Jack Frost

It’s 11 AM and it’s negative six degrees outside on December 16. Inside, Jack Frost has left his mark on all the windowpanes and serves as a symbolic reminder that some days it’s simply too cold to adhere to your own rules and jump outside for a smoke (or at least open a window, FGS). We’ll have plenty of atoning to do later, but for now no one is here.

--Flashback…Second grade, Mrs. Reade writing any words kids need help spelling on the board during her dreaded impromptu writing assignments. Even at seven and eight my fellow kids gave a collective snort-snuff-snicker when I put up my hand and asked or the correct spelling of ‘no one.’—

Snow, thinly, covers the storybook-triangle roofs of the neighborhood houses, duplexes and fourplexes and blends almost imperceptibly with the off-white of the smooth overcast wherever the slopes can break free of the spindly brown oak branches that hem in this low-rise jam. Inside, too, there’s monotony: no sooner has CNN given it back to the smart young ambiguously-raced anchorwoman than (after a few obligatory words) the even smarter guys behind the camera shuffle off to an hours-old loop of the president-elect’s newsconference on the education-department-to-be or whatever. Good speech, the talking heads bleat, and good ed-sec pick besides: one more competent Chicagoan on the team.

Sometime during the past week, without fanfare, some of these same guys have made the considerably more consequential decision to strip down the channel’s on-screen presentation. The newsbar at the bottom has shrunk to make room for no-nonsense block-letter ledes for the anchorperson’s audio—a sign of the times, a new look for the Obama era perhaps? Ah, but what would Fox have to say about it? The weatherman relates the havoc wreaked across the country by the unseasonable & unreasonable cold. Do you—hot anchorchick or all-you-out-there or maybe both, it’s not totally clear—know that it snowed yesterday in Las Vegas, he asks, or that it’s nearly zero degrees Fahrenheit right now in Amarillo, Texas? Even he didn’t, not before he checked the computers this morning, lips pursed at the rim of his personal CNN mug, eyes narrowed dutifully. He could go on for forty-five minutes about all this crazy weather, he assures us. (Just make sure to keep your eyes down and your walk brisk and steady when you pass him in the parking lot.) But alas. Channeling the dour personalities behind the lens, Miss Congeniality gently reminds him that there’s other news to be had today, Amarillo be damned. He knows, he knows. He smiles thinly. He’s hurt. She returns the smirk at about seventy percent, her eyes dead. These two surely don’t make it past smile-and-nod when they pass in the Company’s polished corridors. Maybe they don’t even look up.

Who knows, though; maybe they slam in the bathroom a couple times a week and don’t want their significant others to find out. The cigarette opens up the bowels, but I don’t want to be alone so I grab a copy of Best American Non-Required Reading 2003 Edition, a collegiate re-gift if there ever was one, for the ordeal. It takes a while to find a story that looks good—drivel, drivel, okay, drivel—and by that time I’m almost done, but it’s a lazy day so I allow myself the luxury and draw it out. Nothing is happening today anyway. The clouds aren’t even moving. The weathermap is deep purple; people are taking it easy. It’s hard to see out the scrambled glass of the bathroom window, but every once in a while it’s clear that a car slides by erratically, skipping over the icy snow mixture the city hasn’t even bothered sanding or plowing. It’s too cold for that shit anyway.

By rights

Air Rights Garage—ten charming levels of suspended concrete.

York Street passes underneath, a several-lane one-way wide enough to accommodate fourteen metered spots, seven on each side. The Brutalists didn’t even care, did they—it was all about Function. Dunkin Donuts (nurse central); “Corner Pizza” (usually empty); “Sam’s Food Club” (a little busier); and some chiropractic and dental offices line either side of the street, literally supporting the garage. The little parcels each of these businesses sit on are way long and narrow, corridors with snaky food counters and two-by-ten table arrays and bathrooms way in the back. They have to be. CT-34 surrounds the garage, a six-lane divided highway with a concrete hulk for a median. Only by approaching the thing from the side, on York, and passing under its angular arches can you really appreciate its bulk. What a nightmare! Actual parking levels don’t start till you’re three stories up. Beneath them, in the bowels behind the back ends of the shops and offices (which float out into the gloom like shipsterns), are gigantic symmetrical caverns, empty except for rubble-strewn craters, dirt piles and the idle excavation equipment that occasionally roars to life to cart fill—a truly efficient use of land in this case—to the construction site a few blocks up the road. Between here and there are more median lots, more cars, more fences and more dirt. But the bulky square support structure rising up from the transplanted earth up the road looks suspiciously like it wants to form the basis for another garage, hopefully a bit shinier and handsomer this one. Why not? Crumbling old churches and boarded up brownstones with their sad punch-out windows line the outer edges of this strange thoroughfare, housing no one willing or able to say much about it. Air Rights was probably welcomed as a necessary evil when it was built, the pocket shops underneath offered at the altar of jobs here jobs now by the XYZ Hospital Area Development Corporation or some such. It’s a novel solution to a tricky problem—once you punch the highway through the densely-built historic core, what do you do with all that marginal extra land you’ve debased and devalued? Or maybe it was decided in reverse: it’s 1964, everyone’s driving everywhere all the sudden, and the growing teaching hospital immediately to the west of the new abomination of a surface street they’re planning to punch through a declining black neighborhood to accommodate this strange new behavior needs somewhere to put all those goddamn vehicles converging here every day. The urban-planning equivalent of situational hitting, in other words.

For all?

About thirty minutes into And Justice For All, a thirtysomething Al Pacino meanders halfway across his smart Baltimore (!) apartment’s kitchen to light a candle on the Formica island at which he and his new love interest will be sitting down to a nice Chinese takeout meal. Why not? It’s 1979 and the newly-minted professional chicks who came of age in the late 1960s are totally cool with that shit as long as their cocky, well-paid suitors devote sufficient time and effort to post-meal cunnilingus.

But let’s be real for a minute: a product of a strange historical moment though it may be, this film is way too earnest for its own good. Pre-Scarface, able-to-control-the-tone-and-volume-of-my-voice A.P. reads through his d-r-a-m-a-t-i-c lines with the gleeful self-importance of a do-gooder elitist liberal torn straight out of a right-wing-stereotype sketchbook. Jeffrey Tambor’s drunken-rage scene (was he faking intoxication? tough to say, but drunk or not he could have been more convincing) does provide some balance, a token nod to those who would argue that it’s not just the folks in power who are rotten, that there are some legitimate examples of low life criminal scum out there who deserve to be behind bars, etc., but that subplot feels obligatory, much more forced-out than the rest.

The film’s real focus is of course the corrupting pull of power. Forsythe’s character is a caricature with not an ounce of decency or humanity in his body, a walking advertisement for judicial reform. He’s the worst and most ridiculous, but many of the film’s other major characters are pretty bad too, either foils or caricatures themselves. There’s the ‘good’ judge who understands—has for some time, yet continues to show up for work each day for some reason—the hopelessness of it all and makes it his mission to sensitize idealistic young lawyers to the fact when he’s not contemplating suicide; the poor-bastard kid stuck in iron-barred purgatory, a victim of mistaken identity, whose condition continues to deteriorate as the movie progresses; Craig T. Nelson’s ‘dark-side’ prosecutor who’s allowed his morals to ship out with the tide; even Pacino’s demented grandfather, a parody of a nice old man, whose refusal to admit his grandson had finally begun practicing law would be endearing were it not so contrived. Did these people ever exist? Maybe, in some form. Were they as fun to share Chinese takeout or a suicidal experimental-helicopter ride over B-Harbor with? Probably not. And they’re gone now, way gonner than the old-school fuck-him-Scotty-if-he-were-a-better-boxer-he'd-still-be-alive one-dimmer Tarantino somehow wrenched from Bruce Willis' smug heart fifteen years later. Some unsolicited advice: if you want to your film's characters to stand the test of time, don't leave them out to twist in the political winds. God's sake, Jewison put All out two years before Reagan began systematically erasing from public life every sensibility he must have stood for. Your ciphers can be sympathetic--just don't make them patsies.

It's the drugs

Snapshots. What else to call them? It’s not a perfect descriptor but I wouldn’t trust myself to find one of those. Little snippets of lives they are that flit into ours like a dozen sequential film frames jumping out of the void at widely spaced intervals, recovered bits of lost reels stuck in between the scenebreaks of our own masterworks. Perspective: the lost frames (the in-betweens) inform our own reels, impart meaning. They’re file photographs stacked one upon the other, each separated by a little card with some data and notes (perspective all its own) and yet they’re more than that, too. They’re action scenes breaking up the relentless (necessary? God knows) expositionary tracts we already know by heart. We’ll leave the party and the next scene will start and start and start again, mocking the fickle emotion with constancy. We’ll go home and the exposition will resume—as if it had stopped—and we’ll continue the work we continued in the last scene.

But here’s to hoping we’ll process, too. The snapshots, the loose bursts of frames that break up the sequences of our flattin’ days, might just (God willing) find ways to sneak their way back in. Perhaps we’ll see them coming and going in our mind(s), leaving open the door for other snapshots, loose frames, whole sequences even. Perhaps they’ll stick. Estelle developing into a confident, attractive young woman with a tasteful, unpretentious fashion sense and a mature, liberal attitude vis-à-vis soft drug use. Carson Sorenson’s sister subjugating the gracelessness of her tall, long-limbed adolescence with the grace of her patrician mother. The Liebers enjoying well-deserved satisfaction with the achievements of their sons, their big-city retirement dreams closer to realization, their bourgeois attitudes and sensibilities intact, vindicated. Dean’s youngest sister vamping Kate Winslet in comical tramp mode. Karim Muhammad still (ever) manning the QuickSave self-checkout machines, clean-wiping methodically and dispensing hints of sagacity without much regard for its reception: well-made-up, ageless gentlewoman who politely refused, eyes outward, to believe that K’s daughter had attended that top-tier medical school be damned.

These breaks do for our souls more even than the lively or unexpected bits of our daily exposition, more even than when our sequences fleetingly align in perfect accord with those of our peers, with whom we share canvasses, settings, sections of storyboards. They remind us of what is & what also is possible. Estelle’s well-mannered stoner nonchalance; Ms. Sorenson’s collegiate sophistication & elegance (!); K’s calm, almost pitying sense of self, the butt-end of a lifetime of deferred yearns, rides, of low expectations and stifled potential. These are things, said Leo. These are possibilities.

Cultural exchange

Dark skin; curly, unkempt, thinning hair; tattered, stained off-brand jeans; ripped shoes with one missing heel revealing a bare foot; generic dun-colored jacket half-zipped over a layer or two of smudged undergarments; pungent emanations of body odor and stale wine; unsteady gait + incessant, incoherent mumbling. Messy. The guy wandered, or zigzagged, from the wide concourse outside the café towards our table with a directionlessness that would astound even those used to tracking the physical life of the mentally ill. His unfocused eyes, always looking or seeming to look in different directions, made it difficult to predict his movements through the crowd. Fact it was hard not to feel sorry for the hurried business travelers and well-dressed leisure-mothers, no paragons of social consciousness themselves, forced to dodge about and into one another as he changed orientations every few seconds, always looking furtively to the middle distance like one of those rage-infected zombies from 28 Days Later (he resembled, minus the blood-foam about the mouth, the black army private that sadistic ranking officer had chained, along with his friend, to a wall for “observation”). The cloudiness of his gaze made it difficult to know for sure, but it seemed like somehow he had picked us out of the crowd from a good distance off. We were up against a window, and we did have plates of food and books and backpacks and laughs, conspicuous in a bustling capital city train station on a weekday (even one stacked with upper-caste stores catering to said leisure-mothers), and we were keeping our heads up in clear defiance of local norms. But that was an explanation, not a justification, and it was no stretch to say we were disappointed by the attention. Upset even. Riled.

Nervous. It took him so long to make it, though, that we forgot about it halfway and went back to exchanging laughmakers and eating our pastries. He panted in the corners of our vision at the café’s open mouth and waited for a while, mumbling softly, eyegaze bouncing languidly across the linoleum floor tiles that tied the whole station together, and then a pleasant jokewave that had been building for a minute or two crested and shrunk our little worlds down and down until all in a moment he was standing beside our table, swaying, rasping, spreading inscrutability in discomfiting waves. It might have been the smell that snapped us out of the reverie, actually, and then to look up and find him in our bubble, well, that was rough.

Could have been worse. Comically enough, though he paused in front of us like he was expecting acknowledgement he didn’t alter his behavior in the slightest, just stood and rasped and mumbled and stabbed our levity repeatedly with his ridiculous being. We waited for what we thought would be the inevitable request for change, or food, or anything; but he just stood there like he had in the concourse, except now his unsettling gaze focused or tried to focus on a middle point on the tabletop between us. Pained, bemused looks shot back and forth across that tabletop in the hopes of deflecting the gaze away, maybe to the next table where sat an attractive thirtysomething with a laptop and a pantsuit. We countered the base urge to laugh with manufactured empathy, our untrained souls straining at the effort. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. His gaze and mumbles remained directed at a spot on the tabletop between our plates and bags and rendered our stifled giggles moot.

Our souls soon found respite. Without so much as adjusting the timbre of his mumbles, our visitor slowly, deliberately, unapologetically lowered a trembling right hand toward the closest plate, a cheap unadorned porcelain affair with a forgotten few bite-sized pastry crumbs, mostly devoid of filling, remaining. There was only a moment of hesitation, the last veneer of civility poking up through the weeds, and then before any of us could will ourselves to ask politely if he’d like something to eat he plunged his grabber to the plate and removed the largest crumb to the neighborhood of his face, eyes focusing a bit more than previously to examine the fine buttery layers of the mass-produced goodie, fingers working dexterously, efficiently, to allow all sides equal measure. Not quite equal, actually: the little cavity in which filling would normally congregate (the majority had spilled or been licked out) got a second look, the fluorescent light flattering its appealingly smooth walls. We softened. This was dessert before dinner: how could we not respect a paradox of a man whose bizarre behavior and unsettling appearance allowed him to get away with figurative murder? He knew what he was doing, and he’d be damned if his daily routine was going to include stationary begging at the entrances to places like this, crumpled up and prostrate on the floor like roadkill. Those human lumps existed on a plane far beneath him; he was mobile, in charge of his destiny.

So in charge, in fact, that with the glistening morsel in his sights, not six inches from the maw, and his indecisive mumbling finally coalescing into a circular series of excited guttural utterances—we waited, daring ourselves to breathe, willing the condescending mirth from the corners of our mouths, eyes locked downward for fear of what we’d find if we looked into his—he suddenly and unceremoniously opened his palm flat and like it was suddenly boiling a hole through his hand replaced it with a twitching flourish on the plate.

Replaced it on the plate.

Replaced it on the plate.

Replaced it on the plate.

Replaced it on the plate.

He might as well have removed his clothes and defecated on the table and then turned around and wandered aimlessly, swaying, mumbling, forcing dodges, out of the café and into the concourse and maybe to the city beyond. Which he did, in due course.

We never saw him again.

Sub-MARTA

The Atlanta Greyhound station sits underneath the elevated MARTA tracks on the south side of the city’s core. Its surroundings are stark and warehousey, monochrome and shabby. The city’s mild winters smile on asphaltum, but decades of neglect have left the narrow streets and sagging sidewalks down here looking as weary as any south Chicago side street in February. In a former life this place, by virtue of its central location, must have served some vital economic function, but no more. The convenience store across the street stays open 24-7, or at least whenever the station is, its parking lot serving as a focal point for locals to peddle essential products and services like luggage-portering (from bus station to convenience store); direction-giving (from bus station to convenience store); and crack. The store’s Arab owners take a typically pragmatic view of the situation, letting the victimless stuff slide and only lifting fingers or making phone calls as parking lot arguments threaten to spiral out of control.
Thousands of people pass through big Greyhound stations like this every day, at all hours. This is obvious to everyone who’s ever been to a Greyhound station and especially obvious to the poor bastards who make their living squeezing bucks here and bucks there. These poor bastards come in all shapes, sizes and colors; some are quite clever and some are thick as bricks. Thankfully a certain common spirit of enterprise, dulled or drilled-through perhaps by years of self-neglect and self-medication in some yet present in all, identifies them to those of us who exist outside of their world, or else this subgroup of humanity might lose its definition by virtue of the sheer variation present within its ranks. This spirit manifests itself as, among other things, a fantastic creativity-in-scamming. Each of the station’s several luggage-porters, for example, has carved for himself a relatively lucrative niche suited to a particular segment of the Greyhounding population.
There’s the direct-approachman, stinking of malt liquor, who asks for change and then offers his carrying services as an afterthought. Argue if you’d like, but at least the man is honest. He knows he’ll rarely have to pick up a bag; he targets naïve white kids or family men used to giving older black men who stink of malt liquor change because it’s the right thing to do.
There’s the odd couple who bicker their way through a bidding war with each new prospect. Their relationship is symbiotic; observe them long enough and you’ll see that their desperation is manufactured, their behind-the-scenes behavior genteel. Indeed, if one gets too hot he’ll take a back seat and let the other catch up—within reason, of course.
There’s the older, soberer direct-approachman, his shirt fresh and free of dried bits of vomit. He comes straight into the station when the security guys are busier or friendlier than usual and makes a quiet, reasonable pitch to marks he’s drawn upon his years of experience in the business to size up in advance. Anecdotal evidence suggests he’s the most successful of the lot, and rightfully so.
And there’s the whippersnapper thinks he knows better than the old hands. His racket is simple and dishonest, employed against the grain: he waits outside the convenience store for prospects preparing to make the return trip across the street, warns in vague terms of crackheads and no-gooders offering to carry bags in exchange for exorbitant fees, and then alternates hopeful eye contact with furtive glances towards any luggage-pieces that might happen to be nearby. Time will tell if such cynicism can flourish outside Five Points Convenience.

Among the major highways whose business it is to ferry people and goods across county and state lines there is an easy-to-spot date-based divergence in building style. There exist 'old' and 'new' roads, the former evident between the eastern mountains and the Atlantic coastline from the Carolinas northward and in the close-in parts of the big older metropoli in California and everywhere else and the latter, built in a great spurt, blasting across the vast continental interior between all these places. Old roads, mostly two and four lanes although some have been the subject of periodic 'improvement' projects through the years, exhibit a passing respect for curvaceous landscapes, hugging river bottoms and hillsides and avoiding expensive shortcuts like the notchcuts that allow drivers to pass through mountains rather than around them. One likes to think of old roads as being both about the drive and about the places in between rather than about the finding of efficiencies and the hewing of a continental economy. This is probably overly romantic--exploding rates automobile of usage and incremental improvements in technology do more to explain the obsolescence of the old roads than some great ideological shift--but for the makers of T-shirts and the exploiters of cultural memes it has been a useful fallacy, the cult of Route 66 exerting a greater pull now than during the road's heyday in the middle of the last century. The crisp but uninspired rest stops and the gaudy neon gas mart signs rising from the earth every few exits along the new roads reinforce that lizard-brain memory of a rosy before-time in which arterials didn't consciously ignore the small towns and villages between the more populated areas they sought to connect. Everything about the new roads is arranged in advance for us to the point where we find ourselves growing steadily more nervous the farther we venture beyond the neon exit lights, hearts pounding at the thought that we might soon be reduced to asking a pedestrian or small business owner how to find our way back to the interstate, souls begging God for the release of that blue and red numbered shield. It must have been different once, we muse, visions of neighborly gas pumpers and smiling bespectacled trinket-shop ladies dancing across the blacktop rushing toward us.

en tee

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