Our order is up.
Jason and I start to go left. The checkout lady tells us the dining room is to the right. We come to a sauce bar with plastic soufflé cups. Beside it is a beverage station that has free water and coffee. A sign asks: “Please DO NOT use coffee cups FOR SAUCE.”
“I like my coffee black,” Jason says in a robot voice.
“I lyke mah coffee blaghk,” I say back at him.
Low light from a wagon wheel chandelier sets the mood.
A waitress passes by, looks at Jason’s plate, and makes the most sincere “mmm” I’ve ever heard.
Jason is impressed; she works here every day and still feels that way.
He is less impressed after he starts to eat.
When Jason was 24 he had a job designing video boxes for soft-core porn films. Tired of Photoshopping strategic shadows onto lesbian vampires, he quit and took his camera on a long motorcycle trip. He traveled down the Mississippi River guided by gas station maps.
Upon entering Kansas City, he found an overlook with a view of an industrial area known as “West Bottoms.”
West Bottoms was full of warehouses and crisscrossed with train tracks. Jason was drawn to it and drove down to see if he could find a café.
He parked his motorcycle in front of an old factory. A man yelled from a window above, “What are you doing?” Jason looked up and shouted, “Just looking around.”
“Do you want a coffee?” the man called back.
The man was named Davin and was the same age as Jason. His apartment was a crumbling brick semi-fixed-up loft. It was similar to one that Jason lived in back in Brooklyn, except Davin had the whole three-story building, and there had been a fire, so half a floor was missing.
The loft was Jason’s fantasy come true, complete with a pack of roommates that didn’t mind him crashing on the couch.
The couch felt good. Jason had been on the road for a while. Each morning he would wake up and decide to stay one more day.
All the roommates had jobs, but they worked on different days. So every day Jason got to hang out with a different roommate.
Roommate #1, Harriet, took him to see the Alligator Lady.
Alligator Lady was a black sheep of a wealthy family.
Her house was a big Victorian with ornate wood moldings, patterned wallpaper, and floors rimmed with green garden hoses. Every room had a filing cabinet, and a big cage.
In the filing cabinet were Xeroxes of articles and evidence against water fluoridation. In the cages were live alligators that the A.L. would carefully hose down. Interns from the local art school floated in and out of the rooms with freshly cut trays of dead chickens.
Roommate #2, Neal, took Jason to a record shop and introduced him to Hasil Adkins.
Roommate #3, Leo, took Jason to a BBQ place.
Actually, Jason took Leo to the BBQ place.
Leo couldn’t explain how to get to it, just that it was worth the trip.
So Jason had Leo get on the back of his motorcycle, and the way you find a light switch in the dark, they found the BBQ place.
The light revealed a run-down gas station with a smoker whose doors had welded-on the initials “LC,” junkyard style. When the doors opened, half a foot of black crust was baked to them, and inside were shelves of sweet meat.
Jason went back to the place the next two days so he would never forget where it was.
This is not that place. That place closed two hours ago.
We will go there tomorrow.
This is my second time in Kansas City. The first time was also with Jason. We drove in very late at night.
The first thing he did was take me to the West Bottoms overlook.
Snow on the ground and visible breath, I got out to join him.
“Whoop whoop,” I said, universal code for please lock the car door.
“We don’t need to. There is no one here. Come on,” Jason answered.
“Whoop whoop.”
“It’s fine. We’ll be here for ten seconds.”
“Whoop whoop.”
“It’s silly. It is just over this wall. Come on, I want to show you.”
“My laptop and your camera are in there. C’mon, just lock it.”
He was unmoved.
We then muttered “so stubborn” at the same time. I got in the car and he climbed a stone wall.
Jason froze his nuts off looking at the West Bottoms. Longer than he or I wanted.
Finally he opened the car door, still sore.
“You ruined that.”
“You ruined that. I’m not going to leave our shit in the car unlocked.”
He pointed out that he was twenty feet from the car at all times. I pointed out that I was from New York.
LAYDEE
“What do you mean, the whole catastrophe?” my dad asked Willy.
Well, you gonna get married.
You gonna have kids.
You gonna buy a car.
Get a house in the suburbs,
And have a goddamn station wagon with four gallons of mayonnaise in the back.
Willy kept going on about the catastrophe that was about to befall my dad.
Minus the suburbs, he was right. Eve became my mom.
Willy had a Triumph. A green TR3 that he kept parked at a friend’s garage. He couldn’t leave it on the street. The car might get stolen, and, more than that, good luck finding a spot.
In New York City, parking your car is a blood sport. The sport was a little different during the 1960s. Meter maids hadn’t taken steroids yet, and there was only one parking regulation sign on each block.
The sign on Morton Street originally read:
On Saturdays Willy took the TR3 out of the lot and parked it in front of his building. He would always give it a good wash. Sometimes he’d let a girl have a ride. Mostly he stood next to the car and looked cool.
Willy could park in front of his house because one day he climbed a ladder and painted over “SAT.” on the parking sign with white enamel.
The car was another connection between Willy and my dad. Dad once had the same car, but his was baby blue, and he had abandoned it in Oklahoma.
After dropping out of college, before Morton Street, my dad drove his TR3 across the US. He would hit a big city, get a job, and stay till he felt like leaving.
When he reached Oklahoma City, my dad drove to the center of town to look around.
Near city hall his car starts getting pelted with buckshot. It wasn’t someone shooting at him. The pellets were just falling from the sky. He drives around the other side of city hall and sees these guys with dogs scaring pigeons up to the sky. As soon as the pigeons get high enough, there is another crew that blows them away with shotguns.
The men shoot straight up so the bullets spit over the capitol dome and then land on the other side like hail.
In Oklahoma City, you could go to Woolworth’s and buy guns over the counter next to peppermint sticks and sunflower seeds. If you weren’t tall enough for the counter, they had kid-height bins full of squirrel guns.