by Doug Weaver
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I’m on the spot. Korn just sips his Coke – and I’ve already said that I’m hungry – really hungry. The plump counter guy has generously given us each a set of white plastic utensils, which I don’t really want to use because, in my long experience with plastic knives and forks, this particular class of knife, fork and spoon is just too flimsy to get the job done. Tines break off and the knives simply bend into unusable forms and the spoons seem to be only good for scooping up dandelions. I want to pick the whole burrito up and eat it in maybe three or four bites tops, but these burritos are of the “wet” variety. Picking them up would be as messy as scarfing down ribs at some barbeque joint. But with seemingly unlimited patience, Korn’s just sipping his Coke and sawing away at a tiny portion of the delectable stuffed flour tortilla. I’m jealous, and I’m also salivating.
“We gotta use what we have to work with,” Korn says without looking up.
“Yeah, so what,” I say.
He looks right at me: “These knives and forks,” he says. “As nice a place as Antonio’s is, they don’t really furnish stainless steel utensils – they give us these. Takes patience.”
“Impossible,” I say. “Look.”
And I give Korn a demonstration by diving in and trying to saw through the stuffed flour tortilla, which leaves both the knife and fork a mangled mess.
“Your expectations aren’t realistic,” he says.
“My expectations are just to eat,” I say. “I’m really fucking hungry.”
“See this?” he says, as he licks the red sauce off his white knife and holds it up.
“Yeah, I know. It’s pathetic. Adding serrated edges to something so flimsy is ridiculous.”
“Nah,” he says. “It’s all about your expectations. The whole point of serration is to multiply one cutting edge into many, which makes total sense, even if the material it’s made of is flimsy, like this plastic knife, or hard like a Samurai sword, or your dad’s steak knives way back at home. Remember them? The purpose of each one of the serrations is to reduce the point of contact between the cutting instrument and what’s being cut, kind of like the difference between punching a hole through a piece of leather with an ice pick or a baseball bat. Think of it that way. Each of these little serrations makes it possible to literally rend a piece of flesh – or a flour tortilla – or a sirloin steak – but with movements that are commensurate with the size of the cutting edge and its strength. And being for the moment in California, we should all – whether it’s conscious or not – be aware that this state itself has a cutting edge – and I’m only talking geography here – and not some vague notion called Hollywood, unless you think spending hundreds of millions of dollars on dropping cars from airplanes has anything to do with telling stories – then fine. Hollywood is fucking avant garde in that case, and each brand new sequel that’s shit out with a numeral from II to VI tacked on the ass end of its title is hoped will be just the cookie cutter cutting edge that will finally tear the jugular vein of discrimination from the public so that every last drop of integrity is encouraged to leak out into the cultural storm drains of the world. I’m talking about the mountains. California’s serrated cutting edge is called the Sierras, those jagged mountains that bisect the length of the state. Because of the Sierras, Planet Earth is tearing the shit out of space using California’s serrated cutting edge – or maybe not – but just for argument’s sake, maybe at least pretend that earth’s prow, as it hurtles through space, is California. Or on a micro level, maybe California is the template for the design of sharks’ teeth, which all have these repetitious bumps, these – he puts a little swirly English on the word’s emphasis: “Serr” – and rolls the R: – “r-r-r-ations.” He continues:
“Sharks’ teeth are serrated for the same reason. They make sharks more efficient when they eat – kind of like what I’m doing and what you’d like to do. Forgive me, Bert. I get carried away sometimes. But back to California for a minute. Do you think it’s just a happy coincidence that ‘Sierra’ and ‘serrated,’ as words, look similar? What came first? The idea or the mountains? But then again, there’s that road of privilege in Santa Barbara, Alameda Padre Serra – or APS as it’s known to the locals. Onomastically speaking, Junipero Padre Serra was the cutting edge of the Catholic Church here in the Golden State – a double edged serrated cutting instrument that cut out the souls of California’s Chumash population so that the Roman Catholic Church might have a place to fester here. So think of these little flimsy white knives as maybe the original cutting instruments used to cut out raw unadulterated faith. It must have taken immeasurable patience. Know your strength and know your enemy. And the indigenous population who were successfully converted from a vague faith in the benevolence of Nature into a fearful belief in the Holy Trinity? They all became flimsy copies of the good father’s repeated cutting edges – thousands of them, cutting and sawing and tearing the soul from this state – not to mention the American perpetuation of the Spanish and Roman knives in Europe, even here in the City of Angels where there was literally, in a preferred form of Auto-de-fe, one Jew burned at the stake for being a heretic.”
I want to tell Korn that he’s just jacking off, mentally speaking. But I don’t. I force myself to become comfortable in my discomfort – at least less uncomfortable, because I’m starting to panic and I want, more than anything, to avoid any kind of existential crisis, something I’ve never been good at. I hope Korn won’t notice that my breathing has quickened and that I’ve begun to surreptitiously scan the place for an escape route.
“Lighten up,” he says, then turns away from me.
“Excuse me!” Korn yells to the plump counter guy. “Can you bring more knives and forks for my friend Bert, please.”
“Sure thing,” the guy answers to Korn.
And he dutifully scurries over and deposits a brand new set of plastic utensils before me.
Korn gently grasps the guy’s arm.
“And please,” Korn says – there’s an unusual kindness in his voice as he speaks – “is there any way you could put on some different music…please?”
Amazingly, at that exact moment, the oom-pah-pah mariachi music comes to an abrupt halt, which produces quizzical looks from all of us, including the counter guy.
“That’s was weird,” the WOOF guy says, and he heads to his post inside the kitchen to check on the problem.
After a few moments, he returns to our table: “Looks like our iPod took a dump.”
Korn says he didn’t bring any music with him – and neither did I.
The counter guy asks if it’s okay if we listen to the radio, which can be hooked in to the PA system pretty easily, and Korn says sure, to go for it.
The counter guy has hooked the radio into the PA system and scanned a few stations on the FM band before landing on a preferred station, and the resultant sprint through several of the news stations and heavy metal offerings kind of affords the same kind of experience as maybe a philharmonic orchestra tuning up before the maestro takes the podium, but not as thrilling – or hopeful. With finality, the search through radio signals ends on LA’s classical music station, and there’s that announcer – do they call classical music announcers disk jockeys? – whose voice makes you want to scream to the radio: blow your fucking nose, dude!, he comes on and lazily, with an effete phlegm-ridden mien, although also with a rising melisma of pronunciation and intonation, kind of lets the word “Mazurkas” slither from his lips.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Taciturn: A person of reserved or uncommunicative speech.
“G-d, if only!” thinks Moishe Silverstein, beads of sweat growing on his forehead and his forearm, as he furiously masturbates while he sits on the toilet and entertains a memory of his mother describing
his father’s personality. Moishe forces himself to concentrate, mentally squeezing images of his tyrannical judgmental father, arms crossed, mouthing the word “sinner” while shaking his head in disgust, out of his thoughts. “That’s like calling Hitler impolite!” and “I’ll bet Hitler’s parents let him at least have his own thoughts once in a while.” Moishe bears down. He beats his cock faster, hoping that his fury will steer his lustful thoughts toward Sarah Blattman instead of Ryan Gossling.
It’s Friday night, the Sabbath. Moishe lives with his parents at 2044 South Kenmore Ave., right across the street from Korn’s house. His mother’s name is Ruth and his father’s name is Chayim. His father is a storekeeper who sells Kosher meats in the Pico/Robertson area – Chayim’s (Star of David) Kosher Meats – and has twice in Moishe’s lifetime been caught representing to his customers that certain of the most popular meats in his store were Kosher when, in fact, they were cuts of meat he’d purchased on sale – from Mexicans – and were as far from Kosher as Vienna sausages swimming in a bowl of ice-cold Half & Half and cornflakes. There wasn’t a rabbi around these cuts of meat for miles. Moishe is, if anything, trying to be a dutiful son. He knows better than to construct chains of cause-and-effect psychological elements about why his father is such a son of a bitch, but sometimes he can’t help it. It’s obvious, he thinks. His father is trying to atone for his Kosher meat wrongdoing by judging his son’s thoughts, like he’s able to report to G-d that – oh, G-d – Moishe stops beating off and gulps hard – that I like boys, as if he’d been caught making out with Ryan – or any boy, which he never has because he knows it’s sinful and he believes the stories about G-d’s punishment for being a fagela. Moishe’s cock goes limp. “Fuck you, G-d. Fuck you, dad. You satisfied?” He pulls his pants up and looks at himself in the mirror while he washes his hands, the peyes on either side of his face stuck in place by perspiration. Moishe pulls them free and shakes his head, then goes into his bedroom, grabs his fedora and heads toward the front door of his house. Before he even gets his hand on the doorknob, his mother yells: “Moishe, where are you going at this hour? It’s almost six o’clock!” He says he’s going to his friend Dav’s house to study for shule. He’s pretty sure his mom won’t object to this trip, as Dav just lives up the street so Moishe won’t have to ride his bicycle to anywhere that might be farther away, which would be a sin on the Sabbath. But instead of turning right toward Dav’s house, Moishe turns left and walks down Kenmore toward Olympic. He figures he’s already sinned enough for a couple of weeks with all the masturbation, so he plans on taking the bus over to Vermont, which, even though he won’t technically be driving the bus, he’s pretty sure that just riding it is still a sin. “Fuck it,” he thinks.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Rogarth steps over a dog turd that’s lying horizontally across the sidewalk, and he turns to warn Gallagher about it. “Watch out for that,” he says. Gallagher sidesteps it and says, “Thanks,” but realizes that his thanks is a form of gratitude that’s broader than appreciation for his friend’s level of awareness re: the turd. Gallagher wonders about the reasons that he and Rogarth are friends, not discounting the notion that their camaraderie may actually be based on the fact that neither he nor Rogarth listens to music when they’re out in the world, a detail that’s, here and there at times, piqued his interest, sociologically speaking, because it is a little bit interesting – really. Several times he’s been tempted to acquire an iPod or similar device so that he can add music to his experience of the world – like just about everybody else in existence does. But there’s something that restrains him. He hasn’t really thought about this in much detail yet, but wonders about why the idea of listening to music in public makes him uneasy. If either he or Rogarth had earphones in his ears blasting this or that hand-picked music while walking down this sidewalk, it would be adding a soundtrack to what they’re seeing in real time: El Pollo Loco, Quiznos, homeless guys, dope fiends, businessmen, thieves, thousands of cars and thousands of people, birds – all the “shit” that makes up being outdoors, everything would be mediated somehow with this soundtrack. So what? So what if adding music to someone’s experiences of the world around him can be made more – more agreeable; less objectionable? That’s the thing, he thinks. Would the world be a better place with the addition of a soundtrack? Would the world be made a little less ugly?
Or would the music itself be elevated as it busily attends to its genetic role of creating tonal tapestries and/or puzzles which, due to its performative, time-based existence, can trick the listener into believing that music exists in the spectator’s service and functions to only spice up a pretty dull piece of scenery? Or just – what?
But Gallagher’s pretty sure that if Rogarth had been listening to his favorite music during their walk, that the turd he was warned about would become just another facet of endorsement making up his worldview; part of some kind of inert tableau that was musically tailored to reaffirm his own sensibilities, like it might reduce the already meager level of curiosity he already possesses. After all, it’s not like somebody else would have chosen which music was blaring into his aural canal, which, if actually the case, would have at least allowed for a more robust sense of wonder instead of just plain old validation – one more time – of one’s tastes and appetites. Regardless of who chose the music, though, listening to it probably wouldn’t include a warning to avoid the turd, so Gallagher thinks he’d probably, right about now, be cussing out loud while scraping shit off his shoe.
Gallagher doesn’t mention his thoughts re: the potential of experiencing a musically accompanied turd, but goes right on talking about the teacher of his English class, volunteering that regardless of whether his English teacher is a philistine or not, he suspects he’s going to get a B or maybe an A- for the course, as he’s turned in almost all the assignments – at least the important ones; that he doesn’t really think the SRs – Summary Responses – two-page reflections based on either a) a short story or journalistic article from a newspaper, or b) one of the chapters in one of the books in the class – are that important so he’s only turned in a few of those.
Rogarth says something like “awesome,” then Gallagher asks Rogarth how his math class is going, and Rogarth says they should change the subject; math isn’t his best subject, then suggests that they should head over to Starbucks to get a couple of iced lattes before they buy their burritos for dinner.
It’s pretty much the same routine every Wednesday for these guys. They make a quick right turn and cross Vermont Avenue, and even before they reach the other side, they’re checking out a few of the most pious of Alcoholics Anonymous acolytes who’ve begun to congregate on the smoking patio at Starbucks for the purpose of a) assassinating the characters of many of their sober brethren/sistren or b) earnestly discussing the concepts of Service to the less fortunate and/or God’s will for themselves and others and/or trading anecdotes that prove the existence of a loving god and/or reading from handwritten tomes of dredged up memories that outline various transgressions to fellow human beings, better known as reading your inventory of sins to your sponsor. This latter category is the easiest to identify because of the ubiquity of paper notebooks and multiple writing implements, and the limiting of no more than two people per table, which, in less homosexually tinged arenas, these couples would be pretty much same-sexed because of the unwritten albeit pretty durable rule that dictates that prospective sponsees should choose their sobriety mentors from pools of identically gendered human beings, while the more progressive homosexually-leaning addicts have banished such rules to the cultural trash bin because there can be little sexual deviousness between sexes, so women sponsor men and vice versa. There’s also a pretty potent Force Field of Explicit and Serious Intimacy surrounding these binary spaces, so people governed by more casual considerations know instinctively to steer clear.
Rogarth and Gallagher, not unlike most huma
n beings, at least in Western democracies, enjoy believing that their lives are and always have been governed by their conscious choices, when in reality it’s pure simple, stupid chance that’s herded almost all of them to their current destinations. The only Starbucks table that’s available, which is adjacent to one where Gordon B. (eighteen months sober) and Gordon’s best friend William (not Bill; seven months sober) sit, so Rogarth and Gallagher, each clutching his clear plastic throwaway cup that drips with icy condensation, seat themselves with the potent authority of free men. They are comfortable for the moment in their situation of being roommates in a single second-floor apartment after leaving the sober-living house they’d moved into, at slightly staggered times, after leaving the regimented existence of Cri-Life. And they’re in Hollywood, which somehow confirms for them that they’re in the correct place in the scheme of things – assuming, of course, that there actually is a scheme of things, which is usually a fertile subject for discussion around the tables at this Starbucks, but as luck would have it, neither Rogarth nor Gallagher have to broach any subject at all because their attention is drawn to the adjacent table where Gordon and William are enjoying a moment of sober euphoria that’s not unlike a weird hit of acid or having swallowed a couple of powerful bennies that has them enthusiastically, and with complete abandon, sharing their thoughts with each other about literally what the fuck ever enters their brains – a breathless recitation of each element that makes up an, if not completely empty, but certainly uncritical head while living in an unimpaired life. It almost sounds like a competition – an example of perfected improvisation where the rules of discourse can never be deliberately or even accidentally to disagree, but to enthusiastically concur with his partner and add another detail, an and/also strategy that changes the landscape and subject of any conversation into unrecognizable albeit felicitous forms from whence it had begun. It’s completely unclear what Gordon and William had started talking about, but for the moment it’s a certain movie they’d seen that afternoon. And it doesn’t matter what movie it was, because Gordon and William are like most Americans, so their criticism of any movie can be boiled down to just how creepy, realistic, scary, sad, funny, suspenseful the story is and, of course, the special effects. It’s grounds for a revolution, really, because movies have such potential. To show the truth. To show the cannibalistic monsters who eat movie producers and potential for breakfast. Movie makers are just human – and rarely heroic, so they usually compromise with the money people. And they’re usually bright and retain vestiges of creativity, and many of them have learned to bury a movie’s almost unlimited potential to tell a story by repurposing the artistic axiom, Real creativity can only really occur when it’s constrained within a strict framework of rules into a form that relies on a kind of passive osmosis that has made possible the way most Hollywood films can be described, which is often a version of this:
