Gameday at the Gaslight

When you watch the game on TV at home, the commercials show you people that are way more attractive and having way more fun than you can imagine.

But it is a little like that then when you sit around a screen at your favorite bar on game day, the people are more beautiful in occasional moments than you might have imagined - faces animated, laughing, people making smartass remarks at one another, arguing about nothing much really - empty boxes stacked in a corner, rough edges and real friendship.  The game is in their eyes - the way they look at each other, not paying close attention to the screen when the home team is up by two touchdowns anyway, watching what matters when it matters.

And then suddenly the crowd on the screen and the handful of friends drinking beer together goes wild. What a game!

Fast Food Ad Infinitum

This short story was written in 1990. Only the implications are true. And some of the names. 

            Some friends and I were sitting in a fast food restaurant one foggy night in Fresno, California. It was the Karl’s Jr. near the airport. Albert’s flight to Seattle had been canceled. He sat with his head resting up against the window. Steve, Bill and I had been doing our best to avoid being infected by the gloom Albert seemed determined to draw in through the glass from the cold, wet, darkness outside. The cheery pumpkin-orange vinyl seats with complementary harvest-rust Formica tables here inside where it was warm and dry almost weren't enough.

            We had finished eating. If Albert was going to stare all night at the fog outside that was his business. He had eaten the food we’d ordered for him but as far as conversation, his only contribution had been several announcements of how far away from Fresno he would be if only the night had been clear. Some time ago he had reported passing over Portland.

            The fog was terrible. And it had gotten worse. In the time we had eaten our burgers, the fog had swirled up the light poles along McKinley Avenue and had swallowed several of the more distant streetlamps. Only four or five dim, orangish halos remained.

It had been five or ten minutes since we’d seen the pale headlights of a car materialize out the mists and slip slowly and silently by. This was the Father of all fogs all right.

            Steve, Bill and I had been playing with the ice in our cups and nibbling away at the greasy crumbs scattered among the paper debris. Except for us, the place was empty. The Assistant Manager sat alone near the cash register.

Bill cracked that the rest of the counter kids and burger flippers were in the back eating take-out pizza. .

And then Albert turned from the window to look at us.

            “You know,” he said. “I think I am in Seattle.”

            The rest of us laughed. It looked like Albert was finally beginning to accept his fate. Maybe we’d get another order of fried zucchini and sit around a little longer joking about yet one more victim of the dreaded Fresno fog.

            But as I looked into Albert’s face, there was not even the slightest hint of a smile. His forehead was furrowed as he continued.

            “Look around you. It’s all the same. The hanging plants you were arguing about – whether alive or plastic. The fake-wood trash cabinets with ‘Thank You’ on the swinging doors. It’s all the same.” Albert swallowed hard. “The zucchini we just ate…”

            He sifted briefly through the pile of paper in the middle of the table, mumbled something to himself, then looked back up at us and spoke, his voice low, his words measured out slowly.

            “We could be in the Karl’s Jr. in Seattle. We could be in any Karl’s Jr. in the world.”

            Steve tried to pull Albert off the bench, grabbing him by the arm.

            “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “You can sleep off this food and catch the first flight home in the morning when the fog lifts.”

Bill and I slid out from our side and stood up, a grin still lingering on our faces, but Albert hung onto the table, gripping tightly with both hands.

            “How do you know?” he said, his wide, now gleaming eyes fixed on mine. “How do you know this is not the Karl’s Jr. in Seattle?”

            For the tiniest part of a second I believed him and looked around suspiciously. With the fog swirling around outside, obscuring any landmarks, we could have been anywhere.  Here inside it looked just like the downtown Fresno Karl’s Jr. where we had gone last week for sodas and deep-fried zucchini. Or Seattle’s Karl’s Jr., for all I knew.

            Then Steve laughed again. “Come on. All we’ve got to do is walk out the door, step across the parking lot, and we’ll be back in Fresno, standing next to the car we parked outside this Karl’s Jr. an hour ago … Sorry Albert.

            Albert stood up. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m getting off in Seattle. See you later.”

            Albert shoved past us as we looked at each other, shrugging our shoulders and grinning again. Albert went through the door. We were nearly right behind him. The door had just swung shut before I pushed back out, Steve and Bill behind me.

            Albert wasn't there. We looked at each other. “Yeah, right,” Steve said. “Albert’s in Seattle.”

            Steve ran over to the car. Bill and I headed in opposite directions around the building. We met at the door.

            “I’m going to check back inside,” I said.

            The guy with a Karl’s Jr. a name plate that said ‘Assistant Manager’ sat on a stool at the cash register near the drive-thru window. “Did you see my friend come back in here?” I asked quickly, before he could ask for my order again. “He has short, blond hair, sticks straight up all over?”

            “He’s in Seattle,” The Assistant Manager said. His black, bushy eyebrows nearly met in the middle as he frowned.  “I thought that’s where he wanted to go.”

            “Very funny,” I said, starting to laugh again. “Which way did he go?”

            “Seattle,” he said.

            Steve and Bill walked in behind me. “Albert’s nowhere outside,” Steve said.

            The phone started to ring as I pointed my finger at the Assistant Manager. “This guy says he’s in Seattle.”

            “It’s for you,” he said, offering me the phone.

            It was Albert.

            I questioned him, figuring he had gotten to a phone somewhere close by. But he insisted he was calling from a Karl’s Jr. in Seattle. He sounded a little panicky. I finally told him I believed him.

            “So what’s the problem?” I asked.

            “First, my luggage is still in the trunk of Steve’s car “ – he started to answer, but I interrupted him.

            “So just take the Fast Food Ad Infinitum back here and pick up your luggage,” I said. Now I had his little game figured out, or so I thought.

            “That’s the second problem,” he said. “According to the Assistant Manager here, I can only make a jump between the same two Karl’s Jrs. about once a month. Stepping through an Ad Infinitum Link somehow recharges the extra fat in your system. An immediate reverse trip back to the same place could lead to blood clotting, even a stroke.”

            “Your Assistant Manager – he’s wearing a Karl’s Jr. hat and has dark, bushy eyebrows that almost meet in the middle?” I said.

            “Yeah, how’d you know?” Albert replied.

            “Never mind,” I thought. This was getting us nowhere fast. “How about if we get your luggage, bring it inside, and heave it through the door to Seattle?” I asked.

            The Assistant Manager here in Fresno was shaking his head slowly from side to side.

            “It won’t work,” he was explaining to Bill and Steve. “The luggage would have to believe it was going to get there when you did.”

            “What if you come back to the Karl’s Jr. downtown? We could meet you there.” I offered. There had to be some way out of this. I could hear Albert talking to someone on the other end. I believed that the voice coming instantaneously through the wire was Albert’s so why couldn't he have stepped through a door and ended up in Seattle?”

            I quickly shook off the idea.

            “The Assistant Manager says he can’t do it.” Albert was explaining the Link to me again. “There’s still a good crowd in the Karl’s Jr. here in Seattle, and, according to his instruments, the fog isn't very thick in downtown Fresno. Apparently, this whole restaurant and everyone in it has to make the approach to a jump – either knowingly or unknowingly. If half a dozen Seattle customers looked out the window and saw the used car dealerships on Greystone Avenue appear while they were biting into a Western Bacon Cheeseburger, they’d never believe it, and the Ad Infinitum Link would lurch with me half-way out the door. I’d step on through the door and right back out onto the Seattle Karl’s Jr. parking lot with a queasy stomach – and then some.”

            “Hold on just a minute,” I told Albert.  I held the phone and tried to explain to Bill and Steve everything Albert had just told me.

            “What should we do?” I asked them.

            Finally, Steve suggested we take the luggage to the airport in the morning and put it on the plane to Seattle.

            “Unless one of you wants to take it to Albert by way of the Ad Infinitum Link and stay in Seattle for a month until your cholesterol clears up,” he finished.

            “Or another really foggy night,” Bill added.

            I told Albert what we’d decided. He agreed.

            I thanked the Assistant Manager for letting us tie up his phone.

            “Do lots of people come through here like this?” I asked.

            “You’d be surprised,” he said. “Sometimes people walk in here, they've been eating the same kind of food in the same kind of places for so long, they kind of forget where they are. Frankly, I’m not sure where some of them end up when they walk out the door.”

            It was kind of spooky. After all these years, I figured I knew what I was getting when I walked into a fast food place – whether in Fresno or Seattle or Wichita, Kansas, for that matter. That was part of the appeal of fast food.

            We put the luggage on the plane the next morning.

            Albert called a few days later. He said his luggage never showed up.


See previous post: Get what you really want now and then

Get what you really want now and then

You don’t have to read this ramble before you read my little fast food tale. You don’t have to read it after, either. And maybe, for all that, you won’t like my story, ‘Fast Food Ad Infinitum.’ But someone will. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that people crave stories as much as they crave food.

Now people will eat mediocre food. People will eat junk. And people will waste their time on stories that leave them hungry for something better. There are great cooks out there. And there are great writers that you can read for nothing more than your time and attention. But I’m the only writer exactly like me and I can tell a pretty good story. Only I, in fact, can tell you the story you may never have heard before, told in precisely the way I tell it. Maybe it’s the one you’re hungry for when you read it. Maybe not. But that is partly what this piece of writing is all about.

I like food. My parents brought me up that way. For our birthday, we kids got to choose our meal. Mine, for awhile, was mashed potatoes, hamburger gravy, and corn. Mom probably rounded it out a bit. Always pie. I’d lay odds it was coconut cream. Five in our family. I ate a fifth of that cream pie – coconut in the pudding, browned coconut on top of the merengue. No one has ever made coconut cream pie precisely the way my Mom did. I might have had better. I’ve certainly had worse. But having learned to pay attention to food, I knew when I was satisfied. And there was no one else quite like my mom.

You’ve probably heard this kind of thing before and I promise I won’t go all maudlin on you. I mean to go big. The universe is a vast and complicated place. Most of us are one-of-a-kind. My point is that it doesn’t have to be your birthday for you to choose what you will eat. And it’s surprisingly easy for you to figure out what you want. It also can be surprisingly hard to find exactly what you want.

That’s where fast food and other franchises think they’ve got an angle. They think they’ve figured food out down to a formula. If it’s not a one-size-fits-all food thing, it’s at least close enough to what people think that they want to sell billions and they will advertise you to death to convince you that they will satisfy you. And it’s not that they can’t - if you want their package. But I just don’t go looking in their direction for their formula food very often anymore.

As much as I crave food, I crave people and places that make me feel as if I would rather be no place else on this big earth for a little while than where I am sitting and eating someone else’s cooking. A place that’s not just anywhere. People being themselves. I won’t kid you. The food matters to me. And with one-of-a-kind places, the food will vary a little depending on the people making it. It makes me happy just to say that.

I could start by telling you about the egg crème that they make at Aimee’s, but I won’t. If I was going to, I’d tell you something about the people that make those egg crèmes. They’re not clones, or a corporation’s idea of your friendly food server. They’re better than that. But I’ll skip on.

The lentil soup at Aladdin’s down the street is the best I have ever eaten. And I could tell you about the time my wife and I sat out in their sidewalk cafe area and watched a parade of Dog Days runners running and jogging and walking slowly past our table. I bet I ordered the gyro and the soup.

                              

I could go on to say that Rudy’s Pizzeria a few blocks farther makes the best pizza sauce for my money – they say there’s a little wine in it – but maybe I merely prefer it because I was raised on my mom’s hamburger gravy and I just keep going back because I liked Rudy’s sauce the first time I tasted it.

But this is not supposed to be about what I like, although I will recommend the chicken fried steak at this joint in Tonganoxie, and the bun with chopped egg rolls at the Little Saigon Café on 23^rd street. And if you like pork like I like pork, try the birria at MexQuizito. Or there’s the Vindaloo I make at our house. Good food is good food – even if not everyone can agree which is which.

And it’s not really about the ambiance, although I like the burnt-orange walls at Rudy’s and the comfortable way I feel stepping down into their half-basement - sometimes the light, sometimes the dark, coming in through the windows over our heads as we sit in a booth along the old limestone wall.

Or take Cutter’s out near Eudora - just a roadhouse if that’s what you want. But I had sweet potato fries and listened to a friend’s band play old Beetles and Byrds tunes over there. The ribs are good too. I rocked a little. I didn’t stumble out of there and I didn’t need no pea-pickin’ happy meal. I got satisfaction.

Are you getting my drift, yet? Cause I could go on for pages. Places and people and food. Some I’ve gone to and some I’ve met and some things I ate only once. Some I go back for. It’s not always the best I’ve had in my life. But I give myself that chance every time I go into a café like Aimee’s or some other one-of-a-kind restaurant I’ve never been in before.

At Aimee’s, I might not order the club sandwich and an A&W - and it is just a club sandwich, made by hands I recognize, and the A&W is just corporate root beer, but it compliments my sandwich – but at Aimee’s I’m never unhappy eating there. Sometimes I think all I want for my birthday is a gift card from Aimee’s that gives me the exclusive right to sit in the swivel chair at the high counter – the one against the wall where I can stare out over the kitchen area where the baristas are working or out of the window, watching the sun go down. Wouldn’t even need the egg crème. But I do like the egg crème they make there. Never exactly the same – if you pay attention to food the way I pay attention to food - but it’s always the egg crème I want.

But my mom taught me about sharing. So go take my seat. There are still plenty of places to eat where - if not today, then maybe tomorrow - you will get not only what you want, but what you long for in your soul. Good food, too.

Now next week I will offer you my cautionary tale. Some of the names have stayed the same because they were my friends. As for the rest, believe what you want. Today, I believe I want an egg crème at Aimee’s.

Solstice

A hearse rolled by

on the way the Oak Hill Cemetery –

no one I knew.

A young man then strolled by,

a young woman on his arm –

I recognized him.

With Christmas around the corner,

I half-expected the baby Jesus

to next toddle on by.

The stoplights just winked

red and green, red and green,

and the skies were cloudy all day.

But with the air far too warm for snow

we’ll soon start one more turn around the sun,

the earth’s trajectory and tilt barely wavering.

And as the days get longer again,

throwing off that extra warming blanket

is rarely being mentioned.

There are reasons for the seasons

and the times and days of our lives;

not every change will bring joy.

But I was glad to see the smile

on the young man’s face.

Peace on earth, goodwill to them.

Gardener

Her face appeared attractive under smudges of dirt. Her hair, coming undone from being tied back, might look silky and flowing under different light. Perhaps her shapeless T-shirt would turn later into something more slinky. But in truth, she was beautiful because of her love.

Do not be distracted by my superficial talk of appearances. It was her love of the soil, the seasons within which she worked, a lopper in one hand, a bucket full of tangled plants no longer catching anyone’s eye.

I had lopped off a couple of red dahlias myself, burned brown by frost, the stems bundled with twine for the city compost. I had dug up the tubers, soil clinging to no one’s idea of beauty, but they will back go into the earth next spring because of their spectacular red blossoms.

We humans have an eye for beauty. Young women gardeners who smile and chat with old gardeners are pretty enough sometimes. We cannot help what we are. But much as we look for beauty, it is still deeper than the smudges on that young woman’s dirty cheek.

It’s about love and life – and a measure of beauty.

Merry Christmas Milky Way

It’s not like I want anything this year,

nor does anyone I know really need anything,

but I’m bundled up and strolling up the sidewalk

with a little gladness in my heart anyway.

The Christmas lights have turned Mass Street

into a glittering Milky Way for a season.

But then the city lights wash out the Milky Way

overhead in every season.

I guess maybe I want a little darkness

here on earth.

Peace and good will, too.

And heat for my house

and power for my computer.

Oh, the climate is getting frightful,

but the storefronts are warm and delightful,

and all the lighted trees are cheery

and bright.

But how about this year we turn everything off

on New Years Eve until the New Year brightly breaks

just for the heavenly hosts on high.

Darkness and some egg nog,

and a midnight clear

is all I want for Christmas,

this year.

Good question

What do these colors mean?

I am walking along the sidewalk as I always do. Massachusetts Street. Downtown Lawrence, Kansas. The sun is lowering in the southwest. It’s a wintering sun. The red brick wall of the Journal-World is nearly the color of glowing embers, but not quite. The wall is the color of that particular red brick reflecting the fire of the angled sun.

Yet it seems that it is more than that. How can that be? The bricks are the color of clay from the earth, hardened in fire. The sun’s ray’s are reddened by the extra length they have traveled through the atmosphere. And still there’s a glowing of a color not seen at other times.

But I have no complaint about the color of that wall in the high afternoon in the middle of the hottest summer day. Or its color on a gray day with rain washing down its sides. The color of that red brick wall varies and I change as well, almost imperceptibly. So is that what the colors mean?

And yet I seem to prefer that reflecting fire color. Perhaps more because I have seen that wall in other light, in other seasons and so I can notice how it appears in this moment. But why should I care?

I walk along these storefronts nearly every day. I see the sidewalks empty and full of people. The earth moves and the sun appears to move, from east to west, higher in the sky and lower with the seasons. Clouds or not. All these things appear in front of my eyes. Why should the colors matter?

And all the days and hours and minutes that I walk past that wall and the others, if coincidence occurs, a shadow line appears - the line from the edge of the storefronts on the western side of the street divides the wall across the way into the glowing upper portion from the darker lower one. 

And all these other colors as well, up and down the street, are interesting in their own way.

This is all a commonplace. Often I barely fail to notice all these colors in their profusion, the sky also appearing above in its shades of blue and gray and white and sometime blazes of fiery colors spread out like a flame. Or is it the other way around? And yet sometimes I see some of these many colors in their patterns and textures and in a certain light, and sometimes it seems to matter very much to me.

Evolutionary biology explains a great deal for me, but this is not what my ancestors saw walking along the savannah. What manner of species have we humans become that the colors I see walking along Mass Street mean something to me sometimes?

I’m looking for an answer but not one you might give me. I’m searching for an answer I might find for myself. It’s sometimes something to do as I walk along. This is after all only my small, occasional question, not even a preoccupation. But as the sun appears to go down behind the curve of this earth, I’m beginning to suspect I may not find all of the answers to what all of the colors mean.

I do like to see that one fire-reflecting-from-red-brick color, and several other colors as well. It has been something to see.