The People You Meet: Ruben Lettuce, part 1

I met Ruben Lettuce the other day. I was sitting in La Nevería, finished with my ice cream but lingering, reading an six-month old copy of The Nation, when he stumbled in. After trying the other two customers, he swayed his way to me and held out his hand. “¿Podría darme un moneda?” he asked. I fished in my pocket and came up with a nickel (I stake no claim to generosity, but in a city where bus fare is a quarter and a decent meal can be had for $1.25, five cents is not throw away money). He held it up for a look then turned his eyes back to me and cocked his head. In a voice as off-kilter as his balance, he asked: “You speak English?”

His real name was Ruben Pacheco Lechuga. I know it exactly not only because it stuck in my head—Lechuga means lettuce—but because he wrote it for me on a sheet of lined paper torn from my notebook. Below it is his mother’s email and two guesses at his wife’s—“I’m educated and all that, I just haven’t used it in a while,” he told me as he paused, pen in hand, drawing a blank on the address. I’m to email them to say he’s alright. That he’s been drinking, but he’s alright. Ruben, by the way, is an alcoholic.

His tale weaved more than he did. It shifted from his current lover to a past girlfriend to his present wife, one foot in the last decade, the other in the present. He drunkenly slurred, he soberly thundered, he—who painted his English with swear words—switched to Spanish to ask me how to say ‘water’. He repeated, he revealed, he trailed off. Talking with Ruben was like watching a man peel an onion, moist eyes and all.

First layer: He had lived in Canada, in BC. “Way up there,” he said, his finger shooting toward the ceiling as if Canada was there, above the white rectangles of the plastic ceiling. Second layer: His mother still lives there. “She’s a foster mother,” he kept telling me, as if the detail were a wayward flake clinging to the back of his finger. Third: His wife, “a native Canadian girl”—another flake of husk—lives there too. He hadn’t seen her for three years, when she came to visit him in El Salvador. He hadn’t been in Canada since 1994. Fourth: Oh yeah, also in Canada were his two daughters. The acid hit the nostrils.