Catch up on Part 1 here and Part 2 here

I took my phone back from Kimberly. The song she put on the jukebox was over and the bar was awkwardly quiet.

“What’s your name, guy?” I asked the head biker from McWhiPeePoop.

“You think you’re fucking funny, boy?” he responded while putting his hand on the butt of the gun on his holster right away. This dude didn’t fuck around.

“Yo, let’s all chill!” Coyote jumped in, nervously, like a bitch. “He means no disrespect. This is our…negotiator. He came to mediate this deal. He doesn’t know you but he’s a…like, a neutral party, you know? His name is Classy.”

The big white guy’s eyes got wide when he looked at me.

“Hahahaha! Please don’t tell me you’re The Classy Alcoholic? I’ve read your racist blog. You’ve been spreading hate and anti-white sentiment for years!”

“Is it because I always write about how Mexican food is the best food in the world? I’m sorry I don’t give enough credit to your boiled chicken breast and mayonnaise rice dishes. That’s so culturally insensitive of me. My bad.”

“I knew that if I ever met you, you were gonna piss me off,” the white guy said as he pulled his gun out of the holster. “My name is Guy Von Schneider.”

“Ohhhhhh, okay! I get it now. Anyhoozle, I’ll be with you in a minute, Guy. I just need to make it less quiet in here.

I put another song on the jukebox. It was “Ven Conmigo Cariñito” by David Olivarez. The sound of the Tejano-style accordion and the cumbia beat made all the McWhiPeePoop bikers cover their ears in pain. Guy Von Schneider punched the jukebox with his gigantic ham fist and left a hole in it. He stopped the song dead in its tracks like a reverse Fonzie. (Ask your grandparents.)

“I’ve had enough of your bullshit, Classy! Where the fuck is our drugs?!?”

Possum and I locked eyes. There were drops of blood coming out of his tear ducts. He had his gun in his hand and I had a strong feeling that he was ready to go to hell tonight.

“Tell him, Possum,” I said. “If you want. I ain’t no snitch.”

“What the fuck is going on here, Classy?” Coyote asked me.

I turned to Kimberly. She was scared and had nothing to defend herself with. I pulled her toward me and hugged her. I was close enough to smell the shampoo on her hair. Those three minutes and fourteen seconds of the Intocable song that we danced to almost twenty years ago came flooding back to me. I knew exactly how long the song lasted because I listened to it a million times for years after graduation.

“Get the fuck down,” I said to her. “Shit’s about to go bad.”

Kimberly laid down behind the bar. I grabbed a bottle of shitty tequila off the shelf and took a big swig.

“Hey, Guy Vonderwhateverthefuck!” I slurred. “SAMMCOP doesn’t have any drugs to sell you. So get the fuck out of here, bitch!”

Every member of both biker clubs pulled their guns out and pointed them at each other.

“I knew I couldn’t trust you pieces of shit,” Guy said as he pointed his handgun at my head.

“MAAAAARGE!” I yelled. “Bring out the Fireball!

Marge the Bartender hobbled out from the back holding a Remington XP-100 bolt-action pistol that fired .221 Fireball cartridges. Which is a legit real gun that you can google right now in case you think I’m lying.

“Don’t move!” she said to both of the biker crews. “I’m just trying to keep the peace and you don’t want to see what the Fireball’s stopping power looks like.”

For a second it seemed like everyone was going to put their guns down.

“FUCK IT!” Possum yelled as the blood coming out of his eyes started flowing heavily.

He shot Coyote in the head.

And then the rest of the bullets were let loose. I jumped behind the bar to cover Kimberly from the shots that flew above us. I felt the shattered glass from the bottles of tequila and whiskey falling on my back. I peeked up to watch Marge expertly shooting guys in the head like a woman who had killed many Vietnamese people in the 70s but who may not have ever actually served in the Vietnam War.

I waited for the noise to die down before I stood back up. Every single biker was bleeding out on the floor.

“Goddammit, Classy!” Marge said as she hobbled over with her Fireball gun to make sure everyone was dead. “The guys from McWhiPeePoop were my best customers!”

“They would’ve burned this entire place down with all of us inside and you know it, Marge.”

Kimberly stood up from behind the bar, crying, when she saw that her entire biker crew was dead.

“What the fuck happened here tonight, Classy?!?” she asked me.

“Burrito put half of the meth y’all were gonna sell into a bunch of condoms and swallowed them all. He was gonna shit them all out before the deal with McWhiPeePoop went down but the drugs burst in his colon when he was in the bathroom with me and that’s why he died. That same thing happened to my Cousin Chico’s friend Eddie. The blood coming out of his eyes was my first clue. He wasn’t actually murdered.”

“Did you know that the whole time?”

“I mean…not exactly. I had my suspicions but it didn’t come together until I saw Possum holding on to his stomach after I punched him in the gut. And when his eyes were bleeding too I knew he had swallowed the other half of the drugs and was going to betray Coyote. He was gonna let the white power bikers kill Coyote so he could take over SAMMCOP and then shit out the meth later in order to make a new deal for himself.”

“WHAT THE FUCK CLASSY? That means you killed my boyfriend!”

“No! I mean…obviously I wouldn’t have punched him in the stomach that hard if I knew he was hiding drugs in his colon.”

I walked over to Possum’s corpse and poked him with my foot. I needed to make sure he wasn’t playing dead.

“You’re a fucking asshole! I haven’t seen you in almost twenty years and the only two things I know about you from your blog is that you love booze AND you love drugs!”

“Yeah, but not fucken meth! Even I draw the line somewhere. Just do cocaine in the bathroom at a party like a normal person!”

I expected Kimberly to slap me in the face, like so many other women have, but she punched me in the sternum hard enough to knock me on my ass.

“Fuck you, Classy!” she said before she walked out of the bar. I heard the sound of her driving off on a motorcycle while I laid there, drunk, on my back, on the floor of the most disgusting bar in Tucson.

I saw Marge standing over me with her walker.

“Do you want another round, you fucking prick?” she asked.

“Yeah, Marge. I’ll take a Fireball. Either/or.”

The End.

Read Part 1 here

“Don’t listen to this sonofabitch, Prez, he’s trying to fuck us.” Possum said as he pulled a handgun from the back of his jean waistband. “Let me ice him right now. Ice for ice.”

“Chill for a second,” Coyote said. “Your old lady knows something about him so let’s hear what she has to say. Who is this guy, Kimberly?”

I hadn’t seen Kimberly Suarez since I graduated high school. I was closer to forty than not these days and I surprised myself with what I remembered after two decades of high functioning alcoholism. I was whatever the teenage equivalent of “in love” was back then. I vaguely recall coming home from school and thinking about her all night as I listened to Luis Miguel love songs for hours on my cheap CD player that skipped like a motherfucker if I didn’t hold it steady.

She and I shared a few classes together. She would occasionally ask me to help her with her algebra and history and chemistry and geography and trigonometry and pre-algebra homework so we’d talk all the time. But she had a boyfriend all throughout our senior year and that dude would constantly bully me. Believe it or not, I wasn’t always the confident, charming, handsome, brown stud I am now. Back when I was a kid I was a shy, nerdy loser and talking to any girl was terrifying. Especially Kimberly.

The longer I sat there with my hands tied behind my back the clearer I remembered that one time Kimberly’s boyfriend shoved me onto the muddy sidewalk just for fun. And I remembered that she broke up with him not long after that. I remembered going alone to prom despite wanting to be anywhere else. And I remembered Kimberly asking me to dance with her to a slow song.

While we danced she told me that she was so mad at her ex-boyfriend because of how he treated me. She told me I didn’t deserve any of that because I was such a nice, smart guy. She gave me a hug at the end of the song that I held for longer than I probably should’ve. Then she told me to take care of myself after graduation. And I said nothing other than “you too.”

Almost twenty years later she was standing in front of me again. And she was probably the only reason I was still alive.

“His name is The Classy Alcoholic and he’s a very popular blogger. I’ve read some of his stuff. He likes drinking heavily, doing drugs and committing crimes. But he also follows Batman rules which means he doesn’t believe in guns or killing.”

“Except I’m even better than Batman because I don’t trust cops,” I chimed in. “Now that you know who I am, who the hell are y’all? You already said you’re with SAMMCOP but that doesn’t mean shit to me.”

“It stands for ‘Sexy Ass Mexican Motorcycle Club – Old Pueblo.’”

“Okay that’s actually kinda fucken rad. And it sounds like you were planning on doing a drug deal which I would never interrupt on principle. I can help y’all figure out what happened to your stash but I need to talk to Kimberly privately.

Possum clearly wasn’t a big fan of that idea. He put the barrel of his gun under my chin.

“Why the fuck are you wanting to talk to my old lady alone, pendejo?”

“Maybe ‘cause she’s the only person in this entire place so far without an itchy trigger finger, dipshit.”

Possum was about to fly into a rage but he stopped and held onto his stomach, nursing the area where I punched the shit out of him. He tried to recover quickly but I knew he was hurt.

“You got a little stummy ache there, bud?” I asked, taunting the guy holding the gun. “Got a widdle boo boo on your tum tum?”

“Enough of this shit,” Coyote cut in. “Possum, take a walk and let him talk to the girl. Classy, you better figure this shit out quick because the other MC will be here in ten minutes. And if we don’t have the drugs by then I’ll feed you to them myself.”

The entire SAMMCOP crew walked to the other end of the bar and left me alone with Kimberly. She pulled a switchblade out of her pocket and cut me loose. Marge was nowhere to be found so I walked behind the bar to pour myself a shitload of whiskey into a tumbler. I had a sinking feeling in my gut that tonight could end badly so I decided to forgo the bar etiquette. Also I was starting to feel uncharacteristically nervous, like that high school kid I left behind a long time ago, and I needed to kill that familiar feeling as fast as possible.

“So you’re a badass biker babe now, huh?”

“Yeah, this crew had a feeling of community I really needed. After high school I felt a bit aimless. I was dating one asshole after another. Mostly dumb-dumbs. I had the worst luck dating, really. All I wanted was to find a nice, laid back guy who was kind of smart. Like, a dude who maybe understood bar etiquette at least. Eventually I ended up with Possum. And I know he’s not perfect. Most people call him a drunken degenerate but we have fun and I’m in my late thirties. At least he doesn’t have a bunch of kids, right? I don’t know, maybe I lowered my standards but there was a long period where I was feeling lonely and I hate to admit that any guy could’ve given me, like, fifty percent effort and I would’ve been good with-”

“HEY, tell me about that drug deal!” I said, desperately trying to change the subject while furiously chugging on that shitty whiskey.

“Oh that! Right. We’re about to put SAMMCOP on the map tonight. Well…we were. Our plan was to sell a stash of meth to McWhiPeePoop.”

“Wait, what? You can’t be serious! To them?!?”

McWhiPeePoop was a well-known abbreviation in town for “Motorcycle Club: White Peeple Power – Old Pueblo.” And yes, they misspelled the word “people” but what can you really expect from the “Master Race”?

“Kimberly, how can y’all make a deal with white supremacists? Hell, forget that even! What makes you think those skinheads will ever agree to do a deal with all of you brown motherfuckers?”

“Because we brought some really good shit back from Mexico, where McWhiPeePoop would never go. We were about to be the best plug in Tucson. And Burrito was in charge of holding the stash before he was murdered.”

“McWhiPeePoop has left a trail of bodies a mile long! You can’t trust them!”

That’s when we all heard the sound of another motorcycle crew approaching from the distance.

“Time’s up Classy,” Possum said, still kinda nursing his stomach and waving his gun toward me. “Hand over the drugs or I shoot you in the face.”

“Nah, you can’t shoot me without Coyote giving the word, right? Look, Coyote, this shit is way more complicated than you thought. I can maybe get you out of this but you need to trust me. I know you don’t know me but you can’t tell me you wouldn’t trust another brown guy over a group of fucking neo-Nazis.”

The room was getting increasingly tense as the motorcycles grew louder. The other SAMMCOP bikers who didn’t talk were clearly nervous.

“Fuck!” Coyote yelled. “Alright fine, Classy. What the hell do we need to do?”

“Kimberly, take my phone and pick a Mexican song for the jukebox. It’ll help me think.”

“Ooooh, I know a good one. I bet you remember this one from high school.”

Kimberly chose “Soy Un Novato” by Intocable. And she was right. I did remember that one quite well. It was the song she and I danced to at prom. My heart was about to beat out of my chest and I honestly had no idea if it was from the nostalgia or the prospect of certain death.

“MARGE!” I yelled. “GET BACK IN HERE!”

The bartender hobbled inside after a long while of chain smoking on the back patio.

“Marge, I’m gonna need you to break out the Fireball. The big one. You know what I’m saying?”

“Aw shit, Classy! Is that really necessary?”

“Yes it is, Marge. I promise. Shots for everyone.”

The motorcycles outside all went quiet. A tall white guy with a bald head and a leather vest walked into the bar flanked by a dozen of his henchmen. They were all carrying guns.

“Well, well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t the sissy ass mexican motorcycle club. Where’s the shit you promised me?”

To Be Concluded…

The first sip of the shitty, bottom shelf whiskey burned my throat on the way down. I chased it with a big swig of my flat pilsner. The ceiling in this bar looked like it could fall down on us all at any moment. The lights flickered and almost went out about two or three times tonight. It smelled like a sweaty ass crack in here, as always, and Marge was behind the bar. She slowly unfurled her walker and hobbled her way over to me to ask if I was ready for another round. I wasn’t but I felt bad that she made the considerable effort to drag her bum leg those seven feet toward me so I told her to go ahead and pour me one more beer and one more shot.

It was dead as hell at Frankie’s Saloon that night. I was in a shithole, divey, redneck, biker bar that was walking distance from my apartment. If you know me then you know The Classy Alcoholic loves drinking rare craft beer and expensive cocktails at upscale bars in Tucson. But unless you really know me then you don’t know that I also like getting overserved pints of flat macro beer and house tequila at the shittiest bars I can find. One of the reasons I come here is that I need to hold on to the last remnants of the local watering holes near downtown Tucson that are gonna disappear as my neighborhood keeps getting gentrified. The other part is that sometimes it’s nice to go where nobody knows your name.

Whenever I’m here I look forward to getting drunk enough to take over the digital jukebox with the app on my phone. Every time I walk in I hear some variation of country and/or western songs playing. So after a few rounds I load up money on the app and play a bunch of reggaeton or rap songs about butts ‘cause I know it pisses everyone off. I try to be sneaky about it but I’m pretty sure they know it’s me.

Not that I’m always the only brown guy here. More than a few times I’ve heard some drunk as fuck dudes slurring in Spanish while playing pool. I go hard on the Tejano songs when they’re around because they’ll love it when I play Bobby Pulido or Intocable and I know Marge and the rest of the Necks will be less likely to suspect me.

I always come to this place pretty late and the biker gangs are usually gone by the time I’m around. But this night I heard the roaring engines of a few hogs outside. I know Tucson has a few Mexican biker gangs and there was a slim chance it was them outside. But Frankie’s is like a box of STDs. You never know what you’re gonna get and whether it’s gonna kill you or just make you uncomfortable enough to quietly run back home and lie to your wife about where you were all night. I closed out my tab and went to the bathroom to take a piss. I walked past a wall full of a bunch of shitty boomer bumper stickers that said things like, “I’m not crazy, the voices in my head are!” and, “Exercise? I thought you said ‘extra fries’!” and “Glory be to the white race.”

The bathroom at this joint was either exactly what you would imagine or worse than you would imagine but never better. I did my usual quick breathing exercises before I walked in so I could hold my breath for as long as possible so as to avoid sucking in the black mold in the corner and then ran to the urinal that was barely hanging onto the wall. There was a toilet next to it that I would never sit on even if it cured my grandpa’s cancer. But, to be fair to the toilet, my grandpa is an asshole.

There was a live cockroach inside the urinal and I would’ve been disgusted if I didn’t take it as a challenge to try and pee on it as it scurried around. The walls of the bathroom were thin enough that I could hear the commotion as the bikers walked into the bar but thick enough that I couldn’t tell if they were white or not. I used this opportunity to find another Tejano song on my app to play. I added the song “Sergio el Bailador” by Bronco to the queue thinking I may piss somebody off outside.

“Eyyyyyy! ES BRONCO!!!” I heard a drunk ass Mexican guy yell as he kicked the flimsy bathroom door open. I guess that was one mystery solved. He was wearing the standard leather biker cut with some patches I couldn’t quite read. “Oh shit I’m glad we got two things in here ‘cause I gotta piss real bad. You don’t mind right?”

He smacked me on the back hard enough to make me miss the cockroach with my stream.

“Yeah, go ahead,” I said, turning away enough so we didn’t make eye and/or dick contact.

“Thanks, hermano! My name is Burrito. What’s yours?” he asked as he peed into the toilet, badly.

“I’m…Classy.” I gambled on him never having heard of me and it paid off.

“Classy! That’s a cool ass name. You with an MC? I’m with SAMMCOP.”

“No. I’m not,” I said, still trying to catch that roach and trying to ignore this dude who was too fucked up to be just drunk.

“Man of few words. I like it! Coyote is too! He’s the prez. I’m the Sergeant at Arms. We’re about to do a deal real quick and then we’re gonna party all fucken night! You seem cool, Classy. You can join us if you want. The more the hairier, that’s what I always say!”

Burrito cackled out loud as the lights in the bathroom flickered on and off again.

“Thanks for the invite bro but I-”

The lights went completely out before I could finish my sentence. I felt a stream of piss hitting my pants leg and I honestly had no idea if it was mine or Burrito’s. I finished up my business and put my junk away and walked over to the door. I tripped over something and fell on my face and took a quick second to think about the most efficient way to kill myself right then so I didn’t have to live with how close my mouth came to the floor of this disgusting bar.

But before I could end my life the lights came back on and I saw two other Mexican bikers standing over me. One of them had a shitty tattoo of a coyote on his neck and the other one had a shitty tattoo of a possum…also on his neck. I tried to stand up but the possum guy punched me in the face and knocked me back down.

“You sonofabitch!” the biker said. “You killed Burrito!”

“Wait, what the fuck? Who the hell are you?” I was drunk enough to barely feel the pain in my jaw but I could taste the blood in my mouth mixing with the remnants of the shitty liquor.

“We’re SAMMCOP. And so was he.”

The guy pointed behind me and I turned to see that I had tripped on Burrito’s body laying on the floor inside the bathroom. He wasn’t moving and had blood coming out of his eyes. That motherfucker was dead.

“Okay but I don’t even know what that means.”

“Don’t play dumb! Are you with another MC? Are you trying to mess up our deal?!?”

“How about we all take a breath for a sec? I’m just a rando patron at this bar and I don’t know shit about shit.”

“Maybe you’re police. You don’t wanna know what we do to cops. SAMMCOP don’t trust anybody.”

I slowly stood up and got my bearings. Apart from the possum tattoo guy and the coyote tattoo guy there were about half a dozen other bikers from their crew in the bar; all brown dudes. The few customers that were hanging out when I got there were all gone. I looked the possum tattoo guy dead in the eyes.

“I’ve been called a lot of things in my life. A drunk fuck. An insufferable drunk fuck. A drunk ass fucken fuck. A piece of shit drunk fat fuck. A fat drunk piece of fuck. A piece of fuck drunk fat shit fuck. And none of that bothers me. But I won’t EVER let anyone call me a fucking cop!”

I punched the possum guy in the gut hard enough to make him keel over. I was about to punch him in the head when the coyote neck tattoo guy pulled out a handgun and pointed it at my head.

“You just made the biggest mistake of your life, cabrón.”

Coyote guy bashed me in the side of the head with the butt of his gun hard enough for me to feel it even through the beer and liquor shield I was working on all night. Everything started to get fuzzy. But, like, fuzzier than alcohol fuzzy. A couple of the other bikers zip tied my hands behind my back and dragged me to an open area inside the bar.

“Lock the door, Marge!” the possum guy yelled once he got his wind back.

“Goddammit, Possum, I don’t need no police in here!” the bartender said.

“Don’t worry about that. We’re gonna finish this real quick!”

I was starting to think the guy with a neck tattoo of a possum was actually named Possum.

“Stop, please!” A woman’s scream broke through the noise. “The Classy Alcoholic would never kill anyone!”

I looked around to try to find who said that. My head was spinning so I could only make out the silhouette of a Mexican woman with long hair and a biker vest. She knelt down and put her hands on my cheeks. My vision adjusted enough for me to recognize her bright blue eyes and her beautiful, thick lips.

“Kimberly?” I asked.

“Holy shit, you do remember me,” She whispered.

I hadn’t seen Kimberly Suarez in over twenty years. I hadn’t thought of her in over a decade. But at that moment I realized that I never truly forgot her. I was about to ask what the hell she was doing here when I noticed the leather cut she was wearing. It had an ironed-on patch that said, “Property Of Possum.” At that point I knew for a fact that the guy with the neck tattoo of a possum was actually named Possum. I had an idea what the guy with the neck tattoo of a coyote might be named but I didn’t want to say it and be wrong. I’d look dumb.

One of the lower ranked bikers searched through all my pockets but couldn’t find whatever it was they were looking for. The coyote tattoo guy kneeled in front of me, gun still in hand.

“Let me make this real clear to you because I don’t have a lot of time. My name is Coyote.” Hell yeah. I had guessed right. “I’m the President of this motorcycle club. Typically I have enforcers who help me deal with guys like you. But I’m kind of a hands-on president. Which means that if you don’t cough up the drugs you stole off of Burrito I’m gonna blow your brains out myself.”

“Well it sounds like you have a bigger problem than me right now, Señor Coyote. Because I didn’t steal shit from you and I didn’t kill your guy. But I can help you find out who did.”

“The only people in this bar right now other than you are my crew, Possum’s old lady and Marge the bartender. And none of them would ever betray me.”

“Are you willing to bet your entire deal on that? If so then go ahead and shoot me because you’re gonna come up empty handed. Unless you let me go and let me figure out who did this.”

Coyote looked back at his group of guys. He tried to play it cool but doubt is one thing most people can’t hide if you’re watching them closely.

“That’s right,” I said through a bloody smile. “Trust no one.”

To Be Continued…

Inflation is fucking all of our shit up right now. The cost of rent, groceries and tons of other stuff has skyrocketed lately. And all you brokees aren’t the only ones feeling the squeeze. Even The Classy Alcoholic has had to downsize and start visiting the Monday thru Wednesday lunchtime strippers every week as opposed to his favorite Friday & Saturday night regulars. I even had to get a second job as a janitor at a bank so I could surreptitiously turn off the cameras at night so my Cousin Chico could rob the joint the next morning. You’d think that would’ve scored me a nice chunk of change but my dumbass Cousin was too hungover to show up for the job and his entire crew got gunned down in the street by some overzealous hillbilly who was open carrying and was really excited to shoot a bunch of Mexicans.

Anyhoozle, even though we’ve all made a ton of sacrifices I strongly believe that heavy drinking should not be one of those things we give up. And because The Classy Alcoholic is a man of the people I’m here to show you how to stay as drunk as possible, as cheaply as possible, during this dark period in which some of y’all may have to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet. Let’s go through the typical day of a working class person.

BREAKFAST: BOOZY CEREAL

Look, I get it. Eggs are scarce, bacon is pricey, and milk is pretty much just cow cum. That’s why I don’t usually start my days with breakfast either. I used to just wake up at the crack of noon, pour some coffee, gingerly poke the naked, smoking hot babe who passed out in my bed the night before to make sure she’s still alive, then head out to the bar to start my day. But none of us have that luxury anymore. Now we all have to make sure we clock in early at the factory for our 19 hour shifts and if we talk to any co-workers about unionizing we’re dragged out to the back and get shot in the fucking leg.

But just because our days are miserable doesn’t mean we can’t numb ourselves to them as early as possible. That’s why I’ve been waking up with a bowl of bourbon-spiked cereal every morning. A gallon of milk at the grocery store is $2.89 and these little individual cereal bowls are $2.49. But if you want to save even more money here is a tip: walk into your local upscale hotel like a Marriot or even a Holiday Inn where no one has found a dead body in the pool yet and carry yourself like you belong there. These places usually have a continental breakfast and if you can muster up enough confidence to crash the breakfast bar you’ll be eating all kinds of bananas for free. And you can swipe a few of these little cereal bowls with you as long as you wear pants baggy enough to hide them away discreetly.

Pour yourself a little bourbon into the milk and let the boozy bitterness blend with the milky, sugary sweetness. Let the nostalgia of eating cereal as a child before school wash over you and let the alcohol remind you that your childhood is gone, that both your parents are dead, and that the only joy you have left in your life is that you can almost afford to pay the electric bill since you saved so much money after stealing all that breakfast food from the lobby of the nearby Radisson.

LUNCH: BLOODY MARY SOPITA

Have you ever been to college? Either because you really wanted to get a degree or because you wanted to go undercover to get revenge on that piece of shit economics professor who fired his Mexican maid and almost got her deported after she rejected his sexual advances and also that Mexican maid was your mom? Either way, if you went to college for any period of time you probably remember doing it while broke.

(Note to anyone reading this who went to college and wasn’t broke: eat shit and die you little rich fucks.)

And the most prominent college student food group was cans of tomato soup that you watered down to make them last a couple of days. Now that Jack in the Box tacos are no longer two for 99 cents and instead cost a fucking DOLLAR SEVENTY NINE we’re all living like those broke little college kids again. But I’m here to tell you that you can take your poverty and still make it into a pover-party. First off, don’t buy regular degular tomato soup cans. Buy these little $1 packets of tomato-based Mexican sopita. These shits at least have some seasoning (otherwise known as white people’s kryptonite) and they have little estrellitas and coditos which give you some extra carbs. This is a wholeass meal in a bag.

And what kind of booze goes well with tomatoes? That’s right: motherfucken vodka! Pour that shit in, add some lime, Worcestershire, tabasco and a celery stick and you’ve got yourself a Bloody Mary that you can eat on your lunch break. Your boss will have no idea that you’re getting hammered on the job and if you wrap a bandage around your leg you can blame crashing the warehouse forklift into a pallet of paint cans on the tumble you took off your bike the night before. Plus bloody marys are good for hangovers so this will help you after coming down from that boozy cereal you had in the morning.

DINNER: TEQUILA RAMEN

I used to take such lavish vacations back when I could afford it. Did you know I went to Tokyo like six years ago? It was such an amazing experience. Then last week my Japanese neighbor stabbed me when he caught me siphoning gas out of his 2002 Ford Escort in the middle of the night. That’s as close as I’ll get to fighting the Yakuza again for a long, long time. The days of being able to traverse the globe on first class flights are a thing of the past. Now I only take trips to the southside of Tucson to gradually dig the tunnel that Cousin Chico will use to bust out of jail after they caught him for putting together that whole dead bank crew.

But I’m nothing if not an optimist despite how much I always kinda wanna die. So I bide my time for when I can get back overseas and I sit here in my flooded apartment trying to brace the door to keep the meth neighbors out while boiling a packet of a meal that kinda reminds me of my precious time in Tokyo: a 39 cent packet of ramen noodles.

If I had any real money I’d be spiking this with a bit of sake but unfortunately sake is expensive and I blew all my cash on a claw machine at the grocery store trying to catch a little teddy bear stuffie so that I can stuff it full of heroin and shove it back down the tunnel I dug so my Cousin Chico can stay in charge in that prison for a while until he can escape. So I decided to spike it with something I always have on hand: cheap tequila.

Squeeze some lime into it but don’t worry about the salt. Your tears will take care of that. You’ve got yourself some Mexican tequila ramen, a cross cultural meal that will help heal the divide between you and any Japanese neighbors you may have offended. Think of it as a spicy margarita in a bowl with noodles added in instead of ice or dignity. After dinner you can go to bed knowing that no matter what life throws at you, no matter how much you have to struggle, you will never let the challenges you face force you into sobriety. There’s always a way, y’all.

Stay strong and stay drunk.

Overview

Over the weekend I came across a stupid looking bottle of booze that I hadn’t encountered before. It was a kettle corn whiskey called “Knucklenoggin.” I asked my Instagram followers via poll if I should try it and only 39% of them had the good sense to try and dissuade me from putting this poison into myself. But the other 61% were more than happy to watch me destroy my liver for their entertainment. And apart from not having much of a sense of self-preservation when it comes to what I put in my body The Classy Alcoholic is a man of the people. If the fans want it then Classy delivers; self-respect and my family’s desire to see me grow old be damned!

BOTTLE REVIEW

First off, this thing looks really fucken stupid. Most things on the label are intentionally upside down for reasons I can’t even imagine. But hey, what do I know? The only graphic design I ever did was spray-painting the words DIE PIG on the sides of cop cars back in high school after smoking some weird shit out of a bong shaped like Shrek’s dick. (It was long, green and full of swamp water, before you ask.)

The website will tell you that knucklenoggin means, “A humble person who has excelled into a wonderful life by chance and hard work” but I don’t believe for a second that that word doesn’t have racist origins. Call your black co-worker a knucklenoggin and see how fast you end up on the floor of the break room with a boot coming down on your back. Plus I’m pretty sure that weird design of a skull with a fist for a head is how you say “No Mexicans allowed” in hieroglyphics.  

The final red flag is the little note on the side that says “shake well” because I’ve never had a bottle of whiskey that I’ve had to fucking activate.

Bottle rating – 2/5

VISUAL REVIEW

I dunno, it looks like regular degular ass whiskey I guess?

Visual rating – 3/5

AROMA REVIEW

This is where things get really weird because this shit smells EXACTLY like kettle corn popcorn. And I know you’re thinking, “Well duh Classy why wouldn’t it smell like that lmao?” But don’t forget, dear reader, that I’ve shoved my nose into many strange, foul-smelling things that I felt obligated to drink. But enough about your mom (POW!!!!!!)

Usually the gimmicky flavored liquor bottles molest you in the nostrils with a paint thinner-adjacent fume that has only the slightest semblance of something fruity or sweet buried in the blend. But this thing somehow has the perfect balance of sweet, buttery and even saltiness on the nose. They say smell is the sense that’s most attached to memory. And this thing instantly transported me back to my childhood and to that time my dad lost me in the county fair because he was too distracted trying to cheat on my mom with the carny girl. He eventually found me napping on a giant bed of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle stuffies with a bunch of kettle corn dust on my OshKosh B’Gosh overalls.

Aroma rating – 4/5

Daddy Issues rating – 1/5

FLAVOR REVIEW

The nose is a bit incongruous with the actual taste of the whiskey but the latter is more in line with what I expected. There’s an acidic burn that would be better suited as a strong, delicious finish to a smooth sip of Irish whiskey. But here it’s all just a confusing mixture of too many flavors that barely speak to each other, much less blend harmoniously. While the sweetness is very prominent you can’t just do shit like this to traditional whiskey without creating a tragic concoction that doesn’t have a soul and somehow learned to beg for death. The subtle notes and thoughtful blends of spices, fruit, oak and herbs that you get from tasting real whiskey have been contorted into a shapeless, wet mass of pain and despair that crawls aimlessly in the dark before you beat it to death with a crowbar in what you tearfully tell yourself is an act of mercy. “Kill me! KILL ME!” it roars through the deformed mass of tissue that barely shaped itself into vocal cords, “I shouldn’t be ALIIIIIIIIVE!!!!!”

Honestly tho, I’ve tasted worse.

Flavor rating – 3/5

MIXABILITY REVIEW

After drinking, like, half a bottle of this bullshit while writing this article I realized it was really dumb to just drink it straight. If I were smarter and less drunk I would’ve realized sooner that this is basically a fucking cocktail mix. What goddamn moron would just drink this diabetes in a glass as is? So I decided to pour it into a cup of coffee to at least give myself a fighting chance of waking up and being a functional adult tomorrow. The thing paired really well with coffee, actually! I could see this being used in something like a white Russian to give it an added layer of deliciousness. If you try this please try it with something else to cut through the concentrated sugar bomb.

Mixability rating – 4/5

FINAL THOUGHTS

As a man who loves whiskey I can’t exactly recommend this weird concoction. But based on what’s happened before it’s only a matter of time before the racists at Knucklenoggin, LLC or whatever start paying TikTok influencers and Instagram meme accounts to showcase the stuff on their social media accounts. So get ready to see this everywhere in a predictable attempt to astroturf this into popularity with a bunch of dead-eyed frat kids online. When that happens just remember that it was The Motherfucking Classy Alcoholic who did it first.

Final rating – 2/5 normally but 3.5/5 if you don’t have people in your life who care about you.

What you’re about to read is a true story. Everything in this post actually happened, to the best of my drunken recollection.

My birthday is on February 8^th which means that in 2020 I was one of the few people who got to enjoy a legit, pre-quarantine celebration. That day happened to coincide with AZ Strong Beer Fest in Phoenix and I remember being there with a raging assfuckface of a hangover for the record books. I got blackout drunk the night before at a gay bar that was walking distance from my hotel and there might have also been a drag show that night? Who knows. What I can say for sure is that I spent my 34^th birthday stumbling through Steele Indian School Park (amongst a crowd of hundreds, likely rona-positive assholes) trying to desperately drink enough tiny pours of beer to balance out my shit and get myself right as fast as I possibly could.

We needn’t rehash too much what happened in the 12 months after that. The entire world went on lockdown, I lived through the worst year of my life (as a lot of other people did), and I drank enough alcohol to kill a family of four…elephants. Literally feed the same amount of booze I drank that year to four elephants and all four of those big bitches would tip over and die.

Cut to February 8^th, 2021. I had somehow survived a global pandemic despite always kinda wanting to die so I was feeling kinda good but also being alive was even more goddamn exhausting than usual but also, like, I had an excuse to wear a suit and tie out in public again but also why do birthdays matter because they’re just a reminder that we’re not actually living and instead every day that passes means we’re actually slowly dying because the progression of time brings us one step closer to the grave but then also there’s no better excuse than a birthday to get people to pay for your booze so fuck it, I decided to go out somewhere for my 35^th birthday.

My friend Adam Ledford, and his family, were pretty much the only people I spent time with during the latter half of 2020. So when I told Adam I wanted to put on a suit and drink a martini for my birthday he suggested we go to Sullivan’s Steakhouse on River & Campbell in Tucson. I immediately agreed because I had fond memories of taking ladies to Sullivan’s back in my 20’s since that was one of the nicest places Tucson had to offer then. That was during the time when downtown was really shitty and stabby with nothing to do other than drink at Hotel Congress then hit that Grill diner place that white people loved dragging me to. Sullivan’s was an “upscale” joint with a fancy patio and a fire pit that always impressed the babes.

I walked in to Sullivan’s bar, looking handsome as hell with one of my best outfits and my hair looking fabulous as always. Adam Ledford was there too.

The place closed at 10pm and we got there just before 9pm so we decided to have a couple of quick drinks and appetizers then continue our night at a shitty dive bar that was open for the rest of the night. I got my vodka martini with a twist because that was back when gin and I were still not on speaking terms. Gin and I reconnected recently and I think we might be okay…just as long as gin doesn’t act like a fucken dick again.

Speaking of dicks, Adam decided to (metaphorically!) swing his around that night. After I finished my martini I said I wanted to switch to whisky. And to Sullivan’s’ credit they had a wall full of stupid good bottles of liquor that neither of us saw very often at any other bars.

“I’ll get my friend a glass of 30 year old Macallan for his birthday,” Adam said to the bartender, with the self-satisfaction of a dude whose wife has a PhD.

Holy fucking SHIT, I thought to myself. My buddy is literally spending, like, sixty or even seventy dollars on one single glass of whisky for me. That’s AMAZING!

For those of you not in the know: Macallan is a brand of single malt Scotch and also the word “Scotch” just means whisky from Scotland. The number next to the name refers to how long the Scotch has been aged so Adam just threw caution to the wind and got me a drink that was 30 years old. I had in my hand a glass of whisky that was only five years younger than I was at that time. I took a sip of one of the most delicious things I’ve ever had in my mouth that wasn’t lady parts. It was glorious in ways I can’t even describe. I let Adam try it but he only took the tiniest of sippy-sips and let me enjoy the rest of it on my own.

“Hey, have you ever tried this?” the bartender asked Adam, while holding up a bottle of some other fancy-ass-looking whiskey.

Adam said he hadn’t so the bartender popped the bottle and gave him a wholeass pour on the house. An entire full glass of a really good, top-shelf whiskey. For free.

I didn’t realize it at the time because I was too busy savoring some more of the Macallan 30 that tasted like I was going down on an angel on Christmas morning but that’s when Adam’s hands started to shake a bit. His eyes were growing wider with every sip of his own drink as the realization of what he had just done was slowly dawning. See, when you tip real fat at a bar and spend ridiculous amounts of money a cool bartender will probably offer you a free shot of some mid-tier liquor they want to get rid of. It’s like when you lose so much money at a Vegas casino and they give you a free stay at the hotel and even send a lady up to your room because it all costs them way less than what they just earned from your dumbass sitting at that blackjack table all night.

So it was kind of like that but Adam didn’t get a tiny shot of a mid-tier liquor that the bar wanted to get rid of. He got a wholeass pour of some really good shit. It was closing time so we asked for the check and were getting ready to head to the dive bar but it took the bartender a while to get back to us. A woman who worked for Sullivan’s went behind the bar to help the dude figure out our tab on that little computer thing they charge stuff on. And they were there for a while. But eventually our bartender came back to us with a face-down receipt.

“Hey guys, we didn’t have a button for the 30 year Macallan on the computer so I had to bring my manager in here. We only charged you for a glass of the 25 year and we gave you a one hundred dollar discount.”

I could feel my asshole clench up and I assumed Adam’s asshole loosened up so bad that he literally lost his shit.

Did that motherfucker just say a ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR discount?

Adam signed the receipt and went to the bathroom, presumably to clean the dookie off his undies. I looked at what he signed and saw that he was charged two hundred dollars for that single shot of whisky. Two hundred dollars.

Two. Hundred. Dollars…..AFTER THE DISCOUNT. For one glass. I drank a single glass of whisky that should’ve but somehow didn’t cost three hundred dollars. Or should it have? Because that price was for the Macallan 25. Let’s not forget that I drank a glass of the 30 year. I even tried to get the bartender to tell me what kind of bullet Adam dodged.

“Hey man, how much does the Macallan 30 actually cost?” I asked.

“It’s a lot.” The dude said.

“Holy shit, this is the best birthday present ever. But seriously though…how much does that thing actually cost?”

“It’s a lot,” he said again, just straight up refusing to answer my question.

Adam came back from the bathroom and we both said goodbye to the staff at Sullivan’s Steakhouse. We walked out all cool and confident and shit but as soon as we got outside Adam lost his goddamn mind.

“Oh my fucking fuck I just spent $200 on one drink. We’re never coming back here. Please DON’T EVER TELL MY WIFE ABOUT THIS!”

“Bro. If you want to cheat on your wife I promise I will lie to her and say you were hanging out with me all night. That’s how much I owe you. And also…any well drinks you want at this dive bar we’re going to are on me, obviously.”

We entered the dive bar in awkward silence because I was trying to pretend like I felt bad that Adam spent that much money on me while actually being ecstatic that I got to drink that thing without paying a goddamn cent for it. We sat on the patio chatting for a bit while he drank his bottom shelf tequila that I begrudgingly bought for him. When there was a lull in the conversation he started scrolling on his phone. I sipped my gross, bottom shelf, triple lime vodka tonic that I wished had more limes to mask the taste as I watched Adam’s eyes grow wide as he stared at his phone.

“Holy shit, dude,” he said. “We’ve been looking at this all wrong. Do you have any idea how much an entire bottle of Macallan 25 costs? I looked it up. It’s between two and three thousand dollars.”

“For a fucking single bottle?” I asked as I drank a shot of Fireball because I am a garbage person.

“Yes! And do you have any idea how much the 30 year old bottle costs? That motherfucker is like six or seven thousand dollars. Per bottle.”

The severity of this revelation dawned on us both at the same time.

“If a glass of the Macallan 25 was three hundred dollars then that means the 30 year must have been five or six hundred dollars easy,” he said. “I somehow narrowly escaped paying SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS FOR A SINGLE GLASS OF WHISKY!”

“Are you shitting me? That’s amazing. Did we just beat the house?”

“We absolutely did! And I even got to have a tiny sip. That was probably a hundred dollar sip. This is one of the coolest things that’s ever happened to me and I’m not even mad that it cost me two hundred bucks!”

“Okay, but, like….do you want to go back there tomorrow?”

THE END

Like what you read? Consider buying me a beer.

Catch up on Part 1 here.
And read Part 2 here.

“Don’t shoot,” I said to the masked group pointing assault rifles at us. “Whoever you are, we can figure this out without anyone having to die.”

“You wouldn’t be trying to stop us if you knew what these people did to us in that factory, Classy,” the head masked man said. “We all know you’re a good person. And the only reason we haven’t opened fire already is that we don’t want you to get caught in the middle. But this only ends one way. So pick your side carefully.”

“You’re all a bunch of fucking cowards!” Santa yelled out. “You hide behind your masks pointing my own guns at me when I did all of you a favor. You would’ve starved without me coming here to hire you. This whole town was heading down the drain until I brought my business here!”

“Santa, you need to stop!” I said. “I’m trying to get them to spare your life but you’re making me lose reasons why I should. Also, are those really all your guns they’re holding? That’s like, fifteen rifles. Why the hell do you need to carry fifteen rifles in your goddamn sled, SANTA?”

“Freedom isn’t a compromise to-”

“Okay, never mind, shut up. Just…shut the fuck up dude.”

The man leading the group pulled down his hood and took off his mask.

“We’re not here to hide. My name is Eduardo. Our faces are only covered up because of the cold. Most of us don’t have any heat in our homes this winter. Also we’re wearing masks because there’s still a pandemic going on no matter how much assholes like you want to deny it but whatever, that’s not the point. We’re all residents of this community who were desperate for work. And you took advantage of that. We worked insane hours for slave wages because we thought we couldn’t do better. But we’re done. And you’re going to pay for how you treated us.”

I was literally the only thing stopping the workers from firing into the warehouse and killing the Clauses. But they were so angry and in need of justice for their abuses that they were gonna sacrifice me too if I didn’t think of something quickly. Part of me couldn’t really blame them if they did. I decided a long time ago that The Classy Alcoholic would follow Batman rules: no guns, no killing, and banging tons of babes that I ghosted as soon as they discovered my secret identity. But I also followed ACAB rules so I wasn’t exactly going to call the police on Santa Claus when I knew he’d just walk away from this without any consequences because he was rich and white.

And then there was Mrs. Claus. I wasn’t even sure if I believed her when she said she didn’t know anything about her husband’s operation. I wanted to…but I had to admit that I didn’t really know her at all. I looked over and saw her crying. There was something familiar in her eyes. It was the look of a person who felt betrayed and left completely alone with nowhere to turn. No one understood that better than me. So I decided to take a leap of faith. ‘Twas the season after all.

“Okay, you can have Santa and do whatever you need to do. But Mrs. Claus isn’t part of this. Please let her go. Oh, and me. Please also let me go, if you don’t mind.”

Eduardo had all of the workers lower their guns.

“You’re really going to walk away from me right now?” Santa asked his wife. “After everything I’ve sacrificed for you? Well fine, you can fuck right off!”

Santa grabbed Mrs. Claus by the waist and shoved her into the crowd of armed workers. Most of them fell to the ground while he took advantage of the distraction and jumped into his sled. He pulled out a whip and started hitting the reindeer really fucking hard with it to get them to fly. I heard Rudolph crying out in pain while his bright red nose flickered. His frail old legs shook but he was somehow still able to get off the ground. The masked workers pointed their guns at Santa again.

“No, don’t shoot, you’ll hit the reindeer!”

Everyone put their guns back down. No matter how enraged they were, they weren’t going to murder the innocent animals that were also clearly being abused by that motherfucker. The sled was flying out of the warehouse doors when I decided to do something stupid, as per usual.

I jumped into the backseat as the reindeer hit max velocity. I felt the familiar sinking feeling I got when airplanes took off but with some added terror because I was afraid of heights and the goddamn sled didn’t have any real safety features. I tried to look around for a weapon but I only saw one giant bag full of harmless toys and another bag full of a bunch of grenades because Santa Claus was a fucking asshole. He didn’t even know I was in the sled with him. I watched him continue to whip his reindeer to get them to go faster. I punched him in the back of the head as hard as I could and my knuckles felt like they almost broke. He was a tough bastard.

“You’re really starting to piss me off, Classy,” Santa said as he turned around to look at me. “You’ve robbed me of my Christmas spirit and I’m gonna get it the fuck back from you one way or another, HO HO HO!”

Santa Claus leapt onto me and put his hands around my neck. I tried to pull him off but his fat sausage fingers were too strong for me to handle. I knew I wouldn’t last long so I used every last bit of breath I had to yell as loud as I could.

“RUDOLPH!” The head reindeer looked back at me when he heard his name. “MERRY-GO-ROUND!”

Rudolph may have been dumb as shit but he knew his name and what a merry-go-round was. He started spinning the sled into a circular flight pattern fast enough to knock Santa off balance. I pushed him off of me and moved toward the front. I needed to get to Rudolph but there were eight reindeer with stupid names I couldn’t remember between him and me. I made the mistake of looking down and almost shit my pants. We were really high above South Tucson and my fear of heights was about to make my heart explode. But I couldn’t let that stop me.

I jumped onto the back of the first reindeer that I think was named Daggle, then onto the next one that was maybe named Dimble. I then jumped onto Pringle, then Venkman, on Cooper, on Cutty, on Dino and Bixby. Then there was my boy Rudolph. I jumped on his saddle and held on tight. He smiled and let his tongue flap in the wind.

“I missed you too, boy.”

I felt a painful sting on my right shoulder. I looked back to see that Santa had grabbed his whip again. He caught me a few times in the back. I could hear Rudolph crying even through the heavy winds. He pointed his nose, so bright, onto the leather straps that tied him and the other reindeer to the sled. There was a buckle that I could easily unhook. Santa kept whipping at me and was hitting some of the reindeer when he missed.

“Hey Santa!” I yelled. “I banged your wife, you fat motherfucker!”

I unbuckled the straps and freed all nine reindeer. The sled fell back down toward the South Tucson streets. There was a giant explosion when it hit the ground, probably because of the grenades that Santa carried, because he was a fucking asshole.

I had Rudolph guide me back down to the wreckage. When we landed I looked up and saw the other reindeer flying off into the night sky. I had no idea where they were going but I was just happy they were free. The flame grew larger in the middle of the road from all the toys that also caught fire. I saw the crowd of masked workers from the factory gathering around the impromptu bonfire. Several children ran out toward it too and put their hands out to warm themselves up. I found Mrs. Claus watching the group of people converge. I put my hand on her shoulder to get her attention.

“I’m sorry about everything.” I said to her. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“I know. I’m not sure how I feel about this at all. On the one hand, Santa was clearly a terrible person. But also…I really did love him.”

She gave me a hug and cried on my shoulder. And I could feel my penis grow three sizes that day.

“Oh my god, did you really just get a boner right now, you fucking pig?!?” she asked.

“I’m sorry! But you look really hot in that dress. Also you’re officially single and we’re both in need of some Christmas spirit, right?”

Mrs. Claus slapped me across the face and walked away. I couldn’t help but feel sad as I watched her disappear through the smoke cloud created by her husband’s crispy corpse.

“Muchas gracias por tu ayuda, Classy.” Eduardo walked up to me while holding a small child in his arms. “The families without heaters are going to use that fire to make it through the night. And don’t worry, we’ll tell the cops that Santa fell out of the sky because of some freak accident with his sled.”

“If I had known what he was doing to everyone here for all these years I would’ve intervened sooner. I’m glad y’all stood up to him. And I’m sorry about blowing up all the toys in his bag. I know your kids would’ve loved to have a few of those.”

“It’s not even a problem. We’re just gonna have to teach our kids that toys aren’t important. What really matters is our time together and our dignity. And we took back both tonight. If you’d like to join us for Christmas dinner you’re welcome. We can cook carne asada with that huge fire back there.”

I looked over at Rudolph and saw his nose flickering again.

“No thanks, Eduardo. I appreciate the invite but I think I’ll just do what I normally do around this time and get shithouse drunk on tequila at home. But now I have an old friend to hang out with.”

I hopped onto Rudolph’s back and gave him some more neck scratches and belly rubs.

“Good boy. Let’s go get drunk together.”

His nose lit up brighter than I had ever seen before. Rudolph shot up toward the starry, night sky with me onboard. He smiled and let his tongue flap in the wind.

The End.

Read Part 1 of the story here

The dark jail cell I was trapped in smelled like shit. There was a single light bulb barely illuminating the room. The kidnappers got me before I could hide emergency reserves of tiny liquor bottles in my butthole so I was growing increasingly sober by the minute. And the worst part of it all was finding out that I was locked up with fucking Santa Claus.

“This is certainly a strange way for us to meet, Classy. I’ve heard a lot about you. You’re the only celebrity I can think of who’s almost as well known as I am, Ho Ho Ho! Do you have any idea why we’re in here?”

Ugh. I fucking hated that guy.

“Doesn’t matter. The number of people who’d love to lock me up is too high to count so asking why is a waste of time. In fact, the better question is why you’re here.”

“No idea. Our circles have never overlapped so I don’t know why these terrorists would associate you with a Claus. Is there any connection between us that you can think of?”

“Um. Not…no, definitely nothing that I can come up with at all. Like I said, doesn’t matter, I’m gonna find a way to pick that lock. I bust out of prisons way worse than this all the time.”

“Wait, listen, someone’s coming.”

A man in a dark hood and face mask walked out of the shadows and approached the bars. He had an assault rifle slung over his arm and a ring of keys attached to his belt.

“That’s my AR-15 you sonofabitch!” Santa Claus yelled at the masked man. “You let me out of here right now or every single one of you thugs is gonna regret ever being born!”

“Shut your goddamn mouth, Santa. I’ll deal with you in a minute. We have your wife in a cell next door so calm your ass down if you know what’s good for you. First I need to talk to you, Classy. What were you doing at that bar tonight with Mrs. Claus? Are you working with these people?”

“Wait, what bar with Mrs. Claus?” Santa asked me. “How do you know my wife, Classy?”

“Oh. Um. Well. Mrs. Claus and I just met earlier tonight. For the very first time ever. Coincidentally. At the same bar. And oh no! Look at that, I just dropped my phone on the ground and oh no! I accidentally just stomped on it really hard a bunch of times. What a bummer because all my texts and pictures from the past year are all erased forever because I don’t back anything up. Anyhoozle, I’m sure this is all just a big misunder-”

Santa reached his arm through the bars and grabbed the masked man by the throat. His big fat sausage fingers were stronger than they looked.

“Santa, no, let him go!” I tried to stop him but he was too fast and too strong. I heard the sound of cracking bone and the masked man went limp in Santa’s hand. He grabbed the keys from the dead guy’s belt and tossed the corpse aside.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I asked. “I could’ve gotten us out of here without anyone having to die.”

“Please, Classy! Don’t go pussy on me. These scumbags were going to kill us and I’m not willing to die for anyone. Just so you know they hijacked my sled and stole all the weapons I had stashed inside. So they’re armed and we’re not. If you want to survive this you’ll have to do whatever it takes.”

“First of all why in the literal flying fuck does Santa Claus need to go around strapped?”

“Well, first of all it’s my God-given right as an American to conceal and carry. And secondly, you don’t know what it’s like to have to deliver presents all over the world. I end up in some really shady neighborhoods all the time. You know you’re there when the letters are way longer than normal. Bunch of greedy little shits. They’re probably taking most of the presents I drop off and trading them for drugs. So I need to make sure I can protect myself at all times.”

“Wow. Fucking WOW. You deliver presents to children you goddamn prick!”

“I love children. It’s their thug parents I can’t stand. Now you can do whatever you want but I’m going to find my wife. The poor thing is probably bound and gagged and terrified.”

“Ummmm…yes. Totally. Getting tied up is definitely very scary and not at all sexy for her, like, at all. You would know. Because you know her best. Better than…anyone.”

Santa picked up the AR from the masked man’s corpse and made his way through the halls of this old, shitty warehouse like he knew exactly where he was going. I decided to follow because I really did want Mrs. Claus to be okay. We passed by a few more jail cells, a storage room with some whips and chains, and several stockades. And I know that some of you are thinking this sounds a lot like my apartment. But I assure you it wasn’t the same. This fucked up warehouse wasn’t set up for fun.

I came across the familiar sight of Mrs. Claus in handcuffs but for non-sexy reasons this time. Santa let her out of her cell and they embraced in a way that made me think she really might love him. Or maybe she was just putting up appearances and mostly wanted to bang me again instead. Who knows?

“Hello again, Mrs. Claus,” I said, trying to be all nonchalant and shit. “Nice to see you again after our extremely brief, coincidental meeting earlier tonight for the first time at an adult drinking establishment.”

Fucken nailed it.

Santa led us into a room that housed a massive production facility with assembly lines everywhere. I saw chains and shackles on the ground where the worker stations would normally be. The place was freezing cold and everything was so rusted and filthy that I would’ve sworn no one had been in there for at least fifty years. But I stopped when I saw a doll’s head on the floor that looked new. I kept looking around and noticed pieces of several other toys. Building blocks, action figure limbs and race cars were everywhere and mostly clean except for a few tiny marks of soot.

“We’re almost out of here,” Santa said. “The reindeer and sled are in the outgoing product area. If we just open the garage doors we can fly out of here.”

“Wait!” I yelled. “We’re in your toy factory right now, aren’t we? You really run your business like this?”

Santa scoffed and started to walk away from me. I grabbed his shoulder to stop him but he turned around and shoved me hard enough to knock me on my ass.

“Don’t talk to me about how to run a business, Classy. I’ve been the beacon of hope, love and salvation for way longer than you’ve even been alive. Keeping that shit going takes the kind of manpower you can’t even fathom.”

“So you keep your elves chained up here and work them to death?”

“No one is forced to work for anyone! And actually I don’t employ elves anymore because they kind of have a shorter lifespan than you’d think and, yeah, they pretty much all died so I had to move my operation to South Tucson several years ago out of necessity. I used to have a steady stream of Mexicans ready to fill up this whole facility at any given time. But now I have trouble getting staff in here because no one wants to work anymore. Being me is harder than you’ll ever know.”

I stood up and slowly approached Santa. I had no idea what I was going to do but I was too angry to care. He held his assault rifle in front of him, ready to use it if needed.

“You don’t scare me. And I’m gonna make sure you pay for what you’ve done to these people,” I said. I turned to Mrs. Claus. “Did you know about all of this?”

“I swear I didn’t, Classy! This is horrifying and I promise I’ve never been inside of the factory. I was never allowed.”

“Cut the shit!” Santa said to his wife. “You’ve been reaping the benefits from my job and status for over a decade now. This business keeps your fine ass in designer dresses and fancy jewelry. You’ve always been an expensive habit and I do this to keep you happy. So don’t act like you’re too good for me all of a sudden.”

I fucking lost it after that. I ran toward Santa and punched him in the face. He stumbled but tried to aim his assault rifle toward me. I grabbed it and pointed it at the ceiling as he pulled the trigger. He was strong as hell but I held the gun away for as long as I could. The rounds went everywhere and the ricochets echoed through the room.

The rifle clicked empty and I was about to beat the shit out of him when I heard the sound of a warehouse door opening. Two more hooded men in masks with AR-15s walked into the production facility. They opened fire as Santa, his wife, and I hit the ground. We dodged the bullets by crawling toward the outgoing product area. We saw the nine reindeer and the sled when we walked into the room. I could tell Rudolph recognized me and was super excited to see me again.

“Hey bud!” I said as I gave him some scratches on his head and some belly rubs. “Did you miss me, boy?”

“Ummm…how do you know Rudolph?” Santa asked me as he looked over to his wife, then to his reindeer, then back to me, then back to his wife, then back to me.

“Oh. Yes. Welp. We met a while back…at a beer fest. Yeah. That’s it. He and I used to get trashed at beer fests together. A long, long time ago.”

I gave Mrs. Claus a sexy wink to indicate that I fucken nailed it.

“Okay but why did you just very obviously wink at my wife after you said that?” Santa asked me.

I was about to give another suave, discreet answer but I was interrupted by the sounds of several warehouse garage doors opening behind us.

We looked outside and were confronted by about a dozen more hooded people with facemasks all pointing assault rifles at us. One person from the group stepped forward.

“Step away, Classy!” the man said. “We’ll deal with you later. But first, the Clauses must die!”

To Be Concluded…

I fucking hate Christmas. I’ve gotten pretty sick of hearing the exact same songs every year for the entire three and a half decades that I’ve been alive. Baby Jesus Christ himself was listening to “Jingle Bell Rock” on the day he was born and somehow I still had to hear that shit over the speakers today in the Macy’s while I was trying to buy slippers.

I sat at the bar at Tucson Hop Shop sipping my barrel-aged imperial stout while I waited to meet the woman who texted me earlier that night. Part of me hoped that she wouldn’t actually show. I hadn’t heard from her at all since last Christmas but of course I never blocked her number or even deleted her off my phone. I thought about it a few times as it got closer to the holiday season and just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I tried so hard to convince myself to ignore her message from today. But I’ll never deny how pathetically easy it is for me to fall back into old patterns. And anyone who knows me knows I’m a sucker for a gorgeous, middle-aged trophy wife with a fat husband who takes her for granted.

So there I was, patiently waiting at the bar like a sucker. I knew her husband basically lived at work during Christmastime and that she had to spend her holidays all alone. Except for last year, of course.

My sense of smell isn’t that great anymore after all the drugs I did in my youth with my Cousin Chico but I recognized her cinnamon-scented perfume immediately. She was never hard to spot in a crowd. She put her hand on mine and I saw the same bright green nail polish that she was wearing when we first met. Her body still looked stunning in her form-fitting red dress and she was still wearing one of those dumb oversized black belts around her waist.

“Hello again, Classy.”

“Hello, Mrs. Claus,” I said, as I pulled my hand away from hers.

“So formal of you. You really aren’t going to use my first name?”

I ignored her question and took a long sip of my beer. Most people think Santa Claus spends all of his time in the North Pole but the truth is that he and his wife are snowbirds. They keep it pretty quiet for obvious reasons but if you get to know the right people they’ll tell you about the massive toy factory he runs in South Tucson. I never knew the exact location and never cared enough to ask. A guy like me doesn’t have much in the way of Christmas spirit. But I found some last December 23^rd when I happened to meet Mrs. Claus at a dive bar. We were both there to do some holiday sad-drinking and she was already a few shots in when we struck up a conversation. It didn’t take long for her to open up about how lonely she got every time she had to come back to Tucson for the winter. She hadn’t seen Santa in almost a week and she wouldn’t again until the early hours of the 26^th when he came home exhausted and went right to bed.

Looks like she didn’t have much in the way of Christmas spirit herself. So I bought her a couple more drinks, danced with her (badly) a bit and got an invite back to her house out in the rural parts of Southern Arizona. Neither of us were in any condition to drive but luckily she was able to use the sled for a few nights before her husband needed it for work. She introduced me to all nine of their reindeer who flew us to her place but my ass was too drunk to remember their names. Especially because they were all some weird shit like Donden and Bliggle and Cumin or whatever.

I remembered Rudolph though. The poor guy was really old and dumb as shit. The only thing he was naturally good at was guiding the sled but otherwise he just stumbled around the house running into things. He had his own water bowl but he still went into the bathroom to drink out of the toilet. And his antlers got him stuck in the toilet seat like a dumbass. The other eight reindeer were kinda dicks and made fun of him a bunch. And as a guy who frequently did really dumb shit while drunk I felt like I could really relate to him. Plus my nose is also constantly bright red from all the damn whiskey I consume.

So Mrs. Claus and I spent an amazing night together. We talked, laughed, drank hot cocoa by the fire and I even got to wear one of Santa’s hats while she and I banged which is not a thing I ever thought I’d be into before then. But it wasn’t even twenty four hours later when she told me I had to go. She had to take the reindeer and sled to her husband at the toy factory. She dropped me off at my apartment first and kissed me goodnight. I asked if I could see her again and she gave me a wink and a “maybe.” But then I didn’t hear from her all year.

Until now. It was December in Tucson again. The weather was warm as hell for weeks but today was the first time it was actually cold in the early evening. I was at home about to get completely obliterated on whiskey and eggnog in front of a Golden Girls binge watch when I got the text from Mrs. Claus. She practically begged me to come meet her somewhere. And I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t want to see her again.

“What can I do for you?” I asked, trying to play it cool while knowing that I was becoming increasingly nervous.

“All business, I see,” she said. “Did you lose your ability to make small talk in the last twelve months?”

“I lost a lot of things in the last twelve months.” She could see that being here was getting difficult for me.

“I’m sorry, I’ll get to the point. I need a favor and I know it’ll be the last thing you’ll want to do but will you listen?”

I started to get a sinking feeling in my stomach.

“I’ll listen for as long as it takes me to drink this pint,” I said while holding up the IPA that the bartender had just poured me.

“My husband’s disappeared and I need you to help me find him.”

I chugged that entire beer as fast as I could.

“Oops, I guess we’re out of time.”

I walked outside but got stopped in my tracks by Mrs. Claus’ hand on my shoulder. She grazed her index finger on my neck and my feet immediately felt cemented to the ground.

“I’m sorry, I know this is strange but if I could ask anyone else for help I would. I’ve been coming to Arizona for years and I barely know anyone, much less someone with the connections you have. Every trip here is the same. I just sit at home alone with the reindeer while Santa works. I watch so many Christmas movies on TV wishing I could celebrate with someone. I’m Mrs. Fucking Claus and I haven’t had a real Christmas in ages. Last year was the first time I gathered up the courage to go out on my own. I’m really glad I met you that night but I just didn’t know what to do with myself after what happened. And I decided that this year I’m telling Santa that I want him to retire. I can’t keep living like this.”

I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. A part of me even wanted to do what she was asking. But to help someone actually fix their failing marriage? It was against everything I stood for.

“Classy, please,” she said while my back was still to her. “I don’t know what to-”

The sound of her voice became muffled. Before I could turn around I felt the unfortunately familiar sensation of a fist punching me in the back of my head. My knees buckled and everything went dark before I could fight back. My face was covered by a black bag and two people grabbed my arms on either side. I got thrown into the back of a van that peeled out of the parking lot.

“Hey y’all, I’m not sure who you are and if you’re taking me to a place to get murdered or whatever, which is cool, I don’t mind, but do you think we can stop and get some tacos on the way?”

I felt the unfortunately familiar sensation of the butt of a rifle bashing me on the side of the head. Pretty much all the other kidnappers who snatched me up and put me into a van before had the courtesy to stop and get me food on the way to their murder dungeons. So right away I knew these people meant business.

The car eventually stopped and the kidnappers led me somewhere while the bag was still on my head. I heard the unfortunately familiar sound of a jail cell door opening and closing. The zip ties that were holding my wrists together got cut off. I pulled the bag off my face and tried to look around but my eyes needed a second to adjust to the dark.

“HO HO HO! If it isn’t The Classy Alcoholic,” said a boisterous voice behind me. “I don’t suppose you came to rescue me?”

A white-bearded, jolly, fat fuck in a red suit stepped out of the shadows.

To Be Continued…

I’ve been struggling with how to best describe Gabe Ceniceros for the start of this profile. And it took me a while to realize what the “problem” was. The bottom line is there aren’t many guys like him. If you make time to talk to this dude you’ll see right away that he’s got a natural charisma that never comes off as fake. He’s effortlessly cool without seeming aloof. He speaks with the heart of a poet without sounding pretentious. And he tells you what’s on his mind without a filter but never comes off like a dick. If you’ve spent any time around the Tucson craft beer scene in the last seven years you’ve likely met him and if you’ve met him you know exactly what I mean.

Gabe is the founder of The Blacktop Grill, a restaurant in Marana, AZ that opened in November 2020. But long before I sat with him on a patio sharing a beer outside of the building that was the culmination of a dream he’d been chasing for years, Gabe was parked outside of Tucson’s craft breweries making a name for himself selling nothing more than hot dogs and quesadillas from a tiny little food cart.

Opening your own restaurant is a hell of an achievement for anyone under normal circumstances. And doing it in the middle of a pandemic after starting out working on a grill that was literally as wide as your spread-out arms means Gabe has earned some bragging rights. But instead of singing his own praises and trying to come off like a total badass during my interview with him, the man never failed to stay humble. I was sitting across the table from the owner of a successful small business and the driving force behind a brand with a loyal customer base and a stellar reputation across all of Tucson. But even so, when I asked him when he learned to cook, he practically stopped me in my tracks with his answer.

“I’ve never cooked,” he said. “I grill.”

“I FAILED A MILLION TIMES“

Gabe is a lifelong desert-dweller who was born and raised in Yuma. He describes his father as a very hard worker who “did it all,” from church elder to social worker to auto parts salesman. But he makes it very clear that he means no disrespect to his dad when he pivoted to talking about how much he admired his mother’s work ethic. He is the eldest of six and told me about how his mom managed to get him and his siblings to school, help them with their homework, and give them plenty of time and attention while still managing to get herself a teaching degree. Watching her do all this shaped him into the kind of guy who doesn’t make excuses for himself and avoids complaining about his lot in life. When he says he learned to bust his ass because he didn’t want to let her down you can hear the reverence in his voice.

His path toward Tucson and to owning his own restaurant didn’t actually come through food but through music first. Gabe is also a singer-songwriter with a deep love of reggae and has been a making music since his time living in Yuma. In 2008 he was invited to play at a Tucson event called Club Crawl and fell in love with the town. He even met the woman who would eventually become his wife.

Gabe and I reminisced about how shitty and stabby downtown Tucson was back then. If you’re only familiar with the town as it stands today you’ll be surprised to hear that apart from Hotel Congress it used to be a dead zone with only a few crappy bars and restaurants that were burned down for the insurance money long ago. But even so Gabe decided to move to Tucson because he saw a lot of opportunity for growth; both personal and professional. The key to his success hasn’t just been hard work and drive. It’s also been his ability to look at a seed and immediately start planning on what to do with the flowers. And also luck. A shitload of crazy luck.

When I asked if music or food was his first passion I got a very Gabe-like answer.

“Creativity is my first passion. Music and food both fit into that.”

Somehow this guy always knew that he wanted to own his own business. He spent over 20 years working in restaurants but dreamed of the day he could be his own boss. Not that that was ever an easy or clear path for him.

“I failed a million times at starting a business,” he said as he recounted his attempts at creating a power washing company that never took flight. He tried to start a restaurant once before but he’s very happy that nothing came of it because he knows now that he wasn’t ready. The closest he got was a landscaping business that failed because he would show up late – or not at all – to jobs due to his frequent hangovers. “I got fired from a lot of lawns,” he admits. Which, hey, if anyone knows about being too hungover to finish a job it’s certainly me.

I asked where the food truck fit in amongst that graveyard of business ideas and Gabe recalled talking to the guy who ran a Sonoran-style hot dog cart back in Yuma. For those of you who don’t know what a Sonoran dog is, let me first say that I’m embarrassed by you and that you should immediately go get one after you’re done reading this article. Because it’s a hot dog that’s wrapped in bacon and topped with onion, tomato, beans and Jalapeño. And it’ll be one of the most delicious things you’ll ever eat. If you’re in Tucson all you have to do is drive around the poorer areas and look for a Mexican guy with a cart sitting off the side of the road. They’re pretty much everywhere. You don’t even have to speak Spanish. Just say “hot dog” and put up some fingers so they know how many you’re gonna want. Make sure you bring cash because most of them don’t take credit cards but, like, not a lot of cash because you don’t wanna make yourself a target in those neighborhoods. You’ll be fine though. Just don’t go out there super late and lock your doors really fast when you get back in the car.

Anyhoozle, Gabe would go visit his favorite hot dog vendor after playing gigs around town. And one day the guy told him that sometimes he sold up to 700 hot dogs in one weekend. Gabe’s jaw practically hit the floor and the thought of having a food truck of some sort never entirely left his mind after that. About seven years and a move across the state to Tucson later he got himself what he described as “a shitty little cart” that was practically held together by Band-Aids. At the time it was just another attempt to quit working for other people.

The Blacktop Grill’s maiden voyage was in 2014 on the University of Arizona campus. And because he’s always had what he describes as “a hustler’s spirit” Gabe tends to find creative ways to do what he needs to do. He asked me if I knew the church that was right near one of the entryways to the college and I told him that I didn’t because I am a filthy degenerate. But apparently there was a particular church that, even though it was on campus, was considered private property and not affiliated with the university. So instead of asking the school for any kind of permit to set up the food truck he just had to get clearance from the church. So he’d make a donation and got to hang out slinging dogs all day. It was actually a great idea except for the fact that sales were shit back then.

“My first day I sold one hot dog,” he told me. “Then only two the next day.”

I was a bit surprised. I thought he would’ve crushed the game with a food truck that was easily accessible to drunk, stoned college students. I asked why sales were so bad and whether he thought it was due to racism. He said he realized pretty quickly that it was because college students were broke. I understood that seeing as how a hot dog would’ve definitely been a luxury for me during my poorest college years. But when I reminded him that the U of A has a lot of kids from rich families attending on mommy and daddy’s dime I triggered a memory of a guy he called his “favorite customer.”

He described a 19 year old kid who would drive up to the food truck in a $100,000 Porsche. He would park in a no-parking zone because of course he did. And whenever he showed up he would order twenty bucks worth of food, which was a huge sale for Gabe at the time. I’m guessing that kid grew up to be a senator somewhere voting for, like, anti-LGBT legislation and shit right now.

Whether it was due to racism or lack of funds (but probably racism) the hot dog sales at the university just weren’t cutting it. But instead of getting discouraged Gabe started to pound the pavement and continued trying to make connections. And thanks to a bit of that natural luck that seems to follow him around he hooked up with the place that would help him grow to the successful restaurant owner he is today: Dragoon Brewing Company.

THE BOOM

I still remember the first time I met Gabe several years ago at Tap & Bottle. It was at the downtown location because back then that was the only T&B location that existed. I was with my buddy David who was the assistant brewer for Borderlands Brewing Co. at the time. I had just recently started my blog and David insisted that I meet this “really cool guy” who set up his food truck at Borderlands occasionally. I was quite happy to introduce myself to a fellow brown man at a place that sold craft beer. He didn’t have much time to chat but I told him that I was trying to support local breweries and other small businesses. We followed each other on Instagram and he got back to work. I didn’t try his food that night, either because I had already eaten or because that was back before I was fat.

I’m not sure how much time passed before I actually tried a hot dog from The Blacktop Grill but I remember it was while having a drink at Borderlands one night. The thought of a dog and a beer sounded great. Hell, a lot of my dinners back then were a couple of 40s and a bunch of gas station hot dogs. (Holy shit y’all, I think I just realized how I got fat.) So I was a bit surprised when I saw the menu. It was short and simple with nothing more than hot dogs and quesadillas. But one of the dogs was described as having a sriracha honey coleslaw topping. I don’t know about you but I still don’t understand what we as a society did to deserve sriracha. And of course I was blown away by this dude’s southwestern-style gourmet dog.

I kept seeing this guy with his weird (in a good way) hot dogs at different breweries around town and I became another one of his regular customers. He seemed to have built a really good relationship with people in the craft beer industry. And it all started when he heard from someone that a new brewery called Dragoon was looking for food trucks.

Gabe introduced himself to the Dragoon team early on in their existence and says they welcomed him with open arms. Shortly after that there came a wave of other beer-centered businesses that he connected with. He started getting more work through word of mouth but insists that it wasn’t even the quality of the food that got him on the breweries’ good sides. He says it was just the fact that he showed up when he said he was going to. While other food truck vendors were flaking out he was the guy who never failed to be there.

It seems kind of weird at first but it’s very much like Gabe to take pride in telling me that there were several times that he stood out in the rain for hours outside of a business just to sell one hot dog. Because apart from making a sale it was also just as important for him to be the kind of guy that others could count on. That’s something that still holds true to this day. If he commits to being somewhere he will be there.

With that attitude it didn’t take long for The Blacktop Grill to start developing a loyal customer base. And it didn’t hurt that he moved to Tucson and started taking out the truck just as the city began to boom. The number of breweries and craft beer bars exploded. The streetcar was built and became fully operational. A whole bunch of new businesses opened up downtown and it was no longer the scary shithole it used to be. Gabe says the positive responses to his food started off small but never stopped. After several years of grinding he heard people telling him that Blacktop was their favorite food truck. And even through it all he still says that it started pretty much by accident.

When I asked why he focused on hot dogs and quesadillas only he said it was because he couldn’t do much more than that in his little cart. When he stuck to those two items it gave him the opportunity to try different styles of each. He experimented like crazy.

“We tried it all. You name it we tried it. I even tried a PB&J hot dog,” he told me, causing me to almost gag reflexively because peanut butter and jelly are really gross together and I don’t know how some of y’all grew up eating that bullshit.

I felt a little better about it when I asked if he actually attempted to sell that garbage to people and he said no. His experimental dogs were done at home and he tried to have a sense of quality control before he put anything on the menu. He made sure I knew that he takes everything he does seriously, even if it’s just a hot dog.

He credits Tucson’s breweries for giving him a platform and allowing him to reach a wider customer base. “It was a great relationship. They pumped me with beer and I pumped them with food.”  And his constant drive toward creativity allowed him to offer a menu that was different enough to stand out from the crowd. Gabe was never going to be just one other Mexican guy with a hot dog cart in a town full of them.

Not being one to rest on his laurels, he spent those years improving his recipes and expanding his menu as much as he could. It wasn’t a huge expansion given that he still had a very small workspace. But I remember the day that his dogs appeared to suddenly become twice as big as before and he told me that he made it a point to find a heftier weenie after he got some feedback from customers telling him that, while his dogs were delicious, there was more bun than actual dog. And then there was the release of El Elotero. A hot dog topped with roasted corn and cotija cheese that was better than any other hot dog I’ve had in Tucson. And I’ve had some amazing ones given that I’m always trying every Sonoran dog cart I can find because I’m not afraid of those parts of town because I always kinda wanna die. El Elotero has yet to be beat to this day as far as I’m concerned.

And throughout it all Gabe still made time for his music. There were several times that he spent the first part of the night serving food at a brewery and the rest of it playing gigs around town with Los Streetlight Curb Players.

“Everything I do I love,” he said to me. “It’s not work.” And I know that on paper that sounds like total trite bullshit. And if I heard anyone else say that to me I’d roll my eyes and think, yeah whatever asshole, to myself but when you’re sitting in front of Gabe Ceniceros and hearing those words come out of his mouth you have no doubt that he means everything he says. You believe it because he truly believes it and I can’t help but admit that his optimism is pretty goddamn contagious.

Eventually he linked up with the UberEats app and was the first food truck in town to do so. I remember how excited I got several years ago on a weekend when I was on the couch either too hungover or already too drunk to go out to eat. I opened the app and saw Blacktop could be delivered to me while Gabe was serving outside of a brewery downtown. It was a new approach for him that seemed like it was paying off. He got an order sent to his tablet at the truck, had a driver come over to pick up the food, and he could continue to serve the customers in person. But of course he didn’t know just how crucial this delivery service would become in the year 2020 when everything changed.

THE RONA

I ran into Gabe in February of 2020 at Caps & Corks and was a bit surprised to see him. He and the truck weren’t out as often as they used to be and I hardly saw him at his usual downtown brewery haunts for what felt like months. I was a bit worried that he was pulling away from it all so I asked why he had been such a stranger lately. That’s when he told me that he’d been spending a lot of time working on opening a Blacktop brick and mortar location and asked me to keep it to myself for the time being. And I didn’t tell a soul but now I want to make sure y’all know that I knew about his restaurant long before most of you did. So I got my usual Elotero order and walked away excited and optimistic about what the future would bring for Gabe and for all of us. 2020 was gonna be our year alright!

Well. We needn’t rehash everything that happened just a few months later. Cut to some time in April after several weeks of me spending as much money as I could supporting local breweries and restaurants picking up to-go orders during the lockdown and encouraging others to do the same. I saw on Instagram that Gabe was still serving food out of his truck somewhere on the northwest side of town. I called in an order and drove out to whatever the address was. I honestly had no idea where I was going but by the end of the trip I realized I was at Gabe’s actual home and that he had the truck set up in front of his yard. It was so nice to see a familiar face after all that time in isolation. And the first thing I asked was if he ever signed anything for his brick and mortar location. Luckily he said he was able to put a pause on the whole deal before anything became official. The timing was nearly disastrous for him.

A year later I was sitting with him on the patio of that restaurant that almost never came to be, asking him what business was like during those lockdown months he spent serving from home. He said that sales slowed down, of course, but that he was still able to make a living. His neighbors, passersby, and even Fedex delivery drivers would stop by on their way through the neighborhood to check out what kind of food he was serving. And he also credited the delivery apps for keeping things afloat for him.

Since those apps started being used like crazy during the Rona times we’ve now learned that they all gouge businesses and leave restaurants with a very tiny portion of the profits. So I asked how he was able to keep making a living when those apps were taking such huge percentages for themselves. His face lit up and he answered, “Because I make quesadillas, bro!”

The lack of significant overhead for the food truck allowed Gabe to pay the bills when so many other businesses were clinging on for dear life. He admits that it wouldn’t have been as easy if he were selling barbecue or anything that was much more expensive than cheese, tortillas and weenies. And as we know there have been several places that didn’t make it. We lost too many local restaurants and bars last year in Tucson. But through it all it seemed like The Blacktop Grill was destined to succeed. And I want to make it clear that when I say Gabe has made it all this way with a certain amount of luck I don’t want that to diminish the hard work he’s put in. Obviously it wasn’t only luck that got him to where he is now. The man spent years struggling every day to make a name for himself. He’s clearly earned every ounce of his success with a mixture of hustle and foresight. But goddamn, there’s no denying this guy’s also a lucky sonofabitch in so many ways.

When the chance came to revisit the idea of the restaurant he was able to get a great deal on a lot due to the nature of doing business during the pandemic. And while he describes signing a contract for his own place as “nerve-wracking” he always fell back on his typical optimism. Even though he saw the same stories we all did about small businesses closing down he still knew he had to try and make a go of it. That vision of growth and opportunity that he saw in Tucson way back in 2008 was coming to fruition for him during one of the worst periods for the entire goddamn planet. But he’s never been a man to walk away from a challenge and he wasn’t going to start now.

“Everything worked in our favor,” he told me. “It’s like it was meant to be. We keep things simple and that’s our business model. We don’t need a lot to succeed.”

SUNSHINE

When I sat down for my interview with Gabe I decided that I wanted, more than anything, to paint a picture of the man in front of me. And I knew I would spend only a minimal amount of time in this profile talking about how good his food was. Because, seriously, there’s not a lot to say there. The food is really fucking good and you absolutely must try it. But that’s not the part of the story I wanted to tell. I wanted you to know what it feels like to talk to this dude. Because a cynical prick like me would typically roll my eyes at an eternal optimist like him. But Gabe has the power of sincerity and humility at his back and it’s enough to win over even an asshole like me.

He’s had his fair share of detractors. He told me about the people who used to try to bring him down by telling him that he was ridiculous for thinking he could make a living with his music or with a food truck. He was called “weenie man” by people making fun of him. But he didn’t let that slow him down. Because he believed in himself and in what he was doing. And finally achieving his dream of owning his own business and being his own boss proves he was right to do so.

So after this longass profile I’ll leave you with one last thing. It’s how I always remember Gabe and how I think I can distill him down to a single moment and a single sentence. I was at Borderlands Brewing Co. on a weekday night and he was out in their beer garden serving food. It was pretty dead in the bar so I went out to put in my hot dog order. Because he wasn’t very busy I took advantage and had a long conversation with him. I can’t remember the exact details of what I shared but I do know I was feeling a bit frustrated with the craft beer scene and my place in it.

Gabe understood exactly what I was saying because he was also building something for himself within the same industry. He talked about how people can default to constantly complaining about their situation in life and turn to tearing others down. He told me that he doesn’t spend too much time stressing about that and how he never saw other food trucks in town as competition. He went on about how he just saw an opportunity for people to learn from and support one another. And that’s when he said that one sentence that will always stick with me. He said the words that will always define Gabe Ceniceros in my mind. He said something that still makes me smile as I write this.

He said:

“There’s enough sunshine for everybody.”