I’ve been called an “erotic” songwriter. I don’t disagree, but even though I had plenty of sex when I was younger, I was never promiscuous. The brain is the real erogenous zone, at least for me, so I have to connect with somebody intellectually and almost spiritually in order to be attracted to them physically, and that rarely happens immediately. I realized early in my adult life that talking—real, honest, substantive conversation—could be superhot, and it didn’t have to result in anybody taking their clothes off for it to be erotic in a lasting way. Very often a good conversation is more memorable than fucking.
As I was growing up, I began to be attracted to a certain kind of man, and I would maintain that kind of attraction for the rest of my life. The way I’ve often described this kind of man is “a poet on a motorcycle.” These were men who could think very deeply and have very deep feelings, but who also had a kind of blue-collar, roughneck quality to them. For me, the epitome of this kind of man was the poet Frank Stanford.
Carson realized that if a hard-shell tostada were placed inside a tortilla it could provide interior scaffolding. Across the table from me, she put her iPhone on a sheet of paper and carefully folded the paper around it, to demonstrate. After she proposed the idea to her Taco Bell colleagues, in 1995, she went to the company gym to work out. “I explained it to this gal on the treadmill next to me,” she said. “She was in food operations, and she said there were all these technical reasons it wouldn’t work.” For one thing, Carson hadn’t cracked how to keep the folded hexagon from popping open. She went on to pitch the company’s executives repeatedly on her idea—which would eventually become the Crunchwrap Supreme, the fastest-selling item in Taco Bell history—but, noting the extra seconds required for a worker to make the folds, they initially dismissed the concept. “There’s all these parameters around your creativity,” Carson said. “You just have to wipe your mind of certain facts.”
Taco Bell’s food-innovation staff, which includes sixty developers, focusses on big questions: How do you make a Cheez-It snack cracker big enough to be a tostada? What are the ideal Cheez-It dimensions to guarantee that the tostada won’t crack inconveniently when bitten into? Or consider the Doritos Locos Taco: What safeguards can be implemented to prevent the orange Doritos dust from staining a consumer’s hands or clothing? Can fourteen Flamin’ Hot Fritos corn chips be added to the middle of a burrito and retain their crunch? Can a taco shell be made out of a waffle, or a folded slab of chicken Milanese? These are all problems of architecture and scalability; fast food is assembly, not cooking.
One of the ironies of reading “In the Orchard” was realizing how little I remembered from the first two weeks of my daughter’s life; the book awakened memories I didn’t know I had. To me, Minot’s central concern is the fleetingness of time, the need to pay attention and stay amazed, while also extending grace to ourselves.
Stuck Monkey, then, is ultimately more of a long withdrawing roar at the absurdities of the modern world, at length judged too perverse to be worth saving.