Each week, one of our favorite writers is drafting a list of every instance their favorite food saved their life. From slices of pizza to bagels, tacos to tamales, these emotional eats remind us that food is so much more than fuel.
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By Liz Chereskin
The morning light stung as I searched around my bag for my CTA card, rushing to take the Blue Line to a very early class. It was my last semester of graduate school, and I was already very late.
I was in the midst of fishing through a Mary Poppins-esque assortment of items: singles from the cash-only bar (or bars?) I’d visited the night before, purloined coasters from said bars, a grab bag of writing utensils, and tangled ear buds I knew would come in handy on the loud, crowded train as the incredible hangover I had anticipated began to set in. I stopped by the turnstile as rush hour commuters pushed past me.
I finally located my wallet, nestled next to a plastic bag containing two yellow tamales. They were still wrapped in corn husks, somehow unadulterated—but also unrefrigerated—from the night before. I looked around at the other people on the train, sipping coffee, reading books; normal morning activities. I sent out a quick text to a few friends:
I’m sitting on the train in the same clothes as I was wearing last night. I think I am going to die and I am looking at some tamales from the Tamale Guy. What do I do now?
The Tamale Guy is something of a mystical figure at the bars in the gentrified or mid-gentrifying areas of Chicago’s Northwest side. My knowledge of anything outside my limited exchanges of cash for his tasty Meso-American street food is second or third-hand information that has taken on the quality of an urban legend.
So. Many. Tamales. Photo via Vimeo
Word has it his wife or sister or aunt makes all the tamales during the day; he sells them—hundreds, I’d guess—each night. I have no idea how he makes it to all the bars he does. What I do know: he seems to walk into a bar at just the right time, at the intersection of drunk and hungry where something is about to give. He yells his signature call: “Tamales! Tamales!” and for five dollars, you get five tamales (cheese, chicken, or carnitas) and two sauces: a verde and a spicier salsa.
My individual experiences of the lifesaving power of his tamales blur together into a collection of masa-smeared moments. They begin with me saying a range of expletives and quasi-religious expressions of gratitude, either to myself or whomever I was drinking with at the time. While he has always come to me in my times of need, my experience is hardly unique; I’ve heard an array of stories from friends about the Tamale Man’s role as Chicago’s late night savior. One pair of friends bought the rest of the tamales he had, desperately hungry at the Gold Star Bar. They also asked him to drive them home—he declined. Another friend ruined a date by downing a bag of tamales while the girl he was out with was in the bathroom. There was no second date.
The Tamale Man in lifesaving action. Photo viaTamale
His following is dedicated and in-the know; he’s inspired a Twitter account dedicated solely to his whereabouts on any given night, and a stunning set of reviews on Yelp which read like testimonials to his life-saving abilities. In the most recent slew of reviews alone, he’s been described as “an underground legend”, “life changing and support[ing] world peace,” a “vision of hope and joy” and even “a refreshing zephyr”.
There is something to be said for the situational experience of eating, and the way the Tamale Guy takes advantage of this is unparalleled. Have I ever sought out the Tamale Guy on a stone sober Tuesday night? Of course not; the options to visit any number of restaurants in my area would make this just an inconvenient goose chase. On the other hand, do I have memories of sitting at the Rainbo Club some time after midnight, dumping sauces all over the bar and piling up tamale trash that for some reason the bartenders gladly threw away for me? I do, and they are the memories that are Chicago for me, along with the giant snow banks and historically problematic politics.
I ate the tamales in my purse, even with direct disregard of my friends’ warnings with respect to food safety (“oh jesus of course not” and “ummmm” texts had come back rapid-fire). The CTA squealed as morning commuters looked on with varying levels of bewilderment. The coffee I’d bought just made me more nauseated, but the tamales in that moment were less an accessory to a night of hedonism than sustenance in a time of dire need.
I learned the hard way to never leave leftover tamales from the Tamale Guy; not because they’re not good the next day, but because the night before they are so much better (and may keep you from being as hungover as I was—this is unconfirmed.) But even when you make these kinds of dire mistakes…he’ll still be there for you, whenever you need him most.
