Fixations #1 Caroline McCloskey
Fixations #1 Caroline McCloskey
Pizza Hut Sneakers It must’ve been 1998 or else maybe 2000 when I saw them—the internet was still an infant then, I remember that well enough. Flipping through the pages of some incredibly importantfeeling small-batch periodical, probably something British-flavored involving art and tattooed nudity, I arrived at a photograph of a couple, a man and woman I didn’t recognize, sitting on a
couch. Apparently they were terribly relevant to the subculture. About her, I remember nothing. But he was wearing glasses—is it possible this was Terry Richardson? Is it possible there was a time when we weren’t forced to know who Terry Richardson was?—and, get this, a pair of gleaming white Pizza Hut sneakers. Say what now?! They weren’t flashy but they caught my eye. How can I explain it? The shoes had a chilling subtlety. The tenor of them was abusive.
They were not cool. They were the kind of shoes inmates pad around in; they reeked of incarceration. Visually, I can offer this: Imagine a generic cheap velcro sneaker, essentially a white block of a shoe, festooned with the tiny Pizza Hut logo—the old logo, with the upright font—on the side and tongue. Apart from the logo, a total lack of effort toward customization or style. Almost avant-garde in their bland ugliness. A corporateissue sneaker!, I thought. It’s ingenious!
But…what was their origin and purpose? (“Identify yourself, stranger!”) Were these shoes intended for public consumption? The sneakers had a kind of dark magic, an undertow to them, and I wanted to, not wear them, but somehow possess them. To obtain and examine and absorb them. During my downtime at my job I tried to research the sneakers online. Nothing. I spoke of them in feverish tones to my friends. Over the next few months, my overwrought description of
the Pizza Hut sneakers—combined with the utter void of information available about them, the inability to even confirm their existence—called my credibility into question. Had no one else seen these? Why had no one else seen these? It all seemed to mean something, though admittedly something obscure. Had I somehow invented them out of my own perverse need? And if so, should I be concerned about the vital stats of my subconscious? Etc., etc.; you get the picture. All
the weed didn’t help. It used to be recreational to get jazzed about something and riff a little. Let me pause to clarify this was not the central concern of my life at the time; this was the dust mote that floats by bearing an uncanny resemblance to Don King. And anyway, I couldn’t hunt Pizza Hut sneakers on the internet all day! I had shit to do! Years passed. Calendar montage. I switched jobs, boyfriends, cities, demographics, but from time to time, the idea of the Pizza Hut
sneakers—already vague two weeks out, later just the Xerox of a memory—would dart through my head like a minnow. The internet’s reach grew wider, and then all-encompassing, but each time I searched for evidence of the shoes I came up empty. How could this be? The not just minimal but complete lack of information about them amazed me and won my grudging respect. Beyond the reach of the internet? Fuck me. Even your great-great-great-great grandmother gets
a shout-out on one of those genealogy websites. But these sneakers existed outside the realm of the monstrous human catalog. And here, my friends, the story takes an (for me) unexpected yet (for you) entirely predictable turn, one I relay with a certain amount of euphoria cut with melancholy. For, gentle reader, last week while on eBay hunting altogether different prey, I felt the old familiar tug of curiosity. Why not, I thought, there’s no chance as I typed
“Pizza Hut Sneaker” into a search box for the first time in years. The stakes were low, they could hardly be lower. There was a hit. A person in Atlanta (who was selling, among other things, old $10 bills for more than $50), was offering a pair of brand-new, never-used Pizza Hut sneakers. Women’s size 6.5. Still in the box. “Super rare new one of a kind in this condition!!!!” read the copy. “Rare find and no one else will have these!” I stared at them for
awhile, flipping between the ten available images. They weren’t Velcro, as I remembered—they were lace-up. Made in Taiwan, by a company called Javelin. But otherwise, just as I remembered them. Apparently they’d been made exclusively for managers and “special personnel” in the mid-1990s, available only in certain markets. (Let’s not even get into why these shoes haven’t been worn…that could claim another decade of my fantasy life.) I sent the link to all my friends
from those old years, friends who are homeowners now and expecting children, people who are now living all over the world, some of whom I haven’t seen in a decade. Ho shit, I wrote, you’re not gonna believe this. I found them. My great, ugly-ass white whale. I didn’t buy them, though. I dunno why, the seller was only asking $45 and you’d think after all the fuss I should at least see the Pizza Hut sneakers in person, to close out the file and
be done with it. But I’m older now, not to mention incredibly lazy, and somehow it was enough to just know they were real, they were out there, I could see them again if I needed to. Closure was never what I was after anyway. Actually owning them might break my heart. You get my meaning. And besides, let’s be real: I’m a size 8. * * *
Airline Safty Instruction Cards My brother is six years older than I am, and like many younger siblings, I stole a lot from him. Objects sometimes—Velvet Underground cassettes, a slingshot, pinches of weed—but mostly cues. He and his friends loved Night of the Hunter, so I studied the film for information that might help me pin down what being a cool kid in high school was all about. I read his Tama
Janowitz and Spalding Gray books. These things were mostly above my 12-year-old suburban brain capacity, but they were good clues, promising leads, things I could and would follow up on later. Among his various objects was an airplane safety instructions card, pilfered off an old flight. Now this was interesting. The graphics depicted people of many ages and ethnicities (feel free to think of them as “the gang�) clad in mind-
blowing business-casual separates and emotionally efficient haircuts performing a kind of baffling modern kabuki. The gang got into some truly fucked situations. Here they were going down a big slide to the ocean, apparently with glee; here they are crawling along the aisle floor on all fours; here is a mother applying an ornate dangling facial apparatus on her proportionally deformed offspring. Taken out of context—the best way—these images could be articulating
any number of dazzling modern problems. Unclear on exactly what I was after, I developed a habit of snatching them from flights myself, one that continues off and on even today (jut last week I just added an Air France to the collection). In a drawer in our office, there’s a shopping bag full of them, each with regional variations—Asian, European, even a couple swiped from Amtrak—on the same required safety themes. Sometimes the gang’s faces are fea-
tureless, sometimes cartoonish; other times they are uncomfortably seductive. Alaska Airlines does a particularly fine rendition. At my first job out of college, writing for a magazine, I pitched a story about the cards: clearly they, along with courtroom sketches, were examples of egregiously overlooked expressions of art in our culture. Did their institutional function render them invisible to the snobbish art-world gatekeepers? Fuck that. If only I could interview the committee—or
could it possibly be an individual?—whose job it was to make such indelible, accessible images, maybe together we could restore the work to its proper glory! I shot off an email to the public relations department at American Airlines, but shockingly never heard back. In our first post-collegiate Brooklyn apartment, my roommates and I cut up the cards and decorated the hallway with their tidy vignettes of human crisis. I discovered you could rearrange
them to tell stories of many genres: noir, summer camp comedy, interracial wedding, office drama. There were romances and alliances and villains in this world. When wrapping Christmas presents, I topped off each gift with a little airplane illustration. Give me a pair of scissors and twenty minutes and there’s nothing I couldn’t do! In 2001, I moved to New Orleans with some friends who were familiar with my collection. During one late night safety-card arts-and-
crafts session, a particular image—depicting a mother assisting her horrible Little Lord Fauntleroy of a son in the buckling of his seatbelt—inspired a scrawled subtitle: Nice belt, asshole. In honor of the little bastard, we bought the domain to Nicebeltasshole.com, and continued to email each other on the platform for several years. Sadly, caroline@nicebeltasshole is no longer in service.
I realize that collecting airplane safety cards isn’t the esoteric habit that it used to be. Apparently in recent years the airlines have experienced a real problem with thievery, so much so that many of them are now switching over to a dull photography format, or modifying the drawings to make them less enticing and snatchable. Plus, somebody has to replace the ones you’ve stolen. You get to feeling guilty for making an airline employee’s job any more difficult, which is one reason I’ve cut back as I’ve gotten
older. I have a couple of personal favorites. Anything involving waterslides and teamwork is exciting. Or fire—mustachioed guys in drip-dry suits standing casually near a hallway fire vibes ‘key-swapping party gone wrong’ in a pretty groovy way. The babies are always a mess— lumpen and useless, suspiciously calm. I think of them as the evil ones, operating from their tyrant thrones. But my real favorite is different. It could be called “Bad Oysters,” or “Tuesday,
5:14pm,� but its flavor is far more existential than goofy. People bent over, entire rows of black dudes, white chicks and mutant warlock babies doubled over in the exhaustion of being alive. It gets at something defeated, and human, and, in the many global renditions of this very position I’ve collected over the years, startlingly universal. I defy you not to recognize the feeling from your travels through this life. *********
Merle Porter Postcards When I moved to Los Angeles a few years ago, most of the people I knew in the city were acquaintances of the long-lost variety, and I took the opportunity to reconvene with as many of them as possible. Joe was one of these. I knew him when he was drumming with a friend’s band, first in Providence and then in Brooklyn, but he’d split for the West Coast six years ago for gradu-
ate school and we’d not spoken since. Over lunch on the new coast, Joe mentioned that in his spare time he’d been volunteering at a nonprofit in Culver City called CLUI—the Center for Land Use Interpretation—a couple of doors down from the Museum of Jurassic Technology. He spoke of it highly enough of it that I, being unemployed, decided to pay a visit later in the week. CLUI soon became one of my favorite weirdo hangouts in all of L.A.
CLUI is a small, hushed room with a little bookstore, some video exhibits of things like oil derricks performing land rape, and some oddball charts and graphs that inhabit the intersection between science and art (the center is sponsored in part by the Warhol Foundation). I was drawn immediately to a stand of postcards depicting the West of the 1960s and 70s窶馬ot the so-called main events, like Hollywood or Disneyland, but the scenes you glimpse out of the corner of your
eye while driving through the desert: empty highway swirl stretching on for miles, down and out small towns on the outskirts, old fruit inspection stations, ruins of fences half buried by sand. The marginalia, the infrastructure, the spooky rot. Taken in the aggregate, the images got at something fundamentally haunted about the West. This was not cozy, Wish You Were Here kind of stuff, but it was beautiful. The photographs were all taken by one
Merle Porter, who it turns out had a phobia of big cities. Nine months of the year for 50 years, Porter and his wife Bessie would pack up their van (in the later years, a Ford Econoline) and cruise around, taking pictures and distributing them to small-town shops, gas stations and motels. Porter wrote all the postcard descriptions himself, in a style both informative and hyperpoetic (“Spanish explorers first called this road the Jornada de la Muerte (journey of death)…”). I thought I’d read somewhere that Porter had a problem with
depression and/or alcoholism, but I can’t seem to verify that and must assume I brought that to the table. Whoops. Anyway, when Porter died in 1989, his postcards, more than 20,000 of them, died with him. His family stopped distributing them, and you could only find remainders in the dusty small-town shops that never sold out their original stock. CLUI realized this was fucked up and a total loss for us all, and threw a big exhibit to honor the great artist. His widow came. She
made a speech. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But you can still wander into CLUI and spend some time in the library quiet, maybe pick up a few of Merle Porter’s postcards for a buck apiece. I tacked mine on the wall above my desk, and enjoy spacing out to them from time to time. They’re a good reminder that the West is about more than palm trees and sunshine. That, in fact, palm trees and sunshine aren’t even the half of it.