Ohio Girl

I stop almost every morning at the same convenience store where I purchase some form of caffeine and a protein bar. I am convinced that the protein bar is way better for me than the candy bar that I really want. I don’t buy a banana, though, which would be better than both.

The convenience store is at a crossroads; it marks the intersection of those heading from country to city--or vice versa—although there is far less of the vice versa crowd. The parking lot is often full of trucks loaded down with farm gear and it is not unusual for a man to say “M’am” all while nodding, tipping his hat, and holding the door. I LOVE that, I must admit.

I pulled in today behind a beater pick-up loaded down with rusted, scrap metal—so rusted, so deeply brown, it reminded me of the shaved milk chocolate on the top of a fancy cake. I see people scrapping all the time lately. Folks have come knocking at the door offering to haul away Grandpa’s old tractors and split the proceeds. Many of the cases in my recent grand jury service involved people scrapping the junked-out cars of other people, without permission.

A man, with greased-lined cracks in his hands and beer on his breath, said “well hello” as he held the door. No hat, no “m’am.” His own beater truck was filled with barefoot children and a woman giving me the look of death as he looked me up and down. He looked at my empty, rust-free car with the same leer.

Another man came in, interrupting my pleasantries with the clerk, to ask for four dollars in gas—not even enough for a gallon. He was hurried with furrowed brow and muttered his hope that it would be enough to get him the rest of the way home.

A man with too much cologne was using the pay phone as I left. It was the first time I had seen a pay phone, much less one in use, in ages. I heard him ask the person on the other end if there was work today. He looked back at his truck filled with tools and asked if there might be work Monday then. His voice was over-calm.

When I got in the car the radio was announcing cheap gas spots in the area. As I pulled out another beater truck was pulling in. No farm gear, no hat, and I was already missing the “m’am.”

There is a hospital near my place of employment that offers valet service. There is a panhandler just down the way from there with the cough of consumption. He hasn’t seen a doctor in years. Maybe if he had a car to valet?

I bought a shopping bag at a big box store--the canvas, reusable kind. It was only 99 cents and seemed sturdy. While I was digging for change to cover the tax, the cashier placed it in a plastic shopping bag. Who bags a bag?

I often have lunch at a great, little place located next to an abortion clinic. Anti-abortion folk are always outside with gruesome pictures blown up as big as their pick-ups. They have a new sign that says, “All Michael Vick did was kill some dogs.” Didn’t God create babies AND dogs?

A neighbor down the road has a house back a long drive. It sits next to an open field. Deer gather there in the early morning by the dozens to graze. This neighbor put in a mud hut by the driveway. Why hunt when you can just shoot?

There are epiphanies of all kinds. Mine started as I exhaled. I let my breath out and could SEE brain cells coming out of my nostrils and ears likes so many dancing bears. And then the family seated next to me all in camo—the mom’s a nice pink with rhinestones, the dad’s a complimentary, but manly grey, the kids in traditional green--they joined the dancing bear parade while the announcer announced we would have to take a break due to air quality issues.

We were being gassed and willingly at that.

I pulled my scarf around my nose and worried about the baby with the mohawk two rows down and then let go; let the carbon monoxide take me where all those weekends of acid-dropping never did.

It seems I had been laboring under an illusion. This was my next thought as Vyper interviewed awkwardly and as another driver commented on his tour of duty in Iraq.

“Were you thinking about coming back here to drive monster trucks?” the announcer stalled.

“No, I just wanted to make it back,” said the driver.

“Duh,” said the dancing bears in harmony.

I had been laboring under the illusion that I had seen everything. Certainly everything in the redneck repertoire.

I can be so full of myself.

I like Vyper, I thought, with his round belly and his shy, lack of interview skills. I like that while other drivers ran out and athletically jumped atop the massive tires of their massive vehicles that Vyper had to struggle up from below his beast.

I like Twisted Dragon and his southern drawl and his cute story about taking a blow torch to his corvette and crafting the MONSTER VETTE. The dragon.

And I don’t hate this spectacle, I thought, but was not clear if it was me or the bears talking.

Sure, there was a rough patch at the start.

When I saw the massive trucks in the tiny arena. When the lights went down. When the announcer said, and i mean actually directly said and I quote, “Let’s thank all the troops fighting for our right to have Monster Trucks here in Ohio.”

I mean, Jesus H. Christ.

And I never even say that.

NASCAR certainly carries the same message but it’s polished and buffed beneath corporate logos and glitzy fly-overs. Those boys have been trained not to say it right out like that.

But then came the fumes and the bears and the reflexive squeals when the Monsters began catapulting up and over junk yard cars to “catch some air.”

High Voltage went up so fast and so high it seemed certain he would go all the way over. Instead he became stuck on his end atop an old buick. My hands to my head I gasped and giggled and turned to see my nieces and nephew doing the same.

And just then the girls stood and shouted, “This is better than NASCAR.”

I do not agree, but the kids have a point that was punctuated in the autograph line.

Every driver stayed until every kid got to shake hands and get an autograph. Every kid got a sincere smile and every grown up a thank you. A very specific thank you.

“Thanks for coming out here and letting me have this job,” this was said to me, directly, by a driver.

As ridiculous as his job is, as much as I would trade his job for, you know, drowning polar bears, I got it.

I got that the same guy was changing the oil in my car last week and for not much more money he gets to travel and to meet people and to giggle and gasp right along with the crowd as he crunches atop discarded school buses.

“We get it,” sang the bears as they danced into the night.

Grandpa and Great Aunt Cleo and Grandma are staring at one another when I arrive. They’ve all known one another for a long time. What else do they possibly have to talk about?

“You” Grandma says pointing into my chest—clever avoidance of my name which she cannot recall.

“Wellllllll,” Cleo remarks. I am not clear if she remembers my name either.

Grandpa manages a few more syllables with a “Looky here.”

“You are just in time for the New Year’s party,” he continues, signaling my arrival will mean his escape.

Cleo is fidgeting in her chair and is ready to go as well. She’s older than Grandma and has already had her car keys removed from her custody. She’d rather not risk being confused for a resident by hanging around too long.

At the party down the hall the New Year has come a couple days early. No one cares. Grandma reviews her party favors and puts on the aluminum foil tiara. It is a suitable piece of party finery. The plastic lei, on the other hand, will not do. That is going too far. A man at the end of the table blows his party horn early and Grandma laughs. Someone else covers their ears with their eyes squeezed shut reliving some bad moment.

Charades gets the party started. One man acts out being a spider. Another does a passable bear. What do you mean by that one woman glares upon being told to be a cat. When Grandma receives her assignment she turns to the table and says, “I’m a puppy.” Everyone claps for the effort.

Soft pretzels and cheese flavored dipping sauce are passed around while the staff pours sparkling cider. “Is that wine?” one man asks with the same face the kids approached their presents on Christmas morning.

“I sure as hell wish it was,” I whisper. Grandma jabs me with her elbow. She caught that one.

Next the staff turn on that song; that same song that is played in every scene of every movie when old folks get together. I know the name but cannot place it. It is too old for most of this crowd who are younger than the WWII set, but did not have enough education or free time for war protesting and free love.

Grandma would rather hear Dion. I know this because back when I was a teen and talked about Bono, my future husband, Grandma brought up Dion—HER future husband. Ick, I thought. The guy across from me, whose mind went well before his body, would like to hear a little Megadeth.

The staff starts handing out strawberry pie and 18 year-old nursing assistants walk by giggling. They still say “Eewwwwww” when they have to change a diaper and have not caught on yet that aging is something that happens to everyone. Unless, of course, you die first.

Finally, the residents are asked to go around and share their New Year’s resolutions. The woman to my right says, “To just keep going on.” A couple folks name weight loss. It seems that quest is never ending. The rest are perplexed into silence which is precisely how I feel about it.

She was proclaiming her innocence and no doubt cursing the dirty, rotten, bastard who landed her in jail when I met her, but it was hard to hear past her hair. It greeted me before she did--that wild, bleached entity all its own. It was thinning and coarse, but still hinted at its big, tall, peroxide-filled days of glory.

Lots of people accidentally set beds on fire. Drop their cigarettes when they fall asleep. Far fewer manage it fully conscious with a lighter while someone else is sleeping. But, as she pointed out, it barely caught, and the bastard did not get so much as a first degree burn, and it was an accident, and he goddamned, well-deserved it anyway. Did the hair say that, or did she?

She reviewed her proposed lawsuits in support groups and in-passing as she mopped the jail floors. She told me about the tell-all book she was writing and the people she would expose while she mopped different floors in the state prison. And then she began to say she would be coming to see me when she got out. True to her word she called the morning after she was released.

Counseling was a pre-text more than anything else. We talked. She talked. And talked. Her hair ever nodding in agreement and seconded by bright blue eye shadow and clothes that probably fit before the jail weight, before that man, back when people stared at her bra-free breasts in a good way.

There were still lots of lawsuits to consider. There was still that bastard. There were the friends and family who didn’t give a damn about her and she did not know why except that they were stupid, bastards too. There was also her cat that stood up on his back legs while she took his picture, and oh-how-is-your-dog, and new poems that she wrote, and loneliness. Loneliness was something about which she could be perfectly honest. One of the few things.

There were moments between her fury and her pain, her delusions and her beer, when she was just the sort of person to whom I was happy to listen. One of a few who ever did, she used say. I never realized it, of course, and often felt just the opposite, but i am grateful to have been counted among those few.