In a high school English class, we took a little trip to the computer room in the library. Our school didn't have a guidance counselor, but they did have a new computer-based aptitude test they were dying to try out on us. I sat between my friend Yava, a black gothic girl who would sometimes cut her palms and write the word "freak" on her paper in blood in class, and my friend Raj, a girl who was Indian or some sort of -Stani and who mostly just sat in class and didn't say anything.
When the results came back on the test, Raj was to be a butcher. Yava was to be an undertaker. And I was to be a librarian or 4h club counselor. Had the girls' predictions not seemed so eerily accurate, I might have spent more time wondering about the validity of this test, which had asked question like "Do you like books?" (love them!) and "Do you like school?" (hate it!) but never, "Are you okay working in an environment where no one talks?" or "Are you willing to go to college if it means a better job?"
The point is, years later when I needed a job, I found myself hearkening back to that test, and applying for a job at the local library. The application process was rigorous. Thirty of us were seated in a room and given a list of books to alphabetize or place in the Dewy Decimal system, and the first two to finish would be the ones hired. I have since learned that I should never, ever apply for a job where personality is not taken into account.
The job was fine, at first. I was a "page," and would come in in the morning, grab a cart loaded up with alphabetized books, and wheel it out to the shelves, where I would "shelve" them. It was quiet in there. Nobody asked me questions. I would go entire shifts without speaking to another human being. I would go entire shifts sleeping in my bed at home, and nobody noticed. How could they? Eventually I went about two weeks without going in at all, and that's when I decided to find a new job. I'd made it almost two months. 4H isn't very big in Utah, so I had to get creative. I did return to work at the library for a few more shifts, and one day as I was leaving, thinking about where else I might work, I saw a huge sign exactly across the street from the library that read "Looking for a job? Come inside!" So I did.
It was a phone survey place called BRG, an important cog in the great mechanism of consumerism. Employees there would call people randomly and get them to consent to taking a survey that would ask them important questions such as, "On a scale from one to ten, how much red would you say is at your local KFC, with one being no red at all, and ten being everything is red?" "How likely would you be to spend an extra five dollars to be able to get your personalized photo as the background of your Citibank credit card? Would you say completely unlikely, very unlikely, somewhat unlikely, neutral, somewhat likely, very likely, or completely likely?" If you say "likely" a bunch of times in a sentence it starts to sound really dumb.
Anyway, I picked up the application right then, and was instructed to return the next day to turn it in and schedule an interview.
The prospect of soon leaving the library for good made it easier to return there the next day. Still, there is a reason that librarians are sad, dusty women who die of old age around 45. Shelving books makes you go a little bit out of your mind, which you allow, because staying IN your mind while you do it is torture. So you start to play little games with yourself, like imagining the titles of the last two books you shelved combined into one, or if the author of each book had a superpower based on his name alone, what would it be? I'm sharing too much. Anyway, all those years ago when I had marked that I like books, I think I had misunderstood the question. To read books, I loved; to merely be around them, inundated in covers and bar codes and decimals, the bulk of responsibility to put them in their proper place stifling my every thought? That is my own personal hell. Well, throw in a mad press of pregnant midgets and spiders, and then THAT is my own personal hell. The point is, I had to at least imagine what was in those books, pretend to have some sort of a relationship with them. Not a book went by whose title I didn't examine. And on that last day, I found a book, a small one, that had the potential to change every aspect of my life, or at the very least land me that new job. It was called "How to Get People to Like You in the First 90 Seconds." I skimmed through one chapter right there in the aisle, and it seemed promising. I had about an hour left of my shift before I had to be at that interview, so I put the book-laden cart back in the back room, and sat down on a comfy chair out of site to read my new treasure. The principle was a simple one. Be like people. Do whatever it is they do. Match mannerisms, touch on the topics they talk about, etc. People like people they're like, according to this author.
I decided to try that out when I went to turn in my application, because what the hey? If it worked, great, and if not, there were other jobs.
The secretary at the front desk at BRG that day was a demure girl with an apologetic smile. I matched it, stating who I was and saying that I was "just" there to turn in my application, and I didn't want to be a bother, but how soon did she think it would be possible to get an interview?
She smiled slightly warmlier (warmerly?) and said to wait one second, then went in search of whoever it was that was going to give the interview.
Barbara emerged a moment later. Or maybe I should say she erupted. She was wearing a muumuu that was louder and more floral than an ibex stampede through an Alpine meadow. And her neck! Her neck bounced her head around flaccidly like one of those dashboard bulldogs. I suppose she thought she was nodding enthusiastically, but it looked more like some sort of disorder. Slinkineckitis. Now, I had already resolved to be like her, no matter what, so I started in.
I moved my head up and down and up and down and around and around like I was trying to get water out of my ears or something. Her own bobble head kept moving even more sporadically than mine. After a little bit I noticed that her head didn't merely go up and down, but in a bit of an orbit, like the way the north pole goes in little circles on its way around the sun. So I threw that in, too. I also matched her Jewish-talkshow-hostess breeziness, and smiled confidently after everything I said, like I just knew she was going to love it and might even be considering writing me a little "thank-you" note for saying such wonderful things. After all, that seemed to be the reaction she expected from me.
The thought did fleetly flitter through my mind that maybe she really did have some sort of disease, and what if she thought I was mocking her. Then I realized that if it were a disease, she'd have no way of knowing that I didn't have the same one. If she couldn't control how she moved her head, then she'd have to assume that neither could I. Besides, maybe my head during that interview was the only thing in her world that wasn't moving up and down all the time. Maybe it was a relief to her to see such a level-headed young man when all the world around her seemed to be moving up and down like a storm-tossed ship at sea. Okay, probably not. But SOMETHING worked.
At the end of the interview she offered me two dollars per hour more than they pay the other employees, because, as she said, she had "a good feeling about" me. Then she handed me a blank piece of paper and a pencil and instructed me to write my own schedule. It was great!
Well, the job was great. For about a week. Then I had about two weeks of somewhat great to somewhat not great, and by the time I'd been there a month, the job was not great at all. Eventually I got sick of people yelling at me that they didn't accept sales calls (This isn't a sales call, ma'am, it's a marketing call) and that I had said I would take only five minutes and it had already been 25 (I'm sorry ma'am, we're almost done here. It'll just be another five minutes). Then one day my friends called to see if I would go on a road trip to Seattle and San Francisco with them. We'd be gone for a week and a half, and we'd be leaving the next morning. So I went.
It wasn't the best road trip ever (I think if an mp3 player accident forces you to listen to nothing but Abba and German lessons for an entire 40-hour car ride, it could even be described as the WORST road trip ever), but it sure beat going to work at that awful job. I went in to pick up my last check the day I went back, and the shy secretary asked me if I'd like to pick up a shift that evening. I pointed out that I hadn't come to work for over a week, but I was informed that Barbara was going to dismiss that. I told her thanks, but I had plans. Which included looking for a new job. (Anyone need someone to teach their kids how to raise rabbits and poultry? Anyone?)
For months after that, I continued to get exuberant phone calls and messages from Barbara: "Hi Robbie! I'm not sure if you were planning to come in to work today, but just remember that we're on holiday schedule, so you get an extra two hours to sleep in or do whatever it is you do in the mornings! Okay, buhbye!" The calls only stopped when I finally moved out of that house. For all I know, I still work there to this day.
Showing posts with label stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stories. Show all posts
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Monday, August 18, 2008
Retarded Pt. 2: Identity Crisis
I don't know what my problem is, but if you hand me a 2x3x0" piece of hard plastic, I will lose it within a few weeks. And the worst thing about losing one's identity is that in order to get a NEW identity, one must provide a photo I.D.
Early attempts to skirt the I.D. issue had failed spectacularly:
I was fifteen, and awkward. Picture me with a cowlick, mismatched clothes, broken glasses, and so awkwardly skinny my school counselor had put me into a support group for kids with eating disorders. And I'm trying to rent the Lord of the Rings game for my Super Nintendo on my mom's Blockbuster account. My name was on the account, but I needed a photo I.D. So I brought the game to the counter, holding my hands down by my waist, hoping the big brassy black woman at the counter would just forget to ask for my I.D. She didn't. I reluctantly brought my hands up to the counter, revealing what I'd been holding. "Here, does this work? Look, I'm right here," I said, pointing to a tiny photo of myself. "See?"
She sat there for a few moments, eyes bugging out of her head, and then she started winding up that spring-loaded neck of hers. I braced myself for a tongue lashing. But when she opened her mouth, it was in flat, cruel peals of hoarse laughter. Haaa haaaa haaa haaa. Hooo Haaa Haaaa. Like that. She doubled over, facing the ground, supporting the upper half of her body with her palms on the counter, one of which was slapping the formica for added effect. I just stood very still, trying to not let this become any more of a scene than it already had. The lady had other plans. She grabbed the phone.
"Darnell!" she said, still laughing all the while. "You have to come out here. This white boy just Hoo Haaa Haaa Haaaa. Okay, this white boy just tried to use his HIGH SCHOOL YEARBOOK as his I.D. You gotta come look at this white boy. Hooo Hooo Hooo Haaa."
Soon Darnell was there, with some other employee, and the three of them were looking at me, looking at my yearbook, and falling all over each other in laughter. I didn't feel this was very professional, and in an attempt to remind them of their duty to their customer, I tried to get Darnell's attention. "Excuse me sir? Is this going to work? I missed school on picture day, but this is me in the beginning choir, see? Third row, seventh from the left. One two three four..." In my anger, I doubted Darnell could have counted to seven even if his eyes hadn't been full of tears of laughter. But nothing I was saying was making him laugh less, for sure. Suddenly I was a white guest star on "Martin," pushing my glasses up higher on my nose, nasally imploring the guffawing trio to stop laughing at me, and using white people words like "imploring" and "guffawing." To this day, I can't really be offended by whiteface Wayans-brothers-style comedy, as I know I have done my small part to contribute to the stereotype. At any rate, I eventually had to just grab my yearbook back off the counter and exit, silently. I have no idea how long it was before they noticed I was gone.
My point is that I had had very little success with legal forms of identification. I still didn't have any form of I.D. at all when it came time to get my passport so I could go to Chile on my mission. A kind Polynesian woman from church agreed to drive me down to Costco so I could get a membership and the accompanying photo I.D. Resourceful, right? I don't know why I thought that would work. When we got to the post office, they revealed that they had a list of pre-approved documents, and "Costco card" was not among them. Fortunately, we found some sort of flaw in the system, and the kind Polynesian woman from church, who did have proper identification, ended up having to perjure herself on some legal document declaring that she was my aunt, and that I was actually who I said I was. Surprisingly, that worked, and nobody ever tried to verify my relationship to her. Terrorists, take note.
By the time I was 22 and living in Utah, having very recently decided that maybe it was time to get my driver license, I again had lost every form of I.D. I'd had, including that passport. I can only imagine with dread the black market value of a passport that belongs to a white American kid who happens to look middle-eastern. That aside, I started to look into what was required to get my license in Utah, and found that one of the first things I'd need was a legal photo I.D. Of course. A quick call to the DMV in California revealed that they still had me on record there, and if I could come in, they would be able to pull up a picture of my face in their databank and print me a new one. I decided to get my Driver's permit while in California, as well, since I'd need to have it for two weeks before being eligible for my license. So only a few weeks after having moved to Utah, I found myself on a bus bound back to California.
I have to confess something at this point. I've always wanted a photo I.D. in which I was making a funny face. I know that's not allowed, but I knew there had to be a way, and I figured it out during that long bus ride. I marched through the doors of that CA DMV already making a face. I figured if I made that face the whole time I was in the DMV, they'd just think that was my face. Even if they had their doubts, who was going to say anything? So there I was in the DMV with the right side of my upper lip pulled up, my left eye squinting, and a simpleton's glee beaming from my entire countenance. My brother Randy was there with me for moral support, which was good because I soon ran into problems. The main problem was that I was filling out an application for a California legal I.D., but I needed it to be mailed to my new home in Utah. So I hesitated, and finally decided to put down my new address and just hope that didn't cause any problems. Randy was watching over my shoulder to make sure I didn't do anything stupid. "What about your zip code?" I had no idea what my new zip code was at all, so Randy suggested I leave it blank, and if they really needed it, we could somehow look it up in the moment.
After several hours of sitting in those hard plastic curved chairs, making that face the whole time, it was finally my turn to approach the counter. I was attended to by an irritable Indian gentleman, who gave me the distinct feeling that he was sizing me up and realizing I was going to take a lot of his time. And it's true, I was. And I think that look is a job requirement there anyway, so I proceeded with the original plan. "I need to get my I.D.," I told him. Holding my mouth all crooked like that does funny things to my voice.
He breathed loudly out through his nostrils, his mouth a hard-pressed line, then snatched up the paperwork I'd filled out. I leaned over to watch as he started copying my information into his computer. When he got to the part about how I lived in Utah, he stopped and smoothed down his sideburns with his palms before turning to look at me. "You need to be a California resident to get a California identification," he told me.
I hadn't gotten residency in Utah yet, so I clarified things for him, by saying, "Hey, do your impression of an incredulous lizard."
At least, that's what he must have thought I said. It was a really good impression, too. What I had actually said was, "I AM a California resident; I just live in Utah." Randy jumped to my defense. "He just needs it mailed to that address. Please, he doesn't have any other form of I.D."
Somehow, with his eyes, the man was able to wash his hands of the entire matter. He simply shook his head and resumed typing, muttering under his breath. I watched as he got to the zip code, and as I saw him preparing to ask me, I got my response ready. "What is your zip code?" he asked, but as he turned his eyes toward my face and saw me preparing to say I didn't know, he quickly muttered,"Never mind. Doesn't know his zip code. We'll just put all zeroes."
And that was it. He took my picture and sent me away with the promise that I'd receive my I.D. in the mail within the next week to ten days. I got my Driver's permit right after that. I admit, I cheated. I'd misplaced my glasses right before the trip, and I'd had to have Randy read the eye chart to me while we were waiting in line so I could memorize it, but that's another story. The point is that my scheme worked, and with one unforeseen bonus....
You see, what I hadn't realized at the time, was that the face I was making in that picture didn't just look like a funny face. It looked like a retarded face. It was a legal California I.D. that wasn't a driver license, with a Utah address and 00000 as the zip code, a printed signature, and a picture of a retard, all with my name on it. Which was serendipitous, as otherwise I never would have been able to get my license just two weeks later....
(I'll get a clearer version of this up here soon)
To be continued....
Early attempts to skirt the I.D. issue had failed spectacularly:
I was fifteen, and awkward. Picture me with a cowlick, mismatched clothes, broken glasses, and so awkwardly skinny my school counselor had put me into a support group for kids with eating disorders. And I'm trying to rent the Lord of the Rings game for my Super Nintendo on my mom's Blockbuster account. My name was on the account, but I needed a photo I.D. So I brought the game to the counter, holding my hands down by my waist, hoping the big brassy black woman at the counter would just forget to ask for my I.D. She didn't. I reluctantly brought my hands up to the counter, revealing what I'd been holding. "Here, does this work? Look, I'm right here," I said, pointing to a tiny photo of myself. "See?"
She sat there for a few moments, eyes bugging out of her head, and then she started winding up that spring-loaded neck of hers. I braced myself for a tongue lashing. But when she opened her mouth, it was in flat, cruel peals of hoarse laughter. Haaa haaaa haaa haaa. Hooo Haaa Haaaa. Like that. She doubled over, facing the ground, supporting the upper half of her body with her palms on the counter, one of which was slapping the formica for added effect. I just stood very still, trying to not let this become any more of a scene than it already had. The lady had other plans. She grabbed the phone.
"Darnell!" she said, still laughing all the while. "You have to come out here. This white boy just Hoo Haaa Haaa Haaaa. Okay, this white boy just tried to use his HIGH SCHOOL YEARBOOK as his I.D. You gotta come look at this white boy. Hooo Hooo Hooo Haaa."
Soon Darnell was there, with some other employee, and the three of them were looking at me, looking at my yearbook, and falling all over each other in laughter. I didn't feel this was very professional, and in an attempt to remind them of their duty to their customer, I tried to get Darnell's attention. "Excuse me sir? Is this going to work? I missed school on picture day, but this is me in the beginning choir, see? Third row, seventh from the left. One two three four..." In my anger, I doubted Darnell could have counted to seven even if his eyes hadn't been full of tears of laughter. But nothing I was saying was making him laugh less, for sure. Suddenly I was a white guest star on "Martin," pushing my glasses up higher on my nose, nasally imploring the guffawing trio to stop laughing at me, and using white people words like "imploring" and "guffawing." To this day, I can't really be offended by whiteface Wayans-brothers-style comedy, as I know I have done my small part to contribute to the stereotype. At any rate, I eventually had to just grab my yearbook back off the counter and exit, silently. I have no idea how long it was before they noticed I was gone.
My point is that I had had very little success with legal forms of identification. I still didn't have any form of I.D. at all when it came time to get my passport so I could go to Chile on my mission. A kind Polynesian woman from church agreed to drive me down to Costco so I could get a membership and the accompanying photo I.D. Resourceful, right? I don't know why I thought that would work. When we got to the post office, they revealed that they had a list of pre-approved documents, and "Costco card" was not among them. Fortunately, we found some sort of flaw in the system, and the kind Polynesian woman from church, who did have proper identification, ended up having to perjure herself on some legal document declaring that she was my aunt, and that I was actually who I said I was. Surprisingly, that worked, and nobody ever tried to verify my relationship to her. Terrorists, take note.
By the time I was 22 and living in Utah, having very recently decided that maybe it was time to get my driver license, I again had lost every form of I.D. I'd had, including that passport. I can only imagine with dread the black market value of a passport that belongs to a white American kid who happens to look middle-eastern. That aside, I started to look into what was required to get my license in Utah, and found that one of the first things I'd need was a legal photo I.D. Of course. A quick call to the DMV in California revealed that they still had me on record there, and if I could come in, they would be able to pull up a picture of my face in their databank and print me a new one. I decided to get my Driver's permit while in California, as well, since I'd need to have it for two weeks before being eligible for my license. So only a few weeks after having moved to Utah, I found myself on a bus bound back to California.
I have to confess something at this point. I've always wanted a photo I.D. in which I was making a funny face. I know that's not allowed, but I knew there had to be a way, and I figured it out during that long bus ride. I marched through the doors of that CA DMV already making a face. I figured if I made that face the whole time I was in the DMV, they'd just think that was my face. Even if they had their doubts, who was going to say anything? So there I was in the DMV with the right side of my upper lip pulled up, my left eye squinting, and a simpleton's glee beaming from my entire countenance. My brother Randy was there with me for moral support, which was good because I soon ran into problems. The main problem was that I was filling out an application for a California legal I.D., but I needed it to be mailed to my new home in Utah. So I hesitated, and finally decided to put down my new address and just hope that didn't cause any problems. Randy was watching over my shoulder to make sure I didn't do anything stupid. "What about your zip code?" I had no idea what my new zip code was at all, so Randy suggested I leave it blank, and if they really needed it, we could somehow look it up in the moment.
After several hours of sitting in those hard plastic curved chairs, making that face the whole time, it was finally my turn to approach the counter. I was attended to by an irritable Indian gentleman, who gave me the distinct feeling that he was sizing me up and realizing I was going to take a lot of his time. And it's true, I was. And I think that look is a job requirement there anyway, so I proceeded with the original plan. "I need to get my I.D.," I told him. Holding my mouth all crooked like that does funny things to my voice.
He breathed loudly out through his nostrils, his mouth a hard-pressed line, then snatched up the paperwork I'd filled out. I leaned over to watch as he started copying my information into his computer. When he got to the part about how I lived in Utah, he stopped and smoothed down his sideburns with his palms before turning to look at me. "You need to be a California resident to get a California identification," he told me.
I hadn't gotten residency in Utah yet, so I clarified things for him, by saying, "Hey, do your impression of an incredulous lizard."
At least, that's what he must have thought I said. It was a really good impression, too. What I had actually said was, "I AM a California resident; I just live in Utah." Randy jumped to my defense. "He just needs it mailed to that address. Please, he doesn't have any other form of I.D."
Somehow, with his eyes, the man was able to wash his hands of the entire matter. He simply shook his head and resumed typing, muttering under his breath. I watched as he got to the zip code, and as I saw him preparing to ask me, I got my response ready. "What is your zip code?" he asked, but as he turned his eyes toward my face and saw me preparing to say I didn't know, he quickly muttered,"Never mind. Doesn't know his zip code. We'll just put all zeroes."
And that was it. He took my picture and sent me away with the promise that I'd receive my I.D. in the mail within the next week to ten days. I got my Driver's permit right after that. I admit, I cheated. I'd misplaced my glasses right before the trip, and I'd had to have Randy read the eye chart to me while we were waiting in line so I could memorize it, but that's another story. The point is that my scheme worked, and with one unforeseen bonus....
You see, what I hadn't realized at the time, was that the face I was making in that picture didn't just look like a funny face. It looked like a retarded face. It was a legal California I.D. that wasn't a driver license, with a Utah address and 00000 as the zip code, a printed signature, and a picture of a retard, all with my name on it. Which was serendipitous, as otherwise I never would have been able to get my license just two weeks later....
(I'll get a clearer version of this up here soon)
To be continued....
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Retarded Pt. 1
There was an elderly woman from Guatemala or Panama or one of those Mexican countries down there working at the In-n-Out Burger where I was employed in Napa when I was 22. Her name was Berta, or Marta, or something stereotypical like that, and I came upon her in the back room one day, clutching the potato tumbler with one hand for support, and her heart with the other for dramatic effect, her Charo mascara running down her wrinkly Hispanic jowls and coming to rest in blue-black spatters among the red ones already on her shirt from slicing the day's tomatoes (one of the few chores that could be entrusted to someone who didn't speak English, while also demeaning enough that no one who did speak English would do it, which is precisely why we had Berta, or Marta, in the first place). She looked at me as I approached, and sobbed hysterically, "¡No es ataque de corazón!" or, "It's not a heart attack!" I figured she lied to get this job; she was probably lying about this.
Don't get me wrong. Marta or whatever was like a mother to me. Not my mother, but she just seemed like someone's mother, to me. And we were pretty close. This was largely because I was the only other Spanish speaker who worked there, so they always made me be the one to tell her what needed cleaning or cutting. I had made her this tape to help her learn, in English and Spanish, the answers to the questions on the United States citizenship test, so whenever she was cleaning out the sinks, you'd hear her going "Francees Eh-scoatt Key," or she'd be sweeping behind the dumpster, from whence a voice would emanate: "Dee right to bear arms." I thought it was important that this woman be able to vote on crucial political issues, you know? So now you see how very close we were, Marta or Berta and I. And then one day she up and had an ataque, and I had to be the one to find her.
So I told my boss, and he called an ambulance, and they came to take her away. As they strapped her to the gurney, she called out, her eyes wide and wet with gratitude, "¡No doctores, no doctores!" which, as you can gather from the context, is some strange dialect of Spanish for "You can find my insurance card in the wallet in my left hip pocket!" In all honesty, the arrival of the paramedics had somehow exacerbated her panic, and as they loaded her up into the back of the ambulance, she yelled something that sounded uncannily like the English phrase "Geeve me leeberty or geeve me deeeeeeath!" That's the last thing she said, and then the heavy ambulance doors clanged shut, and I never saw that poor woman again.
Okay, it's true that I never saw her again, but that's not really what she yelled. What she actually yelled was the Spanish phrase, "No me dejes sola," which means "Don't leave me alone." And she said it, yelped it, almost pleaded it, while looking right into my eyes, and the ambulance doors really did clang shut unsympathetically right at that moment, and I was left with her final words to me resounding in my ears. The paramedics told me I couldn't ride in the ambulance because I wasn't related to her, but they were kind enough to tell me which hospital they were taking her to, and then they left.
My boss asked what she had yelled there at the end, and I told him. "Well, why don't you follow her down there and make sure she's all right?" he suggested.
"I don't have a car." It would take over an hour to get to the hospital on the bus.
"Here, take mine," he offered, tossing his keys to me.
I tried to catch them, but yeah. I'd always been terrible at that, ever since tee-ball. But not catching the keys was less embarrassing than what I was saying as I was swatting at the air for them: "I don't know how to drive." Once I'd recovered the keys, I walked over to hand them to my boss (throwing was my other weak point), but he was still reacting to what I'd said, staring at me as though I had just told him, during the McCarthy era, that I was a Communist. A look that was half "I hope you're kidding," and half "This is a terrible time to be kidding." But I wasn't kidding. I had no idea how to drive a car. Well, not NO idea. I had watched Knight Rider religiously as a child, and I had even had a Knight Rider Big Wheel, so I knew there was something about turning a key, and then the car would talk to you and tell you what to do next, but that was as far as my knowledge went.
When my boss composed himself, he simply muttered, "Well, then, get back to work." And I did. As I slammed potatoes through the french fry cutter (the "freedom" fry cutter, as I guess we were supposed to call it in those post-9/11 days, presumably so we didn't have to keep paying evil terrorist-supporting France the royalties for inventing the name of the way we cut our potatoes here in America), I thought about Marta in her paper hat on a paper sheet on a hospital bed, refusing to sign scary paperwork in a crazy foreign medical building where no one spoke her language. Why had she panicked so much at the thought of going to the hospital, I wondered? I decided to think that the only reason the old woman had been so scared was that maybe she'd only been to hospitals in a third world country, and once she arrived at our nice clean American hospital, she'd calm right down. The thought also crossed my mind that maybe she thought they would actually send her to one of those hospitals back in her homeland once they realized she was illegal, and then I realized I wasn't entirely sure that that they don't actually do that, so I decided not to think about it.
Just so you know, the woman didn't die. She was given orders from the doctor to not return to work for at least a few months, and by the time she came back, I had moved to Utah. But I was changed in one way of major importance. I had decided that maybe it was time to get my driver license, just in case of emergency. No more old Mexican ladies dying alone because THIS guy didn't know how to follow an ambulance. But me, Robbie, getting a license? I figure I could have done the normal thing and taken Drivers' Ed and actually learned how to drive, like everyone else. But yeah right. At some point in the next few weeks, I was informed that driving was actually nothing like The Love Bug or Knight Rider at all. Plus, I wasn't really so interested in learning how to drive as I was in just getting my license. A driver license, as I understand it, is like a free pass from the government to be behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. If I ever got pulled over for crashing off the side of the road, I'd be able to simply show my license, and the cops would just help me flip my car back over and wave me on my merry way. Still, as appealing as this license was starting to seem, I was keenly aware that it was The Man who was making me get my license. And I was never one to drive through hoops. So, instead of signing up for driving classes, I hatched a scheme.
To be continued....
Don't get me wrong. Marta or whatever was like a mother to me. Not my mother, but she just seemed like someone's mother, to me. And we were pretty close. This was largely because I was the only other Spanish speaker who worked there, so they always made me be the one to tell her what needed cleaning or cutting. I had made her this tape to help her learn, in English and Spanish, the answers to the questions on the United States citizenship test, so whenever she was cleaning out the sinks, you'd hear her going "Francees Eh-scoatt Key," or she'd be sweeping behind the dumpster, from whence a voice would emanate: "Dee right to bear arms." I thought it was important that this woman be able to vote on crucial political issues, you know? So now you see how very close we were, Marta or Berta and I. And then one day she up and had an ataque, and I had to be the one to find her.
So I told my boss, and he called an ambulance, and they came to take her away. As they strapped her to the gurney, she called out, her eyes wide and wet with gratitude, "¡No doctores, no doctores!" which, as you can gather from the context, is some strange dialect of Spanish for "You can find my insurance card in the wallet in my left hip pocket!" In all honesty, the arrival of the paramedics had somehow exacerbated her panic, and as they loaded her up into the back of the ambulance, she yelled something that sounded uncannily like the English phrase "Geeve me leeberty or geeve me deeeeeeath!" That's the last thing she said, and then the heavy ambulance doors clanged shut, and I never saw that poor woman again.
Okay, it's true that I never saw her again, but that's not really what she yelled. What she actually yelled was the Spanish phrase, "No me dejes sola," which means "Don't leave me alone." And she said it, yelped it, almost pleaded it, while looking right into my eyes, and the ambulance doors really did clang shut unsympathetically right at that moment, and I was left with her final words to me resounding in my ears. The paramedics told me I couldn't ride in the ambulance because I wasn't related to her, but they were kind enough to tell me which hospital they were taking her to, and then they left.
My boss asked what she had yelled there at the end, and I told him. "Well, why don't you follow her down there and make sure she's all right?" he suggested.
"I don't have a car." It would take over an hour to get to the hospital on the bus.
"Here, take mine," he offered, tossing his keys to me.
I tried to catch them, but yeah. I'd always been terrible at that, ever since tee-ball. But not catching the keys was less embarrassing than what I was saying as I was swatting at the air for them: "I don't know how to drive." Once I'd recovered the keys, I walked over to hand them to my boss (throwing was my other weak point), but he was still reacting to what I'd said, staring at me as though I had just told him, during the McCarthy era, that I was a Communist. A look that was half "I hope you're kidding," and half "This is a terrible time to be kidding." But I wasn't kidding. I had no idea how to drive a car. Well, not NO idea. I had watched Knight Rider religiously as a child, and I had even had a Knight Rider Big Wheel, so I knew there was something about turning a key, and then the car would talk to you and tell you what to do next, but that was as far as my knowledge went.
When my boss composed himself, he simply muttered, "Well, then, get back to work." And I did. As I slammed potatoes through the french fry cutter (the "freedom" fry cutter, as I guess we were supposed to call it in those post-9/11 days, presumably so we didn't have to keep paying evil terrorist-supporting France the royalties for inventing the name of the way we cut our potatoes here in America), I thought about Marta in her paper hat on a paper sheet on a hospital bed, refusing to sign scary paperwork in a crazy foreign medical building where no one spoke her language. Why had she panicked so much at the thought of going to the hospital, I wondered? I decided to think that the only reason the old woman had been so scared was that maybe she'd only been to hospitals in a third world country, and once she arrived at our nice clean American hospital, she'd calm right down. The thought also crossed my mind that maybe she thought they would actually send her to one of those hospitals back in her homeland once they realized she was illegal, and then I realized I wasn't entirely sure that that they don't actually do that, so I decided not to think about it.
Just so you know, the woman didn't die. She was given orders from the doctor to not return to work for at least a few months, and by the time she came back, I had moved to Utah. But I was changed in one way of major importance. I had decided that maybe it was time to get my driver license, just in case of emergency. No more old Mexican ladies dying alone because THIS guy didn't know how to follow an ambulance. But me, Robbie, getting a license? I figure I could have done the normal thing and taken Drivers' Ed and actually learned how to drive, like everyone else. But yeah right. At some point in the next few weeks, I was informed that driving was actually nothing like The Love Bug or Knight Rider at all. Plus, I wasn't really so interested in learning how to drive as I was in just getting my license. A driver license, as I understand it, is like a free pass from the government to be behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. If I ever got pulled over for crashing off the side of the road, I'd be able to simply show my license, and the cops would just help me flip my car back over and wave me on my merry way. Still, as appealing as this license was starting to seem, I was keenly aware that it was The Man who was making me get my license. And I was never one to drive through hoops. So, instead of signing up for driving classes, I hatched a scheme.
To be continued....
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Corned Beef Hash
Warning: I know it seems absurd with such a title, but this post is rated PG-13 or 15 or so.
My friend David and I got so good at Taboo that we could do them all in one or two words.
David: Bubbles
Robbie: Root beer!
David: Not at a crime
Robbie: Bannister!
David: Doo doo doo
Robbie: Tchaikovsky!
We could get up to 14 or 15 in one turn. The trick was to boast about our mental connection while at the same time acting like we'd never played before. "So is this kinda like Password? We're really good at Password."
Then we'd destroy them.
There was one card that caused us particular consternation, however. It was one that read "corned beef hash." David had never tried corned beef hash, and he couldn't ever seem to get a grasp on what it was from my descriptions. "Wait, it's dog food for people? I don't get this." Every time that card came up in play, I would try to describe it, and he could never remember the name of it, and we would lose valuable time. I realized the only solution would be to expose him to the actual substance, but couldn't really see myself actually purchasing any.
Then came Youth Conference 1998, which we both attended. We did a canned food drive for the homeless as our service project. One of the bags that were left for us contained a can of precious corned beef hash! I was ecstatic. This was our chance!
When we got back to the church where our dance would be held that evening, we set down the bags we'd collected with everyone else's, but I slyly absconded with one purloined can in my hand. I walked into the alcove toward the scouting room, where my backpack was piled with fifty or so others, but the door was locked. I turned around to find some other place to stash the hash, but there were some church-lady types meeting each other in the hall by the drinking fountain, effectively cutting off my escape. If I was seen with a can right after a canned food drive, I was sure to be questioned. I don't know whether stealing a mere $1.39 can of processed meat would look like a terribly egregious sin to these ladies, but I was pretty sure that stealing ANYTHING in a church was frowned upon, and stealing from the homeless was probably reportable to the Bishop or God or worse. So I ducked through the nearest door, which happened to be the men's room, and looked around for a hiding spot. On the wall was an air-freshener. The type that sprays every fifteen minutes, but the only time you're ever in there long enough to hear it go off is when you're sitting on the pot, and so you start to wonder whether it has some sort of odor sensor on it, you know? So I was able to get the can to stay on the slanted top of that little spray thing. Feeling disaster (or at least judgment) averted, I then used the urinal, and as I was washing my hands afterward, I noticed the problem. The can was out of any normal line of sight when one was facing it, but it was clearly visible (unavoidable, even) in the mirror. I got it back down and peeked into the hall. The door to my backpack was still locked, and the ladies were still barricading the other end of the hall with their wall of gossip. I was getting desperate. I looked in the only as-yet-unexplored part of the restroom: the stall.
Then I got an idea!
An awful idea!
THE GRINCH
GOT A WONDERFUL, AWFUL IDEA!
I took the wrapper off of the can (metal container), took the lid off of the can (toilet), and stuck the hash in the water in the back of the crapper. I would come back for it later. I can be a real genius sometimes, especially when pressed into a corner.
Later:
During the dance, I was walking by that hall to get a drink of water, when I noticed that the room with my backpack was finally open. If I was going to get to my backpack with the stolen Hormel goodness, I would need to act quickly, now, without thinking. I hastily ran into the alcove, through the bathroom door, across the few feet of beige tiles, and threw open the door to the stall, and--
--and the visual cortex of my brain fought the rest of my brain in an attempt to make me process the fat Mexican kid inside the stall had been masturbating when I first burst in, but now he was yelling at me. "What are you doing in here!?"
"What are YOU doing in here!?" I gasped. I had backed away from the stall as much as I could by this point.
"What's your problem? Why don't you knock?" he demanded.
"Why don't you lock the door?" I countered (reasonably, I maintain) "especially if you're going to be...." I fled.
I don't know how I was able to respond verbally to the boy; in my head the whole time I was just thinking, "AAAAAAAAAUHHHHHGHHHHHHH."
A few minutes later, under cover of dim lighting and whirling disco-ball stars of light, I saw el Mexicano gordo y masturbante back on the dance floor with some innocent young girl in his manos. After pointing him out to my friends, I cautiously slipped back into the bathroom, retrieved the can, and packed it away in my backpack. This time, as in all instances prior and since, I tapped politely on the stall door before entering, in order to assure myself of its vacancy.
David and I ate the hash the next morning, and David got to see just how barely tolerable, but shamefully enticing the stuff really was. And we had learned our lesson: never ever ever steal from the homeless. Bad things happen. There was, however, one wholly positive outcome of the whole ordeal....
David: Masturbating Mexican
Robbie: Corned Beef Hash!
Yeah, we were unstoppable.
My friend David and I got so good at Taboo that we could do them all in one or two words.
David: Bubbles
Robbie: Root beer!
David: Not at a crime
Robbie: Bannister!
David: Doo doo doo
Robbie: Tchaikovsky!
We could get up to 14 or 15 in one turn. The trick was to boast about our mental connection while at the same time acting like we'd never played before. "So is this kinda like Password? We're really good at Password."
Then we'd destroy them.
There was one card that caused us particular consternation, however. It was one that read "corned beef hash." David had never tried corned beef hash, and he couldn't ever seem to get a grasp on what it was from my descriptions. "Wait, it's dog food for people? I don't get this." Every time that card came up in play, I would try to describe it, and he could never remember the name of it, and we would lose valuable time. I realized the only solution would be to expose him to the actual substance, but couldn't really see myself actually purchasing any.Then came Youth Conference 1998, which we both attended. We did a canned food drive for the homeless as our service project. One of the bags that were left for us contained a can of precious corned beef hash! I was ecstatic. This was our chance!
When we got back to the church where our dance would be held that evening, we set down the bags we'd collected with everyone else's, but I slyly absconded with one purloined can in my hand. I walked into the alcove toward the scouting room, where my backpack was piled with fifty or so others, but the door was locked. I turned around to find some other place to stash the hash, but there were some church-lady types meeting each other in the hall by the drinking fountain, effectively cutting off my escape. If I was seen with a can right after a canned food drive, I was sure to be questioned. I don't know whether stealing a mere $1.39 can of processed meat would look like a terribly egregious sin to these ladies, but I was pretty sure that stealing ANYTHING in a church was frowned upon, and stealing from the homeless was probably reportable to the Bishop or God or worse. So I ducked through the nearest door, which happened to be the men's room, and looked around for a hiding spot. On the wall was an air-freshener. The type that sprays every fifteen minutes, but the only time you're ever in there long enough to hear it go off is when you're sitting on the pot, and so you start to wonder whether it has some sort of odor sensor on it, you know? So I was able to get the can to stay on the slanted top of that little spray thing. Feeling disaster (or at least judgment) averted, I then used the urinal, and as I was washing my hands afterward, I noticed the problem. The can was out of any normal line of sight when one was facing it, but it was clearly visible (unavoidable, even) in the mirror. I got it back down and peeked into the hall. The door to my backpack was still locked, and the ladies were still barricading the other end of the hall with their wall of gossip. I was getting desperate. I looked in the only as-yet-unexplored part of the restroom: the stall.
Then I got an idea!
An awful idea!
THE GRINCH
GOT A WONDERFUL, AWFUL IDEA!
I took the wrapper off of the can (metal container), took the lid off of the can (toilet), and stuck the hash in the water in the back of the crapper. I would come back for it later. I can be a real genius sometimes, especially when pressed into a corner.
Later:
During the dance, I was walking by that hall to get a drink of water, when I noticed that the room with my backpack was finally open. If I was going to get to my backpack with the stolen Hormel goodness, I would need to act quickly, now, without thinking. I hastily ran into the alcove, through the bathroom door, across the few feet of beige tiles, and threw open the door to the stall, and--
--and the visual cortex of my brain fought the rest of my brain in an attempt to make me process the fat Mexican kid inside the stall had been masturbating when I first burst in, but now he was yelling at me. "What are you doing in here!?"
"What are YOU doing in here!?" I gasped. I had backed away from the stall as much as I could by this point.
"What's your problem? Why don't you knock?" he demanded.
"Why don't you lock the door?" I countered (reasonably, I maintain) "especially if you're going to be...." I fled.
I don't know how I was able to respond verbally to the boy; in my head the whole time I was just thinking, "AAAAAAAAAUHHHHHGHHHHHHH."
A few minutes later, under cover of dim lighting and whirling disco-ball stars of light, I saw el Mexicano gordo y masturbante back on the dance floor with some innocent young girl in his manos. After pointing him out to my friends, I cautiously slipped back into the bathroom, retrieved the can, and packed it away in my backpack. This time, as in all instances prior and since, I tapped politely on the stall door before entering, in order to assure myself of its vacancy.
David and I ate the hash the next morning, and David got to see just how barely tolerable, but shamefully enticing the stuff really was. And we had learned our lesson: never ever ever steal from the homeless. Bad things happen. There was, however, one wholly positive outcome of the whole ordeal....
David: Masturbating Mexican
Robbie: Corned Beef Hash!
Yeah, we were unstoppable.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Nurture
“We can’t have you in here with the other girls.”
The other girls shift skittishly, sensing the storm on the horizon.
Ursula sits on her haunches on the chair of her desk with her muscular brown arms folded on top of her black ashy knees, her back pressed uncomfortably against the bars on the window, her forehead and eyes pointed at the adults as though pure rage might explode out at them. Her neck swivels menacingly; the vituperation continues as the staff members warily close in. “Bitch! I don’t need your fat-ass face in my face! You want something in your face, go get another cheeseburger!” To another: “Just come at me! I’ll rip your titties off!” To the nurse: “You! Black girl! I’ll kill your baby!” The nurse takes a step backward and sideways, trying to shield herself behind some wall or counter or piece of furniture she wishes were there, letting her hands flutter like birds around her distended belly in their search for the most protective place to alight.
“We need you to walk into Investment.”
The girl has become rigid, barely moving. Her breath is an ursine growl. The last thing she says is “You’ll have to take me. And I promise it will be Prob. Lems.” She punctuates each syllable of that final word with another around-the-world sway of her neck. Her eyes lose their focus, and a roar, guttural and startling, emanates from between her clenched teeth and angrily parted lips.
“Ok, let's get the other girls out of here.”
The other girls leave their desks, their pens, everything. They funnel through the door in an ovine panic, following the staff to safety. They get jammed in the doorway, rammed into each other in their attempts to simultaneously leave quickly to escape harm and linger to witness the melee. A wispy girl, Rachel, is pushed, misses the doorway, and gets hit in her clean teeth by the wall-mounted pencil sharpener. She is swallowed up by the stampede, bleeding slightly from the corner of her mouth, led down the hall, and into a new classroom. The nurse looks sternly at all of them as she pauses pregnantly, then closes the door and gives them new pens. They strain to hear, quiet for the first time all day. The first sentence they can make out is:
“You have until the count of three to walk on your own. You are going either way.”
The men of the staff close the circle on the animal, hands forward, shuffling apprehensively. It bares its teeth, growls and screams.
“One.”
Its painted claws clatter dangerously on the desktop.
“Two.”
Saliva pools on its lips.
“Three.”
The boss signals, and two men advance, each grabbing a wrist and a shoulder. The moment it is touched, the animal begins to thrash truculently, kicking, gnashing, jerking its strong arms in an attempt to knock the men off balance. They pull it off of the desk, away from the wall, and two of the women grasp at the flailing legs. It bends at the knees, the hips, the neck, trying to free itself. In a surprising move, it yanks its hand inward instead of out toward the attackers, and is able to catch the back of a man’s manacling hand in its teeth.
“She’s biting me!” he caterwauls madly. Several pairs of hands grasp at its nappy head, its strong jaws. The man doesn’t let go of its arm, though fangs are piercing his skin. Blood vessels are mashed between gnashing teeth and the bones in the back of the hand, causing an instant black and purple ring to shine through. He finally manages to pull the hand away, leaving a bite-sized roll of scraped skin in its mouth. It continues to spasm and scream, shaking its head from side to side in order to drench them all in its slobber. They rustle it into Investment, down to the cold pavement floor, and nimble fingers remove its shoes and belt. The nurse reappears with a hypodermic and doctor’s orders. Heavy hands hold its hips and thighs and head. A flash of brown fleshy buttocks lasts just long enough for the injection. They wait.
After a few minutes, the struggling has stopped. The man with the bloody hand has gone to watch the other girls, a wad of paper towels pressed to the wound. The thin girl, Rachel, shaken and jealous, raises a malnourished arm like a tentative twig growing in time lapse. “May I break chair structure and come ask you a question?” she asks sheepishly. He nods his assent, eyes still on the smashed plum that is the back of his hand. The closeness of her small voice seconds later startles him. “I need to isolate. I feel like I’m going to explode.”
“Sit there in the chair in the hallway, facing the wall, and stay where I can see you,” he instructs impassively. Every other hand in the classroom erupts into the air, each straining to peak above the others. A few girls blurt out. “But!” “Me too!” “I can’t!” The man’s glare successfully conveys his unwillingness to tolerate nonsense this day. Most of the hands have sagged back down even before he says, “We’ve all just been through something stressful. Nobody is in trouble here. Please stay on task. You can’t all isolate at once. Rachel, write me a Feelings Paper and come back to your desk.” They settle back into the work of eavesdropping on whatever might be happening in Investment.
“I think we’re okay to let her go and back out of the room.”
They stand up and start slowly for the door. Without warning, it wheels up and around, punches the heavy-set woman in the face, aims a clumsy kick at the new guy’s knees. The woman throws her hands to her face. The new guy pulls the knee to his chest, swearing on one leg. There are still enough of them to grab it again and get it into a submissive position. This time they let it go and bolt for the door, which they close. They can hear it growling and panting, slamming its bulk against the other side of the heavy door. The long string of invective resumes. They exchange glances, wishing they could be anywhere else. Anywhere calmer.
Elsewhere: “Rachel. It’s been five minutes. You need to rejoin these girls or face a Natural Consequence.” His voice carries out to her in the hallway, but she pretends not to hear. “Rachel!” he says, not more loudly, but more emphatically. She turns her head, and he sees the wet tears on her face and in the chopped bangs that she parts by pushing them to either side of her plastic-rimmed glasses.
“I did it again,” she bleats.
“What did you do?” he asks, as he cautiously stands up.
“I self-harmed,” comes the pathetic response. As he comes around, he sees the electrical outlet on the wall. She has ripped the face off of it, and a shard of the hard plastic is clutched in her slender right fist. He sees the red viscous droplets on the edge of the weapon, continues around her and sees the bright poison red spreading all across her left forearm, seeping out of a six-inch cherry-pie gash in her pale skin, soaking darkly into the leg of her sweat pants, making sticky scarlet elbow prints on the chair. He cries out in alarm, then grabs for his radio. “Code Nine in Classroom Four!”
The ensuing commotion of staff members and radios and paramedics and craning girls is enough to drown out the commotion the beast is making a few rooms down by banging its head against the door until it tires itself out. “I hope you know what you are responsible for today,” comes the bitter voice of the fat staff lady through the little hole in the door of the animal’s cage. Her voice is muffled a bit by the bag of ice she is holding up to one side of her face. “A lot of good people have been hurt trying to help you, but do you care? No. I hope they press charges. I don’t get paid enough to deal with you.” But the animal doesn’t hear her, and really doesn’t care, and sleeps through the rest of the afternoon’s events.
It sleeps through the fat lady’s attempts to sting it with guilt, in order to assuage her own guilt about her size. It sleeps through a man’s testimony to the police as he gingerly favors one knee. Through the police officers’ assurances that the school won’t have to deal with this one anymore, because she’ll spend some time in Juvie and then she’ll be back to her mother’s, if mom’s out of prison herself by then; after all, no other school is going to take her after this one. Through the bosses assurances to the new guy that he'll get used to it, and not to care too much or you go crazy. It sleeps through a frail girl getting stitches up her arm, and a reward (all the attention she has been craving today). It sleeps through a nurse’s phone call to her supervisor, saying that she just had to get away, and that she might not come back at all, at least not until the baby comes. It sleeps through the gossip that spreads through the school, and its own elevated status as another rebel who showed the staff what was what. “Oh, I bit a staff member once,” they brag and lie. It sleeps through that, too.
It sleeps through a man’s sobs. The man has pulled over to the side of the road, just as the clouds mockingly burst. He wipes the tears off his glasses on his tee shirt with a bandaged hand, amazed by the catharsis that begins to spread through him. But still he sobs and sobs, for himself, for that girl, for ALL the girls, for the world, forehead on forearms on the steering wheel. The hail bangs unfeelingly against the roof of his battered old car.
Soon, the animal will be returned to the wild. “Untameable,” they’ll say.
God damn the bastards who raped that little girl.
The other girls shift skittishly, sensing the storm on the horizon.
Ursula sits on her haunches on the chair of her desk with her muscular brown arms folded on top of her black ashy knees, her back pressed uncomfortably against the bars on the window, her forehead and eyes pointed at the adults as though pure rage might explode out at them. Her neck swivels menacingly; the vituperation continues as the staff members warily close in. “Bitch! I don’t need your fat-ass face in my face! You want something in your face, go get another cheeseburger!” To another: “Just come at me! I’ll rip your titties off!” To the nurse: “You! Black girl! I’ll kill your baby!” The nurse takes a step backward and sideways, trying to shield herself behind some wall or counter or piece of furniture she wishes were there, letting her hands flutter like birds around her distended belly in their search for the most protective place to alight.
“We need you to walk into Investment.”
The girl has become rigid, barely moving. Her breath is an ursine growl. The last thing she says is “You’ll have to take me. And I promise it will be Prob. Lems.” She punctuates each syllable of that final word with another around-the-world sway of her neck. Her eyes lose their focus, and a roar, guttural and startling, emanates from between her clenched teeth and angrily parted lips.
“Ok, let's get the other girls out of here.”
The other girls leave their desks, their pens, everything. They funnel through the door in an ovine panic, following the staff to safety. They get jammed in the doorway, rammed into each other in their attempts to simultaneously leave quickly to escape harm and linger to witness the melee. A wispy girl, Rachel, is pushed, misses the doorway, and gets hit in her clean teeth by the wall-mounted pencil sharpener. She is swallowed up by the stampede, bleeding slightly from the corner of her mouth, led down the hall, and into a new classroom. The nurse looks sternly at all of them as she pauses pregnantly, then closes the door and gives them new pens. They strain to hear, quiet for the first time all day. The first sentence they can make out is:
“You have until the count of three to walk on your own. You are going either way.”
The men of the staff close the circle on the animal, hands forward, shuffling apprehensively. It bares its teeth, growls and screams.
“One.”
Its painted claws clatter dangerously on the desktop.
“Two.”
Saliva pools on its lips.
“Three.”
The boss signals, and two men advance, each grabbing a wrist and a shoulder. The moment it is touched, the animal begins to thrash truculently, kicking, gnashing, jerking its strong arms in an attempt to knock the men off balance. They pull it off of the desk, away from the wall, and two of the women grasp at the flailing legs. It bends at the knees, the hips, the neck, trying to free itself. In a surprising move, it yanks its hand inward instead of out toward the attackers, and is able to catch the back of a man’s manacling hand in its teeth.
“She’s biting me!” he caterwauls madly. Several pairs of hands grasp at its nappy head, its strong jaws. The man doesn’t let go of its arm, though fangs are piercing his skin. Blood vessels are mashed between gnashing teeth and the bones in the back of the hand, causing an instant black and purple ring to shine through. He finally manages to pull the hand away, leaving a bite-sized roll of scraped skin in its mouth. It continues to spasm and scream, shaking its head from side to side in order to drench them all in its slobber. They rustle it into Investment, down to the cold pavement floor, and nimble fingers remove its shoes and belt. The nurse reappears with a hypodermic and doctor’s orders. Heavy hands hold its hips and thighs and head. A flash of brown fleshy buttocks lasts just long enough for the injection. They wait.
After a few minutes, the struggling has stopped. The man with the bloody hand has gone to watch the other girls, a wad of paper towels pressed to the wound. The thin girl, Rachel, shaken and jealous, raises a malnourished arm like a tentative twig growing in time lapse. “May I break chair structure and come ask you a question?” she asks sheepishly. He nods his assent, eyes still on the smashed plum that is the back of his hand. The closeness of her small voice seconds later startles him. “I need to isolate. I feel like I’m going to explode.”
“Sit there in the chair in the hallway, facing the wall, and stay where I can see you,” he instructs impassively. Every other hand in the classroom erupts into the air, each straining to peak above the others. A few girls blurt out. “But!” “Me too!” “I can’t!” The man’s glare successfully conveys his unwillingness to tolerate nonsense this day. Most of the hands have sagged back down even before he says, “We’ve all just been through something stressful. Nobody is in trouble here. Please stay on task. You can’t all isolate at once. Rachel, write me a Feelings Paper and come back to your desk.” They settle back into the work of eavesdropping on whatever might be happening in Investment.
“I think we’re okay to let her go and back out of the room.”
They stand up and start slowly for the door. Without warning, it wheels up and around, punches the heavy-set woman in the face, aims a clumsy kick at the new guy’s knees. The woman throws her hands to her face. The new guy pulls the knee to his chest, swearing on one leg. There are still enough of them to grab it again and get it into a submissive position. This time they let it go and bolt for the door, which they close. They can hear it growling and panting, slamming its bulk against the other side of the heavy door. The long string of invective resumes. They exchange glances, wishing they could be anywhere else. Anywhere calmer.
Elsewhere: “Rachel. It’s been five minutes. You need to rejoin these girls or face a Natural Consequence.” His voice carries out to her in the hallway, but she pretends not to hear. “Rachel!” he says, not more loudly, but more emphatically. She turns her head, and he sees the wet tears on her face and in the chopped bangs that she parts by pushing them to either side of her plastic-rimmed glasses.
“I did it again,” she bleats.
“What did you do?” he asks, as he cautiously stands up.
“I self-harmed,” comes the pathetic response. As he comes around, he sees the electrical outlet on the wall. She has ripped the face off of it, and a shard of the hard plastic is clutched in her slender right fist. He sees the red viscous droplets on the edge of the weapon, continues around her and sees the bright poison red spreading all across her left forearm, seeping out of a six-inch cherry-pie gash in her pale skin, soaking darkly into the leg of her sweat pants, making sticky scarlet elbow prints on the chair. He cries out in alarm, then grabs for his radio. “Code Nine in Classroom Four!”
The ensuing commotion of staff members and radios and paramedics and craning girls is enough to drown out the commotion the beast is making a few rooms down by banging its head against the door until it tires itself out. “I hope you know what you are responsible for today,” comes the bitter voice of the fat staff lady through the little hole in the door of the animal’s cage. Her voice is muffled a bit by the bag of ice she is holding up to one side of her face. “A lot of good people have been hurt trying to help you, but do you care? No. I hope they press charges. I don’t get paid enough to deal with you.” But the animal doesn’t hear her, and really doesn’t care, and sleeps through the rest of the afternoon’s events.
It sleeps through the fat lady’s attempts to sting it with guilt, in order to assuage her own guilt about her size. It sleeps through a man’s testimony to the police as he gingerly favors one knee. Through the police officers’ assurances that the school won’t have to deal with this one anymore, because she’ll spend some time in Juvie and then she’ll be back to her mother’s, if mom’s out of prison herself by then; after all, no other school is going to take her after this one. Through the bosses assurances to the new guy that he'll get used to it, and not to care too much or you go crazy. It sleeps through a frail girl getting stitches up her arm, and a reward (all the attention she has been craving today). It sleeps through a nurse’s phone call to her supervisor, saying that she just had to get away, and that she might not come back at all, at least not until the baby comes. It sleeps through the gossip that spreads through the school, and its own elevated status as another rebel who showed the staff what was what. “Oh, I bit a staff member once,” they brag and lie. It sleeps through that, too.
It sleeps through a man’s sobs. The man has pulled over to the side of the road, just as the clouds mockingly burst. He wipes the tears off his glasses on his tee shirt with a bandaged hand, amazed by the catharsis that begins to spread through him. But still he sobs and sobs, for himself, for that girl, for ALL the girls, for the world, forehead on forearms on the steering wheel. The hail bangs unfeelingly against the roof of his battered old car.
Soon, the animal will be returned to the wild. “Untameable,” they’ll say.
God damn the bastards who raped that little girl.
What I Did in Church on Sunday
People are always asking me why I'm afraid of midgets. Well, here's the definitive answer, in children's storybook form. It's a definite departure from my norm, to say the least.
Man, I don't know what's wrong with me. The last thing I need is to be haunted by a midget ghost. I hope you enjoyed this.
Man, I don't know what's wrong with me. The last thing I need is to be haunted by a midget ghost. I hope you enjoyed this.
Curse of the Gypsy!
Don't judge me: when I was a senior in high school, I was a compulsive litterer. I got the biggest kick out of throwing the biggest items out the window. Hitting drivers of convertibles or Jeeps with small pieces of rubbish was particularly rewarding. So was hitting street lights, stop signs, or cop cars. Parked ones. Mind you, I would never litter in the woods. But if we were in an already-polluted urban setting, and if there was a highway adoption sign up for some company I didn't really love, and if there were an eggshell carton or a Blockbuster receipt or a refrigerator box (yeah, I totally hit the Channel 7 News van with one of THOSE) in the car, I just couldn't help myself. Creating jobs, I would say. If the government is going to pay farmers to not grow corn, they can pay those lazy jerks to come out here and pick up my trash. Of course, this was mostly the result of my strict Mormon upbringing. I felt, with every toss of a Twinkie wrapper, that same shameful glee that normal kids must have felt when sneaking a cigarette, looking at a Playboy, or stealing pogs from the Pog Store in the mall. I could feel exhilarated and guilty, and I didn't even have to commit an actual sin! Breaking laws and still getting into heaven! The perfect Mormon teenage rebellion is one that would piss your mother off if she knew, but that you haven't ever heard them speak specifically about in church.
Anyway, the littering comes back later.
One weekend, I went camping with some Foof's (Friends Of Other Faiths), or "gentiles," as Brigham Young would have called them. There was Justin, the giant, whom we derisively called "Wheels," just so he would think we only kept him around for his car, which I'm not sure wasn't really the case. At any rate, it worked, because he always volunteered to drive us places in his huge beat-up Station Wagon, which we lovingly referred to as "Ecto 1," though it was not nearly as cool as the Ghostbusters' car, as this one had wood paneling on the outside and carpet that smelled like fat-roll sweat and cracked leather that revealed yellowing foam on the inside. Justin was actually a giant, at least in our minds. He was tall and fat and had a voice that rumbled around in his bowels, and he would later be able to hold a LOT of liquor. We also had Brad, my best friend, who gesticulated wildly with his massive Italian hands and was practicing a new smile for cameras that weekend where he would stick his tongue into the gap in his teeth so he would look less like a "gay zombie" in pictures. And there was Jeffie, who, when everyone was lighting their hands on fire using lighter fuel, decided to spray some on his crotch, caught his jeans on fire, and had to run into the frigid lake to keep the scorching zipper from doing further damage to his genitals. There was Peter, who would not use the latrine at night, because Brad had convinced him there was a monster living down in the poop, and whom we'd all agreed would be the first to die if this ended up being a horror movie, because he was likable but banal. And finally, there was Derek, who would wear a jock strap on the outside of his green jeans, and whom I think I never saw without a top hat on. He was the only one of us with facial hair, but Brad referred to it as "pubes growing from his chin." So, I never want to see Brad naked, because Derek's beard was GROSS. I'm not sure where I found these guys. They were somehow connected with the drama department at school, though they weren't really in the plays. They were sort of the "rafter people," if that means anything to you.
They packed along an energy drink appropriately called "Red Devil." It was Caffeinosaurus Rex, basically. Now, I don't ever drink caffeine. In fact, at that point in my life, I never had imbibed so much as a Pepsi. Not even diet. My friends thought this peculiarity about me was hilarious. These friends had once come across a video that the church had produced to teach us teenagers about the dangers of peer pressure. They also had a keen understanding of something that we Mormons don't always like to admit about our mindset, which is that without some level of persecution, we never really feel fully Mormon. Being mocked and scorned is in our heritage, and we somehow feel we are letting down our pioneer forbears if living our religion is easy and nobody is picking on us. So my kind friends obliged me by acting out the stereotypical "non-members tempting the Mormon with beer" routine they had learned in that video, only with this caffeine drink. All weekend, it was, "Come on, Robbie, all the cool kids are drinking these," and, "I bet he's just too chicken," and, "are you going to let you bishop and your parents run your life?" I played into their little scenarios like a good Peter Priesthood should. "You guys, you are my friends, but I respect my body too much to be putting harmful substances into it." This went on sporadically for the whole weekend.
The final day, we were packing up to leave, and I was mostly just hovering around the table, trying to pretend I was helping by stuffing whatever food was left over into my mouth so we wouldn't have to pack it up again. Jeffie came over and opened the cooler, and there was one lone Red Devil left. He reached for it, but before he could grasp it, I reached out, popped the top, and didn't stop 'til I'd slopped the last drop. In one single breath, I had committed what might have been my worst sin since sixth grade when I lied to the principal and told him I hadn't been playing chicken fight in the jungle gym when I broke my arm. My friends were instantly flabbergasted, but then highly amused. Mormon 0, Devil 1, by their count. By the time they had stopped laughing, I was beginning to learn that a caffeine buzz is completely indistinguishable from the feeling of the Holy Ghost leaving one's body. We piled up into the car and began the tortuous journey home.
As I'm perpetually ravenous, I soon began to bug the other guys about stopping for some grub. We drove-thru a Taco Bell, and I ate a ton and drank a large root beer. Soon the effects of the Red Devil, the windy road, and the "Mexican" food combined, and I knew I was going to retch. So, I totally blew chunks in the plastic Taco Bell bag. It was unpleasant, but as a point of reference, it was not as bad as ralphing Kenticky Fried Chicken (which is the worst I have experienced), but still slightly worse than just eating at a Long John Silver's. And since Taco Bell, and all Mexican food, really, only uses four or five ingredients to create the entire menu, it didn't look all that different from how it had moments before I had eaten it. A fun fact about root beer: its main coloring agent, caramel coloring, acts as an acid/base indicator, like red cabbage juice that you get to play with in elementary school science classes, and when it hits the acids in your stomach, it turns into a bright pink, frothy liquid that the masticated tortillas and ground beef kind of float around in if that's what you've been eating, which is really neat to look at, but smells terrible. So now we were driving down the freeway with a bag of vomit in the car, and Justin was displeased with this new piece of cargo in Ecto 1. You don't want to see an angry giant, even if he isn't quite as big as I recall. And remember, gentle reader, my propensity toward littering....
Without a second thought, I chucked the upchucked muck out the open window. The bag spun straight to the windshield of the car behind us, smearing throw-up everywhere. The driver of that car turned on the windshield wipers, but the bag was stuck to one, and the vomit spread everywhere. There were napkins and wrappers and things, too, creating a tarring-and-feathering effect as they stuck to the beans and cheese and stomach acid on the clear glass; it was terrible. After the bag o' barf dislodged itself and flew off, the victimized vehicle caught up to us in the next lane over. I was yelling at Justin to outrun it, but we were in his big ol' honkin' station wagon, "Ecto 1," and we had a giant on board, and it just wasn't going to happen. I looked nervously over, and who do you think I saw?
It was a gypsy woman (Brad maintains it was a Mobu priestess, but he is also the guy who made up the Poop Snorkeller). This lady had a silk cloth around her head, and baubles, bangles, and beads on her wrists. In her swarthy hand she clutched what looked like (and we very well could have been imagining things) some sort of bone with feathers tied to it. She was shaking it at me. At ME. And she was shouting something that we couldn't hear because her window was rolled up, but we just KNEW it was in some crazy foreign language. My friends recognized the signs immediately: "Dude, she just put a curse on you!" yelped Peter from where he was hiding at the foot of the passenger seat.
Could it be? Could the woman really have put a curse on me? I'm not so sure. However, from that moment on, nothing has gone right for me until it has gone wrong a hundred times. Mere months later, I broke my spine and was stuck in a wheelchair. When I served a mission after that, they called me "Elder Maldecido," or "cursed elder." Everywhere I went, chaos followed. When my little Chilean town started flooding, and we got evicted, and robbed, and we were starving to death, and our members lost their houses in the flood and we had to go help them find them, and everything was going wrong, I thought back to that bag I'd hurled into and out of the car on the freeway, and I wondered.
One day we were down by the train tracks near the gypsy encampment (gypsies are more normal in South America than they are here). It was a rainy day (actually, the only moments it didn't rain during those three months were the moments it was hailing). As we reached the top of the berm near the tracks, we came face-to-face with an old gypsy woman. She looked me in the eye, and said, "Tu eres maldecido. Sal de aqui! Dejanos tranquilos!" You are cursed. Leave here. Leave us alone. My companion thought it was funny that the lady thought I was cursed. I would half-heartedly laugh along with him later as he would tell the other missionaries about that encounter, but secretly I was wondering if there didn't exist some sort of Priesthood blessing I could give myself to have that crazy curse removed. I hear the sun came out in that village the very day I was transferred.
A few months and a different mission later (I had come down with some mysterious disease of the autonomic nervous system that was never identified, and I'd been transferred to Knoxville, Tennessee), I was in the mission office on my way home (sick again). The office had an elderly couple who handled all the mission affairs. At that time, we had two elderly couples; one was training the other, as it was just about time for the first to go home. As I sat there, looking forlornly out the window at the overcast sky, waiting for the mission van to pick me up and take me to the airport, I heard the old old guy say to the new old guy,
"Everything will go fine until your last eight weeks here. Then everything that can go wrong will. You'll have more sick missionaries, robberies, evictions, car accidents, bike accidents, lost credit cards, and hospitalizations during that time than you had the whole rest of your mission."
Eight weeks. The exact amount of time, to the day, that I had been in the Knoxville mission. And every single item on that list had happened to ME during those eight weeks. I just sighed and kept my burning eyes focused on the stratus clouds out the window, trying not to think about a certain gypsy woman (or maybe Mobu priestess) and a particular ballistic bag of beans, beef, and bile that I had so carelessly tossed out the window years before.
I don't litter any more. I've never drunk caffeine since then, either. But still, my life is a circus: entertaining and chaotic. And still, whenever I go back home, I have one eye out for a dusty, beat-up Volkswagen Rabbit with a mystical, scarf-headed woman inside, so I can find her and somehow make amends. Like take her to Seven Flags Car Wash, where it's a two-for-one special on Tuesdays. But until that distant expiatory day, at least I have better stories to tell. Right?
Anyway, the littering comes back later.
One weekend, I went camping with some Foof's (Friends Of Other Faiths), or "gentiles," as Brigham Young would have called them. There was Justin, the giant, whom we derisively called "Wheels," just so he would think we only kept him around for his car, which I'm not sure wasn't really the case. At any rate, it worked, because he always volunteered to drive us places in his huge beat-up Station Wagon, which we lovingly referred to as "Ecto 1," though it was not nearly as cool as the Ghostbusters' car, as this one had wood paneling on the outside and carpet that smelled like fat-roll sweat and cracked leather that revealed yellowing foam on the inside. Justin was actually a giant, at least in our minds. He was tall and fat and had a voice that rumbled around in his bowels, and he would later be able to hold a LOT of liquor. We also had Brad, my best friend, who gesticulated wildly with his massive Italian hands and was practicing a new smile for cameras that weekend where he would stick his tongue into the gap in his teeth so he would look less like a "gay zombie" in pictures. And there was Jeffie, who, when everyone was lighting their hands on fire using lighter fuel, decided to spray some on his crotch, caught his jeans on fire, and had to run into the frigid lake to keep the scorching zipper from doing further damage to his genitals. There was Peter, who would not use the latrine at night, because Brad had convinced him there was a monster living down in the poop, and whom we'd all agreed would be the first to die if this ended up being a horror movie, because he was likable but banal. And finally, there was Derek, who would wear a jock strap on the outside of his green jeans, and whom I think I never saw without a top hat on. He was the only one of us with facial hair, but Brad referred to it as "pubes growing from his chin." So, I never want to see Brad naked, because Derek's beard was GROSS. I'm not sure where I found these guys. They were somehow connected with the drama department at school, though they weren't really in the plays. They were sort of the "rafter people," if that means anything to you.
They packed along an energy drink appropriately called "Red Devil." It was Caffeinosaurus Rex, basically. Now, I don't ever drink caffeine. In fact, at that point in my life, I never had imbibed so much as a Pepsi. Not even diet. My friends thought this peculiarity about me was hilarious. These friends had once come across a video that the church had produced to teach us teenagers about the dangers of peer pressure. They also had a keen understanding of something that we Mormons don't always like to admit about our mindset, which is that without some level of persecution, we never really feel fully Mormon. Being mocked and scorned is in our heritage, and we somehow feel we are letting down our pioneer forbears if living our religion is easy and nobody is picking on us. So my kind friends obliged me by acting out the stereotypical "non-members tempting the Mormon with beer" routine they had learned in that video, only with this caffeine drink. All weekend, it was, "Come on, Robbie, all the cool kids are drinking these," and, "I bet he's just too chicken," and, "are you going to let you bishop and your parents run your life?" I played into their little scenarios like a good Peter Priesthood should. "You guys, you are my friends, but I respect my body too much to be putting harmful substances into it." This went on sporadically for the whole weekend.
The final day, we were packing up to leave, and I was mostly just hovering around the table, trying to pretend I was helping by stuffing whatever food was left over into my mouth so we wouldn't have to pack it up again. Jeffie came over and opened the cooler, and there was one lone Red Devil left. He reached for it, but before he could grasp it, I reached out, popped the top, and didn't stop 'til I'd slopped the last drop. In one single breath, I had committed what might have been my worst sin since sixth grade when I lied to the principal and told him I hadn't been playing chicken fight in the jungle gym when I broke my arm. My friends were instantly flabbergasted, but then highly amused. Mormon 0, Devil 1, by their count. By the time they had stopped laughing, I was beginning to learn that a caffeine buzz is completely indistinguishable from the feeling of the Holy Ghost leaving one's body. We piled up into the car and began the tortuous journey home.
As I'm perpetually ravenous, I soon began to bug the other guys about stopping for some grub. We drove-thru a Taco Bell, and I ate a ton and drank a large root beer. Soon the effects of the Red Devil, the windy road, and the "Mexican" food combined, and I knew I was going to retch. So, I totally blew chunks in the plastic Taco Bell bag. It was unpleasant, but as a point of reference, it was not as bad as ralphing Kenticky Fried Chicken (which is the worst I have experienced), but still slightly worse than just eating at a Long John Silver's. And since Taco Bell, and all Mexican food, really, only uses four or five ingredients to create the entire menu, it didn't look all that different from how it had moments before I had eaten it. A fun fact about root beer: its main coloring agent, caramel coloring, acts as an acid/base indicator, like red cabbage juice that you get to play with in elementary school science classes, and when it hits the acids in your stomach, it turns into a bright pink, frothy liquid that the masticated tortillas and ground beef kind of float around in if that's what you've been eating, which is really neat to look at, but smells terrible. So now we were driving down the freeway with a bag of vomit in the car, and Justin was displeased with this new piece of cargo in Ecto 1. You don't want to see an angry giant, even if he isn't quite as big as I recall. And remember, gentle reader, my propensity toward littering....
Without a second thought, I chucked the upchucked muck out the open window. The bag spun straight to the windshield of the car behind us, smearing throw-up everywhere. The driver of that car turned on the windshield wipers, but the bag was stuck to one, and the vomit spread everywhere. There were napkins and wrappers and things, too, creating a tarring-and-feathering effect as they stuck to the beans and cheese and stomach acid on the clear glass; it was terrible. After the bag o' barf dislodged itself and flew off, the victimized vehicle caught up to us in the next lane over. I was yelling at Justin to outrun it, but we were in his big ol' honkin' station wagon, "Ecto 1," and we had a giant on board, and it just wasn't going to happen. I looked nervously over, and who do you think I saw?
It was a gypsy woman (Brad maintains it was a Mobu priestess, but he is also the guy who made up the Poop Snorkeller). This lady had a silk cloth around her head, and baubles, bangles, and beads on her wrists. In her swarthy hand she clutched what looked like (and we very well could have been imagining things) some sort of bone with feathers tied to it. She was shaking it at me. At ME. And she was shouting something that we couldn't hear because her window was rolled up, but we just KNEW it was in some crazy foreign language. My friends recognized the signs immediately: "Dude, she just put a curse on you!" yelped Peter from where he was hiding at the foot of the passenger seat.
Could it be? Could the woman really have put a curse on me? I'm not so sure. However, from that moment on, nothing has gone right for me until it has gone wrong a hundred times. Mere months later, I broke my spine and was stuck in a wheelchair. When I served a mission after that, they called me "Elder Maldecido," or "cursed elder." Everywhere I went, chaos followed. When my little Chilean town started flooding, and we got evicted, and robbed, and we were starving to death, and our members lost their houses in the flood and we had to go help them find them, and everything was going wrong, I thought back to that bag I'd hurled into and out of the car on the freeway, and I wondered.
One day we were down by the train tracks near the gypsy encampment (gypsies are more normal in South America than they are here). It was a rainy day (actually, the only moments it didn't rain during those three months were the moments it was hailing). As we reached the top of the berm near the tracks, we came face-to-face with an old gypsy woman. She looked me in the eye, and said, "Tu eres maldecido. Sal de aqui! Dejanos tranquilos!" You are cursed. Leave here. Leave us alone. My companion thought it was funny that the lady thought I was cursed. I would half-heartedly laugh along with him later as he would tell the other missionaries about that encounter, but secretly I was wondering if there didn't exist some sort of Priesthood blessing I could give myself to have that crazy curse removed. I hear the sun came out in that village the very day I was transferred.
A few months and a different mission later (I had come down with some mysterious disease of the autonomic nervous system that was never identified, and I'd been transferred to Knoxville, Tennessee), I was in the mission office on my way home (sick again). The office had an elderly couple who handled all the mission affairs. At that time, we had two elderly couples; one was training the other, as it was just about time for the first to go home. As I sat there, looking forlornly out the window at the overcast sky, waiting for the mission van to pick me up and take me to the airport, I heard the old old guy say to the new old guy,
"Everything will go fine until your last eight weeks here. Then everything that can go wrong will. You'll have more sick missionaries, robberies, evictions, car accidents, bike accidents, lost credit cards, and hospitalizations during that time than you had the whole rest of your mission."
Eight weeks. The exact amount of time, to the day, that I had been in the Knoxville mission. And every single item on that list had happened to ME during those eight weeks. I just sighed and kept my burning eyes focused on the stratus clouds out the window, trying not to think about a certain gypsy woman (or maybe Mobu priestess) and a particular ballistic bag of beans, beef, and bile that I had so carelessly tossed out the window years before.
I don't litter any more. I've never drunk caffeine since then, either. But still, my life is a circus: entertaining and chaotic. And still, whenever I go back home, I have one eye out for a dusty, beat-up Volkswagen Rabbit with a mystical, scarf-headed woman inside, so I can find her and somehow make amends. Like take her to Seven Flags Car Wash, where it's a two-for-one special on Tuesdays. But until that distant expiatory day, at least I have better stories to tell. Right?
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