Working fast food

I wrote a bit on Monday about Antoine Wilson's novel Panorama City, and while I praised Wilson's eye for detail and care for his characters, as well as his nicely turned sentences, I don't think I made clear just how funny the book is. So today I'll share two passages that made me laugh, both from fairly early in the novel, when Oppen Porter has just taken a job in a fast food place.

On his first day, he meets Roger, his manager, and his new colleagues:

Roger had a bushy mustache, an unruly mustache, and he wore his shirt unbuttoned one button too far, which showed off his rough throat and dry Adam's apple, and where you would expect a hairy chest was a mysteriously hairless expanse, which my fellow employees spent much time speculating about. One the first day I was introduced to Melissa, who was round and black and a mother of two, Francis, who had thick glasses and was going to become a filmmaker, Ho, who was a refugee, and Wexler, who talked about cars and nothing else. Whenever Roger told my fellow employees to do something, they always said his name twice, after which he'd threaten to make them call him Doctor Macarona, he wasn't actually a doctor, but he was way the hell ahead of the rest of us in the school of life, his words, and we couldn't call him bachelor because he was married and we couldn't call him master, because Melissa was black and what kind of message would that send, his question.

Before he can start working, Porter is required to watch a training video, one that presents "two separate realities, two alternate universes," one a terrible restaurant and one a successful one. The key to the successful restaurant? That one follows "the fast-food place's five-point system, which was illustrated by a gold cartoon star, five points for five points, each one glinting as it was listed off":

One, smile even if you feel bad. When people smile back you will feel better. Two, do what you can to make others feel important, especially if they are angry about something. Three, take pride in your work. Four, the company, I'm not going to name it, is a great big family. Five, the customer is always right.

In other words, the sort of points that sound fine in the boardroom but rarely survive the grease-laden transition to the fry station.

But Porter, inclined to assume sincerity, takes the five points to heart and attempts to put them in practice with his coworker Ho:

Ho did not smile, not in the least. So I smiled at him the broadest smile I could, and to make him feel important I said thatI hoped to someday learn a few of the many skills he obviously possessed in the kitchen, and to make him feel like family I called him brother. When Roger came in, finally, a half hour later, the first thing he asked was what I had said to Ho. I repeated exactly what I'd said. Roger said that I had disturbed Ho. I explained that I was using techniques I'd learned in the video. Roger said that the only reason he'd shown me the video was so I could sign a paper saying I'd seen the video. . . . Roger said that I was now one of the troops. I thought it was interesting that he called us troops and said so. He said we were at war. I had no idea. I asked him with who? He said the customer.

You know, how I one in a while mention that there are things I miss about being a bookseller? Well, there's nothing I miss about my time in fast food. (Except the free bagels. And the fact that since I was the trainer of new employees, I could have them make whatever sandwich I wanted to eat. And the ten-gallon barrel of pickles. Okay, so maybe fast food wasn't so bad after all?)

Panorama City

Oppen Porter, the narrator and protagonist of Antoine Wilson's Panorama City calls himself a "slow absorber," which is as good a way as any of describing his limited mental ability. Though Wilson doesn't ever have him offer a name for or diagnosis of his condition, he's clearly developmentally disabled in some way. And what Wilson aims to do with him in the novel ought not to work. Telling a story from the point of view of a character of limited cognitive ability who is essentially innocent and well-meaning . . . well, it smacks of Rain Man, or any of countless other works that turn their characters into nothing more than a tool for helping us understand ourselves.

Wilson saves Panorama City from that fate by actually making it Porter's story, and clearly being more interested in him and his experience than in having him enlighten those around him or help us understand our own lives. This is Porter's book, the story of his life laid down on audiotape for his unborn son, and his voice and perspective carry it. In addition, Wilson sets him in a world of Portisean strangeness, surrounded by people who, though they instantly spot Porter's limitations, can't see a bit of their own failings and monomanias. The result is funny, engaging, and even, by the end, surprisingly moving.

The following passage displays both qualities, while also giving a glimpse of Wilson's way with sentences and description. Porter has just boarded an intercity bus, and because he's tall the driver has suggested he sit in the front row. But a "scrawny old man" is taking up both seats:

He had the look, I don't know how else to put it, his face looked like that of a newly hatched crocodile. His eyes were alive and penetrating at the same time, and his mouth seemed wider and flatter than most, he didn't have much in the way of lips, his mouth was like a straight line across his whole face, and yet you couldn't shake the sense that he was, at the very corners, smiling. Papers were spread all over the seat beside him, a disorganized pile of sketches and notes and diagrams. I had no way of knowing where he had boarded, but judging from the pleasure the bus driver took in asking him to collect his papers and make room for me he had been making a mess of his papers for many miles. He managed to stuff into what he called his briefcase, which was actually a flat cardboard box, he stuffed into the box the whole pile of papers that had been the mess on my seat, somehow that briefcase was bigger on the inside than on the outside, and then he asked the bus driver if he was happy now. The driver stated that he was.

That passage also shows another way that Wilson avoids potential pitfalls with Porter: he doesn't make him falsely naive about human relations, doesn't take advantage of his disability for the sake of cheap situational irony. Porter may not be brilliant, but he's not blind to what the people around him are doing and thinking; his failures are not so much ones of perception or ignorance as of trust and kindness.

I mentioned Charles Portis earlier, as there are characters and situations--and even simple descriptions, like this one--

Nick's hair was slicked back and he had a goatee, or part of a goatee, on the point of his chin and a tiny mouth compared to the rest of his face, it was fascinating to watch him eat pizza with it.

--that call him instantly to mind. But the greater influence on the book feels like Nicholson Baker: Porter's descriptions offer a similar attention to, and surprising but apt similes for, small physical details. Examples abound throughout the book, but the point where I actually put it down and e-mailed Ed Park with joy was this paragraph:

When I reached the grocery store parking lot, I returned the cart to an area about halfway in, where carts are supposed to be returned. I pushed the cart into the back of a long line of carts, the cart in front obliged by lifting its hinged back panel, one fit into the other, and the lonely cart I'd found became one with the others, returned to where it could fulfill its purpose.

The movement from attention to detail to the granting of agency to the inanimate--"the cart obliged"--is quintessential Baker, a moment that feels less like simple description and more like an ethical stance, a statement that things, have purposes and can be made (and used) well or ill. The same, Porter would likely say, is true of people.