the lady, and we went back to his place to eat after finding the only place to sit – an outside patio in a steel cage – too wet to sit on with dew.

The fare was fair, and even though the tortillas were the worst I can remember and chorizo & egg could have been called the egg that imagined it once knew chorizo, I ate both tacos (well they were tiny). The carne g was not bad really, and the coffee was decent. If you’d only ever had Whataburger’s excuse for a taco this might be the best you’d ever have, but we do live in Corpus Christi, AKA Tacotopia, the center of the tacoverse.

After we hastily consumed the lot I headed back to my shop, stopping along the way to take a picture of the fog rolling around downtown. A homeless guy shuffled into my shop at 8:30 asking for some vinyl stripes to put on his profoundly soiled jacket and I obliged him, for free, in a effort to cause him to exit as efficiently and expeditiously as possible. Tom Waits put it well in Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Down By Law’ when he said, “It’s a sad and beautiful world, buzz off.”

From the Hat

Agnes Street is the back door to the world.  It’s not the prettiest street, in fact, it’s damned hard to use the words pretty, Agnes, and street in the same sentence.  Rimmed with junkyards and recycling facilities –  it’s a place where cars go to die and dead cars become iron carcasses, picked-over by hyenas looking for that no-longer-available taillight housing, or switch, or Dodge Ram Truck Dash.  If you work it, you can find a rusting hulk to represent each of the last 6 or 7 decades nestled comfortably among the thorns and snakes.  Once road-proud beauties now half-buried, raise their fists in silence as if trying to elicit a mournful cry from Charlton Heston for a world lost in time.

At least it’s a peaceful end.  I’m reminded of similar rusting hulks, nigh when the earth was young, in Oklahoma, Alaska, and North Carolina.  Targets they were, for the field artillery.  They didn’t go quietly.  They stood brazenly upright out in the open, giving a raspberry to any would-be forward observer willing to step up and try to give ‘em a black eye.  Taking high explosive, white phosphorous, (used for equipment and facilities only, its use is prohibited on troops.), and smoke rounds ranging from grunt-carried mortars to self-propelled howitzers.  It was the eighties, so quite often the target descriptions were, “platoon of Russian Special Forces in the open”, or “Soviet T72 tanks in defile”, or the occasional “school bus full of armed children and nuns.”  Humor was a different thing in the field.

At one post, Ft. Sill Oklahoma, on the training course where we learned to put hurt on these targets from artillery located dozens of miles away; it was a daily event when the “Gut Truck” showed up.  “Roach Coach”, “Poagie Wagon”, whatever you called it, you could get a sandwich, or taco (definitely not a good example of either) from this big white ford truck equipped with a mobile kitchen.  It was a paradise of donuts, chips, or any other kind of terrible-for-you junk food you could desire – located conveniently in the middle of a staged war zone.  But we were hungry, and there were tacos.

There were tacos this morning, too.  Toñia’s #2 had an action station for taco construction.  The taco lady hawked her wares from behind glass – an assortment of goodies to choose from.  I had a picadillo, and a chicharrón, both on flour.  The chicharrónes were basically a soup of pig skin and onion, with a tomato base.  They were piggy, but too soft for my preference.  Not enough to put me off on them though.  But they were mighty; undiluted with eggs or other nonsense.  The picadillo was better.  It’s a peasant dish of spiced ground beef and potatoes.  Toñia’s offering was seasoned well with plenty of salt.  The salsa specialists out there will groan at the salsa offering.  And even a tortilla trainee would see that these tarps were not that good.  Mine might have needed a bit more time on the comal.  The coffee was good, but not never-ending.   I liked the place and will probably be back.  I was derelict in my duty by not having noticed the sliced hotdog and barbecue sauce taco.  Damn.

–Salud

“There will be a rain dance Friday night, weather permitting”

– George Carlin (1937–2008)

It was raining when The Hat and I set out this morning – just like the day before.  Downtrodden and in need of coffee we navigated by intuition toward the Donut Hole, a fabled hole in the wall which has been recommended many times.  Closed…  Fortunately we’re in Corpus Christi, so we drove 2 blocks and found Chacho’s Tacos #2.  Sure the numeric reference in the name was unfortunate but if the hand painted sign was any indication we were in for a treat.

From the Hat

It was a dark and stormy morning.  The kind of morning that makes you want to roll over and stuff your head back in the pillow.  But the day was havin’ none of it.  I was still wearing the night on my face when I heard the knock on the door.  I knew what it meant.

By the time the coffee kicked the cobwebs, I was careening down a dark and deserted Staples St.  I knew something about the neighborhood.  It was early morning darkness, but it was still Darkness.  My companion seemed unaffected.  Navigating the video game that was Staples-under-construction with the confidence of man who knew what he wanted and nothing could stop him.

I knew he wanted Tacos.

We’d picked a notorious spot on Ayers called the Donut Hole – nothing could stand in our way… Nothing that is but Thor the god of Thunder.  The Hole was closed – Rained out.  But lucky for us, there was a taqueria a block away where we could gather our thoughts and decide what to do.

I decided to have a nopalitos and egg a la Mexicana on flour, a brisket with the works on corn, and a large coffee.  For the technicians, Chachos #2’s nopalitos and eggs were very good with plenty of cactus and Mexicana vegetables.  The taco was seasoned well.  It was seasoned even better with a dose of their salsa.  It had a bright taste, possibly mostly from canned ingredients.  But it was very well done and had plenty of heat.

The Brisket taco was okay.  The corn tarp was good, but it was hard to tell with all of the big flavors in the innards.  There was plenty of baked brisket dressed with pickles, grilled onions, and bar-b-que sauce.  The more I got into it, the more I liked it, but I still found myself wishing I’d tried the barbacoa.

Chacho’s #2 was a bright spot in the rainy darkness; a sentinel watching over those hardy few seeking early morning tacos.  Not a bad piece of Serendipity.

Salud