I never questioned the authenticity of the order. Yes, it seemed improbable that someone who couldn’t pronounce the letter r would never — just randomly in the course of events — order anything r-less, say, a gin and tonic or a scotch or a steak or a veal chop or spaghetti and meatballs or a chicken pot pie. But I just figured he knew what he liked, knew what his wife liked, and that was that. He seemed like a perfectly decent sort of guy. And I had absolutely no reason to doubt his sincerity. And there’d almost always be dessert — the inevitable “bwead pudding and wed velvet cake”—and at least two “bwandies.” All of which added up to a hefty check for two people, with a potentially substantial tip. So you want to be as accommodating as possible.
One Friday night — this must have been after waiting on them for two or three weeks in a row — the husband asked me some variation on the question, Assuming you don’t want to be a professional waiter all your life, what do you really want to do? And I said that I wanted to be a writer someday. And he said that he and his wife love to “wead.” And I asked, “Who are your favorite writers?” He thought for a moment and he said, “I love Joseph Conwad, Waymond Chandler…and especially Gwaham Gweene.” Now at this point, I remember, I did look around, feeling momentarily that I might be being punked in some way, in some sort of Candid Camera stunt or something, that someone had put him up to this. But again, I really had no reason to think — in fact it seemed a little crazy for me to think — that this seemingly guileless person was in on some sort of elaborate prank that was taking weeks to develop…and who’d want to do this to me anyway? I barely knew any of the other waiters or staff at this place. But still, no r-less writers? No Melville, no Poe, no Hemingway…just “Conwad” and “Gweene”? I mean, c’mon. What are the odds here?
I was just about to head back to the kitchen to pick up one of my other tables’ orders, when the guy said, “I also love music.” I took a deep breath. “Oh,” I said. “What kinds of music?” And again he thought for a moment or two, and then he said, “I love the Wamones, Woxy Music…and especially”—and this he said in a much louder, more declarative voice—“especially Guns N’ Woses.”
And at this moment, I was positive that I heard people sniggering, that there were little contingents of my cohorts huddled in corners of the dining room barely able to control their laughter. And I felt this radiant heat rising from the back of my neck and I felt as if my face must have been bright, bright red with humiliation. And although I never actually saw anyone laughing at me, I knew that they were. Who they were and why they did that to me, I’ll never know. And, yes, it’s possible that a middle-aged man from Jersey City with r-labialization could like “Wob Woys,” “pwime wib,” “Gwaham Gweene,” and “Guns N’ Woses,” but it’s such a remote possibility as to be pretty much inconceivable. Someone…or some people…were behind all this, and their identities will also remain forever in the gnawing-enigma file.
And I also think that this particular event…I guess because I felt so abjectly alone, so on display at that moment, in that dining room full of people (in that particular “food court”)…that this event not only instilled in me a wariness and a hypervigilance and suspiciousness, and maybe even paranoia, that have never abated, but also a weird, masochistic love of precisely this sort of public humiliation. And I’m not saying that’s necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, I’m just saying that that’s probably why we’re all here tonight, and, again, I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity.
The earliest known jokes had no punch lines. They simply consisted of a setup. For example: “A man and a woman exit a garden in shame.” In other words, there were no writers. Today, on the other hand, everyone is a writer. I heard a guy say the other day, “My nuts don’t fit into H&M jeans.” That’s funny, but that doesn’t make him a writer. That would be like calling yourself a gangster because you kill the germs that cause bad breath. To call yourself a writer (and this has absolutely nothing to do with whether you actually write anything or not), you have to imprison yourself in your adolescent bedroom for several years, forcing Kundalini energy up your spinal column until your mind is launched from your body.
Those sounds we hear at regular intervals in our dreams (that some have likened to the sounds of the Ōtsuzumi drum in Noh) are actually the black-box pings of our own errant minds.
Dreams are subject to all the wanton dissimulations of the mischievous psyche, which produce distinct levels of latent and manifest content. I have a recurring dream about my childhood hero, Mickey Mantle. I’m in Yankee Stadium, sitting in a box seat at dugout level right near home plate, and Mantle comes up at bat, and he launches the first pitch deep into the center-field bleachers, and he turns, and, in slow motion and in that slowed-down distorted voice, he beckons to me to come join him in his home-run trot around the bases. So I immediately start trying to clamber out of the box, and it’s one of those frustrating sequences in a dream where, for some inexplicable reason, you can’t seem to get your body to do the simple thing you’re trying to get it to do, and it takes what seems like innumerable attempts and an impossibly protracted period of time to pull myself over that railing, and then when I do finally succeed in climbing out onto the field, my wallet must fall out of the back pocket of my pants, because I feel for it later in the dream and it’s not there. So, I’m maybe ten feet behind Mantle and I’m trotting behind him to first base, and he looks back at me, and he seems really crazy, he has this floridly psychotic look on his face, and then he doesn’t make the turn to second, he just keeps going, he just continues along the right-field foul line, and soon we’re out of the stadium entirely, and we’re running and we’re running, and he’s getting further and further ahead of me, until I can’t see him anymore, but I’m still following that same vector, and now I’m going through all these shifting landscapes — city, country, mountains, jungle, desert. And I realize a funny thing — every couple of minutes, I’m passing the exact same things: a bus stop, a strip mall, a factory, a farm stand, the ruins of the same Mayan temple, the same couple of Bedouins at an oasis, the same sad clowns, the same group of tantric sadhus with their three-pronged trident staffs, marigolds, and red hibiscus flowers, the same gas-station minimart with its baleful Indian chief…then the whole sequence all over again. It’s like the looping, wraparound backgrounds they used to use in early animation and racing video games. And I realize—as I’m dreaming — that the production values of the dream totally suck, that obviously I can only afford a handful of shitty locations and have to keep using them over and over and over again. So not only is my chagrin about the repeating locations the most phantasmagorical part of the dream — because realistically in a dream one can obviously “afford” any location — it is also the part of the dream most laden with meaning for me, depicting, as it does, the shame I feel about my financial fecklessness and perennial insolvency.