Not There Yet

I just saw a familiar name in the Obits today.

But first, let me tell you about a woman whom I’ll call Annie.  Annie was a middle-aged woman – over 50 - who was active in her church.  She was from what is called the lower-middle class, which I would guess describes that end of the working class that gets by on their own efforts with nothing left over – pretty much the class of folks I came from, economically speaking.  Annie was a quiet woman, acknowledged by all who knew her as having modest good taste in clothing, something of a stretch for her, I’d guess, given her budget.  Because of her folks’ economic situation, Annie was unable to attend college, nor was she afforded any opportunity to better her education in another manner.  With her quiet demeanor and other personal qualities, however, Annie had the good fortune to land a relatively decent job waiting on folks much better off than herself in a good hotel, which she probably considered a real break, since Annie had a whole bunch of kids. 

So you get the general picture, right?  Classy lady, poorish, but well regarded by her associates; hard working, decent, having the self-respect to behave and dress well enough to hold a job where deportment and appearance counted.  Maybe you’ve known a few Annies in your time; maybe you are an Annie, at least in many respects.

Now, there are probably people who think there is some glamour in being able to wait on the wealthy and celebrated, in a well-regarded and generally upscale hotel.  But it has its downside.  People who are wealthy, especially people who grew up wealthy, often reserve their good manners for each other.  For the hired help, not so much.  The sort of hotel at which Annie worked has its slow times and its busy times, and when dealing with the upper crust who deem themselves worthy of instant service, busy times can be pretty tough.  I was reading only today how many times there have been riots at Inaugural Balls; it seems once the Prez has come and gone there is such a crush at the coat check table or window, that the police have been called on a number of these occasions.  This is nothing new; Lincoln himself lost his hat in the crush at President Taylor’s Inaugural.  But I am digressing. 

An interesting side-effect of inherited wealth is that it allows people, who would be kicked to the curb in a society based on individual merit, to prosper and thrive and to lord it over persons whose shoes they are unfit to shine.  One busy night after a social event elsewhere, just such a lout came to finish a drinking bout, already very far along, at the hotel where Annie worked.  As the evening progressed Annie was kept hopping in order to keep the drinks supplied to one and all of the revelers.  When this lout ordered yet another drink and was unhappy with the speed at which it was forthcoming, Annie told him, “I’m hurrying as fast as I can.” 

Shock!  Consternation!  How dare she give him what he called “this shit”?!

The lout’s name was of course William Zantzinger, and Annie’s name wasn’t really Annie, it was Hattie Carroll.  You may have heard of her.  Old Willie, of course didn’t have to take that shit; while Ms Carroll, of course, did.  So Good Old Willie did what anyone of his ilk would do in such desperate straits – he raised the toy cane he had brought with him (Good Old Willie – always up for a laugh!) and gave Ms Carroll a good belt with it.  Within hours Hattie Carroll, mother of eleven, was dead from a stroke brought on by the stressful encounter, and –oh yeah - the assault with the cane.  The court recognized and ruled that the assault was a cause and Ms Carroll’s death its effect at Good Ol’ Willie’s trial . 

Nearly all of us who recognize Ms Carroll’s name do so because Bob Dylan wrote a song about it the year it happened.  I heard this song – probably the same year or the next - and knowing nothing of the events chronicled, I assumed this was an event that happened in the late 1800s or early 1900s.  I was shocked a few years ago to hear that it happened in 1963, at a time when I was living about 35 miles from where the event occurred.  William Zantzinger was three years older than me – at the time of the murder he was 24. 

There may be those – in fact, there were those, including the judge at his trial – who would note the occasion, the booze, the man’s age and think, “Unfortunate, but the boy was young (the judge’s word was “immature”), bad things happen.”  Drink was, in those days, an excuse for much – just six years later my brother would be mowed down by a drunk driver who was barely fined.  So let’s just accept for the moment, that logic (horribly wrong though it is) and see if Old Willie led an otherwise upright life, giving to the poor, visiting the sick, comforting the dying.  Well, um, not exactly.

You see, years later, Old Willie was renting a whole bunch of substandard housing to poor Blacks.  And by substandard, I don’t mean the walls weren’t as smooth and well-painted as one might wish, but rather that there was no heat and no running water.  And make no mistake, Maryland gets mighty cold in the winter.  And folks, even when they are poor and black, do need their water now and again.  Like, to survive.  And being the inherited-wealth-made man that he was, Old Willie saw no reason he should be paying taxes on the money he got from the renters.  The state, which had been remarkably forgiving in the matter of Ms Carroll (more on that soon), was far less so when it came to getting its cash.  So the shacks and the land they sat upon were taken from Old Willie; he no longer had any more claim to them than do you or I. 

Well, this never bothered Old Willie; he just kept right on collecting the rent and even more egregious, he hauled any of the tenants who fell behind into court, and had them evicted.  Maryland being what it is, and white courts being what they are in many areas, the courts there just assumed that those damn blacks owed Mr. William, and that no one of Mr. William Zantzinger’s pedigree (and race) - Mr. William whose roots went back to earliest white Maryland settlers - would ever do other than tell the whitest of truth in court as he set about teaching the underclass folks a much needed lesson. 

Eventually, one way or another, the matter got into the press – not so much because black folk were being put out onto the street but because of the conditions in the housing that they were being put out of.  Those looking into the matter soon noted that Old Willie hadn’t owned the housing in question for years, despite his collecting rent and instigating evictions.  I do not know whether or not he was paying taxes on this land he didn’t own, but at a guess, I’d imagine he’d figure why should he pay taxes on land he didn’t own, particularly when he saw no need to do so when he did own it. 

The court presumably found this fraud three times more heinous than the murder, since Good Ol’ Willie’s sentence for this latter peccadillo ran three times as long; even more painful I am sure, Ol’ Willie had to cough up $62,000 this time.

At any rate, when the court recognized at the trial which resulted from Ms Carroll’s killing that the cause of her death was indeed the assault by William Zantzinger, it rumbled and frowned very sternly and sentenced him to six months in jail.  The jail term was, however, delayed and did not begin until a couple of weeks later, because Mr. Zantzinger needed to get his crop in.  Mr. Zantzinger could not afford Hattie Carroll an extra minute to do her job; however the court saw no problem in affording Mr. Zantzinger a couple of weeks to do his.  What Mr. Zantzinger specifically said as he struck the blow that killed Ms Carroll, after she had the temerity to plead that she was working as fast as she could, was, “I don’t have to take this shit from a nigger.”  So y’all use that word as freely as you want: claim it means ‘friend’ or that you can spell it with an ‘A’ or pronounce it differently, or say, “I am just quoting what so-and-so said”, or it’s OK, because I am Black and I am taking ownership of the term, or whatever you like.  But please, when you do, admit at least to yourself, that by doing so you acknowledge and agree that you are seconding the opinion that the life of a working mother of eleven children is worth six months at most, to be served when convenient.  Because that is what, among other things, you are saying.  Mr. Zantzinger’s sentence for the killing was handed down on August 28, 1963. 

Do I hear anyone saying, “Hmm…  August 28, 1963; that’s seems so familiar somehow.  Where have I heard that date mentioned?”  I hasten to enlighten you.  On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King made the “I have a dream” speech to a crowd of more than 200,000 people, most of them black. 

Virtually every news account at the time noted that the crowd was “orderly”.

So 2008 is finished, and I am cautiously raising my head to peer warily at 2009, a year which once was planned to be the year of my permanent liberation from work.  Not gonna happen, I gather, unless a miracle occurs, or (much more likely in my case) I suddenly take a whim into my head to just go ahead and see what happens.   I spent some time yesterday switching all my future 401(k) contributions to go into a stable value fund which made over 4% last year; what I was putting it into previously lost over $7,000 last year. 

Mehitabel the Cat used to tell Archy, “There’s a dance in the old dame, yet!”   While I wouldn’t exactly put it that way, (the gender’s wrong for starters), I must brag that I have had an offer that I have thus far refused, which would, if accepted, take me away from all this.  And how many gents of my vintage can say that?  My off-again on-again ‘special friend’ Tiko, has told me that if I were to agree to become his One and Only, he would not only pay off my mortgage, but pretty much keep me in the manner to which I only wish I had become accustomed.  This is no idle threat, for Tiko is currently experiencing a decidedly upward ride on Fortuna’s Wheel.  The new government in his homeland is headed by a personal friend of his and he is back in that unfortunate land dusting off old deeds on the 200-plus properties he inherited from the family holdings; each of his brothers has inherited a similar amount.  The revolutionary government is gone, and the good times are apparently rolling once again.  He has already leased out a couple of holdings, receiving enough to completely pay off his mortgage in the U.S. – a mortgage which was a good deal larger than my humble debt. 

I wrote a couple of years ago about the downside of the Tiko relationship, and for those of you who can endure two of these overlong entries in a day, that entry can be found here: http://pastdue.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!148B0A2ECFD36181!1407.entry.  (My good pal Jeankfl told me the right way to do a reference, and I can't find her instruction anywhere.)  After reading this, anyone with a modicum of sense would ask, “Why are you even talking to that guy? 

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the grave, as is sometimes the case.  I endured years of stalking, invective, and – let’s be honest - mind-boggling sex.  A main motive in going to Saudi was to get to a place where Tiko could not follow.  Tiko’s own circumstances fluctuated wildly for years; he would one day be owning or renting a fantastic house, the next day out and broke and barely getting by.  He had no sense whatever of reasonable financial practices.  I believe that when he paid a utility bill, it came as a complete shock that next month they wanted more money.  His plans were always based on everything going exactly right.  And they never did.  One thing that kept him going was that he has always had a host of men dazzled by his looks, and his air of being a shy, valiant immigrant in the grip of misfortune, and these were happy to help out in the hope of getting themselves a piece o’ that.  This is still true, even though he has reached 50, and as Shakespeare warned us, every fair from fair sometime declines. 

He was never lazy; he always had a job at which he worked hard; it is just that he didn’t grow up surviving on the paltry sum he could earn, and he just has no idea of how to do so.  He keeps his house very neat and is far more prone to clean and cook than I am.  He never dodged the hard stuff, in terms of effort involved.  He is just convinced that he should have what he wants, and if he can’t afford it, then someone should get it for him – usually me. 

Anyway, around the year 2000, I finally had enough of the harassment; the side benefits just didn’t equal the stress.  I had consulted over the years with a number of people who deal with this sort of thing, and the consensus was that in cutting this kind of tie, the person being harassed only gets killed 10 per cent of the time.  Who could resist odds like that? 

So one day when I was receiving one of his interminable harangues via telephone – he lived in California and I had just bought my house in New York and was living there, I just laid down the phone and walked away.  Now, the last time I had hung up on him years before, he was so enraged that he came and broke through a plate glass window with his bare hands to get at me, and the police had to be called.  So this was a real laying down of the gauntlet.  As it was, this time all he did was fill my answering machine with enraged threats and accusations.  I never answered the phone again when he called and he stopped calling; then I got various jobs in Massachusetts, Ohio, Wisconsin and Alabama and for some years, I never heard a thing from him. 

During those years he underwent some life-changing events.  He had not two, but three hip replacements – his medical smarts, when picking a doctor, were no better than his financial acumen.  His closest friend, on whom he depended a great deal, was diagnosed with cancer and Tiko wound up being the person who had to undertake the responsibility in that friendship for a while.  Probably most devastating to his self-image was a botched side effect of the long and unusually painfully series of surgeries on his hips – a catheterization miscue - caused extensive damage to an area very central to many men’s self-regard.  Tiko finally experienced the sensation, heretofore known only to mere mortals, of feeling physically imperfect. 

One day in Alabama, when I was bored and ripe for mischief – about the same time as I began blogging – I tapped into a former e-mail address and discovered an old friendly e-mail from him sent during our long hiatus.  I wondered what would happen if I said, “Hi” – never let it be said that I did not have some complicity in the long relationship that had preceded my decision to brave his threats and walk away from his angry phone call.  One thing led to another; I learned he had relocated to a small city in Nevada, and heard for the first time about all the surgeries – even the botched business, which I am certain he would confess to no one else except possible the friend with cancer.  He said he had accepted that we were not in a relationship, but he would like to be friends.  We met in Reno a couple of years ago and, indeed, it seemed that in his forties, Tiko finally had grown up in many respects and was no longer the over-aged demanding teen-ager that I had known for so many years.  We got on well, had a nice time together, and despite the physical alteration caused by age and the worst efforts of the medical profession, he still was hugely attractive to me – and I to him.  We have met several times since: he has visited me in both Smallville and Reedville.  There have been disagreements, but none of the threats and so on – one could say they remain well within the normal range of behavior. 

So we remained friends with benefits.  Tiko is intensely aware of the dangers of casual sex, and I am fairly confident that I have been his only outlet in that direction for some time; (his embarrassment over his surgery mishap, which is esthetic rather than functional, is probably even more compelling as a motive to discretion).  Meanwhile, the government back in his homeland changed and his fortunes have been steadily rising.  He has made a couple of long visits home, and some of the things he has done there lately imply a good deal of money to spend.  And as I said, he has fully paid off his mortgage in Nevada. 

Then, before he left for his latest visit home a month or so ago, he told me that if I would agree to enter a monogamous relationship, our fortunes could be joined; he’d pay off my mortgage and so forth.  But don’t worry, he said, I’ll still want to have sex if you say no.  (I told you he was lousy as a negotiator, didn’t I?)  He is thinking of living primarily in Africa, with several visits per year to the U.S. – he has no plans to give up his citizenship here, or his home in Nevada.  He has a place on the beach in his homeland, among the many other parts of the country to which he has a deed.  I demurred, and before he left he informed me he had found a new bf who would join him for a couple of weeks in Africa and who would be the lucky recipient of all his love and worldly goods. 

Since his return to Africa, he has called me several times; the new bf has come and stayed his promised two weeks and has returned to the U.S., but will return in May.  You missed your opportunity, he told me.  I do not know exactly how Tiko thinks, but I do know how he behaves.  First, he has that line of thinking through and through that sex is sinful outside a relationship, and worse, a kind of weakness.  All of his harangues against me in the past have been centered on my refusal to make him the sole recipient of my affection and lust.  I am almost certain that the new bf isn’t getting any; Tiko has in the past kept hopefuls dangling for years with the implication that maybe he’d come across one day, but I am 99% sure he never has.  Second, this bf is a relatively new name in the list of his admirers and I am almost certain he would not so quickly allow the lad admittance to survey the physical damage he has endured.  Moreover, with his insistence on monogamy and the heavy importance he places on is own behavior in this regard, I can’t imagine he’d continue to want to see me or even to talk to me if he had indeed transferred his affections. 

I know that, as much as I genuinely believe in the change I have seen in the last several years, all bets are off if I agreed to enter a relationship.  I had a straight friend who was a great guy as long as he dated a woman, but who became a whole different person toward women who entered into a relationship or marriage with him, jealous, suspicious and controlling.  I don’t want to re-open that can of worms.  I have no pride or complaint about living on the largesse of another (much of which would be no more than my due, since the shoe was on the other foot for a long time).  But I know the demands that I be not only monogamous – not much problem, there, at my age – but also divest myself of friends and family would soon follow.  And that I will not do, especially since Tiko and I have almost zero in common other than our enjoyment of each other carnally.  And he would be suspicious even were I to be as virtuous as Caesar’s wife.  He never reads, likes soap operas and gossip about HIS friends and we just have nothing to talk about except my failings.  (OK, I might mention his failings once in a while, but only under the greatest of pressure, and only in the interests of mutual improvement!  - As if…)  

So I am not really tempted.  It is just when I look out at this 7-degree weather and think of that place on the beach near the Equator; when I face another day alone and remember how very hot he can be, when I feel old and recall that he absolutely cannot see any change in me from the day we met; when I know I must rise tomorrow and endure another day at work in which I have no interest and to which I see no end; well, it does give one food for thought.  If he were only a little more tolerant of the other folks in my life – but he isn’t.  If only he were a little more affectionate outside of the bedroom – but he isn’t.  If only I had a little more trust in his ability to keep living within his means – but I don’t. 

He wants me to come visit this year, and I am toying with the idea.  I am well aware I would be on his turf.  While I do believe that people can grow, I don’t believe they change fundamentally.  I’d visit him in Nevada without a qualm, but in a place where he has powerful friends, and where I am just a foreigner, I am not so sure.  I have zero fear of Africa itself – I always do fine in places like that – and I have been to other parts of the continent before; the issue is Tiko himself, and the power that venue may give him in our nearly 30-year push-and-shove. 

So I guess 2009 need not be entirely boring…

While not as sick as a horse, I was sufficiently sick – let’s say as sick as pony – to quail at the thought of a 2.5 hour drive to Reedville to a house that – let’s face it – is not kept as warm by my brother George, who pays the heat bills – as one might wish.  Moreover the weather people – the forecasters, not the radical underground group – were suggesting that the drive back might be unpleasant, and as I gaze out my window, I can only think they might not have erred in this prediction. 

Since I, sadly, am not one to ‘get ‘er done’, nor one with infinite – or even any – inner resources, a weekend in Smallville where I know no one, is a weekend of sitting slack-jawed in front of a screen of some sort.  However, even I have my standards in viewing what the great screen offers, and Saturday found me watching – as the least of 130 evils, a series of HGTV makeovers, home improvements and general messing about with furniture, paint and power tools.  And whereas a couple of years ago I had reason to complain of a universal desire among the shows proffered to have the paint, furniture, and general décor  to “pop” , the word du jour these days is ‘unique’ incorrectly used to mean rare or unusual.  For those of us who speak English and who blanch at the idea that one thing can be one-er of a kind than another thing, this would be grueling enough; but when, in fact, the one thing that the various designers and clue-free home-owners want to avoid at all costs is anything which hints – even obliquely – that said homeowner (or designers) have a single thought that is not shared by even the dimmest of the general public, it is painful to hear this word applied to the projects.

“We shall start,” declares the designer, “by brightening up the room with a bold color-choice,” and he or she proceeds to paint the place a whitish-yellow color that is barely distinguishable from the off-cream color that has adorned every apartment in every one of those cracker box complexes that specialize in providing more rules than space, in which I have had the spiritually deadening ill-luck to have been forced to dwell.  Upon arriving at the home to be “re-made”, the decorator will have his or her attention drawn to the sole manifestation of a previous owner’s individuality or interests; “What were they thinking?” he or she will squeal.  What these shows are touting as “unique” is pretty much the same exact thing found in every new house or apartment, but done either better, or more quickly or more cheaply.  I suppose, in a society that has no concept of the word “home”, but which frankly discusses property values and resale value where once people spoke of warmth and continuity and love as the chief components to be desired in a domicile, this pablum conformist mentality is no surprise. 

It is bad enough that so many people claiming to value their ‘difference’ wish to be as different from others as a single Lego block is to the rest of the box, but what is infinitely worse is these same people’s enraged reaction when they actually are exposed to a dash of real difference in their community.  Paint your house purple and you will make the local news, if not the national news on a slow day.  On this same morning of dispiriting home improvement, there was a half hour show on improving the grounds of a rather grand house that had been sitting unoccupied amidst one of those housing projects made up of other rather grand houses of fairly similar appearance, designed to imply the owners have a great deal of wealth, and an utter lack of imagination.  The prior owners of this house had apparently spent around six figures trying to construct a rather Romanesque water-park type of structure in a steep back yard.  There were pillars and stone slides and a cement cave of some sort and so on.  My first thought upon seeing it was, “How cool!  It looks like a Roman ruin,” and I began to fantasize what I would do with this, were I to find it in my back yard, and if I had the hundreds of thousands that the new owners clearly had to spend.  It would not have been something I would have put in originally (I wouldn’t have thought of it, for starters), because my personal taste is for way less cement and lots more green in my yard.  But the horror of the owners – and not only the owners, but the entire community – seemed to be aimed at its unusual look.  “Eyesore”, was the common motif that ran through every comment.  It was hardly an eyesore, other than in the way that all these pretentious ‘estates’ spread across the once verdant cropland are.   But even the head of the Homeowner’s Association was on hand to speak brokenly of what a boon to the community a change to the backyard of this house would be.  Let me say right here that Homeowner’s Associations are one of these things I despise with all my being, as I do the current Administration or eating seafood or death by flesh-eating bacteria.  Of all the things that are threatening to reduce America to the rank of a third-rate power, the kind of thinking that finds it desirable to extort large sums of cash from homeowners to force people to live in their homes in a manner approved by the most aggressive and least imaginative persons in a community surely takes the biscuit.  If you ever catch me moving into any place which requires joining one of these entities, please shoot me or make me eat crab.  I thank you beforehand and absolve you of any guilt.   Suffice it to say when the gobs of dollars had been spent to improve these grounds, there was a great deal more greenery (as well as tons and tons of cement less imaginatively configured) and amidst all that greenery there was not so much as a leaf or a twig that would occasion a start of pleasurable surprise. 

Mediocrity is everywhere, and people are so damn proud of it.  It was somewhat shocking to me that one of the areas in which Obama had to brook some criticism was the suspicion that he was guilty of pursuing excellence, or ‘elitism’.  Whatever may be said for or against Sarah Palin, it was dismaying that a huge element of her popularity seemed to be that she was ‘just like us’.  This was not said in order to extol her humanity or her common touch or her awareness of the trials of the common man, but rather her (imagined) thinking and behaving just like we do.  Then rather unfairly, she was criticized because, when given access to a high-limit credit card or two she went out and bought what at first seemed to  be about $150K worth of clothes , but is now looking closer to $200K.  But wasn’t that just like us?  Isn’t that behavior EXACTLY what we all did to wind up in our current mess?  So why is it we want leaders that are ‘just like us’ and then complain when they prove to be, well, just like us?  Personally, I would prefer someone smarter than me, who had a clue how to behave differently from us and could get us out of this mess.   Call me eccentric.