environmentalism when there’s a lack of resources

With the world’s climate changing the way it is, with permafrost not being so permanent anymore, it’s clear that a much broader sense of environmentalism could have been quite beneficial. But there’s always been a divide between people who are just privileged enough to enjoy a relatively contained experience of fresh air with nice views and those who are considered quite far from nature and heedlessly contributing to litter.  It’s not uncommon for the latter to be disenfranchised and often just trying to get through the day. Between this divide is where most people would probably consider themselves: mindful about their environment, but generally just going with the flow of a world where pollution is the not-overwhelmingly-tangible output of convenience as normalcy. I don’t know that environmentalism has ever really addressed those who aren’t privileged, though I’m speaking only to the privilege-regarded field.  Even in something that is supposed to be as eco-friendly and accessible as urban gardening, it seems like the people lacking in privilege who take it up (particularly in areas that aren’t gentrified) are quite the exception. I figure that most populous among polluters are people who are sort of privileged and those who are underprivileged.  But both of them are utilized and out-polluted by rampant profiteers — folks who  have instilled and created an infrastructure of considerably wasteful and literally toxic values all over the world. A disparity in resources can mean the difference between apathy about the environment due to a lack of solidarity, or apathy that comes from entitlement and convenience.   Generally people with resources are the only ones whose opinions count (or seem to count) in a society that can be all too driven by money; maybe this is why few people have ever really expected under-privileged people and areas to be devoid of (or care) about pollution.   If you’ve lived in a place that’s not considered respectable, you’ve probably seen people from neighborhoods that are (considered respectable) come to drop their garbage off. The world’s changing climate is already affecting everyone to different degrees. People who have no resources and are unable to move to drier pastures (hopefully not so dry that they don’t have a decent supply of drinking water) will continue to be affected most negatively — though there’s little clear sailing all around. It’s an awful lot to ask people who aren’t privileged to care about something they don’t get to enjoy the best of.  But, however it may be subdivided, there is only the one planet.

Lifestyle TV

Via the 17th century (and Wikipedia), a courtly precursor to tennis, one of the most lifestyle-driven sports.

To some degree, most people probably covet a lifestyle at some point in their lives: some seemingly predetermined mold of living that just looks right. A show like Mad Men benefits from the sheen — the aesthetic, the lifestyle — that was the cultural ideal of the 1950s. Specifically, Mad Men benefits in exploring how empty and shallow so much of that sheen was, while also being able to milk those qualities for entertainment value. But beyond that narrow realm of idealized-looking people in fancy clothes, the disconnect between lifestyles and substance rarely seems to change.

Even as the economy has stagnated due to unrestrained greed, there’ve been more and more TV networks catering to an upwardly mobile lifestyle. And, well, why wouldn’t they? TV is generally a for-profit business that caters to advertisers, and lifestyles are a premier business model. There’s never just one thing to buy; items, places and experiences are all part of the lifestyle tapestry. Often that collective is unified by the idea of ‘the best’: consuming the best food, living in the best place, etc.

Even though it’s yet to put an ‘F’ for foodies in its acronym of Home & Garden Television., HGTV is probably the premier channel of the lifestyle lot; so many shows, so many boring privileged people looking for the best life has to offer in property.

Bravo has probably been at the forefront of shallow lifestyle TV. Its output seems increasingly obsessed with utilizing the insecurities of those who proclaim to be living some golden dream. A foodie-centric show like Top Chef almost seems quaint in comparison.

There’s also Esquire now, which slightly minimizes an obsession with drama in favor of yuppie/hipster driven reality shows with a magazine-like sheen. Glossy and not particularly deep, which is the thing with lifestyles in general.  In two weeks, the Bio channel will become FYI, another network focusing on — you guessed it — lifestyles.

Obviously lifestyle is quite a broad term, but I do think that the ‘style’ part of the word is intrinsic to how we think about it. As style is thought of by some people who use fashion as their ticket to being special, so is  the idea of a lifestyle.  In that vein, it’s not something everybody can have exactly. A lifestyle has generally been the domain of those with resources.

I guess the idea of a lifestyle will always be comforting, because it’s an insulated way to live. But places becoming tailored to lifestyles is generally one of the elements of gentrification — the process in which people  are mostly as (positively) relevant to society as their privileges are.  Maybe those privileges could entail resourcefulness as opposed to just resources, but it seems like we’re presented lifestyles as a dressed up approach to being a consumer as a way of life.

a problem with brands

You may not like to think of yourself as so easily reflected by the stores you shop at, but chances are that frequenting a certain store reflects that you’re among a certain demographic. Take Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. Depending on where you’re from, these two stores may seem quite different in who they appeal to — or, from outside a particular range of neighborhoods, they may seem like slight variations on the same healthy kind of brand. Trader Joe’s offers foods that are both healthy and affordable, which is a rare combination that disenfranchised/low-income communities could certainly benefit from. While it may not be as remotely upscale as Whole Foods, I don’t think of Trader Joe’s as a place that one would find in a neighborhood not considered desirable — whether that be because it’s considered an acceptable standard to those who are upwardly mobile enough, or because it’s gentrifying to that.  What Trader Joe’s lacks in an upscale experience, it seems to make up for with a whimsical name that alludes to a bygone entity. This has the same appeal vinyl holds to some people.

I recently read a post that mentioned the Portland African American Leadership Forum’s campaign against a Trader Joe’s moving into a primarily black, low-income neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. There’ve been many pieces lambasting that forum, but this one amounted to the way that just a Trader Joe’s, in and of itself (minus accompaniment by upwardly mobile-friendly development projects) could be good for a lower-income neighborhood. I think the problem is that store brands generally aspire to offer the same experience, specifically to appeal to a reliable customer base. So, any one brand that appeals to people who are upwardly mobile is synonymous with such. Think Starbucks.

If brands weren’t such a single-minded entity, then perhaps they could be tailored to low-income communities — with the obvious benchmark being that any variation on their stores all upheld the same standards. It would be easy to hire the majority of a store’s staff from that specific neighborhood, and let the uniqueness of that store be defined by the community that already exists there. The benefits of a brand’s resources could go a long way, even without their usual logos.

As far as wanting to keep Trader Joe’s out of that particular lower-income neighborhood in Portland goes —  it seems unfair to mention this without mentioning the statistical demographics of Portland (both historically and more presently).  Its reputation attracts the kind of upwardly mobile, primarily white people not so funnily lampooned in that dumb TV show — the kind who are generally thought of as being for diversity.  From what I can tell from Wikipedia and the Portland, Oregon section’s sources, the relatively small African-American communities the area has had seem to have been displaced even more exponentially than most.

In honor of today

Lida Husik talked about Martin Luther King Jr. in my 2011 interview with her: “The American travesty that hurts me the most is the Black Experience.  I’m not a do-gooder, or politically active, besides voting, and being vegan. I don’t protest things or write my congressperson.  But I was six years old when Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered. I remember that day and how it felt like a wound piercing my heart.  So this was what the grown-ups got up to.   The heart of a child never gets used to constant disappointment in adults. I grew up in Washington, DC, in the white sector, although later in jr. high and high school black kids were bussed in from other parts of the city, so I was exposed to that other culture thoroughly—and in the seventies as well, a different world.  You couldn’t see the math problem on the board through the sea of afros.  The black kids were loud, angry, and funny; they sang and danced in the halls and popped gum.  There was Kool and the Gang, Earth, Wind and Fire, Marvin Gaye, Parliament.  The hits were sung with gusto.  We little white kids tapped our Lawrence Welk toes hopefully along to the beat.  The black kids had a different way of speaking, mellifluous and abbreviated, full of mysterious code words that cracked them up.  We were meek and pale and tongue-tied, and turned even whiter next to them.  Most of our teachers were black, too.  They were warm and funny and had life experience in their faces.  The white teachers seemed shriveled and boring and nasal.

Art by Robert Pinero. Words by Lida Husik.

“Flash forward to the eighties and nineties and this godforsaken decade.  I am enraged by ‘gentrification’, the very word is so offensive, as if a bunch of ‘gents’ in ascots gallantly swoop in, take off their top hats, and say, ‘Sorry old chaps, we must have use of your neighborhood, but look, there’s a perfectly good crime-ridden suburb for you to move to, and we’ll just turn your old mammy church into a hipster wine bar’; and this has happened everywhere.  The old black grandmas can’t afford the property taxes; if there are government programs that could help they aren’t told about them, etc etc.  Now, I’m not saying that blacks are good and whites are bad; that would be stupid.  The black community has disappointed me too.  I don’t like the anti-gay bias.  I wish there was more of the old-time values instead of the hopelessness and violence, but that’s also just economics.  Mainly though, I’m so sick of how ignorant and selfish some white Americans are.  Just how ignorant of history do you have to be not to appreciate the great moment Obama’s nomination was?  How could you look at one second of footage of the sixties German Shepherd attacks and fire hoses, wielded by government employees, and not grasp that incredibly emotional opportunity for justice?  How could you not vote for Obama and call yourself a Christian?  Well, the hypocrisy never ceases to amaze.”

https://davidmzs.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/lida-husik-interview/

Not my idea of funny

© Robert Pinero and me

While all humor is essentially subjective, what I’ll refer to as ‘hipster humor’ confounds me.  I recently saw a picture of an old homeless person that was accompanied by what I consider a cheap joke.  Possibly it was supposed to imply more about the kind of person who would identify with the joke’s vapid perspective than anything about the homeless, per se, but I think the actual person in said picture — someone who likely has no real lifeline in our society — at the very least deserves not to be used as esoteric commentary by someone of privilege.  Being down and out is not cute.

As a byproduct of apathy as coolness, hipster humor is bigger than people in places tailored to currency and exclusivity.  Apathy as coolness is hardly a stranger to thug culture.  But where thug culture does the most damage — in disenfranchised neighborhoods — perhaps there’s more of a sense that homelessness often has a lot to do with being unlucky.  If anything, you’re more likely to hear idiotic jokes that try to separate how far apart someone is from the conditions of homelessness, as opposed to things like caricatures.

Beyond the very important economic reasons, that kind of humor makes it easy to see why some folks who live in between the “bad” in their neighborhoods find the idea of improvement, and who it brings, so disheartening.  Some people seem to show fresh air more consideration than they would people who are struggling.

Location, location, location

Robert Pinero urban samurai art

“It’s comforting to believe that there’s an essential version of each of us — that good people behave well, bad people behave badly, and those tendencies reside within us.

“But the growing evidence suggests that, on some level, who we are — litterbug or good citizen, for example — changes from moment to moment, depending on where we happen to be.”

The preceding quote is from Adam Alter’s NY Times opinion piece, “Where We Are Shapes Who We Are.”  For a while now, I’ve been writing about the silver lining of so called “bad” neighborhoods — that they can make for a certain kind of strength — but I may have only delved a bit into the thug culture that pervades in some of those neighborhoods.  This was probably because an abundance of people of color in a given neighborhood unduly makes for a bad place to live in the culture at large, even though most of any such people aren’t “thugs” at all.  Beyond a “black people are scary/cool” mentality, the Alter piece got me thinking about the role that location has in the way thug culture plays out — and also in the way that people extend themselves.

There is no greater fulfillment of the way that African-Americans have been disenfranchised than thug culture.  For the past century and a half, black people migrated to the north in a search of less discrimination and more opportunities — but, by and large, found themselves being looked over for working-class jobs (pretty much decreasing in number the more there was an emphasis on valuing employees as people).  Historically, such jobs have been the starting point for families to become middle-class and gain some sense of mobility.  With the people providing those jobs vastly preferring people who looked like themselves, African-Americans, already dealing with the psychological scars of being treated as less than human, typically had to reside in locations redlined by a population that fled to suburbs and various other enclaves.  It’s not an easy place to be (literally and existentially), and if you didn’t have much of a value system internally in the first place . . . well, it’s always easy to embrace mindlessness.

When hip-hop first emerged in crowded, urban black enclaves, it was something that was against hopelessness — much in the same way that rhythm and blues was when it came out of the backwoods of black southern life.  But that was then (and to be fair to what’s labeled as hip-hop presently, it’s the corporate stuff that’s the most mindless), and this is now, when what sets the tone is bass-thumping self-aggrandizement.

In his opinion piece, Alter mentions various studies that postulate that people who live in less densely populated areas are nicer–essentially, more likely to extend themselves.  Urban areas are defined by how crowded they are in relation to surrounding areas; gentrification by whom it thins out.  If you’re in some densely urban place that’s not gentrified (or maybe only a little), and you still haven’t succumbed to apathy and a hard heart, that’s really something, isn’t it?  Just because it’s easier to be selfish where there’s less resources doesn’t mean it’s natural to the locale.  In a world with a population that’s becoming increasingly urban because such is where the opportunities are, it seems to me it’s not all that much to only be able to find kindness where it’s less crowded, less noisy and where the streets are less cracked.

Rediscovery

I smiled as I swept a lone cigarette into the dustbin.  It had been around the sidewalk beneath Elaine’s ledge, and was the best kind of cigarette–one that hadn’t been smoked before it was trash.

What were the chances a temp was the one who threw it away?

It was just about lunchtime, and I was finishing sweeping up when Curtis passed by again.  This time he was with some of my distant co-workers from public relations.  Curtis and I were both from the same side of town, and though he had lived elsewhere for a long time, it was through his old, poorer neighborhood that he was running for councilman.  His chances at winning weren’t great, but he seemed to be a popular source of community outreach photos.  Back in high school, I let him convince me to stop saving for a guitar and get a ukulele.

“Hey, Curtis!” I called out.  “You still playing the guitar?”

He didn’t look back.

My thoughts returned to the possibility of seeing Elaine.  I emptied the dustbin then headed upstairs, sweeping stray bits along the way.  On the third floor, there was a utility closet with a door inside that had been spackled to blend into a wall.  A chair propped that door open.  Sighing at the hint of smoke wafting in, I reached around the spackle and knocked on the building exterior.  “Any temps out there?”

“No,” Elaine said.  “Oh, wait . . .”

There were a few mini-roofs scattered around the five-story building.  When I stepped over the chair, it was onto one of these islands of a sort.  Her hands shooting down to her sides, there Elaine stood.

“The first one was me hoping,” she said.  “I’m sorry if you had to clean it up.  The second–well, I still don’t want you breathing in any of this stuff.”

“Still quitting, huh?”

Elaine showed me a nicotine patch on her arm.  “For lots of reasons.  Hypothetically–if I wanted to kiss someone, it shouldn’t be second-hand.  But that’s a process, Roger, like you getting a mobile phone.”

I smirked.  I really did hope to need one some day.

It had been a few weeks since we last saw each other.  After a little while, Elaine came over and sat down on the chair.  I leaned against the building and slid down until I was crouching.  This put us in close proximity to each other, and though that felt natural, distance between us and other people had a lot more mileage.  We’d both had our hearts broken once before, and that had been enough.  Elaine was brown-skinned and of Chinese descent.  Her family owned a restaurant that had been failing since one opened up a few stores down.  Their block was in the midst of rediscovery, and she said the new place offered some more traditional idea of Chinese decor.  This was why she was temping.

Elaine bumped her leg into mine.  “Hey, you should see your friend more often.”

“I see him.  I just don’t know why he’s still trying to play the blues.”

“Did he give you my last message?”

From my pocket I pulled out the nicotine patch that Arnold said was from her, then I held it up.  It was in this way that we saw a silver-haired man looking at us from a window of the building across the street–somewhere in the middle of its ten stories.

“What’s he looking at?” Elaine said.

“Maybe we should tell him it’s just a nicotine patch.”

“That’s none of his business!  But if he wants a show, let’s give him one.”

Elaine got up and shook my hand in a glorious textbook fashion.  We were still shaking hands, past the show of it, I thought, when a woman belted through the door.  She beamed as she announced her discovery of a new spot for smokers.

***

When I went to see Arnold in the subway, he was sitting on a milk carton and trying to play guitar.  An empty, upturned cap lay next to him.  With hands trembling, Arnold barely managed to fingerpick his way through an old blues standard.  The resulting tune wasn’t constant enough to sing to, but he was in his own little world.   I tapped the back of my ukulele to get his attention.

“I’ll play, you sing,” I told him.

“Okay,” Arnold said, putting his guitar down.  “I guess that’d work just this once . . . I’m glad to see you’re all right.  Elaine told me her family is re-opening their restaurant over on the west coast.  Just ’cause she’s going out there don’t mean you’ll never see her again.”

All of this was news to me, but I nodded and picked up playing where Arnold left off.  He sung the standard words: down and out again today, but maybe there’d be love tomorrow.  The ukulele made it all sound lighter than it was.

A small crowd soon gathered, and I recognized the sides of a face or two from my job.  When the crowd was thick with a mix of people coming and going, a pair of brown arms swung back and forth at the rear.  One arm had a patch on it.  Elaine waved through most of the song, and I smiled a little.  Then she pointed at her wrist where there might have been a watch.  After she left and the song was over, I put on her nicotine patch and played through another tune.

The ‘best’

‘No one likes rejection and since I resist being part of the “best” party, I usually find myself getting kicked out.’

Why do I resist?  When something is considered “the best,” then the competition kicks it into another gear and the easy, relaxed, wonderful experiences begin to diminish.  All of a sudden, things start changing, heads inflate, rules get stricter, security gets tighter, standards or maybe its quality that drops, prices rise through the roof and some folks find they can’t keep up.  Thus, they get forced out.  Then everything and everyone is trying to do and be the same because everyone is doing it.  It looks a lot like gentrification.’

The preceding quote is an excerpt from a great post over at Building Windmills.  It reminded me about a TV show that I think embodies much of the “best” mentality: “House Hunters.”  The name pretty much sums up the show.  Usually a couple is searching for the closest thing they can get to their ideal house in a given region — one within their budget.  And the viewer watches as they tour three properties.  I’ve only seen the show a few times, and, during such, pretty much only for as long as it takes to hear one half of a couple talk about how lacking a property is.  Now, even withstanding that the show supposedly features people who’ve already bought their homes going through a sort of reenactment of the process (see this piece), dismissing a property as something you don’t want to buy is certainly anybody’s right–even by the most ridiculous, arbitrary kind of standards . . .

Thing is, often these properties that are lacking are somebody else’s perfectly livable home.  They’re just so far from “bad,” and, even though the perception that they are might be relayed through one person’s perspective, the opinions about what’s “best” (however genuine or not) seem in tune with a larger sensibility in which one not only has options, one feels entitled to the best of them.  Convenience, beautiful homes, culture and constant quiet?  Frequently ‘best’ is as many virtues as possible, sort of like what the absolute newest smart phone offers (dang, I wish I had that one).  It’s easy enough to want all these things, but buying virtues without working at them tends to mean buying into the appearance of something rather than anything of substance.  And it can be a vain world, so that can certainly work in its own comfortable way.  But who says that’s the best one?

Near and Far (Part 3 of 3)

“Flowers!  Flowers!  Get your flowers here!  Lots of shapes, colors and sizes.  Just like you say you like the folks in your neighborhoods!”

Maybe that wasn’t the best-ever approach to selling flowers, but with most people in their cars ignoring me altogether, it seemed as reasonable an approach as smiling.   That was the way I’d started out, if only because Julia and Tom had taken out all the yellow flowers out that I was allergic to.

When the traffic light turned orange, back to the curb with the bouquets I went.  Leaning on the shopping cart packed with floral arrangements, I watched the cars as they zoomed to what was unofficially the good side of town–their headlights freshly lit against the setting sun.  It was in this stream, Julia had said, that Tom had the best luck selling flowers.  Since he couldn’t stand to do it anymore, what exactly did luck amount to here?  Should I hope a rich old guy who’d cheated on his latest wife would pass by in his limousine all flower-crazed?

“You there!” he’d say.  “I’ll take the whole cart-full.”

“Sir,” I would say, “I can’t let a man of your stature buy these–not without an extremely significant mark-up in price.”

“I’m sure they’re worth every penny.  What they lack in a small but artful card attached, they make up for in being sold by a person of color on the street.  My wife loves that kind of thing!”

“Then you got it!” I’d say, able to head to the bake-off and see my friends win in one fell swoop.

The walk signal went up, and grinning at my daydream, I towed the yellow line as traffic crawled to a halt.  And then, after another sale-free round that I’d managed to smile through, I did it again sans smiling.  A guy in a green car hailed me over and bought some roses.  He was among a swath of passengers big on rolling their windows up as I got nearer.  But, after the woman in the car behind him watched as he rolled his window down to pay for the flowers, she raised a finger and bought a mixed bouquet.

When the sun went down, I should have headed for the pie contest, but in two hours, all I had sold was four bouquets (at five dollars).  Only the wind had picked up in the last half-hour.  I wanted to do just a little bit more, so as the traffic light turned red, I went out between the cars a little further–out of view of the cart.  There was no real logic to this, except some faint hope that maybe the people in the middle and back of traffic were in less of a rush to get to bars and restaurants in pretty neighborhoods.  Maybe they’d see me a bit more, even if they had little use for flowers.

“Flowers!  Flowers!  Get your flowers here!”

On the way back to the curb, the light turned green.  The oncoming cars were sparse, and I was surprised to feel the sense of panic that I did.  Maybe being hit by a car still affected me after all.

On my right, someone honked and I waited where I was for the car to pass.  But it didn’t.  Soon, a black compact pulled up next to me, and Jean, of the flower-planting lot, was in the passenger seat.  In the driver seat there was a husky, dark-haired guy.  The look he gave me suggested the distinct possibility that he hated my guts.

“I thought that was you,” Jean said, leaning over.  “So you hate flowers, and you sell them?”

“Yeah, I’m complicated like that.” I nodded at the driver.  “You want to buy some flowers for your lady friend, buddy?  Or, no wait, that’s not fair.”  I looked at Jean.  “Do you want to buy some flowers for him?”

The driver stared ahead.

“Be nice,” Jean told him.  I looked past her window to the cart with the rest of flowers, which someone in a gray cap was pushing it away.

“Shit!”

I ran for the curb.  In the next lane of the street, I held one of the bouquets up to signal a brown car to stop.  As it honked and braked in short sputters, the guy in the gray cap grabbed a bushel of bouquets from inside the cart — then he pushed the cart rolling toward the street.  I scrambled and tripped over the curb to secure it.

When I looked up, the man in the gray cap was dashing around a corner with a few bouquets.  With the two bouquets he’d dropped on the ground nearby, at least there was a bit less for me to have to re-invest in flowers.

Horns honked back in the street.  With a small queue of cars behind them, Jean and her driver were headed off in the direction of lots of restaurants, which was fitting, since they already kind of got to see a show.

I went to pick up the dropped bouquets before the wind caught in the wrapped paper and pulled them further away.

***

Before I joined my friends, I was supposed to leave the flower cart back at Julia’s place.  But that would have made me even later, so I took it with me.  It wasn’t all that different from pushing the mail cart at work.

The venue for the pie contest was the lobby of an art gallery.  There were a dozen people at the entrance, and the wind was gusting so that I and the remaining flowers in the cart breathed in their mixture of cigarette and choco-cigar smoke.  I stifled a cough and asked:

“I don’t suppose any of you want to buy any flowers?”

Eyebrows raised, but only a brown-skinned guy with a goatee and a faint accent answered.  “Nah, man,” he said.  “We’re good.”

I had to go in back-first to pull the cart in, and the wind pulled away the petals of some of the bouquets.  As I stepped inside the last possible ‘best pie’ was being tasted, and it wasn’t Limon’s and Julia’s.  Over at the top part of a three table set-up, a group of people swarmed around a pretty woman with an asymmetrical haircut.  Before I could turn —

“Hey,” a man in a leather jacket said, approaching me.  “You can’t bring that in here.  Nobody wants to buy any flowers.”

“I’m sorry.  I’m not actually trying to sell any.  Just here to see my friends.  Look, I’ll just tuck it right here by the door.”

The guy noticed we were starting to get the attention of the little crowd up front.   “How about you tuck it outside?”

“It’s pretty windy out there.  Some of them would blow away.”

“I really don’t care, guy.”

“Well, you should.  Check it.  Without flowers, you’ve got no charm at all.  But if I were to hand you one of these, well . . . It’s like night and day.”

The guy blinked then grabbed the other end of the cart.

“All right . . . I’ll take it out.”

Nodding, he didn’t let go until I was maneuvering the cart back through the door.  It was while I was doing this that Tom and Limon came over to us.

“Hey, Roger,” Tom said.  “I’ll put the rest of the flowers in my car.  They’re going to announce the winner soon, anyway.”

As Tom took the cart out, Limon shook his head.

“How is it that you can have that . . .”  Limon stopped to nod at a sculpture of a melted man in a corner.  “But you can’t let this cart stay up in here for five minutes?”

“I’m not going to try to explain how art works,” the man in the leather jacket said, then he went off to a small, crowded table where there was soda and wine.

Through the window, I could see traces of petals zipping through the air as Tom pushed the cart to his car.  Limon and I reluctantly joined Julia on the other side of the room, where there was a piece of pie waiting for me.  Most of our pie — a blueberry number — was already gone.  As we walked through the room, I noticed this wasn’t the case with most of the other pies.

Julia hit me lightly on my arm.  “Why’d you bring the cart?”

“I was trying to wait out some more buyers.  If I didn’t bring it, I would have missed this completely.”

My stomach was growling, but with Tom outside, it didn’t feel right eating the slice of pie with my name on it.  Limon, Julia and I simply waited for the contest results.

We got second place, behind a man who won with two apples and a banana in a pie crust.  Whip cream kept the smile in place.

“Hell no,” Limon said.  “They ate more out of our pie than anybody else’s, and we still get second place?”

“Well,” I said, “at least there’s a little left for later.”

Limon shot me a look.  “I don’t know why I thought you might actually know how I feel these days.  Except for trying to get out of the mail room, you pretty much gave up.”

“Whoa, I did take it seriously.  You’re kidding yourself if you think winning this wouldn’t have made you feel better about Nellie.”

Limon looked to Julia.  “Aight … Tell Tom I’m going to walk home.”

Julia stopped me from going after him.  “Just let him go,” she said.  “Second place isn’t so bad for somebody else’s contest, right?”

***

Years after my own heart was broken, I was walking into the street when a van backed into me and then took off.  I landed on the ground, just under the bumper of a light blue car.  All the air had been knocked out of me.  While the sidewalk was busy enough, no one noticed me.  I thought I’d lay there in pain forever until this brown-skinned woman found me.  She hung up on whoever she was talking to on the phone, and called the paramedics.  In and of itself, this seemed like a miracle, but she stayed long enough for me to be able to talk through the pain.  I remember that she lit up a little every time I spoke, though I can’t remember what I said–just her responses.  She was intelligent and nice and warm–and pretty to me.  And I couldn’t imagine, for the life of me, her being in tune with what already seemed so mapped out in life.

I saw her one more time, when I wasn’t so physically broken, and she raised her head, all excited to see me.  But it was like I was stuck in a tunnel of myself.  I couldn’t get out to say, “Hey.”

***

Tom managed to squeeze the cart in the backseat, and I sat next to it for the drive homeward.  Up front, Julia and Tom were both quiet.  I’d wanted to give them a trifle of a good night, but I’d come up short.  The wind howling around the car seemed to say as much.

I didn’t have anything to add until Tom mentioned something about a lot of bees.

“Those aren’t bees,” Julia said behind the wheel.  “They’re, um . . . petals.”

I squinted through the windshield.  “Yeah, I’d go with petals.”

“Huh,” Tom said.  “You know, they’re kind of nice not all bundled together, aren’t they?”

We all laughed, and I knew that without a night out trying to sell flowers to people in the street, those words wouldn’t have wrung a bit of humor for me.  When Julia put the windshield wiper on, we laughed again.  But under the ginger streetlight, the windswept swarm of petals made for something unique to pass through, and the ensuing quiet was not gloomy like the one before.  It was nice enough that I wished I wasn’t a third wheel.  Then it felt like I’d wandered into the path of the blunt side of a van all over again.

“Where do you think they’re coming from?” Julia said.

“Some kind of magic hippie,” Tom offered.

“I hope not,” I said.  “Pacifist that I am, I’d have to kick his ass before he started doing complicated handshakes with all the guys on corner-duty.”

When Julia turned on a street where there was one side of the local lot, I sat up.  The gusts of petals were coming from the garden there.  As Julia dropped me off near the garden, I sneezed as soon as the door to the car was open.  I told Tom and Julia they didn’t have to stay, but they seemed to be enjoying the site of all those petals swirling upward into the night sky.  Me, I sneezed again as I hopped over the fence inside.

With everything that used to be here cleared away, I spotted Limon immediately.  By the handful, he was tearing the yellow flowers away like they were weeds.

“Rodge,” Limon said, “you’re just in time to help me clear this crap out of here.”

My eyes watering up from the pollen, I shook my head.  “Is this really going to make you feel better?”

“It is,”  Limon said, yanking away another group of yellow flowers.  After he did that, he swiped at only the petals until he had bundles of them in both arms.  “She loves me not, and neither do any of those people who want these flowers here and us outta here.  They don’t have any love for anybody that’s been here they whole life, man.”

” I . . . ” I held up a finger, then sneezed and in that time, Limon was well on his way to tearing half of the garden away.  “Hey!  Will you hold up one moment?”

I put my hand on Limon’s shoulder, and he slapped my arm away.  More sinus than man, I stumbled back and fell on my ass.  Score another one for the magic hippie, wherever he was.

“Damn it, Roger,” Limon said.  He was out of breath.  “Why couldn’t you just help me out on this one?”

“I did . . . Look, there was nothing I could really tell you when it came to Nellie, but it wasn’t like I didn’t try.”

“Everything we went through here,” Limon said. “I just felt like she got that, but, at the end of the day . . . ”

“Yeah, look, I know.  How can it all just come to nothing, right?  Once you get that feeling, it’s like a big scar.  I mean, some people . . . you know they could care less about your existence, but when it’s someone you think might not like be that, it hurts worse.”

Limon reached out his hand to help me up.  When I was standing, I pointed to my face.  “The tears in my eyes . . . all allergy-based.”

Limon cracked a smile for a second, then slowly shook his head.  “Are we even here, if someone over there isn’t telling us that we got first place?  Even if it’s some stupid pie contest.”

“Yeah, we’re here.  Look, I’m not trying to defend these stupid flowers.  They’re far from people, and I’d be a complete chump if I did that.  It’s just, they already think everyone from here does stuff like tear them up.”

Limon took a breath.  “What now?”

“If they need flowers, they still have plenty.  And for once,” I said, pointing to Julia and Tom in the car, “some of us had a nice view when we needed it.”

“So that’s it then, huh?  Back to the mail room tomorrow when I feel like I can barely breath.”

I sneezed.  “I know the feeling.  Take another day off, if you can.  Just try not to sink into yourself like I did.”

Near and Far (Part 2 of 3)

Since Nellie told Limon that they’d always just been really good friends, he’d been using up a lot of his sick days.  And Julia, my other friend at work, was sort of floating through it, worried about her boyfriend giving up altogether.

After another day like this, I was passing by the lot on my way to the house that Limon’s mom owned — where I rented the basement.  It was raining and the flower pollen in the air was minimal.  Over in the lot, a pale freckled woman was planting something yellow throughout its grounds.  Her volunteers were limited today to the two guys  whom usually stood with their arms crossed.

“Hey, fellas,” I said, passing the part of the chain link fence they hung out at.  “I’m local, so you know what to do.”

Arms did, in fact, cross.

“Nice.”

I went further along the fence and stopped at the section I used to look out on some days when it was raining; there’d been a nice view of the overgrown weeds that smelled nice when the water hit him.

At some point, the woman waved to me.  “Hey!” she yelled.  “Would you like to help?”

“Heck no!” I yelled back. “And I mean that in the most polite way possible.”

Hell, that was why I used ‘heck.’

“What?”  She grinned and squinted, then headed over to my part of the fence.  Her glancing over at the volunteer guys put a stop to their slow advance.

“Hi,” she said.  “I’m Jean.  And you are?”

“Roger.”

“Where are you from?”

“Here,” I said.

“Oh, you don’t seem like it.”

“If you say so.”

“So why don’t you want to help?  Just don’t have the time, or . . .”

“Well, I’m allergic to what you’re planting, for one thing.  And honestly, I’m not sure who they’re for.”

“That’s a bit silly.  I mean, flowers are for everybody.”

“Then why are they usually in places that aren’t for everybody?”

“Yards don’t count, if that’s what you mean.”

I laughed a little.  “Not really, no.”

“Well . . . I’m sorry you feel that way, but I’ve been getting some positive feedback from other people around here.”

“People who are, like, around here all the time?  When it’s not a rush hour?”

“I’m sure, yes.”

I nodded.  “Cool.”  I started walking south when Jean spoke again.

“Don’t you want this place to be . . .”  She spent a moment searching for the right words.

What were they?   Decent?  Pretty?

“Look, I just know that–whatever flowers weren’t here–it’s already been some people’s everything.  People left us to it until it was back near some pretty place on a map or something.”

“So what?” she said.  “You think I’m doing all of this just for who exactly?”

I looked back and shrugged.  “Beats me.”

***

I opened the door to my basement apartment at the house Limon’s mother owned, and found her son sitting with his head in his hands on the couch.  The smell that wafted through the vents upstairs was nice.  Hopefully I could some swing some dinner out of it.

“Hey, buddy,” I said.  “Unless my rent is due, I’m going to have to ask you to sob upstairs.”

Limon didn’t look up.

“Phil said your sick days are running out.”

Limon lifted his head and rubbed his eyes.   “That sounds about right.  But look, check it.”  He tapped a flyer on the table..

I went and picked it up: “‘Pie as Art — City bakeoff contest.'”

“Her people–they do these things, and then they talk about how this or that is the best in the city.  But we’re never in play, right?”

“No, I guess not.  So this contest is tomorrow night and you’d want to enter with what?  I can bake in theory, and since it’s probably the same for you, that doesn’t add up to a whole lot.”

“We’ll use my mom’s recipe.  I would have told her about it, but contest rules say that things have to be baked on the premises.  There’s something about my mom being judged there that don’t sit right with me.”

I closed one eye and took a breath.  “All right, man.  I’ll help you bake this pie.  Hopefully the power of friendship trumps all.”

Limon slowly nodded.  “Good.  I already went over there and signed up.  It’s just, it’s the only winnable thing right now.  I know it sounds stupid.”

I shrugged.  “It sounds less stupid than clubbing.  Anyway, I’m starving.  Do you think your mom would let me have some of whatever she’s making?”

“I kind of ate it all ready,” Limon said.

“Oh, well . . . It’s cool.  I’ve been there.  Lots of emptiness to deal with plus food equals . . . . yeah.  I’ll put something together for myself.”

“I went to raid your refrigerator, but you didn’t have anything.”

I scratched my head.  “You mean that glass of water isn’t even half-full anymore?”

“Nope.  Shit, um . . . One of Nellie’s friends tweeted that they’re having a party.  I’ve been to the place before; plenty of food. If you really are hungry . . .”

“Do you think Nellie will be there?”

“Maybe, but it’s not her party.  Dude who tweeted it used to always want to talk to me about hip-hop.”

“You know what?  You deserve to go to a party and not be someone else’s ticket to street cred.  I want that for you, man.”

Limon sat up, chuckling a little.  “Yeah, all right.”

“We won’t even be five minutes.”

***

After they talked about some music video, the guy Limon knew let us in at the door of his building.  We got some dirty looks as we moved through the hallway–mostly from Nellie’s friends, I imagined.  Limon was probably breaking some cardinal rule of dating that I’d never really bothered to keep up with.

Nellie, wearing a green headscarf, was in the middle of a bunch of people over by a bookshelf.  Limon stopped at doorway when he saw her; I tapped him at the shoulder and went straight for the table with all the food.  I sensed a general disquieting by the books, but the other guy at the table nodded at me.

“Hey,” I told him.  “What’s on the menu?”

“Chips.  Something that looks like it should taste like syrup, but . . .”  He shook his head.  “It don’t taste like syrup.  And, uh, some kind of pasta salad thing.”

“Is that last thing great?”

“Not really.”

The guy assured me he didn’t want anymore, so I lifted the whole platter up.  When I turned around, Nellie was standing there.  Her eyes scanned me up and down; they stopped at the platter and then my hair for a little while, until I said:

“My eyes are up here.  I’d point to them, but I don’t feel like I should have to right now.”

“Um, okay . . . You’re Roger, right?  I don’t think we’ve ever really talked.”

I looked back at the doorway; Limon was gone.

“How is he?” Nellie asked.

“Not great.”

She nodded.  “I’m very sorry to hear that, ’cause, whatever he thinks, I really do care about him.  Can you tell him that?”

Some red-haired guy was swishing his head a lot in our direction; he was head and shoulders over the rest of the bookshelf group.  “Hey, Nellie,” he called out.  “Is everything okay?”

When she said “yeah,” I headed for the door.  Then I heard her tell him to let us have the food.  My head dropping, I put the platter down near the door.

“Um, it’s an art thing,” I offered.  “Speaking of which, if you like pie, come to that bakeoff two nights from now.  My friend and I are going to reproduce the best pie in this city, and in doing so, redeem all the people who used to live in this building before they got kicked out.  That is all.”

I found Limon out in the hallway by himself.

“I think she’s going out with that guy with the red hair now,” he said.

“Yeah?  I guess that makes sense.”

“If you heard her on stage, it wouldn’t.”

Together, Limon and Nellie had been big on spoken word clubs.

“Your problem is you’re thinking about it,” I told him.  “Let’s go to Julia’s.  If you have to think about something, think about how the hell we’re going to make a pie even with a recipe.”

***

It may have been falling apart, but Julia had a great little porch.  Two of the steps were stable at just the right height from the concrete.

There was a warm undertone to the chill in the air, so the three of us sat there, trying to deal with the knowledge that Julia couldn’t join our pie venture because she had to cover her boyfriend Tom’s rush hour shift.  He’d been getting up less and less for it, and she had to make up the difference.

“Hey,” I said, “can I go in and see him?”

Julia shrugged.  “You can, if you believe you can.”

Limon stared across the sidewalk into our reflection in a car door.  “It probably won’t do any good,” he said.  “Ah, well.  Hey, Jules.  Did they start planting flowers around here yet?”

“I wish they would,” she said.  “We could sell ’em.”

“Maybe,” Limon said, “but that’s all they’d let you do here after a while.”

I went inside and found Tom sleeping on the couch.  Its fourth seat was empty, so I took a running leap into it.  Tom did not stir.

“Hey, Tom.  It’s Roger.  You gave me a ride a couple of times with Julia, remember?”

“Yeah,” he said meekly.  “I remember.  Is your heart still broken?”

“It was my chest actually–my breastplate, if you want to be technical.  But no, it’s not too broken anymore.”

“I hope it heals all the way.”

“Yeah?  Well, thanks.  So what’s up with you?”

“I’m just tired, man,” he said.  “When I’m out there in the street, nobody even sees me.”

“I’m sure selling flowers at red lights isn’t easy, but you’ve got Julia, and you know, she’s really sweet, got a good head on her shoulders, and she sees you.”

“Yeah,” he said.  “But I don’t know what she sees in me.”

“That is a bit of a mystery.”

Tom let out a small laugh.

“Try to get up soon,” I told him.

He nodded his head up and down.

“Just so I know, that is a nod, right?  With you lying down, it also kind of looks like you’re shaking your head.”

“It was a nod,” Tom said.

I waited for him to get up, but he didn’t.  When I got outside, only Julia was there.  She patted the empty piece of stairs next to her.

“So, why did you take Limon to that party?”

“I can’t help but feel like this is a bit of a loaded question, so I’m going to go with, ‘Because I’m an idiot.'”

“It’d be hard enough if she just broke up with him, but seeing her with someone he thinks is on a whole different level . . .”

“That’s the way of the world.”

Julia shook her head.  “When was the last time you felt a connection with someone?  Do you even try anymore?”

“Not really.  It’s like, you know how at the agency every couple of months, I apply for something out of the mail room.  I’m never quite enough there, though.  There.  Here.”

“Enough of what?” Julia said.  “None of that matters to any woman worth having a connection with.”

I hopped up.  “I know that . . . Hey, look, I’m going to cover Tom’s shift tomorrow night.  You should help Limon.”

Julia turned away from me and slowly nodded.  “I do have mad baking skills.”

“You do.  And I should still be there for the judging of that pie contest.”

“You better be,” she said.

My stomach growling, I took the long way home.

***

To be continued