Dollarapalooza or The Day Peace Broke Out in Columbus

By Gregg Sapp

This sprawling, footnoted, comedic epic centers around Vonn Carp, who travels to his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, for a funeral. He is returning disgraced and destitute, when, after a long and productive career in higher education, he was discovered to have falsified his academic credentials 20 years prior. Recently divorced and suddenly unemployable, he reluctantly agrees to join his father, Milt, in what he considers an iffy business venture—Dollarapalooza, a family-owned dollar store. For Milt the shop is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream for old-fashioned mercantilism, a "general" store. The store falls on hard times when a massive, big box "Wow-Mart" opens across the street and after a nearly tragic armed robbery in his store, Milt disappears. To the surprise and chagrin of the Carp family, Vonn insists on re-opening Dollarapalooza. Along with the store's eccentric staff, Vonn fashions an alternative business model aiming to make a difference in people's lives "one dollar at a time." For just one dollar, Vonn will answer anybody's question on any topic, and the citizens of Columbus come to him seeking his opinions on subjects like love, celibacy, anthropology, metaphysics, the Internet, and the true meaning of value. Through his interactions with the store's staff and customers, he conceives a new way of life with a changed outlook and a restored sense of purpose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: May 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9781609090050

Book preview

DOLLARAPALOOZA

or The Day Peace Broke Out in Columbus

GREGG SAPP

SWITCHGRASS BOOKS—NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS—DEKALB

© 2011 by Switchgrass Books, an imprint of Northern Illinois University Press

Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115

Manufactured in the United States using postconsumer-recycled, acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved

Jacket design by Shaun Allshouse

First digital edition, 2011

ISBN: 978-160909-005-0

This is a work of fiction. All characters are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data

Sapp, Gregg

Dollarpalooza or the day peace broke out in Columbus / Gregg Sapp.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-87580-646-4 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

I. Title. II. Title: Dollarpalooza or the day peace broke out in Columbus.

2011925791

Contents

Acknowledgments

Dramatis Personae

Prelude

Part One

Interlude

Part Two

Epilogue

Notes

This book is dedicated to all the Sapps in the world, and also to all of the saps in the world, and especially to those, like me, who are both.

Acknowledgments

During my senior year in high school, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions was the book that everybody had to read. It was irreverent and somewhat salacious, and thus its corrupting influence was so feared by parents that they successfully lobbied to have it placed on reserve at the local public library. What I remember most about that book (other than its famous sketch of an asshole) was that Vonnegut had written it as a fiftieth-birthday present to himself, adding that I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly. . . . In precisely that spirit, Dollarapalooza is my fiftieth-birthday present to me. It is also a story of personal recovery. If in it I am sometimes guilty of a certain literary exorbitance or presuming excessive poetic license, that’s because that is how I wanted it.

First things first. My parents, Lawrence Eugene (Gene) and Leona Jean (Punky) Sapp modeled the kind of simple, happy, contented, dignified, and quietly confident life that, still and always, represents something truly noble to which I aspire. I want to mention my Columbus-born siblings, Bobbi, Steve, and Laura . . . and their kids. If I had an older sister, it’d be Aunt Shirley. It is my good fortune to be blessed with a better family than I certainly deserve. Beatrice (Bee), my spouse for these many years, just keeps giving, never thinking of herself ahead of others. Kelsey, my daughter; Anthony, my grandson (Kelsey’s son); and Keegan, my son, have their whole lives ahead of them, and I am their cheerleader on the sidelines.

I must thank Alex Schwartz, Sara Hoerdeman, Susan Bean, and all the people at Switchgrass Books of Northern Illinois University Press, who plucked my manuscript off the slush pile, worked with me to improve it, and pushed it through to publication. Light up that cigar, Debby Vetter. A debt of gratitude is owed to the Magic Works Alumni, whose collective spirit of hope is a force that amazes me and inspires me to want to belong. Thanks to Perry Thompson, who knew what to do when I really needed help. Graham Maharg’s wit and wisdom has never failed me. Bill Ransom read an early draft and offered helpful comments. Throughout the writing of this novel, I must have asked my friend Paul Michel a million questions, most of which he probably never knew had anything to do with my writing. Now that he does, he should be thanked, too. Bill Dobbins and Carol Truitt are old, dear friends whose names deserve to be here.

Some strangers stick in my mind. The shirtless, toothless, ever-smiling man who was singing out loud while he watered the flowers outside of an apartment building on North High Street. Everybody who ever threw a Frisbee on a spring day on the Oval at Ohio State University. The goofballs who paint themselves and spell O-H-I-O with their arms at every Buckeye football game. The traffic cop who let me off with a warning. People who know their mailman (or woman) by his (or her) first name. The sweet young woman who opened the Thurber House early to let me in so that I could write part of this book’s final chapter there. The folks who work and shop in dollar stores. These and other people around Columbus will always be, to me, symbols of my hometown.

I was until this very moment tempted to include a list of acknowledgment of persons who were of absolutely no help whatsoever to me during the writing of Dollarapalooza. I decided that would be petty and wrongheaded. Instead, to those people whom I dislike, and who feel the same about me—peace, amends, and good luck.

Finally, I would like to thank all of my characters, both real and fictional. If you are a person who knows me (or, in some cases, even just an acquaintance), and if it seems to you that some aspect or feature of a character in Dollarapalooza reminds you of yourself, that’s probably because I thought about you when I wrote it. I’d like to thank all of you, with sincere affection, for giving me such rich material for this book. I can’t thank you all, but you know who you are. So it goes.

Gregg Sapp

Dramatis Personae

In order of appearance

Vonn Carp—Impostor academician, counterfeit philosopher, philandering celibate, and heir apparent to the trials and tribulations of Dollarapalooza

The Peculiar Gentleman—A stranger, a villain, a connoisseur, a collector, a moralist, and a lost soul

Milton (Milt) George Carp—A man of honor, a devoted spouse and father, the patriarch of Dollarapalooza, and the keeper of happy trails

Stanley (Stan) Lawrence Carp—The cowboy soldier who became the eponymous owner of Stan Carp’s Restaurant and later spawned many children in his old age

Andrew (aka Randy Andy) Ball—Alcoholic jack-of-all-trades and Santa Claus impersonator

Rhonda Warner—Waitress at Stan’s Restaurant who spent her whole life waiting for something and never gave up hoping that it would come

Melissa (Mel) Carp—The belle of the barn dance in Knox County, Ohio, where she met Milt Carp and hoped, for all of her life, that he’d take her away from that place

Mark Carp—The churchgoing Professor Carp, a believer that God reveals himself through success in capitalism

Lucy Carp—The comeliest of the Carps, who was just smart enough to marry well

Dee Dee Carp—Baby of the Carp family, who was unable to settle on a dominant personality

Eun Sook Carp— Stan’s soul mate and mail-order bride

Nutty Dowling—A wayfaring stranger whose music is a moral compass for all wanderers who pass within earshot of its message

Ma’Roneesheena (Shine) Peacock Hoobler—A believer in the power of true love, whose joyful innocence enables her to get away with being too sexy for her own good

Hyun Ki (Huck) Carp—Idealistic and eager to learn but impressionable,a young man in search of a mission

Gretchen (the Phantasm) van Dolder—The forgotten obsession and archetypal lover who visits Vonn only in his dreams—and sometimes in nightmares

Roscoe Crow—A fervent revolutionary whose days have passed, but whose zeal burns on

Kenneth Fusco—The unknown whistle-blower whose moral high ground gains him nothing—except perhaps the satisfaction of ruining a life

The Galoots (of the Borden Milk Company): Lester theMolester, Booby Beerman, Paddy Four Fingers, and Spacey Kasey—Milt’s poker buddies

Ernie (the) Kidd—Milt’s dairy apprentice and homogenized protégé

Ambrose Shade—Like a living piece of cordial candy, a gay and glib man who oozes sweetness

Poppy Timlin—A doughty mail woman who allows neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night to keep her from chasing her dreams

Jay-Rome Burma—The carpet-cleaning King of the Electric Company, who is smart enough to know that he isn’t stupid

Priscilla Craven-Fusco—The driven, opportunistic, ever-smiling embodiment of Wow Mart’s corporate values

Leezy Henshaw—A singer-songwriter with more talent than she realizes or that her boyfriend wants to admit

The Flea-Bitten Curs—Dollarapalooza’s house band

Billy, Sammy, and Bo—The three teenage stooges who pull off the Great Dollarapalooza Robbery

Ugg Dogg—The cynical, streetwise canine who adopts Vonn Carp as his master

Samuel K. Lemmons—Founder, chief executive officer, and principle capitalist of Wow Mart, Inc.

Roland Renne—Lapdog manager of the north Columbus Wow Mart

Officers Beckley and Honaker—Investigating detectives who also happen to be named after two towns in West Virginia

Professor I.G. Nathan O’Reilly—The rotund philosopher who gets more than he expected on his dollar-store shopping spree

Timmy Walter—The cub reporter who turns the story of The Day Peace Broke Out in Columbus into a Pulitzer Prize

Brother Archie Hoobler—Shine’s father and a pew polisher at the Cleveland Avenue Baptist Pentecostal Church of the Love of Jesus, Amen

Reverend Woodrow—Fire-and-brimstone minister of a jealous god and a church that takes no prisoners

Dee Dee O’Blarney—A mischievous, slightly perverted leprechaun, an alter ego of Dee Dee Carp

The Sweet Sisters of Salvation—The Reverend Woodrow’s choir

Assaf Aamani—Grateful Somali proprietor of the Good Safari Coffee Shop, who is often perplexed by the ways of Americans

Mama and Papa Burma— Jay-Rome’s explosively dysfunctional parents

And a cast of thousands.

Prelude

By order of the Author: Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

—Mark Twain in the prelude to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

What am I doing here? Vonn whined forlornly, twisting the chain on his pocket watch. Nobody was there to hear him, which was the only consolation to his pain. It’d been half an hour since the last customer had left Dollarapalooza. What am I doing here? he doubly despaired, fists clenched. It was five minutes until closing time by the clock on the wall. Close enough, he figured—although, technically, it wasn’t even that close, because every day upon reporting for work he set the clock ahead a few minutes, then reset it when he left. Not that those five minutes mattered so much, but it was a small matter of great principle to him. That’s what his privileges had been reduced to: five lousy, stolen minutes a day. In his experience, administrative dishonesty had never come with smaller consequences—or rewards. Five fucking minutes: the measure of his ambition.

Vonn stepped around the counter, already reaching forward to flip over the window sign from Open for Business to Closed: Come Again, when a well-bundled man shoved through the door, pushing it open with his walking stick, and stood, grunting, just inside. This gentleman was wearing a charcoal-gray wool peacoat, collar turned up, and a ribbed cashmere hat; he was panting hard, vapor from his nostrils clouding his thick glasses. He didn’t turn to acknowledge Vonn, not even when he called out, We are closing. . . . Instead the man concentrated on taking off his leather gloves one stubby finger at a time. Vonn should have been more aggravated, but there was something about this person that was peculiar, even for a Dollarapalooza customer. He seemed worth watching.

In the couple of seconds it took the gentleman to orient himself, he realized that he was the sole customer in the shop, and as his breathing began to normalize and his senses came into focus, he regained his wits sufficiently to further realize that something didn’t feel right about his environs. Unsure and confused about his whereabouts, and further discombobulated by Vonn, who insisted again, We’re closing . . . , this gentleman looked around for room to think. He disappeared behind the seasonal Santa’s Stocking Stuffers display at the end of aisle one.

But Vonn could monitor his customer’s movements by watching the fish-eye mirror at the end of the aisle. This peculiar gentleman turned 360 slow degrees in a dozen steps, looking up, down, straight ahead, and backwards, searching for some sign, a you are here road map indicative of the shop’s structure or organization. What was the logic or rationale behind having toilet brushes, paper plates, and generic vitamin supplements on the left side of the aisle and pizza cutters, bungee cords, and tubes of superglue on the right? His lips, exaggerated in proportion by the mirror, mouthed a silent but readable, What in the . . . ? Genuinely perplexed, he rubbed his wiry but gelled and well-groomed goatee. Hanging from a Peg-Board on a wall of kitchen sundries was a two-piece, threaded and screwable, aluminum tea ball, with chain and cup-ledge holder; he took one, inspecting it curiously. The ball was in a bag, and stapled across the top was a label bearing the following words in blue and green letters: All-purpose tea infuser, for the kitchen. He sniffed, air distending his nostrils in a kind of chuckle above his diabolical goatee. Tea ball in hand, he continued down the aisle, marking the passage of cocoa butter and whitening toothpastes, maple-leaf pot holders and butterfly night-lights, and collapsible, all-purpose round funnels. Gradually he seemed to make sense of where he was. A poster of George Washington, tacked onto Sheetrock at the end of the aisle, featured a profile made famous by legal tender but redone with wide, slightly crazed eyes. Beneath the image was the caption Look what a dollar will buy! The gentleman tapped his fingertip to his chin, confirming an insight.

Vonn presumed that this peculiar gentleman had been looking for Buckeye State Coins, the numismatic shop, dealer, appraiser, supply center, and investment adviser that had nearly the same address as Dollarapalooza but was on the east side of the street, both literally and figuratively on the other side of the tracks. Probably this gentleman had had something in mind other than tea balls, but once he’d set foot in Dollarapalooza, he became open to its possibilities. (It seemed to Vonn that many folks from Columbus never got as upset as they should have about getting lost or misdirected, tending instead to linger wherever they found themselves; they were easily misled but not so easily manipulated.) Rounding a corner, the customer proceeded down another aisle, hesitating in front of the paperback bookshelf. That was a loitering spot where customers often spent leisure time—picking up a title, reading a bit, putting it back to try another (messing up the order in which Vonn couldn’t help but try to keep them, futile though it was)—but this gentleman saw something that caught his eye immediately, and he snatched it, as if it were something he’d been seeking for a long time.

From outside, back by the Dumpster, a feral dog barked. When Vonn heard it, he remembered that he’d forgotten to take out the garbage, and he cringed to think about the extra task. He allowed his irritation to carry through in his tone when he insisted, "We are closing—now!"

The gentleman in the peacoat, with a book in one hand and a tea infuser in the other, paused to wipe his nose before advancing with short, semihurried steps, as if he didn’t want to seem like he was acquiescing to so rude an injunction. Standing in front of the cash register, the gentleman adjusted his shoulders to emphasize his girth. He gave Vonn the haughty look of someone who was accustomed to being served.

Did you find what you were looking for? Vonn queried. It was an odd question, he knew, since most people came to Dollarapalooza not looking for anything, but asking it made him feel like he was one up on his customers, as if he knew what they didn’t know about what they wanted. It came naturally to him, for projecting that he knew something about others that they didn’t know about themselves had proven to be an effective skill in his previous lives.

Uh, yes. Thank you. The gentleman spoke in a squeaky voice with traces of the mixed ethnic accents that Vonn often heard round about Cuyahoga County. He leafed through a thick wallet full of large bills, nothing smaller than twenty dollars. "Let me get this straight: everything here costs one dollar, right?"

Yeah. Everything that is for sale costs exactly one dollar.

"Even this?" He showed Vonn a tall, slim paperback of a translation of Plato’s Republic, published by the Classics for Pleasure imprint, with pristine pages as yet unturned by human hand. This is a priceless classic of world literature.

Here it is worth one dollar.

Of course, the gentleman articulated slowly, thinking that maybe Vonn was a bit retarded. I suppose that I just find it a bit . . . hmmm . . . incongruous that you can buy a pack of chewing gum for the same price that you would pay to receive Plato’s allegory of the cave. The man peeled a twenty from the sandwich of bills in his wallet.

Chewing gum is sold in three packs for a dollar. Unless it is sugarless Bubble-Yum, which is two for a dollar.

Oh, I understand the gimmick. . . . While speaking, the gentleman stroked his goatee. But the inherent value of Plato is inestimable, am I right?

Maybe so, but everything here costs one dollar.

This book contains some of the most profound and influential words in Western intellectual history. It’s priceless. It just seems wrong—yes, morally wrong—to sell it for the same price as this tea ball.

If it is priceless, then there’s no difference between selling it for one dollar or a thousand dollars. Except that more people will read it if it costs one dollar.

Maybe some people shouldn’t read it.

That remark reeked like an insult. Back in his Marxist rebel days, Vonn would have been ready with a stinging retort. Anymore, though, he kind of agreed.

The gentleman burped thoughtfully. How do you do it—make ends meet? Your profit margin must be infinitesimal—that is, very small.

I do know what that means. Anyway, the owner here doesn’t measure profit in the normal way.

So, everything here costs one dollar, the gentleman pondered. He pointed to a framed dollar bill on the wall behind the cash register. Hypothetically, then, what if I offered twenty dollars for that one-dollar bill on the wall?

There’s no hypothetical. It is not for sale. Vonn sidled to the left, blocking the man’s view of the wall.

The gentleman fanned his fingers over the edges of four more twenties that he slipped out of the corner of his wallet. What if I offered one hundred dollars?

No.

He reached deeper into his wallet. "Come now. What if I was prepared to give you one thousand dollars for an old, tattered dollar bill? Whatever its sentimental value, you have to admit that’s a deal you couldn’t refuse. Am I right?"

Vonn wasn’t sure if the discussion was still hypothetical or if this peculiar gentleman was serious. He did hesitate for half a second to consider if he might be able to get away with it. But then he imagined Milt standing next to him, arms folded defiantly. It ain’t for sale, he decided, then tried to bring the exchange to an end. Can I ring up those items for you?

That question caused the customer to wrinkle his brow in thought. He put his wallet back into his coat lining. On second thought—no, thank you. Backing away, he returned the book and the tea ball to Vonn.

Vonn followed the peculiar gentleman out the door so that he could lock it immediately behind him. Come again, he chimed habitually but insincerely. A metallic gray Infiniti was waiting by the curb to pick up the man.

The buzzing of the neon Dollarapalooza sign in the window was the only sound, and it set a pace for the whirr of Vonn’s thoughts. The end of the day was time to untie his ponytail, loosen his belt, and fart out loud. Removing his glasses, he rubbed his fading blue eyes and blinked away involuntary tears. As daily ritual dictated, upon the end of the day, Vonn removed the hidden bottle of Wild Scotsman whiskey from under the counter and took a long, cleansing chug. Closing the shop was much simpler than opening; appropriately so, because Vonn believed that opening represented the work ahead, the daily toil that is the human lot, but closing was release from one’s labors, leaving them all behind for somebody else to deal with tomorrow. Returning the bottle to its place, he noticed that on the counter, sticking like a bookmark from a random page of Book VII of Plato’s Republic, was a business card. Vonn took it out, read the name, thought about it for a second, then shook his head and sighed apathetically. He ripped it in half and threw it into the garbage can.

Part One

Before

Columbus is a town in which almost anything is likely to happen and in which almost everything has.

James Thurber in My Life and Hard Times

On the gray, mirthless day in February 2002 when Vonn met his father and business partner in front of the door to the vacant building at the corner of Innis Road and Cleveland Avenue, there was already mail in the mailbox. Three envelopes were waiting, addressed respectively to Occupant, Resident, and somebody presumed to be a Concerned Citizen, and also a bunch of Grapevine newsletters that had never stopped coming, nor would they ever. Vonn rolled his eyes and flung the unwanted, generic correspondence onto the ground. Fuck this fucking shit, he groused out loud, then added fucking shit again for emphasis.

His father, Milt the Milkman, had bent over in front of many a doorstep in his time and, even in quasi retirement, was not above bending some more. He retrieved the papers and tried to give them to his son. These are yours.

This stuff? Ain’t nothing but junk mail for nobody.

Milt rolled up the newsletters, fashioning a spyglass through which he peered at Vonn. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Nobody. He shouldn’t have chuckled, because Vonn let him know by shredding the letters in his hands that he was in fact feeling like a Mr. Nobody at that very moment, and he didn’t appreciate being reminded of it.

Putting his arm around Vonn’s shoulder, Milt tried to encourage him. Son, we’re hoppin’ back in the saddle again.

"When have we ever been in the saddle together?" Vonn had no idea whatsoever what his father was talking about but didn’t ask what he meant because he really didn’t want to know. How’d he get into this mess, anyway?

The first shovelful of soil was scraped from the site in March 1957, with the only fanfare being the squish of a boot in deep mud concealing the sound of a well-timed fart.

There ya go, Stan had grunted as he’d heaved the clods outside of the yellow-taped perimeter. Randy Andy, astride an idling tractor-loader, raised a thermos of whiskey-spiked coffee, hollering, Hear! Hear! as he lurched the machine forward into the muck, thinking to himself that operating that damn vehicle couldn’t really be so hard. Less confident in Randy Andy’s abilities, drunk or sober, Stan warned the curious children who had appeared from nowhere that they had to keep their safe distance, because he wouldn’t be responsible if they accidentally got their arms or legs ripped off.

If you’d asked him, Stan would have admitted that he’d probably spent something between zero seconds and half of an afterthought in his entire life thinking about what lies beneath the ground,¹ so it was interesting to him that, just pushing aside clods with his boot, he found amazing paraphernalia in the overturned slop. He found presumably useful things from people’s pockets: a knotted bandanna, a latched coin purse, a Swiss army knife (opened to the corkscrew), one unopened condom wrapper, a souvenir teaspoon from Crater Lake National Park, a key chain with a skeleton key, clock gears and unsprung springs, a clerk’s rubber thumb cover, a tangled rosary with a crucifix that was missing its Jesus figure, and a flask with a rusted cap that still had two fingers of bourbon in it. For every deeper bucketful that Randy Andy dumped beyond the perimeter, Stan poked with the shovel and found human and animal debris buried in the mud. He found what sure as hell looked to him like a pair of serrated flint arrowheads. Might they be valuable? Stan imagined them to have been shot in a mortal rage by Tecumseh himself in the direction of General William Henry Harrison. And he found bones: vertebrae, pelvic bones. Horse bones, cow bones? Maybe even mastodon bones? Stan didn’t know much about such things, except that people sometimes paid real money for that kind of stuff. He would ask his brother what he thought.²

There were ghosts on that land. Stan had never actually thought about it enough to consider that this briared, overgrown, littered lot had ever been trod upon by other humans, nor if he had would he have attached any significance to that notion. Even so, it gave him pause to think that there, at that spot, forgotten people probably now dead zillions of years had lived parts of their daily lives, and now all that was left was their junk and remnants of the things they had butchered. He knew that this parcel he now semiowned had once been woodland and farm pasture until around the turn of the century when a long section of it had been appropriated by the state government and bisected for the construction of an interurban rail to Westerville, with spurs to other interesting places like Delaware, Mansfield, and Mount Vernon. Its remaining space was divided into the smallest salable units so that those with frontage on Route 3 or Cleveland Avenue sold first, and not until the 1940s, when Innis Road was paved, did this particular acre become useful as anything other than fallow land. Back then, Clinton Township north of Huy Road had still been considered the country, and the plot’s hillbilly owner (who was referred to as Gus Shit-for-Brains) didn’t think it especially risky to wager the land’s title in a game of low-stakes poker. Thus, through Stan and Milt’s father’s clever bluff, did this real estate pass into the stewardship of the Carp family, whose members jokingly referred to it as their estate. Nobody could figure out a thing that it was good for except as a shortcut from Route 3 to the shoe factory that was built in 1950. The Carps blithely neglected the site, never mowing the grass or picking up the litter, allowing roll-away hubcaps shaken loose by railroad tracks to collect there. But in 1957, Stan, by then thirty-two years old and tired of working on the assembly line cobbling shoes, acted upon his bold vision.

What was left by the end of that day was a 75′ x 100′ rectangular hole.

Ain’t nothing but a hole till you fill it, his brother said to him over beers at Bingo’s that night. But once you fill it, it becomes something else.

Yeah, uh-huh, Stan grunted cursorily. In fact, Stan had already filled this hole with a cornucopia of dreams. It would become a way station built upon a vision of food and family, nourishment and sustenance—the altar of the American dinner table served up conveniently, comfortably, and at an affordable price, so that a nuclear family of four could dine out, just like the Rockefellers but economically, for a total bill of under ten dollars. Not just grilled cheese-food sandwiches, either, but flank steak, mashed potatoes, buttered green beans, and a fresh roll. Or fried chicken, home fries, coleslaw, and a fresh roll. Or pork chops, scalloped potatoes, corn on the cob, and a fresh roll. Garden iceberg salad for ten cents extra with any entrée. A sprig of parsley for free. Ham-and-cheese sandwiches and vegetable soup for lunch; scrambled eggs and pancakes for breakfast; and a piece of apple pie anytime from opening to closing. What would make this eatery different from the aluminum freight car diners and hole-in-the-wall greasy spoons is that the tables would have sugar packets without having to ask and plastic flowers in a vase always, a waitress who made sure that your coffee cup never went dry, and a neon sign in the window that read Eat Good Food. For this was a family restaurant, a wholesome environment, where bread was white and milk was homogenized, an extension of the love and comfort of the family table, where the booming families of today and tomorrow would be nourished en route to their suburban homes on the ever-expanding north side of Columbus. And he would name the restaurant something distinctive, something prideful, something that denoted ownership, accountability, a sense of fair play, something that promised high quality; he named it after himself, calling it Stan Carp’s Restaurant.³

By the end of that week, the hole had been dug into a solid basement with a concrete floor and cinder block walls, and a corner had been set aside for plumbing the toilet and sink. Standing in that spot, boots in mud, Stan could already imagine himself taking a piss, looking out of a window at eye level with the ground, watching customers’ feet as they scurried across the parking lot: women in heels, men stamping out cigarettes, children with sneakers untied. He would establish his personal office in the corridor leading to the basement, with a desk and a workbench, a file cabinet for important papers, a safe for whatever he chose to put in it, a small liquor cabinet discreetly tucked under the sink, and the toilet right around the corner. Here he would indeed do his business, in his own space and on his own terms. . . .

On the day that Stan Carp’s Restaurant opened its doors—at 6:00 a.m. to accommodate this new generation of Pontiac-, Packard-, and Oldsmobile-driving commuters on their way to work—Stan was disappointed that nobody was waiting to be let in. He paced, watching the parking lot. Another fifteen minutes passed before the small dinner bell above the door tinkled, announcing to Stan, Rhonda (the waitress whose husband was missing), and Randy Andy (who, after two cups of black coffee, was competent to assume duties as a short-order cook) that a customer had entered the premises. They turned and waited to greet this person. The next sound was the clinking of milk bottles. It was Stan’s kid brother, Milt the Milkman, in his milkman’s jacket and brimmed cap, with an arm patch bearing the image of Elsie the Cow.

Aw, it’s just you, Stan grunted.

Aha, I hear the tintinnabulation of the bells . . . a good way to start the day, he said, ignoring the slight.

This irritated Stan but not more so than usual. What’s that, you say? It sounds to me like one of your fancy, one-dollar words that means you’ve got a tiny dick.

Don’t you be ragging on our first customer, Rhonda inserted, eager to serve, pulling aside a chair at the counter.

Well, sorry, hon, but it sounded to me like he just said that he had teeny ambulatin’ balls.

Milt set his delivery tray by his feet and sat down. All will be forgiven if you’ll just see fit to give me a cup of coffee and, maybe, one of those powdered doughnuts. What Milt didn’t say was that, actually, he was hungry enough for a real breakfast but didn’t quite trust anything cooked by Randy Andy, whom he had seen staggering snot-nosed out of Bingo’s Tavern at about the same time as Milt was starting his daily milk rounds.

Rhonda poured coffee with one arm behind her back, the way that she’d been told was polite to do. Cream ’n’ sugah?

No, thank you, Milt replied, not wishing to encourage her.

As if she needed encouragement. How’s Mel? she inquired, alluding to Melissa, Milt’s pregnant wife. Is she having the morning heaves and grunts yet?

Naw, Milt assured her, even though just before he’d left, Mel had vomited up her morning toast. Then, as he’d wiped her mouth, she’d reminded him to bring home some cinnamon buns because she’d be hungry.

He turned to Stan, who sat on the stool next to him. I’m running a little behind this morning, or I’d have been here to congratulate you when you opened. Is it true that I’m your first customer?

It’s early yet.

Well then, it’s my pleasure to be the first to congratulate you, Milt said, offering his handshake.

For real? Stan inquired dubiously.

As a child, Milt had learned to be wary of his brother’s hand, which even if offered earnestly more often than not provoked a knuckle crunch or arm twist, gestures that Stan (the elder, after all) could not be trusted to resist. For real, Milt assured him. So, straightening his back, Stan assumed a mature, upright comportment, that of a businessman sealing a deal . . . until he took hold of Milt’s hand and felt his moist palm, his vulnerable pulse, and he couldn’t resist the urge to grab hold and attempt to wrap Milt’s arm behind his head. Anticipating the attack, though, Milt stomped his work boot, heel first, onto Stan’s toe. Both men emitted startled curses of Shitfeathers! (their favorite family obscenity).

Their high jinks provoked chortles and guffaws, which relaxed them. They chatted awhile, and Rhonda eavesdropped on their conversation on the pretext of arranging napkins into fan-shaped patterns. In the kitchen, Randy Andy dozed standing up. As usual, Milt talked about milk and its underrated health benefits including vitamin D for bones and teeth, calcium for a smoothly functioning metabolism, and a neglected but vital, colon-health-enhancing nutrient called acidophilus. But Milt stopped short of discussing the merits of homogenized milk versus breast milk versus formula for infants, as that had been a subject of dissent at his house. Rearranging his thoughts, he wiped the sprinkles of powdered sugar off his lip, looked around, and nodded. I really do think that you’ll be okay with this place, brother, he opined. It’s got a certain charm.

Thank you very much, Stan said. It has charm? he wondered. Stan actually thought it was rather plain (honest was how he put it) and practical (efficient). The walls were painted eggshell white; the floor was seamless gray linoleum; the booths were all spaced equally, arranged back to back to back. Along the counter, condiment baskets were spaced at every third seat, and the cash register was right next to the door, a spike on top of the till so that Stan could impale receipts immediately upon receiving payment. The only conscious embellishments in Stan’s decor were the burnished copper ceiling tiles engraved with repeating patterns of interlocking loops and a kind of floral script with no beginning or end. (It was a Celtic symbol, the meaning of which proved a subject of much family speculation.) Still, cultivating a decor of charm had never been his intent; he had aimed for a friendly but pragmatic, cozy but reliable, welcoming but businesslike environment. Not that charm was undesirable, but the kind of charm that Milt saw was entirely accidental or unintentional, by-products of the things that he’d left undone or done wrong. Things like the black-and-white pebble tiles that almost immediately started coming unglued from the porch, the wood floor bowing in the foyer where the corners settled at just a pinch less than ninety degrees, the clumsily placed load-bearing poles at the foci of prime seating space, the ever-so-slight incline of the floor that could be seen on the surface level of liquid in a glass, and, out back, the sickly sycamore tree that Stan had wanted to cut down except that its branches overhung adjacent property owned by he knew not whom. It would be just like his brother to consider that the flaws in a place made it charming. In any event, Stan realized that charm was a commodity Milt probably considered valuable, so he decided that he was being complimented.

Thanks, I guess. At that moment the bell above the door tinkled, and the first real customer of Stan’s restaurant wiped his feet before entering. Excuse me, Stan said, I’ve got real business.

So I see. I have to get back to my route, anyway. Milt reached into his milkman jacket pocket for his wallet, removing a dollar bill too crisp and perfect to have been there just by accident. He wrote the date on the bill, signed it with his name and good luck, and gave it directly to Stan. This here is your first honest dollar earned at Stan’s Restaurant. Congratulations, cowboy.

That, of course, was Milt’s way of letting Stan know the dollar was intended as a keepsake, so Stan snapped it crisply between his fingers, then with an abrupt, almost violent gesture, thumbtacked it to the wall behind the cash register, where it was destined to hang (albeit, later, framed) for many years.

It looks like it belongs there, Stan declared.

Stan was presented with the opportunity and the obligation to return congratulations soon thereafter, when Milt’s first child was born in the eleventh month of 1957. There developed somewhat of a family brouhaha about the naming of this boy child. It would have been much simpler if the baby had been a girl, because then nobody would have cared, but a boy—well, that was different, because clearly, in Stan’s opinion,⁴ the heir apparent to their family’s legacy and the mantle bearer of Carp-ness should be named after their father and patriarch, George, a fine man with a fine name with which nobody would ever find fault. Milt, though, observed correctly that their father had always gone by his middle name, Clete; he even signed official documents G. Cletus, so it would seem disrespectful to impose his own unused name upon a grandson he’d never seen. Instead, Milt suggested an alternative, which Stan at first took as a joke, but somehow it stuck.

It was Vaughn.

Milt never fully explained the name’s significance to anybody, not even to Melissa. He didn’t quite understand it himself. The disputed name appealed to him, first and mostly, because it began with a V, which as a boy was his favorite letter, an easy letter to brand onto cattle or to mark with a sword, like the Z for Zorro (which unfortunately was taken). Second, it could be melodically appended to embellish his last name, so VEECARRP, away! became a special rallying cry to him. It was the name of the make-believe horse of his childhood, his imaginery steed—Silver to his Lone Ranger, Champion to his Gene Autry, or Trigger to his Roy Rogers, depending on which TV hero he was pretending to be on a given day. Onward to tomorrow, VEECARRP was how Milt at age eleven imagined riding off into the sunset. He grew up thinking of a V as a good omen. Years later, the next significant V in his life was Vonnie, which was the name of his first employer Ned Kearney’s most reliable cow, the first cow Milt ever milked in his life. He found it hard to not love that animal, after being so intimate with her, and she so appreciative of his ministrations. Finally, another memorable V in his life was a jovial drunk named Vonk, who was the guitar player whose jug band played at the barn dance in Knox County where he’d met his wife, Melissa. Vonk said that he was pleased as punch to play Midnight Waltz for Milt upon request, and the tune did the trick with Melissa (to that day, it put her in the mood). So, when it came to naming his firstborn, he wanted a name that started with a V (and there wasn’t much to choose from). Although Stan offered several other considerations (saints’ names), and so did Melissa (baseball players’ names), they produced no preferable alternative; ultimately Milt stated his preference (but not why), and the full name penned on the birth certificate was Vaughn George Carp. The one concession upon which Melissa insisted was the spelling of the name, with an augh instead of an o, because she thought it was more sophisticated that way. This ended the matter, except that Stan still occasionally pretended to forget the kid’s name and called him George.

The actual boy, Vaughn George Carp, grew up hating his given name, especially its overly voweled spelling. As soon as he was old enough to get away with it, he dubbed himself Vonn, with two n’s at the end, because it made him feel . . . faster, cooler, sexier. Once he started signing his name that way, even his mother forgot that his real name was Vaughn.

Growing up, Vonn’s family was destined to move five or six times within Franklin County, from one apartment, rental house, or mobile home to another (twice on Gerbert Road, first on the north and then on the south side); he played a lot of street baseball but never had a home field in a park. Eventually, when he was thirteen, the family moved up to a suburban starter home in muddy Westerville, where Milt and Mel still lived. Vonn never really felt at home there, though. He wanted to keep moving. If there was just one place where he formed memories that spanned his early, middle, adolescent, and, finally, young adult years, it was Stan’s Restaurant, a second home better than any of his first homes. It was the site of many major events in his life.

That very first year, less than two months after Vonn was born, the family moved the location of its traditional annual Christmas Eve party to Stan Carp’s Restaurant. Over the years, the site of the party and the number of Carps attending varied, trending toward farther and fewer . . . but that year provided the attractions of the dedication of a new family restaurant and the christening of a new baby, so the turnout for the Christmas Eve 1957 family party at Stan Carp’s Restaurant was large and enthusiastic. The battalion of Carps—uncles and aunts, cousins, quasi cousins, and other interchangeable parts—made the drive down to the capital from Sunbury, Mount Vernon, Danville, Gambier, and other farming communities where they lived among themselves.⁵ Individually and collectively, they were a bunch of curious characters: There was Gram sitting in a wheelchair with a plate of cocktail weenies on her lap; Mama Flo smoking Raleigh cigarettes down to the filters; Great Aunt Toad and Uncle Boog drinking behind each other’s backs; old Uncle Lefty who did everything with his right hand except scratch himself (which he did constantly; hence the nickname); Cousin Warren of the Newark Carps, that odd branch of the family, with his intended third wife and both of their respective offspring; dear Aunt Hazel, aka Sister Lourdes, who was taking advantage of her absence at vespers as an excuse to eat as many gingerbread cookies as possible; and assorted in-laws, half sibs, cousins of the half, whole, quarter, undetermined varieties, whose names not even Milt was ever able to keep straight. An empty place at the table was set for George Cletus Carp, who had passed earlier that year and was missed immensely by everybody. However, the infant Vonn Carp, the firstborn scion of a new generation of Carps, was the major attraction. He was kissed by each Carp, one and all.

The only non-Carp attending was Randy Andy, who made a special appearance in a string beard, portraying a barely credible Santa Claus whose performance was enhanced by an alcohol-induced conviviality that made the cheeks redder and the ho, ho, ho’s more resonant. Nobody much minded the sodden Santa Claus, the Christmas spirit being no less prevalent among anybody else. Santa greeted all of the children, and even though they recognized who he was behind the chintzy, crooked beard, none of them let on, at the risk of compromising their parents’ desire that they believe in Santa.

There was just one thing about that night that everybody would remember, and which thus passed into family lore. The memorable event occurred after Mel took her infant son to a corner booth to breast-feed just before Randy Andy made his arrival in character, shaking jingle bells and calling out, Whar’s that baby? Ho, ho, ho. He spotted Mel in the darkened corner booth, with a blanket over her shoulders and a baby’s bootied feet kicking out from underneath, but he did not grasp what she was doing. She was startled when he approached her; the blanket slipped. Randy Andy couldn’t process what his eyes were seeing—the slopes and contours were unfamiliar—so he stared for several seconds to let the sight register in his consciousness. By this time Mel’s reaction had passed from embarrassment to aggravation. Take a picture, it’d last longer! she snorted, stiffening her back in defiance but with such audacious swagger that her gesture detached the infant’s lips from her nipple. That became the image everybody would remember of that evening: a breast too abruptly sprung free of suckling lips, still squirting milk in airborne bursts like a fountain while the baby’s mouth emptily sucked air like a fish out of water, its lips mouthing little shapes that looked like ho, ho, ho.⁶

Having heard that story a hundred times at least, Vonn counted it as his earliest memory—a precognitive memory, perhaps, but one that left a subconscious imprint that became a personal metaphor for issues of primal needs, fear of abandonment, and ambivalence toward women. It was highly symbolic, whether it meant anything or not.

A real memory had to wait a few years, but the one that Vonn eventually, through careful calculation, determined was his actual earliest memory also took place in Stan Carp’s Restaurant. It was the memory of a sneeze, a sinus-shatterer much larger than he’d have imagined possible from his own four-year-old nose, and although it might well have been memorable for its volume, urgency, or unexpectedness, what really branded it in his mind was how his father reacted. Little Vonn was sitting on a telephone book on a stool at the lunch counter, dining on one of Randy Andy’s specially seasoned fried bologna sandwiches, when an errant sniff, possibly of Rhonda’s cinnamon perfume, tickled the short sensory hairs in his nostrils. When he breathed more deeply to savor it, he triggered something volatile in his sinuses, and a pressure built behind his eyeballs, surging, until he sneezed his whole brains loose. Something that had been plugging one entire sinus dislodged in the form of a prodigious snot bubble that landed with a puckering plop on the clean Formica counter surface, next to a bowl of coleslaw. Vonn’s first intuition told him he’d done something dirty, like pooping in his pants or farting in church, except that this was probably worse because it was out in the open, a ball of snot that he couldn’t hide. He prayed nobody would notice. Milt, though, sized up the situation instantly, and while he had to chew a couple of extra times to force down the bite of meat loaf in his mouth, he quickly pushed his cup and saucer to hide the snot bubble. Rhonda appeared from behind the counter. Are ya’ll okay there? she queried. Milt asked her if she’d fetch some ketchup, and she left. Vonn’s father then scooped the offending wad into a napkin and put it in his pocket.

You’ve got the same greasy boogers as your old man, Milt said to his son when the coast was clear. Too bad that you inherited my big honker.

Many of Vonn’s first memories of Stan Carp’s Restaurant were inextricably associated with memories of church. On Sundays, after mass at Saint James the Less, the family went to Stan’s to undo their purifying fast with a gluttonous breakfast of bacon and flapjacks, corned beef hash, scrambled eggs over hash browns, country biscuits and sausage gravy, all of which, at the old man’s insistence, they washed down with fresh milk. Vonn could remember when the entire family could fit comfortably in a booth; he’d sit next to his father and across from his mother, with his baby brother, Mark, in a high chair at the end, flinging oatmeal clods and spitting chocolate milk, looking for attention any way that he could get it. Mark was a noisy baby, who at church whined so incessantly that Mel hardly ever made it through the whole Mass without having to retreat to the vestibule to try to quiet him down. Afterwards, at Stan’s Restaurant, Mark would continue his protestation by stuffing enough food to fill a mouth two times as large as his, chewing and sobbing simultaneously, so that the half-masticated pulp flew everywhere. Sometimes Mel would hold baby Mark’s jaw shut and try to force him to swallow by massaging his cheeks. There now, Marky, down the hatch, she’d cajole. Vonn would watch, stifling laughter, and if Mel turned her back for so much as a second, he’d poke his brother in the belly, hoping to provoke another projectile expurgation. He always thought it was funny, making Mark puke, and he seemed to have a talent for it. Conversely, what was not at all funny was the Sunday morning when his mother vomited. It was pinkish and lumpy, and leaked from her nose. It was one thing for Mark to blow chunks, but it terrified him to think that his mother was subject to such fits, too. Later, Vonn’s father explained to him that his mother had a biscuit in the oven, which was how he was told to refer to his mother’s condition if anybody asked, on the assumption that whoever was asking would know what that meant.⁷ The family was fertile and prolific, and by the time Vonn was able to read the menu by himself and Mark had graduated to a booster chair, a sister, Lucy, had joined the family around the table in a high chair. She was followed sooner than seemed healthy (even to a seven-year-old) by another sister, Deirdre (Dee Dee), who was content in her infant tote next to her mother’s feet and sucked hard breadsticks into a mush, which she then smeared all over her face. The basic equilibrium of the nuclear family times two, thus established, remained whole and intact. Vonn could remember, from his favored seat at the table between his parents, smugly observing the family unit grow through a long succession of Sundays. He watched the family mealtime dynamics from the privileged perspective of an eldest son, knowing that he had the best seat at the table. His siblings knew it, too.

Stan Carp’s Restaurant was also the site of other, less family-oriented events. On Mondays, Stan’s was closed for business, and behind the drawn curtains, from Sunday night after closing through the entire next day, the men gathered for their poker marathons. The secrets of what went on during these masculine backslapping bacchanalia were carefully guarded, the subjects of much conjecture on Vonn’s part. What did grown-up men do when they went out to play? Vonn’s model for imagining was the barroom scenes in cowboy movies, where men grimaced when they poured back a shot, where a fight might break out at any moment, and where the lonely gunslinger drinking by himself in a corner, washing away the bitter memory of an untrue woman, was not to be messed with. They were regular, hardworking stiffs, the kind of men his father used to say grunt when they shit, and who drank and laughed the hardest when they thought the least. They included Uncle Stan, Randy Andy, Lester the Molester, Spacey Kasey , Booby Beerman, Paddy Four-Fingers, and, later, Ernie the Kidd. They typically greeted one another by faking a punch and catcalling, How’s it going, shithead? (The cruder the epithet, the greater their affection, or so it seemed.) On Mondays, riding his bike home from school, Vonn used to take a detour to pass Stan’s, to check on the grown-ups. He once saw his old man knocking on the porch door to be let in, and the roar of conviviality that issued forth to greet him belied the literal vulgarity of the words. He could never forget the voice of his own uncle Stan, always so methodical and purposeful, ludicrously amplified, bellowing sloppily out the door, Cocksucker! Buttfucker! by way of welcoming his own brother. What compelled men like Uncle Stan and his father to celebrate their passions with such joyous hostility and bombastic recklessness? Vonn wanted to understand. It was a company of men he doubted he would ever fit into, although from what he’d glimpsed, he probably wouldn’t want to belong, anyway.

In high school, Vonn got a stale taste of blue-collar work when he took his first real job at Stan’s Restaurant, a dishwasher—the standard beginner’s position, mastery of which, he was promised, would result in promotion to busboy. The swinging doors marked In and Out presented a philosophical dichotomy to Vonn. On the public side, there were clean plaid tablecloths, fresh plastic flowers in pear-shaped vases, polished brass along the counter, and a valid posted certificate of inspection with a rating of above average. It was a place where mothers admired the spotless silverware and fathers appreciated the quiet efficiency of the ceiling fan. Pushing aside those doors to the other side, though, marked entry into a hidden realm, a bit like Purgatory, Vonn imagined. It was Vonn’s job to poise himself centrally at the hot, vapor-breathing mouth of the dishwashing machine that belched fumes and made his pores red and sore and his eyes burn magma tears. It was his job, reimbursed at the paltry minimum wage of $1.75 per hour, to retrieve trays of loosely stacked and often broken dishes, almost too hot to handle even with rubber gloves, and which during peak hours just kept coming and coming off the belt. He separated them and returned them, stacked, to the pantry. If he got behind, all hell broke loose. Broken dishes went into a wooden barrel next to him. (Stan kept an eye on the barrel to make sure it wasn’t filling up too fast, with the threat of excess breakage resulting in docked pay.) When time permitted, Vonn was obliged to finish the messiest jobs that were too difficult for the machine, those that required human elbow grease. A cast-iron pot, after simmering for days with Stan’s all-purpose secret sauce, would acquire a blackened layer of crusty bedrock that could only be removed, after soaking, by application of scouring pad, a dinner knife employed as a chisel, and on occasion the use of lime-removing toilet bowl cleanser. Vonn would cuss under his breath while scrubbing so hard his fingertips throbbed. After three months at work, he was still a dishwasher and dubious about his prospects for advancement.

The work itself wasn’t nearly the worst of it. The kitchen squalor was enough to make a person swear off eating entirely. Randy Andy said that he had never washed his hands when cooking for the GIs in Normandy, and he saw no reason to start now. (Dirt’s a flavor, he insisted.) He dubbed himself the head chef, an epithet that Stan had actually decreed upon him years ago, when they were in the war together and Randy Andy was the mess officer. Those qualifications notwithstanding, his main talent was cooking for quantity, not so much for quality. He seemed incapable of adjusting recipes for portion. When spaghetti and meatballs went on special, it might stay on special all week, although to his credit the sauce seldom ran out before the pasta, and by inundating the bluish edges of the noodles with marinara and Parmesan cheese and recycling the parsley sprigs, it was as good on Thursday as it had been on Monday. In front of a hot greasy grill, Andy called himself a master, capable of preparing several orders simultaneously, although the precise, final ingredients and preparations differed slightly with every plate served. Seasonings had a way of spilling over so that, if a couple of dashes of cayenne from the Mexicali burger spilled over onto the sourdough French toast, the result was eclectic. Deep-frying brought out Randy Andy’s masochistic tendencies. He stood so close to the basket that, when he sweated, toxic drops dripped from the wart on his brow into the vat; he bent over the basket and seemed to savor the bubbling hot oil frenzy while frozen fish filets were submerged, and since the temperature gauge was broken, he always kept the unit stoked on high so that it occasionally popped hot oil bubbles across the kitchen. Vonn had a roseate scar, like a deflated nipple, where the skin had bubbled up on his forearm from having once taken an incoming hot oil missile. Often Vonn thought that when Randy Andy left something in for too long and pulled it out, a molten, charred grotesquerie, he’d done it accidentally on purpose, like some kind of mad scientist, just to see what would happen. As an employee, Vonn was entitled to free meals, but he couldn’t bring himself to eat anything he’d seen prepared in that kitchen. By the end of any shift, Vonn was left feeling strafed and scorched, bruised, abused, and devoid of appetite.

It wasn’t that he was being ungrateful or even actively rebellious. Vonn had fully expected he was going to hate the job. Even at sixteen, he was not persuaded of the virtue in his father’s honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay⁸ ethic. He’d always known that he wasn’t going to like working. It wasn’t just that it was unpleasant, although it was—tiresome at best, burdensome almost always, and physically oppressive at worst—but to Vonn it was conceptually incompatible with his Vonn-ness. It just didn’t jibe with the theories that he was developing about life and its purpose. To work is to conform: that’s how he saw it. And, in his selfish recalcitrance, it was unacceptable.

Despite his penchant for overthinking and underachieving, Vonn proved himself a begrudgingly reliable employee. Try as he might, he couldn’t figure out an alternative to money. So long as he needed gas money or dope money or funds for pizza night, and the occasional bouquet or thoughtful gift for his girlfriend, Gretchen, he kept the job at Stan’s on the assumption that it was no worse than working elsewhere. He complained about the work often, mostly to Gretchen, who sympathized with his resentment but had no sympathy for him—who in the hell did he think he was, after all? Still, for all of the complaints, he secretly felt that he was filling some personal need, paying my dues. Just by sticking it out, he eventually ascended the kitchen hierarchy, gaining in status from dishwasher to busboy to kitchen’s assistant, entrusted with slicing, dicing, chopping, and simple grill work. Rhonda (whose job it was to start all useful rumors) had even suggested that Vonn might eventually be a worthy heir to Randy Andy when the day came (and, she also said, that day was coming fast if he didn’t stop drinking) that he had to step aside as head chef.⁹ In private conversations, Stan and Milt wondered what, if any, plans Vonn had for his future after high school, inasmuch as he seemed to have theories about all sorts of things, but no answer whatsoever to so simple a question as What do you want to do? When his father asked, he said, I don’t know. When Gretchen asked, she received a more informative answer: I’ll figure it out someday.

On the day that he turned eighteen, he tendered his resignation from the restaurant business (forever, he assumed at