Jupiter drops (one).
I used to work in the Rax in Oberlin, Ohio, and one day I went to the manager to complain. I pointed to one of the factoids printed on the paper placemats they used to line the cafeteria trays. “It says you play soft rock, or jazz, or whatever.”
She looked at it. “Yeah,” she said.
“Not muzak.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“It specifically says you don’t play muzak.”
“I see that,” she said.
“You’re playing muzak,” I said. It was true. They were. I can’t remember what song was playing because that was the point, or it used to be the point. You know what I’m talking about.
She shrugged. —I got the skinny later: you subscribe to Muzak, like cable television. Literally pipe it in. The Rax had taken over the building from some other fast-food brand, Arby’s or some such, and the muzak system was already in place, wired up, switched on, chirping away. Nobody knew which particular service and nobody knew where the controls were and it would have been too expensive to rip the speakers out and anyway the stuff was bland and inoffensive and nobody ever got a bill, so why not? We’d close for the night, mop up, wipe down, just two of us and the echo of some airless afternoon in Van Nuys when some Nelson Riddle second-stringers phoned it in for a little mad money. We’d shut off the lights and lock the doors and leave the syrupy strings to serenade a dark and empty restaurant.
