CCLaP Weekender
From the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
August 15, 2014
New fiction by Matt Rowan Photography by Matthew Thornton Chicago literary events calendar
August 15, 2014 | 1
THIS WEEK’S CHICAG
For all events, visit [cclapce
SATURDAY, AUGUST 16 3pm Lauren Francis-Sharma 57th Street Books / 1301 E. 57th / Free semcoop.com The author reads from her newest book, 'Til the Well Runs Dry.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 17 7pm Uptown Poetry Slam The Green Mill / 4802 N. Broadway / $7, 21+ slampapi.com International birthplace of the poetry slam. Hosted by Marc Smith. 7pm Asylum Le Fleur de Lis / 301 E. 43rd / $10 lefleurdelischicago.com A weekly poetry showcase with live accompaniment by the band Verzatile.
MONDAY, AUGUST 18 8:30pm Open Mic Kafein Espresso Bar / 1621 Chicago Ave., Evanston kafeincoffee.com Open mic with hosts Chris and Kirill.
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GO LITERARY EVENTS
enter.com/chicagocalendar]
TUESDAY, AUGUST 19 7:30pm Homolatte Tweet Let's Eat / 5020 N. Sheridan / Free homolatte.com An all-ages, queer music and spoken word series.
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20 5pm Gabo Challengers Comics / 1845 N. Western / Free challengerscomics.com The artist behind "The Life After" series signs copies of his work. 7:30pm Story Lab Black Rock / 3614 N. Damen / Free storylabchicago.com This month's show features Madelaine Goodreau, Laura Haney, Claudia Jaccarino, Jocelyn Pinkerton, and Devo Sullivan.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 21 6:30pm Local Author Night City Lit Books / 2523 N. Kedzie / Free citylitbooks.com Readings by Sarah Carson, Peter Jurmu, E. Ce Miller, and Megan Stielstra. Presented by Midwestern Gothic and Curbside Splendor.
To submit your own literary event, or to correct the information on anything you see here, please drop us a line at cclapcenter@gmail.com.
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ORIGINAL FICTION
At the start, Old Man Roller snagged eyes and those bodies attached. The ones who would pass his establishment, traveling sometimes from the north and sometimes the south, but always stopping to grab a quick bite. It was the hypno-words, Ripped Burgers, drawn in red-neon, cursive script. He had the neon lights fully aglow by dusk and the spotlights aimed up to illuminate what we called, plain and simple, “The Beef.�
RIPPED B 4 | CCLaP Weekender
Photo: “Driven Thru,” by NotNixon [flickr.com/sansbury]. Used under the terms of his Creative Commons license.
BURGERS BY MATT ROWAN August 15, 2014 | 5
The Beef was a big three-dimensional burger impaled by a conical pole, topping out at the impressive height of fifteen feet. The pole was shaped to resemble a metal skewer and meant to be a full yardstick taller than Bob Wian’s Big Boy statue, which supposedly measured twelve feet. And at that height, I say again, The Beef was pretty good at attracting passing motorists’ attention. Men behind the wheels of their different family-man cars, wood and steel-bodied station wagons and the like. You knew who they were, the romanced, because maybe they’d indicate their fascination by taking another look up at The Beef while they approached the order window, or maybe they’d simply say something about the sign to Charlie, who was our guy manning the register. The Beef wouldn’t change, not like so many things. Or that’s the way you felt back then, when you felt things for The Beef. The Beef was good for its imperfection, which is what made it an oddity of sorts. It was designed with a big, flapping crack, opened and looking completely halved, kind of like the burger equivalent of the Liberty Bell, if the Liberty Bell’s crack was set that way on purpose. Set that way for a purpose. (Which here’s something conspiratorial for you to chew on, what if The Liberty Bell was cracked on purpose? Like imagine this, what if the split was for dramatic effect? Think of George Washington tilting it on its head and splitting a side with a chop from that cherry tree ax. Nobody ever asked Washington the truth about it, so far as I know. Honest Abe Lincoln wasn’t asked, either, but he was likely to have been told the truth. Wouldn’t expect him to lie about it.) In the olden days burger joints weren’t what they are these brand new days. The 1950s had innovations striking awe more frequently than even gold was struck in California roughly a century earlier. Besides, “striking awe” was only an arm of this new kind of gold rush. This new gold was again discovered in California when the McDonald brothers reinvented their car hop as a fast food seller, and re-opened for business that December of 1948. And although the public didn’t take to fast food right away, by about mid-1949 the vein of the golden arches was being mined quite properly as it should’ve been, and showcased to everyone who was bold enough to follow that the moneymaking potential was there. And for us, The Beef, at day’s end, was what sold things. The man behind The Beef sold things, too, Mr. Joe Roller did. The whole Ripped Burgers enterprise was his idea. Said it began during a family trip to Niagara Falls during the summer of ‘59, when he and his family stopped to eat at a Burger Chef restaurant on their way there. He was enamored with their Big Chef, but he was convinced something was missing. And he was right. Something was missing. Joe figured it out straightaway—the actual hamburger sandwich. He told his wife if he were to open his own burger joint, he’d do it with a big beefy burger for the sign. That would be his little difference. Joe didn’t want to be the sort of guy who looks at his kids and says, 6 | CCLaP Weekender
“These offspring are what will decide if my life has meaning or not.” And it isn’t that people shouldn’t want to live for their kids, but as most everyone knows, nobody wants to feel like his or her life didn’t amount to much, all told. Nobody wants to be the guy who had offspring and little else, even if those offspring grow up to be really good presidents of the USA. Living vicariously only gets you so much satisfaction. He waved goodbye to his wife making a name for him and their family long ago (not that he ever wanted her to have to, anyway). After she aged from eighteen to twenty, she went from being a teen beauty contestant winner to a homemaker and mother of his two boys. She wasn’t one of those educated feminists who came later, either, which I’m not saying I’ve got anything against those ladies, just that Ma Roller wasn’t one of them. And she had a ferocious temper if you weren’t careful to be kind. Old Man Roller instinctively knew that the burger idea was becoming something big, harder to see back then than now, with the benefit of hindsight. Maybe if things had gone a little bit differently, Ripped Burgers would be a name people remember to this day, rather than gone out of business with so many others. We did feature, I think, one of the best burgers all-time, the Let ‘er Rip Burger. You’d want it with extra grilled onions—trust me. And if you were really hungry you got the Big Rip, two seriously torn all-beef patties with our specialty whipped cheese sauce. There was nothing like the hamburger to show the Reds that America got it right. I don’t care how much ketchup you put on it, because there’ll always be yellow mustard to even things out, get us to that orange sweet ‘n’ savory of a new juicy-beef-filled American day. Abundance, that’s what we had, and it’s what we’ve expected ever since. And another thing, never trust anybody who doesn’t want mustard on their burger. At Ripped Burgers, I was the grill man. I remember Old Man Roller, which is what we used to call him even though we knew he wasn’t older than any of us by more than ten years, winking and telling me, “Keep grilling, Mick. You are the heart and lungs of our operation.” To which I’d say, “Like I don’t already know that by now.” And of course it’s something I learnt real quick. I got practiced and I got real good. I like to think I was the grill man, outta my grilling so well. You should have seen me with my spatula, hovering over the patties that sizzled. You had to work fast and efficiently to get the job done right, and boy was I fast. I was a specimen, like I had another couple sets of arms. The manic hands and keen eye for cooked-to-perfection all-beef patties of a born-to-grill man, that’s who I was. I took the snaps of popped patty grease and occasional griddle burns with honor, as part of the territory, my war wounds. But don’t get me wrong—I was not bigger than the enterprise and I didn’t want to be. I was a cog in the machine, an important cog, but a cog just the same. August 15, 2014 | 7
Now the typical makeup of your average fast food restaurant, in terms of personnel, was standardized by McDonald’s and it included a staff of seven men, which men were preferred to women for a great many reasons, not least of all being keeping the horny teenagers out of our restaurant. Let ‘em go crash their hot rods and we’ll read about it in the Sunday paper as if it were news. But you know, I’m not callous. I just never liked the nogoodniks who populated carhops and made it near impossible for a decent person to get a decent burger. Neither did Old Man Roller. In fact, he hated them for the same reason all the founding fathers of the industry did—they made a mess of the parking lots and stole stuff for no good reason, only to destroy it. It’d have been really easy to march in complete step with the rest of the fast food franchising movement. But Old Man Roller wanted something a little different for his restaurant chain. See, because modernity is what it is, you begin to see how ideas of mass production and the same hamburger overand-over again got their traction in what’s called “the popular imagination.” People deserve something good to eat, they think, but they aren’t going to risk their money on a place they’ve never been and might be disappointed by, because what the hell kind of lunch is that? Disappointment? That’s for the rest of your life, what’s outside of mealtime, not with the food you consume. Especially when, nowadays, there is no reason to. I’ve always felt really strongly about that. I mean, like the old McDonald’s commercial’s musically intoned adage, “You deserve a break today!” People deserve a break today, is right and true. Who can’t get behind that idea? The reason I think Old Man Roller went in a different direction had a lot to do with what also happened on his family vacation to Niagara Falls. Roller’s youngest, his son, Michael, was the little guy they were doing it all for. He’d gotten diagnosed with leukemia earlier that same year, and the prognosis was good but there were plenty of sensible reasons to be worried. The family was reeling from the news, as any would be, but more for the fact that Mikey was a good kid. I mean, he was real good, like in the pure and innocent way kids can be good but adults almost never can. I didn’t really know the family at the time, but to hear Joe talk about him, well, you knew there was no way it could be otherwise. That’s what made the diagnosis so upsetting, because what kind of world lets a kid like that suffer like that? Christ, c’mon. In time, I learned firsthand it was true. Old Man Roller told us about this story of Mikey waking up after a nap when he was only two or three. He wanted to know where the lion’d gone? “Where’d the lion go, Daddy?” What lion? That’s all Joe could think. The kid did not own a stuffed one. He wasn’t even sure if little Mikey had ever seen one before, but maybe in a picture book or maybe they had gone to the zoo recently? But before he was able to give the question any greater thought his wife sort of trundles in, and she knows what he’s talking about right away—the kid dreamt it! When the lights go back on, that once he’s awake—poof—the lion goes away. “Did you dream about a lion again, sweetie?” she asks Mikey. And apparently this was happening all the time. The lion was his friend, in his dreams. How the hell cute is that? 8 | CCLaP Weekender
And you can bet, I’m not someone casually inclined to use the word “cute.” The people who know me know that about me. I weighed heavily replacing the word with another, in all honesty. I have kept it in, see, but for illustration purposes. So don’t get the wrong idea. Truth be told, it was really cute. The Rollers were really taken with the enormity of Niagara Falls. I went some years afterwards, in part because of my interest in all that went down there and later on. It’s just tons of water frothing and storming over the cliff, daring you to see if you could go over its edge and come out alive below. Going to would-be daredevil, “Give it your best shot, buddy. Try me.” Some take its devil’s dare and live, but they are few. You’d see just by looking at the long and jagged rocks at the base of just the Canadian side of the Falls. They had formed perfectly to make a body torn and broken and go all to hell. Reminds you of how little is yours to control. The end of the week-long stay in Niagara Falls was big news for the whole family and changed their lives in ways they couldn’t have guessed at prior to what-all happened. Mikey wanted to see the Falls up close one last time before they packed up and got out of Dodge. Who could blame him, right? Well. There are all kinds of perverts out there, the worst sort of scum you’d only wish could be condemned to death by a good heave over the Falls for as many times as that takes to do him in. A man calling himself only Fugio was just one sort of dirty, criminal pervert, masquerading as some kind of communist anarchist, one of the dregs of Europe, whose governments knew enough to send him on his way elsewhere like the scum he no doubt was. He washed up on our shore like scurvy making its move on the undernourished, just bastardizing everything by his mere presence. He was at the Falls that last day too, as you probably have guessed by now, reeking and soiled, speaking some sort of nonsense more nihilistic than any of long list of ideologies he probably would claim, collecting them as he did like others absently collect baseball cards and know nothing about the players themselves. Worst of all, he literally got up on a soapbox. Up there he was spewing venom against America and the usual moon-bat line of America’s “imperialistic global agenda.” But what he best showed was how in the hands of individuals like himself, words like that against the state, against the great nation of the U.S. of A., are meaningless. I’ve always been a working man, and I understand the working man’s plight, and though I’m no communist, I’ve read Marx. Marx might not have been so bad, idea-wise, as people think of him now. But Fugio was as bad as anyone’s ever said he was, and probably worse. But Fugio kept railing against America, said it was a land built in the form of our pre-packaged commercial culture which told people to buy and to buy and to buy some more, which is an argument that can be made, but he didn’t care about that, not actually. What he was really doing up there was eye-balling who had any money to filch. This was confirmed when he was taken into custody. They found all kinds of swindled paraphernalia on his person. August 15, 2014 | 9
But while in prison, incarcerated for his crimes, he wrote a stupid manifesto that made the rounds in certain less-than-good-and-decent circles— circles that wouldn’t know an honest day’s work if it jumped up and bit them in the jugular. Point is, anybody who read it saw why so many of us hate Fugio. I’ve included it here for another good reason: I won’t have to tell what happened myself. Because I hate what happened worse than I hate Fugio, and I hate Fugio like sin. When I finally learnt English adequately well, the thing I, Menelias Fugio, would do with my skill was imagine, what was it like not to know English? And I would look at English words and I would pretend that, I, Fugio, did not understand them, but no matter that of course, in true, I now did. This pretend lack of understanding is good for the purpose of illustrating my manifesto’s ethos, inspired of the works of Johann Most and so many political martyrs who have come before, dying at the hands of oppressors and tyrants. You will look at a world you already have known and, I ask, pretend that you do not, so that you can see it with new eyes. I will also preface this manifesto with another story, which leads to my present situation, imprisonment. I consider myself a political prisoner, behind bars because I tried to show the world what the world has no desire to see. Where better to spread such a message than with the backdrop of one of the world’s seven wonders, Niagara Falls? Water that refuses to be muted and chained! Man can only slow it! Never stop its tide! Dragoon all you like! It laughs at you and your futility. The person I needed for this purpose of showing the world could have been any person. In the end it was a little boy, chosen for his atypically good nature. When you rouse the will of the people to the grave extent that they have been set to ire, you must expect innocents to come to harm. Collateral damage, as it were. Or as was the case with my boy, demonstrative damage. Damage meant to showcase society’s anemia. I discovered the boy and his aura of innocence, as I was perched from atop a pedestal of my own contrivance, assailing the audience with my truths. The boy was like any boy, and like any boy there was the presumption of innocence attached to him. Of course no one is innocent but it is perception. I am pure scum to many. It is possibly true that I am. But so much of it is perception that I am, too. Always be sure to be wary of it. It was with a small candy I tricked the boy. I gave it to him, saying trust me. I represent only what is good for you. And who could not like candy? Not the little boy! He took it from me greedily, and I remarked when pain shone on his face, “See what a terrible thing taking things as they seem can be? Trusting in things to want only what is good for you.” Because the boy had slit his tongue and, true, too, his bottom lip had been cut cleanly through by the tiny blade I had inserted in his candy, to prove my point. “Now you know how the world truly works, Boy,” I said. The boy was too focused on his crying to hear me. But you hear me. And maybe you think differently than you did before.
So, afterwards, Joe Roller was heartbroken. His son had cancer, was
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maybe even dying of it, and now he’d been attacked violently? Is there a god or no, because sometimes you wonder. Joe did. Old Man Roller was the eternal optimist. He just had to find good in a situation that seemed so apart from good. I don’t know how. I couldn’t do it. Most people couldn’t, is my opinion. But Old Man Roller found a way. He had some kind of new idea where fast food was concerned. Fundamentally different from the notion of sameness. I mean, always great flavor, but here’s what he did differently: no two of his burgers ever looked the same. There was this idea that you could celebrate being different, food like people. Good for being different, unique. Once he got back from Canada, and after It was with a small candy he made certain his I tricked the boy. I gave it boy had been properly tended to both for his to him, saying trust me. I remaining physical represent only what is good injuries and his illness, for you. And who could not Joe Roller threw himself into his entrepreneurial like candy? Not the little boy! task of starting up He took it from me greedily, Ripped Burgers. He procured a loan, rented and I remarked when pain out an empty corner shone on his face, “See what building at a highly a terrible thing taking things trafficked intersection, not far from a highway as they seem can be? Trusting on ramp and exit. in things to want only what is He hired a few local contractors, guys good for you.” he’d known from his old neighborhood and knew could be trusted. Not just trusted, but he knew they could get behind the spirit of his vision. They, like so many of us, would hear Joe Roller and know that his ideas were possibly going to change the fast food landscape. Then there was the thing. The Beef and its tear, and tearing or ripping burgers or just generally making them imperfect. It was like a new spin on the sloppy joe. If people, kids especially, could get behind a sloppy joe then why not a burger that wasn’t perfectly rounded and shaped like the one that had come before it? Again, flavor, flavor is what’s gotta count the most. Good because of what’s inside. That was the early mantra of our burgercooking efforts. Old Man Roller even wrote it up on the wall, in a kind of August 15, 2014 | 11
obscured spot in the back, right near my griddle, because it was more for our benefit than anyone else’s. The idea eventually caught on with the public, at first by way of word of mouth, but then gradually it entered our advertisement, as the restaurant chain expanded beyond just the first corner store. Franchising was not Joe Roller’s goal. He wanted it to be family owned. He wanted his boys to get in on this family work. Joe’s older boy, Vincent, who in early 1960 had just turned thirteen, started showing up on weekends to help out. Mikey did, too, though by then he was anemic and weak. Mikey did a lot to keep spirits up, since he couldn’t do much else. Nobody thought about complaining around him. Mrs. Roller preferred the setup this way, too, because it gave her an opportunity to play bridge with the other ladies in the neighborhood. She’d been badly deprived prior to then, and her mood lightened noticeably once she had free time for some sport. Vincent, meanwhile, I got to know him pretty well. A good kid, too, if a little more scheming than I think Mikey was ever capable. I say that because he used to scheme. And he probably stole from the till. But he largely meant well, I think. He was also fairly popular and he chased away the trouble makers making trouble around Ripped Burgers whenever they appeared. At least at first, when his dad was still watching. Everything was getting better. Mikey’s cancer went into remission. Ripped Burgers was set to open its first restaurant in the late spring of 1960. The new decade would mean good changes. The rise of you who is special. Good enough, just as you are. And the good times lasted awhile. They did. They really did. I mean there were a good two plus years in which those things we all wanted and felt good about were exactly as good as we all could have hoped. Old Man Roller added locations. He had about seven, most located in the Chicago metropolitan area. One in Indianapolis. I don’t know if Old Man Roller meant to compete directly with the big boys of fast food, namely McDonald’s and Burger Chef both headquartered more or less right there with Ripped Burgers in the midwest, but he did. I don’t think he did. I think he was a victim of geography, where his family lived and where it made most sense to put the restaurants he loved as though they were his own flesh and blood. The opposition certainly did take some notice. Even with 500 restaurants operating by 1963 and a corporate headquarters on LaSalle Street in Chicago, Ray Kroc was said to have remarked to some of his suits about our tiny Ripped Burgers operation, ”If we lose a cent of business to those piles of bullshit burgers they’re passing off as ‘unique like you are,’ it’ll be every one of your asses. I’ll be dead in the ground when McDonald’s aspires to anything but absolute perfection.” Supposedly, down in Indiana, Frank Thomas of Burger Chef was more magnanimous, saying, “There’s something refreshing about what they’re 12 | CCLaP Weekender
doing, but I wouldn’t do it.” And let me clarify. I know I alluded to the process before, but I’d like to explain exactly how it worked. You would get your burger on its tray, normal enough looking, but then either by hand or using an instrument like the swivel blade Old Man Roller invented just for the purpose of cutting the burger, you would make what was tidy and symmetrical, untidy and asymmetrical. When anyone complained, as they did pretty regularly for the first couple of months—heck, really, the first whole year we were open—Old Man Roller got philosophical with them. He’d say, “Now why don’t you just taste the burger? Quit trying to have your cake and eat it, too (and of course I mean burger, not actual cake). How’s the flavor? How’s that?” And the irate customer might say it doesn’t matter how the burger tastes, what Old Man Roller had done to it was gross, weird, wrong. Old Man Roller would ask why, which was reasonable since he washed his hands and wore sterile gloves when handling food. The sanctity of the thing. Is nothing sacred? “I believe that it is,” he’d say. And that would more or less be the argument. That would be all. And the customer might leave or the customer might not leave. The customer might stay and eat. The customer might eat that Ripped Burger, tattered and torn but, yeah, very good. There was one strange incident, I remember, because it was such an anomaly at the time, that happened. It was late spring of ‘62, right around when they finally got to hanging Eichmann for his crimes against humanity. Forgive the crude comparison but Old Man Roller committed a crime against owning a fast food restaurant, albeit an unwritten one. I thought it’d been an accident. I almost didn’t notice it at first. Joe was clearing the table of some really messy customers and there was a half-full soft drink cup that he pulled the top off and poured into the mop bucket he had at his side. I figured it must be some mistake, or something. I didn’t say anything to Joe. Later on, leaving the restaurant, I noticed the floor was really sticky. It didn’t happen again after that, though. When JFK was assassinated in November of ‘63, the mood around Ripped Burgers was somber, as it was anywhere. Nobody was hungry at all. We closed early when news of it broke, Old Man Roller telling us to be with our families. He went to be with his. Old Man Roller seemed older that day—really old. Old like the world and all its weight had finally settled there upon him, carved lines down his skin and made him shriveled and withered. His wisp of gray hair was thinner than I thought it could get. Times were tough, even with business thriving. Things were changing. Many of those things were good things, but those of us who August 15, 2014 | 13
worked at Ripped Burgers restaurants had to doubly increase our efforts to help maintain our restaurant’s niche spot among the bigs. McDonald’s was growing rapidly, and so too its fame. Burger Chef was right behind, seeming like it would have no trouble equaling McDonald’s success. Burger King was a developing force. Couple that with little area chains like Sandy’s, and so many others. We were different, yeah. But difference is always met with skepticism, even when it’s good. And things always change. Things changed, then, majorly from the winter of 1964 onward, coinciding with the big build up toward U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The first thing to change at Ripped Burgers was the Burger Barn, a windowed container shaped to look like a barn and, in it, we’d have the different kinds of buns you could select to accompany your ripped burger beef. We’d pull the bun out and run it through the toaster, then rip it, tear it, give it the individualized attention your food selection deserved. The buns were normally so fresh and so firm and so worthy of beef. Worthy of The Beef. But it got clear pretty quickly in the winter of ‘64 that we were not replacing the buns daily. They were stale. They were tougher to rip. These were the beginnings of a tragic downfall, a real mess. Cups of pop with hair in them. Rats making noises in the walls. No amount of visits from the exterminator could fix their infestation. I tried to tell Old Man Roller we were in serious trouble, but he wouldn’t listen. He was a living apparition. He came and he went like the old Old Man Roller had, sure, but all the zest for life and for selling burgers was gone. He had nothing to say to me. That was clear. And it was hard not to take it personally. What I think about now is, I should have known, gosh darn. I will swear no more, not about Ripped Burgers and not about Old Man Roller, but I will say it plainly, when Vincent took over for his dad, I knew that was the end, plain as day. Joe couldn’t have expected things to turn out any different. He knew what his son could do. Like I said, Vincent was a good kid, but he was no chip off the block. He was more interested in the skirts and in his weekend plans. And he wanted nothing to do with Ripped Burgers when any sort of opportunity for free time came around. Joe wasn’t there to tell him that that’s not what it is to be in charge. Vincent had to man up and take control of the place without his father’s guidance. Worrisome to us all, because for reasons we didn’t exactly yet understand, Old Man Roller wasn’t there for Ripped Burgers like he used to be. That meant an immediate drop in quality of our day-to-day operation. Vincent, when he wasn’t jacking around, was usually crying. It was so easy to make him cry. You’d scold him a little, just say something about that he had to pull his weight better. There you go. He’d start to cry. And he wouldn’t stop for a long time. And that he’d go on these long, like agonizingly long, tirades about how he couldn’t compete. That we couldn’t compete with our competitors. They were unstoppable, especially McDonald’s. It went on like this for a couple years. A lot of the guys left for jobs at other places. I stayed 14 | CCLaP Weekender
on, but I couldn’t tell you why. I kept waiting for Old Man Roller. It was getting to the point I couldn’t wait a minute longer, though. Something had to give. Then they opened a McDonald’s franchise right across the street from us, Golden Arches face to face with The Beef. In the old days, I might have said something like “let’s see what you got.” But my morale was low, lower than low. I wasn’t itching for any kind of fight. I needed to talk to Old Man Roller. He needed to know what was going on, and he needed to come and fix it. I wanted to feel that good feeling again. I went straight to Vincent. “I need to talk to your dad,” I told him. What he said was, “Dad’s busy. Mom’s busy. You can’t see them. They don’t want to be seen, so don’t even try.” I knew what it was. I felt stupid for not knowing earlier. Vincent being moody as I’d ever seen him. Mikey’s cancer had come back. I found the hospital the family was camped out at. They weren’t leaving. Not for anything. I couldn’t blame them for that. God, I knew I’d been a real jerk. I should have left it alone. But I had to go down there. I had to tell them all how sorry I was. I brought a stuffed bear and a balloon. I thought to myself, that’s what you bring for the kids, for little Mikey. And I got there, and I was in the pediatric wing, the cancer ward. I could smell the hospital smells too familiar and not worth naming here. Naming them brings back memories I don’t want to remember. I got to Mikey’s room, and there he was in bed hooked up to all that machinery it seemed like—weak, thin, sallow, a sliver of the boy who had been there before, all that life of his. Exuberance. That’s the word. It’s as if someone had tipped him and poured that word out. He seemed to be sleeping. But I’d learn that, given the stage he was in, how advanced the cancer was, that’s how he always appeared. He came in and out of some small form of consciousness. I wanted to believe it was peaceful, and his being that way was somehow comforting to Old Man and Ma Roller. But I learned it wasn’t so, not to Old Man Roller. He thanked me for coming. He said I didn’t have to do that, and actually, if I’d be so kind as to not tell the rest of the boys, he’d be grateful. He couldn’t think about business, which really and truly, with all that had happened to Mikey, he realized why he’d started the thing in the first place. I mean, yes, he’d acknowledged that in part already—Joe’d done it for his sons. Mikey in particular, because of Mikey’s tough lot and of course the scars he was given. It wasn’t about living through them but living with them and for them, to help them. Their success could be his or not. He didn’t care. He just wanted them to be well. With Mikey so sick again, he didn’t see the point anymore. “He’s not getting better, Mick. He’s never going to get better. The doctors already said so. He’s got a couple months.” I told Joe I couldn’t tell him how sorry I was. He said August 15, 2014 | 15
the same to me, referring to leaving Ripped Burgers to the wolves at a time when he was needed most, when his other son couldn’t yet cut the mustard and was probably dealing with the tragedy of their circumstances in his own way. I tried to be more sympathetic. I knew and liked my place within the Ripped Burgers hierarchy. I truly didn’t want more responsibility, but darn it if I wasn’t really close to offering to run the business as well as I could, which I knew would be better than Vincent was capable. I didn’t, though, for many reasons. Mostly it was out of respect for whatever Joe wanted to see done or not done to his business. If he wanted me to do what Vincent was doing, I was sure he would have asked me by now. But the goof-ups and emotional episodes just wouldn’t quit. It was as if Vincent wasn’t dealing with his brother’s situation, and the awfulness that that was, but had started taking classes The opposition certainly did take to learn the fine art of some notice. Even with 500 melodrama. He was always spilling root restaurants operating by 1963 beer, and the mop and a corporate headquarters on bucket he used to clean LaSalle Street in Chicago, Ray Kroc up after himself was was said to have remarked to some filled with dirty water— of his suits about our tiny Ripped water that smelled. He knew I knew about Burgers operation, ”If we lose a Mikey, that he had a cent of business to those piles of sympathetic ear, but he bullshit burgers they’re passing just continued to carry off as ‘unique like you are,’ it’ll be on the same as before. every one of your asses. I’ll be dead “We can’t compete with those in the ground when McDonald’s prices!” Vincent aspires to anything but absolute would shout, pointing perfection.” across the street at McDonald’s. “Look at how happy their customers are! And who wouldn’t be? They’re easily the best at what they do. We’re not even in the same league.” And usually customers who were in our restaurant would leave, and some of them would cross the street and eat at McDonald’s. They weren’t even shy about it. Vincent had become McDonald’s number one salesman. Ray Kroc would have been proud. “What the hell is it you think you’re doing?” I asked him. Then I whispered, “Your brother is sick as hell and your family is doing everything they can do be there for him. You need to step up, buddy. Where’s your selfrespect?” “Mick,” Vincent said, getting a grip on himself as the last of our potential customers had gone. “We can’t compete with those prices.” I nearly lunged 16 | CCLaP Weekender
for him, for his throat. It took all I could do not to lunge. He was still basically a kid. But he was ruining Ripped Burgers. And I got the distinct impression that might be exactly what he was trying to do. I went to the McDonald’s after work. I needed to be sure of something. The All-American Meal was forty-five cents, same as always. We could compete with their prices. I didn’t go because I thought Vincent might be right. I went to prove to myself what I already knew, Ripped Burgers was falling apart and we had no one to blame but ourselves. I went back to Ripped Burgers to get in my car and get out of there finally, when I saw Vincent talking to someone on a payphone near the restaurant. I snuck up on him, meaning to eavesdrop. With all that had happened, I had a hunch it could be in my own interests, and maybe Ripped Burger’s, to hear what he was saying. I heard this: “Yes, Mr. Kroc, yes. We continue to send business your way, as agreed. Yes, Ripped Burgers is a complete joke, pretty much. Well, goodbye,” then he paused, apparently Kroc deciding their conversation wasn’t yet over. “No, no one suspects anything, and well, who cares if they did? What would you want me to do about it? Murder? Gee, I don’t know. Well, there’s Mick, who mans the griddle. If murder is what you want, I guess so.” Vincent turned around and looked straight at me. I guess he knew I was there. I guess he wasn’t actually talking to Ray Kroc during that last bit about murder. “You sold us out?” I said, “to Kroc?” He nodded. “But your old man knows, doesn’t he?” He nodded. “Your old man set the whole thing up?” “Yes,” he said. “But Mick, it’s worse than that. Dad isn’t entirely okay, and not just because of what’s going on with Mikey. Dad’s kind of lost it. He had a nervous breakdown a few months ago. We were able to keep it pretty quiet, but he was going around to all of the other stores, crying a lot like how I’ve been pretending to cry. His tears were real though. His dream was dying, right along with Mikey. It’s what he thinks, even if it isn’t true. He called Ray Kroc one night, yelling about everything and telling the man the product McDonald’s serves is far better than Ripped Burger’s ‘uniqueness’— ’uniqueness’ itself being ‘a crock.’ Dad said McDonald’s fries are crisp and perfect. Everything about the place was better. He said he should just quit. Kroc told him not to. He’d buy Ripped Burgers, Kroc would. It was all Kroc’s idea, really.” “Why?” “Because Ray Kroc wanted to see us destroyed just as much as Dad wanted us destroyed, or basically believed that’s what Ripped Burgers deserved, thinking it would happen no matter what, anyway. I can’t tell you how much Dad’s not okay. He might regret it yet, if he comes back to his senses ever. I hope not. I hope Ripped Burgers sinks without Dad ever having to shed another tear over it. Anyway, Kroc paid plenty to buy the business August 15, 2014 | 17
from us, small as it is, provided while Ripped Burgers remains open, we use it as a means of drumming up the McDonald’s chain’s better quality and service. He really liked Dad’s ‘loony’ phone call. He didn’t care that he might be taking advantage of man who is mentally struggling in all sorts of ways. They both saw it as win-win,” Vincent said. “Kroc added something about salting the earth that was Ripped Burgers. Dad liked that and would yell it at the top of his lungs some nights at home, keeping Mom and everyone awake. He’s good when he’s at the hospital though.” I felt like crying but I didn’t. Not in front of Vincent. A week later, this was the fall of 1964, Vincent announced that, effective immediately, Ripped Burgers was closing its doors for good. He said something about McDonald’s being just too much for us to overcome and encouraged us all to finish the day with a round of milkshakes. I didn’t feel like a milkshake, really. I wandered around town for a little while, finally returning to Ripped Burgers’ empty parking lot. The lights were off. That’s the last image I have of The Beef, hidden in the dark of night. Across the street, McDonald’s arches were yellowing the surrounding buildings—The Beef just out of reach. I took some small satisfaction in that. I didn’t hear anything from the Roller family for another couple months, until Mikey’s funeral, which I attended heavy-hearted. Mikey’s casket was much too small to be a real casket. Old Man Roller and Vincent and one other man I didn’t know were all the pallbearers they needed. A few years later, I ran into Old Man Roller again. He was downright haggard. It was hard to see him as deeply wounded as he appeared to be. He grinned, “I never had it in me to be Ray Kroc or any of those guys, Mick.” “What about the spirit of the thing?” I couldn’t just let him say what he said without arguing the point a little. “Ripped Burgers was Mikey, Mick. I don’t know if I was ever thinking clearly during that time, but I do know I knew that. But it was never as good as Mikey was. I couldn’t make anything as good as Mikey was. I think of it now, if Ripped Burgers continued after Mikey died, I think of a thing in theory instead of practice. Every ‘idea’ I had for Ripped Burgers was because of something I saw in Mikey. He was the muse, if not the outright idea guy—the Burger Barn was entirely his, and why it was one of the first things to go. I am a fraud, in the end. I don’t have any good ideas. Deep down, I knew Ripped Burgers would be a shadow of itself once Mikey was gone. I couldn’t bear it. I wanted Ripped Burgers to go, too, rather than wallow in a relic, a thing that would never be as good as what inspired it, but I am sorry for the trouble that caused all you guys, all my guys. I should have apologized to you a long time ago. I am truly sorry.” 18 | CCLaP Weekender
“I’m sorry, too, Joe,” I said, and I was, though I couldn’t have said for what. After that we made some small talk about our lives, though very little interesting stuff had happened to me. I’d gotten a job at a restaurant downtown. Joe and his wife were doing a lot of traveling, places like Europe and Asia. Vincent had just about finished college. I was glad for them. There weren’t any hard feelings, of course, because why would there be? I told Old Man Roller I hadn’t forgotten Mikey, that I thought of him often in fact. It made him happy to hear that, he said to me, it made him really happy. C
Matt Rowan lives in Chicago, IL, with a talented female writer and two talented chihuahuas. He co-edits Untoward Magazine and Horrible Satan and is fiction editor of Another Chicago Magazine. He’s author of the story collection Why God Why (Love Symbol Press, 2013). His work has appeared, or soon will, in mojo journal, Gigantic, Booth Journal, Necessary Fiction and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. More at literaryequations.blogspot.com.
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Featuring
Amber Hargroder plus six open-mic features
The CCLaP Showcase A new reading series and open mic
Tuesday, August 26th, 6:30 pm City Lit Books | 2523 N. Kedzie cclapcenter.com/events
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To sign up in advance for an open mic slot, write cclapcenter@gmail.com
Matthew Thornton
PHOTOGRAPHY FEATURE August 15, 2014 | 21
Matthew Thornton is a Chicago-area photographer specializing in nature and abstract imagery.
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flickr.com/revanchiastic 40 | CCLaP Weekender
CCLaP Publishing
An official painter for the Lithuanian Communist Party, Martynas Kudirka enjoys a pleasant, unremarkable life with a beautiful wife and all the privileges that come with being a party member. Yet in the summer of 1989, his ordinary world suddenly turns upside down. Political revolt is breaking out across Eastern Europe, and Martynas comes home to find his wife dead on the kitchen floor with a knife in her back. Realizing the police will not investigate, he sets out to find his wife’s killer. Instead, he stumbles upon her secret life. Martynas finds himself drawn into the middle of an independence movement, on a quest to find confidential documents that could free a nation. Cold War betrayals echo down through the years as author Bronwyn Mauldin takes the reader along a modern-day path of discovery to find out Martynas’ true identity. Fans of historical fiction will travel back in time to 1989, the Baltic Way protest and Lithuania’s “singing revolution,” experiencing a nation’s determination for freedom and how far they would fight to regain it.
Download for free at cclapcenter.com/lovesongs
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The CCLaP Weekender is published in electronic form only, every Friday for free download at the CCLaP website [cclapcenter.com]. Copyright 2014, Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. All rights revert back to artists upon publication. Editorin-chief: Jason Pettus. Story Editor: Behn Riahi. Layout Editor: Wyatt Roediger-Robinette. Calendar Editors: Anna Thiakos and Taylor Carlile. To submit your work for possible feature, or to add a calendar item, contact us at cclapcenter@gmail.com.
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