Superman's Voicemail

When you wake up at 4am, any morning seems cold and rainy, but on cold and rainy mornings, the world looks doubly harsh and impersonal, especially when you commute by bike. But after a few warming sips of strong dark coffee and the application of a rainsuit, the resulting ride isn’t too bad. The streets are empty and the streetlights reflect in the puddles like pennies at the bottom of a fountain. The only rain I feel brushes off my face in a manner that is cooling and comfortable. Protected as I am from the rain, it no longer seems a harsh and vindictive thing bent on soaking me. It falls heedless of my presence. Almost musical.

...

The warmth from the coffee stayed with me even through the cold spray sent up by bike tires and the colder showers, running through tree branches and tapping the plastic hood and arms on my jacket. Even after my short ride, the water had pooled in every wrinkle. I dismounted to lock my bike up and a small cataract tumbled from my lap.

There was only one person at the bakery over on the production side. The area where the delivery drivers bag the bread was dark and rimed in cold flour, like attic dust. Once I began to move things around, this flour shook out of everything I touched and took to the air.

The other driver arrived after the air was saturated with flour and we began the arduous task of bagging bread for delivery, made especially arduous by the need to double bag each loaf with a protective plastic bag in response to the Corona Virus scare. Generally, for fresh baked bread, as near as I can tell, there’s some kind of rule about using plastic and one that I’m glad to follow. Most bread eaters feel an instinctual abhorrence of a baguette in plastic. Even in Southeast Asia, where bread is seldom eaten (outside Vietnam) and most food items regardless of size or temperature or consistency went into a plastic bag, yes, even in the land of hot soup in plastic bags, I don’t recall seeing baguettes in plastic. There’s just no cause for it.

But now there is, so we put the bread in plastic. It’s not so bad because the night crews baked it and it’s been out of the oven for a while, having long grown cold on the racks. While I was double bagging this bread for delivery, a worker on the production side came over and asked for help. I volunteered with alacrity, happy to take a break from all the bagging and rebagging.

I’d expected some kind of errand with a high shelf or a heavy bucket of dough, but I guess I should’ve known better. I did the production job once and I was utterly exhausted at the end of the shift. The people that work over there are tough. The shift starts at 3am. They scour huge vats of dough, they lift multiple 25 lb. bags of flour at once. They’re not the type of people who would need help lifting or lowering something, in fact this is mostly what their job is comprised of.

Some one else was over on the production side. I smelled him before I could see him, a boozy and bacterial breath was mixing with the sourdough starter and the place was fast taking on the scent of a pile of mildewed rags.

I came around the corner and found the culprit standing there, dripping with rain. His face slack and grayed, perhaps as a result of having been in the rain too long. He was shivering uncontrollably.

This happens often enough. Nothing else is open this early in the morning. And someone who’s been roving around all night alone finds something irresistible in the bakery’s warm beacon of light. Initially, they are drawn to it, probably meaning to do no more than look in the window or see if there’s a discarded loaf or two in the trash, but when they arrive, the quaint scene of dough being rolled on a long wooden table through the rustic, flour diffused light is simply too much for them. I imagine these people look in and see Christmas morning. The warm light and the smell of baking bread stirs some instinct among even the most wayward for homely comfort and stability. During the day, perhaps they would spurn this scene for other company, but at 5 in the morning, even the most unrepentant wanderer feels the need for some kind of warmth and companionship, especially under the dull but soaking rains of the pacific northwest. A glance back over the shoulder is sufficient to realize that the rest of the town is still asleep under the dark sheets of rain that have been falling through the night. There is no place for coffee. There is no one to bum a smoke from. There is only the coldest and darkest part of the night to wade through cold and alone. And here is a bastion of warmth and possibly companionship. Who could resist just peeking in the door and saying ‘hi’?

But as in other small and rural communities, methamphetamine has made inroads here and these heads that peek into the doors of the friendly night kitchen often have little idea how obviously the drug has affected them. They have been alone for many nights, kept awake by the drug and adverse sleeping conditions. As tired as everyone in the bakery is, no one is quite on par with the shaggy, tottering, skittish sleepwalkers who come to the door with all manner of unreasonable pleas. Some are sensibly asking for bread—still a request we can’t indulge— but others want the phone, others have a cart full of magpied items that are dropping all over the parking lot and want a piece of rope to tie it down and others are clearly in search of company, but a tight baking schedule, lack of room and, often, inability to understand the speaker, make this impossible. What others want is incomprehensible, perhaps even to themselves. Most of the requests are made politely, but in the strange over-politeness the seems indicative of use of the drug, as if being polite will somehow make up for the absurdity of the situation.

And the most jarring aspect for the bakers, is that these faces often appear out of nowhere. There you are measuring, kneading, shaping, deeply absorbed in your task when you feel a presence. The windows are dark. There’s no one around for miles. The stillness of the night reigns outside and, yet, something is different. The flour falls in a different way through the air. Follow its source, the eddy of a breeze and there, the door, the door is open and peeking through the seam is a face, one whose intentions in this still and otherwise undisturbed night are unknown. No one likes this kind of introduction. To be scared usually sets one person very quickly against another. Even if the scare occasioned was unintentional. The bakery worker assumes a stern air, both annoyed at being interrupted and bluffing in case there is some nefarious reason this person has come to the door in the middle of the night. While the face in the door may have had the most reasonable request, there are simply too many things going against them for that request to be considered. It doesn’t hurt that the excessive politeness often causes them to ask in a way that assumes a negative reply.

“Uh, I couldn’t use the bathroom, could I?”

“Of course not,” the production worker answers, thinking: ‘You scared me. You look haggard. I have a job to do. It’s 3:45 am and I’m alone in here.’

Of course, all the face in the door hears is another ‘no’. This one issued from the dreamy hearth of a night bakery, what looked like it might be a last refuge of kindness, but it’s not to be.

There is a too-long pause, but eventually the face pulls back into the night and for a while it will swim through the dark outside the bakery, surfacing near the glass like a shark in an aquarium and then, in a clatter it will go back into the night to await the same stages of rejection and disapproval in the morning, when the town wakes up and the face is inclined to go asking for other things, in other places in the same dejected tones which preclude negative answers.

But the man who stood at the door on this morning was different. His eyes weren’t quite so red. His attitude was more sullen than skittish and probably because the production worker wasn’t alone, she had let him in use the phone—usually something we frown upon, but, nonetheless a request that is granted by most employees who, perhaps at one time or another, have also needed to use the phone of a stranger. But the man was unable to use the phone, not because he was inebriated or uncertain how to go about it but because he was shivering so intensely he can’t hold the receiver to his ear. How he managed to press the buttons in this condition is a mystery.

This was where I walked over. The gray-faced man was spasmodically shivering, holding the receiver to his ear with his eyes opened to owl width, because he was surprised by something or because It kept the water dripping from his hat out of his eyes wasn’t clear. He looked like someone trying hard to stay awake on a long drive. Seeing this strange expression, I started into the “you can’t be in here” speech but stopped short when I saw the state of this guy. He was absolutely soaked and all he was wearing was a t-shirt which was wet enough to cling to him like milky shrink wrap. His back was muddy. Either he slipped or he’d been sleeping on the naked ground, which is something that anyone who’s ever spent a night outside knows is the best way to lose what little body heat you might still have with you. His baseball hat was dripping, oozing water from its twill like it’d been recently used to scoop water from a river.

“Damn.” I couldn’t help but to exclaim. “You’re soaked, man!”

The owl eyes regarded me and for a moment, I wondered whether he’d understood me, but it seemed he was only trying to coax out a response from his trembling lips.

“I’m t-t-trying to call my g-girlfriend” he managed to exclaim through teeth chattering so hard I thought they’d break. “We had a f-f-fight—Kimmy?!” He suddenly asked the phone, but it was just her voicemail and, from what I could tell, not the first time he’d reached it as the production worker had given me to think he’d been in there calling for a while already. But the way he’d said the name. It was obvious the guy was getting scared. He’d been literally left out in the rain and a night of drinking had rendered him incapable of forming a clear plan. He had nothing with him and I doubted he had any money. Everything was closed and, with shelter-in-place orders, even in the morning, nothing would open. I’d even read that the police were holding off on investigating a string of burglaries because they wanted to maintain social distancing. There was nowhere for this frozen guy to go. Even our homeless shelter didn’t keep regular hours. If anything, early morning was when it turned people out, rather than accepted them.

“Dude,” I began in the way of anyone trying to help, but not willing to commit to anything. “You’ve got to get warmed up. You’re hypothermic. You should let me call you an ambulance.”

He shook his head. He wanted none of this help.

“My g-g-g-girlfriend’s just s-sleeping. If I keep calling, m-maybe I can wake her up.”

The problem was he’d been drinking and judging by the smell, I’d say it was a lot. He was no longer drunk after his night in the rain, but if his girlfriend had been drinking anywhere as much as he’d been and was somewhere warm and dry, there was no way a ringing phone—one that was probably muffled by a purse or pair of jeans—was going to wake her up. He’d been in there calling for a while and his shivering was so violent, something else was called for.

I took him outside to the thrift store next door. I’d often seen donations dropped off after business hours and the resulting messes when people decided to rifle through them in the middle of the night. While we tried the area around the dumpster, to see if there was something dry this guy could put on. I continued calling the girlfriend on my cell. What was so exasperating and surreal was that the shivering man’s girlfriend had one of those outgoing ringtones, a snippet of a song that I could only imagine must’ve been maddening to him when normally calling her, to say nothing of how ironic it was now its impotence.

“...I’ll be here to saaave the daaay/ sUperman’s got no-thing on me/ I’ll be here to sav—Hi, this is Kimmy(!), I can’t get to the phon—”

I hung up. The rain had let up a little, but it was still steady and I was getting wet rummaging around in by the dumpsters listening to tinny snippets of bad pop songs.

“Look,” I told my friend, trying to make some kind of executive decision. “You’ve got to get out of the cold. We don’t have the ovens on in there” I said pointing back to the bakery and you need a heater and a change of clothes. I think your best bet is to go to the fire station. It’s right down this street.” I said gesturing down 10^th, not sure if that’s where it was, but knowing it was close.

But he was set on his course of action.

“She d-didn’t answer?” He almost seemed surprised, like he expected call number 8 to be the one she couldn’t refuse.

“No and she’s not going to. It’s late and she’s asleep. You need help now.” I said, using the kind of clipped sentences it seems first responders find so efficacious. “Go to the fire station. Ring the doorbell and ask if they have some way for you to warm up. If they don’t answer, there’s a shelter less than a block away. I don’t think they’re open, but by the time you get over there maybe they’ll be someone there to help you.”

“Can I call and leave a message?”

I started to sigh, but checked it, redialed, handed him my phone and waited, maybe a little too peevishly, while he called again. I could hear the strains of the ‘Superman’ issuing from around the folds of his wet ear. I made a mental note to wash my phone off when I got back inside.

The song abruptly ended, as if introducing Kimmie. Her peerky voice came on after the song like someone who’d made the resolution to never let anything bother her. No wonder it sounded like this, being beseeched as it was by a soaked and shivering man with terrible breath in an empty parking lot so early in the morning. For as far away as she was, and as nonresponsive, she might as well have been Superman. That was the impression I had at the moment, watching this guy patiently listening to the long-winded outgoing message He might as well have been asking for Superman’s intercession.

I gave him space to leave his message, but I couldn’t get far away enough to avoid hearing part of what he said. The ‘p-please’ and the ‘freezing’ and the ‘I love you’. It was every desperate phone ever made after a fight when, after the slamming doors and the callous words, one person finds that they are the loser in the ambiguous contest, that after the insults were exchanged, they are the one standing hungover in the five am parking lot with no idea what to do next. This is when they realize what it is that they need, that which they so easily take for granted.

He handed me back my phone and it was then that I noticed he had “Kimmie” tattooed in fairly fresh Spencerian script on his forearm. The letters were think, probably each about a ¼ inch across of blackish blue ink. I wondered if this was the result of another fight, the peace offering, a way to anchor the relationship against its tendency to slide into dispute, a reminder that, whatever the problem of the moment, the two were linked together, at least as far linked as the tattoo could make them. I’ve noticed it doesn’t take long before one ceases to see tattoos that are seen every day. Maybe Kimmie had already stopped seeing it and the endeavor had been in vain. It usually is when your actions belie your words. A tattoo is a mute appeal for character—imagine how absurd it would be to hold it up and point to it in an argument—and, as far as I know, as never counted for anything in a courtroom other than incrimination. No one, it seems, can write innocence onto their person, but we keep trying.

And having given me back my sodden phone, the hypothermic man in nothing but a soaked t-shirt and jeans receded from view behind mounting curtains of rain. In the vague direction of the fire station, but clearly hoping that Superman would save him the indignity presenting himself there as the wreck he was.

I walked back in, cleaned the phone off with rubbing alcohol and went back to getting the bread ready for delivery. As expected, I never received the panicked callback from Kimmie. Either she woke up and drove out to get him, or she was beyond the point of caring about his freezing. Even the mightiest of characters can only endure so many appeals before growing indifferent—something Superman would know well.

Coed-19

I was on my way to my Wednesday evening class when another instructor came into the associate faculty room. I stopped to greet her and she launched into a tirade.


“Well I hope you’re prepared to create an online class now.” She exclaimed, throwing her bag down on the desk. “Of course we’ve all got several class modalities to choose from.”


I was already a minute late, but I stopped just long enough to get the clarification. Spring break was being extended by a week so that we could prepare for the possibility remote instruction brough on by the Covid-19 outbreak—which of course, back in mid-March, seemed a ridiculous possibility.

Naturally, community college instructors complain about any such change to their schedule, even when it means an extra week off. We saw the week as an unnecessary infringement on our perfectly crafted schedules.


I was prepared for such changes and interruptions by years teaching overseas where classes are always subject to change. In other countries the heat cuts out, week-long storms flood the streets, kings die and classes must be cancelled, but in the US the only common unexpected break comes from the snow and only about half the country enjoys the possibility of this interruption.


I went to my class that evening and told my students that I’d have to cut the week of writing conferences I had planned; I was a little disappointed, but, as you can imagine, the students cheered at the news that they were going to have two weeks off and after thinking it over all day Thursday. I wasn’t so grieved at the news myself. I left campus with the general rush feeling confident about the loss of a week that was causing everyone else so much anxiety. Of course, restrictions were already being handed down in places like Seattle, but, not planning a trip there, I wasn’t too worried.


For spring break, my wife and I had planned a camping trip with our 16-month old daughter to Mendocino for a few days. We arrived on a clear Friday afternoon and left on a wet Saturday afternoon after the rain clouds moved in, our tent proved itself unworthy to weather any significant rainfall and our daughter decided that she wasn’t going to sleep in such a rude vessel and stayed awake at least half the night crying. I wasn’t upset about the unexpected end to our trip. I had a few days of paper grading to do, but then I’d have another week of a break and if nothing else I hoped to bike out to Patrick’s Point for one more night of camping before the end of the break.


Saturday morning, before we left town, we stopped into a café for some desperately needed coffee after our sleep deprived night. Back in civilization, I decided to check my email. It had only been a day, but the load of emails that had come in Friday evening and Saturday so overwhelmed me that I became one of those reprehensible guys you see seated across the table from a beautiful woman in a comfortable café on a drizzly Saturday morning, entirely oblivious to the potential of the moment around him to provide an even greater comfort that whatever the phone can furnish. You know what I mean. There’s this beautiful scene, steaming coffee, someone to share the table with, rain dripping down the windows and this guy, instead of languorously talking and letting the coffee steam bathe his face and feeling some real poetic quality happiness, is intent on his damn phone. I always imagined these callous bastards to be scrolling through their Facebook feeds. I never expected that they might be trying to digest reams of updates on potential school closures or trying to read through the lines of oblique but potentially startling news.


Shutting down for the rest of the semester? Was the administration really prepared to do such a thing? Weren’t they overreacting? Here I was in a beautiful café, ignoring my wife and my little girl. The place was full of contented people rustling newspapers, eating gigantic scones. Where was the panic? Where were the rubber gloves and masks? The hazmat suits that necessitated such an action as semester-long school closure? Everyone around me was perfectly relaxed. If they were battling thoughts of a pandemic, they were damn complacent about it. I stopped ignoring my wife long enough to tell her what I was reading. She was too busy wrangling our daughter away from other people’s precariously placed lattes to listen. “Oh?” Was all she said from across the café. ‘Yeah,’ I thought. ‘That’s all the consideration this deserves.’ I turned off the damn alarmist phone and we went back out into the rain. For all its tininess, Fort Bragg has a lovely library.


Back at home on Sunday, I was still getting messages. Word was expected Monday about the move to remote instruction. And with the first official day of spring break came the directive that obliterated the rest of the break. ‘Transition to remote instruction’. I stared at those words for a while, blinking in disbelief. There was no ‘until’ given. Already it seemed as if this was poised to continue into the distant future. I dragged the computer out to the shed and started working like a battered correspondent trying to get a dispatch on the situation in Abkhazia ready for the telex when the line opened. That is, I was working against the clock, to try to maintain my class, but the entire time I was assailed with questions. Would my students still attend (remote) classes? What tasks could be salvaged and which needed to be scrapped? What would lectures look like? Would another directive come down—the situation at this time was beginning to worsen in Italy, the news was becoming slightly hysterical—would this this work become invalidated? But with so much to do and learn about online classes, I put my head down, ignored these questions and set about modifying, recording and changing due dates.


For me, the real distraction was the sudden inundation of emails offering varied help with creating online classes—emails, I’ll point out as of April 4, I’m still receiving. As classes across the country went online, representatives from various publishers, educational institutions and colleagues began offering tools to make the transition easier. But this wasn’t the hospital and we weren’t nurses in need of masks which were simply to be put on. Each webinar, each new gadget that could be added to our learning management systems required hours of preparation. And as the emails came in thick and fast, people doing their best to support the struggling teachers, the sense inferiority began to set in. If I wasn’t using such and such an app would my class suffer? Were text discussions enough or did I need to augment them with video? What the hell was 5HP and what did I need it for? I’m a teacher, but for the next week and a half, I became a website designer, as I suppose was all must, eventually. A crash course in such things is fine. And my college did a pretty good job of providing one, but at some point, instructors need to be allowed to continue with their work without continual advice on how to improve. Education, being an imperfect science, is already quite ‘improvement’-haunted.  

Luckily, I was slightly familiar with using my online learning management system. For many of my colleagues who weren’t, this must’ve been a hell of a ride. Receiving mountains of incredibly piecemeal information and then having to translate it for their classes’ needs, figure it out for their operating systems and syllabi and then spend all that anxious time copying and pasting ‘shared secrets’ and generated URLs hoping the apps would work. It was like being asked to program some immense VCR and being handed a stack of operating manuals from all the models in existence, excepting, of course, the one you have before you: an immense gleaning of information and ad hoc application with a looming deadline.


When I emerged from the shed a few days before the end of the deadline, I was dusty and my eyes were sore from trying to keep track of countless tabs and various functions. But, I’d created something. I had a class ready to go and I resolved not to bother with it again until classes began.

Of course this resolution died quickly in the continuing waves of doubt that usually lapped over me in the middle of the night, prodding for possible leaks and, after some reflection, there were many. I lugged the computer back into the shed and spent the last weekend patching, click-and-dragging and worrying.


Now, keep in mind how incredibly lucky I am to have had this shed. I put in some 11-hour days out there. If I had been continually distracted say by the normal occurrences of a household, these 11-hour days very easily could’ve become entire weeks of work. If it were necessary for me to play with my daughter or communicate with my wife on any kind of regular basis, I would probably still be working away. Luckily they permitted my absenteeism, provided it was on a limited basis, but consider the difference in this situation between those who own a house with a rumpus room and a backyard (for the kids to play in) and a computer room with a door (that locks!) as opposed to those who rent studio apartments that they share with two kids. The cafés and libraries that might have once equalized these disparate communities are now closed and, as we move into shelter in place, some instructors and teachers will have a much easier time than others. The shed, after all, wasn’t mine. I gave my landlord $60 bucks to use it for a week and now I count myself lucky to have a laundry room to work from, one albeit that doesn’t have a door that latches, let alone locks. So I am grading papers and listening to my daughter crash around in the kitchen while my wife—who’s already doing three or four things at once brought on, no doubt but my recent absenteeism—tries to keep her from ripping her books up or getting into the diaper pail…again.


In the evenings, before bed, often because I’ve had too much coffee and not gotten enough exercise to sleep, I’ve had some phone conversations that have revealed some people are bored or don’t know what to do with themselves now that everything is closed. They talk of reading War and Peace. They talk of finally getting down to writing that novel. I try to understand this reality, but then my computer dings. In the ten minutes I’ve been on the phone, I’ve received 5 questions from students, missed another Zoom meeting and my inbox has reached capacity with the latest batch of offers to help with webinars that are made to sound like something I would be remiss as an educator to not attend. Before I can consider any of this my daughter comes in waving Hop on Pop around with a ‘there you are!’ look on her face and I hear snores issuing from the living room, most likely from my wife who’s been trying to put the little girl to bed for the last hour. “I gotta’ go,” I tell my bored friend.


Finally, there is the inexhaustible topic of disappearing students, something that no amount of trainings or apps will correct. No matter how elaborate or interesting or easy we make our classes, the reality is that about 1/3 of students have ghosted their instructors and classmates for what are probably very valid reasons. Instructors have taken unprecedented approaches and begun digging through course information to find alternate emails and phone numbers for these students. After sending out 3 or 4 waves of emails with ‘Please Respond’ as the subject, I had to resort to making phone calls. I have now made contact with most of my students, but last night, between deleting emails and changing diapers, I managed to glean from my friend who teaches jr. high that he’s only heard from about 20% of his class. He’s resorted to all the efforts I’ve listed above, but there are going to be students that, for whatever reason will now disappear. Usually over the course of a semester, there are one or two. This year we’re going to have a lot more. Who knows maybe they don’t have sheds they can work from either and, once again we’re back to the revolutionary idea that teachers and students struggle with the same issues. One side struggles in designing the course, the other in consuming it, but the work required is really very similar, especially now that we’re all doing it amidst the same distractions.


With any luck, everyone else has a family member as captivating as my daughter. While I might not get as much done as I’d like, I’m glad to be spending more time with her and, in a way, I feel fortunate that this is happening now rather than, say, when she’s 15. For all the 15-year-olds and their parents, whether or not they are instructors in a community college, I can only say ‘good luck’ with this. I hope you had the foresight to build a shed (or partition off part of a studio apartment) before this happened.