Disorderly Field Notes from Omaha
A milkshake of misanthropy and human connection. Went to the zoo, too, but that's another story.
Aggies
I’d forgotten how much I hated Aggies. How I’d come to believe Texas A&M a training grounds for fascists. It amazed me that this was still true.
My hearing-impaired dad roamed optimistically among crowds hurling invective only I and my brother-in-law registered. My dad, who is the most live-and-let-live person I’ve ever met, would cheerfully engage in miscommunications, smilingly flashing “hook ‘em” to a couple in a two-story bar and grill overrun by maroon, the male part of which responded: “Now and forevermore, fuck Texas!”
A churl in a pub mutters audibly the old saw about steers and queers as we walk in, eliciting the complicit giggles of his mates. What did I say? “Oh that’s so funny!” with heavy sarcastic emphasis. My lone protest.1
Later, the game will be interrupted when an Aggie fan—a thin young white man in the standard uniform—accosts the opposing team in their dugout. He leans rigidly over from the stands, screaming, is escorted out of the stadium by security, both arms upraised, his “gig ‘em” Aggies thumbs up. It will come to light that he’s been at heckling the Florida team about a batboy of theirs who was murdered by his own father.
A Dreary Anthropology
I write to A. that here in Omaha for the College World Series I’m in a jock and preppy salad with grandparent croutons. She inquires after the dressing. Oh, it’s a basic dressing, I tell her.
I am stunned into a kind of bovine silence by the sameness, the sprawling herdlike quality to everyone—for truly there is just this one quality on display, this duplicativeness. They are like a field, a pasture of the same people over and over again.
Girls travel in little squads, usually wearing the same tight tops and short shorts or cutoffs. They are sleek and plump with youth and occupied by their phones.
The guys are legion in their college colors and college hats, their haircut, their sunglasses, their sunglasses with the neck attachments and college visors and fraternity khakis and polos.
In this white crowd a single tattoo leaps out.
The men are thicker copies of the boys. The kind of fellow from the American southeast who follows college sports seems to have known from a very early age what he wants to look like, how he wants to present himself to the world, and once he’s arrived at it—in high school at the latest—he just stays there.
Within the Under Armour apparel the flesh ages, the sun kisses deeper, the dogmas set.
Pair
An elderly couple behind me in the airport sit genially with an empty seat between them. Twin beds in the master, I wonder?
Thickly accented southern voices punctuate long mutual silences with remarks of metronomic predictability.
Did you see about this George Strait concert?
[Cooing chuckle.]
How many hundreds a millions a dollars you think he made from that?
[...]
A hundred seven thousand and fourteen hundred people…
[...]
… … [reading a text:] “ ‘Lo, dad, you’ll get your father’s day present July 15th. Just kiddin. See ya Sunday.” [Guttural chuckle.]
[Cooing chuckle.] That’s funny.
A John Grisham novel is balanced on her luggage.
Shuttle Pilot
Entering the world makes it impossible to deny the seeming sameness of people. But then the woman at the hotel front desk tells me No, it won’t be Trey shuttling you to the airport this morning but Captain Kirk. “I’ll page him.”
Captain Kirk has long, shot gray hair, a dazed, leaning expression, a dubious dental situation, a harmless affect—if damaged. He awaits me next to the opened rear doors of the van. I chuck my bag in there and introduce myself as Lieutenant Spock. “The first mate!” he smiles. “And science officer,” I add, climbing into the back.
He does his job, conducts the pro forma exit interview (Some zoo! I tell him, and Nice hotel, and No rooting interest in the games, no) but I quickly wave this away and cut to the heart of the matter. Is he Captain Kirk in homage to James T.?
It was 1978. He was 18 years old. He ran his Harley through a barricade and into a wall and busted up the frame completely. Over on 121st Street here. Well, he ordered a new frame through Jammers in California and had to wait for it. It took forever to come in. Finally he called them and they said the frame had shipped and UPS had it in Omaha and that’s all they could tell him. Well, he complained about this (“I was a young guy then and all impatient”), he said to his buddies: It shipped from California and UPS has it and it’s here in Omaha but where? And one of his buddies said Well I don’t know Captain, maybe the Klingons got it. And they all laughed. Then a couple days later that friend died in a motorcycle accident, and since that had been the last time they’d all been together laughing, even though Kirk hadn’t liked being the source of the fun, the name stuck.
I told him I’d almost done to a motorcycle just what that erstwhile Omaha motorist had done to his friend and related that story and he said Oh yeah, it’s not a question of if you fall but when, and he told me about his girlfriend (“the blonde at the front desk”), how she’d slid on some gravel after 15 years riding and that was that.
The blonde at the front desk was a big sun-bitten woman with a cigarette voice and a salty kindness. She’d commiserated with me that morning when it became clear that there was no way for me to extract any cash from the hotel for gratuity for the shuttle driver, their ATM out of service all weekend. Will it be Trey this morning? I’d asked, as it had been Trey who’d picked me up Thursday and conducted the pro forma entrance interview with steadiness and calm. (Trey who, on the subject of the warming winters, mentioned that he’d never been able to get out of his head something someone had said once about the Earth gradually falling closer and closer to the sun, and he just couldn’t figure why else, how else to account for this apparently global condition of warming—providing me with an initial opportunity to serve as science officer in the backseat, prefiguring my reverse trip with Captain Kirk.)
Captain Kirk told me Oh yes, he still rode. Still had that same bike, even.
When we were back out on the curb again I asked him if he still called it the Enterprise.
“I call it a bitch!” he said, handing me my bag, and he explained some more about the particular Harley chopper and it was motorcycle stuff that flew directly though me but I concentrated on eye contact and fixing this strange human moment to the end of my memories of this trip, then we bumped fists and got back to our separate lives.
The Madness of Screens
I was sandwiched between two young men on the flight to Omaha. Window Seat overflowed the chair with soft round shoulders and thick arms, had a beard and hat, a tablet in his lap tuned to something true-crimey, restlessly scrolled his phone, had dialed the chairback TV to flight info, had dictatorially lowered the screen on the porthole to the outside world.
Aisle too was triply bescreened: again tablet, again phone. At one point both of them were watching two shows at once.
The row in front sat three men on an evidently boozy work trip employing their chairback TVs to play Hold ‘Em. The leader of the group established his power by nicknaming his competitors things like “T-Bone” and “T-Bag,” conventions with which they all went obsequiously along. Pot after pot resulted in either a T-Boning or a T-Bagging.
Window Seat opted for the cookies, the chips, a Diet Coke; Aisle for the cookies, the chips, a water. Aisle was one of these cornfed blokes that appear made of one continuous hard muscle, a body type I believe my mother—vis a vis the ancient Greeks—would describe as mesomorphic. I by comparison am tall and relatively narrow from side to side, with bony knees and shoulders and a body type—given my wide hips—even my mother I believe would charitably describe as unfortunate. I went for the almonds, a granola bar, an iced water, and put down the frustrating biography of John Milton to snack amid a fly-eye of silently hectoring screens.
HER BODY WAS FOUND IN 201 PIECES. Black convict drama on TBS with lush production values. T-Bag takes it on the river with pocket 7s. The altimeter hovers between 35,980 and 36,020. Joaquin Phoenix tries to strongarm something out of someone in a small room. Joaquin Phoenix is in a tv show? With Jeff Daniels? (Or is that Michael Stuhlbarg?)2 Black and white newspaper copy floats up from the remote, ink-smeared past: WOMAN CONVICTED OF HIRING A HIT ON FIANCEE… A young white male protagonist on a train scrolls social media, the camera zooming-in on the hypnotically rolling surface of his phone…
The gym in the hotel was brilliantly equipped, a mini-Gold’s. All the treadmills had tablet-sized screens jutting up from the dash to own your face. I realize now I probably could’ve turned it off but at the time I simply assumed defeat, assumed that the cost of engaging with this machine was the ownership of my face by whomever and for however long I used it. (And, technologically speaking, I’m no great shakes of a science officer.)
Remember the Malaysian Airlines flight that disappeared back during Obama 2? William Shatner—a non Captain Kirk iteration—was talking to me about it, his captioned sentences failing utterly to convey his trademark cadence. An image salad of maps and maps with extending dotted lines on them and that floating newspaper schtick again and the muted declarations of press conference givers, etc.
SHATNER: Could the secret of Flight 370 have something to do with another mystery—a 50-year old case as cold as a Congressional Committee hearing? We’ll find out right after these messages…
Splat of commercials here.
A fan of live sports, I’ve conditioned myself to fade away during commercials, the ownership of my face having built-in reprieves after all, little caesuras where I sublet it back. One can, for narrative continuity, easily imagine now a suite of 30-second spots for insurance companies that, muted, come off as DaDa bits with various animal co-stars and pharmaceutical ads filled with smiling Americans rediscovering The Simple Things without (because mute) the doomsday soliloquy from the Surgeon General (“may cause bleeding from the ears and eyes, reverse erections, butts to sprout from your forehead, generally cascading feelings of worthlessness and existential rage, the three stigmata of Christ,” and so on).
A Congressman used to take other Congressmen on tours of his native Alaska. The plane disappeared. Floating newspapers—older now, Jimmy Carter papers—tell the tale of the emergency search and rescue operation—military assets bent to the task—largest op of its kind of all time—search called off, the two reps declared dead… SHATNER: What if clues to the vanished Congressmen could be found in the legend of another famous crusader lost in the golden seams of history…?
Viking berserkers demand to see the contents of your wallet. Food is in motion, in slow motion, iceberg lettuce and dewy beefsteak slices glide across the screen, improbably intersect with thick slabs of bacon and juicy flame broiled patties and the requisite bun to form a grotesque architecture of lunch pornographically dripping mayo. Sports gambling. Ads featuring car dealership owners with apparent necktie phobias. “I’m [a piece of shit] and I approved this message” ads.
Still older floating newspapers: visionary desperado addresses Royal Society. The year is 19something-early. Could it be that these fragmentary evidences from yet earlier disappeared expeditions to South America reveal the existence of a city of gold buried beneath the avalanche of jungle and time that’s succeeded the dismantling of ancient empires? A legendary city of untold treasure our hero has dubbed The Lost City of Z?3
Would this keep going forever? James T. Kirk sucking me into chain-linked wormholes leading ever earlier into the dawn of humanity? Had Flight 370 exited stage spooky via some residual Chariot of the Gods legerdemain sewn into the Earth’s atmosphere during the time of the Pharaohs? Was it a Cro-Magnon thing? What if the evolutionary missing link really is the missing link???
A nun!
Coming home, on the first leg to Chicago, a nun and I occupied the two-seat 9th row of coach. You can imagine my joy. A nun!
She was slight and quiet and almost motionless for the entire trip. Her purse was less a purse than a useful anonymous pouch. Her likewise modest backpack, which she’d stored overhead, looked mostly empty. I find when trying to describe her outfit that I want to describe her fabrics, which were clean and gray and black and white and heavy and long and unembellished. I bet half her weight was in those fabrics.
Nonchalantly I opened the frustrating Milton biography to the new chapter. The Almighty’s Hand, it was titled. Would she notice? Would the phrase hold a particular meaning for her? Was I to serve as a numinous hub or Rowside Billboard for her? Had she been dealing with a crisis of faith and was I now being employed by Catholic God as a kind of unwitting fleshy mirror for Him to bounce signals off?4
The chapter turned out largely to be about corporal punishment.
Soon as the wheels kissed off I dictatorially lifted the screen on the porthole. Behold! Amid the roar of velocity, the tilt—behold! Eppley Airfield receding from an unintelligible blot to a pattern of designs—behold! Omaha a mixing grid of human industry, trees reduced to green fluffs, free-flowing traffic seeming to crawl, the nap of the earth flung out in every direction to the horizon, regimented into vast swards of agriculture—behold! Turbulence in the stratosphere as we pierce tomorrow’s stormwaters stabled in their airy lobbies, their permanent cycling limbo between sun and rain, and now—behold!—the dominion of daylight sunward of the clouds, the ocean of clouds, the unremitting blast of the star.
She slept through it. Sister Lydia Lightpacker remained asleep and unmoving the whole time.
I read about the spankings and had dirty thoughts and rebuked myself. Next to a nun, for Christ’s sake!? Cut it out!
Descending to O’Hare we traversed Lake Michigan, sunlight shattered into untold winking pieces breathing in and out in enormous swells. I saw how like leather a lake can appear from elevation, which made sense, skin being mostly water, and hadn’t the rhino in her plate armor shifting up into motion from its disgusting mudbath at the zoo resembled nothing more than a great chunk of land, of earth, enchanted by a creator into life? An earthling?
I thought these things and wondered if she’d woken up but she hadn’t. Only when the wheels touched down was she recalled to our common realm.
More would occur to me later. Popularized by the sadistic basic training instructor in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) and employed by homophobes ever since, the full anti-Texan insult goes: “Steers and queers, steers and queers, where you come from boy there’s just steers and queers. You ain’t got no horns, boy!”
“What a charming little rhyme!” I should’ve said. “Is that even still an insult?” I should’ve said.
It was Stuhlbarg.
Brought to us in the 21st century by David Grann, the T-Swift of historical nonfiction hot tracks.
SHATNER: Does the bear scratch itself on the tree, or does the tree scratch itself on the bear?