Walgreens parking lot, San Pablo Dam Road. This is the one.

Here's the thing about the Walgreens tacos. Here's the thing. They're not even open yet, and there's already a line. It's not six o'clock. The sun is still doing that golden hour thing over the hills to the east, that specific California evening light that makes everything look like it means something, and people are just standing there on San Pablo Dam Road in front of a Walgreens parking lot because they know. Word got out. They already know. They know it's Tacos El Torito.

But we almost didn't make it. A kid cuts in front of us, turning too fast, too close, and then thirty seconds later, we hear him hit a work truck out on the Dam Road. End of day commute. Some guy's Tuesdays just went sideways.

Here's the thing about that. We're standing in the parking lot and we just heard an accident happen behind us and the crew on the other side of the counter didn't even look up. Because they've got work to do. Because it's almost six.

Before the line gets fed, the crew gets fed. It's not even six, and they're already moving, already working, chopping onions and cilantro and opening up containers and getting the salsas out, and somebody, somebody smart, has a plate of tacos. They are eating them fast, standing up, not sitting down, no time to sit down, because they know what's coming. They know that in twenty minutes the line is going to be ten deep, then twenty deep, and it's going to stay that way for hours. Hours. Nonstop. So you eat now. You eat standing up in the golden light before the doors open, because this is the last moment of stillness you're going to get, and you know it, and you make peace with it, and you take another bite.

While you were still thinking about what you wanted for dinner, she was already out here with her flat iron griddle and her big orange bowl of masa and she's grinding out tortillas one by one, tortillitas, fresh, on the sidewalk.  

And then there's the trompo.

The meat pyramid. This towering column of Al Pastor spinning slow under the red canopy tent, lit up by little string bulbs, caramelized dark on the outside, salty and smoky and glistening, and it's maybe three feet tall and it is rotating and a guy steps up and carves into it with a long knife and the slices fall and collect in a pile below and you think, and this is not an exaggeration, you think this goes back somewhere. This isn't a midweek-night parking-lot snack. This is something older. This is trompo and it came from shawarma and it traveled through Lebanon into Mexico City and down through the decades and across the border and up through California and it landed here, on San Pablo Dam Road and it is exactly as serious as all of that sounds.

The trompo does not care about the accident on the road. The trompo has been spinning and will keep spinning. It has its own agenda and its own sense of time.

You have to understand the scope of the operation. The trompo is spinning. There's a separate pot where meat is going low and slow, boiling down into something soft and deep. And then over to the side, there's charcoal, actual charcoal, and Carnde Asada going over the coals, doing its own thing entirely. Different cooking methods are happening simultaneously in a parking lot. A whole system. It shouldn't work. The logistics alone. And yet.

We went with the Al Pastor. Of course, we went with the Al Pastor. You don't stand in that line and look at that trompo and order something else. He carves the meat right there, he drops it onto those fresh tortillas, onion, cilantro, pineapple, wedge of lime. There's a red salsa, and it isn't playing games, and there's that green avocado crema, and it's cool and grassy and smooth. You use both.

Three dollars a taco. Three dollars. The whole plate, three tacos, the avocado crema, the limes, nine dollars. Nine dollars and you're standing in a parking lot on San Pablo Dam Road eating one of the best things you've had in recent memory.

The hills are going dark behind you, and the line behind you is longer than the one you waited in, and somewhere behind you, a kid is having a very different Tuesday night than you are. You feel lucky. Not dramatically lucky. Just quietly, specifically lucky in the way you only feel when something almost happened and then didn't and then you got tacos.

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