by Sam Pink
Halfway through it all, I wanted to start announcing what was happening like a sports announcer at a school sporting event, loud enough for both to hear me.
Charles called me later that day and claimed that what he meant was he had to replace me, “For today.”
He said I could still have the job if I wanted it.
I said I wanted it.
He said he had to take me off the schedule for the week, because he didn’t know if I still wanted to work there.
But he said to call at the end of the week to see about the new schedule.
The next week when I called about the new schedule, the deli manager said Charles told him not to put me on the schedule, and then replaced me with someone from the produce area.
I said, “Alright thanks. Have a good day.”
And I went outside.
A man at the end of the block was selling cut-up mango in a plastic cup.
I bought a cup and the man squeezed lime all over it and it tasted great.
The taste made me want to eat the mango holding someone’s hand so that person could feel it too.
Kids were screaming and playing in the playground at the gradeschool across the street.
June 2009.
Summer.
Pilsen Neighborhood.
Chicago, Illinois.
Looking for socks this morning, I found a sock and picked it up and smelled it to see if I should wear it. When I smelled the sock a crumb went up my nose. The crumb didn’t go too far though, because when I stopped sniffing it fell out easily. It was a shitty feeling though. Really shitty.
After maybe ten to fifteen minutes I have now realized that what I thought was a cat off to the right in my periphery, is really a pair of shoes—one upright, one on its side.
I was at the train station in a town where I used to live.
My friend Rabb still lived there.
Rabbnuwaz Ali Shah.
He lived at his mom’s apartment.
He had a few pieces of an old drumset of mine.
I wanted them back.
“I want them back,” I thought, standing still as people got off the train and walked across the tracks.
I made eye contact with a few guys on the platform.
There were three of them, all in business clothes and sunglasses.
I kind of recognized them.
We went to the same high school.
They seemed to recognize me.
I could only remember half of their names.
Not like one half of the total people (which would be 1.5)—I mean either I knew their first name, or last name.
When they saw me walking across the parking lot, they drove up next to me and offered a ride.
I got in the car in the passenger seat, as offered by the person originally in it.
I usually don’t like to sit in the passenger seat if someone is sitting behind me, because it makes me feel tense.
When the driver asked where I was going, I gave him directions to Rabb’s mom’s apartment.
During the car ride, they all talked about something work/internship related and I sat there looking out my window.
I tried to focus on the blurry stream of trees and grass.
Then I tried to do this thing where I focused on a single tree, by moving my eyes side to side.
One of the people in the car mentioned the high school we attended.
Then someone said, “Oh yeah, did you guys hear about Ryan?”
Someone else said, “Ryan who.”
“Ryan Francis—he was in the same lunch as me and you,” the original person said to the driver. Then, to me, “Did you remember him man, you know who I’m talking about.”
At first I didn’t say anything. Then I said, “Did he have like, brown hair.”
“No, blond hair. Long sideburns, kind of an old lady face.”
Someone said, “Old lady face.”
Someone else said, “Oh yeah. And always with the inside out Pink Floyd t-shirt on.”
“Yeah. He’s fucking dead now, did you hear.”
I couldn’t tell who was talking at that point.
“Wait, Ryan Francis is dead.”
I looked out my window, hoping that Rabb or his mom hadn’t thrown the pieces to my drumset in the garbage—but at the same time, also accepting in advance that possibility.
Someone said, “So what happened.”
One person leaned forward from the backseat.
And I noticed, peripherally, how close his face was to mine.
And it deeply pained me.
Neither of us moved for a second.
During which time I imagined myself playing a fucking awesome drum fill, wearing no shirt, my mouth wide open and smiley, my hair sweaty and slapping my eyes.
The person who mentioned Ryan Francis said, “He was fucking walking along the uh, traintracks last weekend. He ate mushrooms and got too high I guess. And so,” here he paused, and spoke with deliberate clarity, “—a fucking train hit him while he was wandering around.”
Someone else said, “He got hit by a train? Shit.”
“Yeah, fuck man—hit by a train?”
I was doing drum fills with my teeth.
Trees and lawns outside, passing.
It didn’t matter who was talking anyway.
“No, he didn’t get hit by the train. It just kind of—” someone demonstrated with his arm from the backseat, “—he got his arm tangled up in the ladder on one of the cars somehow and it ripped his arm off. He thought he had to get on for some reason and it wasn’t going as slow as he thought or something.”
“Fuck man.”
I sat there thinking about myself sitting at my drumset with one arm ripped off and bleeding onto the drums.
Someone said, “Old lady face.”
One of the people in the car said, “I know—I talked to his girlfriend and she said he fucking bled to death on the tracks, probably panicking.”
Someone else said, “Yeah, wow man.”
“Old lady face,” I said.
Then we were all silent.
The silence was incremental.
Going into town down a significant hill, I saw in the distance the textbook warehouse where Rabb and I used to work and where we used to smash bottles at night.
He lived in an apartment with his mom, a few blocks behind that warehouse.
Someone said, “Yeah you know what though, fuck him. He was a dick, man. A fucking dick—to everyone. Fuck him. I say fuck him.”
“Yeah man, fuck him. Remember how he’d rub his bare dick on the younger kids in the locker room.”
Someone else said, “Yeah dude. And that one kid threw up on his own feet because he was so scared. What an asshole, yeah. He was a fucking asshole.”
Everyone became quiet.
And the quiet was incremental, measured by the wind through the open car windows.
I pointed towards the driver’s side window, and said, “You can take a left up there and just drop me off at the entrance so you don’t have to turn around.”
The driver rubbed his chin and the wind blew through his hair.
As we turned into the apartment area, he looked at me and said, “He deserved to fucking bleed to death in my opinion. Fuck him, you know.”
The others in back had begun a new version of the conversation.
“No man, I’m not glorifying him. All I’m saying is—fuck, all I’m saying was what I already said. He’s dead. I was just telling you guys, I didn’t know if you knew. That’s all I said, I mean his mom seemed pretty sad when I saw her—” he sat up in his seat a little more. “But yeah, I know what you mean. Fuck him.”
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
As I got out of the car I could hear them from the back, still arguing—quieted by the sound of the car leaving.
They drove off and I was playing a drum solo in my head that no one will ever hear.
I buzzed the buzzer next to the name Shah.
Ra
bb came out wearing blue Dickies pants and no shoes, socks, or shirt.
Right away he laughed, and said, “Yeah sorry, I let my brother’s friend borrow your shit. Sorry. I think it’s gone pretty much. I don’t know.”
He laughed again then quickly got serious, idly staring at something in the air.
Then he was nodding and looking at the ground.
I stayed for a while and we sat on the curb at the end of the cul de sac and finished a case of beer he took out from beneath a broken swing chair in the apartment common area.
I said, “Ryan Francis died.”
Rabb said, “Who.”
Then he showed me his leg, where one of his friends tried to tattoo the star of Islam, using pen ink and cigarette ash.
He said, “It looks pretty shitty but—” then he laughed.
I used to have a small television in my room.
One side was kind of burnt from someone leaving incense by it.
Only public access channels worked.
And I developed a hatred for some people in public access television commercials.
People I’d never met, just watched on public access television commercials very late at night.
There’d be commercials about guys who’d mistakenly bought too much merchandise and had to sell it for very low prices, in a warehouse somewhere in the city, but just barely inside the city.
And I’d hate them.
There’d be shows with two people sitting in a room discussing Chicago politics.
And I’d hate them.
There was this one commercial for a barbeque restaurant, and this guy takes a bite of some food and yells, “Awesome stuff!” and the camera zooms in and out with the words “It’s awesome” at the bottom of the screen, blinking, right next to a smiling cartoon of a pig head.
Having seen that commercial however many times, I then hated the man who said, “Awesome stuff.”
I’d deliberately watch the commercial and wait for him to say, “Awesome stuff” and then feel hatred towards him.
I’d try to convince myself not to hate him.
But it’d still happen.
Why—I’d think, feeling hopeless and tired in my room. What is it that I hate about the man in the barbecue commercial. Maybe it’s just the way he says it. I guess I don’t hate him though. I’m just being dumb. It’s weird.
Honestly though, I always liked watching tv because it was a good way to silently panic while making it look like you’re not.
Books work too.
Last night walking west on Montrose Street I passed a woman out walking her dog.
The dog was very big.
Its hair was black and shiny.
As we passed, the dog stopped and nudged me with its head.
I petted it.
The woman said, “That’s weird, he never lets anyone pet him.”
I scratched the top of the dog’s skull for a little bit, in silence.
“Have a nice night,” I said, looking at the dog.
“You too,” the woman said.
And we walked opposite ways.
I smelled my fingertips and there was dog stink on them and I thought, “So good.”
SUMMARY #2
Yesterday walking south on Clark Street I thought I saw a puddle floating towards me, but it was just a section of newspaper blowing across the street. The first thing I thought when I saw it coming at me was, “There’s a puddle coming at me” and then I felt adrenaline. (It was just a section of newspaper though). But it took me a while to calm down.
For a few weeks last year I had a job as a nanny for a rich family in Chicago.
My friend was a nanny and did babysitting work at hotels and this one family asked her to become their nanny but she couldn’t so she asked if I wanted the job.
I said yes.
I’d worked with kids before.
I used to work at a daycare.
I was the “Nap Assistant.”
That meant I watched a room with 10 to 20 kids in it—supposed to be napping—while the teachers got lunch and had meetings.
The kids were between the ages of three and six.
I helped them get their cots arranged and then I watched over them, maintaining order.
Maintaining order meant reading them books, whispering their names from across the room and motioning for them to stop talking and go to sleep, preparing the snacktime food, talking to kids about things to keep them from doing something else that would wake kids up, reading the same book over again, denying attempts by girls to become their boyfriends, sitting by potential loud/misbehaving kids as a source of discouragement, agreeing to play soccer or other sports at recess, agreeing to play legos after naptime, agreeing to sit next to someone at snacktime, and helping outside at recess and doing anything else until the end of the day when parents came.
This one Chinese kid named Hardy always came up to me at naptime, with a ring of dry snot in his nostril.
He’d pinch his genitals and look sideways and say something like, “I like fruit punch and tacos.”
Hardy was really cool.
He always behaved.
I think he only got upset one time (because he missed his mom) and cried a little bit and then was embarrassed about it.
Other than that, Hardy was cool.
Whenever I asked him why he didn’t do something he was supposed to do, he’d say, “Want to know something—” then he’d make shit up to keep me from talking.
Some of Hardy’s jokes were pretty good too.
Most of his material involved “wieners,” but I could sense he was expanding.
There were a lot of kids.
There was this girl named Ariel.
She made me promise to be her boyfriend “before Maria”—if I decided to have a girlfriend.
I said, “I’ll pick you as my girlfriend first if I decide to have one.”
There was a very tiny girl named Aruj and she always slept the entire nap time.
Every day she slept the whole time.
And every time she woke up she’d either cry or shake her finger at me and say, “Vutt is so funny, mister.”
I had to carry her a lot.
Felt like I had her in one arm a lot and would just forget about her.
Other things I did were—
I cut up apples.
I drew a lot of Spiderman masks.
I did legos.
I tied shoes.
I supervised games of tag and often dominated them at recess. (Having longer legs and arms.)
I talked about dinosaurs.
I explained why you couldn’t act a certain way to another kid because of how you had to respect other people.
I addressed questions on the day a bird flew into the recess door and lay there bleeding and dying on the sidewalk by the fire exit, while we all watched.
I addressed questions about superheros and things about their powers that didn’t make sense to them.
I just made shit up a lot of the time, because kids believe anything you tell them as long as you don’t laugh while saying it.
I watched butterflies hatch for a science experiment.
I helped trace kids so they could draw themselves on large pieces of paper and hang them up for Parent Night.
I made paper aiplanes.
I went to museums.
I held hands.
I pushed up to four people on swings at the same time.
I made seven dollars an hour, which seemed like a lot.
When kids actually slept during nap time, I read books myself.
I read a book about World War Two and a death march and how when one prisoner in the march, like, did something wrong or fell down, a guy from the Japanese military swung his sword down into the prisoner’s head and the sword went from the top of the prisoner’s skull, all the way down into his neck.
Sometimes instead of reading I just drew pictures on pieces of construction paper lying around and then gave them to whoever wanted t
hem when everyone woke up.
Every day at the job I felt angry and annoyed and then at the end the kids all said bye to me at the same time and/or tried to hug my leg to keep me from leaving and I felt dumb for getting mad.
No actually I was still mad.
It was summer and I was living in a studio apartment near Little Italy.
At night when it was too hot to sleep I’d shadowbox until I sweated a lot and felt tired enough to sleep.
The mirrored sliding door to my closet had streaks of sweat all over it, from months and months.
Or I had this old soccer ball that I would kick against the wall by the Christopher Columbus statue across the street.
I got thin and hardened.
I was ready for things no one had even heard of.
Ready for things that would never happen.
It was a very calm summer of realizing I didn’t want anything, and there were good reasons.
The nanny job paid thirteen dollars an hour, cash.
I only got the job because my friend told the family about my daycare work and she also made up some shit about how long she’d known me.
The family invited me to dinner.
Their apartment was in the downtown area of Chicago and overlooked the lake.
Their apartment had people working in the office area on the main floor.
It had electronic keycard access.
So fucking awesome it made me lose hope in everything.
The parents were from Ohio.
The husband said common political shit about needing to stop immigration, hating Barack Obama, and he also made jokes that centered on homosexuality as the funny part.
The wife was from Ohio too and she was really nice.
Their daughter’s name was Juliana and she was overweight.
At dinner, the mom said, “So basically, the job is just picking her up from school and doing her homework with her and playing with her until I get back from doing my campaign work. She’s a little brat but she can be good.”
“Yeah she’s a little something,” the husband said. “You like football man? You a Bears fan I guess? Probably a Bears fan yeah?”
