[Extended beep.] When the medications get low, the beeper goes off twice as long. I’ve just seen my final sunset. I’ve been watching the reflection of this room in the window, the bed, the lights, the pumps and screens, the sink, the chair, your mother, everything growing clearer while through the window Madera faded to darkness. Now it is black outside, the sun is down, the sun I will never get to see again is hidden under the earth, is coming around the earth, or we are turning to meet it, I won’t be here. Carmen is blinking at me. [Pause.] Back to sleep, mi amor. Good. Where were we?
The training video turned out to be reassuring. I thought I would be watching something complicated that showed how to do all the jobs at the fast-food place, but the video wasn’t about how to do the jobs, it was about how to think while doing the jobs, how to be, what to keep in your head. The training video was my first exposure to a fully articulated philosophy. I had not yet begun constructing my own, not on purpose at least, I had not yet had the conversation with Paul Renfro in which he revealed that the key to being a true man of the world is to develop a coherent philosophy of your own. The video itself was well made, the camera didn’t bounce around all over the place and look at things from all angles at once, it stayed put. It was like being there. The setting was a fast-food place very much like but not identical to the one in Panorama City, and the video proposed two separate realities, two alternate universes, identical in almost all respects, except that in one the restaurant was disorganized, the customers were angry, the employees were squabbling, you could hear everyone’s angry thoughts, and in the other the employees were smiling and being courteous and even the grumpiest customers ended up with smiles on their faces, you couldn’t hear anyone’s thoughts, happy music was playing instead. The focus of the video was a freckle-faced kid who behaved badly in the first universe, then politely in the second, thanks to the application of the fast-food place’s five-point system, which was illustrated by a gold cartoon star, five points for five points, each one glinting as it was listed off. One, smile even if you feel bad. When people smile back you will feel better. Two, do what you can to make others feel important, especially if they are angry about something. Three, take pride in your work. Four, the company, I’m not going to name it, is a great big family. Five, the customer is always right. After watching the video I saw the kitchen area as if with new eyes. Ho walked up to me and told me Roger was going to be right back, that he’d gone to buy some parts for his boat, that I should go back into the office and wait. Ho did not smile, not in the least. So I smiled at him the broadest smile I could, and to make him feel important I said that I hoped to someday learn a few of the many skills he obviously possessed in the kitchen, and to make him feel like family I called him brother. When Roger came in, finally, a half hour later, the first thing he asked was what I had said to Ho. I repeated exactly what I’d said. Roger said that I had disturbed Ho. I explained that I was using techniques I’d learned in the video. Roger said that the only reason he’d shown me the video was so I could sign a paper saying I’d seen the video, after which he could finally give me my uniform, which he said would be paid for out of my first check. I drew my circle and scribble and he handed me my uniform, which was a shirt, an apron, and a hat. The apron had a pocket in front that was perfect for my compact binoculars. Roger said that now I was one of the troops. I thought it was interesting that he called us troops and said so. He said we were at war. I had no idea. I asked him with who? He said the customer.
I started as a floater. I did whatever needed to get done, it suited me, I have always liked having a variety of jobs, every day brings a new challenge. On that first day I cleaned up a grease spill that was not my fault and I swept the floor all around the restaurant, but my main job was to take the trays from the top of the trash cans to the back, where I fed them into a giant dishwashing machine, Francis showed me how, he demonstrated that each tray had to be lined up right so it would get clean the first time, and while he showed me he seemed almost like he was falling asleep, behind his big glasses his eyes fluttered, he showed me specifically how to line up the trays but shortly afterward he stopped lining them up right, he started sticking them in willy-nilly. When I pointed this out, he said, Fuck it, they’re fucking trays, who gives a fuck, why the fuck are you smiling, what the fuck do you have to be smiling about? I said that I was honored to be learning from someone who knew the ropes around here, as they say, from someone who seemed to have mastered the ins and outs of dishwashers. Now his eyes were wide open behind his glasses. The ropes? he said. Dishwashers? he said. He picked a tray off the rack, before it went into the dishwashing machine, he picked up a tray and threw it across the room, it wasn’t a big room, the tray hit the wall before it hit the floor, it made a huge clattering sound. He said that he was meant to be a filmmaker, not a dishwasher, and he could only ignore the indignity, his word, so much longer before he exploded, he had to work here in order to rent a video camera so that he could make a film so that he could go to film school so that he wouldn’t have to work here anymore. He threw another tray, and could I not smile while I worked, it made him crazy, he said, throwing a third tray, it made him crazy to see my teeth and my eyebrows, he could tell the difference between a real smile and a fake one, and he could see that my smile was real, and if it had been fake he could have tolerated it, but he could imagine nothing more depressing, in these circumstances, nothing more suicide-ideation-inducing, his words, than someone actually genuinely smiling his way through this, he held up a tray and threw it. Roger the manager came in and said, What the Samhain, his word, is going on back here? And Francis said, I’m throwing trays at the wall. And Roger said, Stop it. And Francis said, I’m going on smoke break, and he walked out the back door. And Roger asked me whether Francis had shown me how to use the dishwasher, and I said yes, and he said, Hop to it then.
After washing the trays I returned them to the counter, where I watched my fellow employees work with the customers on whatever it was they wanted to eat, I saw no signs of war, I saw people who were trying to listen to their stomachs while they tried to read the menu, which was elevated above everyone and everything and which had pictures of most of the food and numbers you could choose from. I’ve never been much of a reader, but numbers I know, if you don’t know your numbers you’ll get into a mess of trouble, your grandfather’s words. I did a circuit around the dining area to retrieve the trays from the top of the trash cans, for the first time I found myself among the people of Panorama City. They looked like they could have been eating at the fast-food place by the freeway in Madera, the people of Panorama City didn’t look that much different from the people of Madera, except that when I looked at their faces I didn’t recognize any of them, and they didn’t recognize me, they didn’t know to call me Mayor, they didn’t know to ask me if they needed anything done around the house, they didn’t say hello, they didn’t say excuse me, they just moved around me like I was a dog who wouldn’t get out of the road. At one point a Mexican man in a cowboy hat smiled at me and said good afternoon, his teeth were capped with silver, he reminded me of the old ranch hand Sergio Cruz from Madera and I said good afternoon, did you enjoy your meal, and he nodded. I introduced myself, I let him know that I was new in Panorama City, I let him know that I’d only been working at the fastfood place a short while, but that if he needed anything at all he shouldn’t hesitate to ask, if there had been cameras they could have put it on the training video. He shook my hand, he introduced himself, his name was Alcibiades Cervantes, he’d worked on farms and ranchos in the area before they had been bought out and sold to real estate developers, before there had been a Panorama City at all, he lived in an old farm building right in the middle of town, he missed his horses, he thought about going back to Mexico, but the last time he had gone back so much had changed there, too, and it broke his heart to see the changes back there, even more than to see the changes here in Panorama City, and besides, his grandchildren, they were building their lives here,
they were ignorant of all the changes that had come before, but that was their job, his words, that is all of our jobs, he laughed, to be ignorant of what came before, then he said he didn’t really believe that, as a matter of fact he believed the opposite. He said that the only good thing all of this civilization ever brought here was the fastfood place, he called it by name, at least now you could eat quickly and inexpensively, in the old days feeding yourself was a challenge, you were at the mercy of the weather and your animals. Of course I was talking, too, I don’t remember what I said. Then Roger appeared and said excuse me to Alcibiades, not like he meant it, but like he was telling someone to get out of his way. He pulled me to the back of the restaurant and explained that customer interaction was not part of my job, my job was floater, and right now my only interaction was supposed to be with trays and the dishwasher. He explained that customers walked in with full pockets and empty stomachs and left the other way around, no monkey business.
At the bus stop, a kid with a skateboard kept stepping into the street and standing on his toes to see if the bus was coming. I mentioned something your grandfather used to say, which was that there’s an art to waiting. He said why don’t you get me some fries and a Coke, then laughed, he looked around for someone to laugh with him but no one did. I didn’t answer him but instead reached into my pocket and pulled out my small binoculars and looked down the road to where the bus was coming from. There it was, shimmering in the heat of the road and the afternoon, about twelve blocks away, the flat face of it peeking through a tangle of traffic and wires and signs and palm trees, it was like looking through layers of grass and dirt and branches and leaf litter and seeing a ladybug on the ground. I told the kid that the bus was twelve blocks away, that it would be here soon, and he started to ask me how I could possibly know, and when he saw the binoculars he was silent.
A moment later, or maybe it was that same moment, Aunt Liz pulled up in her Tempo, she pulled to the curb in front of the bus stop, the kid had to jump out of the way. Even before I got in the car Aunt Liz asked why I was still wearing my uniform. I explained that I was taking pride in my work, and I had thought how to best convey that, not the words I used, I don’t remember the words I used, and I figured keeping my uniform on while I rode the bus home was a good way, like those soldiers and sailors you see in the street. She said to get in, I folded myself into the Tempo. She had finished work early, she said, she had gone to Glendale to notarize some loan papers, she was a notary public, her job was to drive around and make sure that people were who they said they were, she was in the verifying and certifying business. Someone in Northridge had canceled on her and so she’d decided to pick me up straight from work rather than wait for me to come home via bus, she had moved up my appointment by an hour. I didn’t know what she was talking about. She said she’d made an appointment with someone called Dr. Rosenkleig. I said I felt fine. She explained that Dr. Rosenkleig was a therapist, I was going to see him to talk about my feelings in the wake of my father’s death, he could evaluate my feelings. She said I could talk freely with him, because he was a professional talker and listener. That made me nervous, I had always been an amateur at both.
Dr. Rosenkleig’s office was not in Panorama City but just across the invisible line dividing it from Van Nuys. The office was in his house, his yard was neatly trimmed, the pebbles bordering the path were neatly aligned, the grass looked greener and healthier than the neighbors’ on either side, I wondered if he and Aunt Liz shared the same gardener. The office entrance was to the right of the front door. Once you were inside, though, it was obvious you could walk straight through the office and into the house, everything was under the same roof, it was obvious to anyone with any knowledge of houses and how they are built or demolished that all he’d done was add a separate entrance to a spare bedroom. The walls were covered with certificates and plaques, they were covered completely, there wasn’t room for even one more plaque. Aunt Liz dropped me off that first time and said she would be back to pick me up, she dropped me off after introducing me to Dr. Rosenkleig, whose name was Armando, who said, Call me Armando. He didn’t wear a doctor’s jacket or stethoscope, he wore a thick multicolored sweater, it was not cold in his office, his sweater looked like some kind of beast that was digesting him. His hair was what they call salt and pepper, he kept his chin up high like a cat feeling the sun on his face. I wasn’t sure what to say, I wasn’t sure how to start our conversation, so I explained to Dr. Armando Rosenkleig that I was new in Panorama City, that I had been there only a day, that I was twenty-seven years old, and so on. Then we were quiet, he didn’t say anything for a long time, I waited for him to respond. He sat on a hard wooden chair, I sat on a sofa, he took some notes on a yellow legal pad, after twenty minutes he started to look sleepy, he looked like he was having trouble not falling over sideways, his chair had no arms. He asked me why I had come to see him, and I said that Aunt Liz had brought me. He asked me why I thought Aunt Liz had brought me, and I said that she wanted me to talk about my feelings in the wake of my father’s death. He asked me what my feelings were in the wake of my father’s death and I didn’t know what to say, it didn’t seem like a question you could just answer. I was confused as to how this man could have become a professional talker and listener. I couldn’t help but wonder, if you weren’t a very good talker and listener, why would you become a professional at it?
Later, much later, Paul Renfro explained to me that typically people become professionals at things they have no aptitude for. People who choose to wear the mantle of professionalism wear that mantle to conceal their lack of natural ability, Paul’s words. Paul told me that in his youth he knew, he knew even at age five, while other children were talking about becoming firemen or doctors or airline pilots, he knew that he would never become a professional anything, he knew even then that professionals were the greatest perpetrators of fraud in the world, that our only hope as a species lay in the hands of those who had not declared themselves professionals at anything. Someone like Dr. Rosenkleig becomes a therapist because he is fascinated by the workings of the human mind, Paul’s words, and he is fascinated by the workings of the human mind because the workings of the human mind baffle him, because he has no natural aptitude for understanding the workings of the human mind.
After our session I found Aunt Liz waiting in the driveway, in her Tempo, she was waiting in the idling Tempo, she had the air-conditioning on, she had her visor mirror down and was examining her face and making small adjustments to her makeup. Dr. Rosenkleig followed me to the car, he seemed to have found a boost of energy somewhere, he smiled wide and told Aunt Liz that we were already making tremendous progress. I did not contradict him, I was pleased to hear it, but as far as I was concerned all that had happened was that I had talked in a great big circle and ended up right back where I started.
Aunt Liz made dinner that night, she made a shepherd’s pie and a salad, and we ate across from each other in the kitchen, at the kitchen table, a single unlit candle between us, despite the fact that there was a proper dining table, in the dining room, with many unlit candles on it. I asked Aunt Liz why we weren’t eating in the dining room and she told me it was for guests, for when we had guests over, it was for special occasions, and once I got myself established, once I began to lead a respectable life in Panorama City, one day I would move into a place of my own, and then she and I could eat at the dining room table, because then I would be a guest, but for now I was a member of the household, and I was expected to contribute as a member of the household, and I was to eat at the kitchen table just as she had always done in the period before my arrival, except of course when guests were present. I asked her why we didn’t light the candle, and she said that she didn’t want to clean up the wax and have to be replacing the candle all the time and besides the lights in the kitchen were soft enough. I asked her then why have a candle at all and she said that it was for atmosphere, that it made things nicer. I suggested that if the power went out it
would also come in handy. She said I was missing the point. The candle, she said, was the difference between a house and a home, it made the difference. Then, changing the subject just a little, in her Aunt Liz way, she asked whether my quarters were adequate. Which was when I expressed concern about my bed, she asked if the sheets were too feminine, I said they were not, I said that the problem with my bed was the size, I could only fit on the bed, I could only get my whole body onto the mattress in a zigzag shape, lying on my side, I had slept that way the night before, in a zigzag, on my left side, but then I had been, or my body had been, overwhelmed with the urge to turn over, for the body is always seeking a sense of balance in sleep, my philosophy, and when I tried to roll over onto my right side, into a zigzag shape on my right side, I had to straighten out and position my legs on the thing opposite the headboard, the footboard, temporarily position my legs there, supporting my weight, which was very uncomfortable, so that by the time I was in a zigzag shape again on my right side I was wide awake with discomfort. This happened several times over the course of the night. I’m not a complainer, I wouldn’t have said anything, except that I was concerned I wasn’t going to be getting enough rest, that over the course of several nights the lack of rest would add up to a general fatigue, it had happened to me before, it had happened to me in Madera, when I had broken my arm, or rather my arm had gotten broken while playing Smear the Queer with the Alvarez brothers, I had fallen in an awkward way, and because of the cast and the way it was situated I could not roll over freely in my sleep, and as a result I suffered from what your grandfather called general fatigue, which he said was quite noticeable with me, what happened was that in addition to having less energy I was less interested in everything and less friendly, too, I wasn’t myself. At the time I did not know the root cause of the general fatigue but I have since come to realize that without sleep the head gets clogged with other people’s words. The head needs sleep to make everyone else’s words into our own words again, it is a conversion process.
Panorama City Page 5