The Fantasy Years

BUT THAT TIDE OF ANGRY VOICES grew. In numbers. And in volume. The outrage about what could and couldn’t be said by whom spread across the country, rippling through society. The talk sizzled. The talk consumed. The conversation spilled over, spreading from small towns to cities, from farms to suburbs and from cities back to farms. Yet more voices, from the stripmalls and parking lots in the center and the south of the country, to the warehouses and parking garages on the coasts. The venting session billowed wider into new radio markets.

The incredulous, aggravated tone puffed up the talk inside trailer rigs and truck stops, barbershops and break rooms, it animated the paunchy-cheeked faces, tweaking the expressions hidden behind beards and shaded under hunting caps, already distrustful of authority. Already wary of government. Trusting only the power they could exercise themselves. The freedom of movement offered by a cars and pick-ups. The personal veto power offered by a gun.

The tone of voice bled into the conversations heard in vinyl upholstered booths, in the smoking section of roadside restaurants
“Why don’t we get a special name? Blacks are free to call themselves whatever they choose. They have the freedom to speak however they like. But us whites? Well, we have to watch our mouths.”
“The African-Americans, you mean.”
“Them and the Hispano-Americans.”
“That’s what we need to be.”
“What?”
“We need to get ourselves an ethnic name like that. Become Something-Americans.”
“What can we be?”
“White-Americans.”
“How about European-Americans. Why can’t we call ourselves European-Americans?”
“Why can’t I be a Scotch-Irish-American?”
“Why can’t I be Italian-Irish American? Do you think I get any special treatment for that?”
“My grandparents were dirt poor farmers. Why shouldn’t I have a special name for that?”
“Well my ancestors were discriminated against. Why can’t I be a Dutch-Irish-Scottish-Choctaw American?”
“How do you think it was for my family?”
“You’d think my ancestors had it easy, the way these people talk today.”
“As if my ancestors weren’t poor and didn’t struggle. I remember my granddaddy’s hands calloused from picking cotton. And these people want a special status?”
“I don’t see where these people get off saying they’re the only ones who were discriminated against,” and with that, the man cleared his throat and spit.

The conversation crackled, the conversation consumed the nation, binding strangers together by a common rage. The voices grunted. The voices sneered. One of the angry voices belonged to Dennis McLeod, who lived in Fargo, North Dakota. Outrage was most definitely in the air for him. Dennis tasted outrage in his phlegm, it collected in the back of his throat. He brought the inhaler to his mouth, depressed the canister and Whoosht! But in the end, even after relaxing his bronchial tubes the choking, suffocating outrage remained.

Everywhere Dennis looked he saw things that flabbergasted him, even in the mall where he wandered, looking for a gift for his mother.

He found himself in the same predicament year after year: his annual last ditch effort to buy his mother something for her birthday rather than give her the annual $25 gift certificate to Marshall Field’s he usually ended up giving her.

Dennis passed under the feeble, filtered sunshine from the massive sunlight overhead. The light gave the impression of being outdoors but without the flies and the other unpleasant realism.
The mall wasn’t too crowded today. Teenage couples walked side by side, their palms inserted possessively down the back pockets of each other’s jeans. Blue-haired grandmothers were led by their grown children. Their excited grandchildren ran ahead of them. Mothers shopped for clothes. Men stood together near the communal benches and trashcans and talked sports and work. Teenagers worked at the earring kiosks and gossiped with each other. This was life, Dennis thought. Or a kind of model of life but better air-conditioned.

Dennis winced at the candles and figurines in the Hallmark Store. Then walked in. He inspected the cards, the stuffed animals. The sight of so much cuteness almost offended him. None of it looked like a gift for his mom anyway. That was the maddening part. Maybe he’d just send her flowers. But that was almost as lame as a $25 gift certificate.

In the department store, he wandered through the perfume section, catching the eye of a few over-the-hill, overly made-up women.

Smells were so personal, he decided. Besides, she was his mom, not his wife. Perfume was something his dad should have bought her.

Clothing? Forget it.

Candles? Dennis wondered. Then he froze. Tim, his boss from work, walked by with his beautiful wife Lucy. Tim was looking oh-so-casual in his red Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts.
Dennis scanned the best route to avoid them and slipped gingerly out of the gift store. He moved into the anonymity of the music store. Dennis couldn’t imagine Tim and his remarkably hot wife coming in the music store. Tim was probably too cool to care for music. Tim was certainly too cool to say hi to Dennis half the time at work. He couldn’t imagine Tim had the heart to like music, either.

No, Dennis wouldn’t give him the satisfaction here in the mall. No way. It was one thing to be built up and torn down every other day at work by Tim’s nods or snubs as they passed each other in the office, it was quite another to allow Tim the chance to snub him in the mall. On a Saturday. On his day off.

No way. Dennis turned his back to the entrance and buried his attention in the bargain CD bin. He flipped past Iron Butterfly, Styx, Iron Maiden, Steely Dan, The Eagles. No way. No way. No way, he thought. Where’s the country music when you need it? Just an inconspicuous moment of browsing…Dennis thought. Oh, but how inconspicuous could he be? Last he checked he was past 270 lbs.

Yet another voice in a diner in Lexington: “The days of calling people what they are, are gone.” A man with bloodshot eyes spoke of the injustice. “You look back in newspapers from fifty years ago and they used clear terminology. Now we all have to be politically correct. You see it on TV all the time. Like that guy in LA who got beat up by those cops. He’s black and he was speeding when he got pulled over. He was endangering people’s lives. But can people say that? No!”
“He’s an African-American, don’t forget,” the man’s friend said. “His ancestors were oppressed.”
“African American? He was resisting arrest when they had to subdue him. But do they show you that on TV? No. They just show you the cops around him hitting him.”
“That’s the liberal media for you.”
“The same media who wants us to feel sorry for this—For this black man who had it coming.”
“Don’t you mean African-American?”
“If he’s African-American then I’m a European-American,” the man with the bloodshot eyes said, holding up his empty glass to the waitress. “And I want to be compensated for the hard life my ancestors had.”
“Me too,” the other said, nodding yes to the coffee refill offered by the waitress.

Another of those thousands – or hundreds of thousands – of annoyed voices belonged to Mike Hurtfield in Little Rock, Arkansas. Mike raked his fingers through his wavy hair, clawing at his sweaty scalp. Then he pulled on his work gloves, walked around the back of his truck and heaved the ramp down to the pavement below. Traffic on the highway hissed behind him in the background and he thought for a second how much he’d rather be driving on the highway rather than working here.

The front door of the customer’s house opened. He could feel their eyes on him, waiting for him to lug their delivery in the house. Just a second of eye contact and he could see their impatience. The couple’s eyes said Hurry up please, sweaty stranger. Hurry up and deliver our furniture. Then leave our precious home please. Mike hated the way these customers looked at him when he came to deliver their furniture.

The women always had a frightened expression. They were worried you’d scuff their hallway walls, which was fair enough, he supposed. Kath, his wife, might look the same way. But it was the men who infuriated him: they watched him as if Mike’s struggling and lifting was so foreign, so strange. It’s called hard work, Mike thought. That’s what he would love to tell them.

If a deliveryman brought Mike’s order to his house, he’d get out there and help the man bring the boxes in. But not these people. No, these people just watched you, like you were practicing some kind of lost art. Like this grunting and sweating and straining was something they saw in a documentary once on PBS.

‘Course it would have been easier if his partner Kenny was here. But after Kenny called in sick one day and Mike’s dispatcher realized he could manage on his own, he had Mike managing on his own more often than not.

Mike grasped the box through his extra-grip gloved, took a great breath of air and lifted. No sooner was the box held a couple feet from the ground than Mike wondered what cotton-ball sized hunk of pollen he just inhaled? Mike could feel the sneeze-to-come play in the back of his nose. He struggled forward with the box.

Almost to the door, Mike set the box down. He held it lightly with one hand as a violent sneeze shook his body. He looked up just in time to catch the expression on the wife’s face. Her eyes said it all. My children’s bedroom set. You almost sneezed on the box of my children’s bedroom set. Well, what kind of fucking pollen cloud, Mike wondered, did these people live in? Then he jerked his head to the side and let loose a roaring torrent of a sneeze.

Yet two more voices of men driving a truck at seventy miles an hour down I-35. “And do you know they want us to call history, HERstory? Can you believe that shit?”
“Herstory?” his co-worker asked. “Where’d you hear that?”
“The radio. Can you believe that? HER-Story. Because HIS-tory is too chauvinist. It’s too sexist. So it’s HER-Story.”
“HER-Story?”
“HER-Story. Have you ever heard of such—?”
“Because HIS-story is too chauvinist?”
“More like too normal, I’d say. These people can’t be satisfied with anything normal.”
“Her-Story? Why not call a hernia a HIM-nia?”
“To them all bad things come from white men.”
“What’s wrong with these people?”
“HER-Story.”
Flat farm land shrouded in darkness passed outside the windows. It had been raining and the fields were wet. “That sounds like the part in a divorce case where the wife gets to tell her side…”

Dennis could see his boss Tim and his wife standing before the record store, debating which way to go in the mall. Of course, they took no notice of Dennis. He might as well have been a potted plant or a trash can as far as they were concerned. But Dennis just kept glancing up, checking that they stood there enough times to notice Tim’s jagged toenails. They hung over the ends of his flip-flops, like boar’s feet.

Yep, Dennis, reflected, his dad was right. There were two kinds of people in the world: those ashamed of everything and those ashamed of nothing. Tim was definitely in the second group. Look at those toenails. How did Tim even get a woman like his wife with those toenails?

Dennis moved from aisle to aisle until to his dismay he found himself turned away, until he found himself vaguely perusing the musical show tunes section. He could just imagine Tim finding him here: “I didn’t know you liked ‘Annie’, Dennis…I didn’t know you were a ‘Cats’ fan.” That would make for a funny story back in the office, wouldn’t it?

Finally, Tim and his wife wandered off in the direction of Banana Republic. Dennis meandered out of the store to a candle shop on the far side of the food court.

There, he found yet another infuriating collection of candles and silk flowers and semi-collectable ceramics. His mom would be surprised if he could find her something different. Something unique. It was all so cute Dennis had to restrain himself from picking one up and smashing it under his shoe.

He examined almost all the gifts within his price range. He had almost settled on a small ceramic pot with silk flowers. Yes, that would be it. Yes, definitely this, Dennis thought. Until he turned it over and saw it was $34.95.

Dennis had to think about it. $35 was a lot of money.
He stepped out of the shop and almost walked into Tim.
“Dennis?”
“Hi, Tim.”
Tim went to say something else but Dennis had already nodded in embarrassment and stepped past him. No, he thought. No. Dennis just couldn’t stand to see Tim, all balanced and easy, with his pretty wife by his side, and his jagged pig toe nails jutting out. Dennis just couldn’t endure the condescension. He couldn’t bear to make eye contact with Tim, he thought and strode on.

Other voices. Voices of men unknown to each other. Gruff, angry voices contorted by work. “Yep, Blacks aren’t even black. They’re not even African-American. Have you heard? Now they’re People of Color,” said a voice in Florida.
“What color?” asked another.
“I don’t know. I guess it means you and I have no color at all.”
“People of Color? What would that make us?” asked a voice, separated by several states and a thousand miles. The voice was in Arizona. Even if its speaker knew none of the other voices, it was part of the same conversation, the same talk gripping the nation.
“The people of non-color?” another asked.
“How about the people of minding our own business?”
“How about the People of Not Asking for A Special Status?” said someone else in Connecticut.
“But why the hell can’t we be the People of the Majority? Or the people of Hard Work? You try to say that and see what happens.”
“Shit. The politeness police would have your hide.”