Over the Top, part 3 of 3
Over the Top
Part 3 of 3
All of what’s been previously transpired expired in August. Over the ember months, the daze dwindled down to a precious phew, for then was then and now is yow. The parade of hits shot up to Number One with a bullet: the weakly checks from unemployment had been a fit, but cinched that time, the maximum number of weeks had run out and so did the benefits. And right after Xmas Winnie’s minimum wage hours at the Cost Cutter had been deeply cut, cutting us to the quirk and costing us un-endearingly.
In truth, we were up against it, our backs to the wail. Winnie’s kitchen cupboards gleamed more immaculately than e’er before, making Mother Hubbard’s fabled cabinet look like a groaning board on a cruise ship. While our own maws groaned and gurgled, a situation even more dire had bubbled up: the apartment mangler had been dogging us for (lack of) payment, his woof at the dour, next step down, viz a viz commandeering the sheriff of the shire forcibly to separate us from our cozy castle. Dreadfully anticipating such an inevitable fate, yours ghoul-ly snarled at the window, ruminating on how we might keep our rooms thereby delaying our doom.
By cheered coincidence, that particular day happened to have been the Monday following the Stupid Bowl, the irrational national event during which snickering fans grazed on sodium-soaked snacks under the daze of the ever-watchful teevee. On this hollow hoopladay it was assumed–nay, almost legally mandated --that Americans would consume massive quantities of cold ones. Once quaffed, their emptied vessels waited for collection– if not by the original consumer then a hopeful and ambitiously hopping opportunist – to return them to the point of purchase to reap the promised nickels upon redemption. Out the glaze my gaze switched to a brighter view.
“Think of all those empties out there, just tripe for the shakin’,” I said. “Those crouched pertater quarterbacks discarded all those nickels, passed to yours truly to intercept. Free money!”
“Oh, no, Art! Dumpster diving? Are we that bad off? “
Her mis(for)givings evidently emanated from a fear that the whole world --or at least the tiny sphere on which the two of us revolved – would witness this desperate measure as a sign of our rock-bottom degradation. My opinion was let ‘em gawk.
But life’s sweet ale had turned all skunky, the fizziness gone flat. What was I do? I could, I suppose, massage an old PBR bottle ‘til a bare-chested Rex Ingram pushed himself through its narrow neck toward eventual freedom following the temporary servitude of fulfilling a triad of wishes. Or maybe I should have summoned up an ancient wizard and bade him to druid his own thing by waving his shaft and instantly making the misery go pouf!
Presently I was out in the end zone of the nearest parking lot, one of many eyesores fronting several identical apartment buildings rudely occupying multi-roods of formerly sylvan acres. Winnie and I were but a couple among several hundred residents of the apartment complex, owned and operated by an overseeing overseas conglomerate and mangled by local parvenus with pretentious notions that the blight of hastily and cheaply constructed shelters constituted an impeccably respectable “community,” --nay, an upscale “village.” So much for upper muddle-class aspirations, as I tilted up the lids of the recycle barrels and sifted through, gathering only the preferred contents, as if a nocturnal pest burrowing through the sodden trash had sullenly become a snobbishly discriminating gourmet. Simultaneously my beloved stood at the window, as she raked nervous fingers through her salt-streaked but predominately peppered hair. She looked like the erstwhile cinematic chronically worried wife as portrayed by June Allyson, but instead of crying at the window, my Winnie was cringing. Poor ol’ gal, cleaving unto my side through thin and thin-- not at the moment quite through with me, but one, alas, never knows.
While busily pushing a line of empty beer cans along with the occasional soda can into the steadily-filling plastic bag, I heard sounds of clamoring and slamming. Nothing but a nervous pair of noises, I thought at first, then to my dissed dismay realized that my stupid visions were being consquirmed in real life. It seemed that a pack of sneering youths un-parent-ly had been endowed with a similar idea, regarding the debris from past festivities of the previous night. This group of muddle-schooler-sized boys (why weren’t they in class?) were unsystematically but nonetheless squarely knocking over the oblong-shaped bins onto the pavement of the all-but-deserted islands of successive parking lots perchance to pluck out the valuables amid the buried blight.
Upon closer (and closer) inspection I saw that the boys, though indeed youthful, looked big and burly enough to vanquish any interloper daring to thwart their mercenary efforts, backed-up by the (sin)ister presence of a ringleader-- a dolt, muddle-aged and world-weary, evidently micro-mangling the underlings with a hirin’ hand. One could surmise that the spell he had cast over his henchboys had been powerful enough not only to put a damper on their natural contumacious tendencies but rein in any inchoate independent entrepreneurship, perhaps by a vague promise to share with the crew a cut of the eventual proceeds.
Whatever the case, in my own case there was a definite feeling that I was the person being cased, targeted, a marked man about to be marked down–chased and tackled to the ground seconds before they’d contemptuously confiscate my hard-won cache. My first in-stink was to hurry the hell up and finish my picking, grab my plastic bag, and retreat to Winnie’s reassuring arms within the relative safety of home sweat home --at least until the sheriff (b)locked us out for good.
Thinking that I had everything wrapped up and ready to roll, I was about to twist and tie the opening of the plastic bag when I saw one last bit of refuse that I flat-out refused to leave for the invaders. Directly behind the dumpster itself stood a snowbank, the residue of a heavy storm long past, plowed up and parked there by the grounds-keeping crew warned and forearmed to remove from the all-important parking lot the traces of every inconvenient and possibly hazardous (i.e. litigious) flake. Having stood there for a month, decreasing in size at a much slower pace than a glacier infected by global warming, the snowbank had resigned itself to unescapable defacement, powerless to prevent a gradual, granular film of automotive exhaust and soot of unknown origins, as well as sporadically squiggly yellow lines, courtesy of local curs, here and there streaking the erstwhile white purity of its surface.
Out of said snowbank protruded the glassy arse-end of one final beer bottle, which I suppose had been facetiously stuck there on the night of the blizzard, perhaps by the plowman himself. I couldn’t resist the temptation of grabbing it; a nickel’s a nickel after all. But wouldn’tcha know–no, the mixture of snow–plus the melted snow reverting to ice–had over time had cemented the bottle’s neck deeply in a kind of frozen stone, keeping the prisoner tightly trapped until Spring.
Meanwhile, the savage horde of Fagin and his overgrown urchins inched closer and closer. The prudent thing to do was to leave the damn thing there, and get out while the getting was good --or by this point– fair. But I did not want to concede the tiniest crumb to this crew of marauders and their prick(ing) kingpin. Thus I decided to follow the impulse to retrieve that damned imbedded bottle, no matter the truth of the consequences.
I pulled and I pulled. The glass, though covered with its own layer of gray film, had retained its original slipperiness, forcing my hand to fly off free but not releasing the bottle itself. I tried pulling again, but the unyielding ice refused to budge. I tried pulling on the bottle again. And again. Each successive attempt was pissing me off by degrees, inspiring stronger yanks accompanied by air-shattering curses. Older angers had begun to surface as well (as ill): the unplayable card which the universe and the stalled economy had dealt us, the untenable, un-tenantable position into which I had lately thrust my Winnie, who by all that’s good and holy deserved the unqualified amenities graciously laid at the foot of an anointed queen, an empress for that matter, yeah verily a saint whose uncomplaining suffering without bounds compounded daily; and most unnerving of all , the unshakable feeling, hidden way down deep in some obscure compartment of my psyche, that yours fooly– a loose-lipped loser, a preternaturally consistent ne’er do-well, had been at least partially responsible for the wretched lot into which I’d thrown our lives.
All of which made me even more resolute and progressively angry, pumping up the flow of adrenalin until– until, mirabile dictu the bottle broke free! And I do mean “broke,” for my hand held a jagged portion three quarters the size of the whole, while still steadfast in the rock of snow, the remaining fourth of the bottle held recesses that could accept the sharp points of the larger part of the bottle in my hand in a perfect fit, like pieces from a well-jigged puzzle. That part–my part-- had in the gray of the late-winter afternoon taken on a kind of metallic sheen. As I gripped the still-intact flat bottom of the glass, it looked for the all the world like a weapon, a sword which with a little imagination could in extraordinary circumstances be dubbed “mighty.” In that instant I felt myself mysteriously changed, transformed –L’morph de Arthur!
Meanwhile the latter-day Atilla and his Huns had appeared just a few yards away on the edge of the parking lot. More than a few of the punks wielded jackknives and box cutters (though, to be fair, probably not originally intended as lethal weapons but as tools to slash swiftly through recalcitrant plastic bags.) Their eyes, however, looked fearsome; they were–as the late night movies would say–“gunning for” me. Not to mention seizing my goods. “Bring it on!” quoth I, a most unlikely champion of truth, justice, and so forth. But, galled is my witless, I would defend my turf!
Fool-hearty as the concept was, I was determined to do what it would take–even if it meant jousting and jostling with them, waging a blood-spurting battle to the death. And if I failed (or fouled)– what of it? What’s the worst that could happen? My own demise? (Oh shoot! and I’d been having so much fun!) Incarceration? Apart from leaving Winnie in the lurch (though in the long run she might be better off), yours truly would thereby meet the assurance of three hots and cot.
Alternatively, what if the gang merely swiped my bag of bottles without the slightest interest in mutual violence? What then? Whatever action I took that afternoon would only result in postponing the inevitable.
For on that day, in the damp and blustering February air, I had a vision of ending my remaining days in an area euphemistically dubbed “downtown”– the city’s waterfront dregs, the seedy and seamy “bad section” where any side of the tracks is wrong. There yours truly would blend in with The Homeless, another euphemism for a bum, rank and raggedly-bearded and scruffily- clothed, lice-and-vice-ridden, with all his earthly possessions hastily bundled into the basket of a wobbly shopping cart, rattling and rumbling on the crumbling asphalt of the streets, where battles of the bottle are hourly waged in cheaply alcoholic encounters of the weird kind. Written off and essentially banished to that realm no cartographer has ever bothered to chart, I’ll join my true peers, my scuffed-sole brothers, my misbegotten brethren, whom the rest of society summarily disowns as expendable, disposable, and unredeemable, as we from time to time stoop even lower to pick up some scattered loose change and the occasional returnable deposit bottle, scratching for dimes and begging for quarter(s), as we stagger and stumble through this wonder-famished, breadless blunderworld all the while shamed and defiled, pickled and slimed, and nickeled and nickeled to death.
Do Not Go Genteel Into That Good Night
Thank you for all of your comments for the previous ditty. Up next:
Do Not Go Genteel Into That Good Night
by Aunt Shecky
Only a few thin lines streaked across Gordon’s fist, but the real possibility of the scratches widening and gushing didn’t frighten him at all. Nothing like righteous indignation to pump up the old adrenalin, fueling the power of a mighty punch.
At his feet lay a pile of fragments of sharply-pointed glass, shattered bits of silicone, a tangle of wires intertwined like spaghetti. From the back of the cable box a slightly thicker, rubbery cord dangled as if it were the tail of a distressed forest creature hanging precipitously off a tree.
The mess on the rug should have been conclusive enough, but Gordon’s anger continued to rage. He grabbed the still-warm casing of the murdered tv and would have choked it if he could. With a ferocious grunt he picked up the electronic carcass and hurled it against the wall.
This final thump, rather than the initial crash, brought the missus into the room. Upon seeing Gordon’s reddened hand she disappeared, returning a few seconds later with a store-brand box of bandages and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. When she gently tried to nurse his wounds, Gordon swatted her away with his injured hand.
Never one to avoid the obvious, his wife asked him what had happened. She had her answer when she finally noticed the heap of destructive evidence littering the living room. Slowly she shook her head with a mixture of disbelief and sadness. For months Gordon and -- especially – Sheila had skimped and saved in order to buy that tv, and God knew when -- if ever -- the couple would ever afford another one.
Bracing herself, she gulped and broached the question. “Why did y–- uh, what brought this on?”
Gordon pointed to the empty spot on the stand where the tv had until recently stood. “That–that!–-some stuck-up bastard on the tube kept bragging about how he used to live in ‘genteel poverty.’ The stupid jerk don’t know nothin’ about poverty!“ He was fuming and sputtering. It was difficult to get the words out.
“But I know,” Gordon said, jabbing his chest. “I know a thing or two about poverty. There ain't one effin' ‘genteel’ thing about it!”
“So that’s why you smashed the tv?” Sheila brushed some stray pieces of glass off the sofa and sat down. “That’s ridiculous. We’re not poor.”
Gordon looked at his wife as if she were speaking Urdu. He squinted at her as a notion momentarily crossed his mind that she might be holding out on him, hiding a winning lottery ticket or something. “What did you say?”
“I said we’re not poor.”
“We’re not?”
“No,” she replied. “We just don’t have any money.”
About the previous story. . .
Thanks for reading #118, YesNo, originally intended to fit in the 50 words or fewer thread, then its 100 word counterpart, with the final count ending up slightly over 400.
Now I'm going to add to that word count with a non-fiction screed:
Couple of precedents for this one--the notorious anecdote in which Elvis shot out his TV when Robert Goulet came on the screen, which itself inspired a little ditty in the aforementioned 50 word thread.
In this story the point I was trying to make is that Gordon personifies the stereotypical (and wrong!) public perception of an uneducated, uncouth poor person. But Gordon is sensitive enough to know when the media are blowing smoke.
And though Sheila usually states the obvious, she is in denial, in her refusal to acknowledge that she and Gordon are "poor," (again, the popular misconception of blaming poor people for their own poverty.)
Recently statisticians studying income inequity have reached a conclusion that flies in the face of my country's vaunted "upward mobility." The researchers have gathered strong evidence that if you're born poor, it's more than likely that's how you'll die. That's why we (and Gordon) often hear latter-day Horatio Algers boast that they've achieved success despite starting out in a condition of "genteel" poverty--"genteel," in order to appear "refined" or "respectable" despite the insurmountable destitution.
Some pundits continue to bash the underclass, while at the same time others euphemize the term, referring to the rock-bottom tier of the 99% as "the working poor" -- or my personal favorite-- "the deserving poor." With the exception of a would-be saint who takes a vow of poverty, nobody in his right mind wants to be poor.
Just as Gordon in his fractious way expresses himself, let me go on the record to state there is absolutely nothing "genteel" about poverty. Nothing anyone can say can ever make poverty acceptable.
It isn't.
