I'm a Stranger Here Myself (26 page)

A couple of years ago, when I was sent ahead of the rest of the family to scout out a place for us to live, I included the town of Adams, Massachusetts, as a possibility because it had a wonderful old-fashioned diner on Main Street.

Unfortunately, I was compelled to remove Adams from the short list when I was unable to recall a single other virtue in the town, possibly because it didn’t have any. Still, I believe I would have been happy there. Diners tend to take you like that.

Diners were once immensely popular, but like so much else they have become increasingly rare. Their heyday was the years between the wars, when Prohibition shut the taverns and people needed some place else to go for lunch. From a business point of view, diners were an appealing proposition. They were cheap to buy and maintain and, because they were factory built, they came virtually complete. Having acquired one, all you had to do was set it on a level piece of ground, hook up water and electricity, and you were in business. If trade didn’t materialize, you simply loaded it onto a flatbed truck and tried your luck elsewhere. By the late 1920s, about a score of companies were mass-producing diners, nearly all in a streamlined art deco style known as moderne, with gleaming stainless-steel exteriors, and insides of polished dark wood and more shiny metal.

Diner enthusiasts are a somewhat obsessive breed. They can tell you whether a particular diner is a 1947 Kullman Blue Comet or a 1932 Worcester Semi-Streamliner. They appreciate the design details that mark out a Ralph Musi from a Starlite or an O’Mahoney, and will drive long distances to visit a rare and well-preserved Sterling, of which only seventy-three were made between 1935 and 1941.

The one thing they don’t talk about much is food. This is because diner food is generally much the same wherever you go—which is to say, not very good. My wife and children refuse to accompany me to diners for this very reason. What they fail to appreciate is that going to diners is not about eating; it’s about saving a crucial part of America’s heritage.

We didn’t have diners in Iowa when I was growing up. They were mostly an East Coast phenomenon, just as restaurants built in the shape of things (pigs, doughnuts, derby hats) were a West Coast phenomenon. The closest thing we had to a diner was a place down by the Raccoon River called Ernie’s Grill. Everything about it was squalid and greasy, including Ernie, and the food was appalling, but it did have many of the features of a diner, notably a long counter with twirly stools, a wall of booths, patrons who looked as if they had just come in from killing big animals in the woods, possibly with their teeth, and a fondness for diner-style lingo. When you ordered, the waitress would call out to the kitchen in some indecipherable code, “Two spots on a dot—easy on the Brylcreem. Dribble on the griddle and cough twice in a bucket,” or something similarly alarming and mystifying.

But Ernie’s was in a square, squat, anonymous brick building, which patently lacked the streamlined glamour of a classic diner. So when, decades later, I was sent to look for a livable community in New England, a diner was one of the things high on my shopping list. Alas, they are getting harder and harder to find.

Hanover, where we eventually settled, does have a venerable eating establishment called Lou’s, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary last year. It has the decor and superficial ambience of a diner—booths and a long counter and an air of busyness—but it is really a restaurant. The menu features items like quiches and quesadillas, and it prides itself on the freshness of its lettuce. The customers are generally wellheeled and yuppie-ish. You can’t imagine any of them climbing into a car with a deer lashed to the hood.

So you may conceive of my joy when, about six months after we moved to Hanover, I was driving one day through the nearby community of White River Junction and passed an establishment called the Four Aces. Impulsively, I went in and found an early postwar Worcester in nearly mint condition. It was wonderful. Even the food was pretty good, which was disappointing, but I have learned to live with it.

No one knows how many diners like this remain. Partly it is a problem of definition. A diner is essentially any place that serves food and calls itself a diner. Under the broadest definition, there are about twenty-five hundred diners in the United States. But no more than a thousand of these, at the outside, are what could be called “classic” diners, and the number of those diminishes yearly. Recently Phil’s, the oldest diner in California, closed. It had been in business in north Los Angeles since 1926, making it, by California standards, about as venerable as Stonehenge, but its passing was hardly noted.

Most diners can’t compete with the big fast-food chains. A traditional diner is small, with perhaps eight booths and a dozen or so counter spaces, and because they provide waitress service and individually cooked meals their operating costs are higher. Most diners are also old, and we live in an age in which it is almost always much cheaper to replace than to preserve. An enthusiast who bought an old diner in Jersey City, New Jersey, discovered to his horror that it would cost $900,000—perhaps twenty years’ worth of potential profits— to bring it back to its original condition. Much cheaper to tear it down and turn the site over to a Taco Bell or a McDonald’s.

What you get a lot of instead these days are ersatz diners. The last time I was in Chicago I was taken to a place called Ed Debevic’s, where the waitresses wore badges giving their names as Bubbles and Blondie and where the walls were lined with Ed’s bowling trophies. But, there never was an Ed Debevic. He was just the creative figment of a marketing man. No matter. Ed’s was humming. A dining public that had disdained genuine diners when they stood on every corner was now standing in line to get into a make-believe one. If there is one thing that mystifies me about modern life it is this impulse to celebrate things we couldn’t wait to get rid of.

You find it at Disneyland, where people flock to stroll up and down a Main Street just like the ones they abandoned wholesale in the 1950s. It happens at restored colonial villages like Williamsburg, Virginia, and Mystic, Connecticut, where visitors drive long distances and pay good money to savor the sort of compact and tranquil atmosphere that they long ago fled for the accommodating sprawl of suburbs. I can’t begin to account for it, but it appears that in this country these days we really only want something when it isn’t really real.

But that is another subject. Meanwhile, I am off to the Four Aces while the chance is still there. There aren’t any waitresses called Bubbles, but the bowling trophies are real.

I went into a Toys “
” Us the other day with my youngest so that he could spend some loot he had come into. (He had gone short on Anaconda Copper against his broker’s advice, the little scamp.) And entirely by the way, isn’t Toys “
” Us the most mystifying name of a commercial concern you have ever heard of? What does it
mean
? I have never understood it. Are they saying they believe themselves to be toys? Do their executives carry business cards saying “Dick “
” Me”? And why is the R backward in the title? Surely not in the hope or expectation that it will enhance our admiration? Why, above all, is it that even though there are thirty-seven checkout lanes at every Toys “
” Us in the world, only one of them is ever open?

These are important questions, but sadly this is not our theme today, at least not specifically. No, our theme today is shopping. To say that shopping is an important part of American life is like saying that fish appreciate water.

Apart from working, sleeping, watching TV, and accumulating fatty tissue, we devote more time in this country to shopping than to any other pastime. Indeed, according to the Travel Industry Association of America, shopping is now the number one holiday activity of Americans. People actually plan their vacations around shopping trips. Hundreds of thousands of people a year travel to Niagara Falls, it transpires, not to see the falls but to wander through its two megamalls. Soon, if developers in Arizona get their way, vacationers will be able to travel to the Grand Canyon and not see it either, for there are plans, if you can believe it, to build a 450,000-square-foot shopping complex by its main entrance.

Shopping these days is not so much a business as a science. There is even now an academic discipline called retail anthropology whose proponents can tell you exactly where, how, and why people shop the way they do. They know which proportion of customers will turn right upon entering a store (87 percent) and how long on average those people will browse before wandering out again (two minutes and thirty-six seconds). They know the best ways to lure shoppers into the magic, high-margin depths of the shop (an area known in the trade as “Zone 4”) and the layouts, color schemes, and background music that will most effectively hypnotize the unassuming browser into becoming a helpless purchaser. They know everything.

So here is my question. Why then is it that I cannot go shopping these days without wanting either to burst into tears or kill someone? For all its science, you see, shopping in this country is no longer a fun experience, if it ever was.

A big part of the problem is the stores. They come in three types, all disagreeable.

First, there are the stores where you can never find anyone to help you. Then there are the stores where you don’t want any help, but you are pestered to the brink of madness by a persistent sales assistant, probably working on commission. Finally, there are the stores where, when you ask where anything is, the answer is always, “Aisle seven.” I don’t know why, but that is what they always tell you.

“Where’s women’s lingerie?” you ask.

“Aisle seven.”

“Where’s pet food?”

“Aisle seven.”

“Where’s aisle six?”

“Aisle seven.”

My least favorite of all store types is the one where you can’t get rid of the salesperson. Usually these are department stores at big malls. The salesperson is always a white-haired lady working in the men’s wear department.

“Can I help you find anything?” she says.

“No thank you, I’m just browsing,” you tell her.

“OK,” she replies, and gives you a smarmy smile that says: “I don’t really like you; I’m just required to smile at everyone.”

So you wander round the department and at some point you idly finger a sweater. You don’t know why because you don’t like it, but you touch it anyway.

In an instant, the sales assistant is with you. “That’s one of our most popular lines,” she says. “Would you like to try it on?”

“No thank you.”

“Go ahead, try it on. It’s you.”

“No, I really don’t think so.”

“The changing rooms are just there.”

“I really don’t want to try it on.”

“What’s your size?”

“Please understand, I don’t want to try it on. I’m just browsing.”

She gives you another smile—her withdrawing smile—but thirty seconds later she is back, bearing another sweater. “We have it in peach,” she announces.

“I don’t want that sweater. In any color.”

“How about a nice necktie then?”

“I don’t want a tie. I don’t want a sweater. I don’t want anything. My wife is having her legs waxed and told me to wait for her here. I wish she hadn’t, but she did. She could be hours and I still won’t want anything, so please don’t ask me any more questions. Please.”

“Then how are you set for pants?”

Do you see what I mean? It becomes a choice between tears and manslaughter. The irony is that when you actually require assistance there is never anyone around.

At Toys “
” Us my son wanted a Star Troopers Intergalactic Cosmic Death Blaster, or some such piece of plastic mayhem. We couldn’t find one anywhere, nor could we find anyone to guide us. The store appeared to be in the sole charge of a sixteen-year-old boy at the single active cash register. He had a queue of about two dozen people, which he was processing very slowly and methodically.

Standing in line is not one of my advanced social skills, particularly when I am standing there simply to acquire information. The line moved with painful slowness. At one point, the young man took ten minutes to change the receipt roll, and I nearly killed him then.

At last my turn came. “Where’s the Star Troopers Intergalactic Cosmic Death Blasters?” I said.

“Aisle seven,” he replied without looking up.

I stared at the top of his head. “Don’t trifle with me,” I said.

He looked up. “Excuse me?”

“You people always say ‘Aisle seven.’ ”

There must have been something in my look because his answer came out as a kind of whimper. “But, mister, it
is
aisle seven—Toys of Violence and Aggression.”

“It’d better be,” I said darkly and departed.

Ninety minutes later we found the Death Blasters in aisle two, but by the time I got back to the register the young man had gone off duty.

The Death Blaster is wonderful, by the way. It fires those rubber-cupped darts that stick to the victim’s forehead—not painful, but certainly startling. My son was disappointed, of course, that I wouldn’t let him have it, but you see, I need it for when I go shopping.