Babbling for Babel With no Tower in Sight
Cues for All of Nature’s Hues, Blues Brewed Through-’n-Through into a Tasty Human Stew
PLAYING POOL AT A POLYGLOT KOREAN MEXICAN RESTAURANT
I’m a didact, as anyone who reads more than a few lines of my work guesses quickly. I’m also a garrulous guy, go figure! In the course of any given week, a hundred Asians come under my watchful gaze and lightweight Socratic tutelage. A score or more of Anglo, African, and Hispanic Americans join this larger Oriental cohort, at the interstices of my efforts to make a living through the magic of mediated expression.
Not only this, I live among folks who are uniformly Spanish speaking; turnover is part of the accompaniment of the general dilapidation and only modestly discounted rent. Not a single collaborative environment that I inhabit is primarily paleface---quite the contrary in fact. The only times I find myself in crowds largely of European heritage, I am writing in some favored coffee shop or otherwise making a commercial connection as a consumer.
I make this point because many people would conclude the opposite of an Atlantan, a resident of “Uptown Down South,” whose great great and great great great grandparents came from all over Europe. Depending on how the counting occurs, greater Atlanta contains five to six milliion souls, not that large an agglomeration of flesh by the standards of the world’s megaloptic urban centers, but, depending on who is talking, at least at the ass end of the ten most populous cities in the United States.
Even the most exact census is at best an accurate approximation. I once took it upon my eight year old self, on a bet from my father, to count in one week to the august level of one million. At the end of a harrowing few hours of total concentration, I somehow achieved 12,000. He had said that I could accomplish my goal incrementally, which I did not understand exactly even after looking it up, but which he explained meant in pieces. Over the next two days, determined to win five dollars(he had given me ten to one odds), I managed similar concentrated concatenations and got just over thirty thousand logged in.
I would have kept going, except that my father laughingly suggested, “All you have to do now, bub, is do the same thing thirty three more times.” I laughed too and borrowed fifty cents from my brother and went to play instead. I recall this event so that readers will reflect that if anything the figures I offer are likely undercounts of folks who frequently don’t want anyone with even the vaguest official gheist to take notice of their alien asses.
So saying, the best guesses for the number of Hispanics in and around Atlanta are all over half a million. We have just shy of a hundred thousand Koreans, and slightly smaller numbers of Cambodians and Vietnamese, with at least as many Chinese in addition. There are likely another hundred thousand East Asians of various stripes and between a hundred and a hundred fifty thousand Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and other South and Central Asians and vaguely designated “Middle Easterners.” There are, in addition, a few tens of thousands of various African and European, and a smattering of thousands of “others” from all the far-flung reaches of our beautiful planet.
All tolled, in other words, this aggregate accumulation approaches one and a half million people. Unless the undercount of residents is severe indeed, in other words, the expectation that metro Atlanta is fifty odd percent European American and nearly thirty percent African American, as the Bureau of the Census suggests, is impossible. This conclusion, if accurate, suggests changes have occurred that practically necessitate a polymorphous North American continent, not in some future generations hence, but now. To think and act otherwise is nonsense, at best.
Babel is ascendant, albeit with the potential to ESL(USED AS A VERB!) and otherwise interactionally network ourselves to a communicative capacity in spite of the frightful proliferation of Linguas of vastly different Francas. Living in America’s grand cesspools of human energy and enterprise, the notion of returning to an allegedly more uniform past---the sharecropper Whites and Blacks, Welsh, Hungarian, Czech, Italian, Polish, and other workers who built and operated the steel mills and coal mines of Birmingham, Alabama, for example, would have hooted at the notion of uniformity, whether linguistic, cultural, or otherwise affiliational---appears as fantasy, childishness, or childish fantasy.
This appears like good news to the likes of me, who is a daily witness to the vibrancy and variety of the human prospect in Georgia, in spite of racism, White supremacy, vicious and endemic discrimination, and a general case of the vapors among my closer cousins of the lot of us here at the moment. One of my five personal favorites, among all the essays I’ve ever penned or tapped or otherwise midwifed into existence, bears the titular inscription, “We’re All Cousins, After All.”
And I have no problem with that. The fantastic productivity and creativity and intensity, the ferocious joy of living and working that is all around me, everywhere I look and with every cohort I am in contact, could not be more sublime or marvelous if more alike in shade or accent. The personalities who demonstrate this contention will show up here in detail as my daily screed unfolds over months and months and months and as many years as I can squeeze out of this body that I have rode hard and put up wet for many decades already.
In any case, whatever one’s personal inclination about this process, it is a fact. To stand against this fact is to stand for mass murder, the daily likelihood of human annihilation, as a lifestyle choice. To any who see themselves so inclined, therefore, my advice is simple. Go kill yourself and leave the rest of us to enjoy the variety and spice and unbelievably glorious aroma of all God’s creatures gathered together. As one of my prayer partners, a wizened African American princess, expresses the point, “We are doing kingdom building work here.” And it is work that accepts all of the ways of worshipping the creator which we have devised over the millennia.
As usual, of course, I digress. Who would have thought such a thing? What I set out to communicate today concerns two recent events, at one of which I participated, much further from the fringes of the action than I like, and at the other of which a friend of mine was an unfortunate principal. Both of these happenings will show up in pages similarly inscribed in the future, since both are ongoing phenomena.
The first of these manifestations of mankind will be the sole addition to these pages now, since I am waxy with eloquence and wary of taxing my audience’s sweet patience. This matter formed itself into a noteworthy yarn last Saturday night, at a local billiards tournament. In and of itself, such a phenomena arguably takes place a thousand times every week. Imagining such a melange as I had the pleasure to witness, however, is almost unfathomable. I would not have believed it, had I not seen it. Two of my students, young Koreans less than two years from their final Customs clearance, came here to join their father and uncle, who had established a bit of a pool-table-empire in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida.
My pair of apprentice writers have about as much interest in words, philosophically, as I have, practically, in learning the finer points of Korean cuisine. I pay other people to cook, just as they will pay other people to facilitate proper English for them. They continue to come before me, week after week, in hopes of passing the newly mandatory State Competency Exam in writing, a requirement for High School graduation, in their culture a sine qua non of respectability. In order to leverage their lives into the accomplishment of such an unlikely performance, I have taken to finding out about them---their interests, activities, etc. My sluttish desire for stories has nothing to do with this, I swear. I needn’t look afield for more stories. They do show up, however.
To wit: although Papa and Uncle have a tidy base of customers to whom they sell and deliver pool tables in the Southeastern corner of the USA, Jae, and his younger sister Ji’s boyfriend---a Chinese fellow who, in my estimation, is nebulously nefarious---wanted to find some offshoot of the family enterprise a bit less mundane than showroom and warehouse and delivery work. Ji was partying with her playmate within a month of coming to Georgia, and the three of them were fast friends very shortly thereafter. Playing pool one languid afternoon, in a largely Hispanic nieghborhood, while Jae was cleaning up at eightball from his sister’s polylingual paramour, they stumbled on a possibility. Or, rather, a possibility bumped into them.
One of the Mandarin’s languages is Spanish, and while he and Jae drank beer and broke rack after rack, a large group of Mexicans came in and gathered around to watch. Unaware of the Chinaman’s facility with their words, the Hispanics commented first on the Oriental pair’s foreignness---about their being skinny and homely, for instance---then on their disparate facility at pool---Jae would have hated to hear this, since he had taken a month to give his sister’s lover the sense they were equals at the table---and finally on what a fucking bummer it was that nowhere in Atlanta were there decent facilities for Hispanics to play the damned game, where they would not feel at a disadvantage due to language, status, or otherwise.
Ji’s Chinese sweetheart took this moment to reveal his Spanish. I’ve met him just once, but he is physically quite prepossessing, in spite of being ‘skinny and homely.’ He projects an intensity that removes oxygen from the lungs of those to whom he is in close proximity, and otherwise exhibits the mien and glance of a man unafraid of others and capable of anything. Apparently, the Mexicans were more than a little sheepish about their loose tongues, until the Mandarin laughed heartily to let them know all was well. He inquired at length about the lack of a culturally diverse pool hall, thereafter, and after Jae let him win a final game that transpired when the coterie of Mexicanos wandered into the night, Jae and his comrade discussed the implications of what the Latinos had conveyed.
Over the course of the next month, the two of them found the counsel necessary to gather all the necessary permits and permutations of commerce essential to cover their asses legally; they also found an old half empty shopping center in which an old grocery store was convertible to a large space for gaming and gustatory relaxation. They discreetly put all of the pieces of a proposal into place, presenting it to dad and his brother as a better warehousing solution for new shipments of tables, since the rent would be less than their current costs in that regard, with an unknown but definite upside if the venture proved popular.
The dealmaking aspect of the agreement, that Jae would manage the operation, was precisely in line with what his father wanted---a commitment to work---and as a result as far afield as imagineable from what Jae was hoping. Not to worry: Ji’s sweetheart’s cousin oversees things, and Jae just acts as cashier and floor flack, meaning he can play five to ten hours of pool a day and keep a portion of the salary his father pays to the position. The cooks at the place, which doubles as a Mexican eatery with a wild name, like “Hombres Quatros,” are also cousins of the Mandarin.
Thirty pool tables, ten dollars per hour, mostly full any night, totally swamped with business Fridays and Saturdays, East Asians offering Tex-Mex fare, Latinos of every flavor drinking and eating and cracking away at balls, money and sweat and pride at stake, in and of itself this makes for a setting at least modestly interesting. When I wandered over, for the first time, Saturday night, I found myself observing the start of their first “Monthly Weekend Tournament”---I don’t even know if this translation was accurate, but the place was certainly packed with people of various hues of brown.
Jae was so enthusiastic to see me, I wondered if he were drunk or otherwise inebriated. In any event, he gave me a job to do, “very important,” he assured me, “Jon Hai not here til midnight,” the first time I had heard the name of Ji’s mysterious manfriend. The panoply of the scene made being the center of attention seem an interesting assignment, and besides, I was supporting the narrative enhancement of one of my students.
Smoke and Latin Polka and mainly manly laughter, not to mention the authoritative “WHACK!!” of the cue ball on breaks every few seconds, interspersed with darting Korean and Chinese waiters, even the occasional gringo tourist family walking into this den of iniquity as if to a normal Hispanic dining experience as a garnish of psychedelia, the whole situation was merely madcap and marvelous, manic and melancholy mosaic at every turn. On the several occasions when suburbia acidentally intervened in this erstwhile but fully false suburban enclave, I felt a sense of satisfaction that I could help out, explaining in nuanced PR diction that “tonight might not be the best night for a dinner at ‘Hombres Quatros.’” What took the night beyond bizarre and delightful, though, right up to the verge of dangerous psychosis, was a late entry to the competition.
Jae had set everything up with buybacks until the third round robin series, which left the purchaser eligible for all the money. Just before the close of this final buy-in, the craziest possible party sauntered through the door, incomprehensibly weird really. I don’t know all the details, but the leader of this loose pack of seven people was a HUGE African, a Nigerian would be my guess, very imperious and condescending as I have found Africans of a certain social background to be. His right and left hand henchmen said nary a word, almost certainly“bad boys” of whom I have written before in various stories of evil deeds and murder. If one of them was blinking, the other was wide eyed, and they wore loose clothing that seemed somehow weighty with more than the burden of their flesh.
This would almost invariably be a chance for the likes of Jimbo to make a sly exit and catch the details at a later date. Somehow, though, in spite of the completely inapproprate diction that resulted, Jae had recruited me to be the MC responsible for announcing results. But for the foursome who rounded out the African trio, I would have felt certain that a nasty robbery was about to take place. The coats of the bad boys had plenty of room for Mac 10’s and like mayhem.
The quartet that magnified the strangeness to a logarithmic level of lunacy, instead of common larceny in an uncommon setting, held four unbelievably WHITE, gorgeous, willowy women, whose accents and language were undoubtedly Slavic, though I asked nothing of any of them, since not a word of English passed their haughty, pouty, pretty, puffy lips, which only very infreqently accompanied a sly wink hither and yon with the ghost of a grin.
The true magnificence of the situation---the sense of destiny resplendant---came when I realized I KNEW ONE OF THESE ‘PRADA GIRLS’. She is the cousin of a Lithuanian Hyper-Fox who works with one of my pharmacist friends. I fantasized about her for several days after we met, although she looked much more accessible and alluring to me in jeans and t-shirt than in the impossible threadbare collection of expensive rags that revealed nipples when she laughed and pudenda when she sat or farted. She actually recognized me before the end of the evening, a slow blink of her eyes and a tongue darting between teeth to contain a chuckle the only sign that she knew who was looking back at her.
In any case, the Nigerian was unbeatable. He cut through one side of the nearly full bracket of sixty four, with barely a pause for his opponents to shoot. He cleared the table from the break six times. The sense of tension that resulted from this, to say the least, highly unusual exigency inevitably insulted mortally the machismos of the Mexicans, Salvadoreans, Dominicans, and odd Colombians who constituted the ‘usual suspects’ for the evening. I don’t like fights, especially when I see them coming, especially when I find myself somehow inextricably intertwined with their brutal blossoming, and specially particularly especially when I stand uncomfortably close to the center of the ring, incapable of graceful extrication or clumsy exit.
My Spanish is pitiable, but the cumulative tide of “puta’s” and “chinga tu madre’s” and like unpleasant appelations I remembered from San Antonio, whispered at first, but increasingly vocal as the final round approached, at twelve o’clock, seemed like a social tsunami rising up to sweep away all the idiots---like me---who might stand the ground it would inundate. Only a miracle could save me. Analytical acuity is a marvelous quality to have, but it gave me less leeway than a moronic but effective left hook in the matter at hand.
At just the juncture when this restless and wreckless will to confront the wrongdoing that was taking place, no matter how rightfully it appeared---in the sense that no cheat seemed possible---became a palpably ineluctable force as powerful, albeit being invisible, as pulses of gamma rays just approaching the melting point for human flesh, the newly named Jon Hai pranced onto the set, like a diminutive Falstaff blustering onto a battlefield just prior to the immolation of all the combatants.
And like a massive dose of boron on a chain reaction, within seconds he was speaking to the giant African in his native tongue, having effectively cowed the ‘bad boys’ with the merest hint of his potential as an adversary---he had, one after the other, danced close enough to them quickly enough to brush both of their cheeks lightly, some sort of martial arts code, Jae would tell me later, for don’t fuck with me brother, if you want to breathe much longer. Sir Jon Hai had that big Black man laughing like a tawny Springtime incarnation of Santa, chortling so uncontrollably that he dropped his pool stick, defenseless with mirth.
Although Jon’s mirth was also genuine---he screamed with laughter as he let loose one barrage of Bantu syntax---instead of being defenseless it was aggressive. Every Hispanic onlooker was powerless in the grip of the scene, as was I, as were Jae and the other Asians. After a few minutes of this, Jon somehow was right in front of my eyes, without having relinquished control of the overall scene, demanding “two hundred dollars, Jimbo, please!!” That moment, the collapse of oxygen, which I mentioned before, insinuated itself on me in the presence of this little dynamo, and as it turned out, I had three Ben Franklins in my pocket, which I gladly and dutifully handed over.
My svelte Lithuanian siren acknowledged my existence just as she was leaving, the last of the magical crew of seven who might have brought about the end of the world that night. I haven’t yet recovered my C-notes; I wonder if I can add them on to my tutoring invoice. Maybe someone will pay for this treatment, as a film premise.
Who the fuck knows? Everything worked out, without loss of life or blood, the precious fluids we expend on such adventures like the costs of sex---worth the expenditure and arguably the only reason we’re here in the first place. We get a little closer to God, come closer to an understanding that can stand up to wisdom, perhaps, and leave behind something that may develop into a new lifeform, miraculously and without any willpower involved in the exchange.
In any case, for now, with promises of loose ends tied at some point, THAT’S MY STORY AND I’M STICKING TO IT.