Continuation of Clash of Cultures.

As a teenager, especially at just 15 years old, I was generally a little shy. Just maybe one level more shy than the average kid trying to find his way in the confusing maze of social interactions. And where girls came into my social interactions, my shyness increased an extra level. I was often oblivious to feminine flirtations. (Heck, I’m still pretty lost with that stuff.) When I did actually realize someone was flirting with me, it was usually 30 seconds after the fact.

While working at the Chic-a-burger, this 30-second-later realization happened fairly often. My obliviousness proved humorous to my coworkers: a couple of twenty-something local [black] men, an elderly Greek [white] man, and my step-dad [white].

“Man, she was flirtin’ hard with you.” – twenty-something guy.

“You need to learn to say, ‘Hey, baby.’” – twenty-something guy.

“She only came here to see you.” – twenty-something guy.

“Don’t you like girls?” – old man.

“You could have at least winked back at her, son.” – step-dad.

But my missing all this wasn’t just from my shyness. This was my first real job. I was often concentrating so hard on doing what I was supposed to be doing – that cash register was complicated – that thinking of the cute teenage girl talking to me as anything other than a customer to serve usually didn’t enter my mind.

There was one flirtatious event that I understood right from the beginning. One girl whacked me square in the face with the obvious bat.

The restaurant was closed – we had cleaned up and turned everything off for the night – and I was sitting outside at a concrete table waiting for my step-dad to finish whatever he was finishing up inside. It was around 9:30 in the evening, so the area was dark except for what dim light reached the sitting area from the street lights way over there and there.

There were no patrons left, and the only people even somewhat nearby were those walking past on the sidewalk. I was just sitting there, leaning back against the table, and a girl appeared out of nowhere. She was about my age, definitely not much older. “Hey,” she said.

I sat up and said, “Hey.”

“You work here, don’t you,” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

She was cute, and that made me extra nervous as a matter of course. And to be perfectly honest, she was black and I was white – in the 80s, in both our cultures, this was something non-trivial.

She sat down beside me and asked, “What’s your name?”

I told her.

“I’m Keisha,” she offered. Then we made some small talk about our schools, our families, etc. She did most of the talking, and she kept easing closer up to me until she was actually side-by-side against me. OK, this I caught pretty quick: she was definitely flirting with me. As she talked, she’d occasionally touch me, on the arm, on the leg, on the chest. My hands were to myself. I was hella nervous – no girl had ever flirted this blatantly with me before, especially when we had been talking only about two minutes. This encounter was years before I had read anything like “Dear Penthouse” letters.

Then she said, “Let me see your dick.”

“What?” I almost stammered.

She repeated the request.

Trying to sound completely neutral, not shocked, I asked, “Why?”

“’Cause I want to see.”

“Um, my dad is inside,” I jerked my head towards the restaurant, “and he’ll be out in a minute to take me home.” My hands were in my lap.

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“Out in the county.”

“I live over on Simon Street.”

“OK.”

My step-dad came out of the restaurant. He had a humored grin on his face when he saw me and this girl sitting there. She didn’t back off from me when he appeared. He knew me well enough to know, in just a glance, that I was completely out of my comfort zone. “We’ve got to go now, son.”

I slid away from the girl and stood up. “I’ve got to go.”

“OK,” she said, still sitting. “Bye.”

“Bye.”

* * *

In my step-dad’s pickup truck, he commented, “Your face is red. You make a new girlfriend?”

He teased me a little, but he also listened to me describe the encounter, in full.

“You handled yourself just fine,” he said.

In the following months I worked at the Chick-a-burger, I saw that girl at the restaurant a few times, but we never again had so much as eye contact. And that was a relief for me. I wasn’t ready for the fast track with that sort of situation.

Continue: Clash of Cultures – Fighting

Bullgrit

When I was 15-16 years old (1983), my mom and step-dad owned a small fast-food restaurant. The building was about the size of a city bus (not that we had city buses to compare it to in my hometown), with all seating outdoors, under a permanent awning. I worked there a few nights a week and some weekends taking orders, running the cash register, and doing some cooking and cleaning as needed. It was my first real job outside of mowing lawns in the summer.

The place was in a completely different community than I was used to. At the time, we lived in an essentially all white subdivision outside of town (in the county, surrounded by farm land). The restaurant was in an all black inner city neighborhood — I was the only white boy within a couple of miles when working at the restaurant.

The restaurant patrons were the hundreds of black boys, girls, men, women, and families living around the location. As the token white boy in the neighborhood when I was working, I got attention that I never got anywhere else in my life. To some of the locals I was a despised outsider, and to others I was an intriguing curiosity. As an inexperienced 15-year-old, I didn’t know how to handle either reaction.

Where I went to high school (in the county) was well mixed racially — I always thought it was a 50/50 white-to-black ratio, but I later came to learn it was really around 70/30 white-to-black numbers. But school had a culture I was used to.

When I worked at the Chick-a-burger, (as the hamburger stand was named — it served primarily fried chicken and hamburgers), I saw a whole different culture — the 80s small-town inner city culture. I saw one or two classmates from my middle school days in the neighborhood, but I don’t know if they recognized me. I was in a stranger in a strange land.

I have a few stories to tell about my experiences during my many months working at the Chick-a-burger. Some may be offensive, but that’s not my intention. They’re all true, but admittedly, the truth is from my point of view — the POV of a skinny white teenager of the 1980s.

Continued: Clash of Cultures – Flirting

Bullgrit

Our home phone line was having problems a few days ago. When someone called, our phone would ring once and then nothing more. Even the answering machine wouldn’t pick up. So I called AT&T to get some repair service.

Through the push-button choices, I chose to talk to an agent. After a minute on hold, an agent answered. I told her my phone problem and she said she’d put me through to the repair department. While on hold, waiting for them, the agent gave me a sales spiel.

She asked me about having repair insurance, and explained AT&T’s deal. I said, “No thanks.”

She asked me about Internet service, and explained AT&T’s deal. I said, “No thanks.”

She asked me if anyone in my family needed wireless service, and explained AT&T’s deal. I said, “No thanks.”

She said we were still on hold for the repair department – “I’m keeping an eye on it.” I thought it odd to be on hold like this (the agent continuing to talk to me), and soon I came to not believe it.

Then she asked me to rate her customer service: satisfied or very satisfied (apparently it’s not an option to be less than satisfied).

I said, “Satisfied.”

She said, “You’re not very satisfied?”

“Well,” I said, “I’m not talking to the repair department yet.”

“Yes sir,” she said, “we should be through to them in only another minute. Is there anything I could have done or can do to make your experience with AT&T customer service very satisfied?”

I said: “I can’t think of anything other than get me through to the repair department.”

She said: “OK. Just for clarity, if during your call, you get asked to rate customer service, the question is only for your dealings with me.”

I said: “OK”

I was put on hold. About 2 seconds later, another woman answered and introduced herself as the previous woman’s supervisor. She wanted to ask me why I wasn’t very satisfied with her handling of my call. She said they strive for very satisfied.

I said: “Well, I need my phone line repaired, and that’s not exactly something she can help me with.”

She said: “I understand. Is there anything we can do to make your experience with us very satisfied?”

I laughed out loud, and said: “I still need my phone line repaired. I could talk to the repair department.”

She agreed to put me through to the repair department, but before letting me go she reminded me that if I get asked to rate customer service, the question only pertains to my dealings with the previous representative.

At last, I was put through to the repair department. But I only got a computer wanting me to give my phone number and answer yes or no questions. At one point when I was trying to give my phone number, the computer cut me off with, “You have answered that you wish to discontinue this phone call . . .”

“No,” I said. Fortunately I wasn’t disconnected.

In the end, the computer told me that it has determined there is a problem with our phone line, and a service person will come out to fix it. It should be fixed a week from tomorrow. Oh great. A week without a home phone.

Fortunately, a couple days later our phone line was working fine. They must have fixed it.

Then a couple more days later the AT&T repair man called our home phone. He mentioned the repair ticket he had, but he couldn’t find anything wrong with our line. I told him that it started working properly a couple days ago, and I just assumed they had fixed it.

He said maybe they had fixed it, but the repair ticket was still open. I told him all was well, and he closed the ticket.

So I’m not sure what to think of my experience with getting repair work from AT&T. The initial phone call and dealing with customer service was hilarious, and my dealing with the repair department was only through an automated system. But the line got fixed in a couple of days and the repair man called personally to check up on it. In the end, the result left me very satisfied. Ironic.

Bullgrit

As kids, my brother and I had this strange desire to scare (startle) each other, as often as possible, in new and funny ways. I think it’s a genetic thing; our granddaddy was big on scaring people. But I think it must skip generations, because I don’t remember our dad being particularly interested in scaring us, and my boys don’t like to be startled. 

Our granddaddy would poke us with his finger and make a sound with his lips — a sound I can’t think of how to describe in writing — to make us jump and scream. The start always made us, and anyone watching, laugh.

I remember standing with my dad beside my grandaddy’s casket, looking down on his still form. I whispered to Dad, “I almost expect him to open his eyes and poke us to scare us.” My dad laughed and agreed.

Anyway, so my brother and I were in a constant state of scare war. We might go months without a good scare on one or the other, but there was never a formal truce. The delay was all part of the set up.

Off the top of my head, right now, I can remember twice that I really scared him, and once that he really scared me, but I know there were many other attacks.

I once hid in his room, between his bed and the back wall for over an hour waiting for him to come to bed for the night. (He was around 8 or 9 years old.) Eventually he came into his room. He put on his pajamas, turned out the light, and got under his covers. After a couple minutes, I reached up from behind his bed and grabbed him. Oh God! He jumped and screamed like a professional horror movie actress.

Another time I scared him was a pure scare of opportunity — I needed no preparation. He was watching a scary movie late at night (after 11:00 — he was probably 11 or 12 years old), sitting cross-legged on the floor about 3 feet from the console TV. The whole house was dark, and he was totally engrossed with the movie. I picked up a toy rubber aligator (about 8-10 inches long), snuck up the hall and tossed it at my brother. The little lizard plopped perfectly right down on his lap. Oh, the jump and scream — pure entertainment for a teenage big brother.

But if I’m remembering correctly, my little brother got the last scare and laugh on me. I was in my bedroom with the door closed, minding my own business. A light knock on my door brought me to open it.

My brother had acquired a family Halloween decoration: a posable life-sized skeleton. When I opened the door, he wiggled the skeleton and made some noise. The flailing bones, the evilly grinning skull, and the moan or whatever sound, startled the T-total Hell out of me. I screamed and jump backwards all the way across my room.

Life’s evolution had me moving out of home soon after that, so my brother and I really didn’t have any other opportunities to scare one another since then. I kind of miss the whole scare war. Cowgrit is easy to startle, and she doesn’t like to be. My boys get very angry with me if I scare them. It seems that I’m going to have to wait till my boys have children of their own (to pass on that generation skipping gene) for me to be able to have appreciative targets for terror.

Bullgrit