Later that week I found JB and his gold Datsun waiting for me after work. I asked him if Aunt Liz had sent him to monitor my activities. He told me he hadn’t seen Aunt Liz since we had all sat down at the table together, he told me he’d come to pick me up and take me to the Lighthouse, he was a soul tender, his words, and my soul needed tending. All I had to do, his words, was come with him and keep my eyes and ears open. That sounded easy enough. We arrived just in time to hear the speaker, Scott Valdez, founder of the Lighthouse. Everyone had arranged the chairs facing the front, toward a simple podium, though some people stood along the walls or sat on the floor or on tables, I don’t quite know how to say it, they made a show of being informal. We took two seats in the back and I kept my eyes and ears open. Scott Valdez began by saying that he was going to talk about grace, he spread out his arms, which were alarmingly short, and repeated the word grace. Or maybe his arms were normal length, it’s impossible to know, maybe they were normal length but his body had swallowed them at the shoulders. He was built like those football players, linebackers I think, I don’t know much about football, I was only on the team at Madera High for one day, it wasn’t my talent. He had a massive round head, with spiky hair on top, his head looked like a pineapple. And I didn’t see this then, I was looking at the front of Scott Valdez, I didn’t see it until later, but when he sat down a bulge appeared at the back of his head, above his neck, or at the top of his neck, a bulge of flesh appeared there, like a pillow, flesh that had nowhere else to go. He was a man of strength, his physical strength reflected his spiritual strength, JB’s words later, which made me wonder what the bulge of flesh represented, spiritually. Scott Valdez’s face cramped up and he said to everyone that Jesus is Lord and whosoever believes in him shall have eternal life. Which didn’t mean much to me, but in pursuing Aunt Liz’s plan one hundred percent, without any reservations, I set my feelings aside, feelings being mutable unlike God’s immutable love, JB’s words. Scott Valdez said that Jesus’ father loved the world so much that he gave his only begotten son, so that whosoever believed in him should have eternal life, this was straight from the Bible. The father in question here was not Jesus’ actual father, but God the father, the first of the three Gods. The Old Testament of the Bible was about him and the New Testament was about Jesus. The Holy Spirit didn’t have his own testament. This was because there was a rule somewhere that the only thing that couldn’t be forgiven was talking against the Holy Spirit, and so to avoid talking against him by accident, nobody talked about him at all. I listened with an open mind, I have to admit I was confused, so many new ideas were flying into my head with nothing to connect them to. But the main subject of Scott Valdez’s talk was grace, this is the important part, Juan-George, not because you need to know what grace is, I don’t think you do, if you want to know more you are free to find out, but because Scott’s words echoed in my head in a particular way. He talked about how God’s grace was strong enough to forgive all of our sins, and then he said that while being a good person was important, it wasn’t enough, good deeds weren’t enough to earn entrance into the kingdom of heaven. All the good deeds in the world without accepting Jesus as your lord and savior would land you in hell with the rapists and murderers, Scott’s words. Which didn’t sound right to me. At the pearly gates, Saint Peter, I don’t know why God himself couldn’t let people in, at the pearly gates Saint Peter wasn’t going to pull out a calculator and add up our good deeds. When Scott said that, when he mentioned the calculator, I realized that I had heard it before, I had heard it and much of what Scott was saying from JB’s mouth. This was a revelation, Scott could talk all day about grace and it wouldn’t have had the impact that the word calculator did. Because grace had nothing to attach itself to in my head, while the calculator was already in there. It dawned on me that JB was a repeater. He collected things that Scott said and spread bits and pieces to people Scott hadn’t met. When JB talked about being a conduit, he talked about being a conduit for God, but he was in fact a conduit for Scott Valdez.
I have talked before about how the head gets filled with other people’s words, how in sleep we transform those words and make them our own. The measure of a man’s thinking is in how those words are transformed, the measure of a man’s thinking is what he does with other people’s words, they must penetrate him deeply, they must penetrate him to the core, they must filter through his piled-up experiences and opinions, and they must return transformed. I didn’t have this philosophy straight while at the Lighthouse Fellowship, it came later, I knew only that JB had repeated Scott Valdez’s phrases without transforming them at all. What came out was what had gone in. Which meant that the phrases hadn’t even grazed JB’s core, they’d only bounced off a series of mirrors inside JB.
After Scott Valdez was done talking JB introduced me to him, he displayed me to Scott as if I was a fish he had caught. Scott extended his short arm and welcomed me warmly but in his eyes I didn’t see the instant friendliness I had seen in JB’s eyes, in Scott’s eyes I saw something else, he was a fellow thinker.
FRENCH FRY MAN
At work the next day, Francis and I were sitting at the table behind the fast-food place, watching the drive-thru. Roger always said this about the drive-thru, you wanted three cars in it at all times. If there was just one car, you should drag ass to let a line build up, if there were four cars you’d better pick up the pace. It was the one thing of fucking value, his words, he’d ever learned from working in nightclubs. Francis was smoking, he always smoked during break. He was smoking and blinking behind his large glasses. There was one car in the drive-thru. Francis took a drag and told me that this was the end of the line for him. He wasn’t coming back the next day, he was done with the fast-food place. He hadn’t told Roger yet, he wasn’t going to tell Roger, he wanted to shaft Roger. He made me promise not to tell Roger. He was telling me now, he said, because he wanted me to know that he’d enjoyed working with me, that in my own way I’d helped him stay on his path toward film school. I didn’t understand how I had helped him. I wasn’t going to question it, though, and so I thanked him. Also half the things that came out of his mouth made no sense to me, he was always quoting movies I hadn’t seen. For example, he said to me, his words, It’s a strange world, isn’t it? And I said that yes it seemed strange, but that it was the only world we knew, so who could say? Of course he wasn’t really asking me, it turned out to be a line from a film, it was the last line from his favorite film. Then he asked me what my vision of an ideal world was. Once I was clear that this was not another line from a film, I answered, I hadn’t ever really thought about it, or at least I didn’t think I had, but when I opened my mouth the words came out. In my ideal world everyone knows everyone else, bicycles and binoculars get the respect they deserve, there is no such thing as money, thinkers have time to think, everyone is as lucky as I am, and people are buried where they want. I could see that Francis wasn’t really listening, he was only waiting for me to finish talking, he had only asked the question as a prelude to his own answer, which he had been thinking about for a long time, he said. In his ideal world, everyone knew all the films he knew, and they communicated only by using lines from films. With each line came implications and shades of mood and meaning, all perfectly communicated from one person to another. In his ideal world, he would hardly have to talk, he would only have to quote. He took a drag off his cigarette and said that I was all right, but that talking with me was the opposite of all that. He flicked the butt toward the dumpster, I would pick it up later, and pointed at the drive-thru line, which was now six cars.
***
People incorrectly use the idea of a ladder when they talk about getting promoted, it would make more sense to use the idea of caulk, because promotions don’t come from hard work or honest effort but because a crack has opened up and must be filled. If Francis had not walked off the job I would not have become a french fry man no matter how hard I worked. In fact, if I had worked hard enough to make myself
indispensable, I never would have received a promotion. I was unaware of all of this, I did not know any of this yet when I came home from the fast-food place after my next shift, when I came home from the fast-food place no longer a floater but a french fry man. I told Aunt Liz the good news, I let her know I had been promoted. She was floored, her words, that I’d made such quick progress. Aunt Liz set the dining table in the dining room, she lit the candles, I hadn’t expected that. I thought it was reserved only for guests and for when I got a place of my own, but Aunt Liz said she was so proud of me, she was willing to make an exception. She set the table and lit candles and put back into the fridge the casserole she was about to reheat. She opened the freezer and pulled out some frozen packages I had not seen before, something she said she had been saving for a special occasion, surf and turf, her words, which were lobster and steak. Your grandfather had never been very good at celebrating, Juan-George. There was always something else coming, even when something good happened, there was always something else around the corner, something that either took away what you’d achieved or surpassed it so much that your earlier celebrating seemed hasty, your grandfather’s philosophy. Aunt Liz made a point of celebrating, she had taught herself, her words, she had decided years ago that if something good happened she was going to stop and acknowledge it, damn the torpedoes, her words. This was while she was preparing dinner, the steaks were in the broiler and the lobster was in a pot, she had opened a bottle of bubbly wine, I drank ice water. She raised a glass to my success. I was pleased that she was pleased. We ate our surf and turf in the dining room, on opposite sides of lit candles, over a fancy tablecloth. She looked softer in that light, her reddish brown hair and reddish brown lipstick didn’t scream at you that they matched, her hair didn’t look as no-nonsense as usual, her leopard print pants were below the table. Aunt Liz said that if we had eaten like this every night, if we had lit candles every night, we wouldn’t appreciate the specialness of the occasion. I wondered aloud, I still wonder this, how did people celebrate before electricity, when candles were part of the normal routine? Aunt Liz said that I was well on my way to becoming a contributing member of society in Panorama City, and, what was more, a respectable citizen, with a sense of personal responsibility, people could look at me from across the street while I was waiting for the bus to come and could see that I was not some foreign substance mucking up the gears but an essential cog in the smooth functioning of the city itself. I liked the sound of that, essential cog. That night I celebrated wholeheartedly with Aunt Liz, without reservation, without questioning the nature of promotions, and without second-guessing. I had the feeling, I don’t know how to describe it, the feeling of everything coming together in harmony. It’s difficult to imagine now how I could have felt like that. We were celebrating a fluke. And yet what remained with me was not the unsound reason for our celebration but the warm feeling of sharing a happy moment with Aunt Liz, however brief.
Brief because Aunt Liz had a dark magnet inside her. When she’d finished half of her food and a second glass of bubbly she turned the subject to my father, her brother, your grandfather. She smiled, she was still smiling over my promotion, she smiled and asked me to imagine if only my father had gotten me started earlier with something like the fast-food place, imagine where I’d be today, considering how quickly I’d gotten my first promotion, imagine where I’d be if my father, her brother, your grandfather, hadn’t been so laissez-faire, her words, in raising me, or failing to raise me. The smile was still on her face only now she was working to hold it up, she was trying with her face to hide the fact that she’d talked herself into the same corner she was always talking herself into. Your father, she said to me, your father was a good man. She told me about how he’d been in his youth, how energetic he’d been, how nobody could ever seem to keep up with his zest for life, how when he was an infant in his stroller he would whistle like an adult, how he always wanted everyone to stay up late and wake up early with him, how he had always taken life by the horns, if life was a bull he took it by the horns and flipped it onto its back, her words. But by the time I came along he had already been destroyed by that woman, my mother. Aunt Liz told me that my mother had been trying to destroy herself her entire life, and for some reason my father thought he could prevent her from doing it. Then she succeeded in destroying herself, which destroyed him. She sacrificed herself to ruin him, Aunt Liz’s words. Which was why I grew up in Madera, doing nothing but riding my bicycle around, comporting myself like a village idiot, it was because my father, who had been a fount of energy in his youth, had been drawn into the spider’s web and lay stuck there unmoving for the rest of his life, rendered passive, passive and impassive, by that woman who left us when we needed her most. At this point Aunt Liz wasn’t trying to hold back, she wasn’t trying to find her way out of the corner she’d talked herself into, she said instead that she was afraid, frankly, her word, frankly, she was afraid that I was in turn going to destroy her, that half of my nature came from my mother, that her destructive disposition was in me somewhere, and that my promotion had raised such hopes in her she couldn’t help but fear she was being drawn into some kind of trap, like my father, your grandfather, her brother had been when his hopes were raised about turning that remote piece of land into a vineyard. Your father never should have died, she said, I’m the old one, I’m the older one, she said, I should have died, not him, but your mother killed him, she said, she killed him and she kept killing him long after she was gone.
My promotion had raised hopes in me, too, Juan-George. As I mentioned, I had not yet learned the nature of promotions, Paul Renfro had not yet illuminated for me how these things happened in the so-called real world, what these things really meant. And so in those sweet first hours at my new post I immersed myself completely in the thrill of the promotion, the sizzle of frozen fries sinking into hot oil, the fact that I’d become an active participant in food preparation. Not to mention that from the catbird seat location of the french fry hopper, I could watch Ho and others working the front counter, and I could see all the way past Roger’s tiny office to the freezers containing the giant bags of french fries and all the frozen dirt and grime that came off the trucks every week, and beyond that to the giant dishwasher where Harold, the new floater, who arrived at work in a special van, who was brought to work every morning by some kind of counselor, was standing with a finger in his nose or ear, or mouth, as if the tip of his finger would come off if it was exposed to open air. It seemed, for the first day, ideal. But on the second day, the second time I came into work and set myself up at the fryer, I felt something else creeping in, it was the feeling of opening your lunch to find the same thing that was there yesterday. I couldn’t quite understand it, I had moved up in the world, as they say, I should have been grateful, and instead I found myself watching Harold, watching the new floater, roaming the restaurant, doing all his variety of jobs, doing none of them very well, and I realized that I missed, already, being the floater, I missed not knowing what my job was going to be, from day to day. I felt chained to the fryer. I tried passing the time by making up tunes, I made up tunes and whistled them, or I didn’t really get a chance to make up tunes, I was still feeling my way around the notes when Roger told me to shut the fuck up, he couldn’t concentrate on whatever he was concentrating on in his office with me making that spooky racket, his words. With great freedom comes great responsibility, someone said once, well, it doesn’t work the other way around.
It was a low moment. But low moments are more valuable than high moments, because when you reach a high moment you just want it to go on forever, which is impossible, whereas when you reach a low moment you look everywhere for a way out, and so things present themselves that you might not have noticed otherwise. I had just lifted the fry basket out of the hot oil and secured it to the rack so that the grease could drain before the fries got dumped into the trough under the heat lamp, I had just done that, and I saw, lying atop all the other fries, a sin
gle fry, normal in color and texture and width but exceptionally long. I had possibly seen one before, they occurred every hundred fries or so, but not before having been in a low moment had I recognized, not until Roger Macarona told me to shut the fuck up, had I recognized its potential. I set aside the abnormally long fry, and from that moment on I made a point of setting aside every abnormally long fry, I pushed them to the edge of the trough until I had enough to fill one of our cardboard fry cartons, at which point I shifted my attention to the counter, to determine the recipient. I could pick whatever customer I wanted, it was liberating, I was no longer bound by my job description, which is an example of the thinking man’s way to empowerment, Paul Renfro’s words. First I picked the most interesting person of the day, he had no hair, he had shaved his head, and instead of regular clothes he wore an orange sheet, like a toga, he had running shoes on and a big white plastic digital watch. I wanted to reward him for being interesting, by giving him what were in my opinion the most interesting fries, but for some reason he didn’t notice his interesting fries, maybe he had so many interesting things going on in his life already that interesting fries didn’t make much of an impact.
Panorama City Page 10
