MAGIC         PORK

To catch up on the story, refer to parts one, two, and three.

Before I get back to Jim, I sneezed the other day and remembered something funny about Shaky. Whenever someone sneezed, instead of saying “bless you” he’d say “f*** you”. But he’d say it with the same tone of voice as if he was saying “bless you” so you’d start to say “thank you” before it even sunk in what he had just said.

Back to Jim and his stories… There were certain topics Jim knew a lot about, or at least knew enough to make it sound like he knew a lot about. It’s almost like he had seen a History Channel special on those topics, but the History Channel wasn’t around back then so I can’t accuse him of that. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had learned about them back in high school but had repeated the stories so much it was still fresh in his mind.

Here’s just some of the stories he’d tell. I know there were more but this is all I can remember at the moment:

• Civil War. In particular, Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman’s march to the sea.
• FDR’s fireside chat. How he got on the radio and calmed everyone by saying “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking”. (I looked up the speech online here. It’s hard to believe that the president once used to talk to the American people like they were intelligent adults, and that our leaders’ speeches weren’t just a series of sound bites.)
• Some ship that sunk. I don’t remember which ship it was - I should, considering he told me about it multiple times. But I remember that during that summer, I was watching Jeopardy one night and it was one of the questions on the show. I was like “Hey I know that!! Jim talks about it all the time!”.
• Hitler.

I wish I could remember the rest, but maybe I blocked it from my memory. He’d also tell personal stories, about Shaky or others he had worked with. He told a story about some retirement celebration the cops were having, and how a call came in for some theft so they all jumped into their cars drunk and drove around the city aimlessly even though they had no information to go on to identify the person. I don’t have a hard time believing that story at all.

Somehow Jim would always steer the conversation towards one of these topics. We’d be talking about something completely unrelated and I’d think there’s no way he could end up launching into one of these stories I’ve heard multiple times before… but somehow he’d find some link to the Civil War in what we were talking about.

I brought my lunch every day and would eat it by myself in the garage while I read a book. It was the best part of the day. Jim and Shaky would both go out to lunch - separately of course, since they hated each other. I was always welcome to go with Jim but I established early on that I bring my lunch every day so I dodged that one and got to have some time to myself.

But every morning, I would go to breakfast with Jim. They were entitled to a morning break, which I think is supposed to be 15 minutes, but Jim would use it to go to a diner down the street and have breakfast. Since he came right to work from the corn fields, he must have skipped breakfast along with the shower and change of clothes. Occasionally I would eat something too but usually I had some cereal before work and would just sit there watching him eat. And smoke of course. We’d get the same waitress every day. She was a very friendly woman who I’m sure felt sorry for me. She’d give Jim his menu and coffee and every day Jim would open up the menu and look at it, and then when she came back to take his order, he’d say “I think I’ll have the pancakes”. Every day. The guy must have had some sort of memory disorder. I mean every day he would act as if he didn’t know what he was going to have and then order the same thing.

He’d have a big stack of pancakes and shovel them into his mouth. He’d chew, and talk, with his mouth open which I don’t have to tell you was pretty disgusting. It was during one of these breakfast sessions that he was talking to me about his son, who was studying mechanical engineering at RIT. That’s where I was going to start in the fall, and also the major I was going into. (I didn’t switch to computer science until after my first year.) His son apparently played basketball but couldn’t get on the RIT team, or was on the team but didn’t get to play much… or something. I don’t remember and it’s not important. But during this conversation, he said “You know about those black guys, right?” (pause in which I didn’t respond) “They’re liars.” *DING* You’ve finally reached the point in the story that explains why I don’t care that I’m trashing Jim online.

I was a little surprised and confused by that statement. Surprised because it was so blatantly racist, and confused because that wasn’t even a racial stereotype that I had heard associated with black men. I mean is it too much to ask that if you’re going to be racist you at least propagate the right stereotypes? He might as well have said “You know about those black guys right? They never know how to use the triple word score in Scrabble to its best effect!”

After my initial shock wore off, I stood up from the table and said “I won’t sit here while you spew such racist crap out of your mouth!!” Then I started toward the door. But towards the back of the room I heard a sound that made me pause. I turned around, and saw a little blonde girl in pigtails and a red dress… slowly… clapping. Soon others joined her and the place erupted in cheers. A black busboy smiled at me and gave a wink as if to say “you’re alright, white boy”. As tears welled up in my eyes, I turned and walked out the door, my head held high.

At least that’s how it will play when someday a movie is made of my life story. But it’s very possible I just said “uh huh” and let him keep talking. I had to work the rest of the summer with this guy!

That’s about all I have to say about Jim. But in honor of Jim, I’m going to keep talking your ear off for yet another post. You thought I was done didn’t you? Now you’re getting a hint of what it was like for me. In the next (and hopefully final) installment, I’ll tell you about Dale the dogcatcher.

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