Setting down the map, Henry said, "I hope I can get a little of everything. But that last one depends a lot on luck, doesn't it?"
The plump waitress gave Henry a once-over and teased, "Don't worry. With what you've got, you'd be very popular even up in the San Fernando Valley."
Aside from being a tourist destination, the San Fernando Valley was best known for housing more than three hundred porn production companies.
In response to the waitress's mild jab, Henry mocked himself. "Hopefully, I won't fall that low anytime soon."
After saying that, he neatly rolled up a strip of bacon with his fork and stuffed it straight into his mouth without even cutting it. Chewing, he gave a thumbs-up in praise. "Mm, this tastes really good."
The plump waitress felt a small surge of pride. "Take your time."
Henry picked up his knife and cut the sausage into sections. He had no desire to demonstrate the miraculous skill of swallowing an entire sausage in public. Choking to death would be one thing; being thought fit to perform gay porn in the San Fernando Valley would be much worse. Better to be a little more refined.
And when he said the bacon tasted good, it was not empty flattery. It genuinely was delicious.
He had chosen this family restaurant carefully in the first place. It now seemed that the super sense of smell he had trained was still reliable.
After cutting everything up, Henry ate with his fork while reading the newspaper. He had already memorized the entire map, so he only needed to keep it nearby for future use.
The newspaper's headline claimed that the Red Empire near the Arctic Circle was on the verge of collapse, and it made the case with great conviction.
But at this stage, the Americans were probably just exaggerating the danger to steer public opinion. They likely never imagined that they could actually talk a powerful country into collapse.
Flipping through the paper, he found the other pages filled with Christmas-related news: where events would be held, where donations were being collected, where aid could be claimed, which celebrity had made some public statement. It was all bullshit.
Henry paid a little more attention to the entertainment and sports sections.
The NBA regular season ran from October each year through April of the next, followed by the play-in games, the playoffs, and then the championship finals in June.
According to the report, Mike Jordan was leading the Chicago Bulls on a rampage. In Henry's memory, 1991 would mark the beginning of the Bulls dynasty. Throughout the entire nineties, the NBA would tremble beneath the rule of Black Jesus.
As for Major League Baseball, its season ran roughly from April to October each year. It was currently in the rest and training period after the championship, so there was not much news in the papers.
Come to think of it, the NBA and Major League Baseball together perfectly covered an entire year's sports entertainment needs.
But what was truly popular in the United States was the NFL—American football. Its preseason began every August, its regular season started in September, and it continued until the Super Bowl championship game in February of the following year.
Still, unlike basketball and baseball, which could spread worldwide and attract players from all over the world to compete professionally in the United States, American football was more like a game Americans played behind closed doors in their own backyard.
As for movies, Christmas was right in the middle of the peak season, and it was also the most fiercely competitive period for the Golden Globe Awards and Academy Awards.
The notorious Harvey Weinstein had not yet taken control of Hollywood's awards, so the pages were not yet filled with smear campaigns.
Many films this year were hot topics: the highly anticipated Dances with Wolves, the landmark romance Ghost, Pretty Woman, the classic comedy Home Alone, and all sorts of sequels to famous works.
Such as The Godfather Part III, Back to the Future Part III, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, the horror film The Exorcist III, and so on.
Henry even noticed that there was a Captain America movie this year. Its heavily altered plot described a Captain America who had not died during World War II and saved the President of the United States from a criminal family that disliked environmental policies.
In a world where Captain America really existed, Hollywood still dared to make up a story and parody him as though it were a biopic. They really did not take Captain America... Oh, Captain America had no surviving family. What they did not take seriously was the U.S. military.
But after the surge in Navy enlistments brought about by Top Gun four years ago, in 1986, the U.S. military and Hollywood had been in perfect harmony these past few years, working hand in glove.
If they had Captain America step forward to save the President of the United States, could the military really object?
Surprisingly, perhaps because Captain America truly existed in this world, the film received far more attention than an ordinary superhero movie. People were not turned off by its cheap fifty-cent special effects.
Though he had not yet watched this world's 1990 Captain America, the glowing language in the papers suggested it was being positioned alongside this year's smash hit, Dances with Wolves.
Even Kevin Costner, Whoopi Goldberg, Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and many other excellent actors and major directors had praised Captain America highly.
Of course, most of that praise was directed at the anti-fascist hero who had earned tremendous fame during World War II. They did not have much to say about the movie itself.
It seemed they knew better than to tug a tiger's tail. Captain America might be gone, but the U.S. military was still around.
Even during the Vietnam War, the U.S. military's classic recruitment ad, "I Want You," had replaced Uncle Sam's image with Captain America's. That showed how deep Captain America's influence ran; it was far beyond a single generation.
After that came entertainment gossip, some true, some false.
As for previews of next year's films, there was not a single report. Perhaps everyone was focused on major award ceremonies like the Golden Globes and the Oscars during this period.
While he was reading, the cooked steak was brought to the table, along with a thoughtful plate of fries. The bread delivered earlier had long since been eaten.
Henry hacked the steak into chunks, set down his knife, and ate while reading the paper, throwing all table manners to the winds. This was a family restaurant, not some upscale establishment. No one would fuss over that sort of thing.
By the time he stuffed the last piece of steak into his mouth, he had nearly finished the newspaper as well.
After refilling his coffee, Henry waved and asked, "Sweetheart, do you have Yellow Pages here?"
The plump waitress pointed to the platform beneath the payphone by the entrance, where a thick phone book lay.
Henry walked over, brought the phone book back to his seat, and began searching through it.
In this era without the internet to search, if you wanted information about shops in a particular industry, you did not go to a bar to ask the bartender or find an informant in some back alley.
You simply looked through a phone book called the Yellow Pages. It was a search tool from a primitive age.
The Yellow Pages were usually provided free by phone companies, with advertisements serving as their source of income. Even without an ad, you could usually tell what a company did just by looking at its name.
It even listed private phone numbers, which could be found alphabetically.
Twenty years later, people would sue them to death for "leaking personal information."
But in this era, it was perfectly normal.
Of course, the Yellow Pages were not updated very frequently. Basically, they were revised once a year.
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