Chop down the memory tree



Nighthawks — Edward Hopper

 
No Rilke or Rodin here today. Just a bit of autobiography, an outbreak of remembrance triggered a couple of weeks ago when I came across this delightful poem by Elliot Fried at Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac blog (where amongst other treats you can hear Keillor recite it) ...

Daily I Fall In Love With Waitresses

by Elliot Fried

Daily I fall in love with waitresses

with their white bouncing name tags

KATHY MARGIE HONEY SUE

and white rubber shoes.

I love how they bend over tables

pouring coffee.

Their perky breasts hover above potatoes

like jets coming in to LAX

hang above the suburbs—

shards of broken stars.

I feel their fingers

roughened by cube steaks softened with grease

slide over me.

Their hands and lean long bodies

keep moving so...

fumbling and clattering so harmoniously

that I am left overwhelmed, quivering.

Daily I fall in love with waitresses

with their cream-cheese cool.

They tell secrets in the kitchen

and I want them.

I know them.

They press buttons creases burgers buns—

their legs are menu smooth.

They have boyfriends or husbands or children

or all.

They are french dressing worldly—

they know how ice cubes clink.

Their chipped teeth form chipped beef

and muffin syllabics.

Daily I fall in love with waitresses.

They are Thousand Island dreams

but they never stand still long enough

as they serve serve serve.

This piece touched a soft spot in the tummy of my memory, recalling for me the fondness I have long felt for diner restaurants. My first meal in the United States was at just such an establishment and though I had not yet turned five, I remember still …

My parents, brother Phil and I arrived at JFK airport in New York in the summer of 1961, back when it was still known as Idlewild. We had flown in from Caracas, Venezuela, where I was born and spent my toddlerhood, which I now suppose ended on that flight to America. Leaving the only home I had known, my toys, bed and room, saying goodbye to family and friends and adiós to español, were all farewells a bit too outsized for me to comfortably pack and carry. On arriving in New York, there was more wild than idle at the airport; I vaguely recall a sense of feeling lost and adrift in the bustling vastness of the airport, with so many complete strangers hustling by as fast as the words I couldn’t understand. Nothing made any sense… until one of those seeming strangers picked me up and wrapped me in a hug; my Uncle Floyd, a gentle bear with a pencil moustache that stretched out above a rich deep voice as he bellowed “Larry, my boy!”, a call that would forever after in my life announce and rhyme with Thanksgiving and giving thanks, with Christmas trees and Easter eggs and all family holy days.

I suddenly felt less lost and, though perhaps nothing made much sense yet, there was now a possibility that it would, that my parents may actually have been right when they reassured me that I would be happy in America. This possibility began to flesh out soon after leaving the airport when Uncle Floyd wheeled his huge car and my entire family and our belongings into the parking lot of a diner, a real diner, one of those converted railroad dining cars, somewhere in Brooklyn (“God’s country”, as my Brooklyn-born dad must always clarify). Inside the curved silver walls of the strange restaurant, I now imagine that I was christened into my new American life with maple syrup and pancakes. No more arepas for Lorenzo; pancakes for Larry.

I digress … I actually wanted to talk about diners that came later in my life, all-night diners that I frequented for many years over a quarter century ago now, the diners conjured up by the Elliot Fried poem above. But, as my good friend Bonnie observed recently in a comment, sometimes we can only reach out by first reaching within, so while blowing on those memories, the long lost ember memory of Brooklyn baptismal flapjacks flared up, and I offer it here as the first course of this long all-night meal.

Unlike the daily enamoring of Fried’s poem, for me it was nightly that I fell in love with waitresses — the ones at the 24-hour diners I visited several times a week after work during the years I worked nights loading and unloading trucks. Perhaps that first Brooklyn diner planted the seed, but my fondness for diners stems from those years when me and my work buddies would punch out from work at 3 or 4 am and head for the diner nearly every night.

From 1976 to 1985 I worked as a Teamster at a transportation company that has long made scientific harassment the core of its management ethos and practice. The job did pay the rent and put food on the table, two concerns shared by poets and non-poets alike, or so I have been led to believe. But there was more to it than that. Somewhere in my history studies, I had been so taken by the thesis of two venerable Germans who long ago observed that philosophers have only interpreted the world but that “the point is to change it”, that I decided to drop out of college and go change the world from inside 42-foot semi-trailer trucks and from deep within a corrupt union. Working nights allowed me time during the day for community organizing where I lived and union organizing at work. A few of us took part in the founding of a nationwide rank-and-file reform movement, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and began a chapter of TDU in our own Local 177.

The pay was decent and we fought like hell to keep it that way. The work was physically exhausting, but we were young and grew strong in the punishment; mentally it was stultifying, our dreams were still unquenchable though. We got harassed and treated like trash by the supervisors, but some nights we gave as good as we got. Some nights. And our union was misrun by hacks; quietly we would swallow our pride and loudly we spit fire. Some nights.

Every night we would emerge from the trucks physically spent and covered with dust. Working the graveyard shift and the ever-present cardboard dust turned us all into a monoracial brotherhood of sorts; regardless of whether we were black, brown or beige when we punched into work, by the time we clocked out, we were all just different shades of grey. And ready for coffee and some eats.

There was a poem in here somewhere …. Oh yes, here it is, it begins in the diner washroom where we’d stalk in on arriving to try to remove our grey patinas of dust and sweat…

caked in dried sweat
gotta hit the head
a quick trip to the terlets
we grimly smeared the grey grime
across our faces
patted down
our uncooperative hair
scrubbed our hands good
yeah, got them real clean
before we pissed

and then for some eats
coffee
boob banter
chit chatter with the waitresses
who for some reason
my memory has now all named
Josie

The menu had French omelets
Spanish omelets
German omelets
Italian omelets
English omelets
yeah, we chowed down
a lot of Old World worldliness
right there in Edison, New Jersey
had home fries too

Cheesecake could turn the talk sweet
to what we would do
when we won the big weekly lottery,
that would get Johnny Paycheck
singing on the mini-jukebox at the table
Take this job and shove it

On those other nights when
unbending lottery numbers
only made the coffee extra bitter,
there’d be elaborate plans for
daring heists
to knock over an Atlantic City casino
maybe two

Or wolfman Chris might tell us about the poem
he would write one day
“chop down the Cadillac tree”
what does it mean?
I don’t know he would tell us
but it’s a great first line
and we would all agree
a great first line

Or we would retell and celebrate
the night that him and Sam drove
into the City in Sam’s revved up GTO,
common sense damped down
and their courage souped up
on some beers and bourbons,
and drove the wrong way
across the Brooklyn Bridge
all the way to the other side
all the wrong fucking way to fucking Brooklyn
(God’s country)
without killing anyone
or themselves
or landing their fool asses in jail
a great line

With our gutwanderlustfulness sated
or Dillinger derring-do depleted
with our wrong-way one-line poems doing u-turns
it’d be time to split
we’d leave
our Josie sisters of the night
outlandish tips next to
crumpled cigarette packs
and a song still playing
on the tabletop jukebox
Don’t let the sun catch you crying

on the way out
there were arcade machines with some jeopardy
question and answer game
but when we did not want to not be stumped
again
by who directed Cool Hand Luke
(what we have here is a faaaailyour to communicate)
we would play the great new thing
Pacman
wow
how sophisticated
better than Pong even
or another game where
my electronic blips and bloops
had to break through
the descending brick wall
before your blips and bloops

and they did
our late nights yawned
with such howling triumphs

we were resigned prisoners though
and tunneled our walls
only halfheartedly
while inviting the blips and bloops
to do on our minds
the same numbing number
the trucks and night
had done on our bodies

and we left dust trails
in the prison yard parking lot
on the way to our cars
on the way home
on the way to sleep

Damn! Is that the sun coming up already?
Tomorrow was already here
again
and all I wanted to do was
sleep away
such alarming wisdom
and scrub my face away
on the pillowcase
    © Lorenzo — Alchemist's Pillow

In affectionate memory of Wolfie, with whom so many of those all-night work and diner sessions were shared and who, 30 years ago today, mistook a sunrise for a sunset, the wrong end of a shotgun for a friend and quenched his thirst and his dreams with a cannonball instead of a bourbon. Oh, Chris, what you’ve been missing…

Brooklyn Bridge, A Tribute in Light

Well, not sure how I got from Fried's perky potato breasts landing at LAX airport to Chris going the wrong way over the Rubicon in his one-line Cadillac, but strange things can come down when one begins to shake that memory tree...

Ray Charles — Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying ...