Sunday, July 11, 2010
The Last White Man
Sat next to a woman in shades on the bus who had a big old shopping bag on her lap. I yammered on and on to someone God and curb service for ten minutes. When another seat cleared at a bus stop ten minutes later, I got up and took the empty space. I looked back and the woman in shades slammed her bag angrily on the space I just left. There was a laminated sign taped to her shopping bag that read in bold halvetica font 'JESUS WAS NOT WHITE." I read the sign and the lady in shades looked at me, scowling. Then she flipped me off. I grinned and gave her the finger right back at her. She looked at me for a few seconds and then gave me the bird again. I returned the middle index salute. We did that a couple of more times and then she got up and waited at the exit, her shopping bag held in her left hand. The "JESUS WAS NOT WHITE" sign dragged on the floor of the bus. The bus stopped and she got off on to the sidewalk. I opened my copy of Alfred Kazin's "God and the American Writer".
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GOOD TIMES
ReplyDeleteAs I remember, the Oiled Mitt was a sports bar on the first floor of an old hotel in an in-between neighborhood that used to be on the trolley line but now was not “between” anything anyone wanted to go to. Presiding at the bar was Mutt, a pleasantly grouchy guy who always looked nonplussed, like he had snails hidden in his cheeks or something. He collected pictures of Mamie Van Doren and affixed them to the mirror behind the bar. The Oiled Mitt had been there at least since the ‘50s and seemed impervious to depressions, recessions, obsessions or anything else. The owner lived in Cleveland and had never come to visit within the memory of any of the regulars. “God’s own bar,” one wag dubbed it.
In the smoke and the music – the jukebox was stuck in 1965 MOR-ville mostly, with a little Frankie Carle for spice – there was a mood of low-smoldering delirium, of waiting for the big alarm to go off. There was an esoteric language the old timers knew, in-jokes so long-running they were passed on to younger customers decades after their meaning was forgotten. It was like the Dead Sea Scrolls, except meaningless. One concerned the “Broken Leg Contest,” an event that had something to do with collecting photos of legs in plaster casts. Mutt stuck them onto the opposite corner of the mirror, a decent interval from the Mamie shots. There were at least 25 of them and some were so old they had faded into blobs of pale color. The Oiled Mitt even served a mixed drink called the Broken Leg that was rarely ordered and was supposed to resemble a boilermaker except stronger and nastier.
Very few women ever came into the Oiled Mitt. The ones who did were fairly terrifying if you went beyond the chit-chat. One of them supposedly knew the REAL Broken Leg story. La-La looked like a WAC, although she had never been in the service. She had hair the color of a collie dog’s chest. She was always blinking and her mouth turned down at the corners. Generally, one stool was always kept vacant between her and any other customer. I got along with her fine, for some reason. One night she said to me, “Time is just an agreement, right?” I thought she wanted to shake on it and I felt a cold chill run down my back…