A sense memory

[pseydtonne]

I kept having this dream during the summer of 1995 where I was running my hand through liquid butter. The whole dream would take five seconds but would be all I remembered about dreams the next morning.

The summer before my senior year of college was during 1995. That previous year of school was my favorite to date: I'd gotten comfortable with being a big man on campus. I knew everyone and everyone knew me in a school of nine thousand undergrads. If you wanted to rescue a lost cause, I could either hook you up with the right person or be that person for a little while. In turn I saved the campus comedy magazine when it fell into the hands of a man capable of pissing off anyone. I set one guy up with the single legal document he felt would boost his career. I slept on a surprising number of couches and never paid for illicits.

I had completed the requirement for graduation with a major. I was still getting scholarships for another year, so I stayed to take weird stuff, get a minor and see what happened. Senior year would be worthy of several other stories but none of them are important now.

I was feeling like the cock of the walk. That's why I decided I would live off-campus senior year with the best friend I made junior year, dobrovolets. In fact, I had decided I would live in that flat all summer and work in town. Three days of walking several miles in the hot sun to get groceries let alone get the five miles into downtown were enough to make me go back to my parents' house and simply mail the rent.

I was very bummed to be back in Utica for another summer. It turned out to be hard to line up a summer job: even my temp agency only got me one day's work that summer. A friend of mine had been working at Arby's for five years and he was able to get me an interview. Please understand that Utica is a tough town: you needed pull to get a fast-food job.

The upside of Arby's was that we didn't see at much traffic as other fast food joints. We also did not have a griddle. However, we had ancient deep-fry and prep equipment and staff with attitude about how obedient we should be. Later on that Arby's got taken over by more pot-addled folks, which makes the place a lot more relaxed.

I worked the fries and the registers. I also wound up doing the cleanup in the back most nights because it meant not standing in the heat for a couple hours. I got a good rhythm for cleaning things and never minded it. I'd zone out very effectively.

This is how I met the butter trough.

Before an Arby's sandwich gets roast beef slices on it, the insides of the bun are typically pressed against a cylinder rolling in a trough of very warm liquid butter. The cylinder is only four inches in diameter but about eighteen inches long so that three buns could be lubed at the same time. Then the bun would go through a toaster. If you want to save some calories the next time you hit Arby's, you can ask to leave the bun dry. You're more likely to get this by default when you order near closing and the butter roller has already been washed for the night.

I would clean the roller and the trough, along with the slicer assembly, the fry racks and all sorts of crazy sauce bins. I would pour the butter dregs down the sink and watch toasted onion slivers that had fallen off onion rolls slide into the abyss. I would then start sliding the rest out of the trough with my hands so that the soap would have less to do. We didn't have an overhanging industrial spray hose and soap needed to last, so cleaning took planning. Everything would always come out gleaming when OCD boy did the dishes.

Then one night I had the dream. The whole dream was just me running my bare hand through the butter trough the way I did every night at work. The trough was still full of the neon ghee. I could feel its warm as if it were a warm bath tub. It feels like the first time you finger someone's pussy: you connect and you have nothing else you'd want to do.

Then I woke up. That was it. Back to crummy reality and a stinky uniform neither detergent nor surfactant could redeem.

Remember that this was before dial-up Internet was available commercially, back when Talk Soup was the most interesting thing on TV. This was the summer Windows 95 came out. I was working the register when I learned Jerry Garcia had died. This was also around the time trance bands first started getting videos on MTV at night. It was fascinating to have an entire video based on, say, some people selling old crap out of their car trunks at a flea market in the country (what the English call a boot sale). There would be trippy, disjointed material sewn together to make a video that avoids plot. There is no girl for the guy to chase: there's a really nice screen saver instead.

Suddenly I was having this dream where my fingers would open and close as my flattened hand slid aerodynamically through the liquid butter. I had no idea what it meant, and that drove me nuts. I was hallucinating my own trance video and really wanting to know why.

Then I had the exact same dream again not too many days later. Twelve years later I can picture my hand, feel the butter gliding around it, and bask in that warmth.

Maybe my mind was desperate to find something redeeming about a situation where I didn't belong. My friend quit the job about a month into my stint, so I was alone in that place. Everyone thought I was a freak because I brought a book with my for my breaks instead of cigarettes and scratch tickets. Ours was the closest fast-food joint to the local make-work center for Downs Syndrome and other special folks, so I had to be part of someone else's uninterruptable ritual every day. I was the walk-on instead of the star. I was dying inside from lack of connection.

That summer I wrote several fourteen-page single-spaced letters to dobrovolets and gazebogrrl. This was before they hooked up; in fact, I figured out during that summer I would not be winning Gazebo's heart as she was getting interested in him. I figured I'd better help Dobro make a connection with her because I didn't want conflict as his flatmate. I also knew I could never forgive myself if I didn't stop her from going back to that scuzball former friend whom she was dating before that summer.

I was so used to rejection that I skipped the formal shoot-down and made the third-party connections effective. I have worked very hard never to be that conciliatory about my desires the way I did then. Then again, my hunch was right: they made the most disgustingly cute couple and they are still married.

A lot of the characters I still use for verbal riffing came from that summer job or the later job at Sears. I will have to tell the stories of Bob Dobbs Without The Slack and Gold Bond Fetish Girl another time.

I think that sense memory stays because it's the sense of bliss within the banal, comfort during the painful. Think of the old koan: A tiger chases me, I fall of a cliff, I grab the last tree branch on my way to a long fall and as it splinters I see the ripe strawberries on a plant far out of reach. They are beautiful and I am pleased to see them, no matter how dead I will soon be.

I wrote this because of a sense memory post mangosteen made. I really enjoyed what he evoked and wanted to see whether I could do something similar. Assignment: Now it's your turn. Write about a particularly vivid sense memory and its context.

Comments

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

You realize that since that summer I have never again eaten in an Arby's. Your letters were that evocative

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

You wrote that great letter about slicing lemons for water glasses at Shoney's, comparing it to the castration complex in Anti-Oedipus. You then explained the lemon was used to cut the bad water from the days of segregation, thus you wanted to refuse to put lemons in people's water because it was a sign of de rigeur racism and then said "big lights: "SARCASM"". That was beautiful.

I still eat at Arby's. I know what's in the food, so I can tailor without guilt. "large with cheese, don't butter the bun and a small jamocha shake". I just won't touch the curly fries because I still flashback on the smell of them burning my skin.

My mother has always loved the jamocha shake. I was pleased to tell her there was nothing creepy in it -- the syrup may be made with crank but the milk is real.

Remember that this was the same Arby's where, at the age of nine, I said "ma, how do you fuck a pig?" at a fairly loud voice. She was trying to explain to me where AIDS could have come from before humans and said "probably an animal."

oh god

[chaggalagirl.livejournal.com]

"'ma, how do you fuck a pig?' at a fairly loud voice"

LOL. i never knew that story. and honestly, do ever talk in anything *but* a fairly loud voice? ;D

♥

[intuition-ist.livejournal.com]

yanno, i think you & frank zappa would have gotten on like a house afire...

[michigansundog.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall in the koan that it ends like:

"There, growing on a vine near the breaking branch are a cluster of ripe strawberries. He picks one and eats it. Ah, how sweet!"

Which is to say, we are born into death the inevitable for us all. There is no escaping. Enjoy the pleasures that are to be had before the final end.

Thanks for sharing your story, btw. I was temping that summer in the worcester area and I remember hearing about Jerry dying while I was sitting at a receptionist's desk at a cardboard box company. But I was on the road when Leary died.