Continuation of Clash of Cultures.

I didn’t make any friends among the neighborhood teenage guys. Not that I was actively seeking friends –- I was just working in the neighborhood, almost always inside the small chicken-and-burger joint. Most of them treated me neutral, with no more or less personality than you’d give a self-checkout register nowadays. But a few openly disliked me. And on two occasions, a fight was attempted. (Note: “attempted,” not “started.”)

Now, I was never even in any kind of schoolyard fight, unless you count the bloody rumble on the bus incident. (In my teenage years, I guess I flew under the radar of schoolyard bullies.) So an invitation to fight just wasn’t something I had experience with.

One incident was a straight forward, announced challenge. The challenger’s second approached me at the order window and told me, “There’s a guy out here who wants to fight you.” He pointed to a crowd of maybe a dozen teenagers, boys and girls, who were hanging around in the parking lot.

The Chick-a-burger was a public business with all its seating outside, so a crowd of people was not unusual. There was always a crowd of people around during lunch and dinner time. The crowd with the fight challenger looked no different than any other crowd the restaurant ever had.

“I’m working,” I said. I was dumbfounded that such a challenge would be issued to me, especially when it was obvious that I couldn’t just run outside for anything. I mean, I was working.

The challenger’s second looked at me, “You scared?”

Surprisingly, I really wasn’t scared. “I’m working,” I repeated. I wasn’t scared because there was no chance a fight would actually happen. I mean, I was working.

“Pussy,” the guy called me. Then he left the order window and went back to the crowd of teenagers. What could I do even if I was insane enough to want a fight? I mean, I was working.

I just mentally shrugged my shoulders and took the next person’s order –- you see, I was working. No more happened or was said regarding that incident.

The other incident was less verbal and more mental. I was sweeping the area outside the order and pick-up windows, and a teenage boy came up and stood about six feet away from me. He scowled at me without saying a word. He scowled at me for a full couple of minutes while I continued to sweep and clean up.

His presence and stare unnerved me. It was obviously a challenging glare, intending to get a rise out of me. This time I was scared. There was nothing between me and the challenger, but I continued my work duties. A couple of times I turned my back to him –- tactically dumb, but I was trying to just break the stare.

After a couple more minutes of failing to get a response from me, the challenger left. As he walked away, a crowd of teenagers started laughing. They were laughing as much at him for not getting a response from me, as they were laughing at me for not taking the challenge. I was embarrassed and he looked even more angry.

Having finished my sweeping, I took my broom and went back into the restaurant. No more happened or was said regarding that incident, either.

I should note that in the several months I worked at the Chick-a-burger in the “inner city” of my small town, I never witnessed any violence at all – not even a scuffle like I was challenged with. We once heard some gunshots from somewhere nearby, and those of us working the restaurant on that day noted the sound but didn’t really react –- we were working, you know.

Turned out that a verbal altercation had started in the restaurant parking lot, and ended several minutes later down the street with shots fired. The police questioned us employees, but only one of us even knew there had been an argument outside.

Not exactly the drive-by-shooting-a-day kind of environment that the media and suburban myths portrayed at the time.

Continued: Clash of Cultures – Friending 1

Bullgrit

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

We’re still reading The Hobbit each night before bedtime, and although Calfgrit4 has lost all interest in it (it’s a little too complicated for a 4-year-old to keep up with), Calfgrit8 is totally into the story; he looks forward to us reading more of the book each night.

Now that I’ve read some more of it aloud, it’s getting a bit easier. But it’s still a very complicated out-loud read. The archaic language and very long sentences almost become tongue twisters.

We’ve reached the point in the story where Bilbo has escaped Gollum and the goblin caves, with the help of the magic ring, and has just met back up with Gandalf and the dwarves. I really got into the character of Gollum, reading his lines with the appropriately sinister voice. But the riddle game was a bunch of gibberish to me, and I can’t imagine that CG8 got any of that stuff. He listened closely because of the tense situation (Gollum threatening to eat Bilbo), but I think a lot of the text was over his head -– heck, some of the riddles were nonsense to me. (But I’m generally not very good with riddles, anyway.)

As I was reading the last pages of the chapter about Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum, I remembered I have an illustrated hardcover version of The Hobbit – I had forgotten about it for years. (We’ve been reading from a non-illustrated trade paperback.) I pulled it off the shelf in the den and showed CG8 the illustrations of the all the main characters as well as the trolls, the goblins, and Gollum. “Gollum doesn’t look like what I thought,” he said. I was taken aback at that comment. I worried whether I should have left Gollum’s image up to his own imagination.

I first read The Hobbit for myself after seeing the old Rankin/Bass animated film, so I had a completely different image in my mind of Gollum when I read the book. The 1977-film Gollum looked like a frog-creature. The illustrated-book Gollum looks more like the 2000s-film version: a twisted, nasty hobbit. I wish I had asked CG8 how he pictured Gollum in his mind before showing him a picture. And maybe I shouldn’t have shown him a picture at all. This is going to bug me for a while.

CG8 was excited to learn that the ring Bilbo found turned him invisible. His excitement showed when he told his momma about the magic of the ring, “It made him invisible! No one could see him!”

He’s interested in Gandalf and Thorin as much as Bilbo; their magic swords, Goblin-cleaver and Foe-hammer, have captured his imagination almost as much as the ring. He knows Bilbo’s knife is magic, too — I’ve told him Bilbo will eventually name it Sting –- but it hasn’t done anything other than glow a little bit.

Middle-Earth hasn’t replaced the Star Wars galaxy as Calfgrit8’s preferred imaginary play place, but he’s definitely loving the story. I’m just glad that my mediocre verbal skills aren’t mangling Tolkien’s elaborate prose beyond enjoyment for either of us.

Bullgrit