Theft by Finding
Page 13
She has two friends in town from Raleigh, Jan and Sherri, and they joined us all for Thanksgiving. Tonight we went to a bar around the corner called Sharon’s Hillbilly Heaven, a big mistake, as the girls were all dressed up. After we walked in, an older man started talking to Lisa. He was driven off by someone much younger who had glasses on with thick lenses. I tried to step in, and the guy turned on me, saying, “Hey, back off. I was talking to the lady.”
Meanwhile, Amy was cornered by a pimp named Dwayne. “You’re my little shortcake, aren’t you?” he said. He told her he knew all the ladies in Uptown and asked if she liked riding the love stick.
An American Indian woman watched them talk, and as she stomped past, Dwayne called, “Hey, baby, you leaving? Don’t do it, babe, don’t go.”
November 30, 1986
Chicago
Yesterday in Lincoln Park a man asked us for money. “I’m a nice person, really. I’m not a bad guy, just a hungry guy. Can I have some money from you?”
I rooted through my pockets for change but couldn’t find anything. As we walked on, the man shouted after us, “I thought you were nice people, but you’re not. You’re real sons of bitches. Go to hell. May you fall down where you live.”
December 4, 1986
Chicago
There is a deaf man with a goatee in my painting class who can’t speak and is much older than everyone else, in his late forties, maybe. His work is cheerful and surrealistic, Magritte-like trains steaming over the ocean, two dolls having a conversation. The man has no idea of the noise he makes. During critiques and slide lectures, he drags tables and chairs across the room. Steve has two deaf uncles and said that one used to drive through Cleveland with the radio playing full blast. Sometimes it was just static.
December 8, 1986
Chicago
It was foggy today, and dark by three. By five, delinquents were breaking into cars. They’re shameless in this neighborhood. All are white with greasy bangs brushed to the sides of their heads. They all wear Windbreakers and sneakers. Delinquent style is timeless. Real trouble doesn’t walk around with a ponytail. It doesn’t have a Mohawk or special shoelace patterns. Real trouble has a bad complexion and a Windbreaker.
I am making Jeannie’s baked mostaccioli and cheese. You need:
1 pound of mostaccioli
Spinach (I use frozen)
3 eggs
Cheese (Muenster)
1 cup of milk
Butter
Parsley
Cook the spinach and the mostaccioli and mix them together. Add eggs, cheese, and milk. Put it in a buttered pan and dab some butter on top, along with some parsley. Bake it at 350 degrees for half an hour to forty-five minutes.
December 10, 1986
Chicago
Today we started painting critiques. The deaf man put his work up at the front of the room, and while he did it, he farted. Then he handed out pieces of paper we could write our comments on.
December 15, 1986
Chicago
An Asian woman approached me at the IHOP tonight. Without asking, she sat at my table, snuggled up beside me, and said, “Have you had your hug today?”
I pulled back because I am not a hugger. Never have been. When someone wraps their arms around me, I shut down and stand there with my eyes closed, waiting for it to be over.
“I don’t think I need a hug today,” I told the Asian woman. She moved to the next table, where a black man was eating pancakes and looking at a magazine. She did the same thing to him that she’d done to me, and he said, “Would you please leave me alone?”
I’d seen the woman at the IHOP before, trying to sell flowers, and both then and now she was almost eerily cheerful. You have to at least give her that.
After the black man rejected her, she moved to a large group of Mexicans. All the seats at their table were taken, so she squatted on the floor. They couldn’t understand what she wanted, and when she asked a second time, the waitress came and threw her out.
December 17, 1986
Chicago
I read a funny article by Patricia Marx called “Getting Along with the Russians.” She says, “Education, not force, is the effective way to change the Russians. If we want a three-year-old not to put his hand on a hot stove, we do not beat him unmercifully. Rather, we teach him that a stove is hot, by pressing his hand to the burner for a minute or two.”
She goes on with soft approaches and offers harder ones if plan A fails. “Continue to send the Russians wheat, but package it in cartons filled with so many Styrofoam pellets that Russia becomes a big mess.” “Give them broken headsets at the UN.”
We had our final critique this afternoon. I read a brief short story by Joy Williams and then pinned first- and second-prize ribbons to my paintings.
December 22, 1986
Raleigh
Paul missed a class and borrowed a weight lifter’s notebook so he can catch up. Written on the front and back covers in Magic Marker are:
Born to be wild!!!
Break a sweat!
Pump iron, then your mate.
Once you go around, there’s no turning back…so raise hell.
Lift for life.
Love conquers all.
Grunt power.
If you raise hell you’re gonna burn your feet.
Doobies!
1987
January 13, 1987
Chicago
The deaf man has shaved off his goatee and is in my new painting class. Our teacher, whose name is Judy, started the day by showing slides, mainly of famous artists in their studios. We saw Matisse, Braque, and Renoir. When she got to Picasso, the deaf man became excited and tried to say something, perhaps “Picasso.” The teacher wasn’t sure how to handle it. She smiled, and just as she asked him to sit back down, he farted.
January 18, 1987
Chicago
In the mail we received a video guide of new releases. One movie is called Never Too Young to Die. The copy reads, “A vicious hermaphrodite wants to control the country, and only two people stand in his way. [Only two?] The resulting ‘battle of the sexes’ will blow your mind with a heady mixture of powerful heavy-metal music, state-of-the-art weaponry, martial arts, and espionage that makes this exciting action flick a winner.”
Times have changed when a hermaphrodite wants to control the country and only two people stand in his way. If he were a black or Hispanic hermaphrodite, he’d probably have a harder time of it.
April 26, 1987
Chicago
A woman at the IHOP tonight got up from her chair and crossed the room to eat french fries off the plate of a person who had just left. She was stylishly dressed and had a suitcase with her. Everything on the menu was too much, she moaned. It sounded like she was trying to watch her weight, though she was surely talking about the prices. Four chocolate chip pancakes were out of the question, she said, “so how about you sell me two?”
The waitress said short stacks just come in buttermilk, so the woman ordered a plate of french fries, which she ate with ketchup. Then she took syrup and poured it onto her spoon, the way you might with cough medicine. She had multiple spoonfuls of all the various flavors, one right after the other. In my nine years of going nearly every night to the IHOP, both here and in Raleigh, I have never before seen anyone drink the syrup. She had to be crazy.
May 5, 1987
Chicago
I told Dad I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be graduating in a cap and gown—the Art Institute doesn’t swing that way—and he said, “I’ve got your old cap and gown from high school. Want me to bring them when we come up?” Then he said, “Do you think it will still fit?”
A person would be in pretty serious trouble if his graduation gown no longer fit. It’s like outgrowing a tent, basically.
We had our final critique in sculpture class today. It was dull, which is good, as it’ll give me less to miss. I’m sad to be finishing school. I liked being in college. It was respe
ctable to be a student. You get discount admissions all over town, and it makes you work.
May 6, 1987
Chicago
Today I worked for Marilyn Notkin. She had company coming and needed her storm windows removed, and knobs applied to her bathroom linen closet. I was taking out one of the windows in the sunroom when I broke it. Then I dropped one of the porcelain knobs she had special-ordered for the linen closet. “I guess this just isn’t our day,” she said when I confessed. It was the “our” that got me. It was my bad day for breaking things and her bad day for hiring me. “You don’t need to pay me,” I said.
She insisted on giving me something and settled on $7. I honestly would have felt better if she hadn’t paid me anything.
May 20, 1987
Chicago
Mom came for my graduation and stayed with me after everyone else had left. It was nice having her. We went out to eat with Amy every night, and she gave Neil lots of attention. I’d wake up and find them both in the kitchen, Neil in Mom’s lap while she smoked and drank coffee. She slept in my office and took naps on the sofa. This afternoon she left, and now I’m not sure what to do with myself. I’d looked forward to everyone coming, and now it’s over.
On Saturday, when the whole family was here, we got dressed up for cocktails and dinner. Lisa, Gretchen, Amy, Tiffany, and I were walking past the vacant lot on Leland that’s always full of drunks and drug addicts. Any time of day or night they’re there—white, black, American Indians, but strangely no Mexicans. They have fistfights, they build fires and pass out. As we walked by on our way to the L, a drunk woman fell in behind us and put her nose in the air, bringing up the rear in what she saw as a snooty parade.
Then someone yelled out, “Hey, they’re people too!”
May 22, 1987
Chicago
This morning a Jehovah’s Witness woke me up. Someone buzzed her into the building, and she came to my door with a small child and two copies of The Watchtower, which I paid 40 cents (printing cost) for. The child saw Neil in the background behind me and said, “Once we had a cat, but it scratched the baby, so we had to get rid of it.”
May 23, 1987
Chicago
My recipe for Koto Kai Pilafi:
Pour a little oil into a pan.
Wash a quartered chicken and rub it with garlic.
Dot it with butter, big dots or small—whatever.
Add 3 tablespoons of tomato paste and half a cup of water, and put it in the oven at 400 degrees.
Cook the chicken on its side for 15 minutes and then turn it over and cook the other side an equal amount of time.
Add 2 cups of water and 1 cup of rice and cook it for another half hour at 350.
May 24, 1987
Chicago
Last week, after being drunk for two days, F. came to. It was Sunday, and the last thing he remembered was Friday night. He woke up naked with no furniture left in his living room. The front door was open, and there were piles of shit on the floor.
May 27, 1987
Chicago
Jehovah’s Witnesses came again this morning, this time a pair of young black women. I told them I already had both current issues of The Watchtower, and they gave me some information on their next big meeting. If I were to become a Witness, then I could go door-to-door just like they do.
June 3, 1987
Chicago
This afternoon I found a $50 bill in the foyer of the building near the mailboxes. It was folded thin and full of cocaine. Some of it spilled when I opened it up, but there’s still plenty left. So that’s $50 in cash and around $80 worth of cocaine—$130! If I find $50 every day, I won’t need to get a job.
June 7, 1987
Chicago
I dared myself to lean too hard against one of the living-room windows yesterday, and it broke and cut my elbow up. Later in the afternoon I took the empty frame to the hardware store, where they said it would cost $30 for new glass. That seemed exorbitant to me, so I was walking back home by way of the empty lot when an American Indian woman grabbed on to it, saying she’d been looking for a window frame just like this. “I need it,” she said. “Hand it over.” Her face was strikingly flat, and for a second all I could do was stare at it.
The woman was holding a beer bottle and put it down so she could grab my window frame with both hands. “Turn it loose,” she said, and the several drunk people behind her cheered her on. Then a man who was slightly less drunk told her to let it go. “Leave him alone, Cochise,” he said. “This here’s a working man.”
I haven’t worked in more than three weeks, but it was nice to be mistaken for someone with a job. Today I took the frame down a different street to the L, where I thought I’d try another hardware store. Right near the station a man asked me for money, and when I walked by he shouted, “Watch where you’re going with that thing, asshole! You almost killed that girl. You almost hit her with that window, you fucker.”
I said, “What?”
“You just about hit that baby, you son of a bitch. I’m going to kill you. I’m going to teach you a lesson you’ll never forget, you little fuck. You can’t get away from me.”
The guy was really beside himself, and I’m lucky I was so close to the ticket window. I worried he’d panhandle enough money to reach the platform before the train arrived, but luckily he didn’t. And what baby? I didn’t see any baby.
Why did I have to break that window, and on a dare, for God’s sake?
June 11, 1987
Chicago
I got a few days’ work painting for Lou Conte, a nice guy in a high-rise. On Tuesday afternoon the doorman in his building chewed me out for riding in the elevator. He said, “How did you get upstairs this morning? How?”
The main elevator is burled walnut. It was very clean, and riding in it, I wondered why anyone might ever think to deface anything so beautiful. Not that it was defaced.
The doorman marched me around back to the service entrance. He said, “Our tenants don’t want to come home and find people like you in the lobby.”
I just happen to be a college graduate, I wanted to say. But of course I didn’t, as it never works to get huffy in these situations. If I have to, I’ll just take the nice elevator from Lou’s floor, then change to the service elevator on two. The service elevator is like riding in a cat-food can.
There were two men at the IHOP tonight. One was brokenhearted and did not give the other guy a chance to talk. His topic was getting over Beth. “The relationship didn’t fall apart,” he said. “It was torn apart.”
June 13, 1987
Chicago
We went to Betty’s Lounge for a drink last night. It’s never crowded, and when we arrived, there was only one customer. She looked like a grandmother and wore rimless glasses and a straw hat with fake flowers on it. The woman was drinking beer and playing pinball, fighting the machine but never calling it names. I was watching her when three other women came in, two of them wearing feed caps. The bartender singled out the one who was bareheaded, saying, “I’ll close up shop before I ever sell to a nigger, and that’s what you are: a white-faced nigger.”
All three women appeared to be drunk. Two of them adjusted their caps while the third one said, “You can’t talk to me that way, you son-of-a-bitching asshole.”
The bartender told her to leave. Apparently she’d shot a friend of his named Doug, with whom he had once worked at an ice factory. He said he would not serve any bitch that would shoot a man in the back with his own fucking gun, shoot him while he was shaving, no less. “How many years did you get, bitch?”
“Your mama’s a fucking bitch,” the woman said.
The bartender lit a cigarette and threw the burning match on her.
Then the woman started to cry. She said that Doug deserved to die and asked how the bartender would like it if someone pushed his head through the basement window and kicked his ass up and down Magnolia Avenue.
The bartender said she deserved it.
“You ain’t never going to get the chance to kill me, nigger, ’cause I’m never going to turn my back on you,” the bartender said.
The woman stepped toward the door and called the man more names. She said she didn’t want to stay in this dump anymore. “Come on, girls!” she shouted. “Let’s go down to the Wooden Nickel.”
But her friends didn’t join her. They stayed. After she left, they ordered drinks and told the bartender that they never liked that bitch in the first place. Never.
June 14, 1987
Chicago
Geraldine Page died yesterday of a heart attack. I heard about it on the radio. She was one of my favorite actresses.
I went to the beach at Montrose Harbor and sat on a towel for a while. People there barbecue and then dump their hot coals on the grass and drive away, leaving everything else behind. They throw garbage into the lake just to watch it float. Children swim in the shallow water and pull soiled Pampers up from the bottom. What I like about Montrose Beach is that all the loud music is in another language.
Bad teenagers hang out in the alley behind our building, and whenever they see me on my bike they call me Pee-wee, after Pee-wee Herman, because I have an old one-speed that cost $8. It gets on my nerves, but if I had a better bike they’d just steal it.