A Glass of Papaya Juice and Back to Work
October 1, 2021
By Atsushi Ikeda
Back in first year, late to a class on the New York School of poets, I sat down sweaty and fell down clean into a poem as if it were an open manhole, as someone in the back volunteered to read aloud and said, almost too seriously, “It’s my lunch hour, so I go / for a walk among the hum-colored / cabs.”
Hum-colored is right, was right, and if you, like me or poet Rebecca Rustin, “grew up around more concrete than trees,” then everything else Frank O’Hara managed to catch on his lunch break, a step away from his working self at the front desk of the MOMA and in the teeming middle of Times Square, is right. You read his work the way he wrote it—waiting in line for something, on your way somewhere. It’s amazing what you can catch in the corner of your eye, in the time it takes to eat half a sandwich. Every gesture becomes grand.
“It’s all well and good of course, to write sensuously, with deep involvement, about preparing food, the origin of ingredients, the history of a dish, what a meal can mean, or the rationale behind a recipe, but the lunch hour is hardly material for that kind of rhapsody.”
Gilbert Sorrentino once called O’Hara’s world a world of gesture, not without a hint of mockery at O’Hara’s effete hipsterism and appetite for action in every form. Quick-witted and airy, alert but wandering; it may not be Sorrentino’s world, but I like it here, where the poem and I (and maybe you too) agree that the world’s speed is its own kind of timelessness.
And over time, the reason I love O’Hara’s writing wanders too, not away from its obvious strengths—the warmth, the scope, the endless grab-assing with the “eternal questions of life”—but deeper into their sources. Those sources were friends talking, clouds looming, strangers making passes. Perfect gestures he recorded “while never forgetting to eat lunch his favorite meal….”
Food was one of the things O’Hara wrote so precisely about because he never fussed over it. On the Table is partly about the celebration of food, but eating can just be a gesture too, an automatic move. Did you labour over your lunch today or just walk to the nearest menu board between classes? Doesn’t matter. Celebrate having that little slice of time where your mind can roam.
It’s all well and good of course, to write sensuously, with deep involvement, about preparing food, the origin of ingredients, the history of a dish, what a meal can mean, or the rationale behind a recipe, but the lunch hour is hardly material for that kind of rhapsody. Lunch as most of us know it didn’t exist until industrialization. It was an hour wedged into the workday for people to gorge and keep from breaking like the factory parts they were trying to fix. Of course there’s much intrigue and beauty in thinking through what lunch looks like in different places, from the clockwork choreography of dabbawalas in India biking around their hot tiffin boxes to the kinds of bento my own mother used to make for me. But damn it, you get an hour.
So your eye jumps, you walk to the biggest sign, and you get “a cheeseburger at JULIET’S / CORNER” or a sandwich at Schwartz’s, hoping today’s the day a tourist fucks up badly enough to get thrown out. Maybe you get an iced coffee that makes you think of how devastating Tao Lin made them seem in “Shoplifting from American Apparel,” or a “chocolate malted.” You have options, and having them is as thrilling as the options themselves are fungible, kind of pointless at the end of the day, because you’ll still have clocked out not quite bone-tired but exhausted enough that maybe those eternal questions start crowding in on the quiet train, and those lights are a bit much too, and maybe (most definitely) city life is not quite what it was to you who grew up in cities, or not quite what it seemed to you who wants the trees back, but the grass is always greener, and well, what do you want now that you’re here? Make it quick. The line’s not getting any shorter.
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