A Place to Call My Own

There’s this little tamale place in Corona—down about 97th street—where I go sometimes when I get the hankering for traditional Mexican food. Now I’m not talking about the fancy shit that they serve in pseudo-Mexican dining establishments like Don Jose’s or Senior Pepe’s, which are nothing more than sanitized versions of Mexican cuisine aimed at pleasing the neutered palates of pasty gringos. No, what I’m referring to is the real deal: the kind of grubby, greasy, mouth-blistering Mexican slop that they actually serve in every piss-ass town south of the border. And I can assure you that this is most definitely the real, fucking deal.

I would tell you the name of the place so that you can go there some time, but I don’t think it has one. There was a tacky sign outside the restaurant at one point, but I think it was stolen by vandals in the early 90s. Now all that’s left is a tattered piece of cardboard in the window that simply says “Comida.” In case you failed seventh grade Spanish, comida means “food,” which doesn’t help very much if you’re trying to figure out what they have to eat.

My Mexican dive in Corona has its own unique ambiance that often goes unappreciated by those who covet such pretentious commodities in eating establishments as cleanliness and proper hygiene. But, if you can get beyond tables perpetually covered in the detritus of decaying half-eaten food particles and the thin film of grease coating every inch of the place, you just might come to appreciate its laid-back atmosphere.

I must confess that I have a particular fondness for the women behind the counter who take orders with all the charm of Marine drill sergeants. They have a look of dull apathy as they ring up endless rounds of rice, beans, and plantanos. They take down the orders well enough, I suppose, but the orders never come out quite the way you ask for them. It might have something to do with the language barrier…or the women who work there might just be incredibly stupid. I haven’t figured out which yet.

The place also as its own peculiar smell—something like a cross between rotting garbage and bad body odor. I know where the garbage smell is coming from: it’s not hard to notice the mountains of decaying food overflowing the buckets that serve as waste receptacles in the dining area which are rarely, if ever, emptied. I also know damned well where the b.o. is coming from: it’s the fragrance of choice of the local clientele and the army of homeless men who descend upon the establishment after getting their methadone prescriptions filled at the local rehab center down the street.

As you eat your lunch, you try as much as possible to ignore the fat roaches scurrying along the floors and on the walls. When the roaches attempt to walk away with your food, though, you have little choice but to flick them off the table. When that happens, the little Mexican children sitting on the floor jump up in delight. Fat roaches are like house pets to kids in this part of Queens. They dress them up in costumes according to the season, walk them around on leashes, teach them to do back flips, and give them funny names like Tito and Puta.

There are those individuals of limited cultural appreciation who are horrified at the thought of eating in a place like this. “It’s a fucking death trap, man,” my friends always tell me. “When the bubonic plague strikes again, this is gonna be ground zero,” they joke.

In my heart I know they have a point. I also know that they are right when they say that the food served in my favorite Mexican place in downtown Corona tastes liked “ground up dog shit mixed with cilantro and lime.” Although I myself have no particular gourmet’s fetish for canine waste products, I do have a fondness for cilantro, so I am able to ignore the otherwise repulsive flavor of the food. Besides, I spend so much time flicking roaches off the table that I’m barely even aware of how the food tastes.

“Why do you always have to go to that horrible place in Corona?” my mother asks every time I tell her I need to make a run there. The answer is quite simple: everyone has to have a place they call their own. Woody Allen has the Russian Tea Room, Robert Deniro, Le Cirque, and I have my little “Comida” joint. One day in the future—and I hope to God that day may never come—the Board of Health will probably come and close down my favorite little Mexican dive. Until then, I’ll always have a place to go whenever I get the hankering for small taste of sunny Mexico right on Roosevelt Avenue just east of the 94th street station in beautiful downtown Corona.