The Fantasy Years

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.