American Paranoid Restaurant
Page 8
years. It just sat there, without wires, without tubes, in a solution of vitamins and elemental goodness, its little fibers contracting over and over for the span of an entire era, long past the deaths of all the fowl friends and relatives of its one-time owner. I think when it was finally thrown out the guy had just been keeping it in his basement, periodically going down to refresh the solution, the same way you'd every now and then go down to your basement to check on the furnace and change the filter.”
“Fascinating,” I say.
I think in a former life I was a restaurant reviewer. Maybe. I pull out a notebook and begin to write down the stuff that's happening around me.
“Which war was that?” I ask.
“What?”
“Which war did they have to halt their experimenting for? Was it the one with the bombs or the one with the gas?”
“I think it was the one where we went to the moon.” He says.
“Huh.” I say.
When I leave the restaurant a homeless man asks me for a ride. I ask where he's headed and he tells me a town twenty miles from where I live; I tell him he's in luck and that I was headed in his direction.
“Were you in the war?” I ask.
Yes, he answers, after a short hesitation.
“You read your Bible?” I ask again.
Yes, he says. Whenever he gets the chance.
“Good man.” I say.
We have been listening to the radio, and when the station breaks for commercials I do not change the channel. A woman tells us where we can see forty-nine others like her, every night of the year, including Christmas. She tells us there are drink specials and private parties, that we should come visit soon. We listen to some more songs before another girl comes on the radio and beseeches both of us to give life a chance, telling us that help is nearby and that babies are a gift from God.
The voice of the girl advertising the crisis pregnancy center sounds the same as the voice of the girl advertising the strip club—a milky-smooth voice to neutralize the guilt felt by the hearer, to assure them, to assure us, me, that what had happened and what would happen would be okay, that what we were going to do was okay and right. And good. When we arrive in town, the homeless man gets out and I hand him fifty dollars and tell him, “God bless you.”
“Thank you.” He says. “God bless you.”
When we had been sitting in the restaurant someone at the table next to us perused a newspaper and Eduardo had started telling a story.
“When I was a kid I was flipping through a newspaper and came across a picture of a movie star, this classic Hollywood starlet type, at the Oscars, walking down the carpet, in a backless dress with this fantastically plunging neckline.”
He takes a drink of water.
“There was really more neckline there than dress. Some faggy clothier had gotten out their wax pencil and started artistically trimming away on their conceptual mock-up to the point that only the truly integral portions, the dress qua dress, remained. Basically it was a skirt with two strips of fabric attached to the top at the front, tapered until they wrapped around the back of this starlet's neck in a bare string. Forget what I said about dress qua dress—there was no dress. There was a topless woman who happened to have two strips of fabric placed over her more crucially scandalous bits.”
I laughed at this point, nervously, because I thought the newspaper-reading man next to us could overhear our conversation.
“So that's the mental image that forms in my eleven-year-old brain, that formed from this smeary black-and-white newsprinted photo. This woman strutting about the Academy Awards with the sacred space between her breasts open to the world, the tender side-bulge out there and exposed. She was brave, glamorous, revealed from neck to navel, taut, only the merest signifiers of flesh as breast—under-crease and aureole--still hidden by this décolletage.”
This time I took a drink of water and Eduardo kept going.
“Five years later I was cruising the internet and quite by accident found a high-resolution copy of the image I'd seen in the newspaper. Shockingly, she appeared to have been wearing an illusion top. The space between her breasts was covered in flesh-shaded mesh, covering her as high up her neck as any Puritan collar. The back was still open, baring her to the waist, but her front was now prosaic, a lie and no longer brave, no longer bold, but complacent and safe. I had thought that I was getting a glimpse of this brave and sexual outside world, away from the hypercultist milquetoastery of my youth, and instead there was only disappointment.”
I didn't know what to say. The newspaper-bearing man, old, whiskered, wearing a driving cap and having ordered coffee and drank it with a minimum of accessory elements, had already gone, and I took another drink of water.
“What's the moral here.” I asked. I felt strongly that there should be a moral in all this, a point to the story.
“It's this:” Eduardo said. “When I was fresh out of college I moved to Hollywood and I got a job stringing for a newspaper, and they sent me out on this gig to go photograph the opening of this new restaurant. I get there and there's no one there, it's completely deserted, but the front door's unlocked so I go in. There're all these little back rooms, like funerary chapels turned into reliquaries turned into museum alcoves, like boudoirs, or harems. I keep going from room to room and from the cracked-open doorway to one I see a leg on the floor, I go in and there's the Hollywood starlet, spread-eagle, naked, conked out, eyes open at the ceiling.”
He paused to gauge my reaction and I indicated that I was interested enough for him to go on.
“Overdose.” He said. “Anyway, the point is, I got to see her naked. Finally.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I called my editor. We broke the story. I quit my job and bought a bigger camera.”
There is a gas station at the edge of town, and around its corner is a diner, attached and tiny, both by-product and co-dependent. A lunch counter six feet long faces six tables big enough for one or two diners apiece. The French fries here are out of this world.
I order my extra-large helping and ask for the bathroom. The diner is run by an immense man wearing thick glasses, hearing aides in both ears, and knee braces. With him there is always a woman, younger by twenty years, her hair tied back in a bushy ponytail and her sanitary gloves baggy and large on her hands. They sell the miscellanea of the urban fringe here, the fare of truckers and gas station attendants. Under the lunch counter is a glass window showcasing tiny dishes of potato salad and baked beans, coleslaw and slices of strawberry cheesecake. To its side is the cash register, and below that another window, displaying candy bars and crack pipes. Behind the register the wall is ranged with bottles of herbal supplements designed to enhance performance, or size, or to keep one awake on long cargo hauls, or all three. There are condoms and miniature bags of nacho chips. When I ask to use the bathroom the woman escorts me into a hallway at the rear of the building, above the doorway to which is tacked a sign:
Adults Only.
We have cameras in the back room.
There is a similar sign behind the cash register instructing the reader: “Smile, you’re on camera!” I am not sure if the cameras spoken of here are meant to deter children from entering the back room, or if the sign exhibits two separate admonishments conveniently consolidated on a single piece of paper. The hallway contains stacked crates of the kind used to hold bottles of soda and sports drinks before they are stored in the glass-fronted refrigerators such as those that line the back wall of the diner. In addition to the crates there is a single magazine stand bristling with pornography, the pages of the magazines already spread open at the corners, very few still in their original plastic sleeves. The bathroom is further in, inside the manager’s office. There are no lights and the door does not lock, so I leave it open a crack to admit illumination from the fluorescents that hang in the office outside. There is another sign here, above the sink:
Before returning to work,
all employees must wash hands
to stop disease.
Do this, and ye shall prosper. There is no soap on the sink. When I turn the knob, no water comes out. The rim of the toilet is flecked with semen. I hear someone moving in the other office.
“You ever see guys try to watch belly dancers?”
I pause for a moment to consider this question.
“Yes.” I say.
“They're awkward,” he says, “because they're trying to look as if they're not enjoying it too much.”
I think back to a photo album found at the bottom of a dumpster, and to the images inside.
“They're awkward,” he continues, “because they're watching something that's ostensibly about culture, skill, grace, poise, costuming, et cetera—oh yeah, and fitness, I forgot fitness—but really, for them, it's about sex.”
“Go on.” I say. We have been talking for a long time.
“That’s it.” He says. He takes a giant bite of hamburger. The juice runs down from the corners of his mouth.
“That’s it?”
He doesn’t respond but takes another bite of his burger. The extant rivulets of myoglobin are reinforced now and extend down his neck, disappearing into his collar.
“Come here often?” I ask.
“Every other day.” He reaches for the salt shaker, screws off the top, and douses his French fries. “It’s a terrible