Strange Encounters: 3

It appears that I have collected a triptych of strange interludes/lewds in recent weeks, and I thought that I'd sort of process them here, as I'm trying to force myself back into time-intensive blogging as a regular practice. As someone who enjoys making meaning from events observed in the world and employing and deploying (in turn) off-the-cuff ethnography and autoethnographic methods, as well as thick description and all that silly pseudo-anthro social dramaturgy stuff that makes performance people cream and others cringe, I wanted to discuss three encounters that I’ve had lately while being in the world/ in time. Here they are in list form for your perusal/unpacking, not that they need it. I just sort of felt like they were amusing anecdotes in the tradition of Brecht’s ‘street scene.’

1. I was out late at a party on the north side full of Bolivians and The People Who Study Them (meaning Latin American anthropologists, spearheaded by this interesting gender-bending figure who lives in the craziest Bauhaus-cum-cruise ship deck-cum-Legoland housing complex, but that’ll have to be discussed at another time), and on the way home I caught a taxi out of Morse or something, in Edgewater. The driver was African, as I’d expected, since many north-side cabdrivers are, but he seemed to be some sort of African royalty, the Oroonoko of Edgewater (excuse my racism here!), as he was fat in this very stately way and seemed to command a lot of respect from the other cars, particularly the other taxis, which kept driving around him in a sort of protective phalanx or cadre, honking and giving him thumbs-up signs, in response to which he smiled sort of expectantly. Anyhow, he was driving in this weird manner, leaning over and yelling into his bluetooth, with all the windows down and music blasting. The music sounded like Fela Kuti to my untrained ears, and so I queried the driver, who responded that it was indeed Nigerian music but was King Solomon, a smaller-scale celebrity based out of New York. He then said, “I’m talking to him on the phone right now!” and indeed, he was. He asked me if I wanted to talk to King Solomon, and before I could respond, he shoved the bluetooth into my ear and said, “tell him to come to Chicago!” so I did. Of course, the whole time we were having this fast-paced conversation about Nigerian culture, the Nigerian communities in Chicago and New York, and my studies (always a hot topic with the taxistas – they often say things like, “I have a great deal of respect for teachers” or “I am also a teacher, I taught X topic back home” [with the inevitable depressing subtext, “but now I’m a cabdriver”]. So when I jumped out mid-conversation, he almost looked sad to see me go and asked if he could drive me a bit further, closer to my door. I declined, but I did actually want to keep talking to him. Interactions with taxi drivers are always really interesting to me, in Panama and the U.S. – I think I’ll coin the term “taxismo” to refer to the phenomenon of short and ephemeral ‘taxicab confessions’ where intimate information is revealed during brief trips, with the implicit agreement that both driver and passenger will likely never see each other again. I wonder if that anonymity and the brevity of the exchange make it easier to divulge important secrets, anxieties, fears, jokes, and the like.

In that vein, I present #2. This happened when my friend and I were en route to Milwaukee, and we stopped to get my car’s emissions tested at the DoT (dept of transportation) for license renewal purposes. So, we were waiting in this little booth while the guy checked the exhaust – an operation that took all of 10 minutes – and this other attendant starts chatting us up– we being two diminutive women dressed in generic urban-casual wear, with nerdy academic glasses, clearly not from around these parts, socioeconomically speaking. The guy asks us where we’re from, and we say that we live in Chicago, and then he abruptly launches into this anecdote (prefacing it by explaining that he’s in fact a very rustic farmboy from rural WI) of his first trip to The Big City and how he was deeply traumatized by the sight of two men kissing in a public phonebooth. He remarked that at that time he did not know that they were ‘queers,’ but now he does. He said all of this with a chuckle, as if to show us that he wasn’t homophobic but had, in a former life, been so naïve as to experience homosexual panic from this sight that was so foreign to his rural understanding. His story came as a sort of “huh, isn’t that something” vignette rather than a straightforward example of hate-speech…yet it seemed so unmotivated by anything, so arbitrarily pulled out of the air. Very weird scene. There was an immediate, huge ripple of major anxiety and discomfort, like static electricity. He didn’t seem to notice anything, but everything sort of shifted or tilted for me. This incident sort of placed a black cloud on the entire day, raising my hackles and putting me on the alert for more policing of identities and mundane hostility to difference, not incredibly hard to find in Milwaukee and its environs.

Afterward, back in the car, my friend E. and I reflected upon the situation, wondering what we should have done, how we should have reacted, rather than just sort of sitting paralyzed, looking away, perhaps laughing softly and uncomfortably, as we did. E. felt that we could have used that moment to communicate our disapproval of and disagreement with this stance by making some sort of gesture of irritation or even intervening in a sort of political way. I felt that I personally could not have formulated an interventionist counterthrust that would have done anything other than piss off this guy, who was telling us all this in a very affectionate, fatherly, jolly tone that nonetheless seemed as though it would fall apart and collapse into reflexive rage at even a feeble demonstration of opposition. his heaviness and square-bodied nature gave me that creepy feeling of American gothic, this sort of morbidity and pathology hiding behind the open-faced friendliness of ‘the Folk’ (see David Lynch, Deliverance, et al). But I didn’t know if he would have exploded into rage or if, by chance, he would have been open to discussion – I shouldn’t necessarily turn him into Psycho Hayseed apriori. We also debated whether the statement truly was homophobic or whether he was just stating this as a benign commentary on his former ignorance of ‘big city life’ and its complexities and (potentially threatening) liberties. I felt that he was latently very homophobic, but E. thought that there was some ambiguity – although neither of these stances could explain why he told this story to us. I was left with that sad feeling that I get when I hear commonplace homophobia tossed around by, say, my parents (who are always passing judgment in their weird anxious-middle class way on the effeminate, the hypermasculine, the unmarried, the spinsterish – reproductively peripheral people around whom linger “questions”). I am always totally put off by this and wonder why it’s such a big question for them (although I know that paranoid discussions of the nonnormative are what keep the normative in business). In those cases, at least, I can play the pouty, self-righteous adolescent and call attention to what I view as abusive ideologies, knowing that I won’t trigger much violence (or, lamentably, make much change), that everything will be smoothed over with the arrival of the first course, the setting of the table. Cold comfort indeed.

The third strange encounter happened as I was waiting for the el on an unseasonably cold night – in fact, the same night that I met the African cabdriver. I was on the Howard platform, readying my lingual muscles to open with a flood of curses at the CTA for its usual shenanigans – late trains, the just-missed-it syndrome that seems to plague us all even despite the advent of ctabustracker.com, and all of the other ills that accompany Chicago’s decrepit public transportation system. Ninety percent of the time that I’m dealing with the train or bus, I experience intense rage that quickly converts into the most toxic physical symptoms of stress, probably shortening my life and hastening my end, etc. Well, on the CTA’s off days, this world doesn’t much feel like a place to live in anyway, so I guess that yelling obscenities into the often seemingly infinite void between train and platform is sort of like slow suicide, my death wish fully emerging.

But all this preamble is beside the point, since on this night I wasn’t particularly perturbed about the wait; I was more perturbed about the shit weather that accompanied my book-reading attempt. While I waited, this hunchbacked, elderly Asian woman whose face was nearly entirely wrapped in a scarf that looked like protective medical gauze approached me, and we started chatting. It turned out that she was Japanese, from Kyushu, and she spoke this very elegant and formal English that contrasted with her tattered layers of sweatpants. She kept turning to me confidingly and speaking in this heightened whisper. Totally interesting. We talked about a variety of subjects, and then the train came, and as we got on it some young black men were gallivanting around, and she turned to me and said, “In Japan, we are ruled by two guardians: respect for the self and respect for the other. Not here. Some of these people [gesticulating suggestively in their direction] don’t deserve to ride the train.” She went on to say something to the effect of: “Their behavior is bad. But what is worse is their smell. It’s the smell of grease, of greasy food – not a good smell of grease, but of cheap grease, like fried chicken and fast food…” I was sort of frozen to the spot, as usual, but she burbled on without any sign of stopping. In her defense, there was a drunk black man running around in the train car, darting into people's paths and screaming loudly, so that she had to strain to make herself heard over his guttural shouts. Anyhow, despite this man's presence and the racist things that she was saying, the woman was relatively calm. The discussion got into Japanese travel and politics, some interesting social observations, and it turned out that we were both going to the same place: “Full Foods,” as she called it (Whole Foods), I to buy some quick dinner and she to check out the fresh fish for her sushi. It was a very long time that I spent with this woman and her piquant views. Then we abruptly parted, and again, I wondered: why.