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The author's
ID badge worn around
the neck for his circus job.
The Popcorn
Machine
John
Graham
“There are no passengers on spaceship earth.
We are all crew. . . .We become what we behold.
We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”
— Marshall McLuhan
ASK ME ABOUT
MY MAN Roland spilling the popcorn oil on his shoes. With his handkerchief
he worked the glaze into the leather and made them shine, opening a
whole world of possibilities. The things we used to afford could be
had again. While real shoe wax was momentarily out of the question,
oil from the popcorn machine was going to be just fine.
Working for the circus had us wearing out patent leather
best, as well as jester hats made of felt, carnival shirts, black trousers,
dull photo ID tags slung around the neck. These were the great equalizers
under the tent. As was the popcorn machine.
Mind you, we once had a deal: vice presidents, executive
and administrative assistants, programmers, web masters, Photoshoppers,
coders, sales and marketing people. After our dismissal, the Dot Com
stock options in our top drawers lined our kitties’ litter boxes
for nearly two months. Some had savings. I know I did—a whole coffee
can full of change on the kitchen counter.
I suppose we all had Roland to thank for spilling the popcorn
oil on his shoes. The gaff became a prospect. None of us could afford
anything like mink oil or a shoeshine. We began to circle the oil pool
with rags in our hands, a dozen of us working the gold lubricant into
our dark leathers. How shiny they looked.
I had been cleaning the popcorn machine at the circus for
the last month. The same time last year I was at a university, teaching
and writing a thesis. Now I was digging ditches in a popcorn diorama.
I delineated the predicament. One theory I fell back on
was that conditions had turned me into an ant and the popcorn machine
was my aphid. Rubbing the machine down with a rag produced the sweet
nectar I could live on. It didn’t come directly from the machine
itself—not a polyp of syrup grown out of its stainless steel, or
an offering from its foggy glass—it was the envelope that showed
up in my mail box at home. That is where I could find my nourishment
as the ant I had become.
As I cleaned the popcorn machine, I knew—from years
of smarty pants seminars—that I was facilitating a complete reach-around
in support of Marshall McLuhan’s declaration that all tools were
an extension of our nervous systems, each bringing our desire closer
to a face whose eyes, mouth, ears and nose were waiting. The ape in
me was using a stick to eat termites.
When I first started cleaning the popcorn machine, I couldn’t
see the direct connection between my action and my reward. My movement
within the machine—whole head and shoulders sometimes inside to
tight spots—was indirect tool using. I was not using the machine
to feed myself popcorn. I was doing the cleaning motion for money. It
was the abstraction of the hunter-gatherer conceit: I moved things around
in the popcorn machine, washing it with a rag like a farmer yanking
at teats, a man and his spear walking the bush, accountant with a pen
and ledger. When I stroked the popcorn machine a packet of something
sweet known as my paycheck came out of the postal system in the form
of something known as an envelope in my mail box.
I realized by almost having nothing, newly beat, that the
whole human system was an extension of the collective nervous system.
Big wow. The vagrant, indigent and homeless I passed on my way to this
lame but necessary circus job: they were situated outside of the system
and at few points, if any, did they connect up or plug in. Nothing came
to them in the form of a sweet packet. They stroked no aphids as they
were not in the proximity of any aphids to begin with.
“Where have all the aphids gone?”
I ran my fingers through my pockets.
Each night at Cirque, when everything was cleaned up and
shut down, we rubbed our shiny shoes with popcorn oil and headed out.
People watching us leave the tents were impressed. If it weren’t
for Roland spilling the popcorn oil, none of us would look as good as
we did. It didn’t matter that we didn’t have jobs—not
real jobs (we worked at the circus for heaven’s sake)—at least
our shoes looked fine.
I headed home, on the train each week, to find my sweet
packet waiting in the box for me, just an ant in a colony living the
dream.
With shiny shoes.
—John
Graham
San Francisco, 2007
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