Seven Red

I was coming home on the train today, re-reading Paul Willis’ classic study and analysis Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. I first read the book somewhat badly as an undergraduate, and then again maybe my second semester in graduate school. In the graduate school version, I remember reading Willis, Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress all together, probably all in the same week. Willis’ significantly gloomier version of things just resonated with me more than the others, probably because his ethnography bore significant resemblance to my own memories of high school, though Willis’ study takes place in early 1970′s industrial England. In any case, I’m re-reading the book for a project I’m working on, and it’s as good and funny and cogent as I remember, and maybe as gloomy. This time I actually bought a used copy.

So I get on the train, and I’m surrounded by a bunch of young CTA workers who are clowning around and generally trying to get through their day. They’re standing around cracking on each other, telling each other in exaggerated voices that they’re “blocking the patrons” with their equipment. They have canvas bags filled with florescent orange flags and various tools.

“Get out the way! Can’t you see that lady’s tryin’ to get off the train!”

“You need to move, young man! Those reserved for senior citizens. Patrons.” They’re punching each other, laughing.

Then two more get on at Southport station, and these guys are the real clowns.

“Hey,” says the guy sitting next to me, playing the boss, to one of the new arrivals, “I know you weren’t posted to Southport, so I don’t know how you gettin’ on there.”

“Oh,” says one of the new guys, “I was over at Wrigley.” They all laugh.

“Oh, OK,” says the Boss. “At Wrigley. Drinkin’, too, prolly.”

“Oh, no sir. I’m a dedicated employee. I would never be off drinking at Wrigley when the CTA needs me. But I shouldn’t uh had that sixth.” They all laugh.

“Mmmm hmmm,” says the Boss.

It goes on like this for some time, until I’m one of the few left on the train with these guys. They’re all loud and carrying on. Then, suddenly, the Boss says, very officially, “Will y’all quiet down? Can’t you see this gentleman here is reading?” That would be me. This gentleman.

“Oh, he’s studyin’ for a test! Stop messin’ him up!”

“You gonna quiz him?”

I look up and smile. Alright. You got me. I get it.

“He fail that quiz he gonna end up workin’ the CTA,” says one of the clowns. “You better let him read.”

They’re all laughing their asses off. I’m smiling. OK, guys. I get it.

Now, stuff that’s ironic. I was reading the following paragraph as all this was going on:

Some of the non-conformist group in the grammar school are, in fact, from working class families. Despite even their origins and anti-school attitude, the lack of a dominant working class ethos within their school culture profoundly separates their experience from ‘the lads.’ It can also lead to artificial attempts to demonstrate solidarity on the street and with street contacts. That the working class cultural forms of school opposition are creative, specific, borne and reproduced by particular individuals and groups from afresh and in particular contexts – though always within a class mode – is shown by the cultural awkwardness and separation of such lads. The lack of the collective school based and generated form of the class culture, even despite a working class background and an inclination to oppositional values, considerably weakens their working class identity (58).

Sometimes, it doesn’t matter if you get it.

Yup yup.  It’s that time again.

• Victory! Having scarfed down about 20 chocolate chip cookies, there was no way I was going to get to sleep at my usual bedtime of 1am. But I tried anyway, tossing and turning and generally getting no closer to sleep. Then I watched as my daughter came scampering out of her room, headed for the bathroom. She went in, pulled down her pajamas and her pull-ups, sat on her potty, made her pee, dumped it, wiped, and flushed the toilet. In the middle of the night. This is a great victory in the Seven Red house, and I’m just so proud that I’m telling all you fine folks about it. Potty training was an ordeal, but what I’ve learned is that it’s a completely non-linear process. We worked on her for four months, through refusal, tantrums, false starts, hiccups, half-steps, half-a-dozen how-to books, and massive frustration. We were getting nowhere. Then, one day, I sat with her for about an hour and simply refused to let her leave the bathroom. She settled in, did her thing, and then took to it. Overnight. She went from refusing the potty and saying “I’m a BABY,” to using it all the time, as if by magic. It’s clear that she could have been potty trained earlier, but she just didn’t want to do it. But a night-time trip, completely self-motivated? It’s a beautiful thing.
• Irony! We live on the third floor of a three-flat, as they call them here in Chicago. Downstairs from us is a nice guy named Steven, who lives (I think) with his girlfriend (who I’ve never seen). Below them lives a couple who moved in when we did – the building had just been through a gut rehab, and we were the first tenants. The first floor couple are married, but they’re young, maybe in their mid-twenties. They fight all the time. It’s really unbelievable. I go out back to smoke, and I hear them two floors down in these brutal conversations, like “Can’t you even understand the question I’m asking you? Are you stupid? “Are you?” “I’m so sick of dealing with your shit!” All the time, like that. This qualifies, in my book, as “putting your business in the street,” and she knows that there is nothing I detest more than putting one’s business in the street. I don’t think she and I have ever had a fight in public, because as soon as one even comes close to starting, I mutter something like “business in the street” and disengage. And we don’t wonder whether they have the same fights inside. The basement of our building is a general storage area for all the tenants, and we put tons of stuff down there because we have almost zero closet space. So, from time to time we have to retrieve this or that from the basement. As it turns out, you can hear conversations in the first floor apartment pretty clearly from the basement. It goes like this: “I can’t fucking believe you. You asshole.” “Oh, like you’re better. Fuck you.” “God, something so simple and you still manage to screw it up.” Etc. All the time. Now the kicker for this came about three months ago. I was in my usual state of insomnia, and heard some ruckus outside at around 2:30am.It was so loud that it woke she up: some commotion in the street. We both went to the front window, and saw a very drunk woman laid out on the ground, with a man trying to pull her to her feet, tugging her arm roughly and yelling “Get up! You never fucking listen to me!” The woman was saying, screaming “I want to stay here!” “Get the fuck up!!” she and I looked at each other like – no, is that them, our neighbors? People started coming out of their buildings to see what was going on and help the woman into her house, and the police even came. Sure enough, it was our downstairs neighbors. A truer instance of putting your business in the street would be hard to imagine. The woman was literally in the gutter.  Two days ago, she was yelling at her husband to let her into the car, and he drove off while she was still gripping the door handle. This as I was walking up the block, so I reached our front door at the same time as she did. “Uh, how you doin’?” I asked awkwardly. So today I was coming in, and I bumped into Steven, the nice guy on the second floor, not connected with the first-floor couple. But he says to me,  mistaking me for the first floor guy (I had a hat and scarf on), “Sorry about the noise last night.” Huh? Then he sees that I’m his upstairs neighbor and says “Oh, sorry again. The first floor people were banging on the ceiling because we were being too loud.” I smiled. Nope, I would actually come down and knock on your door if that was happening. Since I’m like, an adult. We parted ways at the second landing. But I just had to laugh that the first-floor couple would have the nerve to tell other tenants to, um, lower the noise. Amazing. Now, she thinks that they shouldn’t be married. I agree. They seem to despise each other. But I will say that there is at least one activity they seem to enjoy doing together, and they are no less loud at that than they are in their fights. Let’s just say that I hear a lot when I am outside for my smoke breaks…
• Fluffy! We watched Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Eh. I can do without that Juno kid, for reals. Always with the same character. I get it, with the halting delivery and self-consciously charming not-like-the-other-high-school-guys bit. I really do. I’ve had a television series and now three movies to learn it, and I get it now. Basta! But I will say this. The movie gets exactly right the teenage all-night-Manhattan-trip, even down to the Rasta guys who invariably butt into your conversations. We used to do this occasionally when I was a teenager, especially after the rave clubs opened on Hudson Street, and it was always exactly like that. In similar news, we watched Zack and Miri Make a Porno last night. I also get the whole Seth Rogan bit. she calls it the “schlubby guy gets hot chick” appeal. For my part, I don’t think any of those Judd Apatow movies (and their various Roganesque offspring) are about women at all. They are about the intense pathology of the male friendship. The women in these movies are merely functions to contrast the male friendships. This is most obvious in Pineapple Express, but re-watch The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, whichever, and tell me these aren’t primarily studies of the contemporary male friendship circle.
• Cookie! It’s all like Revolutionary Road up in here today. I made my ass-kicking Organization Man 1950′s Style Meatloaf and she baked a batch of her awesome cookies, which is why I’m still up writing this blog post at 2:56 in the morning. I should have been asleep for twenty minutes by now! (I don’t really sleep. It’s a personal failing). I won’t even try to describe the cookies. This is what the kitchen counter looked like at around 4:30 this afternoon:

• Pretty! As in, you think you’re so…

• Groovy! Michael White and the original Liberty Jazz Band were just incredible on American Routes today, playing live at the House of Blues in New Orleans. Knock you down good. We had it on when we were eating dinner, and I was just mesmerized by it, as I always am by good live jazz. There are worse ways to spend an hour than this, I assure you:

American Routes, February 21

In which Jim Cramer accuses Chris Cox, the head of Bush’s Securities and Exchange Commission, of being a communist. It’s hard to get laughs like this for free.

So, after one year in Chicago, I am just a boss parallel parker. I mean, I’m fantastic. I squeeze into impossible spots at the perfect angle, and end up arrow-straight three inches from the curb. Let me reinforce this point: I’m friggin awesome at it. It took some work, since I didn’t do a whole lot of parallel parking in Massive State University College Town, where we had a giant parking lot at our apartment complex. And what really did it here was this past Hell-Winter, a trial by fire (some say by ice), which involved inhuman parking maneuvers through snow-plow walls and over hard-pack – a nightmare. Ah, but it honed my skills, Grasshopper. Sometimes adversity is the best teacher.

So, like, anyway, a few weeks ago, I asked she if I could consider myself a parallel parking guru. Y’know, since I’m so goddamn good at it? she informed me – rather unceremoniously, to my mind – that in order to be a guru, I would need actual followers and, since it didn’t appear likely that I would gain any actual followers for my fucking incredible parallel parking abilities, that I could not be a parallel parking guru, and would have to settle for being a delusional self-congratulator RE: my pizzarking skillz. I thought her assessment ungenerous.  Today I determined that it was also false.

I was coming back from The Target (as babygirl calls it) because yesterday I promised her that she could watch Diego on the computer if only she would cease whatever unbearable tantrum that she was then conducting. Yes, it was a bribe, and one that would require procurement of an actual Diego DVD at some point, but it made sense at the time, largely because it didn’t commit me to any immediate activity. Damned if she didn’t remember it in its exact phrasing this morning, so off I went to The Target, looking for Diego. When I arrive back at The Block, I notice a spot right in front of our place. It’s tight, people. Maybe two feet bigger than the car, maybe less. In other words, it’s perfect. The question is not whether I’ll get into it. That’s obvious. I’m awesome. The question is how many moves will it take? Can I shave some off? I survey the space, check the distance of the two bordering cars from the curb, and pull into place. I check my angle one more time, cut the wheel, reverse. Perfect. Cut the wheel, pull up. Perfect. One last reverse for fine-tuning, and I’m in.  The whole operation takes less than ten seconds. I brush the dust off my shoulders Obama-style, knowing that the small space directly in front of my door couldn’t defeat me, and I exit the car.

Standing there next to the door is Some Guy Hanging Around on the Street, a typical sight. What’s he doing? I don’t know, and I don’t care. But I notice that he’s looking down at the wheels of my car. He looks up at me, and back down at the wheels. He checks my distance from the car behind, and the car in front. Ten inches on either side, maybe. And he says:

“Hey man. That was great parking.”

No lie, G.I.

I nod knowingly, like I know it was great parking, son. You ain’t gah tell me. And I head inside.

But the conclusion here is simple. I appear to have a follower, so that would make me a parallel parking guru, after all. Score: topspun 1, she 0 (if scoring begins today; otherwise: topspun 3, she 2,791).

Workers and Students. Indeed. For an education in the service of the workers. Workers and Students in solidarity… That’s 40 years ago now. And all I hear on TV is that the students and college-educated support this one, while the “blue collar” workers support the other one. We have to learn these lessons again and again, I guess.