Nice Commuter Rail Ride to Wisconsin: 2 Nice People.

The other week when I went up to Wisconsin to help get-out-the-vote for a woman I know running for county board – it was like a reunion from the Obama campaign! – two very nice people helped me:

1) Right before I went through the door into the commuter rail station, I picked up a free newspaper and tucked it under my arm, and as I moved my bike into the foyer past the slid-open electronically-triggered door, some advertising papers fell out of the free newspaper and onto the ground.

Some (middle-aged) (working class) white guy coming the other direction immediately picked them up and handed them to me, the Subway coupon flier that had been inside the newspaper happening to be on top of the pile he was handing me. 

“In case you want to go to Subway, ha,” he was like.

2) On the train, a (slightly skittish and perhaps mildly mentally ill) (stringy) (older) (black) guy ahead of me hit the automatic door opener and as I waited for him to pass in, he gestured to the door and waved me and my bike on board and was like, “Nah, I did that for you, man.”

Memorializing Tragedies: Airline Crash.

I have a slightly new bikeroute when I go downtown, and as I was biking home the other evening, I saw that a Chinese podiatrist on the outskirts of my neighborhood had a homemade banner above his store saying –

MALAYSIAN AIRLINES

MH370

 - and nothing else.

Very Rewarding Bar Night (5 of 5): 5 Places Downtown.

At the bar in a specialty burger place, the bartender remembered me from another bar, the 2^nd time this has happened

(The 1^st time was a [Russian] waitress who had worked at a bar on the 2^nd floor of a major skyscraper in the city and was standoffish when I talked with her the first time, but remembered me fondly when I surfaced half a year later at a bar in a sushi place where she had a new job.)

The bartender of this night had been working at the bar in an Italian restaurant the night I was going to see Nebraska and barhopping before and after, and that very same day I had picked up a journalistic treatment of Mexican prison nun Madre Antonia.

“Remember, we talked about that woman who sewed her own nun’s clothes,” the bartender was like.

It also turns out that she used to frequent the bar in the gyros lounge, and we both reminisced about what a great bar it was and how sad it was that it had to close.

Very Rewarding Bar Night (4 of 5): 5 Places Downtown.

At a closing hotel bar, I was talking with the (white) (male) bartender and somehow we got on the subject of people from 2^nd and 3^rd world countries who are in the States because of kidnapping threats.

“My one friend disappeared,” he was like, and told me about this dude who was half hispanic and half Syrian and said his parents were in oil.  “But he did a lot of cocaine and was getting paranoid, then one day an email bounced back and I called and his number was disconnected.”

He said that the guy used to say that people were watching him, and they would come into his apartment and move shit around when he wasn’t there.

Also, he would say that the people who lived across the alley from him were Satanists, and they were the ones responsible for throwing dead rats into his yard.

“So did you ever find out what happened to him?”, I was like.  “Did your other friends know anything?”.

“I only knew him through people and the other people drifted off and never knew him so well, so,  no,” the bartender was like.  “And we weren’t that close.  But, I feel kind of bad, I just have no idea what happened to him.”

“That’s too bad,” I was like.  “Both for what happened with him, and because people like that make life interesting.”

“I know,” the bartender was like.  "I miss him."

Very Rewarding Bar Night (3 of 5): 5 Places Downtown.

As for the 4th stop of the night, this garden-level bar (basement, but with windows high up on the walls) that’s very fratty on Fri. and Sat. nights (beer pong, pool tables), everything turned out to be chill on a Sunday, so I sat at the bar and read Balzac. 

After my beer, I popped into the restroom to piss – and it turned out that the mirror on the wall outside the restroom was a one-way mirror positioned right above a pissing trough, so as you pissed into the trough and touching your junk you could observe everyone out in the bar.

Right as I was finishing pissing, one of a group of (early 30s) (aging) (white) bros broke off from a group at a table near the restroom door to piss, and as he came in his friends, who must have been there before, were pointing at the window and laughing as he sidled up at the trough and started to pull out his dick.

He started laughing at them laughing, and I was like, “What the fuck’s up with this mirror?”.

“No idea, bud,” he was like, laughing some more at them laughing.

I then washed my hands and stepped outside, and as I went past the group, I said, “What the fuck’s up with your friend?  He was trying to start something and was like, ‘Quick quick, before my friends come.’”

I then waited a beat and was like, “Just kidding,” and they laughed, a few nervously, and one of them said something I didn't catch in a vaguely southern accent, and I left.

Outside the door, a (fat) (white) waitress and a (middle-aged) (hipster) doorman were smoking together, and I asked them what the fuck was up with the restroom mirrors.

“It’s so you can watch what’s happening in the bar,” the waitress said.  “There’s one in the women’s room, too.”

“Why?  So you can look at someone you like and rub a quick one out into the trough?”, I was like, and at that the woman started laughing.

“Or,” I was like, “You’re like, ‘Here bud,’ and you can jerk each other but stop and tuck it if you see anyone coming?”, and as I motioned reaching over to jerk off a fellow urinal user they both laughed.

“It’s been that way since the 70s”, the woman was like.

“A lot of shit went down in the 70s,” I was like.  “You know [a late-night club that I sometimes go to]?" - at that both nodded - "One time I was leaving there and an older black dude asked me if I wanted coke, and when I said no, he said we should walk and find a park or an alley or something, and he’d let me snort some off his nine-inch dick.  Maybe that’s why the mirror is there, so people could snort coke off each other’s dicks back in the 70s.”

“That’s my new explanation for people!”, the waitress was like as she laughed again, and as she rubbed out her cigarette into the brick wall to go back inside, I left.