The Basketball Bitch accosted C– and her friend outside of a Pizza Hut tonight. I left a pan of half-popped corn on the stove to drive immediately over there. I’m like 89% sure this was the same self-proclaimed Basketball Bitch (how many could there be?) I witnessed on the Red line a few months ago, angrily declaiming, gesturing, threatening someone who wasn’t there. C– is fine but shaken; I picked her up and her friend got a Lyft.
Who dreamed up this city? Why is it like this? Why are we like this? Whose dreams is this the city of? To paraphrase William Kennedy in Ironweed, nobody is born a Basketball Bitch. How does someone go from being someone’s baby to wandering up and down trash-strewn streets like some kind of Minecraft witch, helpfully inserting (amidst the mumbling and ranting and reaching menacingly into pockets) a warning to hapless kids about the even worse zombies and creepers and ravagers that are out there. And they are out there. She’s not wrong.
Anyway, the night is old. If I don’t type this pigeon up and go to bed, I’m gonna start snacking like a motherfucker and then feeling like shit about it later, so let’s hurry up and see what tonight’s random feathered visitor is gonna be.
pigeon
True or false: The American Indian is.
Haha. That’s what my stepfather told us one time was one of the questions on a high-stakes final exam for one of his college classes. Or was it one of the law school classes? History? Or Philosophy? Don’t recall the details, as I was truly just a little kid when I heard this story. At the time it seemed both delightfully absurd and laughably unfair. The outer layer of the anecdote seemed to be saying, The class was hard, college was hard, law school was hard, whew, I’m glad I somehow made it through all that! — A bit of a cautionary tale, a bit of a morality tale about perseverance, a bit of the old hero’s journey tale. We can laugh now, because we’re OK. Yes, it kind of scared me to hear about this — this was the kind of Alice-in-Wonderland deranged-adult bullshit I could expect to have to deal with, if I were lucky enough (if it could be called lucky) to survive childhood and somehow transmogrify into this mysterious urbane traveler called a college student?
On the other hand, Wonderland is not only a maddening nightmare, it’s also a vindication, a reassurance (to those of us who are Alice at heart) that even pompous, boring adults who think they have all the answers definitely do not, because you can always come up with a question ridiculous enough to stump them. It’s a reminder that there is always more than one possible world out there. OK so some of the timelines have frothing lunatics like the Red Queen in them, but then ours has some humdingers too, including any number of even worse petty tyrants, along with plain old wildcard crazy people too, and you can meet up with them on any old street on a random Saturday night, and they might just fish a taser out of their pocket for some reason, just ask my daughter. A Mouse with a long and sad tale, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Basketball Bitch — they’re all poets of one kind or another. So is a slightly grandiose history professor in the 1950s, thinking he’s some kind of philosopher. So was my stepfather though, the way his dinner-table stories were always alive with music, irony, and a folksy, resonant, capacious sense of humor that I really didn’t appreciate when I was a kid. One of the main differences between me then and me all grown up is, now I totally get what my mom saw in him.
In retrospect, the test question itself (am I a bit disillusioned?) doesn’t seem all that nonsensical. It could be read as “Is the term ‘American Indian’ legitimate? In what sense is an ‘American Indian’ American? and in what sense Indian?” and so on. In fact it could be grouped with a whole bank of similar test questions: True or false, the African American is; the European American is; America is — (or was). True or false: these questions can be answered with either “true” or “false.” And so on. The way we talk about people. The way we label them. Categorize them. The way we bend towards simplicity — to rationalize our privilege, to assuage our anxieties, to shut out the gaping howl of the infinitude of universes right next door.
My most memorable test question I ever had to answer was: “Tell me everything you know about rocks.”
But that’s another pigeon for another time.
My daughters are home safe. Good night. I’m going to bed.