American Paranoid Restaurant
Page 9
strain…”
I take one of my own fries and eat it slowly while he catches his breath.
“…pretending like that, to like something other than what you’re really there after.” He takes the last bite of the burger and picks up the second one. “That’s why I… why I quit my job as a reviewer.”
The fan in the back of the room turns slowly, the breeze it sends out too small to prevent the beads of sweat that drip down his face and into the basket of fries in front of him.
“You were a reviewer?” I ask.
“Yeah, I was. But I had to act like I cared about culture and skill and nuance and really I just wanted to eat.”
I cannot hear the radio because the woman who makes the doughnuts is once again singing in the backroom, louder and louder the words of a hymn. The decals in the window have been changed, now depicting a tableau of colored eggs and white rabbits, the eggs like the work of some Russian workman turned daycare assistant, pastel patterns evoking complex systems of adornment that have been consolidated into monochromatic bands and speckles. The rabbits stare at me.
Through the plate glass window I see the dancers walking to a single car, exiting the club that sits next to us. Three men enter the shop, tripping the bell as they do, and the woman emerges from the back room. The men talk to the woman about payment options, something about a new currency being introduced. A new system.
I get up and leave a quarter on the table as a tip, carefully avoiding tripping the bell as I open the door and step out. There is no indication that the dancers' club exists except for a sign at the periphery of the parking lot, one of those hollow embossed plastic rectangular boxes inside of which fluorescent lights will come buzzing on at night. It sits atop an iron pole, listing dangerously in the parched ground into which it had been driven, almost unnoticeable from the highway, shy and pleasingly nostalgic in the image of the red-nailed white-skinned iconic woman who smiles out from it amid a swirling mass of black hair. There is no door in the stripmall front by which one may enter. The doughnut shop is joined by a convenience store, a cash advance agent, and a tiny religious bookstore, but the club remains invisible except for the listing sign. I walk around the back of the building. There is a dumpster in the rear parking lot, a giant metal tank twenty-two feet long and taller than I. There is garbage on the pavement. A plastic bag blows slowly past me, spilling out little white slips of paper. I pick one up but it’s gotten wet with rain and I can’t make out what’s written on it. There are two doors in the back of the building, unlabeled, both blocked by stacked crates of the kind used to hold bottles of soda and sports drinks. I push aside the crates and release the latch that holds one of the doors shut. Inside it is dark, and cool. I see some men reclining on couches and a woman behind the counter of a bar. I walk toward her and she welcomes me to Touches.
When I was a child I sat in a church and listened to the people around me singing louder and louder the words of a hymn. The man at the front carried a microphone and walked toward me, and transferred the microphone from his lips to mine. When he put his hand on my head I heard the stars singing.
Starting in 1950, “Sounds Good, Tastes Even Better” was the slogan of coffee-and-pastry franchise Dunkin’ Donuts. However, in 1964, amid the turmoil of the Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassination, and loss of American influence in Panama, Cuba, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, Dunkin’ Donuts introduced the slogan “America's Favorite Donut and Coffee Shoppe.” This was to be subsequently modified as “America's Favorite Donut Shoppe,” “America's Donut Shoppe,” and “America's Dunkin'” over the course of the next thirteen years. The progression is clear: while once Dunkin’ advertised their goods as both sounding and tasting good, they now attempted to persuade their purchase solely on the grounds that so doing would identify the buyer as American. The doughnuts need not be good, but merely those to which America was partial, and eventually not even that, but simply those doughnuts to which America laid claim, intrinsic qualities of those doughnuts aside. Finally, even exclusive possession was unnecessary—the statement that America was dunkin’ was sufficient to persuade the purchasee that Dunkin’s was the right choice. While other advertising campaigns would make use of quality-based slogans (“It’s Worth the Trip” (1979-1990, and again from 1997-1999) and “You Can’t Get Better Tasting Coffee” (date uncertain)), these were far out-weighed by identity-based slogans (“Only at Dunkin’ Donuts (1950-1991), “You’re Dunkin’” (1980-1993), and “You’re Still Dunkin’” (1993-1997)), including the “America” campaign, which eventually evolved in 2007 to become “America Runs on Dunkin’.”
I order a beer from the woman at the bar and she asks me if I know the game. I’m too afraid of what I’ll find underneath the cap so I tell her to just give me a beer. I take it to one of the couches and sit down, the cushions on either side of me exhaling sparse clouds of white powder. I look around, at the stage, which is lit only by the small recessed bulbs that run around its border, like the lights in the aisle of a passenger airplane, and at the other patrons, who are sitting on couches as well. I do not know why they remain in the middle of the day, or why this club is open after the dancers have already left to sleep until nightfall. Perhaps these are not patrons but employees, taking their ease in slacktime, scattered about the room with nowhere else to go. I get up and begin to walk around. No one seems to notice me. No one is talking to each other, and while there are televisions in the four corners of the room, no one is watching them. I look closer at the televisions. They show a parade, a slow grind of cars draped in bunting and covered in flowers.
After Dunkin’ Donuts began using the slogan “America Runs on Dunkin’,” they ran a series of commercials in which people were shown attempting to purchase coffee and similar beverages at a restaurant in which the items were all given non-English names. “Is that French?” The customers would ask. “Or is it Italian?” An announcer would then admonish the buyers: “Delicious lattes from Dunkin' Donuts. You order them in English.” That lattes and cappuccinos are themselves foreign products, with foreign names only lately appropriated to American speech, was an irony that apparently escaped the creators of these television spots. In an event similarly indicative of either the mindset of Dunkin’s fanbase or that of its directors (or both), a commercial was pulled after it was pointed out that the woman featured in it appeared to be wearing a keffiyeh. While the garment in question was in reality nothing more than a scarf with a black and white paisley floral design, the distance and distortion afforded by the television cameras resulted in a passing plausibility to the public’s claim that the scarf resembled that worn by Middle Eastern political leader Yasser Arafat, and was, therefore, a sign of the wearer’s support of terrorism.
I walk over to one of the men on the couches. I sit down next to him, sending up, once again, a slight poof of dust, this time smaller than the last.
“What’s up with the parade?” I ask.
“Huh?”
“The parade. On TV.” I gesture with my beer. Grainy bands cross the screen, slowly scrolling down, distorting our view.
The man shrugs. He takes a sip from the plastic up in his hand. He looks familiar.
“It’s not what goes into a man’s mouth,” he says, “but what comes out that defiles him.”
We change things by looking too hard at them. Scientists have determined that the elemental sparks of existence are fundamentally unobservable in their natural state, as reality bends itself around our prying.
“What comes out?” I ask.
“Uncleanliness.”
“What went in?”
The man gestures expansively. I’m not sure if he means to take in the breadth of the club surrounding us as answer or if this is merely an elaborate shrug. He settles back further in the couch and takes another sip. He offers the cup to me.
“No thanks.” I say.
He pushes the plastic cup toward me again. “The blood
of Christ, shed for you.”
“What?”
“The blood of Christ.” He says. “Shed for you.” He tips the cup forward and I see the tiny remainder of red in the crushed ice at the bottom.
I remember where I’ve seen this man before.
“Were you in the war?” I ask.
“What war?”
“The war.”
“Oh. Yes. Got poisoning in my blood.”
“That which goes into a man,” I say.
Eduardo sits down in front of me.
“I thought I might come across you here.” He says.
“Hi.” The word comes from the both of us, the man beside me and me. “What brings you here?” I ask.
“This gentleman.” Eduardo nods and points with his beer. “An up-and-coming local preacher.”
I turn back to the man, whose head is tipped back to get the last drops of wine from his cup.
“You preach?” I ask.
“E’ry Sunday.” He fishes in his pocket and pulls out a business card. “Got a friend of mine down at the copy shop got these printed up for me and all.”
COME AND BE FILLED
First Church of the Redeemer
Services Sunday, 10:30-12:00
“I’ll visit.” I say.
“Ten-thirty,” he says. “Or a little earlier if you