say dontcha know me
One afternoon a few weeks ago, I drove west. I drove west from the snow fort of the parking space that had been my miraculous reward for not having killed anyone exactly one week earlier. Exactly one week earlier, I had driven for the very first time in the snow. The snow had started as a sputter as we'd walked in to the movie but had grown to a fury by when we got out. When we got out, I drove us back home at ten miles an hour with the kind of visibility I might have gotten with a loose blindfold. And, having not killed anybody on the way, I was rewarded with a beautiful space just a few steps down from my house in which to leave my car while I recovered from the wracking terror of this event, which took about a week and a letter from the State of Illinois telling me to go test my emissions.
So that afternoon I went and cleared the one remaining hunk of snow from my windshield. While I'd been putting off buying a shovel with which to extract my car, the sun had come out and most of the snow had melted. There was still around a foot of crackled, iced snow hedging me in like the recalcitrant edge of a slurpy, so I squatted for a while and beat it with my windshield clearing tool (surely a person who'd driven for more than three months in her life would know the appropriate term for this implement), remembering what a friend had been telling me about the work of miners and thinking that I would not make a very good one. And I drove off west. I drove west from our whitish grocery store and university neighborhood through a checks cashed here and pawnshop black neighborhood and finally into a salvation army and carnecita neighborhood that seemed to be somewhere between Mexico and Poland. It's kind of great how Chicago is exactly what you'd think an American city would be, at least down here where we are.
I got my emissions checked on what looked like an abandoned stretch of street crossed by an abandoned stretch of rail, by a man who attached a number of machines to my car while I stood in a heated glass booth with a television screen that depicted a generic man doing to a generic car exactly the things that this man was doing to my car. I alternated between watching the television screen and the window until one of the men indicated that it was time to go. A little bit disoriented, I took possession of my car once more, among whose ailments, I was amazed to find, improper emissions is not one. The man—the real man—was easily mistakable for the television man because the entire process, including our interaction, seemed both automated and somehow removed. Trying to alleviate the pressure of so much distanced humanity, I said something resembling a passing remark in a tone resembling that which one would use for a live social interaction. The effect was remarkable: a smile, a nod, a comment: he came alive, like the moment when everything bursts into color as Dorothy lands in Oz. (I guess a metaphor drawn from 3D movies would be more appropriate, but I don't have stereoscopic vision so I don’t feel the punch.)
I was charmed, no, inspired, by this little interaction, by the humanity of it, and drove off in no particular direction in the way one might kick up one’s heels. That is the difference between walking and having a car, it turns out. I drove around in rectangles for a while, observing the populace, ended up accidentally on a highway, got off it, did a few more spins, and ended up on a large road with many stores. (Someone gave me a big thick book of city map for my birthday to replace the skinny vague poster I had, and now I am fearless, though still not competent.) A parking space presenting itself to me, I took the opportunity for a little stroll. Can you hear how stuffy I am right now? It’s this head cold, it’s killing me. I’ve been sounding like this all day. Do they have Sudafed for writing tics? Lord, she said, and, Achoo.
So I’m walking down the street in no particular direction and there’s this little used stuff store with a few stuffs in the doorway. Inside, it’s packed, a tiny railroad type of compartment but dressers and tables one on top of the other, chairs sideways and upside down, shelves of bakeware I remember from my childhood and copper colored bundt pans each one more ornate than the one before, its previous owner an ever older and more purple-haired grandmother. A squattish coffee carafe in silver and the orange of the late nineteen seventies. Some male members of a Spanish-speaking family are wheeling a number of large items down the little path; the mother asks me the price of some dishware, in Spanish, to both of which I regretfully shrug. Then they disappear and a thin, short man in a very large hooded sweatshirt is saying to me, “Ah good thing they came early. They said they was gonna come around seven tonight cause that’s when they could get the truck, and I says, okay, well, I usually close around six but okay, I’ll wait for you for seven. But they just came already.”
“So you don’t have to wait,” I said. “That’s cool.”
“I guess they got the truck early,” he nodded. “So they already got their stuff. So now in a little while I can get ready to head out. And have a drink at the bar. Like I do every night.” I could almost swear he lifted his eyebrows a bit on every night, with such significance did he weight the phrase. I had no idea what the significance signified so I did what my old boss Ronna taught me to do when something I didn’t have a response for happened.
“Huh,” I said, and nodded a bit. But then I exceeded Ronna’s instructions and asked, “You go to a bar around here?”
“Oh yeah,” he said, “There’s lots of places you can go to around here. There’s one right on the corner. Hell, there’s maybe nine bars right around here I go to.”
“Huh,” nod.
“But there’s one, there’s one. There’s this Polish bar down the street, yeah? One day I’m in there, I’m sitting at the bar having a beer, and this Polish guy down the bar, he uh, he’s been drinking vodka. He’s been drinking vodka, right, and he was talking. I just kept sitting at the bar drinking my beer, and he keeps talking. Finally he walks down from where he’s sitting and he stands right behind me, and he keeps talking, you know. So I got down off my stool,” (he shifted his weight a little and lifted his ribcage up and to the side, as you would when getting off a bar stool) “and stood and faced him. So, we’re facing each other in the bar and everybody’s looking, and he keeps talking. And I told him, he better shut up, and he just keeps talking, so, well, I punched him. Knocked him right down.” He’s definitely relishing the telling of this story in the way that men relating their knock-down exploits are described by the word relish, but somehow it is obvious that this is not the punchline. He’s just building up to the climax and this is background information. So I don't go all girly on him knocking someone out, though I do nod with my eyes wide and my eyebrows up.
“The next time I walk into the bar,” he continues, “Donna who’s serving shakes her head and says No. No, Bob. No more. And I say, What, what no more? And she says, Last time, you fight. You got in a fight. No more. So I says Yeah I got in a fight, the guy was saying stuff, that Polish guy he had too much vodka. He was saying stuff. So, you know, we had a little verbercation, and, ah, I punched him. And she says, Bob, no. That Polish guy, is my husband, and the owner of this bar.”
“Wow!” I laugh. In all my years in graduate school, have I ever come across the term verbercation? And here this man, hooded in the too-big sweatshirt, had just casually mentioned it, with the kind of guileless ingenuity that had surely struck Toqueville. “So you don’t go there much anymore?”
He speaks slower now, nodding a little for emphasis and stretching some of the words out, “Haven’t been back in nine years.” Then speeding up, “Hell, I’m forty-three. I can walk into any bar I want. There’s lots of bars.”
I buy the carafe. I almost buy a bundt pan, I’m so delighted. On the drive home I hear a rumbling in my head and start off from that to reconstruct, phrase by phrase, by ceaseless repeated singing as I drive back through the thrift stores and the carnecitas and the pawn shops and into the lower temperature of the university, the entirety of City of New Orleans. I’ve got most of it by around halfway home, and I just keep singing and singing, from the diaphragm, for the rest of the way. When I finally land near my house, I realize that the light in the car has been on the whole time. Probably hundreds of people, from the west of Chicago to the east of it, have just observed me loving America, loudly and off key.
So that afternoon I went and cleared the one remaining hunk of snow from my windshield. While I'd been putting off buying a shovel with which to extract my car, the sun had come out and most of the snow had melted. There was still around a foot of crackled, iced snow hedging me in like the recalcitrant edge of a slurpy, so I squatted for a while and beat it with my windshield clearing tool (surely a person who'd driven for more than three months in her life would know the appropriate term for this implement), remembering what a friend had been telling me about the work of miners and thinking that I would not make a very good one. And I drove off west. I drove west from our whitish grocery store and university neighborhood through a checks cashed here and pawnshop black neighborhood and finally into a salvation army and carnecita neighborhood that seemed to be somewhere between Mexico and Poland. It's kind of great how Chicago is exactly what you'd think an American city would be, at least down here where we are.
I got my emissions checked on what looked like an abandoned stretch of street crossed by an abandoned stretch of rail, by a man who attached a number of machines to my car while I stood in a heated glass booth with a television screen that depicted a generic man doing to a generic car exactly the things that this man was doing to my car. I alternated between watching the television screen and the window until one of the men indicated that it was time to go. A little bit disoriented, I took possession of my car once more, among whose ailments, I was amazed to find, improper emissions is not one. The man—the real man—was easily mistakable for the television man because the entire process, including our interaction, seemed both automated and somehow removed. Trying to alleviate the pressure of so much distanced humanity, I said something resembling a passing remark in a tone resembling that which one would use for a live social interaction. The effect was remarkable: a smile, a nod, a comment: he came alive, like the moment when everything bursts into color as Dorothy lands in Oz. (I guess a metaphor drawn from 3D movies would be more appropriate, but I don't have stereoscopic vision so I don’t feel the punch.)
I was charmed, no, inspired, by this little interaction, by the humanity of it, and drove off in no particular direction in the way one might kick up one’s heels. That is the difference between walking and having a car, it turns out. I drove around in rectangles for a while, observing the populace, ended up accidentally on a highway, got off it, did a few more spins, and ended up on a large road with many stores. (Someone gave me a big thick book of city map for my birthday to replace the skinny vague poster I had, and now I am fearless, though still not competent.) A parking space presenting itself to me, I took the opportunity for a little stroll. Can you hear how stuffy I am right now? It’s this head cold, it’s killing me. I’ve been sounding like this all day. Do they have Sudafed for writing tics? Lord, she said, and, Achoo.
So I’m walking down the street in no particular direction and there’s this little used stuff store with a few stuffs in the doorway. Inside, it’s packed, a tiny railroad type of compartment but dressers and tables one on top of the other, chairs sideways and upside down, shelves of bakeware I remember from my childhood and copper colored bundt pans each one more ornate than the one before, its previous owner an ever older and more purple-haired grandmother. A squattish coffee carafe in silver and the orange of the late nineteen seventies. Some male members of a Spanish-speaking family are wheeling a number of large items down the little path; the mother asks me the price of some dishware, in Spanish, to both of which I regretfully shrug. Then they disappear and a thin, short man in a very large hooded sweatshirt is saying to me, “Ah good thing they came early. They said they was gonna come around seven tonight cause that’s when they could get the truck, and I says, okay, well, I usually close around six but okay, I’ll wait for you for seven. But they just came already.”
“So you don’t have to wait,” I said. “That’s cool.”
“I guess they got the truck early,” he nodded. “So they already got their stuff. So now in a little while I can get ready to head out. And have a drink at the bar. Like I do every night.” I could almost swear he lifted his eyebrows a bit on every night, with such significance did he weight the phrase. I had no idea what the significance signified so I did what my old boss Ronna taught me to do when something I didn’t have a response for happened.
“Huh,” I said, and nodded a bit. But then I exceeded Ronna’s instructions and asked, “You go to a bar around here?”
“Oh yeah,” he said, “There’s lots of places you can go to around here. There’s one right on the corner. Hell, there’s maybe nine bars right around here I go to.”
“Huh,” nod.
“But there’s one, there’s one. There’s this Polish bar down the street, yeah? One day I’m in there, I’m sitting at the bar having a beer, and this Polish guy down the bar, he uh, he’s been drinking vodka. He’s been drinking vodka, right, and he was talking. I just kept sitting at the bar drinking my beer, and he keeps talking. Finally he walks down from where he’s sitting and he stands right behind me, and he keeps talking, you know. So I got down off my stool,” (he shifted his weight a little and lifted his ribcage up and to the side, as you would when getting off a bar stool) “and stood and faced him. So, we’re facing each other in the bar and everybody’s looking, and he keeps talking. And I told him, he better shut up, and he just keeps talking, so, well, I punched him. Knocked him right down.” He’s definitely relishing the telling of this story in the way that men relating their knock-down exploits are described by the word relish, but somehow it is obvious that this is not the punchline. He’s just building up to the climax and this is background information. So I don't go all girly on him knocking someone out, though I do nod with my eyes wide and my eyebrows up.
“The next time I walk into the bar,” he continues, “Donna who’s serving shakes her head and says No. No, Bob. No more. And I say, What, what no more? And she says, Last time, you fight. You got in a fight. No more. So I says Yeah I got in a fight, the guy was saying stuff, that Polish guy he had too much vodka. He was saying stuff. So, you know, we had a little verbercation, and, ah, I punched him. And she says, Bob, no. That Polish guy, is my husband, and the owner of this bar.”
“Wow!” I laugh. In all my years in graduate school, have I ever come across the term verbercation? And here this man, hooded in the too-big sweatshirt, had just casually mentioned it, with the kind of guileless ingenuity that had surely struck Toqueville. “So you don’t go there much anymore?”
He speaks slower now, nodding a little for emphasis and stretching some of the words out, “Haven’t been back in nine years.” Then speeding up, “Hell, I’m forty-three. I can walk into any bar I want. There’s lots of bars.”
I buy the carafe. I almost buy a bundt pan, I’m so delighted. On the drive home I hear a rumbling in my head and start off from that to reconstruct, phrase by phrase, by ceaseless repeated singing as I drive back through the thrift stores and the carnecitas and the pawn shops and into the lower temperature of the university, the entirety of City of New Orleans. I’ve got most of it by around halfway home, and I just keep singing and singing, from the diaphragm, for the rest of the way. When I finally land near my house, I realize that the light in the car has been on the whole time. Probably hundreds of people, from the west of Chicago to the east of it, have just observed me loving America, loudly and off key.
posted by blahgstein at 7:53 PM
4 Comments:
Once again, luminous, luminous.
it's called a 'scraper'
Verbercation: an altercation arising from, or consisting of, verbal interaction.
One person insists it ought to be "verbication," which is, of course, what it sounded like. I guess I'll have to decide which one to use before I send it in to the OED.
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