The location — the door sealing shut, leaving me a victim to airconditioning whose level was set, I believe, by corporate HQ — the physical plant. It smelled like grease, fat/soap/Our Lady of Guadalupe votive candle, acne ointment. I took a seat at a table. A table amid tile. I took out a pen and notebook with the intention of taking notes, wrote on the top of the first page, McDonald’s, then crossed it out and wrote the plural possessive, McDonalds’, then looked at the logo by the cash registers and crossed that out and wrote singularly again on the third line, McDonald’s, put the notebook back in my coat.
It was exactly as I’d imagined it, which is to say exactly as I hadn’t imagined it because I’d been imagining something imaginary to begin with — all down that sorry drain. Mopswishes, mopswishes on the floor, the fins of the mop, the mop’s knotted tentacles swish across the floor. A goldenarched pyramid — a sandwichboard — cautioning “Slippery When Wet,” and the sexual jokes that occasions, then that other phrase comes to mind, “on the clock,” and there’s a clock there, ticking shifts above the citations and mugshots: Employee of the Month wanted for armed robbery, nonsupport. Restroom coed but being cleaned, restroom coed but out of order.
Burger culled from asphalt, results in pothole. L(ettuce), t(omato), o(nion), mushroomcloud of sodafoam. I can make a noose with three straws, I can make a noose from two. A thirty minute seating limit, regularly enforced: a customer changing his seat every thirty minutes would take exactly how long to have occupied every seat (whatever’s in that booth doesn’t have to be homeless)?
Microphones foaming interjacent to the registers. Everything on the dollar menu costs a dollar. A dollar never includes tax. $1.08. $2.15. $3.23. $4.30 $5.38 $6.45. I was no longer so hungry, predictably. Thirst was more difficult. No soda would have been sufficiently large or sufficiently small. I had a medium thirst, a mediocre thirst. Only mediocrity would suffice and so becomes mediocre, preservative. A medium ensued. I sat, watched, listened. Big black and hispanic kids drinking blackcolored and hispaniccolored sodas. Fat old white man eating burger. The woman, his wife. Mashing pills into ketchup for fries. The climatized cold. The hard silence. A silence with edges. Open carton. Flip up top. Chew pen turning tongue graveyard dark. The old man drooled above his seconds. Wife still finishing her first. Big burgers for those bloodless bodies! Those big big big big burgers! (No more writing, nothing more intelligent than that.)
THE COLLEGE BOROUGH
I helped build the Flatiron Building, though I’ve never been to New York — though Dem and I had never been before indulging our daughter Veri’s desire to visit New York University — on my one week off this year and Veri’s junior year springbreak — despite our hope that she, our only child, would choose to stay in-state.
The decision is hers — but we keep telling her, In-state was good enough for us.
After all, that’s where we met.
Dem and I had four classes together prior to applying to Professor Greener’s workshop — it was competitive certainly, but he accepted us both for what reasons we years ago came to terms with — this in the days when Dem was still doing poetry, not yet motherhood and the career of a freelance interior designer, the days when I was writing fiction as if literature were life.
And here was Veri, rebelling against our rebellion — she was bent on studying some profane concatenation of finance and psychology — she wanted to be employable, while all I wanted was to avoid the Flatiron.
And because I did, I insisted we do everything downtown: we’d sleep downtown at the Wall Street W (the hotel I’m writing from now, by midnight on W stationery with a W pen), we’d eat downtown (Dem an unreconstructed gastrophile when traveling, a compulsive cuisiniste who keeps files on restaurants, docs and.xls spreadsheets of what dishes and deals can be had on what days where) — we’d tour and enjoy exclusively downtown: historic-districting around Trinity Church, the Exchange, the new Trade Center being built, going up slowly, slowly, after a decade of stagnancy, SoHo art galleries and Village bebop she’bam clubs (Dem had downloaded discount admissions), struggling improvisational comedy cellars (she’d scanned vouchers for three late sets free), and, Wednesday, if we can fit it in, one or two interactive museums.
Downtown’s also where the school is, or rather the school is downtown, having taken everything over. The streets are the classrooms not in some ridiculously wistful sense but legitimately, or rather illegitimately — privately owned, zoned for children only.
Beat, footsore, inadequately caffeinated, Dem and I stood with our daughter at the front of the tour group led by a girl named like a corruption of a Dutch cheese — Goudla? Dougla? this cheerfully chubby checker of any survey’s Pacific Islander box, majoring in — I wasn’t paying attention — let’s say postcolonial beading or basketry as therapy. She was very kind to Veri, very patient and always touching — Dem and even me, with a bit to the cuticle fingernail graze of my elbow, a hennaed palm to my shoulder, tender but then she’d think nothing of reaching out with a surprisingly firm grip and turning Veri’s head to direct her attention: there the library, there the center for university life, here the freshman dorms (where you’ll be living next year — what a presumptuous girl) …
I told Dem I wasn’t impressed and she shushed me but I could tell from the side of her smile, she agreed. I’m saying the physical plant wasn’t much. Prefab. Incapacitated by its overcapacity. Smogged. Now I know no city can contain all the amenities you’d find at a place like our alma mater. A city university just doesn’t have the space, no matter how big the endowment, no matter what sums of R&D cash are banking around — Manhattan Island is only so large and it’s telling that about half of its lower half is landfill. Back home we have more chlorinated pools, more recreation facilities with more stationary bikes and stairmasters, treadmills and the latest in weight machinery — hell, we even have the Flatiron, if you want to forgo the elevators and walk up it — the Fauxiron, Professor Greener once called it, whose roof I laid about twenty years ago, with Veri turning 18 this September.
I did a fine job on that building, finer workmanship than anything we saw on our tour save for a few of the older buildings — I’m talking the stolid stuff actually of the 1900s, those tiles and carvings from when we still cared about craft, those noble columns and colonnades and ornamental gutters — all the fineries I learned to duplicate, the techniques that usurped my writing to give me a destiny with salary and benefits.
You want Peterson’s Roofing to do up your house, but first you want to looksee our standard? Go down to auxiliary field #3—incongruous, isn’t it? insane, perhaps? jutting from amidst sports pitch and prairie, a skyscraper visible from the Mississippi, as the meeker, more Mormon guides claim when you take the tour of that campus. That slight wedge of trouble that has us wedged south of City Hall, that was Dem, that was me — clients call impressed, I do well for myself. Veri would thrive, twenty floors below that turbid eclipsing—1,750 miles away from 175 Fifth Avenue.
Professor Maury Greener was invited out to our flyover square state to be Writer in Residence for the 1992–1993 academic year on the merit of his recently published and only book, a novel about its author’s formative years so searing, so bridgeandtunnelburning and explicitly realistic that we couldn’t resist ravishing it for autobiographical fact (an interpretive approach that Greener both practiced and abhorred). So art reconstitutes biography — or better, biography like iron can make art like steel, but then the art can be heated again and the iron reseparated, the biography flowing molten all on its own — what a significant simile! such a suitable image! He — like his hero who shared his initials, height, weight, eye and hair color, wardrobe preference for wry denims, and predilection for deli — was born on the Brooklyn-Queens border, at the conjunction of those two potent, across-the-water boroughs so fetishized for having provided the nativity of so much authentic, impactful culture of the century past: Irish, Italian, Jewish, and he was the lattermost, he wouldn’t let you forget it. Greener was the first Jew I ever met. Now I was a student of literature, not a student of the study of literature but of the making of literature (already there was the vocational calling: the desire to be trained to task, to do, to make), and though I was a voracious reader of the right writers — the lustier ethnics, the WASP authoritarians — practically speaking, my experience was nil. Jews were in the Bible, they were of the Bible. They weren’t on my TV or in the movies I borrowed, but they made the TV and movies. I didn’t expect him to have horns or anything — it was Dem’s family (typically exasperating inlaws, but also bison ranchers) who’d passed along that stereotype and when Dem mentioned it to me after reading up on Greener before he arrived, I immediately imagined a man with airhorns, or megaphones, grown out of his head — and it wasn’t like I was expecting a version of Shylock or Fagin, but I was not prepared for the irony, that fuck you and fuck your mother cynicism. This was because — memoir, self-writing again — he was raised without a father and had to toughen up fast. He had to learn — he taught himself, as his protagonist, M. Groonik, had taught himself — how to fight, how to stand up for what was his. What was his was Stuyvesant, followed by climbing the Ivy, uptown — rungs above the college Veri and Dem and I were touring, eons — humanities educationwise — beyond our own peonic undergraduate and graduate careers. And of course he had his book, which followed this titular Groonik, “amateur erector cum semiprofessional ventilation inspector,” through myriad ménages à trois and quatre in downtown New York of the mid-1980s. What that book earned him: low advance on low sales, hysterical acclaim, and, once remaindered, once out of print, this sinecure stint in the provinces teaching us hicks to rite good.