American Paranoid Restaurant Read online

transferred to her small breasts, setting them swaying. I wondered if all the female bartenders were instructed to shake the cocktail mixers high above their heads. I watched the male bartenders but could never catch them preparing a drink in the same way. Also moving, like Steve, from room to room was the manager of HR, smiling at me when she saw me, smiling at everyone, at one point laying out several plates of hors d'oeuvres on a table at the edge of the room, in preparation for the movement of patrons that would accompany the end of the current band’s set. She seemed, in her perfect hair and slim body, in the cheerful sexy modesty of her movements, the image of a 1950s housewife in a magazine advertisement for Frigidaires, brought improbably but refreshingly to life in the dim pot-lighting of a nineteen-nineties bar. If not revived from that era, she might at least have been preserved from it: the generation which had included thalidomide exquisites had now evolved into pickled specimens who had swallowed so many martinis and had had filled so many prescriptions for antidepressants that their smiles were permanently affixed in their skin, their crows’ feet, forged in the fires of tanning salons, rendered iconic by Maybelline.

  The band--a du-wop quintet with a keyboard simulation of a female chorus--acceded the stage to Eastern dancers who moved among the diners like strippers in full jellabiyas. They swayed in yards of cloth under the noses of embarrassed husbands and the younger, more appreciative girls. Under the veil and headpiece of one I recognized the face of another of the bartender girls. As I stood at the periphery of the room I waited for her to approach, waited for her to make eye contact. The cloth across her derriere was flesh-colored, and underneath the strings of bells one might easily believe that there was nothing but skin.

  I asked Steve what had been in the small white plastic box that he had hidden under the table.

  “Found it in the bathroom.” He said.

  “I know.”

  I had this brave and sexual sense of immersion in a culture with which I had previously been on indifferent terms.

  “What's in it?” I asked.

  “Promise not to tell?” Steve said.

  “I promise,” I said.

  When I left the bar to check on things, I took to a back alley, believing it in its dark recesses to hold more promise than the lit streetfront in front of the bar. At the sight of a dog watering the sidewalk I was suddenly overcome with the need to urinate, and not willing to go back inside. There was a dumpster in the alley, a giant metal tank twenty-two feet long and taller than I. I approached it and unzipped, and then on a whim decided to stand on the lip, facing inward, watering whatever contents might be inside. Still unsteady on my feet, I used the footholds in the outside to climb, those metal sleeves grasped by the pneumatic trucks that would come to collect. On top, I braced a foot on two adjacent sides, straddling the corner, and peered in, holding myself. When I heard the door of the business behind me swing open, I startled and fell headfirst into the blackness, still holding myself, then flailing, then bleeding, my face scraped by a wooden pallet propped up on the inside of the dumpster. I lay still, waiting for voices, waiting to be discovered by whoever had exited the building behind me. I looked around, on my hands and knees. The dumpster was nearly empty. The garbage had only recently been picked up. I crawled toward a plastic bag, then jerked back--what had appeared as the flat floor of the dumpster was in fact sawdust floating on a puddle of water that stretched all the way to the opposite wall. The plastic bag I was looking at was snagged on another wooden pallet, lying just above the waterline, and what appeared to be a pile of snapshots spilled from the stuffed plastic bag. It was difficult to see anything in the darkness--the only light came from the security lamp on the back of the building, twenty feet away, and, from my perspective, was almost entirely obscured by the high walls of the dumpster. I had forgotten about the voices outside. After standing up carefully, I waded through the puddle, my feet, then my ankles, submerged, crunching the fine layer of silt I found lay beneath the sawdust-flaked water.

  The photos stank. I don’t know what chemical process occurs in the degradation of paper and silver halide, but the smell that came off the bag as I lifted it turned my stomach. Photos spilled out and I tried to catch them, but the bag ripped and the whole sloppy mess came out with a flop and a slopping sound as it landed on the wooden pallet. I turned and climbed from the dumpster as fast as I could.

  The nature of the photos in the dumpster continued to haunt me for days thereafter. In my brief glimpse I had seen that they were Polaroids, faces and figures blurred and framed, colors muted by age and water. Some terrible secret had compelled the owner to throw them away—not tossing them in a desk-side wastepaper basket, not piled at the curb, but shoved down into a bag and hidden at the bottom of a dumpster in an alley. Perhaps it was the record of a failed marriage, a relationship turned so horrible that it could only be forgotten if all photographic traces were removed to an anonymous trash heap. I wondered if it was child porn. Or compulsively-taken shots documenting a grisly murder. Torture scenes, lying waiting in a rusty dumpster for someone else to come and take upon themselves the incriminating evidence.

  For days the question of the Polaroids recurred to me, and I found myself returning to the dumpster by daylight, once again climbing up the side and now coming down, more gently this time, gingerly on the even-wetter detritus. The photos were still there. I picked them up one by one—some had blown away, were now hidden under crates and creaking, precarious piles of twisted metal and wood. I reached in, through, under the groaning tangles and extracted wet photos on my fingertips.

  The album, sopping and falling apart at the hinges, bulged with mementos, ribbons and papers and inserts, a string of beads, undeveloped negatives. Pages limply succumbed to gravity and dropped from the binding as I stood up. I turned to the album's first page and started moving forward. There were pictures of a prom, of cars in driveways and football games, a graduation, hospital beds. There was a school play and home medical equipment. Someone ate Thanksgiving dinner. There was a birthday in a white room.

  I got braces when I turned eleven. I was outfitted the day after my birthday, not unlike some modern rite of passage, a bodily modification designed to make me acceptable in adult society. Sitting in the waiting room alone except for my mother, I watched a ceiling-mounted television broadcasting music videos.

  There on the screen was something new, something never before encountered and dangerous, a woman earnestly entreating the listener to kiss her. It was “Kisses, Please,” by Great Divorce, from their third album, An End to Metaphor. In the video, the frontwoman, singing softly, compellingly, sat on a bench with four men, looking at each in turn, as if she wanted to be kissed not only by the listener but her bandmates as well. My mother made a comment and I was appropriately horrified at the license implied by the dulcet voice hovering up near the ceiling. The receptionist, hearing the comment, came out from behind her counter and changed the channel to the news.

  Five years later a cousin would burn me a copy of An End to Metaphor, and I would painstakingly copy the titles from the back of her disc onto a piece of paper that I slipped into the blank jewel case that held the pirated music. The title of the fourth track did not elicit my interest, but when the gentle guitar strumming bloomed from the speakers of my headphones I was thunderingly transported back to that waiting room on the early edge of puberty, seeing now only dimly and blurred the mouth and hair of the angelic chanteuse but hearing her voice in full and pellucid volume.

  I was shocked. The utter license and explicitness of passion that I had heard five years before was now merely sweet, the harmonious and quaint way of children together, of innocence and love and guileless attraction in equal measure. A few years later I was to look up the video on the Internet, to find that the peculiar moral plaisance so recently discovered was not an artifact of hearing the song in isolation, but permeated the video as well.

  Five years after that, on an amateur
porn site, perusing videos of doughy young couples in harried and imitative coitus, of unbelievably vocal masturbators and young girls grinding in their bedrooms to distortingly over-loud rap dubs, I clicked on “1967_stip-and-dance-on-the-cam-wildly.mpeg.” The video began with the girl leaned over the camera, simultaneously pressing “record” on a laptop and “play” on some unseen boombox, and as she stepped back I heard, sweetly shockingly thrillingly, the opening guitar strumming, the softly syncopated snare and kick drums, the flowing liquid voice of the woman who all those years before had seemed to me an unparalleled specimen of unbridled sexuality. The girl in front of me peeled off a jacket, swayed gently, reached down, and lifted the hem of a baggy sweatshirt. Up came the flesh, the midsection, the white brasseire--and her arms were over her head, the shirt was off and dropped gently from an extended arm to the floor below. She moved, her waist describing perfect circles in an acceleration, a deceleration, an acceleration, a deceleration, a throbbing of radial motion. Her arms were up again and all was white, white everywhere, except her eyes, large, and hair, dark, now lifted