The Midwest

The following post is a piece written by my friend and fellow-PC blogger, Cody Rogers.  Cody’s interests and talents are a bit different from the rest of the PC crew.  His style is uniquely literary and his interests are much the same.  Since asking him to join us, I think he’s felt somewhat out-of-place.  Most of the writings on PC are politically oriented, or at least allude to some political aspect of society.  Although this may be true, I’d like Cody to realize that he reason we asked him to write with us is for his unique literary focus.

He recently wrote an extremely interesting and thought-provoking piece about what it’s like to grow up in the Midwest.  It particularly interested me, because I grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis – the Gateway Midwest city.  Although most of his experiences are fundamentally different from mine (Cody’s from outside of Des Moines), there are multitudes of similarities that strike my home-cords, because I know exactly what he’s talking about.  I’ll tell no more and let you, the reader, draw what you want from Cody’s literary expose about life in the Midwest.  It’s a bit long, but it’s well worth the read.  Enjoy!

- S.C.

The Midwest’s palette is the most uniform and starved in America.  Blue is that worn out crayola your kid uses to color his place mat at the shitty twenty four hour diner up the street, and nothing more.  Azure or cerulean are just big words for assholes to choke on.  It is a languid, dull place, that grinds your soul up in its mortar and pestle into an indistinguishable mish-mash to match the rest.

It is this striving for mediocrity that makes the poor of the Midwest the saddest specimens of all.  Have a wife, kids, get a job that won’t result in painting your brains against the bathroom wall, and your set.  The Midwest, in its own right is a beautiful place, but it isn’t a beauty that inspires so much as tranquilizes.  High minded individuals can come here and produce great works, but the homegrown cannot find any solace in the soil that has poisoned them.  Long stretches of corn fields, splashed with trees and creeks can soothe the outsider, but for the Midwesterner, they only serve as a metaphor of their prosaic and stultifying upbringing.

So, being poor in the Midwest is an even more painful experience for the creative mind than anywhere else.  When your only real expectation is to propagate and take uncomfortable family portraits for the in-laws, it becomes hard to find ambition or direction.  What develops is a comfortable stasis with all the flair and energy of an opium den.  What follows is an excerpt from a fictional piece I have started about growing up poor in the Midwest…I remember on that day a big beautiful beast of a car pulled up behind us and a man in slick backed gray hair got out.  I couldn’t make out what was being said, I just remember the light dancing across the man’s rings.  There were raised voices and gesticulations, but as for actual words I’d have to guess.   An obviously well off person like this man slumming to help poor people like us must have been like a tap dancer helping a paraplegic back into his wheel chair to my father.  It was help, but an indirect slap in the face.  “Flashing his rings and his big fancy car!  He can go suck on a tail pipe!”   Instead he opted to push it to a side street, park it, and then walk another couple of blocks to a payphone to have my mother come pick us up in her equally shitty car.

Through the years I have acquired my own impressive list of  shitty cars.  My 95 Chevy Corsica is my personal favorite.  I bought it with a fine layer of dust that gave it all the appeal of an Egyptian tomb.  The radio in it constantly shorted out so I was always seeking a pothole to jar it back into commission.  The most unusual part about it was the creaking sounds it made.  The shocks must have been worn down to rusty bed springs because it creaked like a mile long wagon train.  The noise was frightening, but at the same time exhilarating because doom always seemed to be lurking around the corner.  The car garnered 250,000 miles on a handful of oil changes.  I talk about the car with same reverence one might a grandfather who smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day, ate a pound of bacon, and drank a twelve pack, and somehow lived to a miserable ninety.

But shitty cars keep you on your toes.  Every morning I felt as if I was balancing a bowling bowl on the neck of a champagne bottle blind folded, and even if I made it through I always felt as if at some point fate would just say, “Fuck it,” tie my shoelaces together, and put an end to the whole absurd charade.  I was never surprised though when my car broke down in the middle of a traffic jam in hot summer slag heat.  I made sure I always expected the worse.  But my father, well, I don’t know what he expected.  He was always talking about this bitch named Luck, who never seemed to treat him right, and was hell-bent on castrating him publicly.  “Of course, fucking Luck!  Gotta break down right in front of my boss!”

But the man knew how to throw together a string of cuss words and riff on them with all the precision and jazz of a six-fingered saxophonist.  “You whore fucking, shit eating, worthless son of a nun’s cunt!  You can go suck the shit off a tranny’s dick!  Yeah, you can choke on it and die the same worthless death a million times over, and burn in some stink bath in hell!”  And so it would continue.  At times like this my mother would get this terrified look on her face.  It wasn’t that she was scared of him, but more scared of what embarrassing feet he might pull off next.  It all seemed relatively normal to me.  Inanimate objects had a way of provoking him like no human being could, and after a while, every time the toaster wouldn’t loosen its grip on his toast, the picture tube in the TV decided to turn into a key hole, or yes, whenever the car decided to lay down in a traffic jam, I began to think, well, they got the verbal beat down they deserved.

I even picked the habit up myself as a child, but not in such a colorful fashion.  I would get angry whenever a toy bent under the undue punishment I gave it, shout my cuss words, but then, unlike him, I would slap my hand over my mouth like a fig leaf to try to conceal my most shameful of  instruments.  I knew where swearing would get me and I had lived without air conditioning all my life, so I was in no hurry to go there.  Poor people are funny that way.  Although they have the least to be thankful for, they are the most grateful to God.  It’s really just concealed revenge.  It is a good feeling to think that the guy across town with his slick hair gels, immaculate shirts, bejeweled wife, and over priced bottled water will be roasting on a skewer in hell, while you, some apish, bottom feeding, spit on, money less floor scrubber will be up in heaven swinging from clouds.  But I didn’t buy it for long and I pulled that little scarecrow Jesus off my wall only to have my mom put it right back up.  I figured that somewhere, someone was breeding a camel small enough to jump through the flaming eye of a needle, so why not join the circus.

But I am speaking as if an economically poor childhood guarantees a poor childhood, which isn’t necessarily the case.  Actually, in many ways I feel it is the opposite.  Although lack of money undeniably means less opportunities, it doesn’t necessarily determine the overall experience of childhood.  Being poor, you have to use your imagination much more.  Most of us didn’t have game systems or cable to force feed us entertainment, so we made up our own.  I remember hundreds of games of sand lot baseball and just as many basketball games.  It was here that we perfected the art of demeaning one another.  One’s self esteem was a bug easily squashed, and it was great fun to tap dance on it once victory had been perceived.  Unfortunately most of our jokes were rather uncreative, focusing mainly on someone being gay, or once in a while, when the knives came out, talking about someone’s sister or mother.  Overall, we preferred the gay jokes.  I have never known any of us to this day to be actually gay, but then again, even if we were, after the verbal onslaught we gave one another, I think we would have castrated ourselves with our own teeth before we would have ever admitted it.

But we were also a different kind of poor, we were a rural poor, which is much more conducive to the imagination.  There weren’t winos pissing in gutters, or crackheads sucking dicks on park benches.  There was still beauty in our environment.  But I will say there is a certain beauty to urban poverty that is lacking in rural poverty.  There is something beautiful about wet brick tenements, decaying churches, and rooftop wash lines that doesn’t exist in rural settings.  Rural poverty is trailers and government housing, overgrown lawns, and shitty cars on blocks.  Urban poverty has the splendor of a sunken ship; its wreckage is its beauty.  Rural poverty has to look beyond itself to find its beauty.  We had to go to the grasshoppers and fields, the creeks and their cobbled banks, and the gnarled oaks that would cast their great ghoulish shadows over everything we did.

But even to call it “rural” poverty is misleading, because we were not traditionally rural.  Although I had a corn field in my back yard, the city was still only fifteen minutes away.  Everyone miserably commuted to the city everyday in their gum and tape jalopies, leaving the cornfields and corner stores behind.  We were more like a tide pool that marked where the city had receded.

Des Moines had a mystical presence in my mind growing up.  Here I could see some of the things on a smaller scale that I had seen on TV in cities.  Semi-chic dressed women, manicures, fast walking slicksters in suits, bums rummaging through backpacks on park benches, alley cats hiding beneath dumpsters, and even a few skyscrapers stabbing through the cityscape.  But Des Moines didn’t really possess any of the urban impoverished beauty I spoke of earlier.  It was a river town, which should have lent it a colorful history, but it didn’t, and it had poverty, just no unifying spirit about it.  In small river towns that history is raw, unadorned, and still breathing.  Small river towns don’t grow out of their history, and remain like little museums dedicated to old wooden buildings, town squares, pompous courthouses, and rickety riverfronts.  But Des Moines grew out of its small history, and what is left of it remains only as a curiosity.  The beauty of urban poverty depends on participation.  You have to be able to recount a building’s many incarnations, and be able to watch the paint chip off old signs from season to season,  and there also has to be a culture there that this melancholy can resonate in.  But Des Moines is too busy refurbishing itself and locking up its few gems, so its beauty lies just on the periphery.  Des Moines’ poverty is dull and lifeless, with no music of its own, which ultimately makes for the most miserable kind of poverty, a poverty that bankrupts the soul.

My house was a small split foyer painted baby shit brown with baby blue shutters.  Our lawn was always fairly overgrown, but it was nice grass, not cabbage weed and thistle, giving it a sort of white trash Little House On The Prairie look.  Sometimes a sea of dandelions would appear overnight, and I couldn’t wait until there little yellow heads would turn into white afros so I could pluck them and with a deep breath send them billowing across the neighborhood with the fervor of a Little Johnny Demon Seed.

In the back yard we had a war-torn jungle gym whose rusty swings would screech like tortured cats.  Next to that was a sandbox that all the neighborhood animals used as their personal toilet.  My father would go in fits of rage over it, cursing every tom cat across town with his left fist while he dug the shit out with his right.  Upon even seeing one he would blow up and rattle off a slew of bloody threats and epithets.  “Come here you little whore cat!  Yeah go paint your brains on the pavement!”

The cats almost seemed to mock him, the way they would gingerly walk up and shake their little asses in the sandbox and deliver their unmarked gifts.  They were true guerillas and my father found himself in a war he couldn’t win.  In the end it symbolized the tragedy he felt he was a part of, and the cats were all too willing to play their role.

My other friends lived in similar foyers, or trailers, with the same overgrown yards.  The refuse of abandoned projects were piled against the sides of every house.  Rusty chicken wire in warped heaps, odd collections of Sisyphian boulders, and piles of lumber turned white with rain all combined in a chaotic Feng Shui.  My favorite was the sepulcher of appliances.   A Mexican family three houses down from me had the greatest selection known to man.  It seemed every appliance they had ever owned had succumbed to a brutal, premature death.  There were shattered TVs, burned out toasters, stacks of microwaves, weather-beaten coffee makers, and most conspicuous of all, a giant, space capsule of a refrigerator that I am willing to bet is still leaning crookedly against their deck.

We combined to form a trash heap on an otherwise beautiful piece of land.  It wasn’t “majestic” like an Ansle Adam’s photo, but there was a peaceful tranquility to the grass feathered fields and patches of farmland that seeps into your senses rather than overwhelms them.  The stars were always bright, willing diversions out there, and the crickets never kept you awake, but lulled you to sleep.  The city was humanities ever evolving monument, something we could never be a part of, but out here the earth held us closely to its breast, or at least that is what I liked to believe.

This land was also fruitful for our baseball and football games that I played with other kids in the neighborhood.  The best baseball players among us came from the Mexican family three houses down.  They had four kids, two of which were my age, while the other two were significantly older.  Their mom was always mad, and pointing accusingly with her cigarette at anyone within distance.   She had a voice that mercilessly stabbed at your brain, and wore a set of gigantic, thick glasses that made her eyes look big and threatening.  I always hated that nasty butter toothed bitch, and every time I had to go fetch them to play baseball she always made a point to tell me not to slam the screen door as she tossed the remains of her cigarette at me.

It was no wonder that they were both such little shits, not to mention dull witted and dumb.  Their names were Aaron and Jason.  Aaron was the older, tougher one who always had a ratty set of whiskers bristling on his upper lip.  He never thought twice about smacking someone in the mouth or kicking you in the back of the leg when you least expected it.  I always secretly hated him and whenever I swung at a baseball it was always with the malicious intent of decapitating his little eraser nub of a head.  Although they were both dumb, Jason was the dumbest of the two, eventually graduating high school right before his twenty-first birthday.  He talked with a whispery lisp that gave his voice a snakish quality and also made you acutely aware of just how stupid he really was.  He was also a sick little bastard who played with his penis quite openly and had a thing for mutilating small animals.  Whenever we saw a dead raccoon or possum he had to stop and poke at it surgically with a stick, or at the very least give it a good kick.

My playmates at this age were all of this quality; dumb, savage, and twisted.  I began to mimic, and even admire these traits.  Toughness was of the utmost importance, and was something I severely lacked.  For the other kids everyday was a dog fight, from which the alpha male would be decided.  I tried to put on a mean face, but it ended up looking more like a constipated grimace.  The others could look like they were ready to rip your heart out and play a game of kick ball with it.  The oldest kid I hung out with was Ryan.  He always had a Kool-Aid mustache and a sinister grin.  When he really smiled, it would reveal a jagged set of teeth that looked like a neglected picket fence.  He was big, mean, and equally dumb as the rest.  I always thought that one day he would either become some King Pin’s goon, or the captain of a bowling team…

Dostoevsky might have gotten a space needle of a hard on from shame, but I didn’t.  Shame was like a fog you could never wipe from your window no matter how hard you tried.  It’s not altogether a bad thing of course, but when you are a kid, it is a bit stultifying.  When I was younger shame was always present, and my parents’ hysterical reactions only amplified this.  My shame was primarily rooted in poverty.  But as much as I hated my impoverished surroundings, it was the only place I felt comfortable.  If someone were to place me in a ritzy hotel with a bidet and fresh fruit, there is no doubt within the next hour they would find me strapping a radio to my chest and doing a header into a full bath.  There is nothing more painful and shameful than knowing the sound of loose change actually means something to you, yet at the same time you cling to the familiarity of its jingle, because that disgraceful sound is the only music you have ever known.