I woke up in the morning a bit groggy. Look over at my clock and it’s already eight in the morning signifying that I got a grand total of about 4 1/2 hours of sleep. There’s already a text message on my phone.

Lovely. I agreed to take a car-less friend to her third interview with the same company. Apparently there was some sort of critical information they missed in the first two rounds of three hour interviews that couldn’t be gleaned from a phone call at a more decent hour; but after a few weeks of not working, 8am seems like the crack-of-fucking-dawn and I’m not particularly happy to be up at such an ungodly hour.

Still, it’s a friend and I assume these are the things you do when you’ve been labeled as such, and she’s been a pretty good friend so it makes the pill a bit less bitter to swallow, which is all of great comfort until I’m cut off by an Audi who’s driver must have concluded that while traffic is unbearable, it would be more so if forced to look at my Ron Paul 2008 bumper sticker - median be damned.

My passenger is trying to calm me down, which is an exercise in futility; if there’s one thing that is bred by a lifetime in South Florida, it is a razor-thin edge between courtesy and road rage. Of course there are no police officers around, not that they would do much because aggressive driving isn’t so much a crime down here as one would think, that is unless an officer somehow notices you rolling through a stop sign on an otherwise empty intersection in which case you might as well been caught cornholing kids at a playground while wearing a clown suit and selling snow cones laced with LSD and Ecstasy. Traffic penalties in the area are only enforced if the officer can prove that absolutely nobody is in danger from your less-than-responsible driving. Thankfully, I’m stuck behind this asshole for the next three miles of stop-and-go traffic, so if nothing else I was able to ensure that the rest of her day would be accompanied by a faint ringing of her ear, remnants of unnecessarily long periods of quite literally standing on my horn.

The area is starting to become a lot more familiar to me even though I’ve never taken this route to get here. The office I’m driving to apparently is right around Loehmann’s Fashion Island, a complex I visited all too often during my stint in the world of estate jewelry and high-end timepieces. I maintain that for all the stash houses, drug spots, and money-laundering fronts in the Greater Miami area, there is no place quite as shady as the bullpens inside of the Loehmanns and Seybolds of the world. The type of downright uncomfortable shit that goes on in that business makes my experience in the staffing industry seem like a noble pursuit by comparison.

We’re early, an admitted rarity for me - I don’t so much run on Cuban-time as I run on Even Cubans’ saying “Goddamn you’re late”-time. Punctuality is not my strong suit, to the point where I go all Rumsfeld and flat out refuse to establish timetables for any undertaking, regardless of size or relative importance. I know at any moment, I’m one funny cat picture on the internet away from blowing any arbitrary meeting. My little worker thinks that bagels are in order and I’m way too sleepy and still angry at that goddamn Audi to argue. Bagels would be good. A salmon bagel: the most delicious of Judaic treats and reason enough to lament the horrors of the Holocaust, for there would have been no greater atrocity against man than the extermination of bits of salmon and other unidentifiable Jewishness sandwiched between the manna that was bequeathed to Moses and his traveling band of future central bankers.

Waiting for a latina caregiver to usher her elderly employer into a Mercedes-Benz SL600, slamming my head repeatedly into my steering wheel for the three minutes it takes for this surely unlicensed woman to clumsily get the 600 horsepower vehicle out of its parking spot, I’m starting to think that perhaps Mo’s Bagels & Deli isn’t the best place to go. But the idea of a non-commercial bagel, or at least one without the manufactured pretension of an Einstein Bros. bagel, was appealing. I wait by the deli counter for about 5 minutes, the attending Haitian man not paying much mind until my friend, now feeling a bit rushed for the interview, simply begins to order without need for a prompt (or even acknowledgment) from our bagel artist. He is quick enough, crafting one (1) salmon sesame bagel and one (1) cream cheese bagel. I make my way for the register and speak with the apparently partially deaf cashier.

“One salmon sesame bagel, one cream cheese bagel, and one coffee”, me.

Blank look, cashier.

“One salmon sesame bagel, one cream cheese bagel, and one coffee”, me.

Blank look, cashier.

Blank look, me.

“What are jew hobbing?”, cashier.

Blank look, me.

“What are jew hobbing, sir?”, cashier.

“One salmon sesame bagel, one cream cheese bagel, and one coffee.”

By some Rosetta Stone miracle, I have established a line of communication. I normally don’t mind switching to Spanish to complete an order, I can’t imagine getting angry every time you had to do that in Miami; but in Aventura, at a bagel shop, I expect to have my order taken in English, preferably by someone who’s body has been serialized. Fingers begin to fly across the register, in a process that I still somehow have never full understood, and numbers begin to appear on the green liquid crystal display.

$2.99, must be my salmon bagel.

$1.50, must be my coffee.

$5.99, the fuck?

An audible “holy shit” escapes me; this seems to register with the register, and the nice Colombian lady looks up as if to say, “what’s the problem”.

“Is my salmon bagel six dollars?”

“Jes”.

“And the plan bagel is three dollars?”

“Jes”.

“Six dollars, for a bagel?”

“It’s saul-mon”.

At which point I realized it was a futile to get into argument over bagel pricing because a.) it’s not like I was going to score a discount after I gave them money and b.) Mo’s had gone as far as to hire a cashier that pronounced their most expensive bagel as if it was a Rastafarian homage to King-Fucking-David’s predecessor.

She had this look on her face as if I had just committed some grand affront to the establishment, an establishment where I just paid six fiat dollars for a bagel and still had to make my way over to the waitress station and pour my stale, potted coffee into a styrofoam cup. I paid a total of $10 for two bagels and one shitty coffee. That isn’t expensive in the “ha ha, I can’t believe I just paid $6 for a bagel, but it’s really good and worth it” sense. It’s a “holy fuck, I can’t believe I just paid $6 for a bagel, and even if it somehow was a magical blowjob giving bagel it wouldn’t be worth $6; because, after all, if I really put my mind to it I could have sex with any bagel, even an english muffin, regardless of its price”.

It was a pretty fucking good bagel though.

— Alex Cabrera, Apr 10, 2008.