Sunday, May 25, 2014

Opposite People: A Cure for American Psychosis



Recently I’ve been feeling patriotic, which is strange. I've always disliked authority, always sided with the underdogs. Patriotism always seemed a far too obvious choice. Plus, in the United States, it seems irrevocably tied to an anti-intellectual, conservative worldview, which is not in line with my upbringing. Maybe I've spent too much time abroad.
The other day a Babe Ruth picture nearly brought me to tears. He’s sitting in the stands. The seats directly around him are empty and he’s dressed in a three-piece suit. A far cry from the Yankees Bambino that drank beer between innings and waddled out of the dugout only to hit 410 foot home runs, here is a quiet, concerned spectator. One leg rests over the other and his hands are folded in quiet respect on his knee. It's a picture of vulnerability: someone trying to witness and understand what bought him the seats he's sitting in, and the clothes, and the solitude. He looks so embarrassed you feel he really must love the game.
The same feeling grabbed me during an NBA post-game show. The white communications major deferring to the black analyst, the former player, the former food-stamp beneficiary. There was such ease in the exchange. Tell me your story, he seemed to say. It was a nod to history. Harmony. Two hosts.
Then it struck me again, this time as I watched the commercials during a Bulls game from 1986, Michael Jordan's rookie year.
Alka Seltzer. No matter what shape your stomach is in, when it gets out of shape, take Alka Seltzer. Better than any other antacid. Better than anything you can get without a prescription. Anything. Alka Seltzer. It’s the best.
And then a commercial which appeared to have been financed by the Arizona Department of Tourism.
When hay fever pollen invades your sinuses, brings runny nose and watery eyes, take Dristan. Dristan is like sending your sinuses to Arizona. Yes. Dristan is like sending your sinuses to Arizona. When pollen causes hay fever misery, don’t wish you could be in sunny, dry Arizona. Just remember: Dristan is like sending your sinuses to Arizona.
There was something refreshing about the language. It was bold, direct, not yet the post-commercial world where people try and make themselves appear to be everything, anything, but what they are. It was unequivocal, unashamed. It was so...American.
Even the McDonald's commercial was fascinating. Ronald McDonald wore a cheap red wig and ran around hugging kids. You could see the wrinkles under the face paint. It was just a man in a suit, selling burgers. He seemed genuinely happy to do it, which was a relief. What scares people about clowns is their humanness, not the makeup. The emotions being concealed. The falsity.
Because McDonald's isn't trying to sell me hamburgers anymore. They're trying to sell me a lifestyle in which I would eat hamburgers. Ronald is largely absent. If anything, he's a cartoon, sometimes a life-sized cardboard cutout waving goodbye in the restaurant by the door, pushed one more dimension toward abstraction. "Bye!"
I felt like I was beginning to see America for the first time, and I loved it. Were my true colors starting to show? Had I been living a lie? With all I've said in my life about being a liberal, what have I actually done? Sure I've complained, but I didn't vote for Obama, either time. I don't appear to be any more prejudiced than your average person, but I really may be much, much more. Maybe I'm an Opposite Person.
Opposite People have fears that are so overwhelming that they're forced to display the opposite. There are countless models: the ladies man that's afraid of intimacy, the libertarian that's actually uncomfortable with people being free, the hippie, a person who cares so crushingly about what people think of their appearance, they forgo it altogether, and replace it with a form. And of course, there's patriotic people, a group almost uniformly dissatisfied with their respective countries. They say things like, “I’m damn proud to be an American,” yet don't acknowledge the authority of the federal government. They benefit inordinately from government relief, but often, on ideological grounds, refuse to pay taxes. How does this happen? Is it the love of something that’s no longer there, something that never really was more than an idea, that turns people screwy? Why do we attack outward expressions of what we fear we are? It must be something about balance, equalizing some pressure to ensure we never do exactly what it is we want to do.
I've decided it's best, even for a moment, to embrace those things you have spent your life opposing. Basic self denial prevents us from becoming monsters, but maybe it also prevents us from realizing the small truths that exist on our dark sides. Performed too vigorously, self denial will turn you into an Opposite Person.
Some people take drugs to see the other side and I did my fair share of that, but for me, drugs turned out to be just like the commercials. So now I entertain the possibility that they’re right, all my opposites, and the world seems much more sane. What if trickle-down economics is actually the best way? Why don't I pull myself up by my bootstraps? I find myself traveling, but why? What else could I be, in the end, but American?


Saturday, May 24, 2014

IDs




Spring

The DMV is like an electric church. The windows are some sort of black plastic that is reflective from the outside. Everyone is faced in the same direction. Heads twitching and twittering in the pews. Or maybe it's like a hospital: Everyone is missing something. Everyone gets a number. Everyone is waiting for their number to be called.
There is a system that’s visible to customers, though they can’t make any sense of it. A red scoreboard displays the counter and customer numbers and a voice, not a human voice, but a computer generated noise that sounds female, reduces these numbers to a vague, tentative concept. Almost a question.
Now serving customer: Zero. Zero. Nine. At counter: Nine. Teen.
The number nine floats out and away without seeming to end. Nineteen is not a buoyant little iamb, bum BUM, but two separate, emotionless noises. Nine. Teen. Like a church bell: BUM BUM. No inflection, no terminus.
Jones thought a lot about numbers. He said they were holes where the light of God shines through.

Summer

DMVs, like airports, are places where diverse groups of people wait together after being questioned about their identities.

Now serving customer: Two. Six. Nine. At counter: Nine. Teen.

A man, appearing as if he’s just clawed out of a mudslide, walks toward the counter with a briefcase trembling in one hand.
This is Joseph Makowski.
Joseph is skeletal, cranial, very frail. He needs a replacement drivers license to see an eye doctor. He has no passport and no Social Security card. His family was emotionally distant and had ties to the Communist Party.
Looks like he was dressed by his mother for a class picture.
“How can I help you,” Todd asks.
Todd had a bow-cut. It made for the remainder of his body a mushroom-shaped pillar of shade that distilled his other boyish qualities: bushy eyebrows, uncorrupted blue eyes, and a thin mouth that instantly betrayed anything he felt or thought. He wore solid, primary-colored dress shirts with large, milky-white buttons made of plastic. They were uncomplicated, an extension of the face. When he asked: “How can I help you?” he wanted to know the answer. He was upset when people had wasted their time; when they lacked a document to get what they needed. Proof of birth. Proof of death.
“I need to see the doctor. An eye doctor,” Joseph said. He’d tried to get a new license, but he couldn’t pass the eye test.
“If it’s just to see a doctor, you can get a state ID. Do you drive?”
“I’ve driven for forty years.”
Todd noted the vision restriction on his previous license, 1F: side mirrors.  
“You’ll need to produce a piece of mail with your name on it and a Type 1 document: a passport, social security card, or a copy of your birth certificate.
“But I was born in Pittsburgh.”
“You can order a copy online.”
Joseph looked at Todd in bewilderment.
“Online?”
“Yes, online. It’s all electronic now.”
Like that, customer number: Two. Six. Nine. lowered his head and walked toward the black windows and out the black door.

Now serving customer: Zero. Zero. Two. At counter: Nine. Teen.

“How can I help you?”

Fall

In the fall, all the employees at the Glenbrook DMV are beset with definite ideas. Like Colombina who hides chicken feet between stacks of paper around her desk. And Evans the cashier who refuses to water the plants on his desk. There is nothing that makes it seem like they are not ex-cons. No sharp objects. Balding and losing his lower lip, Jones, a veteran in HR, was finally fired for wearing a Hawaiian shirt every day and lying about it.
“This isn’t a Hawaiian shirt,” he would say.
Jones had worked next to Todd for three years and usually confided in him that the office was hot. When they moved Todd from HR to reception Jones would walk to Todd’s desk covered in sweat and say, “Buddy, it’s hot in here.” The temperature is kept at a chilled and uncompromising 68.9. One could not say that 68 degrees is inhumane, but after being deprived of Todd’s enthusiastic listening skills, Jones had developed the habit of mimicking people.
One brisk fall day, Bob called Jones into his office. Bob was the boss. Bob came from a family with ample wealth. His choices had naturally carried him from minor successes to greater ones and lent to his character an aura of fatalism—the sort that did not provoke jealousy, but the faux feeling of prophecy one enjoys in re-watching a favorite movie. He was shy with women and feared that people did not trust him with their children. He had that skin disease that makes people white and black and splotchy at the same time. During the fall he looked yellow.
Jones sat down.
“Jones, I think you’re dangerous,” Bob said.
Jones leaned back in his seat and was quiet a long time. He put an open palm on the desk and made a little turkey out of sweat.
“Mr. Bob, I honestly think you’re dangerous,” he replied.
Bob looked through the blinds. “You’re fired.”
“But it’s Friday.”
“Sorry pal.”
“Sorry pal.”
It was Tuesday.

Winter

Todd enjoyed, most of all, the 16 year old kids coming with their parents to get drivers licenses. He also liked the near-universal smiles people wore after seeing the new pictures on their IDs. He didn’t have any definite ideas. That’s why Jones liked him.
He was not skeptical and had no sense of irony. He was good at his job. He had complete belief in people’s constructed versions of themselves and provided the solemness and respect their imagined authorities seemed to demand. It was Todd’s innocence that drove him toward older employees. They found encouragement in a young person that was also confused and embarrassed by the perplexities of modern life.
Todd ate lunch with Columbina and Radnitzer in the empty lunchroom. Most employees took lunch at one of the 15 or 20 restaurants that lined the busy road outside. Columbina, a first-generation Mexican immigrant, worked nights in an open-air market. She took whatever was going to be thrown away from the market and hid it in her desk. Sometimes there were half rotten pumpkins. There were always chicken feet. Feet are full of tendons. They make great soup. Radnitzer, a bespeckled raisin of a woman that outdated Bob, his predecessor, and the DMV regulation against decorating office spaces with personal items.
Todd provided Radnitzer and Columbina with a less-painful window from which to view the horrifying nature of the present world. They enjoyed watching Todd eat his healthy bagged lunches.
A typical lunch went like this:

“They only want hamburgers,” Columbina would say. “Hamburgers all day.”
“You can get three double hamburgers and a medium drink for four dollars from the dollar menu, but the meal costs five. It’s like an oversight,” Todd would say.
Columbina would smile. “He’s a bad boy! He tricks McDonald.”
“Four hamburgers?” Radnitzer would say, astonished. “You don’t buy four hamburgers do you?”
“No, but you can.”
“He eats four hamburgers,” Columbina would say, smiling and shaking her head. She was like an aunt with no children. She was enamored with benign naughtiness. It made her feel like she understood what it was to be a parent.
“I don’t! Yuck!” Todd would say.
Columbina would continue. “He eats the four hamburgers with his friends,” she would say.  
“I certainly hope not,” Radnitzer would say. But there was no way for her to know.  “If Charlie knew it was going to be like this for me he would have taken care of himself.”
Her affection came a heavy dose of despair. Then Columbina’s voice would change.
“Mr. Rad died just for the hamburgers,” she would say.
And Mrs. Radnitzer would say: “Please be careful.”
And Todd would say: “I promise I will.”
All lunches ended with a dramatic mood swing: Columbina’s playfulness replaced by a quieted awe at the depth of North Americans’ struggles and Todd doing anything to cheer Radnitzer up. He did not like to see such an old, lonely woman feeling depressed.
Usually he promised something. One thing he’d promised many times was that he would stop talking to Jones.
Then on a Tuesday that fall Jones had been fired and replaced by Rick.

Spring

An upright 28 year old of Irish stock with black hair and a thin face, Rick groomed himself and wore bright, expensive clothing. It didn’t come off as contrived. He understood that good people wanted good things to come to others.
Rick liked to be happy, so he was. It was not linear in that way for Rick, but it was that way.He was of the most obvious elite: a willful attractive person with muted emotions. He did not judge people who lived darker, more nuanced lives. They simply confused him.

Evans and Jericho were the youngest people in the office after Todd.  Short of talking to him, they found his presence a relief. Evans was a cashier that wanted to be a writer, like Tom Clancy. Jericho took ID pictures. He wanted to move to New York and occupy a vague, high-paying position on Wall Street. As long as Todd was there, they both felt like they still had time.
Then Rick showed up. He carried himself the way they imagined they would carry themselves if they hadn’t worked in the DMV. He was what they imagined themselves being in ten years.
The day he’d arrived, Jericho and Evans gravitated toward each other. Jericho found Evans’ neurotic sarcasm reassuring. Evans was on a roll.
He was talking to Jericho about the various depths of the Great Lakes when Todd and Rick approached his desk. “There’s a lake in Siberia that’s over 5,000 feet deep,” Evans was saying. “Superior doesn’t even crack the top 30.”  
“Sorry to interrupt,” Todd said, bowing with deep respect. “This is Mr. Surestaat.”
Jericho stood confidently behind Evans, looking bemused.
“Call me Rick,” Rick said. “I’m new in human resources.”
“You are human resources!” Todd cried, incorrectly repeating something Jones had often said: “I am human. Resources.”
Rick pointed at the plants behind Evans.
“Are those your plants?”
Evans half turned. The plants were dead. The pots were full of dead leaves.
Jericho blushed, feeling that he may have backed the wrong horse. He edged away from Evans, a slight but meaningful lean, like Judas in Michelangelo's Last Supper.
Two months earlier, Evans had realized that the DMV lacked a sense of hope and life. He decided to bring in plants to put around his desk. He would downplay it, pretending it was an easy, obvious thing to do. It would illustrate to his coworkers that it was them, in fact, that were not enjoying their lives. It would say: There’s a problem here. Now it’s yours.
He’d walked in the front doors with three plants, detached, hovering over himself, imagining the office around him: Todd enthusiastically nodding his head, Bob twitching in his office, eyes inches from the blinds, performing a professional reappraisa, and Gabriella, the spectacularly blonde Italian, was leaning over, asking Radnitzer “Who is that?” in a hushed voice. And Radnitzer was saying: “Name of Evans. An old fashioned type. Like my husband’s Navy portrait on the mantle. Quiet. With a man like that a woman doesn’t have to worry about being taken care of.”
Reaching his desk, barely able to keep himself from shouting something moronic to begin the orgy of recognition, he’d set the plants down as carelessly as he could manage and leapt into what he imagined looked like work, capitalizing on the spotlight he imagined was now focused squarely on him.
But it was not that way. He had underestimated people, in general.
His coworkers would not follow his example. Out of spite they resisted the urge to forge a close and lasting relationship with him. What was the saying? “The first reaction to all revolutionary ideas is fear.”
Weeks passed. He’s searched their faces, feeling his own existence, drooping, becoming yellow. Soon the plants had become a painful reminder, like bleeding gums, of a failure he could not bring himself to acknowledge. Watering the plants would surely signal some weakness on his part. If dead was the way they liked it, dead was what they were going to get.
Now here was Rick, whose sharp dress and easy smile served as another unwelcome reminder. Evans studied his face. Rick should just go back to the future, he decided.  Maybe they would be friends later.
“That one looks like it was a rubber tree plant,” Rick said cheerfully.
Evans nodded.
“Why don’t you water them?”
“I’m seeing how they respond to adversity.”
“There’s no way we can know what that means,” Todd quickly reasurred Rick. “Evans and Jericho are artists.”
Evans swiveled pensively in his chair as Rick walked away. He watched the material on Rick’s suit fold and unfold like an accordion. The pinstripes intersecting. Brought together for a moment before being pulled back apart.

Rick’s replacement arrived in March.

Summer

His name was Wayne.
Wayne was an HR specialist from the downtown department who was dodging a debt collector named Joseph Freewater who’d been hired by the Riverboat casino to find him. Wayne had requested a transfer to the Glenbrook department. Rick heard the news and headed downtown.
Wayne was a gambler.
For March Madness Wayne started an office pool. He pooled all the money. For the first time at the DMV employees were talking to each other over the tops of their cubicles. It was a lot of fun. Bob watched from his office. Wayne made him fill out a bracket. Todd filled out a bracket too.
Mrs. Radnitzer commented that Carnegie Mellon won the NCAA National Championship when her husband was a student there, although in those days it had just been Carnegie University. Mellon was a women’s college at that time.

He was always thinking up ideas for office pools. He thought of other matters, the lower-order concerns like eating and bathing that all humans must entertain in order to tolerate the privilege of consciousness, only in short respites.
He talked about gambling all the time—even on first dates. “You can even smoke inside the Indian casinos,” he would say.
Wayne never learned any of their names. In October he looked at Todd for the first time.
“You don’t wear glasses,” Wayne said to Todd.
“No, do you?”
Wayne’s face fogged over and his eyes dribbled out the window. “I’m hungry,” he said.

People worried about Wayne.

Fall

One day, a man in a grey dress wearing a grey wig and red-tinted aviator sunglasses arrived and sat in the waiting area. The wigged man tried whispering something to Todd on the way out, but he was being handcuffed and Todd couldn’t hear him.
Todd knew it was Jones, but he played along, not sure of what would happen next.
As the police lowered Jones into the police cruiser, a gust of wind blew the front door open. A bird landed in the entryway and Jones shouted something out the cruiser window. There was the rattle of cartwheeling leaves.
Todd saw these things all at once. His bowl-cut went vertical and he screamed, "Fall has a welcome sensation!”
The bird cocked its head.
Bob was watching from his office window, hoping the winged little creature wouldn’t get stuck in the office. It was hopping along the open doorway in the curious manner animals of flight sometimes reject their unique gift. Then door was slowly pulled shut by the opposite end of the same force that blew it open. Todd screamed and lowered his head darkly as the bird careened away on a 45-degree angle. He felt he'd just lost something precious and vital, but couldn't figure out what it was.
Then the moment snapped shut. Bob closed the blinds. Columbina reshuffled some papers over her chicken's feet.

It was winter again.

Winter

It was almost November when Columbina walked in on Wayne bathing in the women’s bathroom. He suggested to her that Grand Cahokia was better than Pottawatomie and put a handful of soap in his pubic hair. Bob didn't fire him, but by December he was invisible; in January pencils on his desk sat like trees in snow.

Then it was spring.

Sunday, May 11, 2014

Why I Love Mountains: Part III


a mountain has an anatomy.

there is the neck, where the low-hanging clouds that bring the rain pass into the stunted trees. then the rain rushes down for the bottom, leeching into the soil before getting there. then mist that comes up from the ground blows between the trees.

there is the belly, where rocks that have fallen and been broken are collected and cleaned on the banks of the river in the valley, and higher up they are round and unbroken and covered in moss. still higher, where there is the humidity, the game trails skirt along the river, over the bent necks of plants, and through the packed dirt, sometimes crossing a long, flat section of rock where the tracks of the animals are dried by the sun until the next rain washes them away.

the heart of the mountain is nearly indistinguishable from the gut. the heart is where you get the feeling you came for, where you feel a communion with, and where you see the traces of everything that is hiding from you. usually it's by the river, or when suddenly the weather changes and the whole forest moves. the idea is to stop and find what's escaping you, but most people assume the sensation will grow the higher they go, and they keep going up.

the machinations of the mind can lead a person nearly anywhere, and anywhere is very far from the true desire of the heart.

every mountain has a highest point, and this, to take the metaphor to its natural extent, is the head. as you approach the head, the very earth narrows beneath your feet, depriving you of the opportunity for missteps. the world tapers until the margin between success and failure is as narrow as a single step. it is an overwhelming place. it is a human place. i have often found a feeling of emptiness atop a mountain, because it is not what i really wanted it to be.

there is the view, but with the view comes the knowledge of still more beautiful places left to climb, many of them very distant, and all of them, for the moment, unreachable. it is only the mind that could turn a success into the evidence for a new-found failure, but it does.

like the hands gathered around the planchette of a Ouija board, we tend to become unwitting participants in the ambitions of others. we trample past the places we really want to be, settling for the mean of our inclinations. sacrificing freedom for inertia, adventure for equanimity; someone whose lure is more mysterious for something that's easier to explain.

Friday, May 9, 2014

Migration

I hate dull metals too much
for making children.

Seems absurd in winter
to think about children.

The snow melts.
It looks like fall to you. In the little pictures I send

I’m creaking away from this house,
towards you and toothlessness,

following stray dogs like a bear
that can’t stay or shake.

They look at me like I’m crazy
and wonder if I’m coming back.

If I arrive,
will you be kind?

And tell me what your mouth has been doing
so far from my ear.