at home, I turned on the radio and heard a televangelist exhorting me, his flock of one:
HEAR ME AND UNDERSTAND: NOT THAT WHICH GOETH INTO THE MOUTH DEFILETH A MAN, BUT THAT WHICH COMETH OUT OF THE MOUTH DEFILETH HIM.
I left the radio on and walked into my living room, turning on my TV and tuning the channel to the news. The man at the fast-food restaurant had been taken in for a heart attack, stopped dead (although not quite literally) in the middle of a double-melted patty fry. When emergency services arrived on the scene, the manager had already begun to reassure the other patrons and was attempting to persuade them to continue eating, even as the myocardially infarcted customer began vomiting, coughing around the food, his sweat running down his forehead and mingling with the ejecta on his chin. It was his third heart attack, the second this year. The doctor advised him to follow a careful exercise regimen and prescribed nitroglycerin pills to be taken nightly, both of which were refused. I realize again that the news anchors have said none of this. I am watching a medical drama and my food is growing cool, congealing on the plate I hold in my hand as I stand in the doorway to my living room watching television.
Thursdays are blue-sticker days at the thrift store. Any item carrying a dark blue adhesive dot is automatically twenty-five percent off its already low, low price. A woman gathers bunches of artificial flowers from a bin.
“I can't believe people would just toss these out!” She says.
“Yeah,” I say. “It's terrible.”
“Terrible! There's a lot of wear left in these!”
“Yes.” I say. “A lot.”
“I teach a class.” She says.
I turn and rummage through some VHS tapes.
“First and third Sundays. That's why I buy so many.”
“So many flowers.” I clarify.
“I teach a class on memorializing.”
Someone has donated an entire series run of a sitcom from a previous decade. I do not own a VHS player.
“Memorializing what?” I ask.
“The departed.” She says. “I teach people how to decorate graveside.” She pauses as she weighs the relative merits of two different sprays of silk asters, before putting both in her basket. “There's a technique, you know.”
“I should think so.” I say.
“Quite a bit of technique.”
There is a jazz quintet performing in the street, a du-wop number with a keyboard simulation of a female chorus. People have come out of nearby restaurants and bars to listen, white napkins still in hand, glasses of wine still held in tentative grasp. They are middle-aged and content and mostly attentive, the women swaying appreciatively and the men watching dutifully, their cellphones pocketed for the most part and their coats left on chairs inside, as if they trust both to the brevity of this event and in their own ability to quote unquote roll with it. The faces of the women are tired. I can see, in the way they shift their weight in high heeled shoes, that they are contemplating the extent to which they can stretch out this dinner by engaging with happenstance and otherwise-ignorable events, and by so doing delay the moment at which they arrive home and relieve the babysitter of her duties, going upstairs to undress only to be greeted with the sound of all-too-easily reawakened children. They take another sip of wine. I remember reading in the paper today about a lawsuit between rival wine manufacturers over conflicting labeling, the bottler of “Mommytime Merlot” insisting that the nomenclature of the cab sav sold as “Margaux for Mommies” was in direct and deliberate infringement. The case was ultimately thrown out upon the determination of the judge that mommy-themed wines had so proliferated throughout the market that the term no longer possessed distinction in any form, and such trifling similarities as had been brought to case were insufficient for prosecution. I see Eduardo on the far side of the crowd, so I walk over.
“What's up?” I ask, not sure if he recognizes me.
“Hey, man, what's up? Great stuff, huh?” He nods at the quintet. The two saxophonists are facing each other, bobbing and swaying as if in some elaborate mating ritual which will ultimately end with their horns linked at the bowls and mouthpieces in a brassy coitus.
“I was taking a walk.” I say.
“I was eating at that new place over there where they serve your food to you with a picture of the animal it came from.”
“I see.” I say.
“Yeah, it's part of this whole omnivore-consciousness movement. 'Be aware of your fare.' That kind of thing.”
“Be aware of your fare.”
“Yeah, exactly, like—god, that was a great riff right there—that saxophonist's really killing it—it's like, here's the face of what you're eating. Here's this cow or chicken or whatever staring you in the eyes as it sits on the end of your fork. Really promotes awareness.”
“That saxophonist really is killing it,” I agree. “Yeah, awareness. I get you.”
We listen more. The men who were first to arrive on the scene have begun to put their arms around their wives as a preparatory move to ushering them back inside to finish dining.
“This looks like it's winding down,” Eduardo says. “You wanna come back to my place?”
Eduardo's apartment sits atop a two-story bar across and down the street on which we were standing. Inside are posters of films of which I have never heard. In the middle of the room there is what was known in my parents' decade as a “conversation pit.” It is lined with shag rugs. It is a little clichéd, I think.
"This used to be a sex club." Eduardo says. "Ever heard of Touches?"
I have not.
"Absolutely no life left in this town."
This, too, strikes me as something I've heard before, in a movie or a play performed by college students.
Eduardo lights a cigarette and picks a piece of fruit from a bowl on the low table in the middle of the pit.
"There was this guy," he says, "who lived off sunlight and berries. Or sunlight and his own piss, I forget which. One of my documentary friends in South America made a documentary about him."
He looks contemplatively at the skinny cigarette in his hand.
"I wish I could live off smoke," he says.
Unlike the ill-fated Dominos ad campaign featuring The Noid, the contemporaneous “Where's the Beef?” promotion by hamburger-chain Wendy's revolved around personal indignation and consumerist outrage, rather than attempts at frustration of unmeditated villainy. In the Wendy's ads, whose catchphrase far surpassed the Dominos credo of “Avoid the Noid” in terms of populist appeal, a group of three elderly women inspected a large hamburger provided by a fictional restaurant chain. While two of the women remarked on the girth of the bun supporting the all-important hamburger patty, the third angrily demanded to know “where's the beef?!” This manifestation of outrage was carried over in subsequent television spots featuring the third woman yelling at drive-through windows and at a hamburger executive as he relaxed on his yacht. The import of these advertisements is unmistakable, in that they condition the viewer to expect amounts of beef whose quantity is never specified but is implied to surpass anything the viewer has yet witnessed, or at any rate anything the viewer might reasonably be expected to be offered at competing hamburger-restaurant chains. While the Dominos promotion encouraged the viewer to contemplate the possibility of nefarious forces beyond their control, the Wendy's campaign turned the focus inward on personal gratification and left the supposed “evil” to be defeated undefined and faceless, conceived only as a lack rather than an active negative force. The ultimate demise of the “Where's the Beef?” campaign came not in the form of aberrant public reaction but in the betrayal of the actor who uttered the critical phrase, who agreed to advertise for Prego pasta sauce with the claim that she had finally “found the beef.” Wendy's subsequently terminated the actress's contract, claiming that her performance implied that she had “found the beef at somewhere other than Wendy's restaurants,” clarifying that the actress was pe
rmitted to “find the beef in only one place, and that is Wendy's.” The difference between the two chains is ultimately one of possession versus observation; note even the difference in the names of the restaurants, with the possessive apostrophe in “Wendy's” lending the franchise an atmosphere of ownership and entitlement, while the image presented by “Dominos” suggests patterns, cause and effect, and chain reactions.
I inspect the flowers closely. They are held together with brown pipecleaners, those bits of wire wrapped in abrasive fibers long since surpassed in use by children than by men, the stuff of day-care arts-and-crafts rather than meerschaums and custom blends. The arrangement is held down with grey duct tape, the better to blend with stone.
I step back to admire the entire scene. There is, as she said, quite a bit of technique. Those headstones in sandy or coral shades are given strips of masking tape, while the more common grey granite receives, as I said, duct tape. The rarer red granite is given bits of matching red electrician’s adhesive. There is a wisdom and foresight in the use of brown pipecleaners—a novice might well choose to use green in order to match the stems, but the person responsible for this arrangement--all-too-well acquainted, it would appear, with death—has anticipated the demise of these flowers and chosen a brown binding that will blend with the result of a few short