December 2008 - Drew 2by4

12/01

“There is no symbolism left,” he grumbled. “Everything is so obvious now, so shiny, so goddamned right now.” He set his fork down on the table. He began to roll a breadcrumb across the linen tablecloth with a single, fat finger. The nail was shades of yellow and gray. He didn’t look up as he spoke.

“Nobody puts any thought into creating representations, in creating illusions, in thinking beyond what’s right in front of them right now.” The crumb rolled off the table and fell to the floor. “It’s all so apparent- THIS IS AMERICAN MIGHT, YOU WANT THIS WOMAN…

12/02

"THIS WILL MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER. THIS FLASHY THING IS THE MOST IMPORTANT OBJECT ON EARTH UNTIL THE NEXT FLASHY THING COMES ALONG.” People sitting at the tables surrounding him looked at him with embarrassment in their eyes as his voice got louder and louder. Why tonight, the night I am going to propose, our anniversary night, our first date does this crazy man have to ruin everything? Can’t he just be quiet.

Mr. M. Bordy ignored the stares and the nervous glances. Small beads of sweat breaking out across his forehead stuck his dishwater colored hair to his skin.

12/03

The folds of fat spilling over his collar quivered as he spoke. His breath came short and heavy. The rich meal of osso bucco and risotto began slowing his circulation. The fat and cholesterol of cheap Italian food circulated through his veins and found snug little places to bed down and harden until it was time to break free and head straight for his brain three years later while he was teaching a course on medieval symbolism present in “Blade Runner” in front of two dozen students that just wanted class to be over so they could start spring break.

12/04

The students would think, why did he have to have a stroke 20 minutes before spring break, can I get a trauma A out of this, I don’t have to turn my paper in.

But now, in an Italian restaurant nice enough to have linen tablecloths and specialize in a specific region but not so fancy as to feature decent Italian olive oil on the table, he looked up at the one student who really wanted to know about the medieval symbolism seen throughout pop culture- Mr. D. Rouse, a sallow fellow without facial hair or friends- a classic loser.

12/05

Mr. Rouse worried about how to pay for the meal. The bill could be larger than his monthly grocery budget and there was still a dessert and after dinner drinks to be had.

Mr. Rouse worried even more about the spiritual death of symbolism in American culture and what would happen to the intellectual and moral fiber of a country that couldn’t find meaning in anything. Bordy was right to raise his voice about the issue- shit, that armagnac cost $21 - everything was too shallow nowadays. No one saw or understood the deeper implications of things like he did.

12/06

Let’s take a moment to examine where we are because I am not sure where this is going.

The scene: a fat professor, obsessed with a long dead culture and only three years from death’s door, and his graduate student are having dinner in an Italian restaurant. The restaurant is kind of fancy but not really so much- that’s what the whole linen and olive oil bit was about. It felt a little trite to me but I was trying to have a “telling moment” about the physical space these two characters are in. I am not sure it worked.

12/07

I haven’t managed to fit this in yet, but the graduate student is specializing in and drafting his thesis about “Warrior Culture Symbolism in Modern Japanese Graphic Novels”.

Does that seem too easy? I am thinking that having Mr. Rouse study Japanese comic books while lamenting the loss of intellectual life in America feels like really low hanging fruit. I thought about assigning him some sort of arcane research on enlightenment era calligraphy and its transcendent effect on human communication or something but there is no way I could bullshit my way through a character being an expert in that.

12/08

A quick story note- both of the characters have ordered dessert- crème brulee for Mr. Rouse and a tiramisu for Mr. Bordy, (I told you the place wasn’t that fancy). I’m sorry, I’ve made a mistake- it should be Prof. Bordy or even Dr. Bordy from now on. He gets quite irritated when people don’t add the honorific- it’s the symbolism of it after all. Prof. Bordy- there is nothing to his name by the way, no riffs on “bored” or anything silly like that, it just sounds like the last name of a really fat guy I knew once.

12/09

I should mention that Prof. Bordy doesn’t like Mr. Rouse at all, doesn’t like the way that he won’t make eye contact or the way that he sits in the back of the classroom and constantly clears his throat so that everyone else in the classroom knows he is sitting alone. Bordy hates that he uses his (probably intentionally) bad skin and greasy hair that Rouse uses as a way of avoiding nearness to other people. There’s also the constant worrying about money, workload and loneliness. But Bordy mostly hates that Rouse thinks that the two of them are friends.

12/10

Mr. Rouse doesn’t think they are friends. He thinks he should pretend they are friends to make his life easier and his workload a little lighter. That’s why he does things like this- take Bordy out for an expensive dinner once in a while, under the pretense of wanting to talk about the progress of his thesis or a particularly thorny symbolic interpretation of the sword fights in (insert Japanese comic title here). He’ll listen to the old windbag bloviate for a couple of hours, watch him sweat as dinner clogs up his arteries and go home without learning anything.

12/11

Now, I’ve gone and gotten lost in the weeds. I started this digression and interrupted a story that was at least moving to say that I am trying to create these two characters and their setting as a symbol of, well what I really don’t know what.

But I think there is something to a professor, near death because of his lifestyle and a student, living a dead life, having an empty exchange about the lack of depth in American cultural symbolism and the dearth of legitimate intellectual discourse in a restaurant that fails to project an air of authenticity.

12/12

I’ll get back to the story in a second- you’ve only missed an ackward moment when the waiter- an entirely inconsequential character that does not warrant a physical description at all- drops the check off at the table. If you are interested, Prof. Bordy pretends to be pre-occupied with a stain on his shirt while Rouse reluctantly pulls the check across the table.

The bill is $300.

The characters never look at each other during this whole exchange. The point is this- wait, I should show you rather than tell you, right? Besides, I haven’t figured the point out yet.

12/13

Finally, back to the story.

Three hundred dollars, Christ almighty. That’s five weeks worth of groceries. This fat fuck better not make me turn in my footnotes for review next month for this. Rouse reaches into his back pocket and takes out the American Express that his father sent him. It’s nice of the old man to recognize that I am still alive. I hope he falls off of his Aspen mountaintop and takes his fuck bunny with him. Look at him, sitting there turning red with gluttony. I hope he chokes on every Middle Ages Bestiary he’s ever seen.

12/14

The waiter, a thin black man with the grace of a former dancer and the distantly cheerful and well practiced smile of a professional server, swept the check off the table with the same graceful motion he used to cleared the crumbs in front of Prof. Bordy away. The waiter’s name is Heidrich- well, that’s the name he goes by now anyways. Before he moved to the city, he used the name his parents put on his birth- Martin. Marty doesn’t have the same cosmopolitan ring as Heidrich and besides, how many black men do you know with German names?

12/15

I need to go back.

It doesn’t ring true that Mr. Rouse is the son of a wealthy man that sends him pre-paid credit cards while at the same time this character is worried about bills. If Mr. Rouse is an outsider and poor then there is no reason for him to be a pampered child of privilege. So I am going to start the scene over where Heidrich, the gay black waiter hoping to become to a documentary filmmaker in order to chronicle the injustices that gay black waiters face back home in Doughtry, Mississippi face, brings the check.

12/16

As soon as Bordy set his dessert spoon down, the waiter set the check in the middle of the table, an equal distance form each man. A quiet, awkward moment passed as Prof. Bordy worried a small, brown stain on the front of his shirt. Rouse sighed deeply, reached across the table and slid the black book back. He had asked the professor out for dinner, so there was really no reason to think that the fat man would pay. It wasn’t often that he got this much attention and if things got tight for a stretch, so be it.

12/17

It can’t be too bad. If he pulled a couple of extra shifts at the library over the next couple of weeks and stuck to tuna sandwiches it wouldn’t hurt too bad. A dull ache settled in the pit of his stomach when he saw the number at the bottom of the check. Alright, maybe it would have to be more than just a couple of extra shifts. Tuna is probably going to be a luxury for a while.

“So why did you ask me for dinner tonight?” asked Prof. Bordy, his breath short and thick with a rich meal.

12/18

An after dinner mint rolled around his mouth and clicked against his teeth as he spoke. “I know you’ve had some concerns about the representation of women in modern Japanese works that don’t necessarily correspond with the views of a paternalistic and misogynistic warrior society but I am certain that I answered those questions with my last email.”

Bordy paused for a moment and struck a pose of calculated concern, hand on cheek, chin spotted with veal grease stuck out. “This isn’t about McReady’s misunderstanding of my position on the Romance Calligraphy symposioum, is it? He’s quite wrong, you know.”

12/19

Rouse nervously shuffled his silverware in circles on the table in front of him. Fork on the left, fork on the right, fork on the left, fork on the right.

“Your position on the symposium is clear and correct,” Rouse finally answered. “There is no way that McReady has a defensible position for the committee to consider. I am considering sending an email in support of your synopsis to the full committee listserv and I don’t think that McReady is prepared to take such drastic step. I am sure that this debate will be a clear victory for you. I’m not worried.”

12/20

Now I am totally off the fucking reservation. Symposium? Full Committee Listserv? What’s this nonsense? I haven’t the foggiest clue what the fuck I am talking about and there is no way that this is the way these characters would talk and there is certainly no point to this as it relates to the emptiness of modern symbolism.

This is just a trite and silly way to caricature characters I’ve invented out of the cloth to make a point I don’t fully comprehend. I might as well have them bantering about how they only possess knowledge they’ve learned on Google.

12/21

Rouse wants to drop out of his doctoral studies but doesn’t have the heart to talk about it with his adviser, Prof Bordy, a man so self-absorbed with trivial slights and arcane academic arguing (nice alliteration no?) that he has no idea that his “star” pupil is bordering on suicidal madness. While Rouse ultimately decides to stay in school and not commit suicide, no thanks to Bordy, neither man will live to see the 37th month anniversary of tonight’s dinner. The slight quivering of tenses in this story is wholly related to the author’s shaky memory and poor copy-editing skills.

12/22

We know Bordy dies when he has an embolism in front of a room full of students. There is some symbolism in his death- the principles, theories and studies he held so important, knowledge he dedicated his life to, never even remotely crossed the minds of his bored and horny students because his death served to delay a drunken weekend, a weekend in which all that anyone could talk about was the color of his face as he died at the feet of the projector. His is a death of inglorious inconvenience for his students. By midterms, he is forgotten.

12/23

But this still seems too easy- a professor dies in front of his students and leaves no legacy of learning or knowledge. And what does that have to do with the dinner, in a middling regional Italian restaurant, that Prof. Bordy has with a strange and disquieting graduate student, a man that can’t even afford the check and is weakly considering a suicide he knows he’ll never carry out? Both men have things to say but neither will. The only notable aspect of this dinner is the sheer banality of it all. Three characters and nothing interesting happens at all.

12/24

Ah, the third character: the waiter- of course he is oppressed as a gay man in a stifling little backwoods Mississippi town. Even his own family makes sideways remarks every time he enters a room- at home in Mississippi he is known as Queen Sheba and made to wait in the car whenever the family runs errands. Imagine that- a grown man sitting in the car while his 80-year-old mother buys milk from his high school classmate working the counter at a Stop-N-Shop. That is not a story he tells the “girls” working the floor with him at the restaurant.

12/25

But I can’t comment on any of that- I am not black, gay or a waiter anymore. Well, I’ve never been gay or black, nor have I been to Mississippi so I have no idea if this is the way a gay black man with an adopted German name is treated there. I’ve been a waiter so I know people fidget in restaurants and avoid all sorts of awkward conversations by talking about their flights, the regional and historical origin of dinner and how many times they’ve been to Europe. Or how the rebuttal to the committee should be worded.

12/26

Heidrich, or Martin, whichever you prefer, will never make a documentary about the oppression of black, gay waiters. In the parlance of the documentary business, “there are no stakes” in a story like that. We all know that gay, black waiters are oppressed.

What we want is a world we’ve never seen before- truck drivers on the icy edge of the world, gay penguins or a group of charismatic nerds battling it out over a obscure board game. That’s the stuff- not indignities suffered by a waiter we’ll never notice or two academics not saying what’s really on their minds.

12/27

Let’s close this out already. Nothing happens at the dinner. Prof. Bordy doesn’t pass anything on and Mr. Rouse doesn’t talk about quitting the doctoral program or his lackluster suicidal tendencies. He leaves a bad tip and Heidrich chalks it up to racism and homophobia.

I am rushing through this because it is a bit tedious. There was supposed to be a deeply symbolic metaphorical story about the loss of symbolic metaphors but I got lost in the details of shuffling silverware and whining about the state of documentary films. The men featured all fail for the rest of their time.

12/28

Bordy and Rouse fail for the rest of their short lives. They fail in their unremarkable and unrelated deaths.

Heidrich lives for another forty-two years. In a bid to enter the documentary business, he gets a job as a researcher (based on his art history degree) in the archive department of a major cable broadcaster. He stays there until the department becomes fully automated and archived in computer servers. He does nothing remarkable until he is murdered at the age of 76 by a home invader. Martin gets a three-line mention in the metro section of the local paper.

12/29

Rouse just dies. Nothing more beyond that. There was, of course, a reason and a cause but they are so irrelevant as to be entirely unmentionable. Besides, I can’t come up with a good metaphor for how he would have died. I do know that he had no idea the man who waited on him the night he decided not to tell Prof. Bordy that he was leaving the program was gay.

Rouse was two months from finishing his dissertation when he passed on. Should it matter if he dies before Bordy or not? It doesn’t seem to matter much.

12/30

Let’s finish the conversation at any rate.

“Well, we should go now,” said Mr. Rouse. He dropped his napkin on the table.

“There is one thing I think we should talk about,” replied Bordy. “You should be turning in some footnotes for me next month. I am going on a culinary tour of Napa Valley on your due date. Can you have those to me a couple of days early so I can read them through before I go away?” Bordy had always wanted to take the tour but waited until his wife died so he could actually enjoy himself.

12/31

“Of course, I guess that’ll be fine, I am working on them and they’ll be done I suppose.”

“Great, I’ll enjoy reading them. I hope there aren’t any mistakes like the last time. Very careless. Your supposition about the symbolism of subway trains was excellent but there was so little follow through with the research. Please make sure that you are thorough and cite completely.”

“I will”

The men leave. The waiter flips open the checkbook as he clears the table. Tip: $9.00.

That’s bullshit, cheap asshole. I knew he was homophobic. I hope I never see that fucker again.