Arsenic Soup for the Soul: A Pretend Story about Pretension
When I don’t have anything to say, particularly around the female species, I often find myself gazing off in to the distance. Usually its all pretense: an attempt to convince both her and I that there is something hopeful inside me churning, an articulation of that spontaneous human irrationality manifested in dreams. I am telling her that the here and now is transient, boring, insignificant, but oh baby, stick with me and we’ll ride off together into the infinite horizon.
But when the thick silence occurs during a first date at the Silver Diner, there is little room to maintain that dreamer image. Hillary seemed nice. Really nice. I met her through a my best friend Nate at the mall. We talked about college, and how neither of us could shake the feeling that the middle class privilege our parents had worked so hard for had only prepared for us a more mundane way to wait for death. The real people, she demanded, were sweating and loving in a setting that didn’t include cold Chinese food dinners with plastic utensils or faking credit card applications for free t-shirts that read “RETRO” on the front and “CitiBank ®” on the back. College was for the fakers and the tragically misled, and we agreed to meet two days later over dinner to discuss more about how we fell into the latter category.
I swear she was the one that chose Silver Diner. It was close to where we had met and my agenda had less to do with food than making out in the back of my dad’s car, so I agreed. But while I sat in the waiting room for her and Elvis sang “Jailhouse Rock” on the close circuit “Silver Diner Network” TV for the second time in 10 minutes, I started worrying. How could two people initiate an honest relationship in a place whose music video play list lasted only long enough to give the customer the sense that this was an old fashioned, rock and roll diner? Silver Diner doesn’t care about the 1950’s. Silver Diner cares that it’s PR and Marketing Office comes up with a cost effective way to convince customers they know what the 1950s were about. “It’s the corporations”, I assured myself. “The fact that some business man found that chrome gilded architecture and pictures of old cars are marketable ways to sell shitty food has no relevance with how this date will go. She probably hates this place too.”
When she finally arrived, we made our awkward greetings (to hug or not to hug?) and were seated at a big red booth that had a miniature juke box hanging on the wall next to our table. We both admitted to already having eaten, and so Rick, our red-white-and-blue appareled waiter, took our brief orders quickly: A strawberry milkshake for her, vanilla milkshake and coffee for me. We played the “small world” game (“You know Nate Jeffreys?! NO WAY!”) and the “I bet saying I listen to this obscure band will impress you” game (“have you heard any of ‘Bud Vanderbean and the Bagels’ new album?”). I told her the story about that one time I was almost charged with a felony for throwing a hot dog, and she laughed and swore, “That is the funniest thing, ever.” And then it happened. Silence. She nervously picked away at her black finger nail paint, as I started to survey the room. There were Marilyn Monroe posters, old Cadillac hubcaps, and license plates from a few different states that read “SLVRDNR”. I wondered if they really meant us to believe that the hubcaps had been handed down by generations of Silver Diner restaraunts, or that the “SLVRDNR” plate from Oklahoma had ever been on a real car, or had ever even been registered with the state. And then I wondered about the type of place that actually makes artificially vintage odds and ends to place around the Silver Diner walls. Do they have an “antique” manufacturing plant at Silver Diner headquarters? Are there really people who get up every day to go to work to fabricate items that are supposed to be meaningful and rare references to a simpler time? My vanilla milkshake was starting to taste sour.
“So you’re pretty good friends with Nate?” Hillary broke the silence.
“Yeah, he’s my buddy. Why do you ask?”
“Oh. Nothing. I don’t know. Actually, I kind of don’t like hir. At all. He’s too immature for my tastes.”
The milkshake was definitely starting to sour. This girl, whom seemed so friendly and intimate with Nate at the mall, was now calling my best friend immature?! I needed to change the subject.
“So, you swim?” I asked, pointing to the “Riverside Dolphins Swim Club” shirt clinging to her body.
“Oh, no. I got it at a thrift store. People are always asking me that when I wear it though.” Thrift stores. The next generation is going to hate us when Halloween comes around because all of the hipsters and irony indulgers of our generation will have already taken all of the cheap costumes from Salvation Army.
I was starting to see where this date was leading; where this world was leading. Is this what post modern means? Have we agreed once and for all that simply alluding to a concept of “the genuine” is enough? When the freshness of our food is less important than the decade we are supposed to be reminded of by eating it, where will we find nourishment? When people prioritize the image of friendship over actual friendship, where will we find our confidants?
I told Hillary I was really tired and probably should go home, and I was being honest. On our way out, I tried to play a song on the jukebox next to us, but as I reached for a quarter, Rick, our waiter told me not even to bother. “It’s not actually real,” he said. “It’s just there to look good.”
But when the thick silence occurs during a first date at the Silver Diner, there is little room to maintain that dreamer image. Hillary seemed nice. Really nice. I met her through a my best friend Nate at the mall. We talked about college, and how neither of us could shake the feeling that the middle class privilege our parents had worked so hard for had only prepared for us a more mundane way to wait for death. The real people, she demanded, were sweating and loving in a setting that didn’t include cold Chinese food dinners with plastic utensils or faking credit card applications for free t-shirts that read “RETRO” on the front and “CitiBank ®” on the back. College was for the fakers and the tragically misled, and we agreed to meet two days later over dinner to discuss more about how we fell into the latter category.
I swear she was the one that chose Silver Diner. It was close to where we had met and my agenda had less to do with food than making out in the back of my dad’s car, so I agreed. But while I sat in the waiting room for her and Elvis sang “Jailhouse Rock” on the close circuit “Silver Diner Network” TV for the second time in 10 minutes, I started worrying. How could two people initiate an honest relationship in a place whose music video play list lasted only long enough to give the customer the sense that this was an old fashioned, rock and roll diner? Silver Diner doesn’t care about the 1950’s. Silver Diner cares that it’s PR and Marketing Office comes up with a cost effective way to convince customers they know what the 1950s were about. “It’s the corporations”, I assured myself. “The fact that some business man found that chrome gilded architecture and pictures of old cars are marketable ways to sell shitty food has no relevance with how this date will go. She probably hates this place too.”
When she finally arrived, we made our awkward greetings (to hug or not to hug?) and were seated at a big red booth that had a miniature juke box hanging on the wall next to our table. We both admitted to already having eaten, and so Rick, our red-white-and-blue appareled waiter, took our brief orders quickly: A strawberry milkshake for her, vanilla milkshake and coffee for me. We played the “small world” game (“You know Nate Jeffreys?! NO WAY!”) and the “I bet saying I listen to this obscure band will impress you” game (“have you heard any of ‘Bud Vanderbean and the Bagels’ new album?”). I told her the story about that one time I was almost charged with a felony for throwing a hot dog, and she laughed and swore, “That is the funniest thing, ever.” And then it happened. Silence. She nervously picked away at her black finger nail paint, as I started to survey the room. There were Marilyn Monroe posters, old Cadillac hubcaps, and license plates from a few different states that read “SLVRDNR”. I wondered if they really meant us to believe that the hubcaps had been handed down by generations of Silver Diner restaraunts, or that the “SLVRDNR” plate from Oklahoma had ever been on a real car, or had ever even been registered with the state. And then I wondered about the type of place that actually makes artificially vintage odds and ends to place around the Silver Diner walls. Do they have an “antique” manufacturing plant at Silver Diner headquarters? Are there really people who get up every day to go to work to fabricate items that are supposed to be meaningful and rare references to a simpler time? My vanilla milkshake was starting to taste sour.
“So you’re pretty good friends with Nate?” Hillary broke the silence.
“Yeah, he’s my buddy. Why do you ask?”
“Oh. Nothing. I don’t know. Actually, I kind of don’t like hir. At all. He’s too immature for my tastes.”
The milkshake was definitely starting to sour. This girl, whom seemed so friendly and intimate with Nate at the mall, was now calling my best friend immature?! I needed to change the subject.
“So, you swim?” I asked, pointing to the “Riverside Dolphins Swim Club” shirt clinging to her body.
“Oh, no. I got it at a thrift store. People are always asking me that when I wear it though.” Thrift stores. The next generation is going to hate us when Halloween comes around because all of the hipsters and irony indulgers of our generation will have already taken all of the cheap costumes from Salvation Army.
I was starting to see where this date was leading; where this world was leading. Is this what post modern means? Have we agreed once and for all that simply alluding to a concept of “the genuine” is enough? When the freshness of our food is less important than the decade we are supposed to be reminded of by eating it, where will we find nourishment? When people prioritize the image of friendship over actual friendship, where will we find our confidants?
I told Hillary I was really tired and probably should go home, and I was being honest. On our way out, I tried to play a song on the jukebox next to us, but as I reached for a quarter, Rick, our waiter told me not even to bother. “It’s not actually real,” he said. “It’s just there to look good.”