Me and Art in the Car
It was a long day Thursday.
I was scheduled for another long day of training at the Home Depot on Tylersville Road (Westchester, store 3823) which meant, among other things, nearly an hour in the car each way. I don’t like riding in the car as a passenger and I like it even less when I’m the driver. I’m not sure what it is about the experience that I detest so much, but detest it I do.
Lately I’ve found that I can redeem my required day-to-day drive time by listening to books on tape borrowed from the Cheviot branch of the Cincinnati Public Library, and when I’m alone that helps. I can lose myself in a story and even if it’s mediocre the time spent driving, say to work and back, isn’t so bad. When I’m not alone, however, things are tougher. Inevitably whomever I’m with wants to talk, (the nerve!) and I’m obligated to listen and contribute something thoughtful, or at least convincing. No matter who I’m with, even if it’s you, if we’re in car two things are very likely to be true: One, I don’t want to be there and, two, it’s not personal. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you, its that I don’t want to be trapped in a car watching telephone poles zip by to do it.
Driving is even worse for me than riding with someone else. I don’t do it well, so I avoid it -- if Ruthie and I are together, I never drive -- so I don’t get any better at it, so I avoid it all the more. I get lost, I run into things, you know how it goes. Highways are especially stressful for me, so the trip to Westchester was not something I would normally have been looking forward to.
Except that the book I currently have on loan from the library is Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, by David Sedaris, read by the author. If you’re not familiar with Sedaris, get that way. He writes incredibly funny stories drawn from his experiences. His stories aren’t unlike what’s going on here except that they’re funnier, he reads them on NPR and in Carnegie Hall, they have the punchy endings that I never seem to be able to give anything and in his stories, no one calls me a nigger. More on that last in a bit.
All that to say that I’d actually been a bit excited about spending nearly two hours in the car by myself listening to the stories. This excitement, though, was the short-lived kind as it turned out that there was another guy from my store scheduled for the same training and I panicked and accepted when he suggested that we ride together, caught again in the teeth of social mores. You just don’t look at a guy and say, “I know it’d be a colossal waste of gas and all, but let’s take separate cars so I don’t have to deal with you and I can listen to the very amusing tapes I’ve borrowed from the library instead.” Not an option.
To compound things, not only was this a fellow employee, this was Art. Art Spencer. I’ve worked with Art for five years now, and for the first four we spent very nearly forty hours a week together in the same department, I working and Art, well, working but also talking. The whole time. About nothing. Eight hours a day. Forty hours a week. For four years. Do the math.
Art doesn’t just blabber about nothing, though that would be bad enough; he complains and whines and repeats himself and just won’t ever stop. So much so that a couple years ago, when Ruthie and I went to Alaska, I sent a postcard to the folks at work which said only,
“It’s amazing -- I’m three-thousand miles away and I can still hear Art bitching.”
(I don’t remember now if he was amused; probably he liked the attention.)
And on two different occasions, because he’s also contentious and inflammatory, he made me so angry that I’d not spoken to him for three months. And yet, somehow, through all of that a kind of a friendship had endured that allowed us to be amiable with each other at work and even friendly spend time together off the clock. I’ve been in his home, have imbibed with him at the bar, have sat by him at a Reds game. What I hadn’t ever done was spend any time at all alone in a car with him. This was a terrifying prospect. I could imagine the talking that would begin the instant his fanny hit the passenger seat and I dreaded it.
I’d miscalculated; it started before that.
We’d made plans to meet at seven A.M. at our home store and just as I pulled into the darkened parking lot and began to look for him, my cell phone rang and the talking began; he was waiting for me inside the store and why didn’t I pull up to the curb and get him? It was on. He wasn’t even in the car yet and he was talking.
I put the car in park near the store entrance and got out to throw away some garbage that had collected in a plastic shopping bag hung over the shifter, empty espresso cups mostly, which I like to keep around in lieu of an air freshener, and water bottles. As I deposited the bag in the large trash can/ashtray there at the door Art climbed into the car and my friend Randy gave me a knowing smile and said, “You two have a good time.” What he meant was, “Ha-ha, you have to spend time locked in a car listening to Art.”
And so we rolled. There had been talk of a winter storm and it was cold outside, but the car was as warmed-up as Art’s mouth, so at least we were comfortable. Art’s a talker, but not what you’d call a conversationalist, so it doesn’t require lots of participation from whomever he’s with. What it requires is patience, which I began to run out of before we even got to the highway.
Time spent with Art is almost always a classic example of “non-conversation.” He’s talking, you’re talking out of social reflex, but no one’s saying anything and when it’s over there’s rarely any evidence that it ever happened. Our ride took about forty-five minutes, during which Art covered pro wrestling, the weather, the 1970’s, childrearing, where Flop and Leslie may or may not move to, movies, the weather, life in New Jersey, the Bearcats and the weather. Because we’ve known each other so long, I don’t feel the need to respond to every disconnected, out-of-the-blue comment that he makes, and he doesn’t seem to mind the lack of reciprocity, so mostly he talked. Occasionally I’d make a comment like, “Eisenhower came before Kennedy Art, not after,” but just to keep him honest.
We reached our destination on time and settled in for what I knew would be the most predictable eight hours of my life. I don’t know how other companies are -- I suspect they’re all pretty much the same -- but when the Depot sends you for training, they post statements like this on the wall:
“Today’s Goal: Equip you with skills to improve the way you deliver results and inspire achievement by optimizing your ability to get the best performance from your associates.”
This is the Home Depot version of the C. Montgomery Burns Award for Achievement in the Field of Excellence. Basically I think they want us to be better at being better. Isn’t that what that says? Anyway, these sessions are based on literature written by the Hemmingways that came up with the phrase above and conducted by some Store Manager or Human Resource Manager who has captive audience to which he or she is unaccustomed. They always get their money’s worth. Talkers they are. Just like Art. One of them actually admitted to us that his philosophy was, “Might as well talk if there’s down-time.” This is a quote. Verbatim. I wrote it down. These people are incapable of stopping.
So not only have I spent the entire trip there listening to some one blabber on, I’m trapped in a training room with twenty other people listening to another such talker for eight hours. And as if that weren’t enough, out of twenty people in a setting like this, you’re guaranteed to have at least one person who thinks that the whole group is actually there to hear him talk, rather than whoever is actually in charge. You know the type. Has a story for everything and tells them all, unbidden and indifferent to whether or not they have anything to do with the topic at hand. I used to be that guy -- you should have heard me in college -- but I’ve spent ten years killing the part of me that won’t shut up, and I’m doing much better now.
This particular day, I knew that I was guilty of delivering That Person to our meeting, and I wondered if that made me an accomplice. Shouldn’t I have been more persuasive that morning in the car when I’d offered to let Art jump out onto I-75 at sixty-five miles an hour? He’d declined, of course, but couldn’t I have tried a little harder? Didn’t I owe it to my classmates? Wasn’t the whole group going to suffer because of my weakness? Because I wasn’t strong enough to insist that he leap from my car? I’d let them down, I realized, and hadn’t optimized my ability to get any kind of performance at all.
Art didn’t disappoint either. If our curriculum called for us to talk about inclusion, Art wanted to talk about the March of Dimes, and therefore did. If our instructor, (or facilitator, or whatever,) wanted to talk about how to sell snow-throwers, Art wanted to talk about dust in the receiving department, and therefore did. When our leader asked if there were any questions before we broke for lunch, Art raised his hand and told a story about being a child in New Jersey, which was neither a question nor even marginally relevant. It was bad.
What made it worse was that he wasn’t the only one. The was a lady there who might even have been more out of control than Art. The two of them dominated nearly all of the time that was designated for group discussion and much of the time that wasn’t. Sprinkle in two or three lower-level blabberers and you’ve got the kind of day that wears me out in ways that working never could. I took advantage of every break I could to bury my nose in a book and let it deliver me, if only for five or ten minutes, from the incessant blah, blah, blah. At one point, the lady next to me, (not the one I just mentioned,) said to me, “Do you read a lot?” I looked up from my book and told her that I do, and while she seemed satisfied with my response, it was clear that she’d have preferred that I expand on it. Not a chance.
Art’s story finished, it was finally lunch time, and rather than turn him loose to walk to lunch somewhere on his own the two of us went looking for a Chinese restaurant, which we found. It was a buffet, so there were brief periods when one or the other of us was filling a new plate, but apart from that it was, me and Art at in a booth. Me eating, him talking about…well, just talking.
After lunch it was back to the store for the afternoon’s session which was dedicated to what the Depot calls, “coaching.” Essentially this means persuading your subordinates to wear more than the minimum number of required pieces of flair. “You have to get your people to buy in,” they say. “Buy-in” can also be used as a noun, as in, “If you can’t get a buy-in from your people, you can’t succeed as a team.” Getting a buy-in from your people frequently sounds a lot like, “you want to express yourself, don’t you Joanna?” Which means that I sound like Stan from Office Space. Which means that I sound like a tool. This is how I pay my mortgage.
After the class was over we settled into the car for the ride home. It was snowing, which Art informed me was because it was inordinately hot in Missouri, (Art watches the Weather Channel a lot). That may have been true, I don’t know, but I care even less. The roads had gotten tricky during the course of the day and the snow made visibility bad -- wrecked cars were strewn along the median and shoulder every mile or so as if they'd been dropped from a low-cruising dirigible. Now, given my nature as a nervous (by which I mean bad) driver, I wanted silence even more than usual, which is a lot. No luck.
It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that he started talking as soon as he got in the car, because he’d never really stopped at any point during our day together. He continued, at one point even saying something to the effect that I’d really have to concentrate with the weather as bad as it was. “Maybe you could stop talking,” I suggested, hoping beyond reasonability that he’d make an exception in the interest of our making it home alive. (It’s just the nature of the relationship that I can say these things to him without sounding rude -- I can’t explain it.) He looked at me and grinned a grin that said, “Both of us know that’s not going to happen,” and I exhaled sharply though my nose, smiled and shook my head.
“Those are the big flakes,” he noted. And then, “Gotta watch those, they flurry around a lot,” as they flurried around a lot.
“Thanks Admiral.” This is an abbreviated form of “Admiral Drizzlebottom,” my official nickname for him. The name was originally intended to encourage him to not take himself so seriously, but Art never caught on.
“You know what?”
“What Art?”
“These roads are slippery.”
No response required, none given.
“Back in Jersey,” he continued, “they knew how to handle slushy roads and low visibility.”
Again, no response.
A beat of silence, and then, “Maybe you should get over in the other lane.”
This was about the ninth time he’d made that kind of suggestion, including route suggestions. Normally I’d have declined his suggestion just on General Principle, but this time the idea itself was actually bad. I’d found that any attempt to remove the car from the ice-grooves in which it was riding created an unsettling lack of directional control and changing lanes would involve not only leaving the grooves, but working through the slush covered ice between lanes at an angle and none of that was appealing to me.
“Not so much.”
He offered a suggestion like this every couple minutes or so, between irrelevant little mini-diatribes, and finally I indicated that it sounded like he was volunteering to be the driver on Friday. This didn’t shut him up, but it did put an end to his passenger seat driving, and as we exited the highway and made our way through the residential neighborhoods toward our home store where his van was parked I felt a sense of impending relief, both from the treacherous driving and from Art, that allowed me to talk a bit myself. As we passed Ridgewood Avenue, I pointed and said, that’s where we live, right there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Art, it’s my house. I go there everyday. All my stuff is there. I’m pretty sure.”
He said okay, but looked unconvinced as though maybe he’d read something on the Internet or seen something on the Discovery Channel which had indicated that Ruthie and I make our home somewhere else entirely, and he was just humoring me until he could do a little more research. I reminded him that if I hadn’t had to take him with me I’d have already been home.
“What do they call this part of town?” he asked.
I cringed and told him, “Monfort Heights.” I hate the way that sounds, “Monfort Heights.” So much snottier and impressive that it really is. It’s mostly a bunch of old Cape Cods, but I knew exactly what Art would do with it.
“You sure?”
“I live here Art.”
A beat.
“White neighborhood, huh?” he said, and we both laughed. Art and I have, over the years, had some refreshingly honest (actual) conversations about black/white race relations, and have said to one another many of the things that people tend to either keep to themselves or air in the anonymous and one-directional world of talk radio. I’ve asked him questions about the African-American experience that you can’t just march up to a black person and ask and he’s been remarkably frank in his answers. It took years for our relationship to get to the place where we could be that open about things, but those conversations reflect a degree of trust that’s worth the time invested, although granted, in a dialogue like that, he’s holding all the marbles.
In that way I think we’ve been good for each other, he a forty-something year old African-American from New Jersey and I a thirty-something year old white guy raised in Michigan, via Buffalo, New York, coming together in Cincinnati, Ohio, a city where racism smolders white-hot (no pun intended) and never very far from the surface. Pick up nearly any local newspaper and it’s there. It’s a big part of our reputation around the county, and sadly we have earned it.
Art’s “white neighborhood” comment was a callback to an episode several summers ago when Art and his wife had hosted a backyard barbecue at their home. A co-worker named Chris showed up with his girlfriend, marched right up to Art and said, “Damn dude, what’re you doing living in a white neighborhood?” Somehow, no one was offended; we’d come to expect such statements from Chris. He once explained to Art and Loretta, another African-American co-worker and one of my Favorite People in the World, over pancakes at a Perkins restaurant that black people’s noses were shaped the way they were (don’t ask me what that means) in order to serve as a kind of radiator (or carburetor or some such -- I really don‘t understand cars at all). If Art puts too much faith in the Internet, none of us were ever sure where Chris was getting his information. Through his ignorance Chris became a punch-line and his comments provided our first doorways to real and sensitive conversations on some big issues.
“Which way you gonna go?” He wanted desperately to give me directions.
I resisted the urge to remind him that I was retracing the very route that I take to work five days out of every seven and instead told him that I planned to cut up Washington Street. (Art would know that Washington was our first president; Chris had always confused him with Lincoln.) Art nodded and smiled the smile of a man who recognizes in another person, albeit mistakenly, the same shrewdness for shortcuts in which he himself takes so much pride.
“My nigger,” he said through that smile, and winked.
“Did you just call me a nigger?” I smiled back, and we arrived at the store.
We had one more day of training coming, again at the Tylersville store and just before he closed the car door behind him, Art leaned down and said, “Pick me up at seven tomorrow?”
“Yes Miss Daisy.”
And I slipped David Sedaris into the cassette player and laughed all the way home.
I was scheduled for another long day of training at the Home Depot on Tylersville Road (Westchester, store 3823) which meant, among other things, nearly an hour in the car each way. I don’t like riding in the car as a passenger and I like it even less when I’m the driver. I’m not sure what it is about the experience that I detest so much, but detest it I do.
Lately I’ve found that I can redeem my required day-to-day drive time by listening to books on tape borrowed from the Cheviot branch of the Cincinnati Public Library, and when I’m alone that helps. I can lose myself in a story and even if it’s mediocre the time spent driving, say to work and back, isn’t so bad. When I’m not alone, however, things are tougher. Inevitably whomever I’m with wants to talk, (the nerve!) and I’m obligated to listen and contribute something thoughtful, or at least convincing. No matter who I’m with, even if it’s you, if we’re in car two things are very likely to be true: One, I don’t want to be there and, two, it’s not personal. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you, its that I don’t want to be trapped in a car watching telephone poles zip by to do it.
Driving is even worse for me than riding with someone else. I don’t do it well, so I avoid it -- if Ruthie and I are together, I never drive -- so I don’t get any better at it, so I avoid it all the more. I get lost, I run into things, you know how it goes. Highways are especially stressful for me, so the trip to Westchester was not something I would normally have been looking forward to.
Except that the book I currently have on loan from the library is Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, by David Sedaris, read by the author. If you’re not familiar with Sedaris, get that way. He writes incredibly funny stories drawn from his experiences. His stories aren’t unlike what’s going on here except that they’re funnier, he reads them on NPR and in Carnegie Hall, they have the punchy endings that I never seem to be able to give anything and in his stories, no one calls me a nigger. More on that last in a bit.
All that to say that I’d actually been a bit excited about spending nearly two hours in the car by myself listening to the stories. This excitement, though, was the short-lived kind as it turned out that there was another guy from my store scheduled for the same training and I panicked and accepted when he suggested that we ride together, caught again in the teeth of social mores. You just don’t look at a guy and say, “I know it’d be a colossal waste of gas and all, but let’s take separate cars so I don’t have to deal with you and I can listen to the very amusing tapes I’ve borrowed from the library instead.” Not an option.
To compound things, not only was this a fellow employee, this was Art. Art Spencer. I’ve worked with Art for five years now, and for the first four we spent very nearly forty hours a week together in the same department, I working and Art, well, working but also talking. The whole time. About nothing. Eight hours a day. Forty hours a week. For four years. Do the math.
Art doesn’t just blabber about nothing, though that would be bad enough; he complains and whines and repeats himself and just won’t ever stop. So much so that a couple years ago, when Ruthie and I went to Alaska, I sent a postcard to the folks at work which said only,
“It’s amazing -- I’m three-thousand miles away and I can still hear Art bitching.”
(I don’t remember now if he was amused; probably he liked the attention.)
And on two different occasions, because he’s also contentious and inflammatory, he made me so angry that I’d not spoken to him for three months. And yet, somehow, through all of that a kind of a friendship had endured that allowed us to be amiable with each other at work and even friendly spend time together off the clock. I’ve been in his home, have imbibed with him at the bar, have sat by him at a Reds game. What I hadn’t ever done was spend any time at all alone in a car with him. This was a terrifying prospect. I could imagine the talking that would begin the instant his fanny hit the passenger seat and I dreaded it.
I’d miscalculated; it started before that.
We’d made plans to meet at seven A.M. at our home store and just as I pulled into the darkened parking lot and began to look for him, my cell phone rang and the talking began; he was waiting for me inside the store and why didn’t I pull up to the curb and get him? It was on. He wasn’t even in the car yet and he was talking.
I put the car in park near the store entrance and got out to throw away some garbage that had collected in a plastic shopping bag hung over the shifter, empty espresso cups mostly, which I like to keep around in lieu of an air freshener, and water bottles. As I deposited the bag in the large trash can/ashtray there at the door Art climbed into the car and my friend Randy gave me a knowing smile and said, “You two have a good time.” What he meant was, “Ha-ha, you have to spend time locked in a car listening to Art.”
And so we rolled. There had been talk of a winter storm and it was cold outside, but the car was as warmed-up as Art’s mouth, so at least we were comfortable. Art’s a talker, but not what you’d call a conversationalist, so it doesn’t require lots of participation from whomever he’s with. What it requires is patience, which I began to run out of before we even got to the highway.
Time spent with Art is almost always a classic example of “non-conversation.” He’s talking, you’re talking out of social reflex, but no one’s saying anything and when it’s over there’s rarely any evidence that it ever happened. Our ride took about forty-five minutes, during which Art covered pro wrestling, the weather, the 1970’s, childrearing, where Flop and Leslie may or may not move to, movies, the weather, life in New Jersey, the Bearcats and the weather. Because we’ve known each other so long, I don’t feel the need to respond to every disconnected, out-of-the-blue comment that he makes, and he doesn’t seem to mind the lack of reciprocity, so mostly he talked. Occasionally I’d make a comment like, “Eisenhower came before Kennedy Art, not after,” but just to keep him honest.
We reached our destination on time and settled in for what I knew would be the most predictable eight hours of my life. I don’t know how other companies are -- I suspect they’re all pretty much the same -- but when the Depot sends you for training, they post statements like this on the wall:
“Today’s Goal: Equip you with skills to improve the way you deliver results and inspire achievement by optimizing your ability to get the best performance from your associates.”
This is the Home Depot version of the C. Montgomery Burns Award for Achievement in the Field of Excellence. Basically I think they want us to be better at being better. Isn’t that what that says? Anyway, these sessions are based on literature written by the Hemmingways that came up with the phrase above and conducted by some Store Manager or Human Resource Manager who has captive audience to which he or she is unaccustomed. They always get their money’s worth. Talkers they are. Just like Art. One of them actually admitted to us that his philosophy was, “Might as well talk if there’s down-time.” This is a quote. Verbatim. I wrote it down. These people are incapable of stopping.
So not only have I spent the entire trip there listening to some one blabber on, I’m trapped in a training room with twenty other people listening to another such talker for eight hours. And as if that weren’t enough, out of twenty people in a setting like this, you’re guaranteed to have at least one person who thinks that the whole group is actually there to hear him talk, rather than whoever is actually in charge. You know the type. Has a story for everything and tells them all, unbidden and indifferent to whether or not they have anything to do with the topic at hand. I used to be that guy -- you should have heard me in college -- but I’ve spent ten years killing the part of me that won’t shut up, and I’m doing much better now.
This particular day, I knew that I was guilty of delivering That Person to our meeting, and I wondered if that made me an accomplice. Shouldn’t I have been more persuasive that morning in the car when I’d offered to let Art jump out onto I-75 at sixty-five miles an hour? He’d declined, of course, but couldn’t I have tried a little harder? Didn’t I owe it to my classmates? Wasn’t the whole group going to suffer because of my weakness? Because I wasn’t strong enough to insist that he leap from my car? I’d let them down, I realized, and hadn’t optimized my ability to get any kind of performance at all.
Art didn’t disappoint either. If our curriculum called for us to talk about inclusion, Art wanted to talk about the March of Dimes, and therefore did. If our instructor, (or facilitator, or whatever,) wanted to talk about how to sell snow-throwers, Art wanted to talk about dust in the receiving department, and therefore did. When our leader asked if there were any questions before we broke for lunch, Art raised his hand and told a story about being a child in New Jersey, which was neither a question nor even marginally relevant. It was bad.
What made it worse was that he wasn’t the only one. The was a lady there who might even have been more out of control than Art. The two of them dominated nearly all of the time that was designated for group discussion and much of the time that wasn’t. Sprinkle in two or three lower-level blabberers and you’ve got the kind of day that wears me out in ways that working never could. I took advantage of every break I could to bury my nose in a book and let it deliver me, if only for five or ten minutes, from the incessant blah, blah, blah. At one point, the lady next to me, (not the one I just mentioned,) said to me, “Do you read a lot?” I looked up from my book and told her that I do, and while she seemed satisfied with my response, it was clear that she’d have preferred that I expand on it. Not a chance.
Art’s story finished, it was finally lunch time, and rather than turn him loose to walk to lunch somewhere on his own the two of us went looking for a Chinese restaurant, which we found. It was a buffet, so there were brief periods when one or the other of us was filling a new plate, but apart from that it was, me and Art at in a booth. Me eating, him talking about…well, just talking.
After lunch it was back to the store for the afternoon’s session which was dedicated to what the Depot calls, “coaching.” Essentially this means persuading your subordinates to wear more than the minimum number of required pieces of flair. “You have to get your people to buy in,” they say. “Buy-in” can also be used as a noun, as in, “If you can’t get a buy-in from your people, you can’t succeed as a team.” Getting a buy-in from your people frequently sounds a lot like, “you want to express yourself, don’t you Joanna?” Which means that I sound like Stan from Office Space. Which means that I sound like a tool. This is how I pay my mortgage.
After the class was over we settled into the car for the ride home. It was snowing, which Art informed me was because it was inordinately hot in Missouri, (Art watches the Weather Channel a lot). That may have been true, I don’t know, but I care even less. The roads had gotten tricky during the course of the day and the snow made visibility bad -- wrecked cars were strewn along the median and shoulder every mile or so as if they'd been dropped from a low-cruising dirigible. Now, given my nature as a nervous (by which I mean bad) driver, I wanted silence even more than usual, which is a lot. No luck.
It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that he started talking as soon as he got in the car, because he’d never really stopped at any point during our day together. He continued, at one point even saying something to the effect that I’d really have to concentrate with the weather as bad as it was. “Maybe you could stop talking,” I suggested, hoping beyond reasonability that he’d make an exception in the interest of our making it home alive. (It’s just the nature of the relationship that I can say these things to him without sounding rude -- I can’t explain it.) He looked at me and grinned a grin that said, “Both of us know that’s not going to happen,” and I exhaled sharply though my nose, smiled and shook my head.
“Those are the big flakes,” he noted. And then, “Gotta watch those, they flurry around a lot,” as they flurried around a lot.
“Thanks Admiral.” This is an abbreviated form of “Admiral Drizzlebottom,” my official nickname for him. The name was originally intended to encourage him to not take himself so seriously, but Art never caught on.
“You know what?”
“What Art?”
“These roads are slippery.”
No response required, none given.
“Back in Jersey,” he continued, “they knew how to handle slushy roads and low visibility.”
Again, no response.
A beat of silence, and then, “Maybe you should get over in the other lane.”
This was about the ninth time he’d made that kind of suggestion, including route suggestions. Normally I’d have declined his suggestion just on General Principle, but this time the idea itself was actually bad. I’d found that any attempt to remove the car from the ice-grooves in which it was riding created an unsettling lack of directional control and changing lanes would involve not only leaving the grooves, but working through the slush covered ice between lanes at an angle and none of that was appealing to me.
“Not so much.”
He offered a suggestion like this every couple minutes or so, between irrelevant little mini-diatribes, and finally I indicated that it sounded like he was volunteering to be the driver on Friday. This didn’t shut him up, but it did put an end to his passenger seat driving, and as we exited the highway and made our way through the residential neighborhoods toward our home store where his van was parked I felt a sense of impending relief, both from the treacherous driving and from Art, that allowed me to talk a bit myself. As we passed Ridgewood Avenue, I pointed and said, that’s where we live, right there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Art, it’s my house. I go there everyday. All my stuff is there. I’m pretty sure.”
He said okay, but looked unconvinced as though maybe he’d read something on the Internet or seen something on the Discovery Channel which had indicated that Ruthie and I make our home somewhere else entirely, and he was just humoring me until he could do a little more research. I reminded him that if I hadn’t had to take him with me I’d have already been home.
“What do they call this part of town?” he asked.
I cringed and told him, “Monfort Heights.” I hate the way that sounds, “Monfort Heights.” So much snottier and impressive that it really is. It’s mostly a bunch of old Cape Cods, but I knew exactly what Art would do with it.
“You sure?”
“I live here Art.”
A beat.
“White neighborhood, huh?” he said, and we both laughed. Art and I have, over the years, had some refreshingly honest (actual) conversations about black/white race relations, and have said to one another many of the things that people tend to either keep to themselves or air in the anonymous and one-directional world of talk radio. I’ve asked him questions about the African-American experience that you can’t just march up to a black person and ask and he’s been remarkably frank in his answers. It took years for our relationship to get to the place where we could be that open about things, but those conversations reflect a degree of trust that’s worth the time invested, although granted, in a dialogue like that, he’s holding all the marbles.
In that way I think we’ve been good for each other, he a forty-something year old African-American from New Jersey and I a thirty-something year old white guy raised in Michigan, via Buffalo, New York, coming together in Cincinnati, Ohio, a city where racism smolders white-hot (no pun intended) and never very far from the surface. Pick up nearly any local newspaper and it’s there. It’s a big part of our reputation around the county, and sadly we have earned it.
Art’s “white neighborhood” comment was a callback to an episode several summers ago when Art and his wife had hosted a backyard barbecue at their home. A co-worker named Chris showed up with his girlfriend, marched right up to Art and said, “Damn dude, what’re you doing living in a white neighborhood?” Somehow, no one was offended; we’d come to expect such statements from Chris. He once explained to Art and Loretta, another African-American co-worker and one of my Favorite People in the World, over pancakes at a Perkins restaurant that black people’s noses were shaped the way they were (don’t ask me what that means) in order to serve as a kind of radiator (or carburetor or some such -- I really don‘t understand cars at all). If Art puts too much faith in the Internet, none of us were ever sure where Chris was getting his information. Through his ignorance Chris became a punch-line and his comments provided our first doorways to real and sensitive conversations on some big issues.
“Which way you gonna go?” He wanted desperately to give me directions.
I resisted the urge to remind him that I was retracing the very route that I take to work five days out of every seven and instead told him that I planned to cut up Washington Street. (Art would know that Washington was our first president; Chris had always confused him with Lincoln.) Art nodded and smiled the smile of a man who recognizes in another person, albeit mistakenly, the same shrewdness for shortcuts in which he himself takes so much pride.
“My nigger,” he said through that smile, and winked.
“Did you just call me a nigger?” I smiled back, and we arrived at the store.
We had one more day of training coming, again at the Tylersville store and just before he closed the car door behind him, Art leaned down and said, “Pick me up at seven tomorrow?”
“Yes Miss Daisy.”
And I slipped David Sedaris into the cassette player and laughed all the way home.
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