Corner Bodega, 10:05 a.m. Walking in from the biting winds that are coming in hard and slashing from the northwest, quickening from the maze of wind tunnels that clog the block. Three English newspapers and two of the Spanish variety on the newsstand. I pick up the New York Times for a moment and scan the headlines, then put it down because it’s $2. Opt for the Daily News, which I consider to be a hair-width more intellectual than the Post. Both are mind-numbing, crass-less pieces of shit. They are enemies to anyone who believes that journalism can inspire. They are jokes without audio. Old man with a shiny aluminum cane holds a 20 oz bottle of Mountain Dew in his right hand. Left hand has been reserved for gesture-making. I stand behind him, close enough to smell his mustiness and see the grease trails in his gray hair. Makes me want to vomit. His voice, barely audible, reminds me of a soft wind as it slides through the tiny, flexible branches of a birch tree. It’s more noise than words. Tall black man next to him, hands in pockets. Wears black fleece pullover with a zipper that goes down halfway. “RJReynolds” embroidered in white on the left breast. Company man. His teeth are perfect: white like new bones and straight as a Nolan Ryan fastball (when he threw strikes). His smile, gleaming now. Old man whispers stories about 5 cent packs of cigarettes to the black man. “Yeah, I bet those where the days,” black man says. Then he whispers again, and it’s is so tired and labored and pathetic that I want to tell him to stop, just stop trying to talk because you can’t do it. The days of you and talking are over, done, finished. Talking left you a long time ago and I do not have any sympathy for you, I think. When he whispers, I swear I see dust spew from his mouth and hover a bit over his cracked lips. Old man talking about non-filter Pall Malls. Used to smoke them, good flavor, easy pull of the smoke. “You still have Pall Mall non-filters, don’t you?” black man asks the Middle Eastern clerk. “Yeah, yeah, of course they do.” Old and black man look up at the ceiling, see hanging ad for Pall Mall Full Flavor and Newport 100s, both for $8.50 a pack. The ad swings back and forth every time the door opens and the wind crashes in. They look at it like someone looks at a photo album. Memories. Conversation waning. Old man lurches a few words out and black man nods his head a bit, looking over old man’s head at the section of single-dose cold and pain pills. “Yep, yep,” he says.
December 7, 2009
November 18, 2009
The color purple
So small and so innocent – like the face of a child or of children, then ones you see hung over the shoulders of a mother who seems to barely notice they are carrying it – that was how it arrived at my feet.
Sitting in Marco Rampiz Park on the corner of Marcy and Metropolitan, the screaming trucks barreling through the intersection carrying loads of heavy metal and steel, of thick, rusted chains and palates of broken, sharp medieval looking bits, the kind of haul that bounces up and down when even the slightest pot hole is hit, sending a bombing noise outward, threatening to crush the old brick facades of buildings. Pedestrians made their trek across the intersection, eyes forward as if in a trance, oblivious to how close the rear bumper of some gigantic rusted metal behemoth on wheels just came to slicing their right leg in half.
The sound of whooshing cars and the low lurch of semi truck horns poisoned the air behind me on the 278, a wide-laned elevated freeway that is so congested I think sometimes it might crumble form the weight of the vehicles. The freeway’s 60 foot supports snake through Brooklyn and Queens like the Roman aqueducts of old, the kind that you still can see in remote areas of France and Italy and Spain. They brought water to thousands. This bit of infrastructure brings stress and billowing clouds of stinking smog clouds.
The sun seemed high in the sky that afternoon, cutting through the heavy gray rain clouds that were departing quickly but had just a half an hour earlier laid down a thin covering of rain on the earth, just enough to smell it as it seeped into the small, trash-strewn parcels of grass that dot the landscape. Even though it was early fall, maybe 2 in the afternoon, the beams were blinding, and seemed to intensify as they were cut by the golden leaves still hanging on from the tree branches. I sat on a park bench, placing a New York Post with a headline screaming “SWINE FLU SNAFU” under my hind area to stave off wetness. As I let it soak up the moisture that the bench had sucked up like a dry sponge, I gazed around and began to wonder – again – about what I was doing here.
This place, so foreign from where I’d come from, with its constant movement. Nothing ever stops here. Nothing ever comes to an end. There is perpetual motion. And it has at times made me a bit mad. The scowling faces that meet my sincere “hey there, how are you?” are making me a bit bitter. I don’t hold doors open for strangers anymore. It just doesn’t seem practical to do here, to break out of that heavy mold of self-reliance that defines so many behaviors. To be alone in a place with so many people, to feel lonely amongst a slathering of humanity. To be silent among so much noise. To be reprimanded for helping. These are some of the most obvious of the myriad contradictions that exist here. I have fresh eyes, I see them. I have a fresh heart, too, made soft and eager to help – longing to assist – from a life spent in communities where such a desire was not looked upon with ultimate contempt or even disgust, such as is the case here, right on this corner.
I could feel my underside beginning to dampen, so I stood up and took the paper in my hands. I began to read it, some story about how much the city of Philadelphia is inferior to New York. The World Series was on, so, yeah, I got it. But of course, every New Yorker will tell you that every city in the world is inferior to what has been constructed and hewn on this relatively small piece of real estate. Arrogance, it’s a hallmark here.
I heard some children laughing They just got out of school and are playing on the swings, trying to get as high as they can, pulling on the chains and straining their little are ligaments and looking like they might defy physics and actually loop around the central beam of the swing structure. They can’t though, but it sure is fun to try. A few nannies are playing with their surrogate children, sending them down a twisting plastic slide. The children’s’ voices echo as they scream inside the tube, then, as they emerge into the world, their voices burst like its being born, and it makes my ears scratch. They stick out, these strange couplings. They never look the same. Black nanny, white child. Asian nanny, white child. Hispanic nanny, white child. You get the picture.
I go back to reading the paper. Page Six. Tabloids. I begin to despise humanity for a moment and our lust for celebrity status that we will never attain, subconsciously know it, and therefore root for the destruction of those who are famous. It’s a pathetic way to live and think and might one day lead to our financial ruin. Really.
Then, suddenly, I see something cut through the bottom right corner of my peripheral vision, just below my right wrist. It rolls through a bit of sunshine that is focused on a cigarette butt and a small collection of yellow Locust tree leaves. I snatch the paper out of my vision and look as this purple orb comes to a soft end to its rolling in the corner of some chain link fencing. It steadies itself, and then stops completely.
For a moment, I am stunned and confused. I gaze around to see if it came from a handball court, but there are none of those here. Perhaps it came from a child’s wild toss across the street, but there were no children across the street. The abandoned lot kitty-corner to the park? Empty and depressed looking with its three foot tall grass, which catches all sorts of dingy items that blow into it: plastic bags, opened condom wrappers, Styrofoam take-out boxes with splotches of some sodium-laden sauce in it.
I bent down to pick it up. It was firm like a racquetball and soiled with dirt and mud and leaves. I held it up to a group of three Latino kids sitting on a bench next to me. They shook their heads. I walked, still a bit stunned, toward a basketball game taking place in the back of the park. Nine black boys, one white boy. They’d been playing their game for a while and didn’t notice me. A few park employees stood around the entrance to a restroom hut in the middle of the park, talking and laughing, one of them resting their arm on a broom. They wore blue plastic gloves, the kind that a surgeon wears while performing surgery. They didn’t throw the ball, they said, no one would, they added. These are a premium item around here. Handball is THE pastime in a city park.
So I entered the men’s bathroom and turned the tap on the faucet on. It made the cracked porcelain sink – which looked like an afternoon WPA project – shake and shiver. I washed the ball off and I dried it with one and a half feet of brown paper towel.
I placed the ball in my black messenger bag on my way out of the park. We walked home together, wondering why we came into each other’s lives. No one stopped me.
September 14, 2009
They Want Us to Listen
The souls who have been at rest here for centuries must have thought it strange on that shimmering mid-September day when the hot rush of wind and debris swept over them like someone shaking a heavy, dusty blanket overhead. Here, in the St. James Church cemetery close to the southern tip of Manhattan, where some of New York City’s first residents lay some 300 years after the soil here was opened-up to accept their lifeless bodies, near a church that survived The Great Fire of 1776 and has remained it’s worn, cobble stoned-self ever since, another rip in the land was created just eight short years ago. But I can’t help but wonder what the spirits that swirl around St. James think of what’s happened to the hallowed ground neighboring theirs – Ground Zero – and how long it’s taken to gently fill in the Earth, tenderly care for it and begin the process of remembrance, gratitude and grieving that seems to be slowly slipping away from our national consciousness except on a certain day in September.
The stones of St. James have been rinsed clean – as have the massive windows on the towering buildings that encircle Ground Zero – of the powdery remains of papers, office equipment, drywall, ceiling tiles, concrete, and yes, human beings, that blew through the canyon-like streets of the financial district like a nightmare made real on that crisp, sunny day. The graveyard has for years been in the shape that any cemetery in a big city should be: full of tourists with cameras, people on their lunch breaks sitting on benches, scores of flying rats and other assorted avian species that live for the metropolitan bustle, cigarette butts and worn grass between tombstones weathered, worn and giving way to gravity.
Not as much of this kind of progress can be seen just west of here. Where the World Trade Centers once loomed hugely above a city known for its ferocity and enormity, a city that calls itself the Capital of the World, the spot where backwards cave-dwelling assholes from one of the most remote, desolate and technologically deprived areas on the globe pulled off the greatest national tragedy we’ve ever seen, the only thing that is rising from the ashes and grief and horror are a few rusting I-beams near a couple cranes that slowly swing items back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
Eight years.
2,920 days.
70,080 hours.
4,204,800 minutes.
One massive, gaping wound to our national conscience, our heart, indeed our very identity, that, as long as it is open, still seeps with the pestilence and depraved evil of that most evil of days.
This here, in the United States of America, where we pride ourselves on the ability to do whatever is within the realm of possibility – or even push past that if we can – what remains at the site where our worst fears became a reality is nothing more than a large pit, plain and simple. And it’s pathetic.
I remember the days and weeks after 9/11. With ease I can go back in time and conjure-up images of politicians and officials standing on piles of still-smoldering rubble holding bull horns and giving big, inspiring speeches that “this will never happen again.” I remember the tears and tortured faces, the screaming and the hugging, the running – terrified – down some alley or street. The mom or the wife or the child holding a worn picture up to a TV camera. “This is my son, my husband, my daddy. Help me find them.”
Americans. That’s all we were. No political affiliation. No Conservative vs. Liberal. No Hawk vs. Dove. No Big Government vs. Small Government. No Black, White, Red, Brown, Yellow. None of that. We are Americans, we said, and we put stickers in our car windows and on our bumpers saying as much. We flew flags out of the backs of our cars and off our front porches. We talked about things with our neighbors and the guy at the coffee shop and the drycleaners and the bank. The more we talked, the more connected we became. We wanted something to happen. We wanted revenge. We wanted to clean-off Old Glory and raise her up – way up – to the top of the flagpole. “You fucked with us, now prepare to be royally fucked with,” we thought, and it made us feel good to think that way.
And we imagined that maybe within just a few months after the workers were finished painstakingly combing through the soil at the site of not only New York’s tragedy, but our tragedy, once all the tiny bone fragments and company ID cards and family photos bordered by a broken picture frame were all recovered, the building would begin. “Build as soon as possible. Don’t wait.” I remember hearing that a lot. “You might have knocked them down, but we will build them right back up. Again and again. Another after another. Whatever it takes. And the faster we built it, the larger a middle finger it will be.”
Several ideas were thrown around. The Freedom Tower was one. It was to be a shiny, metallic structure 1,776 feet tall, soaring over the New York skyline. It was to nearly pierce the sky. It was to be undeniable. It was to be our Middle Finger. Our Fuck You. Our Kiss Our Red, White and Blue Ass.
A few rusted I-beams and a couple of cranes swinging items back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
“Everyone here is proud of what they’re doing. They want to put this building up and show the country and the world what we're doing,” reads a quote from a steelworker on wtcprogress.com, a Website set-up to show the public what’s being done at the site.
Work is currently ongoing on a September 11, 2001 National Memorial. Cascading water that runs down the sides of two gigantic pools where the towers once stood are to be a reminder of how they plummeted, almost elegantly, to the ground. It’s to be a place of solace and reflection, a place where we can collectively gather as Americans, and maybe try to recapture some of that solidarity that we shared in the weeks and months after 9/11, a feeling of collectivity that has been blown away just like the easterly wind blew away that cloud of debris and bones and evil in the hours after the planes hit the towers.
The re-building process has been mired in politics. It’s been slowed by the myriad groups that have a special connection to that horrific day and, therefore, want the site where their husband, daughter, son or comrade perished to look, smell and feel the way they want it to. It’s personal for us, but to them, I’m sure, it’s much more than that. 9/11 might have cut our heart, but it tore their soul out. I’m sure, for them, it was like having the whole nation watch your loved one die and see you tear out your hair with grief. I can’t imagine the pain they felt and continue to feel.
But I think we can learn a few things from the old New Yorkers in the graveyard at St. James Church. They know the healing power of time. They have seen the city swell with progress and build itself up into what very well might be the greatest city on Earth. They are calling to us now, their voices whirling through the busy streets, past the honking horns of taxi cabs and through the pharynx of pedestrians that trudge past each other on the sidewalks of the streets that border the gargantuan graveyard adjacent theirs, but one that hasn’t quite been given a proper burial. They’re telling us to close-up the wound, it’s been long enough. We know how to get on with things, they say, we know what it means to bury the past, we miss the cooling shadow of something that says America. We want to be blinded when the sun hits it just right. We want to rest in wonder of the city – the country – that we helped create and rest well we will when the towers that we thought were the pinnacle of progress are replaced with something even more spectacular, because that’s what we hoped this country would become: a place where once you reach the mountaintop, you find a taller peak just over the horizon, and you have to climb it. That’s what we want, and that’s what you want, too.
The stones of St. James have been rinsed clean – as have the massive windows on the towering buildings that encircle Ground Zero – of the powdery remains of papers, office equipment, drywall, ceiling tiles, concrete, and yes, human beings, that blew through the canyon-like streets of the financial district like a nightmare made real on that crisp, sunny day. The graveyard has for years been in the shape that any cemetery in a big city should be: full of tourists with cameras, people on their lunch breaks sitting on benches, scores of flying rats and other assorted avian species that live for the metropolitan bustle, cigarette butts and worn grass between tombstones weathered, worn and giving way to gravity.
Not as much of this kind of progress can be seen just west of here. Where the World Trade Centers once loomed hugely above a city known for its ferocity and enormity, a city that calls itself the Capital of the World, the spot where backwards cave-dwelling assholes from one of the most remote, desolate and technologically deprived areas on the globe pulled off the greatest national tragedy we’ve ever seen, the only thing that is rising from the ashes and grief and horror are a few rusting I-beams near a couple cranes that slowly swing items back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
Eight years.
2,920 days.
70,080 hours.
4,204,800 minutes.
One massive, gaping wound to our national conscience, our heart, indeed our very identity, that, as long as it is open, still seeps with the pestilence and depraved evil of that most evil of days.
This here, in the United States of America, where we pride ourselves on the ability to do whatever is within the realm of possibility – or even push past that if we can – what remains at the site where our worst fears became a reality is nothing more than a large pit, plain and simple. And it’s pathetic.
I remember the days and weeks after 9/11. With ease I can go back in time and conjure-up images of politicians and officials standing on piles of still-smoldering rubble holding bull horns and giving big, inspiring speeches that “this will never happen again.” I remember the tears and tortured faces, the screaming and the hugging, the running – terrified – down some alley or street. The mom or the wife or the child holding a worn picture up to a TV camera. “This is my son, my husband, my daddy. Help me find them.”
Americans. That’s all we were. No political affiliation. No Conservative vs. Liberal. No Hawk vs. Dove. No Big Government vs. Small Government. No Black, White, Red, Brown, Yellow. None of that. We are Americans, we said, and we put stickers in our car windows and on our bumpers saying as much. We flew flags out of the backs of our cars and off our front porches. We talked about things with our neighbors and the guy at the coffee shop and the drycleaners and the bank. The more we talked, the more connected we became. We wanted something to happen. We wanted revenge. We wanted to clean-off Old Glory and raise her up – way up – to the top of the flagpole. “You fucked with us, now prepare to be royally fucked with,” we thought, and it made us feel good to think that way.
And we imagined that maybe within just a few months after the workers were finished painstakingly combing through the soil at the site of not only New York’s tragedy, but our tragedy, once all the tiny bone fragments and company ID cards and family photos bordered by a broken picture frame were all recovered, the building would begin. “Build as soon as possible. Don’t wait.” I remember hearing that a lot. “You might have knocked them down, but we will build them right back up. Again and again. Another after another. Whatever it takes. And the faster we built it, the larger a middle finger it will be.”
Several ideas were thrown around. The Freedom Tower was one. It was to be a shiny, metallic structure 1,776 feet tall, soaring over the New York skyline. It was to nearly pierce the sky. It was to be undeniable. It was to be our Middle Finger. Our Fuck You. Our Kiss Our Red, White and Blue Ass.
A few rusted I-beams and a couple of cranes swinging items back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
“Everyone here is proud of what they’re doing. They want to put this building up and show the country and the world what we're doing,” reads a quote from a steelworker on wtcprogress.com, a Website set-up to show the public what’s being done at the site.
Work is currently ongoing on a September 11, 2001 National Memorial. Cascading water that runs down the sides of two gigantic pools where the towers once stood are to be a reminder of how they plummeted, almost elegantly, to the ground. It’s to be a place of solace and reflection, a place where we can collectively gather as Americans, and maybe try to recapture some of that solidarity that we shared in the weeks and months after 9/11, a feeling of collectivity that has been blown away just like the easterly wind blew away that cloud of debris and bones and evil in the hours after the planes hit the towers.
The re-building process has been mired in politics. It’s been slowed by the myriad groups that have a special connection to that horrific day and, therefore, want the site where their husband, daughter, son or comrade perished to look, smell and feel the way they want it to. It’s personal for us, but to them, I’m sure, it’s much more than that. 9/11 might have cut our heart, but it tore their soul out. I’m sure, for them, it was like having the whole nation watch your loved one die and see you tear out your hair with grief. I can’t imagine the pain they felt and continue to feel.
But I think we can learn a few things from the old New Yorkers in the graveyard at St. James Church. They know the healing power of time. They have seen the city swell with progress and build itself up into what very well might be the greatest city on Earth. They are calling to us now, their voices whirling through the busy streets, past the honking horns of taxi cabs and through the pharynx of pedestrians that trudge past each other on the sidewalks of the streets that border the gargantuan graveyard adjacent theirs, but one that hasn’t quite been given a proper burial. They’re telling us to close-up the wound, it’s been long enough. We know how to get on with things, they say, we know what it means to bury the past, we miss the cooling shadow of something that says America. We want to be blinded when the sun hits it just right. We want to rest in wonder of the city – the country – that we helped create and rest well we will when the towers that we thought were the pinnacle of progress are replaced with something even more spectacular, because that’s what we hoped this country would become: a place where once you reach the mountaintop, you find a taller peak just over the horizon, and you have to climb it. That’s what we want, and that’s what you want, too.
August 23, 2009
Parting Glass
To the 8 years I’ve spent in this city, I raise to you the Parting Glass. I toast to the heartbreak and the joyousness. I raise my glass of Jameson to all those who I’ve known and all those I’ve let write a story on my heart. I feel honored and humbled that I’ve been able to love here; the sunny days and the snow-swept streets, the long nights glued to my laptop, typing out what I’ve seen and heard and lived, the hearty laughs and streams of tears, the friends that I will forever be indebted to because they made me better than I was before I met them. To the days on the beach and the lonely walks down allies. To the places where I frequented and knew every name and every line on every face. To the best coffee on Earth served at the dirtiest place in the world. To the bar that will forever be the place where I feel at home, close to the dark wood and the smoke-stained ceiling tiles and the old man in the corner sipping on a glass of Pabst. Last call. Be well. Live lots and laugh hard. I raise to you the Parting Glass. Now let’s drink awhile.
August 17, 2009
The Box
Duane Funches came in from the thick, swampy night looking like so many others that I’d seen before, and I placed him almost immediately in one of those many boxes one has in their mind that house a certain kind of person. He was a black man, tall and thin, with a baseball cap and white whiskers in his splotchy beard. He smelled ripe and musty and carried a white plastic garbage bag that was straining against the contents inside of it.
He sat down next to me, near the corner of the counter, and ordered a pint of beer and “a shot of vodka. A double shot of vodka,” he said. The bartender seemed less than impressed with him, a look of complete ambivalence on her face, like Duane had just stolen something from her. I talked with my friend for a few moments while Duane fumbled through some items he’d placed on the bar. Something stirred in me and I knew I had to talk with him. I was curious about him. I wanted to know who he was.
For a few moments, Duane sat with himself, even though he was right next to me. He spoke to himself in a low voice and then lit a long Newport cigarette. I asked him how he was doing and he sprung to life almost immediately, like I’d just plunged a shot of adrenaline into one of the thick veins that snaked just beneath the chalky skin on his skinny arms.
“Oh, man, I’m good, I’m good,” he said, in a voice that started high and ended low, the ashes from the cigarette falling like snow onto the bar. I asked him where he was from and he began talking angrily about Chicago. “It’s fucked up there, man. Gang bangin’, gangs, all that shit.” Then he placed his face next to mine and whispered: “You know they even got gangs of homosexuals? Yep, five, six of them, they’ll jump your ass and fuck you up.”
“On Halstead Street? Boystown?” I said.
“Fuck yeah, man,” he said. “You know I ain’t fuckin’ around,” he said.
Duane is from “all sides” of Chicago; “Northside, Southside, Eastside, Westside,” he said. There, apparently on “all sides,” he told me he worked the third shift, cleaning the floors at Burger King, Subway, Quiznos and other chain fast food joints.
He didn’t much like to talk about Chicago – I could tell. He wasn’t in that city anymore for a reason, I thought. He ran away, got out, came to Kalamazoo to see his sister and brother-in-law. He wanted to start something new, even at 53-years-old.
“Look at this,” he said, pulling a soaking wet wad of papers from a pocket in his light blue coat that hung from the back of his chair. He placed the wad on the bar and I went through it, finding a Greyhound bus ticket to Chicago. He was to leave on August 10 on the 1:25 p.m. bus. He never got on.
We shook hands and I could feel the heaps of heavy calluses that circled around his right palm. They were working hands, the kind that aren’t nice on the eyes, but are functional for the person whose arms they are attached to. He didn’t want to talk much about what those hands had been doing since he got to Kalamazoo, but I could sense it involved a lot of loneliness. I decided not to press.
My friend gave Duane a taste of his Guinness. Duane was impressed. He’d never tried the stuff, but being a “connoisseur,” as he called himself, he gave a running commentary of the goodness of the drink. “It’s got taste. It’s got class. It feels good in your mouth,” he said.
“It stays with you,” I said. “Hell yeah it does!” he said matter-of-factly.
I don’t know why, but I asked Duane if he liked Marvin Gaye. He did, a lot. Duane seemed to like everything, well, except for the City of Broad Shoulders.
I felt an urge to touch his back, to run it up and down just to make him feel somehow safe, at home. It felt like the back of a dying man, thin from the chemotherapy or the unwillingness to eat anymore. His scapulas felt like dull knives. I put my left arm around his shoulders and we sang together.
“Ain’t no mountain high, ain’t no valley low, ain’t no river wide enough baby…”
“Mother, mother, there’s too many of you crying. Brother, brother, brother, there’s far too many of you dying…”
We laughed together, and I could look deep into Duane’s mouth. I could see what life had done to his teeth, the edges of which were a dark brown, like he forgot to brush them after eating a big brownie. As he laughed, tiny drops of saliva spewed from between his teeth, landing on my left arm and the left side of my face. I didn’t care.
A Michael Jackson song came on and Duane got up to show my friend and I “a few moves.” He stood just behind us, and flapped his arms ever so slightly, nodding his head to the beat. He had mad rhythm, and had for his whole life, I thought.
He slapped me on the back. “Chris, we’re brothers, you and me,” he said. A waitress stood nearby, fumbling with something on a table. “Hey, you know what?” he asked her. “Me and this man are brothers.”
“Yeah, brothers from another mother,” she said. He laughed again.
“Can I have some of that big baboon booty sliced real thin,” he said to the bartender, who wasn’t quite able to make out what he said. Duane laughed, like an 8-year-old would when they just got away with a joke on an adult. At that moment, he seemed at once completely innocent, almost childlike in his antics and sincerity. He just wanted to laugh with someone, have them acknowledge him, make them know that he was a man, a human being, a soul.
“If the whole world stopped spinning tomorrow, we’d all be gone,” he said. “It don’t matter who you are. You got one shot, just one shot.”
My friend and I had to go. Off to another establishment on one of the ever waning nights I was to have in this city.
“We got to go, Duane,” I said. “Got to work in the morning.”
His face changed and I felt a little guilty about the work comment because it wasn’t true. I felt like I owed this man complete sincerity, because he was giving it to me.
“Oh, no, Chris. Now I’m going to be all alone here, just by myself,” he said. “I’m going to be sad.” I knew that he was not lying. His eyes got long and looked misty. He seemed like a little boy who was about to be abandoned.
“I’ll see you around, man. I will,” I said. “Give me a hug.”
We embraced and Duane spoke softly into my ear.
“I love you Chris, I do,” he said. “I love you, too, Duane,” I responded.
I meant it.
My friend and I walked out of the bar and into the night’s thickness, made that way from a recent thundershower. I looked up at a streetlight and enjoyed how the amber glow was all fuzzy from the humidity that hung in the air like a blanket.
Then I thought of Duane. I took that box out of my mind and I crushed it, then threw it in a dirty dumpster in the back of the bar.
He sat down next to me, near the corner of the counter, and ordered a pint of beer and “a shot of vodka. A double shot of vodka,” he said. The bartender seemed less than impressed with him, a look of complete ambivalence on her face, like Duane had just stolen something from her. I talked with my friend for a few moments while Duane fumbled through some items he’d placed on the bar. Something stirred in me and I knew I had to talk with him. I was curious about him. I wanted to know who he was.
For a few moments, Duane sat with himself, even though he was right next to me. He spoke to himself in a low voice and then lit a long Newport cigarette. I asked him how he was doing and he sprung to life almost immediately, like I’d just plunged a shot of adrenaline into one of the thick veins that snaked just beneath the chalky skin on his skinny arms.
“Oh, man, I’m good, I’m good,” he said, in a voice that started high and ended low, the ashes from the cigarette falling like snow onto the bar. I asked him where he was from and he began talking angrily about Chicago. “It’s fucked up there, man. Gang bangin’, gangs, all that shit.” Then he placed his face next to mine and whispered: “You know they even got gangs of homosexuals? Yep, five, six of them, they’ll jump your ass and fuck you up.”
“On Halstead Street? Boystown?” I said.
“Fuck yeah, man,” he said. “You know I ain’t fuckin’ around,” he said.
Duane is from “all sides” of Chicago; “Northside, Southside, Eastside, Westside,” he said. There, apparently on “all sides,” he told me he worked the third shift, cleaning the floors at Burger King, Subway, Quiznos and other chain fast food joints.
He didn’t much like to talk about Chicago – I could tell. He wasn’t in that city anymore for a reason, I thought. He ran away, got out, came to Kalamazoo to see his sister and brother-in-law. He wanted to start something new, even at 53-years-old.
“Look at this,” he said, pulling a soaking wet wad of papers from a pocket in his light blue coat that hung from the back of his chair. He placed the wad on the bar and I went through it, finding a Greyhound bus ticket to Chicago. He was to leave on August 10 on the 1:25 p.m. bus. He never got on.
We shook hands and I could feel the heaps of heavy calluses that circled around his right palm. They were working hands, the kind that aren’t nice on the eyes, but are functional for the person whose arms they are attached to. He didn’t want to talk much about what those hands had been doing since he got to Kalamazoo, but I could sense it involved a lot of loneliness. I decided not to press.
My friend gave Duane a taste of his Guinness. Duane was impressed. He’d never tried the stuff, but being a “connoisseur,” as he called himself, he gave a running commentary of the goodness of the drink. “It’s got taste. It’s got class. It feels good in your mouth,” he said.
“It stays with you,” I said. “Hell yeah it does!” he said matter-of-factly.
I don’t know why, but I asked Duane if he liked Marvin Gaye. He did, a lot. Duane seemed to like everything, well, except for the City of Broad Shoulders.
I felt an urge to touch his back, to run it up and down just to make him feel somehow safe, at home. It felt like the back of a dying man, thin from the chemotherapy or the unwillingness to eat anymore. His scapulas felt like dull knives. I put my left arm around his shoulders and we sang together.
“Ain’t no mountain high, ain’t no valley low, ain’t no river wide enough baby…”
“Mother, mother, there’s too many of you crying. Brother, brother, brother, there’s far too many of you dying…”
We laughed together, and I could look deep into Duane’s mouth. I could see what life had done to his teeth, the edges of which were a dark brown, like he forgot to brush them after eating a big brownie. As he laughed, tiny drops of saliva spewed from between his teeth, landing on my left arm and the left side of my face. I didn’t care.
A Michael Jackson song came on and Duane got up to show my friend and I “a few moves.” He stood just behind us, and flapped his arms ever so slightly, nodding his head to the beat. He had mad rhythm, and had for his whole life, I thought.
He slapped me on the back. “Chris, we’re brothers, you and me,” he said. A waitress stood nearby, fumbling with something on a table. “Hey, you know what?” he asked her. “Me and this man are brothers.”
“Yeah, brothers from another mother,” she said. He laughed again.
“Can I have some of that big baboon booty sliced real thin,” he said to the bartender, who wasn’t quite able to make out what he said. Duane laughed, like an 8-year-old would when they just got away with a joke on an adult. At that moment, he seemed at once completely innocent, almost childlike in his antics and sincerity. He just wanted to laugh with someone, have them acknowledge him, make them know that he was a man, a human being, a soul.
“If the whole world stopped spinning tomorrow, we’d all be gone,” he said. “It don’t matter who you are. You got one shot, just one shot.”
My friend and I had to go. Off to another establishment on one of the ever waning nights I was to have in this city.
“We got to go, Duane,” I said. “Got to work in the morning.”
His face changed and I felt a little guilty about the work comment because it wasn’t true. I felt like I owed this man complete sincerity, because he was giving it to me.
“Oh, no, Chris. Now I’m going to be all alone here, just by myself,” he said. “I’m going to be sad.” I knew that he was not lying. His eyes got long and looked misty. He seemed like a little boy who was about to be abandoned.
“I’ll see you around, man. I will,” I said. “Give me a hug.”
We embraced and Duane spoke softly into my ear.
“I love you Chris, I do,” he said. “I love you, too, Duane,” I responded.
I meant it.
My friend and I walked out of the bar and into the night’s thickness, made that way from a recent thundershower. I looked up at a streetlight and enjoyed how the amber glow was all fuzzy from the humidity that hung in the air like a blanket.
Then I thought of Duane. I took that box out of my mind and I crushed it, then threw it in a dirty dumpster in the back of the bar.
Which side are you on?
It’s about 3:30 p.m. and the Amtrak train from Chicago is hurtling into the city, its horn blaring out all the other noise as I stand near Rose Street. A few haggard looking men rush across the tracks and head toward the homeless drop-in shelter, down a rocky makeshift path strewn with thousands of cigarette butts, broken pints of cheap liquor and discarded shitty diapers.
The train tracks cut the city in two here. Starting at Westnedge Avenue and heading east for more than a mile, there are two Kalamazoos: the downtown area to the south with its shops, bars, parks and people wearing sunglasses and walking around with briefcases and places to go and an area to the north seemingly abandoned.
It’s here, on “the other side of the tracks,” that an area very much unknown even to those who have called Kalamazoo home for decades languishes beneath the fear and ignorance of the rest of the city’s residents.
Welcome to The Northside.
It’s a word that describes more than just a neighborhood. It has become part of the lexicon of this city, a word that has become synonymous with drugs and violence, prostitution and poverty, laziness and ineptitude.
One of the largest of Kalamazoo’s neighborhoods, it’s a place where the dreams of the city go to die, it’s said, an area where well-intentioned programs passed by city leaders fizzle and fail in the face of a residential population that could care less.
But there burning questions that swirl around the Northside that no media outlet in the city would dare ask because of the big issues that would undoubtedly bubble to the top. Thorny issues like race, class, poverty and lack of economic opportunity.
Hell, most reporters won’t even dare walk the streets here. I know, because I’ve seen the anxiety-filled inaction. It’s too dangerous, they say. Better to make a phone call to the police or find a person to talk to close to a major road. No sense in heading into the guts of the place. Lord knows the only thing they might find of you is your tattered reporter’s notebook with “HELP ME!” hurriedly written on the first page.
But that is exactly what drew me to this place.
Take a few seconds. Think of that word: Northside. What comes to mind? Perhaps you are one of those who wish you could drive faster than the 30 mph speed limit on the two main roads that cut north and south through the neighborhood. When do you frequent the area? An afternoon beer in the Bell’s beer garden?
The train tracks cut the city in two here. Starting at Westnedge Avenue and heading east for more than a mile, there are two Kalamazoos: the downtown area to the south with its shops, bars, parks and people wearing sunglasses and walking around with briefcases and places to go and an area to the north seemingly abandoned.
It’s here, on “the other side of the tracks,” that an area very much unknown even to those who have called Kalamazoo home for decades languishes beneath the fear and ignorance of the rest of the city’s residents.
Welcome to The Northside.
It’s a word that describes more than just a neighborhood. It has become part of the lexicon of this city, a word that has become synonymous with drugs and violence, prostitution and poverty, laziness and ineptitude.
One of the largest of Kalamazoo’s neighborhoods, it’s a place where the dreams of the city go to die, it’s said, an area where well-intentioned programs passed by city leaders fizzle and fail in the face of a residential population that could care less.
But there burning questions that swirl around the Northside that no media outlet in the city would dare ask because of the big issues that would undoubtedly bubble to the top. Thorny issues like race, class, poverty and lack of economic opportunity.
Hell, most reporters won’t even dare walk the streets here. I know, because I’ve seen the anxiety-filled inaction. It’s too dangerous, they say. Better to make a phone call to the police or find a person to talk to close to a major road. No sense in heading into the guts of the place. Lord knows the only thing they might find of you is your tattered reporter’s notebook with “HELP ME!” hurriedly written on the first page.
But that is exactly what drew me to this place.
Take a few seconds. Think of that word: Northside. What comes to mind? Perhaps you are one of those who wish you could drive faster than the 30 mph speed limit on the two main roads that cut north and south through the neighborhood. When do you frequent the area? An afternoon beer in the Bell’s beer garden?
August 2, 2009
To Lando, with affection
Never go into a small room in the basement of a bar. Nothing good happens there – ever.
However, being just barely intoxicated – the kind of buzz where you’ll do things you normally wouldn’t but where you are still able to remember whatever it is that you do – I didn’t take this advice on a recent night. And the consequences were nothing short of mind-numbing.
The setting: A college bar called “The Grotto at Capone’s,” one of those flair-riddled bars with the kind of overblown kitsch that makes you feel like you’re in your grandmother’s basement, only a lot cleaner.
The notorious Chicago gangster is well represented here. Tommy guns line the walls, pictures of Capone with a freshly lit cigar between his teeth are within eyeshot of any particular place as is, of course, his famous mug shot.
The Grotto used to be a hippy bar, full of patchouli-oiled, dred-locked hobo co-eds who would sip microbrews and sneak hits off a bowl in the bathroom.
Those were the good old days, and I wanted to return to them one last time.
The bar was already filling-up when my best friend – who happens to be old pals with the manager – led me down a short hallway, through a door with the feel and look of balsa wood and into the break room, a small space lit by two, long fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling.
The room was full of shit – cigarette butts littered the floor, various hardware implements were thrown in the corner, un-matching chairs circled around a white thrift store table.
It didn’t take long for things to get down to brass tacks.
The manager packed weed so tightly into a short, glass bowl that I thought a marijuana diamond would emerge from the ashes of the last hit.
Four semi-intoxicated men sat at the table. Something about gangster rap was uttered and then the bowl – with a skull and crossbones emblazoned on the glass (which didn’t ally my fears one bit) – made its crazed carousel from hand to hand to hand to hand.
I can’t speak for the others, as pot packs a different punch for everyone, but this is how the session went for me.
After hit No. 1: Rising euphoria.
After hit No. 2: Growing concern.
After hit No. 3: Loss of feeling of feet.
After hit No. 4: Complete panic.
For the sometimes pot puffer, smoking with professional pot-partakers is dangerous in two ways.
First, you don’t want to seem like some kind of pot pussy, so you try to keep up. And you better inhale, because they’re watching you. “Are they watching me? I think they’re watching me. Oh my god, are they watching me?”
Second…well, fuck it. You just get blown out of your mind.
The only reason we left that room was because the weed had been cashed. What wasn’t cashed was my tab, and the four of us had every intention of taking this lightheadedness to BuzzCon 4.
As we emerged from the man cave/pot den, the bar seemed to be overflowing. It seemed like every slut and douche bag multiplied themselves five times over, like Gremlins do – with the bubbles on their back that steam and froth after they get wet, eventually spewing forth a new
Gremlin from each back pod.
This was not a pleasant thought.
Neither was the fact that we were in a dimly lit basement with capacity for about 100 but was filled with 200. One staircase, 200 people, someone drops a cigarette, bar lights on fire, mob scene to escape flesh melting fire, pathetic death.
At this point my mind was reeling. I scared two women I was talking to because I told one of them they’d never get a job because corporate America was “a big slut that fucks everybody.”
They hastily moved to another table.
The air was thick and my ears had a constant furry buzz in them, like someone was ripping apart a pad of steel wool inside my eardrums. I sipped a pint of PBR and told my friend that we should go outside for some fresh air.
Outside, I made a mistake of lighting a cigarette. It seemed like it was 10 minutes, but I took probably only four puffs. Then my legs started to give way, like my torso was being held up with over-cooked angel hair pasta. I was laughing the whole time – for no reason – and reminiscing about the time I took a landscape rock from outside the “old bar” and threw it at a frat establishment across the parking lot.
Turned out I almost hit a cop in the head. My friends at the time told me to rush into a video store in the area, but I never made it. The cop came up like gangbusters and asked me “what the fuck are you doing, you asshole?” and took my information. The stars aligned, however, and he was called to more pressing matters.
So by this time, me and my pasta legs noodled our way back down to the basement.
By now, the entire scene was a sea of tube tops, popped-collars, cleavage, gelled hair and high heels. It moved and began to drive itself into a massive, whirling mess. IT whirled faster and faster, tighter and tighter, and I thought that at any moment the energy would either crack space-time and usher in some kind of demon legion or create a black hole that would suck us all to another dimension.
It was now that I swore the manager laced the pot with crystal meth or crystal light or some kind of heavy shit that has crystals in it.
I had to leave.
“Dude, I’m out,” I said to my friend, now shooting a glass of Jameson, which made me puke in me head.
“Just hold on, you’re fine,” he said.
“Dude, I’m out.”
“What the fuck? Just stay. You’re freaking out.”
“Dude, I’m out.”
“Why? Now you’re freaking me out.”
“Dude, I’m out.”
And then I was.
I made my way through the Capone mob, past the two girls and frat guys that seemed to be 10 feet tall at the time. They reminded me of oak trees.
I made it up the stairs, clutching the railing for dear life – literally – through the upstairs malay and in to the street.
I made a zig-zag pattern through the parking lot and somehow ended up – ok, purposefully ended up – at the Campus Kitchen Chinese restaurant, an establishment that specializes in mystery meat concoctions that are sucked up with reckless abandon by drunk college kids who throw food at the help and scream about the pussy their going to get later with voices that could cut through marble.
I ordered a pint of chicken lo mein and a side of crab rangoons. I paid at 1:30 a.m. and got the meal at 1:45 a.m., but it actually took 45 minutes to make the food.
As I stumbled out, I was looking for some ambiance. I like to be inspired when I’m stoned.
The WMU campus would be perfect, I thought.
So I made my way in to the heart of this fine institution – my alma mater – a place where you go when you can’t get into MSU or U of M. In the hazy, yellowness of the streetlights, I ate my rangoons and a deep blanket of calm wrapped around me. A campus cop drove by and I waved.
He didn’t wave back.
I walked over to the Honors College, where I’d spent many semesters, and looked at my image in the mirrored front door for probably 10 minutes, noting the way the rangoons greased-up my lips and admiring how well I chew my food.
The college’s dean, a man who I’d had many philosophical conversations with, would have been so proud.
The lo mein had to be eaten in a more quiet setting. The paranoia was setting in quick now. Ten freshmen drunks were making their way back to their dorm and I didn’t want to be spotted, so I found a pine tree and sat underneath it on a bed of wet wood chips.
After each bite, I looked over both my shoulders, like I was some kind of cave man looking for a horde to come over a non-existent hill in the distance. I’ve never finished a pint of lo mein, but I did that night. Even the soybean stragglers were slurped up.
Thirst overwhelmed me now, probably from the MSG. Water? No. Salt-splattered, dirt-encrusted snowbanks? Yes. I took a handful and ate it like a snow cone. I must have looked like a transient with nothing to lose.
Now to get home, about a mile and a half away.
I walked gingerly. Why is it that, when your mind is swimming in THC, that everything you want takes forever and everything you don’t want takes a few seconds?
I cut through campus, avoiding people like they had darts tipped with the AIDS virus that they intended on throwing at me. I ducked behind bushes, dumpsters, cars. A few people honked at me as they drove by, and my heart jumped against my rib cage.
One last hurdle.
I tried to time my walk across Stadium Drive so that the least amount of cars would be to my right and left, and I timed it perfectly. Running would have looked too strange, but I had to do something different. A regular gait would not do, so I chewed my fingernails as I crossed the five lanes.
Up the hill, down the hill, then up another hill, next to the football stadium. I tried to jump the fence and get on the field, where I intended to run the entire length of the gridiron for the only reason that I was stoned. Seeing the outlines on the snow of other people’s failed attempts, I gave up, imagining a broken leg, collar bone, face, and other assorted maladies.
I was now five minutes away from my flannel sheets.
Up another hill and I ended up at East Hall, overlooking the city. I screamed with all I could “I
LOVE YOU!” and scampered off, down a staircase that leads to my street. It was so packed with snow and ice – from snowboarders, residential skiers and drunk stoners like myself – that I had to schuss my way down, which was easy because my kicks have no traction. I had to hunch the whole way, like some kind of half-alive Quasimodo, and I’m sure it appeared to the sober observer that I was about to toss the recently ingested lo mein onto the dirty snow.
I made it home unscathed, however. In the bathroom, I flipped on the lights and peered into the mirror. It looked like my eyes just had an artery explode in them. Red, everywhere, like a thousand tiny blood drenched streets converging together in a twisted, non-sensical pattern drawn up by a city planner on an acid trip.
But all was well. I was safe.
I went to bed with my shoes on.
However, being just barely intoxicated – the kind of buzz where you’ll do things you normally wouldn’t but where you are still able to remember whatever it is that you do – I didn’t take this advice on a recent night. And the consequences were nothing short of mind-numbing.
The setting: A college bar called “The Grotto at Capone’s,” one of those flair-riddled bars with the kind of overblown kitsch that makes you feel like you’re in your grandmother’s basement, only a lot cleaner.
The notorious Chicago gangster is well represented here. Tommy guns line the walls, pictures of Capone with a freshly lit cigar between his teeth are within eyeshot of any particular place as is, of course, his famous mug shot.
The Grotto used to be a hippy bar, full of patchouli-oiled, dred-locked hobo co-eds who would sip microbrews and sneak hits off a bowl in the bathroom.
Those were the good old days, and I wanted to return to them one last time.
The bar was already filling-up when my best friend – who happens to be old pals with the manager – led me down a short hallway, through a door with the feel and look of balsa wood and into the break room, a small space lit by two, long fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling.
The room was full of shit – cigarette butts littered the floor, various hardware implements were thrown in the corner, un-matching chairs circled around a white thrift store table.
It didn’t take long for things to get down to brass tacks.
The manager packed weed so tightly into a short, glass bowl that I thought a marijuana diamond would emerge from the ashes of the last hit.
Four semi-intoxicated men sat at the table. Something about gangster rap was uttered and then the bowl – with a skull and crossbones emblazoned on the glass (which didn’t ally my fears one bit) – made its crazed carousel from hand to hand to hand to hand.
I can’t speak for the others, as pot packs a different punch for everyone, but this is how the session went for me.
After hit No. 1: Rising euphoria.
After hit No. 2: Growing concern.
After hit No. 3: Loss of feeling of feet.
After hit No. 4: Complete panic.
For the sometimes pot puffer, smoking with professional pot-partakers is dangerous in two ways.
First, you don’t want to seem like some kind of pot pussy, so you try to keep up. And you better inhale, because they’re watching you. “Are they watching me? I think they’re watching me. Oh my god, are they watching me?”
Second…well, fuck it. You just get blown out of your mind.
The only reason we left that room was because the weed had been cashed. What wasn’t cashed was my tab, and the four of us had every intention of taking this lightheadedness to BuzzCon 4.
As we emerged from the man cave/pot den, the bar seemed to be overflowing. It seemed like every slut and douche bag multiplied themselves five times over, like Gremlins do – with the bubbles on their back that steam and froth after they get wet, eventually spewing forth a new
Gremlin from each back pod.
This was not a pleasant thought.
Neither was the fact that we were in a dimly lit basement with capacity for about 100 but was filled with 200. One staircase, 200 people, someone drops a cigarette, bar lights on fire, mob scene to escape flesh melting fire, pathetic death.
At this point my mind was reeling. I scared two women I was talking to because I told one of them they’d never get a job because corporate America was “a big slut that fucks everybody.”
They hastily moved to another table.
The air was thick and my ears had a constant furry buzz in them, like someone was ripping apart a pad of steel wool inside my eardrums. I sipped a pint of PBR and told my friend that we should go outside for some fresh air.
Outside, I made a mistake of lighting a cigarette. It seemed like it was 10 minutes, but I took probably only four puffs. Then my legs started to give way, like my torso was being held up with over-cooked angel hair pasta. I was laughing the whole time – for no reason – and reminiscing about the time I took a landscape rock from outside the “old bar” and threw it at a frat establishment across the parking lot.
Turned out I almost hit a cop in the head. My friends at the time told me to rush into a video store in the area, but I never made it. The cop came up like gangbusters and asked me “what the fuck are you doing, you asshole?” and took my information. The stars aligned, however, and he was called to more pressing matters.
So by this time, me and my pasta legs noodled our way back down to the basement.
By now, the entire scene was a sea of tube tops, popped-collars, cleavage, gelled hair and high heels. It moved and began to drive itself into a massive, whirling mess. IT whirled faster and faster, tighter and tighter, and I thought that at any moment the energy would either crack space-time and usher in some kind of demon legion or create a black hole that would suck us all to another dimension.
It was now that I swore the manager laced the pot with crystal meth or crystal light or some kind of heavy shit that has crystals in it.
I had to leave.
“Dude, I’m out,” I said to my friend, now shooting a glass of Jameson, which made me puke in me head.
“Just hold on, you’re fine,” he said.
“Dude, I’m out.”
“What the fuck? Just stay. You’re freaking out.”
“Dude, I’m out.”
“Why? Now you’re freaking me out.”
“Dude, I’m out.”
And then I was.
I made my way through the Capone mob, past the two girls and frat guys that seemed to be 10 feet tall at the time. They reminded me of oak trees.
I made it up the stairs, clutching the railing for dear life – literally – through the upstairs malay and in to the street.
I made a zig-zag pattern through the parking lot and somehow ended up – ok, purposefully ended up – at the Campus Kitchen Chinese restaurant, an establishment that specializes in mystery meat concoctions that are sucked up with reckless abandon by drunk college kids who throw food at the help and scream about the pussy their going to get later with voices that could cut through marble.
I ordered a pint of chicken lo mein and a side of crab rangoons. I paid at 1:30 a.m. and got the meal at 1:45 a.m., but it actually took 45 minutes to make the food.
As I stumbled out, I was looking for some ambiance. I like to be inspired when I’m stoned.
The WMU campus would be perfect, I thought.
So I made my way in to the heart of this fine institution – my alma mater – a place where you go when you can’t get into MSU or U of M. In the hazy, yellowness of the streetlights, I ate my rangoons and a deep blanket of calm wrapped around me. A campus cop drove by and I waved.
He didn’t wave back.
I walked over to the Honors College, where I’d spent many semesters, and looked at my image in the mirrored front door for probably 10 minutes, noting the way the rangoons greased-up my lips and admiring how well I chew my food.
The college’s dean, a man who I’d had many philosophical conversations with, would have been so proud.
The lo mein had to be eaten in a more quiet setting. The paranoia was setting in quick now. Ten freshmen drunks were making their way back to their dorm and I didn’t want to be spotted, so I found a pine tree and sat underneath it on a bed of wet wood chips.
After each bite, I looked over both my shoulders, like I was some kind of cave man looking for a horde to come over a non-existent hill in the distance. I’ve never finished a pint of lo mein, but I did that night. Even the soybean stragglers were slurped up.
Thirst overwhelmed me now, probably from the MSG. Water? No. Salt-splattered, dirt-encrusted snowbanks? Yes. I took a handful and ate it like a snow cone. I must have looked like a transient with nothing to lose.
Now to get home, about a mile and a half away.
I walked gingerly. Why is it that, when your mind is swimming in THC, that everything you want takes forever and everything you don’t want takes a few seconds?
I cut through campus, avoiding people like they had darts tipped with the AIDS virus that they intended on throwing at me. I ducked behind bushes, dumpsters, cars. A few people honked at me as they drove by, and my heart jumped against my rib cage.
One last hurdle.
I tried to time my walk across Stadium Drive so that the least amount of cars would be to my right and left, and I timed it perfectly. Running would have looked too strange, but I had to do something different. A regular gait would not do, so I chewed my fingernails as I crossed the five lanes.
Up the hill, down the hill, then up another hill, next to the football stadium. I tried to jump the fence and get on the field, where I intended to run the entire length of the gridiron for the only reason that I was stoned. Seeing the outlines on the snow of other people’s failed attempts, I gave up, imagining a broken leg, collar bone, face, and other assorted maladies.
I was now five minutes away from my flannel sheets.
Up another hill and I ended up at East Hall, overlooking the city. I screamed with all I could “I
LOVE YOU!” and scampered off, down a staircase that leads to my street. It was so packed with snow and ice – from snowboarders, residential skiers and drunk stoners like myself – that I had to schuss my way down, which was easy because my kicks have no traction. I had to hunch the whole way, like some kind of half-alive Quasimodo, and I’m sure it appeared to the sober observer that I was about to toss the recently ingested lo mein onto the dirty snow.
I made it home unscathed, however. In the bathroom, I flipped on the lights and peered into the mirror. It looked like my eyes just had an artery explode in them. Red, everywhere, like a thousand tiny blood drenched streets converging together in a twisted, non-sensical pattern drawn up by a city planner on an acid trip.
But all was well. I was safe.
I went to bed with my shoes on.
July 20, 2009
to you, my old man
You, there, alone in your dark escape
Pulled too many a string.
You, there, behind the thickness of your Vaseline eyes
In the deafness of your mind.
Waiting.
No
Going
Back.
“You didn’t hear? I’m so sorry.”
But I did.
My ear’d been on you,
I was onto you.
There.
To see you once more.
You, there, but not at all.
A white-washed wall, too clean
And you, there, just down the hall
Swaddled in a baptismal cloth
Keeping you from the chill, but not from cold
Reality.
I, here, cast a gaze at you.
My prideful one
My moxied marauder
My life’s lesson
Of how not to live.
Heart pounds and palms ache
To touch you
(sonofabitch).
You, there
Split my mind with your silence
And I, here, don’t seem to mind.
Pulled too many a string.
You, there, behind the thickness of your Vaseline eyes
In the deafness of your mind.
Waiting.
No
Going
Back.
“You didn’t hear? I’m so sorry.”
But I did.
My ear’d been on you,
I was onto you.
There.
To see you once more.
You, there, but not at all.
A white-washed wall, too clean
And you, there, just down the hall
Swaddled in a baptismal cloth
Keeping you from the chill, but not from cold
Reality.
I, here, cast a gaze at you.
My prideful one
My moxied marauder
My life’s lesson
Of how not to live.
Heart pounds and palms ache
To touch you
(sonofabitch).
You, there
Split my mind with your silence
And I, here, don’t seem to mind.
July 10, 2009
The first thing that hits you when you walk into Ministry With Community is the smell. It’s heavy and thick and you can nearly chew it after you fling open the heavy, oily doors. There’s a pow-wow of African American men, all in their fifties, in a sunfilled room near the front of the building, near the clothes washing and drying machines clothes are washed for free. They’re talking about fishing in a polluted, trash strewn stream that snakes through the downtown. They don’t catch much there, they say, except for a discarded crutch or the plastic rings that hold six packs of beer together. So they usually pack up their tackle and lie under a tree near the stream and stare at the sky. Walking toward the back of Ministry, there is a room filled with people waiting to use the three telephones available. Toothless people dial numbers written on ratty, torn shreds of paper. Their voices hiss off their gums and you can scarcely make out what they are saying but they sound adamant about everything. There is immediacy in their speech, like they are making investment deals or negotiating a land contract. They lean on the walls and look like they are sinking into the floor. In the building’s rear, near the kitchen and cafeteria – now-locked with a heavy chain and a few intimidating pad locks – the homeless sit on plastic patio furniture around round formica tables. An old, nearly bald woman leafs through an old issue of “Home Magazine,” looking intently at each page, like she is considering a big remodel of her mud room or looking to add some new appliances to her kitchen, the kind with the shiny aluminum facades that make guests ask questions and long for the same convenience and efficiency. A man with a crisp white t-shirt tucked into his beltless black jeans sits in a cubby hole on the side of the room. He’s resting his head on his arms, perched on another chair in front of him. His feet are bobbing up and down like they’re punching out Morse code. I wonder what the message might be. Next to him is a middle aged woman with long blond hair that looks to have the consistency of straw. She’s staring at the wall, with a look on her face that is confused and frightening. I’m scared of her. Her eyes are large and opened wide and she looks at me, emotionless. Her skin is ashen and puffy looking, the kind of skin that somehow coats the body of someone on heavy medications. Her nails are long and yellow and they are attached to fingers that clutch hard on a big purse with dark colored flowers on it. It looks to be brand new. For a moment, she seems to be waiting to go somewhere, and she’s getting anxious because her ride isn’t here yet. She’s not going anywhere, but I bet she thinks she is. Walking outside. A thousand generic cigarette butts litter the parking lot like dead insects. The benches out front are full of people, some with large stomachs or distended livers. They wear oversized t-shirts with the names of Ivy League colleges on them, or some Looney Tunes character or a verse from the Bible. They greet each other with handshakes, nods and swear words. “Don’t fuck with me, bitch,” says a woman to her bench mate. She’s being nice. I walk through a cloud of generic cigarette smoke as I head to my car and it smells like burning grass.
June 18, 2009
I got up this morning to the blast of my alarm clock. 5 a.m. came like a thousand daggers into my mind. Piercing, piercing. I flop out of bed – there’s no need to worry about disturbing anyone. When I get up, all that’s left is a crumpled white sheet and a pile of blankets that look like a small igloo.
I don’t make the bed. There’s no use, no point.
I flip on the recessed lights that dot the bedroom ceiling and shuffle into the bathroom. The light oozes in and I stand there, my hands pressed tightly against the sink, as I lean toward the mirror. I can barely see my face, but I know it’s there. Glued against the image of myself, I have a conversation with my face. We talk for several minutes, but nothing really gets said. It’s hard to talk to someone you barely know.
I turn on the light. It bounces off the white walls and clear plastic shower curtain and straight into my eyes, and I’m blinded for a moment. I splash some water on my face, shake a can of Aloe Vera Barbasol and dispense a large puff ball of shaving cream into my hand. And as I frame my face with it, I’m taken back decades, to a time when my father and I would share the bathroom at our tiny home on Detroit’s west side before he would go to work and I to school. He’d take the cream he didn’t use on his face and paint mine with it, the last bit he’d dab on the tip of my tiny nose and I’d laugh. I remember the scraping sound his razor made as it tore off his whiskers and how the first lines it made on his freshly creamed face looked so perfect. I felt so proud I got goose bumps on my tiny arms.
I shave in exactly 23 strokes. Six for each cheek, seven for the neck and two to clean-up my sideburns, a stroke where I pull up the skin toward the side of my face to tighten the skin, making my wrinkles disappear. I’m taken back to my father’s bathroom again, and my eyes water for the thought of it. But I wash away the tears as I rinse my face. They disappear down the drain with the creamy, whisker-speckled water.
The light shines on my head as I comb my hair back and I can see the shininess of the oil on my scalp. I’m not bald, but I will be.
I dress. Nothing fancy. Baby blue button down shirt, paisley tie, all hugged with a black suit. I slip on a pair of thin black socks and place my feet into my worn black shoes and it feels good, like I’m not wearing any shoes at all, like the hot summer evenings when I shot hoops in my driveway as a child, nicking the soles of my feet on the cracked cement driveway but loving the touch of the soft dandelions that poked out of them, drifting over my feet like a brand new paintbrush.
I walk out of my bedroom and into the large expanse of my home, a ranch in a quiet neighborhood. The click of my shoes against the hardwood floor bounces off the walls like drumsticks on a snare drum. There are no pictures, no relics or memorabilia. The walls are as flat as flat can be. There’s no cushion to them. I like it that way because I like things hard, sharp, devoid of nostalgia.
The early morning light is just now making its way through a large bay window in the dining area just off the kitchen. The milkiness is cutting through the phalanx of trees in the backyard and I walk over to the window and look out. The light is thick and almost intimidating, as if it was trying to envelop me like a huge white blood cell.
I grab the keys to my car off the kitchen counter and head for the garage. There is no particular scent to my car, as is the case in most people’s because they become a second home for most. My car is pristine, almost like I just drove it off the lot. The passenger and back seats are hard. No one’s ever sat in them.
When I open the passenger door to place my briefcase on the seat, I get an image of a child, about 7 years old, with moppy blonde hair. He’s standing next to me, playing with a backpack. I’m taking him to school and we’re late.
“C’mon, sport, this is the third time this week!,” I say out loud. I want to be angry, but he’s got my blue eyes and he melts me when I look at him. I take my hand and place it on top of his head, running my fingers through his long, thick hair, curling it around his ears so I can get a better look at him.
“When I pick you up this afternoon, we’re gonna go to the Y and play one-on-one, ok?” I say out loud.
“But dad, you’re a thousand feet tall,” I say out loud.
Then I wake from the moment at the ridiculousness of me, petting the air, being warm to the stillness of this garage phantom I created. I start to cry, but can’t bawl – even though my insides are screaming to – because my neighbor and I leave for work at the same time. I stand there, steadying myself against my spotless car, silently shrieking.
I wipe my eyes with an old Kleenex in my pocket and gather myself with a scowl. Pulling the car out of my driveway and heading down the street, I make a wrong turn toward the elementary school just down the road.
I slow the car down as I ease it to the side of the road, throw it into park and run my hand over the hard, cold seat to my right. It should be so much warmer. But then I pull my hand away quickly, like I had just been startled, and wrap it tightly around the steering wheel, twisting it until I hear the leather squeak.
I don’t make the bed. There’s no use, no point.
I flip on the recessed lights that dot the bedroom ceiling and shuffle into the bathroom. The light oozes in and I stand there, my hands pressed tightly against the sink, as I lean toward the mirror. I can barely see my face, but I know it’s there. Glued against the image of myself, I have a conversation with my face. We talk for several minutes, but nothing really gets said. It’s hard to talk to someone you barely know.
I turn on the light. It bounces off the white walls and clear plastic shower curtain and straight into my eyes, and I’m blinded for a moment. I splash some water on my face, shake a can of Aloe Vera Barbasol and dispense a large puff ball of shaving cream into my hand. And as I frame my face with it, I’m taken back decades, to a time when my father and I would share the bathroom at our tiny home on Detroit’s west side before he would go to work and I to school. He’d take the cream he didn’t use on his face and paint mine with it, the last bit he’d dab on the tip of my tiny nose and I’d laugh. I remember the scraping sound his razor made as it tore off his whiskers and how the first lines it made on his freshly creamed face looked so perfect. I felt so proud I got goose bumps on my tiny arms.
I shave in exactly 23 strokes. Six for each cheek, seven for the neck and two to clean-up my sideburns, a stroke where I pull up the skin toward the side of my face to tighten the skin, making my wrinkles disappear. I’m taken back to my father’s bathroom again, and my eyes water for the thought of it. But I wash away the tears as I rinse my face. They disappear down the drain with the creamy, whisker-speckled water.
The light shines on my head as I comb my hair back and I can see the shininess of the oil on my scalp. I’m not bald, but I will be.
I dress. Nothing fancy. Baby blue button down shirt, paisley tie, all hugged with a black suit. I slip on a pair of thin black socks and place my feet into my worn black shoes and it feels good, like I’m not wearing any shoes at all, like the hot summer evenings when I shot hoops in my driveway as a child, nicking the soles of my feet on the cracked cement driveway but loving the touch of the soft dandelions that poked out of them, drifting over my feet like a brand new paintbrush.
I walk out of my bedroom and into the large expanse of my home, a ranch in a quiet neighborhood. The click of my shoes against the hardwood floor bounces off the walls like drumsticks on a snare drum. There are no pictures, no relics or memorabilia. The walls are as flat as flat can be. There’s no cushion to them. I like it that way because I like things hard, sharp, devoid of nostalgia.
The early morning light is just now making its way through a large bay window in the dining area just off the kitchen. The milkiness is cutting through the phalanx of trees in the backyard and I walk over to the window and look out. The light is thick and almost intimidating, as if it was trying to envelop me like a huge white blood cell.
I grab the keys to my car off the kitchen counter and head for the garage. There is no particular scent to my car, as is the case in most people’s because they become a second home for most. My car is pristine, almost like I just drove it off the lot. The passenger and back seats are hard. No one’s ever sat in them.
When I open the passenger door to place my briefcase on the seat, I get an image of a child, about 7 years old, with moppy blonde hair. He’s standing next to me, playing with a backpack. I’m taking him to school and we’re late.
“C’mon, sport, this is the third time this week!,” I say out loud. I want to be angry, but he’s got my blue eyes and he melts me when I look at him. I take my hand and place it on top of his head, running my fingers through his long, thick hair, curling it around his ears so I can get a better look at him.
“When I pick you up this afternoon, we’re gonna go to the Y and play one-on-one, ok?” I say out loud.
“But dad, you’re a thousand feet tall,” I say out loud.
Then I wake from the moment at the ridiculousness of me, petting the air, being warm to the stillness of this garage phantom I created. I start to cry, but can’t bawl – even though my insides are screaming to – because my neighbor and I leave for work at the same time. I stand there, steadying myself against my spotless car, silently shrieking.
I wipe my eyes with an old Kleenex in my pocket and gather myself with a scowl. Pulling the car out of my driveway and heading down the street, I make a wrong turn toward the elementary school just down the road.
I slow the car down as I ease it to the side of the road, throw it into park and run my hand over the hard, cold seat to my right. It should be so much warmer. But then I pull my hand away quickly, like I had just been startled, and wrap it tightly around the steering wheel, twisting it until I hear the leather squeak.
June 6, 2009
I’ve just been awoken by the needley poke of tiny snowflakes bouncing off the other side of the window in my room. It’s still dark outside and the moon is playing hide-and-seek with the dark snow clouds that are moving across the sky like cars on a freeway.
I lay here and stare at the ceiling for a moment. I know all the specks in it, and I think of all the figures and objects I’ve crafted in my mind from the formations of lines and dots on the soft white tiles. I stare for a long time, longer than usual.
I close my eyes and try to fall back asleep. Sleep is a refuge to me, a temporary reprieve from my life chained to this bed, my hands and feet tied to it with tubes and wires. My body is my prison, but this bed is my torture. I want to arise like Lazarus and tear these strings off my body. I want to feel the pain as they ease out of me. I want to scan my skin and see the blood ooze out of the holes where they’d once been. I want to feel my body again and peer into a mirror, fix my hair up, curl my eyelashes, let a puffy brush tickle my cheeks and powder my face ever so gently.
A shot of moonlight pierces through the window and into my left eye. I want to grab it and feel its brightness. I want to wrap it around my body and wear it. I want to believe that it can take me someplace else. I look down at my right hand, twisted and deformed like a crab claw. I inspect my nails. They’re long and yellowed, with bits of gummy particles under them that no one cares to remove. It disgusts them. They won’t let me grab onto anything except one day at a time.
I take my good hand and move it slowly to the crown of my head, gently tracing the tiny strands of hair that poke out of my scalp, covered in crusty scabs and sores. They’re crooked and dry, like thin, mangled wires, spread far from each other from my monthly dose of chemical cocktails. I open my eyes and begin to dream in the moonlight. I’m with Bobby Trumbull in his ’66 Chevy Camaro, on the beach at Burt Lake, just a mile from the farmhouse. His uneasy hands are caressing my face and I can feel the calluses on his palms. Then he moves his hands up to my hair and they disappear in its thickness. He takes a few large clumps of hair and frames my face with them. He tells me I’m the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
The moon is going away now, shifting over the building and out of site, leaving behind a milky light on a perfect slathering of snow that clings to the tree branches and lies silently on the rolling hills outside.
I lay here and stare at the ceiling for a moment. I know all the specks in it, and I think of all the figures and objects I’ve crafted in my mind from the formations of lines and dots on the soft white tiles. I stare for a long time, longer than usual.
I close my eyes and try to fall back asleep. Sleep is a refuge to me, a temporary reprieve from my life chained to this bed, my hands and feet tied to it with tubes and wires. My body is my prison, but this bed is my torture. I want to arise like Lazarus and tear these strings off my body. I want to feel the pain as they ease out of me. I want to scan my skin and see the blood ooze out of the holes where they’d once been. I want to feel my body again and peer into a mirror, fix my hair up, curl my eyelashes, let a puffy brush tickle my cheeks and powder my face ever so gently.
A shot of moonlight pierces through the window and into my left eye. I want to grab it and feel its brightness. I want to wrap it around my body and wear it. I want to believe that it can take me someplace else. I look down at my right hand, twisted and deformed like a crab claw. I inspect my nails. They’re long and yellowed, with bits of gummy particles under them that no one cares to remove. It disgusts them. They won’t let me grab onto anything except one day at a time.
I take my good hand and move it slowly to the crown of my head, gently tracing the tiny strands of hair that poke out of my scalp, covered in crusty scabs and sores. They’re crooked and dry, like thin, mangled wires, spread far from each other from my monthly dose of chemical cocktails. I open my eyes and begin to dream in the moonlight. I’m with Bobby Trumbull in his ’66 Chevy Camaro, on the beach at Burt Lake, just a mile from the farmhouse. His uneasy hands are caressing my face and I can feel the calluses on his palms. Then he moves his hands up to my hair and they disappear in its thickness. He takes a few large clumps of hair and frames my face with them. He tells me I’m the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
The moon is going away now, shifting over the building and out of site, leaving behind a milky light on a perfect slathering of snow that clings to the tree branches and lies silently on the rolling hills outside.
April 30, 2009
Bus. Fair.
It’s been three days now since my car has been in the body shop recuperating from a front-end “kiss” she received last fall in St. Ignace, when a mid-1980s red Chevy van – driven by someone still wily from the Wild Turkey bath he took the night before – “didn’t see” my Prelude behind him when he backed-out to leave the remote cabin on the Lake Michigan shore.
The van did have mirrors, but I doubt the poor chap’s eyes were doing him much good, especially after the mid-morning nips he took to take the edge off, a tactic that actually sent him even further off “the cliff.” As he pulled away, I felt bad for his lady passenger and all the drivers on U.S.-2 that sunny morning.
Now, because of my procrastination, my car had been enduring this black eye for months. But on Monday, I took her in because I didn’t want to see her sad anymore. Oh, and Mr. Turkey’s insurance company was starting to hound me.
And the weird thing is, I kinda hope she dies on the operating table.
You see, we take our cars for granted. When you have one, you don’t really realize you own a vehicle. Driving is kind of like pissing. You do it every day, but don’t really remember the particulars of any one session. It just kind of happens.
Not having a car – or more specifically, having a car and then losing it for a while – can throw things a bit out of whack. And for me, that shift happened, and I like it a lot.
But of all the benefits of not having a vehicle at your disposal – the added exercise, no carbon emissions, no irresponsible trips to IHOP at 3:30 a.m. and through a “DUI enforcement zone” – the best is having to use public transportation.
Kalamazoo is no metropolis. There is no need for rail, or light rail or rickshaws. In the winter, I sometimes wish I had eight huskies and a sled, but like many cities of about 100,000, we have buses, and I boarded one today for the first time in years. I felt like a kid when I put my $1.35 in the cash collector and took my seat. I’ve ridden on subways, buses and trains all over the country and in Europe, but there is something about riding the bus in your own city when you rarely ride it at all. You feel like a stranger in your own town.
I was on my way back to downtown from an errand trip when I saw the bus turn the corner and come to a stop before me. I stepped inside and met eyes with the driver, a large black woman with arms that looked like droopy hams.
“You need a transfer?” she asked me.
“Uh, no,” I replied.
“Then go sit down,” she said.
The ride was only about 5 minutes, but I took in so much. It was like my eyes were at a buffet and they just got voted off Survivor.
There was a little boy, maybe two years old, his skin the color of creamed coffee, looking out the window as the world flew by. He was wearing a camouflage jacket and a black New York Yankees baseball cap too big for his head, its bill perfectly straight. His hair fell out of the sides of the hat like little springs.
We glanced at each other.
“Hi,” he said, and I said “hi” back, smiling.
Then again, and again, as relentless kids do, we said “hi” to each other.
I shut my eyes.
“Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi,” he said in a sweet voice that reminded me of a kitten. Soft and innocent.
His mother picked him up and held him in her lap, never breaking her conversation with the bus driver.
“I think I’m going to Chicago in a little bit and then maybe move there then get out, go someplace else,” the mother said.
“How ‘bout Africa,” the driver replied.
Sitting calmly across from the mother was an old woman in a red electric wheelchair. The chair was strapped to the floor with four, heavy-gauge straps that looked like seatbelts on steroids. She had large, meaty ears that looked like marshmallows.
She was dressed all in yellow – yellow coat, shirt, pants, shoes. Her hair was done up and she’d put little purple hair clips the shape of butterflies all around the top of her head, like a crown. I thought that a girl of 5 or 7 or maybe 10 would do the same thing and I smiled as genuine a smile as I have in days.
Every 30 seconds or so, she’d take a sip from a huge cup of frozen coke, holding it delicately with her left hand. Her index finger was wrapped in dirty gauze, but that wasn’t what made her hand noticeable. No, that was the nearly neon green nail polish on each fingernail.
I don’t know where she was going, maybe a doctor’s visit, maybe a friend’s house, but she oozed confidence and peacefulness and I felt like I knew her.
In the rear of the bus, four young black men sat silently, each one looking out the window with a blank stare. One in particular – the kid wearing the earmuff-sized headphones and an orange t-shirt that read: “I have multiple personalities and none of them likes you” – caught my eye.
He looked young but seemed old and I couldn’t understand why. Maybe it was the look he had, the face that he was showing: tight lips, eyes too intense for someone with no lines stretching from their outer edges – at least not yet. I wondered where he was off to as well, but more than that, where he’d been.
We pulled into the bus station. The boys in back got out quickly and scattered. I stayed on for a few moments.
The driver got out of her seat – slowly – using her hands to lift her legs out of the cubby-hole area beneath the steering wheel.
“Hi, baby,” she said to the little boy. He waved back like little kids do, opening and closing his hand.
“When does the Portage No. 2 come?” the old lady asked.
“Half an hour,” the driver said.
Then she bent over and began to the release the straps from the wheelchair, exhaling as she reached for the straps’ ends.
“Lord have mercy,” she said. “Lord have mercy.”
April 17, 2009
Middle-Aged Mastur-Peace
The Michigan News Agency is a place like no other in Kalamazoo. From its neon sign to the uber-friendly staff (who will hold your newspaper if you’re on vacation) to the wealth of print materials available even as the digital revolution threatens to gobble-up all things paper, it’s a small business straight out of The Baldwins.
But it wasn’t today.
I entered through the front door and, being in a cheery mood from the warm weather and plentiful sunshine, I smiled for some reason as the little bell attached to the door handle did a cute “ding, ding” as I took my first few steps inside.
The store’s owner, Dean Hauck, crept out from behind a tower of dusty boxes and saw me. Our daily back-and-forth – as scripted and predictable as the bad paperbacks that line the center aisle – began.
“So it’s 10:10 p.m. tonight,” she said. “I hope anyway. It’s drizzling in Seattle.”
“I think there’s a dome, or a semi-dome there,” I said. “Anyway, we need a good outing from Verlander. I mean, he’s the ace. He’s gotta step-up. And what’s the deal with Zumaya? When is he coming back?”
“I heard he threw well at Triple-A, but who knows,” she said.
And so it went for a few more moments, a quick, Cliffs Notes breakdown of Detroit Tigers developments and happenings over the past 24 hours.
My eyes moved from Dean’s thinning brown hair and whirling hand gestures to the table behind me, a buffet of different newspapers. I thumbed through a Kalamazoo Gazette, some story about high-speed rail. I went to the jump page for five seconds and then put the paper down. I can’t buy this product anymore, not since I had become the victim of the Gazette’s Secret Service, but that’s another story for another time.
I reached for a Free Press and noticed a black hand with thick, wrinkled fingers enter my field of vision. A watch was attached to the wrist; gold face, small diamonds in place of numbers, black, faux-alligator skin strap.
The hand picked up a Gazette and the man attached to it stood in line. He and I were the only patrons in the store, which I remember at that moment smelling musty and sweet, the kind of scent that can only ooze from a place of significant age.
The man stepped to the counter.
“Do you have “Hometown Housewives?” he asked Dean nonchalantly. Shit, he was so calm he could have been asking if they had “Yes, There Really is a Kalamazoo” coffee mugs (they do).
“Oh, let’s see,” she said, taking him back to the plexiglass-covered Display Case of Porn, or D-COP. There, between the Rolling Stones and Homemaker’s Journal, an salacious smorgasbord of pornographic materials both innocent and depraved are arranged, staring out at the browsing public. Each one has a plastic cover them, which allows potential patrons to view the title of each magazine (Club, Stuff, Stacked and Oui – doesn’t mean “yes” in French? Weird) but not the “goods” underneath.
It seemed the stars were not aligned for my line buddy this afternoon. “Housewives” was out of stock.
“Well, lemme have a “40 Something’s,” he said. “Oh, and this paper, too.”
Apparently, he likes to inform while viewing his porn. Killing two birds with one stone – or killing two stones with one hand, in this case.
I felt a bit awkward, so I brought up the Tigers again and Dean and I talked while she slipped the porno into a thin paper bag.
“What we need to do is get dem Lions back own track,” the man said.
“Really?” I thought to myself. Then I realized that his sports commentary was not meant to divert my attention from the porno purchase that had just taken place. He just really wanted the Lions to get better. The porn could wait – for at least a bit.
“Well, we’ll see ya,” he said.
The man left and I asked Dean how porno sales were lately. She mentioned that since the economy started tanking, sales of “teen” magazines were “exploding.”
“There used to be only one or two of them, you know, Barely Legal, stuff like that. But now there are like 30 of them. Hot sellers.”
I got an image of a middle aged man, laid off from his job, sitting at the dinner table with his family – wife, teenage daughter and 10-year-old son – counting down the seconds before he could get back in the bathroom and meet-up with Candi, Brooke or Riley.
I shivered for a second. But then I felt, well, I don’t know, honored that I was in the presence of an uninhibited porno purchase. For such transactions are fast becoming things of the past as the digital revolution sucks all this filth online.
I should have shook the man’s hand. Well, maybe not.
But it wasn’t today.
I entered through the front door and, being in a cheery mood from the warm weather and plentiful sunshine, I smiled for some reason as the little bell attached to the door handle did a cute “ding, ding” as I took my first few steps inside.
The store’s owner, Dean Hauck, crept out from behind a tower of dusty boxes and saw me. Our daily back-and-forth – as scripted and predictable as the bad paperbacks that line the center aisle – began.
“So it’s 10:10 p.m. tonight,” she said. “I hope anyway. It’s drizzling in Seattle.”
“I think there’s a dome, or a semi-dome there,” I said. “Anyway, we need a good outing from Verlander. I mean, he’s the ace. He’s gotta step-up. And what’s the deal with Zumaya? When is he coming back?”
“I heard he threw well at Triple-A, but who knows,” she said.
And so it went for a few more moments, a quick, Cliffs Notes breakdown of Detroit Tigers developments and happenings over the past 24 hours.
My eyes moved from Dean’s thinning brown hair and whirling hand gestures to the table behind me, a buffet of different newspapers. I thumbed through a Kalamazoo Gazette, some story about high-speed rail. I went to the jump page for five seconds and then put the paper down. I can’t buy this product anymore, not since I had become the victim of the Gazette’s Secret Service, but that’s another story for another time.
I reached for a Free Press and noticed a black hand with thick, wrinkled fingers enter my field of vision. A watch was attached to the wrist; gold face, small diamonds in place of numbers, black, faux-alligator skin strap.
The hand picked up a Gazette and the man attached to it stood in line. He and I were the only patrons in the store, which I remember at that moment smelling musty and sweet, the kind of scent that can only ooze from a place of significant age.
The man stepped to the counter.
“Do you have “Hometown Housewives?” he asked Dean nonchalantly. Shit, he was so calm he could have been asking if they had “Yes, There Really is a Kalamazoo” coffee mugs (they do).
“Oh, let’s see,” she said, taking him back to the plexiglass-covered Display Case of Porn, or D-COP. There, between the Rolling Stones and Homemaker’s Journal, an salacious smorgasbord of pornographic materials both innocent and depraved are arranged, staring out at the browsing public. Each one has a plastic cover them, which allows potential patrons to view the title of each magazine (Club, Stuff, Stacked and Oui – doesn’t mean “yes” in French? Weird) but not the “goods” underneath.
It seemed the stars were not aligned for my line buddy this afternoon. “Housewives” was out of stock.
“Well, lemme have a “40 Something’s,” he said. “Oh, and this paper, too.”
Apparently, he likes to inform while viewing his porn. Killing two birds with one stone – or killing two stones with one hand, in this case.
I felt a bit awkward, so I brought up the Tigers again and Dean and I talked while she slipped the porno into a thin paper bag.
“What we need to do is get dem Lions back own track,” the man said.
“Really?” I thought to myself. Then I realized that his sports commentary was not meant to divert my attention from the porno purchase that had just taken place. He just really wanted the Lions to get better. The porn could wait – for at least a bit.
“Well, we’ll see ya,” he said.
The man left and I asked Dean how porno sales were lately. She mentioned that since the economy started tanking, sales of “teen” magazines were “exploding.”
“There used to be only one or two of them, you know, Barely Legal, stuff like that. But now there are like 30 of them. Hot sellers.”
I got an image of a middle aged man, laid off from his job, sitting at the dinner table with his family – wife, teenage daughter and 10-year-old son – counting down the seconds before he could get back in the bathroom and meet-up with Candi, Brooke or Riley.
I shivered for a second. But then I felt, well, I don’t know, honored that I was in the presence of an uninhibited porno purchase. For such transactions are fast becoming things of the past as the digital revolution sucks all this filth online.
I should have shook the man’s hand. Well, maybe not.
April 11, 2009
Spring has "Sprung"
I was walking down one of our downtown’s dirty streets this morning on my way to a greasy, cholesterol laden omelet when I came across a terrifying springtime scene.
Near the library, in the shade, two birds were struggling with each other, a flapping, noisy ball of bird that kicked-up clouds of dust it moved and hopped along.
In one moment, one of the birds was strangling its partner with its beak. In another moment, they danced together, their fragile little bodies bouncing up and down on pogo stick legs.
Then they rolled in the dust, and a screeching came from one of the birds as its wings flapped violently, making it look twice as large as it is. I thought for a moment that the bird was being killed. A violent death at the hands of a comrade who became enraged after his counterpart stole a twig from its nest.
But then a beam of mid-morning sunshine shot on my face and I felt a warming inside me.
Now, I’m no ornithologist, but I do know what happens in the early spring as the earth thaws out and begins to be baked by that ball of flame that we forget about for four months or so.
Birds do get boners at this time of year, it’s as simple as that. The sun does something to them, and other species as well. It thaws their libido, which had been cooped-up in an icy hold all winter long.
I was witnessing a bird scrumping.
That, actually, was kind of beautiful, the circle of life that was taking place before my eyes.
But what was this?
But what was this?
As the bird ball became more and more intense, another bird came hopping along, positioning itself just a few feet from the feathery fucking.
It stood there, gazing at them and hopping from side to side, sometime uttering a barely heard “chirp, chirp.”
If there are perverted voyeurs in Bird World, this guy fit “the bill” perfectly.
I got the feeling he wanted desperately to join in. A ménage “caw” if you will.
But the bird ball didn’t even notice it, so the Perverted Parakeet stood, looking a bit dejected. I bet he wished he had hands, though.
April 3, 2009
'Tis (almost) the season
Full of enigma, emotion and sentimentality of the highest order, baseball is the most beautiful game.
No other sport can match it; the history of how the game developed and grew into our nation's collective conscious. Or the memories that it elicits from a fan's childhood. Or the pastoral nature of it, and how it seems so organic, so able to be related to, to be touched.
It engages the senses, from the searing heat of an early afternoon sun on an exposed back to the smell of blue collar fare wafting from the concourse to the sound of the crack of bat against ball, the sight of 5 ounces of cork, string and white leather soaring into the late night sky and the stickiness of dried beer under your feet.
The 2009 season is almost upon us. Opening Day is an unofficial holiday in our country and for good reason. Deep down we all, I think, have an affinity for baseball, whether we know it or not.
With every new season - started in the early spring - new hopes are made, new beginnings are charted. Baseball follows the ebb and flow of our lives.
I was fortunate enough to have attended Game 4 of the 2006 American League Division Series between the Detroit Tigers and the New York Yankees. The Tigers won and eliminated the Yanks and I felt a soaring within me after the final out. I clapped so hard my hands grew blisters. I yelled so hard I swear I could have coughed blood. I kissed strangers and they kissed back.
And I cried so hard because of what this game means to me because of how it's shared, passed down from generation to generation, father to son, like some kind of precious family heirloom meant to be held close to the heart and then passed on again.
I wrote the below story when I got home. Play ball!
DETROIT – As Game 4 of the American League Division Series was about to conclude, the sun was setting over the right field grandstands, giving way to a milky moonlight that shone through the city’s skyline.
And much like the sun that set giving way to that hazy harvest moon over Detroit, the years of Tigers ineptitude and heartbreak had set. There was a feeling of re-birth in the Motor City that special Saturday night.
It’s been said that baseball is a game of moments, and Saturday’s incredible victory will surely be etched into the memories of not only those at the game, but of all those who have rooted for the Tigers for years, but never had a chance to celebrate.
It was a victory for Detroit, a city that has not had much to cheer about for decades. It was a victory for Michigan, a state that has endured so much economic woe in recent years. It was a victory for all those who believe that passion and grit still matter. It was a victory for all of us.
The Tigers beat a team with a payroll of nearly $200 million, and one that most believed was one of the most potent of all-time. The Tigers, a team with players that most outside of Michigan have never heard of, knocked-off the Bronx Bombers like they wanted it, like they stole something. Desire beat out decadence.
When the Tigers lost Game 1 of the American League Division Series in New York, 8-4, most everyone wrote them off, including nearly all of the national sports media.
The Yankees are too much, they said, their lineup a modern day Murder’s Row, capable of not only hitting the ball out of the park, but of taking away an opposing team’s will to even play the game.
Welcome to the “D.” Welcome to Michigan. Welcome to a place where we don’t lay down and whimper in the face of adversity – whether it’s a struggling economy or being down one game to none to the mighty Yankees in hallowed Yankee Stadium, where the spirits of the team’s baseball heroes of decades past loom large, picking and probing at opposing teams.
If any one moment in the game epitomized the Tigers’ perseverance and passion more, it was the post-game celebration which ensued after the final out.
Most teams who win a game like this head to the clubhouse and relish the victory with their teammates. The Tigers went in, and then came out, brandishing bottles of champagne, drenching their fans with the same stickiness that was supposed to be meant for only themselves.
But not this team. The fans deserved it. It might have been one of the most populist moves in modern sports history. The champagne spray into the stands meant that we were all in it together. All were part of the magic
Like a great symphony, the game built to a crescendo. Sure, the Tigers hit the ball around all afternoon, scoring eight runs. Starting pitcher Jeremy Bonderman was stellar, pitching 8 1/3 innings of 2-run ball.
But it took a full eight innings for the crowd to reach a point where they could believe exactly what was happening, and the sheer emotion seen after the game’s final out could have only come from fans that had been bottling it up for the past 19 years.
It was a release of explosive, unbridled emotion.
Beer was spilled and strangers hugged and kissed one another. Jovial fans streamed onto the streets surrounding Comerica Park and shook hands with Detroit cops, horns honked in a chorus of joy.
The glow of the stadium’s lights seemed a bit brighter as giddy fans, who had just witnessed a bit of history, headed out into the city to celebrate the night away.
Baseball is back, not only in Detroit, but throughout all of the Great Lakes state.
Now let’s bring on the A’s.
No other sport can match it; the history of how the game developed and grew into our nation's collective conscious. Or the memories that it elicits from a fan's childhood. Or the pastoral nature of it, and how it seems so organic, so able to be related to, to be touched.
It engages the senses, from the searing heat of an early afternoon sun on an exposed back to the smell of blue collar fare wafting from the concourse to the sound of the crack of bat against ball, the sight of 5 ounces of cork, string and white leather soaring into the late night sky and the stickiness of dried beer under your feet.
The 2009 season is almost upon us. Opening Day is an unofficial holiday in our country and for good reason. Deep down we all, I think, have an affinity for baseball, whether we know it or not.
With every new season - started in the early spring - new hopes are made, new beginnings are charted. Baseball follows the ebb and flow of our lives.
I was fortunate enough to have attended Game 4 of the 2006 American League Division Series between the Detroit Tigers and the New York Yankees. The Tigers won and eliminated the Yanks and I felt a soaring within me after the final out. I clapped so hard my hands grew blisters. I yelled so hard I swear I could have coughed blood. I kissed strangers and they kissed back.
And I cried so hard because of what this game means to me because of how it's shared, passed down from generation to generation, father to son, like some kind of precious family heirloom meant to be held close to the heart and then passed on again.
I wrote the below story when I got home. Play ball!
DETROIT – As Game 4 of the American League Division Series was about to conclude, the sun was setting over the right field grandstands, giving way to a milky moonlight that shone through the city’s skyline.
And much like the sun that set giving way to that hazy harvest moon over Detroit, the years of Tigers ineptitude and heartbreak had set. There was a feeling of re-birth in the Motor City that special Saturday night.
It’s been said that baseball is a game of moments, and Saturday’s incredible victory will surely be etched into the memories of not only those at the game, but of all those who have rooted for the Tigers for years, but never had a chance to celebrate.
It was a victory for Detroit, a city that has not had much to cheer about for decades. It was a victory for Michigan, a state that has endured so much economic woe in recent years. It was a victory for all those who believe that passion and grit still matter. It was a victory for all of us.
The Tigers beat a team with a payroll of nearly $200 million, and one that most believed was one of the most potent of all-time. The Tigers, a team with players that most outside of Michigan have never heard of, knocked-off the Bronx Bombers like they wanted it, like they stole something. Desire beat out decadence.
When the Tigers lost Game 1 of the American League Division Series in New York, 8-4, most everyone wrote them off, including nearly all of the national sports media.
The Yankees are too much, they said, their lineup a modern day Murder’s Row, capable of not only hitting the ball out of the park, but of taking away an opposing team’s will to even play the game.
Welcome to the “D.” Welcome to Michigan. Welcome to a place where we don’t lay down and whimper in the face of adversity – whether it’s a struggling economy or being down one game to none to the mighty Yankees in hallowed Yankee Stadium, where the spirits of the team’s baseball heroes of decades past loom large, picking and probing at opposing teams.
If any one moment in the game epitomized the Tigers’ perseverance and passion more, it was the post-game celebration which ensued after the final out.
Most teams who win a game like this head to the clubhouse and relish the victory with their teammates. The Tigers went in, and then came out, brandishing bottles of champagne, drenching their fans with the same stickiness that was supposed to be meant for only themselves.
But not this team. The fans deserved it. It might have been one of the most populist moves in modern sports history. The champagne spray into the stands meant that we were all in it together. All were part of the magic
Like a great symphony, the game built to a crescendo. Sure, the Tigers hit the ball around all afternoon, scoring eight runs. Starting pitcher Jeremy Bonderman was stellar, pitching 8 1/3 innings of 2-run ball.
But it took a full eight innings for the crowd to reach a point where they could believe exactly what was happening, and the sheer emotion seen after the game’s final out could have only come from fans that had been bottling it up for the past 19 years.
It was a release of explosive, unbridled emotion.
Beer was spilled and strangers hugged and kissed one another. Jovial fans streamed onto the streets surrounding Comerica Park and shook hands with Detroit cops, horns honked in a chorus of joy.
The glow of the stadium’s lights seemed a bit brighter as giddy fans, who had just witnessed a bit of history, headed out into the city to celebrate the night away.
Baseball is back, not only in Detroit, but throughout all of the Great Lakes state.
Now let’s bring on the A’s.
April 1, 2009
Butt, wait
Everyone of them has a story to tell, but seldom do we ever stop to think about what they can tell us. It might seem queer to most to ponder a cigarette butt. But for such an omnipresent component of daily life, it serves as appropriate for the more inquisitive amongst us to stare for a while at these cylindrical castaways.
They can be found on any street corner in any city of any size. They are like dead leaves, rolling in mud or dust or water, thrown off in reckless abandon from the place from which they came. The wind blows them tightly together in alleys and the corners of buildings. They huddle upside-down in heavy glass ashtrays in dive bars and dingy coffee shops, or they make their own lonely sojourn down a no named street, helped along only by the wake of air conjured up by a passing car.
Some come in speckled brown, others in bright white. Some are ringed with a thin gold strip, others in a circumference of deep red. And like leaves or snowflakes, no cigarette butt is like another.
One might by stained with a heavy magenta coating that reveals the wrinkles in the lips that had pressed against it, tossed by a woman as she drove to a first date or had a smoke outside a bar with a no smoking rule or took a smoke break outside her office.
But I’d most like to believe that these butts made their way from the lips of a woman who was waking down the street, clad in a form fitting black dress, and propped up in five inch black heels that made the concrete pop as she walked on the sidewalk in a rhythm of intimidating femininity, her hair and breasts bouncing with each measured step. She smokes as she walks, head held high. She takes a drag, and pulls the cigarette quickly from her lips. She holds the cigarette between her right hand’s middle and index finger, attached to an arm that swings as she walks, like a pendulum gone awry. After five or six drags, she flicks the butt and a thin streak of smoke extends from the lit end into the air as it arcs toward the street, like a falling bomb. She walks away and the butt sits there, slowly smoldering, longing to be abused by her again.
Another might be crushed in an ashtray, smoked until the smoker’s throat was burned by the heat from the filter’s cotton. It lies there, twisted and degraded, like a used condom worn during a night that someone wants to forget about. These butts are usually the end product of thriftiness or anxiety. But I’d like to believe that they are the result of someone who was smoking alone at the end of a bar made of dark cherry wood.
The smoke-stained vertical blinds that hang in the bar’s only window cut the early afternoon sunlight into slats. An old man sits at the bar and lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, then spews a long stream of smoke from his lungs. The smoke moves from slat to slat, invisible in the void between them, then reappears in each measured light box before it seems to give up on itself, evaporating into the bar’s stained rectangular ceiling tiles. The light boxes elongate and thin as they move into the bar’s cramped expanse, like it doesn’t want to go any further. What would the point be? Even light can’t illuminate some places.
The old man’s droopy face oozes toward the bar’s top. He doesn’t put the cigarette down in the ashtray, instead it rests gently between his fingers, just inches from his right ear. He takes drags, and twists off the ash in the ashtray before placing the cigarette back in the initial position. When every last bit of tobacco has been burned away, he crushes the butt in the ashtray. It squeaks under the weight of his pushing as he moves it in quick half circles, putting out the frustration of his life with every twist.
They can be found on any street corner in any city of any size. They are like dead leaves, rolling in mud or dust or water, thrown off in reckless abandon from the place from which they came. The wind blows them tightly together in alleys and the corners of buildings. They huddle upside-down in heavy glass ashtrays in dive bars and dingy coffee shops, or they make their own lonely sojourn down a no named street, helped along only by the wake of air conjured up by a passing car.
Some come in speckled brown, others in bright white. Some are ringed with a thin gold strip, others in a circumference of deep red. And like leaves or snowflakes, no cigarette butt is like another.
One might by stained with a heavy magenta coating that reveals the wrinkles in the lips that had pressed against it, tossed by a woman as she drove to a first date or had a smoke outside a bar with a no smoking rule or took a smoke break outside her office.
But I’d most like to believe that these butts made their way from the lips of a woman who was waking down the street, clad in a form fitting black dress, and propped up in five inch black heels that made the concrete pop as she walked on the sidewalk in a rhythm of intimidating femininity, her hair and breasts bouncing with each measured step. She smokes as she walks, head held high. She takes a drag, and pulls the cigarette quickly from her lips. She holds the cigarette between her right hand’s middle and index finger, attached to an arm that swings as she walks, like a pendulum gone awry. After five or six drags, she flicks the butt and a thin streak of smoke extends from the lit end into the air as it arcs toward the street, like a falling bomb. She walks away and the butt sits there, slowly smoldering, longing to be abused by her again.
Another might be crushed in an ashtray, smoked until the smoker’s throat was burned by the heat from the filter’s cotton. It lies there, twisted and degraded, like a used condom worn during a night that someone wants to forget about. These butts are usually the end product of thriftiness or anxiety. But I’d like to believe that they are the result of someone who was smoking alone at the end of a bar made of dark cherry wood.
The smoke-stained vertical blinds that hang in the bar’s only window cut the early afternoon sunlight into slats. An old man sits at the bar and lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, then spews a long stream of smoke from his lungs. The smoke moves from slat to slat, invisible in the void between them, then reappears in each measured light box before it seems to give up on itself, evaporating into the bar’s stained rectangular ceiling tiles. The light boxes elongate and thin as they move into the bar’s cramped expanse, like it doesn’t want to go any further. What would the point be? Even light can’t illuminate some places.
The old man’s droopy face oozes toward the bar’s top. He doesn’t put the cigarette down in the ashtray, instead it rests gently between his fingers, just inches from his right ear. He takes drags, and twists off the ash in the ashtray before placing the cigarette back in the initial position. When every last bit of tobacco has been burned away, he crushes the butt in the ashtray. It squeaks under the weight of his pushing as he moves it in quick half circles, putting out the frustration of his life with every twist.
March 31, 2009
Flash Point
It’s easy to get annoyed at gas stations.
People can be pushy, rude, and, with gas prices the way they are these days, volatile.
But there is one behavior sometimes witnessed at gas stations that seems to some to be a mere inconvenience that they’re willing to thumb their noses at.
Painted, plastered or otherwise posted on every gas station in the world are the following two words: “No smoking.”
Why? No, gas station attendees and owners aren’t worried about your heath. Lord knows the fumes that emanate from the nozzle are enough to do away with thousands of your precious brain cells if inhaled thoroughly enough.
What they are worried about is the fact that those same fumes are highly explosive.
An explosion anywhere is a bad thing, but an explosion at a gas station is usually nothing short of catastrophic.
So, when I was filling-up my car the other day, it took be aback when a man pulled up next to a pump in front of me, got out, began filling his car and lit a cigarette.
After he placed a stopper in the pump’s handle to keep the gas flowing, he wedged the cigarette between the trunk and rear-quarter panel. As he walked inside to pay for his gas, I locked eyes with him, intending with my glare to communicate the phrase, “Just what the hell are you doing?”
The returned look from the man said something between “You got a problem?” and “What? Is there something in my beard?”
He walked inside. The freshly lit cigarette sat wedged between the two panels, smoke extending skyward in a near perfect line.
For a moment I thought it looked like a stick of incense. Then, as the sound of gas gushing through the pump in my hand reminded me of the volatility of this liquid, it looked more like a time bomb.
Now, the chances of an actual explosion were probably miniscule. Anyone who knows the properties of gas as an accelerant will inform you that gas fumes need a flame to explode and liquid gas doesn’t even ignite. The fire is in the fumes.
But that didn’t exactly allay the anxious feeling I had watching something that was actually on fire placed next to a substance that we use to make explosions in our engines to get us from place to place.
The man came back to his car and placed the nozzle back after he picked up his smoke.
He drove away, a billow of smoke escaping from the driver’s side window after he took a drag.
I went inside to pay and said to the attendant, “Do you believe that guy? He was smoking out there like nothing was wrong with it.”
The man behind the counter told me something about a special chemical spray that was laid down on the entire gas station’s pavement which absorbs any spilled fuel as a way to increase safety.
That’s nice, but what about the fumes, I asked.
“Oh, I’m really sorry about that,” he said. “Some people are really stupid like that.”
Then I got a image in my head of a page in one of those books that detail how people doing stupid things end up ending their lives or maiming themselves, like the guy who lost a hand when he tried trimming his bushes with a lawnmower.
I don’t want anyone’s last moments to be spent at a gas station. They’re not nearly dignified enough.
So, for those who just can’t help but smoke while they’re pumping their gas, please, take a few moments and do some deep breathing exercises, whistle a show tune or roll down your window and listen to the radio.
Light-up as your driving away so you don’t end up potentially lighting-up your innocent, non-smoking gas pumping pals.
Your second-hand smoke is bad enough.
People can be pushy, rude, and, with gas prices the way they are these days, volatile.
But there is one behavior sometimes witnessed at gas stations that seems to some to be a mere inconvenience that they’re willing to thumb their noses at.
Painted, plastered or otherwise posted on every gas station in the world are the following two words: “No smoking.”
Why? No, gas station attendees and owners aren’t worried about your heath. Lord knows the fumes that emanate from the nozzle are enough to do away with thousands of your precious brain cells if inhaled thoroughly enough.
What they are worried about is the fact that those same fumes are highly explosive.
An explosion anywhere is a bad thing, but an explosion at a gas station is usually nothing short of catastrophic.
So, when I was filling-up my car the other day, it took be aback when a man pulled up next to a pump in front of me, got out, began filling his car and lit a cigarette.
After he placed a stopper in the pump’s handle to keep the gas flowing, he wedged the cigarette between the trunk and rear-quarter panel. As he walked inside to pay for his gas, I locked eyes with him, intending with my glare to communicate the phrase, “Just what the hell are you doing?”
The returned look from the man said something between “You got a problem?” and “What? Is there something in my beard?”
He walked inside. The freshly lit cigarette sat wedged between the two panels, smoke extending skyward in a near perfect line.
For a moment I thought it looked like a stick of incense. Then, as the sound of gas gushing through the pump in my hand reminded me of the volatility of this liquid, it looked more like a time bomb.
Now, the chances of an actual explosion were probably miniscule. Anyone who knows the properties of gas as an accelerant will inform you that gas fumes need a flame to explode and liquid gas doesn’t even ignite. The fire is in the fumes.
But that didn’t exactly allay the anxious feeling I had watching something that was actually on fire placed next to a substance that we use to make explosions in our engines to get us from place to place.
The man came back to his car and placed the nozzle back after he picked up his smoke.
He drove away, a billow of smoke escaping from the driver’s side window after he took a drag.
I went inside to pay and said to the attendant, “Do you believe that guy? He was smoking out there like nothing was wrong with it.”
The man behind the counter told me something about a special chemical spray that was laid down on the entire gas station’s pavement which absorbs any spilled fuel as a way to increase safety.
That’s nice, but what about the fumes, I asked.
“Oh, I’m really sorry about that,” he said. “Some people are really stupid like that.”
Then I got a image in my head of a page in one of those books that detail how people doing stupid things end up ending their lives or maiming themselves, like the guy who lost a hand when he tried trimming his bushes with a lawnmower.
I don’t want anyone’s last moments to be spent at a gas station. They’re not nearly dignified enough.
So, for those who just can’t help but smoke while they’re pumping their gas, please, take a few moments and do some deep breathing exercises, whistle a show tune or roll down your window and listen to the radio.
Light-up as your driving away so you don’t end up potentially lighting-up your innocent, non-smoking gas pumping pals.
Your second-hand smoke is bad enough.
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