(Roughly) Daily

Alexander Chee shares a memory…

It is the year 2004 and I take a seat at the counter of the Koreatown Denny’s, just three blocks from my apartment, and for a little while, I watch as a blonde waitress with makeup the colors of a tropical fish smiles at me every time she walks by. Her path is constant: she arrives from one side, departs from the other, grabbing or leaving pots of coffee on the warmer. She leaves a cup with me at my request and, in this way, I become part of the ritual.

I am a little drunk from drinks and no food. The day has become a kind of strange dream, telescoping down to the menu in front of me. I am here in Los Angeles for what will turn out to be seven months but I don’t know this yet.

At the counter, on one side of me are two young men studying a text in Spanish, the books so thick I assume they are Bibles. They ignore their pancake stacks. On the other side, a grizzled man of middle age sits, eating a hot fudge sundae.

Let me ask you a question, asks the man with the sundae.

Sure, I reply.

Is there ever a reason, a moral reason, to take a man’s life.

He spoons through the last bit of the hot fudge, putting it in his mouth. His hair, gray wire like a shoe brush; his glasses fish-eye his eyes. Say he is a judge, he says, and he sent you to prison for three years, didn’t allow you to have a fair trial. You know he had it in for you.

I look away from him and see that what I thought were the Bibles of the men next to him are Plato’s Dialogues, translated into Spanish. A sign that I might be in a Greek tragedy.

You do the time, the man continues. You get out. Would you have a right to take his life. A moral right.

I am God’s monkey, I think to myself. Watch me dance.

No, I say. Your duty after you leave prison is to yourself. I say this while looking forward, as if we are both in a car and driving. A moment later, I glance sideways and see the man’s wild eyes settle for a moment.

The reason you’re angry is because he didn’t value your life. To go and try to take his, that destroys what might be left for you in life.

But what if it felt good to do it, he says.

I note the use of the past tense. A confession? The waitress walks by again. Pleasure isn’t the highest value in this life, I say. Pleasure is only pleasure. It has no good or bad to it. That wouldn’t be a moral reason, at least.

This questioner takes it in. Hmm, he says. Thanks, he says.

To destroy him is to take some or all of what you have left and destroy it, I say.

He nods. Thanks, he says.

He pays and leaves.

Did he believe me, I wonder. I will feel a little more alone after that night in some way I will never understand and always try to forget.

Beside me now are only the two students of Plato. I order the sampler, it comes fast—mozzarella sticks, chicken fingers, onion rings. I eat them all…

From the annals of existential encounters: “The Denny’s on Wilshire Boulevard,” from @alexanderchee.bsky.social‬, one of his regular “I Come Here Often” columns in the LARB Quarterly (@lareviewofbooks.bsky.social‬)

* Montaigne

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As we wonder, we might note that today is, appropriately to the piece above, National Chicken Fingers Day.

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