Monday, November 24, 2014

Making a Snowball

 Making a Snowball

            Howling like an unseen wolf, the wind makes its presence known, pawing at the suddenly insufficient layers of clothing, while the snowflakes paradoxically caress like the lover who is no longer there. A single tear bravely tracks its way down the stubble covered cheek and onto the brown leather jacket, congealing into just another snowflake. “Can the heart freeze like my stupid toes are starting to?” the lone figure asks himself, adding “And can my inner dialogue get any more dramatic?” Still, drama aside, it’s been a rough, raw kind of day. Rough enough that the frozen feet that the aforementioned frozen toes are attached to have walked themselves to the span of Adams Street that becomes a bridge across Interstate 180. The whir of the cars passing underneath is like steel hummingbirds while the occasional truck rumbles and shakes the asphalt and chain link as the tread of giants might. “This” he sighs, “Is a freakin’ stupid idea” and climbs down from the fence that some engineer thought was proof against drunks and jumpers. The last swig of Jack Daniels (Old #7 Tennessee Whiskey, Lem Motlow proprietor) disappears as does the bottle (into some bushes). Then, as the traffic thins and the silence grows, he bends over, squatting in the snow and begins to make a snowball. At least he knows how to do that.
            He remembers a day, decades past. running around with his brothers and sisters, ecstatic that school was cancelled, the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception having deemed the day too raw even for those hardened by rulers across knuckles; he’s bent over, squatting in the snow, muttering under his breath. “Why don’t I know how to make a stupid snowball?” he whines, the double layers of wool that wrap his feet like Brill-O pads disguised cleverly as socks keeping his feet as warm as Mom intended. He remembers getting dressed, each layer of clothes like the armor of some medieval knight, specially fitted for Arctic adventures. The green knit cap that Aunt Sissy made him for Christmas beginning to absorb some of the sweat earned by chasing his brother Mike around the yard. And suddenly there’s Dad, just home from work, tucking his service revolver into the garage, ready to join in. “So son, let’s make some snowballs” Dad growls, not letting on that he knows that his boy doesn’t have the slightest idea how to construct this simplest of snow creations.
            His dad was a city cop. Rosedale was a cop neighborhood. The city had a rule then that a cop had to live within city limits, so the neighborhoods on the border of the city, as far from the dirty, nasty center as possible and still with the city, were cop neighborhoods. Every booth at the church bazaar was manned by a guy with a gun, school kids shared the bus ride to school with men who read newspapers and carried brown bag lunches but had guns strapped to their ankles. That was his dad. He was also the guy who umpired Little League and coached his kids’ hockey team and went to church every day. His dad spent three hours a day, an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and a half in the evening commuting by bus and train. That was his dad. He was also the guy who made a point of putting his gun and badge away when he got home to spend time with his five kids.
            Even though there’s a pack of kids running around, siblings and cousins and neighbors and school pals, it’s as if there’s no one else there but father and son. Crunching snow echoes as Dad walks across the yard and picks up a handful of snow and motions for his son to do the same. Having recently graduated from colorful, hard to lose in the snow mittens, to gloves, fleece on the inside, suede on the outside, and leather on the palms, the boy holds the loosely cohering snow in his cupped hands and following along with Dad, slowly and methodically applies pressure to the not wet enough snow, pushing and pressing, smoothing and molding until Dad has a perfect ivory sphere and the boy has a lumpy mass that resembles a rogue asteroid. “Take your gloves off son” he is instructed. And miming the apparent expert motions, he uses the heat from his bare hands to slightly melt the crust of his little globe, working magic that he never thought he could until he too had a perfect ivory sphere. “Dad, I did it!” he yelled, a little embarrassed at what he thought was a girlish squeak to his voice. “It’s perfect”. Dad chuckled, “So now we need to make a hundred more so we can ambush your Uncle Richie and your cousins!”     
            Memory skipped forwards a generation to a day when he was the Dad and it was his kids running around the yard, off from school. Except that he didn’t feel like a dad, not like ‘Dad” was a dad. In a thousand ways he felt that he didn’t measure up, he didn’t have a job that defined him like his father’s did; he didn’t have the seemingly effortless ability to do the right thing, but today he was going to try.
            “The perfect ivory sphere, that’s what grandpa’s snowballs looked like” he found himself reminiscing to his son. “So, what do your snowballs look like Dad?” smirked the son. “Look, wise guy, you take those foo-foo mittens off and get some gloves on if you’re going to make snowballs”.
            Not surprisingly, his son doesn’t need as much instruction as he did at that age, and it certainly helps that the snow is wetter and easier to pack than that day when the nuns cancelled classes so that it requires very little pressure to shape the crystalline whiteness into those ivory spheres. An hour later, before each of them, a pyramid of ivory spheres, or maybe rogue asteroids, but each one hand crafted and ready to leave off being admired and put into action. The basketball hoop stood at the end of the driveway, a likely target, the garage door was also very inviting, but in the end, snowballs are meant to be thrown by their makers at other makers of snowballs. The first snowball hit him square in the face, the icy sting as stunning as the blow itself, exacerbated by the sudden fogginess that accompanies loss of glasses by the nearsighted. But revenge is cold, cold as a snowball. After an hour all the son can say to him is “Perfect ivory spheres Dad; perfect ivory spheres”, laughing as he says it.
            “Memory seems to be dragging me to snowy days it seems” he thinks, as the sights and sounds of those two days, one as the son, the student of snowball-ology, and another as the father, the teacher, faded away. “Today, now today was not so fun filled”, floated to the top of his consciousness. He could see his children’s faces as they looked out the living room window, some angry, some sad, some defiant, all confused about what was happening. She stood in front of him, a cigarette between her fingers, darting like a wasp to her lips and back to her side, punctuating her sentences with it, doing everything but extinguishing it in his eye. While she stood almost a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, she seemed to tower over him, dominating, crushing with words and more. She invoked her God; she quoted from her Holy Book, her voice sing-songed like a televangelist and she intoned the list of his sins. He was cast out, cast out from their marriage and from his children. The fog from the cold and the cigarette smoke mingled together, like a veil separating him from all that he loved. He slunk away, got in his car and drove away, watching his life dwindle away in the rear view mirror.
            “Geez, how maudlin do I have to be before somebody just stamps ‘clichĂ©’ on my forehead” he says, fully back in the present, unfolding his six foot, 240 pound frame as he stood up, holding in his hand a perfect, ivory sphere. He leans through a ragged hole in the chain link fence where he had climbed earlier and, in lieu of his previous plan, he let the snowball make the leap, watching it fall, glinting in the streetlights, turning, turning, turning, that one spot that he hadn’t quite smoothed out indicating each revolution. Time seemed to slow as his creation grew closer to the surface, but finally it hit, flattening and expanding, shattering and dissolving and it was no more. “Better you than me, snowball” he croaked and began the long walk home.
            Despite the rubber soled, fleece lined boots and two pairs of socks; there is a fuzzy numbness where his feet ought to be. Aunt Sissy’s green knit cap has survived the decades and still keeps the heat in better than any other hat he’s ever owned. Giving the frost giants a heartfelt middle finger he walks across the street to the playground, to the snow drifted basketball court where he begins to make snowballs. The snow is drier than he’d like it, but the man whom he is now finds himself more apt than the boy he once was to apply sufficient pressure, smoothing out the grooves as he readies himself to hurl his creation at the backboard; and stops. Gingerly, handling the snowball like a FabergĂ© egg, he sets it down and begins another, and another, depleting the snow down to the dead brown grass as his arsenal grows larger and larger. He moves over to the children’s slide and swings, scooping up handfuls of snow as if mutually assured snowball destruction awaits any who defies him. “I can do this, I can do it; this is something that I can do” he chants. Sweat begins to pour down his neck from under the knit cap and begins to soak his shirt. Even his feet begin to feel warm. The furnace of his tenacity burns fierce.
He is about spent when with a “thump!” something hits him in the face, knocking off his glasses and causing a painful iciness to take up residence where his face should be. Before he can retrieve his glasses he hears the words “Perfect ivory sphere Dad, perfect ivory sphere” and knows that he still is “Dad”. His fingers clumsy due to the thick gloves he replaces his eyewear, the world shifting from smeared watercolor to digital photograph as he does so and sees the smirking face of his son. “You didn’t think I believed all that crap, did you Dad?” he said as he hefted another snowball. “You’re the best Dad in the world…even if you’re wearing that foo-foo hat”
             
           


The Hovel

The Hovel
Here I am; it’s Friday night, sitting in my new apartment, one which I will later dub “The Hovel”. I’ve got my clothes hung in the closet, my mattress on the floor (I couldn’t squeeze the box spring up the stairs so it didn’t make the cut) and my one plate, one spoon, one knife, one fork, a pot & a pan and a handful of ceramic mugs (and tea, I’ve always got to make sure that I have a supply of tea) stored in the kitchen cupboards where I’m pretty sure that I saw mouse droppings. The guy who lives in the Porsche repair shop next door yelled at me earlier for blocking his driveway with my late 80’s Cavalier station wagon that has rusted spots in a far greater proportion of total surface area than the white paint that hangs on precariously, while I unloaded my meager furnishings without any help from anyone other than the meth-dealing single mom who lived one flight of rickety stairs festooned with bare wires below me on the ground floor. Darren, my new landlord, gave me a discount on the rent so that I could buy cleaning supplies, but I hadn’t gotten around to cleaning the greasy dust that looks like one of the aliens from the first season of Star Trek: Voyager off the overhead fans, the unidentified motile brown stuff from the top of the stove, or the sentient mold from the bathroom. I open the door to the oven and quickly shut it, horrified by the scene within, vowing to never open it ever again.
“The Hovel” is located on the corner of 17th & N Streets in downtown Lincoln: twelve one-bedroom apartments on three floors; once a hotel for railroaders, possibly built when the golden spike was being driven and great herds of buffalo still darkened the plains. Lincoln Nebraska, home of the then-powerhouse Cornhuskers football team, Tree City USA, highest per capita gay population and highest percentage of police compared to total population. More homosexuals per square foot than San Francisco and more cops per wise guy than in New York. Or so they tell me. Or maybe it was on the “Welcome to Lincoln” sign. Next to the Porsche garage is BB&R pawn shop and behind my building is a parking lot that is used by the HMO across the street during the day and us hovel dwellers after sundown. Despite the dismal immediate surroundings, it’s a pretty good location…if your standards are somewhat negotiable. Russ’s Market grocery store is less than a mile away, and Klein’s Grocery is even closer if you don’t mind the smallness, lack of selection, and panhandlers, but they do sell the New York Times. A block and a half away the bars start sprouting. I’ve never counted, but there’re probably several dozen drinking establishments within walking distance; with the University of Nebraska about five blocks northwest, it probably isn’t enough. There’s also the public library, The Gourmet Grill - a gyro joint where the Iranian workers claim me as one of them, and a variety of other small restaurants all within a stone’s throw. Of course the State Capitol and the Governor’s Mansion are nearby if you want to hobnob with politicians. Or protest something. Or bribe somebody.
I’d lived in Lincoln at this point for just over twenty years. I spent six months in Kearney, and before that, six months in Sidney after moving to Nebraska from Queens New York, where I was born and had spent the first twenty two years and six weeks of my life, other than brief excursions to Ohio, New Jersey and a couple of trips to Washington D.C. I got talked into coming to Nebraska, and I’m still here due to inertia, or perhaps momentum; I’m not sure which is metaphorically correct in this case. Entropy definitely figures in.
It’s pretty quiet here in The Hovel, since I have no radio, no television, no CD or tape player and no one to talk to. I’ve got a bunch of my books, but they don’t make much noise. There’s some activity outside, from the gay bar across N Street and the constant drone of traffic on the main drag, O Street, a half block to the north. Considering my options, I briefly consider blowing my brains out. The problem with that idea is that I have no gun and have no idea where to get one at this hour. The idea itself, from my squalid corner, looks like it has some merit though. How about jumping off a highway overpass? They’ve got those things all over town. Surely I can jump off a high one, hedge my bets by doing it into oncoming traffic, but I still have enough of a vestige of good citizenship that I don’t want to land on the hood of some poor bastard who hasn’t had his life slide into a pool of crap in the last couple of months. How about sticking my head in the oven and turning on the gas? Hell no! I had made a vow not to open that thing ever again! As I thought up and rejected idea after idea, I fell asleep. One of these days I’ll get better at making a timely decision.
So I wake up the next morning. Apparently I didn’t kill myself. If I was dead surely I wouldn’t be able to smell the, shall we say, unique aroma of The Hovel. Okay, change of plans: I’ll not kill myself and do something about that smell. That’s enough of a plan for now.
Before getting moved in the previous night I had stopped by my part-time job and found out that they were closing down. I still had my full-time job, assistant store director in a local grocery store chain, but it would have been convenient to keep the income from that second job. Two years pastward from the events of this paragraph I sold my soul to the Devil for a dime and became a telemarketer. That’s right, I was the guy who, no matter what time you had dinner, called right as you sat down, the guy who was seemingly oblivious to your repeated ungrammatical assertion that you “didn’t want none”, the guy who apparently didn’t understand the meaning of the word “no”. I sold something called ASDC, which stood for Auto Savings Discount Club, but since it had nothing to do with autos, savings or discounts, and wasn’t a club, changed its name to American Savings Discount Club, (yeah, I know it makes little sense, but they thought that changing that one word solved the problem); but we just called it ASDC. We called people who for one reason or another couldn’t get a credit card, who had effectively killed their credit, and who had credit scores that were expressed in fractions. We called them and sold them “The Plan”. “The Plan” consisted of a “line of credit”. For a nominal fee of $180 ASDC members could draw on a line of credit, instant cash that they could “access at any time by calling the toll-free number”. All that they had to do was give us their social security number, their bank account number, and be recorded giving us permission to draw out the $180 from their checking or savings account. No way! No one would be stupid enough to do that! One would think not, but there were enough idiots out there that a couple of dozen of us made pretty good money selling this questionable scheme. We used to talk about the “ASDC Continuum”. On one end were the people who were too smart to ever buy anything over the phone in the first place, and certainly not this plan. You could hear it in their voices even before you identified yourself, they were skeptical, they were suspicious, and they were smart. On the other end of the continuum were the dolts who were incapable of understanding what you were talking about. They couldn’t have told you what was wrong with ASDC, but they also couldn’t follow what you were saying. You might have been offering to send them a shoebox full of $100 bills and they’d say ‘no’. The people who we sold to were right in the middle of the continuum; stupid enough to have ruined their credit, stupid enough to talk seriously to telemarketers, but smart enough to know what their checking account number was and to have a job of some sort. Okay, maybe not right in the middle; closer to the stupid side would be more accurate.
For two years and then some I labored on the phones peddling ASDC, sometimes also doing political polling or surveys (I helped elect Jon Corzine of New Jersey to the US Senate), but ASDC was our bread and butter, at which I was extremely good at selling to the cerebrally deficient and congenitally desperate. During training they taught us that we were to stick strictly to the script. If someone offered an objection we were to reply using a list of predetermined answers. We were to talk to whoever answered the phone, whether it was our target or not, and try to sell them ASDC. There were several problems with that last part. No matter how carefully you explained that you understood that Mr. John Smith, the person that you asked for, was not home, and that you were now making this incredible offer to Mrs. Smith, or John’s brother Ray, or whoever, and that you were pitching directly to them and not merely leaving a message for Mr. John Smith, they would inevitably say, at the end of the long and complicated spiel, “John’s not home”, so I stopped trying to sell to secondary residents. I stopped pushing for the sale to belligerent people and those who were plainly stringing me along. This meant that I was breaking the rules; it also meant that since I was eliminating a large percentage of almost-guaranteed rejections without taking time to talk to them, my sales per hour went up and I was making a large amount of bonus money, despite only working part time. Every time they hired a new quality assurance monitor, I’d get written up for breaking the rules, until they figured out that I was making everyone a lot of money precisely because I was breaking the rules. Eventually they left me alone completely, and even stopped scheduling me, just letting me show up whenever I pleased.
It was a pretty good until some regulatory agency whose initials I forget shut down ASDC, and since ASDC was our biggest client, we were shut down too, just when I could really use the money. Crap.
So it’s back to The Hovel, since it’s a Saturday and I’m unlikely to find a job on the weekend. I still have to clean this place and it still smells pretty bad. Even though The Hovel was, well, a hovel, there were always an interesting cast of characters. Right across the hall was Denis the meat cutter, seemingly the only other person in the building who had a job of any kind. Dennis always had some down-on-his-luck guy sleeping on his floor, but he often was one of the few people who seemed reasonably sane. Although I suppose that there are different ways that you can define “sane”. After all, he was living in The Hovel too. In the first floor front apartment was Ba Nguyen Bao, a guy who had spent a lot of time in Vietnamese prisons and was somewhat nuts. Ba could often be found walking up and down 27th Street shouting at passers-by in a mixture of Vietnamese and English, or buying drinks for people with a large wad of bills (I never inquired about their source). One time he fell asleep and left some food cooking on the stove; it caught fire, coming close to burning the building down. Several of us were finally able to wake him up after banging on his door and windows for fifteen minutes. There was Dana, the gay born-again Christian, who moved in after the meth-dealing woman downstairs moved out, and owned two big pit bulls. His church’s position on homosexuality was that it was a sin, but he still felt gay, so his was a very confusing life. He lived there until one of his dogs ate a small dog in the neighborhood and they went on the lam from the Humane Society. On the third floor were a father & son who didn’t seem to have any visible means of support. The son would come down to my apartment to borrow my phone, then leave messages that he could be reached at my number. When they moved out two guys who owned guitars & drums moved in; they played loud music and jumped out of the windows into the alley. From the second floor. One day I came home to find them handcuffed and being led away by the Lincoln Police Department, the pieces of their meth lab laid out on a table in the parking lot. And who can forget the woman who stopped by to “borrow a cup of Jack Daniels”.
I lived in The Hovel for about two years. Most people were horrified by my living conditions. But it was cheap, it was close to the bars, and I was too lazy to move. What motivated me to move stemmed from the water being cut off. I came home late on Friday night, in dire need of a shower, and found that I had no water. The next morning I bathed and shaved using some bottled water that I had in the fridge. After returning home from work the next day, and finding that the water was working, I went about my business, doing laundry, showering, using the toilet, and making tea. After about 45 minutes I heard a horrific screaming from one of the downstairs apartments, followed by its inhabitant, Leroy, running into the hall with murder in his eyes. Apparently the reason that we had no water was that a water main had cracked and every time someone flushed the toilet or the washing machine drained, it flowed into Leroy’s apartment, geysering soap and human waste up through his toilet. I can see why he’d be upset. Everyone in the building had been cautioned to not flush the toilets, not use the washing machine, and use water sparingly, but since I was one of the few who actually worked, “everyone” didn’t include me. I persuaded Leroy to refrain from killing me and got the classifieds and started looking for an apartment. My landlord couldn't believe that I’d want to move.