Leftbanker
Saturday, October 29, 2005
CENTRALIA
A Novel
Chaper 9
Me Llamo Juan Eduardo Mejía
“I grew up in southern California, a place where most people, most white people, look down their noses at Mexicans and other Latinos. My parents are from Mexico, from Guanajuato—not that I really cared about where my parents were from when I was growing up. I just wanted them to be American and speak unaccented English. When you’re a kid you don’t want to be the least bit different; you just want to be camouflaged and fit in with everyone else.
“I actually went by John as a kid. I made my parents call me that instead of the name they gave me. I suppose that I just wanted to my parents to adopt the American child they had given birth to and were raising in southern California. I was named after my grandfather but I didn’t meet him until I was in college—the first time I ever went to Mexico. My folks went back a couple of times when I was growing up, but I never had any interest in seeing where they came from. I stayed home with relatives. For me there were just too many Mexicans in Mexico, even more than in California, if that was possible.
“Spanish was my first language and I didn’t speak a lot of English until I started kindergarten. That’s when I really knew that I was different, and I hated it. I hated being ashamed of my parents, my name, my language, and my skin color. I was lucky on that last account; I am fairly light skinned. Most of the kids in my neighborhood were darker skinned Latinos. They seemed less self-conscious of their race than I did. I was afraid of getting the slightest bit of sun which would further darken my pelt—try avoiding the sun in the beach culture of L.A.
“I spoke Spanish at home with my parents and I spoke English everywhere else. I watched so much TV as an infant that by the time I got to kindergarten I understood English perfectly. My parents, on the other hand, had a tough time learning their new language. Their first jobs were in restaurant kitchens where everyone else was Hispanic. The owners had a long history of hiring illegals, so they spoke enough Spanish to get their point across. Their point usually consisted of getting the illegals to work as hard as possible for as little pay as possible.
“There weren’t a lot of resources available for learning English as a foreign language, even if you had the time or the energy after working twelve hours a day. Even to this day, after living in the States for almost forty years my folks speak English imperfectly. I don’t look upon their heavy accents and fractured syntax with the shame I once did. It’s a terrible and disgraceful thing to be ashamed of your own parents, especially when you have wonderful parents like mine.
“My folks, Hugo and Rosa Mejía, were both 18 when they were married in Guanajuato, Mexico. My father had been working as a mechanic along with his father and two older brothers. He knew that he wanted more for his own family than what was probable in a life spent in Guanajuato. He decided after he was married that he would follow a childhood friend who had crossed the border into the United States and started a life there. They were 19 and Rosa was pregnant with my older sister. My mom and dad made their way north, just the two of them.
“Like all immigrants who have come to this country their story is fairly harrowing. So many of us take our own citizenship for granted, especially those who are critical of immigrants—either legal or otherwise. My own U.S. citizenship was conferred upon me by the simple fact that I was born in this country. My parents knew this, that’s why they had their children in U.S. hospitals, even if that meant taking tremendous risks. My parents had each other, and that has always been their greatest asset.
“So without a lot of planning, my parents left everything behind. They traveled by bus north. It was only a matter of a couple of hours before they were both farther from home than they had ever been before. I think that they were either incredibly brave or simply terrified. Like all other illegals seeking a better life in America, they risked robbery and violence at the hands of both Mexicans and Americans involved in smuggling human cargo. My father’s friend in the States had arranged for them to meet someone who was to help them slip across the border, a coyote. His friend had paid the coyote $200 and who was supposed to drive Hugo and Rosa across the border into Texas where my father was to pay the coyote another $200.
“My parents got off the bus in Ciudad Acuña, a ratty border town that would be the last stop in Mexico on the journey to their new lives. The bus station in Acuña was the home base of every coyote, drug dealer, and thief looking to cash in on the steady stream of desperate refugees from every part of Mexico and Central America making their way into Texas.
“My parents almost thought about turning back and going home after a few minutes at the bus station. They were looking for the coyote who went by the nickname of El Ruso. They had barely stepped off the bus when they had half a dozen propositions for every conceivable combination of illegal activities, some of which probably were invented at the Cuidad Acuña bus station. They spent the day trying to sleep on a metal bench in the station waiting for their deliverer.
“They spent that night in the bus station along with about a dozen other hapless castaways, most of whom looked far worse off than Rosa and Hugo. Groups of young men sat in silence reading the mildly pornographic comics for sale at the station kiosk. Extended families of campesinos who barely spoke Spanish huddled together whispering in their native Indian dialects. Everyone was either trying to steal into the United States or had already been turned back by the border police and now found themselves at the bus station purgatory.
“I have listened to dozens of stories and almost every Mexican has a pretty harrowing account about how they came across the border into America to seek out a better life for themselves. Robbery, rape, and brutality are fairly common experiences of these immigrants. Men, women, and children will walk for days through the blistering desert for the chance to do any job that Americans will no longer even consider.
“My father talked with almost everyone waiting. An old man selling candy told him that El Ruso did some business out of a bar nearby. My mother was sleeping as soundly as she could on the metal bench so my father decided not to wake her to say that he was going to the bar to look for the coyote.
“The bar was called El Sinaloense and my dad remembers that the place actually had swinging door, just like a saloon out of a western. When he entered it was about four in the morning and the place was deserted except for the bartender and about five men, a couple standing at the bar and the others seated by themselves at tables. Even by the standards of Mexican border towns, El Sinaloense was a rough place.
“It was fairly large and had a dance floor in the back. Above the bar the prices were hand-painted on the wall; cerveza and tequila being the only choices. Hugo ordered a beer to work up his courage. He took a few pulls from the bottle before he asked the bartender if he knew someone called El Ruso. He answered by raising his eyebrows towards the two men standing at the bar a few feet away.
“They were both tall and dressed as cowboys, the standard uniform for men in this part of Mexico. Hugo stepped over and greeted the two cowboys. They barely turned their heads as they studied the stranger under the brims of their white cowboy hats. Without waiting to hear a response my father started to explain that he was looking for a guy who was supposed to take him across the river and then drive him and his wife to San Angelo, Texas. He mentioned the down payment and the $200 that was to be paid when the deal was concluded. ‘Somos todos Mexicanos aquí, no hay ningun ruso.’ They both laughed at this and turned away. Hugo returned to finish his beer. The two cowboys didn’t so much as glance at him. Then dad made the mistake of walking to the back of the place to find the toilet.
“El Sinaloense would give the worst dive bar a bad name so you can imagine how squalid the bathroom was. It was a large open room, perhaps fifteen feet by fifteen feet with a single cement trough that went along the walls. Just as my father was finishing he turned and met the fist of El Ruso. The punch landed squarely on his nose and broke it. Blood poured down my father’s face.
“As bad as this situation may have seemed for my father, the cowboy had made two fateful mistakes. His first mistake was trying to rob my father without the aid of his partner who was still drinking at the bar. His second mistake was starting a fight with a man who had aspirations of becoming a Greco-roman wrestler. The cowboy had fucked up and he didn’t even know it yet.
“My dad told me that he didn’t even feel his nose being broken. He said that he had been hit much harder during wrestling practice. He had taken head butts that had almost knocked him unconscious on many occasions so he knew all about taking a punch. El Ruso tried for a follow-up punch but my father clinched up around the bigger man and pushed his head into his chest so that the cowboys flailing arms couldn’t do any damage.
“All my father said that he could think about during these furious few seconds was that his partner would come into the bathroom and he would end up dying on the filthy floor of this disgusting bathroom. He thought about how my mother would wake up to find him gone and he would never return to her. He didn’t have much time to have these thoughts.
“Hugo leaned into his attacker and threw him violently into the air with a hip throw. My father came down on him with all of his weight. El Ruso’s head hit the concrete floor hard. The fight was over…almost. He was completely unconscious. My father kneeled on his chest and smashed his fist into the cowboy’s cheek. He could feel the bone splinter. That was payback for the sucker punch that broke my father’s nose. Dad knew that a broken cheek bone is much worse than what he got. A broken nose is just cartilage.
“Hugo couldn’t believe that the other cowboy hadn’t walked in. He quickly washed most of the blood off his face in the sink and walked out of the bathroom. There was a back door to the place behind a few stacks of empty beer bottles which meant that he wouldn’t have to get past El Ruso’s drinking partner. When he got back to the bus station Rosa was still asleep on the bench. He finished washing up and changed clothes in the bathroom. He reset his nose in the mirror. To this day you can see the imperfect job he did that night in the Ciudad Acuña bus station.
“Hugo was already getting two black eyes so when he woke Rosa she was terrified. My father’s complete calm assured my mother that he was fine. When she asked him what had happened he just told her that he had saved them the $200 they were to pay the coyote. They left the station immediately. It was still an hour or so before daybreak as they walked to the northwest, away from town and towards the river and America. As the sun started to come up that morning they stopped in a stand of trees on a low rise a few hundred feet above the Rio Grande, or the Rio Bravo as the Mexicans call it. At this time of year the river is neither grande nor bravo but the sight of it was a tremendous comfort for the young couple. After what they had been through this gentle river would be the easiest hurtle of the trip.
“That evening my folks took the time-honored method of getting into the United States of America illegally from Mexico: they waded across the gentle river that separates this land of great hope from the despair and poverty of our neighbor to the South. I used to cringe with shame when I heard the term ‘wetback’ but when my father tells the story about the night he and his young bride waded across the river to their new lives in America, it is obvious that this is a pleasant memory for him.
“On the other bank of the river Hugo and Rosa settled in the cover of the sagebrush and mesquite just above the flood plain of the river and looked back at the land they were leaving. With their youthful outlooks they could only foresee prosperity ahead of them. By the next morning they had made it to a highway several miles from the border. They walked to an intersection where one of the roads had to stop to yield to the other. They hid in the brush until a pick-up truck approached the stop sign. The driver was alone and he looked like a Mexican. My father ran up to the truck and asked him for a ride. It was Hugo and Rosa’s lucky day. The stranger drove them north to the first bus station and helped them buy tickets to San Diego.
“It wasn’t long before my parents were prospering. Like generations of immigrants before and after them, they worked hard, saved, and provided the best that they could for their children. By the time I was in high school they owned their own business and we were solidly middle class. I could never escape from the shame I felt of being the son of Mexican immigrants. I spoke Spanish only when I had to around the house or at family functions. My grandmother came to stay with us and she didn’t speak a word of English. As much as I loved my grandmother, I hated being out in public with her because the whole family had to speak Spanish. I was American and I wanted everyone to know it.
“When I went away to college I had absolutely no interest in Latin culture. I hated the music from Mexico and everything about it. I had never traveled to Mexico and I didn’t care if I never went there. I actually took French at the university because I didn’t want to use Spanish as my foreign language requirement.
“Being the affluent middle class kids that I was, thanks to my parents’ hard work, I decided to go to a summer school program in Paris. After the six weeks of classes had ended my friend, Murph, and I began a two month trip around Europe. We both had rail passes which allowed us to travel second class on any scheduled rail line on the continent. From Paris we decided to visit the French Pyrenees area and then we were going to double back and go on to Italy.
“With the rail passes we didn’t need to plan very carefully. You just found a train that was going your direction and go. It was very improvisational. We found a train going to Bordeaux and found two seats inside an empty six-seat compartment. The train began to pull out of the Gare Montparnasse and we commented on our good luck of having a compartment to ourselves when the door opened and four beautiful young women with backpacks practically fell through the door.
“They were obviously Scandinavian but I spoke French to them just to show off that I spoke a bit. By the time we helped to get their bags settled we also settled on English as the lingua franca of the compartment. None of the girls—Finnish as it eventually came out—spoke French but they all spoke English to one degree or another. I was seated across from the one who spoke the best English. Her name was Seija-Liisa and she was probably the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I couldn’t even look at her for more than a couple of seconds. It was like looking at the sun.
“When the train finally got up to speed out of Paris I asked anyone if they wanted to go to the club car for a coffee. As my luck would have it only Seija-Liisa took me up on the offer. We made our way to the club car where I ordered. ‘Un café au lait et un double espress avec du lait à part.’ If I could do one thing in French after six weeks of classes it was order coffee. Seija-Liisa complimented me on my French and remarked that she found it curious that an American spoke anything other than English. It didn’t even occur to me that I also spoke Spanish. If I had thought of it I wouldn’t have told her.
“The club car didn’t have seats but there was a stand-up counter along the windows on both sides. I couldn’t imagine a better place to have a conversation with this insanely attractive girl. We were the same age, both studying at a university, and we both had the rest of the summer off to travel. I had already decided that if I had any say in the matter I would spend as much of it as possible with her.
“We were in the club car for a couple of hours together when the subject got around to where she and her friends were headed. They had plans to go to Madrid and then on to Sevilla and Granada. I immediately excused myself and said that I would be right back. I practically ran back to the compartment where Murph was playing his guitar and singing for his three fellow passengers. I entered the compartment and dug my camera out of my pack. I studied it for a second and then asked Murph to step outside to take a look at it for me.
“Out in the passageway between the compartments I told Murph that we were going to Spain. ‘It’s taken you this long to figure this out? I found out where they were going ten minutes after you left the car. John Mejía, you ain’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. Very tricky ruse with the camera. Smooth.’
“I know that it’s ridiculous, but before that moment when Seija-Liisa said she was going to Spain, I had never, not for a second, considered going there. Spain represented for me my Latin heritage that I was trying so desperately to leave behind. Women have that power over us, and thank God for it. As the train moved through France towards the border I still didn’t think about Spain other than it was the destination of the beautiful woman who was sharing my train compartment.
“We crossed into Spain early the next morning. A conductor came by our compartment to look at tickets and passports. Without even thinking about it I was speaking Spanish, trading jokes with the conductor about the sorry state of our compartment as six people all tried to find their documents at the same time. He was cheerful considering it was before seven ion the morning. When he left Murph turned to me, ‘You never told me you spoke Spanish. Where the hell did that come from?’
“I had met Murph over a year ago in a class and I supposed that I never had mentioned that I spoke Spanish, or that I was Mexican-American. That was my secret, when I could keep it a secret. The Finnish gals were talking among themselves in their language.
“Seija-Liisa turned to me, ‘You never told me you were Spanish. I though you were American?’
“’I’m not Spanish. My parents are from Mexico but I was born in California.’ Just on a side note, it’s nice to be able to tell people you are from California because everyone in the world at least knows about Hollywood, so they assume you’re from Hollywood and must have something to do with movies and I say that they can keep thinking that. So this gorgeous Finnish girl thought it was cool that I spoke fluent Spanish, and for the very first time in my life, so did I.
“I had never used my Spanish except for talking with friends and relatives, I never saw it as a means for communicating outside of the Latino community of southern California which I wanted as little to do with as possible. Now all of a sudden, in this group of women, I was exotic, suave, worldly, and most of all, desirable, at least as far as one of them was concerned.
“When we arrived in Madrid we found a hotel near the Puerta del Sol. The six of us got three adjoining rooms and everyone differed to me to do all of the talking. The hotel clerk slid the registration card across the counter. Without thinking, and for the first time in my life, I signed my name as Juan Eduardo Mejía, and that’s who I’ve been ever since.
“We spent several days in Madrid doing all of the usual tourist things. We went to the Prado and several other museums. At night we did walked the streets and ran in and out of dozens of tapas bars. On our last night Seija-Liisa suggested that we all go to a flamenco show. It sounded corny to me, I just assumed that a flamenco show would be solely for the sake of tourists, but I was thoroughly infatuated with her by this time. I asked the concierge at the hotel and he told me of the best place in Madrid to see flamenco. By his enthusiastic recommendation of the show I began to think that perhaps I was wrong about the flamenco show.
“The place was on the Calle de Torija just a few blocks from our hotel. The six of us sat at a table in the middle of the café. The only other people who looked like tourists was a table of three young Japanese girls, everyone else was speaking Spanish. The show was a mixture of a vocalist accompanied by a guitarist or perhaps two guitarists, and a group of men and women dancers. I’d never had much interest in dancing, and I had avoided and sort of Latin music at any cost, so I was completely taken off-guard by my reaction to it all.
“Luckily I was sitting at the back of our table against the wall because I broke down completely. I felt so many conflicting emotions, all of which were completely overwhelming, that I practically hyperventilated. The immense power of the singing, dancing, and music was undeniable and obvious to everyone in the room. The intense agony that is such a big part of the lament of flamenco spoke directly to me that night.
“I guess you would call it an epiphany. I came to the realization that up until I had arrived in Spain I had denied my entire heritage. I thought to myself, ‘This is your heritage, and it is truly magnificent, and you’ve wasted so much time being ashamed of it.’
“The others were so enraptured by the performance that I didn’t think they noticed my sobbing. I got up from the table and walked to the back of the room. It was like I was feeling the most overwhelming grief and the most joyous elation at the same time. I felt the happiest I had ever felt in my entire life up until that moment. I was overcome by a sense of pride of who I was. I was Juan Eduardo Mejía.
“From that day forward I never again felt ashamed of who I was. I stayed in Spain for the rest of that summer. Murph and I went our separate ways because he wanted to visit other countries. I would see those places some other time. On trip I could not get learn enough about my Spanish roots. I even waved goodbye to Seija-Liisa at the train station in Sevilla as she, too, wanted to travel on to Italy and Greece with her friends. I never told her that she was the one who made me proud of the fact that I spoke Spanish. Never since have I underestimated the power of a woman.
“I stayed in Sevilla for the rest of that summer. I found a cheap room with a Spanish family. I wanted to learn everything there was to learn about life in this Spanish city. I hounded the señora until she taught me to cook. I spent my days sitting standing at the bars in cafes writing long letters in Spanish to my parents. I felt so incredibly thankful to them now that I could speak their language, a language I had learned almost against my will.
“I felt an almost spiritual affinity towards Sevilla. I had fallen immediately in love with Paris, as everyone does, but this city was different. Paris is such a treasure that it seems like it belongs to everyone who visits, even for a day. In Sevilla I felt like I belonged there, as if the city had chosen me to be a part of it. I didn’t learn this until I returned home but my mother’s family came from Sevilla. After my epiphany I wanted to learn everything that I could about my family.
Juan took another sip of tequila. “In Spain people drink mostly wine, Mexicans drink beer and tequila.”
“So did you finally take a trip to Mexico?”
“The first thing that I did when I returned home at the end of e the summer was plan a trip to Mexico with my folks. After avoiding it for so long I was dying to see where my parents were born. Like most Americans I thought of Mexico as just poor and dirty. There certainly are plenty of places that are poor and dirty but there are also lots of wonderful cities. As I said, my parents are from Guanajuato, a city older than any colonial city in America. It is high in the mountains in central Mexico. We flew into the airport that services this area outside of León.
“At that point I didn’t know what I was expecting but I certainly didn’t expect the beautiful colonial city of Guanajuato. It is one of the most beautiful cities I had ever seen but what really struck me was the lifestyle of the people who live there. I had grown up in the suburban sprawl of southern California where we thought nothing of driving 45 minutes just to go to a restaurant. We were completely dependent on our cars. I guess we see this as being sophisticated. Cars in our culture have always been symbols of independence and freedom. It’s almost impossible for most of us to imagine living without our cars.
“I was shocked to find that Guanajuato was more like European cities than anything I had seen in the United States. People walk everywhere. Every evening people pour out into the streets to shop, sit in cafes, watch their children play in the parks, and listen to music. Every night that I was in Guanajuato we heard people playing music in the streets.
“I would sit in the main plaza in Guanajuato and talk with my parents and the rest of my family that lived there. At least two nights a week throughout my childhood we would either have guests at our house or we would go to someone else’s home. We would listen to Mexican music and eat Mexican food. I always thought that these evenings were simply a way for my parents to live in the past. Now I could see how my parents had tried to provide the kind of community they left behind in Mexico for our family in California. They wanted us to live like they did here in Guanajuato. Now that I had experienced it for myself I wanted to live this way myself.”
I looked around the crowded bar at O’Something or Other’s. There was a view of the parking lot out front. “Was this what you had in mind? This place charges extra for items like ‘sense of community.’ It’s probably on the menu under side items. Honestly, I don’t think that you could get farther from what you are talking about than this place. What happened? How did we go from listening to music in the park while watching our children play to sitting in a phony Irish pub trying to block out the sound of the canned hit parade?”
“Of course, this isn’t all bad, if it were the business model would fail. They do have a lot of great tequila for an Irish place, after all,” Juan waved at the row of bottles above the bar.
“There certainly is no shortage of consumer choices along this stretch of road. It’s hypnotic—hypnotic or boring. I think that part of my problem is my brain can no longer distinguish between hunger and boredom.” This seemed like a perfectly obvious statement but I had never said it out loud.
7:09 PM
(113061305998572526)
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
CENTRALIA
A Novel
Part Two
And Then I Wake Up and Do it all Over Again
It isn’t really that bad. My life, that is. Like I said, millions of people around the world would kill to have a life like mine, maybe billions. At least I’m not going to be hungry at night. Yes, you can say that again. I think that it is safe to say that I go to bed at night about as far as you can get from being hungry. I’d probably eat while I sleep, if that was possible. I did have a dream about that pizza with the cheese on top and in the middle. Lots of my dreams have cheese in them.
I go to the plus size rack that is my closet and get ready for work. I wonder what it would be like to have a different kind of wardrobe. I wonder what it would be like to have clothes whose function was something other than trying to make me look slightly less fat than I am. Old Italian widows probably don’t have as many black outfits as you find in my closet.
In the morning the traffic isn’t nearly as bad as it is in the evening. This gives me the courage to eat my fast food breakfast while I drive. In the business world this is called multi-tasking—a highly regarded skill. I guess you could call me an efficiency expert. I’ve seen some go-getters drive, eat, smoke, drink, and talk on the phone all at the same time. We live in a highly competitive world.
I finish with everything but my coffee as I pull into the parking lot. I get a spot in the front row. I call it my “employee of the month” parking space. The day is off to a good start. I’m always the first person in the office in the morning. The hour and a half before everyone else gets here is my favorite part of the day. There are no distractions, no silly popularity contests to deal with, and if I want to snack on a donut or two there is no one around to make me feel guilty. Don’t mind if I do.
Although I have come across so far as a fat lazy slob—and I am in many ways—I have tremendous work ethic. As dumb as my job seems at times—even to me, especially to me—I take it very seriously. A psychologist or whatever could write a book or make some sort of career just coming up with reasons why I seem to pour so much of myself into this job and so little into any other aspect of my life. Believe me, I’ve thought about it enough myself to write my own book. I guess that’s what I’m doing.
Just when I’ve settled in at my desk I look up to see someone standing over me. Dark hair, medium height, and he’s not fat. That is how I seem to categorize people; not by race or ethnicity but by body mass. So this guy is standing right over me, this guy with not an excessive amount of gravitational pull, this guy who is dressed too well to be part of the cleaning crew yet it’s well before anyone else usually shows up.
“Let me guess. You’re Chris? Who the hell else would be here this early?”
“Juan?” What are you doing here?”
“I came a week early.”
“You came to Centralia a week earlier than you absolutely had to? “I hope they let you go home two weeks early.”
This is Juan, Juan Eduardo Mejia to be exact. That’s what he always call himself, Juan Eduardo Mejia, like all three names have equal stress and equal value in his overall identity. He uses a slight Latin pronunciation for his name although he’s American, or at least he speaks perfect American English. We’ve never met in person but we have talked on the phone for work dozens of times and exchanged countless e-mails. I know him better than I know anyone who works with me here in the office. He works out of the Seattle headquarters of our company. He does information technology troubleshooting for all of the branch offices. I knew that he was coming for a few months to work here but I didn’t expect him until next week.
I suppose that I have never thought about this before, but on the phone or on the internet no one knows if you’re fat. For all Juan Eduardo Mejia knew from the phone and e-mails, I may have been an underwear model. He may still think that upon meeting me, he’ll just think that I model really, really big underwear. He, on the other hand, looks like he just walked out of one of those Mexican soap operas.
“How long are they keeping you here?”
“this project should take at least four months.”
“You think you can last four months in this town?”
“I like the travel aspect of my job.”
“I wouldn’t call Centralia ‘travel.’ Exile maybe, but not travel.”
“For me it’s fun to get to see new cities and spend enough time there to really get to know them. That’s how I like to travel when I’m on vacation. I just pick some place and try to act like I live there. I look at my work travel as a vacation in a way.”
I almost think that he must be kidding. Just using the word ‘vacation’ in the same sentence as Centralia seems horribly inappropriate unless you say ‘vacation from Centralia.’ I guess that he will see Centralia’s limited charm for himself soon enough.
“Maybe you can show me around a little after work tonight. It is Friday, after all, although you seem to work a lot on weekends.”
I don’t admit that I probably put in so many hours on Saturdays only because I usually don’t have anything better to do. Having someone think you have this incredible work ethic is better than them thinking you are just bored stiff.
“I’m sure a lot of the other people will want to take you out. The office usually goes to this place I call O’Something or Other’s out on the highway.”
“I was thinking about just a good local place, nothing special.”
Good and local are two things that I generally don’t put together; it’s kind of one or the other. Nothing special wouldn’t pose a problem in Centralia. I don’t play host to many out-of-town guests. I had sort of given up on the kind of place Juan Eduardo Mejia had in mind. I wasn’t sure if we had a place like that in Centralia. This would take some thought.
This would be easier if it were the other way around. If I was visiting Juan in Seattle we could go to a different great place every night. I’ve been there before and it’s a beautiful place. Not everyone is lucky enough to live in a great city. Most of us are from Centralia or a place something like it. I don’t know why I feel embarrassed at times like these, the times when I think that I need to explain my hometown to an outsider. I know I shouldn’t be ashamed of this place, it’s not like I invented it, or that I’m somehow responsible. I was just born and raised here. You would think that someone born and raised in Centralia could think of at least one decent place to take this guy. This was going to be the hardest part of my work day.
I got let off the hook because Nancy, our operations manager and queen bee, made plans for everyone to go to O’Something or Other’s after work. I can’t believe how hard I was trying to think of a good place to take a visitor. There used to be a family-owned Italian place near the downtown. I think it was called Ambrosia, but it closed about a year ago. I went by one night and it was gone, just like that, like it ran away from Centralia like everyone else. I had fallen into the routine of going to all of the franchise places out on the highway. That’s what everyone else does. O’Something or Other’s is packed every night. At least you don’t have to worry about parking at those places.
I was actually thinking about not going but Juan stopped by my desk towards the end of the day and made me promise to show up.
“If I have to go you have to go.”
“Just to warn you, all of this weight you see on me, none of it is compliments of O’Something or Other’s. Their food is terrible.”
“Then we’ll just stay long enough to be polite and go some place else. We’ll have a couple of flaming margaritas or whatever the hell gimmick drink they make and sneak out.”
“The last time I went there for an office party I was so bored I would have climbed out a bathroom window to get away except the window was too small. The shipping dock was a tight squeeze, but I made it.”
“Hey, I have a rule: No fat jokes and no Mexican jokes—too much family history at stake.”
“I’d kiss you but I have donut breath.”
“Just make sure you’re there on time. I don’t know anyone else.”
O’Something or Other’s was packed by the time we got there. Almost exclusively business casual types: loosened ties, sport coats hanging from bar stools, and over-dressed women. It’s one of those phony Irish bars. I wonder if there is a real Irish bar somewhere that has a bunch of random crap hanging on the walls and ceiling because this style has spawned a million clones. There must be a factory that makes all of this stuff. Our table is directly under a rowboat. Juan is seated next to Hayworth and Rita who is a kind of female version of Hayworth. Juan sees me and actually stands up.
“Chris, I saved you a seat.”
“I don’t think this place has enough lifeboats for all these people,” I say as I look up at the rowboat.
“That’s OK with me. I’m not a big believer in that ‘Women and children first’ shit.”
Juan pulls out a chair and I sit between him and Hayworth. I order one of the dumb drinks everyone else is having. Of course I’m hungry but if you think there is a bunch of incongruous stuff hanging on the walls, you should look at the menu. It’s like a testament to ethnic diversity: nachos, sushi, egg rolls, pasta, Greek salads, hummus, corn beef and cabbage, hot dogs, you name it. The problem is everything is so bad it’s like the food is an ethnic slur, an insult to the cultures they represent. It’s like somebody making fun of foreign accents or something.
Juan is a big hit with all the people from the office. I excuse myself and slip over to the bar to order a real drink, a drink that wasn’t invented at O’Something or Other’s world headquarters, something that probably never came with a free t-shirt like tonight’s drink special. There’s an empty seat at the bar.
“Are you going to leave me there to fend for myself?” Juan stands next to me and motions to the bartender.
“This place wasn’t my idea.”
“There is one of these in Seattle…somewhere.”
“These places are everywhere. They’re like McDonald’s for the slightly upwardly mobile. By the way, if this isn’t corny enough maybe I can get the staff to clap and sing Happy Birthday for you.”
Another seat at the bar opens up, The bartender comes over.
“Do you like tequila?”
“Only the decent stuff, I’m too old for the rot gut.”
Juan asks the bartender about the tequilas and they immediately start speaking Spanish. I don’t speak much Spanish but I can tell that they are talking about a lot more than booze. Finally they finish their conversation and the bartender pours two
shots of tequila from a long silver bottle.
“Salud.”
“Salud, gracias,” Juan answers. He hands me one of the glasses and toasts again. “Salud.”
“Salud,” I reply and take a small sip. “What were you two talking about?”
“Just the usual Mexican to Mexican chit chat.”
“You’re Mexican?”
“My parents are from there. I was born in California.”
“Have you been to Mexico?”
“I have, but let me start this story from the beginning.”
3:37 AM
(113021149249890962)
Friday, October 21, 2005
CENTRALIA
A Novel
Chapter 7
TV
Where do I start? I’m sure that my thoughts speak for many people. Television is our best friend. It’s our worst enemy. It’s there when we need it, and it’s there when we don’t. It is the center of most American homes. There is something on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, year after year. Televisions come in all shapes, from wall-sized to hand-held. TV is ubiquitous. TV has become a state of being that permeates and influences every aspect of our society. We couldn’t turn it off even if we wanted to, and we don’t want to.
Television has also been our best and our worst teacher. What we have learned from TV we never seem to forget. Sometimes I wish that I could get all of my TV memories surgically removed, call it mental liposuction. I often wonder about how my life could be changed for the better if I wasn’t carrying around all of the billions of bits of TV trivia that I picked up over the course of my life spent in front of the box. Perhaps they could swap real memories for the virtual memory of TV programs that fill up my head. Instead of the theme song from Gilligan’s Island, I could have a memory of being a member of the singing Van Trapp family from The Sound of Music. Instead of knowing the intricate rules of The Price is Right, I could know more about Mayan cultural anthropology. Then again, I could use actual liposuction—first things first.
In most American residences the television sits in a position of honor. If you were a visitor from another planet you would think the TV was some sort of God that we worship, and you wouldn’t be all wrong. There are many sacred icons that don’t get the kind of respect that most televisions receive. Television has many faithful followers. I’m one myself.
Most of the time when I am home my TV is on, in that I think I’m like a lot of people. TV is like my roommate that never makes a mess and is never judgmental. The problem is that the TV never wants me to go out and actually do anything. Why go to a movie when I can watch one at home? Who needs friends when I have lots of friends on the programs I watch? Travel isn’t necessary if you have the Travel Channel. If there were such a thing as a Work Channel I’d probably never leave the house.
When I first walk in my door I sit down with the bag of fast food in front of the television I have in my front room. I don’t have any plans for the night so this may be it. You probably don’t believe this but it’s not like I sit in front of the TV every night. I know that I’ve painted a fairly grim picture of my life but I have friends and family. There are things to do in Centralia besides work, spend money, and watch TV. I just don’t have plans to do any of those things today—maybe tomorrow. I have high hopes for tomorrow, but tonight there are a few things on TV that I want to see.
There are a few things on TV that I want to see every night. This is the biggest problem with this medium. If everything on television were terrible, we would always find something better to do with our time. You hear plenty of the pseudo-intellectual types say proudly that they never watch TV and some of them go to movies. There isn’t a difference in my book. Television is simply another vehicle for movies so unless you have abandoned the whole medium of film, you shouldn’t be too much of a snob about how people ingest what they watch.
The content these days is positively relentless. Television is like this huge, voracious beast that is constantly searching for programming. You may think that a lot of what is aired is positively atrocious, but to each his own. There is plenty of programming across the dial, or whatever you call the range of channels in the post-dial era. We used to call this the dial because televisions had a round dial that you turned to change channels. It would have to be a pretty big dial to accommodate the dozens and dozens of channels available to today’s viewers. It would have to be as big as a truck tire, bigger than my waist. Today there is something for everyone—and I do mean everyone. With a little mixing and a little matching every single viewer can have their own private channel.
Most of the channels on TV are about perfect people. In the world on screen almost everyone is thin and beautiful. They all have straight teeth and great hair. Sure, they have lots of problems, but their problems are called entertainment. We watch the perfect people deal with their minor annoyances and during the commercial breaks they bombard us with products that guarantee to make us just as perfect.
Just about the least perfect thing to be in this TV world is fat. Watch a couple hours of television and you’ll see that about half of it is selling you stuff to help you lose fat, or selling you the products that got you there in the first place. On TV everything looks delicious. This is the yin and yang of modern-day America. On the one hand I’d love to be an underwear model, on the other hand I think, “Doesn’t that frozen pizza look fantastic? I mean look at it! There is cheese on top and inside the crust. Aren’t our scientists wonderful?” How can dieting and exercise compete with a pizza with cheese on top and in the middle? We put a man on the moon so why can’t they make exercise equipment that is stuffed with cheese?
It’s Thursday evening so I don’t feel too guilty sitting around watching TV. I have to work in the morning so it’s better than going out and getting drunk. Right? Only people in TV shows have lives exciting enough to go out during the week. Their job is to have pretend lives exciting enough so that the rest of us will stay home and watch their fiction instead of going out ourselves on Thursday evening. They put all of the really crappy shows on Friday and Saturday nights because the people that stay home to watch TV on those nights aren’t very hard to convince. On Thursdays the shows are pretty good so it’s not a bad night to stay home if you don’t have anything better to do. I don’t.
6:26 PM
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Wednesday, October 19, 2005
CENTRALIA
A Novel
Chapter 6
Tennis Anyone?
All of the new housing in Centralia has sprouted up in the southern part of town adjacent to the shopping district. All of the housing developments have British country estate names like Wildewood Manor, Maplecrest Grove, Alderwood Estates, Brentwood Terrace, and a lot of other silly names to make you think that everyone who lives here is part of the Centralia aristocracy.
My chateau is located at Brentwood Terrace. On the sign for Brentwood out front by the highway there is a painting of a fox. Brentwood Terrace sounds like a place where everyone goes fox hunting on weekends. I’ve never been fox hunting. I wouldn’t know what to do with one once I shot it, or caught it, or blew it up, or whatever happens at the conclusion of a fox hunt. They look too scrawny to eat and if you can’t eat them what’s the point?
There is a swimming pool here and a couple of tennis courts. The idea is that people who live at a place like Brentwood Terrace are active and on the go. As with automobiles, and a lot of other consumer goods, the buyers rarely live up to the ideals of the marketing behind the products. We are all like children who aren’t living up to our parents’ expectations.
Tennis seems to be about as popular around here as fox hunting. I’ve never seen anyone playing. Sometimes I see a group of teenagers at the courts smoking cigarettes. At least someone is getting some use out of them. The swimming pool seems to get some use. I’ve never been but I’d like to go sometime. I should check to see if they have a special pool hour for the big and tall crowd.
Brentwood Terrace has five apartment buildings with about thirty units in each building. Each building is completely surrounded by a parking lot and all of the buildings form a circle around the pool and tennis courts. The buildings are far enough apart that people actually drive to the swimming pool. The apartments are further isolated from one another by a few acres of grass and recently-planted trees. The trees have been planted in dense clusters to make it look like a forest. All of the mature trees were removed to facilitate construction. The landscaper designers at Brentwood must have been from the “we have to destroy the forest to make a forest,” school.
I have lived here since the place first opened five years ago and I think I’m the only original tenant. I suppose that people aren’t meant to stay at a place like this. Although they aren’t inexpensive, the Brentwoods of the world are merely stepping stones to better places. From here you are supposed to purchase a condominium further down the highway. After that you move a little farther into a single family home. The apartment complexes, the condominium communities, and the housing developments all use the same slash and burn landscaping techniques making this entire side of town look like it has sprouted up in the wake of some devastating world war.
I can pull right up to within ten feet of my front door, just like at a cheap motel. I’m surprised that no one has come up with drive-thru apartments where you don’t even need to get out of your car when you get home. I’ll bet someone has played around with the idea. Being able to park ten feet from your front door is the next best thing, or next worse thing, depending on how you look at it.
I almost never see any of my neighbors. When we do run into one another we don’t say much. It is difficult for apartment dwellers to get over the initial feelings that being too friendly to their neighbors is an invasion of their privacy. It is too easy not to be friendly, to just mouth the perfunctory greetings and run inside or run to your car in the parking lot. Avoidance is fairly simple; avoidance is the path of least resistance.
On this evening there is no one to avoid, which makes the path to my door even easier. Televisions illuminate most of the apartments on this side of the building. The faint, dancing glow from the screens seeps through even the slightest openings in the closed curtains. You can pretend that you aren’t at home but the TV will give you away. As I walk to my door I can hear the volume from my next door neighbor’s set.
5:42 PM
(112974383040367641)
Monday, October 17, 2005
CENTRALIA
A Novel
Chapter Five
Fast Food
Something that I do too often is stop for carry-out food on my drive home from work. I tell myself that it’s easy, that I don’t have time to cook, that it’s too expensive to prepare food for myself. It certainly is easy. It does save time, but I never bother to ask myself just why I need to save time. I know that the part about take-out food saving me money is a lie. I also know that eating this stuff is probably killing me pretty quickly. Did I mention that it’s easy?
I don’t even have to get out of my car. Whoever invented the drive-thru window should become the patron saint of lazy, fat people. With the proliferation of services available with a drive-thru window, you would think that laziness has become some sort of crippling handicap that requires special dispensation.
I pull off the highway and steam into one of the fast food restaurants that seem to dominate this side of town. In the parking lot there is a special lane for the drive-thru window. I stop in front of a menu board and static from the speaker greets me. The entire menu has been reduced to a series of numbers, like in Chinese restaurants. In Chinese joints they number all of the menu items so if the servers have limited English skills they don’t have much problem understanding your order. If you ask for the #2, that’s easier than ordering moo shoo pork with a side of rice, or whatever the #2 is. Fast food joints have reduced the menu to numbers solely for expediency. If they can reduce your order from six words to one word, they can get you out the door—or through the drive-thru—that much faster. I order the #3 and pull forward.
Although I come here quite often, the turn-over among employees is so high that I never recognize anyone. They range in age from teenagers to senior citizens. You can almost smell the resentment the young kids have for their minimum wage jobs waiting on the likes of people like me. The older workers seems overly grateful to have any sort of employment, although they always appear to be too overwhelmed by the frantic pace of the service to have any energy left over to be personable. Sure, the place is boiling over with ‘Thank you’s’ and ‘Have a nice day’s’ but it all comes out in that forced corporate-speak enunciation that would sound the same if they were telling you to fuck off and die.
When I get to the window a good-looking teenage kid tells me without so much as a glance my way that the total is $5.35. I hand over the money and the employee forks over the food, although there are no ‘forks’ involved because fast food is so easy you don’t even need utensils. I put the bag of very questionable nutritional value on the passenger seat and drive away. I hear the young employee say, “Die now,” or something like that. That’s it. I bark out a number into a microphone, pull up, exchange money for a greasy bag, and drive off. Not much chance for friendships to develop. There is barely an opportunity for civility. The fast food industry is just one very small step above using a vending machine.
I have another ten minutes of driving before I get home, giving the bag of food time to get cold and coagulate—not that it was good at any stage of the operation. Eating slightly fresher food inside the restaurant is not a very pleasant option. The dining area seems like a treat for children—there is actually a playground inside—but for me the atmosphere always seems slightly desperate—like a cafeteria in a prison or a mental ward. Bright fluorescent lights and uncomfortable seats bolted into the floor. On the walls are machine generated art prints direct from the home office that probably cost more than original oil paintings by living artists. Art without any shred of controversy. You can bet that these places employ a team of engineers and designers to come up with an ambiance that practically screams at you to eat quickly and leave.
I used to stuff myself as I drove home, but I quit after I almost got into a collision trying to unwrap a double cheese burger. Instead, I take a swig of my cola. The cup is so big that it doesn’t even fit in the center console cup holder. I don’t know how many ounces it holds but when I’m finished I can use it as a garbage can in my bathroom. A large cola now comes in the huge bucket that used to hold a large popcorn at the theater. A large popcorn comes in something the size of a small suitcase. Whoever it was who said, “Less is more” would get laughed out of every boardroom in America. More is more, and don’t you fucking forget it.
Not that you could forget it. More of everything is almost obligatory. Nobody really wants a small wastebasket of cola. The thing is, they make it easier and cheaper for you to get the mondo-grande size. Ordering anything less seems almost wasteful. The frugal thing to do is to get the mondo-grande meal. Why get the small cola when for a few pennies more you can get a glass of cola so big you could float toy boats in it. They even give out free toy boats to the kids.
That entire exchange took about five minutes. I’m pull back on to the highway and steer home with the bag of food on the seat beside me and the gargantuan cola propped precariously between my legs. As pathetic as the fast food experience may have been, it will be my only contact with people on this evening. There is no chance of contact with anyone on the drive home. In the rain I can’t even see other people in their cars.
6:08 PM
(112957256861635229)
Saturday, October 15, 2005
CENTRALIA
A Novel
Chapter Four
Commuting
Because I get to work a couple of hours before everyone else, I usually have a parking spot in the first row. For some reason this is always a bit of a moral victory for me whenever I can pull it off. I will often drive around parking lots a couple times in the hope that a space in the front row will vacate so that I won’t have to walk an extra 100 feet, but I’m not the only one who does this. I must have learned it from someone. Maybe everyone does it.
Most people who work here have nice cars. Hayworth has one of those Legspreader 5000 sports cars. A lot of the single women drive little convertible Barbie Funmobiles. People are fairly transparent in the car choices. If you did a personality test you could probably match every car in the lot to its owner. Single people are supposed to identify more with the sexier models of automobiles—whatever that means. I came to the conclusion a while ago that putting myself in one of those small sporty models wouldn’t make me any more appealing and it would probably take the Jaws of Life to get me out.
My car is pretty boring. If it were newer you’d think it was a rental. About the only praise that I have for it at this stage is the fact that it is paid off. I made the huge financial mistake of buying it new several years ago because I thought I wanted that “new car” smell. The “new car” smell lasted until about the third monthly payment and then the overpowering stench of a looming four year debt took over. Now I’m saddled with a boring car, but it gets me around. I won’t buy another new car. I want to drive this heap until I drop dead. I’m out to be practical and not morbid when I say that I want to be buried in this car.
If I were an undercover cop posing as a nondescript, boring suburbanite, my car certainly wouldn’t blow my cover. I think the factory name for the color is something like Insipid White. My car-choice personality test would reveal that I’m just out to blend in; I’m looking for camouflage. If cars were clothes, mine would be a school uniform.
I get in my stealth mobile and drive out of the lot, turn right, and head to Highway 31. Almost all of this area of town is no more than ten years old. Locals jokingly refer to this area as Silicon Valley because this is Centralia’s technology district. That is perhaps a bit too flattering a description for what these businesses actually do. It’s mostly service industry companies: insurance, finance, real estate, and more insurance.
I work on the north end of town and I live on the south end. Centralia isn’t a very big city but it still takes me about 20-30 minutes to drive to work. Highway 31 is the main north-south artery through Centralia which runs perpendicular to the east-west Interstate on the south side of the city.
Since the 1970s this corridor has seen an explosion in growth, about 90% of which is in the form of national franchises. All of the franchise places would make my commute look a lot like yours if you live in a place like Centralia. I drive past MacDonald’s, Burger King, Denny’s, K-Mart, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, KFC, O’Something or Other’s, Shell, Mobile, 7 Eleven, Outback Steakhouse, TGI Fridays, you name it, they’re all here.
Today, like most days, there is quite a lot of traffic on Highway 31. It’s like someone lifted the city up and all of the cars slid over here to the highway. This is exactly what happened as far as the city’s commerce is concerned. As I make my way south the road briefly skirts the downtown area, although there is the buffer zone of Midas Muffler, Wendy’s, Office Depot, and Kinko’s forming an almost impenetrable barrier of commerce between the highway and the old city center. With every new franchise along Highway 31 there is one less reason to visit the crumbling downtown. The state university is also in this part of town, my Alma Mater.
The Centralia Mall is just off the highway about two miles south of the downtown. The mall was originally built at the extreme southern end of the city but so much new growth has occurred in the post-mall era that this is now more like the middle of Centralia. Growth is progress and progress is good. There was a time when I looked at this area of town differently than I do now. I can’t remember how I used to feel, and I can’t articulate how I feel about it now, I just know that something has changed.
Everything about this part of town used to seem so convenient to me: the mall, the smaller strip malls, the fast food joints, the multiplex theater, the quickie-marts, and the acres of free parking everywhere. The charm of this area has worn off in much the same way that the new-car smell faded from this car that I cherished so briefly. As I paid off my car I gradually understood that I had been duped into buying it new in the first place. As my enthusiasm for my car waned, so too did my interest in the manmade landscape built around the automobile. I’ve only recently begun to think of driving as a tedious chore. In this culture, that’s like saying that you think living is tiresome.
6:47 PM
(112940226648064937)
Thursday, October 13, 2005
CENTRALIA
A Novel
Chapter 3
It’s Called Work for a Reason
I’m being extremely generous when I call this cubicle my office. It’s not a lot different from the twenty other cubicles that make up the company where I work. Even the boss has a cubicle not much bigger than mine as a sort of gesture of corporate socialism, an “all for one” mindset she tries to foster. The cubicle has been the standard operating procedure in businesses for decades. Five feet high and six feet long barriers made of metal and cloth fabric. Cubicles offer the advantage of not providing privacy and facilitating isolation at the same time. Cubicles provide just enough of a barrier to squelch any sense of camaraderie among workers while they aren’t adequate to allow the concentration necessary for individual achievement. Cubicles have walked quite a delicate balance of failure.
I’ve got one of those hunky firemen calendars on one of the walls of my cubicle. I found it in the dumpster and I thought that it would give the office trolls something to talk about. The boss is fairly sharp but no one else here has any grasp of irony.
At work I barely register with anyone around me. We don’t really have to interact to do our jobs so my coworkers keep their interactions with me to an absolute minimum. About the only time anyone talks to me is if they need an answer to one of life’s truly perplexing questions. A guy named Hayworth works next to my cubicle. He’s been here two years and we’ve exchanged maybe 50 words besides greetings. He has a habit of asking me questions without really posing them as questions. It’s like he thinks that he knows the answer but he isn’t sure so he will make a statement with an intonational question mark tacked on to it.
“Italy is in Europe?”
“Mexicans speak Spanish?”
“World War II was against the Nazis? Right?”
He really asked me these questions. I couldn’t make that up.
There doesn’t seem to be many facts that Hayworth can state confidently. He doesn’t feel remotely self-consciousness or embarrassed for not knowing these basic facts of adulthood. He has a university education; everyone here has one. He may have even done well in school. His technical prowess is enough for him to get a job like this and make a decent living. His attitude about his own intellect seems to be “good enough for government work.” He probably hasn’t touched a book since he graduated. He needs all of his intellect for watching the 24-hour sports channel. On the wall of his cubicle he has a photograph of what looks like a bunch of football players in the middle of an orgy.
He’s not much different than the rest of the crew around here. In our break area you’ll find a stack of tabloid magazines detailing the lives movie stars. These are usually left there by the women in the office, but the men will unashamedly page through them if there isn’t a sport’s page lying around. Yes, this place is a real think tank.
My coworkers feel no need to apologize for wasting their time with star magazines. I overhear them saying things like, “Sometimes I just need something mindless,” or, my favorite, “I just want to be entertained.” As if they spend their entire day in deep thought from which they need the respite of celebrity rags, like when they aren’t reading about the latest pop star they are reading Neuroscience Monthly or Philosophy Today or something. As if anything that isn’t completely moronic couldn’t possibly be entertaining.
After studying my coworkers I have determined that there are three levels of conversation. The lowest level of conversation revolves around people’s personal lives. The favorite topic of conversation around here is gossip, what they did over the weekend, tedious details about their relationships, and all of the other things that fall into this lower level of conversation hell.
The big news today is that one of them just got engaged. I seriously doubt that many of the women in this office could name three countries in South America but they are all amateur gemologists when someone is flashing a new diamond. I heard one of them quote the diamond industry mantra that men are supposed to spend the equivalent of two months of their salary on the engagement ring. Everyone seems to take this at face value. I said that I heard the same thing from the American Hot Dog Council, that it suggests that everyone spend five percent of their annual income on hot dogs. If it’s possible for me to be less popular around here, that attempt at humor may have done it.
The next level of conversation is discussing the world around you, outside of your personal experiences. These conversations around the office are fed by two sources: Hollywood and professional sports. These seem to be the overriding passions of a large percentage of the population. There is nothing new in this. Even the ancient Greeks moaned about their citizens worshipping jocks. Actors probably had it pretty easy back then, although no celebrity magazines have survived from ancient Athens. There doesn’t seem to be a modern-day Xenophanes to criticize our infatuation with athletes and actors. That they make an immeasurable contribution to our society is taken at face value.
The third level of conversation is the discussion of ideas and abstract concepts. If this ever happens around this place it must be when the cleaning crew is here at night because during office hours nothing remotely comes close to a conversation about ideas. But this is work and they call it work for a reason. If I wanted brilliant conversation I should have got a job at a research institute or something.
I haven’t said what it is that I do for a living. Everyone always wants to know that. It is one of the first questions adults ask each other when they meet for the first time. People always ask you where you are from. I was taught not to end a sentence with a preposition so I don’t ask that question. I also don’t want them to ask me. I’m embarrassed to say that I’m from Centralia, even if someone from here asks me that. If they aren’t from here the next thing they ask is, “Where the hell is that?” People from New York or London or Paris don’t have that problem.
So besides where you were born, everyone wants to know what you do for a living. What I do is the moral equivalent of being from Centralia when people ask me where I’m from. I tell them what I do for a living and their next question is, “What the hell is that?” Not everyone can be a rock star or an astronaut. I like my job. We’ll leave it at that.
Everyone in the office has been invited to some sort of engagement party for the gal with the new piece of chipped glass on her finger that better have cost at least two months of her fiancé’s salary. They are going to that faux Irish place, O’Something or Other’s or whatever it’s called. I wasn’t invited specifically so I don’t feel much guilt in blowing it off. I’ll get her a gift later, maybe a subscription to People and a new remote control for her boyfriend.
I’ve arranged it so that my hours are different. I come in early and leave a couple hours before everyone else in the office. This makes it easier for me to sneak out without getting roped into going to O’Something or Other’s with the wedding party. I don’t like the food there anyway, except those deep fried cauliflower things. Those are really good and I almost decide to go to the party until I think about who will be there. The last time I went to an office function I was so bored that I felt like fainting. It was the Christmas party and I seriously thought about escaping by jumping out of the third story bathroom window. I couldn’t fit through the window so I snuck out the back fire exit. Today I walk out with a little more dignity through the front door of the building.
Our building is situated in what is known as an office park, truly one of the cruelest euphemisms in modern corporate lingo. I suppose that the area looks pleasant enough from the window of an automobile; there are plenty of trees and well-maintained grass lawns. There are about six other office buildings nearby which all look about the same. They are all surrounded by parking lots. A four lane road funnels traffic off of the main highway a few blocks away.
It’s all very convenient and efficient until you try to walk. There are no sidewalks, no crosswalks, and, more importantly, almost nowhere to go on foot. There is a coffee shop in the building across the street from ours but it’s almost impossible to get there unless you drive. There is a grass medium between the East and West bound lanes of the road that serves as a drainage canal. I tried to walk there one morning for a donut and I almost drowned. Not exactly drowned but I did sink in the mud up to my ankle. I could have died out there. The lesson I learned was to stay in my car. Cars are safe, walking is treacherous.
10:28 PM
(112924257952249279)
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
CENTRALIA
A Novel
Chapter 2
FAT AND UGLY
I’m Fat and ugly. Just hearing those words must be painful for you. Sorry about that. They also make for a lousy introduction. I wish that I could say that I was thin and beautiful. Everyone likes stories about people who are thin and beautiful but as I said, I'm fat and ugly—the two worst things to be in this culture.
I was born ugly. Ugly goes way back in my family, generation after generation, as far back as photographs could document. You can see in photographs that my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents—on both sides—didn’t have much in the looks department. Before the camera came along to document my family’s homeliness my kin were simply described as being ugly. If one of my ugly ancestors had their portrait painted it hasn’t survived. Why keep around a painting of an ugly guy? It would scare the kids. Ugly is my birthright, a sort of feudal duchy I have inherited. I look in the mirror and bask in my domain.
As far as the fat thing goes I’m proud to say that I’m self-made. I’m first generation fat, the first one in my family with a waist bigger than you can get both your arms around. I would like to tell you that it was difficult, that I struggled long and hard to be fat; that I did it completely on my own, but—like most “self-made” millionaires—I had plenty of help. I would like to thank a few people: Ben and Jerry, Little Debbie, Mister Frito-Lay, MacDonald’s, Burger King, Coke, and Pepsi. The list is long and distinguished.
I wasn’t always fat. It happened over the course of several years. It sort of snuck up on me. Yeah, that’s what happened, those 50 extra pounds snuck up on me when I wasn’t looking—probably while I was busy eating. Be careful or it could happen to you.
Fat is such an ugly word. These days we just say that people are overweight. In fact we are saying that over half of Americans are overweight. It is probably more by now—it’s a growing problem. Pardon the pun, but that brings up another subject. If you are overweight, along with the fat they should hand you a sense of humor about it because you are going to hear an endless barrage of fat jokes and comments about your weight. It goes with the extra territory.
You would think that with the numbers we represent, the lard-asses of America would take over and set a new standard for beauty, make our own rules. We could say that being five foot nine inches and two hundred twenty pounds was normal. We could boycott advertisers that insisted on using famine-victim skinny models to sell their products. We aren’t a radical bunch, so we bow down to the television ideals which dictate that thin is beautiful and fat is not.
I sometimes think that I will win the battle with fat; that I’ll diet and exercise my way to thinness; that scientists will develop some miracle pill to cure obesity, but the ugly thing will always be with me. I don’t know who makes the rules but ugly is, and always will be, ugly. Not much you can do about ugly. Ugly never sleeps. There is no known cure. I’ve heard that wearing a hat helps; they work as a distraction. I’ve got a closet full of hats. I’ve got a freezer full of ice cream.
From the looks of the shelves at the bookstore you would think that half the country has written a book about how to lose weight. There have been so many fad diets that you could probably eat any combination of foods and it would make up someone’s miracle diet. I’ve tried my share of them. Nothing worked for me. Then I saw an old broad on a cooking show making a dish with everything the diet books had been telling me to avoid. The old gal looked great, she also looked happy. That’s when I decided I’d never go on another diet again. Now I eat whatever I feel like eating. I’m still huge but I’m not getting any bigger.
Lots of people say that working out is the key to losing weight. There is no shortage of gimmicky exercise equipment for fat people. That whole exercise angle seems like the same scam as diets. Everyone has a theory about why we are fat, how to lose fat, how not to get fat, how to keep fat off once you lose the fat, how to turn fat into muscle, and how to keep muscle from turning into fat. Fat people are the biggest suckers out there. We fall for anything if it promises us a chance at being skinny. Some say fat people need to change their lifestyles. I’m all for that, I just don’t know how it’s done. I can’t even work up the inertia to clean out the trunk of my car.
It is certainly a growing health concern, but most of our preoccupation with obesity is more about the aesthetics of being fat. Thin is in and fat isn’t where it’s at. Even at a time when most Americans are overweight, advertisers try to shove thin people down our throats. I meant that figuratively, of course, but if someone came up with a cannibalism diet, shoving thin people down our throats would probably be a big craze. I’ve seen worse diets. I’ve actually been on worse diets.
Now I’m trying a weight loss system I thought up all on my own. It’s called the STOP FUCKING EATING program. I have that written on the door of my fridge. Not very sophisticated, I’ll agree. It’s easier said than done, but what isn’t? I just decided that I got fat because I ate too much. But this isn’t a diet book. As I’ve said, there are enough of those to fill the library of Alexandria. I don’t think that diet books were what Gutenberg had in mind when he came up with the printing press. Our obsession with our bodies is pretty boring; it’s like talking about bodily functions.
Perhaps I’ll figure out how to do one of those lifestyle changes and I’ll lose a few pounds, but don’t hold your breath, don’t leave the light on, and don’t keep supper warm for me. Chances are I already ate.
The truth is that the lifestyle that I have is too comfortable for me to change it, as much as I know it needs changing. Like the extra pounds that I put on over the years, my lifestyle sort of snuck up on me little by little. For many years I never really thought much about the way I lived. I have a job, a car, and an apartment filled with stuff. I’m doing everything that everyone around me is doing. If there is anything else no one told me.
Besides being fat and ugly I am also getting older. Ouch! Getting older is almost a bigger sin in America than my other two flaws. The funny thing is that although I’m as big as a house, I hardly get noticed by anyone. People ignore me for the most part. It’s like if they pay any attention to me I will screw up their People Magazine 25 Most Beautiful People world where they want to live. People like me have become invisible. We also tend to keep quiet.
7:18 PM
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Friday, October 07, 2005
CENTRALIA
a novel
chapter one
Doing 18 to Life
I live in Centralia. It’s not by choice. There are no volunteers in this town. Most of us were drafted here by the accident of our birth. If your parents committed the crime of living here, that meant that you were stuck with the Centralia sentence, too. I was doing what we called “18 to life.” The first 18 years were at home with my parents. This covered infancy and the dreaded school years, the minimum sentence. I wasn’t paroled from Centralia when I left home, so here I am in the same prison but in another cell, so to speak. If I had been marking off the days of my sentence on the wall they would add up to 32 years. There doesn’t seem to be any prospect of an early release for my good behavior. I have no plans for escape. I wouldn’t know where else to go. Centralia does this to people.
Maybe you’ve been to Centralia. Maybe you’re from Centralia, or a place just like it. From what I’ve seen, there seems to be no shortage of Centralia’s in America. For all that I know, Centralia is the registered trademark of American hometowns. Centralia ®.
So I’ve lived my whole life in Centralia. Now that I’ve said it I realize what an ironic statement that is, considering that I feel that I haven’t really started living yet—eating, breathing, and surviving, yes, but not living. I had come to think that it wasn’t possible to have a life in a place like Centralia; a city indistinguishable from thousands of other towns across the country, a place without distinction, a place from which the best and brightest—when given the chance—flee like felons from a poorly-guarded prison. Of the top ten percent of my high school graduating class, I’d guess that zero percent of them have chosen to live in Centralia. They seem to vanish without a trace, never to return.
In truth, Centralia is no worse or no better than most places I’ve seen around the country. Stand at any busy intersection in town and look around. You’ll see the same businesses you’d see in any town in America. You could be anywhere; you could be nowhere. I could tell you how to get here but I couldn’t tell you how to get out. From what I’ve seen, going some place else wouldn’t be much different.
There are lots of worse places to live in the world than the place that I reluctantly call home. I’m sure there are millions of people around the world who would literally kill to live in Centralia. I shouldn’t be complaining. I’m not complaining. I just started thinking that there could be more; that things could be better; that things didn’t have to be the way they have always been; that things could actually change. But for someone who has spent their entire life in an American small town, change can be a terrifying word. Change is uncomfortable. Change takes too much effort. Change is disorienting. Most people say that they are creatures of habit, not creatures of change. I don’t know about you but change scares the living shit out of me.
If you must blame something for the homogeneity of commercial America, it probably started with the interstate highway system begun in the 1950’s. With the inception of this marvelously modern and destructive system of highways, Americans were able to travel easily from one end of the country to the other without even having to so much as slow down to look at how other communities were constructed. The increased speed of the new highways sparked a demand for convenience along the route. People didn’t want to take the time to experiment in new places. Very quickly the entire local flavor of businesses along the route of the highways was replaced by less-confusing franchise outlets that consumers would be familiar with from one end of the country to the other.
Now that Americans were traveling in such great numbers they would create a huge demand when they were in an unfamiliar city. Travelers wouldn’t know that the local bar and grill served a great sandwich, but they would be familiar with a franchise hamburger joint. The price would always be the same. The food at the franchise joint was fairly horrible, but travelers would know what to expect there and they would prefer this institutionalized awfulness to gambling on an unfamiliar local joint. As I said, change can be frightening.
Business people began to realize that they could take one good idea (and in many cases a bad idea) and replicate it across the continent. It’s difficult to think of a single good or service that hasn’t been developed into a nation-wide marketing strategy. This means that for most Americans, you are able to go about your entire day of commerce without spending a dime in a place that doesn’t also exist in Anchorage, Miami, Des Moines, Sacramento, or Centralia—especially Centralia. It has gotten to the point where in Centralia you can’t spend a dime anywhere at any place but some nationally franchised chain outlet.
Is this homogeneity of the marketplace a good thing or a bad thing? I never really thought about it one way or another for most of my life. The economy of scale is something taught to every American school kid. Henry Ford invented the automobile (That’s what I was told) and then revolutionized the production process by using the assembly line. Why not use this process to make hamburgers or to sell automobile mufflers?
A couple of other events conspired to bleed the life out of many American cities, both big and small. After World War II American GI’s were guaranteed home loans from the Veteran’s Administration. Home ownership drastically increased in the 1950’s and 60’s with many of those new homes being built in new suburban areas surrounding larger cities. Some of this suburbanization had to do with white people fleeing the inner cities, away from an increasing urban black population.
The home in the suburbs was, and still is, looked upon as the American dream. Ask most people what they feel is the American dream and they will probably describe a single family home with a yard and a picket fence. Not many people will say the American dream is a one bedroom apartment in the city within walking distance of shops, theaters, and restaurants. So with the help of guaranteed home loans and a booming post-war economy, Americans started buying their dream in record numbers.
Automobiles had become essential to the life of almost every American. People began to consider driving 5, 10, 15, even 20 miles or more to work every day. People would now commute one hour each way, every day, in order to have their single family home with a yard in the suburbs. The city was just a place where they would visit on weekends or where they went to work. More and more highways were built to support the suburban lifestyle. People began driving more and more and walking less and less. The American dream of the single family home was the pot of gold at the end of the asphalt rainbow.
Shopping malls came along starting in the 1950’s and really took over in the 1970’s. Malls were built in the suburbs and made going to the city more and more unnecessary for suburbanites. With the coming of shopping malls, very little remained of the downtown area of many American cities. Malls were convenient for a population completely addicted to the automobile culture. Malls provided acres and acres of free parking. The parking lots were big enough to facilitate the busiest shopping days of the year which left them eerily fallow most of the time. The only thing uglier than a parking lot is an empty parking lot.
Very quickly every city in America had a shopping mall and they all looked pretty much the same. By this time Americans seemed to have abandoned any idea of making their cities attractive. Shopping malls were simply about function and facilitating commerce. Although there is probably a mall somewhere in America called the Taj Mahal, shopping malls are universally ugly. Even the Taj Mahal would be an eyesore if it were surrounded by a parking lot.
Malls became the heart of the community. At one time the town square was the center of civic life, now people drive to the mall. I was a mall rat kid in middle school and high school. Many of the people that make up my demographic spent countless hours of their youth inside the confines of these commercial villages.
The Centralia mall, like malls everywhere, has usurped the downtown area as the shopping center of the city. I can’t even remember the last time I walked around downtown. I couldn’t name a single business that still ekes out an existence near the courthouse square. I don’t even go to the courthouse. There is a drive-through courthouse annex at the mall. No kidding. What a world.
The Centralia mall lies a few miles south of the downtown, right off of the interstate highway. Since the mall was built, this southern side of the town has expanded to include a host of other franchise commercial enterprises. Fast food joints, phony Irish pubs with names like O’Something or Other’s, and huge retail outlets have sprung up along this corridor. There aren’t any family-owned restaurants in this part of town. The menus in these places, like the manmade landscape of my town—like the manmade landscape of your town—was planned by the corporate office somewhere in another time zone. I hope you like it, not that anyone at the home office cares what you think.
Along with the commercial cancer that has attached itself to the highway host organism, this area of town has also seen a boom in residential housing. People have been abandoning Centralia in droves to live in the outlying unincorporated communities. The American dream in Centralia is being pursued in the new suburban housing tracks. One of the main attractions to the new housing is the parking. Older homes in Centralia were built before automobiles became ubiquitous. There are no attached garages on the beautiful Victorian homes in Centralia. Many of the grander homes had carriage houses but in this day and age no one wants to walk fifty feet from their garage to their house. On the autopsy report for American towns, one reason for their demise was the desire for attached three car garages.
For most of my 32 years in Centralia I never was conscious that there was anything wrong with the life we lived there. Like everyone else, I was intoxicated with the convenience of everyday living. I just had to get in my car and drive to get everything that I needed to survive. I never had to walk more than a few hundred feet after I parked my car. We all thought that this was a good thing. None of us noticed that we were spending more time in our cars. If we did noticed we didn’t care. Our cars were nice. Our cars defined us, or so said the advertising.
We accepted our way of life because that was all we knew. We saw no examples where people were living any other way. We grew up believing that this was the way to live. People drove cars in our culture and our job was to go out there and buy the best car we could get. No one actually came out and said it but we all understood that “you are what you drive” was the modern day equivalent of “I think, therefore I am.”
7:10 PM
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Thursday, October 06, 2005
The Blog Novel
My newest endeavor may require a bit in the way of an introduction. I will try to serialize a novel over the next few weeks written as a series of essays that could stand on their own, more or less, outside the confines of fiction. Over the course of my adult life I have come to cherish novels that have something to say about the culture in which they were produced. I have found that some of the most highly regarded American novelists have almost nothing to say.
How many times have you read a novel written by one of these titans of American literature that is about a writer? Like Hollywood, the literati have simply lost touch with America and the problems faced by the vast majority of us. I remember reading about Ian McEwan’s latest novel in which he wanted to write about a character who had a job so he made his protagonist a brain surgeon. Nice try, asshole. The John Irvings, the Joyce Carol Oates’, the John Updikes et al have done a fairly horrible job of creating an American literature fit for anyone other than English graduate school students. It is rare that a novel considered to be literature by academics actually has a bit of popular appeal.
I don’t want to bother myself with an essay detailing the shortcomings of contemporary American fiction. What I would like to do is create a novel that attempts to come to grips with my incredibly ambivalent feelings towards American society. I want to deal in specifics. I have written often on this page about the environment in which I now live. I have tried to communicate the joys of city life for people who have never had that pleasure and who have probably viewed city life as crowded, dirty, dangerous, and impersonal.
Over the course of my life I have also seen a tremendous failure on the part of city planners throughout most of the country. I have witnessed a numbing homogeneity of American cities, a grotesque explosion in the growth of suburbs and a corresponding collapse the infrastructure of cities both small and large. Most of our citizens have accepted this change without protest. I don’t think that most people know any other way to live. I see so much of our culture is subconsciously creating alienation, destroying community, and denying people the critical skills necessary to question their environment and demand change.
I’m no Buddhist monk, but I can see that our individual pursuit of material goods has interfered with our ability to create livable communities. It is possible for us to change ourselves and our communities. I am fortunate enough to live in a place that has taken great strides to improve the living environment of the city. With the novel that I am writing I want to show how people can rebuild their lives to their own specifications, not those dictated by the commercial environment in which they live.
Wish me luck!
10:38 PM
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