Wonderoom

Once upon a time, I totaled my car. Rolled it. It was a slow roll, which was probably a good thing since I didn’t have my seatbelt on. I destroyed my Cutlass Supreme, which had once reached 110 miles per hour on an empty stretch of Texas highway, because of a tuna fish sandwich I was eating for breakfast. I dropped it in the floor and was trying to retrieve it, swerved, drove up on a bank and bam. Canned tuna, Miracle Whip, pickle relish and celery seed. That’s what it takes to kill a car.

I got this job in a restaurant on the Blue Ridge Parkway so I could save enough to get another vehicle. When you don’t have much money, a lot of your time is spent worrying about transportation, at least in the U.S. Other countries, even some places in the States have this crazy thing called reliable mass transit, but where I was it was more like a myth, a legend, a vague hope in some damn liberal’s head. So I got this crappy job.

I lived in the old inn, which had been condemned but they let workers live there if they wanted. Every morning, way before dawn, I was up and cracking eggs into large containers, mixing pancake batter, prepping huge sheets of bacon. I discovered that if you baked enough bacon there will always be a few perfect pieces. The melt in your mouth kind-not burnt, not floppy…flavorful enough to send shivers into your nether regions. Granted, I wasn’t getting any, and maybe that had something to do with it, but perfect bacon can be a reasonable substitute for an orgasm.

Old Aunt Bee sat in the corner making biscuits and cobbler in the morning. Her favorite thing to do was to catch people doing something wrong…taking a smoke break without permission, eating food on the line, having too much fun…and then she would report it to the manager. She had one glass eye, and absolutely no sense of humor, sitting like some ancient crone queen surveying her dominion, muttering to herself. Her biscuits were good, though.

There was also the old man who was the morning dishwasher. He came in every day with a six pack of beer, and hid it in the ice machine. By noon he’d be singing country love songs and slurring his words. The manager knew all about it but didn’t care as long as the dishes got clean. He fell in love with one of the cashiers in the gift shop, but she wanted nothing to do with him. Not long after that he was found dead of a self-inflicted gun shot wound, sitting in his truck at one of the overlooks. Love’s a bitch.

This other guy I had to work with sometimes would start sprinklng cocaine into folded papers and snorting it during his shift. The more cocaine he had, the more useless he became, until by the end of the morning I would be doing his job and mine. There were lots of people like that. The desperate. The deluded. It seeps into you after a while.

I was cooking hundreds of eggs a day. Over easy, over hard, soft-boiled, poached, omelets, scrambled, no yolk, on and on. Thousands and thousands of chicken ova with pig muscle and pig fat and Aunt Bee’s goddamn biscuits. Egg white slithered into my dreams.

Every now and then I would take a smoke break. Smoking and being a short order cook really do go together-a convenient excuse to get away from the pressure and the smell. No one argues with a smoke break. I would go out back and stand as far away from the garbage dumpsters as I could, getting my little nicotine release, trying to forget chickens even existed. One morning on my break the air was so swollen with moisture that the sun stayed red as it rose, and the sky was sherbert orange. In this bizarre light the Appalachians were stretched out for a hundred miles of olive green, poking up through the rising fog. There was a double rainbow, mostly red because of the sun. I was so lost in it I forgot to go back in for a long while, watching colors change and clouds form, like everything before had led to this.

Jim and I were friends. One night, while he was washing dishes and I was cooking on the line at this restaurant, we started talking about art and life. About how we would start a secret club that anyone could join. We put on a little percussion show, made the kitchen into a stage for the late night staff. Talked about how Paradise, Jerusalem, Hell were just outside the back door. Whatever you want. We talked for hours. One night I rode with him on a pile of canvas in the back of this truck, laughing at the world way over the speed limit. I took pictures of him, of his world. We weren’t going out. We just connected. He had too many girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, angry women, crazy women. I knew I couldn’t play that game and win.

He lived in a schoolbus on a farm. I went to go see him this one time, and he had a book about vampires. He was into vampires at that particular moment, thought the idea of draining a human life was o.k. as long as the person didn’t have anything to give to the world. No talent, no beauty, whatever. This was a disturbing visit. For years I had more or less searched for the wellsprings of compassion in myself, the world, and here I was hanging out with, drawn to, the opposite. Might makes right, and only the worthy deserve to live. I shouldn’t be surprised…it’s the unstated philosophy of our nation.

One night, though, we sat on the stoop of some old house with a bottle of wine, and somewhere near the bottom of the bottle he kissed me. I was a fool with enough wine. Later that night I woke up and he had lit several candles around my bed. He had a candle in one hand, looking at my face. Really looking. He had another hand around my neck. I knew he wasn’t going to hurt me, even though for some reason there was also a knife in the bed. I knew he wasn’t going to hurt me, but I knew he had been thinking about it. About what it would be like to kill someone. We slept together for a few days, but I knew nothing would come of it. I was angry at him for spoiling a perfectly adequate friendship. I yelled at him and threw him out of my car one night, because earlier in the day he called me a chump. I enjoyed yelling at him almost as much as I enjoyed being friends

The last time I saw him he had just finished playing a gig. He was tripping on acid. I was wearing my favorite suede jacket. He was walking through the crowd, and so was I. He looked very surprised to see me, and kind of scared, like I was going to try and strangle him. Without saying a word I guided him through a secret handshake, then I asked him how he was doing. Still looking very much afraid, he said “fine.” I patted him on the back and said “good” as I walked on.

Strangling is not my game.