Panorama City (13 page)

 

Brief because Aunt Liz had a dark magnet inside her. When she'd finished half of her food and a second glass of bubbly she turned the subject to my father, her brother, your grandfather. She smiled, she was still smiling over my promotion, she smiled and asked me to imagine if only my father had gotten me started earlier with something like the fast-food place, imagine where I'd be today, considering how quickly I'd gotten my first promotion, imagine where I'd be if my father, her brother, your grandfather, hadn't been so laissez-faire, her words, in raising me, or failing to raise me. The smile was still on her face only now she was working to hold it up, she was trying with her face to hide the fact that she'd talked herself into the same corner she was always talking herself into. Your father, she said to me, your father was a good man. She told me about how he'd been in his youth, how energetic he'd been, how
nobody could ever seem to keep up with his zest for life, how when he was an infant in his stroller he would whistle like an adult, how he always wanted everyone to stay up late and wake up early with him, how he had always taken life by the horns, if life was a bull he took it by the horns and flipped it onto its back, her words. But by the time I came along he had already been destroyed by that woman, my mother. Aunt Liz told me that my mother had been trying to destroy herself her entire life, and for some reason my father thought he could prevent her from doing it. Then she succeeded in destroying herself, which destroyed him. She sacrificed herself to ruin him, Aunt Liz's words. Which was why I grew up in Madera, doing nothing but riding my bicycle around, comporting myself like a village idiot, it was because my father, who had been a fount of energy in his youth, had been drawn into the spider's web and lay stuck there unmoving for the rest of his life, rendered passive, passive and impassive, by that woman who left us when we needed her most. At this point Aunt Liz wasn't trying to hold back, she wasn't trying to find her way out of the corner she'd talked herself into, she said instead that she was afraid, frankly, her word, frankly, she was afraid that I was in turn going to destroy her, that half of my nature came from my mother, that her destructive disposition was in me somewhere, and that my promotion had raised such hopes in her she couldn't help but fear she was being drawn into some kind of trap, like my father, your grandfather, her brother had been when his hopes were raised about turning that remote piece of land into a vineyard. Your father never should have died, she said, I'm the old one, I'm the older one, she said, I should have died, not him, but your mother killed him, she said, she killed him and she kept killing him long after she was gone.

 

My promotion had raised hopes in me, too, Juan-George. As I mentioned, I had not yet learned the nature of promotions, Paul Renfro had not yet illuminated for me how these things happened in the so-called real world, what these things really meant. And so in those sweet first hours at my new post I immersed myself completely in the thrill of the promotion, the sizzle of frozen fries sinking into hot oil, the fact that I'd become an active participant in food preparation. Not to mention that from the catbird seat location of the french fry hopper, I could watch Ho and others working the front counter, and I could see all the way past Roger's tiny office to the freezers containing the giant bags of french fries and all the frozen dirt and grime that came off the trucks every week, and beyond that to the giant dishwasher where Harold, the new floater, who arrived at work in a special van, who was brought to work every morning by some kind of counselor, was standing with a finger in his nose or ear, or mouth, as if the tip of his finger would come off if it was exposed to open air. It seemed, for the first day, ideal. But on the second day, the second time I came into work and set myself up at the fryer, I felt something else creeping in, it was the feeling of opening your lunch to find the same thing that was there yesterday. I couldn't quite understand it, I had moved up in the world, as they say, I should have been grateful, and instead I found myself watching Harold, watching the new floater, roaming the restaurant, doing all his variety of jobs, doing none of them very well, and I realized that I missed, already, being the floater, I missed not knowing what my job was going to be, from day to day. I felt chained to the fryer. I tried passing the time by making up tunes, I made up tunes and whistled them, or I didn't really get a chance to make up tunes, I was still feeling my way around the notes when Roger told me to shut the fuck up, he couldn't concentrate on whatever he was concentrating on in his office with me making that spooky racket, his words. With great freedom comes great responsibility, someone said once, well, it doesn't work the other way around.

 

It was a low moment. But low moments are more valuable than high moments, because when you reach a high moment you just want it to go on forever, which is impossible, whereas when you reach a low moment you look everywhere for a way out, and so things present themselves that you might not have noticed otherwise. I had just lifted the fry basket out of the hot oil and secured it to the rack so that the grease could drain before the fries got dumped into the trough under the heat lamp, I had just done that, and I saw, lying atop all the other fries, a single fry, normal in color and texture and width but exceptionally long. I had possibly seen one before, they occurred every hundred fries or so, but not before having been in a low moment had I recognized, not until Roger Macarona told me to shut the fuck up, had I recognized its potential. I set aside the abnormally long fry, and from that moment on I made a point of setting aside every abnormally long fry, I pushed them to the edge of the trough until I had enough to fill one of our cardboard fry cartons, at which point I shifted my attention to the counter, to determine the recipient. I could pick whatever customer I wanted, it was liberating, I was no longer bound by my job description, which is an example of the thinking man's way to empowerment, Paul Renfro's words. First I picked the most interesting person of the day, he had no hair, he had shaved his head, and instead of regular clothes he wore an orange sheet, like a toga, he had running shoes on and a big white plastic digital watch. I wanted to reward him for being interesting, by giving him what were in my opinion the most interesting fries, but for some reason he didn't notice his interesting fries, maybe he had so many interesting things going on in his life already that interesting fries didn't make much of an impact.

 

After some deliberation I decided to bestow the fries on the meekest customer of the day. When I first heard that the meek shall inherit the earth, I felt bad for the meek, because
after the Rapture they would be left behind with the sinners, but JB said I had my stories mixed up and that in this particular speech inheriting the earth was a good thing. I don't know if Panorama City is bolder than other places, but it took some time until a meek person stepped up to the counter. He was a skinny and pale man, bald except above his ears, and when he ordered he couldn't seem to bring his eyes to meet Ho's. I had to leave my station, I had to leave the french fry hopper to get close enough to hear him speak, he nearly whispered his order, which, fortunately, included french fries. I returned to my station in time to position the carton of abnormally long fries where Ho was sure to grab it, and everything went according to plan, as they say. In that moment, the moment of him walking away with the abnormally long fries on his tray but not having noticed them yet, I felt quite good about myself, I had given the meekest customer a preview of his future inheritance, french fries coming from the earth, I mean, via potatoes. I had not only solved the problem of my lack of freedom but also changed someone's life in the process. I had not yet realized, or rather Paul Renfro had not yet enlightened me, that most people despise change, that most people, when faced with a change in their lives, will ignore it for as long as possible, until they are forced to face it. Most people are not thinkers like you and me, Paul's words. The meek man went to his table with a preview of his earthly inheritance right there on his tray and, because he was so meek, there was no telling what his reaction was, or whether he even noticed.

 

That disappointing attempt got me thinking that all of the energy I had put into selecting the right customer had been misplaced and that instead I should focus on putting together a carton of fries with more obvious impact, with what Francis would have called mainstream appeal. Which got me started collecting some shorter fries along with the longest fries. I had realized that an entire carton of long fries might look, to someone without a set of reference fries, unremarkable. I began to arrange for a customer, for a random customer, interesting or plain, meek or proud, a carton of fries expressly designed to highlight the single abnormally long fry, a carton that might replicate the joy of discovery I had felt upon finding that first abnormally long fry among the rest. When the carton was ready I turned to the counter. The customer standing there had what some people call a mousy face, people who have never looked closely at a real mouse. I listened to make sure she ordered fries, which she did, and then I personally delivered the special carton directly to her tray, which disturbed Ho, who was working the register, he scowled at me, he looked like he wanted to kill me. Ho did not respond well to having his space invaded, as he put it, he did not respond well to a lot of things, and sometimes he would be overcome by some kind of spell, and he would mumble nonsense words, his eyes staring at something in the distance, all of which was explained by the fact, Roger Macarona's words, the fact that Ho was a refugee, or had been a refugee, from someplace in bumfuck Asia. In general, though, if you did not invade his space or catch him during one of his spells, Ho was a nice fellow, you could always talk to him about cards, he was a poker fanatic, and his shirts were always perfectly ironed, he did them himself.

 

The woman didn't notice the fries on her tray, and I almost lost hope that I could bring anyone to pay attention to their fries, and indeed she would later claim that she had not noticed them until she got to her table and sat down to enjoy a nice peaceful meal alone and without any disturbances, her words. From a corner of the dining room I heard a squeaking sound that I would accurately describe as mousy, and then she was at the counter again and Roger was asking her whether there was anything he could do. I heard her say that she had received a carton containing an obscenely long french fry, that she had looked at that fry alongside the others in the carton, and that she couldn't imagine how a fry this long had come from a real potato. It was disgusting, she said. Her mind, she said, flashed immediately to an image from her childhood, which had been an unhappy childhood, though that didn't come out until later, to an image from the
Guinness Book of World Records,
of the man with the world's longest fingernails, and this image, which had come to her by involuntary recall, her term for it, this was not a laughing matter, her words, the
image had so disgusted her, prompted by the obscenely long fry, that she had lost her appetite completely. She made a gagging sound that convinced me but that Roger later said was fake. She demanded from Roger Macarona that something be done, starting with holding accountable whoever was responsible. Together they looked at me, the tallest employee, six and a half feet tall, standing at the fry hopper, the evidence was my body itself, my height, I was making fries in my own image, as they say, and, her words now, I had picked her, I had singled her out for harassment, when all she wanted was to eat anonymously and in peace. Roger walked to where I was, it was only a few steps, really, he walked over and silently loaded a cardboard container with a bunch of average-length fries, with the freshest fries in the hopper I might add, though I wouldn't expect her to know it, he loaded it up, not a word to me. Of course I thought I had ruined everything, I thought I was about to lose my job, I was trying to do the math, as they say, in my head and figure out where and when I had gone wrong, maybe I had not deserved the promotion after all, I thought, but I didn't yet understand the nature of promotions, I couldn't bear to face Aunt Liz, I thought, after she had so courteously arranged a real job for me and I had ruined it, especially while I was doing my best to apply myself to Aunt Liz's plan for me, all of these thoughts were going through my head, and then I saw, I couldn't bear to look directly at Roger, I saw out of the corner of my eye Roger, his back to the woman, wink at me before turning to deliver the new carton of fries. Then the new carton of fries lay on her tray next to the carton with the obscenely long fry sticking out of it. You could see now that the seemingly average bunch of fries in the offending carton were in general shorter than those in the replacement, further evidence against me. She stood there like she was waiting for an elevator, looking at nobody. Roger took the offending carton from her tray and threw it away. She said, I heard her say, her voice wasn't so mousy, she said that Roger didn't understand, she didn't want new fries, her appetite had been ruined by the old fries, she couldn't get the image of a horrifying spiraling fingernail out of her head, it was disgusting, she wanted Roger to do more than replace her fries, her problem wasn't solved by new fries, what he was doing, her words, was trying to replace the heater in a building that had already burned down because of the original heater. Roger said that he thought they were talking about french fries, what did heaters have to do with it? This was a ruse, he admitted later, he had gotten her point completely. He declared himself responsible for the food only, he had no control or influence over what mental images popped into her head, and while he was sorry for, he used her words, her flash of involuntary recall, he couldn't exactly go back in time to her childhood and prevent her from opening the
Guinness Book of World Records.
Kids are naturally curious, he said, what can I do about that? As a paying customer she declared herself entitled to compensation for her negative experience, she described the whole incident over again now, as if Roger hadn't witnessed it and hadn't heard her describe it already, and he listened patiently without interrupting her, nodding the whole time, which was when we heard about her unhappy childhood. After she re-detailed everything that had been said and done, Roger said that he was very sorry for what had happened to her, and if there was anything he could do to make up for the unpleasantness of her dining experience at the fastfood place, anything at all, she shouldn't hesitate to ask.