Four New Messages

by Cohen, Joshua

  RR, this is what your writer did: He stopped writing and began reading, library books and pages printed from the internet, pages on the internet, all about the history of this burger franchise he was thinking of, this burger franchise that cannot be named (but unfortunately cannot not be thought of) (while the job was ignored, while he neglected his word counts, his presence in the office that of a fussy, persnickety, ultimately rejectable caret, him stetting all carelessness by being careless himself)—reading about the brothers who’d founded a restaurant that made burgers and that was very successful, everyone loved their burgers and came to eat them from all over the area where their restaurant was located, this was California and the year was 1954 (information like a conglomerate restructuring imagination: 1954 the birth of color TV, your writer’s parents, desegregation!), and then another man approached these brothers, an entrepreneur with the entrepreneurial spirit, and bought from them their restaurant and along with buying their restaurant did something absolutely incredible—your writer remembers how shocked and incredulous he was when he learned this was possible, he remembers how naive and immature he felt when he learned that not only could this be done but that it was done often and that there were even laws in place to govern such indelible transactions—along with selling this man their restaurant these brothers sold this man their name. The burger restaurant’s founding fraternity sold their surname to this man who promptly trademarked it, in doing so preventing the brothers from collecting any further monies based on its usage: if they wanted to open another restaurant—emburgered, unemburgered, regardless—they couldn’t use their own name, they had to use another, it was almost an indulgence that they were allowed to keep their surname at all, permitted to pass the name of their father as a birthright to their children (did they have any children? check?). This man as sole owner of the patriprefixed name of other men then took this sole restaurant he owned and duplicated it, triplicated it, corporatized the restaurant into restaurants throughout California to begin with before proceeding to culinarily colonize the country and then the world and your writer read about this, RR—this was his only attempt at research and his findings disgusted and that was winter, New York City, 2008.

  A winter in which your writer avoided his parents and slacked on his quotas and for environmentally unsustainable months kept you driving insomniac throughout the Midwest or middling enough environs only because he couldn’t bring himself to write or type out the novenary letters that nominalized the restaurant you and he so desperately had to patronize, RR—with that body in the back, that bloody body in the back, with the corpse in your trunk, your writer thought, the corpse in pieces pocketed about your person, your writer rethought. The difference between freeway and highway being. The difference between a street and a road is. Verbs: to vor at vittles, to phage the grub. Adjectives: wet highway, green highway, bluegreen highway, knotted/involutedly tortuous. Tolls? (Incorporate: the relationship between procrastination and hunger, image: radio’s volume knob as areola, image: roadside ditch like a rumbling fryer, image: RR’s stomach a spare tire, image: in the backseat, only soured leftovers clunking around.)

  12/08, pages/.txt files were surfeited with substitute titles for this unnameable pit: Melter’s, Grilltastic, Big Burger (“Where the Burgers are Big,” whose stale logo was to have been two linked Bs, two interlinked Bs—like the monogram on a newlywed couple’s luxe towel set—until he stumbled on the potential inherent in two Bs whose long vertical spines had been laid horizontally, lazy recumbent BBs suggesting two brothers with beerguts knocked flat on their backs breathing hard after a meal—as if a napkin had been pulled out from under them—or like four stomachswelling burgers queued up for an aftermeal snack: ). The hope was to make art, RR, not problems. Not recipes for prose, not prosaic receipts. Your writer couldn’t bring himself to wordprocess the name of this famous imitatee, searching instead for other names to call it, why? he asks himself, Why? Maybe he can’t mention the famous out of resentment? maybe he resents everything famous? After all this famous original—he should start calling it differently every time so that not even a reference or negation becomes its appellation by default: Famey Chain, or Fra-Fra-Franchise, Sobriquette, or The Restaurant That Resists All Monikering—after all, this infamous chain has never paid him, this cloying corny syrupy franchise that won’t or can’t etc. etc. has never supported his art.

  RR, your writer is (hopes to be) a writer who writes, not a corner office capitalist on an expense account binge, bibbing himself with stock certificates. Why should he sponsor or be sponsored by that fastfood company by putting its brandname in his story? in yours? Would that foodstuff corporation ever print his scriving on its wrappers? would they festoon their fries containers with the opening of The Bloody Body? Could you swallow this, RR? “His girlfriend of the tawny mouthsized eyes,” descried across the apple pies, among the chicky nuggets—what tawny fries like fingers! and what a terrible title, The Body Dies Bleeding! Maybe your writer’s afraid of the present? of the genre of the present (ephemeraphobia)? maybe he doesn’t want to date his story? stories should be timeless—anachronistic? The dilemma being that even the slightest details—such as a car and feast of equal speed, pharmaceuticals and spires—serve to date and place a text, fix it in history and geography. Your story’s now become a text, RR, which is when you know the story’s over (it should’ve been over with that sizzly neon you had passed, neon scribbles everything pluperfect).

  RR, maybe your writer’s the only writer who has this problem, maybe he’s too serious. Possibly other writers have been better adjusted to their circumstances, as people less inhibited. He would ask them if he knew them, knew any intimately enough. Only A.J. of the cursive mustache and Russian obsession (they were in school together, A.J. writes whodunit juvenilia). B.C.D. (another schoolmate hack, she wouldn’t dryhump) who profiles for a weekly more read for its less logorrheic cartoons. H. who wrote her dissertation on Nabokov in the voice of Nabokov: fractious, lilting, Germanophonic, Francophonic, superiorly unsuburban, the prize for which is tenure. Y. who doesn’t know if the plot he’s “fleshing,” the flesh he’s “developing”—his fiancée has learned to cook from the appropriate TV—wants to be a novel or screenplay. Fear not libel or defamation (I’ve even falsified initials), literature has lost that power. Fair use means only that the user’s unfairly used. Your writer knows visual artists who’ve sold their bodies to corporations, tattooing emblem and catchphrase on cadaverous forearms and calves. He knows more abstract composers whose music features dissonances that must be endured if only to more fully appreciate the relief afforded by a DJ snippet of pop from the 1990s or ’80s or ’70s or ’60s or ’50s. Art that samples other art, quotes that quote other quotes—your writer knows this phenomenon, in jargon he’s aware, he was raised in a culture of (not more ironic jargon, select only the most appropriate gustatory analogy): regurgitation, a culture of glutting to vomit and glutting again on the vomit until reemesis—chunky cheese mimesis—then licking that puddle again. RR, your writer knows that concepts regarding the usage of brandnames and sundry commercial verbiage in fiction have been thoroughly described by other writers using other words, using long words, multisyllabicized compoundlongfrankfurteresquewords that sound and look on the page as repellent as the copyrighted proper nouns they critique (he won’t “instantiate” them here) and, RR, your writer also knows—as fact! as fact! that all his concerns about brandnames & co. are considered old and trite and that most people meaning most of his peers consider him if intellectual then pretentiously stilted (what Y. said when he sent your story to him, “preciously stilted”), grinding and dull (Y. saying, “your story’s all grind grind grind and only then, dull”), they think his problem—that writing the name of a profiting entity in a nonprofit or negligibly profitable story causes him pain—is more like an antiproblem, a solution of years ago, a solution of decades ago, that in the very annus Reaganis your writer was born it was already OK to use copyrighted brands in one�
�s art. But what your writer senses now is that it has become not OK anymore and that what once was liberating is now just sad, is now also in some sense controlling. What once transgressed today merely oppresses. (Add a clause to the effect that people don’t smoke or drink as much anymore after a century of manipulation by the alcohol/tobacco industries/lobbies) but still writers insist on branding brandnames onto their stories, RR, doing unpaid product placement like this not because to avoid doing so would be incongruous or distracting but because the question to place or not to place does not even occur to them as a question, they’ll insert a brand into a story because brands have been inserted into their lives as if through stabbing gavage or rape and have become, what is the banality, second nature, yes, brands have become a second nature to nature and breathing them in as natural as breathing. Today entire sentences can be made by brands jammed like cars, entire paragraphs like crashed cars your writer’s rubbernecked—his sore sloucher’s neck—on his commute: Redesigned mascot icecreamed telecom spokesperson in re: specialty flavor glitch w/ online airline ticketing. Revise, verise. Make even this technique proprietary. “He would die before he fell in love” translating to, Male celeb would [suffer the same fate as (he did in) his previous film] before he diamonds/dozen roses/boner supplement champagne. He checked his watchbrand. His smile as sticky as brand of tape or glue. Your writer is alone, RR, having no wife to carnificate into hamburger meat or future. He has no girlfriend to mold by pattycake into the burger of the future. An aborted novel he has, set aboard a space capsule that was to be revealed at novel’s end to have never been launched from Camden. A novella, a novelette, narrating at a page per minute an hourlong pornclip starring a pornstar named Jami Joyce. And this, the story of his neuroses, paranoia becoming a style: He never writes the word America, opting instead for allusion or ellipsis; he writes “the City,” CAP optional (instead of New York City); he writes “anonymous strip” (instead of I-95, though a foolish instinct counsels: “I-nonymous”); and, of course, he never uses semicolons. And while we’re at it, RR, let’s insist on “styrofoam,” which was likewise left above in lowercase, in minuscule, though it properly should be “Styrofoam™,” in majuscule, the term for “extruded polystyrene foam,” trademarked by the Dow Chemical Company. Possibly your writer has no reason. Is impractical. Is not practical. Like why, after all this time, is he still writing—“has no reason”—in third person?

  I was tired of this, tired of inventing other worlds—“realms,” “dimensions,” I was exhausted by synonym, by quotationmarks too—tired of inventing alternate worlds while misunderstanding my own, yes, yes, but also I was starving.

  I got up, left the house (apt.).

  No more ambiguities. Imprecision renders nothing worthier, nothing universal.

  The following writers have worked as advertising creatives: (fill this in later)

  Nothing universal but, galaxies. Nothing universal but, the universe.

  I walked—I mclive in Brooklyn, I mchave no car—to McDonald’s. There, there, walked, walked, a welfare visne, nobody has cars, there are barely buses. Gravesend’s what it’s called, the end of graves, the grave of graves (the British buried atop the Dutch). Cameras surrounded by barbedwire like they were gun installations, protecting. The parkinglot, empty, speckled with gums. Lines for the cars that were missing were black like grillmarks. The drivethru window everyone walkedthru was blacked too. When the shade was down you had to knock. I considered walkingthru myself and knocking, reconsidered. I had to force myself to full experience. “Full-Service”—a euphemism used only by callgirls and restaurants. This was not research but living, this was not living but life.

  The location—the door sealing shut, leaving me a victim to airconditioning whose level was set, I believe, by corporate HQ—the physical plant. It smelled like grease, fat/soap/Our Lady of Guadalupe votive candle, acne ointment. I took a seat at a table. A table amid tile. I took out a pen and notebook with the intention of taking notes, wrote on the top of the first page, McDonald’s, then crossed it out and wrote the plural possessive, McDonalds’, then looked at the logo by the cash registers and crossed that out and wrote singularly again on the third line, McDonald’s, put the notebook back in my coat.

  It was exactly as I’d imagined it, which is to say exactly as I hadn’t imagined it because I’d been imagining something imaginary to begin with—all down that sorry drain. Mopswishes, mopswishes on the floor, the fins of the mop, the mop’s knotted tentacles swish across the floor. A goldenarched pyramid—a sandwichboard—cautioning “Slippery When Wet,” and the sexual jokes that occasions, then that other phrase comes to mind, “on the clock,” and there’s a clock there, ticking shifts above the citations and mugshots: Employee of the Month wanted for armed robbery, nonsupport. Restroom coed but being cleaned, restroom coed but out of order.

  Burger culled from asphalt, results in pothole. L(ettuce), t(omato), o(nion), mushroomcloud of sodafoam. I can make a noose with three straws, I can make a noose from two. A thirty minute seating limit, regularly enforced: a customer changing his seat every thirty minutes would take exactly how long to have occupied every seat (whatever’s in that booth doesn’t have to be homeless)?

  Microphones foaming interjacent to the registers. Everything on the dollar menu costs a dollar. A dollar never includes tax. $1.08. $2.15. $3.23. $4.30 $5.38 $6.45. I was no longer so hungry, predictably. Thirst was more difficult. No soda would have been sufficiently large or sufficiently small. I had a medium thirst, a mediocre thirst. Only mediocrity would suffice and so becomes mediocre, preservative. A medium ensued. I sat, watched, listened. Big black and hispanic kids drinking blackcolored and hispaniccolored sodas. Fat old white man eating burger. The woman, his wife. Mashing pills into ketchup for fries. The climatized cold. The hard silence. A silence with edges. Open carton. Flip up top. Chew pen turning tongue graveyard dark. The old man drooled above his seconds. Wife still finishing her first. Big burgers for those bloodless bodies! Those big big big big burgers! (No more writing, nothing more intelligent than that.)

  THE COLLEGE BOROUGH

  I helped build the Flatiron Building, though I’ve never been to New York—though Dem and I had never been before indulging our daughter Veri’s desire to visit New York University—on my one week off this year and Veri’s junior year springbreak—despite our hope that she, our only child, would choose to stay in-state.

  The decision is hers—but we keep telling her, In-state was good enough for us.

  After all, that’s where we met.

  Dem and I had four classes together prior to applying to Professor Greener’s workshop—it was competitive certainly, but he accepted us both for what reasons we years ago came to terms with—this in the days when Dem was still doing poetry, not yet motherhood and the career of a freelance interior designer, the days when I was writing fiction as if literature were life.

  And here was Veri, rebelling against our rebellion—she was bent on studying some profane concatenation of finance and psychology—she wanted to be employable, while all I wanted was to avoid the Flatiron.

  And because I did, I insisted we do everything downtown: we’d sleep downtown at the Wall Street W (the hotel I’m writing from now, by midnight on W stationery with a W pen), we’d eat downtown (Dem an unreconstructed gastrophile when traveling, a compulsive cuisiniste who keeps files on restaurants, .docs and .xls spreadsheets of what dishes and deals can be had on what days where)—we’d tour and enjoy exclusively downtown: historic-districting around Trinity Church, the Exchange, the new Trade Center being built, going up slowly, slowly, after a decade of stagnancy, SoHo art galleries and Village bebop she’bam clubs (Dem had downloaded discount admissions), struggling improvisational comedy cellars (she’d scanned vouchers for three late sets free), and, Wednesday, if we can fit it in, one or two interactive museums.

  Downtown’s also where the school is, or rather the school is downtown, having taken everything over. The streets are the classrooms no
t in some ridiculously wistful sense but legitimately, or rather illegitimately—privately owned, zoned for children only.