Absolute Gentleman

On the ride back from Milwaukee, I noticed the low headstones in one of the cemeteries, and I got a sense, from the arrangement of the headstones, as if it were some kind of message, that one stone couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be any higher than any other. All of the headstones were low to the ground, modest. I suppose status is all relative, though. As a collective, Wisconsin might be a humble and unassuming personality, or it might like to think it’s being humble in respect to the gaudiness of the giant stone crosses in the northeast. In its own community, though, there’s probably a pecking order when it comes to headstone height.

The hopeful part of me has conjured an elderly woman who must bury her husband. She corrects the headstone guy, the proprietor of the headstone place: “No, no. Not higher anyone else, by God…” or whatever it is that elderly women from Milwaukee might say. “By God” sounds right to me. I actually tried to research this by emailing a couple of colleagues who grew up or resided in the Milwaukeee-ish area. I received no response – not even an acknowledgement of my question. It may have been a bit offensive to ask someone about regional colloquialisms, as if I’m accusing them of some abnormality, so I take the absence of a response as their refusal to believe that “folks” (I know that’s fucking right.) from this part of the Midwest aren’t any different from folks anywhere else, and why are you asking us this ridiculous question when you should be working, maybe planning your next class, or better yet, answering a petulant email from one of your other colleagues? So much happens in the silence, especially when you’re a paranoid Northeasterner. Maybe it’s “dear God.”

The dominant, cynical part of me now forms that same woman taking measures to ensure that her husband’s headstone is two centimeters higher than George Redzinski’s, taking into consideration how the stone might shift and settle over the years, the generations, because “We’ll be back to check, you know.” Even if it’s not any higher than George’s, it must be at least the same height, so just to be sure, let’s make sure it’s three centimeters higher. No, I will not even consider a flush headstone. Our cat has a flush headstone. We want our headstones to impose on the landscape, but not too much.

As I write this, though, I’m remembering walking past the cemetery in Chicago on Irving Park while I came back from the post office. The air was thick with heat, and I remember smelling sperm for about a hundred feet of my walk past the cemetery (Graceland, I think it was called). The air was musky and alive, and it melded with the earth and the weeds, and yes, probably the corpse-enriched soil, and the result was what I swear was a spermy smell for a good hundred feet. I’ll always remember that smell, but I’ll also remember my hypothesis being shot to shit when I saw all those giant headstones – those giant, unassuming, urban, Midwest headstones all staggered, inconsistent, asymmetrical, independent, alone.

Then there’s the terrified part of me who thinks it took no thought at all. His insurance covered this kind of stone, and the elderly woman was told which ones she could choose from. It was all done without thought and consideration other than she loved him like it was a duty, but life goes on and who was she to kick up a fuss over what every other person on Earth has to endure? Just call Don Rembowski at the funeral home on Ogden and tell him that you trust him to make all the arrangements, ‘cause golly and gosh and shucks, he’s been in this business for, what, eighteen years? Burying her husband is something she has no experience with, so she’ll just let go of this responsibility and let the professionals do what’s best.

It’s different with the Army cemetery in which my grandparents rest, though. I’m not convinced it’s any kind of social arrangement there, but more trying to impress with repetition and symmetry. The National cemeteries do impress with this symmetry, too. The stones roll over hills and turn with the land – miles and miles of symmetry. Look at all that dead, it says to us. Look at how they continue to hold the line, stand shoulder to shoulder, march on.

There are at least two other ways to look at headstone theory, though. The headstone could be like the tip of the iceberg, where all of the mass and substance lie beneath the surface. The tip of the iceberg isn’t impressive at all, and those who subscribe to this theory really don’t care about outside perception when observing the size of a headstone. The survivors know that the importance is what lies beneath. Still, others might see the headstone as a tree. I learned rather recently that a tree has a symmetrical network of branches both above ground and underground, almost like a reflection on a glassy pond. Survivors need the big headstone, in this case, because passing observers – fucking strangers – must be able to identify the grandiosity of what lies beneath by observing the size of what exists above ground.

These theories don’t work for mausoleums, however – these fucking houses in which some people are entombed. A mausoleum is a mausoleum. If you reside in one, you’re really goddamn important.

Maybe the theory does work, though, when you consider that anything you might ever need to know about someone in a mausoleum is superficial and thus (thus?) only exists above ground level. Their intrinsic value only goes as deep as they exist, physically, beneath the Earth.

I know I’m playing on someone else’s field, by someone else’s rules. I expect it to be difficult to excel, and I expect to struggle, but given a chance, I can win in foreign territory because I am better, more skilled, than the ones who made the rules. It approaches insurmountable, though, when the people on your own team, the ones who asked you to join them, are smiling in your face in one instance, then doing everything they possibly can to hurt you when your back is turned. It is impossible to do well when you cannot see who your opponent is, or when you never expected it to be a competitive event in the first place.

I’ve been getting some dislike mail about the grammatical structure of my posts, or that I’m sounding less coherent, and while I never found the need to defend my extemporaneous writings before, I probably should say that my entries are unpolished intentionally. I’m in the throes of a ten-step recovery program for writers who haven’t turned out anything for five years, so excuse me if I’m choosing to be a little raw with my posts. I think my entire existence as a writer has been about putting out material that’s been raw and truthful, so I’m not going to stop now, necessarily. If any of you ever wants a grammar beat down, give me a call. I’m happy to slap you around with the dangling participle I keep handy for just such an occasion.

Now if I may continue:

I hopped on the 146 to the South Loop of Chicago, where I needed to conduct some business. It takes a long time to travel the three and a half miles from my apartment in Lakeview to the Loop by bus, so there was an opportunity for me to sit at the back and think without worrying about missing my stop. When the bus got close to the Loop, I thought I was attentive in finding my stop, but when I was the last one on the bus and the driver waved to me to come forward, I knew I missed something. I handed her a rectangular card I kept my notes for this trip on. It was an important card, one that had my name and contact information on it. My school made me about a thousand of them, and whenever I need to write down directions, I turn to these cards, for some reason. I like that they’re cards, too, and not thin sheets of paper from a pad. It’s almost like having my own baseball card, only my picture isn’t on the front – my career stats aren’t on the back. I wouldn’t mind the picture on the front so much, because I’m happy with the way I look, but the stats on the back might bother me. I haven’t been the George Brett type – the Cal Ripken, if that helps you – someone who has stuck with one team his whole life. I’ve moved around to different organizations and different towns, and I’m starting to seriously contemplate why I’ve moved so much. I’m pretty sure it’s about not wanting to commit to a final resting place and about fear of death.

The bus driver didn’t really know what to make of my notes at first. There were a lot of numbers and arrows and one of the bus routes wasn’t even hers. The bus drivers of Chicago can tell you everything you need to know about their particular route. They know which restaurants fill up at Happy Hour, where all the careless pedestrians are, and where there always seems to be parking available. If you ask them about anything away from their route, though, even a block outside of their route, they have a hard time giving you any kind of direction. The driver helped me, though. Her long manicured nails tapped and scratched the front of the card while she was thinking of a way to get me toward my destination, the place I needed to conduct business. I kept tried to give her an out, told her I’d just get off where we were, run into Starbucks, and look it up online. She conceded and let me off at a nonscheduled stop, which is something these bus drivers never seem to do. I looked up at the sign at the bus stop, the one that explains which buses stopped there, and the 146 wasn’t on this sign. I felt special.

As much as I dislike western Massachusetts, and as disappointed as I am in how Pittsfield never did bounce back like everyone said it would, I miss our house. Since I left my parents’ when I was twenty-four, there’s not been a place I settled down in for as long as I’ve been in that house in Dalton. I miss the things that make it my home. There’s no way to properly write how much I miss my family, so I won’t even bother. Instead I’ll tell you that I miss my dog, and I miss my garage door, the one on the right, with the hole in one of the panels. I miss the precariously stacked pile of firewood on the right side of the garage, miss watching my neighbor, the hump, walk out to get his paper every morning. I miss looking out the living room window and onto the porch, where our porch rockers are, and hearing Molly’s paws on the floor, and I miss the screen door Jennet found who knows where but restored it to a soft, middle-class luster.

I’m never going back there, though, because it’s a stale place inhabited by stagnant, mediocre people – little fish in a little pond – and I’m getting my sons out of there.

I made my way west across West Lake Street, which crosses the Chicago River and runs directly underneath the EL, following its path for a few blocks. It wasn’t raining at all, but it was damp. Maybe it was snowing. As I walked west, I had to stay to the right, really close to the buildings, because water was coming off the tracks in a steady stream, as if the trains were swollen gray clouds that finally reached their saturation points. I like to think it always rains here, like some kind of anti-oasis, but I imagine it’s dry when it’s sunny…

Let me edit here, because I hit on a cool image of the EL as a long cloud: Let’s change “clouds that finally reach their saturation points” to “pouring rain on the street below.” So,

It wasn’t raining at all but it was damp, cold. It may have been snowing, I don’t remember. As I walked west, I stayed to the right, really close to the buildings, because water came off the tracks in a steady stream, as if the train were a long, swollen, grey cloud, pouring rain on the street below. I love to find the poignancy in every little scene, so I convinced myself for a second that it rained there all the time, like some kind of anti-paradise – poured down on the homeless people who made their homes beneath the bridge. It’s not realistic, though, to think the water pours down when it’s sunny.

Then the EL roared over my head with such a thunder that I didn’t know where I was, as if everyone under the bridge were tossed into the air, and we were not coming down to regain our bearings until the thunder stopped. The Loop is home to just about every EL route in the city, so the thunder is constant.

So when I walked further and saw makeshift cardboard homes tucked rather permanently into the catacombs under the bridge, it made sense to me. At least poignancy and metaphor began to fuse together, which is what we want in our clever little essays, right Meghan Daum?

The homes were tucked in the side slots of the cement, the catacombs under the bridge – equidistant cement beds where cardboard boxes nestled perfectly. To seal off the walls of these homes, the cardboard was overlapped. Plastic sheets and worn blankets covered the walls, and what I want to get at here is that there was a kind of doorstep, a section of plastic grass, that indoor/outdoor carpeting, where someone might wipe his shoes clean before going inside. These men sleep in their shoes; never have the comfort of removing their shoes in their own homes because you have to be ready to move when the proverbial Billy club taps atop the roof of the temporary home. Who was moving this home, though? It seemed too permanent to be able to pack up, even fold up, and move to a different location. It’s possible that these homes were permanent and that the inhabitants were the ones who changed. That wouldn’t make sense, though, because if the Chicago Police wanted them out of there, there would be no house to begin with.

So maybe the man did remove his shoes, occasionally, when he knew he’d be in for the night, when there may have been an understanding that he wouldn’t be bothered, because the rough, smoking, bundled, and brawling Chicago Police have hearts and better things to do (There are murders being committed, for chrissakes and you’re arresting me?) The Chicago Police know this line and protect the men who make their homes under the bridges – the busy, thunderous bridges.

I wish I had the skill to describe these catacombs correctly. They were shielded from traffic on the left and open to pedestrian visage on the right. I wish I had the smoothness of working the screen door into this scene because in front of one of the homes in the catacombs under the bridge of the EL on W Lake Street, a splintered and forgotten screen door rested horizontally. When the great trains: the Blue, the Pink, the Brown lines thundered above the home, the screen door shook, the teacups rattled in their cabinets, and the man inside the box slept.

I was just browsing in my local Borders, but only because it was there. Borders is by far the most inferior of the book chains on and off the web. There’s no stock, their prices are too high for an alleged big book chain, and they brew terrible coffee. In my browsings, I came across a Moleskine-looking display of notebooks – only they weren’t Moleskines. These were called Piccadilly, an obvious ripoff of Moleskine. They’re black, have the elastic band wrapped around the notebook, the paper seems to be high quality, and most importantly to me, it opens up like a Moleskine does. The problem with most small journal-type notebooks is with the binding. Most have a seemingly spring-loaded binding that makes it impossible to write in the notebook without using a small boulder to hold down the other side of the book. It’s especially cumbersome for left-handed writers, like I am. Normally, with inexpensive, pretentious notebooks that white people like, you have to crack the binding in half for it to lie flat.

Piccadilly Notebooks don’t have this problem and they are 50% cheaper than Moleskine notebooks. Piccadilly, Inc. needs to know, though, that in spite of being a Borders exclusive company, the Moleskine display is way more prominently placed than the Piccadilly one. You walk into a Borders and the Moleskine display is right there in your face. The Piccadilly display is nestled in a ghost town section of my Borders, upstairs and buried on a shelf next the cookbooks.

Still, I’ll not buy one of these notebooks, nor will I buy a Moleskine ever again. Couple reasons: I have a few blank ones left from a Borders Outlet going out of business sale, where I got a bunch of lined Moleskines for three bucks a piece, and these Mead Composition books, the ones that were apparently good enough for my writing habits before I decided to lean toward being trendy. Mead Composition books range from $1 at Target to two or three dollars at CVS or Walgreens. It still looks cool, too, to walk around town with a Mead Composition book.

The truth is that I always thought it would be cool to be a brooding, isolated person who was misunderstood by everyone. There may have been times in my teens and early twenties when I actually practiced this artifice on people with the convenience of being able to revert to my happiness.

I had a very good childhood, and that never boded well for me as a writer. I needed to have a terrible childhood, been abused or something. I needed a tragedy early on to be a good writer, because in my mind, if there was no tragedy, there was no conflict, and thus (thus?) nothing to write about. If there was no family tragedy, then I’d have to drink, snort coke, do (do?) speed, drop (I know this one is correct) acid, or something. I wasn’t interested in any of that, either.

So now that I got my wish, experiencing all of it genuinely, hearing from people of different degrees of importance in my life that I am aloof, an asshole, that I isolate myself, I’m unfriendly, moody, unreliable, a terrible host, bad friend, that I exhibit the behaviors of an alcoholic (Yes, someone recently said that to me despite the fact that I drink one beer every two or three weeks, but I think I’ve figured out why I come across this way.) — now that it’s all too real, and that there’s nothing I can do to revert to my strong roots in happiness, it is remarkably and unmistakably painful.