Buck Rogers Meets Zod on a Midnight Street in Chicago

At first we were just PALS, the acronym for the Lincoln Park library discussion group I was involved with for much of the 70’s and 80’s. G. always admonished me against even casually calling the group a “book club” because our discussions ranged well beyond the pages of any popular book. In addition to being a venue for lively literary conversation, we also hosted some notable speakers, giving them a place to air their more private thoughts - thoughts they’d reserved for just such an intimate group. My biggest guest-speaker triumph was Stuart Brent, who talked to us about the state of literacy in this society. It was one of the last such speaker appearances made by this most independent of all independent Chicago booksellers.

As I’d found to be the case with most librarians, these branch librarians were curiously incurious about anything pertaining to reading. They would only stick their noses in our meeting room briefly to remind us that we had to vacate the premises by 8:50 sharp, no matter if Shakespeare himself had reincarnated to appear before us. And mind – “Be sure to pick up all coffee cups and snack wrappers after yourselves!”

Although the librarians usually operated under the primacy of such strict time constraints, G. himself never had any such limits. He was usually late to meetings, but once he got there, he wanted to linger indefinitely. After the library closed, many of us, aspiring poets and writers ourselves, would extend our conversation out into the Seminary Restaurant that then occupied the corner of Lincoln and Fullerton. There we’d get into such earnest debate about the meaning of life, we’d often have to prolong our meetings further yet by going to the apartment of one of our nearby members.

G. never invited the group as a whole back to his house. It would have been so convenient to us, I often wondered why – until I finally saw the place. When we two had been the last to linger chatting on chill street corners enough times, G. finally extended a privileged invitation especially to me. It was to be for lunch the following week. I was intensely curious to see how this pixilated book-lover lived.

I was in for a shock that first time I entered his inner sanctum. I immediately saw that G. was a hoarder, although back then, I’d never heard the word used to refer to a “condition.” This was before there was a TV show featuring the clean-up and organizing of the homes of inveterate clutterers. This was before the compulsion was widely recognized as being in the spectrum of OCD disorders.

There were magazines and books teetering, toppling from every surface. But mostly there were computers. Well, there were fragments of computers. Very few were actually up and running. In these earlier days of computers, most of them were still little more than bulky word processors. However G. was not interested in doing much word processing, even though in his youth he’d written a lot of poetry. Now he just liked to tinker with the computers and all their accessories. He liked to make the ink jet printers spit out bigger, bolder italics in mauve. He was proud of the early Sinclair computer he had assembled himself. Such parts and projects were scattered everywhere.

Like most hoarders, he didn’t see much wrong with his living conditions. He felt he was recycling; he was making use (or would someday) of all these scraps that other people had so foolishly, so unimaginatively discarded. He had rescued them for some higher purpose. For example, G. was gleeful about the use he’d found for all that extra beet juice in cans, all the liquid that most people just pour down the sink. On the one hand, he’d seen his threadbare, faded carpet. On the other hand, he had that beet juice. Why not put the two together? He showed me the spot where he had poured the beet juice onto his carpet, dying that area back to what he insisted was a vibrant, lush maroon color. Well, maybe…

He’d promised to make a fabulous lunch for me to celebrate my inaugural visit. As it turned out, he opened a can of tuna (with the edgy remains of an electric can opener he’d salvaged). Then we sat in front of his flickering TV (another salvage) and watched Buck Rogers. Everything stopped for him when the Buck Rogers TV serial starring Gil Gerard came on the air. The series was already in re-runs, but G. didn’t mind. He could see each episode over and over with the same enthusiasm he watched it the first time. His enjoyment didn’t diminish because he hadn’t ever really seen the actual episodes the first time around. He’d only seen his own projection of plot and motive, and he never tired of himself.

So there I was with a clump of tuna fish on a chipped plate, roped into watching Buck Rogers. It wasn’t quite my idea of an ideal date, or party, or get-together, or whatever we were having. But in those days, I was still charmed by G.’s outlook on life. I wanted to believe, at least partially, in his conviction that we might all be simulacra, holographic projections of someone’s dreaming. Or we might be more purposeful. We might all be part of an elaborate drama that some unseen cabal of mad scientists was staging for their own amusement. Those puppeteers were apparently very prone to boredom, because they relished setting all of us to fighting with each other. They contrived all sorts of conflicts. As soon as they tired of one drama, they’d script a new sensation. And the play would go on, spinning off in new directions. But in G.’s mind, none of it was real. No one was really fighting with anyone else; no one was really dying.

It was several years before I really started to become impatient with such a philosophy. Eventually, I came to see it as just a way of shirking responsibility. I’d get downright angry when G. would stoutly deny that the Holocaust had ever happened. He didn’t maintain that for the typical reasons that “Holocaust deniers” advance. His belief was simply a further elaboration of his conviction that nothing bad ever happened. None of those Jewish people were really dead. They had all just been temporarily ushered off into the wings by some Master Manipulator. They were all still there, waiting to come back on stage to play different roles for the entertainment of that experimenting psychologist in the sky – as were we all.

But this belief relieved G. of any social involvement, of any obligation to spend his time on this earth trying to make it a better place. He could be content to just tinker, to stay in his merry mishmash and turn the print-out generated by his rejuvenated printer from mauve into shocking pink.

He cluttered the outside of his property as much as the inside. He took special delight in rescuing discarded stuffed animals he found in the alleys and arranging them around his yard in various tableaus. Come to think of it, this might have been his way of becoming a minor sort of Master Manipulator himself. At least within the confines of his rickety fencing, he was staging the play, he was casting the characters in kinder, gentler relations. Except for Kermit the Frog. He had found a bedraggled stuffed version of Kermit and proudly hung it from a rope off the crumbling sill of his second story window. G. fancied the frog was rushing forth in eager greeting of visitors. But it looked to me as if, thoroughly beaten by life, Kermit was hanging himself. However such was the power of G.’s ability to project his own optimism onto the world, that he would never have seen Kermit as a suicide.

        

 

I got into the spirit of this collecting. Whenever I saw a child’s stuffed animal thrown on a garbage pile, I’d snatch it up and bring it to G. One day, just before G.’s birthday, I scored a real coup. There was an enormous panda, bigger than I am, propped against a dumpster. It was rather stained, with what childish excretions I could only imagine. But that sort of thing never bothered my friend. I wrestled the huge bear into my hatchback. Since we were both inveterate night owls, I drove over to his house to deliver the big hug of a bear to him at two in the morning, confidant that he’d be up and chipper at that hour, ready for any adventure that might present itself.

When I first met G., his neighborhood around Halsted and North Avenue had been a sketchy area that cab drivers were loathe to go to at night. G.’s rickety house fit right in with the general deteriorated state of the street then. But in the 80’s, the area had rapidly gentrified. G. suddenly found himself surrounded by upscale restaurants, boutiques, and theaters. A ragtag person now stood out in these surroundings and could be assumed to be a non-resident.

A squad car drove up just as I had tugged the panda out of my trunk and was attempting to walk it across the street. The police paused suspiciously and shone a flashlight at me. I wondered how on earth I could explain myself if they started to question me. Why would anyone be waltzing an immense besmirched panda across Halsted Street after midnight? Was this perhaps my outrageous way of concealing a mother lode of narcotics destined to be cut and sold outside the nearest school playground? After a few moments though, the police apparently decided I must be engaged in some harmless eccentricity, and they rolled away into the night.

G’s house stood out for reasons other than the fact that it was no longer in keeping with the circumspect wealth-behind-frosted-glass atmosphere that the street had come to represent. G’s rickety relic was one of that minority of old frame houses that somehow hadn’t gotten placed at the new elevated street level when most Chicago buildings were hoisted to rise above sewage effluent. As a result, what might once have been G.’s first floor and front yard were now below sidewalk level. With his usual unshakeable positivism, G. viewed what some might have perceived as this unruly pit of a front yard as a “sunken garden,” an added touch of opulence that he was sure made his property extra valuable.

You had to traverse a plank suspended about eight feet above this chasm to get from the sidewalk to what was now G.’s front door. This plank, like the rest of G.’s life, was always in dangerously bad shape. But G. protested vigorously against the idea that it posed any hazard. Didn’t he keep that plank in perfectly good repair, what with the strips of rubber he’d pasted down at intervals along its length – tire peelings that he’d found along the shoulders of roadways?

 

                                                

So once again on this late night visitation, I walked the plank to G.’s doorbell. I rang, with no confidence that it would issue any alerting sound. G. was always experimenting with alternate ways of wiring and cross-wiring his many phones and electric apparatuses. Consequently, he was usually left huddled inside under a few guttering lights, with no way of being reached by ringing anything ostensibly connected to his house. This time proved to be no exception. His doorbell was obviously out of commission. I was forced to walk the plank back and go around so I could knock on one of his side windows.

Aha! That raised him. I heard a furtive scuttling inside and got back to the front door just as G. was cautiously opening it a crack. When he saw it was me, bearing a bear – his slightly watery blue eyes lit up with a warming Irish twinkle. There was no gift that could have pleased him more than this stained panda I had in tow. I thought of a song sung by Rod Stewart to the accompaniment of a sensual MTV video that asked, “Who else is going to bring you a broken arrow? Who else is going to bring you a bottle of rain?” And to whom else besides G. could I bring such a thing, with the assurance that it wouldn’t be viewed as a disgusting discard, but rather as a rare offering filled with magical imports?

The panda got a place of honor in G.’s sunken garden, among all the other stuffed and grittily stifled members of his animal family. I was to see it out there rain or shine on all my future visits, getting more stained with each passing year, but bravely holding its post under the weedy tree-of-heaven that G. kept chopping back, but that, also with brave persistence, kept growing to sidewalk level. However, on that night of the panda’s introduction to its new home, we were all as pristine as we’d ever be. G. welcomed me in for a feast. He didn’t open tuna this time. He was on a strict Pritikin diet kick, which he interpreted to limit him to eating bulgur. So he heated up a bowl of bulgur for me in the old microwave he kept running by plugging its holes with tin foil. Yes, he assured me, it actually WAS all right to put metal in a microwave that way, as long as you kept it out of the directional of the unit’s magnetron. Or something like that. And miraculously, this time at least, nothing caught fire.

We literally talked of cabbages and kings that time. The cabbages were also high on Pritikin’s list of approved foods, while the kings entered the conversation in connection with G.’s observation of the splayed deck of playing cards he had in front of him. He called my attention to the mysteries lying latent there in the pictures on the cards. G. had his own theory about who that King of Diamonds represented. No, he wasn’t holding an axe behind his back, as so many historians claimed. It was an attacker sneaking up on him. We were seeing the oblivious King in the seconds just before he was about to become the victim of a murder most foul – just before he was to be whacked. Someone who envied his power and possessions was about to give him the axe. G. could identify with the King’s plight, because he also often felt he might be the target of envious others up and down the street.

I soon learned that G.’s compulsion, like that of many hoarders, came with a good dose of paranoia. He lived in fear that people were just cultivating him in order to gain access to all the obvious valuables he had. When a scruffy alley cat he’d adopted disappeared out the door for good one night, G. was sure the creature had been abducted. He was sure his neighbors had been watching him, burning with envy at the sight of his beautiful cat. Finally able to restrain themselves no longer, they had lured the animal away. Of course there was no possibility that the hapless creature had simply left for greener pastures or gotten run over.

G. went on to talk about his real-life role model, Nikola Tesla, the “mad scientist” who, in the early part of the 20^th century, gave startling public demonstrations of his experiments in harvesting energy from “empty” space, and in projecting energy wirelessly over vast distances. Tesla had reportedly rocked distant buildings to their foundations with the energy waves he’d loosed upon the world. G. had briefly taught electronics and knew all about Tesla’s more serious, grounded inventions, such as his advance of alternating current against Edison’s insistence on direct current. Still, it was the wilder side of Tesla that G. naturally identified with - his assertions of being hot on the trail of making telepathic communication a reality and of communicating with space aliens.

G. abandoned most of his ambitions at the tinkering stage. But there was one practical project that G. actually finished, one that might have been partially inspired by his interest in Tesla. A few years after that initial visit in his house, G. bowled me over by presenting me with something that was actually presentable. He gave me a Theremin. He’d built it himself, from discarded parts - naturally. But it was newly assembled and ready for use. A Theremin is an exotic musical instrument. It was invented by Leon Theremin in 1920, but it’s right in tune with Tesla’s experiments in exercising “power at a distance.” You don’t have to actually touch anything to play a Theremin. You just wave your hands in the air in its vicinity – and you can produce a quavering, eerie series of sounds. Whenever you see any Grade B movie of the 50’s involving space aliens or ghosts, you can be fairly certain the accompanying sound track is employing the metallic vibrato of a Theremin.

Before he let me walk out his door that time with that unexpected completion of an instrument, we had a good time taking turns waving our hands dramatically around the Schrödinger-like little black box of the thing. We waved together and danced around the Theremin (as much as anyone could be said to dance in those close, clustered quarters). We made strange music together. But it was those kinds of moments that so enchanted me at first, and kept me fighting my way back to G., through all his craziness and clutter.

Meanwhile, G.’s true love was always whatever improvisation he could call a success. And of course, he deemed almost all his jerry-rigged contraptions to be successful. Whatever kind of make-do he flung into the breach to nominally keep something running, was a triumph in his eyes.

I remember the first time G. allowed me down into his basement, the most restricted and private part of his generally very guarded quarters. It was a tour he reserved only for those most trusted in his circle of acquaintances, a circle which by that time had pretty much shrunk to a party of one – me. Even though I’d known G. for over a year by that time, I was still a little fearful of following this strange man into his basement. But I warily braced myself and groped my way down the inevitably rickety steps to the foundation of his fantastic life.

As it turned out, the only legitimate fears I need have for going down there were small ones. The place was even more cluttered than his upper floor, but in addition, it apparently harbored tinier proliferations – of mites, fleas, and spores. I immediately began to wheeze; my skin began to crawl. In characteristic fashion though, G. was cheerfully oblivious to there being anything amiss down there and I soldiered through the tour he was eager to give me.

He immediately conducted me over to his premier success story, the wash machine his mother had bought when she was married and which, over sixty years later, he congratulated himself on having kept perfectly functional. Of course its agitator had long since ceased to agitate. But no matter. Like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he triumphantly pulled a toilet bowl plunger out from behind the machine, and showed me how he manually supplied the requisite pumping action to harry the dirt out of the clothes he jammed in there. Why buy a new washing machine when there was nothing essentially wrong with this one?

He felt the same about his car, the 1967 Chevy he had crammed into his garage during the first years I knew him. The car was similarly bristled with Rube Goldberg contrivances that kept it running. The DIY repair I liked best, the one that always made me laugh when I thought about it, was the one he’d made to keep his windshield wipers operating. Since the electrical power to them had long since been severed, he had rigged a rope running from them, through the slightly bent-out-of-shape wing window on the driver’s side. He had only to repeatedly pull on that rope to make the wipers sweep off whatever rain or snow was falling. And really, this arrangement was ever so much better than the original set-up which had been dictated by the car’s electrical system – didn’t I think? This way, G. was in control. He proudly showed me how he make the windshield wipers move as fast or as slow as necessary, just by how rapidly he tugged on the cord.

G. didn’t often venture outside his neighborhood. He always insisted that I lived much too far away for him to contemplate visiting me. He never considered that the ease with which I made it to his neighborhood might work both ways. I privately thought he might have a touch of agoraphobia to go along with his other phobias. But he did visit me and my mother a couple of times, when he still had the car. I have an indelible memory of him navigating away from our house one rainy late night - his right hand on the steering wheel, his left hand pull, pull, pulling, on that windshield wiper cord. Off he went, a cheerful Santa at the reins of his sleigh.

Soon after that, his car became permanently imbedded in his garage, incapable of being moved in less than several hours lead time because of the accumulation of junk that barnacled its sides. During the years it was stowed in there, most of its remaining wiring got gnawed away. Its tires went flat, and its roof became notably concave with the weight of all the additional stuff stockpiled on top of it. But G. still insisted it was a valuable antique that he wouldn’t let go of for less than top dollar. Now it probably would be valuable. But back then, I couldn’t share his conviction of its being an “antique classic.” Miraculously though, he did eventually find a buyer for it. Although come the moment of the tow truck, he almost wasn’t able to relinquish it. But he did.

That sale left him with only his succession of salvage bikes as a means of transportation. He couldn’t go any farther than the wobbly wheels of these vehicles could carry him. Still, he did manage some amazing feats of cartage on just two wheels, even though most trips included the delays attendant upon one, or both bicycle tires going flat. Once he even balanced a 32-inch screen TV on the handlebars of his bike, all the way home from the thrift store he haunted a mile or so away. He also bragged about the enormous tonnage of Pritikin-approved food he was routinely able to haul away from the nearest grocery store on each run.

But G.’s social circle didn’t shrink as a result of his lack of wheels. It actually started to expand again. As his neighborhood became a more and popular destination for Yuppies, the restaurant next to him had to hire parking valets. G. and the predominantly Spanish-speaking valets proved to be natural allies. They were outsiders together in this brave new world of condos decorated with faux coach lights. G. fancied that he could speak some Spanish, although in a rare moment of accurate self-appraisal, he once joked that although he’d studied dozens of languages, including ancient Egyptian – he really didn’t know any language well enough to speak it. Including English, haha.

I don’t know if some of the valets might have made mild fun of this “dotty old man” behind his back. But they were always polite to his face, and if they did privately think him a bit ridiculous, he never suspected it. For a while, he brought old chairs out in front of his house for the valets to sit on, but that accommodation was short-lived. The restaurant owner didn’t like the look of his valets lounging around out there. It made it look as if he was running a lax establishment. He ordered the valets to stand at the ready at all times.

But G. continued to slip snacks to them sometimes, although these still usually had to be something bulgur-based, and therefore I thought it likely he was imposing repeated tasks of discrete disposal on the valets. Overall though, G. and the valets formed a convivial coterie. G. would actually stop talking long enough to learn a little of the men’s lives and ambitions. He took an interest whenever one of them announced a birth in his family – either here or in Mexico. Each of these new arrivals would send G. delving back into his treasure trove to come up with some trinket he thought the infant might enjoy – a musty copy of Wind in the Willows or one of those stained, stuffed animals. These probably went the way of the bulgur.

When one or the other of the young men was able to save enough money to go back to Mexico and support a family there, G. would sometimes keep in touch. He even managed to send off an occasional note to that distant land. The main purpose of these missives was still to exercise his rejuvenated printers to render type in a hodge-podge of as many colors, sizes, and fonts, as conceivable. Any actual communication was secondary. Nevertheless, some information did get exchanged. G. learned when the wife of one of the former valets had twins. He learned when one of them managed to buy a “top-of-the-line” juicer and start his own business selling smoothies and chilled fruit drinks from the cart he pedaled up and down the streets of Monterey. Congratulations! The young man had moved up in the world to become an entrepreneur himself. He could sit down with impunity, on his bicycle cart, as long as he wanted to now.

Since G. had this social outlet, I didn’t feel quite so guilty when I eased off answering his calls. More and more, I would let my answering machine pick up, and then wouldn’t get around to returning his call. I still phoned G. on the dot of midnight every New Year’s in order to foolishly honk some horn at him. Or, I should say, I would try to phone at midnight. I almost never could get through until well after the hour though, because G. would have experimented with hooking up his phone line through some fantastic series of intermediaries. He was sure these elaborate riggings would get him “better reception,” whereas in actuality they rendered conversations with him a crackling series of disjointed syllables, probably reminiscent of early trans-Atlantic calls.

Our conversations became trying for me for other reasons though. G.’s paranoia was carrying him farther and farther out to sea. He thought his neighbors, principally the theaters that had moved into the district, had mounted their own electrical experiments against him, setting their neon lights expressly to create interference with his power supply. Although he generally kept up polite enough conversation with the neighboring restaurateur, G. privately thought that individual had aimed the downspout from his gutter so that G.’s basement would get the brunt of water run-off. Finally, G. turned off all heat and water service to his house so he wouldn’t have the likely hostile intrusions of meter readers coming onto his property every month.

He sank back further and further into repetitions of his theory of simulacra and also of how he had conquered his youthful bouts of depression by swearing off smoking, wild partying, sugary-starchy foods, and mostly by embracing the visitation he’d had from God. I got to the point I didn’t want to hear it any more. I didn’t answer his last call.

When I hadn’t heard any more from him for a few months, I thought I’d take another of my late night drives over there. I expected to see the usual guttering light coming from his kitchen window, at which point I thought I’d decide whether or not I wanted to tap on his pane and incur another all-night fusillade of philosophy, which lately contained fewer and fewer twinkles of genius. But as things were, I didn’t have to make the decision. Instead of any flickering light coming from a window, I saw a monitory yellow police tape flapping across his front door. And I knew.

In the days that followed, I made calls to the neighboring restaurateur and to a quasi street-person whom G. had occasionally employed to do yard work and whose cell phone number I had. Between the two of them, I learned that G. had been found dead in his house, already gone about five days when the itinerant handyman, suspecting something, had got into the house through an unhinged, rotting back door. And there was G. He wasn’t buried underneath his clutter as those phenomenally hoarding New York brothers had been. But he was embedded in the mess, dying in the embrace of all his valuables, probably just as he would have wanted to go.

I later heard that a consortium of twenty-two of G.’s surviving cousins materialized and sold the property to that next door restaurant owner with the offending downspout. G. had always maintained that he’d been a target of City inspectors because his neighbors had coveted his beautiful home. In actuality, only the land in his now thoroughly gentrified neighborhood carried any value. The presence of the house had actually reduced the value of the property, because it only had to be torn down, its contents carted off to the dump. Gone all the computer parts; gone the books and magazines; gone the wash machine and those stuffed animals and all the other fragments of the elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption that had been G.’s life.

The new owner raised the property to street level and extended his restaurant to include an outdoor dining patio on what had been G’s land. It was about a year before I drove over that way again to look at the transformation. As usual, I made it a midnight ride.

As I pulled up in front of those old stamping grounds, I saw the restaurant owner coming out of his place, locking up for the night. We stopped and chatted a while, reminiscing about what a character G. had been. I agreed that for all his aggravating habits, he had a loveable quality.

The restaurant owner and I weren’t alone on the chilly autumn street for long though. I soon saw one other person, a man recognizable even from a distance, come weaving towards us. Unbelievable! It was a Hollywood actor, a man whose intense, slightly off-kilter gaze had won him the role of Zod, Superman’s arch villain in the latest installment of that superhero’s adventures. By amazing coincidence, I had just rented two other movies featuring this actor. In both he portrayed a gripping derangement. But at the moment, so astonished was I to see someone like that making his way towards us in facilitated double-jointed ease – I couldn’t think of the name of any movie I’d seen him in or indeed, the name of the actor himself.

But I was spared having to search for his name. As soon as the actor got closer to us, the restaurateur hailed him over like an old familiar and introduced me to him. It was Michael Shannon who joined our little huddle. Shannon has his roots in Chicago theater and often comes back to play in or cheer on current productions at the Royal George or Steppenwolf Theaters. He’d also clearly been a patron of Gianni’s, the restaurant we were standing in front of, because the owner slapped him on the back, congratulating him on how well his career was going. Since I still couldn’t think of the name of any of his movies I’d recently seen, I was reduced to just gushing inanely at him. The encounter reminded me of that episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show in which Mary is introduced to Walter Cronkite. All she could sputter out was “Nice, nice, soooo nice to meet you.” I don’t think I was even that articulate.

But Shannon didn’t seem to mind. He was too well lubricated from what might have been some cast party he’d just attended to take my ramblings with anything other than polite acceptance. The restaurateur rescued me from my loop of lavished pointless praise. He took up the slack in the conversation by explaining to Shannon the occasion of our reverie there on the otherwise deserted midnight street. He told him all about G., who had been such a maverick fixture on Halsted for so long.

Although G. was not generally an admirer or a fan of any living person other than himself, he would probably have been at least mildly pleased that Zod was there, acknowledging the quirky contribution he had made to the neighborhood. Next to Buck Rogers, G. had most appreciated Superman’s caped escapades.

Gianni told how he himself had contributed to G.’s collection of stuffed animals. He conjured the ghosts of all those bygone furry hanks for Shannon. The three of us stood there, imagining what had been G.’s proud playpen. We stood in silent, bleary, slightly baffled, homage to the man who had been such an integral part of Halsted Street, from its slumlord days to its current sparkling glass facades.

Then the spell was broken. We wished each other the best and said our farewells. The restaurant owner and I went to our respective cars. And Zod veered, a little unsteadily, off into the night, newly regaled with the dancing, dangling fictions of G.’s life.

As I pulled away from the curb after this fantastic encounter, I could almost hear the faint wafting tremolo of a distant Thermin. And the thought - maybe we are just simulacra – holograms – figments of someone’s imagination after all.

Whacked By a Loquat

A friend of mine recently moved into a house in California which had an unusual tree in the back yard. The tree was loaded with yellow fruits that weren’t quite mangoes and weren’t quite plums. She did research on the Internet and found she had a loquat tree. She sent me a picture of the preternaturally laden growth that seemed almost as if it might have been planted by space aliens in her garden - to flourish from mere floral effulgences into paunchy human simulacra.

Ah, loquats! That brought back memories of what had been one of my own more outlandish experiences - memories of a colorful, roaring twenties-style episode in my life.

Back then, I was dating a man from Sicily. Without meaning to play into any ethnic stereotypes, this man in fact bragged that he had friends who were “connected.” That is, he had friends in the mob. He brought one of these pals along on one of our dinner dates. The two had grown up together, getting into minor smuggling mischief along the coasts of Cefalú and Taormina. They had come to the U.S. around the same time. Spencer Tracy/Humphrey Bogart fashion, they had taken different paths here – the good and the bad.

This pal turned out to be a perfect embodiment of the Joe Pesci character in Goodfellas, except he was taller. But he was fore-square and burst forward with a burly sense of always having the right-of-way. Again in embarrassing stereotype, he wore a tailored dark suit (even on that hot summer night) and drove a black Cadillac.

He said we should go to Chinatown. He was ripe for a meal at one of his favorite hangouts there. So we loaded into his Cady, all three of us crammed onto the front bench seat, with me in the middle. I soon learned that Jimmy not only looked like Joe Pesci, but he was filled with the same erratic, dangerous kind of presumption.

He soon apparently lost his way, but of course it was impossible for him to admit as much. He said he was taking “a short-cut.” After a long course of twists and turns along unfamiliar streets, we found ourselves at the entrance to an abandoned railroad siding on Chicago’s south side. “No Trespassing” signs were posted along the periphery of this desolate acreage. We were further meant to be warded off by a heavy anchoring chain that had once been stretched across a side road leading onto the property. But the chain had rusted and fallen onto the pavement. Jimmy took this as a come-on. He gunned his engine and shot over the heavy chain and over some other twisted metal as if he were Evil Knievel ramping up and over the hurdles in an obstacle course.

My date meekly observed, “I no think we suppose to go this way. The signs say about Tres…, Traipsing…”

“Those signs no apply to us!” Jimmy asserted with supreme bravado, as he shot over a spool of cabling.

As we jounced along, I was slung against him and became aware that he was “packing.” When I told this story to a friend of mine, she suggested the alternative that he might just have been glad to see me. But no, he actually was wearing a shoulder holster. This was well before the days when carrying concealed weapons had been made legal in Chicago. So no wonder the reason for the heavy suit jacket even in the heat of summer.

Miraculously, we finally made our way out of that terminus of abandoned railroad cars and railroad detritus, without either us or the car having suffered any damage. We actually found ourselves in a neighborhood within striking distance of Chinatown. Jimmy felt vindicated, although what should have been a twenty-minute drive had taken us over an hour. “I knew it a short-cut,” he pronounced. He parked the car and we walked.

On the way, we passed a thin, elderly black man who was weaving towards us down the street. The black man was obviously very inebriated and was having trouble steering a straight course. To my shock and horror, Jimmy grabbed the black man by the T-shirt as we passed him. He shook the man and yelled into his face, "Hey you! This Chinky town! You a Chink? I no think so! No you ain't! You no belong! Get off of da street!" With that, he flung the man aside toward the curb as if he was a sack of garbage. I guess Jimmy wanted his Chinatown to be like a DisneyWorld experience, peopled only by authentic Chinese actors.

I couldn’t believe it! Neither could the black man. The reality of this virulent rebuff clearly didn't register on him. He rolled his eyes as if trying to bring reality back into better focus, as if he believed he must be suffering from D.T.’s and just had some hallucination more exotic than the usually cited pink elephants. He staggered on without making any reply to what he’d obviously taken as some figment of his imagination.

Of course Jimmy had no sense of the irony of his objecting to a black man walking down the streets of Chinatown, while he himself, distinctly NOT Chinese, was walking there. But again, his conviction that none of the rules applied to him carried him forth, undeterred. With him leading the way, we finally got to his hangout, the King Wah Restaurant on Wentworth, the main street of Chicago's Chinatown.

There was more harrowing, illogical rough-talk from him during our meal. Jimmy’s politics were staunchly Republican – Republican to the death.  He vehemently took the side of the latest Republican Senator to be embroiled in a scandal. He said all the man’s opponents should be lined up against a wall and shot! Jimmy illustrated his point by pantomiming a St. Valentine’s Day-style massacre right there on the spot as he pointed his arms toward a wall of the restaurant.  He was filled with such violent partisanship. There were no gray areas for Jimmy. He was either all for or all against.

The mobster stereotypes kept coming hot and heavy. He said he was “in construction,” with the quotation marks floating almost palpably around his statement. He said he poured a lot of concrete. When my date rather disingenuously asked him what job he was currently working on, Jimmy said he had something he had to do out of town the following day. He said he was leaving for Detroit, to “straighten something out.”

Was Jimmy’s whole life a pantomime of mob affiliation? Was he just a wannabe? I’m not sure, but I have it from reliable sources that he did in fact leave for Detroit the following day, and my date was convinced his boyhood pal had become the real thing. He recommended him as someone you could always go to if you ever wanted a problem fixed. As we sat there, I felt no doubt that Jimmy would in fact straighten out whatever – or whoever – was fated to meet with him in Detroit.

But then it came time for dessert. This is where loquats played such a memorable role.

Jimmy imperiously snapped his fingers, and our elderly Chinese waiter eventually came over to our table, none too compliantly though. The waiter had a sour, disinclined look on his face. Jimmy had some trouble describing what he wanted for desert. “You know, that fruit, lo…lo…somethin’ like that,” he groped after the word.

The waiter said "Loquat? We no have that. Just what on menu." The waiter pointed testily to the absence of any mention of loquats on the menu. (This became a case of dueling dropped articles of speech.)

"No," the mobster tried again, although with clearly flagging spirit. "No, I think I have here before. Lo, lo - yeah loquat."

Then I remembered. It was true, I used to see lychee nuts, but occasionally loquats too, offered as desserts in Chinese restaurants. They would bring the fruit on dishes of chipped ice – cool succulences to end a spicy meal. But maybe now only the most expensive Chinese restaurants offered such delicacies. I hadn’t seen them in mainstream Chinese restaurants for a long time.

In any case, our waiter at this restaurant was definitely not willing to make common cause with Jimmy’s hankering for loquats. Like a teacher reprimanding an unruly child, the waiter sternly repeated, "No, we have no loquat. We have what on menu. You no see on menu - we no have!"

Amazingly, the mobster, the hit man - melted in meekness into the cushion of his booth before this onslaught of refusal. He backed down, all sheepishness, "Oh, OK. I thought... It OK. I wrong. Just... I guess we'll just have the fortune cookies. That OK. Yeah, we want fortune cookies," he said with face-saving assurance, as if that’s what he’d really wanted all along.

After all his rough talk, the mobster had been cowed by a waiter. Well, I guess NO ONE can intimidate a senior Chinese waiter.

The next day, my boyfriend passed along a message to me. He said Jimmy had liked me and had asked if I’d be interested in becoming his mistress.

I have to admit - despite the man's vicious racism and absurdist approach to life - I was tempted. I thought how nice it would be to be ushered through this world on the arm of a man who could “straighten out” all my adversaries. I thought of a popular tune sung by country/western star Joe Sun back then – “Shotgun Rider.” In the lyrics, Joe Sun asks his girlfriend to “Let me be your shotgun rider.” He says, “I will protect you from the rain and the cold.” I guess the term originally referred to armed men who’d ride on the sides of stagecoaches and shoot away all would-be stagecoach robbers. Then later the term was applied to the roaring 20’s mobsters who’d stand on the running boards that cars had then. They’d stand outside flanking their boss who rode in more secure luxury inside. These latter-day shotgun riders carried machine guns and Tommy guns, ready to blast away any impediment or enemy who crossed their path.

Yes, it would be nice to have a person like that running interference for me, in a metaphorical sense of course. I wouldn’t want anyone to actually get shot – I guess. But more generally, I longed to be in the company of a man who could umbrella me under his conviction that the rules – “They no apply to us!” For a moment there, I felt that with someone like him, I could break through the chains that warded mere mortals off sacred property. With such audacity by my side, all the “No Trespassing” signs, all the chains, and even death itself - would not apply.

But even then, I was wise enough to know that men who spout violence like that rarely can be counted on to aim their violence in the right direction. They usually end up wreaking their violence on their mates, while they coweringly cave-in when the real world presents a challenge. They’re too afraid of appearing foolish to ever ask for directions. They’re nowhere to be found when a repairman presents a grossly padded bill. And they back down when a sullen waiter refuses to bestir himself to produce loquats.

I sensed Jimmy would fail me in all those more vital everyday categories. I could picture him furtively siding with the plumber who charged me $250 to change a faucet washer – slipping him the money against my protests while he rolled his eyes to indicate that I could be a little moodily difficult, at certain times of the months. And he had shown himself to be incapable of standing his ground to get us those loquats that would have been so cool a refreshment on that hot summer night. All he could do was bully elderly black men on the street – men who weren’t in a position to fight back.

So I politely sent back a message declining Jimmy’s offer. I used the excuse of my loyalty to my current boyfriend – although we both knew that was a crock. Ours was just a casual summer liaison.

So to this day, I’ve never had a loquat. I don’t see them in the grocery stores where I shop, and I’ve never again seen or heard mention of them in any Chinese restaurant. My friend in California said she would send me some from her tree – except she found hers got mushy the day after being picked. They’d never make the trip. So all I have of loquats is the picture she emailed to me – and the memory of a hit man years ago who didn’t have the ammunition to get a loquat on our table.

                                         

Seeing Things

One of my more embarrassing moments in grade school didn’t involve bad hairdos, outdated clothing, or anything that got me teased by classmates. It was my performance on the day of the standard “Eye Test” that brings a red flush to my cheeks.

When I was in third grade, they had an optician come around to administer a standard eye test to all of us. This included a test for color-blindness. I had to peer rather hard and deep into the Seurat-like pictures of colored dots to make out the 7, the 6, the 4, embedded in them. Then I came to that fateful card whose pattern appeared more obscure than the rest. I looked long and deep into the pointillist display, and finally pronounced that I discerned a number there. I think I said I saw a “3.”

The optician smiled indulgently at me and said no, actually that card had no number hidden. She cautioned me that I shouldn’t feel I had to identify a number on every card. “Just see what’s there,” her tone turned slightly monitory.

I felt ashamed of myself. I’d thought I was better than that. I didn’t think I could be so easily led into seeing things that weren’t there just because there was an assumption that such things existed. I had told myself that I would never go into a house and see ghosts just because the house had a reputation for being haunted. I felt rather condescendingly removed from all those people who see images of the Virgin Mary emerging from every water stain, just because they believe that holy presences are floating around, standing ready to manifest themselves and help guide believers through troubled times. I thought I was above being influenced by the preconceptions other people planted in every situation. Even at that young age, I had prided myself on being more independent-minded. Now here I was, seeing numbers in what was just a random spattering of parti-colored dots.

I swore - from that moment on, I would rely only on my own judgment. I wouldn’t be influenced by assumptions of what I was supposed to see and think. Yes, sure…

Skip ahead a few decades. I saw zigzag white flashes in one eye. Worried that this might be a sign of a detaching retina, I rushed in a flurry of anxiety to my regular eye care center, the only place I could get in without being referred by a primary care physician. As it turned out, this was the best possible place I could have gone. A majority of these franchise chains now have much the same kind of high-tech examining equipment that the most expensive ophthalmologist has. And you don’t need a referral. You can pretty much just drop in.

The optician, a comforting, pretty young woman, examined me with some impressive imaging equipment. What a relief when she told me that my zigzags were just normal aging, the result of pieces of the lining of the back of the eye peeling off and floating into the vitreous, the liquid of the eye. “It happens to almost everyone,” she reassured me. (Although after later taking a poll of my acquaintances and finding no one else had those kinds of floaters, I thought that perhaps the woman might have stretched the truth in order to be a little too reassuring. But I’ll settle for reassurances wherever I can get them.)

But after she had finished that more urgent exam of the inner workings of my eye, the Doctor proceeded to do a routine eye exam – which included, shades of yesteryear, a test for color-blindness. Once again, those pointillist paintings were presented to me on flash cards, one after the other.

The only excuse I can offer for what happened next is that I was still coming off the edge of my nervousness about losing my vision altogether, so I was eager to prove to myself and to the Doctor that nothing was really wrong with me. I peered deep into the heart of each one of those cards, looking for the “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” subject matter that I assumed a normally-sighted person should be able to discern in them. With the third or fourth card, I strained to see and finally, with false bravado, pronounced that it contained an embedded “7.”

In almost perfect replay of that exam I’d had decades before, the Doctor gently corrected, “No, that card actually has no figure in it. That’s OK. Just tell me what you actually see.”

I’d done it again! After all those intervening years of chiding myself for having been so easily led into making false reports, after a virtual lifetime of resolve to be true to what was actually true for me – I’d gone wrong again. At the first opportunity I’d been given to prove my stalwart honesty – I’d failed once more! It was a humbling experience.

Now I better understand how easily people can be led into making false confessions to the police, even when the police don’t use overtly intimidating methods. Just a persistent pressure of suggestion that a person is guilty can soon lead that person to assume guilt.

This whole experience recalls more specific ways in which police investigations go wrong. The danger is not only in leading suspects to confess to crimes they didn’t commit, but there’s a broader danger that lies in the way witnesses to a crime are interviewed. Procedural manuals for detectives are recognizing some of these pitfalls and are encouraging changes in the ways witnesses are presented with line-ups and mug shots. More and more care is being taken not to plant suggestions in the minds of witnesses.

One procedural recommendation I read about particularly addresses the kind of error I made during my color-blindness tests. It’s been found that making one small change in the way eye witnesses to crimes are presented with mug shots can make a large difference in the accuracy of their resulting identifications. When a witness is just silently presented with a series of pictures of likely offenders, or with a line-up - chances are high that the witness will identify some individual from among the group as having been the perpetrator she saw, and she’ll will a positive identification, an identification that later proves to be dead wrong. But if a witness is first cautioned that the person who committed the crime may or MAY NOT be among those presented to her in the mug shots or in the line-up, then the witness is much less likely to finger anyone they see in the assortment. Many fewer false arrests result.

In many other ways, police are being trained to carefully avoid planting any assumptions in the minds of witnesses or of anyone likely to testify about the way a crime went down. It’s so easy to float an assumption and to consequently skew people’s perceptions of what happened and their reports of what they saw.

So apparently I’m not alone in being easily influenced by what I think I’m supposed to see. But I’m going to be ready for them next time for sure. When, in another five or six decades, I have my color vision tested again – I’m going to be sure to be on the alert to see nothing. Of course, by then, I’ll be well over 100, and “nothing” might be literally all I can see!

                                                 


Can You See Me Now?

A Sweetish Hospital

I did volunteer driving for seniors for years, which took me to a lot of doctors’ appointments and a lot of hospitals. But I was only there as an onlooker. I hadn’t been to any hospital on my own behalf since I’d had my tonsils out when I was six years old. The prospect of being looked at rather than just looking made me freeze in terror.

I realized how cheap it was to give comforting advice, how easy to be optimistic - when it wasn’t me on the examining table. How annoyingly facile my consolations must have been to all those in the past who had really been facing the cold steel gaze of various hospital apparatuses. If anyone had accompanied me to this hospital appointment and had reeled off a rote “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right,” I knew I would have looked for the nearest custard pie to smoosh in her face. I realized that’s probably how the victims of my volunteer consolation must have felt.

But I soon saw there was a big difference between most of the hospitals I’d been to by proxy, and this very real and personal visitation. Most of the hospitals I’d visited vicariously had been large downtown complexes, spanning and sprawling over multiple wings, multiple high-rise parking facilities, and multiple “Centers” named after donors. In most cases, I could expect to have to leverage my charge in a wheelchair between distant outposts, sometimes even braving the outdoors in the process. We had to plot appointed meeting spots where I would pick her up again after her day’s rigors and after my rigors fetching my car from the 10^th level of whatever garage I’d used. These different parking levels were usually distinguished only by some forgettable color coding and by the kind of Muzak that filtered out from their audio speakers. As a result of all these precarious, protracted forays, I still smell antiseptic whenever I hear Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are…”

I assumed this was the kind of experience I’d again face when my family doctor sent me to have some outpatient hospital tests. But my experience turned out to be the opposite of the ones I’d ushered my friends through in the large, prestigious downtown hospitals of Chicago. My PPO plan had me assigned to a smaller neighborhood hospital, cozily embedded in residential city streets.

Swedish Covenant Hospital did have its own parking facility, but I avoided the $4 a day parking fee by leaving my car several blocks away on a tree-lined side street. Walking back to the Hospital under blossoming linden trees, past front yards with gurgling fountains – was a lot nicer than the harrowing downtown traffic snarls I’d faced in my earlier experience of hospitals.

I was in for a further pleasant surprise when I got into the Hospital itself. Rather than the scattered acreage of different departments, I found that the variety of tests I had to take were all sequestered in the same “Patient Testing” nook which was itself just a few yards to the right of the Hospital’s one-and-only entrance. I had blood drawn, then stepped a few feet over to have X-rays, then a few more feet brought me to the ultrasound room. This togetherness was like a delightful throwback to the days of the one-room school house. There was no need for making expeditions down long, forbidding corridors whose fluorescent lights eerily lit up as you approached, and then shut off after you’d passed – reminding you of the darkness of your mortality. There was no navigating across bridges to other buildings, other specialists. There was no need to go in search of wheelchairs, no need to be shuttled up and down elevators between distant terminals.

I did see that there were some other out-buildings connected with the hospital, in one case by a bridge. But I assumed those distances would only have to be traversed by people with some really unusual, specific needs. The average patient such as myself could find everything right there, at her fingertips.

This cozy warren of adjacent testing rooms was presided over by friendly staff that beckoned me forward almost the moment I arrived. Four barbers – no waiting! I had to go to the Hospital on several successive days because one set of tests required strict fasting while another set required that I down a gallon of water. (Well, it seemed like a gallon.) On these successive visits, I got to be almost chummy with one of the men at the “Testing” reception desk. By the time of my third visit, we greeted each other with all the eager curiosity of twins who’d been separated at birth.

I saw that the Hospital’s clientele was an enlivening mix of nationalities. During my brief waits on one of the couches outside the test labs, I saw a colorful parade of people wearing everything from turbans to dashikis to dirndls to serapes. So although this Hospital’s neighborhood had once consisted more strictly of immigrants from Scandinavia, the area had apparently blossomed into being a veritable international house. In keeping with this world-wide welcoming, there is a sculpting of a globe outside the Hospital’s revolving door entrance, showing the efforts of people on all the different continents to improve the environment. This all-embracing aspect of the Hospital adds a touching grace note to its appeal.

 

                                    

I was surprised and disappointed to read some of the very negative reviews that Swedish Covenant Hospital got on the Internet’s “Yelp.” But most of these reviews applied to its Emergency Room, so I felt as long as I could steer clear of that extremis, I could maintain my happy impression of the place’s friendly, efficient, pouched approach.

It wasn’t long before I coincidentally ran across another reference to the Hospital. Northeastern University is nearby. On one of my visits back to that school, my alma mater, I picked up the latest copy of the school newspaper and saw an article reporting a health fair to take place at the Hospital. Except - the student reporter who’d written this article seemingly wasn’t on a proper first-name basis with different parts of the community, and in all seriousness, she had written that the fair was to take place at the “Sweetish Covenant Hospital.”

I had also noticed that a smaller sign near the Hospital’s entrance makes a further culinary offering of the facility. The sign is missing a letter - so the place announces itself as “SW * DISH COVENANT HOSPITAL.”

                                     

In a world that increasingly centers on mega-stores and mega-medical centers, many of Chicago’s smaller neighborhood hospitals have had to close. I’m glad this source of neighborly health care has so far managed to hold-out against this tide of massive consolidation. Maybe the errors and dropped letters connected with its name aren’t really such misprints. The place is sort of a tasty “Sweetish Dish” after all.

Walking a Few Blocks Beyond

You might have lived on your same city street all your life, but never ventured down it past a certain point. Or perhaps you’ve explored up and down your own street, but there are many nearby streets you’ve never explored past the corner convenience store where you get your coffee, or past the gas station where you regularly fill up before you veer off to pursue your day’s business along farther avenues.

The other day I realized how many blocks right in my own neighborhood I knew nothing about. I would turn off the next main street and visit an acquaintance who lived just a few doors further down on a residential street near my house. But I had no idea what lay beyond on that typical-seeming street. For all I knew, it might have been labeled “Here be monsters,” as the old cartographers would label the terra incognita that no explorer had yet reached on our globe.

So the other day I made my own exploration. I passed my friend’s house and walked on down the street, farther than I’d ever been before. And there were wonders to behold.

After a while, I found the street was blocked off to cars. The only way anyone could have continued straight ahead was on foot, across an old bridge that spanned the Chicago River there at one of its shallowest, laziest stretches. The sidewalk led up onto the bridge with its picturesquely rusty cross-beams. Looking through the diamond-frame of those cross-beams, I saw some ducks. They weren’t paddling on the water. This early balmy spring day was too leisurely for any effort like that. They were letting the current just drift them along, taking them where it would.

 

                                            

Where the bridge rejoined the sidewalk on the far side again, there was a triangle of fenced-in land that seemed to belong to no one in particular. It was heaped with antique discard - with old bushel baskets, tires, and stove compartments. Some weedy vines had overgrown this ancient offal, running down to the water’s edge. But the overall effect was not one of ugly discord. In this context, the accumulated rubbish looked like a treasure trove that invited a searching eye.

I went on in the same unappointed spirit as the ducks. Many of the houses along here were neat bungalows, with catchy yard decorations. I passed miniature windmills and lighthouses. I walked along the coming block, and then the next. Then I was burst out onto another business street. I had driven along this street fairly often, but I’d never come at it from this angle before, or on foot. It was like lying down on your kitchen floor. There were unsuspected twists and turns, pipings and utilities. Looking at the workings of this ethnic neighborhood from such a different angle of approach, I saw things from a whole new perspective. I could see things that drive-bys often don’t give a person time to see.

I was immediately greeted by the big flapping dark wings of rugs posted out on the sidewalk for sale. There were rugs and blankets, hung on huge versions of newspaper racks. They waved me over, inviting inspection. Tigers and pandas waited to pounce out at me from this jungle of plush pile fabric. Some of the blankets were also imprinted with race cars and superheroes like Spiderman that zoomed out as I riffled through the racks. There was a big Justin Bieber looking with plush disinterest off into the distance.

                                                 

The street was lined with discount stores that had arrays of Spanish, Korean, and Indian knick-knacks in their windows. A man was waltzing a floor lamp with a faux Tiffany lampshade out onto the street. A fat Buddha candle-holder beamed out beatifically at me. Seen quickly from a distance, all this might have seemed like a clutter of kitsch. But on foot on the street that sunny spring day, I felt as if I was inside the object chamber of a kaleidoscope, morphing along with the other sparkling shapes and shards, forming new patterns of thought.

Most arresting of all was a line-up of just the lower halves of female mannequins out on the sidewalk. They were covered in brightly colored skin tight jeans and leotards. The mannequin’s derrieres were all plumply facing the public, an army of partial pin-ups. In unconsciously ironic reflection of this theme, there were several fruit carts parked nearby, laden with early peaches, mangoes, and other produce likely from south of the border. Restaurants with dancing tacos painted on their windows were interspersed with the discount shops.

 

      

The whole street was alive with quirky initiative. It all reminded me of the film biographies of American notables such as George Gershwin who grew up in Brooklyn in the early part of the 20^th century. Brooklyn then was usually shown as a complex harmony of immigrant energy and enterprise. There were always people calling to each other from fire escape stairways. There were peddlers hawking their wares, pitchmen, con-men, and pick-up artists brassing up every corner. And here it was again, a street that the young Gershwin would have recognized. Except – on this busy commercial street, a staccato Spanish clip predominated rather than Eastern European schmaltz.

That different note of immigrant music was sounded most strikingly as I walked back, off the main street, onto the leafy residential street again. As I passed along, approaching the bridge, I heard it – the clarion call of a rooster. Again and again, the rooster announced itself. It happily reminded me that keeping chickens and roosters had once again been made legal in Chicago, although the ordinance is always in danger of being rescinded.

Once having discovered this walk, I’ve returned along the same route several times since. And always, during either my coming or going, the rooster announces itself from behind some fence. I have never seen it, and I can never quite pin down which house and which fence it’s behind. It has become like the Wizard of Oz, a disembodied oracle whose reality I don’t quite want to expose. I just appreciate its greeting – and walk on.

Have you explored any of your neighboring side streets lately? Have you walked along one of them farther and farther, beyond where you’d ever gone before?

                                         

The Many Prejudices We Ignore

Most people who consider themselves to be liberal, educated citizens, are sensitive to any kind of prejudice against racial or religious groups. They guard against making any statements themselves that could be considered to fall in those categories, and they are quick to heap opprobrium on anyone they hear mouthing such prejudices. That’s all well and good. But meanwhile, these very same people are often guilty of harboring other forms of prejudice that can be just as destructive of our social fabric. Let me cite an awakening example.

A group of us from “Friends of the Library” had booked a bus tour to different branch libraries. Almost all the people in the group were retired women from more affluent Chicago neighborhoods or suburbs. However there was one somewhat younger person in the group, a demographic rarity in this context for being under retirement age, for being a man, and for being black.

We were all standing around outside the central library, waiting for the rented motor coach to get revved up. One of the more mature ladies in the group, a spruce matron in a neatly tailored suit, approached the black man and cheerily asked him if he was our bus driver. The moment froze. With vast indignation, the man issued a smarting correction. “No, madam,” he adjured. “I’m a member of the library group.”

The women immediately saw how she had been guilty of a terrible faux pas – and worse. She had been guilty of what might be construed as racial profiling and of the basest form of racial prejudice. She’d been guilty of assuming that the one black man in the group must of necessity be there only to perform some task regarded as being manual labor. A pall was cast over the day’s adventures for all of us who had been within earshot of this social blunder.

And yet, and yet – when I thought about it, it seemed to me that the man was more guilty of prejudice than the woman. Why did the suggestion that he was a bus driver affront him so much? Well yes, there might have been some legitimacy to his taking exception to the stereotyping of black men as laborers. But his indignation went beyond any such abstract historical considerations. He just did not want to be taken for a mere blue collar worker. It was obvious that he considered such work beneath him. He viewed himself as being a person with literary interests. He was an intellectual far removed from working stiffs who drove busses or wielded jackhammers and whom he no doubt automatically considered to be too dumb to appreciate any of the “finer” things in life.

But isn’t that sort of attitude as unworthy a prejudice as some of the other prejudices that we more often revile? There is perhaps something understandable about a black man taking that attitude. Black people were for so long generally confined to jobs involving hard labor, that now they want to distance themselves as much as possible from any such association. But white people feel the same way. Any banker, whether white or black, would likely be insulted to be taken for the janitor in his bank. But why? If it’s wrong to assume that anyone who is black has less worth than anyone who is white – why is it right to assume that anyone who is a bus driver has less worth than anyone who is a library patron? That sort of dismissal of bus drivers seems to be part of a larger class prejudice that lingers in this society and that is all the more pernicious because it is so widely held and even so socially acceptable.

There’s a similarly ubiquitous prejudice that virtually no one objects to. Men predictably want to dissociate themselves from anything feminine, because for them, femininity is a lesser state. In another essay on this Blog, I wrote how disappointed I was that President Obama spurned certain breeds of dogs because they were too “girlie.” If he had spurned some breed of dog because it was traditionally associated with African-Americans and if he had expressed that opinion by using some belittling term for young African-Americans – it’s likely his right to continue in the Presidential office would have been called into question. If he had said, “Oh yuck no! Not THAT kind of dog. That’s too pickaninny!” – there might even have been a call for his impeachment. But since his slur was only against women, everyone, including his wife sitting next to him, just chuckled indulgently.

This kind of devaluing of women is so widespread in our society and in most societies, that it’s part of the very air we breathe. Men routinely make a show of shunning anything pink, anything frilly, anything decorative, anything at all typically associated with women, because they consider it beneath them and because it would indeed make them the target of merciless ribbing and derision. But again, imagine replacing that display of aversion with an aversion to anything stereotypically associated with black people. By making that substitution, the level of prejudice inherent in the attitude becomes apparent.

Imagine a man refusing to eat collard greens because they’ve been associated with black people. “Oh no! I won’t eat THAT! That’s what black people eat!” If a man made such a remark, and if he were a public figure – the uproar against him would be immediate and massive. The man might be called to resign whatever post he held and he would be made to make a series of abject, tearful apologies. But when his aversion is only towards things associated with women, everyone smiles, colludes with, and even encourages, his repelling fervor. “Yeah man, you definitely gotta toss that apron!”

This sort of prejudice against women is so pervasive that it calls for treatment in a series of separate essays. Where is Gloria Steinem when we need her the most? For now though, it’s enough to note that there is widespread prejudice against members of the working class and against women, and against all kinds of people regarded as being unattractive. It’s OK to be vocally prejudiced against all these groups. Everyone feels free to voice these prejudices, knowing there will be no repercussions, only general understanding and endorsement.

But going even beyond these specific unacknowledged prejudices, there’s a still more encompassing prejudice that’s so embedded in the way we think that it’s virtually invisible and untouchable. I was brought up short and made to realize I harbored just such a prejudice by a particularly revolutionary remark that someone made to me. We were walking along near the University of Chicago when we passed a white couple who veering off to a parked car. The man leaned in to ominously warn the woman, “Lock all the car doors as soon as you get in, honey. There are lots of blacks around here.”

When my companion and I had passed beyond earshot of this other, so clearly benighted and stupid couple, I voiced my opinion of them. “Well, there are two I’d like to lock my doors against!” I sneered.

My companion looked at me with an admonishing twinkle in his eye and said, “Well, they’re good for something at least. They gave you a chance to feel superior.”

There it was! The word has become a cliché, but it’s the only one I can think of to describe what I had. The word is “epiphany.” Yes, I had felt superior to that couple. I’d felt a sweet little surge of “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah. I’m better than you!” in the wake of the man’s remark. And isn’t that at the base of a lot of our vociferous condemnation of those who express any kind of politically incorrect sentiment? We are secretly glad of their infraction because it gives us a chance to feel so superior to them, and to demonstrate that superiority by denouncing them.

That’s the very definition of prejudice. It’s a reflex feeling of spurning superiority towards someone, not because of who they are in the fullness of their being, but because of some single stamped characteristic they exhibit, which is often a characteristic they’ve had little or no control over acquiring.

I don’t mean that we should condone racism or any of the other forms of prejudice to which our society is sensitive. But at the same time, we should recognize that there is an overarching, unacknowledged prejudice that might be operative in the very eagerness with which we dismiss others for their infractions. If all we do is make another’s person’s remark the occasion for us to gloat in superiority over them, then we are exhibiting the very kind of prejudice that we are ostensibly fighting. We’re using another person simply as a means of boosting our own egos by making a show of our rejection. Giving ourselves a satisfying fillip of superiority won’t do much do eradicate the other person’s prejudice, while at the same time it merely entrenches us in a more encrypted prejudice of our own.

This is all the more true because our allowance of prejudiced remarks is so unequally distributed. We applaud black rappers for saying the kinds of things that would cause us to permanently banish white suburbanites forever from our social circle. Black rappers are given free rein to make violently prejudiced remarks against women, against whites, against other blacks. Issuing from them, the remarks are considered artistic expression, or a commentary on their mean streets upbringing, or a complicated product of their history as members of a certain race.

But a white person making comparable remarks is given no such dispensation. We don’t stop to consider that they too might be products of very compromising environments. A good ol’ boy acquaintance of mine who’d been helping me with household repairs happened to drop in on a charity luncheon I was giving at my house. He was a fish out of water from the start, but then, in response to a strained attempt on the part of one of the other luncheon guests to reach out to him with a question about his work – he responded, sort of sheepishly abashed by this alien attention. He said that he did “a black man’s work, toting stuff, working off the strength of his back.”

That broke it. The society lady walked out of my house in high dudgeon. She called me the next day and said she would not tolerate that obvious kind of racial prejudice. She wondered why on earth I associated with such a person and she intimated that she had doubts about ever again visiting the home of anyone who did associate with such people.

Well, there was a lot wrong with that whole round-about of prejudice. While my handyman’s remark showed a habit of making a separate class out of blacks – the charity matron’s reaction showed an equal habit of making a special class out of rural whites. (Actually, the handyman was half Native American. If the society matron had known that, would she have taken a more lenient attitude towards him? Would status as a Native American, like the status of black rap artist, have been enough to have given him allowance to make prejudiced comments?) But in any case, as much as the handyman had demonstrated a habit of putting blacks in their place – the society matron showed a parallel habit of putting poor southern whites in their place, a place that she’d enforce as being distinctively separate from any place she ever occupied. I suspect that society matron, although she was white, would have also been offended if anyone had taken her for a maid in my household – showing how much she considered maids to be beneath her.

I knew the handyman better than just that one remark of his. I knew a little more of his context. He told me how growing up in the Carolinas sixty years previously, the adults in his family had instructed him in the social mores of the place. They had told him that he was always to address white people as “Mr. And Mrs …..,” but that he should address black people by their first names only. He had been the child of his father’s second marriage. When his father’s first wife had died at the age of twenty-one, after having given birth to the couple’s third child – his father had married a fourteen-year-old Cherokee woman although she didn’t reveal her Cherokee ancestry until years later because she was deeply ashamed of her non-White status. She promptly started to have children, one of whom was the handyman.

The handyman spoke highly of his father, mostly because his father had tried to bring him and his siblings up strictly according to the Bible. When his father had caught him and his brother playing during the time they should have been reading the Bible, the man had taken them out behind the barn and beaten them to a fare-thee-well with a chain. His younger brother had received a bad head injury in the process and had always been a little “slow” after that. But still the handyman respected his father for making such valiant efforts to set them on the straight and narrow. Later on, his sister had tried to poison their father because he was always “messing” with her. But the handyman thought his sister’s reaction had been extreme. He said all the fathers he knew back then had been likely to “mess with their daughters.” It was just the way of things.

Talk about mean streets! If black rappers have the right to make vicious, prejudiced remarks because of the hard way they and their people have come – it would seem my handyman might also qualify for such dispensation. But the point is certainly not to fight for the right to make prejudiced remarks. The point is that not all the prejudice we need to fight against is the kind of prejudice that has been so roundly defined and targeted over the last decades. When civil rights leaders say that we still have a long way to go in conquering prejudice – they’re right. But there’s a lot of prejudice that few people have even begun to recognize, much less started to address in their lamentations.

Again, the goal should not be to condone any sort of prejudice against minorities, but neither should our goal be to simply assume a high-and-mighty sense of superiority over someone who is struggling against ignorance and a bleak family background. If we judge people based on one snippet we hear issue from them, we do the very thing we inveigh against. If we in effect say to them, “Step off the sidewalk when I walk by. I, in all my glory, am superior and have the right-of-way,” we are hardly better than the many prejudiced white people who have come to symbolize southern society in the 1930’s. We are in effect becoming our own sort of clansmen.

Rather than immediately putting anyone in his place because of an errant remark or because of a perceived lifestyle that we reflexively dislike, we should strive to know that person more fully. Whether that person is black, white, a woman, Jewish, fat, gay, old, a teenager, a prostitute, a maid, a redneck, a Wall Street broker, or a bus driver – we shouldn’t give ourselves a cheap shot of self-satisfaction with a display of disapproval and distancing. Rather we should eagerly approach that person with a sense that a new adventure in knowing the human spirit awaits us.

A Different Kind of Moving Day

Spring and fall I face a different sort of moving day than others who might just be changing apartments or migrating to and from summer vacation spots. I face the more difficult job of relocating a giant lemon tree. Since I live in Chicago, the tree has to come inside during the winter where I place it near my front plate glass window. By spring, the tree is usually suffering from the stress of cabin fever and has to be moved back out into my yard.

This started as an easy enough routine. The tree was given to me as a 6-inch sprout that a friend grew from the seed of an everyday grocery store lemon. My friend was eager that I take good care of his one green thumb accomplishment. Every time he visited, he would inspect its progress. Under this kind of scrutiny, and also because of what is just my natural aversion to wasting anything or letting anything go – I perhaps tended the tree too diligently.

It grew and grew. And grew. Over the years, it became a 15-foot behemoth. I replanted it in a large city dumpster on wheels. Despite the wheels, it became a major project to escort it through its migrations. I luckily have cathedral ceilings, but the tree still had to be canted inside to accommodate its height. Then getting it in and out of doors was a dangerous operation that had to be carefully choreographed.

I couldn’t simply roll it along the length of my building from the front door and out the back into the garden. With its long bayonet thorns, that would have involved too much strafing of ceiling light fixtures and furniture along the route. The only logical way to move it was to take it out the nearest front door and walk it around the block to my back gate. But it was so heavy, I usually had to hire movers to help me.

Fifteen years of this exercise left me thoroughly put out with that “friend” who had visited this chore on me. And for all my trouble, the tree still showed not the slightest sign of producing a lemon. I finally felt I just couldn’t do it any longer. I made the wrenching decision to abandon the tree. Late that summer, I didn’t roll it indoors as usual. I rolled it out into the alley and abandoned it to its fate. I hoped some salvage man who had connections with a solarium or a conservatory somewhere would pick it up. But no such luck.

It languished out there. Then one morning I made the heart-rending discovery that in the night, someone had brutally uprooted it from the dumpster, heaved it aside, and made off with the dumpster. That was such a waste, because the dumpster could hardly have been of much use. I had drilled holes in the bottom of it to give the tree drainage.

So there the tree lay, a fallen soldier, victim of my war with my weariness. Its broken, mangled form rolled around from one side of the alley to the other. Occasionally, I would haul it out of the way of traffic and bank it back against my fence. But soon enough, it would tumbleweed down to the apron of some other property, its abject sear skeleton a constant rebuke to me. Its remains lingered for almost a year that way. Its main trunk looked like the desiccated mast of some Flying Dutchman appearing here and there, spiking through the effluvia of this industrial alley, haunting all my comings and goings.

This is hardly the end of the story though. I hadn’t been able to part with the tree without keeping some souvenir of it. I’d taken a cutting and put it in water. Miraculously, the cutting had grown roots. That usually doesn’t work, or it only works according to some complicated horticultural formula that I’ve never quite understood. But this offshoot produced enough of a root system to encourage me to in turn pot it – and in due course replant it into an industrial size garbage pail on wheels. So here we are again.

More years have passed, and once again I have a skyscraper lemon tree. The sight of its mother so tragically dying out in the alley has made me determined never to abandon a lemon tree again. I know I will stick by this baby – forever. What’s more, this hasn’t been in vain. The offshoot apparently had some genetic memory of the developmental phases its mother went through, and has picked up where she left off. In just a few years, after it had grown to about 10-feet, it started to produce blossoms – and then lemons. The lemons take a long time to ripen on the branches. Some are on there almost a year before they can be picked, and even then they have thick skins. But they are tangy lemons – fresh off the tree. They provide a valuable present come birthdays, Christmases. I can impress recipients with the value of my offering, telling them that the individual lemon I’m bestowing on them cost me about a thousand dollars, considering the moving costs and the daily fertilizing, watering, tending.

The tree’s readiness to produce actual lemons has inspired me to service it in yet another way. Now as soon as I see blossoms on it, I go around with a feather duster and tickle, tickle, tickle, from flower to flower, transferring pollen betwixt and between. I had heard about and even once seen ticklers in the fields - people supplementing the work of bees by cross-pollinating between blossoms since often the pistil of one blossom won’t be ready to receive the pollen from the stamen of the same flower. The organs of different blooms come ready at different times. I had thought that to be a rather rarified occupation, little suspecting that I would one day enter the ranks of ticklers myself.

 

 

I no longer have to hire outside help to move this progeny plant though. I rent a room to a neighborhood man, so now I have a helper handy to make the big haul around the block. Since this “baby” has itself grown to a bushy 12-feet though, my renter had to call on some barroom buddies to help him with the move the other day. The lads were already well lubricated when they attempted the move, so it got to be the occasion for a carefree careening, a bouncing from pillar to post along the side street and into the alley. It was risky business angling the tree out the front door and under a neighbor’s awning. My renter had attached a long rope to it to give him better leverage pulling it along on its wheels. This makeshift leash notwithstanding, the crew lost control of their charge more than once and the tree veered violently into a wall or some other upright. But the joviality of the moment readily loosened the tree from whatever entrapment it encountered, just as the men’s wits and limbs had already been loosened by whatever brew they’d imbibed.

We lost a few more unripe lemons than I would have liked, and a few more branches got snapped. But on the whole, the tree didn’t suffer too much damage. As I stood at the back gate, I rejoiced to see my renter rounding the bend from the side street. As he pulled his recalcitrant bulk along, it attempted to make one last foray to the side, scouring the margins of the alley. But then it was in the clear, heading for its home stretch into my garden.

Just then, a woman walking her dog on a leash came from the other direction. My renter and the woman recognized they were on kindred errands. As they passed each other, my renter cheerily observed, “You walk yours, and I’ll walk mine.” And that’s probably about as good a motto for life as I’ve heard.