Cringe

One of the hardest things for me is to have someone angry at me, or disapprove of me, or hold any opinion of me that materially differs from “what a nice person she is”. (Which, it occurs to me as I write this, is a rather difficult conundrum to resolve: am I a “nice person” or am I a rabble-rousing challenger of the status quo? Thank god for the printed word, which lets me be the nice person on the outside while the rabble-rousing side of me conjures unflattering descriptions of those who dare to piss me off. If this were a pre-literate society, where everything had to be expressed in words, in person, I’d doubtless be the most maladjusted of my tribe. Supposing the pre-literate society to which I belonged had somehow nonetheless managed the invention of clocks, and the engineering needed to put them in towers, I’d likely be the clock-tower sniper.)

Mostly I hide behind written words, especially to express strong emotions or questionable opinions. Especially in the few situations where I’ve done differently, I’ve usually fumbled it badly enough to generate one of those cringe-inducing memories, the kind that follow me for years. Shortly after September 11th, I made an offhand comment to a woman on the bus who was holding forth on the injustice of all Muslims being judged by Osama Bin Laden, and even though the comment was in agreement with her, I ended up getting a verbal beatdown which would quite likely have escalated to a physical one if I hadn’t decided that discretion was the better part of not getting my ass whipped by an angry black woman and her friends. (Evidently she didn’t appreciate my participation.) Whenever I think of that incident, even five years later, I always feel like an ass.

Well, today I’ve managed to give myself another one of those cringe-ables; once again I find myself feeling like an ass and not sure whether it’s even necessary to feel so. It’s a statement of experience that got me in this trouble, after all, and what’s a more-solid basis for an opinion than personal experience? And yet…Urgh. Ever just want to crawl under the blankets and hope for Armageddon, preferably before the next time the alarm clock goes off? Yeah. Like that.

When I got to work today, there were police in front of the building. Evidently, one of the other offices on our floor had been broken into over the weekend. Nobody knows why anyone would want to break into the place; then again, nobody knows exactly what type of company we’re sharing our floor with, either. We know that they tend to share our coffee supplies without being invited, that they leave the break room messy, and that they’re none-too-friendly when we encounter them in the halls or in the shared restroom. Whatever the temptation was, however, someone took it—hence, this morning’s police presence. Or, as one of my other co-workers phrased it: “CSI (Suburb) is on the scene.” Needless to say, this was the main topic of conversation as everyone came in.

One of my other co-workers, an African-American man, came in during all the excitement, and made some remark about the break-in. “Did they search you on the way in?” I asked. “They DID look at me pretty good as I walked in, “ he said. “Well, this IS (Suburb)”, I replied.

“That’s not correct,” chimes in Co-Worker #3, “and I take offence at you saying that.”

Co-Worker 3 is a nice enough guy, but he’s very strongly opinionated in nearly every case—and in nearly every case, his opinions and mine are at complete right angles to one another. He’s the one who, on the day of the immigration-rights parade downtown, was complaining about the temerity of “illegals” to demand rights—which, after about two minutes, drove me to a colleague’s desk, to plead for the loan of his headphones.

I’d managed not to make an ass of myself that day, but apparently I was not gonna get off so lucky today. “Well,” I said, “I apologize.” “I don’t know if you know this,” he replied, “but (Suburb) was…” Here he detailed this community’s history of progressive racial politics, including a stop on the Underground Railroad. “(Suburb) isn’t like that,” he finished.

“Well,” I said again, “I apologize. But I’ve had very different experiences in several of the areas VERY near here,” I continued. “VERY near.”

“All right,” he said, “though I beg to differ with that, too…” And there the conversation ended.

Now, mind you, the only mistake made here was mine, opening my mouth in the first place; once the words were out, though, nobody was wrong. We were both speaking from experience—he from his, me from mine—and so we were both right, each in our own way. Had he asked—had he wanted to know, instead of just to rebuke—I could have told him stories of my days with JP: how the police one suburb to the south had stopped us with a handful of friends, taken me out of the car for sobriety testing, then taken JP out of the passenger seat and generally heckled him until it was clear they had no real grounds to hold us, other than my slight sloppiness in taking a curve. Or I could have told him—had he wanted to know—about the treatment we’d gotten a couple of suburbs north, one night when I was still married and we were sitting in my husband’s old blue Hyundai on a dark road, both of us in the front seats, just talking. The officer had come fairly close to calling me a whore outright; his implication was clear. Had I been in that same car in the same spot, caught sitting and talking with my Italian-American hubby, we would have been “a couple of kids” and shooed, like harmless gnats, to another dark secluded spot. Because I was with JP, though, he took our names and license info, and gave us the usual hoo-haw about “don’t let me catch you here again.”

And I’m sorry—maybe I’m wrong here, again—but you can’t tell me that driving two miles, or crossing a couple of invisible man-made dividing lines between one municipality and another, can cause a diametrical opposition in beliefs. And there’s always the argument that “we’re not all like that”—an argument I have to accept, since I don’t know everyone in a 25-mile radius. Yes, I realize we may have run into the only two bad apples the North Shore has to offer—but it’s certainly quite a coincidence, if you ask me.

The final call on this one, though, seems clear to me, though maybe not to anyone else: if this town is so good to black people, why don’t any of them seem to live here? There may be a handful of homeowners here who aren’t Caucasian or Asian or Middle Eastern in descent; but mostly here there are a lot of white folks. If you see a Hispanic or an African-American, chances are he or she is here to work, not to relax. I get funny looks when I drive the truck with the windows open at the end of the day and my radio’s playing the 5:00 mix on the station I listen to.

As always, though, it doesn’t matter whether I’m right or wrong, exactly—I might feel worse if I were proven wrong, but really I’m just going to feel bad, regardless. It’s not so much about race, than it is about class divides; but it’s about race, too. Mostly, though, it’s about me, making an ass of myself, and a memory which, when I think about it five years from now, will probably still make me cringe.