Nonplussed Over NunBun

 The third night of Hanukkah

Weirdness has struck again.  Now, there’s nothing funny about the theft of the Mother Teresa Cinnamon Bun.  I strongly feel that it should be treated as grand larceny since the shellac-preserved pastry has become part of Bongo Java’s brand equity.  After re-reading the story on the website, I realized that insuring the NunBun object itself was not even a viable option.  Undoubtedly somebody had to postpone or curtail plans on December 25th to deal with cops and building logistics.  Merry damn X-Mas, indeed. 

But that’s not the weirdness I’m talking about here.

As I’ve shared before, Bongo Java has been one of my past “offices” where I went in my college days to break writer’s block.  Though I’ve rarely lingered more than an hour, I’ve accumulated a commonplace book and wealth of character sketches that popped into my brain years after the people I watched have dropped from my life forever.  You all have dreams about casual acquaintances or people you don’t know but see regularly — I won’t go into the fine points of semiotics here, but archetypes are creative forces to reckon with. 

Yes, public relations issues are a major theme in the book and the Nun Bun is a compelling case study in and of itself.  I kicked myself today for not realizing the common threads running between the Nun Bun PR saga and my novel.  Yet the bun doesn’t figure into it at all.  Half my characters are modeled after past and present employees of Bongo Java — strangers I’ve observed and accumulated notes on over a period of time.

I don’t fraternize with my muses.  I couldn’t be inspired by them if I knew them personally.  The Bongo-inspired characters are rounder and have more fleur than those based on people with whom I’ve had actual relationships.  For me, my mind flows the most freely and the most generously when I freewrite about near-strangers.  This helps me universalize the ethnic characters in the book.  The Bongo team  are a WASPy bunch, excepting a few Ashkenazim.  But I manifest them a tad differently on paper.  A blue-eyed blond guy became a Dominican installation artist.  A fortysomething Ashkenaz morphed into a Cuban high school student.  Yet another whitey was transformed into a Haitian musician.  How often do you kick back and relax in a coffeehouse, eye the staff passing by, and think, “I wonder what she’d look like if she were Pakistani?”  How might her physical features, his mannerisms be manifested differently under the tutelage of another culture or ethnic gene pool? 

No, I don’t go around undressing innocent working types with my eyes.  (Those swinging dishrags are vaguely phallic, but not disturbingly so…) 

One endearingly attractive male staff member remained in my book just as G-d made him in real life. I just performed a little weird science, that’s all.  As you in my writing posse know, I don’t believe in villains and rarely is any character’s action blatantly unforgiveable.  I work with conflicting interests — friction not between good and evil, black and white, but between khaki and slate.  When readers meet the central main character in my book, he is obnoxious, of questionable ethical integrity, and has an annoying habit of referring to himself and his website in the third person to the point that it’s unclear which of the two he’s talking about.  We see another side of him later, but he needs to be somehow endearing from the very beginning.  He also happens to be based on a celebrity whom I feel, from my extensive research, is grossly misunderstood.  

In my laboratory at home, courtesy of Toshiba, I implanted the personality of Celebrity Prick into the body of Bongo Boy.  Now, I doubt very much that Bongo Boy wants any part of this dude — even his intangible attributes — anywhere near his lily-white body.  (I’m not talking about some Brokeback Mountain tryst.  I’m not even into cowboys.  Give me a neurotic New Yorker any day.)

But hey — I don’t just stick strange guys up other strange guys’ bodies and leave them there.  I took him right back out.  I am confident Bongo Boy has not experienced any cramping, nausea, or diarrhea from this operation.  He might if and when he finds out about it.

There’s a country song in here somewhere.  I think it goes something like, “I put food on the table serving tea to fruitcakes.” 

By combining the two individuals and concocting from there, I was able to break away from the constraints of both of them.  The result is that all my Bongo-inspired creations have sprouted body parts and personalities and taken on lives of their own, bouncing off each other, exchanging energy in this little world of my creation– hell, carrying out photosynthesis for all I know or care.  And nobody at Bongo Java would know if I didn’t tell them.

Would I tell them?  Hell, no!  And I certainly wouldn’t reveal the identity of specific individuals whom I clandestinely observed from my table, off and on over a decade. I don’t care if you’re buying my hummus — I’m not nudging anybody and slyly pointing “hey, man… he might be an OK college boy, but when I got my hands on his archetype, he made a bitchin’ middle-aged Argentine.”

“How dare you suggest such things about dear, sweet Bongo Boy!”  Someone roars in my daymares.  “You don’t even know him!  And I will have you know that I am a young 21 and a natural blonde, if you must know.  By the way, where do you get off making that dude over there a rabbi?  He may blend a mean espresso, but inside he has a depraved mind and he doesn’t even look Jewish!”

Or I’m accosted with this:  “My mom and her lawyer say that I need to feel violated, debased, stripped of my dignity, feel like I’m in a hostile working environment and have trouble performing the duties of my job because of you and that I’m MUCH prettier as I really am with Grandma’s blue eyes and Dad’s button nose.  I know the wheels are in motion and all, but if you just wanna give whatsherface my character and tell everybody I’m that radiant Salvadoran intern…”

The truth is that as long as I acted in good faith to guard the privacy of individuals and did nothing to harm the brand equity of the coffeehouse, the home of the Nun Bun and the First Amendment would be rather ingratiated by this little morsel of information. Or not give a shit. 

In my paranoid moments, I imagine my muses getting together to brew a special secret Bongo Body Fluid Blend frappucino just for the foolish author who immortalized them.  Totally free, of course. 

Therein lies the rub.  What I’m talking about here is pretty innocent.  Understood in the proper context and treated sensitively, anyone who found out that they unwittingly inspired a fictitious character would be flattered.  Still, I don’t know enough in the fine points of privacy and intellectual property laws to be sure Bongo Boy won’t sue my sorry ass.  And I’m certainly not breathing anything while the book proposal is being shopped around. 

So what has this to do with the Nun Bun?  Everything.

I’m probably not hurting anyone with my grand creative schemes.  Sure, at a moment of severe writer’s block or total explosive diarrhea of the brain, I do feel a little like Bill Clinton in the Oval Office, pulling that cigar out of Monica while Yasser Arafat waited outside.  There’s a decidedly palpable thrill in spilling my guts here, even if I never say another word about it.  There’s a delicious risk.  I could be misunderstood, humiliated. Or no one could give a shit.

But the person who unhinged the Bongo door and made off with the Nun Bun?  They’re getting off on this in a major way.  They’re humming.  Most importantly, they will not be able to keep it on the down low forever.

Whoever took this bun ain’t taking the secret to the grave.  They’ll brag to someone.  It’s too charged, too juicy.  And someone will rat.  Unfortunately, I’m afraid Teresa is gone for good.  But the truth will come out sometime, somewhere.

I don’t think there’s such thing as the perfect crime or the perfectly kept secret.  Maybe I’ve been a little too immersed in Dostoevsky this year during my Russian fellowship, walking the real streets where the fictional Raskolnikov plotted and concealed his murder, visiting the apartment hallway where Crime and Punishment lovers from all over the world have left their own memorial to the spirit of the misunderstood iconoclast.  Real life is complicated and sloppy.