Vignettes
I walk into the locker room at the gym on the day after Massachusetts’ Primary Day. There’s a short, seventy-something guy holding court, his finger wagging, his spindly-fish-belly-colored legs sticking out of wrinkled, khaki shorts.
“My guy won last night,” he’s saying, squinting from behind thick glasses.
His index finger stabs the air emphatically at a thickset, Hispanic, seventy-something man sitting on a locker room stool struggling hard to pull a black-and-grey, knee compression brace up over his calf.
“Oh yeahs, who’s dat?” the thickset guy says; his efforts with the knee brace rocking the stool backwards. “Who’s wonned?”
“I … dunno, … can’t remember, but he’s wuz the best a t’lot, he’ll do the best.”
“Good, good, we needs someone’s as can beat t’Indian.”
They’re talking about the Republican Primary: “T’Indian” is Elizabeth Warren who Trump calls “Pocahontas” as she has cited her partial Native American heritage.
“Yeah, we needa ta take back control a this country, it’s goin’ ta hell in a handbasket.”
“Whose did he beat?”
“I dunno, I dunno, there wuz three of ‘em,” the skinny guy, puts his foot up on a stool to tie the laces on his scuffed-off-white sneakers.
“Three! Three’s too manys, why so manys?”
The skinny guy stands upright, his hand shooting out to steady himself against the lockers.
“I dunno, but you know one of ‘em wore a baseball hat at the debate, I mean …,” he purses his lips, shakes his head slowly. “I mean, I just … didn’t like that!”
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Taking a friend to a doctor’s appointment, in the elevator at a big downtown hospital, a rangy, fifty-something, man with a scuffed-electric-blue backpack lashed tight across his chest shares, unbidden, that he’s had a heart transplant:
“Yeah man, got me a secondhand heart, works pretty good … pretty durn good,” he says nodding a lot, smiling a lot. “Low mileage, heh…heh, walked here, but just from North Station, not the twenty-two miles.”
The only thing you can be sure of in a big hospital is getting lost, so I do. While waiting, outside the wrong clinic, an eighty-something woman, hair immaculate, cheeks heavily rouged, picks her way along on a shiny-black cane, her sixty-something, mini-me daughter linking her arm.
The elevator dings opens and a corresponding, but ten years younger, mother-daughter couple emerge. The daughter is tall, heavily made up, hair dyed vibrant red, eyes manic.
The older women’s faces light up with smiles of recognition; they shake hands; exchange greetings in a language unknown to me.
Mid conversation, everyone talking simultaneously, the redhead blurts out: “My daughter has brain cancer!”
The eighty-something woman peers up at her with panic-stricken eyes as she fishes blindly in her bulky, black handbag.
“An’ … an’ … my husband has a girlfriend,” she holds up her blank wide-screened iPhone.
They lapse back into their language, all talking at once; the eighty-something dabbing her eyes with a tissue, the product of her fishing expedition.
“Let me show you his girlfriend,” the redhead’s forefinger swipes across the phone screen.
“Yeah, my brother, he loves me, he’s showin’ me ‘round his condo building; a door opens an’ who walks out … but my husband … in a bathrobe!”
She shakes her head rapidly, finger swiping wildly.
“There!” she turns the screen for the other pair to see. “My … husband’s … girlfriend!”
The older woman keeps dabbing her eyes, soaking the tissue, fishing for another.
“An’ I have breast cancer,” the redhead says. “It’s under control, I just come here every six months.”
The three other women all talk simultaneously in their language. The redhead glares at them one by each.
“And … Antonette,” she says loudly, silencing the other three. “She couldn’t walk on Tuesday, then she can walk on Thursday. I don’t know what the hell’s goin’ on with that girl!”
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I’m lacing my sneaker at the gym, foot up on the locker room bench, when from behind I see a white cane sweeping over and back, headed my way.
“Can I help in any way,” I ask the jowly-red-faced man with one inert eye, the other bleary but highly active.
“No, but thanks, I aint fully blind, I still sees a little.”
A few feet away, readying themselves to workout, two young Afro-Hispanic men banter:
“Man, you should have a snook,” the shorter thickset guy says enthusiastically. “I mean if you aint for a few weeks, when you hits that pipe man, ye’re gonna feel sooo goooood!”
“No way man!” the taller guy stands upright, shakes his huge Afro, scowls at his friend. “I can’t man, I got t’union exam comin’ up an’ I gotta make a clean blood test.”
“Man after a few weeks, you take one snook, ye’re gonna be hiiiiigggghhh!”
“He’s right ya know,” the blind guy shuffles himself around to face the two younger men. “I did all those drugs in prison, started in there, never took a drug before prison, but I’m clean sixteen years now, done fifteen inside, drugs all the time.”
Time freezes for the silence for his inbreath.
“I lost two brothers an’ a sister ta drugs, even that didn’t stop me, not when I wuz inside, but I stopped now, clean sixteen years. We useta give ourselves breaks, cuz we didn’t have any money, have any drugs, then when you’d get a hit!”
He raises his hand to his face, kisses the tips of his fingers and waves his open hand toward the fluorescent light.
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I’m waiting for a free sample of Glendalough Gin at my local liquor store. In front of me a squat, fifty-something, goateed baldy holds an empty clear plastic sample cup up to his nose.
“I aint so nuts about gin usually,” he says, his scraggly goatee flapping up and down. “I’m more of bourbon man maself, but this is purdy gud!”
He moves the tiny plastic vessel from one nostril to the other.
“Would you like one?” the forty-something, bleached-blonde marketer asks over his shoulder.
“Please,” I smile back.
“See now Beefeater’s a bit too smooth for me,” baldy starts up again, “but this has a nice … bouquet … I guess. I thunk t’Irish on’y done whiskey an’ that gawd awful black beer.”
“Actually, …,” the marketer pauses, swipes her hair from the side of her face and leans forward for emphasis, “Irish gins are the fastest … growing gins in the … the world, I guess.”
I take the sample cup she offers, swallow the clear liquid and suppress my beer drinker’s grimace.
“What is gin made out of?” I ask, inhaling a deep breath.
“It’s a grain alcohol, basically every white spirit starts as a vodka an’ then you add berries,” the marketer offers, “of course for a gin you have to have ju….”
“Juniper,” baldy cuts in. “It aint gin if it aint got juniper.”
“Yes an’ do you know that at our distillery in Ire…land our forager hand picks all the plants within a … hundred and … fifty miles of the distillery!”
“Course Tanqueray’s the gin I’d buy if an’ I was buyin’ gin, it won like t’Oscar for best gin!”
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I’m battling sciatica and the New Yorker article on Alice Munro as I sit on a shitty chair in the Natick Mall concourse the day after the day after Christmas. The Mall is thronged with fast-walkers unsated by the just concluded orgy of consumerism that is Christmas. My daughter, a late-late Christmas forager is lost somewhere in the bowels of the mall bargain hunting. If she hunts anything bigger than a pair of socks, it’s unclear that we’ll be able to fit it into the house, at least not until we get recycling Mount Everest hauled away to careless-middleclass oblivion.
I hard-fold the New Yorker and lean closer to my sadness at Alice Munro’s family dysfunction. This Nobel Prize winning short story writer stayed married to an unrepentant predator for decades as he destroyed her family, while she digested their lives to bring back in her fiction.
At the table next to me the first date that started just a few moments before with curt hellos and forced smiles starts to melt down.
The woman, heavily made-up, thin faced, hair ruthlessly ponytailed, sits straight-backed in her shitty chair, arms folded tight in front of a still-buttoned, three-quarter length black coat.
“I think my profile’s pretty clear,” her ponytail wags. “I aint inta sports, like not … at … all!”
The man, dark, deep-set eyes in a pale complexion that hasn’t been shaved since at least Christmas day, white sweatpants, unzippered Celtics jacket showing a washed-out blue “Pats VI” tee shirt, lounges back on his shitty chair – a luxury sciatica stole from me forty years ago! His arms rise to clasp behind his unruly hair, then retract so he can doubly emphasize his point slow-tapping the soft-sides of both hands on the black metal-mesh tabletop.
“What’s not ta like ‘bout sports,” he says, hands gently rising and falling. “First ya got yer Celts winning World Titles, then the Pats is just a few players away from comin’ back, an’ the Bruins, … well maybe the Bruins is just a few lobotomies away from winnin’?”
The back of my left leg yowling with pain, I suddenly get up from my chair, fast-turning two unhappy heads. I make a fake apologetic face; stuff the Munro family’s sad history into my back pocket; and walk off into the mall, hoping that movement also fixes despair.