Chapter Thirteen

For the following weeks, I was in a bizarre sort of haze. I hadn’t known quite what my sensuous little interaction with Jerry had meant for sure, but given that he had behaved the next morning as if we were still cool, I figured that all was good. I had given into my primal urges, sure, as had he. However, if all went well, it would be a situation where we wouldn’t get too caught up into things. I couldn’t afford to grow roots in this place; that much was for certain.

It was that part of the year where the smell of the leaves was fresher and crisper than any I had ever smelled in California. This was strange because they were turning the red and golden hues indicating that they were about to fall from the safety of the boughs from which they had formed. It confused me that the morbid perfume of floral death could have such a bright quality to it.

“This is when we have a whole variety of apples in stock!” Dora instructed me with the bright enthusiasm that I had really only seen before in a child.

I was charmed by her ability to be excited for the novelty of seasonal produce, even though it couldn’t have changed that much year after year.

But when I thought about it, I didn’t have much of a leg to stand on in that regard. I was a little mournful thinking about how I was about to miss out on the Halloween festivals that my friends and I would attend back home. It was something I liked to do every year. What made being excited over exotic phenotypes of apples so different?

This offered cold comfort, however, as I could not logic away the way I felt about being there and spending all my time working at a place that I wouldn’t even deign to shop at.

Just hold strong and work as hard as you can for these people, became my day to day mantra looking in the mirror in the morning. The sooner you get them in the black, the sooner you can leave.

It was only the autumnal beauty that engendered any solace in me commensurate to the disdain I was slowly building up while I was at work. There was a single tree within viewing distance of the parking lot of the Fresh Face Co-Op. Every four hours, I would allow myself the liberty of stepping outside for a few minutes with my thermos of coffee and looking at it for a while.

It was the only thing of beauty in the immediate area. Garbage, while diverse and often very interesting in how it ended up being there in the first place, littered the ground. Once, I even saw a bulk package of flash frozen hamburger patties from the nearby fast food chain laying on the ground. I wondered how it got there. Had it been stolen from the burger joint and abandoned? If so, I immediately suspected the deli manager at the Fresh Face Co-Op. Had it been taken by an employee who saved it from the garbage after seeing that it would have been thrown out anyway having passed the expiration date? I didn’t know. Nobody could know.

Errant cups, all in the largest size available from the nearby convenience stores, rolled by tumbleweed style on the road where motorists had dropped them when they decided they no longer wanted them.

To shut all of this out, I put the hand I was not using to hold my coffee up to the side of my left eye to block the periphery of the least attractive portion of my range of vision.

“What are you doing?” a voice from behind me asked, making me jump.

It was Sara.

“Just pretending that I’m not here for a few seconds,” I said.

Since it was Sara, I felt I could be honest. She sighed in response.

“Me too,” she said. “Me too.”

“You headed home?” I asked, noticing that she had a backpack slung over her shoulder.

She nodded.

“You’ve got the day off tomorrow?” I asked.

“Hopefully,” she said. “Unless somebody calls in.”

I knew that it was very probable that somebody would call in the next day and so did Sara, based on the resigned look on her face. More than likely, she would get browbeaten into working for the fourteenth consecutive day in a row. I felt bad for her; I really did.

But I pretended that she was going to get the day off the next day, anyway.

“Hopefully,” I responded.

I also didn’t tell her that I was going to get the day off the next day no matter what, because it wasn’t like it would make her feel any better.

It was rare that I had a day off or really even a few spare hours that weren’t spent devoting myself fully to the cause of reinvigorating the Fresh Faced Co-Op or passing out with a half-eaten protein bar in my mouth. Though I was only supposed to be working a maximum of ten hours a day at the Co-Op, there was always some sort of emergency that required me to be there for an hour or two longer.

However, on a rare occasion that I did get a day, or even half the day off, it was probably that I was spending the day with Caroline, Jerry or the combination of the charismatic siblings.

It’s not as if I asked Caroline or Jerry to be my closest friends and guides in the area as if I were the new kid in school and they were from the welcoming committee in student council. That’s just how it turned out.

While my activities with Caroline tended to be more social (she took me to gatherings and art events while introducing me to all the right people), it was the outings with Jerry that I came to look to with eager anticipation, days in advance. Jerry was just as well acquainted with the area as Caroline, but his interests skewed toward the more reclusive.

Jerry knew of all the best bookstores and museums. Even though the content of these places was incredible, they were sparsely populated.

“Why aren’t more people here?” I would ask. “This place is amazing!”

Jerry would shrug at this.

“People around here simply aren’t interested,” he said. “It’s sad, but that’s the way things are.”

“So, then how do they get culture?” I asked one time.

Jerry winced at this.

“Are you telling me that nobody around here is interested in culture?” I asked.

“That would be a douchey thing for me to say,” Jerry said.

Despite my pathological inability to use politically incorrect words, I didn’t mind it so much when Jerry did it. In fact, he did it with such flair, that I kind of liked it. It was sort of like he was a verbal artist as well as a visual one.

“Is that your way of saying it without saying it?” I asked.

“Well…” Jerry hesitated. “I wouldn’t say that they’re completely uninterested in culture. If somebody local has an exhibition or a show, they’ll go, but only if they have a lot of friends.”

“Wait,” I said. “You’re telling me they only go if they’re friends with the artist?”

“That is correct,” Jerry said. “But only if the artist really pressures them to do it.”

“Isn’t that like holding your family emotionally hostage to your work?” I asked.

“They charge an arm and a leg at the door, too,” Jerry said. “That’s why I’ve never had any of my work displayed at any of the commercial galleries around here. Most of them require the artist to force at least twenty or so people that are their personal friends and family to buy a ticket to the exhibition. I couldn’t do that to the people I care about.”

I thought of the work by some of the employees at the Fresh Face Co-Op. Practically all of them were artists “on the side” and would frequently rail against the cuts in government spending toward the arts. This was probably because they knew that no one would ever willingly pay to see their work and they needed government funding to get paid for it.

Also, Jerry’s resolution to not take advantage of his friends and family struck me as extremely admirable. I knew that more than enough people cared about him and would be more than willing to shell out the twenty or so dollars required to look at paintings. The circle he ran in was certainly affluent enough. However, I could see the impulse not to exploit that affluence; he just wasn’t that sort of guy.

My ever-growing crush on him blossomed. All the cynicism and apprehension I felt about the world sort of melted away for brief periods of time around him. It’s not that my suspicious personality ever completely went away. It’s just that sometimes, when Jerry spoke, I could take comfort in knowing that there was at least one honest man in the city of Milwaukee.

My face flushed, and I felt like a fourteen-year-old girl talking to the lead member of her favorite boy band.

“No wonder people around here think all art is shitty,” I said, trying to hide my fan-girlish feelings from showing on my face.

“There’s also a tour of the brewery,” Jerry offered. “That one is quite popular, actually. They don’t need friends or family involved to buy a ticket to that.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “They offer beer on the tour?”

“How did you know?” Jerry asked.

“Just a hunch,” I said.

We stepped out to find some decent food to eat as we discussed this. While Caroline was fond of restaurants and cafes in which it was important to be seen, Jerry preferred somewhere quiet and out of the way.

“If an eating establishment looks a little scary, it’s probably the best place to go,” he explained to me.

This was as we were just about to go into one such place. It didn’t look a little scary; it looked really scary.

“I’ve never seen a restaurant that looked like it was a house that belonged to a small-time drug lord,” I said.

“That’s because it was up until recently,” Jerry explained. “A couple of years ago, the city seized the property and turned it into a commercial building instead of a residential one.”

That was a good guess on my part, though not wholly unexpected. The building looked like a two-story home with siding that had clearly once been snow-white. However, years of abuse and neglect had rendered the siding to a sad, peeling state in a mottled coat of grime. Rather than replacing the glass that had been broken in the windows of the upper floor, the owners had nailed wood, painted in a tasteless shade of puce, over them.

“Why didn’t they just knock the whole thing down?” I asked.

“Cheaper this way,” said Jerry. “They sold it off for a dollar to the current owner.”

It wasn’t hard to think of how Jerry had come across the place; it was sheltered in the dark shadow of the museum he frequented the most. “Are you sure this place has a passing grade with the health department?” I asked. “It’s so hard to tell around here because they aren’t legally required to display it in the windows.”

“Quit being a baby,” said Jerry. “Anything lower than a B gets shut down around here.”

That was a relief at least. I followed him inside which revealed the interior to be significantly less frightening. It wasn’t a high end dining establishment, that was for sure, but at least it was clean and well kept. Unlike the outside, I could tell that there wasn’t much risk of rodents or roaches.

A good portion of the walls had been outfitted with stainless steel. This was a tactic I had seen employed at many restaurants I wished I could represent had I not gone down the path of alternative and natural representation. It was a sign of a smart business owner. Even though it wasn’t as glamorous as it could be, it was practical and easy to clean. An employee, a young man so small he could have been no more than sixteen years old, was shining the stainless steel as we entered.

“Hi!” he exclaimed even as he continued to clean the wall. “Sit wherever you want and I’ll be right with you!”

We did as he told us and sat in a booth near one of the windows which, unlike the ones in the upper levels, had been outfitted with fresh new panes of glass. What little sun the museum did not block out, shone in through the window, which was good because the lights were dim, but not in a way that they were lowered to make the place seem intimate or cozy. The lighting above was fluorescent lighting, but the bulbs were inconsistently lit. I would have guessed that three out of ten of the long, narrow, light bulbs were burnt out.

Jerry must have seen me glancing up at them.

“Paula’s still in the process of fixing the place up,” he said. “That’s her son over there.”

He gestured toward the boy who had been cleaning when we first entered. He had temporarily stopped doing so in order to grab some menus and pour some glasses of water for us. He stopped by to drop them both off at our table.

“How long has she been here?” I asked after thanking him and making sure he was out of earshot.

“Almost two years, now,” said Jerry. “But a lot of the repairs were slow going. She had to gut this entire place out and replace the windows here on the bottom floor. Let’s not even talk about the second floor.”

“Why is it taking so long?” I asked.

“Paula’s a proud woman, so she won’t allow any repairs to be made on credit,” he said.

I had to spit the sip of water I had taken right back into the glass.

“She didn’t take out any credit to rebuild this place?” I asked.

Jerry shrugged.

“She’s always been really strict about that sort of thing,” he said. “It comes from her family, I guess. I think it might be against their religion. Anyway, she’s been saving money her entire life so that she could have this place. I feel bad; I just wish more people could know how good the food is.”

I nodded. From what I understood, the Fresh Face Co-Op was still in millions of dollars’ worth of debt, and that number got higher and higher on a daily basis with each new gimmick and marketing strategy they implemented. They chose to resolve this issue by raising prices on the products and the amount they needed paid by their owners. If they had followed Paula’s policy, there’s no way they’d ever be able to afford my services.

What followed was the sort of uncomfortable silence to which I had not been accustomed: the uncomfortable silence that comes from temporarily running out of things to say when you’ve spent the entire day with someone who shared with you an intensely sexual experience that neither of you is comfortable admitting had taken place.

Jerry’s face went slack with the realization that this was happening just as it dawned on me as well.

Quick! I thought to myself in a panic. Say something right now and break the silence before things get too awkward.

“So,” I said. “It’s finally happened.”

“What?” Jerry asked.

“We’ve finally run out of things to talk about,” I said, only realizing what a lame joke it was even as I said it.

To his credit, Jerry made a valiant effort of looking sincere and engaged in response.

“Haha,” he said. “Yeah, I guess.”

I had made a mistake. The second round of silence pounded on my psyche like a furious drummer during a performance of Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero.” Now that I had acknowledged the silence without leaving a string for Jerry to pick up on and continued the conversation, there was nowhere to go from there. Also, having brought it up, I had inadvertently made the silence even more uncomfortable.

Wow Ron, I thought to myself. Maybe you really deserve this Midwestern exile until you learn some conversational grace.

“Ron?” Jerry finally asked.

Oh thank God! I thought. He thought of something to talk about!

I was so grateful for the break in the silence. I promised myself that no matter what Jerry wanted to discuss with me, I would pick up the reigns and just go with it no matter what the topic was.

“About the other night…” Jerry began.

Or… maybe no matter what any other topic was. I realized right there and then that I wasn’t quite ready to address what had gone on between us. Just as I was about to have a full blown panic attack, my middle-aged savior came from the kitchen.

“Oh!” I exclaimed to him. “This must be Paula!”