Strip Malls
The restaurant was part of a chain of businesses stretched along the main roadway in Olmsted County, Minnesota. Chains of pharmacies, hardware stores, pet shops and places that sold furniture & baskets of potpourri and maybe few restaurants were commonly known as strip malls and sometimes as mini malls. As the world or the American part of the world grew, it spread sideways rather than up, so when driving along a highway a driver could see a strip mall with a Home Depot, a Target, a Barnes & Noble, a Michael’s, an Old Navy, a Bed Bath & Beyond and probably an Applebee’s or if not Applebee’s then a T.G.I. Friday’s. Later along the same highway in the next town or maybe just on the other side of the same town, there would be another strip mall. This one had a Home Depot, a Target, a Barnes & Noble, a Michael’s, an Old Navy, a Bed Bath & Beyond and a Blockbuster. The strip malls were still strip malls though most people didn’t call them that. The business just became the place where people parked their cars and traded their money for things. They had names like South Oakwood Tree Bluff View Shopping Center, but no real way to distinguish them against any other type of shopping because for most people this was the only type of shopping they would do all year. The strip mall in Olmsted County, along Broadway Avenue the busiest road in the area, was more of a traditional strip mall. Not that there was anything especially noble about being a traditional strip mall. For the most part it just meant that the businesses were a little smaller, less colorful and more nationally unknown. There were those nationally popular stores in Olmsted County, but just not as many along this particular strip of storefronts.
Olmsted County, the only county in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes without a natural lake, is situated near the Southeast corner of Minnesota, which is not a small state but not quite a big one either. The famous twin cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis float a good two-hour drive along Interstate 90 up north out of Olmsted County.
Referring to a place by its county usually hints that there is going to be some talk about farming or ranching and that sort of thing. Olmsted County would be a picturesque example of a community connected by dirt rounds and a post office where the men talk about crops and the women talk about the men and the children go to church socials and picnics and the bad children smoke cigarettes and use curse words. But Olmsted County’s county seat is Rochester, MN, a town named after its founder’s hometown, Rochester, NY. The Rochester of Minnesota is in no way a pathetic city, and out of the 16 places named Rochester in the United States of America, only the original Rochester, NY has a greater population.
Rochester once was pathetic city or just another small town, a place where it wouldn’t have seemed as silly to be named after another city in the same country because every place had to be named after something and wouldn’t you have to say it was silly then that Rochester, NY used to be called Rochesterville and silly that that name came from Colonel Nathaniel Rochester’s last name and wasn’t it so damn silly that a town be named after a man from the same country.
It had been a long time since Rochester, MN was pathetic, and now Rochester wasn’t pathetic anymore because years before the turn of the 20th century a tornado had ruined most of the town, the crops and barns were knocked over. A doctor and the local nunnery set up a hospital to care for the injured. The hospital stuck around after the tornado injuries had passed through, and by now the whole city of 100,000 people has in someway something to do with the hospital or the clinic or the research facilities. And if somebody didn’t end up on the Mayo Clinic’s payroll, then they owned a shop or a restaurant where most of the money came from people who did. So Rochester had a downtown or something like it. Most of the buildings were Clinic buildings or hotels and few bar & grill type restaurants huddled around the hotels. The restaurant that is now part of a strip mall used to be one of these hotel-side restaurants in the downtown of Rochester. Doctors in neat suit coats had jogged in for a quick lunch. Three dollars got two slices of pizza and a can of pop, a word Minnesotans use instead of soda. Though they would have said everybody else used the word soda instead of pop. The pop cans were in a big salad bowl of ice and it was one of the restaurant worker’s jobs to keep the bowl filled with five Coca Cola Classics, five Diet Cokes, two Sprites, two Orange Crushes, two Dr. Peppers and one Schweppes ginger ale. He didn’t have to worry about filling the bowl with ice because the lunch rush only lasted thirty minutes or so. They left the bowl with the drinks out for an hour after the lunch crowd and when the restaurant emptied out there were usually a few drinks floating belly up in the cold water of the salad bowl. Nearby a few stiff looking slices baked in the heated pizza case.
At night the restaurant was a family dining area and a bar constantly lined with doctors, loosening their ties and emptying their beer pints while talking in loud voices about their committee meetings and staffing problems. There were regulars at the bar who came each night to drink more than the others and often more than they ought to have. By 10:00 p.m. on weekdays and 11:00 p.m. on Friday and Saturday the place was empty again except for a few at the bar refusing to leave without another beer. And if they couldn’t have another beer could they have a taxi called or could they just have a shot of something hard so they could straighten out their mind enough to locate their car keys.
Three months before the restaurant left for the strip mall, the four-year lease on their building downtown ran out. The owners of Oxxxxxx’s Pizza Pub, Sxxxxxx, Exxx and their brother Bxxxx Oxxxxxx, had originally planed on simply extending the lease for another four years. The owner of the building, Fred Garner (a owner of many buildings downtown: the Red Lobster, the North Star Bar, the Eagle Drug Store were a few) thought things were going well enough downtown for him to raise the rent by 50 percent. The building, a marble and stone bank building, was emptied out of everything over a period of two weeks. The Oxxxxxx’s found a cheaper lease of a larger space on a strip mall where the last local record store had just closed down. The new location had plaster walls and storefront dress code. Everything on the outside of any shop along the strip had to be approved by the landlord and had to fit with the color scheme of the neighbors. The ovens and the tables and chairs were all loaded onto trucks and carried down the street for half a mile to the new location. The four 50-light chandeliers that used to hang from the old bank building downtown suddenly disappeared sometime during those two weeks.
Bxxxx Oxxxxxx had told Mr. Garner, “I didn’t have anything to do with your missing chandeliers and it’s such a goddamn shame you don’t have them anymore.”
“I hope you haven’t done something very stupid,” said Mr. Garner. “I’ve gone to the police about this and don’t expect me to give you any pardon just because you used to rent my building.”
“I never wanted your pardon and I certainly don’t want your building anymore now that it doesn’t even have four great big chandeliers hanging in it. If you want to talk to me ever again you can write me a letter and mail it to me because I’m sick of seeing your ugly face and smelling your ugly smelly breathe.” Only he didn’t say ugly and he often said words that weren’t the word ugly but were considered ugly. He said them to men often and to women too often.
Bxxxx never said anything to anybody again in Rochester about the chandeliers because most people didn’t ask. But most people in Rochester had never been to his house in Lake City, along the Mississippi River 45 miles east of Olmsted County. Most people had never been inside Bxxxx’s three-car garage that was lit like the Grand Ballroom at the Waldorf=Astoria.
Bxxxx drove to Rochester from his house in Lake City six days out of seven to spin the pizza dough at the restaurant and occasionally pour beers when the bartender, John, Chad or Kory had to, as Bxxxx like to call it, “go and make a mess in the bathroom.” Each time he substituted as the bartender he leaned on the bar and waited for him to return and when he did he always said something nasty to the bartender while winking at whoever might be seating at the bar close enough to hear him.
“Did you leave a mess again?” he said once. “Am I going to have to send one of the dish boys down there with a bucket and mop? Are they going to have to pull their shirts over their noses because you left such a stink in the bowl again?”
“Oh you know me Bxxxx,” said the bartender. He made himself laugh and watched Bxxxx laugh and watched Bxxxx slap his knee, laughing loud all the time.
“I am funny aren’t I?” He winked again at the bar and said, “And good looking.”
The bathrooms used to be in the basement when the restaurant was downtown. When the bartender came back he usually had just ran up the stairs.
“Boy that took a lot out you didn’t it?” Bxxxx said when the bartender came back breathing heavily from the stairs. “You look like you just lost twenty pounds. Did you give birth down there? Are you crying or just sweating? Was it hard work down there all alone?”
“Oh you know me Bxxxx,” he said that time again and watched Bxxxx slap his knee, laugh and wink at the bar. Then Bxxxx returned to the kitchen to roll out the pizza dough. He did it all day long for the six days a week he was at the restaurant. When the business was not too fast he threw the flat disc of dough around on his hand. If there were children waiting for their family to be seated he rolled out small pieces of dough and walked to the front. He kneeled by them and talked at their eye level.
“Are you ready to learn how to throw pizza dough?” He asked them.
“Yes. No. Mom is it okay if I learn how to throw?” one of the little girls asked. It was okay and she reached out for the dough, but Bxxxx held the dough and spoke to her.
“Hold out your hands,” he said. “Put your thumbs in and make fists on top of your thumbs. Now when you have the dough on top of your fists you twist them like this. Yes, then you untwist at the same time as you throw the dough in the air. If you don’t have your thumbs in they’re going to catch on the dough and rip it.”
He tossed it once for himself then gave dough to each of the girls and watched the girls throw the dough. If they ripped the dough he pinched it together, but he let the girls pick up the dough off the ground if they dropped it. He smiled at the girls’ mother and shook hands with the father. They both thanked him and he said goodbye to the girls asking them to throw the dough in the garbage when they were done.
When he returned to the kitchen he said to the cook leaning against the prep table, “Did you see the those?”
“The little girls? Yes, they’re cute aren’t they,” he said.
“No, not the girls,” Bxxxx said. He leaned forward with his chin pushing on his big chest. “You mean to tell me that you were looking at the little bastards running around when their mom was standing right there with tits the size of your head?”
“Oh yes, those. Sure I saw those,” he said.
“Are you a faggot, Dylan?” He asked. “If you are, you know, I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t have a problem with faggots. Only if you’re a faggot then you shouldn’t be carrying on like you’re not a faggot. If you’re a faggot then be a faggot and that’s that.”
“I’m not gay, Bxxxx,” Dylan said to his boss. “I just wasn’t looking. That’s all.”
“I’d sure like to play around with those for an hour or two,” Bxxxx said not to the cook anymore, but not really to himself. “Watch them stick out through her shirt like nails when she walks passed the air conditioner. The cold air hits them and the turkey’s done.”
The mother, her husband and the two girls were seated at a both in the middle of the dining area. Bxxxx could see them under the florescent rectangle of light from the low ceiling above them. As they finished their pizza and pitcher of root beer, the sun was past the horizon and the lights on all the businesses of the strip mall turned on together at once.
Olmsted County, the only county in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes without a natural lake, is situated near the Southeast corner of Minnesota, which is not a small state but not quite a big one either. The famous twin cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis float a good two-hour drive along Interstate 90 up north out of Olmsted County.
Referring to a place by its county usually hints that there is going to be some talk about farming or ranching and that sort of thing. Olmsted County would be a picturesque example of a community connected by dirt rounds and a post office where the men talk about crops and the women talk about the men and the children go to church socials and picnics and the bad children smoke cigarettes and use curse words. But Olmsted County’s county seat is Rochester, MN, a town named after its founder’s hometown, Rochester, NY. The Rochester of Minnesota is in no way a pathetic city, and out of the 16 places named Rochester in the United States of America, only the original Rochester, NY has a greater population.
Rochester once was pathetic city or just another small town, a place where it wouldn’t have seemed as silly to be named after another city in the same country because every place had to be named after something and wouldn’t you have to say it was silly then that Rochester, NY used to be called Rochesterville and silly that that name came from Colonel Nathaniel Rochester’s last name and wasn’t it so damn silly that a town be named after a man from the same country.
It had been a long time since Rochester, MN was pathetic, and now Rochester wasn’t pathetic anymore because years before the turn of the 20th century a tornado had ruined most of the town, the crops and barns were knocked over. A doctor and the local nunnery set up a hospital to care for the injured. The hospital stuck around after the tornado injuries had passed through, and by now the whole city of 100,000 people has in someway something to do with the hospital or the clinic or the research facilities. And if somebody didn’t end up on the Mayo Clinic’s payroll, then they owned a shop or a restaurant where most of the money came from people who did. So Rochester had a downtown or something like it. Most of the buildings were Clinic buildings or hotels and few bar & grill type restaurants huddled around the hotels. The restaurant that is now part of a strip mall used to be one of these hotel-side restaurants in the downtown of Rochester. Doctors in neat suit coats had jogged in for a quick lunch. Three dollars got two slices of pizza and a can of pop, a word Minnesotans use instead of soda. Though they would have said everybody else used the word soda instead of pop. The pop cans were in a big salad bowl of ice and it was one of the restaurant worker’s jobs to keep the bowl filled with five Coca Cola Classics, five Diet Cokes, two Sprites, two Orange Crushes, two Dr. Peppers and one Schweppes ginger ale. He didn’t have to worry about filling the bowl with ice because the lunch rush only lasted thirty minutes or so. They left the bowl with the drinks out for an hour after the lunch crowd and when the restaurant emptied out there were usually a few drinks floating belly up in the cold water of the salad bowl. Nearby a few stiff looking slices baked in the heated pizza case.
At night the restaurant was a family dining area and a bar constantly lined with doctors, loosening their ties and emptying their beer pints while talking in loud voices about their committee meetings and staffing problems. There were regulars at the bar who came each night to drink more than the others and often more than they ought to have. By 10:00 p.m. on weekdays and 11:00 p.m. on Friday and Saturday the place was empty again except for a few at the bar refusing to leave without another beer. And if they couldn’t have another beer could they have a taxi called or could they just have a shot of something hard so they could straighten out their mind enough to locate their car keys.
Three months before the restaurant left for the strip mall, the four-year lease on their building downtown ran out. The owners of Oxxxxxx’s Pizza Pub, Sxxxxxx, Exxx and their brother Bxxxx Oxxxxxx, had originally planed on simply extending the lease for another four years. The owner of the building, Fred Garner (a owner of many buildings downtown: the Red Lobster, the North Star Bar, the Eagle Drug Store were a few) thought things were going well enough downtown for him to raise the rent by 50 percent. The building, a marble and stone bank building, was emptied out of everything over a period of two weeks. The Oxxxxxx’s found a cheaper lease of a larger space on a strip mall where the last local record store had just closed down. The new location had plaster walls and storefront dress code. Everything on the outside of any shop along the strip had to be approved by the landlord and had to fit with the color scheme of the neighbors. The ovens and the tables and chairs were all loaded onto trucks and carried down the street for half a mile to the new location. The four 50-light chandeliers that used to hang from the old bank building downtown suddenly disappeared sometime during those two weeks.
Bxxxx Oxxxxxx had told Mr. Garner, “I didn’t have anything to do with your missing chandeliers and it’s such a goddamn shame you don’t have them anymore.”
“I hope you haven’t done something very stupid,” said Mr. Garner. “I’ve gone to the police about this and don’t expect me to give you any pardon just because you used to rent my building.”
“I never wanted your pardon and I certainly don’t want your building anymore now that it doesn’t even have four great big chandeliers hanging in it. If you want to talk to me ever again you can write me a letter and mail it to me because I’m sick of seeing your ugly face and smelling your ugly smelly breathe.” Only he didn’t say ugly and he often said words that weren’t the word ugly but were considered ugly. He said them to men often and to women too often.
Bxxxx never said anything to anybody again in Rochester about the chandeliers because most people didn’t ask. But most people in Rochester had never been to his house in Lake City, along the Mississippi River 45 miles east of Olmsted County. Most people had never been inside Bxxxx’s three-car garage that was lit like the Grand Ballroom at the Waldorf=Astoria.
Bxxxx drove to Rochester from his house in Lake City six days out of seven to spin the pizza dough at the restaurant and occasionally pour beers when the bartender, John, Chad or Kory had to, as Bxxxx like to call it, “go and make a mess in the bathroom.” Each time he substituted as the bartender he leaned on the bar and waited for him to return and when he did he always said something nasty to the bartender while winking at whoever might be seating at the bar close enough to hear him.
“Did you leave a mess again?” he said once. “Am I going to have to send one of the dish boys down there with a bucket and mop? Are they going to have to pull their shirts over their noses because you left such a stink in the bowl again?”
“Oh you know me Bxxxx,” said the bartender. He made himself laugh and watched Bxxxx laugh and watched Bxxxx slap his knee, laughing loud all the time.
“I am funny aren’t I?” He winked again at the bar and said, “And good looking.”
The bathrooms used to be in the basement when the restaurant was downtown. When the bartender came back he usually had just ran up the stairs.
“Boy that took a lot out you didn’t it?” Bxxxx said when the bartender came back breathing heavily from the stairs. “You look like you just lost twenty pounds. Did you give birth down there? Are you crying or just sweating? Was it hard work down there all alone?”
“Oh you know me Bxxxx,” he said that time again and watched Bxxxx slap his knee, laugh and wink at the bar. Then Bxxxx returned to the kitchen to roll out the pizza dough. He did it all day long for the six days a week he was at the restaurant. When the business was not too fast he threw the flat disc of dough around on his hand. If there were children waiting for their family to be seated he rolled out small pieces of dough and walked to the front. He kneeled by them and talked at their eye level.
“Are you ready to learn how to throw pizza dough?” He asked them.
“Yes. No. Mom is it okay if I learn how to throw?” one of the little girls asked. It was okay and she reached out for the dough, but Bxxxx held the dough and spoke to her.
“Hold out your hands,” he said. “Put your thumbs in and make fists on top of your thumbs. Now when you have the dough on top of your fists you twist them like this. Yes, then you untwist at the same time as you throw the dough in the air. If you don’t have your thumbs in they’re going to catch on the dough and rip it.”
He tossed it once for himself then gave dough to each of the girls and watched the girls throw the dough. If they ripped the dough he pinched it together, but he let the girls pick up the dough off the ground if they dropped it. He smiled at the girls’ mother and shook hands with the father. They both thanked him and he said goodbye to the girls asking them to throw the dough in the garbage when they were done.
When he returned to the kitchen he said to the cook leaning against the prep table, “Did you see the those?”
“The little girls? Yes, they’re cute aren’t they,” he said.
“No, not the girls,” Bxxxx said. He leaned forward with his chin pushing on his big chest. “You mean to tell me that you were looking at the little bastards running around when their mom was standing right there with tits the size of your head?”
“Oh yes, those. Sure I saw those,” he said.
“Are you a faggot, Dylan?” He asked. “If you are, you know, I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t have a problem with faggots. Only if you’re a faggot then you shouldn’t be carrying on like you’re not a faggot. If you’re a faggot then be a faggot and that’s that.”
“I’m not gay, Bxxxx,” Dylan said to his boss. “I just wasn’t looking. That’s all.”
“I’d sure like to play around with those for an hour or two,” Bxxxx said not to the cook anymore, but not really to himself. “Watch them stick out through her shirt like nails when she walks passed the air conditioner. The cold air hits them and the turkey’s done.”
The mother, her husband and the two girls were seated at a both in the middle of the dining area. Bxxxx could see them under the florescent rectangle of light from the low ceiling above them. As they finished their pizza and pitcher of root beer, the sun was past the horizon and the lights on all the businesses of the strip mall turned on together at once.
posted by Gary Crane at 10:25 PM
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