Bridge over Icy Water

by Jeff Isaacson

  I had another coffee and achieved a level of caffeination that made me think that the world was really a pretty decent place. I was quite revved up. Like to the point where I wondered if I would be safe to drive if I had a car.

  That’s right. I work in transportation and I don’t have a car. My office is Minneapolis. Bus, light rail, or sensible shoes can go anywhere.

  I walked in those sensible shoes back over the Third Avenue Bridge. I really doubted that this new pain in the ass company would be there by nine. People need to realize that the private sector doesn’t do everything better. Ask anyone in a government job what they think of the outside vendors they have to deal with. Be prepared for a lot of profanity.

  I was shocked. They arrived only five minutes after nine. It wasn’t good enough for government work, but it was good enough for government contractor work. We hadn’t wasted a lot of daylight.

  They got the cherry picker off fairly quickly. I stepped into my bucket. I guided myself up to the part of the bridge that I needed to inspect.

  I looked at the steel structure under the deck. I shined an intense light all over it. I looked at every rivet. I looked at every inch of every beam. I examined that section of the bridge and the one next to it in the most granular detail.

  And I found zero flaws.

  As long as the pothole was filled promptly everything would be okay.

  I began to pack up. I turned toward the far end of the bridge as I looked around for the intense little light that I had just set down on that side.

  As I turned, I noticed something moving in the wind on the edge of the bridge. It was something small, but I could see it clear as day.

  It looked like a rope or a cable or something. Someone had probably tried to hang a sign on the edge of the bridge. Or maybe they even had hung a sign on the edge of the bridge and that sign had blown away in the stiff November gales.

  I was furious.

  I had more work to do. I had to get a maintenance guy to clear that debris. Then I had to inspect that section.

  I checked my watch. I was okay on time. It wasn’t even noon. But it was close.

  But now I had to call my boss to have her call the outside vendor to move my cherry picker about two hundred feet across the river. God only knew how long it would take them to respond. I also had to have my boss notify maintenance. And God only knew how long that would take.

  I pulled out my work phone. I made the call.

  At least I was getting paid to spend a lot of time at my favorite coffee shop.

  Then the sun came out from behind the clouds. The sky was that brilliant color of azure that it only is when it’s clear and cold. I was smiling, and I didn’t know why as I walked back to the bridge.

  I found out why.

  My cherry picker hadn’t made it there yet, but this delightful, rotund, little maintenance dude was waiting there. You want to talk about charming! He was so charming! You want to talk about funny! He was hilarious. He was like a little, rotund standup comedian.

  In fact, it turned out that he moonlighted as a standup comedian.

  He was short. He was pale. He was balding with a ring of brown hair and a weird little patch almost in the middle of his glistening melon. He had the face of a happy bulldog. He was either Latino or more likely a white guy who was still tan from all the outdoor work that he had done over the summer.

  “Girl, you simply have to go to this club called Minneapolis Millennium: 2856 downtown with me tonight!” he blurted.

  I decided that I would go anywhere with him. He was fabulous.

  “Maybe we’ll find some guys and be naughty,” he touched his pinky to his lips.

  Eventually the cherry picker made it to the other side of the river. Thad (my round, little new best friend) went up first. He cut off a piece of rope. Then he guided the bucket back down toward earth.

  “What do you make of this?” he asked me as he flung what looked like a person sized spaghetti noodle in front of me.

  I studied it. It took me a minute to make any sense out of it.

  It was a length of rope that had been painted black. It had a loop on the end of it that looked kind of like a noose made by someone who didn’t know how to tie a hangman’s knot. I studied it and shook my head.

  “If I sent a letter to the editor of the Star Tribune criticizing skinheads, I’d make damn sure to proofread it,” Thad hissed.

  I laughed a nervous laugh.

  “So it looks like that to you too,” Thad observed.

  “What else could it be?” I asked.

  “Right, it’s clearly a threat by some skinhead asshole, an homage to the good ol’ days of lynching, when people like you and I could hang for no reason and no one gave a shit,” Thad sighed.

  I nodded.

  “But why paint it black?” Thad wondered. “It’s redundant. It’s not like anybody has to specify that they’re talking about black people who got lynched.”

  I nodded.

  “And for God’s sake at least learn to tie a proper noose if you’re such a master race, I mean come on!” Thad protested.

  I laughed.

  “Do you think that I could include that last one in my standup routine or is it too dark?” Thad wondered.

  “Probably too dark,” I laughed. “But you’re killing it here.”

  “What do you make of this?” Thad repeated.

  I shook my head and said, “Probably hung there as a message to folks like us. And that message is that they wish they could kill us,” I decided. “I agree that it’s weird that it’s painted black. And I don’t understand the slipshod knot. There’s got to be an online tutorial on how to tie a hangman’s knot out there. There’s no excuse for that kind of laziness. It’s one thing to be a skinhead thug. It’s another thing to be bad at being a skinhead thug. Where do you work if you can’t even handle the job of skinhead thug?”

  “The White House,” Thad stated.

  I laughed.

  “Well, I’m going to report this as a hate crime,” Thad declared. “Who knows how long it will take for the cops to get here for something as small as this? This might eat up the rest of my day, but what can I do? Can I let someone get away with being a racist homophobe just because they’re bad at being a racist homophobe? Of course I can’t. MNDOT is going to hate me for reporting this, and they’re going to require that I report this. You know what I mean.”

  “I do,” I nodded with a chuckle.

  So Thad called the police. As I got in the cherry picker, Thad waved to me.

  “Where do you live? I’ll swing by and pick you up to take you to the club tonight. It’ll be pretty early, like sixish,” Thad said.

  I told him my address. He didn’t write it down or anything, and he cut me off before I tried to explain that it was a big tower full of condos that stood out like a sore thumb near Northeast Minneapolis.

  “Fancy!” he blurted. “They pay bridge inspectors better than maintenance men! I’ve got an ex that used to live in that building. I know it exactly. I’ll be by around six. And I am punctual.”

  I smiled. I guided my cherry picker toward the bridge.

  It was tough to leave Thad behind for mind numbing, and in this weather, hand numbing inspection work.

  Of course there was no damage to the bridge. How would a length of rope damage a metal substructure, even if it was painted black and fashioned into something vaguely like a noose?

  It was about three in the afternoon when I came down from the cherry picker. Even though it had been a couple of hours, I still thought that it would be fifty-fifty whether or not Thad was still down on the shore waiting for the Minneapolis Police Department. But the cops must have come. Thad was gone.

  I packed up all my stuff and started to walk toward home. I still had probably a fifteen minute job of writing three different reports once I got home. The first one was for the possibility of damage in the area of the bridge where the deck had eroded. The second one was about finding that black leng
th of rope with a near noose attached to the opposite edge of the bridge. The third and final report would be about the inspection of the area of the bridge to which said rope was attached.

  Two of the inspection reports found nothing. So they would each take about two and a half minutes. The one about the rope would be a little more involved. That would take about ten minutes.

  My mind left my inspection and the length of rope behind as I began to walk over the Third Avenue Bridge yet again. I started to imagine what the night ahead might look like!

  What kind of club would Thad be a regular at?

  I began to imagine a place filled with smoke from a smoke machine with that faint fake smoke odor, something like wet burnt toast. Techno was throbbing. Gorgeous men in tight pants, mostly shirtless, and ringed with glow sticks, danced with beautiful women and beautiful men. The girls at the bar were doing body shots off of a gorgeous bartender splayed across the bar.

  Then I realized that even my daydreams had been corrupted by implicit bias. I was projecting my stereotypical beliefs about what it meant to be a gay man onto my fantasies about Thad’s favorite club.

  Thad’s club was probably just some ordinary club with all kinds of men and women. Some were more concerned about dancing than drinking. Some were more concerned about drinking than dancing. But most were pretty concerned about dancing AND drinking.

  Still, I actually kind of hoped that we were going to the club of my stereotype because I was in one of my unusual moods. I really wanted to loosen the collar a little bit.

  My collar was already loose, but you get the idea.

  So I kept imagining a club with a smoke machine, techno music, and gorgeous guys dancing with perfect rhythm. I kept imagining girls taking body shots off of hot, shirtless, and waxed men laying on the bar.

  The best part about going out for a night of premeditated drinking is usually the premeditated part of it.

  So I walked home quickly. I knocked out my reports and was done for the day by half past four. I decided that I didn’t have enough time to take a run.

  So I watched Jeopardy! I even got the Final Jeopardy question.

  I knew that Thad had said that he wouldn’t be by until around six, but I was getting impatient around five.

  So I started to plan my outfit.

  At first I thought blue, but then I reconsidered. Blue was the color of sorrow, and I was not sad.

  Red seemed slightly too aggressive. It seemed better than blue, but no.

  Black just seemed too stereotypical. Not of my race or races, but my gender. Ah, yes, the little, black dress that goes with everything.

  That was when I realized exactly what I should do! I should make an outfit out of my shortest skirt and my tightest blouse, the ones that I wore in the picture I sent to Mark the jailbird!

  That would turn some heads!

  I smiled as soon as I put that outfit on and looked in the mirror. It was so right, especially after I added some heels.

  By then it was almost six. So I grabbed a cute little maroon coat, rode the elevator down, snuck out the back door rather than have the security and front desk person see me. Then I walked around the block until I was out in front of my building.

  Thad picked me up right at six in a black Ford Focus. I got the final seat in the back.

  “Someone thought we were going dancing,” Thad laughed.

  “Aren’t we going to a club?” I started to panic.

  “Of course,” Thad laughed. “But there’s not going to be a lot of dancing there tonight.”

  “Huh?” I wondered.

  “I have a confession to make,” Thad declared.

  9

  “Before I make my confession, however,” Thad paused as he turned onto First Avenue. “I simply must introduce you to my best friends in the whole wide world.”

  I looked around. I could see the face of the woman in front of me in the rear view mirror. She appeared to be Latina with soft brown eyes framed by round, wire rimmed glasses. Her short, chestnut hair was spiked up. She was a bit portly. I could see the elbow pad on her tweed jacket on the arm rest in front of me. In a strange way, she looked like the intellectual, Latina, lesbian version of Guy Fieri. That was a tortuous comparison, however, compared to the man who was in the backseat with me. He looked exactly like a younger version of David Cross. He had the dark, donut ring of receded hair. He had the dark framed glasses. He had the same uneven speckles of facial hair that were a testament to similarly lackadaisical grooming. They were certainly not the kind of people that I thought Thad would hang out with. And they were certainly not the kind of gorgeous guys that I had been hoping for.

  “To my right, in the front seat up here, is Jace, or Professor Gonzalez if you want to be formal,” Thad began. “She is an expert on all things liberal arts. She has a master’s degree in liberal arts from the University of Minnesota and she teaches several liberal arts courses at MCTC downtown. She knows everything from art history to hermeneutics…”

  “Hermeneutics?” I wondered.

  “Yes, hermeneutics,” Thad insisted.

  I looked at the guy who looked like David Cross, but he was facing forward.

  “And behind me is Dave,” Thad announced.

  “Cross?” I asked.

  No one laughed.

  Dave spoke, “I always start my standup routine with a joke about David Cross. They’ve all heard it too many times.”

  “So you’re a comic too?” I asked.

  “I try,” Dave declared.

  “We’re all comics,” Thad said. “Except you.”

  “She’s probably the funniest one out of all of us,” Jace joked.

  “Probably,” Dave agreed.

  “But I absolutely have to tell you Dave’s specialties. He traffics in all things pop culture. He has an encyclopedic mind for movies, music, television, trash novels, and gossip,” Thad beamed.

  “And I,” Thad boasted. “I know all things mechanical. I’m good with computers. And I also know classical music, music theory, and musical instruments.”

  “And why are you telling me what you guys know a lot about?” I wondered.

  “Ah, that’s the thing!” Thad blurted. “That leads me to my confession. We’re not really going to a club.

  I take that back. We are actually going to a club. At least, it’s a club the rest of the week. But tonight, tonight it’s bar trivia, and we intend to at least place. And we would if anyone of us knew anything about math, science, or sports. And I’m guessing that you at least know math and science,” Thad stated.

  “Yeah, but I’m not like a professor of anything,” I hemmed and hawed.

  “Neither are Dave nor I,” Thad admitted.

  “Yeah, Thad’s only been through tech school. I’ve only had some college. Thad’s a maintenance guy for MNDOT, and I manage a record store called Solid State. You don’t need to be a college professor to be good at this, or at least some part of this,” Dave encouraged.

  “Hydrogen is the lightest chemical element. What is the second lightest chemical element?” Thad suddenly asked as he looked in the rearview mirror back at me.

  “It’s helium, obviously,” I replied.

  “What is true about the sides of an equilateral triangle?” Thad demanded.

  “All the sides of an equilateral triangle have equal length,” I stated.

  “She’s perfect,” Dave beamed.

  Thad and Jace nodded.

  “What you guys were asked that, and you seriously didn’t know the answers?” I laughed. “Didn’t you go to high school?”

  “Says the woman who doesn’t know what hermeneutics are?” Dave joked.

  They all laughed.

  “We all went to high school together, Roosevelt High…”

  “We are Roosevelt!” Jace and Dave interrupted Thad.

  “But we partied,” Thad said.

  “We were a living joke,” Dave agreed. “So we acted like it. We were a gay handyman, a lesbian Latina, and a whit
e guy who already had the hairline of a middle aged man just looking for a bar to walk into.”

  “We couldn’t get into a bar so we went to house parties instead. Or else we’d smoke up and hit laser Floyd or laser Zeppelin at the planetarium,” Jace laughed.

  They all laughed.

  “Didn’t you party in high school?” Thad asked.

  “No, I didn’t party until college,” I admitted.

  “Well, you party now right?” Thad laughed. “Your outfit tonight says that you party now.”

  “A little bit,” I replied.

  “You’ll love bar trivia then,” Thad decided.

  “Why?” I laughed.

  “Because you’re like the rest of us. You’re a nerd who secretly wants to show off how much they know. It’ll only take a couple of drinks to get the competitive juices flowing. By the third round, you’ll be glad that I was somewhat disingenuous in the way that I…the way that we…”

  “Kidnapped you,” Jace stated.

  “Exactly,” Dave agreed.

  Minneapolis Millennium: 2856 didn’t seem like the kind of club that would temporarily convert into a den of bar trivia on Monday nights. But I hadn’t thought of one thing at all in my premeditation. I hadn’t thought about it being Monday night, the slowest night of the week at the clubs. And club owners probably had to do whatever it took to get people in their club.

  Minneapolis Millennium: 2856 had a strange vision of the future. It was one in which there was Mylar all over the walls. Little green space creatures dangled from the ceiling. A full size android stood in the corner looking a little bit like a suit of empty, shining armor that once clad a knight of yore. Giant cyborg heads with one red eye in the robot half of the face looked down on us on the dance floor. The sprawling, silver dance floor was (obviously) temporarily full of the kind of laminated wooden tables and metal folding chairs that you see in a church basement after a funeral. Except that they were round tables with space for only about four people.

  That was when I learned that each team was capped at four people.