Chocolate, Baby

I just spent a lot of time talking to Chocolate the food server in my dining hall.

He always calls me Baby with that smooth jazz sway that makes me feel like I could pick up a trumpet and just go.

His given name is Daniel, but at work there were always too many Daniels, so he asked people to call him Chocolate. Why Chocolate? I did not ask. No one would call him that until one of the younger managers walked into work one day with a "Good morning, Chocolate," and then it was done.

I don't think the chicken tenders he was cooking cooked all the way through. I think I was distracting him.

Chocolate came from Mississippi with his then wife. His then wife's family came with them in an uninvited caravan and settled four houses down. They ruined the marriage. Chocolate said his then wife's grandmother told her she couldn't have any more kids after having had three, and one day she got her tubes tied without telling Chocolate. I don't know if that ended the marriage, but the way he talked about it, it might as well have been the Last Straw.

Chocolate has three kids. Two sons and one daughter. The oldest is 35, the youngest 21. They grew up with their grandparents, though I did not ask Why. I did not ask what they do, either. I told him about my two brothers, how Juan Carlos was a business man and Darren was a theater director in China. Baby, Chocolate said, your Momma must be proud. And I thought about reminding him that Darren wasn't blood related, and then telling him that Juan Carlos has a different mom than me, then I thought about telling him that actually my mom passed away and so it was in fact my step mom who was very proud. I said, "Yes, she is very proud of us."

When I told him I was a writer he was impressed. Chocolate is the kind of person who makes you feel good no matter what you say, and I had him stomping around on the kitchen's raised plastic mats, bent over from laughing at our jokes about Californian hospitality. In California, if two Southerners were to fly by each other like two ships in the night, the only words they'd yell to each other before careening off, laughing, would be, "The hospitality!"

Chocolate is married again, to a Latina woman named Maria. Chocolate was going to visit his son and his ex-wife one weekend and he asked if he could bring Maria with him. Sure, they said. Chocolate said that when his ex-wife saw Maria the claws came out. I laughed. What is that? I said. What is it about dating a woman of another race, and when your ex-girlfriend sees that she goes crazy? What is that?

Baby, said Chocolate, stomping the mats, That's called an ass whooping.

One time Maria told Chocolate to listen to the radio. 107.3, somewhere around there. It's a Christian station. Chocolate mentioned how good the Lord was and I felt myself recoil, which I thought was wrong of me, so I tried to ask him questions. He said he had a hunger in his skin that wasn't satiated by sex. I didn't exactly understand, though I kind of did. I didn't ask much about that.

Chocolate's been working for Stanford Dining for 13 years. I forget. Whenever I see Obama on the news talking about the working family I always think, Who? It's hard to see it when you're in school around a bunch of people who will be making six figures in a couple years. It's people like Chocolate and his wife, Maria, who just got a second job to help pay for bills.

Chocolate recently went to his wife and said, Baby, we're moving out of the apartment. Why? She said. He told her that they were wasting all their money and that she didn't have a retirement plan, which was true. Chocolate had bought an RV, with a flat screen television for his lady. He said they've saved up $4,000 already.

That's good money, I said.

Yeah and you know what, he said. Now I want to put it all into my '57 Chevy.

We both bent over and he stomped the black plastic mat and I held onto the metal counter top so I could let out a good laugh without losing my balance.