Panorama City (6 page)

For some reason Aunt Liz's idea of a respectable job was a local fast-food place that shall remain nameless, I'd rather not say the name of it, because there are thousands of it across the country and I can only speak about the one I worked in, I can only speak about my experience in our franchise, which did not blindly follow the simpleminded standards developed by the company in charge of all the restaurants but rather blazed its own trail, as Roger Macarona the manager put it. Roger had a bushy mustache, an unruly mustache, and he wore his shirt unbuttoned one button too far, which showed off his rough throat and dry Adam's apple, and where you would expect a hairy chest was a mysteriously hairless expanse, which my fellow employees spent much time speculating about. On the first day I was introduced to Melissa, who was round and black and a mother of two, Francis, who had thick glasses and was going to become a filmmaker, Ho, who was a refugee, and Wexler, who talked about cars and nothing else. Whenever Roger told my fellow employees to do something, they always said his name twice, after which he'd threaten to make them call him Doctor Macarona, he wasn't actually a doctor, but he was way the hell ahead of the rest of us in the school of life, his words, and we couldn't call him bachelor because he was married and we couldn't call him master, because Melissa was black and what kind of message would that send, his question.

 

That first day, that first hour, Roger sat me down in his office, which was a tiny room, which was barely larger than a closet, and looked over the paperwork Aunt Liz had filled out. He moved a pile of binders to reveal a television and VCR wedged into a bookshelf. I am followed by televisions everywhere I go, I have always been doomed that way, there is even one here in my hospital room, hanging from the ceiling. He told me I would have to watch a training video before proceeding any further. He hit play, and the screen showed two men and a woman, naked, except for the woman's shoes, she had not taken off her shoes. I had not seen anything like it before on a television but I knew, it was clear to me, they were making love, or having sex, I should say, if the words making love are reserved for the most sincere expression of that act. I was surprised at the feelings the video aroused in me, it was clear these people, these men and this woman, were trying to portray pleasure, it was obvious, from the small bit I saw, that they wanted whoever was watching to know they were having a good time, but all I felt was a sharp kind of sadness at their bodies moving on the screen, not because I could imagine their lives outside the scene, that didn't come to me until later, but because in their bodies and in their faces, in their sounds and in their motions, I could see only effort, I could see only how hard they were working, and built into that effort was the failure of that effort, because the pleasure of pleasure is that it is effortless. These people were trapped, the harder they tried, the further they were from their goal, no wonder people called TV the box. Roger just laughed. He ejected the tape and put in the proper training video. He dimmed the lights and left the room.

 

[Extended beep.]
When the medications get low, the beeper goes off twice as long. I've just seen my final sunset. I've been watching the reflection of this room in the window, the bed, the lights, the pumps and screens, the sink, the chair, your mother, everything growing clearer while through the window Madera faded to darkness. Now it is black outside, the sun is down, the sun I will never get to see again is hidden under the earth, is coming around the earth, or we are turning to meet it, I won't be here. Carmen is blinking at me.
[Pause.]
Back to sleep,
mi amor.
Good. Where were we?

 

The training video turned out to be reassuring. I thought I would be watching something complicated that showed how to do all the jobs at the fast-food place, but the video wasn't about how to do the jobs, it was about how to think while doing the jobs, how to be, what to keep in your head.
The training video was my first exposure to a fully articulated philosophy. I had not yet begun constructing my own, not on purpose at least, I had not yet had the conversation with Paul Renfro in which he revealed that the key to being a true man of the world is to develop a coherent philosophy of your own. The video itself was well made, the camera didn't bounce around all over the place and look at things from all angles at once, it stayed put. It was like being there. The setting was a fast-food place very much like but not identical to the one in Panorama City, and the video proposed two separate realities, two alternate universes, identical in almost all respects, except that in one the restaurant was disorganized, the customers were angry, the employees were squabbling, you could hear everyone's angry thoughts, and in the other the employees were smiling and being courteous and even the grumpiest customers ended up with smiles on their faces, you couldn't hear anyone's thoughts, happy music was playing instead. The focus of the video was a freckle-faced kid who behaved badly in the first universe, then politely in the second, thanks to the application of the fast-food place's five-point system, which was illustrated by a gold cartoon star, five points for five points, each one glinting as it was listed off. One, smile even if you feel bad. When people smile back you will feel better. Two, do what you can to make others feel important, especially if they are angry about something. Three, take pride in your work. Four, the company, I'm not going to name it, is a great big family. Five, the customer is always right. After watching the video I saw the kitchen area as if with new eyes. Ho walked up to me and told me Roger was going to be right back, that he'd gone to buy some parts for his boat, that I should go back into the office and wait. Ho did not smile, not in the least. So I smiled at him the broadest smile I could, and to make him feel important I said that I hoped to someday learn a few of the many skills he obviously possessed in the kitchen, and to make him feel like family I called him brother. When Roger came in, finally, a half hour later, the first thing he asked was what I had said to Ho. I repeated exactly what I'd said. Roger said that I had disturbed Ho. I explained that I was using techniques I'd learned in the video. Roger said that the only reason he'd shown me the video was so I could sign a paper saying I'd seen the video, after which he could finally give me my uniform, which he said would be paid for out of my first check. I drew my circle and scribble and he handed me my uniform, which was a shirt, an apron, and a hat. The apron had a pocket in front that was perfect for my compact binoculars. Roger said that now I was one of the troops. I thought it was interesting that he called us troops and said so. He said we were at war. I had no idea. I asked him with who? He said the customer.

 

I started as a floater. I did whatever needed to get done, it suited me, I have always liked having a variety of jobs, every day brings a new challenge. On that first day I cleaned up
a grease spill that was not my fault and I swept the floor all around the restaurant, but my main job was to take the trays from the top of the trash cans to the back, where I fed them into a giant dishwashing machine, Francis showed me how, he demonstrated that each tray had to be lined up right so it would get clean the first time, and while he showed me he seemed almost like he was falling asleep, behind his big glasses his eyes fluttered, he showed me specifically how to line up the trays but shortly afterward he stopped lining them up right, he started sticking them in willy-nilly. When I pointed this out, he said, Fuck it, they're fucking trays, who gives a fuck, why the fuck are you smiling, what the fuck do you have to be smiling about? I said that I was honored to be learning from someone who knew the ropes around here, as they say, from someone who seemed to have mastered the ins and outs of dishwashers. Now his eyes were wide open behind his glasses. The ropes? he said. Dishwashers? he said. He picked a tray off the rack, before it went into the dishwashing machine, he picked up a tray and threw it across the room, it wasn't a big room, the tray hit the wall before it hit the floor, it made a huge clattering sound. He said that he was meant to be a filmmaker, not a dishwasher, and he could only ignore the indignity, his word, so much longer before he exploded, he had to work here in order to rent a video camera so that he could make a film so that he could go to film school so that he wouldn't have to work here anymore. He threw another tray, and could I not smile while I worked, it made him crazy, he said, throwing a third tray, it made him crazy to see my teeth and my eyebrows, he could tell the difference between a real smile and a fake one, and he could see that my smile was real, and if it had been fake he could have tolerated it, but he could imagine nothing more depressing, in these circumstances, nothing more suicide-ideation-inducing, his words, than someone actually genuinely smiling his way through this, he held up a tray and threw it. Roger the manager came in and said, What the Samhain, his word, is going on back here? And Francis said, I'm throwing trays at the wall. And Roger said, Stop it. And Francis said, I'm going on smoke break, and he walked out the back door. And Roger asked me whether Francis had shown me how to use the dishwasher, and I said yes, and he said, Hop to it then.

 

After washing the trays I returned them to the counter, where I watched my fellow employees work with the customers on whatever it was they wanted to eat, I saw no signs of war, I saw people who were trying to listen to their stomachs while they tried to read the menu, which was elevated above everyone and everything and which had pictures of most of the food and numbers you could choose from. I've never been much of a reader, but numbers I know, if you don't know your numbers you'll get into a mess of trouble, your grandfather's words. I did a circuit around the dining area to retrieve the trays from the top of the trash cans, for the first time I found myself among the people of Panorama City. They looked like they could have been eating at the fast-food place by the freeway in Madera, the people of Panorama City didn't look that much different from the people of Madera, except that when I looked at their faces I didn't recognize any of them, and they didn't recognize me, they didn't know to call me Mayor, they didn't know to ask me if they needed anything done around the house, they didn't say hello, they didn't say excuse me, they just moved around me like I was a dog who wouldn't get out of the road. At one point a Mexican man in a cowboy hat smiled at me and said good afternoon, his teeth were capped with silver, he reminded me of the old ranch hand Sergio Cruz from Madera and I said good afternoon, did you enjoy your meal, and he nodded. I introduced myself, I let him know that I was new in Panorama City, I let him know that I'd only been working at the fastfood place a short while, but that if he needed anything at all he shouldn't hesitate to ask, if there had been cameras they could have put it on the training video. He shook my hand, he introduced himself, his name was Alcibiades Cervantes, he'd worked on farms and
ranchos
in the area before they had been bought out and sold to real estate developers, before there had been a Panorama City at all, he lived in an old farm building right in the middle of town, he missed his horses, he thought about going back to Mexico, but the last time he had gone back so much had changed there, too, and it broke his heart to see the changes back there, even more than to see the changes here in Panorama City, and besides, his grandchildren, they were building their lives here, they were ignorant of all the changes that had come before, but that was their job, his words, that is all of our jobs, he laughed, to be ignorant of what came before, then he said he didn't really believe that, as a matter of fact he believed the opposite. He said that the only good thing all of this civilization ever brought here was the fastfood place, he called it by name, at least now you could eat quickly and inexpensively, in the old days feeding yourself was a challenge, you were at the mercy of the weather and your animals. Of course I was talking, too, I don't remember what I said. Then Roger appeared and said excuse me to Alcibiades, not like he meant it, but like he was telling someone to get out of his way. He pulled me to the back of the restaurant and explained that customer interaction was not part of my job, my job was floater, and right now my only interaction was supposed to be with trays and the dishwasher. He explained that customers walked in with full pockets and empty stomachs and left the other way around, no monkey business.

 

At the bus stop, a kid with a skateboard kept stepping into the street and standing on his toes to see if the bus was coming. I mentioned something your grandfather used to say, which was that there's an art to waiting. He said why don't you get me some fries and a Coke, then laughed, he looked around for someone to laugh with him but no one did. I didn't answer him but instead reached into my pocket and pulled out my small binoculars and looked down the road to where the bus was coming from. There it was, shimmering in the heat of the road and the afternoon, about twelve blocks away, the flat face of it peeking through a tangle of traffic and wires and signs and palm trees, it was like looking through layers of grass and dirt and branches and leaf litter and seeing a ladybug on the ground. I told the kid that the bus was twelve blocks away, that it would be here soon, and he started to ask me how I could possibly know, and when he saw the binoculars he was silent.

 

A moment later, or maybe it was that same moment, Aunt Liz pulled up in her Tempo, she pulled to the curb in front of the bus stop, the kid had to jump out of the way. Even before I got in the car Aunt Liz asked why I was still wearing my uniform. I explained that I was taking pride in my work, and I had thought how to best convey that, not the words I used, I don't remember the words I used, and I figured keeping my uniform on while I rode the bus home was a good way, like those soldiers and sailors you see in the street. She said to get in, I folded myself into the Tempo. She had finished work early, she said, she had gone to Glendale to notarize some loan papers, she was a notary public, her job was to drive around and make sure that people were who they said they were, she was in the verifying and certifying business. Someone in Northridge had canceled on her and so she'd decided to pick me up straight from work rather than wait for me to come home via bus, she had moved up my appointment by an hour. I didn't know what she was talking about. She said she'd made an appointment with someone called Dr. Rosenkleig. I said I felt fine. She explained that Dr. Rosenkleig was a therapist, I was going to see him to talk about my feelings in the wake of my father's death, he could evaluate my feelings. She said I could talk freely with him, because he was a professional talker and listener. That made me nervous, I had always been an amateur at both.