Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

Tony Martinez, Pat Buchanan. "He knows Mexican cooking and I know American,” says Pat.

In and out, in and out – it reminds me of my grandmother darning the toe of a sock as the needle came and went, except these are lunch trucks see from far away: white, Winnebago-shaped delicatessens-on-wheels and built like Sherman tanks.

Mata Ponce, Cathy Stangel. At every curve, Cathy says, “Hold on, Mata.”

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

The Department of Environmental Health calls them Mobile Food Preparation Units. Other names run from Gourmet Wagon to Roach Coach. From where I sit the view through rain and fog of the distant Chula Vista hillside is of miles of orange mud and partially constructed houses, some of which will cost several million dollars. A sporadic hammering is carried over on the wind and sometimes the whine of a saw. Then I see a lunch truck emerge from one curving muddy street and disappear into another. A second lunch truck pops from a second street, then ducks around a corner. Then a third appears. In and out, in and out, like a silver darning needle. Actually, I'm riding in a lunch truck myself.

“You have to go into each stop completely full, and you can never let anyone think you’re running out."

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

From this distance it is impossible to see what companies the trucks belong to. At least one is surely from Moody’s, the oldest and largest company, with nearly a quarter of the 215 or so routes in San Diego County. And one might be from a mid-sized company like Fiesta, with 14 routes, but Fiesta tends to work the office complexes and small industries to the north. Or one might be from a small company like Mike Yaikian’s San Diego County Catering here in Chula Vista with six routes. But probably these are independents, since construction sites are the least secure stops — being affected by the weather and the transient nature of the building business — and independent operators often have to take their work wherever they can find it.

Moody’s warehouse is like the Grecian labyrinth.

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

I’m riding with Hector Rubio Jr., whose father, Hector Sr., owns Hector’s Lunch, a three-truck operation. Recently, they only have enough business to keep two on the road, but when business is good, the daughter Mayra, 18, drives the third truck.

Cathy Stangel. "You go to a construction site and what are the men going to want to look at? Guys used to come up to me and say, You’re the only woman I see all day."

Photo by Sandy Huffaker, Jr.

I’d met Hector Jr. that morning at San Diego County Catering, a cavernous food warehouse surrounded by a shabby lot with a few battered lunch trucks, a dozen older cars, prisonlike walls, and barbed wire, although the fog and January rain wouldn’t have made Balboa Park look much better. Perched on the walls, about 200 seagulls seemed indifferent to the soggy hot dog buns and doughnuts half submerged in the puddles. Then I noticed that fish line had been strung 20 feet above the pavement.

“The owner here, man, he hates the gulls,” explained Hector. “He throws cherry bombs at them. He strung up the fishing line. The first gull that flew down after that got hung. Now they won’t land on the pavement even if we were to throw food all over the place.”

The health department requires lunch trucks to park on lots — called commissaries or Approved Headquarters for Preparation Units — where the drivers can wash and maintain their vehicles and store their food — all for about $14 per day. Besides having 47 trucks of its own, Moody’s provides space for about 30 independents, while another company, Johnson’s Catering, has none of its own trucks but provides space for 29 Asian independents. The commissaries also function as huge discount grocery stores where the drivers buy most, if not all, of their food. If Hector buys $2000 of food a month from San Diego County Catering, he receives a $200 rebate.

Hector Rubio Jr. is 24, stocky, round-faced, and has short brown hair. He wears a blue Notre Dame cap, which he occasionally turns around backward, a green sweatshirt, jeans, and basketball shoes. He gives the impression of a slightly wiser older cousin, someone who has been around the block more than once — a balance of humor and Hispanic sagacity. It’s 8:00 a.m. Most lunch trucks get on the road between 4:45 and 5:15 because they serve breakfast, morning break, lunch, and afternoon break. By two o’clock they are done. One of the reasons I picked Hector is that he starts late.

“Five o’clock,” he says, “that’s too early for me. I’m one of the last to leave in the morning and one of the first to come back in the afternoon.”

The truck’s rust-spotted overhead door is up, showing the display case with rolls and doughnuts — sugary goodies. Hector is collecting a few final odds and ends for his cook, Toni Avila (“Don’t call me Antonia” ) — a cheerful, solidly built, 36-year-old woman with hennaed hair in a ponytail and small hands that move so fast she must have been born to deal blackjack. Maybe she is five feet three inches. She gets to work each morning at six to prepare the food and stays a half hour after they get back to clean up. Although Mexican food is her specialty, she cooks Italian, Korean, Chinese, and plain American, depending on their stops. Both she and Hector live in Tijuana.

We leave about 8:15, heading toward eastern Chula Vista. I’m on a jump seat next to the doughnuts and coffee urns. Toni is back at the grill, next to the oil for the fried food — 50 pounds of oil kept at 450 degrees. The steam table is 180 degrees. When I ask Toni if she ever gets burned, she gives an easy smile and raises her hands and arms, showing me the small scars of 16 years of working on lunch trucks, beginning in L.A.

Hector is telling me some of his history, shouting over the roar of the truck: born in Orange County, a 1993 graduate of Chula Vista High School, a year at Southwestern Community College. Eight years earlier Hector Sr. had come down from Los Angeles and opened a fish restaurant in Tijuana that went bankrupt. Then he worked for other restaurants, worked for Moody’s, then he bought a truck and route for $20,000, which was how Hector’s Lunch got started. Hector Jr. explains that a $400- to $500-a-day route could cost $10,000, while a new truck could cost about $85,000. His own truck, an ’86 Chevy with 140,000 miles, cost $12,000.

The truck is beat-up inside and looks older than it is — two big coffeemakers, sinks, refrigerator, cupboards, grill, and a narrow walkway down the middle. Water drips from the overhead windows. The air feels thick with grease. The steady thwap of the windshield wipers reminds me of a shooting gallery heard from a block away. Everything rattles. The radio perched above the windshield tells of accidents — trucks overturned, cars burning — as if the rain had turned San Diego into a war zone.

“Normally I have the radio blasting Howard Stern in the morning,” Hector tells me.

By now we are nearing Hector’s first stop, a construction site called Rancho Del Rey. Most of the workers are gone. Hector honks his horn to get the attention of whoever is left. From about 30 partially built houses bedraggled carpenters, laborers of all sorts slowly make their way toward us like bears from their dens.

“Construction guys,” says Hector, “when it rains, they leave. They don’t show up and I don’t show up either. What’s the point?” Toni slaps some meat on the grill.

Every day San Diego’s lunch trucks supply food for the stay-at-works — healthy, inexpensive, oversized helpings, ethnic, American, New Age, fresh, and hot off the grill. The drivers have 10 to 35 stops, schedules broken into five-minute segments that would put an airline to shame, and they show up twice a day on the dot. The trucks cover nearly every road in the county from back alleys to the fastest freeways. Often trucks on which I was riding were cut off by cars in a rush. Lunch trucks don’t stop on a dime; they don’t even stop on a pancake. There aren’t many accidents, but every driver has stories — small tidal waves of 450-degree oil and boiling coffee, cooks thrown against hot grills.

As the workers make their way toward us. Hector straps on his coin changer, sets up a folding table with his money box, and polishes his smile. Toni gets ready to take orders.

“A good construction site you can sell $150 in 15 minutes,” Hector tells me. “You can’t go into a job site without the permission of the supervisor, so another truck that wants to get in might leave the super a card. But you got to be friendly with the super, be really nice, and the super gets free food. I’ve heard of some guys paying off the super, but I’ve never done that. But sometimes a super will get bought off. I had a job that was supposed to last for a year and after a month the super told me that he didn’t want me to serve no more. The assistant supervisor said the super had been paid off. I don’t know how much — it must of been a lot.”

Within five minutes the truck has a dozen workers crowded around the display case, ordering food, giving money to Hector, eating, talking in English and Spanish. The Hispanics are soft-spoken; the Americans are louder.

“Where’s the ketchup at?” “Oh no, she put tomato on it.”

“Un plato de gato, por favor.”

“Good day for coffee. Black and strong, like my women.” “Hey, it’s a good drugrunning day.”

“It’s too slick today to get up on those roofs. If you fall, it hurts.”

“It sucks big-time, slip on that slick plywood like I did on Wilson’s job.”

“Pinche lluvia. ”

“I can’t believe you forgot the goddamn ketchup.”

Hector and Toni switch back and forth between English and Spanish. They know most of the workers, greeting them by name. They even know their favorite foods. It’s immediately clear that half of their job is public relations, making small talk, taking an interest. Toni sings as she makes burritos. The plates of food are gigantic.

One man pays for his hamburger with pesos. A gringo says, “You really take that funny money up here? You take that funny money for a burger?”

“I’ll take anything,” says Hector.

Ten minutes later Hector has put the card table back in the truck, fastened down the overhead door, and we’re on our way.

“Most of the guys at the construction sites are cool,” Hector says, “but I get tired of the wetback jokes. The foreman will tell you the ones you can’t trust. But when you show up, you got 20 to 30 guys around your table all shouting at once and you’re looking and can’t see anything, whether these guys are taking anything or not. And these construction guys will ask for credit, then they up and leave in a week and you get stuck. You never know how long they’ll stay.”

On a good day Hector grosses $800 and nets $250, but there are a lot of bad days and a lot of expenses. Hector’s transmission has broken five times in four months, which has meant stops missed, hungry workers, angry supervisors, and $150 to tow the truck back to the shop. When a Moody’s or a Fiesta truck breaks down, a tow truck drags it through the rest of its route and no stops are missed. It may look foolish but nobody goes hungry and whoever contracted the truck is suitably impressed. And Hector can’t afford to make mistakes or to overstock. He doesn’t carry cigarettes because they cost too much and many times he runs out of food. If he didn’t live in Tijuana, he couldn’t make it pay.

As we drive the muddy streets to the next stop. Hector points across the rainy hills and canyons toward the unfinished houses. Six months ago nothing was here. Pointing to the bare hills farther on, he says they plan to build 10,000 more houses. Then he shows me the house of the daughter of San Diego’s mayor, the house of a famous singer from Tijuana, the house of a man who owns a power company in Tijuana, and a house belonging to the man’s son — houses that look like small high schools but with no land. A good spitter could spit from the window of one $2 million house, over the fence and into the window of the next.

“Once a year the construction company buys food for all these guys,” says Hector. “It will be a surprise day. They’ll let me know two or three weeks in advance so I can stock up. It’s all free and they send me a check for $1500 to $2000. Guys get four or five tacos and take them home. I see guys I never seen before. The company has someone there to make sure no one takes a dozen burritos—you know, calls his wife and says don’t make dinner.”

We pull into another circle of unfinished houses and Hector honks his horn. Again the workers begin to emerge from the wet, yellowish, skeletal structures. The ground is muddy. Stacks of plywood, lumber, shingles, buckets of nails, plastic pipes.

“Whaddaya mean, no ketchup?”

“Splitsville, man. The rain sucks.”

“Pinche lluvia. ”

“Un burrito de lengua, por favor.”

“No ketchup again?” Hector shrugs and gives an apologetic smile. “I forgot.” “ What’s a burger without ketchup?”

“We’ve got salsa,” says Toni brightly.

“I hate that shit. You can’t put salsa on fries. Do I get a discount if you don’t have ketchup?” “What about barbecue sauce?” suggests Toni.

The worker scratches his Padres cap. “That’s okay on a burger. I can do that.”

As we leave, Hector says, “Some of these American guys are suspicious of Mexican food. They say, I don’t eat Mexican food, are you sure it’s going to be good to put salsa on my French fries? But the fact that I’m Mexican and live in TJ, most of these workers live in TJ too, and it helps me. I give them the food they like. I speak the same language.”

In the next two hours we make about six more stops. At each Hector explains that he forgot to bring the ketchup. He urges everyone to put salsa on his burger and French fries. The workers talk about the rain in the way we talk about a major snowstorm back East. Toni cleans up after we leave each site. Every several months an inspector from the Department of Environmental Health makes a surprise inspection, checking for cleanliness, to see if anything is broken, to see if the temperatures are correct, the refrigerator is functioning, to make sure that the cooks have up-to-date food handler’s permits. If something Is wrong, the inspector will issue an official notice that the problem has to be fixed by a certain date. If it isn’t repaired, the inspector can ask the police to issue a citation.

Later in the week I speak with Javier Heras, an inspector with the Department of Environmental Health, who tells me that one of their greatest worries with the lunch trucks is whether they have hot and cold running water. “Sometimes the pump breaks but they keep running for another week or so. These trucks are basically rolling kitchens, so everything has to be working properly. The lunch trucks are quick to comply, though the poorest are the slowest and occasionally we have to close one down.”

A greater problem is the illegal vendors. Hector explains one encounter.

“One time a guy kept beating me to the construction site and selling burritos out of the trunk of his car for a buck, so when I got there these guys had already eaten. And he had a case of Gatorade and ice. I warned him and warned him and he still came back. So I called the health department and they came out and gave him a ticket, but he still came back. I warned him again but he still kept coming back. So I called the health department again and they came out with a cop. When the guy saw them, he grabbed a shovel and started digging like he worked there. But the health guy waggled a finger at him and said, 'Hey, come here.' They seized his car; they arrested him. I don’t know, they probably deported him. I felt bad. He should have quit when he got the ticket. My business at the site went up $100 a day.”

Javier Heras tells me, “The illegal vendors will sell out of their vehicles or shopping carts, even out of their hands. We’re forced to seize and destroy their food. But the dangerous stuff is queso fresco, or fresh cheese, which can be packed with bacteria and is deadly, especially for old people and pregnant women. It’s a real danger. But these people are working hard and trying to make a living, so we go out of our way to tell them what they need to do to get a permit.”

Around twelve thirty Hector pulls into a strip mall for lunch. After spending the whole morning praising Mexican food, he heads for the first Chinese buffet he can find. I take this opportunity to talk to Toni.

She has three boys and two girls, aged 20, 15, 9, 3, and 1. At 36 she is already a grandmother. “I started too young,” she tells me. Toni’s husband is foreman for a company in Tijuana that makes hospital supplies for the U.S. market — disposable syringes, plastic bottles, and tubing. For this he gets about $80 a week.

“I feel much more comfortable working for independents,” Toni.tells me. “The big companies have more problems, there’s a lot of pressure. Here it’s easier. I’ve worked for Hector’s father for seven years. We feel like family. I get up at five and I’m home by three. A neighbor takes care of my kids, and my older daughter helps. When we get to a stop, I need to hear everybody at the same time. Nobody waits their turn. They’re just shouting orders. So I’m shouting, Okay, okay, and working like a crazy woman, but I like it, I really like it.”

When Hector returns, I remind him that he has no ketchup. He slaps his forehead and runs into a supermarket. However, on the way back out to the construction sites, water slops into the oil, ruining it, which means no more French fries.

At Hector’s first stop a burly, red-bearded worker orders a double order of French fries.

Hector bobs his head apologetically. “Sorry, no French fries.” Then Toni chimes in. “But we’ve got ketchup!”

Because of the rain even fewer workers are around than in the morning. Many sites appear deserted, and it would seem easy to swipe truckloads of lumber. Hector tells me that security is lax and that there has been a lot of theft — Hispanics taking stuff back across the border. He explains that the building boom in Chula Vista has led to a building boomlet in Tijuana with the pilfered construction material. This is probably what the Republicans mean by trickle-down economics.

Maybe it’s the rain, maybe it’s the fact that the day is a bust, but Hector’s talk, which had been moderately optimistic in the morning, begins to turn darker. The transmission is acting up again and the windshield wipers keep getting stuck.

“I like how I get to drive around and talk to all these people,” he says. “The days go by quick, but the bad thing is the routine, doing the same thing all the time. I mean, all my route is out here in these construction sites. I never get on the freeway. I only see these guys. I never see any girls, only tough-looking ones.”

Hector talks about playing drums in an alternative rock band with his cousins, about his girlfriend, his four-year-old daughter, the various cars he has rolled over, his father who plays guitar and keyboards.

“The only chance I get to travel is with the band. I’m pretty much tied down here with my route, but I’ll sleep only three hours if I have to. We play in Ensenada or L..A. in small alternative clubs. We like to play our own songs, not other people’s. My girlfriend doesn’t like it much. She has a kid. I’d love to play professionally, but I don’t know how to read notes. My dad could teach me. I tell myself I’ll get around to it. But here I’m my own boss. People are friendly. If I had a regular route of my own it would mean earlier hours and I wouldn’t want that. I’ll stay with the construction sites for a while, save some money. Then, if the construction stops, I'll move on to something else. If I had my way, I’d go back to school full-time. When I was in college, I didn’t take any business classes — I mean, I been around the restaurant business all my life — I took history and literature classes. But right now I need money for expenses and I don’t want to ask my dad, so I’d have to work and go to school part-time, but then I’d have to quit the band, and there’s my girlfriend.” Hector pauses and turns his cap around so the bill points backward. “I’ll have to sacrifice. There’s my daughter and I have to attend to her as well. That just piles it on. But doing the same thing every day, the routine, it’s getting worse. I’ll break out of it, I got to break out of it.”

At 24 Hector feels he still has lots of time. On one hand he has his obligations and on the other he has his desires. At the moment the two seem evenly balanced and his desires still seem possible to achieve. I wish him luck.

Before we get back to the lot, I ask Toni to make me a chicken burrito. Because of the damp and grease, my clothes, hair, and skin smell like a burrito, so I feel obliged to have a burrito in my belly as well. She gives me a burrito the size of a toddler’s arm and twice as juicy, thick with chunks of chicken, dripping with salsa and all the good stuff. It must weigh three pounds. Never have I had a burrito this good.

Early the next afternoon I drive out to the other side of San Diego to Fiesta Catering, which has a one-story brown cinder-block front on a tidy street of storage warehouses and commercial plastics companies off Miramar Road. Then, walking down the driveway, I see the mass of lunch trucks being washed, restocked, or simply parked, having begun to return around 2:00 p.m. The lot is a tangle of hoses and it’s impossible to walk in a straight line. The sky is blue; the concrete spotted with puddles. Men and women call to one another in English, Spanish, and a few languages I don’t recognize. In two minutes I’m as lost as if in a fun-house maze. I get directions to the back door to the building and just inside I find a single checkout counter like in a grocery. All around are stacks and shelves and freezers full of food. I ask directions to the office and within ten seconds I’m lost again among towering cases of canned goods — the food with which the drivers stock their trucks. Most they buy in the afternoon, while bread, doughnuts, tacos they get in the morning. People give me directions; everyone’s friendly. It’s like a library with cans of pineapple instead of Shakespeare; applesauce instead of Aristotle.

The president of Fiesta Catering is Ron McAtee, who came down from Los Angeles in 1969 and started Fiesta with two partners, whom he later bought out. In L.A. he had worked for a large catering company for eight years, finally as district manager. McAtee is 57, thin with swept-back brown hair, and several inches over six feet.

He has a craggy, squarish head and speaks with a slight Kansas drawl. He looks like someone you might have seen on one of those TV Westerns in the ’60s — Wagon Train or Rawhide. He’s a smoker and wears a gold pinkie ring.

He explains the difference between cold trucks and hot trucks and the revolution that occurred in the business in San Diego in 1985. Cold trucks are the small trucks with what Iooks like a small chrome camper on the back. The closest they come to hot food is a microwave. Mostly they sell cold sandwiches, soft drinks, candy, and pastries. A hot truck is the deli on wheels — the tanklike, RV-shaped vehicle with the 450-degree oil and steam table. When McAtee started, he had one cold truck and expanded to about 25. Hot trucks were illegal in San Diego. They are still illegal in most cities back East. They are just too big and the streets too small. But they were not illegal in LA., and there was increasing pressure to legalize them here. McAtee and other companies fought against it. Hot trucks were dangerous and the cost of changing over was huge.

“Even after we got them,” says McAtee, “it meant twice the expense, twice the manpower, 10 times the hassle, and 100 times the nightmare. There were a whole new set of sanitation problems, health and environmental regulations, the danger on the road. Do you know they’ve got to be insured for a million liability? But we were getting more and more competition from L.A. and there was a company here, Cajon Catering, that had been pushing for the change for years — and they had some people in city government on their side. We fought it, but when the board of supervisors said go, we went. We weren’t going to go under, much to the chagrin of some other companies that ended up going broke. Even Cajon Catering, that had pushed so hard, went under. We had to buy 20 brand-new hot trucks at $35,000 a shot. We sent people up to L.A. to train, both cooks and drivers. And we hired some people from up there. New freezers, a bigger warehouse, all the environmental stuff — it was well over a million.”

McAtee’s wife Melodie is co-owner of Fiesta, and their daughter Monica runs the office. Now Fiesta has 14 of its own routes and rents space at $14 a day to 32 independents who buy much of their food from Fiesta. The company mostly has industrial routes—small factories, electronic and computer firms, offices, hospitals, outpatient clinics, colleges—all over the county. For 20 years Fiesta’s biggest contract was General Dynamics and Fiesta had 20 trucks, but when General Dynamics closed its big plant, Fiesta had to scale back.

“This business has always been a dogfight,” says McAtee. “After the change in 1985, we had lots of trouble with independents or trucks from other com-panies jumping each other’s stops.”

To jump a stop is to show up at a stop where another truck already has a contract or prior agreement. This can lead to slamming down each other’s overhead doors, spray painting each other’s trucks, even fistfights.

“Right now we’ve been having trouble with Asian drivers who’ve been coming down from the north,” says McAtee. “They just pull into a stop and sit there. They’re pesky guys. Not all of them, of course. They don’t work like the rest of us; they don’t obey the rules. They can come and blow my head off, but it hasn’t come to that. But we’re better. They’re too one-dimensional. They only serve Chinese, you know, teriyaki.” When I ask Javier Heras at the Environmental Health office about the Asian drivers, he says, “The Asians may not be used to our rules and regulations and so may be more aggressive, especially as first-generation Americans. But we try not to pay attention to the ethnic aspects of the various differences of opinion between the drivers.”

Other drivers I speak to also complain about Asian drivers, but also of Middle Eastern and Hispanic drivers. In each case, the complaints seem to be against independents who are first-generation Americans and who are aggressively trying to break into the business.

Companies like Fiesta, Moody’s, and half a dozen others own their trucks, which they lease to drivers. Fiesta drivers pay a route lease, which is a 14 percent addition to what they pay Fiesta for their food; a $50-a-day truck lease; a $12.50-a-day maintenance fee, which goes toward repairs on the truck; and a $14-a-day lot fee. However, if a driver’s route isn’t doing well, then part or all of the lease is waived until the route builds up again. Drivers and cooks receive workman’s compensation. Also out of their gross drivers pay their own health insurance, pay their cooks, pay everything, so that the drivers are in fact independent businessmen or women (Fiesta has half and half) who, if they do a bad job, can be fired. After all,

the Fiesta name is on the truck. Independents on the other hand, own their trucks and might have two or three, like Hector Rubio Sr.

One of the most delicate aspects of the bUsiness is matching a driver and a cook. In the two weeks I spend with lunch trucks, over a dozen people describe the match as like a marriage, no matter what the gender combination. These are two people who are forced together in an intimate ballet of fast-moving money and even faster food for upwards of 50 hours a week. As one person tells me, “The slightest friction and you can smell it the moment you approach the truck. The smallest angry word between them could get somebody killed or a customer poisoned.”

This is why successful driver/cook combinations tend to stay together for years and when they die they are probably buried side-by-side and share the same tombstone.

Independent drivers have to hunt out their own stops, but if a driver is attached to a company, then he or she is greatly assisted by the route supervisor who hunts out stops in the way Ernest Hemingway used to hunt lions. At Fiesta this is handled by the vice president, Jim Cavanaugh, 47, who also takes care of the daily running of Fiesta.

Cavanaugh is a giant of a man: six feet five inches with a slight slouch, glasses, and bald on top. He bears the marks of teenage acne and has an expressionless face. At first you think, I’d hate to meet him in a dark alley. Then you think, this is probably one of the kindest men I’ve ever met. Most of the people I talk to describe him as sweet. He is also ferociously competitive and his business is expanding.

“I pound the sidewalk,” he tells me, "and get referrals. You try to get referrals any way you can. You have to imagine there’s another truck next to you all the time even when there’s not — like a Moody’s truck that’s after your business.”

I ask him about the Asian trucks. He shrugs and gives one of those smiles a person gives when he’s trying not to smile— half boyish, half sly. “I follow the Asian trucks now and then and ask their customers if they don’t want a change from teriyaki. We’re always trying to get an edge, get a foot in the door. The other day I followed a Moody’s truck for a couple of hours just to see where it was going. In the morning it stopped at a local college, but it didn’t seem to go back. So I went over there. It turned out no truck stopped there at lunchtime, in the afternoon, or in the evening. Now Fiesta’s got those stops.” Jim gives another of his smiles— half shy, half sly.

Jim Cavanaugh came to Fiesta in 1986 after working for years for the Denny’s restaurant chain. He had a route for nine years but over that time the pressure grew worse. “You’ve got to be real mellow. I played a bit of jazz when I had my route. I arranged my stops so I’d leave and see the sun rising at six over the mountains and it was beautiful. People spent 15 minutes around my truck and I wanted them to enjoy it. I tried to make the whole thing a pleasure. But after nine years I was getting burned out. I used to get home around six and my wife would say why don’t you talk and I’d say I’ve been talking all day — that was one of the hard things about having a route.”

So Cavanaugh went back to Denny’s, but his fellow employees said that his eyes lit up only when he talked about Fiesta and driving a lunch truck. Shortly after that McAtee hired Cavanaugh back as a supervisor and then he became vice president. And a little later Cavanaugh received the tribute of a job offer from Moody’s.

“It was a real compliment,” he says, “but Moody’s has always been the big competition, the enemy. So I really felt good when they said I’d always have a job with them. The plus of a smaller company is that it’s more like a family. Many of our drivers have been here over 20 years. Drivers that leave Moody’s say there’s more pressure. Nobody’s bossy or unfriendly — it’s just the size of the place. It was a little different when Dennis Sr. was running Moody’s. We used to work together and if we got a great deal on ketchup, we’d give Moody’s a call and ask if they wanted some or if they got a deal on something, they’d do the same. Or if we needed some of our spots covered or we’d cover some of theirs. It was friendlier. Now it’s more competitive, more cutthroat.”

Cavanaugh has set me up to ride with Pat Buchanan, a slender, 38-ycar-old Yankees fan from Poughkeepsie, New York, who came out here in the early 1980s. I meet him the next morning, and we walk out to the lot, which, at 6:45, is mostly empty. The remaining drivers and cooks arc hurriedly graining last-minute items, mostly dated bakery goods, which they check out with the cashier near the door. It’s a chilly January morning with a promise of rain. On my way over to Fiesta, I saw snow on the mountains.

Cavanaugh looks up at the sky and gives one of his slow smiles. “In cold weather, business can be astronomical. People eat more.”

Pat has bright blue eyes and dark blond curly hair that hangs to his collar. He wears a blue Yankees cap, a beat-up brown leather bomber jacket, purple flannel shirt, and jeans. He’s handsome, he looks Long Island, he could be a shortstop. He gives the impression of being a reformed bad boy. He’s got tremendous charm. His roguish smile has almost a bend in it; it’s almost wavy. He uses his hands when he talks and shifts his hips, almost a shimmy. He has a mild worldly-wise cynicism. At his stops he calls the men buddy and the women darlin’. He knows all their names and what they cat.

He says, I appreciate it and Thank you veddy, veddy much.

He says, I’m staying away from Vegas for a while; they got my 400 bucks.

He says. Hey, guy, what’s happening, what’s going on, buddy?

He says, That’s what I’m looking for — a rich old widow woman with a bad cough.

He’s had a route for eight years, and while there is nothing false about him, there’s a certain exaggeration, a sharp eye for public relations.

“It’s all service,” he says, “give people service. It’s your grocery store. Be fair, be honest, be clean, and keep trying something new. If you keep a rhythm, see what people want and give it to them, then they’re happy. You can’t say — Sorry, I don’t have any. People say how come you have that big menu if you don’t carry any of it? I hang out with some of my customers — not a lot, but if I see someone on Friday night, I buy him a drink and he buys me a drink. I got this cellular phone and if I see some action, a potential stop, then I call Jim Cavanaugh and tell him to get on it right away. And if I’ve got the time, I’ll try to go into the place myself.”

Pat’s cook is Tony Martinez, 31, who has been in the business ten years and has worked with Pat for one. Previously he worked in a restaurant but he didn’t like being bossed around. Tony wears a red T-shirt, green shorts, white apron, hiking shoes, and a tan cap over his black hair. He moves incredibly fast and never seems to hurry. He is angular, powerful, and has the sort of calves where you see every muscle. His passion is soccer and he plays defense for a team in the Universal League, having been thrown out of another league for fighting. He is married with four children and lives in San Diego. He and Pat clearly have great affection for one another. He starts work at six and takes a half hour to clean up the truck when they get back.

"He knows Mexican cooking and I know American,” says Pat. “We taught each other, but I could never do what he does, though he sometimes takes my job, selling and taking money. Tony’s like a partner."

Like Hector Rubio, Pat’s stops are at places where people can’t easily get out; but unlike Hector, Pat doesn’t have any construction stops; rather, his 17 or so stops are more stable— a company that does computer work for other companies, which is a stop that Pat has had for four years; the sheriff’s department; an electronics company; a company that makes golf clubs; a Jeep dealership; Solar Turbines. Most places he visits both mornings and afternoons. The places where he has been longest, he is more likely to give credit (“People tend to buy more when you give them credit — like it’s free, although I’ve been burned. It’s all a game” ).

I notice that the economic scale of the employees is reflected in what they drink — the construction places buy Gatorade, business places buy the smoothies. “I’ve had a lot of luck with designer water,” Pat says. “It costs more than gasoline.”

Between stops, Tony chops and sings. At each stop he knows what the customers want and is already preparing it before the truck arrives.

The truck is a 1985 Chevy with 230,000 miles, a new engine, a new front end, and it’s had several transmissions. Although older than Hector’s truck, it’s in better shape. In fact, Pat’s whole operation seems more professional and doesn’t give the impression of operating on a shoestring. Hector never seemed to be doing anything wrong (except for the ketchup), but he couldn’t take a chance or waste a penny. Consequently, he made many mistakes. He ran out of food, his truck broke down, and all the best intentions in the world couldn’t fix that.

At the busier stops like Solar Turbines Pat sets up his table and keeps busy with his coin changer. He puts a big wad of bills in his back pocket — his bank—and keeps another wad of bills in his hand. He throws out bits of Spanish — gracias, de nada, and Spanish numbers — although he says he doesn’t know Spanish. And he throws out a certain amount of slangy conversation; “That boy was stressing for a heart attack, dude.” He tells different people that I’m his boss, an auditor from the IRS, or a writer from Playboy. He introduces me to Eddie, a distinguished African-American who is an assistant pastor at a church; to Tim, an ex-Navy SEAL who was on the presidential guard and presented flags to the families of dead servicemen; and to a woman with a passion for diamonds — “Show him those diamonds. This woman’s got more diamonds than Liberace.”

At every stop, people seem tremendously grateful to see him. One customer says, “At 7:30, if he’s not here, we’re out in the lobby saying where is he? He must have been partying too late last night. If Patrick doesn’t show up, nothing in the day goes right.”

Partrick laughs wickedly, “Those were the old days.” When he’s done at a stop, he calls up to Tony, “We got to roll, brother.”

“I don’t get much theft," Pat says, “but you’ve got to move around a lot, look at them from different angles, don’t stand in the same spot so they can anticipate where you’ll be.”

Despite Jim Cavanaugh’s claim that people eat more in cold weather, business is down today. It gets colder and starts to rain. There is a lot of discussion about hot coffee and rubber boots. The day Ls gloomy and Pat begins to talk about the future.

“I can’t see doing this in ten years, but who knows? I’ll do it a few more years till I get worn out. I don’t mind the routine, but it gets a little redundant. You mostly know what people are going to say before they say it. When I make the change, I’ll probably do something connected with food — that’s what I know best. But I won’t open a restaurant, that takes too much capital. I should probably go back to school, but I don’t really know what I’d be happy in. There’s no security in this business, but there’s no security in any business. You start feeling too old for this business, but I’m good at it, I know what I’m doing. But I try to learn stuff every day, work the Internet, read stock market stuff. I follow the stock market on the Internet all the time. I got a mutual fund, stocks, an IRA. Nobody gives me anything. I got to do it myself. I’m self-employed.”

Pat has a bachelor apartment in Ocean Beach and a serious girlfriend in Phoenix. He feels his party days arc behind him and he wants to settle down, but he’s not sure if he wants to settle down behind the wheel of a lunch truck. In this way he is not very different from Hector Rubio Jr.

Before I leave I ask Tony to make me a chicken burrito. It is thick, flavorful, and dripping with sauce, but it is not quite as good as Toni Avila’s burrito — more like the arm of a plump infant than a plump toddler. Still, it is better than anything I have ever eaten in any restaurant in either the United States or Mexico, and I am satisfied.

On another day I visit Moody’s, the largest and oldest of the companies whose routes crisscross San Diego. Moody’s began in 1926 when the grandmother, father, and uncle of the present two Moody brothers began selling sandwiches from a card table on El Cajon Boulevard when it was still a dirt road.

Today Moody’s on Market Street is a jumble of several lots for 80 trucks, with puddles of water, metal carts, snaking hoses, cables, and dozens of opportunities to get lost. The warehouse scents gigantic and of no particular shape, with passageways going off every which way and cases of food piled on wooden pallets. I would have to see the building from a helicopter hovering 100 feet overhead to get a sense of its shape. Mountainous crates of food, wooden shelving, rows of coolers and freezers, beeping forklifts — if Fiesta’s warehouse formed a maze, Moody’s is like the Grecian labyrinth. I feel there must be people wandering around who accidentally strayed into the building days ago and are still trying to find their way out. At least they won’t starve.

In a second-floor office I talk to Liz Eckhardt, one of Moody’s two route supervisors. Liz has worked for the company for 22 years—16 years as a driver—and at one point she leased three of her own trucks. Liz is a solid blonde in her late 40s who came to San Diego from the East in 1976. Although born in England, her accent is more New Jersey. Liz seems bored and slightly ill-humored, but it’s there to hide her shyness. Her hands are jittery and she keeps interrupting herself with quick high laughs.

“There are two different kinds of routes at Moody’s,” Liz tells me, “leased routes that are big enough to support themselves and which have between 10 and 35 stops, and house routes that aren’t big enough but that we’re working on — and you always have a few of those around because they can cover little areas that you can’t cover in a leased route. A leased route tries to go to a stop at break, because you always make more money at break than at lunchtime just because people think about bringing their lunch, but if they don’t, then they can usually go out. But at break they’re stuck there, especially the construction workers, so that’s your best time to sell food. So say I have a good leased route and the company wants the lunch stop real bad but the driver can’t get there at 12 noon — because every company wants 12 noon — so I’ll send in the house route. That way I’ll be covering lunch in order to keep the leased route protected for the breaks. But we’re constantly working on the house routes to make them big enough to be leased routes. I mean, our dream would be to have them all leased, but I don’t think that would ever happen."

Actually the use of leased and house routes is standard among most of the companies in San Diego. Fiesta has two house routes.

Drivers who lease a truck from Moody’s pay the company 11 percent of their gross whether they make $750 or $1500 a day. The drivers are covered by Moody’s insurance, but they are ultimately charged through their lease, as they are charged for the use of Moody’s three full-time mechanics. All this is included in their lease. But out of their gross the drivers pay a daily $15 lot fee that goes for electricity, ice, a place to park, and to have someone wash down and clean up their trucks; they have to pay their cooks’ salaries and their salaries, and they have to pay for gas, oil, taxes, health insurance, etc. The lunch-wagon companies in San Diego all have different leasing arrangements with their drivers, but the final sums paid to the companies are more or less the same. Consequently, Moody’s won’t let a driver take over a route until he’s grossing at least $500 a day because that would bring the leasee only about $350 a week. At best, Hector Rubio was grossing about $500 a day.

“If you have a cook that’s not economical,” Liz says, “you’re going to lose a lot of your profit there. You work to where you don’t have any waste. I mean, throwing a few sandwiches away is nothing because you want fresh food every day. Most cooks get down to where they have only two or three items left over when they get back into the lot. You get it down to a science.”

Moody’s has a far higher percentage of women drivers than the other companies: 36 women and only 4 men. The same ratio exists among the cooks.

“This is a job where women do better than men,” Liz explains, “because you go to a construction site and what are the men going to want to look at? Guys used to come up to me and say, You’re the only woman I see all day. It means something to them to see a woman. I don’t mean to be sexist but they’re construction workers. It’s not that men can’t do as good a job if they have the personality. Personality means a lot. Like, if you went down and sat down with the drivers when they’re all downstairs counting their money and everybody’s talking and laughing and telling stories — they’re special, they’re live wires. You’ve got to be real outgoing to do this job. But you also have to lie calm, take all the criticism, solve your problems, and keep the bosses happy.”

We discuss the bad parts for a little: the routine, seeing the same faces day in and day out, getting up at 3:30 in the morning, or how rain or a flat tire can cut your earnings in half.

“But when you lease a truck,” says Liz, “you learn a whole business, the ins and outs and all the secrets. I mean, it’s not like other businesses, because you don’t put any money up front and all you need is a driver’s license and the willingness to work hard. Someone comes in and they work here in the warehouse for a week or so on salary, then they’re trained for a week on a truck. Then it depends what’s open. You could come in and get a terrible route or you could be lucky and get a real good route. If it’s leasable, we try to lease it to them, then we’ll help them through it. So they’d start on a house route, then go on to lease a route. There’s always a chance to make more money if you want to put the effort into your job. You start adding stops, then you drop the little ones and pick up bigger ones. We try to weed out the drivers who only want their paycheck, who don’t have any push. But it’s hard to find people who arc real ambitious and want to work harder.

“When I was a driver myself, what I liked was that there was nobody watching over you, saying do this, do that. I mean, you’re pretty independent and the harder you work, the more money you make, which you don’t find in a lot of jobs. And I used to work real hard. I’d go out after work in order to find more stops for myself because an hour invested here and there would mean a lot more money. I’d go door-to-door or hear about construction coming up from another company and chase it down because it’s the superintendent who always makes the decisions and sometimes they don’t pick the superintendent until two weeks before it starts. And I still do that as a route supervisor— trying to get stops for the drivers. We’re chasing construction all the time. The most secure kind of route is an all-commercial route because it never changes unless the company moves or closes, but when I had a route I had a basic route with which I supported myself, then I got construction stops on top of the others, and they were like gravy and my salary went up a lot.

“In looking for new stops, we’re often in touch with the city planning department and we find out about new construction. The drivers are supposed to watch because it’s their money and if you’re driving around every day you’re going to notice if a new business is opening up, and if you don’t have the courage to go and talk to them, then me or the other route supervisor have to do it. A lot of drivers aren’t real aggressive, but I’ve done it for a while. I mean, I can handle rejection. Ninety-nine percent of the new stops are stops that are hunted out by me and the other supervisor. There’s a lot of pleasure in that. We’ll go door-to-door, give them a little spiel, and usually it’s a direct yes or no. But I can’t get a whole lunch-truck company full of people who are gung ho. I mean, you have to be real gung ho to go cold calling, to just walk in and go after the business. We’ll take a house route that’s not making money and we’ll work in the area and we’ll go everywhere — businesses, hardware supply stores, anything that we think might use a lunch t ruck, but they’ve got to have a certain number of employees or it’s not worth it."

Moody’s Is co-owned by the brothers Dennis and Gary Moody, the third generation to have the business. Gary, in his early 50s, has been here since 1968 except for a two-year stint in the Marines. Dennis, 37, came in 1985, although, as he tells me, “I’ve worked here since I was this high.” He points to his knee. When Moody’s was running 60 cold trucks prior to the change to hot trucks in 1985, Dennis sometimes worked on the assembly line, chopping onions, cutting up peppers, and helping 15 women make 4000 sandwiches every day. Later he worked as a cook for several weeks and had a route for a year in order to get a better sense of the business.

Dennis and Gary divide the responsibilities, with Gary dealing with the food, taking care of all the purchasing. Dennis oversees the routes, drivers, office staff, the lot, the three full-time mechanics, and the icemaking operation. Both men are blond and of average height. Dennis is tanned with bright, almond-shaped blue eyes, an easy smile, and extremely white teeth. He looks about 25. If the Beach Boys had ever needed an extra member, Dennis would have made the perfect addition even if he could only squawk.

Gary is solid and no-nonsense. He seems always in a rush, always thinking two steps ahead. His Marine training shows. At least five people tell me that he is there five mornings a week at 2:00 a.m. to let in the early drivers and that he often stays until 6:00 in the evening. And he often comes in on Saturday and Sunday as well. Both men are married with two children.

One afternoon Dennis and I stand near the cash register as drivers and cooks check out groceries for the next day. The warehouse is drafty and cold. Dennis describes that nightmare period in 1985 when the law changed to permit hot trucks within the city limits.

“When the law changed, hot trucks were coming down from L.A. to jump the stops of our cold trucks. That’s when we started buying hot trucks, just to stay in business. We mortgaged everything, went deeply in debt, and bought hot trucks as fast as we could over a two-year period while trying to sell our 60 cold trucks, mostly to places in Texas and Mexico. Then I went up to LA. for a few months just to learn about hot trucks— they had about 2000 of them up there then."

I had thought that Moody’s was in the business of running lunch trucks and leasing routes. Dennis sets me straight.

“We’re a wholesale food business; we make our money selling food."

The drivers who have leased routes or house routes and independent drivers who use the lot are basically captive and semi-captive customers.

“We can’t legally make the independents buy here, although we’ll offer them rebates at the end of the month, which may offset their repair bills. And with our leasees, we only hope they buy their stuff here through competitive pricing and unique products. We can’t force them even though they’re supposed to. But we offer lots of services like building up and maintaining their routes. And when their routes go down, we cover their lease. We pay $80 a day to keep a leased truck on the road — insurance, registration fees, health department fee, maintenance. That amount is constant no matter how much a driver makes. The truck uses 150 pounds of ice in the winter and 250 in the summer. So if we get $50 from the lease, we lose $30. The lot fee’s a wash. But it’s more than being a big grocery store. It takes more than a piece of equipment and good food. That’s not what makes the business. It takes the customer and your relationship with the customer.”

So what sells the food is not just the food — it’s the smile and the chitchat, it’s knowing the names of your customers, whether they like chicken burritos (“Hold the salsa!’’) or BLTs, it’s knowing how their arches are holding up and if their Great-Aunt Tilly has gotten over the flu.

On Friday I spend the day with a Moody driver — Cathy Stangel, 48, trim, attractive with straight shoulder-length blond hair and dressed in jean shorts, a green sweatshirt, and running shoes. A pair of sunglasses are pushed up on her head. She looks closer to 38 than 48 and she tells me she intends to go to New York City and run the marathon for her 50th birthday.

When I show up at the lot at seven, she eyes me with a mix of skepticism and good humor, her hands full of packages of Twinkies. “Life pretty slow in the journalism business?” she asks.

Cathy’s husband Rick drives a truck for Fiesta Catering, and while Jim Cavanaugh and Liz Eckhardt seem to spend half of their lives trying to outfox one another in their competition for stops, they have reached a sort of truce as far as Cathy’s and her husband’s routes are concerned.

Cathy has three kids — a married daughter with children, a son at Whittier College, and an eight-year-old daughter. The previous evening Cathy was out with the eight-year-old at the Girl Scouts and Brownies’ “Cookie Kick-Off” at Sea World — 5000 girls pumping up their adrenaline to get ready for the annual sale of Girl Scout cookies — and Cathy, who gets up at 3:30, is yawning.

Mata — Maria Ponce — docs the cooking and she has worked with Cathy for 12 years. Pretty, with her black hair in a bun and large round earrings, she wears gray sweatpants and a blue T-shirt under a white apron. She lives near Moody’s and has three children. Each morning she arrives at five to start preparing the food.

We leave the lot shortly after seven, heading north on 805 toward Mission Valley. The truck is an ’85 Chevy with 167,000 miles but seems new—Moody’s re-conditions the trucks every several years making all the chrome bright again. Over the ignition a pink Day-Glo decal announces: “Bad to the Bone.”

At every curve, Cathy says, “Hold on, Mata,” interrupting a flow of talk to me about blowouts she has had on the freeways, blown engines, and dropped transmissions.

“When it rains," she says, “you can’t slam on the brakes or Mata would go flying. Every driver should be a cook for a while just to know what it’s like.”

Cathy glances at the malls, the office high-rises, the miles of apartment complexes, the trickle of scummy water that makes up the San Diego River. The morning is brilliantly blue. Cathy was born in San Diego and has seen the changes.

“There used to be farms out here when I was a kid. We’d come out here to buy milk.”

Cathy’s first stops are at office parks, and the differences between her and Hector Rubio and Pat Buchanan are instantly clear. While Hector had a cheerful courtesy and Pat was a hot-shot, Cathy is a tornado. In part this is due to external conditions — the weather is warm, the sky is blue. On those other days, it was raining. Also Cathy is an attractive woman and most of her customers are men. Indeed, when we later reach the construction sites some men respond to her the way a prospector'in Death Valley with a busted canteen might respond to an ice-cold bucket of beer.

Then there are the semi-externals like her horn. Hector and Pat had regular horns, which they blew when they approached a stop — toot, toot. Cathy’s is like the air raid siren on top of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin at the end of World War II — WAHN, WAHN, WAHN, WAHN.

“I asked them to make my horn particularly loud,” Cathy explains, “so people would hear me coming. It’s so annoying. It sounds like Woody Woodpecker.”

Another semi-external: at the first stop Cathy sets out her table and cashbox, then she grabs her blue backpack and dumps its contents into a tin pan—out tumbles an avalanche of Reese’s Pieces, Tootsie Pops, Snickers, Baby Ruths, Mounds bars, and so on. She nods at them with satisfaction as about 20 men and women come hurrying up.

“I have all this candy,” she tells me, “because on Fridays I give candy away. I tell them that I used to give beer away but that they won’t let me do it anymore.”

And as each person buys a hamburger or hot dog or burrito, Cathy urges candy on him, like a mother pressing vitamins on her young.

Lastly, Cathy gives away free coffee (“A lot of them come just for the coffee”). And as people stand around drinking coffee, they decide, after all, to buy something to go with it.

This is before Cathy makes her presence felt, and her presence is very high-powered. Like Hector and Pat, she knows most of her customers by name and knows what they like to eat. Like Pat she knows details, even the history of many of her customers. But it always seems more than that. For instance, when a customer places an order she’s able to give the impression that the man or woman is making the correct choice. And her questions appear solicitous, caring, sisterly rather than flirtatious, and indicative of the seven years she spent as a medical assistant before coming to Moody’s. She gives the impression of being fascinated by the world and by other human beings. And when she says, “What a shame,” you believe it.

“You guys,” she says, “you guys” and “Happy Friday, aren’t you glad it’s Friday? What’re you doing this weekend, you going to have fun this weekend?”

Then there are short conversations, discussing tax problems with one man, Diet Coke with another. She consoles a woman about the death of her father and speculates about what it would be like to be married to someone for 50 years. With another man she discusses high school basketball fund-raising and with another she talks about extra-hot jalapeno peppers and how she once knew a man who could eat ten at once.

“I’m so nosy,” Cathy tells me. “I ask them about their families. I’m like a bartender. They tell me their problems. I’m curious. But you’ve got to make people want to give you their money. You know all their names, you say please and thank you. You’d be surprised at how hard it is for some people to do all that. But I like my job. Where else can you go and take money from people and they’re laughing.”

Yet she is never inattentive and at a construction stop after she has given the project manager his free burrito, she asks, “Are you guys doing any new buildings?”

The man glances up and mumbles with his mouth full. “I don’t know yet.”

Cathy gives one of her most winning smiles. "Can you find out?”

As we leave, she explains, “You always have to be asking questions about who’s buying land and upcoming jobs. The supervisors hear about what jobs are being planned, and this is how you get new stops.”

Between 7:30 and 2:00, we visit an acupuncture school and a partially built apartment complex with 700 apartments in the first phase, with even bigger phases to come; we stop at other office blocks, a company that sells bottled water, more construction sites. We stop at a junkyard guarded by rottweilers, and we park outside NASSCO, the National Steel and Shipbuilding Company. NASSCO is Moody’s biggest contract, and twice a day 18 Moody trucks make their way through the huge gates to feed the people inside, while Cathy mops up around the edges.

Cathy’s movements are always graceful and relaxed, as fluid as a dancer’s. She never seems tense even though her workday is broken up into five-minute segments. She uses no cash register or calculator but knows all the prices and adds and subtracts quickly in her head with no mistakes. Mata seems slightly shy, but she smiles and urges a boy to put lettuce on his taco because it’s good for him. She is quick and cheerful; she asks questions and exchanges small talk in Spanish with the Hispanics,She seems more serious than Toni Avila but uses the casual Spanish endearments like “carino” and “corazon.”

Cathy talks about her stops in terms of money — a $150 stop, a $200 stop. The $300 stops and above get frantic and at times she has to hire someone to make sure nothing is stolen. “At one place I made a complaint and the supervisors said they would watch for me, and my sales went up $200 a day. When supervisors catch someone stealing off the trucks, they fire them on the spot. These are guys who wouldn’t dream of stealing from a 7-Eleven, but they think nothing of stealing off a lunch truck.”

The industrial stops yield the same amount of money every day. The construction sites can go up and down depending on the weather or, more often, on the job. “They may be in a rush to finish so there’ll be an extra 100 guys or they’ll have laid off everyone and it’ll be a ghost town. You never know.”

I ask if there are other differences.

“The industrial stops can be a lot more finicky,” Cathy tells me, “especially the women. A woman says, ‘Can you fix this with diet mayonnaise?’ I say, 'Lady, this is a lunch truck, we don’t have diet mayonnaise.’ And sometimes the women will look down on me for working on a lunch truck, though I bet I make more than they do. At construction sites, they’ll eat anything and love it. Of course, supervisors and project managers eat for free. What I can’t stand is when the secretaries at the construction sites want free food. Who do they think is paying for this stuff anyway?”

Cathy slowly pulls the truck down a muddy track next to a huge, partially constructed apartment complex being built by a company called JPI. I ask a dozen people what it stands for. The project manager scratches his yellow hard hat and opines that the J stands for Jefferson. That’s the most he knows. This sprawl of unfinished three-story units and stacks of building materials is the future home of about 10,000 people. Cathy’s awful screaming Woody Woodpecker horn is like a cattle prod touched to the base of one’s spine. As far as I can see workers are setting down their tools. Forklifts come to a stop, hammers fall silent, saws cease their whines. The upturned, tanned faces have salivating expressions. Mata’s grill is hissing and crackling. Cathy hops out of the truck, grabs her table, and pushes up her overhead doors as several dozen men begin to mosey in our direction, a mixture of gringos and Hispanics, hardly any blacks. Everybody looks hungry.

“You have to go into each stop completely full,” says Cathy, “and you can never let anyone think you’re running out or they won’t get something if they’re last. Drivers who go into a stop only partly full or they run out of stuff — it makes people feel bad.”

Within two or three minutes 20 men are crowded around the truck ordering sandwiches, burritos, tacos, tortillas, or getting doughnuts and soft drinks, pouring themselves coffee, grabbing free candy; then they gather around the table that Cathy has set up in order to pay. Half a dozen conversations are going on. There’s no order, no one stands in line, but there’s no hurry or stress. Cathy keeps up the jokes and laughter. Mata gives a joven an aspirin for his headache. The hiss and smell of hot grease, the clink of coins on the metal table, the mix of Spanish and English. Cathy addresses many of the men by name, asks about their weekend plans, their children, their wives, their cars, their dogs. Soon a dozen or so men are scattered around the site standing or sitting on stacks of shingles or plywood eating plates of beans or sandwiches.

All day Cathy’s been telling people that I’m an IRS agent or a health inspector or a government inspector from a secret bureau or a writer doing her life story. Here she says I’m a supervisor from Moody’s.

One semi-truculent hard-hatted roofer taps my chest with a muddy finger. “Good free coffee, that’s the ticket right there. Put that in your report. You let the lunch lady beat you up?”

As the day winds to a close, I can see that Cathy is getting tired. She still maintains the good cheer and small talk, but now there is an element of strain. Several times that afternoon she has said that it takes a lot of money to live in San Diego. As she drives away from the construction site, she confesses that she doesn’t think she’ll be able to keep up her route much longer. What bothers her most is that at the beginning of the month the health insurance for her family was increased from $330 a month to $410 a month (Pat Buchanan pays $122 a month).

“I don’t know why they raised our insurance,” Cathy tells me. “No one’s ever sick and there’s only three of us. Anyway, this increase makes it impossible for me to keep the route. I just can’t afford it. But I’m not going to make a change till I find something I like. I’m not going to rush into anything. What I want is a job working with people. I love working with people."

And I can see Cathy trying to pry herself loose from the lunch truck, which she also loves, despite having done it for 12 years. Earlier she said that one of the things she liked was getting off at 2:00 or 2:30. It was like having two days in one. Now she says, “All the days feel full. When I get home I go running or work out, then there’re school projects and Brownies with my daughter. There’s never any time, even with two days in one. And the route, what I don’t like about the job is the lack of mental stimulation. I get bored with it, really bored with it.”

Then she smiles and gives a philosophic shrug — one of those shrugs that acknowledges the pressures that the world puts onto your shoulders one by one, then adds a few more just to see how much you can take. Still, I think of the division between public relations skills and the grinding routine. The better you get at the first, the harder becomes the second. Hector, Pat, and Cathy had all reached a point where the liabilities of their chosen professions had begun to outweigh the benefits. Or perhaps they were just tired after a long day.

“Hold on, Mata,” says Cathy, as she pulls onto 805 heading back to Moody’s lot. It’s shortly after two o'clock. All over San Diego County lunch trucks are heading home to be recharged, refilled, and scrubbed down. Little or no food is left except the nonperishables. Twice a year the trucks are fumigated. Then there are the spot health inspections. You want to find rats, mice,and cockroaches, go to a restaurant, not a lunch wagon.

After Cathy’s last stop I had asked Mata to make me a chicken burrito. It was excellent but it wasn’t as thick as a toddler’s arm like Toni Avila’s, nor was it as thick as an infant’s arm like Tony Martinez’s. It was more like an infant’s wrist—a healthy, well-fed infant but still an infant.

There are two possible conclusions to be made here. One draws on theories concerning big corporations versus the small fry:— that true home cooking can only be found among humble independent businessmen struggling to succeed. The other has to do with the science of calculating how much food will be left at the end of the day — that after Cathy’s last stop Mata had little left to offer, making her the most thrifty of the bunch. I don’t know. Check out a few lunch wagons on your own, but don’t tell them I sent you.

— Stephen Dobyns

Stephen Dobyns has been a reporter for the Detroit News and is the author of nine volumes of poetry and 20 novels, the most recent Boy in the Water (Henry Holt & Company).