American Paranoid Restaurant

by Caleb Hildenbrandt

through some shit, but I still believe in that motherfucker!”

  Two men in fedoras and pinstriped suits argue beside us.

  “You believe—you believe—you believe--”

  “I believe there's an overall plan! There's an--”

  “You don't believe shit. All this, all this, all this is just you tryina make some sense outta a lot of B.S. that's been thrown your way--”

  “But I still believe--”

  “Get this, get this, get this—there may be a god, but why you think he's messin' about you?

  “Well, he may not be layin' it all out before me because that's why faith--”

  “Listen man, listen man, you know the bible? You think thas still a good way to get around here?”

  “Yeah man!”

  “Well hey, well hey, well tell me this: how did Adam's sons procreate?”

  “How?”

  “Yeah man, look, there's this whole brand new world, right? God made man, made Adam, took out a rib and made Eve, they had kids, and these kids had kids—where you thinkin' these kids came from? How they have their kids? Clearly they fucked their mother.”

  “Well, now--”

  “Clearly they fucked their mother. Where else they gonna find a lady to fuck?”

  Procreation is essentially a death-wish as well. The squicking squicking slapping moaning sounds of sex are nothing more than a form of white noise, a hymn to entropy and an acknowledgment that reproduction is both futile and detrimental.

  “--AND THE ELEMENTS SHALL MELT WITH FERVENT HEAT--”

  The scientists will collect all, the frequencies and timbres and volumes, and place each note in its place according to its voice and provenance in some desperate bid to take the noise of the universe and reduce from it some systemic pattern of information. There are periodic variations and regular perturbations--pulses. Beats. A tempo. Overlaps of frequencies—like chords. When we have assembled the song sung by the universe we will know its heartbeat--and when we have triangulated all the sources of radiation--we will know its heart. There will be no more noise, no more random data.

  “--AND THE EARTH ALSO AND THE WORKS THAT ARE THEREIN SHALL BE BURNED UP.”

  When I leave the show I pass a storefront church, a two-story brick building in a contiguous block of buildings lining this deserted street. There is no indication that it is, in fact, a church, aside from the colored bricks forming two crosses on the upper story, flanking a broad, barred window. There is not, at street level, a plate-glass window given over from displays of hardware and lawn furniture to a painted simulacra of a carnival banner rendering the words “Victory Temple” or some such, as is so often the case in these sorts of churches. In fact I do not even recognize it as a church until I am frozen in place by the sound of a hymn coming from the sky over my head, four-four meter belted out with organ and electric guitar and the voice of a single throaty man in place of the (customary) big-tent congregation. When I look around me there is nothing, there is no one, and the windows in the church are dark. At the boundary of the first and second stories there is a metal bracket bolted in to the brick and mortar, and on it a single all-weather speaker affixed (duct tape, chains) and wired via cables passing from it to the single barred window on the upper level. It pours out into the night.

  No one in this doughnut shop speaks my language, and I love it. The sports team decals in the window have been replaced by Halloween decorations. There are ghosts, witches, a wolfman, which upon closer examination resolve into the images of children dressed as ghosts, witches, and a wolfman, holding their pillowcases in front of them, eager to receive, eager to eat. I take another bite of my doughnut.

  Three men come in wearing ties and talk to the woman behind the counter about price protection, something about a rate hike for electricity.

  The radio plays a seamless stream of oldies, one familiar sound blending into the next in a way that does not disturb our slumber but corresponds with our own internal recollections of what the world was and should be.

  “Can you give me a ride up the gas station?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Get in.”

  He explains on the way up about gas in wartime and poison in the blood. I'm not sure which war he's talking about. Was this the one with the bomb? Or was it just a lot of people on the ground, crawling around in jungles and blowing up cars and hospitals? His feet swell now, he says. He's going to try to get a little breakfast at the station. When we pull up he asks for money and I hand it over.

  “Listen,” he says. “I don't know if you're a religious man, but pull out a Bible sometime and take a look. Just read it. I'm not a preacher or anything, but it's all happening now. Keep an eye out and you'll see it.”

  I know he's telling the truth, so I thank him and hand him another dollar. He thanks me again and walks past the automatic doors of the station, heading toward warming counter where hot dogs turn on greased rollers. There is a sign for lotto in the window.

  There it is, the neon sign glowing redly ten feet above the sidewalk, block letters sans-serif, bold as hell and like a credo or command.

  AMERICAN. PARANOID. RESTAURANT.

  When I pass under it I see the neon reflected in the puddled water by the curb, in the block glass that stands on either side of the door. I take my seat in a corner and a waitress walks toward me. I order and she leaves, a sheaf of straws cutting back and forth in space as they are held in the left back pocket of her retreating pants. The room is dim and the damp of the surrounding street pervades the glasses on the table, the bulbs in the lamp over my head, the paper napkins under my wrist. When the waitress comes back I ask.

  “What's the story behind this place's name?”

  “Huh?”

  “American Paranoid Restaurant. Why is it called that?”

  “Um, this is”

  I cannot hear her.

  “Is what?” I ask, cupping my hand to my ear and leaning in, as if we are in a crush of noise and I must pantomime my need for her to shout. In reality there is nothing to be heard but the tinking of silverware on plates.

  “We're”

  It sounds like she says ValuEets, or something like that. Happy Meat.

  “What?” I ask.

  There is no sound. A plate is placed in front of me and I begin to eat.

  It is dark when I leave. I stand on the sidewalk outside, leaning against the wall. A man in a long fur robe is strolling the streets, carrying a cane surmounted by an affixed goblet encrusted with plastic rhinestones. His hat, his glasses, his shoes, his pants, are snakeskin and pin-striped polyester and neon green and purple and black and the feather in his hat is impossibly long and improbably died.

  “'Ey yeah! Hey yeah over there! You know pimpin's tough man!”

  A man thrusts both his muscled arms over the wrought iron fence surrounding the porch of a bar, threatening to snag the sleeves of his polo shirt on the metal tips.

  “Hard out here for a pimp!” He yells.

  The robed man approaches and lifts his cane in silent greeting.

  “Crissy! Crissy! Come here!” Inside the fence a cluster of girls loosens to admit a single member to approach the perimeter of the porch--

  “Bret--”

  He keeps one hand grasping the metal bars of the fence, as if afraid to let go of his place there and, by extension, of the vision in front of him.

  “Crissy, come here and get a picture!” He is nearly shaking in excitement.

  The pimp awkwardly places his arm over the fence to put it as well as he can around the shoulders of the man inside. They both grin at a cellphone.

  “Awesome!”

  Arms retract across the fence to respective sides and faces turn back to each other.

  “Thanks man.” A five dollar bill crosses folded between the bars.

  There is a thriftstore downtown, swarmed by the poor and the chic. They spread through the aisles and call back and forth like a flock of birds
descended on a field. They are not unlike like birds, in their bright plumage of oversize sunglasses and scarves and fingerless gloves, in the drapery of tatters that follows behind them like the tails of exotic paradisaea, in their wheelchairs, legless, apoda. The store is open late in a desperate bid for sustenance, staffed eighty-two hours out of the week by minimum-wage dry-drunks and grown-up crackbabies, but it is nearly empty by seven-thirty, and the poor have fled, leaving only highschoolers with brand-new drivers’ licenses and vintage jeans. I noticed it a few minutes after coming in, the way they called back and forth, holding up garish sweaters and checkered blouses over the aisles for each other to see, with voices whose intent I could not discern--they trod the line between enthusiasm and irony so well, back and forth, across the racks and bins.

  When I went to check out, the cashier smiled, her mouth garnished with subtle traces of fetal alcohol exposure. A half dozen hipsters came up behind me and began trying on outlandish sunglasses from the rack next to the check-out counter.

  “Hai!” said the cashier, dropping what she was doing and waving from the wrist at the teenagers now outfitted in shades of previous decades.

  “Hi, Rosie!” said one of the girls, taking off her glasses and grinning broadly. “How you doin’?”

  “Good! I’m getting’ off inna hour!”

  “Good!” said the girl, still grinning and maintaining relentless eye contact, holding the glasses in front of her by gripping both earpieces. A man with a tallboy poking from his jacket