My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Susan Orlean

  Q: How did you prepare?

  A: I studied my script, I practiced my lines, I got to the studio at seven a.m. for all the rehearsals and dry blocking, and during lunch I called my doctor for some authentic insight on nursing.

  Q: What did she say?

  A: She recommended that I consider my character’s back story; avoid wearing my hair in a bun, because nurses don’t do that anymore; work on understanding my motivation; and forget about a tight uniform, because only Nurse Gloria gets to wear one.

  Royalty

  My first apartment in Manhattan was on West End Avenue near Seventy-second Street or, as I soon came to think of it, about two blocks from Gray’s Papaya, which is at Broadway and Seventy-second. My husband’s office was around the corner from Papaya Kingdom, which was Broadway and Fiftieth. My gym was down the street from Papaya King, which was on Eighty-sixth between Second and Third. My best friend lived near Papaya Prince, in the West Village. I spent a lot of my afternoons at the mid-Manhattan branch of the public library, a few blocks from Papaya World. I can’t remember exactly where Papaya Princess was, but I know I passed it now and then, in cabs. Before I moved to New York four years ago, I hadn’t had much contact with papayas. I knew they existed, and I saw them in supermarkets—stickered with their country of origin, like luggage—but they never figured greatly in my life. Now papayas were everywhere I was.

  My preoccupation with papayas didn’t hit me all at once. A few nagging questions only gradually turned into a full-scale fixation. It’s not that I was especially interested in consuming papayas, which I think taste like a vague memory of something that tastes a lot stronger; it’s that I grew increasingly determined to understand the phenomenology of papayas in New York. How did a tropical fruit come to be so prominent in a temperate-zone city? Why were there so many papaya stores? Why did all of them sell frankfurters, too? (I mean, were they health food stores or junk food stores?) Why did so many papaya stores include references to royalty in their names? Why were all of them decorated with signs using stilted, hyperbolic descriptions of papayas, like THE ARISTOCRATIC MELON OF THE TROPICS, THE FAMOUS MAGICAL PAPAYA MELON, and GOD’S GIFT TO MANKIND IS OUR PAPAYA DRINK? That nobody I knew could answer these questions, or had even considered them, came as no particular surprise; one characteristic of the New York personality I had noticed right away was an ability to overlook prevailing conditions, such as high taxes and sidewalk bridges. Papayas seemed to be just another prevailing condition.

  I did what I could to get answers. I put questions to countermen at various papaya outposts and got strangely specific but unsubstantiated reactions, among them “Eighty-five percent of all people in the world love papaya” (the bun man at Papaya Kingdom) and “The relationship between the hot dog and the papaya is very good” (the juice man at Gray’s). I also talked to Peter Poulos, the owner of Papaya King, which, I learned, was the original papaya store in New York. He said that his father had traveled to Florida decades earlier and had come back fired up with the idea of introducing New Yorkers to the tropical delights of papaya juice. The outbreak of other papaya stores, he said, was an attempt to copy Papaya King’s success. The romantic paeans to the papaya were his father’s own words and cadence, and the other stores duplicated them. The other stores’ reference to royalty were meant to fool customers into thinking that all the papaya stores were affiliated, like some tropical fruit juice House of Hapsburg.

  A few days after talking to Mr. Poulos, I came across a United States District Court opinion in a 1989 case involving Papaya King and Papaya Kingdom. The former had charged the latter with trademark infringement, on the ground that the papaya-plus-royalty name implied that the two businesses were associated. Papaya King had won. The owners of Papaya Kingdom then tried to satisfy the judgment by merely covering up the “K” on its sign with a piece of tape. Peter Leisure, the judge in the case, observed wryly that the defendant was “contented apparently to be known as ‘Papaya ingdom.’ ” Less wryly, he imposed contempt charges on Papaya Kingdom—or, rather, Papaya ingdom: twenty-five thousand dollars in damages, seventy-five hundred for contempt of court, and more than thirteen thousand in attorneys’ fees. I went down to Papaya ingdom a few days after reading the opinion to see whether the store had a new name and a new sign. It was gone, and a pizzeria had risen in its place.

  It was about this time that I began to get used to living here: I knew uptown from downtown, and I had finally figured out that the guys in my parking garage were denting my car because I hadn’t tipped them, and I had come to realize that there were certain things about the city that I would never understand. I wouldn’t say that I gave up; I simply started taking things in stride. This was when Gray’s was selling its frankfurters for fifty cents (they’re now sixty), and business was particularly brisk; I rarely passed by when a House O’Weenies truck wasn’t double-parked by the door, offloading product. (I never saw anything like a House O’Tropical Fruits truck parked nearby, so I assumed that the papayas were delivered late at night—just the way you’d expect exotic cargo to arrive.) I still dropped in for a hot dog now and then, but I stopped pestering the countermen with questions about papayas. The crowd at Gray’s was always the same peculiar mix of panhandlers, with barely enough money for a Gray’s special (two frankfurters and a papaya drink for two dollars), working people in a hurry, and one or two anxious-looking guys in suits. No one ever talked to anyone, and the radio was always blasting country music. I no longer drove myself crazy trying to figure out this combination of the tropics, street life, hot dogs, and Loretta Lynn. It had become a part of my neighborhood, period. In some ways, I felt relieved.

  One day at Gray’s, I ordered a hot dog and a small papaya—I had finally come around to drinking papaya juice—and got in line for the mustard, which was in a stout gallon jug with a plastic squirt top. The man behind me was skinny and bedraggled, and in my best “I’m a New Yorker now” style, I pretended he didn’t exist. I certainly expected that, in keeping with the custom at Gray’s, we wouldn’t converse. As we waited for the mustard, though, he leaned over my shoulder and muttered to me, “It’s going to blow up.” I took a deep breath and looked away. “It’s going to blow up,” he repeated. I tried to look more explicitly uninterested. Garrulous strangers with the urge to share their apocalyptic visions appeared often enough in my day-to-day life that I had gotten good at this; in fact, I took pride in staying unruffled. I was now just one person away from the mustard, and I planned to dress my dog quickly and find a place at the window far away from the skinny man. He said it again, this time very distinctly: “Hey. It’s. Going. To. Blow. Up.”

  It was my turn. I set my papaya juice on the counter, positioned my hot dog under the nozzle, and pressed down hard on the top. It blew up. Mustard splattered all over my hands and my shirt. Most of the hot dog remained naked; the bun had a small mustard-filled crater, made by the impact. A plug of dried mustard that had caused the explosion was somewhere east of my papaya juice. “I told you it was going to blow up,” the man said, shaking his head.

  I looked at him and said apologetically, “I just moved here.”

  Uplifting

  If you’re the kind of person who gets a kick out of saying “bosom” and “breast” and “bustline uplift,” you ought to go visit the Maidenform Museum on East Thirty-seventh. That way, you can walk around the display with the curator, Catherine C. Brawer, and ask questions like “Did the bandeau that preceded the brassiere squish the breast or just smoosh it?” and “When did natural shaping supplant the torpedo?” and “Can you please elaborate on the nipple?” If you pretend to be a scholar, you can then pause for a really long time in front of the best pair of breasts in New York City—which are on a miniature mannequin, are perfectly shaped and absolutely firm, and have a one-inch forward thrust—and say, “The semiotic evolution of window displays sure is interesting, isn’t it?” and hope that Ms. Brawer is suddenly called away. If she isn’t—and don’t get your hopes up—she will
probably stand there with you and point out that the mannequin with the terrific breasts is wearing a petite copy of a 34-B Interlude bra, made of Alençon lace and broadcloth, with trapunto stitching on the undercup, which Maidenform marketed in the 1930s for women who prefer “the rounded as well as uplifted bustline.” Then you will drop the scholar shtick and just observe that the Interlude and the other little bras made for this particular display—a teensy version of the Dec-La-Tay, made of fine peach netting with a lace edge and satin straps, and a Ves-T-Lace, which was designed for the fuller figure but, in this instance, would just about fit your thumb—are totally cute.

  Then you might ask a reasonable question, like “Where did Maidenform get all these old bras for the museum?” and Ms. Brawer will answer that some guy who used to work for the company cataloged almost every single style that Maidenform made—the Chansonette, the Star Flower, the Tric-O-Lastic, the Twice Over, the Blue Horizon, the Maidenette, the Semi-Accentuate, the Hold-Tite, the Gree-Shen, the Allo, the Allo-Ette, the Allegro, and so forth—and when she is finished, you will definitely not say anything about leg men versus boob men. Because that would be childish. Especially when Ms. Brawer goes on to tell you that the museum has regular visits from the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders from IS 246 in Brooklyn and CS 211 in the Bronx and, to the best of her recollection, none of the students ever giggle. “They come here prepared,” she will say. “They are here to work.”

  So you will work, too. You will take a lot of notes about the Maidenform war effort, which involved designing cotton-gingham bras, because nylon was requisitioned for parachutes, and also manufacturing carrier pigeon vests, which are almost as cute as the tiny 34-B Dec-La-Tay, and you will study the display highlighting the twenty-year history of the “I Dreamed . . .” ad campaign (“I dreamed I barged down the Nile in my Maidenform Bra”), and you might even copy down the text from an “I Dreamed . . .” ad that ran in Denmark (“Jeg drømte, jeg blev forfulgt i min Maidenform b.h.”), commenting to Ms. Brawer that Danish is quite a poetic-looking language, just so you can take another long cheap look at some ladies in their underwear.

  Okay. You’re done, you stared at lots of breasts, you managed to maintain some dignity, you believe Ms. Brawer may actually still view you as an adult. Then she says, “Oh, I’ve got to show you something hilarious,” and she leads you into a conference room and pulls out an atlas and turns to a map of the Grand Tetons—a name you always got a giant charge out of—and she says, “My husband and I went on vacation in Wyoming this summer, and, honest to God, we were looking at the map and look at this,” and she points to a spot between upper Moran and Leigh canyons, about three-quarters of a mile south of Peak 49, and there it is on the map: Maidenform Peak, elevation 11,137. “Can you believe it?” Ms. Brawer says, grinning. “And it’s a twin peak.”

  My Life: A Series of

  Performance Art Pieces

  1. Birth

  As the piece opens, another performance artist, “Mom” (an affiliate of my private funding source), waits onstage, consuming tuna noodle casseroles. Eventually, she leaves the initial performance site—a single-family Cape Cod decorated with amoeboid sofas, Herman Miller coconut chairs, boomerang-print linoleum, and semi-shag carpeting—for a second site, a hospital. There she is joined by a sterile-clad self-realized figure of authority (“Sidney Jaffe, MD”) who commands her to “push” and then externalizes through language and gesture his desire to return to the back nine. This tableau makes allusion to the deadening, depersonalizing, postwar “good life.” “Mom” continues “pushing,” and at last I enter—nude. I do this in a manner that confronts yet at the same time steers clear of all obscenity statutes.

  2. Coming Home Extremely Late Because I Was

  Making Snow Angels and Forgot to Stop

  Again, an ensemble piece. But unlike “Birth,” which explores the universal codes of pleasure and vulnerability, “Coming Home Extremely Late” is a manifesto about rage—not mine, but that of the protonuclear family. The cast includes “Mom,” “David,” “Debra,” “Fluffy,” and my private funding source. In “Coming Home,” I become Object rather than Subject.

  The piece is also a metaperformance; the more sophisticated members of the audience will realize that I am “coming home extremely late” because of another performance: “Snow Angels,” an earlier, gestural work in which, clothed in a cherry red Michelin Man–style snowsuit, I lower myself into a snowbank and wave my arms up and down, leaving a winged-creature-like impression upon the frozen palimpsest. Owing to my methodology, I am better at it than anyone on the block. Note the megatextual references to heaven, Superior Being–as-girl-child, snow-as-inviolable-purity, and time-as-irrelevancy. “Coming Home Extremely Late” concludes with a choral declaration from the entire cast (except for my private funding source, who has returned to reading the sports section), titled “You Are Grounded for a Month, Young Lady.”

  3. I Go Through a Gangly Period

  A sustained dramatic piece, lasting three to five years, depending on how extensively the performer pursues the orthodontia theme. Besides me, the cast includes the entire student population of Byron Junior High School, Shaker Heights, Ohio—especially the boys. In the course of “Gangly Period,” I grow large in some ways, small in others, and, ironically, they are all the wrong ways. I receive weird haircuts. Through “crabby” behavior (mostly directed at my private funding source), my noncontextual stage image projects the unspeakable fear that I am not “popular.” In a surreal trope midway through the performance, I vocalize to a small section of the cast (“Ellen Fisher,” “Sally Webb,” and “Heather Siegel”) my lack of knowledge about simple sexual practices. Throughout the piece, much commentary about time: how long it is, why certain things seem to take forever, why I have to be the absolutely last girl in the entire seventh grade to get Courrèges boots.

  4. Finding Myself

  This piece is a burlesque—a comic four-year-long high art/low art exploration. As “Finding Myself” opens, I am on-site—a paradigmatic bourgeois college campus. After performing the symbiotic ritual of “meeting my roommates” and dialoguing about whether boyfriends can stay overnight in our room, I reject the outmoded, parasitic escape route of majoring in English and instead dare to enroll in a class called “Low Energy Living,” in which I reject the outmoded, parasitic escape route of reading the class material and instead build a miniature solar-powered seawater-desalinization plant. I then confront Amerika’s greedy soullessness by enrolling in a class called “Future Worlds,” walking around in a space suit of my own design, doing a discursive/nonlinear monologue on Buckminster Fuller and futurism.

  Toward the end of “Finding Myself,” I skip all my “classes”—spatially as well as temporally—and move into an alternative environment to examine my “issues.” At this point, my private funding source actually appears in the piece and, in a witty cameo, threatens to withdraw my grant. Much implosive controversy. To close the performance, I sit on an avocado green beanbag chair and simulate “applying to graduate school.”

  5. I Get Married and Shortly Thereafter

  Take a Pounding in the Real Estate Market

  A bifurcated work. First, another performance artist, “Peter,” dialogues with me about the explicit, symbolic, and functional presentations of human synchronism. We then plan and execute a suburban country club wedding (again, with assistance from my private funding source). Making a conceptual critique of materialism, I “register” for Royal Copenhagen china, Baccarat crystal, and Kirk Stieff sterling. Syllabic chants, fragments of unintelligible words like the screeches of caged wild birds gone mad—this megatonality erupts when I confront my private funding source about seating certain little-liked relatives. At the work’s interactive climax, “Peter” and I explode the audience/performer dialectic and invite the audience to join as we “perform the ceremony.”

  The second part of the piece—a six-month-long open-ended manifesto on the specificity of place—culmin
ates with “Peter” and me purchasing a four-and-a-half-room cooperative apartment with a good address in Manhattan. Conran’s furniture, Krups appliances, task-specific gadgets (apple corers, pasta makers, shrimp deveiners), and other symbol-laden icons are arranged on-site. Curtain goes down on the performers facing each other on a sofa, holding a Times real estate section between them, doing a performative discourse lamenting that they have “purchased the apartment at the peak of the market.”

  The series will continue pending refinancing.

  Shiftless Little Loafers

  Question: Why don’t more babies work?

  Excuse me, did I say “more”? I meant, why don’t any babies work? After all, there are millions of babies around, and most of them appear to be extremely underemployed. There are so many jobs—being commissioner of Major League Baseball, say, or running the snack concession at the Olympic synchronized swimming venue—and yet it seems that babies never fill them. So why aren’t babies working? I’ll tell you. Walk down any street, and within a minute or so you will undoubtedly come across a baby. The baby will be lounging in a stroller, maybe snoozing, maybe tippling a bottle, maybe futzing around with a stuffed teddy—whatever. After one good look, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that babies are lazy. Or worse. Think of that same baby, same languid posture, same indolent attitude, but now wearing dark sunglasses. You see it all the time. Supposedly, it has to do with UV rays, but the result is that a baby with sunglasses looks not just lazy, but lazy and snobby. Sort of like an Italian film producer. You know: “Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. Baby isn’t available at the moment. No, Mr. Baby hasn’t had a chance to look at your screenplay yet. Why don’t you just send coverage, and Mr. Baby will get back to you when he can.”