Downhill Both Ways

A Man on 7th Street at 7 AM

He’s young, skinny, has several piercings and a coffee. He wears fitted jeans that drape over his yellow and orange canvas shoes with what I assume is perfection. His shirt is tight, but you already knew that.

His satchel hangs over his left shoulder and bounces off his right hip. It looks like a designer diaper bag, given its girth, tan-on-brown florals, and gold faux buckles that hide the bag’s inadequately magnetized clasps.

He walks quickly, which doesn’t generally lend a person an air of cordiality. His coffeeless hand pendulates him forward and holds a cigarette, which the air is smoking as he swings it by his side. He looks intently, almost nervously, down at the sidewalk ahead of him.

Clearly, he is neither a morning person nor too keen on the employment he’s heading toward. But, as George Carlin says—or maybe it’s Drew Carey, I don’t know—You hate your job? There’s a support group for that. It’s called everybody and they meet at the bar.

This evening, with his support group, he’ll be happier. He’ll loosen up a bit, have a laugh or two, and probably take his eyes off the ground as he tips back a martini, slurping the Sobieski Cytron, but letting the blueberries fall back into the glass for later.

It’s too bad he’s unaware of what I’m thinking as he walks by, because if he knew how I described his tote, that would surely provide some fodder for his and his friends’ amusement tonight. A designer diaper bag, please. Anyone who’s anyone can tell it’s Louis Vuitton.

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Sale in Alley

You never see the little sign soon enough to actually turn in. Unless you’re walking, I suppose. By the time you’ve laid eyes on it, and its magic-markered content registers in your brain, you’re already past it.

(Sharpies look plenty big in a cup on your desk next to Bic ballpoints. But garage sale advertisers, no-experience-necessary part-time job offerers, and folks who will pay you $50 for your junker seem to forget that size is relative, and that the Sharpie, while the master of its deskly domain, will cower in commercial defeat when posted on a telephone pole beneath a billboard slogan written in 4,000-point font telling passersby all about the new over-the-counter paternity DNA tests.)

Despite the inadequacy of the signage, you now know that there’s a sale in the alley back there. Next you must decide if you would’ve wanted to go this Sale in Alley if you’d seen the sign soon enough to turn where it told you to. After you answer Yes to that, you then need to ask yourself if the sale is worth backtracking for. Because, sure, you’d have gone to it if you saw the sign in time, but you didn’t. Now you’d have to go back to places you’ve already been in order to arrive at said sale.

Nobody likes to backtrack, but let’s say you decide it’s worth it…

So far in your decision-making, you’re still in your own brain. Now you have to bring your process into the more linear sphere—yes, linear sphere—of conversation with the other people in the car.

Hey, a sale in the alley.

Where?

Back there. We passed it already.

Oh. Yeah. Saw that.

Wanna go?

I mean, if you do. But, whatever.

It’s probably nothing.

Yeah.

But, still. Can’t hurt to check it out.

K.

By the time you’ve pussyfooted your way to what passes for a decision in Minnesota, you’re already three blocks past. Nevertheless you take a right onto Blaisdell and come back around to the minimally advertised alley between Pleasant and Grand.

There, stuck in the ground, is the twin of the first sign you saw. Sale in Alley. This one, of course, is far more promotionally effective (as ads you want to see are wont to be) since you were looking for it.

You ease into the alley and begin your 10mph trek toward the sale, hoping against hope that this will be The One—the one sale that vindicates not only your current third-of-a-mile backtrack, but all the other thirds-of-a-mile that you’ve backtracked on Saturdays past only to discover that what passes for a garage sale these days is simply a proprietor-of-the-day and her neighbors chatting behind their houses like this is their ordinary block club tea-time…

…except at this social, strangers are invited to stop by and pay four bucks for a Cabbage Patch doll or 20 for a Chenille throw that the soon-to-be-former owner wants you to know “was $80 at Pottery Barn.” Your interior response, of course, is “What does you being duped in a mall have to do with the price of tea in China (or, in this case, the price of a used blanket in a South Minneapolis alley)?”

But you will not succumb to this defeatism. This could be the sale where prices are based (as the title of the event would have you believe is the idea) on sales, not sentiment. Because—really—you’re not gonna attack that lady’s kid or anything, but also you’re not gonna pretend that her precious baby’s bile stains make that old bouncy seat worth more than maybe $2.50—maybe.

There it is—the Sale in Alley—on your right a few houses further on. A garage door is open, letting your possible possessions overflow. Ah, the endless potential of used sofas, floor lamps, and boxes of books by the eminent likes of Doctor Phil and L. Ron Hubbard.

Two friendly-looking ladies and their happily indentured men stand beside four tables scooched together and bearing up under a burden of bric-a-brac none could hold alone. The two couples smile and chat pleasantly while taking money from the occasional customer.

You park on their neighbor’s cement pad and get out. Without a modicum of discipline, all your pessimism is put aside. This is what weekends were made for. A new sale on a new Saturday. Who knows what treasures await you—and at what modest prices, too!

You look both ways and cross the alley, already eyeing that distressed kitchen table just inside the garage—“Hey, I could cut 9 inches off those legs and we could use it in the living room. We do need a coffee table…”

You make eye contact and smile a hello at the current owners of your future stuff.

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Writing Is Like Eating Chips…or Maybe It’s Not.

I like writing the way I like eating potato chips. Namely, I’m utterly ambivalent until I’ve had a bite. Then I can’t stop. And, with writing, that “first bite” is a tasty first sentence—tasty to me, that is. (It may be entirely unsatisfactory to an audience, much like the lip-smacking, cavernous echo-crunch, and onion breath provided during the consumption of a chip is largely for the sake of the eater rather than his company.)

Then, of course, there are also a few differences between writing and eating a bag of Ruffles or a tube of Pringles. First, eating a chip is easy to do. They’re over there in the cupboard beside the fridge. Just go get one, put it in your mouth, and you’re off! Eat on, young gourmand! You can’t stop even if you wanted to, which you don’t. Cuz yum.

First sentences, though, are a bit more elusive than your ordinary flavor-laden munchable. Chips would be more like a writer’s inspiration if they had the power to displace themselves and reappear at will throughout the dark labyrinth of kitchen storage space. And the power, at some times, to disappear entirely.

Another key difference between writing and eating potato chips (since What are the key differences between writing and eating potato chips? is what you woke up asking yourself this morning) is that when you find that illusory First Sentence—the kind an entire book could grow out of—you don’t always know if it really is as invitingly fecund as it seems, whereas a chip is a chip and there’s not much variance between the top one that your fingers grab once your hand and your brain collude to subject your belly to that bag and the last one you scrape out of the bottom 10 minutes later as you hold the package up and see that the serving size is “9 Crisps.”

In fact, as I think about it more, typing that first line on a blank sheet is actually quite dissimilar to the snacking experience. So dissimilar, in fact, that mentioning the meager comparabilities has turned out to be somewhat futile. Except for one thing. I wanted to write 500 words this morning, which is exactly what I’m doing…all thanks to:

I like writing the way I like eating potato chips.

Thank you, First Sentence. Now I feel like a worthwhile human being who can happily go on about my worthwhile day. My essay (unnecessary and trite as it may be) is almost complete; my belly is full (albeit somewhat queasily); my keyboard is greasy (especially asdf, jkl, Shift, Enter, Space, and e); and what’s left on the kitchen table in front of me (besides my coffee cup and elbows) is a crinkly bag that formerly harbored LAY’S® Kettle Cooked Crinkle Cut Spice Rubbed BBQ Potato Chips and a near useless, logorrheal attempt at creativity shimmering here on my computer screen.

12 helpings of chips. I’m glad I did that.

Maybe what’s worth comparing isn’t so much a First Chip and a First Sentence, fraught as they may be with illusions of potential. No, maybe what’s worth comparing is this empty bag of salty, greasy foodstuff and any essay that results from a first sentence that has anything to do with potato chips.

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Related:

• In Defense of Writer’s Block
• You, Dear Reader, Sometimes Do Not Exist

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Last Week’s Back Alley Hit and Run

The first apartment my wife and I lived in was the second floor of a duplex on 31^st and Cedar. Since this is a block off Lake Street and since Cedar is a main north-south thoroughfare, we lived amid a mishmash of revving motorcycles, wandering prostitutes, brown paper litter, liberals, and Lutherans.

We loved it. Except for the motorcycles.

One of the Lutherans was our landlord Old Man Todd. Now, we never referred to him as Old Man Todd, but I’m calling him that here because it gives a pretty good sense of what he was like without me having to describe him too much.

Let’s just say he was the kind of guy who kids are terrified of after they hit a baseball through his window, but then after finding the courage to take responsibility, that one brave kid (who didn’t run away in fear like all his friends) discovers that, really, the old man they’d been scared of all this time is actually remarkably noble and worth knowing. Henceforward said boy and old man strike up an ironic, yet natural and deep, friendship that is only ended by the old man’s death, leaving the boy terribly sad but significantly more emotionally mature.

I learned one main thing from Old Man Todd: Your neighborhood is your neighborhood—Own it. It doesn’t belong to anyone but those who live there and respect it. It doesn’t belong to the obnoxious HOGs gunning their engines at the red light on 31^st; it doesn’t belong to the gangbangers walking down the alley with spray paint leaving their futile marks of turf here and there like pissing dogs.

And as owners, Todd showed me, we ought to be confident in maintaining the quality of the neighborhood. Nowhere did Todd exhibit this more than in his response to cars racing down the alley.

Slow Down!

He’d yell it from wherever he was on his properties if he could hear a car accelerating past the prescribed 10 miles per hour. And if he was near to the offending vehicle, he’d step out and make a scene, raising his arms, hollering.

It worked, generally. People slowed down.

At the time, I thought to myself that I wanted to be that audacious when I become an old man. But, like it or not, old men are only made out of young ones, so after I moved out and lived along my own alley without Old Man Todd to watch over it for me, I realized that I couldn’t just wait. I needed to experiment with and practice a measure of chutzpah now, as a young man.

So I’ve regularly practiced authoritative alley-safeguarding in the five years since, every time remembering, admiring—perhaps even channeling—Old Man Todd.

On Friday, a shiny gold Audi whipped past me down our alley as I rearranged the car seats in our van. Before it passed, I had time to stand up straight, make eye contact with the driver, give my best crusty-old-man face, and tell him angrily to slow down, gesturing with both my hands. Usually I yell, too, but this time I didn’t.

I immediately thought to myself that, since no words attended my hand motions and since there’s no universal sign for “SLOW DOWN!” my gesticulations must have looked quite a bit like I was simply asking him and his passengers to stop. And not just stop, but also beat me up.

Two seconds later, just after I’d returned to my attention to the car seats, I heard a screech.

And in less time than it takes to notice what color a tree is, I looked up and saw the Audi stopping. I felt my kidneys, lungs, and heart drop pusillanimously down behind my bowels. Oh no—I’m about to get my ass kicked. So much for channeling Todd’s 6 and-a-half decades of righteous tenacity. I was about to die.

I’d overstepped my authority—which is none—telling them to ease up on the old gas pedal, and these guys were gonna make sure I knew it. And not just make sure I knew, but also offer a physical token or two of reminder to make sure I didn’t do it again.

But then I realized I’d heard a crunch. And as the car had slowed down, I’d seen a girl and a boy sprint-dive out of the way. It happened so fast, I couldn’t tell if I’d seen the crash or if my brain had pieced together what happened out of the information it gathered after arriving on the scene a nanosecond after the fact.

A kid had been hit.

All thoughts of this car’s stopping being motivated by me instantly ceased. I started running toward the accident, two houses down, only to notice the offending car start to leave.

My initial Oh-Lord-I-hope-he’s-alright jog turned into a ­Get-back-here-you-bastards sprint. As I passed the terrified and injured boy, I saw several adults coming to his aid and felt free to continue after the perpetrators.

Me against the Audi. That’s a fair race. I was a property’s width behind the car, just trying to get near enough to read the plate number. Then the car accelerated even more. Apparently, they’d just noticed that some dude was chasing after them.

The distance between us increased and I hadn’t gotten the plate numbers yet. I kept running, though, because I knew they’d have to stop at the end of the alley. 24^th Street is relatively busy and the parked cars along it create a blind turn out of the alley. There’s no way to turn out of it without stopping first. This ought to give me time to catch up, I figured. And kept sprinting.

I was about a quarter of a block back. If I’d been standing still, I could’ve read the plate. But no matter how I strained my eyes as I ran, my brain wouldn’t make sense of the blue numbers and letters through the fog of adrenaline and onsetting fatigue. I had to get closer, and this was my chance. The Audi reached the end of the alley.

But they didn’t stop. They darted sight unseen into traffic, causing the car they should’ve yielded to to brake and swerve. And that was that; there was nothing more to do. I coasted stompingly to a stop in the parking lot on the corner, breathing heavily. Already, I couldn’t see the car anymore. It must’ve turned up 10^th.

In the aftermath, the police came, also an ambulance and a fire truck. I told my version of the story to the cops and the EMTs. A gold Audi, I kept saying. No, I didn’t get the plates, but there can’t be too many of those around. A Gold Audi. Must’ve been going 25 miles an hour.

I thought of Carl Sandburg’s poem about Anna Imroth burning to death. “It is the hand of God and the lack of fire escapes,” the story ends. Here in our alley on Friday evening, the hand of God didn’t kill a child, so that’s good, (just some cuts and bruises, as they say) but no thanks to the shortage of fire escapes, or, in this case, speed bumps.

Minneapolis charges neighborhoods $500 per alley for speed bumps. Yeah.—That’s not gonna happen. I told this to an officer as he sat in his car. He shook his head bitterly. “You’re telling the wrong guy. There are six of us on the street right now. Only six. You can thank the mayor for that. But, hey, he’s buying you some shiny new water fountains.”

“I know you can’t do anything about it,” I said empathetically, almost apologetically. “I just needed to get that off my chest. I mean, it’s costing Minneapolis more to have you guys out here and these emergency teams than it would to just give us some speed bumps.”

“I know. I know,” he rejoined tiredly. “Talk to your councilman.”

Perhaps I will. Until then, I’ll continue manically waving my arms and shouting at speeding cars. I’ll continue watchdogging with imaginary authority. I’ll continue chasing cars and calling the cops. And one day—I can only hope—as I grow and gray, it will turn out that my block has its very own Old Man Todd.

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The Cops and Two Angry Women

At first, it sounded like a warble, then from nearer by, it sounded more like a toddler’s eager post-naptime babble from inside her crib. Right before I came to where I could see the noise’s source, I realized what it was. It was screaming—unfiltered, unfettered feminine scorn.

How, just before, I could’ve mistaken it for a birdsong or a baby, I have no idea. Just like Rocky Mountain Oysters taste like liver until someone tells you they’re testicles.

All I could hear now was rage. I couldn’t yet make out any words. If anger is an overflow of pain, she was full of pain. But to my relief, I could tell by her timbre that she was not in imminent danger. The pain she expressed in her screaming was years in the bottling, and was not in response to a current attack of any sort.

That this relieved me, I realize now, is somewhat selfish: Whew! She’s not being attacked. She’s simply lived a life full of pain and anger up till now. What a relief. I was glad I wouldn’t have to play the hero. I was glad that if I called cops, it would be to report a disturbance, not a kidnapping or a rape. Still, I should probably call the cops, I figured.

Then she came into view. At a distance, I saw her waving her arms. She tantrumed like a caged cat getting stuck by sadistic teenagers with sharp sticks. But—and, again, to my selfish relief—I realized that I wouldn’t need to call the cops. That’s who she was yelling at.

She paced back and forth (if one step this way and then a step back can be called pacing). The squad car was behind her and she faced—or at least directed her unceasing vitriol at—a burly officer who stood with emotionless patience, waiting for her to quiet down like she was a wind-up toy.

The cop and his car created an invisible pen around the shrieking lady. She could’ve made a break for it to the right or left. And maybe even made it. But she remained in her six-foot circle, her indignation toward the authorities clearly not able to overpower her fear of them.

On the hood of the cruiser were two hands, palm-down, and connected to these hands, as one would expect, was a man. He leaned forward over the hood and received his patting down from a second officer. He was—in contrast to his partner-in-innocence-(till-proven-guilty)—quiet.

I still couldn’t hear what the detained lady was screaming, only that she was. But this scant intelligibility was no longer for lack of volume (I was now just across the street.) but for lack of enunciation, and, at points, for lack of any language at all. Her dialect, her fuming rage, and her strident bawling cacophonized into a primal noise. Violent, yet pitiable and animal.

A lady two doors down came out of her house and approached this scene of captive and captor.

“What are you doing?” She was already reproaching the police with her tone of voice, despite having no answer to her question yet.

The officer keeping the screaming lady penned snapped to. He snatched his flashlight out and pointed it into the neighbor’s eyes.

“What’re you doing?” he asked gruffly, letting her attitude and the evening’s stress determine the tone of this conversation.

“What am I doing?—I live here.” She pointed behind her to the door she’d just come out of.

“Then go back in your house.”

She ignored his blunt demand. “What’s going on?”

“Go back in your house.”

They increased in forcefulness together, hand in hand.

“I live here. What are you doing?” There was a full stop between each word in her question. She was standing her ground but not without shaking. Why she quavered was lost in the distance between her and me. Anger or fear? I couldn’t tell, but both seems like a reasonable guess.

The policeman’s vehemence increased, but his voice quieted to answer her: “We’re doing what we do. Now go back in your house.” He matched her halting, unyielding tone and had again reached his former volume by the end of his imperative.

“What you do? What you do?” Her volume one-upped his. And kept going. “I live here. And when you’re done ‘doing what you do,’”—She was mocking him now—“you’ll leave, and I’ll still be here. You don’t—”

“Go back in your house.”

—live here. You don’t live here. You don’t live here. What are you doing? I have a right—”

“Go back in your house. Now.”

She seemed to catch the officer’s unspoken threat and stopped talking. She stood still for a moment to exert the fading power of her final breath of outward rebellion. Then she turned around and stalked into her home. The beam of the officer’s flashlight followed her in, until she shut her door and pushed it back out.

Only then did the cop seem to remember his charge, the screaming lady. She hadn’t stopped. And now this brief exchange with the demandingly curious neighbor seemed to have alerted him to the fact that a lady hollering at the top of her lungs might cause some concern among the townsfolk. He stuffed her unceremoniously in the back of the car and slammed the door.

And it was quiet.

Eerily quiet. I’d gotten used to her shrieks as if they were white noise, as if the technician engineering the neighborhood’s audio had blended her part right into the mix, so it harmonized perfectly with the rest of Ventura Village’s late-night soundscape.

But now her part was muted and somehow—subtly, subconsciously—the night became darker, more ominous, and unnaturally silent.

The man with his hands on the hood of the cruiser still stood waiting. He was no more a character in this tale than the tree to his left or the pavement behind him where the two officers stood in quiet conference.

Lifting their heads from their huddle, one cop led the detained man to get in the car, and the other opened the door on the lady’s side. Immediately, her shrieking filled the night again, accidentally unmuted. Without doing whatever he’d opened the door to do, the cop slammed the lid back on her.

The perturbed neighbor stood at her barred screen door and watched them drive off. When they were half a block away, she came outside into her yard in an impotent gesture of insurgence.

It turns out she was right, though: The cops did what they do, and now they were gone, just as she predicted. And she still lives here, just like she said she would—3 AM, hair a mess, in her bathrobe. Still angry, still afraid.

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