Waiting for the Man (6 page)

STARDUST

Money feels irrelevant here at the ranch. To me. It’s not, of course; I understand this. The place is premised on the idea of the possibilities afforded by vast sums of it. But for us, our isolation means there’s nothing to spend it on but booze and cigarettes. There’s an odd lack of commerce here. The ranch is very careful not to mention the price of anything. Even the bath balms from the spa don’t carry price tags. Guests don’t hand over a credit card upon check-in. Everything is assumed. And that’s a sign of wealth, too.

The closest bar is almost an hour away and the employee lounge carries four brands of scotch, some whisky, some bourbon, two types of vodka, and beer. And once a week, one of the delivery guys brings extra beer and we buy it from him. We save a few bucks this way. When the ranch opened, he worked out a deal with the wranglers and the deal has stuck. He’s developed quite a side business and though everyone knows about it, there have been no efforts to shut him down. The GM, the owners, they don’t care. They aren’t making money off the employee bar. And they need our relative happiness.

The delivery guy’s name is Ben. He’s a giant, close to seven feet, I think, and he supplies us not only with beer but also with dope and whatever chemical is making the rounds. He’d supply cigarettes also but for some reason the canteen sells them for a cheaper price than he can offer. No one asks Ben where he gets his beer or why his prices are so reasonable but I can imagine someone like Ben has things worked out. He never smiles. He’s the stereotype of the stony-faced Indian, Mr. Spock with a tan.

Ben is of this land. There is a certain symmetry in this. Giant Ben born under the giant sky. Everything here is so big, the land is so big, the sky is so big, the mountains are so big, it’s difficult not to feel that the world is aligned with something positive. People from this place are optimists. It is ingrained and logical. Our country takes its cues from land such as this. The endlessness of everything that surrounds you here creates a mythology that encourages limitlessness. Thoughts of freedom. I can see that. It’s difficult to imagine the end of the world here. This is where I can understand the concept of infinity. I may not be from here but I’m not so dumb as to not see the possibilities that a place like this can will into existence.

In Montana, you look up and the stars are there, magically, an insomnia of stars spreading out toward the peaks.

Ben’s deliveries are done in a methodical, joyless manner. He projects an image of disdain for the entire operation and, if his merchandise weren’t so vital, some would prefer the long drive to the nearest store to having to deal with him. Watching Ben work is to see a man unsuccessfully straddling the line between stoicism and contempt.

In my room in the trailer, I have a bar fridge, left behind by the previous tenant and for which I am grateful. I can stock it with beer and vodka and a carton of cigarettes. I have taken to bringing back fruit salad from the kitchen. It is my regular breakfast now.

In the mornings, I eat some fruit salad, get dressed, walk to the washrooms, and brush my teeth, wash my face, and head off to the kitchen. I share a smoke outside the service door with some of the dish pigs, go inside, pour myself a coffee, and scan the local paper. I never find anything of importance and I derive an odd sense of comfort from this. The news cycle moves on. Its relentless march forward is one reason certain starlets forget their underwear. It’s why the world of PR is so big and getting bigger. Why we pay people to manage and massage reality.

And then I get to work.

The head chef is from Chicago. His name is Tomas Hill. His mother was Czech or Slovak. One of the two. He worked his way through some big kitchens in Chicago until he found the backing of investors and opened up a brasserie just north of The Loop. It bombed. And then he did what chefs do when they need to recover from failure: he went overseas and cooked in a hotel. In Singapore. And away from the pressure and a high stakes foodie culture that tolerates greatness and mediocrity but nothing that merely promises greatness, he thrived. His kitchen became renowned, praised by the very critics who had driven him from the country.

In Singapore, he created the kind of cuisine that should have worked in Chicago but didn’t. Because it wasn’t of the moment. Because food culture in America is about trends and fashions and not really about food. Because in Chicago, it became cool not to like his cooking.

Vindicated, he looked to return home. But bad memories last longer than good ones. Instead, he wound up here, on a ranch near Canada where the wind can blow the smoke of his creations clear to Mexico. And the food critics love him again. Here, he has been elevated to celebrity. Maybe the critics see in his exile something noble. He has published a cookbook. There has been talk of TV, but he’s unsure about that kind of work. And he doesn’t want to expose himself to the critics in that way again.

His food is very good. He applies his love of brasserie to classic American cuisine. It works for a place like this and the clientele adore this, though I don’t think he’s doing the ranch’s brand any favors. He probably sells more porterhouse steaks than he’d like to, but as a Chicagoan, he understands the lure of a good piece of meat as well as anyone. He also sells a lot of bison, something that seems to thrill him. We have a herd of bison next door. Tomas is constantly going on about how fresh the bison is. “It’s still moving!” he says every day upon examining the meat.

One joke I dislike: his love of clafouti. He hired a French pastry chef just so he could get her clafouti. It’s on the menu every night. The Japanese, in particular, think this is perfect. Ranch. Clafouti. Two Japanese obsessions — Americana and a perceived high-end French culture — in one sitting. And clafouti means peeling an inordinate amount of apples. It is a punch line delivered badly. Apple pie makes more sense to me. A pie in these surroundings, perhaps with some homemade ice cream, would taste better here. But there is no pie when there is clafouti. And there is always clafouti. Every day.

And so, today, for reasons I don’t quite understand, I tell him what I think. Because I have had enough of peeling these apples. Today. And forever. And I have said maybe two words since I’ve been here. To anyone. “More clafouti?” I ask.

Tomas walks into the kitchen and washes his hands. He has his apron slung over his shoulder. “Excuse me?” he says, half smiling. I realize he’s never heard my voice.

“Why all the clafouti?” I ask.

He takes his apron off his shoulder and puts it on, over his head, adjusting the back. “Do you have a problem with tonight’s menu?”

I sigh. Apples surround me. I have a bucket of lemon juice the peeled apples go into to prevent browning. I am surrounded by peels. All of it destined for the compost. “Who comes to Montana to eat clafouti?” I say. “Everything here is about the West or is trying to be. What’s clafouti have to do with it?”

“What’s Thai massage got to do with it?” Tomas asks, by way of answer. It’s a good answer and it tells me that perhaps I should shut up. And I should.

“Clafouti doesn’t fit into the brand of this place,” I say. I can’t help myself. For the first time since my arrival, I’m questioning my station. “It exists outside of it. The clafouti messes up your menu. There are wagon wheels in there,” I say pointing in the direction of the dining room. “Your desserts are brilliant. Your tarts. Your cakes.”

“They aren’t mine,” he says.

“Mathilde’s,” I say. Mathilde is the French pastry chef.

“And I brought her here because she’s brilliant.”

“Yes,” I say.

“And I don’t need to explain myself to you.”

“No, of course not.”

“Not to be rude,” he says.

“It’s your kitchen,” I say. “You’re not being rude.”

“Whatever I put on the menu is on brand, as you might say.”

“I disagree. Respectfully. There’s nothing easy about a brand.”

“The Japs love the clafouti,” he says.

“It’s true. But the Japs wouldn’t miss it either. And from what I’m told we don’t get so many of them anymore.” And this is also true. Even the Japanese are having trouble affording the place.

“They’ve become almost iconic,” he says. “The food writers love them. There’s a recipe in my book. The recipe’s on the website for this place.” He finishes tying his apron. “I like them, too,” he says. “Mathilde’s clafouti reminds me of my mom’s tortes.” He walks into his office. What is good food but a pleasant memory? I should appreciate my place. A kitchen is a dictatorship. I need to respect that. Or I could find myself wandering again. Or worse, shoveling up after the horses.

Both Ends Burning

I had short dreams. I wasn’t sleeping well. I was on my front steps and I slept about as well as could be expected. Sometimes my dreams ended abruptly. The Man would get up and leave. And when he did, I knew I was awake.

In one dream we’re on an airplane. The Man is a flight attendant. Who smells like a clean horse and wears a floppy straw hat. And he comes over to me and hands me a cup of water.
I like you
, he says. And then the seatbelt sign comes on. And the plane rapidly loses altitude.

The story took up more and more space. Literally. The
Post
gave it four hundred words. It was closer to the front, not a column buried with comics and clairvoyants. And because the story was more prominent, better positioned, more people came to watch me, more eyes waiting for the moment. For a climax. For news. I felt as if I should entertain them somehow, sing perhaps, catch a stack of quarters resting on my elbow, something, over and over until they could feel their time had not been wasted. “No news is bad news,” a voice called out from the crowd.

“No news is boring,” another yelled.

“Bad news is good news,” came the reply. And there was applause.

“You’re a very odd, very local celebrity to a very small demographic,” Dan said, impressed by the growing success of his little story.

“I’m a niche product,” I said.

If nothing else, I understood the compulsion of celebrities to punch certain members of the paparazzi. The intrusion is immense. It is an odd thought to know that when you get up and walk into your own apartment because you have to go to the washroom, others are watching, knowing what it is you need to do; some of them imagining it even. I was a story in the paper that could very conveniently be tracked down and verified, an object of curiosity, a noun. I could have been made of wax, really. I was online. I was the object of blogs. I was not a person. There was a temporal quality to me now. I had become an event.

And no one in that crowd, that growing mass, spoke to me. There was little conversation or interaction. This might have made the intrusion feel less invasive. I would have welcomed conversation. Anything. But they couldn’t. Speaking to me would have broken the invisible wall between us. It would have confused subject and object, like web-generated translations from German. Instead, every once in a while they shouted something out at me. Or for the benefit of the crowd. And one shout bred more. And then it would die out and you could hear someone’s cell phone ring. And someone would comment about that.

I spoke on the phone from time to time. Usually it was with my mother and explaining this to her was almost comical. She wasn’t happy. And that got tiresome. And I turned the ringer off. I was afraid of what my father thought. I kept my phone on vibrate.
I like your mother
, the Man said. He was sitting next to me. And then he wasn’t.

Dan left and returned an hour later with some pizza and a photographer. He told me the newspaper had been receiving calls. People wanted to see what I looked like. As if they couldn’t find an image online. His editors didn’t want to lose their lead on me. They clued in to the posting on the internet. That others had gone places they had not. An editor brought up the idea of a photo essay, some kind of day in the life feature. “This is becoming something,” Dan said, the proud papa, lording over his strange creation. “A photo essay. A whole page. This brings you to another level.”

“Just what I’ve been begging for,” I said.

“And we’re talking about the web,” he said. “Creating a presence for you. Pushing the story on the web in a meaningful way.”

“I’m not keeping a blog,” I said.

Dan shrugged and handed me a slice of pizza. “This is Dick.” He gestured in the direction of a small, bald, dark-skinned Asian man. His left eye was fused shut, or so it seemed. I imagined him in a war somewhere in southeast Asia. I saw a jungle, rice paddies, water buffalo. “We’re just going to take a picture of you, maybe place some of the kids behind you, and you have to hold a slice of pizza. You don’t have to eat it if you’re not hungry but hold on to it.”

I was hungry but biting the pizza for the camera seemed crass. “I thought mentioning the pizza was enough,” I said. “What’s next, T-shirts?” To me everything in the world that was possible and laudable and not laudable and smart and not smart culminated in a T-shirt.

Dan thought about this, storing the idea.

I could imagine posters and T-shirts and desk calendars. I could see pizza cutters. I could see apps for smartphones. I could imagine it all. My life was unfolding in ways I had never expected. Were the reality TV people far behind? Was there a TV producer lurking amidst the crowd, trying to figure out the angle? I could choose someone to wait with me. I could assemble teams of young blonds to mud wrestle and dive into pools of Jell-O. I could have a theme song.

“We have a deal,” Dan said. The cynicism and weariness. The endless pursuit of cheese. The greed of everything we do. Our facility for ignoring what’s best for what’s . . . not so best.

Dan was sexed by the way this whole thing was unfolding.

I understood that he wanted to see how big this would become. He saw the money. A payoff. I understood this for the first time. Maybe he fell asleep every night humming that imaginary theme song.

You should smile
, the Man told me. I resisted the urge to look around. I could smell him.

Dan directed his one-eyed photographer to ensure that the pizza appeared in all the shots and that I held it in such a manner so as to avoid being cropped by the photo editors back at the office. He moved people away to give Dick room to frame his shots properly. “Okay, now,” Dick said, his face behind a zoom-lensed black Olympus digital camera. The thing was a monster. With his good eye looking through the lens, the camera became Dick’s eyes. Or eye. It was discomfiting to watch his eye-lens face take the pictures. So I decided to look away. If his face weren’t so eerie, Dick could make the perfect spokesperson for a camera company: “I lost my eye in a war. But with the Olympus Mega Zoom, it’s like having my eye back.” Well, that would have been the first draft. The first idea floated in a meeting that would last into the morning and would include copious amounts of beer and takeout. A campaign for something so major would require a lot of billable hours. Research. Phone calls. Walks. More beer. Arguments about things that were way beyond our mandate. Discussions about Plato’s Cave. Anti-Semitism in Vichy France. The math on Wilt Chamberlain’s claim of bedding 10,000 women. And then the what-ifs: What if we had cameras thousands of years ago? What if the camera had been invented later? What if New York had been founded on Staten Island? Billable hours. Spent arguing about the Mets and how the older guys loved saying “Mookie Wilson” and what is it with that franchise and whether it really is impossible to love the Yankees if you’re from anywhere else but here. We would commission research into the history of photography. We would bring in professional photographers to talk about their craft. We would eat a lot of takeout. We would surf porn on the internet. And then we would present our ideas and the client would say, “I want this,” and we’d do it and charge for everything.

“This way please,” Dick said.

“What’s wrong with your eye?” I asked.

Dick looked at Dan, baffled, as if to say, The thing can talk?

“Just take the shot,” Dan told him. “He asks lots of questions.” He looked at me, exasperated, flushed with energy. “Don’t hassle him.”

“Is Dick incapable of speaking?” I asked.

“I speak,” he said, shooting.

Dan pushed back at the crowd. Their interest in Dick grew. The presence of a professional photographer with an array of lenses added a legitimacy to the proceedings that had been lacking. Anyone can have a decent camera. But Dick was a professional. There were undoubtedly bloggers in the crowd seriously envious while looking forward to putting Dick out of business.

They closed in. “Stay back!” Dan yelled. And the crowd pushed forward.

Dick was struggling to maintain his position. He really was a small man. I saw him as Vietnamese. I always picture the Vietnamese as being a short people. Or at least slight. I don’t know if that’s true. It may be an impression I have from movies. Or from restaurants.

Dick shot a few more photos. “Okay,” he told Dan.

“Take some more,” Dan ordered.

You can do it, the Man told me. I’ve seen your smile.

“Take pictures of us,” someone from the crowd shouted. “We’ve been waiting as long as him. And we’re on our feet!” The camera changes us instantly, the belief that being caught on film, or on TV, even in the corner of an image, is our only road to recognition. Validation. To the fleeting immortality that is fame. Old media still owns a legitimacy that new media can not possess.

“We’re more interesting than that dumbass!” another voice said.

“And better looking!” added another.

Dan grabbed his photographer by the shoulder just as Dick was shooting another picture. It was like he was being pulled out of the streets during the fall of Saigon or something. Dick protested but within seconds they were gone, their jobs done, and the crowd watched the two of them run to a waiting car, jump in, and drive off.

The buzz of Dick’s visit was everywhere. It was a buzz, that’s exactly what it sounded like. It was a noise of a hundred discussions. It was the noise of being the only one at a party with no one to speak to, the noise of my invisibility.

In the morning, I was on page four of the
Post
. The photo wasn’t large but everyone who read the paper saw it. Page four is not a page most people skip. It implied a kind of prominence. Everyone on the street had copies of the
Post
. Kids came by with it, opened it to page four, and asked me to sign it. I signed T-shirts and ball caps and pieces of torn-up paper and greasy napkins. More people brought me food. An old Japanese lady brought me a wakame salad, which was a godsend. A hot dog vendor set up shop on the sidewalk across the street. A burger truck parked on the block. And then a dumpling truck. I was creating commerce. People were being drawn to me just to take a look. I was a spot to click into on location-based social networks. A new kind of proper noun. People took their own pictures. They brought their kids, posed them in front of me, took a picture, and left. They brought their guitars and sang, their cases open in front for change. I was creating busking opportunities. They came with sandwich boards proclaiming the Second Coming. They came with their sketchbooks to draw. They came selling balloons. Girls started flashing me. Older people brought lawn chairs.

I awaited the arrival of porta-potties.

All of this happened in one day. All of this the result of a photo in a third-rate newspaper. My musings on the death of print had been overblown. I suspected they always had been. The very thing that makes the web so powerful — its democracy — is the same thing that makes people distrustful of it. And so while we bemoan elitism, we want our leaders.

I awaited the tour buses.

And I wondered where were all these people when the story first appeared in the paper. Does anyone read anymore? I had an idea for a newspaper with no writing. Just photos with captions. Take
USA Today
to its logical conclusion.

Dan set up webcams. He brought four. Three were focused on me, one on the crowd. “We’re live,” he said and beamed. “Like those eagles with chicks.” The tap-tap of his laptop was permanent now. He had three smartphones. He had two blogs going: one for the
Post
’s website and one he had created himself. “It’s cool with the editors,” he said. “They can appreciate the possibilities. They see what I see.” Apparently, hits on his
Post
blog were impressive. Photos of me were all over the web now. There were people in the crowd chronicling this. Debates fired up. Dan also had all the social media angles covered. I had a Twitter account that Dan “curated,” he said. But everything on it would be stuff I’d said. My Facebook page had almost 10,000 fans. Dan came across one website for agnostics that was running a special series of reports about my meaning. “What
do
you mean?” Dan asked, smiling.

“Agnostics aren’t intellectually honest,” I said.

I saw the Man eating a hot dog. He waved, shrugging. What was
he
waiting for?

More reporters showed up.
Newsday
. AP. Some radio stations. A British journalist from the BBC. And finally, almost two weeks after I had started waiting for the Man, even the
Times
sent someone. But only for the website, not for the print edition. I wasn’t yet fit to print and for that I was thankful. And every reporter who wanted to interview me brought with them a slice of pizza. This was the tragedy. Pizza. Some of it was quite a lot better than Dan’s brother’s, but the implication, the commentary about me that each and every slice implied, was demoralizing. The medical community says it is healthy to eat fruit and when you ask for an apple, people think you’re crazy. I craved an apple. I told people this. Instead, they would hand me another slice of pepperoni, the grease running off the cheese, onto my hands, dripping onto the pavement. My pants especially, were covered in grease stains.

And yet, they still fit. My pants. My shirts felt comfortable. I had put on some weight but not what you’d expect from a diet clogged by pizza. Somehow, this made sense to me: my world had changed and, like some old Tex Avery cartoon, the laws of physics had changed as well. I could get thrown off a cliff and return in the next frame unscathed. That night, I dreamed that the Man gave me an apple. We walked down a path in the middle of a forest.
Get ready
, he said. For what? I asked. And he laughed.
Just be ready
, he said again. And then I was awake.

Dean & DeLuca sent me a box of apples. And they sent out a press release about it. And a PR girl came and instructed me on what to say about the apples — they were organic and came from upstate — and how much this meant to the chain.