S ometimes, if Brown was hungry at the end of the day, and in a certain mood, they’d go to Gray’s Papaya for the Recession Special. Milgrim always got the orangeade with his, because it seemed more honestly a drink, less juice-like. You could get actual juices there, but not with the Recession Special, and juice didn’t seem like part of the Gray’s experience, which was about grilled beef franks, soft white buns, and watery, sugary drinks, consumed standing up, under brilliant, buzzing fluorescent light.
When they were staying at the New Yorker, as it seemed they were again, tonight, Gray’s was only two blocks up Eighth Avenue. Milgrim was comforted by Gray’s Papaya. He remembered when the two franks and drink that were the Recession Special had been $1.95.
Milgrim doubted that Gray’s comforted Brown, exactly, but he did know that Brown could become relatively talkative there. He’d have the nonalcoholic piña colada with his franks and lay out the origins of cultural Marxism in America. Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown, but it was really cultural Marxism, and had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II, in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School, as they’d called themselves, had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipositors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old-school American academia. Milgrim always enjoyed this part; it had an appealing vintage sci-fi campiness to it, staccato and exciting, with grainy monochrome Eurocommie star-spawn in tweed jackets and knit ties, breeding like Starbucks. But he’d always be brought down, as the rant rolled to a close, by Brown’s point that the Frankfurt School had been Jewish, all of them. “Every. Last. One.” Dabbing mustard from the corners of his mouth with a precisely folded paper napkin. “Look it up.”
Which was exactly what had happened, this time, after Milgrim’s long day in the laundry. Brown had just said that, and Milgrim had nodded, and continued to chew the last of his second dog, glad of something in his mouth to preclude answering.
When they’d both finished their Specials, it was time to walk back down Eighth to the New Yorker. The traffic was moderate and there was something like a touch of spring in the air, a slight premonitory warmth that Milgrim suspected of being hallucinatory, but welcomed nonetheless. When the yellow Hummer cruised past, in the nearest lane, as they were walking south, he noticed it. You would, he’d tell himself later. Not that it was a real Hummer, just one of those half-assed ones, and not just that it was yellow, but because it was a Hummer and it was yellow, and it had those goofy counterweighted hubcaps that didn’t rotate with the hubs, just sort of rocked there. And these were yellow, matching yellow, and had a Happy Face on each one, or at least on the two on the sidewalk side, the two Milgrim could see.
But what really held Milgrim’s attention, after the northbound yellow vehicle flicked past, was how closely its driver and passenger had resembled his two Moorish knights of the laundry, down on Lafayette. Black knit skullcaps snugged low over massy skulls, and sofa-like chest expanses of black, button-studded leather.
Gilbert and George, in the front seats of a Hummer.