Country Buffet and the Rebirth Of Cool

Me and Paola have been cool for a minute now. But it's a different cool than you're thinking. No, not that fawned-over mestizaje of rained-in Luso-enlightenment and picked-a-part delta-Chi-town detachment that conceived the bossa nova on a tastefully upholstered snooker table. That's a wondrous theory and all, but you will seldom catch me touting a postcolonial fantasy after it reveals itself to be inconveniently untrue. We're cool like something else altogether. After a few weeks of unbroken routinized boredom, my mind is stuck on a frosty glass, cold harbor, segue stirred memory of the seventeenth time our Tuesday evening plans dissolved into something too temperate, too janky, and I'm good again. You cannot accuse us of not knowing each other.

After exhausting the better options we trade circuitous fables and toss back cheap spirits while some breezy jaunt, say George Benson's "Face It Boy, It's Over," whirs and bounces throughout her violet and fuschia Victorian duplex lodged tidily in Long Branch's least remarkable neighborhood. To some of you out there, it may be worth noting that this represents an advanced level of righteous smooveness my pops wouldn't necessarily have endorsed even at his Clark's Desert Boots meets pomegranate guayabera peak of perfection. Sometimes, too many times, Paola jokes that church bells are right around the corner. I ingeniously respond with a series of obvious nonverbal cues suggesting only dread, every time. But realistically, this saturnine tropicalia quest leads only to the autumnal pax americana we'd both prefer to overlook. We're going precisely nowhere, baby.

We do strike a tepid consensus, though, which should count for something.  She packs several metric tons of agonized longing into every half-baked warble and sexy little nose scrunch and that alone keeps me partially civilized. She doesn't curse me to East Windsor if I respond to her text messages one note below enraptured or palm her ass during serious conversation.  Paola is something else, all rite, and only a middling, easily distracted ingrate takes her chanteuse-ness for granted. Portuguese to Spanish to English translation being risky and grating, she summons the brutish Americanese conjured in a Pentecostal prayer nook/makeshift classroom carved out of the side of a Dunkin Donuts in Parlin and does what she can. Her body English is right on the ball, curving somewhere between Pica Zuro and Colombian so you know I'm bound to mistranslate and fuck this all up.

For now I know better. Her filtering, her phrasing, her sequencing, and her pitch is Brasilero to the core or it's senseless babble.  She may lovingly muster "my cousin Andrea from Nueva Cobriza is an erratic wildflower in a fragile vase" and even pronounce a few of the words correctly. But this is not truth-telling, literalized or poetic. In reality, she is nudging and noodling with tone, pocket, and color in a manner not dissimilar to low resolution YouTube clips of Elizeth Cardoso in her prime. In this same chill mode she murmurs her pulsing dissatisfaction with life in these united states -- the energy expended on buying big giant dumb flashy sexy things, isolation as normative behavior, and so on. My second instinct is to soothe her through trickery, to play the golden-hearted cosmopolitan everyman mystic who with a decidedly sophisticated to-do list and endless availability to whisk away.

Against her better nature she's willing to endure trips to see the World's Oldest Barn Owl (in captivity at a farm in Mendover) or the Museum Of Supernatural History in bucolic Koenig Meadow. Now, you may fool yourself into believing that my anxieties die upon contact with air, but I know Paola better than you. And if she's  more like you or I than we might initially guess, then even the most unsettling of roadside oddities or bombed out downtowns will eventually be banished to the section of the brain reserved for terribly useless memories like the South Amboy Memorial Day Parade. I had to come up with something very real, I figured, or risk catching her daydreaming out loud about Manhattan socialite hives that I can't even find.

To truly know me she must know a trillion coupons stuffed into a Hush Puppies shoebox, National Geographic fold-out maps strewn across the living room, Don Quijote memorabilia, Flintstone's glassware from Roy Rogers, YMCA camp, Old Spice bottles spanning decades, random books on loan from a makeshift library located within the neighborhood's last surviving synagogue, sanctified needlepoint art, a gallery of refrigerator magnet advertisements,  my parent's imaginatively worded threats of corporal punishment, interminable Reader's Digest subscriptions, a neon green laundry basket storing assorted and often mismatched winter accessories, a closet full of snack trays and bridge tables, corners and crevices and cupboards and end tables all one degree of worn out just below quaint since the time of the flood.

Yes, if we're to continue, she must be immersed in the unrefined but dutiful trappings of the (yo yo dieting) middle to lower middle class, the earnest and scrappy ambition that proudly asserts its vision of uplift in hallowed Ivy halls to a chorus of harmless, contemptful snickering. She must sit knee-deep in the detritus that signifies borderline white trashiness for those whose racial destiny was somehow compromised but alternately indicates glacial upward mobility for us (sure to be grateful) colonized full-castes. This is our shared, contested zone, our dusty rumpus room, our space-time, and there is no summation of it more accurate than slogging a bent spoon through powdery mashed potatoes intermingled with dry unseasoned roast beef at the motherfucking Country Buffet.

Skeptical but intrigued, she meets me at the spot after work, hair frizzing from rain-sleet but still looking right, slightly overdressed for the occasion. The exterior inspires zero coherent memories but instead a whole litany of vague sensory responses that nearly amount to negative sentiments. It isn't life that flashes by. It's as if all the blandest or least comforting instances were strained into a soft disquieting paste and every moment of joy or interest set aside for the dog to gnaw. But as we enter the establishment my entire plot is subverted in front of me, for the line to pay in advance (and don't we deserve it!) is composed not of single mothers and their children, but an amateur jazz quartet and their bulky uncased instruments.

By the time we are seated and picking ever so cautiously at our assembled meals, Paola is supremely unconvinced that live elevator music is not the normative Country Buffet experience (it isn't). She's right, though, nowadays live elevator music is the normative Country Buffet experience. The band unwittingly resembles the demographics of the surrounding area, as well as the population that typically patronizes the restaurant: there is an unemployed Indian engineer in his mid-thirties on drums, the bass is handled by a youngish Puerto Rican social studies teacher, a white and possibly Canadian retiree in a denim shirt plays the keyboard, and a black municipal employee  in his fifties with graying temples strums the guitar. We don't converse with these guys, of course, but inventing bios is the sincerest form of flattery.

We listen. They are corny and amateurish, barely operating as a unified force, tripping over the kind of musical do-nots that are neither affecting nor smart. But something happens to the spirit of the place as they play, and not just the spirit of the place that my brain and ignorance conspire to create. Paola is typically vivacious-- her womanly lilt sounds like the oldest trick in the book and I've relaxed my ego long enough to savor her fluttering half-comprehensible storylines. Our eyes meet more often than normal, we bump into each other in line for soft serve more frequently than chance might permit, we sigh and curl our lips in time with the offbeat stylings of the house band and the music is just loud enough to prevent us from saying or hearing the wrong things.

Where our mutual gaze unlocks, I spy on my fellow patrons. An elderly black man makes a concerted effort to insinuate himself in the conversation of the family in the next booth. They are not amused by his tales of adventure set in Venezuela in the 70s and they struggle to return to their conversation about lottery tickets. A young Dominican couple whisper-argue ferociously about splitting household chores. A perfectly articulate, nonplussed Guatemalan busboy relates his dissatisfaction with losing a college scholarship on account of his alien status to a strikingly beautiful Arab girl. Half of the patrons are sportively conscious of the band's presence and the other half go about their business without so much as a neck bop or a polite smile. I've never felt more polyglot, more thankfully anonymous in godforsaken Middlesex County, or more proud that I'd likely be ejected from the set of a Digable Planets video shoot.

We've never been cooler.