In Memory of Monuments

[This post, as well as four others from The Pariah's Syntax, was selected by the editors of Meridian, a semi-annual literary journal from the University of Virginia, for publication in their twenty-seventh issue, in May 2011. The other posts to appear in that issue were "Halloween in the Hoosegow,"  "Only a Fleeting Thing," "On the Scarcity of Toilet Paper," and "Joe." But just because you can read them here doesn't mean that you shouldn't order a copy from Meridian's website, thereby supporting the kind of publication daring enough to print such writings as these.]

The first to go was Otto's. I can remember precisely where I was standing and what I was doing when I got the news. Not that I'm some naive Pollyanna who thinks anything lasts forever — certainly not when it comes to restaurants — but I had a little investment in Otto's Malt Shop, emotionally speaking. My friends and I went there all the time, as much to soak up the airborne grease from the fryers as the 1950s ambiance of the service-station-turned-diner.

I couldn't understand why the news took so long to reach me. It took a hookah bar to open in the same location before anyone deigned to mention the death of Otto's. No one wrote a conciliatory note: Byron, I'm so sorry to have to tell you, but Otto's closed its doors for the last time yesterday. I know how much you liked it there. It's probably small comfort, but I promise to fix you a Ricky Ricardo when you get out, okay? No one.

The last part may be just as well; my favorite menu item there wasn't the Ricky Ricardo, it was the Graceland — banana slices and chunky peanut butter on a half-pound hamburger. Sour grapes, though, right?

Nichol's Lunch went next. Unlike Otto's, which had been a relative newcomer to Kansas City's assortment of dives, Nichol's had been around since the '20s. There was a copy of their very first menu framed and hung on the north wall. A cup of coffee there used to cost three cents. Alongside the menu were decades' worth of newspaper pieces proclaiming the restaurant the "Best Place to Eat at 2:00 AM," the patty melts a tasty bargain.

It never mattered that the decor was tacky and dated twenty years ago, that the kitchen probably violated a litany of health codes, or that the tall redhead waitress had an Adam's apple and five o'clock shadow. Nichol's was where patrons from any walk of life could agree on something. The cheap fried food brought us all together, in a way. Nowhere else comes to mind at which conservative sexagenarians would peaceably sit at booths adjacent to those of drag queens and drunken frat members. It was a beautiful thing.

At least when Nichol's went out of business, the closing made every channel of the local news. Reverent elegies were delivered, in short on-scene clips, by many of the same fixtures I used to see on my many late nights there. Those brown tiles and nicotine-stained ceilings will be missed.

Very recently, a random craving for a gigantic reuben sandwich caused me to mention the New York Deli to my mother. The New York Deli was Kansas City's renowned home of the eight-dollar reuben. More than twenty-four inches around, piled high with a good three inches of pastrami and kraut, and almost impossible to eat without the aid of a utensil of some kind, there was no wondering why their reuben, specifically, was on my mind. "Oh, Sweetie," Mum lamented, "they closed. Last month, I think."

We used to go there every week when I was little. Their bakery supplied some of the best bagels I can remember eating. I vividly remember my excitement as a little boy at glimpsing their bright orange awnings. The sight was a sure sign a sweet, baked something would soon be mine to savor. When I grew up and went to live on my own, I continued going there, for onion, poppy seed, blueberry, or egg bagels. And for that huge reuben.

My disappointment was evident, sounding almost like desperation. "Seriously?" I pleaded. "Them too?"

Honestly, it isn't that Otto's Malt Shop, Nichol's Lunch, or the New York Deli were heartbreaking in their respective extinctions. I didn't know their owners, and generally wasn't more than passing acquaintances with the staff at any of these places. Besides that, big burgers and bagels, sizable sandwiches and specialty sodas can always be found elsewhere; another diner or deli will always open up, sometimes right around the corner from the old. What is substantially more difficult is accepting that I am becoming a foreigner, against my will and bit by bit, to a neighborhood I once called home. At the same time, in a certain sense, I never even left.

The Miracle Mattress

It was like Christmas: I returned from a particularly interminable workday to discover that, in my absence from the cell, someone had not only remade my bed, they'd actually replaced it. A new mattress! What I'd left was an amorphous wafer of aging foam, covered in tan tarpaulin, but what I came back to was a spongy new slab, twice as thick as its predecessor. This sort of miracle ranks right up there with discovering an image of Jesus burnt into your French toast, or that elves have cobbled you a lovely new pair of shoes as you slept.

Mind you, in the twenty-two years before I was abducted by the state, I slept in a fair number of uncomfortable spots. Among them were train station platforms, classrooms, strangers' floors, and even — once — a parking garage. None of these, though, were long-term arrangements. None wreaked the chiropractic havoc I've known from my prison mattresses. Waking with a headache or pinched nerve from daring to sleep on your side is common, as is flopping around in the deep hours to find the sweet spot — a position that won't put your kneecaps to sleep.

My bed — my bed: the one I owned for three and a half years of serendipitous somnolence — was a king-size Serta. About it, one uncompensated reviewer declared, "The most comfortable bed I've ever slept on." "Soooo comfy!" exclaimed another. And certainly there was room aplenty. I'm no big sleeper; I don't sprawl, as a rule. The freedom to loll, or lie crossways sometimes, on a whim, and occupy different space is nevertheless a pleasurable thing. Plus, reclining with a good book, with my cats occupying their own regions of that pillow-topped plane — independent but proximal, like a pride in the African wilderness — was nice.

The downgrade to a heinously uncomfortable single was shocking. Compared to the other assorted travesties of my imprisonment, my sleeping accommodations are far from topping the list of the worst. This hasn't stopped me cursing with deep sincerity each of my 3,011 restless nights.

Of the 1,500 beds at Crossroads Correctional Center, my cellmate and I won the mattress lottery. Only fifty were delivered. I spied the difference immediately, and not just for my cellmate's valiant failure at putting my bedding back to the military crispness I fold and tuck into it. The new mattresses we few were issued dwarf the old ones. They're actually square-edged (no more shapeless lumpenness for me!) and lack those rips, holes, and burrs that sometimes worked their way through the sheet to poke me awake.

I wanted to jump up and down on it. Lacking that kind of headroom, however, I contented myself with hopping atop it. I did that stupid open-handed rub-and-push motion that people do in mattress showrooms the world over, and in those late-night mattress commercials. You know the ones. As if a good indicator of how well I'd sleep on it was how quickly it reformed after a gentle press! Under my weight, the sheets stretched loose of their tucks and receded, exposing the mattress's soft gray cover. To contend with the unexpected thickness, I realized I'd have to make my bed differently now. A trade-off, then, but an eminently fair one.

The rest of the day, I walked around thinking of bedtime. I was like a kid who couldn't wait to get home from school and play with his new remote-controlled car. Maybe it wasn't exactly like Christmas. Close enough, though. Really close. And around here, I'll take what I can get.

A Very Technical Boy

If you've seen the movie version, starring Keanu Reeves, forget it — you've been tainted. The 1981 short story "Johnny Mnemonic," by William Gibson, is pure cyberpunk flash far superior to the big-screen adaptation that followed more than a decade later. Amid neighborhoods under geodesic domes, high-tech implants aplenty, and even a talking cyborg dolphin, it's the tale of a turning point in the life of Johnny, a cybernetic data courier, whose head contains secret information that's got a Japanese organized crime syndicate hard on his tail. Every sentence is amped-up pulp noir, with heaping helpings of smart jargon and grit.

Remember, this was '81. It's all got the whiff of cheesiness and cliché because this sort of story's been told for almost thirty years. At the time, few had actually written anything resembling this yet. Gibson's was the talent that, if not birthed the genre, at least made it readable. He invented the term cyberspace; it's hardly overstating when I say his work is visionary.

The introduction I received to Gibson took the form of his first novel, Neuromancer. An über-geek friend of my father's loaned it to me when I was thirteen. The next book I read, though — the one I chose on my own, having barely let Neuromancer's back cover close — was Burning Chrome, the collection of Gibson shorts in which "Johnny Mnemonic" features.

If all this stuff didn't inspire me to lose countless teenage nights in front of a glowing monitor, it at least fed the beast that was my growing obsession. A few months into my teens, I was already irrevocably plugged into the world of PCs. An avid BBSer, my cobbled-together computer was a 33mHz 486 with a huge 500-megabyte SCSI hard drive and 32 screaming megs of RAM. My pass to the thrilling world of online message boards with color ANSI graphics was a 14.4 US Robotics I paid almost two hundred dollars for. Not having to wait those interminable seconds for a blocky dragon image, made up entirely of pound signs and ampersands, to scroll into view in the Terminal window — that was a totally worthwhile trade for that year's birthday money.

At the breakfast table, I'd pore over pages of the phonebook-sized Computer Shopper catalog while absent-mindedly spooning Shredded Wheat into my face. For me to miss the school bus because I'd been eyeing the latest selection of processors ("Whoa, Pentium!") was hardly uncommon. When my father asked what I wanted for my fifteenth birthday, I didn't hesitate to tell him about the sale on Sony Trinitron monitors at CompUSA. In the truest instance of ignorance being bliss, my mother got away with non-peripheral gifts only because she didn't know the first thing about computers. Otherwise, she would not have been spared that particular hell of hearing me discourse ad nauseam on clock speed and resolution, on our way to the grocery store or dentist's.

Gibson appealed to me because nothing could have captured my teenage brain more than the idea of a future in which people ubiquitously melded with computers. The advantages to that, the pure sensibility of it, seemed so obvious.

By the time I was living on my own, there could have been no doubt I'd become a full-fledged geek. My computer rendered and raytraced, edited video and sound and pictures, answered my telephone, stored my CDs as MP3s, screened movies, beat me at Quake II, ordered pizza, gobbled down my HTML, and stood in as my alarm clock, secretary, and TV. I'd have carried it around in my skull if only it'd been small enough.

In that first apartment of mine, if no friends were over, my station was at the keyboard, typically with a cat curled contentedly in my lap. Perpetual music pumped from my speaker towers — retro futurist synth-pop fare, like Kraftwerk or Gary Numan, that would have been called bleeding-edge if the term had existed twenty years prior.

Gary Numan. Yes, I'm especially keen on Gary Numan. Most associate the name with the early '80s song "Cars." A one-hit wonder. Writing him off this way could be justified if your only metrics for determining musical worth are commercial radio play and chart success. They aren't mine. I've cultivated a fandom for the man's music bordering on rabidity. True, he hit a mid-career low with bad albums like The Fury and Strange Charm but to these I turn a blind eye (as any good, true fan should).

My first listen to Gary Numan came at sixteen, in my best friend's basement. The album my friend put on was Replicas, the cold, complex 1979 epic. Numan's otherworldly integration of punk's edginess with full, smooth synthesizer drones, combined with his affectingly personal (if oddly so) sci-fi lyrics, were like nothing I'd ever heard. I quickly accumulated his albums, starting from his days with Tubeway Army, and making my way up through his discography to the contemporary stuff — 2000's Pure and the dark, anthemic 2006 release, Jagged. Despite the music's dour lyrical themes, it's music that somehow resonates, makes me feel really, really good. A friend once observed that a particular expression forms on my face whenever I'm listening to Numan's music: simple, beatific joy. I've seen a couple of photographs, snapped at exactly the right time, and am inclined to agree. The slight curling upward of the corners of my mouth could mean nothing else.

So here it is, practically eighteen years after that first encounter with William Gibson's visions, and fifteen after discovering the alienated android rock of Gary Numan. Since those memorable moments, my life has taken a drastic turn. The last time I so much as checked my e-mail was eight years ago. Still, the tech-addict in me is covetous as ever: I still fantasize about jacking my brain into the Net, about those pricy Zeiss Ikon eyes Gibson wrote about, before I even knew how to read, in "Burning Chrome." Seeing the spine of that book of the same name — in front of me again for the first time — on the prison library's new-book shelf, my reach-and-grab was automatic. It was as if my body had been craving it.

Back in my cell, I kicked my shoes from my feet with uncharacteristic carelessness, I let them land where they may, one on its side, as I climbed onto my bunk with the slim Burning Chrome in hand.

Could it have been more right that the CD in my portable player happened to be Gary Numan's atmospheric 1980 release, Telekon. I pressed play, and those five familiar, fat notes of "This Wreckage" teleported and time-shifted me. Once again, I was back in my leather high-back, tweaking lines of JavaScript, a tiny cat wound warm and Möbius-like by my knee. The first terse paragraphs of "Johnny Mnemonic," at the same time, phasing me into that perilous theoretical future I used to dream about nightly.

It sounds contradictory, this revisiting of a pasts imagined future. In a way, I suppose it is. I can't explain it any better. All I know is that slowly, oh so slowly, as I read to the tones of Moogs and synthesizers reverberating through my headspace, the mottled concrete walls of this cell diminished, eclipsed by the spreading of a once-familiar expression of singular joy across my face.