silent underbelly

South by Southwest draws to a close tonight. despite a reported 10% drop in badge sales, the 24 hour cafe i cook for was as busy as any previous SXSW. i was busy cooking obscene amounts of carb heavy foods tuesday through saturday. i can't complain though. i'm glad to be employed. i am  glad to have picked up a set of skills that can earn me a living.

not that i am some kind of master cook. i spend most of my days cooking bulk amounts of soup and various sauces. i make a first class pollenta (with herbs) and really good baked mac & cheese. i can say that most of the food i make seems to go away. someone is eating it. i also do a lot of purchasing of supplies, spending thousands of dollars of someone else's money every week without squandering to much.

 the skills i am actually referring to might have less to do with the finished product and more to do with such qualities as being able to stay on my feet for up to nine hours without complaining (too much), or being able to work at a hot stove all day without setting myself or the kitchen on fire. i spend all day wielding a ten inch piece of razor sharp steel (this is a literal description. if your knife won't fling hair off your arm, sharpen it!) without cutting myself more than two or three times a year.

it is also a matter of pride with me that i have called in sick twice in sixteen years. i was given a week off when my dad died. every other shift i have been absent for was covered in advance. i have an annoying habit of showing up and doing my job to the best of my abilities.

i am not some kind of iron jawed super cook. i am driven as much by insecurity as anything else. for a variety of headache inducing reasons, i still feel like i am proving myself almost every day i work. i would be devastated if anyone ever accused me of being a slacker, or of not pulling my weight.

once i get over being devastated, though, god help anyone saying that about me.

**********

i am currently reading a book called You Can't Win by a man named jack black-not to be confused with the comedic actor. this book was written in 1926.- the book is blacks criminal autobiography, detailing his progression from youthful tramp to sneak thief to house burglar to safe cracker, and on through hard jail time before reforming himself in middle age.

this book was a childhood favorite of william s. burroughs, who was fascinated by this unveiling of the late nineteenth century american criminal underbelly. the book is overflowing with detailed descriptions of thieves and fences, pimps and prostitutes, corrupt cops and shyster lawyers, opium smokers and morphine addicts. burroughs freely admitted to appropriating characters and even whole passages from this book for one of his last novels, The Place of Dead Roads.

early in the book, the author leaves kansas city sometime around 1889 and takes to the road. he falls in with a group of kindly tramps who give him pointers on how to ride the rails and the various scams he can pull to get food and money. one of these involves handing a stranger a card with words to the effect of " hello. i am deaf and mute. i have had all my money stole. i need money for train fare to Great Falls, Mont. i have not ate for days."

black asks a tramp what he would do if he ran into an actual deaf person who exposed him as a fake. the tramps reply: "why, i would do what anyone does when they're caught doing something wrong. i'd cuss the hell out of him."

********

South by Southwest kicked in on tuesday. my shift was long and left me exhausted and somewhat irritable. i was riding the bus home and listening to my ipod when a man and woman boarded. from where i was at the back of the bus, i could see that they were both dressed a little odd, sort of like gypsies with lots of scarves and bandanas. they stood out also because they were both somewhat large- i'm 6'2 and weigh around 230 pounds. they were both, the woman included, about my size. they sat across the aisle from me.

the woman leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder. i looked up and slid my headphones off. she shoved a laminated piece of notebook paper in my hand. in magic marker it read "i am a deaf person and i am hungry..." i handed it back and shook my head.

i feel like i have to defend myself here. first, the only cash on me was a twenty, and i needed it. after almost two decades in austin, i have seen plenty of panhandlers. these people just didn't fit the profile. their clothes, odd as they may have been, were clean. these people did not smell bad. i mentioned their size. sorry, but these folks weren't missing any meals. more significant to me, i ride the same bus twice a day five days a week. i had never seen these people before ( and i didn't see them the rest of the week). i believe they were drifting through. were they really deaf? i don't know. if they were, i feel sorry that they have to deal with this, but i still didn't have any money for them. and most deaf people learn to get by without accosting strangers on the bus.

the bus stopped at an upscale shopping center built around a Central Market grocery store.

the man and woman rose to get off, the woman first. as they were moving down the aisle, the man kept turning around and glaring at me. i stared straight ahead and tried to ignore him.

the bus driver decided to keep the bus stopped for a couple of minutes to keep from getting ahead of schedule. the man walked around to my window. he pointed at me, then made the "whatchew got man?" gangbanger gesture of slapping his chest with both hands and then spreading his arms wide. he repeated this, then stepped back and mimicked shooting me with a pistol. not every work day ends with a death threat.

i did not ask for this. i probably should have just ignored him, but.....

as it was, all i could think to do was to meet his i-kill-you glare and give him by biggest, goofiest, "aww shucks" grin. this seemed to confuse him. as the bus finally drove away, i shook my head laughing and turned away. i glanced up and saw him as a diminishing figure standing by the curb, still shooting at the bus.

i could wish all kinds of horrible fates upon this man, fantasize about how i should have stood up to him, kicked his ass. but the sad truth is that, deaf or not, he has let himself get to such a bad place that punishing him couldn't change anything. in a weird way, i found myself hoping that he and his lady friend got what they wanted without any more ugliness.

 

the next day, i told this story at work. my sarcastic friend doug said that it sounded like i was a victim of a mime drive-by.

slings and arrows

this post brings me back in to the real world for a little while. the last four posts have been chapters of a science fiction story about a dystopian, near future austin. the story deals with the nature of reality and perception. since i am also trying to have a little fun writing this, you can be guaranteed that future installments will touch on my favorite subjects : drugs, guns zombies, religion, firearms, extraterrestrials, conspiracy theories, and mental hygiene. 

*********

speaking of drugs...

saturday morning brunch was in full swing at the cafe i work at. people were waiting 30+ minutes for a table. cooks are yelling, waiters are running, etc.. a phone call comes in for the manager. 

as related to me:

"this the manager?"

"yeah"

"i thought you might want to know, the guy who cleans your carpets? he's a drug addict. he's all strung out on drugs."

manager: "and you want me to .... ?"

"i just thought you would want to know."

manager: "well, we're kind of busy here dude. later."

there's a couple of problems with this. first, he is a carpet cleaner, not a commercial airline pilot. who cares what he does as long as the carpets are clean? second, of all places, you call a 24 hour diner in austin, tx expecting people to be shocked by substance abuse? you must be high.

if the manager had not been so busy, he would probably have asked the anonymous caller if he thought the guy might be holding.

******

one of the cooks i work with, lets call him jim, told me this story.

he had been off work and partying pretty hard for a couple of days. he was planning to spend a quiet friday night at home, trying not to be hungover and sick for the next mornings shift. suddenly, a large group of his friends showed up and insisted he get cleaned up and come with them. they had something fun planned.

he was a little shaky and kind of out of it, but he couldn't help but notice that his friends were dressed oddly. some of the guys were wearing cheap suits. one young lady was " decked out like that dole pineapple chick."

they drove to a racetrack a few miles outside of town, but it wasn't racing that was going on this friday night. it was lucha libre, masked mexican wrestling.

 evidently, a touring company of wrestlers had rented this old racetrack with it's decrepit wooden bleachers ( i saw Survival Research Laboratories there in '96 or '97) for a no holds barred extravaganza, masked heros and villains throwing each other from one end of the ring to the other in ritualized combat.

since lucha libre doesn't usually come to central texas, the event was packed. mexican families had travelled who knows how far to root for their favorites and hiss at the bad guys. "we were probably the only white people there."

they had arrived in two car loads. as jim stood in the gravel parking lot trying to get his bearings, two of his friends began pulling grocery sacks out of car trunks. everybody had to carry at least two bags. jim assumed that his friends had loaded up on beer and snacks.

when they finally found a spot large enough for all of them near the top of the bleachers, jim found out what the bags really contained: about a shelves worth of H.E.B. corn tortillas.

jim was told that it was lucha libre tradition to throw corn tortillas at villain wrestlers. to jim, this made as much sense as anything else. when the first match began, jim got in to the spirit of things and began tossing tortillas down the bleachers. it didn't occur to him until later that he and his friends seemed to be the only ones doing this.

at first people were laughing. then they were not laughing. then they were shouting.

things reached critical mass when jim decided to see how far he could hurl an entire package of corn tortillas. "i hit this old lady right in the face. she screamed, and everyone around her stood up."

before jim and his friends could get what they had coming to them, an armed security guard told them that they were about to start a riot and would now be leaving. now.

the only other thing jim really remembers from that night is hearing the words "pinche gringo" over and over.

jim is actually a very cool guy, but i fault him for accepting dubious instructions in a culturally unfamiliar environment. he may be proof that god does, indeed, watch out for fools and drunkards.

the story reminded me of a mentally unbalanced friend of mine from high school. his mother was a scientologist with a murky past as a "showgirl". she was also canadian. 

she liked me because her son was usually a complete jerk to her, whereas i had been raised to be respectful of my elders. she liked to tell me stories about her past because, unlike her son, i would listen politely.

to hear her tell it, her and her first husband had been some kind of hippy free spirits during the seventies. their favorite thing to do was to follow gordon lightfoot all over canada and the northeastern u.s., much like the deadheads that used to follow the grateful dead. they followed him on tour from town to town, seeing every show they possibly could.

to distinguish themselves from your everyday gordon lightfoot fans, they came up with a novel way of expressing their affection: they threw turquoise jewelry onstage. i asked, but she had no idea how they came up with this.

mr. lightfoot was the recipient of many airborne bracelets, rings, and necklaces, all with lovely polished blue stones until a fateful evening when a stage hand saw them in the act. during intermission, the manager of the club invited them backstage to meet the man himself.

this should have been the high point of their lives, instead an unsmiling gordon lightfoot asked them to please, please stop throwing things at him.

i can imagine canadas finest songsmith explaining patiently that it was hard enough to remember all the words to "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" without having to dodge stone jewelry, eh?

that's all for now. think twice before throwing things.