What I do to people who don’t love me
Carrie Hall “You don’t know! You don’t fucking know!” said Jerry Kummer. “Why don’t you try being me for fifty-five years? Then you might know something!” He was sidled up to the counter, red face, big coat, uneven stubble, hat with a huge pompom on top, drinking a Jolt Cola, his favorite drink. The label read: “all the sugar and twice the caffeine.” Outside, night was falling fast. It was so cold that the huge plate glass window was blocked white with ice and the only thing you could see were the lights of cars going by brightening the whiteness for a moment before they were gone. But inside it was warm, even hot, especially where Jerry and I were, steam rising from the espresso machine, the coffeemaker, the dishwasher. Jerry sat at the end of the bar, his regular seat, and shouted at the other regular customers as they walked in. No matter how hot it got, he kept himself bundled up for the deep freeze—never took off that goddamned hat. He was a wide man— not fat, so much as bloated like a balloon ready to pop, probably from his meds. His face, too, was swollen and flaky from psoriasis, which sometimes fell around his feet like snow. He had a bipolar disorder. I knew because he told me four thousand times a day. “I’m sick and tired of being frustrated and confused and manic depressive and living in Minneapolis!” he would shout at twenty minute intervals from the end of the counter. If there’s anything I learned from working at that place, it was that most people, no matter their supposed level of sanity, just repeated
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the same few lines over and over. It was no wonder I was losing my mind. We were a 24-hour coffee shop in Minneapolis, about a block away from the Riverside Towers, two monoliths of section eight housing that were half full of Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees. It was the nineties and these guys had just left Africa because they were at actual war with each other, but the Minnesotans hadn’t taken this into account when they’d given them a place to live, so the warring parties had little cell blocks in these high-rises side-byside. The other residents were the people who Reagan had kicked out of halfway houses in the eighties when he cut funding. The Towers were always buzzing with electricity—not just the wires and the lights, but a human electricity that would be hard for anyone to bear. There were a lot of runaways in the neighborhood too. I guess I was kind of classed in that group, even though I was too old. Eighteen. Ancient by neighborhood standards. I don’t remember actually leaving. I like to think I walked out of my parents’ house, far away in the suburbs where the busses didn’t even run, just walked out the door, down the steps and across the lawn, my final act of defiance. My father had spent thousands of dollars trying to get the grass green—we weren’t allowed to touch it. I imagine I walked down Wood Duck Lane, past the houses getting their autumn decorations up: garlands of leaves and dried berries, past the “no trespassing” sign, past miles of strip malls and specialty wine shops and to the highway, and then I walked and walked until I reached the city, just before dawn. In truth, I probably got a ride in my mother’s heated car, the radio turned to the drone of the news, my eyes closed. She probably said, “Are you sure you’ll be okay? Do you need any money?” “I’ll be fine,” I probably said, taking the soft bills from her long hand.
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Whenever someone walked into the café, a clean, brutal cloud of cold air hit us so hard Jerry and I both let out a short cough. Steam would surround that person for just a second while they warmed up to the inside air. With every new person, Jerry would make a sound of total disgust—sometimes just a grunt or a spiteful laugh, sometimes a full-throated curse. When Nick walked in, Jerry grumbled, “fuck you.” Nick responded with a cursory salute and a smile. He wore a too-thin bomber jacket, no hat. He was an anti-racist skinhead. You could only tell the anti-racist ones apart from the racist ones by the color of their shoelaces. I can’t remember which color was which anymore, but only the anti-racist ones hung out in the cafe. They didn’t do much about being anti-racist besides beat the racist skinheads up. Nick stared me up and down. “Looking good today,” he said approvingly, his white teeth too white, probably capped, biting over his lower lip, the steam still rising from his mouth. I wore long underwear with shorts over them, a T-shirt that said “Jersey tomatoes are the best.” My lips were stained red with five-hour-old lipstick. I looked like an electrocuted clown. I was skinny. Not too tall. My hair was blonde in any other state, but it’s dark blonde so in Minnesota they called it dishwater. I never brushed it. In any other state my eyes were blue, but in Minnesota, they called them grey. I walked with a limp from a hip deformity. My mother told me I was born with it, but I always figured it was something my father did to me when he was messing around in there with his thick thumb. I tried to make it look like a swagger. My posture was bad, terrible even. What I’m trying to say is: if I was pretty, I was trying hard not to be, but sometimes people noticed anyway. “Fuck you,” I said. I smiled a little; I couldn’t help it. My mother had taught me to smile.
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“Any time.” I could feel Nick’s little pupils on my skin, like they’d crawled out of his head and were skittering all over me. “Two Jolts,” he said. “You want one?” I shook my head and pointed to my full coffee cup. “She said fuck you!” Jerry yelled, more to the room than to Nick. “Why don’t you try being me for fifty-five goddamned years? Then you might know something. If you had half a brain, you’d be dangerous!” “Yeah, and I’m gonna get one too,” said Nick, unfazed. Whether he was trying to mess with Jerry or make conversation, I don’t know, but much to Jerry’s surprise, and mine too, I guess, Nick set the second Jolt in front of him, winked at me and walked into the dining room. There were only a few seats up at the bar, and then a pretty big dining room with maybe twelve tables and a sticky blue floor. That night there were just a handful of guys in the dining room: Deaf John—he was deaf, if you couldn’t guess, and sat all day behind the fish tank talking to the fish. And then a guy named Red Ed was there. We weren’t too creative with our naming. He had red hair and wore all red clothes and drove for (seriously) Red and White taxi, even though he seemed, looking back, far too crazy to drive cab. He was sitting in front of the board of a game called “Go” and just moving the little pieces around and yelling things like: “This is my territory now! This is Lake and Hennepin and this is my corner!” Two Eritreans at the next table, Kiros and Baraki, who were playing Go for real, stared at him with disdain and disappointment—Kiros had been a doctor in Eritrea, and was a cab driver now too. They’d both also been guerrillas. I mean, that’s another story, but these were serious men, and they didn’t have the time for Red Ed’s bullshit. There were a couple of anti-racist skinhead kids—we called the young ones the Milk Chickens, I don’t know why. Anyway, there
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were two Milk Chickens there: a tall one named Lank, hunched over so he could yell at someone on the pay phone, and a little one named Little Luke, who was passed out on a table. I was the only woman in the cafe, I guess. Looking back. Jerry had a twin brother; he came into the café once or twice. You could see how they were twins, identical even, but also they didn’t look anything alike because that brother wasn’t clinically insane. He was a bank teller or something like that, an insurance salesman? The kind of guy who also wore polyester pants like Jerry but for some reason they didn’t look raggedy on him. Polyester pants, short sleeved collared suits, a parka with a fur collar. His winter hat didn’t have a pompom on it, but other than that, they dressed the same. His face, though, the brother’s, was clenched up into a different kind of fist. Jerry’s was all fury and disgust. The brother, it was that you could tell he was always lying. That he was always saying shit like “nice day today” or “this car’s a real peach.” Nothing sinister, just the kind of guy that you were always clawing at your own skin to try to get away from. The reason I bring this up is that weirdly enough, the next guy that came in on this cold-ass-even-for-Minnesota-winter’snight, also had an identical twin brother. I’m not sure how I know this. Somebody told me, I guess. And I thought about that a lot afterward, that somewhere in the world, in Minneapolis even, there was a normal version of Bill Lundquist wandering around, telling everyday lies, sitting down to dinner, giving his kids grief about how they were dressed, maybe even worrying about his schizophrenic brother. I can’t remember if I ever saw sane Bill Lundquist or if I’m just imagining what he looked like, who knows. But I can picture him as clearly as I can picture sane Jerry Kummer with his clenched, evasive face. Sane Bill Lundquist wore, as I picture it, very nice suits—well-tailored. Real Bill Lundquist wore jeans,
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T-shirts, sweaters from the Goodwill. I mean, you can assume everyone wore a parka, that’s not an actual defining feature of a Minnesotan in the wintertime, but real Bill Lundquist’s was dirtier, more holes. Sane Bill Lundquist’s was clean and perfect—nothing out of place. Both sane and real Bill Lundquist had handlebar mustaches, brown, and full thick heads of brown hair. And the way you could tell something was terribly off about real Bill Lundquist was that he smiled and smiled and smiled ear to ear, wide enough to crack his face. Almost all of the time. So back to that night: the real Bill Lundquist walks in, swinging both doors open wide and holding them open like the new sheriff in town. This may be a move his schizophrenic brain thought was cool. Some guys are like that, they enjoy making a scene, though I want to be clear that some schizophrenics are kind, heroic even. But this asshole was just that, an asshole and I’m not going to be nice about him just because he had a diagnosis that a million other guys I know have and they manage to be decent human beings. One way or another, swinging both doors open wide like that when it was like fifteen below was basically pathological because the cold air hit the restaurant, especially me and Jerry sitting right there by the door, like a bomb. Jerry just shouted out a big loud sound, not even words. Not even so much as a “fuck you,” just a shout. And as the steam started to disperse, Bill Lundquist shouted out: “Bill Lundquist!” That’s right, his own name, which is what he always yelled: an asshole move. In defense of Jerry, Jerry at least had some variety in his mantras, but not ol’ Bill. He only had two: his name and the next thing he said, which was: “Do you love me?” His regular routine, which was what I thought was going on here at first, was that he would hold peace fingers above his head, both hands, like Nixon, and yell: “Bill Lundquist! D’you love me! Bill Lundquist!” over and over in a voice, also like Nixon’s, at top
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volume until eventually everybody was staring at him and he wore himself out or someone made him shut up or something. I guess he found a way to order coffee from time to time, but I don’t remember how he did that. He’d been permanently eighty-sixed from basically everywhere in town, but not our café. We were like that. We let everyone stay. As the steam cleared, I saw what was happening wasn’t Bill’s regular routine. His hands weren’t above his head—and they weren’t empty either. His right hand was palm up, like an offering. Across it lay a railroad spike, like a thick, giant nail, huge and rusty, except the point, which was sharpened until it shone. “Do you love me?” he said. To me. He was talking to me. And nobody in the dining room could see him from where he was standing; he was obscured from their view and I guess the music had stopped playing; I didn’t remember when it had stopped. And Bill Lundquist, the first time I’d ever seen this, wasn’t smiling at all. “Do. You. Love me?” I don’t remember what Jerry was doing—was he suddenly quiet now for the first time in his entire life? What I do remember is that Bill was far away from me and he wasn’t coming any closer, but he stood there like the Virgin Mary, haloed by his fur-collared parka, weapon in outstretched hand and I don’t remember when I got out from behind the counter, but at some point I was standing in front of the bar, facing off with Bill Lundquist in a real high noon. Without the music playing I could hear everything, the ticking of the clock, Lank whisper-shouting into the phone: “Call Western Union!” Call Western Union!” Kiros and Baraki chatting seriously in Tigrinya like they were making a major decision. “Do you love me? You have to tell me you love me.” Not the Nixon voice, but a soft, dangerous, familiar voice. “No,” I said. And then everything went quiet. What was it about me that made me prey? I tried every second of every day to protect myself, but they always came for me, the
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Bill Lundquists and the Nicks, these wolves. Ever since the day I’d been born they’d been coming for me. I knew it was the wrong answer, that “no,” was the worst possible answer, but I didn’t care. At that moment I felt like I’d die before I told him what he wanted to hear. “You know what I do to people who don’t love me, don’t you?” The lights of cars passing behind him, sirens in the distance, a warm room full of men drinking their coffee, playing their chess and their Go and their cards—in silence now. No sound but Bill Lundquist’s voice. Of course I knew what he did to people who didn’t love him. I’d always known, since the day I was born. But he had to say it anyway. “I kill them.” The last thing I remember, until after the whole thing was over, was me, standing there arms by my sides, staring at the real Bill Lundquist. He was smiling again. I thought about his twin brother at home in a warm bed, and a twin Jerry at home, making up simple little lies in a mirror, and even an imaginary sane version of me, in an imaginary safe place being held maybe by someone who loved me and didn’t even want to kill me for it. I can’t remember a goddamned thing about my life, but I can remember as clearly as if I was there right now, this feeling of standing there: unable to move a single muscle but defiant and unafraid, even as Bill Lundquist started moving slowly toward me. And then one more thing: out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nick, his face warm in the amber light, looking up and giving me a wink. I have a million stories like this: terrible danger there was no way for me to get out of and then somehow my memory finds me safe on the other side, with nothing but blank space in between. Someone grabs my knee on the train, a man finds me drawing by the river and says “hey honey what you doing here all alone,” his voice high and hissing “it’s dangerous pretty pretty” and his big red
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hand is cracked and weather-torn or the sound of my bedroom doorknob turning. And then nothing. It’s the next morning. Little birds twitter in the window announcing the stupid sunrise and I’ve been awake the whole night. I probably told him I loved him eventually. That’s the part I’d want to forget. My guess is, with Jerry sitting there quiet as new snow and Bill Lundquist marching toward me steady as a zombie, I put on my sweetest smile, like my mother taught me, and said “I love you too,” like I used to tell my bloated, bleating father. Then I probably said it again, just a little too loudly so that somebody might notice something was wrong, so that Nick, of all people, might save me. Maybe I even screamed it: “I love you Bill Lundquist! I love you too!” He probably held his weaponed hand out to me. Or, more likely, did the Nixon fingers while the spike fell to the ground. And then Nick and the Milk Chickens and whoever else was looking for an excuse to fight probably took the fucking hint and came out from the dining room and took Bill Lundquist down. And Jerry probably cheered them on, yelling, “You don’t know! You don’t fucking know! Why don’t you try being me for fifty-five goddamned years? Then you might be dangerous!” What I do remember is this: Afterwards, I sat on a milk crate outside the cafe, holding the railroad spike in my gloved hands. They were shitty gloves, black cotton, and the cold air cut right through them. I wasn’t ready to go home yet, sit in my room and pretend I would ever fall asleep again. And I didn’t want to go back into the cafe, now that my shift was over. I could see the silhouettes inside, muted by the frosty window—festive, everyone in after bar close, drunk and happy, flirting and shouting and probably reliving the fight. I don’t know how I got the spike, but nobody had gotten stabbed with it. There was no blood. And besides, if the fight had
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been bad, the Milk Chickens would’ve talked about it for years. The story just kind of faded from the neighborhood memory. We never did see Bill Lundquist again after that. The padded van probably came to take him away. I kept that spike for years. Took it with me every time I moved, kept it on the shelf with my candles and photos. Nobody really asked about it and who knows what I would’ve told them if they had: the whole story—including the fact that I can’t remember it? Or would I just tell them it was a memento of where I was from? It’s gone now. I lost it somewhere along the way. It was freezing out there. But when it’s that cold, things sparkle in the moonlight. My breath glowed. The mica in the sidewalk too. And of course the dirty old snow, everything sparkling. Branches I couldn’t see cracked under the tightening ice. I pressed the sharpened point of the spike softly, repeatedly, into my reddening cheek, realizing that even though he’d sharpened it, it was unlikely Bill Lundquist could’ve done any real damage. I mean, it would’ve been hard to puncture too deep into the skin with that thing—it was thick. I guess a psychotic in an episode, you never know— superhuman strength and all that, but I think he was just trying to scare me, and probably to get himself locked up again. He wasn’t his twin brother. There was no place for him out in this world. As I held the weapon flat to my face, Jerry stormed out of the cafe—storming was Jerry’s only pace. When he saw me, he stopped in his tracks. I don’t know if it was the strange lighting or my exhaustion, but it looked to me like he smiled. Maybe it was a grimace. After a pause, he held his hands up in the air in peace fingers exactly like Bill Lundquist. “Jerry Kummer!” he cackled. For the first time that night, for the first time in what seemed like a hundred years, I laughed. “God,” I said, “that guy is an asshole.” Jerry glowed like a cloud in the moonlight. We were all glowing that night, even the newspaper box—even me. But I’ll never forget
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the way he looked standing there, wearing a smile or a grimace, the pom pom on his hat giving a little bounce, his eyes beady and incapable of deceit. “Ha!” he said with disgust. “I bet you don’t even know what that means!” “What what means?” I’d put the weapon in my pocket and stood, ready to head home. “Kummer! Kummer!” he shouted. “My name!” I shook my head, embarrassed that I didn’t know, although I didn’t know what my own name meant either. He cackled again, a little softer this time, tilting his head and studying me for a while, his small eyes shining as if lit from the back. “Never mind,” he said. “You know. Just look at you! You know.” “I don’t” I said. “What does it mean?” “You know,” he said. I looked at him, dumbfounded. I had no idea; I didn’t speak German. We stared at each other for what felt like a long time but was probably thirty seconds. “It means grief!” he finally shouted, annoyed as usual. Then he stormed off toward the Riverside Towers, into the darkness, leaving a trail of psoriasis and glowing moonlight behind him. As he went, he yelled “Grief! Grief! Grief!” laughing all the while.