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Blood and Chocolate	By : christinecornell Category: Celebrities - Misc > AU - Alternate Universe Views: 14 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: Based on my own predilections or not, this is still a work of fiction. by the way, you will get hungry reading this. Just, just just trust me on this.

Chapter List
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He was the kind of boy whom you only read about before in those guitar player magazines on the back shelf in the grocery store. He seemed to have come from another world altogether, a world that gave us the fastest, most fantastic fingers to dream of. That little plume of gray at the crown of his head only further indicated of his otherworldly qualities. The way he sashayed and moved about utterly hypnotized and mesmerized everyone, including me.
So I was told, especially when I went about with business as usual in the grocery store. I saw him on the cover and I sighed through my nose.
Some day I would have my own moment in the sun. Some day, somehow, by some dark magic, I would do it. I would reach the same top that Alex did.
He was my band mate, my kid brother, my everything. He had those long, spidery fingers that crept and crawled about on the fretboard, and he moved about as if his ass was in fire. Sometimes, I’ll listen to those early solos that he performed for me, Steve, Lou, and Derrick, and we salvaged them on tape, and I’ll get goosebumps all up and down my spine. Though I made a promise to myself that things were decent between me and him, I still had my moments, especially when I noticed how much more attention he was garnering in comparison to me and Louie, the actual founders of the band.
A part of me wanted to merely forget it, because damn it, we let him in. We made our bed and thus, we have to lay in it. He also was like the antithesis of the lead guitarist: where most of them were known for going out and getting some ass with booze and coke rolled into one single cocktail, Alex went home and curled up with a book to read and a cup of coffee, or he went home and had dinner with his parents and his grandmother.
The boy barely turned eighteen: of course he was going to have coffee over the really hard stuff.
And yet, I still had an itch I couldn’t hardly scratch. I wanted to be at the top, and I wanted to be seen for my deeds, and I wanted Lou to be seen, too. Damn it, we expanded the platform and this new boy from the ‘burbs was stealing our thunder with his own properly trained stuff and things.
But let me tell you: the boy loved to eat.
He was Jewish, and so I figured that most of it had to do with the fact that he grew up under the direction of his elder professor parents, who lived on teachers’ salaries and they lived over in the really suburban neighborhood of Berkeley. Everything I knew about Jewish cuisine was the humility of it all: I had had my share of matzo ball soup from the bakery not too far from my house.
Delicious, but quite humble. The same could be said for Challah bread, or latkes, or any kind of babka.
When I was in school, my mom taught me how to cook: being half-Mexican, it’s kind of a big deal. I kind of have to know these things, especially if I wanted to live my best life with the band that I had founded with my cousin and one of my bestest friends. But she taught me how to make tortillas from scratch as well as chorizo without breaking the bank. Given I was often practicing and doing all things musical, I had very little time to go about and make lunch or dinner for my parents or my band mates. I could make breakfast willy-nilly, but I could only do so much with an egg and a piece of toast, or a bowl of cereal with a cup of coffee and a glass of juice. There were some days where all I felt like doing was swinging by a place like the Golden Arches and picking up one of those egg sandwiches on an English muffin, but I also yearned for the tenderness of home, the sweet comfort of knowing where your food came from.
Most of all, the comfort and coziness of home itself.
Home had become more or less of a strange place to me when I thought about it, as I had moved out of my parents’ house about four years ago and Lou and his girlfriend had a little nest of their own in the apartment three doors down. It was strange the more that I thought about it, and the more that I wanted Lou to be in on it, too. He and I had known each other for about that long, and I was eager to make him a little more than my proverbial brother.
I thought for sure that Lou would want to be in on it, especially when we got to discussing homemade food one evening during a rehearsal, back when we were still called Legacy. He was behind his drum kit and I sat there on a stool with my guitar perched across my lap.
“When I was little, my mom would make me spaghetti and meatballs, but she’d make the meatballs in such a way that they almost melted in your mouth.”
“Really?” I asked him, taken aback. “How’d she make them?”
“I have no clue,” Lou confessed. “I do remember that she put a little bit of chili powder and nutmeg in them, too, just for a little bit of a kick, but the meat itself was so tender and lush. It almost melted in your mouth.” He even licked his lips when he said that.
“Reminds me of my mom’s chorizo,” I added. “The one time it snowed by our house when I was a kid, and she made that stuff so well and it fit the whole entire night so perfectly. I had always wanted to make it the way that she did.”
“Makes me kind of curious about Alex, to be honest,” he said.
“How so?”
“Well, I just think about how thin he is,” Lou clarified. “Thin and stoic, too.”
“He’s probably got some stories of growing up,” I suggested with a shrug of my shoulders. “Growing up fast, though. I would think after he’s had older parents and they both hail from the very heart of New York City.”
But then again, I realized that Alex didn’t have very fond memories of growing up. The quiet kid, bit of an outsider with his heritage and the plume at the top of his head, and a kid who was also rather artistic to boot. The kind of kid I myself had bore witness to in the past, and they always got their asses whooped because they refused to play sports and went with the nourishment of the soul instead.
So, I just wondered what on earth was going to make Alex feel this way, the same way that Lou and I did with our mothers’ food when we were young boys. He told us about it, about life in that part of Berkeley and through his eyes, but he never fully elaborated on anything particularly home-worthy. His parents were reluctant in finding him guitar lessons, first with a neighborhood guy and then with this guy Joe Satriani.
To me, it sounded like he had a very stuffy home life, where it almost felt as though he had been raised by his grandparents than anything. Two very distinct feelings, and they both left quite the impression, especially with him.
Nevertheless, I wanted to blow Alex’s mind with something delicious: all the food that we had taken for ourselves was pretty humble, too, paid for by the label and all its own humility in its own rite.
So, because of this very tidbit here, it’s been a long time coming with all of this. It’s been a long time coming since I had been able to look at him and also Lou, and for me to say to myself that this was the right decision for me. Of course, it’s imperative to find the opportunities at first and thus, they will be almost given to me at the right time.
And there I was, at the grocery store, all to pick up some necessities for myself before I threw myself at the wall with the new music for the album. I said “new music”, granted, but a lot of these songs I had written when Zetro sang with us.
They would be new to the world at large, as Lou and I both would duly believe.
I carried the little basket by my side and, as I made my way past the baking aisle, something caught my eye. I peered over my shoulder to ensure no one else was headed my way, and I reached for the little packet of matzo meal. I had no idea as to what it was, or what it even tasted like: but I thought of him the very second that I saw it there on the shelf. It helped that poked out a bit from the shelf, as if it beckoned me to pick out for myself.
The package was smooth, and about the size of a bag of coffee grounds: indeed, I opened a little corner of it with the expectation to smell coffee inside of there. I gazed on at the back side, at the little footnote there on the back: a footnote about matzo balls and the accompanying soup, but nothing about the making of said soup. I glimpsed up at the rest of that section, that particular corner of the baking aisle that I had always seen while in passing, but I never scrounged up the courage to graze over for myself.
It felt strange to stand there, this stubby little Hispanic boy with his eye on some food outside of his culture. But everything that I had seen there tickled me, and such in a way that my own culture could not suffice for me.
I had an idea right then, to fuse the best of both worlds, to give Alex a little piece of home while I gave him a little piece of me and my home.
I raised my gaze from the bag of matzo meal to find one of the clerks there before me.
“Excuse me, how do you make matzo soup?” I asked him as he sauntered towards the other side of the aisle.
“Nope, but—I think Elle does, though.” He gestured to the other clerk right behind me, a short lanky brunette with a little Black-eyed Susan pinned to one side of her head.
I thanked him and I scooped up the basket from the floor, and I padded over to her.
She turned to me with a smile on her face: I spotted the Star of David medallion around her neck. I hit the jackpot.
“Hi, do you know how to make matzo ball soup?” I asked her.
“Indeed, I do!” she declared: she set a couple of boxes of day-old pastries on the shelf behind her and she returned to me.
“It’s really simple,” she started as she rubbed her hands together. “Like really simple.”
“I worry about messing it up, though,” I confessed to her with a shy shrug of my shoulders.
“Well, you use matzo meal, eggs, and water to make the dumplings, and then they’re simmered in chicken broth for a time. I would recommend all day just to bring out the flavors a bit more. Also—forgive me if I’m a bit nosy…” Her eyes grazed over my body. “May I ask who’s it for?”
“I want to make a batch for my friend,” I told her. “He’s Jewish and I kinda wanna cook for him.”
“Oh, mazel tov! Well—“ She touched the Star of David around her neck. “—you, my dear, came to the right person.”
I looked on at the packet again at that little footnote on the back. Surely, it could be rather easy.
“Now, does he like the balls light or dense?” And I had to double take when she asked me that.
“Uh, what do you recommend?” I asked her.
“I like a nice balance of the two,” she replied. “Light and fluffy, but neatly packed. When they’re dense, they’re full of flavor. When they’re light, they melt in your mouth.”
“Okay, uh… I’ll take best of both worlds,” I quipped to her. She reached into the front pocket of her apron for a little pad of paper and a pen.
“Excellent! I’m gonna write it all down for ya because, like I said, even though it’s simple, you’re a gentile boy and I want you to make it again if you’d like.” She flashed me a wink and rested the paper on the shelf. All the while, I glanced down at the other groceries in the basket.
I had a feeling I was going to have everything I needed for when I saw him again. I watched her scribble it down for me, and all the while, I had butterflies in my stomach. I was eager to make something for Alex, and I was eager to have Lou with me when the whole thing went down.
Elle then handed me the piece of paper with a sly smile on her face.
“Thank you so much,” I told her.
“Any time, bubbeleh,” she assured me. “If you ever need a little recipe of the Jewish sort, I’m your woman.” She bowed back to the shelves behind her and into the back room for something.
I kept the paper in hand as I returned to the rest of the market behind me.
A nice big bowl of matzo ball soup with a big cup of Mexican hot chocolate.
I hoped it would work for him.
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Blood and Chocolate