I first met Don Bronco while working at The Pelican House, a family-style bar and grill, located downtown in a tourist city with a popular river. I’d only been there a few months, tending bar, so to me, Don was a veteran; and with nearly a year in the kitchen, he was.
Time’s different in a restaurant. With fluctuating speeds, it’s ghost town to knee-deep in the weeds in a matter of minutes. So, with no certainty do I remember the exact moment we hit it off. But this, our encounter, was the flap of a butterfly’s wing that changed the world. Or, well, if not the world, then our worlds. The course of our lives. Then again, I was reading a lot of Nabokov back then, so who knows?
But as Nabokov knows, that’s the thing about butterflies and their wings: fate had brought us together initially, so I shouldn’t have been surprised she brought us together again. It was a family vacation in the guise of a “book tour.” A friend of an acquaintance at the college scheduled me for a book signing at the city library’s main branch as a sort of favor to boost programming despite my insisting people did not care about signed books. This was my first visit back to the city since moving hours inland years and years plus another child ago. The Pelican House had tipped into a distant memory. But some things are never fully forgotten. He wasn’t there for the signing. I was surprised he was there at all. I was browsing the shelves as a means to settle my nerves in the lake of pages, words, and thoughts I’d never reach the shore of in one lifetime. And there, across from the Dewey 100s, at the print station scanning documents, was Don Bronco.
We caught up the way people do via small talk, enough to verify our contact info hadn’t changed (it hadn’t) before he excused himself to, because some things never change, not be late for work. Not sure if he actually expected me to text him, but I did the next day.
[edited to be more conversational than epistolary]
DR: What have you been up to since The Pelican House days?
DB: Nothing exciting, really. Know this is supposed to be all gripping and engaging, but since Shell I’ve just tried to get my shit together. And even that’s a struggle. But in a narratively linear sort of way, I was done with The P Hole, done with the whole city, really. So I quit the restaurant. Although, obviously I stayed in the city because here I am. Or, at least, here I am close enough to the city. I’m still technically within its limits but found a decent little spot on the northside damn near the furthest you can get from downtown. Got a roommate now, and my roommate has a dog, which is great, the companionship of a pet without the responsibility. Got a new gig managing a sandwich shop. Pays not great and the only benefits are hanging out with goofball coworkers, but that’s the price to pay for no stress sammies. I don’t even have to bake the bread. This lady comes in super early, Shelia, she does that. What about you? What you been up to?
DR: Oh, this isn’t about me. But since you asked: Got an offer to take on a couple of courses at a college, which ironically is in my wife’s hometown. It was a community college back when she was growing up and apparently a pretty wild spot—or, so she’s implied without going into details—but it has since been bought out and is now a full-fledged, booming university. It sort of pays the bills, but I enjoy it. Can’t have everything.
DB: So, you’re a writing professor?
DR: Technically. Teach a comp. course, which for the most part is surface level: grammar, structure, citation, and the like.
DB: Assumed it’d be creative writing.
DR: Too new. Officially, at least. But in a way I do and in a way I don’t. There are limits to the basic, formal 5-paragraph essays assigned. So creativity takes the form of setting clear, concise thoughts on paper. Push them to find that buried thought trying to escape from under the initial thought. Sure, the initial thought will make the grade, but a grade’s in no way indicative of learning.
But what I enjoy teaching most are lit courses. For myself as much as for the students. This is where a true creative writing class schools. I introduce the extensive plethora of words in the hope someone finds a spark, an idea, a style. Because all art is mimesis, but you know this. Cave paintings are of encountered animals. Still-lifes are the objects seen. The Statue of David is a person. Starry Night is what and how Van Gogh saw from his window. Even fantastical creatures when broken down are a composite of the bits and pieces of other things. Nothing new under the sun (which itself isn’t a new phrase). So creative writing is in the world the way literature is in the words.
Then again, with this sort of ramble, if I was one of my students, I’d fail myself.
DB: Think it’s obvious I agree. About the art stuff. Not the failing. Got no guidelines on that. Although, I did stumble upon Lynda Barry’s Syllabus at the library, which, full circle, I wouldn’t have known existed if it wasn’t for the library. But this does have guidelines. And homework. And suggestions. And all the while, it inspires. Her style is as neat as her style as a teacher: basically, you put in the effort and, by effort see thought, you make the grade. Doesn’t have to be great. But it must be attempted from a place of sincerity. Or fun. Or honesty. Or whatever else I attempt to put into each and every sandwich I make. High art’s nothing but the rich high on themselves.
DR: I’ve never heard of Lynda Barry, so please excuse any ignorance. But it seems, accordingly, if I didn’t know better, you are a sandwich artist.
DB: Fuck Subway. Otherwise, artist? Who’s to say?
DR: I’m not as passionate. Although I am more partial to Jersey Mike’s myself.
DB: My spot’s a local chain, so I think it’s safe to say if I was on a trip or something out of town and wanted a taste of home, then yeah, Jersey Mike’s ain’t bad.
DR: You a sandwich influencer?
DB: Like a social media thing?
DR: I don’t know. Like an attempt at wit.
DB: Cause I tend to stay off those things. I can barely stay atop word counts, let alone the refining and polishing, that equates to my sporadic, once-to-never submission rate to maintain pace with the constant barrage of liking content and notifying content and creating content, content, content… But who knows? My phone has a decent camera, and all these pictures I’ve gotten into taking might one day need an outlet. Stranger things have happened throughout the seasons.
DR: Didn’t you use that in Shell?
DB: Use what?
DR: The Stranger Things reference.
DB: Oh, maybe. I’d have to go back and look, which I’m not going to. But that was back when the first season came out, so it’s possible. Haven’t seen it since, so any other allusion is accidental and beyond me. Although, I’m not opposed; it’s just not something I’ve done. Would probably need to rewatch the first reason. Refresh. I remember the big scenes: the Christmas lights, the pool, the graboid-face creature, where I was and who I was with. But I’m sure the nuances have escaped me.
DR: Was it with that girl from the restaurant?
DB: Doesn’t matter.
DR: Have you seen her lately?
DB: No.
DR: Speaking of, have you heard from—what’s his name? That guy you were hanging around with in Shell. Ezekiel, wasn’t it?
DB: You mean Zeek? Nah, all that’s behind me. Although, it was the weirdest thing. A fluke circumstance or whatever. But when I first moved into the new spot, my roommate was watching some game, being a big baseball guy, and during the commercials there he was—Zeek, not my roommate—for just a blip, brown suit, briefcase, mustache, and all standing at the edge a pool, pushing insurance, I think.
DR: You don’t know what he’s up to otherwise?
DB: Can only assume he’s a star.
DR: What about anyone else from The Pelican House? You keep in touch?
DB: Ha, no. Which is amazingly easy with no social media accounts. People tend to think it’s fake when I say that, which amuses me cause it ain’t no more fake than a curated online existence. Or a quest for pings of dopamine and exaggerations to be liked. Like trying to navigate high school with the whole world, every voice spewing, from the scholars to the trolls, yet where no one is heard. It’s white noise. Wifi’s the new airborne toxic event. I get my little hits of dope from other bowls. What about you?
DR: Have social accounts. But still don’t keep in touch in that or any other way. Never really had strong ties to the place. It was just a gig to get by, which we barely did, while I finished up some semesters. I think other than Stephanie and a couple of regulars, I interacted with you the most, anyway.
DB: I don’t think I remember a Stephanie.
DR: She was a hostess. Had that weird thing for Dave. Although, don’t think they trusted her on the floor because she disdained people.
DB: Fucking Dave, man. Why was there always “a thing for Dave?” Like, how?
DR: Every sandwich has two sides.
DB: What you know about sandwiches?
DR: Believe me, I’m no expert. But I’ve had a few.
DB: Ok, then: what if a sandwich isn’t a metaphor here? What if a sandwich is just a sandwich? And metaphors are limited because they can’t mean more than what we create? What if we acknowledge a similarity without attributing what we want to see? Life isn’t as something—life is something. Yet realities aren’t the same as understandings. Maybe all the Daves mean everything and nothing in the same way that art is as meaningless to some as it is to others meaningful.
DR: I’ve always leaned towards the notion everything’s a symbol for something else in the same way these shapes make letters make words make meaning: but I think I’m following…
DB: Shit, man. I don’t know. I’m thinking like how scholars continue to debate if Apuleius’s 1st-century retelling of Lucius, or the Ass was intended to be an entertainment or a philosophical fable. Then layered onto this with how either side of this debate leads to zero forward progress for the world at large. Like, as an example, eradicating hunger, the opposite of what I do by making sandwiches. Either that, or now you just got me thinking about sandwiches. But whatever, it’s just an idea: it’ll come, it’ll go, it’ll change the world or be forgotten.
DR: Do think you’re right, though. Now thinking about sandwiches. Going to go make one.
DB: What’s your poison?
DR: Guess whatever I can find.
DB: I’m going PB&J.
DR: Simple and classic.
DB: Yet we don’t make them at the shop.