by Rick Bailey
The term “cruller,” according to Free Merriman-Webster, comes from Middle Dutch crul, meaning “curl,” although according to my urban dictionary, cruller also means “anus” (“yank those rosemary [sic] beads out of my cruller”) and “a man who likes to pee on himself” (“My friend is a cruller so he always takes the stall instead of the urinal”). Very well then. But the best definition—at least the one that best harmonizes with my upbringing—is “a tractor tire–shaped donut.” That pretty much nails it, while inducing fantasies of size. When I was in the ninth grade, a cruller the size of a tractor tire would have been heavenly. Or perhaps an inner tube–sized cruller, enabling a gluttonous adolescent to float down the Rifle River, yanking off hunks of donut and stuffing them in his mouth.
I was in college when Tim Hortons came along. It was the early seventies. At that time, Tim Hortons and Wendy’s had not yet become a combined, multinational corporation. Tim Hortons was still a far-off Canadian thing, making it more exotic than Dawn’s. I had a pal from Philadelphia named Denise who, one weekend when her friend Lynne was visiting, decided to join me on a trip to Stratford. We saw Love’s Labor’s Lost at the Shakespeare Festival and slept in pup tents in a hot, weedy lot posing as a campground, Denise and Lynne together in one tent, me solo in the other. The next morning we sat at the counter in Tim Hortons eating crullers and drinking Tim’s heavenly coffee. For me, donut regret had already crept into the experience. Even one tasted like too many.
At that time my friend and her companion had a Philly pal studying art in London, so on our way back to Detroit, we stopped to visit this friend Sharon, who was older and married and had a house. To celebrate this little reunion, we did not eat donuts. We ate scrapple, a Philadelphia pork mush delicacy also known as “pon haas” by the Pennsylvania Dutch and “death by sandwich” by anyone not raised in the mid-Atlantic states. What else are you going to do with your hog offal?
It was a brief stopover, marked by an awkward moment when Sharon’s husband, who wore baggy shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt and had long, shaggy hair, ushered us into the vagina room, formerly known as the dining room, to show us the latest masterpiece in his wife’s oeuvre. The painting was right above the buffet and depicted a woman’s thighs and gigantic sexual vortex. There was nothing stylized or abstract about it. This was no Georgia O’Keeffe flower. It was just a big anatomical billboard, in garish colors, that caused me to reflect on the difference between art (take a long look, it makes you feel good) and porn (take a quick peek, it makes you feel bad). But this thing seemed neither art nor pornography.
Denise and Lynne gazed, nodded, and approved. They said it made a statement. Sharon said that was her purpose. The feminist movement was in full swing, represented in the popular imagination by bra burning, by Gloria Steinem and her glasses, by Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique. This work of art, Sharon said, was neither aesthetic nor erotic. It made a statement.
Yeah, the Philly girls said. It’s rhetorical.
We stood there in silence, sucking scrapple from our teeth, contemplating the rhetorical vagina.
“What do you think?” the husband asked me, with obvious pride. I had an idea it was not rhetorical to him.
I was at a loss. I would have been happy going back to the kitchen, even if it meant eating scrapple. Finally I just said what was on my mind: “It’s really big.”
Many years after that my wife and I took her cousin’s family, visiting from Italy, to Disney World, where we encountered no end of food difficulty. It seemed to me, Mickey and all those roving characters notwithstanding, the place might have more properly been called Hormel Land. Hormel and its smoked, processed meat were everywhere. Breakfast in particular was a challenge. How do Italians start the day? Sausage and eggs? No. Cereal? Don’t believe those Müeslix commercials. They like coffee and pastries. Italian kids like cookies and chocolate spread. There was no chocolate spread, and none of the cookies were right anyway. The cousin’s wife could find nothing to feed her child, a nervous little boy around three years old, until the second day, when she discovered sugar donuts that resembled their bomboloni. She broke the pastries into pieces and fed them to her boy, who lay back in her arms in dreamy donut ecstasy. What he didn’t eat she finished. They had finally found a food they could reason with.
I took psychology in college. Child psychology, abnormal psychology, psychology of religion, psychology of sex. I may even have read some of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and learned about the pleasure principle and wish fulfillment, about unconscious desire finding expression in dreams. The idea of dream interpretation seemed appealing. As far as I could tell, there were no rules other than “this stands for that” and “make it work.” In your dream you are running. You’re trying to get away from something. Those white basketballs in the dream—those are cauliflowers, which stand for your mother, who insisted you eat your vegetables. You’re trying to get away from your mother.
I have an idea what Freud would have said about my donut dream, about donuts in all their various permutations. He might have been right. These days, I can’t drive by Tim Hortons and not think about rhetorical vagina. But am I really working through unconscious turmoil and wish fulfillment? I don’t think so. For one thing, deep down, I’m a very superficial person. And for another, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a donut is just a donut.
10
Love and Breakup in the Time of Watergate
My junior year of college I had a close call. I was driving home from school one Friday afternoon, having pulled an all-nighter studying for a test. The class was psychology of sex. I’d had a lot of psych by that time, but not a lot of sex. I needed one more psychology class for a minor, and then I was done. But I still kind of hoped, as one hopes of all psych classes, that this last class would give me some answers.
I was going home that weekend because the trio I played in had a Friday and Saturday night gig at the Red Fox Bar. I was also going home to see a girl named Suzanne. I wanted to find out if she and I had a thing.
I was an hour up the road from campus that afternoon when I realized I was in trouble. It was a damp Michigan day in October, sky the color of slag. Three or four times my head dropped and snapped back up, and I realized each time—with horror—that I had been asleep for a few seconds. North of Flint, I pulled into a truck stop and ordered breakfast. Morning food, I thought. I knew my Pavlov. I had eggs and potatoes and drank a lot of coffee. Awake and face the day. Thirty minutes later, on the business loop through Saginaw, driving with the windows down and my shoes off and the AM radio volume turned up, I started to nod off again. It’s a curvy stretch of road. The last thing I heard before my car crossed lanes heading for the median was the Singing Nun’s folked-up version of “The Lord’s Prayer.”
I grazed the guardrail at fifty per. The car ricocheted back onto the road, and I jerked awake.
The singing nun was still singing when I crossed back into the right lane and pulled onto the shoulder to stop and assess the damage. I was trembling, both frightened and relieved. I got out of the car and took a few huge gulps of cool air. Good Lord, I thought, I am an idiot.
A few minutes later, I turned into the driveway at home, where I was met by my father. I explained to him what had happened.
“Really,” he said, shaking his head. “The Lord’s Prayer?”
The driver’s side door screeched when I opened and closed it. I remember thinking, looking at that savaged door panel and trim: How’d the door handle not get swiped off?
“It’s a miracle,” he said.
“Yes, it is,” I said.
The idea was Suzanne would meet me at the bar that night, hear the band, and we would talk between sets. I went in the house, took a shower, and called her.
“That’s tonight?” she said. “I have to work. I’m subbing for Delphine.”
“Well,” I said, “what about tomorrow night?”
“Tomorrow night too.” She waited tables at the Lil Chef. Delphine had ga
llbladder trouble and a sick kid. Suzanne said she was sorry.
I told her it was okay. I kind of wanted to talk. The bar wasn’t exactly ideal for, you know, talk talk.
“Talk talk,” she said. “That sounds serious.”
I told her I had driven off the road on the way home and hit a guardrail. I felt kind of shook up. Plus, you know, what were we doing?
“How about Sunday?”
I had to get back to school on Sunday, but I was motivated. “What about breakfast?” I said. “How would that be?”
She and I had met that summer in an American lit class I was taking at the local community college. The instructor was old and stuffy and gentle and kind of drunk on literature in a way I was starting to admire. One day Suzanne came in and sat next to me. She wore jeans and a white muslin shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbow. The top two buttons on the shirt were undone. The jeans and shirt were tight. I noticed there were other vacant seats in the room. She had sat next to me on purpose.
We heard about the Over-soul and friendship and self-reliance for half an hour. We went over some passages from Emerson and then took a break. I followed Suzanne out of the classroom. She leaned back against the wall in the hallway and crossed her arms, waiting. It was my move.
“So,” I said, “what are you into?”
She gave me an amused look.
“You know,” I said. I tried to embellish the question with a couple of interpretive hand gestures.
She said she was into—I’m pretty sure she gave me air quotes—the Transcendentalists. She liked Dickinson more than Whitman. She appreciated the Puritans for the diaries they kept but otherwise found them repressive. She was taking this class, she said, for a refresher. She planned to go to law school.
“What about you?”
I said I didn’t know. I told her right now I was at Eastern, currently in psych, adding—when I saw the eye roll coming—that I thought I’d end up in English. It was my turn to say something about the course, to mention someone we’d read. Panicked, I said I really liked the William Cullen Bryant stuff from last week, especially the poem about the bird.
“Vainly,” she said, “the fowler’s eye might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong.”
“That’s the one,” I said. She memorized. “You memorize?”
She said it was a hobby. And did I want to come over to her house after class?
I followed her home, that day and every day for the three remaining weeks of class. We sat on the couch and made out. While we did that, we listened to Steely Dan and watched the Watergate hearings, some days both at the same time. A parade of witnesses took the stand. John Dean testified. Suzanne guided my hands. Alexander Butterfield testified. She crossed a leg over mine.
We drove north and went swimming one day. I think she wanted me to see her in a bikini. Another day, while we watched the hearings, her mother passed through the living room and went into the kitchen. She was tall and pale and—I thought—prematurely gray. She was not the least interested in us or in what we were doing.
“There’s tapes of conversations in the Oval Office,” Suzanne called to her. “Nixon’s in a lot of trouble.”
A kitchen cupboard opened and closed. Her mother floated past us again, holding a cocktail.
One afternoon I met her father when I was leaving. He had short dark hair and black-framed glasses. He reminded me of Howard Baker. I wondered if he was a lawyer.
“Nice to meet you,” he said. We were standing in the doorway. There was an awkward silence. He stepped aside to let me out and then turned to Suzanne and said, “What about that Johnny?”
The Red Fox Bar was a farmer/trucker/ass-kicker bar at a four-way stop west of Chesaning, the only sign of civilization on that corner and for some miles beyond. It was run by a little woman named Rita and her disgruntled son, Dave. They paid us thirty bucks each for playing four sets a night.
Just before our first set, which started at 9:30, Rita would get in her Impala and drive home, leaving her son to mix drinks and serve up chips and jerky. He also bounced as needed. When business was slow, Dave leaned on the bar next to a vat of pickled eggs. This, he said, was not where he wanted to be. He said he really wanted to be a cop. I think bouncing was the only thing he found satisfying about the job. Busy nights he outsourced bouncing to a long-haired Mexican man named Pinto. Pinto stood at the end of the bar in a swath of shadow and glowered at patrons. He bounced for pleasure. I’m pretty sure he did it for nothing. Beating on guys made him feel good. He knew what he wanted.
Both nights that weekend I sang a couple of Beatles’ songs: “You’re Going to Lose that Girl” and “You Can’t Do That.” Every so often I’d look to the front door and imagine Suzanne walking into the bar, smiling, and waving at me. I pictured us sitting by ourselves at a corner table in the back—far from the smell of cigarette smoke, spilled beer, and urinal cakes—having a serious talk.
She never came.
My car door screeched open and closed in her driveway that Sunday morning. I think I got to her house a few minutes early.
I knocked on the door, a few polite knuckle knocks. When nothing happened, I rang the doorbell.
A light rain was falling. I stepped off the porch and looked up at the second-story windows. I checked my watch. Straight up 9:00 a.m. I knocked again, a little harder, and rang again, more insistently, starting to feel angry and a little ashamed. The doorbell in particular got me. You ring a doorbell six or seven times, how do you not feel needy and ridiculous? I rang it again. Leaning close to the door I could hear the tones behind it. I could picture the sleeping house, lights off, the angle of the couch facing the television where we had watched the hearings. I could see the magazines and ashtrays on the end tables, the pillows we rearranged when we kissed while listening to Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work.”
I stepped back from the door and said, out loud, “Come on, Suzanne.”
Then I heard the doorknob rattle and the lock turn.
The door swung open. Her father stood there. He was wearing flannel pajamas and a robe, no glasses. He had an unlit filter cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth.
He nodded hello. “She asked me to give you this.”
He handed me a white business envelope. It was sealed and heavy. I must have looked confused.
“It’s from Suzanne,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “We were supposed to have breakfast.”
“You were,” he said. “She’s not coming down.”
He shrugged, pulled the cigarette out of his mouth, and examined it. He coughed a gooey cough and started pushing the door closed. Then he pointed at the envelope. “She said read it. You’ll understand.” The door clicked shut and the lock turned.
I stood there a second and then got back in my car. I remember I slammed the car door hard. For some reason, I raised the envelope to my face and smelled it. The paper felt cool against my lips. It smelled like mint.
Inside the envelope there were four or five pieces of paper. On top was a handwritten note. She said she was sorry. She said she was engaged to be married. The engagement had just happened. Long-term boyfriend, out of her life, then suddenly back in it.
Johnny.
At the end, she signed off. Not sincerely, not warmly. Not with regret. Not even her full name. Just the initial, S.
Along with the note she had enclosed three or four poems. She had typed them for me, each one perfectly framed on its page. I sat in the driveway and read the one on top by Kahlil Gibran. I learned that there were spaces in our togetherness, that the strings of the lute were alone and quivering, that the oak tree and the cypress could not grow in each other’s shadow. This message was very helpful. It was a sigh to let me go by. I imagined Suzanne rolling sheets of paper into her typewriter, opening a book, and meticulously typing those poems. Or maybe she had memorized them.
The truth is, I was sort of relieved. I had flunked the test. I felt lucky. I folded up the papers and put them
back in the envelope. And I remembered: breakfast.
The hostess at Lil Chef told me I could sit anywhere. When I asked her if Delphine was working that morning, she nodded and pointed. I took a booth in her section, next to a window that looked out on the road. Across the street was a department store parking lot, more or less empty on Sunday morning. Gulls whirled above it, landed, and strutted around puddles. Delphine brought me eggs and potatoes and coffee. She had nice nails and long fingers and long artificially black hair gathered in a ponytail she wore over her right shoulder. She called me “Hon.”
She was refilling my coffee cup when I said to her, “I thought you were sick.”
She set my bill on the table and cocked her head. “What?”
I told her I knew Suzanne. “She said you were sick. She was covering a couple shifts for you. Last night. And Friday night.”
“She did, that’s right.”
“She did?” I said. “Really?” That much, at least, was true.
“She’s a sweet kid. And smart.”
I didn’t know about sweet. I said, yes, she certainly was smart.
“She wants to be a lawyer.”
“That’s what I hear,” I said.
“I could see her doing that,” Delphine said. She gave the coffeepot a gentle shake. “I just hope she doesn’t get stuck doing this.” She thought for a minute and then added, “It’s easy for a girl to get stuck.”
I took a while finishing my coffee. There was a newspaper on the table with fresh Watergate news—the tapes, the special prosecutor, the obstruction of justice charges. Could Nixon survive? What did the President know, and when did he know it? The questions seemed simple enough where impeachable offenses were concerned. But between two people, maybe not. What did we know, and when did we know it?
I left Delphine a nice tip from my Red Fox money and waved good-bye to her on the way out. I had a two-hour drive back to school on not quite enough sleep. I had AM radio to keep me company. At the end of the term, I would have to get my car fixed. That was six weeks and a couple more psych tests away.
