Del Taco is a fast food chain that finds its customers, I suppose, among those who consider Taco Bell a little on the swanky side, a bit too “uptown.”
The bill of fare at both places is about the same, the chief difference being Del Taco goes heavier on the beans. And while Del Taco food doesn’t taste quite as oily as Taco Bell’s, that’s not the same as it being good. In fact, the best thing Del Taco has to offer isn’t even on the menu: it’s their “Del Scorcho” hot sauce, served up in ketchup packets and packing more heat and flavor than anything in the competition's arsenal. I used to swipe the stuff by the fistful to mail to a friend back east who’d developed a fever for the flavor while out here on vacation. He’d storehouse the ominous black and red packets in a locked desk drawer at his job, then dole them out with great ceremony to co-workers looking to add punch to their lunch breaks at the nearby Taco Bell.
With all the really good fast food colors already taken, Del Taco staked its claim on what was left: a dull, 1970s red and a sandy sort of adobe shade. And though Del Taco décor is about as cast-plastic functional ugly as you’d figure, at least it’s pleasantly free of the hard-sell aggressiveness on display at most fast food places, where in-store promotion has all the subtlety of a guy waving his dick at you: Look! This is NEW! This is CHEAP! This says buy TWO of them! Supersize EVERYTHING! Fucking TOYS! A PLAYGROUND!
Not that Del Taco doesn’t trade in that to some extent, but it's handled far less egregiously. For instance, you don’t run into much in the way of entertainment industry tie-ins there, though it’s probably safe to say the Batman people aren’t exactly itching to slap their billion dollar brand on the wrapper of a Macho Combo Burrito, either. Maybe Del Taco’s comparatively limited reach (they’re only in 16 states out of 50) scares off Hollywood, or maybe Del Taco corporate is singularly unambitious, but anymore it’s almost reassuring that a fast-food place is content to simply be a fast-food place; particularly when compared with the coked-up lust for synergistic marketing partnerships evinced by their peers. Number 2, as the old ad campaign goes, may very well try harder; but those holding steady at 7 or 8 don’t always share that manic compulsion to sell the bejeezus out of every poor bastard wandering in wondering what all a dollar gets them.
As a fringe establishment, it only makes sense that Del Taco would attract a comparable class of customer. “Get a lot for what you’ve got” was the chain’s slogan for a time, and they weren’t only talking about the food. Chalk it up to being in the Entertainment Capital of the World, but to so many of its patrons, there’s something about a visit to Del Taco that says “Star Time,” inspiring a level of street theater and audience participation that elevates a dollar-menu dinner to the Tony n' Tina’s Wedding of the crack pipe set. How many other eateries in this price range deliver dinner and a show, all for the cost of a few hours’ panhandling and checking payphones for change?
Less renowned for its cuisine than as a punchline to jokes involving the transsexual prostitutes that make up its most consistent clientele, the franchise on Santa Monica Boulevard at Highland Avenue may just be the jewel in the Del Taco crown. The Radio City Music Hall of 2-for-1 Soft Taco Tuesdays, with trannie streetwalkers its Rockettes.
It’s an odd and bizarre thing, the first time you see trannie hookers on the stroll; and Santa Monica at Highland is the place for trannie hookers like Texas is the place for assholes. And whatever your feelings about men dressed as women to sell sex, seeing a whole gang of them lined up for rent on the corner is never not strange. Yet like most things, you live with it awhile and eventually it more or less becomes part of the scenery.
The Del Taco trannies hew to a fairly contained agenda. When not playing kidney stone to the beleaguered graveyard shift, most of them pass time between tricks loitering on the opposite corner. There, they hassle the night cashier at the Donut Time, a cramped way station where the desperation in the air is about as stale as the muffin tops. Loud and vicious petty arguments occasionally relieve the monotony, perversely help them define themselves, and, along with liberal doses of cheap speed, keep them awake while waiting for the next twenty bucks to roll up to the curb.
Also big proponents of makeup at the Del are emo kids. They tend to travel in threes, with the girls always outnumbering the boys, and the boys always out-girling the girls. There’s something about non-threatening male company and everybody wearing an excess of eyeliner that is emboldening to chubby outsider girls, and the emos share loud giggles among themselves at inside jokes and secret coded references. Giving voice to their sarcasm via huddled murmurs, they get catty when stuck at a dump like Del Taco, or any other place they feel is beneath them—which, for prematurely cynical teens, is pretty much anywhere. Nothing unusual there, yet something about the boys rankles. An aggressive girl is still a girl, but the frail and frightened mode of femininity embraced by emo boys crosses into uncertain territory, and opens them up to hostile opposition.
“You know who their role model is? Who they emulate?” a guy once told me. “Prison bitches.” He was right. The uninformed might call them punk rockers, but this is punk rock dropped into a game of Telephone and lost in translation. The punchline? No rock, just punk. Jailhouse punk. State Pen prag. Prison squeeze. Heads hung low on slouched shoulders, ready to be traded for a pack of smokes.
For all their bitchy bluster, the last thing the emo kids want is trouble, and they quiet down around the young blacks in do-rags; better safe than sorry. Recognizable by the oversized jackets hanging off their shoulders and baggy jeans sagging past their asses, these young thugs are now seeing even the gay black hustlers incorporating their gangsta street fashion and attitude. Maybe it’s affectation, like whites with bikers and cowboys, or maybe young black faggots raised poor just have to be that much harder to survive. Either way, it takes effort to tell the ruffneck queers from what you might consider real muthafuckin’ Gs—who, for the record, also frequently stop by, blunted as hell and looking for quesadillas.
On the periphery hover intense old white men with a predilection for suspenders and thick glasses with complicated prescriptions. They specialize in turning their booths into miniature offices; long stays at fast-food places being de rigueur for musty Nutty Professor types. Oblivious to the action transpiring around them, they surround themselves with dog-eared copies of last week’s newspapers and review elaborate notes-to-self, usually scrawled on looseleaf in crowded ballpoint. Occasionally sipping from dirty paper or styrofoam cups that they might well have brought in with them, at times they seem almost too together to be homeless; at other times, too untogether to be anything but.
Dusty from all-night piecework somewhere, Mexican and Guatemalan laborers drift in in the streetlamp hours after the local taco trucks stop rolling. In places like these where everyone appears to be fucking off, a curious, undefined legitimacy can be conferred upon laborers on a meal break. Often, they are the only customers not in some way calling attention to themselves.
And then there are the aging players on a budget. O.G.s, eager to impart a lifetime of half-bullshit street wisdom to younger ears willing to listen—hell, any younger ears willing to listen. Whatever they were chasing back in the day, they’re never going to catch it now, and it only heightens their hunger to at least be regarded by a generation that can’t push them out of the way fast enough. It’s a full-time job, trying so hard not to come off so much like an old squirrel still trying to crack that nut.
That was my man: black and proud, a George Jefferson swagger in his strut and a blown-out jheri curl on his head; a middle-aged thrift store Superfly in designer knockoffs from the swap meet. He wheeled in steering a piece of imitation high-end luggage with one arm and holding his thick white girlfriend with the other.
His girl was a plain, plump woman in unattractive eyeglasses, and she wore a loose brown sleeveless summer dress patterned with tribal markings in earth tones. She outsized her man, but in his pleated pinstripe slacks and a silk shirt carefully maintained since the 80s (“You know this is from Italy!”), he was the one dressing to be noticed.
Together they reviewed the menu, illuminated on boards high behind the counter. Then, pursing her lips, she kissed him extravagantly on the cheek and walked back to their car, parked in the lot outside.
Remaining behind, he stood well back from the blonde ahead of him as she picked up her order. She was a transsexual streetwalker, and maybe more convincing as a woman than some; but then judgment calls like that often depend on who’s looking, and what they want to see in the first place.
With a pudgy belly beginning to push over the top of her short denim cutoffs, she was looking straight off Tobacco Road, used and dirty. A typical Dixie girl going to fat, she was another pasty, white trash blonde on a short ride down a steep hill, and she’d pick up speed as she went. That she had a dick in her jeans and paid the rent selling discount handjobs only greased the slide.
She left the restaurant to eat on the corner, a warm paper bag of takeout in one hand and a strawberry milkshake already starting to sweat in the other. The aging player turned to me, shaking his head in sympathy.
“She needs to lay off all these beans and eat hamburgers instead. Hamburgers’ll put it on her ass, where she wants it! Beans put it—” Unable to think of the word, he placed his hands on either side of his waist to illustrate what he meant.
Whether or not he realized she was a man was unclear. And though that made his referring to her as "she" either remarkably naïve or impressively hip, it didn't affect the point he was trying to make either way.
“She thinks she’s swinging it, but she’s… She’s not swinging what she thinks she’s swinging, because it’s not where she wants it to be. It’s all up here,” he insisted, hands on his waist again.
His girlfriend returned, beaming and wearing a bedazzled African kofia on her head. Aesthetically, a little hat on a big woman is a hard thing to reconcile, and the bottle-cap topping her lumpy frame did her no favors.
“I found it in the car,” she said proudly of the hat as she approached him.
“I’m just telling him about how she needs to eat burgers and stay away from the rice and beans,” he told her, indicating the hooker who had exited. Coming so late to the conversation, his girlfriend had no idea what he was talking about, but this was nothing unusual. Content to let him do the thinking, she busied herself with subtle adjustments to her headwear.
“It was in the car,” she repeated, taking a more intimate tone and putting her arms around his neck. Her back to me, she kissed his cheek tenderly and squeezed him close. The apparent sincerity of their mutual attraction was strangely comforting.
He nodded to me from over her shoulder. From my place at the table, it was plain to see what I already knew: his girl had a massive ass. In case I somehow missed it, he moved his hands down her body, splaying fingers and thumbs on either side of her rear like a cameraman framing up a shot. Looking at me, he raised his eyebrows in proud confirmation of all he’d just explained.
“Okay?” he said. 
copyright, © 2008 Wyatt Doyle for information on Wyatt Doyle's collaboration with Stanley Jason Zappa, STOP REQUESTED, click here.
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