Reporter: Let's finish up with hamburgers. Then we'll move onto other things: grilled cheese sandwiches, chili.
Mexican Fry Cook: I've never been interviewed before. I'd love to talk about chili.
Reporter: Don't worry. We'll talk about it. I'm very certain my readers want to hear everything you know about chili, but first let's finish up with hamburgers. That hamburger you cooked when you were ten years old was an amateur hamburger, wasn't it?
Mexican Fry Cook: I guess so. No one paid me to cook it.
Reporter: When did you cook your first professional burger?
Mexican Fry Cook: Do you mean when I got paid to cook my first hamburger?
Reporter: Yes.
Mexican Fry Cook: That would have been my first job. 1927 in Denver. I went to Denver to work in my uncle's garage but I didn't like working on cars, so my cousin had a little cafe near the bus depot and I went down there and started helping him out cooking and pretty soon I had a shift all my own.
I was seventeen.
I've been cooking ever since, but I cook a lot of other things than hamburgers. I cook—
Reporter: Let's finish with the burgers first and then we'll get onto other things. Did you ever have any remarkable experiences cooking a hamburger?
Mexican Fry Cook (now beginning to show a little concern): How can you have a remarkable experience cooking a hamburger? I mean, you just put the patty on the grill and cook it. You turn it over once and put it on a bun. That's a hamburger. That's all there is to it. Nothing else can happen.
Reporter: What's the most hamburgers that you ever cooked in a day?
Mexican Fry Cook: I've counted a lot of things in my life but I've never counted hamburgers. People order them and I cook them. That's all I know about it. I mean, sometimes I'm busier than other times and sometimes when I'm busy people order a lot of hamburgers, but I've never counted them. I've never even thought about counting hamburgers. Why should I count hamburgers?
Reporter (undaunted): Who is the most famous person you ever cooked a hamburger for?
Mexican Fry Cook: What's the name of the paper you're writing for again?
Reporter: The Johnson Union High School Gazette. We have a large circulation. A lot of people out of high school read our paper instead of the Johnson City Herald.
Mexican Fry Cook: Do your readers want to know this much about hamburgers? I had some very interesting experiences in the War, cooking in the South Pacific. Once I was cooking breakfast on Kwajalein when a Japanese bomber—
Reporter (interrupting): That sounds very exciting but let's finish up with the hamburgers, so we can get onto other subjects. I know that talking about hamburgers may seem dull to you a professional, but my readers are fascinated by hamburgers. My editor told me to find out as much as I could about hamburgers. Our readers eat a lot of hamburgers. Some of them eat three or four hamburgers a day.
Mexican Fry Cook (impressed): That's a lot of hamburgers.
Reporter: In my article I'll mention the name of this restaurant and you'll be getting a lot more business. I wouldn't be surprised if this place became famous. Who knows. You might even become part owner because of this interview.
Mexican Fry Cook: Did you get the spelling of my name right?
Reporter: G-O-M-E-Z.
Mexican Fry Cook: That's right. What else do you want to know about hamburgers? What the hell! If people want to know about hamburgers, I sure as hell won't stand in the way.
Reporter: Have you ever felt sad cooking a hamburger?
Mexican Fry Cook: Only if I'd spent all my money on a girl or if a girl left me. Then I'd feel sad even if I was cooking pancakes. The most trouble I have in this world is with girls. I always get girlfriends who give me a lot of trouble. They take all my money and I feel bad afterwards, but some day I'll meet the right one, I hope. In the meantime, yeah, girls make me feel sad when I'm cooking and that includes hamburgers.
I'm dating a girl now who's a beauty operator. All she wants me to do is take her out to fancy restaurants and nightclubs. I have to work two shifts to keep her in restaurants and nightclubs, and you can bet your life that she won't eat here.
I once asked her if she wanted to eat dinner here. Of course I wasn't cooking. It wasn't my shift, but she said, "Are you kidding?" Three hours later she ate so many shrimp at this fancy seafood place that I had to hock my watch the next day. She wouldn't eat here if this was the last place on earth.
I stood there with my notebook imitating as if I were taking down notes about his love life that he was really getting into now, but they weren't notes. They were just nonsense symbols and useless abbreviations in my notebook. They could not be used for anything, but whenever he mentioned hamburgers my notes became as bright and clear as a searchlight.
Reporter (interrupting the boring tragedy of his life. He really wasn't a very good-looking man. The only reason women would go out with him was that he worked sixteen hours a day cooking hamburgers and he would spend all his money on them): Did you ever feel happy cooking a hamburger?
Mexican Fry Cook: If it was the last hamburger of the day, and I was going out on a date afterwards, I might feel happy because I was getting off work and was going to maybe have some fun with a girl.
I ingeniously ended the interview by keeping him away from cooking breakfast on Kwajalein during the War and a Japanese bomber—Also, his chili ended up being very much left out in the cold. As I was leaving the cafe, he began to have second thoughts about the interview. "When is this interview going to come out?" he said.
"Soon," I said.
"Do you really think people want to know so much about hamburgers?" he said.
"It's the latest rage," I said.
"I didn't know that," he said.
"Keep those burgers coming," I said. "And you'll be a very famous person."
"Famous for cooking hamburgers?"
"No one ever heard about Charles Lindbergh until he flew across the Atlantic, did they?"
"Yeah," he said. "But cooking hamburgers is a lot different."
"Not that different," I said. "Think about it."
"OK," he said. "I'll think about it, but I can't see what hamburgers have to do with Charles Lindbergh. I don't think they have anything in common."
"Let me put it another way," I said, rapidly approaching the door on my way out. "Lindbergh took some sandwiches with him to eat when he flew across the Atlantic. Right?"
"I guess so," he said. "I think I remember something like that."
"Well, none of them were hamburgers," I said. "They were all cheese sandwiches."
"All cheese?" he said.
"Not one hamburger," I said, nodding my head solemnly. "Everything would have been completely different if he had taken three hamburgers with him."
"How do you figure that?" the Mexican fry cook said. "If he took hamburgers with him, they'd just get cold and a hot burger tastes a lot better than a cold burger."
"If Charles Lindbergh had taken three cold hamburgers," I said. "With him when he crossed the Atlantic all by himself in The Spirit of St. Louis, he would have been famous for the cold hamburgers and not the actual flight itself, right?"
Before he could reply to that I had closed the door to the cafe from the outside. I had a feeling that whatever girl he saw that night, no matter how many orders of shrimp she ate, she would make him feel better.
I interviewed about two dozen fry cooks in my quest for burger Satori. I went to meat markets and interviewed butchers about the quality of hamburger meat, personal feelings and reminiscences and anything odd they might tell me about the making of hamburger.
I went to bakeries where the hamburger buns were baked and interviewed bakers to find out everything I could about the baking of hamburger buns and any stories related to their baking.
An old baker who had heart trouble told me that he always prayed when he put the hamburger buns in the oven to bake. I asked him if he prayed when he took them out. He said no.
I wanted bizarre stories about hamburger buns!
I searched high and low for burger information.
I interviewed over fifty chosen-at-random victims to tell me their personal experiences eating burgers. I wanted unusual burger stories. I wanted happy burger yarns and amusing incidents concerning the burger.
I wanted tales of hamburger terror.
I collected a dozen file cards dealing with people who got sick eating hamburgers. A woman told me that she once got so sick eating a hamburger that she fell off the front porch.
There was no extreme that I wouldn't go to find out more about the hamburger.
I looked for hamburger references in the Bible. I was certain that there must be an overlooked reference to a burger in the Book of Revelations. Maybe the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse liked hamburgers.
My days and nights were nothing but fields of burgers for months and months after we had to move away from the February-17th incident with the rifle in the apple orchard.
Well, the truck and its load of furniture are still pasted like some kind of greeting card to a mirage which is the past. I should let them advance and take their rightful places beside the pond.
They are only about a hundred yards away from the pond and all I have to do is let go of them and they will drive right up here where I am sitting.
But for some strange reason, I won't let the people drive up to the pond and take their furniture off the truck and go about their evening's fishing a third of a century ago.
I'm quite certain they are dead by now.
They were in their late thirties back then, and they were so huge and fat that they probably died of heart attacks maybe twenty years ago when they were in their early fifties.
They both had that early-fifties-heart-attack look to them.
First, one would die and then the other would die, and that would be the end of them, except for whatever I write down here, trying to tell a very difficult story that is probably getting more difficult because I am still searching for some meaning in it and perhaps even a partial answer to my own life, which as I grow closer and closer to death, the answer gets further and further away.
In my mind I can see two extra large graves in the middle of nowhere with not a single piece of fishing furniture in sight.
It's totally over for them now: no more truck, no more each other, no more couch right beside the edge of the pond with them sitting there fishing into the dark, illuminated by three electric lamps converted to kerosene and a fire coming from a small wood stove with no pipe because you don't need a pipe when there's no roof or house or room, just the outdoors beside a pond in perfect harmony with their fantasy.
I'm going to leave them in the past, driving against reality for a little while longer. They don't know how slowly they are travelling to the pond because they've been dead for so many years now.
They will remain for a while longer two American eccentrics freeze-framed in grainy black and white thirty-two years ago at sunset:
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
Dust ... American ... Dust
David didn't like to shoot at the junkyard. He said it was boring. He was two years older than I and my secret friend. I was a sort of social outcast in school because of my obvious poverty and ways that were sometimes hard for other classmates to understand. Basically, my only claim to fame was my lack of fear of the old man who lived at the pond.
That kind of fame has its limitations.
You're not going to be voted the most popular kid in your class because you're not afraid of an old man who has only one lung and lives in a packing-crate shack beside a pond that doesn't even have a name.
But I was smart and a year ahead in school and attending junior high.
David and I did a lot of things together but we always did them alone. I was not admitted into his social group. I wasn't invited to any parties that he gave or to drop by his house. We always met on the sly.
David was an enormously popular kid: the most outstanding athlete in school and class president. Whenever anything was voted on, he got it. His grades were straight A's.
He was tall and slender and had fine blond hair and all the girls were madly in love with him. His parents worshipped the ground he walked on. Whereas a lot of other kids got into some kind of trouble, he always got into achievement and glory. He had everything going for him. His future was unlimited.
I played a hidden role in his life.
He liked the odd paths of my imagination.
He could talk to me about things that he couldn't talk to other kids about. He told me that he wasn't as confident and self-assured as everybody else thought he was, and that sometimes he was afraid of something that he couldn't put his finger on.
"I'm scared of something, but I don't know what it is," he once said. "It bothers me all the time. Sometimes I get very close to knowing what it is, but then when I can almost see it, it fades away and I'm left alone, wondering what it is."
He was also the best dancer in school and sang "Blue Moon" at student body assemblies. His version of "Blue Moon" made the girls' hearts beat like the hearts of excited kittens.
David went out with a girl who was a cheerleader and president of the drama club and played the leading role in all their plays. By any standard, she was the prettiest girl in school.
I admired her from a distance, but I had a strong feeling that she had no idea we shared space on the same planet. Their going out together was the biggest single topic in school, but he never once mentioned her to me.
He and I would meet at odd times in a constant but almost accidental pattern. We saw each other two or three times a week but seldom were our meetings worked out in advance.
They just happened.
The day after I got the bullets when I should have gotten the hamburger, I bumped into him at the bicycle rack at school.
He was of course alone. He had been talking to another kid as I walked up, but he finished his conversation with him and he left just as I arrived.
So there we were alone together again.
"Hi," he said. "Let's go for a ride."
His bicycle was in perfect condition. His spokes and chain shined like silverware. Mine were muddy and rusty. The paint on his bicycle looked brand-new. My paint just looked.
He led the way and somehow we were riding along a street where not many other kids lived or rode their bicycles. It was almost a kidless zone.
We didn't say anything as we rode along until he started talking. I always let him initiate the conversation. He was the king of our friendship and I was his vassal. I didn't mind. I had other things to think about. Though he seemed to be the crystallization of excellence and normality, I found him almost as odd as I was.
Finally, he spoke: "I had a dream about it last night," he said.
"Could you see it?" I said.
"No, just before I can see it, the damn thing disappears and I wake up feeling strange and unhappy. I've had dreams about it all week," he said. "I wish I could see it just once. That's all I ask."
"Maybe you'll see it someday," I said.
"I hope so," he said.
We bicycled by a cat.
The cat didn't pay any attention to us.
It was a huge gray cat with enormous green eyes. They were like very small ponds.
"I got some bullets for my gun," I said. "Do you want to go shooting tomorrow?"
"Not at the junkyard," he said.
"No, the orchard," I said. "We'll shoot rotten apples."
"That sounds like a good idea," he said. "I've been feeling so bad recently because of those dreams that I'd like to shoot some rotten apples."
Then he smiled. "Yeah, I'll shoot some rotten apples and then I'll feel better."
"It beats doing nothing," I said.
We pedalled another block and then we saw another cat. This one was smaller than the first one, but it was gray, too. Actually, it looked identical to the first cat except for its size and it also had enorm
ous green pond-like eyes.
"Did you see that cat?" he said.
"Yeah," I said. Then I knew what he was going to say next but I let him say it first.
"It looks like that other cat, but it's smaller," he said.
Those were the exact words that I knew he was going to say.
"I wonder if they're related," I said.
"Yeah, maybe so," he said. "The big cat's the mother and the small cat is the son or daughter."
"Makes sense to me," I said.
"For some strange reason those cats make me think about those people who brought their furniture to the pond last summer," he said. "Remember when you took me to see them?"
"Yeah," I said.
"They were really strange people. I wonder why those cats made me think about them," he said.
I wondered about that, too.
I put the two cats together in my mind and I couldn't figure out why they made him think about the pond people and their furniture. The cats' eyes reminded me of ponds but that was as far as I could travel with it.
"You got to know those people real well," he said. "Why did they bring their furniture with them?"
"I guess they just wanted to be comfortable while they fished," I said.
"They came there every night, didn't they?" he said. "What did they do with all the fish they caught? I mean, they were both huge people but nobody could eat that much fish. When I was there with you, they caught about thirty fish and they kept them all. Those people couldn't eat thirty fish night after night. That's fifteen fish apiece."
What David was talking about was something that had never really crossed my mind before. What did they do with all those fish? because they always kept every fish they caught. They even kept the smallest ones. They put all the fish on a big stringer in the water and fastened it to the shore with a railroad spike. They always brought a special very heavy hammer with them to pound the spike in with.
It was a part of their ritual.
That means that every week they must have eaten at least 105 fish apiece and some of the fish were big catfish and sometimes they caught bass that weighed up to five pounds.
They always cooked dinner at the pond on a wood-burning kitchen stove, but of course they didn't need a pipe because there wasn't any ceiling to their kitchen.
Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away Page 29
