In the subway terminal at O’Hare, I had to go to the currency exchange to get change for a $20. When I walked in, there were three people in line. A small black girl with an Adam’s apple that was a little too big was arguing with the teller. “I just need to get this done,” she shouted.
“Yeah, but you can’t just cut in line. You gotta wait your turn.”
“He don’t mind,” she said, looking at the guy behind her.
“Yeah, but what about the people behind him?”
She turned to us. “Do you mind!” It wasn’t really a question, and she didn’t really wait for an answer, although me and the girl in front of me both shook our heads. “See, they don’t mind. Now can we do this?”
“Well, they might not mind, but I still ain’t gonna do it,” the teller said. “You can wait your turn like everyone else.”
“Fuck you, then, bitch. I’ll take my business somewhere else then, bitch.”
“Well, you’re gonna have to now, because it ain’t gonna happen here.”
She backed up to the door, head weaving. She sliced her acrylics through the air, and her Adam’s apple bulged. “Fuck you, bitch! I hope you croak, bitch! I hope you fuckin’ croak and die, bitch! I hope you fuckin’ croak and die, bitch.”
----
I think she got on at Irving Park, although I’m really not sure. She walked past me, to the end of the car, and set her tattered plastic shopping bags on the floor behind the divider. Her gray sweatsuit was stained with dirt the way that smog browns the clouds before the rain. She turned her back to the sliding door, and looked around the car, although her eyes never seemed to focus on anything. I noticed the wet spots on her thighs just before the smell first drifted to me. It was mild, but sharp, the acrid burn of fresh urine on top of stale. She squatted slightly, plunged her hands past the elastic band of her sweatpants. Her forearms moved up and down, back and forth, like a prospector panning for gold. A full minute passed, and when she pulled her hands out of her pants they glistened, slick with I don’t care to know what. She held them out in front of her, looking through them, looking through us.
The smell moved down the train car in a wall. The Mexican woman with graying hair and a floral print blouse flinched, and I saw her catch a gag in her throat. It passed the doors, and came to me. Thick, salt and pussy, rich and clear, but stained. Like the orchard, a week after the last apples fall, while the leaves are still red or brown on the trees, after first frost, but before snow. The stink caught in my throat too, and my stomach turned violently. The blond in the white blazer and horn-rimmed glasses put her hand to her nose. We all did. The young black couple in Ecco Unltd tees, the punk rocker with purple hair and a jacket made of safety pins, everyone.
For the first time in my life, I washed my hands as soon as I left the subway.
----
Last night, it rained. The streets were fresh at six o’clock this morning. A young woman sat in the corner of a doorway outside Dunkin Donuts. Her sign read “I AM HUNGRY.” There were free copies of the paper at the hotel’s front desk, so I gave her the dollar in quarters I had saved for a machine. She met my eyes as I bent to hand it to her. She was either indomitable or fresh to the street. Her eyes were clear, soft, and underwritten with a smile. “How are you this morning?” she asked, eyes locked on mine.
Last night, it rained. The streets were fresh at six o’clock this morning. A young woman sat in the corner of a doorway outside Dunkin Donuts. Her sign read “I AM HUNGRY.” There were free copies of the paper at the hotel’s front desk, so I gave her the dollar in quarters I had saved for a machine. She met my eyes as I bent to hand it to her. She was either indomitable or fresh to the street. Her eyes were clear, soft, and underwritten with a smile. “How are you this morning?” she asked, eyes locked on mine.
“Um, good, thanks. You?”
“Lucky to be alive.” She broke my gaze and looked east towards the lake, and excused me with “Thank you.”
“Good luck.”
----
“What would you say if I told you power is good?” Mike growled at us.
He must be 60, although he could just as easily be 40. Close cropped black hair, lightly salted. Sharp, deliberate eyes. Weathered jaw. Black oxford, untucked, black slacks, black shoes.
A few people shook their heads. “How ‘bout this? Who here wants power? Who really wants it?” My hand went up, and a few others. “Okay, you do. Who doesn’t?” He scanned the room. “Who’s not sure?” His finger stabbed at his target. “You. Why not?”
“That’s a lot of responsibility. I don’t know if I want that responsibility.”
“Okay, fair enough. What kind of responsibility?”
“You know, to the people. The people under you.”
“Right. Okay. You’re responsible to the people under you. Some of us don’t want that responsibility. Why not? Who else?” His finger stabbed again. “You.”
“Well, I guess I’ve just seen it abused.”
“Good. Abuse of power. We’ve all seen that, right? Everyone’s heard that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely?”
There was a murmur. “Good, right. But what about this. If you don’t have power, what’s your other option? Powerlessness, right?” He scribbled on the whiteboard, words sloping diagonally away to the right. “So what if I told you, power is good, powerlessness is bad?” Again, a murmur, stronger. “If you don’t have power, you’re powerless. You should all want power. Because power is good. With power, you can accomplish things. Without power, you can be oppressed. Does anyone know what Frederick Douglas said about that? How much will people be oppressed? How much pressure people will accept?” He prowled the front of the room, scanning.
“As much as they’ll take.”
“That’s right. There will be as much oppression as people will take. So what does that mean? If you are powerless, someone’s gonna oppress you as hard as they can. But if you have power, you can fight back. So where does power come from. There are two sources. Two sources of power.”
“Money!”
“Right, money’s one. What’s the other?”
“People!”
“That’s right. But not just money and people. Organized money and people. What’s more powerful? Getting a million dollars from one person, or a million dollars from a thousand people? A thousand people, right, because then you have money power and people power. But money and people have to be organized to be powerful. If they’re not organized, it’s just money, and just people. You need an organization to be powerful. And you need power because power only respects power. Who knows what Frederick Douglas said about power? Yes, Ariel?”
“He said, ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will.’”
“That’s right! ‘Never has, and it never will.’” He paused over this, watched us. “That’s the key in community organizing. First, you have to find out who has power. Then you have to find out what their self interest is. Then you figure out how to use that, not in a manipulative way, but in a way that helps both of you."
"Let me tell you a story. When Barack first went to the state senate, he was a member of the black caucus. Now that’s pretty much all from the city, and then it wasn’t a very big caucus. They couldn’t do much on their own. But the caucus wanted a law to deal with racial profiling. We were getting too many stops for driving while black, too many tickets and arrests. We wanted a law so police would have to record the race of everyone they pulled over and every arrest, so they’d have to consciously mark it and so we could see who was being stopped and why. But the caucus was small, the police didn’t want the law, and we couldn’t get it through. So Barack looked around for another group that was too small to get their own things done. He went to a group of guys from the south, rural whites, and he said ‘what do you need?’ And they said, ‘We need a seatbelt law.’ They said, ‘We’re having too many fatalities on rural roads. But we can’t get a seat belt law through.’ So Barack said to them, ‘You help me with my law, I’ll get yours for you.’ That’s a good tradition here in
“One thing I don’t get, it seems like those are both common sense. I mean, I seems like, you know, it’s common sense, you should wear your seatbelt. It’s common sense, we shouldn’t be racially profiling. Shouldn’t we be able to get common sense laws like that passed easily?”
There was a chuckle and a groan in the room. One of the black guys, a big, broad smiling guy of maybe 45 with a sharp eye and a deliberate tongue rolled his eyes. He looked behind him at one of the younger black guys. They shook their heads, with a sad laugh.
“We should be able to,” Mike barked, “but that’s not the reality. You know why? Because common sense is not common.” There was a rumble of agreement, heads nodding. “To you and me, sure, that seems like common sense. But common sense all depends on where you come from. Common sense is not common. To people in the south, it was common sense that the sons of
----
There were no cars coming, so we crossed against the light. A train rolled by, drowning out John’s voice for a moment. “I feel like this is a real urban center,” he shouted as the train crackled above us. “Just everything here. It feels like Gotham . I mean, when I think of a city, this is what I think of. I can see Batman here, not in Manhattan
----
In the shower, the morning I came, I lost my breath. Two years, especially the last six months, I’ve been a zombie. Walking dead. The weight of it covered me as fully as the hot water. When I stepped out of the shower, the mirror was fogged. I wiped it with a towel, lathered, and put the razor to my cheek.
In the shower, the morning I came, I lost my breath. Two years, especially the last six months, I’ve been a zombie. Walking dead. The weight of it covered me as fully as the hot water. When I stepped out of the shower, the mirror was fogged. I wiped it with a towel, lathered, and put the razor to my cheek.
----
Stepping off the blue line at O’Hare, I could still smell the acid stench, a bad memory of a smog cloud, lingering. When the plane finally went wheels up, I watched the airport hotels, the houses and warehouses and rail yards drop away. We passed into the haze of last night’s raincloud, spent now, barely more than a thick fog. The white crept in at the edges of my window like a bad movie scene cutting out of, or maybe into, a dream, crept in until it was all I could see. Somewhere below me, freeways and box stores faded into the winding cul-de-sacs of suburbia. Somewhere below me, the grid of roads and wires faded into the broad squares of corn country. Somewhere below me a town nestled into the lee of a gray-green lake. A high school football field. A water tower with some girl’s name scrawled in spraypaint on the side. A grain silo. A wind farm. All around me, a white veil of cloud that could open on clear sky, or anything at all.
