All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found by Philip Connors Read Free Book Online Page B

breathing the oleaginous air of the nation’s McDonald’s franchises.
    The next morning I showed the notes to Francine Schwadel. I told her about my idea to visit Holden where he lived and take him to a McDonald’s he’d not yet seen. I’d discovered the existence of a new one not far from his home, just across the state line in Maryland.
    That way, I said, I’ll be there for breaking news.
    Very clever, she said, grimacing. Write me a proposal and I’ll send it on to the page-one desk. I’ll see if they’ll let you travel. Don’t get your hopes up. And tell your guy not to talk to any other reporter, anywhere, until your story runs.
    After approval came down from page one, I was instructed to book a Friday evening train to Washington with my own credit card. I was needed at the fax machines during regular work hours, and as a greenhorn I would not be allowed to report on company time, though all my expenses would be reimbursed. For someone of my position, reporting was an extracurricular activity.
    I’d learned some tricks about the various strategies one could employ from listening to the reporters around me. The guy in the cubicle to my left had the manner of a no-nonsense dentist. He was blunt and demanding, all business, insisting that he didn’t want to waste anyone’s time, so why beat around the bush, just tell me what I want to know and I won’t bother you again—and people did. The woman in the cubicle across from me adopted the pose of a hopeless neophyte, confused, in over her head. She asked for things she pretended not to understand to be repeated, slower this time, like you’re talking to your adolescent niece—and people did. Sometimes she laughed to herself after hanging up, amused by her own performance. She ought to have been. She broke news on all sorts of sophisticated Wall Street shenanigans and she got a lot of her leads by sounding like a complete ditz on the telephone.
    With Holden I simply shut up and listened, nodded and ah-hummed a lot, and took page after page of notes as he extemporized. On a muggy Saturday morning we drove to a new McDonald’s in College Park, Maryland. From the moment we stepped inside he smiled with childlike enthusiasm, his head swiveling as he tried to take it all in. The seating area had plastic tabletops laminated with the University of Maryland shield, and the walls were emblazoned with the words M ARYLAND T ERRAPINS .
    Look at this, Holden exclaimed. I love this stuff!
    He told me his greatest excitement in life came from finding a McDonald’s restaurant with something slightly different about it, since most were carbon copies. He thanked me profusely for leading him to a version that was one of a kind, and for sharing in the joy of the discovery. We stayed no more than half an hour; the place was jammed with customers, and it didn’t feel right to linger merely to admire the tabletops, the walls.
    That afternoon he showed me around his home in suburban Virginia. Each room contained a different collection of some object: African masks in the living room, Russian nesting dolls in the dining room, and so on, dozens and dozens of each particular thing. In its museumlike tidiness, it looked like the kind of place a fastidious serial killer might call home. I couldn’t stop myself from picturing a collection of severed body parts somewhere in the attic—thumbs, ears.
    Are you a collector of anything? he asked.
    About to say no, I thought of the commonplace book I’d been keeping. If I’d wanted to disturb him even more than he’d disturbed me, I could have quoted some of the entries. Pavese: No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide. Jong: It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. . . . It was harder to do nothing. Freud: No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself. Nietzsche: The thought of suicide is a great consolation: with the help of it, one has got through many