Racist.

My job is beginning to get to me.  I’m a home health occupational therapist, and I sit on my butt, driving around Phoenix all day to see my patients.  It’s not a very healthy lifestyle, what with value meals and hot coffee being the sum of  my nutrition most days.  Add into that a Bluetooth phone that won’t properly sync and contractors that are mad for text messaging, and it makes for a pretty stressful job.  That, and the golf cart demolition derby on the sidewalks and streets of Sun City.

So I wasn’t surprised a few years ago when my heart started to bark at me; I am descended from a long line of tall, ruddy faced Northern Europeans with all the genetic coding to die young.  My paternal grandfather died at 51; paternal grandmother at 64; and so on.  After a full tilt boogie work up at the local cardiologist, I found that while all those years on my bike kept the pipes clear, my Purkinje fibers were another thing altogether.  My heartbeat had always thundered on with a certainty like the march of time--but now when it burps, it is the most amazing and scary feeling; you are motoring along at the speed of light when suddenly, everything stops and you look down to see one foot out over a vast, echoing abyss.  There is a cold sensation of waiting, waiting, waiting . . . and then ba-dunk!  Meds help, but not always.  At the end of the day, I am overwhelmed with a shattering fatigue that doesn’t seem to ease with sleep.

So, longing for that old, worked over feeling, I joined the local gym (again).  I should practice what I preach:  exercise, healthy living, no booze, plenty of rest.  It’s a great idea, but most of my patients are where I’m going to be in twenty years.  Now I see a sprightly collection of golf mad Sun City septuagenarians who are going through periodic upgrades to their joints, hearts and eyes.  But in my line of work there have been way too many episodes of “I’ve never seen that before”.  Some things I would rather forget: people in pain, people without limbs, power, movement or sight, people burned so badly that you can’t tell the color of their skin, only the red mess of tortured flesh.  That’s the hard part, but that is what I do—rehabilitation.   And I would like to think I am pretty good at it.

So here I am, entre deux guerres, on the elliptical and watching a hundred people around me bobbing up and down like demented pistons.  It is an unsettling sight, and reminds me again why I liked cycling.  It’s generally a solitary sport, and no one can watch you groan, huff and sweat.  The TV overhead was on a 24 hour news channel, where the blow dried blonde was babbling on about the Trayvon Martin murder and George Zimmerman in a seemingly unending tirade of racist, racist, racist.  It made me flinch and fling a disgusted look at the TV.

Then I realized the man on the machine next to mine was watching me.  And he was black.  And I don’t know if he saw my eyeroll, but he suddenly stopped bobbing, jumped off the machine and stalked away.  I don’t know if he was pissed at me, at the TV, at Zimmerman, at Trayvon, or just at the world in general.  But there was no mistaking the widening of the eyes, the flare of the nostrils, the tightening of the mouth. U mad, bro?  Yes, he was.  I’ve seen that look before.

What I always struggled with was the anger.  I am from Michigan; I grew up in the 60s; I remember the integration of my school, the burning of parts of my hometown during the riots, the simmering, slow, hot hatred that festered between whites and blacks.  Michigan, in those days, was an unhappy place.  Like so many other whites, I developed a well polished defensive stance against the assumption and accusation of racism.  Hey, my dad’s family was Canadian; in my mom’s family bible there is a list of soldiers who went to off to fight in the War of Northern Aggression and died for their trouble.  I went to an urban college, wrote for the Flint Voice and tried to get real with the revolution and my black brothers and sisters.  But that barrier was always, always there.  That anger, that quiet, accusatory look.

I moved away, got married, got with child, got divorced, got less liberal and got back on my own.  Luckily, along the way, I stopped being a medievalist and became an occupational therapist.  But that had shocks of its own.  Going to see an elderly black lady paralyzed with pain and mute from a stroke (her skin a dusky charcoal from malnutrition and dehydration), and realizing the grandkids were dealing away her pain medication.  Having my car window shot out (while I was inside).  Being spit on because the project dweller thought I was the social worker there to question his eligibility for benefits, not the therapist who was to help him get back up on one foot and learn to walk on the prosthetic limb replacing the rotten leg lost to diabetes and gangrene. Watching in horror as baby daddy pitched an obviously pregnant teenager down three flights of steps into a pool of blood on the landing—and then baby daddy pointing a pistol at me when I tried to call 911.

It’s not racism, it’s reality in the projects, a reality that continues to exist no matter how much money is thrown at it.  And no, it’s not all of society, but it is the stereotype that cuts the deepest.  The anger and hostility directed at anyone in that world is caustic and terminally destructive.  It was better in the professional environment I move in.  Courtesy, collegiality, polite disinterest; but still the guarded look and at times ugly comments and actions. So I continued to polish up the armor and the ever growing chip on my shoulder, sliding by my fellow men and women in an endless waltz of political correctness, walking on crumbling eggshells in order not to offend.

But part of me wanted to stand up and bawl like an eight year old:  Why?  I didn’t do this.  I wasn’t here.  What the fuck, homer?  Five million Jews were blasted into nonexistence along with another five million of assorted Eastern Europeans and somehow the survivors got up and kept on living. A few Germans paid for what they did, but the whole nation was not destroyed.  Somehow Europe got its collective act together, cleared out the trash and rebuilt.

But now things are a little different.   My president thinks that Trayvon could have been his son; hell, Obama is two months younger than me.  I don’t hear him saying that about my son, who is putting everything out there for this country.  But that line of thinking runs counter to the preferred dialectic these days; I am considered a racist not just by the color of my skin but by my politics and even by the way I choose to live my life, bitterly clinging to my Skygod and boomstick.  The anger burns, the rhetoric rises; the word racist is used like a whip, indiscriminately and abundantly.  The white oppressors must be punished, over and over and over.  Maybe even beyond the seventh generation.  

Rhetoric eventually dies out and only ugly truth can remain.  It finally became real for me when I was speaking with a patient, an old black lady who had moved from Alabama to Arizona with her family early in the last century to work in the cotton fields of Mobile and Goodyear. The history of her people, laced  with want, hunger, heavy labor and slow death from overwork and tuberculosis are the threads that are interwoven into the tapestry of life in Depression era Arizona.   Slowly I realized that slavery didn’t end with the war between the states; this lady and her family were slaves as well, economic hostages paid in script and solaced with hellishly hard work during the week and a little church to ease the pain on the weekend.  And who profited from their labor?  It was clear enough.  She held my hand and smiled toothlessly at me, saying it was so nice of me to visit with her, and would I like a little sweet tea?  The shame was devastating.  And there really was no answer for it.

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So, here I am, sprawled on the Cool Deck next to the gym’s outdoor pool, burning in the blazing sunlight; my joints feel deconstructed after the exercise.  I squint one eye open:  over there is a mess of kids pitching headfirst down the slide in a tangle of brown arms, white legs, hysterical screams and laughter as they somehow hit the water without major injury.  Next to me a woman in a sapphire swim burqua kneels in the water by her little child.  Said kid clambers up round the woman’s neck pulling the hood off, and her blonde hair gleams in the sunlight; I look into eyes as blazingly blue as her drape.  She smiles, and I smile back.  Under the slide, the kids are screeching at each other in a fluent Spanglish and the toddler gurgles in time with the splash of the water.  The woman’s Nigerian husband arrives with icy, melon flavored waters for us all and I inhale mine, so cold in the volcanic heat.  Time suspends and my mind drifts.

  

The Sun squats like an Aztec god on the edge of the White Tank Mountains, scorching the valley below,  and I dreamily watch my forearm, with its smear of freckles, scars and strawberry blond hair slowly turn red.  Twenty five thousand years of conflict with  glaciers, endless winters and predatory megafauna never prepared my genetic code for the midsummer Arizona afternoon. My existence alone demonstrates the victory of natural selection; my forebears survived their environment long enough to propagate and extend the family line all the way down to me, and hence my son.  My evolutionary duty is now fulfilled, I suppose.  And yet here I am, confounding nature in my own dusty little corner of the universe by immersing myself in UV-B, the modern thanatos.  I am in  my skin, dressed up in memory, culture, politics and power.  White in a heritage of oppression and exploitation, but just flame red here next to the pool.  Skin is the barrier, separating us at all levels.

Brown, black, white, yellow, sunburned; and when we die, yellow, green, purple, black and gray.  Color is power, but is ultimately ephemeral.  I squint in the sun, my eyelashes forming a reddish lace against a white sky.  The water slops in the pool like molten bronze, dispersing dazzling chips of light and I begin to doze.  Dream a dream, dream of peace, of love, of loss of all the cares, sadness and burdens; dream that somehow we will find each other, all of God’s children.  The Sun becomes like a pillar of fire, burning everything away--prejudice, hate, skin, bone, all of it to ash until nothing is left but spirit without mind, love moving in the void.