What's Hot!

 

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Uncle Albert L.

Dallas, TX

You remember Arval, the maitre d' who was about to kick my ass on the front lawn of the French restaurant? Well, after we got things straightened out (he knows I'm not the Roto-Rooter guy and I know he's not Marcel Proust) we started palling around. It's a bizarre relationship since we have virtually nothing in common. Arval has a real job, a home to go to, and money in the bank; whereas I run a Three-Card Monte game behind Adair's Saloon, then go to Starbucks on Knox Street to steal newspapers and bum cigarettes from people exactly like Arval. But Arval's mother was a famous Polish roller skater and there's your connection (which proves something I'm somewhat certain of: everything in life ultimately links to the glory of wheels beneath our feet, the missing component in the Unified Theory), roller skates.

Sunday morning Arval and I were in East Dallas eating roller dogs at the What's Hot! roller rink snack bar when this chick in a red and black derby-girl outfit skates up to the counter and orders a foot long. When she got it, she extracted the beautifully cooked frank, laid it in an ashtray like a bad cigar, then replaced it with a sterile-looking gray tube she took from a Ziploc. When she caught Arval and me looking at her she held up the dog and broke out her best smile. "Soy weenie. No animals hurt here."
"God, not another vegan," Arval mumbled. The look on my face must've said plenty so he whispered, "Vegans don't eat or use animal products. Occasionally, they wander into my restaurant and grill me about how the food's cooked."
"Why don't you run their asses off?" I asked. "If I ever open a restaurant, I'll cater to hard-drinking lard asses sucking on fat cigars with high-dollar whores on each arm. That's how you run a successful Dallas restaurant." I bit off two inches of cows' armpits stuffed in a roller-roasted membrane.
"Look, Albert, she is coming over," Arval said in his nervous and unmanly French accent.
When I looked up, the dingy broad was gliding our way and staring at me so hard it gave me the willies. She rolled over to the empty stool next to me and laid that Frankenstein dog on the counter. "Hey, you're Doctor Al," she said through thirty-two perfectly aligned chompers that you don't see in my end of town. I ignored her, but Arval elbowed me.
"Hubba hubba," I said. It was all I could think of. I need to hone my meaningless conversation skills if I intend to stay in Dallas.
"I recognized you from a picture my mother keeps on our mantle," she said.
"What picture?"
"I'm not sure when it was taken, but you're wearing the yellow Tibetan prayer cap the Dali Lama gave you for his skate repair lessons."
"Ah, yes," I said and nodded serenely, but her words had triggered an earthquake inside me. Twenty-five years ago, I told an Austin stripper called Methyl Ermine the stupid Dali Lama story. Even then I thought it was so lame I never reused it. So if Methyl was her mother, then...oy!

Dr. Albert Leberri, Dean of the Dallas Academy of Roller Skate Repair, says: Get on out to What's Hot! roller rink at 400 South Buckner Blvd. in beautiful scenic Pleasant Grove in Dallas, Texas.
Go there. Eat some stuff. Skate if you like. Watch the Lone Star Assassins and La Revolucion roller girls defy the laws of physics. Then make up your own bullshit story.

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