At first, I liked this newcomer, a new guy at a client’s company. He was roughly my age, he played the guitar; we liked the same music. Above the black Les Paul that hung on the wall of his suburban office in the Midwest was a big old bar sign of a man hoisting a mug of suds. Beneath the man were the words: “Beer. Helping ugly people have sex since 1862.”
I wanted to believe we were kindred spirits. And at this phase of life, I’ll take all the new friends I can get.
But in the weeks that followed, this new fellow quickly got under my skin. It wasn’t his “dontcha know?” Fargo accent, either. Rather, it was the fact that he took every opportunity to break my chops about my regional accent. In his approximation of New Yawk-speak, I’d be treated to his lame “Yo, how’s it goin’?”
I supposed that is what passed for wit amongst his sunset-seating, walleye-eating crowd. His part of the world (deleted here, to protect the innocent) is a very nice place, of the sort where the locals consume king-cut prime rib by the roaring fireplace of The Double Muskie Pub, secure that their eight-eight percent white world would forever repel virtually all manner of “the other.”
And at the risk of getting all “Sarah Vowell-ish,” it is instructive to note that taciturn Europeans settled to the region’s wild prairies and virgin forests, via emotionally reserved New England. The locals vamoosed out of Vermont as soon as the Erie Canal was complete and the Blackhawk Wars were won.
In short order, Yankee elites came to this guy’s home turf for “the waters” and the area was recast as the “Saratoga of the West” – that is, until the healthy, healing waters were befouled by radium pollution.
Groaning Geiger counters aside, Money Magazine ranked it as one of our “100 Best Places to Live.”
Last November, I sat at my desk in anticipation of my recent weekly client update conference call. Then the new guy, let’s call him, oh, “John Smith,” called.
Midwesterners enjoy starting business calls with chitchat. Generally, I’m ok with their “how’s the weather?” and “what are you doing this weekend?” opening gambits. But this particular phone call caught me completely off-guard.
He actually started, in his New Yawk, put-on accent, with: “Yo, you havin’ pastrami and all the trimmings this Thanksgiving.”
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I was shocked. Because he knew that I am Jewish, and he knew what he thought he could say, that is, get away with, since he was – after all – “the client”.
And, thus taken aback, I wanted to say: “You know, my dad had the front of his head rubbed by southern boys when he was in basic training in Camp Van Dorn Mississippi. They were looking for his Jew horns.”
And I wanted to add: “And weeks before he shipped out to fight Nazis, he got into a bar brawl at a local roadhouse, and had his forehead split open by an MPs baton, because he dared to play Louis Jordan and His Tympani Five on the juke box.
“And the following winter, his foxhole buddy drawled, in the snow and sleet of the Bulge, ‘you a Jew?’”
And I felt my blood pressure build. And my gut said stomp on the gas, rev it up, Thelma and Louise, baby, screw the account, forget the money, damn my professional “reputation.” Just tell him to piss off, because after all the years, and all the BS, I’ve had it. And now this? “Yo…you havin’ pastrami for Thanksgiving?” And he actually added: “With all the trimmings?”
But the adult me, thankfully, as befit the holiday, grabbed back the steering wheel and I answered, flatly:
“Actually, I’m serving Oregon Pinot Noir, and we’re having roast turkey, and sage sausage dressing, cranberry sauce, pan roasted Brussels sprouts, candied yams, walnut bread, pumpkin and apple pie – you know, our usual, traditional fare…
“So, to look at our table, you’d never suspect that we were….”
And I stopped myself. And there was silence at the other end. And we continued our update meeting. As if nothing, at all, was wrong.