Viewmaster

by Ferdinand Stowell

I never left the mall.

  For me, the shopping mall has come to represent a retail experience so pure that it almost grasps a certain banal spirituality, a weightlessness of bright, shiny surfaces. With the exception of a few high-end restaurants that absurdly tie the consumption of alcohol in with food ingestion, this particular mall was a liquor-less shining city within a city, worlds within worlds. I don’t always want to reach that deep or that high, don’t always want to be reminded of the hot inner circles of affluence, which for poor folk like me without credit cards is as hellish as anything Dante could have dreamed up. Sisyphus had better credit than me.

  My powers as a consumer are limited because I no longer possess credit cards, except for the debit/credit card issued by my bank, but that doesn’t really count since there’s no way you can go seriously into debt with it. Once I’d fallen into debt in my mid-twenties, it was a state of affairs that went on and on until it just seemed to be part of the natural order of things. I had even taken to bantering with the hired minions of my creditors. Most were Italian-American, chosen, I think, to unnerve me with vague suggestions of the sort of Sicilian shenanigans familiar to movie-goers of the 1970’s.

  Before you condemn me as a debtor, think about the credit companies who were remiss in their oversight and irresponsibly approved the issuance of my credit cards in the first place. I was a victim of an overly aggressive financial services industry.

  The pandemonium of the day was winding down but there was still a buzz in the food court as first hand accounts were proudly passed on to those unfortunate souls who missed the spectacle. Bread and Circus pacifies the mob; they’d gotten their circus and were now availing themselves of the entitled bread. I called Maxine as I sat staring at the scattered remains of a bran muffin on the table in front of me.

  “I saw you on the news,” she screeched. “Lord, the car chase, the shopping mall, how exciting.” I mumbled something and Maxine said, “Honey, you don’t sound so good.”

  “I’m ok. I just called to see how you’re doing. How’s the business?”

  “Smooth as Crisco. Really. I’m having the best time. The French folks are still here and they are just so nice. I met some other folks in Union Square, elderly gentleman and his wife and they’re staying for two nights, a hundred dollars a night. Is that about right?”

  “Yeah, that’s great. Wow, you really have a knack for it.”

  “Now, I’ve been communicating with a bible study group online and they’re comin’ to town for a convention. I can book them for six nights in January at $400 a night; you just say the word.”

  “Bible study, huh?”

  “Now, honey I know you feel left out but we’re all children of God. Don’t be afraid of your brothers and sisters.”

  “Sure, book them in. Thanks,” I said with a bit more resignation than was necessary. Maxine deserved better. “Have you heard from Tip?”

  “I’m still working on him.”

  “Does he hate me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh…I wasn’t really looking for that direct of an answer.”

  “Now, don’t you worry about it. He’ll come around; just you leave it to me. You’re a troubled soul but Maxine doesn’t run away from troubled souls. I’m not going to leave until you realize how blessed you are.”

  “Thank you Maxine. I mean really, thank you,” at that I began to sniffle.

  “Now, you tell Maxine what’s goin’ on. Release the burden, dear, just let the lord’s love into your heart.”

  “I’m drinking,” I said through tears.

  There are times when alcohol burns through my life like a purifying fire, a terrible fury of judgment from a higher power.

  Just before Arthur died, I’d been clean and sober for almost three years but his death was the catalyst for another drinking binge. I was a soldier fallen back into the trenches I’d hollowed out and returned to several times and in no condition to mingle with that part of society that frequents B&Bs. Tipton continued running the show seamlessly after Arthur’s death until I was ready to wear the mantel of succession. I sometimes forget how thankful I am to him for keeping the whole thing viable, because it has been my lifeline. My inheritance of Arthur’s estate is proof that blood is thicker than Irish Cream.

  I don’t know what got me through that period but it certainly wasn’t the power of positive thinking.

  When I hold a glass of alcohol in my hand, it’s not really alcohol, but rather a supple, velvety smooth palate cleanser that would make of my tongue and my life a tabula rasa. It’s a tide of molten minerals and ash clearing a path through my body and into the sea: a fresh start.

  That’s what San Francisco represented to me once before I’d moved here but from all this distance I can see more clearly now that San Francisco is the place to end-up for those who have exhausted it everywhere else. The lure of wealth attracts gold diggers and dreamers, who needn’t lift a finger to move mountains, the bowels of the earth do it for them.

  I arrived in San Francisco sporting a Civil War goatee and a Civil War name, Jeb. I was a gold rush boy with my tattoo, piercings, hair color that ranged across the entire spectrum according to the day or the mood of the day. I’d stand on the sidewalks in front of tarted-up buildings, looking just like so many of the Victorian houses of this gold rush town; cheaply built and timid boxes that hide behind poly-chromed, carved and festooned facades, their hopeful false fronts proclaiming ties to a larger cultural ambition, an insiders understanding. I wasn’t exactly timid but there was a shyness to me, a shyness that was in its waning days. I was learning but still young and I betrayed a nervousness, an unknowingness that made my missteps not only bearable but charming, or so I was told.

  I embraced the city as the place where I could let my dreams run into the Pacific like those mice in Russia whose excess population crosses thousands of miles of Siberia for the sole purpose of tossing themselves into the ocean. I called on the muses to descend but they were caught in a holding pattern waiting for clearance and I’m afraid clearance was not mine to give. Instead, I seem to have dialed the wrong number and reached the Furies of my alcoholism, who were agitated by the call. After only six boozy months I felt like I’d reached the end of something, maybe me.

  Technically speaking, the end (or what seemed at the time to be the end) didn’t really begin in the city of San Francisco. When I first lived in ‘San Francisco’, I didn’t actually live in San Francisco, I lived across the bay in Oakland. So the beginning of what was almost the end was actually in Oakland, but to make it easier on whatever audience of out-of-towners you’re addressing, you just say San Francisco. That they can understand. If you’re in New York but you come from Issy-les-Moulineaux, you don’t say I’m from Issy-les-Moulineaux, you say I’m from Paris. If you’re talking to someone in Calgary but you live in Hoboken, you don’t say you’re from Hoboken, you say New York and so on. Necessary lies. Hemingway quote: “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.” End quote. Any truth to that statement went the way of Penn Station and Les Halles – into the fields of ruin.

  Driving across the Bay Bridge from Oakland to San Francisco, I would cut through the shadows of the girders that tensed and the cables that suspended. Time itself tensed and suspended; the two spans of the bridge provided an interlude during which I could concoct my romance of the city as I glided over the bay and through the heart of Yerba Buena Island out to the second span on the other side. Its gothic-deco towers of silvered steel led me effortlessly into ‘The City’.

  Oh, San Francisco, seductive urb - the genies of this place had cast a spell over me. I had been suspended from the animation of economic relationships; the grind and tumble of the workweek. There was in me a bit of the conquistador looking for the seven cities of gold contained in this one conurbation. I was mapping paths through the city inside of me; charting the complex transportation networks t
hat were my veins; circling the cul-de-sacs of my nerve endings. By following the path of neurons and blood, I believed, I might be led to the gold. Relying on these lines of emotion as I monitored the daily commute of my feelings was like taking public transportation, an act of faith that often left me stranded or late arriving.

  Eventually, the fake tattoos would wear off, the holes in my ears would close up from disuse of the rings I’d loop through them, my shyness and my real name would return as would my real hair color and my general mystification. The doldrums, it seems, were my real destination.

  And here I am – and where am I?

  The shopping mall. On the phone with a born-again Christian.

  “Honey, you come on home for some of Maxine’s TLC. I may be all sweetness on the outside but on the inside I’m tough as a piece of gristle on a ham hock and I fight for my friends. You heard of a steel magnolia? Well, I’m a titanium magnolia, honey, tougher than steel.”

  “You’ve got such a good heart; I don’t know what I would….”

  “Don’t make me cry, Roy, I just put on my mascara and I’m not about to pull a Tammy-Fae.”

  “Ok. I think I’ll just stay here at the mall for a little while longer. I’ll call you when I’m ready to come back.”

  “Oh, listen, if you happen to go by one of those Mix and Match chain stores, could you get me a pair of these suede mules I saw on sale in the paper today? Get me either the olive or the teal. I’m a size…I’ll reimburse you when you get back.”

  “Of course I will. I’d love to get them for you.”

  “Jesus loves you, Roy and so do I. Bye now.”

  I didn’t want Jesus to love me; I wanted Maria to. It depressed me that she now hated me. An urge to flee the mall to get a real drink took hold of me. But with mental concentration I pulled myself together enough to realize that I was where I was supposed to be. Something or someone had brought me here and it wasn’t just Charlene.

  I was depressed and exactly where I was supposed to be because I’ve finally learned to just go shopping when I’m feeling blue.  I know this isn’t news to most Americans, but I’ve finally given in to that.

  I used to find such an attitude pathetic and some people still do. The shopping should be done at famous name retail stores (though thrift stores will do in a pinch) and designer clothing seems to work best; I suppose because it’s something you use to actually transform your body and the material is the spiritual, at least it is for members of certain lesser sects of Christianity and for all those sweatshop workers in the garment district.

  Post-depression, my purchases sometimes open me up to ridicule from others – ‘you could have bought that for half what you paid if you’d gone to the outlet store at the mall.’ ‘Never pay retail,’ they say, as though it was a commandment far more important than ‘thou shalt not covet another man’s wife’ and almost on par with ‘thou shalt not kill’.  It hurts me when they say ‘I could have gotten that for you wholesale’, as though I didn’t deserve my sense of wellbeing.

  But these people don’t acknowledge the recuperative powers of retail.  If I’m feeling happy and I buy huge quantities of things at one of those huge wholesale warehouses, then it makes me feel like I’ve gotten away with something, which makes me feel even happier.  If I’m happy and I shop retail and then find out later that I could have bought it for less somewhere else, then that makes me feel bad.  If I’m depressed and I shop at the huge wholesale warehouse, it makes me even more depressed because I’m just another cog in the wheel of commerce and everybody gets the same good deal that I get and that doesn’t make me feel special.  If, however, I’m depressed and I shop retail and buy expensive stuff that many people can’t afford, then that does make me feel special and I feel less depressed.  It’s pretty clear-cut and at least so far, pretty fool-proof.

  I went to the store and bought Maxine two pairs of the shoes she wanted, olive and teal and then drifted out to the faux street, where I found a bench next to the standing clock that was trying a little too hard to be ‘olde fashioned’. The hands of the clock were a handle bar moustache with louche, roving eyes above them. It would be hours before the mall closed and the roving eyes of the clock were making me uncomfortable.

  I wanted to shop some more but the thought of being with people made me nervous. I understand celebrities have the power to shut stores down while they browse during their visits, with the understanding, of course, that they will spend many tens of thousands of dollars without so much as batting an eye. That sounds ideal until I think about it a little more and realize that celebrities rarely shop alone. They have hangers-on that precede and flank them, with stragglers taking up the rear. I didn’t think I could shop with an entourage right then, however much they’d have adored me.

  I walked along the passage, which I’m not even sure, according to the lexicon of the mall, what one is supposed to call exactly. Street isn’t right. Hall seems too conventional. I kept walking until I found one of those maps of the mall that always seem to be the shape and size of a Mayan stele and strangely, or appropriately perhaps, the configuration of the mall’s floor plan sort of looked like a pictograph of a priest blood-letting his penis with a branch of thorns. The map didn’t know what to call the long passages of the mall either, it just stuck big letters like ‘A’ and ‘B’ in primary colors on them and left it at that.

  I decided to head for the Central Atrium of the mall, hoping to come across the sort of plaza one might find in an ancient Tuscan hill town but the inspiration for the atrium came from points further south. In the center of the Central Atrium, there was an elaborate jungle set piece with dense undergrowth and a sort of Swiss Family Robinson Tiki hut in the crotch of a concrete tree. Right next to it a waterfall fell some twenty feet into a pool below. It looked like just the sort of hermitage I would have wished for in my dreams. I went and sat on a ledge by the pool and gazed at the shiny copper pennies and occasional dimes and nickels sitting at the bottom of the shallow water.

  I walked around the pool to the tree and in the back, hidden from view, I saw an unattractive rebar service ladder sticking out of the concrete trunk, which looked even more like concrete back here where less effort was made at verisimilitude.

  I felt both tired and adventurous and so climbed the ladder to reach the hut where I had imagined tropical flowers strewn on soft mats of woven grasses upon which bowls of suckling pig and pineapple could be found, but instead I found cigarette butts strewn on a dirty plywood floor upon which a dirty magazine could be found. I didn’t have the energy to lift myself out of the squalor.

  I could hear the work crews speaking in Spanish, a woman’s voice and that of two men.

  After the sounds of talking, shuffling and the click of locks ceased, I brought my head up slowly to look out the window of the hut. The lights had all been subdued. It’s all so calming, so civilized, everything presented just so. The mannequins are petulant and sexless, the very ideal of romantic idolatry, seductive yet chaste, like tall, drink-of-water blondes, in the contorted poses of technical virgins. They lured me down from my perch and I sat once again by the edge of the pool, wishing that the waterfall hadn’t been shut off.

  It would seem to make sense that someone was watching me and yet I proceeded unmolested through the passages of the mall and this puzzled me. Why weren’t alarm bells ringing? I mean – hello! – 9/11 anyone? Could it be that the nations shopping malls are as vulnerable as our ports and chemical plants; that efforts to make them more secure have been as stymied by the paralysis of partisan politics?

  This was what I’d been searching for, the quiet dignity of retail devoid of human presence and its tendency to corruption.

  I turned my attention to the marketplace in the form of a watch store and as I was inspecting the watches on display I saw my watch, a machined Swiss beauty, the one I was wearing at that very moment, with a marked down price of $300. I bought my watch online for only $70! It m
ade me feel so good, a rush of low-grade euphoria.

  I had needed a new watch. The allegedly water-proof one I’d inherited from Uncle Arthur had rusted to one solid piece, indivisible, with movements on permanent stall. I’d bought another a few years back but preliminary to embarking on an airplane had ‘lost’ it during a pass through the clutches of The Department of Heimatt Security, which had been thrown up over night to cover the country’s collective ass after 9/11.

  It seems rather quaint now that I felt a need to get a watch but in the mid-2000’s things were infinitely more primitive than they are now and I decided to get serious and get online. I was there for hours, four anyway, much longer than I would have lingered at an actual watch store, but the money I saved more than paid off my sweat equity.

  There I am, seated at my computer, neck deep in a lather of indecision. I know I want a discount of at least 70% and I find several candidates. I’m briefly elated for getting through all 35 pages, some 3400 watches; it feels like such an achievement. One watch rises above the rest and I submit it to further questioning. Do I need luminous hands and markers? Deployment Clasp? – (What is?) The case is stainless steel but not brushed. Will it be too glitzy, too back-alley Asian jewelry arcade? Sure it has a sapphire crystal, but will anybody notice it? The case is 35mm in diameter, which is fine but only 6mm thick, which could be a problem. These days, when it comes to watch cases, the thicker and bigger the better. I wouldn’t want a woman drawing false conclusions about me based on a quick read of my watch.

  If ‘Swiss Movement’ (?) were a question, the answer would be methodical, careful, regular but strained.

  Of all the lives I could have lived, the safest would have been Swiss. I’m intrigued by Swiss risk aversion and when it comes to questions of insurance I ask myself ‘What kind of insurance would Jesus get if he were Swiss?’ Did you know that every Swiss citizen is required by law to have a bomb shelter or access to one? Or that they carry even more insurance per capita than the Canadians?

  Ah, Switzerland! – A tucked-in, tight as a drum country, a no-nonsensical, lulling land. I see great crowds of Swiss people roaming their hills, their quaint cobbled streets and their small but surgically clean factories, gurgling and drooling, cooing their contentment. Living there would have saved me from a certain American vulgarity of expression.

  When you get to know Swiss people better, it makes perfect sense why for hundreds of years they have had such a meticulous obsession with time. Time flies and their trains are fast but they are so damned slow! That takes a lot of careful planning.

  If Switzerland is a place where passions run slower than molasses going down Mont Blanc in January, at least the Swiss aren’t as numerous as Germans.

  While traveling across the US once I ran into a huge group of German hippie tourists. They were cleaner and had nicer watches and shoes than your average American hippies. One of them was this gorgeous blonde. She had single-handedly restored my faith in the humpy-ness of German women. As a youth, I’d been conditioned by television to think that they were all tall, icy blondes with tits as pointy as those funny helmets the Kaiser used to wear. Yet whenever I met actual German women in the real world, they were all so thick and bovine.

  Oh, this girl was a dream, about five-foot-ten with a devilishly sweet smile. Her eyes and lips were forever moist. I’d watch her bend over her laundry basket in the common area of the youth hostel, her back tanned a golden brown, like it had been slowly baked and basted. She had tiny symmetrical blonde hairs running almost imperceptibly down either side of her spine, joining in a wispy little goatee on her tail bone. And when she crouched low in front of the dryer, her sweatpants rode down her ass, exposing pure white skin against the line of her tan, like a soft loaf of Wunder Brot.

  I fantasized myself as a bead of sweat dripping slowly down her spine, licking every goose pimple, every goose-step of the way, until at last I fall into that deep, dark crevice between those golden white buns. It’s strange to think of your life and realize you’d give it all up for the chance to be a reductive drop of moisture that would melt away into a woman’s behind.

  I managed to forge an acquaintance with her by first ingratiating myself into the confidence of a traveling companion of hers. Her companion was Swiss and not attractive. I chatted them up and was being brazenly false with both of them. With the Swiss girl I pretended I had a smidgen of interest in her and with my Teutonic tit girl I made myself out to be someone she might take an interest in. I was headed for California. She would eventually get there, she said. I gave her the number of a friend I’d be staying with in Santa Barbara. She said she would call when she got out there. I urged her to come. I was in an ecstasy of sexual reverie for three weeks and jacking off like I hadn’t done since 11th grade.

  Sure enough, the call came. My friend took it as I wasn’t home at the time. He’d been as excited as I was after I’d told him about my open-hausfrau. But the much anticipated arrival turned tragic upon realizing that my beautiful German girl was nowhere to be found. She had given my friend’s number to her Swiss companion and this cow-like creature had invited another Swiss national, the male of the species to stay with us for what seemed like time without end – the Swiss enjoy nesting; they aren’t to be rushed.

  We tried putting them to work but they had no aptitude for anything. Watering the garden up in the dry hills above the coast was important but they didn’t really get the concept of watering with a hose. What do they do back in the old country? I wondered. I tried showing them that it was just like milking a cow except the udder is longer and that didn’t seem to click either.

  To be fair, I have met other Swiss people who are competent. When Arthur was alive, we had a young gay couple of Swiss guys. They were cheerful without being stupid about it, conversant without being chatty and affluent without being showy. They exemplified a type of European man who at the age of 17 is already thinking about his retirement, setting up his pension plan, getting the ok from mama.

  Arthur was away at the time and I was minding the store while he was gone. I liked the Swiss and so invited them to go to a party where I knew there would be lots of other young gay guys for them to mingle with, but they were standard bearers of sobriety and kept their youthful adventurism on a short leash. They declined.

  They had assumed I was proprietor of the B&B, rather than just its temporary caretaker and when they found out I didn’t own it, they gave me one of those looks human beings give to animals that are cute but known to have short life expectancies. As a soon-to-be middle-aged person cleaning toilets in a house I didn’t own, they pitied me. Do you know what it’s like to be pitied by a couple of Swiss homosexuals?

  It’s that same pity, not to be confused with buyer’s remorse, which I can’t separate out from the retail experience.

  Why do the problems of the world get so caught up in my heart with the trials of romantic love and why does romance cling intractably to advertising? It is this knot of desire and the miseries of the news week that makes me ache and long for utopias and golden ages. What does the survival of a family in Africa have to do with my love life?

  The act of my salvation would require such little effort. For four dollars a day, I could feed, clothe and educate a large family. A few choice words, one provocative gaze could secure for me a lover with minimal expenditure. Why then do I hold back?

  When I finally decided on a Swiss watch, it came in the mail only two days after I ordered it. I took it to my bed; I opened it and my eyes teared. I want to do good, but most days I just get by.

  Chapter XXI: Devils