Paris on Passyunk Avenue
Brian Rodan

I
work at a computer monitor in a windowless office on the second floor of a
1960s strip mall at Drones over America in the back of Heritage Springs
Shopping Center in Overland Park, Kansas.
Carly Foley works at a clothing store at Deer Run Mall in Gwinnett,
Georgia. I have never met Carly. Carly
had sex in her Chevy Volt with a moon-roof window in the Deer Run Mall parking
lot with her store’s married regional manager.
The store manager got out of the car when he was done, zipped, turned
his head both ways to see if anyone was looking, then got in his Camry and drove
away. The incident together with all
names and license numbers and video is recorded, of course, in the file. Carly has never heard of me or Drones over
America which her husband hired. However,
what I think is important to her even if she doesn’t know it. It matters to her what I think because I
follow her with the drones from my
monitor in Kansas. Carly has lots of issues,
relationship issues, financial issues, emotional issues, sexual issues, all on
videotape and in the file.
I have to decide if I will flush Carly’s life down the drain. That’s my job at DOA, flushing people’s lives down the drain. You need to know, and I have come to learn from my job which deals in large measure with human degradation and suffering, that for some people, for certain lives or certain portions of lives, that the appropriate response is a good flush. I just have not made up my mind about Carly. It might seem like this is all about Carly, but not really. Carly is just one more disembodied person on my monitor. The decision is really all about me.
Mimi and Gabriel have been on my mind a lot lately. I grew up in my parents 3-story row house on Passyunk Avenue in South Philly. Mimi and Gabriel lived in an identical 3-story row house which was directly across the street, the windows and doors lined up in perfect parallel uniformity. Mimi and Gabriel were in their 80s, they kept to themselves and they were just “the really old people across the street.” Passyunk is a narrow street which cuts diagonally across South Philly. From my monitor in Overland Park I can follow every turn, every street, every foot and mile between South Philly and Kansas. Yet, even with all this huge-assed pile of detailed information, I still lose my way and get lost and I can’t remember how I got where I am. That’s what happens along the way. Despite all the good intentions and no matter how much information piles up, I still get lost in the weeds and lose my way. I need to figure this out before I can decide about Carly.
When I left the condo this morning Sandy had this weird expression on her face. Her lips were pushed together and then twisted off at an angle. Sandy is my third wife, or is it fourth, no it is definitely third wife. And, she did not seem like she wanted to make eye contact when we were saying goodbye this morning at the door to the condo. She was rattling about an oil change or returning a top she bought at Target. It was a nervous prattling. She was just rambling on and on.
Sandy is not so close to me lately. She doesn’t ask to meet me at the Pepper Pot for lunch anymore. This thing with Sandy, this loss of the Pepper Pot, is giving me a feeling a tightness in my stomach and lower back. Or, maybe this feeling is just that slipped disk in my back or too much sitting at the monitor without exercise. Still, there is a strange little uneasiness with Sandy. It feels like we lost our way. That makes me think about Mimi and Gabriel because they were the first people to show me that there could be a way for somebody like me. So, when I wonder about my way, about Sandy, or about what to do with Carly I think of Mimi and Gabriel.
Like I said, I grew up in my parents' row house on Passyunk. Except it didn’t feel like I grew up IN the neighborhood, instead it felt like I grew up suspended OVER it. I was detached from it, as if I were viewing it on a monitor or hydroponically as if I were detached from the soil. Don’t get me wrong, my parents loved me and provided well for me, there were no bullies or horrible secrets which haunted me. There were great families and an intense tradition that came out of the neighborhood in South Philly. The smells and sounds of the neighborhood, the faces of my parents with their heavy accents torturing their lips around “cawfee” for coffee and “wooda” for water, the smell of cheese steaks, onions and peppers cooking and the sound of it sizzling on a hot grill surrounded my life in a dense network of searching and grasping roots. It just wasn’t for me, it didn’t take root in me. I didn’t belong there, I was lost.
I was 14 years old and I lay in bed in my third floor bedroom of my parents' row house. It was a summer afternoon, the window to the room was open. Mimi and Gabriel were visible at home in their house across the street, visible to me out the window framed between my sneakers at the end of my bed. Mimi and Gabriel had always lived across the street but they had kept to themselves. They were invisible and had faded into the background, just “the really old people across the street.” But, that day was different. That was the first time I actually noticed them. They had been promoted in my life from mere background to people with an identity. I sat up in my bed and looked, really looked, and studied them through their windows across the street. Their rooms were filled with heavy dark wooden furniture with secrets and memories carved deeply carved into the dark mahogany. The rooms were dark and shadowy. Inside the house I could see a dining table which was covered with a yellowed lace table cloth. Ceramic vases of nymphs or whatever that was were visible on the window sills and inside the rooms. I was spying into their lives, looking into a time capsule.
They were dancing slowly in their living room on the first floor. Gabriel was a tall man and Mimi was short. I could hear music from a scratchy record, a woman was singing in French, it sounded like a sad song with a soft piano accompaniment. Gabriel held Mimi to his chest but she kept her face away from his shirt to keep from smearing her makeup or the mound of curls died an unnatural bright red, not gray, and constructed carefully into a tower of Babel of hair from a bygone time atop her head. Once I realized that these were real people with real lives then a flood of other memories about Mimi and Gabriel were drawn to the surface as if by an ointment. They greeted people on Passyunk Avenue with “bonjour” with a heavy almost exaggerated comical cartoon-ish French accent.
My father said “they have that first generation immigrant look.” I didn’t know what he meant. But, when Mimi walked by, whether near an open window even an open third floor window or on Passyunk Avenue, a residual cloud of stale and strong perfume surrounded and trailed after her. Mimi wore dresses and stockings always and her eyebrows were shaved then painted on in lines floating high over her eyes on her forehead. Gabriel walked with his back straight and head held high, he would not let himself be dragged into a slouched posture by the weight of his age, like most 80 year olds. Gabriel’s pants were worn high and his shirts were buttoned to the top button, always. They didn’t have to say it, but the words were always there with them, “from the Old Country.”
“Don’t let them fool you,” my father said. “They’re not from Paris. And, they are not French. They don’t want to be just one more Italian in South Philly. So, they say they are French. Who cares?” My father’s words seemed mean-spirited and petty and it pained me to hear him say them. He was bigger than those words.
Mimi and Gabriel didn’t belong to Passyunk Avenue where they lived or to the time period that they lived in. Their row house on Passyunk Avenue was Paris for them, a manufactured Paris which they had never lived in and which had never existed except in their minds. It was their gothic cathedral which they built brick-by-brick, spire-by-spire. Mimi and Gabriel wrapped themselves contentedly in their manufactured Parisian lives.
I realized in that moment, watching Mimi and Gabriel, that I was free of South Philly and could create my own path in life just like them. Paris on Passyunk belonged to Mimi and Gabriel not me, of course. And, I didn’t know why South Philly belonged to my parents but not me, but it did. It would be several years before I found my way to Overland Park, Kansas. The vision of Mimi and Gabriel strolling the streets of their imaginary Paris on Passyunk Avenue has always inspired and sustained me over the last 22 years.
Jan Ting is my boss at DOA. Ting gives me only cheating-wives investigations at DOA. That’s how I got Carly Foley. Ting walks around the offices at DOA during the shift, up and down the rows of employees in the windowless rooms, looking over our shoulders as we work at our monitors. When Ting comes up behind me, as I work at my monitor, he makes sad and slow “tisk, tisk, tisk” sounds over my head. Ting pats me on the shoulder with his fingers, it’s a fatherly touch even though Ting is in his twenties and a decade younger than me. When Ting stands behind me I wonder if he will say to me one more time the words that he has told me so many times before. “So sorry,” Ting says in his hard to follow heavy Chinese accent. I know what he means. He is sorry that all of my marriages ended because all my wives cheated on me. Ting doesn’t know about that odd feeling that I’m getting about Sandy lately. Ting doesn’t need to know about Sandy and me. I’m not going to tell him.
“You are very good at this work,” Ting tells me in broken English. But, Ting doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. There are times when I feel lost and confused about my life and about what I am doing at DOA and I do things I am not supposed to do. Maybe, if Ting is not looking, entire files get deleted. Or drone cameras are pointed away in the wrong direction so as not to record the errant behavior which DOA is being highly paid to record. Or, notes are not made in a file. And, there have even been times, lots and lots of times, that I send messages, anonymous undocumented messages to the subjects of my investigations, “Being watched! Beware! Stop it now!” I wait and see if the warnings are heeded, and whether they change and stop their indiscretions which I am paid to record. Nobody ever stops, nobody ever listens. The results seem so inevitable but maybe someone will listen, just once.
So, back to Carly Foley, the subject of my investigation this week. She’s got me thinking about Mimi and Gabriel and about their Paris on Passyunk. I think of poor Carly and how tangled her life must be, about how trapped she must feel in a web that she has created all by herself, hiding so much, so very much from her husband and her friends. Maybe if she could start over, she could disentangle from it all. So, I ask myself what I am going to do with poor Carly. The decision is all mine. Then, it becomes clear what I must do.
Flush! There goes Carly! Too bad for her! I know now that investigation is what I was born to do. I learned that looking in the window at Paris on Passyunk, in the frame formed by my sneakers. And when I follow my bliss, people just get hurt.
Then, I turned to my computer and emailed my Carly Foley report, with all the incriminating video attached, to Carly’s husband. I felt deep and warm satisfaction all over, even relieving that tightness in my lower back, as I sent my report to the husband. Just like Ting said, I am good at this work. Ting will be pleased. There will be no anonymous warnings or second chances this time.
I have to decide if I will flush Carly’s life down the drain. That’s my job at DOA, flushing people’s lives down the drain. You need to know, and I have come to learn from my job which deals in large measure with human degradation and suffering, that for some people, for certain lives or certain portions of lives, that the appropriate response is a good flush. I just have not made up my mind about Carly. It might seem like this is all about Carly, but not really. Carly is just one more disembodied person on my monitor. The decision is really all about me.
Mimi and Gabriel have been on my mind a lot lately. I grew up in my parents 3-story row house on Passyunk Avenue in South Philly. Mimi and Gabriel lived in an identical 3-story row house which was directly across the street, the windows and doors lined up in perfect parallel uniformity. Mimi and Gabriel were in their 80s, they kept to themselves and they were just “the really old people across the street.” Passyunk is a narrow street which cuts diagonally across South Philly. From my monitor in Overland Park I can follow every turn, every street, every foot and mile between South Philly and Kansas. Yet, even with all this huge-assed pile of detailed information, I still lose my way and get lost and I can’t remember how I got where I am. That’s what happens along the way. Despite all the good intentions and no matter how much information piles up, I still get lost in the weeds and lose my way. I need to figure this out before I can decide about Carly.
When I left the condo this morning Sandy had this weird expression on her face. Her lips were pushed together and then twisted off at an angle. Sandy is my third wife, or is it fourth, no it is definitely third wife. And, she did not seem like she wanted to make eye contact when we were saying goodbye this morning at the door to the condo. She was rattling about an oil change or returning a top she bought at Target. It was a nervous prattling. She was just rambling on and on.
Sandy is not so close to me lately. She doesn’t ask to meet me at the Pepper Pot for lunch anymore. This thing with Sandy, this loss of the Pepper Pot, is giving me a feeling a tightness in my stomach and lower back. Or, maybe this feeling is just that slipped disk in my back or too much sitting at the monitor without exercise. Still, there is a strange little uneasiness with Sandy. It feels like we lost our way. That makes me think about Mimi and Gabriel because they were the first people to show me that there could be a way for somebody like me. So, when I wonder about my way, about Sandy, or about what to do with Carly I think of Mimi and Gabriel.
Like I said, I grew up in my parents' row house on Passyunk. Except it didn’t feel like I grew up IN the neighborhood, instead it felt like I grew up suspended OVER it. I was detached from it, as if I were viewing it on a monitor or hydroponically as if I were detached from the soil. Don’t get me wrong, my parents loved me and provided well for me, there were no bullies or horrible secrets which haunted me. There were great families and an intense tradition that came out of the neighborhood in South Philly. The smells and sounds of the neighborhood, the faces of my parents with their heavy accents torturing their lips around “cawfee” for coffee and “wooda” for water, the smell of cheese steaks, onions and peppers cooking and the sound of it sizzling on a hot grill surrounded my life in a dense network of searching and grasping roots. It just wasn’t for me, it didn’t take root in me. I didn’t belong there, I was lost.
I was 14 years old and I lay in bed in my third floor bedroom of my parents' row house. It was a summer afternoon, the window to the room was open. Mimi and Gabriel were visible at home in their house across the street, visible to me out the window framed between my sneakers at the end of my bed. Mimi and Gabriel had always lived across the street but they had kept to themselves. They were invisible and had faded into the background, just “the really old people across the street.” But, that day was different. That was the first time I actually noticed them. They had been promoted in my life from mere background to people with an identity. I sat up in my bed and looked, really looked, and studied them through their windows across the street. Their rooms were filled with heavy dark wooden furniture with secrets and memories carved deeply carved into the dark mahogany. The rooms were dark and shadowy. Inside the house I could see a dining table which was covered with a yellowed lace table cloth. Ceramic vases of nymphs or whatever that was were visible on the window sills and inside the rooms. I was spying into their lives, looking into a time capsule.
They were dancing slowly in their living room on the first floor. Gabriel was a tall man and Mimi was short. I could hear music from a scratchy record, a woman was singing in French, it sounded like a sad song with a soft piano accompaniment. Gabriel held Mimi to his chest but she kept her face away from his shirt to keep from smearing her makeup or the mound of curls died an unnatural bright red, not gray, and constructed carefully into a tower of Babel of hair from a bygone time atop her head. Once I realized that these were real people with real lives then a flood of other memories about Mimi and Gabriel were drawn to the surface as if by an ointment. They greeted people on Passyunk Avenue with “bonjour” with a heavy almost exaggerated comical cartoon-ish French accent.
My father said “they have that first generation immigrant look.” I didn’t know what he meant. But, when Mimi walked by, whether near an open window even an open third floor window or on Passyunk Avenue, a residual cloud of stale and strong perfume surrounded and trailed after her. Mimi wore dresses and stockings always and her eyebrows were shaved then painted on in lines floating high over her eyes on her forehead. Gabriel walked with his back straight and head held high, he would not let himself be dragged into a slouched posture by the weight of his age, like most 80 year olds. Gabriel’s pants were worn high and his shirts were buttoned to the top button, always. They didn’t have to say it, but the words were always there with them, “from the Old Country.”
“Don’t let them fool you,” my father said. “They’re not from Paris. And, they are not French. They don’t want to be just one more Italian in South Philly. So, they say they are French. Who cares?” My father’s words seemed mean-spirited and petty and it pained me to hear him say them. He was bigger than those words.
Mimi and Gabriel didn’t belong to Passyunk Avenue where they lived or to the time period that they lived in. Their row house on Passyunk Avenue was Paris for them, a manufactured Paris which they had never lived in and which had never existed except in their minds. It was their gothic cathedral which they built brick-by-brick, spire-by-spire. Mimi and Gabriel wrapped themselves contentedly in their manufactured Parisian lives.
I realized in that moment, watching Mimi and Gabriel, that I was free of South Philly and could create my own path in life just like them. Paris on Passyunk belonged to Mimi and Gabriel not me, of course. And, I didn’t know why South Philly belonged to my parents but not me, but it did. It would be several years before I found my way to Overland Park, Kansas. The vision of Mimi and Gabriel strolling the streets of their imaginary Paris on Passyunk Avenue has always inspired and sustained me over the last 22 years.
Jan Ting is my boss at DOA. Ting gives me only cheating-wives investigations at DOA. That’s how I got Carly Foley. Ting walks around the offices at DOA during the shift, up and down the rows of employees in the windowless rooms, looking over our shoulders as we work at our monitors. When Ting comes up behind me, as I work at my monitor, he makes sad and slow “tisk, tisk, tisk” sounds over my head. Ting pats me on the shoulder with his fingers, it’s a fatherly touch even though Ting is in his twenties and a decade younger than me. When Ting stands behind me I wonder if he will say to me one more time the words that he has told me so many times before. “So sorry,” Ting says in his hard to follow heavy Chinese accent. I know what he means. He is sorry that all of my marriages ended because all my wives cheated on me. Ting doesn’t know about that odd feeling that I’m getting about Sandy lately. Ting doesn’t need to know about Sandy and me. I’m not going to tell him.
“You are very good at this work,” Ting tells me in broken English. But, Ting doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. There are times when I feel lost and confused about my life and about what I am doing at DOA and I do things I am not supposed to do. Maybe, if Ting is not looking, entire files get deleted. Or drone cameras are pointed away in the wrong direction so as not to record the errant behavior which DOA is being highly paid to record. Or, notes are not made in a file. And, there have even been times, lots and lots of times, that I send messages, anonymous undocumented messages to the subjects of my investigations, “Being watched! Beware! Stop it now!” I wait and see if the warnings are heeded, and whether they change and stop their indiscretions which I am paid to record. Nobody ever stops, nobody ever listens. The results seem so inevitable but maybe someone will listen, just once.
So, back to Carly Foley, the subject of my investigation this week. She’s got me thinking about Mimi and Gabriel and about their Paris on Passyunk. I think of poor Carly and how tangled her life must be, about how trapped she must feel in a web that she has created all by herself, hiding so much, so very much from her husband and her friends. Maybe if she could start over, she could disentangle from it all. So, I ask myself what I am going to do with poor Carly. The decision is all mine. Then, it becomes clear what I must do.
Flush! There goes Carly! Too bad for her! I know now that investigation is what I was born to do. I learned that looking in the window at Paris on Passyunk, in the frame formed by my sneakers. And when I follow my bliss, people just get hurt.
Then, I turned to my computer and emailed my Carly Foley report, with all the incriminating video attached, to Carly’s husband. I felt deep and warm satisfaction all over, even relieving that tightness in my lower back, as I sent my report to the husband. Just like Ting said, I am good at this work. Ting will be pleased. There will be no anonymous warnings or second chances this time.