At Aetna in Middletown, Connecticut, they had cake for everyone’s birthday and every day was someone’s birthday. A bigass building in a maze of parking lots and looping drives off Interstate 91. Thousands of employees. Of course it was someone’s birthday. There was a fucking cake shop right outside the cafeteria for the express purpose of selling cakes to people in order to celebrate their coworkers’ birthdays. The manager would go down there, maybe an executive assistant. Order up a chocolate or vanilla cake and pick a color frosting. Personalize it please. Then at some point the work team would gather in one of the very many conference rooms and declare surprise to the birthday boy or girl, here’s your fucking cake, look at this beautiful cake. I can’t believe you got me a cake! Then we’d each get a slice on a wobbly Dixie plate and plastic-fork the mealy sponge and too-sweet vanilla creme into our unhungry gullets, everyone, everyone on the work team, even temps like me. Every single fucking day. Cake. Like it or not. You could not refuse the cake. To say no would be an affront to the celebrated one of course, but even worse to everybody else, all who dutifully choked down a wedge of angel food at ten fifteen in the morning on a Tuesday. It’d be a bigger violation of the place itself, not just this corporation that benevolently made this space within which we may toil and magically deposited funds into our banks on a semimonthly basis but the society, the structure, the institution, America in the fullness of reality and dreams. We were the army of  the nauseated, the reluctantly obese. On the verge of ecstasy and diabetes.

I was thinking of eating and drinking and all, how you might as well you know, life is short. The image of my old schoolmate crossed my mind, the one who was once a slim and manic boy in braces and is now a portly Bob Vacant, autocorrected from bon vivant. At our high school reunion he spoke at length of his travels in Asia and his fondness for smoky Islay scotch. Anyway life is short and we all die. I lingered on that thought a moment, wanting it to sink deep into my psyche. Maybe there could be a sign. And just then a glitch in the broadcast of the Tour de France I was watching warped the image of bikes on a country road into garish psychedelic blurs and streaks: red, green, turquoise, white.

We were in some kind of canyon in the south of France in the summertime, watching a jazz fusion band perform. A steep rock wall with boulders piled across on which spectators sat with their blankets and picnics. We were up around the top I think. With our sad-ass ham sandwiches. We might even have accessed the space from the bluff up above, not from below by the stage. It was hot as fuck. I was maybe seven or eight. How did I even know there was such a thing as jazz fusion? Do I remember it that way now because my brain connected what it had perceived of the music with later knowledge? I don’t think so. I always knew what this music was on some level. Tedious, disappointing. I saw everyone up on that stage with their bell bottoms and electric guitars with the phone cord cables and the synthesizers with all the buttons and knobs and I thought we were getting rock and roll. Big Led Zeppelin rock and roll. But instead we got bleeps and bloops and major seventh chords and elliptical, acrobatic solos that are supposed to take hold of your brain, and maybe it was someone great, maybe it was Weather Report. But my young mind wasn’t having it. I retreated to my default position of sullen boredom and restlessness. On a long, hot car ride before AC the plastic of the Evian bottle would seep into the molecules of that weirdly smooth, bland mineral water and that’s all you had to drink.

When I saw the American cheese on the burger on TV I nodded involuntarily. I don’t know why. Not in affirmation, or agreement. Almost defensively.

 

At halftime I ate the pizza like a, what? Animal. Sure. But what? Like a dog, maybe. Like a rat. Then it occurred to me the reason that rat with the pizza video went viral is because deep down inside we’re all the rat. Snaring a cold slice and running away furtively, desperate to make it descend our throats before someone or something intervenes to tell us: No, you can’t have that.

Music had been promised between two and five and here we were two-ten and they were still tuning up and fucking around, some sitting on folding chairs in the street, 5th Ave revelers strolling by with their grilled corn and mozzarepas. I really didn’t mind. The plunks and blurps from their instruments faded nicely into the hubbub of the fair. I didn’t want the music to start.

In the supermarket after the game. There’s no such thing as pretzel rods anymore. Ever since the pandemic. You can buy a bag of black truffle sea salt potato chips but no pretzel rods. I dropped a couple things trying to carry them away from the checkout counter and the guy ahead of me apologized profusely like it was him who knocked them out of my arms. Then the cashier offered me a bag and didn’t make me pay.

It was a quiet time at the bar. Just a few of us out back, a few inside. A man with long white hair and a goatee sat at the table in the corner of the yard, smoking a cigar that never seemed to get small. Not paying attention to the game. But there just the same.

Day 4

I dove down to touch the canon and tried to appreciate something of its antiquity. It really just felt hard under a veneer of moss. Like an old stone wall in the Connecticut woods. The anchor veiled in seaweed looked like a crucifix someone had escaped and discarded. And yet the fish and the coral and everything else is alive.

On the way out some others on the boat, maybe Eastern European, Russian, asked if it was okay to smoke. Nods all around. A mother and son pulling from the same pack. He lit up right after he got out of the water, too. Cigarettes as a means to delineate events.

It had rained pretty hard in the afternoon.The flagstone terrace of Rick’s ran with rivulets of dirty water that amassed in little pools. We watched the cliff jumpers, saw the sun set through the remains of the storm. The DJ played loud, punctuating the music with birthday shout-outs. Goddamn if it isn’t always someone’s birthday. A young couple, well-dressed, sat facing each other romantically at the corner of the bar. They were daintily eating dishes of penne pasta, one marinara, one cream. She lifted her phone and gazed into it as though it were a mirror.

Day 1

I marveled at the blue sky, mouth agape like an idiot. Two birds thrashed in a nearby palm. Were they special birds, I wondered? Special Jamaica birds you don’t see back home. Are they somehow aware of their own identity as such, their splendor? I watched them dart around the fronds. Just a couple of birds.

I decided to roll off the floatie face down as though someone were trying to dispose of my corpse. To cast me adrift hoping I’d never wash ashore. I fell gently below the surface.

At poolside I took pains not to drip on my book. I lay on the chaise and read and drifted off to sleep and read again. At one point I remained conscious just long enough to read two words: the game.

I ate a small bag of hot and spicy banana chips and turned the edges of the pages crimson.

Music blared from the bar over the fence. Footloose, Night Nurse. You could hear the DJ’s patter but nothing else, no giddy, drunken crowd. 

I had to fashion a bookmark from a corner of paper towel.

They’re in India in the book I’m reading, the color and chaos. I distracted myself thinking about Indian food, a forkful of rice and curry. How many grains sit uneasily upon the tines? Eighty? A hundred? How many grains are produced for human consumption each year? No, how many have ever been produced, to date in the history of agriculture? To be devoured by rich and poor alike across the globe. It’s in the trillions, right? Hundreds of trillions? Or is that number woefully, naively low? Is it some other order of magnitude? I imagined being punished if I got the answer wrong. All mankind punished because of me.

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 18

Harry and I began to hang out with Jim. Just another loser with a mother who knew our mothers. Is that not how lifelong bonds are formed? I sensed that Jim was interested in more than television and Atari and Star Wars and sports. He did like guns and swords and tanks. That was normal but he liked them more than me, more than most. In the library I’d look for race car books. There was one with black and white pictures of North American sports car races in the ‘60s, a book that was already old and nobody cared. Races that had faded deep into history, their results recorded but never re-examined, the names of the drivers forgotten by all but their descendants. Triumphs and Corvettes with roll bars winding up and down and through the fields. Men in white, short-sleeved, button-down shirts and their wives or girlfriends in long floral-print skirts sitting on the hilly lawns to watch. This is all I wanted. Jim came over to my house one day to build model airplanes. We began with a strangely ceremonial lunch, as though my parents had to check him out to be my girlfriend. For some reason Mom had severely undercooked the burgers. I gamely swallowed clumps of cool, mealy meat, its blood soaking the bun, dressed in pickle relish and Heinz Tomato Ketchup, as Jim excitedly explained why he’d prefer a knife to a machine gun in hand-to-hand combat. “A machine gun might jam,” he said. “With a knife, you can stick it in the other guy’s body.” I gulped my iced tea and the lemon wedge knocked my nose. My parents examined Jim with some concern. “Unless you have a bayonet on the gun. A bayonet is the best,” Jim exclaimed. “It’s like a knife!”

A bead of water trickled down Jackie’s electric toothbrush after it had been replaced on its stand, probably to gum up the electronics once it reached the charging base, causing a short circuit, starting a fire. I envisioned us naked on the street as annoyed firefighters clambered up the four flights.

No matter what technology you have, smart devices, app controls, computers in the car, nothing works like a toilet.

Jackie had a fortune cookie in her lunch. I unfurled the little wisp of paper, spotted with sauce. Ready for another fortune? it said, and I thought: good fortune. Smart. Did not expect that. Then I realized of course the fortune was on the other side:

Declare peace every day.

Lately when I read a book that’s supposed to be good, I think: this book has been read ten million times. It’s been read to death. I start to worry there’s nothing there for me. I try to reassure myself that every act of reading is unique. It must create its own universe from the reader and the text. I believe that, but still I worry. Hasn’t everything been thought already about these words? Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. I thought this reading “The Sound and the Fury” and now I think it reading “Ragtime.” But then a word or phrase comes round to penetrate my brain. Tonight it was this: The freaks were delighted.

After the beans were already cooked I found a raw one on the counter, pristine, more beautiful than all the rest. Smooth, unblemished sea-green flesh. I threw it away.

At the appetizing store in the big long line two girls began to sing in harmony. Their voices chimed against the din of numbers called, orders recited, delivery guys coming through. A third girl, younger, sang along a little but then stopped, self-conscious. The song picked up and stopped from time to time. A little while later, and suddenly, the third girl began to cry. I watched her face, wet with tears. “Nothing’s gonna ever make me feel better,” she wailed at her mom.  I imagined what kind of heartbreak, what deep despair might cause someone to feel this way. Her mother knew, and said so: she was hungry.

Was it 1975?

It was summertime in the south of France, or was it Switzerland? A jazz-rock fusion band was playing down in a sandy valley below steep, rocky slopes where we sat with the rest of the crowd. We had a picnic—ham sandwiches, peaches, Evian water in the corrugated liter bottles, everything the same unappetizing temperature and smelling of the plastic of the insulated cooler bag that was in the trunk of the car for the past three hours.

I was worried we might fall off this jagged boulder and tumble down, gashing our heads and breaking limbs.

The men in the band looked like dolls down there in flared pants, silk shirts, bandannas. Strange, angular sounds bleated from their speakers and I wished somebody would sing.

Into the Mouth Again

When I was in fourth grade at Northwest Elementary School there was some event when old people came to visit. They must have been from a nursing home nearby. Were they invited to tell us their stories growing up, about schools and teachers long ago? Or were we meant to entertain them, to lift their spirits on their long, dull slog towards death? All I can remember is lunchtime, when they joined us in the cafeteria. They sat segregated from us—for their comfort, or for ours, I don’t know.

The menu that day was grilled cheese sandwiches. For dessert, canned peaches in syrup. I stared at a sclerotic man with unkempt white hair. He wore a tan windbreaker. Why didn’t he bother to take it off? His spotted face hung low over his food, as though he were scrutinizing something unfamiliar. Like the others he ate silently, mirthlessly, paying no attention to his tablemates.

He speared a peach wedge and lifted it out of its pleated paper cup. Luscious drops of golden syrup ran down along the edges of the technicolor fruit, and down the white tines of his plastic fork, and onto the institutional pale-green tray. He placed it into his mouth and chewed. The sight was jarring. An old man eating little kids’ food. Accepting something designed for juvenile appetites. Was it humiliating? He didn’t care. Was it delicious? No. But I’ll never forget his air of duty, of determination. Into the mouth. Chew, chew, chew. Into the mouth again.

The tedious progression through the day, the sitting down, the getting up, the walking past strangers in the hall, the yanking of paper towels crookedly from the men’s room dispenser. The afternoon punctuated by another active shooter, on time like a clock.

In the kitchen, a man was telling another about some work trip he’d been on, where he’d expensed a crazy tasting menu.

“One of the dishes was like, this truffle jelly with a straw,” he said. “I was like, what the fuck is this?”

“Ha ha,” said the other.

“But it was fucking awesome,” he continued as I turned my back and walked away.

The First Time I Heard About the Disaster of '55

We sat at a round dining table covered in lace, somewhere in the middle of France. These were friends of my parents—was it the family my mom had stayed with as a student? Or someone else they’d met along the way? We were forever criss-crossing the country: Paris, the south, Provence, the Alps, Brittany, the Pyrenees. Who the fuck knew who these people were. I can’t remember.

They were older—older than my parents—which befit the exquisitely bourgeois surroundings. The fine china displayed in cabinets along the wall, the flowered wallpaper, the Louis chairs. There must have been a grandfather clock somewhere.

We were there to eat cake. A classic French cake with meringue and cream and lavender. It was not very good, in my opinion, as it contained no chocolate. But it was sweet, so I ate it. I don’t know why we didn’t eat lunch. Just cake. Maybe we’d arrived too late, stuck in traffic on the autoroute.

Someone mentioned the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The man wistfully recalled the race in ‘55. A car slowed on the track and Pierre Levegh struck it. His Mercedes took flight and tumbled along the stands, disintegrating as it crushed and tore asunder dozens of human beings.

I gripped the silver fork and thrust it into the violet icing. The meringue resisted a little bit—you had to press hard. When it broke, the layers shifted willy nilly. Soon, crumbs and cream covered the floral pattern along the perimeter of the plate. I was afraid I was not elegant enough for this.

Drivers are worse and worse these days, weaving back and forth across the lines as they text or tap their apps or God knows what. When I see a car like that I hold my breath and pass it, to put the impending calamities behind us.

Feel tired and a little nauseous now, after three days of weird eating and drinking, of too much at once, then not enough for too long, then too much again. And all of it under this cloud of grief, this funeral that doesn’t end.

But there is always something to look forward to: the empty page, another day, and death.

Every time I peel potatoes I think about the Holocaust. In the comfort of my well-appointed kitchen. Why is that? Is it some movie, “Sophie’s Choice” or “Schindler’s List”? Is there a potato-peeling scene in one of them? In both? Of an attractive Jewess who’s been adopted by the sadistic camp commander and who, in the midst of horror, has the chance to peel and fuck her way to survival? Such a European food, potatoes. So plain and dumb and useful. Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, fry ‘em. The food of kings and pawns and Nazis. I think I also read that the peels were desperately coveted by starving prisoners. Forced to grovel for scraps, like dogs. I think about them with each flick of my wrist.