So basically they're just standing around, as people will, their luggage a vivid jumble at their feet, kind of bogged down, tired, with that so-near-and-yet type of tension, a sense of somewhere definite they must be at by a definite time, but no clear consensus on how to get there. Since they're late. As Dr. Ambrose might venture to observe, they're figuratively unsure about where to go from here.
HOW THE CENTRAL ILLINOIS TOWN OF COLLISION CAME TO BE INCORPORATED
Fact: all Illinois communities, from well-built Chicago down to Little Egypt, have their origin and reason in the production of nourishment. The soil of Illinois is second only to the Nile delta in terms of decayed-matter percentage, fertility. Illinois has also always been known for its uncountable number of tiny, shittily maintained, shoulderless rural highways, against and alongside which corn grows quickly and thickly and tall. Tall, dense, the gorged corn obscures drivers' ability to see, at intersections of the little roads, whether anything's coming. And the funding necessary for CAUTION signs just never has quite come through.
And so in the early Great Depression era, during which Central Illinois' soil got not one bit dusty, the corn no less verdant, there was an unmarked intersected collision between a wealthy Chicago woman on her way South in a big touring car and a farmer on a small tractor who was crossing the road East to West to get to his other field. The car won the day. The farmer was thrown ass over teakettle into his field, where, hidden by corn, he expired. Loudly. The woman couldn't get to him because her car had knocked him so far into the green, and the humus-clotted soil made the woman's high-heeled shoes just impossible. The woman, who had a cut on her forehead and had killed somebody by knocking him way farther than any person was meant to fly, was traumatized beyond belief or reason. But she had will; and she vowed, right then and there, according to J.D., never to travel again. Ever.
Her vow, plus strength of character, yielded certain implications. Her slightly dented touring car stayed right where it had stalled, and the woman lived in it. Pretty big car. Farmer Kroc's family, across the field, was rather honked off, at first, about the collision and death and disappearance (utter) of their breadwinner's body; but the woman, out of guilt, paid them more than the farmer himself would have brought in in a lifetime; and not only was there no litigation, but the woman became almost an extended Kroc-family member, from her home in the motionless car. Various farm kids, at first out of minimal bare human charity, brought her food and basic essentials, appearing from the walls of corn as out of nowhere with the things she needed to live.
And but in return, plus out of gratitude and guilt, she reimbursed them, for these essentials. In fact she paid anybody who brought her anything she wanted. Inevitably, given the way the world wags, a kind of market was quickly established: here was this urban person in this big car at an intersection equidistantly central to rurally Depressed Champaign, Rantoul, and Urbana, who wanted things, and would exchange money for the things. The area was substantially transfigured. Misery, guilt and charity became prosperity, redemption, market. Itinerant Depressed poor, but with things, and entrepreneurial drive, flocked to the intersection where her tractor-smacked car sat inert, she inside. The redeemed poor built lean-to's, which became perma-tents, which became shanties, thence a kind of nouveaux-bourgeois Rooseveltville, clustered around the site of the collision.
A handsome scimitar-nosed itinerant peddler, bicycling through from back East, where things were just not in good shape at all, bearing East-Coast flora he'd purloined from the lavish funeral of a recently suicided banker, was the one who got in on the ground floor, so to speak. He saw the woman, in the car, and in that kind of ingenious marketing epiphany from which American legend grows, insisted on selling the woman his very top-of-the-line tea-rose bulb. At cost. The bulb was planted in the world's second-richest soil and in no time at all begat a bush. The bush begat countless other bushes, through fertilization, and an irruption of Valentine red began to impose its beauty on the green utterness of the farmerless field's own beauty.
In a parallel development, the destitute itinerant peddler and the wealthy inert woman fell in love with each other, in the big car, eventually begat a child, and then moved out of the car (a car being no place for a child) into a sprawling farmhouse the peddler designed and the woman underwrote, a house from which they never budged again, sustained by those in the surrounding shanties whose origin and reason was sustaining the guilty wealthy woman. The irruption of rose bushes became an actual tea-rose farm, a central dot of red on the state's black-and-green, camouflaged face, and Jack and Mrs. Jack Steelritter raised their well-fed children on the sheltered intersection Jack had discovered between beauty, desire, and discount.
Across the cornfield-turned-rose-farm, the Ray Kroc, Sr., farm family, minus a patriarch, but plus a settlement way beyond legal, and with a son who, once out from under his hard-working father's shadow, discovered he had vision, began to engineer a rotation, shifting the emphasis of their labor and capital in the direction of cattle, potatoes, and sugar. And it became good.
For whom is the Funhouse a house? Maybe for liars, creative types, campaigners, tree surgeons having at the great Saxonic tree. For Tom Sternberg, the Funhouse is less a place of fear and confusion than (grimace) an idea, an ever-distant telos his arrival at which will represent the revelated transformation of a present we stomach by looking beyond. A present comprised by fear of confusion.
OK true, Funhouse 1, like all the foreseen and planned national chain of Funhouse franchises, is, in reality, just a discotheque. A watering hole and meat market and gathering place where the spotlights tell us where and how to swing to the beat. One big enclosed anarchic revel — a Party: where we, via Party rule, gather and pretend with grim Puritan fortitude that we're having just way more fun than anybody could really be having.
OK now but the Funhouse also represents, to Sternberg — as hero, as Protagoras — the Funhouse represents the future. As of right now, the prediction here is that Sternberg will arrive, through the inexorable internal logic of his choice and circumstance, at Collision's Funhouse, as a tagged and registered part of the foretold and long-awaited Reunion of Everyone Who's Ever Represented the Product in a McDonald's Commercial; will unite and interact with the crowd of actors there; will have numerous insights, revelations and epiphanies; and will, ultimately, at the end of the time, confront his future. An implication will be that Sternberg, as an emblem — or synecdochical appendage — of his generation, will countenance, in his future, The Future.
All this is being made explicit both to avoid any possible appearance of Symbolist/New Realist coyness, and also because the true tension of any record of Reunion day just doesn't rely on this stuff, and so hopefully isn't compromised or tranquilized by being made, as Dr. Ambrose told the workshop just before Memorial Day, "desuppressed, anti-replenished, exhausted, in full view."
He'd tell us yes friends and neighborhood association the textual tension and payoff here lies in the exact sort of late-twentieth-century Future this introverted aspiring product-representative will confront. Ambrose explained — and it's all in Mark Nechtr's notes, in a precise crabbed hand — Ambrose held that there are numerous types of potential futures flapping and honking in man's conceptual pond. Specifically that there's differences between the trinity of: a future within time (history & prophecy); a future beyond time (resurrection & eternity); and a future that ends time (eschaton & apocalypse). Which did we find most attractive? he'd asked rhetorically, finally wiping the nastily critical poem off his green blackboard.