Is that your breakfast today? I ask this silently of each person who comes into the donut shop. Is that your breakfast today? A donut and coffee? Often, actually, it’s two or three donuts. No wonder Americans are so obese. And yet, here they are, secretaries and chiropractors and CPAs en route to nearby offices, school bus drivers, students heading for the university, and construction workers on the new high rises going up all over the place. The construction guys push in with their flag hardhats and protruding bellies, order whole families of donuts, unaware that I am asking them silently, Is that your breakfast today? For all that physical labor? Well, somehow, they make it through another day, and another building goes up.
Me, I have a banana in my briefcase. A donut is just a little preliminary goodie, a nice amuse-bouche to kick off the day, not the main course. The banana balances it out and provides proper sustenance that a donut can’t. An adult person should know this. Still, I enjoy this little pick-me-up in the donut shop as I clear up paperwork and review my marching orders for the day.
The donut shop is owned by a Vietnamese family, who remain in back as if sequestering themselves from a potentially hostile alien culture. Just now, if I twist around in my seat and peer through the display case, I can see an older woman who sits in a cheap metal folding chair rounding out a cake of some type not for sale to the public. There is a little altar mounted on brackets against the wall, and sitting on the altar is a little plastic figurine that doesn’t look like Buddha at all, but more like Sophia Loren. In front of Buddha/Sophia is a bunch of rotting bananas. As if not wanting to attract attention, the altar is inconspicuous, and it took me a long time to notice it. I wonder if they eventually will remove the bananas and do something more “fruitful” with them, like eat them or give them to a homeless person. Seems to me that would be more in the Buddha spirit, but then, Buddhists can be just as nasty as the rest of us.
Ly himself mans the counter. He is a light-skinned Vietnamese with a pouchy face, and he shuffles with a rigid gait as if unaware that his legs are actually designed to move up and down, like pistons: human pistons. Maybe his can’t; maybe they’ve atrophied, somehow. How does someone get that way? A tragedy. But Ly is a nice man who always says “good morning” to me and sometimes gives me a free munchkin along with my donut. That’s nothing to sneeze at nowadays.
I am in my usual window seat in the right front corner facing the street: my “window on the world.” There is nobody else in here. Most customers come in, order, and take their donut (donuts, usually) out, so I’m often surrounded by empty chairs and tables. Before taking a bite from my donut (one), and after cleaning up any stray crumbs from previous customers, I like to sit and watch my coffee (black) steaming. I find the wafting steam a happy sight, offering the reassurance of warmth, comfort, purpose, good thoughts, social stability, and of course, sexual potency. (The sexual potency component is latent; one must act on it, turn steam into power, so to speak.) In the past, we used the latent power of steam on gigantic scales, and so now, in my mind’s eye, the coffee cup steam expands into the steam wafting out of the funnels of the Titanic: wafting cozily and reassuringly as the ship slumps down into the ocean, curling steadily forth as if there will be further use for that energy. All that power, steaming patiently for the next ring of the bell, a ring that will never come. Happiness and social stability and chocolate éclairs and pianos (grand in First Class, upright in Steerage) against all those billions of gallons of cold, cold sea water. Man against the abyss. It’s a very uneven match.
They don’t have éclairs at the donut shop, but they do offer a nice bar in chocolate or maple, which I sometimes have. Today, however, I’m having a plain old-fashioned. I like the old-fashioned, plain or glazed; they are a quiet, unassuming donut with these odd little protrusions you can handily peel off and eat one at a time, slowly and deliberately. In this way, the old-fashioned truly lives up to its name, as well as in the fact that they have no chocolate, no sprinkles, none of these trendy modern additives to give the gut extra protrusion of its own beyond what it’s already getting. As a donut, the old-fashioned is kind of off in left-field, and I suspect (though of course I have no way of knowing it) that it’s less popular than the fancier kinds. I wonder why they’re called “old-fashioned,” and this gives me an idea for a lead to check at the library and maybe do some research into. With this new topic suddenly in mind, I am prompted to wonder how many books have been written on donuts. I sense a possible opening for me, here, so I go into the briefcase, take out a sheet of paper, make a note—DONUT—OLD-FASHIONED—SOURCES—and return it to the case. My paperwork fits nicely under the banana, which will be my breakfast today.
These donuts are a quality product. The owners learned at some point to give a donut a proper crust, and in my book a donut without a crust is no donut at all. The donuts are stacked sumptuously in a large case with a glass front curving downward like a glittering waterfall. That glitter is a big part of the appeal of a place like this; it says, silently, All that glitters may not be gold, but it is good. A man can eat a donut from the glittering case and feel that he is enjoying a taste of the good life. His little piece of gold, so to speak. I suspect that modest little hint of opulence is at least a small part of why I come in here.
From the back comes the chatter of the sequestered owners and the fainter chatter of television. Their language is amusing to me, harsh yet high and singsong, and in fact, every few minutes a female voice, either from the older woman I saw shaping the cake or possibly from a younger woman, bursts out singing, Ya-dee, ya-dee-dee-dee-yahhh. A pretty sound, and unexpected. You would never have heard any singing in an old-time American donut shop; those places were all-business, clattering cups and banging trays, maybe a chattering radio, maybe bitching about the weather or the ball game or some damn thing. But singing? Never. Can you imagine a burly, dough-faced white man in a little white cap suddenly bursting into song? The thought is comical. In this shop, though, it’s simple reality. This is one good thing about these people coming in from overseas: they’re loosening things up.
I sit and watch my coffee steam and eat my day’s donut and think about the Titanic and try to make some more progress through these Philip Roth stories currently on my docket. I like to keep up on my reading, and picked Roth because he’s a major name I should be acquainted with. Many of his stories seem to deal with being Jewish in the postwar years, and are full of angst, family relations, social repressions, and various types of self-loathing. I’m finding him tough going, a little too dense for my comfort, too many digressions and insertions and asides, too much psychological analysis, which I never could understand. I can’t get traction. Oh! Here’s something about a train. My interest pricks up, but he doesn’t explain, doesn’t carry through, just drops it down and moves on. What the hell? As for self-loathing, I may have some things, but I don’t think I have that. Not habitually, anyway.
I scan the pages for more about the train, but there is nothing. Dammit, Phil, I ask silently, are you jerking my chain? Why bring something up if you’re not going to follow through? I take a sip of coffee, slowly, and it settles me down. I think maybe doing what Phil did here must be considered a “cool” thing to do among literary people: being opaque. I bet they use that exact word, too, guys like Roth, Updike, and Cheever. Upper-echelon types: New Yorker people, very smart intellectuals, the people who wrote the book on analysis. Why do some people think being opaque is cool? Not finding more about the train only makes me disappointed. I would love to read about a transcontinental train trip in Roth’s day: the Super Chief, the Twentieth Century Limited—trains a serious writer might have ridden.
Thinking about trains, I take another little sip of coffee, slowly, and begin to hum softly to myself. A low buzzing note, hmmmm…This is something I do while I’m going around or even sitting in the donut shop and other places, and lately possibly more often than I used to. A reflexive train horn? As a kid, those things scared me, I was a terrible wimp when it came to loud sounds. I wouldn’t be scared by them now, but this horn-hum is not necessarily only a train but equally a fog horn, or a distant vessel sailing through the fog, or ultimately the hum of the Cosmos itself—the Big Bang—echoing in me. I sometimes catch myself making the sound almost involuntarily, and can only regard it as beacon of my presence in the universe. But as I said, I’m not much for psychoanalysis. Of course, a lone man issuing any sort of repetitive audible signal in public runs the risk of upsetting others, so I keep my humming very low, only halfway outside myself. Still, realizing this makes me wonder if I’ll be going away soon, or if I’m possibly going slightly crazy. Many people do, as they grow older. I don’t care, really. I keep humming (do we really have a choice about being beacons?), peel another leaf from my old-fashioned donut, and move on to the next paragraph of Philip Roth. Texas? Armagnac?
A large man, his belly protruding in front of him, pushes in, making the buzzer on the door go braak! He says to the stunted attendant, “Two of the ones with the white on top and coffee,” and I ask him, silently, Is that your breakfast today? He puts his tray on the table down the row from me, pulls back a chair with a terrible scraping sound, and sits down slowly, making a sort of deflating balloon noise. He wears a dumpy blue slicker and blue slacks and brown, sensible shoes and white socks; a facilities manager, maybe, or a maintenance guy or a meter guy or some other kind of doojamathingie guy, a man who makes society function. I steal another sideways glance in his direction, and with a slight feeling of shock I become slowly aware that he is younger than I am. Quite a bit younger: an old young man. The type is familiar to me, the kind of person who looks fifty at age thirty and thinks and acts even older. I see so many now who look like the old people of my youth and who are younger than I am, and this depresses me. How did they get like this? Didn’t we learn anything when we were young?
No matter, really; he is of no consequence to me. (Though I accept that I might conceivably be inconvenienced in some way without him and his confreres.) I suppose he’s got a wife or girlfriend whom he can be of consequence to. I wonder what woman would want to be his girlfriend, but they do, the women: they have a great capacity for love. I read another paragraph but my eyes keep straying out the window while the man eats his donut and issues a faint wheezing sound between bites. He eats fast, drinks his coffee in gulps, then heaves himself up with a grunt and walks out, issuing a faint farewell wheeze as he opens the door and thrusts his newly-enlarged belly back onto the street. I think about running after him and yelling, “Sir! Was that your breakfast today?” but I know that would only be a pathetic act on my part, not to mention open to interpretation as an act of hostility. Luckily, such an act is far from my intention, and I adhere to the prevailing social reality that it’s better to mind one’s own business. And there’s also this: maybe he’s planning on having something else a little later, like I am. With that protruding belly, I think it’s very likely.
A pair of pigeons is pecking around the curb by the bus stop. They’re hoping to find bits of discarded food, donut crumbs, maybe. Imagine that: living on crumbs. But they do. I tell them, silently, Look out, little pigeons, look out! There are people out there driving who would actually swerve to hit them. Can you imagine that? I’d rather not. I don’t really like people; I do like pigeons and am relieved when these two steer away from the street and peck their way up the sidewalk, their little iridescent heads jerking toward destiny. Their day has begun, nourished by crumbs of people food, no good at all for birds, as evidenced by their ample protruding pigeon bellies. Was that your breakfast today? I hope not.
A young woman comes bustling in, making the buzzer go braak! She’s all business, hurry-hurry, likes she aspiring to the upper echelon, and she orders six “donut holes.” Donut holes? This shop does not serve donut holes, it serves munchkins. The same thing, true, but with a different name, and there’s a nice, easily readable plastic sign in the display case saying “munchkins.” Not “donut holes.” And yet, here’s this woman, all business, looking right at the display and presumably the sign, but refusing the nomenclature provided and instead substituting her own. Maybe she thinks saying “munchkins” is beneath her.
Somehow, this behavior annoys me, like refusing an outstretched hand or slapping it away and saying, “I’ll do it myself.” My mother used to do that when I offered to help with some task around the house. “No,” she’d say, “it’s easier if I just do it myself.” I was injured by this rebuff and today I consider it among the several factors responsible for stunting my development. I can’t control other people’s behavior, and this behavior has been to consistently, over many years, reject me. Then this woman comes in and rejects the obvious, just because she feels like it, or has no feeling at all.
Two young dudes saunter unsteadily across the parking lot heading toward the donut shop. Uh-oh. One of them is sort of prancing, as if high or stoned or hopped-up. At eight in the morning this implies that they’ve been out all night. They look punchy and mean, feral opportunists, but I get the impression they would probably not stand up well under a beating. (Not that I would be the one to give it to them.) They both do a controlled collapse on the curb outside and the giddy one—I’ll call him “Prancer”—comes in, making the buzzer go braak!, and asks for a coffee and a chocolate donut with sprinkles. Mr. Ly tells him it will cost two-twenty-five, so he goes back outside and asks his friend for some money. He comes back in and gives it to Mr. Ly, who says, “Thank you, sir.”
Prancer says “Thanks” and takes his coffee and donut outside, and I ask him, silently, Is that your breakfast today?
The way this transaction went down without any trouble, which these guys looked strongly prone to, satisfies me, and I lean back in my little donut shop chair. The coffee continues to steam and look happy and reassuring, and I think of the Titanic and poor old Captain Smith, who never used up all his steam and who went down not happy at all. Those funnels—like giant coffee cups—kept right on steaming, the boilers and engines standing by and ready to push the great vessel on to New York, right until the sea poured in. All that cold, cold water: against that, what chance did happiness have? In fact, at this moment, I remind myself that we, too, are sinking very, very slowly into space. Cold, cold space. What chance does happiness have against that?
The mini mall containing the donut shop is a tidy little shopping center, a metropolis in miniature, lacking only a residential component. Next to the donut shop is Subway, then the Sav-Mor smoke shop and Teriyaki Time and Sunrise Supplements. Somebody could almost live here and never have to go anywhere else. Not me; I like a good diet. Vegetables. Vegetables are not popular with people who live off mini-malls. Mini-malls are ridiculed by intellectuals, but they are interesting places full of the struggles and festering hurts and sexual secrets of the quiet people working in them, whereas the Hollywood and Wall Street big shots go blabbing all over the place and only end up looking silly. Mini malls aren’t silly at all; they’re all business. They’re small, so they have to be. I like small places, and I think again about maybe finding a job in one of them, maybe even this one. The supplement shop, maybe. I think I could do well, helping people find things that would benefit them. But I’ve got too much on my plate right now.
Outside, the pigeons are gone and buses disgorge small groups of texting young people, their cell phones blanching their faces ghostly white, as if drained of blood. Which they might well be if a car suddenly careened up onto the curb and punted them into oblivion. Your face is really white now, I’d think, silently, if that happened. Yet they stand at the corner waiting for the light, right on the brink of the busy street, as if calamity could never happen to them. Hah! All those things that “never happen”: how many of them happen through simple inattention? Not that these young people would really care; they’re young, and if a car came up and punted one of them into oblivion the others would probably just flutter around like pigeons for a few seconds, then go right on texting and phoning each other and doing other things incomprehensible to older people. As for the clammy hand of death: I like to think I’m ready, but I know I’m not. No one is.
The young people with their phones and their blanched faces wander off to their jobs or the university, and the cars continually swish by. I can hear them through the window faintly, singing their song, the cars, the cars, the cars, and it makes me think of the movie with Gregory Peck playing General MacArthur, complete with liver spots, and his famous farewell at West Point, the old man’s death-rattle voice going, “the corps, the corps, the corps…” Swish, swish, swish, the cars, the cars, the cars, the corps, the corps, the corps. I wonder what the upright old general, so exalted in his own mind that it got him fired by the little failed Kansas City haberdasher, would have thought about this country that he and his men fought for—these mini malls with their instant food and kids in T-shirts and foreigners like these Vietnamese. Of course, MacArthur considered himself a friend of Asians (though he probably called them “Orientals”), so he might be pleased to see how they are advancing themselves in America. The thought of MacArthur leads me to wonder what the boys at Gettysburg and Chickamauga might have thought about their farms and villages evolving into mini malls full of nail parlors and donut shops run by Asians/Orientals. Before saddling up to do battle for an alien and terrifying new America somewhere far up ahead, would the onetime (now dead) eaters of home-smoked ham and chard and hominy grits ask us donut and Cheerios eaters, Is that your breakfast today? I think it likely as hell. Poor boys.
I return to Roth but a scarlet flash immediately catches my eye. It’s a whizzing Volkswagen convertible. Whizzz! Cute, jaunty little red runabout, like a cardinal, perfectly made with German precision for happy summer days, youth and laughter. Ha-ha-ha! Nothing cute about Auschwitz, though. Oh, no, don’t think we have forgotten, mein herren. Your little red Volkswagens won’t make us forget, forget that you people were serial mass murderers, weren’t you? I can sit here in the donut shop seventy years later and remember exactly what you bastards did. I wasn’t there, of course, but I’ve seen the pictures. I’ve read John Hersey. My reading has taken me up the Rhine and past the Lorelei and into your death factories. All those lined-up, pale white faces, white and drained of blood for real. Not texting. Life was serious in those days—dead serious. Do German young people, texting and only thinking of today and tomorrow (maybe) and who they will text next, think of this? I suppose they cannot be held accountable for the abominations of their elders, but the nation as a whole still has a lot of explaining to do, in my book.
A young man wheels up on a bicycle, props it by the door, and enters, making the buzzer go braak! He wears a captain’s hat, which is unusual, and I immediately think of that group from the seventies. The Captain and Tennille. I always wondered why that guy wore a captain’s hat and called himself “the Captain.” He looked so serious and stuffy on the albums, as if telling potential buyers, “When you see me, Mister, salute!” Or, more likely, “When you see me, Mister, buy this album!” Well, they obeyed, in spades. It was all a gimmick, of course, but that gimmick made the Captain and the girl a nice pile of dough. Marketing people are pretty damn shrewd; they know that some men like authority figures and would buy the album for precisely this reason, while women like a man in uniform and would buy even more. The ladies liked Captain Smith, too, but of course, Captain Smith was nothing like the Captain-singer. Me, I never wore a uniform and I never had a girl and as far as singing goes, I’d rather hear myself eat. I suppose this young man’s captain’s hat is a gimmick, too, for picking up girls or telling people that he likes boats or that he actually hopes to become a seaman one day. Or maybe he actually has one of their albums and is taking after the Captain-singer, using him as some sort of role model. It seems silly, but I wouldn’t mind coming up with a gimmick or two for myself.
The Captain orders a coffee and “six of those things,” by which I know even without looking that he means munchkins. He won’t say it, either, like the girl of a few minutes ago. A strange phenomenon. I have no qualm about saying “munchkin” aloud, so I don’t understand these people. Do the Captain and the hurry-hurry girl consider “munchkin” a not-cool word—threatening, even? Though they are blandly unconcerned about standing six inches from juggernaut-inflicted death, young people are completely consumed by little fears of this kind: fears of being seen as uncool, of saying things that they would never say and using words they would never use, even in front of complete and inconsequential strangers. Seems like a hell of a burden to carry every day. What is “munchkin” but a cute name that makes you want to buy some and pop them right in your mouth? I bet the large man would have loved to pop a baker’s dozen into his wheezing mouth, but at least he had sense enough not to. I think about going over and ordering a couple, myself, so I can say “munchkins” in a loud, firm voice while the Captain is here, but I stop myself. The Captain is having six, but he’s young, he bicycles, he will work them off. Then again, maybe he’ll be texting on his bike and a car will punt him into oblivion. Never happen to you, eh, white-face?
A woman enters, making the buzzer go braak!, and stands in front of the case gazing in at the donuts. I give her a brief, sideways glance and look back at my book. I hate when people stare, especially when they look you up and down. People like that have no conception of rudeness. I look (glance) just long enough to see that she is short, middle-aged, and wears a plaid muffler and matching fedora. Natty. “Natty” is like “jaunty”; how many people use those words, now? Mr. Ly asks, “Help you?” leaving out the “can” and the “I” and also any kind of “ma’am” or “miss” to match the “sir” he calls all the men. She says, “No” and continues looking into the case. After a moment he asks again, “Help you?” “No.” She continues standing there, staring, then abruptly walks out. Maybe she was offended by not being called “ma’am,” or maybe she asked herself, silently, Is this your breakfast today? and decided that it would be better if it wasn’t.
I suspect that, although the woman appeared natty, she is possibly a form of mildly deranged person who will very probably get worse with time. Natty people often fall into this category. I wouldn’t exactly call myself natty, but I wonder if I, myself, might be getting worse with time, since I’ve been sitting here for the past twenty minutes humming like the Super Chief going through Pasadena. Hmmm…hmmm…The hum is barely audible but sound carries in this little room with its big windows and linoleum floors, and I don’t want to make Mr. Ly nervous. He’s probably got enough to worry about.
Philip Roth has disturbed me somewhat with his density and lack of follow-through, but it’s time to put him away. Oh, I’m not giving up on you quite yet, Rothie, even though you’re opaque as hell. No, sir, I may not be an upper-echelon intellectual, but I don’t give up that easily. You’re not the only sausage in the deli. I have paperwork to review in my briefcase, not just you and a banana. I always carry a briefcase; I find it lends dignity and purpose to the day as well as being ideal for carrying breakfast, reading material, and my paperwork: things I’m going over for the day, research projects, notes to review, ideas to flesh out.
Ideas like this suddenly new one on the evolution and nomenclature of the donut. Who else is doing this, right now? Very likely no one, I suspect, and that is where I step in. I carry many ideas and thoughts in my briefcase, along with other things to review and get out of the way. If I don’t commit them to paper, they tend to wander off and get lost. I’ve had some pretty good ones wander off, but lately I’ve been pretty good about keeping them in line. I’ve got several things to get out of the way today, ideas about articles to be submitted to The New Yorker and maybe some other journals. I wonder if The New Yorker would be interested in something about donuts.
My paperwork here is about concluded. This takes the form of having what I consider a certain quota of thoughts and ideas formulated or developed in further iteration. I’ve come to realize that many iterations of one document or thought are required before it can be considered complete. Sometimes, completion never comes. That’s something I’ve taken years to realize and accept. Completion of anything is only partial reward; the other parts of the equation—the conception and development—are equally valid, in my book. (Though maybe not so much in society’s.) In any case, I’ve cleared the docket and gotten enough out of the way that I can move on into the rest of the day.
I snap my briefcase shut and look once again out from my window on the world. A bus pulls away from the stop just as a woman runs up with mincing little birdlike steps, pulling a wheeled suitcase. She stops abruptly, raises her arm, and gives the bus the finger. She’s tall and scrawny and has mousey sand-colored hair and looks like a college type, but is not young. She turns to a young Asian woman standing at the bus stop and smiles and shrugs. Is she apologizing? Women like that are always apologizing. But the finger! I wonder why she did it. All that pent-up anger inside us! Shortly, another bus comes, and after making some inquiry of the driver she steps aboard, lugging her case behind her. The incident is closed, but it added a little spice to the morning. I wonder what such a woman would do if the bus driver she flipped off actually stopped and got out and confronted her. The thought amuses and intrigues me; maybe I’ll do some looking into female anger issues and how they compare with the male’s. I reopen my briefcase and jot down a note: ANGER—MALE-FEMALE.
My donut is now part of history and the coffee cup nearly empty and emanating very little in the way of steam. No, this is not my breakfast today, but a half hour of material and a good launch of a new day and maybe a new project, too. Eat your heart out, Rothie, baby, to hell with the Armagnac! I stand up and grasp the briefcase handle. Hmmm…hmmm. It occurs to me that I might stop by the tunnel and watch trains for a while. I realize I have other items pressing, such as this donut project and maybe finding some sort of gimmick, but after that donut and steaming coffee, I think it might be doable. I could probably handle both. And I have a banana to balance it all out.