Several times a week, while looking at X/Twitter, I see a post from a person (or paid-off bot) with a picture of, say, a crowded, hijinks-a-poppin’ Pizza Hut in the 1980s, with the caption, “We used to be a proper country.” I believe America is still a “proper country” (as opposed to “improper”) but as long as freedom of speech exists—and unlike the UK, where on-his-way-out Prime Minister Keir Starmer makes a fool of himself nearly every day by allowing his government to arrest citizens for nasty social media comments, I don’t see such a crackdown here—such silliness doesn’t even rate half an arched eyebrow. One person’s gauzy nostalgia is another’s painful memory, a reality that’s centuries old.
America, for the most part, hasn’t gone to the dogs, it’s just different. That’s hardly an original statement—I hope!—and I’ll admit there’s some very weird shit going on today. At the end of last month, The New York Times ran a long story about the increased use of food deliveries, under the headline “Freedom With a Side of Guilt,” by food reporter/YouTuber Priya Krishna that was so funny I read the entire article (that’s not beans, pardner; it’s not as if I can read past a paragraph of columnists Thomas Friedman or David French).
The article noted, naturally, that many of the people contacted for the story, even though “addicted” to delivery, worried about the environmental concerns of their habit and the wages of the drivers. (A caveat that presumably allowed publication.) That done, like a decade ago when people automatically said to veterans and current military members, “Thank you for your service,” they then ripped open the bags and chowed down. My wife and I use DoorDash or Grubhub a few times a week, especially this month as the streets of Baltimore, with 12-foot mountains of plowed snow, and crazy drivers doing zig-zags, makes driving hazardous. Our sons follow suit at their apartments.
But the anecdotes Krishna collected (and I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt that they weren’t fabricated) were startling, although in a funny way, and it beat reading about The Washington Post’s travails or a random university protest over what students and faculty members are “standing with” at the moment.
This one’s my favorite: “Mercuri Lam, a Yale sophomore, said there’s almost always a delivery driver outside her dorm, even though undergraduates are required to pay for a meal plan… To keep in touch, she and her long-distance boyfriend order the same meal and eat it together over Facetime.” I don’t care for sitcoms today, but that would make for a hilarious bit on a show. Not my bailiwick (no Ann Landers/Dear Abby here), but I don’t give Mercuri’s Facetime relationship a long shelf life.
This one sounds fishy: “Between raising two young boys and putting in long hours at a marketing job in Atlanta, Kevin Caldwell can almost never find time to make dinner. So he and his husband spend about $700 a week to order in. ‘I’m so burned out and tired, I would rather just throw my credit card at the problem and delay that unhappiness until the bill comes.’” It could be that Mr. Caldwell is remarkably well-compensated for his marketing job—doubtful, but if so, go, go, go Kevin and cash those checks before they bounce—but that’s a tab that totals $36,400 a year for delivery. I smell exaggeration, although for what purpose I don’t know. (By the way, back when America “was a proper country” at Pizza Hut, Blockbusters or a jammed suburban mall, you couldn’t conceive of a newspaper article that referred to a married same-sex couple with two kids. That’s progress, at least in my view.)
I came across the picture (1971) above in a desk drawer at home, pondered it, and recalled that as a 16-year-old my friends and I pursued recreational activities that likely aren’t even considered today by teens. (“Boomer shit.”) Again, not better, not worse (although it rattles my head thinking of kids today studying their phones, sometimes to the point of rudeness, and that isn’t progress), just different. I took the photo (borrowed my dad’s Minolta) of Richard Hoblock in his family’s VW “Beetle” at the LaRue Dr. home of my buddy Howie—now a retired surgeon living in South Carolina—who must’ve violated a point of high school etiquette and so his family’s property was “papered.” As in with two dozen rolls of Mr. George Whipple’s Charmin.
It was a harmless (if vexing to the recipient) Friday night prank and I remember this specific “papering” because after the five of us crammed in the beat-up car, congratulated ourselves and shed tears from laughing, “Hobie” upped the ante and drove down LaRue Dr., knocking over garbage cans—“Sorry, lost control!”—which was cool until the car got stuck and an “old” (probably 45) neighbor alighted from his split-level, clad in a nerdy bathrobe and said he’d called the cops. The downside of “cruising.” (The specter of the “fuzz” or “pigs,” in that era’s parlance, was instantly sobering because Robby Walton was “holding,” meaning he had a baggy of pot in his jeans pocket. Another negative about when America was “a proper country,” getting “busted” on a drug charge could fuck up admission to college.) Fortune was on our side, however, as “Hobie” extricated the VW, and we proceeded to the Southdown shopping market and convinced an-over-18 dude to buy us two sixers of Schaefer beer. And later took turns puking in the woods.
No one was immune from “papering.” One May morning in 1970, I woke up early and saw a collection of trees on our quarter-acre property festooned with t.p. My dad was out the door, on the way to his car wash, and calmly told me to clean up the mess before my mom got a peek. (She would’ve tied up the phone party line trying to identify the perps.) I did and it was a brief job. Payback. Later that day I went—after snagging a $1 Italian hero at Monaco’s—to a matinee of The Beatles’ Let It Be, a crummy film made even worse by the band’s break-up. Like everyone, I blamed Yoko. Four buddies and I met outside the theater, and I looked Ricky Morrison straight in the eye and gave him a slight nod. That he blushed and then made alarmingly stupid small talk told me he was the “papering” ringleader. No malice, no accusations, I just wanted to let him know.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023