Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (37 page)

"
Yes, child.
"

"
Why does Daddy look at the stars all the time, Mommy?
"

"
Because he's an asshole.
"

"
Do assholes always look at the stars, Mommy?
"

"
Your father does.
"

He had his telescope in the attic and he was always confusing his constellations. He could never get it quite straight between what was Orion and what was the Big Dipper. For some strange reason he couldn't accept that the Big Dipper looked like a big dipper, but at least he wasn't in jail for stealing cars.

He worked hard and gave his wife all his money and she went to bed with the postman every chance she got. It was barely a life but being always confused about the Big Dipper gave it a fingernail-clipping continuity and meaning. "How could it be the Big Dipper if it looks like a big dipper?" was the way he approached it.

But all that was years in the future and now he
was standing in front of me bedless and telling me all the details.

Changing the subject completely, I put my plan in effect by asking him if he still had that old .22 rifle of his.

"Yes," he said, looking slightly bewildered at the turn of mental events. "What does that have to do with anything? What am I going to do? I'll catch pneumonia out there in the garage."

I successfully concealed my instantaneous revulsion when he said the dreaded word pneumonia. I had more serious things on my mind than to be rattled by the idea of pneumonia.

"No, you won't," I said.

"How do you know?" he said.

"I've got a mattress," I said.

He looked at me.

"I've got a mattress, too," he said. "But my folks won't let me take it out of the house into the garage."

Good!
I thought: My plan is a certain success.

"I've got an extra mattress," I said, emphasizing the word EXTRA. He was impressed, but he knew that there was a catch to it. He waited.

I made it simple and sweet using the English language like a brain surgeon ordering a sequence of nerve events with his scalpel.

"I'll trade you my mattress for your .22."

His face showed that he didn't like that idea. He
took out a twisted and hunchbacked cigarette butt. It looked as if he had found it in the Hugo novel.

Before he could light it, I said, "I just read someplace that it's going to be a . . . . . very . . . . . cold . . . . . winter." I dragged the key words out until they sounded as long as December.

"Ah, shit," he said.

That's how I got the gun that led me to making the fatal decision to get a box of bullets instead of a hamburger.

If his parents hadn't made him go live in the garage, I never would have traded my mattress for his gun. Even if they'd still made him go live in the garage, but had given him a mattress, I wouldn't have had that gun. I got the gun in October of 1947 when time-sequenced nature was beginning to close the pond down for winter.

When the first cold rainy winds of a big autumn storm blew across the pond, everything changed, but of course none of this has happened yet.

It is the future.

The present is watching their truckload of furniture drive/rattle down the road toward me, but somehow they never seem to get any closer.

They are like a mirage that refuses to have any responsibility toward reality. It just stands there satirizing actual things. I try to make it respond like reality but it refuses. It won't come any closer.

They and their truck are pasted like a child's drawing against the fourth dimension. I want them to come, but they won't come, so I am catapulted into the future where it is November 1948 and the February-17th apple orchard event is history. The court found me not guilty of criminal negligence in the shooting.

A lot of people wanted me sent to reform school, but I was found innocent. The subsequent scandal forced us to move and now I'm living in another town where nobody knows what happened in that orchard.

I am going to school.

I'm in the seventh grade and we are studying the American Revolution, but I have no interest in the American Revolution. I am only interested in everything that I can find out about hamburgers.

Somehow I believe that only a complete knowledge of hamburgers can save my soul. If I had gotten a hamburger that February day instead of bullets, everything would have been different, so I
must
find out all that I car about hamburgers.

I go to the public library and pour over books like intellectual catsup to gain information about the hamburger.

My desire for hamburger knowledge dramatically increases the level of my reading. One of my teachers gets alarmed. She calls in my mother trying to find out the origins of my gigantic intellectual leap.

My mother can only help by saying that I like to read a lot.

This does not satisfy the teacher.

One day the teacher asks me to stay after school. The teacher is becoming obsessed by my newly-found reading level.

"You're reading a lot," the teacher says. "Why?"

"I like to read," I say.

"That's not good enough," the teacher says, her eyes brightening. I'm beginning not to like this at all.

"I talked to your mother. That's what she also told me," the teacher says. "But you don't think I believe that, do you?"

I'd had teachers before who were strict disciplinarians and wouldn't think twice about whacking a kid, but this teacher was rapidly becoming dangerous right in front of my eyes.

"What have I done wrong?" I say. "I just like to read."

"That's what you think!" the teacher yells, loud enough to summon the principal who takes her away to his office, sobbing hysterically.

Following a period of recuperation, a month's sick leave, total rest, the teacher was transferred to another school. After a series of substitute teachers, we got a new permanent teacher who didn't give a damn about my reading, so I continued gaining the reading tools to aid in my exploration of the hamburger and
possible redemption through a complete knowledge of its origins, quirks and basic functioning.

Looking back on it now, I guess I used the hamburger as a form of mental therapy to keep from going mad because what happened in that orchard was not the kind of thing that causes a child to have a positive outlook on life. It was the kind of thing that challenged your mettle and I used the hamburger as my first line of defense.

Because I looked older than I actually was—I was thirteen, then, but I was tall for my age, so that I could easily be mistaken for fifteen—I passed myself off as a high school student who was a reporter for the school paper and doing an article on hamburgers.

This gave me access to almost all the fry cooks in the new town where we had been forced to move. Ostensibly, I interviewed them about their experiences cooking, but always worked the interview around to their involvement with hamburgers. The interview would start out being about one thing and would always end up being about hamburgers.

A bright young high school reporter (me):
When was the first time that you cooked a hamburger?

A Mexican fry cook approaching forty the hard way:
Do you mean professionally?

Reporter:
Yes, professionally or just as an amateur.

Mexican Fry Cook:
Let me think. I was just a kid when I cooked my first hamburger.

Reporter:
Where was that?

Mexican Fry Cook:
Albuquerque.

Reporter:
How old were you?

Mexican Fry Cook:
Ten.

Reporter:
Did you enjoy cooking it?

Mexican Fry Cook:
What was that question again?

Reporter:
Was it fun cooking your first hamburger?

Mexican Fry Cook:
What kind of article did you say this was?

Reporter:
It's about cooks here in town.

Mexican Fry Cook:
You sure ask a lot of questions about hamburgers.

Reporter:
You cook a lot of hamburgers, don't you?

Mexican Fry Cook:
But I cook a lot of other things, too. Why don't you ask me about grilled cheese sandwiches?

Reporter:
Let's finish up with hamburgers. Then we'll move onto other things: grilled cheese sandwiches, chili.

Mexican Fry Cook:
I've never been interviewed before. I'd love to talk about chili.

Reporter:
Don't worry. We'll talk about it. I'm very certain my readers want to hear everything you know about chili, but first let's finish up with hamburgers. That hamburger you cooked when you were ten years old was an amateur hamburger, wasn't it?

Mexican Fry Cook:
I guess so. No one paid me to cook it.

Reporter:
When did you cook your first professional burger?

Mexican Fry Cook:
Do you mean when I got paid to cook my first hamburger?

Reporter:
Yes.

Mexican Fry Cook:
That would have been my first job. 1927 in Denver. I went to Denver to work in my uncle's garage but I didn't like working on cars, so my cousin had a little cafe near the bus depot and I went down there and started helping him out cooking and pretty soon I had a shift all my own.

I was seventeen.

I've been cooking ever since, but I cook a lot of other things than hamburgers. I cook—

Reporter:
Let's finish with the burgers first and then we'll get onto other things. Did you ever have any remarkable experiences cooking a hamburger?

Mexican Fry Cook (now beginning to show a little concern):
How can you have a remarkable experience cooking a hamburger? I mean, you just put the patty on the grill and cook it. You turn it over once and put it on a bun. That's a hamburger. That's all there is to it. Nothing else can happen.

Reporter:
What's the most hamburgers that you ever cooked in a day?

Mexican Fry Cook:
I've counted a lot of things in
my life but I've never counted hamburgers. People order them and I cook them. That's all I know about it. I mean, sometimes I'm busier than other times and sometimes when I'm busy people order a lot of hamburgers, but I've never counted them. I've never even thought about counting hamburgers. Why should I count hamburgers?

Reporter (undaunted):
Who is the most famous person you ever cooked a hamburger for?

Mexican Fry Cook:
What's the name of the paper you're writing for again?

Reporter: The Johnson Union High School Gazette.
We have a large circulation. A lot of people out of high school read our paper instead of the
Johnson City Herald.

Mexican Fry Cook:
Do your readers want to know this much about hamburgers? I had some very interesting experiences in the War, cooking in the South Pacific. Once I was cooking breakfast on Kwajalein when a Japanese bomber—

Reporter (interrupting):
That sounds very exciting but let's finish up with the hamburgers, so we can get onto other subjects. I know that talking about hamburgers may seem dull to you a professional, but my readers are fascinated by hamburgers. My editor told me to find out as much as I could about hamburgers. Our readers eat a lot of hamburgers. Some of them eat three or four hamburgers a day.

Mexican Fry Cook (impressed):
That's a lot of hamburgers.

Reporter:
In my article I'll mention the name of this restaurant and you'll be getting a lot more business. I wouldn't be surprised if this place became famous. Who knows. You might even become part owner because of this interview.

Mexican Fry Cook:
Did you get the spelling of my name right?

Reporter:
G-O-M-E-Z.

Mexican Fry Cook:
That's right. What else do you want to know about hamburgers? What the hell! If people want to know about hamburgers, I sure as hell won't stand in the way.

Reporter:
Have you ever felt sad cooking a hamburger?

Mexican Fry Cook:
Only if I'd spent all my money on a girl or if a girl left me. Then I'd feel sad even if I was cooking pancakes. The most trouble I have in this world is with girls. I always get girlfriends who give me a lot of trouble. They take all my money and I feel bad afterwards, but some day I'll meet the right one, I hope. In the meantime, yeah, girls make me feel sad when I'm cooking and that includes hamburgers.

I'm dating a girl now who's a beauty operator. All she wants me to do is take her out to fancy restaurants and nightclubs. I have to work two shifts to keep her
in restaurants and nightclubs, and you can bet your life that she won't eat here.

I once asked her if she wanted to eat dinner here. Of course I wasn't cooking. It wasn't my shift, but she said, "Are you kidding?" Three hours later she ate so many shrimp at this fancy seafood place that I had to hock my watch the next day. She wouldn't eat here if this was the last place on earth.

I stood there with my notebook imitating as if I were taking down notes about his love life that he was really getting into now, but they weren't notes. They were just nonsense symbols and useless abbreviations in my notebook. They could not be used for anything, but whenever he mentioned hamburgers my notes became as bright and clear as a searchlight.

Reporter (interrupting the boring tragedy of his life. He really wasn't a very good-looking man. The only reason women would go out with him was that he worked sixteen hours a day cooking hamburgers and he would spend all his money on them):
Did you ever feel happy cooking a hamburger?

Mexican Fry Cook:
If it was the last hamburger of the day, and I was going out on a date afterwards, I might feel happy because I was getting off work and was going to maybe have some fun with a girl.

I ingeniously ended the interview by keeping him away from cooking breakfast on Kwajalein during the War and a Japanese bomber—Also, his chili ended up being very much left out in the cold. As I was leaving the cafe, he began to have second thoughts about the interview. "When is this interview going to come out?" he said.