Panorama City by Antoine Wilson Page B

exceptions, but I can say with some certainty, and with experience, it was my experience that everyone I met and made friends with in Panorama City was decent.
    C: Listen, Juan-George, take it with a grain of salt, your father’s always giving people the benefit of the doubt.
    O: It’s true I don’t judge a book by its cover.
    C: Panorama City is gangs, drugs, lowlifes. Stay in Madera, it’s safe here, it’s families here.
    O: I can only say what my experience was.
    C: I don’t know why your Aunt Liz stays there. She’s crazy to stay there, Oppen.
    O: She was a generous host.

A CAREER IN SALES
    A few days later, I was on top of the fast-food place dumpster corral, I was pulling a broken television off the chain-link roof of the dumpster corral, it had appeared since the last time I’d been up there, I am doomed to be haunted by televisions, at least this one was broken, I was up top when a large maroon Mercedes-Benz pulled up, Paul Renfro at the wheel. You should have seen him, he looked like the king of the neighborhood, talk about a man of the world, he was wearing a white button-up shirt and a red bow tie, and when he got out of the car I could see he was wearing fancy black pants too. His shoes weren’t fancy, his shoes were plain running shoes that looked like he’d painted them black, they looked ratty, in fact. I was going to ask him about the shoes, but he told me we didn’t have a lot of time, he wanted to talk with me, he had a proposition. He explained that he’d borrowed the car from his job, the people who had dropped it off were elderly, they were in for a long lunch, their situation was leisurely compared to ours. Paul pointed at the dumpster corral and said that this was typical of what society did thesedays with thinkers, with real thinkers, he said, not those hiding under piles of professional paper, but real thinkers, no wonder the world was short of us. To put food in our mouths we take out the trash and park other people’s cars, his words, even while we single-handedly shove history forward. A prophet is not recognized in his own land, Jesus himself complained about it, Paul’s words. He asked me whether the drive-thru microphone was always on, I did not know, so we moved to the outdoor dining table behind the restaurant, the lone table on a square of concrete next to a patch of grass, out of earshot, out of microphone shot, of the drive-thru. Paul asked me whether I wanted to work at the fast-food place for the rest of my life, whether I wanted to be absorbed into the mass of anonymous nonthinkers. I hadn’t thought about it that way, I had been focused on the philosophy of the training video, I was trying to live by it, I was trying my best to be a part of the great big family that was the fast-food place, I told Paul that Aunt Liz and I were looking for the same thing, that we were both interested in my becoming a man of the world, and part of that idea was working at the fastfood place, and part of working at the fast-food place was what was on the training video. Paul’s eyebrows went up. He said that nonthinkers have always treated the thinkers like this, always, and the thinkers have always taken it, the thinkers have always locked themselves up and starved themselves to death and only a hundred years later do their papers appear and everyone realizes they were unrecognized geniuses, his words, this has always been so but it doesn’t have to be. In Paul’s estimation there was no reason we couldn’t build a solid financial base to enable us to think some advanced thoughts in comfort for once, without all of this car parking and garbage clearing nonsense. Which made sense to me, after all I wasn’t doing any advanced thinking on top of the fast-food place dumpster corral.
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    They say, Juan-George, and by the time you listen to this you will have heard them say, that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a