malaise*lithium

I’ve heard more than one person say, “Whatever you think of Mussolini’s politics, at least he made the trains run on time.” That’s bullshit, of course–the last throes of a rumor propagated by Mussolini himself, intended to spread the notion that the only form of government capable of streamlining and optimizing it’s own workings (e.g., making the trains run on time) is a fascist one. It’s a small irony that in this form the rumor has so long outlived the party that disseminated it.

Almost everything I read about Amtrak before our departure had griped heavily about the widespread and often outrageous delays the trains often incur. One account told of arriving nearly fourteen hours late. More that once I winced at the recollection of that article as I glanced over our itinerary, counting the connections that had only an hour or so of overlap. It may not have been anything but luck, then, that Amtrak delivered us to Chicago just a few minutes off the advertised time. I wish it had been hours late.

Fifteen minutes to five is not the best time to arrive at Union Station, as it turns out. After sleeping the previous two nights in coach seats and not seeing a shower head in nearly sixty hours, we were both looking, feeling, and smelling our best. Union Station’s floor plan is as convoluted as a wildebeest’s digestive tract and we struggled upstream, boggle-eyed against the deluge of commuters. Our clothes were snagged; our toes, stomped; our spirits, smothered; my wallet, stolen.

Bastards

I thought it was in a zippered pocket. Scratch that, it was in a zippered pocket goddamnit, but them bastards are as smooth as they are shady. When we returned to the Amtrak desk I discovered that it was gone. Without access to my money or proof of my identity, the trip was officially and unceremoniously called off. We called around until we found a hotel with a vacancy and then hoofed it a dozen blocks to a crummy TraveLodge next to what I would call a pretty scary section of the ‘L.’ The room was horrible and overlooked an alley right out of Gotham City.

The following morning we took a cab to a hotel on the edge of town where we holed up for about a week until there was a plane ride back to Portland whose price we could stomach. I contacted the Oregon DMV for a fax to help me prove my case to the TSA, asked my sister to airmail me an old expired license from my desk drawer, and agreed to submit to an extra-thorough (cough, cough) screening at the airport in exchange for being permitted to go home.

The remainder of the stay was uneventful and characterless, right up ’till the cab ride to O’Hare.

Grzegorz

He was the cabbie. Polish. I can’t remember his last name. It’s a minor miracle that I remembered his first. Not thirty seconds after we were loaded up and on our way he reached over and cranked up the traffic report on the radio, then switched to what I infer was a Polish talk station. He listened for a minute and then shook his head with a look that I saw in the rearview mirror was disgust. He spoke haltingly and chose his words from a narrow vocabulary. I don’t know if he spoke about the things he did to all of his fares or only to scruffy and squinty bespectacled young couples with backpacks and Nalgene bottles. Reproducing his speech patterns is beyond both my ability and recollection, so I will simply approximate for you the fragments I understood.

Stupid Rules

“They say that last month the houses that sold here cost less than they have since the year 2000,” he said. “But everyone makes less and less and they still can’t afford them. The apartment building across from mine is all empty because less and less people can afford to live there, so they raised the rent for those who were still there, and now they can’t afford it either.”

“The other building has a stupid rule about air conditioners. They were allowed to be in the window, but then the people in the houses on the other side of the street got together and said they didn’t like to look at them. So they made a rule for the people in the building that they couldn’t have them any more, and now this old lady has to die because she was too old to be so hot. They all get together and make stupid rules that kill us because we can’t go to where they make the rules.”

“Bush is having a party for the other man, McCain. In order to go to the party and hear what laws they want to make you have to pay five thousand dollars. How can I know if I agree or not if I can’t afford to pay? Democracy in this country is very expensive. They advertise it like it is a movie. They all want you to pay, but none ever say what the laws they want to make are, or if they want to start wars or stop them. In Poland, it is free. They come to say what they think, and everyone can go listen, for free. And you decide who you agree with. Here you have to pay before you vote.”

Ten years of work

“Everything is expensive in this country. When I first came to the United States, I had in my bank five thousand dollars. I worked for ten years, in construction, putting in flooring. After ten years of work I had in my account five thousand dollars in the minus. And now my back is no good. I had to start driving this cab, but I can’t make enough money. This is a very bad country to work in. My family has already gone home to Poland. In two weeks I’m going home, too. I can’t afford to work here anymore.”

He said a lot more, but it was too disjointed to recount. Something about civil servants here, how they don’t care. They’re lazy. That’s the word he used. He said in Poland they’re not lazy because when you go to see them they know they work for you. Grzegorz said in Poland he can have a man fired for being lazy. He said it’s easy.

Not everything he said made him quite so sympathetic, though. There were more than a few sexist remarks, and I’m not sure if it only seemed he was talking directly to me because I was listening so intently or if he was disregarding Janine just a little. But he went down an even more unsettling line of discourse late in the ride, saying things I’m sure he wouldn’t have said if everyone in the car hadn’t been white. I was surprised. I guess I thought that someone from Poland, of all places, with its history and young and raucous democracy, would never talk like that. But I might have been being ignorant. There are, after all, other kinds of fascism. Subtler ones.

By then we were at the airport. We paid him. Tipped him. And then we went home.