It is not unintentional that I've avoided the cold-weather places of America. Not long ago I decided that I will never live in a state north of Interstate 40. There's something about wearing layers, not seeing the sun, shoveling snow and getting locked inside for even a day that keeps me from traveling north.
But my family is not a one to keep a domicile for long. Kin folk live all over the United States: Massachusetts, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, New Mexico, Florida, California and, now, New York. So my traveling into cold-weather states will happen.
My brother Kyle graduated from undergraduate school at Baldwin-Wallace College in Cleveland, Ohio, in early May. He got a good job with the Western New York PGA (Professional Golf Association) that was scheduled to start the week after graduation. So my mom, dad, sister Kelly and I helped him move out of the iconic-college house he was living in to the Buffalo, New York, area where he was moving.
That first day, the sun had not been out. It hid behind a canopy of clouds and the day had turned into night, the Village of Depew, New York, was quiet. There had been a light rain fall since my family arrived in Buffalo. So the streets were wet.
Only eight hours earlier we arrived from a three-hour drive from Cleveland. It was a Monday. My parents and sister went back to the hotel. The night turned into midnight. I was not tired. My brother was in bed in his new apartment, a very modest studio space on the first floor of a three-story house on a busy street.
As the night wore on the street grew more quiet. Kyle needed sleep, because he was due at work the next morning. But I had never been to the state of New York before, much less the Buffalo-metropolitan area. I wanted to explore.
After drinking a couple beers, growing only more restless, the paper-back book growing less interesting against the prospect of foot-traveling exploration, I headed out the door for a walk.
To be candid, there was nothing about Buffalo to like so far. The sun is a very important ingredient in my life. Earlier in the day, my sister, for some reason, felt the need to inform me that the weather at my home in Raleigh, North Carolina, was a perfect 79-degrees Fahrenheit with only sunny skies. As I had said, the sun was nowhere in site. This is May, for Christ sake.
Restlessness got the best of me. Only a few days earlier, I finished my second semester in law school. There was a feeling a great accomplishment and great worry as I was relieved to be done with the work that had been dogging me for months and fearing that perhaps I didn’t do well on my final exams. Accomplishment in law school is to a great extent the work one puts into his studies. But there’s also an element of surprise and luck. I also worry about my brains, my faculties, whether they’re enough to get me through these challenges. The work doesn’t intimidate me. Lord knows I tried. But the latter factors are my great worries. They’re the ones that I have little control over (I was born with this brain, and I’ll be damned to die with it too).
With no exams to worry about, I was in something of a confused existence in this world. There was a huge void. My task now was to move my brother into his new apartment in the state of New York. It was like a mother bird with all her chicks away from the nest. I had been nesting five final exams for months and until my summer job starts in North Carolina in a couple weeks I’ll have little to distract my mind but silly novels and the lure of the dark end of the street.
Tonight, I wanted to walk down these dark American streets until I found something interesting.
So I lit out, a little past midnight on what had become the eighth day of March, 2012. At first, I figured, Hell, I’ll go out and buy cigarettes and walk around for a while, return at 1 p.m. and call it a night.
The night was quiet. There were no people or cars on the street outside my brother's apartment. Even the gas station, where I had hoped to purchase a pack of some arrangement of tobacco, was closed. So I kept walking, shortly passing over a bridge that took me over a small river. Here they probably call these little bodies of moving water creeks, or streams. Where I come from, southern California, they call these sizable bodies of moving water, Mighty Rivers.
There was something very cold about this town. It may just be my perception of these northern states, a sense that it must be so cold here during the winter months that everything should prepare for the snow fall. All the buildings seemed prepared for a harsh winter. But the rain had stopped. There were store fronts all up and down the street I walked. Trees were everywhere too. The complete solitude was appreciated after a long drive from Ohio.
Later that evening, I met a man named Dwayne who told me that whenever he goes to a new city he says to his taxi drive, “take me to the dirtiest neon-light joint you know.” There was one of these places about a half a mile down the road from my brother’s apartment. A place called “My Little Margie’s Restaurant.” There were neon lights in the windows and a big picture of Betty Boop, that old sultry All-American brunette.
The resistance to these gin-joint places, the better half of the conscience that says, "enter here and you will die," never much sways me from entering, because the other half of the brain that says, "you’ll always wonder if you don’t go," dominates, and isn’t that a bit worse than dying anyway -- never knowing? And so I went through the door.
The first words said to me were, “Oh, there he is.” And all five of the folks who were huddled around the bar laughed. Yes, they were expecting me, or someone like me, someone off the streets. And there I was.
The five at the bar were as follows: two large bearded younger men who looked like they could handle themselves; two middle-aged woman who were closer to older age than middle age; and Dwayne, the gentlemen I ended up sitting next to at the end of the bar.
But before I took much stock in the bar, or any of the surroundings, I noticed the girl behind the bar. She was exquisite. The belle of the night. She had short blonde hair and brown eyes that seemed like Hersey chocolate bars, melting by the lights above the bar and into each drink she made, reflecting back and sweet notion of acceptance into this world. She wore a red and blue plaid shirt and blue jeans.
I asked for the beer special. She looked confused.
“All the beers are $2.50, sweetie.”
“Ok,” I said. “What beers do y'all have?”
“We’ve got Miller, Bud, Labatt Blue . . .”
“I’ll have a Labatt Blue,” I said, not wanting to really get into the whole shitty beer selection they had at this place.
A quick study of the customers showed that nothing was being drunk that had a price tag above $2.50.
And it is to these cold-weather cities that I attribute their source of great warmness. Even in the dark and the cold, where human beings are stuck living with each other, warmness has to come from somewhere. Not long after the belle of the night brought my beer, Dwayne started talking to me about Buffalo. He talked about the 1990s Buffalo Bills football team that lost four Super Bowl Championship games without ever winning one. "That's why us old people are better drinkers than them," pointing to the two large bearded men at the end of the bar who mostly ignored the old folks as they played video poker all night. The older ladies started telling me that this was a great neighborhood my brother was moving into. "No triple homicides in the neighborhood, right?" I asked. "Not since last month," they joked.
Then there were dirty jokes.
You see, Dwayne took the garbage out this morning and when I asked what he got from that, he said he got a “hand from his wife.” Someone else said, “Well, that’s better than a clap.” Laughter all around. Jokes like this were common over the next hour. "Do you know what is the curse of the Irish?" "No," I said. "Small, cute penises." Laughter. And one of the ladies, reacting to the food being shown on the Food Network (Yes, the Food Network was the preferred programing), "I only put things that are appealing in my mouth." Laughter.
These folks battle cold winters together. These pubs are here so no one has to get in their cars and drive into Buffalo. They’re here because Dwayne and the crew are waiting to met a young person who stubbles in, hoping to find some warmth in sun-less Buffalo, with fresh ears to listen to dirty jokes.
Village of Depew, New York
May 8, 2012
