Tour

I had heard about them in the venue of Woody Allen jokes. Maybe had seen one or two on the TV screen. But here was the real deal and I was inside a new kind of church.

This place fascinated me and I went there everyday. Rectangle room, narrow and low ceilinged, up and down oblong machines, with dozens of little doors, like see-thru post office boxes, containing enveloped sandwiches, liquid drinks, that spilled automatically into paper cups. But the thing that so fascinated me was the heavy floor to ceiling glass wall, through which could be seen, the sub-level tram waiting platform, a half-way roof overhang, outdoors, the waiting platform, the tracks, electric-tram and overhead flashing wires, with a low green-grass knoll on the far-side. You could see but not hear. Nothing but the low-hum of the automat motors whirring. The outside was silent. People came and went, walked slow and hurriedly, with newspapers, sometimes maps and suitcases, lips moving, they talking to each other if accompanied, and for me a silent movie, looking into an aquarium window of silent social stream-scape. The place fascinated me. A concourse of people were right there, but I couldn't hear them and they didn't notice me like being invisible a sightless ghost . I was usually alone in the automat.

I used to read in those days outside, under trees, sitting on benches mostly, in the summer and sometimes fall. The real world busy-buzz and the printed fiction on white-paper mind. The automat turned it around. For the first time maybe in my life I was in the fiction. The abstraction was out there. What is this ? There was a counter along the window, and I would get coffee or tea, maybe a sandwich and sit on a stool and watch the transaction outside.

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