The OK End of Funny Town

by Mark Polanzak

  Even as “Wild Restaurants,” as they were known, became the rage, even as we hurled ourselves passionately into the new style of dining, we felt a secret resistance, a desire for something else. Did we crave a restaurant in which we had to kill animals with our bare hands? Did we crave raw flesh? Did we desire more of a challenge? A three-day fast before the dining hour? Did we want to eat worms and spiders and beetles? Whatever it might be, whatever form this desire took, we felt a need for it rising up from deep within.

  It was in this atmosphere of passion and secret dissatisfaction that we heard of a new restaurant. As with most novel ideas, the first of the “Future Restaurants” had taken a common assumption in the current climate of dining and subverted it. The Laboratory, as it was called, was a rebuke of the natural, organic, rural, rustic, archaic, and earth-infested establishments. The restaurant provided a truly new way to dine. They offered similar menus to those of Pilgrim’s and Animal Farm and Slaughterhouse, with one important exception: all meat dishes were “never-live.”

  After the vestibule, we entered and saw, again, a long window that showed a white room, with lab-coated men and women in goggles, holding up vials, leaning over microscopes, and pulling stainless steel trays of quivering mounds of muscle and fat and bone from under glass laboratory hoods. One could identify almost immediately, the lump of yellowish protein as chicken, or mound of bleeding red tissue as beef, the tender pink strips of flesh as rabbit. But other ingredients were entirely unrecognizable. These “meats” were grown on white protein scaffolds of loin, liver, stomach, wing, and heart, the menu explained. The muscle and fat concoctions were then shuttled into the kitchen on conveyor belts. It was a tight ship. A good clean process.

  The dining room was a welcomed return to elegance, with kitsch accents like beakers for champagne flutes, gauze for napkins, clamps and scalpels for silverware. The kitchen staff and servers wore hospital scrubs, and the dinners were served on stainless steel and sectioned rectangular plates. Some meals came with capsules as sides, pills of yellow and pink. The plates of meat glowed red, shaped into small pyramids or perfect circles. The salad leaves were squares. Some meats were transparent.

  The taste was similar to meals of our past, meals of real living things. Not exact, if only for its superiority. There was no variety in the quality of the animal, no chance of putting two duck breasts in the oven and discovering one slightly more cooked than the other.

  Conversation ramped up again. The purity of eating everything one could want and without the need of breeding and holding an animal or stalking and murdering. This was the solution. And the connection to the food, the communion with the dining experience was altogether fresh. It was as if we were eating in the way the progress of humanity would someday take us, should someday take us; we were on a path to this way of eating already throughout civilization. Everything was controlled—no fear of E. coli or mad cow disease or some new mutation in the livestock. Even the cholesterol and fat content could be predetermined at each batch. This was how it would be, and we were the lucky few to have it now.

  After inhaling lab-generated espressos through vaporizers and autographing sizable checks, we, once again, strolled into the crisp night, satisfied. We once again enjoyed making our reservations and showing up to the bar for aperitifs and getting into long dresses and sport coats. The meals were ours again. And really truly ours, as scientific creatures on this earth, among beasts.

  Of course, though, we all knew there would be another new restaurant, already in the works perhaps, that would come along and show us how we were wrong before, we were wrong now. We would gladly try it out. We knew that. But until then, we were confident we had made it.

  But other times we will be sitting in the park on a warm Sunday afternoon, reading a book, not yet thinking of dinner. Totally content. And then our stomach will growl. We will feel a twist on our insides, a biological discomfort. Hunger. And we will do just about anything to make it go away.

  3.

  WITNESS MAGICAL THINGS!

  PORCELAIN GOD

  The dudes who remodeled my mom’s master bathroom plumb forgot to take away the old pink toilet. So, there it stood, in the middle of our front yard—a constant amidst the turning, falling leaves of autumn.

  We figured they’d be back for it, the toilet. After a week or so of rousing suspicion among the other residents of Green Street though, the unspoken realization hit us: that pink throne was our problem now.

  One crisp November afternoon, my mom and brother and I all found ourselves standing around the thing with steaming cups of coffee in our hands. My mug had a chip and read “Nobody’s Perfect.”

  “How heavy is it?” My brother tried his best to surmise the toilet’s heft with his mind then tilted it with his free hand.

  “Don’t hurt yourself,” cautioned my mother.

  “Well?” I wanted to hear that it was no problem; that Simon would throw it on his back and carry it to wherever hoppers go to rest in peace.

  “Like a boulder,” he said, sliding a timid step back from it, sipping his coffee.

  We just stared at the thing for a while, in silence. A leaf landed on it. We eyed each other.

  Later on, we were back in separate rooms of the house, all of us pretty sure that that toilet situation would just take care of itself.

  If my dad hadn’t gone and had a heart attack and died during a tennis date last winter, we would have let him deal with the throne’s removal. It was his after all. Well, we all conducted business with it, over the years, the taco nights. But my dad, he used it exclusively, never settling for a leak in the downstairs half bath, or maybe just a gassy false alarm in the upstairs hall john. The rest of us were equal opportunity with our ones and twos.

  The only time I saw my father naked, he was draining the lizard into that pink toilet. He was upset, I remember. I was little; I flung open the door and froze. My old man looked up; he sighed; he breathed my name. He was never angry before or after that. Something cosmic transpired between my dad and the pink toilet that my encroaching upon disrupted. Also, outside that moment, I never saw him vulnerable. But, of course, he was vulnerable and probably pretty pissed when his heart went and dropped the ball at deuce point.

  Besides the toilet on the lawn, there were other new features at the Clark household. For one, my brother was there all the time. He bailed on his life across the country, in San Francisco, after Dad bailed on his for good. When December rolled around, Simon began to pick up the pieces, got a marketing gig in Beantown, started saving for an apartment. I was in my senior year at a ridiculous private school, applying to ridiculous colleges. California schools looked good junior year, but I narrowed the list to campuses within driving distance of our house, closer to our pink toilet. Mom, despite talking vaguely of renewing her RN credits, stayed locked away in her room more and more. When I returned from school, she would be wrapped in her red and black flannel robe, in bed watching bad Lifetime movies, or at the computer googling involved French recipes that I certainly never had the pleasure of eating.

  We were curious when the first snowfall began covering the pink toilet—would the thing go out of sight, out of mind? Early one morning, the first flakes made a white and pink polka-dotted sculpture of the toilet in our yard.

  “Shit,” shouted my brother, and I hadn’t sensed that he was standing behind me, watching through the window, too. “We need to take a picture.” He ran off, then appeared in the yard with his camera, motioning for me to come out, and mouthing “bring the paper.” I grabbed the Sunday Globe and trotted down the steps.

  We met up at the toilet.

  “Sit on it,” he said.

  “On the toilet?”

  “Like you’re taking a shit.”

  I lifted the seat.

  “Don’t actually crap in the thing. Just sit on the lid.”

  I did so.

  “Now read the paper.” Simon danced around and snapped photos from all angles. At first, he was framing
the shots for like whole minutes, preserving the moment, the image, me on the toilet. He looked so focused, like he was staring at a developing cure in a petri dish. All of a sudden, I wanted to try and deal with it like my brother; I got into the whole charade. I mimed unzipping and fire hosing it. I pretended to barf, praying to the porcelain God. I laughed. My bro laughed. I faked all embarrassed like getting barged in on. Posing for a swirly proved too difficult. When we were through, Simon out of film, I depressed the handle, folded the paper under my arm, and whistled my way back inside with Simon chuckling and winding his camera behind me.

  At the new toilet, relieving myself of what all the pretend bathroom business had conjured, I thought, so that’s how it happens, that’s how people wind up with junk on display around their property: something is kind of too heavy or annoying to remove, then you get attached to it. It was sad and scary that my dad was a doctor, I was in private school. But none of that matters when you’ve got a toilet in your front yard—Presto—White Trash.

  It was a white Christmas that year, first in a decade we were told. Mom said we were too grown-up to get presents, to get a tree, to put up the little white lights, and we agreed. I didn’t want any gifts anyhow, at least nothing that she could have given me. We gave Mom a nosegay of daisies and yellow roses though, and, of course, she cried, and Christmas was saved only when Simon rolled up an eternally constipated snowman to sit on the snowtoilet. He called Mom out to see, and she laughed. When she laughed, it was good. I watched through the window, her breath a misty cloud, then gone. The snowman strained. It was good for her and for Simon.

  After New Year’s, a new orange bottle fluttered into existence on the white laminate countertop of our kitchen. Mom called them her happy pills. She didn’t seem to be taking the proper amount at first. It is slightly more upsetting, I noticed, to have someone around who is too happy rather than too sad when you know it’s just manufactured smiles. Either way, throughout that winter, Mom was out of bed before me, with breakfast made and everything.

  “Am I doing an okay job with you, sweetie?” she asked, over scrambled eggs and coffee.

  “Of course, Mom. You’re the best.” I didn’t look up.

  “Good. I’m so proud of you, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Dad is proud of you, too.”

  Pregnant pause.

  “You can talk to him, you know.” She brushed my hair back with the tips of her fingers. My head, a block of ice.

  Along with my mother’s newfound energy came a confusing and weird spirituality. This involved, as far as I could tell, a mixture of referring to Dad as still with us and watching The X-Files. After an episode in which the ghost of a little girl keeps appearing to her mother, and the ghost-girl helps solve her own murder, my mother declared, “I believe that.” I told her to hang a shingle, do some readings.

  One night, my eyes shot open, awoken by what I thought to be, please God, a scantily clad and thieving nymph. Out in the yard, under the gently falling flakes, in her pale blue nightgown, my mother stared intently at the pink toilet, part of which had peeked out from the snow. The silver handle glowed in the spotlight of the full moon. I stood next to my mom in my boxers and slippers, glancing at her, then the toilet, then her. Her eyes were bright and fixed on the thing. She smiled a calm and all-knowing little smile, and a tear rolled down her moon-white cheek. I put my shivering hand on her warm and steady shoulder.

  “Sweetie?” she whispered. “Did you hear it flush too?”

  Simon moved into his new pad in the Fens that February. His bathroom had a claw-foot tub and a red hopper. “Close but no TP roll,” he said, indicating the thing. He developed and framed all his toilet art, and they were the first things to go up. Beautiful black and white and vivid color both. Some shots of leaves swirling about the thing went in the kitchen. Some of the thing half encased in snow went in the hall. One with me reading the paper went in the bathroom. He hung with care. The one picture of the toilet in a lightning storm went in his bedroom. Last, he placed an ancient photograph of us, the smiling family, on his nightstand.

  “So, that’s how important we are,” I said, looking from the tiny ancient guy to the gallery of pink toilets.

  “Nothing matters more. Come here.” Simon must have misheard, since he was spreading his arms for a hug.

  God, my girlfriend sucked. Of course, she was on student government. Of course, she was an A student at a ridiculously competitive private school. Of course, she was pretty and happy. Of course, she sang in the a cappella group. Of course, somehow, she knew how to avoid looking like an idiot while dancing. Of course, she was involved in the theater department while balancing her commitments to softball and field hockey. Of course, she founded the all-female anglers society. Of course, she was a freshman mentor. And of course, she sucked.

  When she marched around the corner into Gleason hall, where I was enjoying a doughnut, during one of my free periods, I just knew that she wanted me to do something. And not anything useful, like make out in the music rooms, but be productive or whatever, participate.

  She smiled her hey-I-seem-to-have-too-many-teeth smile and waved an I’m-so-excited-to-see-that-you’renot-busy wave, which, frankly, I didn’t agree with—the doughnut. She sat down and flung off her gargantuan purple backpack.

  “Baby,” she said, and it didn’t sound sweet, it was a serious, business-baby. “There’s a freshman boy whose father …” She trailed off, sliding her eyes around like fishing lures. “His father passed on.”

  “Bought the farm. Checked out. Kicked the bucket. Ate his last doughnut.” I shouted them out while she cast treble hooks through me. “It’s died, baby.” I employed the business-baby, too.

  “Fine. His father died. Anyway, I told Mr. Sweat that you’d talk with him if he needed to talk, and apparently, the boy wants to talk. Can you talk?” She grabbed my free hand.

  “Mr. Sweat’s first name. Is it Richard?”

  “What?”

  It took her a second, but when she got it, I was almost in love again. Soon enough though, she was mad at me like always: telling me that she was no longer asking, that I don’t do anything anyhow, that I’m always hanging around after school, that I’m avoiding activities and home, that I haven’t been to any club meetings in months, that the boy’s name isn’t Dick either, and that I had to meet him after classes, in the bio wing. Then, she was gone, off to her million other obligations, me being one that she was sucking at.

  “This doughnut tastes bitter. And where’s that side of betrayal I ordered?” No one else was free that period to hear my quips.

  So, I found myself in the bio wing, surrounded by standing plastic skeletons, deconstructable mock-ups of human hearts and human brains, and big maps of the human body with red and blue veins squeezing pink striated muscle tissue. I was studying the urethra and bladder when I heard the kid.

  “You Wesley?” the kid said.

  “You the kid whose father passed on?”

  He didn’t respond. He just stood there, in the doorway, looking down and kicking at the checkered black and white linoleum with his bucks.

  “You got a mom?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Brothers? Sisters?”

  “Older brother.”

  “Man, do we have a lot in common. I got a mom, an older brother, and, of course, the dead dad. I got it all!”

  The kid went and sat down at a big black table with Bunsen burners all over it. I sat behind the teacher’s desk, spun a metal replica of an atom, then folded my hands.

  “How’s it been?” I wanted to hear that it was nothing at all; that this kid would just throw his sadness on his back and carry it off to wherever you take sadness.

  “I hate everybody and everything.”

  No dice. “How’d it go down?”

  “Cancer.”

  “Lungs? Muscle? Ear?”

  “Brain.” He fiddled with a Bunsen burner.

  “Brain. Heart.” I hel
d up a piece of hippocampus and a left ventricle. “Both major players in the body. Both hugely important to human survival.” I juggled the bits of organ along with a rubber large intestine. “Slow death. Surprise death. Still dead. We all bought a ticket, kid: a one-way ticket to the bone yard.”

  The kid just sat there, in his required school tie, looking down, looking scared. He was coming to me. Boy, was he lost, this kid, who was about to torch himself on the Bunsen burner because he was now a zombie. Just going through the motions. And why shouldn’t he be sad? Why shouldn’t he be scared? He obviously has no idea how to deal with having his life all flipped around and slammed in the toilet. Then flushed. Then plunged. He didn’t expect that. He didn’t deserve that. Just a kid, who got robbed.

  Then, something miraculous happened. Someone, something, some god spoke through me. “Everyone finds some way to deal with a loss. My brother, for example, he has busied himself with a job, a goal, and has been doing his best to laugh at memories of his father. My mother, after losing her husband, she has sought some medical help, developed a connection to a power greater than herself, and she is essentially making it now. And they’ve done this on their own, found these solaces. Truth is, kid, this is kind of an individual thing, this coping with loss. There’s no right way. And no one can help you find your way. Everyone has his or her own technique, method, or process. You can try to do what others do. You can observe what your mother does, but maybe it’s not your way. Perhaps, for you, it will not come quickly, but listen: it will come. Try to believe: it will come.” When I escaped my trance, it was just me and the fake human parts left in the room. I put my hand on a skeleton’s shoulder. He wobbled.

  That spring, when snow melted off branches, revealing oaks and maples; when icicles slipped from gutters and basketball nets; when grass rippled out in soccer fields and birds sang again, so, too, did the pink toilet bloom, emerging from its icy hibernation.