Leaving the City
I dream of an old man with a face like a rubbery hamburger bun. He finds himself thin-breathed and morally confounded in a Buick car lot downtown. He’s come to make a purchase, I understand. I see how his whole damn life has been a series of these purchases, as if in the transactions he’s reached and reached for stasis, for some state of being incorruptible. I make his face scrunch as the young salesman approaches. I dreamt him as well: a handsome man, sleek-suited, a go-getter. The young man sniffs out pickles on my old man’s breath. If both could lift the sewer-grates at the corners of the lot, they would see I also dreamt a store of pickles beneath the streets, sliced in stars, tangy, fermenting in their multitude.
“Have McDonald’s for lunch?” the young man asks in a brusque yet solicitous tone. He believes old men respect boldness. I dream his muscles twitching: he wants to run back to the office and get his paper cup full of Coke. He wants to show commonality, solidarity of experience.
“Hmph,” my old man grunts. “I’m sick of McDonald’s.”
He cranes his head. He squints at the brightly lettered banner above him, which puffs out in the dirty breeze like an official flag of the city. What does he see? What does he remember? Was there ever love that lifted him above it all? There was, he remembers, I remember for him. A few close calls. Once his feet sunk in song beneath the city, while his head exploded in the sky. Once little birds cleaned his mangy heart with their beaks. He felt clean, fluid in the feeling. He thought he might have seeds to give from his body, which remained hard despite his head exploding. He thought we could make a choice to give love.
“This is all starting to feel like communism,” he tells the young man, who’s also staring at the Buick flag.
*
I’m sick of McDonald’s, personally. We tell ourselves it’s only provisional, a snack for the day, that better things await, but the truth is the superstructure rules us with each hamburger flip, fry-dunk, and glossy logo. O, come on! you say. But listen, I remember my girlfriend, Sierra, in my beaten-blue pickup truck. We were smalltown sweethearts who’d met at a firehall dance in autumn. Sixteen and hunger like a vow. That first snort of exhaust in the cold, the driving side-by-side as if the world moved around us rather than us moving through the world. Two №2s with Coke, please. What was it? Double cheeseburgers, Big Macs? It would have seemed perfect if it hadn’t all been laid out for us in advance. No, no, no! When one night she ate my nipples in her dark bathroom, it felt so different, wild like lightning, like shattered sky.
“Scott, I’m sick of McDonald’s,” she said one day. Yes, me too. We went to the park with sack lunches I had prepared. There were carrots soaked in pickle juice, which I’d gleaned from my mother’s supply — the pickles, not the carrots. O yes, for a while, Sierra and I were high-school pagans. We rejected the greasy gods to watch dandelions in ballet across the grass. For a while, we thought we were far enough away. But still the golden arches downtown, remanding sky. Still, two kids walked into their high school in Colorado and blew their classmates away.
*
“I’m done with this,” my old man says. His hand falls in a bitter wave of dismissal. He is souring. “No more,” he says as he walks toward the peasant-brown sedan parked on the edge of the lot. My young salesman thinks: No one will mistake that car for sale! I gave him that thought.
“Sir, I’m sorry. If there is something I can help you with…Sir?”
But my dream is dreaming. The old man is seeing his beat-up car break down in the desert. He is seeing himself sitting under a juniper tree as buzzards circle overhead. He is dreaming of fresh water, the way grass sprouts like hair around springs. He’s also dreaming of the sea, of cliff divers in Mexico. The speed of falling perfectly is what cuts through, breaks the mold. They knife the blue water. Their bodies unfurl beneath the surface. No one can sell that perfection.
“I don’t want any crap,” my old man says to my salesman. “I’ll break the damn mirrors if I have to!”
*
O, McDonald’s everywhere I go. Maybe it’s unfair to pick on them, but it seems like the sun itself is deep fried now, a synthetic syrup glistening over the city.
And I am leaving. I am heading back to the desert, to things earthy and numinous. I am heading back to the ocean. And I am thinking of you.
Sweetheart, come back to me.
