So about a thousand years ago, give or take 965 years, I’m literally just coming back into town, I mean my boots were wet and my traveling pack was near empty but on my back, and this kid (to me, at the time, an older gentleman, but when you grow up as a professors son every student is a kid until their dissertation is approved) picked me up in Ann Arbor and dropped me in the hustle and bustle of downtown East Lansing, which, at the time was sort of three corners. Since they put in the marriot it’s more like four corners, except the Marriot isn’t quite flush, it’s sort of like a corner that’s trying to look like it’s not with the other three, like they just met or something.
The kid was going to to visit his girlfriend asked if I knew where to score some weed and I lied to him because I was about to go into the easiest place to score weed and I didn’t really want him tagging along. For the record that’s not why I went in there. The most immediate reason I went in there was because outside it was like one degree to the positive, farenheit lads (and lassies if you are one) and inside it was warmer, the less immediate reason being I was likely to run into a few of my friends there, more likely than other places that were warm (I had girlfriends, parents, and I could have pointed my thumb towards phoenix in the first fucking place instead of the god damn tundra harsh flatlands of the god damned mitten).
It was a place called then, and, I think, still is called, Pinball Petes. Pinball machines, arcade games (though in the mid seventies there weren’t a whole lot of those) foosball and a few pool tables, at any given time at least one was level and had a full head of unsoiled felt. Absolutely no one was there except for one of the long time employees a guy we always referred to as Mr. Hippie and he always answered to Mr. Hippie without scorn or glee.
“Where the fuck you been?” he asks
“Nowhere special.” I said.
“Oh. Cool.”
And machines blinked and rattled and tried to entice and the radio blared. It was about three minutes into a Jackson Browne song (he was this fellow who played popular music and was on the radio frequently in those days) before he said anything and I could start feeling my toes again which turned out to be a not so happy event on either count.
“Man fuck the fucking boo-schwa motherfucker in his gay ass.”
“Pardon?”
“Jackson the fuck Browne.”
Sometimes you just are faced with a decision and no time to make it in. I had been distracted by the sensation of thawing toes making painful little fists in my boots and enjoying the beeping and buzzing of machines and I had to either engage of disengage. It’s something you just do and either regret later or make a whole list of options you hadn’t considered.
“What’re talking about Mr. Hippie?”
“This rock and roll millionaire fuck who shit a hundred bucks everytime the radio plays one of his whiney pee-pants pablum songs just cried about “ Struggle for the legal tender…” My ass got up at six fucking thirty, walked through a god damned blizzard to open this shit hole, it’s three and you’re you’re the first live body I seen today, and after taxes I’m gonna clear forty bucks when that ginger prick comes in at six. Twelve fucking hours; forty bucks. Struggle for the god damned legal fucking tender my hairy hippie ass, mother fuck.”
“Oh. Yeah, that sucks.”
“Man, fuck Jackson Browne.”
“Yeah, yeah, sorry. Listen, you got any coffee made? I’ll buy you a cup.”
“Fuck you.”
“Ok, but seriously, I might have frost bite, you got any coffee made?”
“I’ll make some.”
“Thanks.”
Ok it’s not verbatim, but it’s close enough for jazz. I mean I remember it pretty well all things considered. I did think I might have lost a toe (turned out I had just broken it and the cold kept me from feeling that) and it was the first time I’d ever heard this guy, a grown up, someone I had seen almost daily, I mean when I was in town, for about three years, talk about how shitty his life was. Seriously, I mean there are some people you think of like characters on a TV show, you like them, you’re comfortable with them, you expect things to go a certain way and they do --- characters on TV don’t shit, they don’t really sleep though you see them in bed, they don’t … they don’t operate outside the plot.
I mean I had never thought about a grown man resenting the hell out of a minimum wage job in a place frequented by kids where most of the marijuana in town at least visited though without compensation to, well, him, and we weren’t exactly privileged kids, but, compared to him we sure must have seemed that way. Some of us. I mean I think he snapped that day because it was just me I looked exactly like I felt and was, three days sleepless, underfed, and that blizzard he walked to work in? I spent the night trying to hitchhike out of Massachusetts in. For that one small moment I looked like a peer.
I don’t mean to suggest I had an insight into class structure or even empathy, what really was crossing my mind was ‘can this shithead keep it together long enough for me to thaw and get a cup of coffee and maybe a slice from upstairs?’ and, later, more philosophically ‘What a dumbass. A big fucking culturally revolution happened just outside during most of the last decade and the only class struggle complaint he can come up with is that Jackson Browne really doesn’t have to work that hard and gets paid a lot.’
I mean shit, a hundred yards from where he was bitching were anti-war demonstrations that brought in the national guard, race riots, hash bashs, full frontal nudity, and, well, shit. I was a kid, a frost bit one, or so I thought, and, I don’t know, I would have embarrassed him if I had had that conversation with him seriously. A class struggle is a bit like a prize fight, if you ain’t in the ring or have an investment in the outcome, you’re just a spectator.
Yeah, later I tried on the empathy shoes and walked for a little ways in them. I wasn’t impressed. I’ve always been able to do that. I was impressed with my internal flash of meanness , and, even, a little surprised at my impatience that he was all self absorbed and I was obviously dying of frost bite and he didn’t even have any fucking coffee made. I did, however, suggest he change radio stations. He nodded at me like we were part of a cheech and chong sketch, “Oh wow, man, good idea.”
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