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

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

When I was a young boy (of single-digit age), I had an interest in airplanes. In support of this interest, my dad bought me a flying model airplane.

The plane was a red, white, and blue Cessna-style, single-engine, wing-on-top flyer – blue plastic fuselage, white styrofoam wings, and red trim work. Its wingspan was less than three feet and its speed was only barely faster than I could run underneath it, but it was a fantastic machine.

The propeller was battery powered, and its flight pattern was controlled by small disks you installed under the fuselage. As the plane flew, the inserted disk turned and would move the rudder in the chosen pattern. There were several of these disks to choose from, each supposedly giving a different flight path, but we only ever saw two distinct patterns in actual use: fly into building, and fly into road.

We’d take the plane to one of the local public parks – the only park with a wide open field – and let the plane go. My dad tended the motor, made sure all flight controls were working, and we put in the flight disk together. Then we’d turn it on, and my dad would launch it with a smooth over-handed toss.

My brother and I would run around the park field, under the plane, chasing its flight path. It soared about 10-20 feet above the ground – high enough to look like a real plane (to 5-9 year olds) and low enough to look like we could almost reach up and touch it. The plane would fly for a couple of minutes, making turns as the attached disk dictated, and then, inevitably, the flight would end with the plane flying smack into the side of the big park building. It would crash into the brick wall and then fall to crash into the ground at the bottom of the wall.

Every time it did this, it sounded and looked like it would be the end of its flying days – the fuselage would crack, the wings would pop off the top, and the prop would bend. But my dad managed to put it all back together, and he kept it running for a long time.

If the plane didn’t fly into the building, it would fly out of the park and land in the main street – four lanes plus a center turning lane. Fortunately, it was a small town, and we weren’t flying during rush hour, so the road wasn’t all that busy. We would watch for cars and then either I or Dad would run out, pick up the errant plane, and run back into the park. Surprisingly, I don’t think the plane was ever run over.

All the times we flew that plane, I don’t remember it landing safely in the field a single time. I remember many building collisions, a few street landings, and a couple times it came down in the tennis courts or among the playground equipment. But I didn’t consider these flight endings anything but totally exciting. Landing safely in the field would have been boring – we got daredevil crashes.

That plane lasted a surprisingly long time considering all its calamitous flight paths. Those experiences sit in a hallowed shelf of my memory. Thinking back on this, now, I’d love to get something like it for my boys to see and play with today. If you know anything about these kinds of planes, let me know. I’m going to look them up and see what’s being sold nowadays.

But, that plane did eventually stop working. After a little while without a flying model, my dad bought another, different style plane. To be continued.

Bullgrit