The Fantasy Years

WITH FOX NEWS ON THE AIR, all the bombast and intellect of people associated with Rush moved on to the television screen. Now people were no longer restricted to hearing the outrage in the voices of the hosts; now they could see the foreheads crinkle in expressions of dismay; they could see the eyes squint in daggers of accusation towards the liberals, the elites, the wishy-washy secular relativists, for any pencil-necked geek who found themselves under the hot glare of the studio lights.

The outrage was visible.

The spasms of outrage, vexing, refreshing, gripped Rush listeners, who spoiled for a fight, who spoiled for an opportunity to win.

“America was better in the 1940s!” a voice in Nevada claimed.
“Right, except not to the liberals with their relativist history,” agreed another.
“What could liberals hate about us beating the Nazis?
“You’re forgetting the Japanese.”
“We kicked their asses too!”
“No, the Japanese that were put in camps in America.”
“Oh, of course. How could I forget?”
“Right. And that makes America a bad country to liberals.”
“As if liberals back then cared about the Japanese in camps.”
“As if anyone in wartime can care about foreigners put in camps.”
“As if that’s a normal way of thinking.”
“I guess for the liberals it is.”

The liberals contorted in anguish hearing these arguments. They were driven wild by what they heard. But that was simply more proof to the Dittoheads everything they were saying was true. The rise of the conservatives was so consistent, across so many lines – on the radio, online, in ideas formulated and circulated, on Fox news – that the goalposts of reality themselves had shifted. Together the rhetoric and the rightwing media ratcheted the country rightward.

The liberals retreated from the debates, more sure now than ever, that like silly rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh and the stars of Fox News could be dismissed. Liberals dismissed the right wing views, under pinned by reams of junk scholarship from right wing think tanks, as symptoms of the Dittoheads bad taste. After all, poor right wingers shopped at Wal-Mart. They were inclined to wear a shirt incorporating stars and stripes. They might put a flag sticker on their bumper, alongside a sticker showing Calvin pissing on a Ford or a Chevy. And the bumper might belong to a car parked at a wrestling match.

Anything of these things were symptoms. Symptoms of that part of American society that needn’t really ever be taken seriously. They were unserious people, living uninformed lives, consuming tasteless items. And so they weren’t to be dignified with a response to their endless accusations.

When that wasn’t enough, liberals could contend that politics didn’t matter anymore. As the liberals retreated and vacated the perennial arguments that make up the American political scene, the Dittoheads advanced.

Besides, the spectacle of TV and its explosion of cable choice made it easier for liberals to tune out all the right wing unpleasantness. The explosion in media had crowded out the space allotted in many Americans’ attention for real politics.
Of course, politics were there if you really wanted them. You could watch almost all of it happening on C-Span. Gavel-to-gavel congressional coverage, speeches, rallies, readings, symposia at think tanks. Everything that made up a political discourse.
But visually, men talking about policy could not compare with car chases and fiery explosions on TV. Men talking about policy could not compare with how the stars were dressing for Oscars Night. People talking about policy couldn’t even compare to the graphic-rich news.

Beside, Americans in 1996 were getting caught up in the possibilities of the economy just emerging then as a topic in and of itself. Jenny, Mike, Dennis, Brandon, Don and most everyone else could taste it. They knew wealth was just around the corner even if it wasn’t within their reach. The economy was heating up. The Internet would create a whole new industry of jobs.

That’s why Ben moved to New York, where he was having a bracer with his co-worker Walt. The economy sure was working for Ben. He’d just been granted 2,000 shares of stock at below market prices from the Internet start up he worked at. After a couple panicky, exhilarating weeks of job searching, New York had been a continual whirlwind party for Ben since he arrived in New York.
Tonight was no different.

He picked up the habit of calling drinks ‘bracers’ from Walt. And a bracer was a good swaggering word that matched Ben’s swaggering tone as he bragged to Walt about how in his last job back in Cleveland, he had given advice to the principal of the investment firm. He helped Mr. Towers understand part of prospectus on a dotcom. He left out the fact that after he told Mr. Towers the sentence made no sense, Mr. Towers invested in the company anyway. That didn’t matter. What mattered was the look of Ben talking confidently in a bar for the chicks to see.
Ben was on his second Glenmorangie and had hit the sublime point in the mind of 25-year old man in New York with his life ahead of him when the whole city, and within the whole city, the whole world felt possible.

The scotch was served in large, polished, bottom-heavy rocks glasses. The glasses rested on a scrubbed copper bar top. He and Walt had come to this place, the Gotham Lounge, after a small Friday afternoon party at Apexonline.com, where they both worked. Apexonline had celebrated it’s 5,000th registered customer, which meant the company was on track for 27 percent growth year over year, which meant…big things. It meant they were on the ground floor of something potentially massive.
Walt had worked at Apex for only a few months longer than Ben but he was from Connecticut so he knew the lay of the land. He knew New York, if for no other reason than his Christmas trips to the city as a child. Walt also knew which bars catered to the “bridges and tunnels” crowd and which didn’t. He was also taller.
These factors together impressed Ben and Ben was grateful to have a mentor with whom he could pursue the eternal quest: meeting chicks.

Ben had wanted to go to another bar tonight – McChesney’s – but Walt had assured him that the kind of people who went to McChesney thought Killians Red was a good beer. “The hicks!” Walt exclaimed. Instead, they came here, which boasted a fine selection of single malts.

And Walt was right. After his second Glenmorangie, Ben felt closer to where he wanted to be in life, in work, everything, although he couldn’t say exactly where he wanted to be. He was just closer. That’s all. If nothing else, he was no longer shut up in a room with a jerk of a co-worker in Cleveland. Now, he had a cool co-worker to hang out with in a cool city, where they went to cool bars. And not the bars where people drank Killian’s Red. This was closer to where Ben wanted to be. This was moving in the right direction.

And there were plenty of chicks at this bar too. Healthy, young, freshly graduated chicks, coming down from Bard, from BU, from Vassar, and all these other colleges that elicited in Ben images of impossibly East Coast, impossibly cardigan-clad and busty.
Another girl sat down next to Walt with her cluster of girlfriends.
“Watch this,” Walt said, positively reeking of confidence.

A girl brought a cigarette to her lips. Walt lit it. She glanced at him with irritation, puffed and said thanks. Then she turned back to her friends. Ben suppressed a laugh. Walt was obviously hoping for a warmed response.

“You get points for trying,” Ben said.
Walt laughed a blustery laugh. “Ah, look at her, ordering a margarita.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“What is this? Some kind of South Florida, Jimmy Buffett, college house?”
“I guess you’re right.”
“People are what they consume. And that’s why I go for what’s best for me,” Walt explained. Walt was always explaining something to Ben. “Take this glass of Glenmorangie. The way the Scotch is served says a lot about the kind of place you’re in. And it says a lot about us that we chose to be here.”
“Indubitably,” Ben replied. “It says we like our Scotch served in a good solid highball glass.”
“And that’s the way it’s best enjoyed.”
“I say its best enjoyed in the company of a 3rd year student at Vassar.” Ben asked.
“Better a senior at Smith.”

“Of course, a Baruch graduate goes best with a single malt. Maybe a 12 year Balblair.”
“A Balblair. Of course,” Walt conceded, smiling at Ben’s ironic chitchat. And no men talking about policy anywhere in the world could compare to this entertainment, so pleasing to the senses, so full of possibilities. Walt returned to his faux world-weary talk about how you need to reinvent yourself constantly on the job “Because the online business is constantly reinventing itself.”

“I’m already on my second job there and it’s only been months since I was hired.”

“That’s good. Then they like you. If they didn’t like you, they wouldn’t let you innovate.”
“Glad they like me.”
“’Cause you gotta figure, none of us know where we’ll be in a few years time. Not even Jerry.” Jerry was the start up’s CEO.

A gorgeous young woman, tanned and voluptuous, with hair like combed gold, passed by, “I’d have her with Glenturret,” Walt said. “On the rocks, of course.”

Ben felt a bump on his side. He turned and saw the girl who had stepped up to the bar, facing stock forward. She was about his height. She blinked as Ben glanced at her.

Ben glanced back at Walt made a frantic ‘have at her’ gesture. Ben turned to her and said.

“So my friend and I were saying that every woman corresponds to a kind of single malt scotch. What do you think?”
She turned to him and smiled. “What?”

Tony Bennett’s brassy voice blasted from the sound system.

“My friend and I…Oh, never mind. What do you do?”
Her face lit up with her lipstick smile. The bartender took her order. And she asked again, amid the barking happy hour clamor, “I didn’t hear you. Can you say it again?”
“What do you do?”
“Student.”
“From here?”
“Boston.”
“Oh, yeah. Go to college there?”
“Sarah Lawrence.”
“Nice to meet you, Sarah.”
She burst out laughing. “I go to Sarah Lawrence College. My name is Megan.” And she looked as Irish-blooded, tan and as all-American and as healthy as they came.
“Sorry, it so loud in here.”
She peeled a ten out of her little wallet when the bartender put her gimlet down before her. Ben raised a hand to the bartender, pointing to her drink, “On my tab, please.”
Ben loved saying those words.
“Thanks,” she said, turning to Ben and raising the glass to her mouth to suck through the stirrer. “What’s your name?”

IN A SUBURBAN DENNY’S in Dallas, cars and trucks turned into the busy parking lot, the first of many waves of the bar crowd trickling in. The men wore gimme caps and shiny league jackets, the women wore denim shirts and jeans. All of them moved with a sort of Saturday night triumph. They squinted behind their boozy grins. They smelled of beer and alcohol. They stood in the lobby-way, boisterous, exchanging all-too-amused quips while the waitresses and busboys readied tables for them, then sat them, then served them.

In the back, behind the sweaty, frantic cooks, the food splattered, polyester-clad wait staff, a busboy named Don and a waiter, Brandon, sat crammed in the back of the cluttered break room.

“Racist white boy!” Don said, not even making eye contact with Brandon.

“Who? Me?” Brandon asked. The accusation made his face a hot red.

“Not you,” Don scowled. This was typical Don, thought Brandon. Typical and not his idea of a good dining companion. A second later, Don exhaled, with a pungent scorn. “Shhiii” as if the overwhelming weight of his disgust stopped him from completing the word ‘shit.’

Don was always fuming about customers, about work, about anything. It was all one Great White Conspiracy to Don. And he intimidated enough of the rest of the staff, including Joel the manager, that everyone just let Don say whatever he liked. No matter how intimidating. Tonight Don was pissed off at some boozy kickers who’d used the n-word.

A TV blinked silently in the corner. Images of the LA riots.
Brandon hunched over his employee-discounted meal, a club sandwich and fries, which he stuffed into his mouth in a careless, hurried way. He hated every extra minute spent at this job. Still, a half price meal was a half price meal. Between his fries and pickle, Brandon looked up and asked Don, “Do you feel oppressed by white people, Don?”

The images of the riot replayed on the screen. Overhead shots. Shots from inside police cars.
“Man, what a stupid white question that is!”
“I’m just asking a question.”
“That’s a stupid one!”
“I figured with Rodney King and those riots going on in LA and all. And there’re no such things as stupid questions.”
“Yes, there are.”
“My biology teacher at the community college always says there’s no such thing as a stupid question.”
“Asking someone if they feel oppressed is.”
“Why’s it stupid?”
“What do you even mean by that? I don’t even know what you mean by that.”
“Do you think black people have it harder?”
“Harder then who?”
“Us.”
“Let’s change skin for a couple weeks and I’ll tell you. How the hell should I know—How do you feel about your life?”
“I dunno.”
“That’s what you’re asking me.”
“I’m asking you if black people feel oppressed.”
“What am I? The speaker for all black people? Do y’all white people feel like oppressors?”
“Should we?”
“You’re asking me the same. Am I happy with where a lot of black people are? Hell no.”
“There you—”
“And that’s the stupidest question a white guy ever asked me.”
“You don’t have to call me stupid.”
“But it’s a dumb white question.”
“Yeah, and if I called your answer a dumb black answer they’d be fighting words.”

Don nodded vigorously, his face sour. “They sure would be.”
Brandon wished Don wouldn’t react like this. Brandon didn’t mean to piss him off. It was an honest question. An innocent one. Brandon pushing the last fry into his mouth. He got up, deposited his plate, glass and silverware at the dishwasher’s station, returned to the break room.

Brandon grabbed his jacket from the peg — he’d already clocked out — and walked out the back door, into the parking lot where he passed through a strong whiff of ashes, maple syrup and wet coffee grounds coming from the dumpster. The pavement was stained with food run-off and grease. He went to his Cutlass and got in.

“Dear Lord please let it start,” he muttered instinctively. Then he turned the ignition. The car started without any of that recurring trouble from the alternator. Brandon pulled out onto the access road and out into the forest of signage and store fronts that was suburban Dallas. The back-lit signs on the road were the same everywhere yet never in the exact same order. Their rhythm unspooled in Brandon’s vision making the horizon both reassuring and monotonous.

He was glad to be out of work at this earlier hour before the bar crowd arrived. Of course, in truth Brandon was heading over to his friend Shane’s to get loaded. Sometimes it seemed to him that the whole world was stoned or drunk in shifts. And work just meant the hours you had to stay sober to care for the drunk people. If you were an ambulance driver, you cared for the drunk accident victims. If you were a cop, you arrested the drunk drivers.
Then in your free time, you went and got drunk. The EMTs and the cops certainly did. He knew because he could hear the conversations when they got out of bars and came to his Denny’s. He could smell their beer breath.

Brandon drove from work to home, even passing the other Denny’s, the one on the south part of town. He could imagine the work inside there. He could imagine a guy just like himself waiting on tables, bringing out food, refilling coffees. Serving drunks. Just like him. The employees there followed the same rules, had the same troubles with the greasy tray holders that tended to slide shut too easily. Just like he did. Those guys probably even went off to their friends after work, or to the parking lot, to drink and smoke the night away. Just like he did.

Brandon always listened to metal. Never to talk radio. So he missed the anger growing on the AM radio waves. The anger for the liberals, for the politeness police, for the politically correct college professors. To be sure, there should have been anger about political correctness. Because political correctness, for its effort to create a better world though better word choice, did precious little for the downtrodden and disadvantaged.

Women, given little choice in their obligations, discouraged from education and from the freedom that it can bring, enjoyed hardly any satisfaction at being called “womyn” and discussed in non-patriarchal words.

Poor “people of color” red-lined by backs, discriminated against by bigots, shut away in inner city America, did not gain materially by college students calling them “people of color.” “Native Americans” went about their lives fraught with health and social problems no matter what college professors called them.

The world’s poorest of the poor drank from the same rivers they bathed in, they lived in the shanty towns sprung up outside of cities, whole families huddled under highway overpasses, and yet none of them were comforted by being described as “developing”- rather than “third” world.

But political correctness was doing something; it was exacting a bitter toll somewhere…

In a conversation, at vinyl upholstered booth on Forbes Avenue in Pittsburgh, where Ben, the college student had transferred to go to college last semester. He and a young woman named Annalee talked about the injustices America was built on. Slavery. The right to vote being withheld from women. Manifest destiny and the broken treaties with the Native Americans. He spoke in an earnest, passionate voice about how America has always been a nation founded on violence. Whether violence at home or abroad. The one thing that was constant was violence, “Whether against African slaves, Native Indians, Filipinos, Central Americans. What?” He asked.

Annalee smiled languorously. She glowed with a kind of impish youth. Ben liked her blue-eyed smile.
“What?” he asked.
“You keep calling it history?”
“And? Oh, her-story.”
Annalee smiled.
“It would help if you weren’t smirking at me when you said these things.”
“I’m not smirking.”
“You’re smiling. Which makes me think this is kind of a game.”
“You aren’t comfortable being corrected by a woman.”
“Sure I am.” Ben was certainly used to it, always being trapped up by the linguistic orthodoxies of P.C. talk. “But you were smirking.”
“Maybe my desire to be taken seriously makes you uncomfortable. Maybe that bothers me. So I smile nervously.”
“You didn’t look nervous.”
“Well, I was, okay? You said you believed in feminism. Then you talk to me—you talk down to me—like so many other boys do.”
“I wasn’t talking down to you.” At least, he secretly thought he wasn’t.
“Don’t you think I’d know I’m being patronized?”
“That’s not what I meant by using the term ‘history’.”
“It’s not the word you used, it’s the way you talk. As if I need the world explained to me.”
“Oh, no,” Ben raised his palms.
“It seems that way.”
“Oh, not at all. Not at all.”
“It seemed that way. I thought you were different than the other guys.” Annalee batted her eyes at him or he thought she did. He could be sure with her. One wrong word and everything would change.
“I am different than the other guys,” he said.
“That’s what I thought,” she said, leaning her knee casually against his under the table. Then she moved it.
Ben hated to interrupt the moment. “I hate to say this. But I have to go to the bathroom.”
In the restroom, he stood at the urinal, peeing, wondering if things would finally happen with Annalee. He read the graffiti written above him.

To Do Is To Be—Descartes

To Be Is To Do—Sartre

Do Be Do Be Do—Sinatra

Someone else had written, “How can you trust something that bleeds every month but never dies?”
Ben reached into his pocket for a pen.

The next morning, after his Thursday night shift at Denny’s, Brandon would remember only the hail of extended guitar solos. And a hazy, theoretical discussion about freedom for normal dudes. Brandon had drank too much again and crashed on Shane’s couch. Brandon’s shoes were off, which meant he’d had enough sense to kick them off before passing out. He and his friends Shane and Rock and Darryl and Mark had hung out and rocked and smoked weed and drank beer till nearly dawn.
He sat up and put his shoes on. An empty grease-stained pizza box yawned open on the coffee table, amid the forest of empty beer bottles surrounding Dr. Feelgood, Shane’s mammoth bong. The taste in Brandon’s mouth was stale and resinous. It was sweetly alcoholic with hints of yeast, malt and kind bud. It also tasted like cheese and tomato sauce. That’s right, they had a pizza. Brandon wanted a drink of water. Oh, well, he’d drink some water when he got home.

Brandon let himself out the side door by the garage into the day’s horrible raw gray light. The birds tweeted totally unmindful of Brandon’s hangover. The chipper sound and soft, dewy sensation of the grass under Brandon’s feet filled him with remorse. The day had already left him behind and he’d have a lot of catching up to do to get back in the frame of mind for work that afternoon.
His Buick stood on the far side of the road. He’d parked it with one rear wheel hitched up on the curb. In a painful wince, he remembered himself driving to the pizza place last night. But how much did he have to drink? That’s right. He remembered Shane warning him against it. Then with a laugh, promising to help him steer. But Brandon insisted. He’d drive. He’d drive.

“Shit,” Brandon muttered. Why did he do that? He already lived paycheck to paycheck. What would happen if he got picked up for a DWI? He was supposed to be saving money for community college. The last time he got close to having the money for a few credit hours, his alternator went out and the bill for the repair sucked up what he would have spent on those. What would happen if he had to blow his meager savings on a DWI court case?
He couldn’t drink and drive again. He wanted to get back to community college next semester, if he hadn’t already missed the deadline. He’d have to check on that when he was in the right frame of mind.

Getting in his car, with the one wheel parked drunkenly on the curb, Brandon wondered why he ran these kind of risks? He unlocked the door—-at least he remembered to lock it—and got in. What a life, the thought flashed through his groggy mind. He supposed he could no longer say he was “experimenting” with drugs and alcohol. No, he was just “using” these days.
“Dear Lord, please let it start” he muttered holding his breath as he turned the ignition. The engine started and stayed on. “Thank you,” he mouthed to heaven.

He took the emergency break off and the car plopped down off the curb with a groaning, slightly humiliating thud. Then Brandon pulled out, relieved, after a couple turns at the anonymity of being in traffic.