Conversation with a 99%-er.

A few months ago, me and my one (Asian-Canadian) friend hit up a film festival screening with a free post-screening reception with open bar, then we headed out afterwards to grab a drink near where he was meeting someone later.

Right after we left, we ended up on the subway platform next to some (white) (male) Occupier, who somehow began giving us dietary advice about sugars and carbohydrates, because my one (Asian-Canadian) friend was talking effusively about Canada’s version of the food pyramid.

“I thought the tip of the pyramid was the rich,” I was like, “’Eat sparingly, as a treat.’”

At that, the Occupier started laughing, and being like, “I applaud you, sir, I applaud you.”

Comeuppance: Did It Happen...?.

So the other week when I dropped off that offprint of mine to the asshole Egyptologist, I dropped one off to the nice Egyptologist first.

Actually, I went to the departmental office looking for their mailboxes, and the administrator there told me that the nice Egyptologist was actually in her office, and the asshole maybe in his, so I should try there first.

So, I went to the nice Egyptologist's office first and the door was slightly ajar, and when I knocked she opened it, and I could see a bunch of faculty members in the meeting, including this short bearded white guy who leered up at me as I said hello and handed her the offprint and apologized for interrupting.

In retrospect, I think that the guy there was the asshole Egptologist, and he was checking me out.

First of all, I had just got a haircut, and I was dressed well, so I did look good.

Second of all, the guy is gay, and I heard that he had had this really fucked up relationship with the specialist librarian for his department, where they were a repulsive couple who hated each other and argued all the time but kept together since no one else would sleep with them, at least until the librarian died a few years ago and he was left alone.

If that was the case, that would be delicious:

He leers at me, wants me, and then puts two-and-two together when he sees the offprint that I left for him, that the hot guy he wanted was the one who gave him a big "fuck you" in publication by using him as an example of how not to dabble in linguistics.

At least, that's my fantasy of comeuppance.  The guy is a total tw*t. (and I don't mean twit).

Evening of Barhopping from Several Months Ago (2 of 2): Conversation with a young (white) guy from Alabama.

A few bars after that, I was at this chain bar and the NCAA playoffs were on, and during a commercial break I started chit-chatting with this young bearded (white) guy from Alabama, who was a rare (straight) screenwriting major at an arts-inclined local college downtown.

After we had talked about this and about that, I asked him if it was true that (white) guys from the South had a thing for (black) women, since it was more forbidden down there.

“Why do you think that?”, he drawled.

“Oh,” I was like, “I have a friend from Mississippi, and he’s said as much, so I’ve always wondered.”

“Well, not that I know of,” he was like.

Then, he added, “Though, I’ll admit, the first time I slept with a black girl, I texted my brother,” and he put on a dude voice and made a texting motion with his thumbs and was like, “Hey, you’ll never guess what I did...”

He also said that it’s great to be a (straight) guy in art school, since people are very free, but it can be a culture shock.

“I’m used to drumming naked on a beach and forming a bond with women,” he was like, “But I visited a friend at Notre Dame, and people get drunk and fuck women in the backrooms at parties, there’s no bond, there’s no connection.  Some girl even tried to drag me in the back room.”

Then, he added, “I went, and we had fun, but it’s not what I’m used to.”

Then, he was like, “What a slut.”

Evening of Barhopping from Several Months Ago (1 of 2): Conversation with a (Black) Lady.

A few months ago when I was downtown during a weekday for some stuff at the art school where I’m teaching, I went around to some bars that were closed on Monday, which is the day I usually am downtown to barhop.

This one bar I go to was a soft jazz bar that was open for a cocktail party for young lawyers from a local law school, but other customers could still go in, so I sidled up to the bar a few seats away a larger (black) woman, since although there were other seats at the bar, I wanted to position myself in a reasonable distance to strike up a conversation with her, if she was sociably inclined.

Anyhow, we started chit-chatting, and she said she was “flying solo,” and it turns out that she works downtown for the federal government but has her house in the big (Irish-American) neighborhood far south of the city, where I’ve always felt very intimidated.

I said as much, and then she told me what she thought.

“Newsflash,” she was like, “I’m black,” and she pointed to her forearm.

Then, she said that statistics for the neighborhood say it’s 98% white, and that she knows the other 2%, because they all live on her block.

I told her how I had been to some bars around there when my one (white) colleague from Mississippi’s band played there, and she said she hasn’t been yet, though she always peeks in.

“Maybe I’ll go some Saturday night,” she was like.

“Maybe instead of going from zero to sixty,” I was like, “You should stop by on a slow weeknight, and feel things out, to see if it’s safe.”

“Good point,” she was like.  “I always look in, though!  It’s so busy on a Saturday night, I want to go.”

Somehow we also started talking about AIDS in the (black) community, and she said that her 19 year-old nephew found out he was HIV+ from Facebook.  The girlfriend of some guy he had been sleeping with posted that she had tested positive, so he went to go test himself, and he too was positive.

Then, she also said that in Indianapolis, where she’s from, she knows about this “fine looking brother” who was a drug dealer and always had women, and kept sleeping around without protection even though he knew he was HIV+.

“He’s in the hospital now, and some damn women try to kill him, he need a police guard.  They try to come in there with guns and everything.”

“No shit,’ I was like.  “How many women are doing this?”

“Fo’, last time I heard,” she was like.

Bar conversation with a Lebanese engineer.

So a few weeks ago I was having a glass of wine at a new bar, the bar inside this Indian restaurant downtown, and I struck up a conversation with the guy next to me, a (Lebanese) engineer in town for work.

We talked a bit about the Boston bombings - the TVs in the bar area had constant coverage - then we talked about the city (which he likes) and religion (which I study).

It turns out that the guy *loves* Kahlil Gibran's "The Prophet", but he admitted that that was esp. a Lebanese thing.  At his wedding, even, his best man had to improvise most of his speech, since the speaker right before him had chosen the same quote as his topic.

A Bar the Next Day.

The next afternoon I had a one day conference at a campus just south of downtown that I biked to, and then since it was a weekend and a nice day, I took a long bikeride on major streets through the (poor black) neighborhood west of downtown, to get a sense of what bars were there, and maybe stop through some if it seemed safe.

On this one major street, there was exactly *one* bar, on all the miles of road all the way to city limits.

(That’s true for a lot of [black] neighborhoods; they’re just liquor stores, all the bars were owned by older people who closed them up because of the bullshit, or are just hanging on for their few friends who still go there, but the gangbangers aren’t let in.)

Anyway, this one bar was a cinder block bar south of some overheard train tracks and across from an industrial yard full of stacked pallets, and the bar turned out to be Mexican (!).  As the (Mexican-American) bartender (“Crystal”) said, it was on the edge of city limits and drew from the (Mexican) population beyond that, though occasionally a few (black) people came in, usually 2-3 at a time, and were quiet and just stayed for one beer and left.

“I say I work here,” she was like, “And people say, ‘You work there?’, and I’m like, ‘No, it’s not like that!’”.

As I sat and drank like 4:30pm on a Sunday afternoon, this one older (Mexican) guy who had been drinking heavily with his friend down at the other end of the bar sent down a beer to me, which I interpreted as a gesture of hospitality since I was obviously new to the bar.

“Gracias por la cerveza” (“Thanks for the beer”) I called out amicably to him, and at that he gravely nodded and gave me a thumbs up, which I interpreted he did because of my use of Spanish.

Overall, I find that Mexicans are esp. gracious and appreciative when you try to speak even a little bit of Spanish; I think it might be because so many of them are monolingual or just speak a little bit of English, and they not only empathize with the attempt to learn another language, but appreciate the effort, since I don’t have to do that, since I could only use English if I wanted to.  They get that.

Next Bar of the Night...

The next bar of the night was tucked away on a side street right up next to the back end of the stockyards, and a (7^th generation Mexican) (female) bartender from earlier in the night had told me how to find it.

On my way there, I passed by this busy private club full of (Mexican) bikers in leather, with at least 15-20 bikes lines up out in front of the clut.

Then, on that same residential street in an industrial area, the bar is there, a yellow place with its name in black letters backlit in red, and I walk in, and the bar falls silent.

It’s full of (white) people, mostly regulars, and someone was like, “Hey, why’d you kill the party?”.

“Not my fault!”, I was like, “I’m just here to grab a nightcap!”.

Then, everyone went back to talking.

A third of the way done with my beer, the older balding (white) security guard comes up, and checks my ID, “Just to be sure,” and from his eyes you can tell he’s a heavy drinker and maybe a bit odd.

After I left, I stood outside with him and chatted a bit.

He said the (Mexican) bikers don’t come by that much, but when they do, there’s almost never any problems.

He also said that he was surprised that the racing hadn’t started up that night, and that you could just stand out there and hear it, all the guys who come from all over the city and bust into the stockyards and do illegal racing in souped-up cars.

“They start by midnight,” he was like, “But sometimes they already start by now,” he said, checking his watch.

“ZHHEEEEEEEEEENH, uh-ZHEEEEEEEEEEENH,” he then burst out, making a sound of racing cars going fast and changing gears.   “Just like that, you can hear them.”

“Like Mexican, Polish, American?”, I was like.

“Mexican, Chinese, everything,” he was like, “All mechanics.”

He then added that he used to be a security guard in the stockyards, and he never called them in for trespassing and racing, since he liked to stand outside at his guard booth and watch them fly by.

One night, he added, the police locked all the gates but one, and he watched the racers go in a high speed line from one locked gate to the next, slowing down and doing a u-ie still in that single line of cars, “Just like in ‘Fast and Furious,’” till they finally got to the one open gate and the cops busted them all.

He also said that he’d seen semis just bust through one of the locked gates, since no one was around to open it, and they didn’t feel like driving all the way around the stockyard, but rather straight through it.

At that point, this (Mexican) biker couple in leather pulled up and got off their bikes and went to ask him something, so I said bye friendily and he then said goodbye and I went to go on my way.