Suburgatory

by Linda Keenan

  Bradford Johnson described his family’s move here very openly as a classic case of “white flight” from the section of the city where the population is 50 percent black or Hispanic and growing. This reporter thought using the term “white flight” was an unusual choice for a black person to use.

  “Just because I’m black doesn’t mean I give a rat’s ass about other blacks. I want the same things white people do. To be far, far away from black people. To suggest that I love blacks just because I’m black, well, that’s just racist.”

  Johnson has been wholeheartedly welcomed into his new affluent Westgate neighborhood, with residents appreciating the chance to have the appearance of diversity, even though Johnson’s background makes him far more similar culturally to his neighbors than to the black or Hispanic server at the local Dunkin’ Donuts. “The diversity I provide is that I am the first person of any color on our street to attend MIT.”

  Peggy Marist was thrilled at the idea of what she called “our own, personal Obamas!” Lowering her voice, Marist said, “They didn’t seem black-black at all, and not even Michelle Obama–black. They’re Barack-black all the way. Some of the kids bused in from the city are really black-black and kind of wild, so I was really excited for my Madison to have her own sweet ‘Malia’ to be friends with on the bus! We already have a gay, a bunch of Chinese all in one house, and even one Mexican. So the Johnsons seemed like the perfect addition. But … well, Bradford has a little … anger. I think he’s, like, mad at America or something. I mean, not mad at America but other black people.” She had loudly whispered the words “black people.”

  The white residents had a very clear idea of how their interaction would be with Johnson: They would have light, friendly contact in which his race would go unmentioned, at all costs. But Johnson didn’t comply. People would frequently say, “You must have really wanted your kids to enjoy the great schools here!” He would be honest and reply, “Yes, we wanted them away from those black people. Believe me, you don’t want your kids around them. If it’s more than 10 percent black, well, I’d never send my kids there. They just bring you down.”

  Johnson found himself very frustrated, and alienated people with his blunt race-talk. “I thought they would want to talk about black people as much as I do. Isn’t that why I moved here? Thank goodness I found Old Bill.”

  “Old Bill” Jesper, also known by his harsher critics as “the Starbucks Klansman,” now meets Bradford for coffee a few days a week to discuss some of their favorite areas of attack, like unwed mothers in the black community or the evils of the drug trade. “They call me a racist? If I was a black guy and got stuck in an alley, it’s Bradford I’d worry about, not poor old falling-apart Bill Jesper. I just like to rile people up to pass the time. Johnson wants a race war. Him versus the rest of ‘hims.’”

  Interestingly, Bradford has faced at least one moment of true racism, but blames the incident on the failings of black people. One time a new neighbor assumed that Bradford was actually NFL player Deshaun Watson, one of the few other prominent black residents in the area. The neighbor believed that the only way a black man could afford to live in the area was if he was a pro athlete. But rather than attack the neighbor for that assumption, Bradford blamed “the blacks.” “That assumption is not racist. It’s incontrovertible fact. There are not hardly enough rich black professionals and we have no one to blame but themselves.”

  So what does he make of the idea that he is viewed as the town’s Obama? “I don’t get that man. Obama had the perfect life, completely free from blacks, and then he picks up and moves to Chicago to be with all those, those people? But notice he didn’t decide to stay in blackie-town. He had a plan to get out. And notice also,” he said triumphantly, “did he send his girls to public school in D.C. to be with all those no-good blacks? Nope. Because he is a proud black man who wants the best for his black daughters, just like me.”

  PAID ADVERTISER CONTENT

  Macho Pottery Camp—

  Where Boys Become Men

  Who Become Potters

  So your son wants to take up pottery. You’re not worried he’ll become gay. You’re a modern man; gay is completely fine with you. What’s not fine is the idea that you might be fostering a sensitive straight man. No one likes them!

  At Macho Pottery Camp, we offer the full array of potter skills; but you won’t walk in and find a gray-haired lady with a brocade vest and comfort clogs as your son’s teacher. Oh no. Your pottery instructor is Marine Corps all the way, and the majority of them were honorably discharged. OOH-RAH! They will whip that clay into shape, just like they will your son. He’ll “Semper Fire” a misshapen cup for Father’s Day that says, “I love you Dad … for making me a man at Macho Pottery Camp.”

  Also consider for your son our brother facility, Macho Mime Camp. That Invisible Box won’t know what hit it when your badass son crushes it in a single imaginary blow! Call us now!

  Poor by Choice Meets Just Plain Poor

  Suburgatory, USA—A woman who is poor by choice gave some less than helpful advice to a woman who is just plain poor, as the two of them were checking out groceries at the Bay Street Stop-n-Shop.

  Kristin Perry lives in town and shops at the store regularly, as does Callie Bennett, who works there as a cashier and lives right outside the town line in the Edgemont trailer park. When Perry saw that Bennett had a food stamp swipe card, like she has, she thought she had found a kindred spirit. “Not too many poor people around here, we have to stick together!”

  Perry attended Cornell University and then the Wharton Business School; her husband attended Dartmouth. Both grew up in an upper-­middle-class suburb, and after college they both stepped on the upwardly-mobile work treadmill along with most of their peers. That is, until their first child was born.

  “We just decided we wanted more out of life, and being poor was the answer. All that stuff we were accumulating and the time spent earning money to buy it was just making us emptier. Not everyone can handle the impoverished life, but for us it was the challenge of a lifetime, and we were eager to conquer it. With a small stipend from Mike’s dad’s stock dividends, I was able to leave my job and Mike was able to fulfill his dream of perfecting his craft.” Which is? “His craft? I don’t know, we keep our passions separate. You should ask him!”

  Why did they choose to live in such an expensive town? “Of course, education is number one to us, so we were really lucky Mike’s father supported our decision to be poor and bought us the house, which helped him on his taxes, too. Win-win!”

  Store clerk Callie Bennett says she’s just plain poor and comes from a long line of just plain poor people who came before her. With no chance to attend college, she feels lucky, though hardly pleased, to have her job at Stop-n-Shop. But, as it goes with the just plain poor, she is only just getting by, and has a new baby to boot. Bennett described her encounter with Perry.

  “When I pulled out my EBT [food stamp] card, the scary hippie lady behind me sort of waved hers at me, with a small smile, like it was sign language for ‘I’m poor, too, let’s be friends!’ Ugh I was so zonked from work, I just wanted to go the fuck home.”

  Perry noticed Bennett’s several boxes of diapers. “Knowing that many other poor women don’t know about the value of cloth-diapering to both the environment and their budgets, I thought maybe I would do some outreach.” So she said, “Have you considered cloth diapers for your baby? It’s soft on their bottoms, good for the globe, and it’s practically free, and free’s good for poor women like us, right?”

  Bennett for a second just stared. Then she responded: “It’s only free if you don’t put any value on my time, and my time is worth fifteen bucks an hour, and I need every dollar from every hour and every minute that I work. You think I want to add disgusting ‘cloth’ diapers to my insane laundry load?”

  Perry seemed chastened and said, “Well, it’s really not that hard. You boil them, using tongs, about six times for about fifteen minutes to
make them more absorbent and then you … ”

  Bennett looked at her, slack-jawed. “Why don’t you worry about your own life and your own baby’s bottom and your own boiled shit and I’ll worry about mine? I have to think about my future and I don’t plan to be poor forever.” Bennett assumed, correctly, that Perry doesn’t work. “Maybe if you got a job, you could dream bigger, too.”

  As Bennett walked out, Perry said, “See, she’s still on that terrible treadmill we were on. She hasn’t discovered the freedom that being poor can give you.” Perry shook her head and said, “I so hope it happens for her someday.”

  PAID ADVERTISER CONTENT

  Scrappers for Slackers

  Moms, have you ever felt the shame when another mother asks, “Gee, where are all your scrapbooks?” and you are forced to hide the unthinkable: You have failed to document each moment of your child’s life. ’Fess up, sister: You’re a slacker. You always were a slacker, muddling your way through college and the brief “job” you had, and motherhood didn’t change a damn thing. But now you don’t have to look like one, with Scrappers for Slackers. Scrappers for Slackers will hunt through every stray computer file, every tagged photo at your cousin’s graduation party, every dusty side closet and desk drawer for some evidence of your child’s life. Then with the magic of Photoshop, we’ll construct a picture-perfect, expertly bound scrapbook that screams, “This child was in no way, shape, or form a big drunken mistake.” Give us a call. You may be a slacker, but you’re no Casey Anthony. Let Scrappers for Slackers prove it.

  Child Precocious in Sarcasm

  Suburgatory, USA—A local child has both impressed and alarmed his teachers with his precocious fluency in sarcasm.

  Tex Holter attends the Mason Elementary School. His teacher, Jared Bauer, is bowled over by his abilities and describes the first time he became aware of Tex’s sarcastic talents.

  “He’s six years old. And yet he overheard me saying Principal Massey accidentally sent out an embarrassing personal e-mail to the whole staff and, without missing a beat, said—I shit you not—‘Awkward!’ and walked away.”

  At first, Bauer and others thought it was a fluke, but it was not.

  “One day a specialist came in to help one of the disabled kids in the class. This specialist is just a bumbling idiot. Of course, what do the kids know? Well, one of them knows; Tex Holter knows. He sees her and says, ‘Oh great, that one.’”

  But Holter’s strange fluency in sarcasm has a serious downside. It sets him well apart from his classmates, according to Bauer. “These are six-year-olds. Their idea of a joke is to put the word ‘poop’ at the end of every sentence and then say, ‘Get it? Poop. Get it? Poop. Get it? Poop.’ Again and again. That’s normal—and annoying after a few minutes, by the way—but the kids love it and laugh and laugh. So what does a kid like Tex do with that? They keep yelling ‘poop!’ in his face waiting for him to laugh and he just says, ‘Talk to the hand.’ So yeah, he’s become a total outsider and we’re worried about him. And I shouldn’t have said ‘a kid like Tex.’ I’ve never met another one like him. I’ve seen more albinos than I’ve seen this.”

  The school took action to help protect Tex, allowing him to join the teacher’s lunchroom. Now he has become fully conversant in school gossip and has become such a welcome source of humor among the teachers that they would be sad to see him go. “We know, we know, he needs to negotiate how to get along with his peers, but when I told him once that he was my own personal Jay Leno, he just gave me this stare and said, ‘I’m with Coco,’ meaning I had insulted him by choosing Leno instead of Conan, who I guess he thinks is far superior. Oh God, I laughed so hard.”

  The school felt it was crucial to pull Holter’s parents into the mix to try to understand what’s going on with their son. So Ben and Teresa Holter came in for a talk with teacher Jared Bauer.

  Jared: So I just want to say that I love having Tex in my class and he’s a great kid, but he seems to have this unusually, um, developed way with humor, a kind of sarcasm that is very atypical for his age.

  Teresa [rolling her eyes]: Right, we wouldn’t want him to excel in anything, just try to make him mediocre like the rest of them.

  Ben: Zing!

  Jared: Ummmm, OK … it’s just that his strange, I mean, extraordinary ability is causing him social problems.

  Ben: Oh, like Bill Gates had problems? Yeah, he turned out just awful.

  Jared: Sorry? Not quite understanding either of you.

  Ben: Are you new here?

  Jared: Huh?

  Ben: Great, you’re going to force me to speak in your language with all its ugly directness. We as a family are fluent in sarcasm, it’s our primary language, our culture, our mother tongue. Tex is just doing what he was born to do. So what do you suggest be done?

  Jared: Wow. Weird, never heard of this one. Well, I think we need to stop accommodating for Tex’s “different ability” and force him back with his peers, or he’ll never learn to speak and interact well with kids his age.

  Teresa: Yeah, it’s always been my dream that Tex think up the wittiest poop joke; yours too, Ben?

  Ben: Harvard weights quality of poop jokes right alongside SAT scores.

  Jared: Listen you two, Harvard’s a long long way off. Right now I just want to make sure Tex makes some friends and finds a supportive group to thrive in.

  And with that, Teresa began a “slow clap.”

  As the meeting ended, Jared Bauer said, “Wow, that was brutal. What’s cute and funny on a six-year-old is pure D-Bag on a forty-year-old. I’m going to help Tex with every fiber of my being to knock some of that smarm out of his system. ‘Culture,’ my ass. Poor kid!”

  Bauer has his work cut out for him. When he told Tex that he could no longer have lunch with the teachers in the faculty lounge, he added, “Tex, we just think it’s best for you to be with kids your age, to try to fit in and be with the regular boys.” Tex stood there, in his ironic Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner T-shirt, and said, “Epic FAIL.”

  Mom “Never Yells” at Kids,

  Uses Scorn Instead

  Suburgatory, USA—A local mom prides herself on never yelling, preferring to use pointed scorn instead.

  “Those people who yell, they should be hauled off to protective services. Don’t they know what they’re doing to their kids? I never even raise my voice when my—” Gina Burke’s four-year-old daughter interrupted. “Mama, can I have a cup of water? I’m, I’m thwirsty now.”

  Gina took a very big breath, as if winding up, clenched her jaw and slowly articulated each word. “Right, Anna. I would just love. To get up. And get you something. Right after I sat down. Right after I asked you. If you needed something. It would be so so much fun for me. To get up. Again.”

  She got up in a huff and continued speaking about the lasting legacy yelling can have on children. “I grew up in a yelling household and I flinch every time I hear a raised voice. I simply never do it, in any context, no matter my frustration level. In fact, I won’t let my kids even go to a house where I know the parent yells. My kids would just shut down, crumble.”

  In fact, what Gina doesn’t know is that she is a mom whispered about by other parents for her “terrifying” discipline style. “I just don’t have any reference point for it—I find it astonishing! It’s so carefully thought out, and designed for maximum damage, like she’s tossing an emotional shit bomb in her kids’ faces,” said friend Madeleine Golden.

  Said another mom, “In every other way she is Miz Model-Mommy, I mean, she acts like if they were to eat a single non-organic blueberry, they’d keel over and die. But then she talks to them like that? I’d rather send my kid for a playdate with the creepy single guy next door to her who looks like Dog the Bounty Hunter, that’s how bad I think she is.”

  Back at the Burke’s home, Kenneth had just asked his mother if she could buy him a new Lego Star Wars kit.

  Gina breathed deep again, and clenched. She picked up Anakin and Obi Wan and quietl
y but intensely started to playact with them. “‘What do you think, Anakin?’ ‘Well, Obi Wan, I think Kenneth is pretty selfish when he knows we don’t have the money to buy another Lego set.’ ‘Yeah, Anakin, and does Kenneth ever pick up the ones he already has?’ ‘No, Obi Wan, he sure is a spoiled rotten Sith Lord.’”

  Kenneth just stared at his mother as Gina got up to make lunch. While Anna fussed, Gina said, “This must be why I spent eight years getting a PhD, so that I could cut happy faces out of sandwiches. Dreams do come true!”

  At this point, Anna is too young to understand what her mother is getting at, and Kenneth just thinks “Mama is mad.” But Gina’s oldest, fourteen-year-old Kendra, fully understands what’s behind her mother’s “technique.” She stated her take on this: “My mother. Is mad. That we. Ruined. Her professional. Ambitions. We didn’t. She did that. Herself. And she. Can bite. My. Ass.”

  SHOUT OUT

  Join Our Weirdo Junior League!

  Jenny Jorgenson is a mom and self-described “freeganista” who lives on Blanco Street.

  We, as “freeganistas,” take to the Shout Out today not just to scorn your throw-away culture, with your constant visits to big box stores and relentless focus on regular bathing. We want to win you over, too.

  (Just to clarify. We are not “frugalistas,” a term that has been overused to the point of becoming a pathetic Great Recession cliché. Frugalistas, put simply, are pussies. Only when you scavenge for completely free items can you truly disconnect from America’s nauseating consumer culture. We are freeganistas. Not trite at all, right?)

  Though I do enjoy scorning this culture of waste, I wanted to show the human side of dumpster diving and scouring this great town for free items. My freeganista adventures have brought me far more than untold savings and one admittedly nasty case of intestinal worms. Freegan living has brought me firmly into the fold of what I call our town’s Weirdo Junior League. Trust me, they’re the only people worth knowing within a hundred miles.