Maggie Fiasco

Happy Tuesday morning to all my readers...

I was remembering, a little while back, about a couple people whom I've met who had given themselves nicknames.

The first being "Raven Madd," which was the pseudonym that Angela Washington, a black girl that I once dated (and even lived with for a few months) had given herself.

Angela was a black lady whom I would have to consider a racist, only because her race was the primary filter through which she saw the world.

I would be driving her somewhere and she would be looking at the faces of the other motorists, wanting to see their reactions to a white guy and a black girl together in a vehicle. She might, at some, point lean over and kiss me on the cheek if she thought that some redneck in a pickup truck needed to see that, perhaps to clarify to him that, yes, we were a couple.

We were in the deep south of Jacksonville, Florida where the relationships between the blacks and whites were noticeably different from the Massachusetts that I had left in 1993. For one thing, you would see a table with all blacks sitting at it and another one with all white, in places where the 2 races were mixed, such as a workplace that might have a dozen or so of each. When lunchtime came the break room would become segregated as each group would, almost subconsciously I often considered, eat with their own race. There would be a "black" table and a "white" one in divers places. Even in a hospital waiting room, or at the DMV, I would see the races congregated together with few exceptions.

One time, at  labor pool job, I had offered a black co-worker some of the cold drink I was drinking "If you don't mind drinking out of the same can as someone else," I had said. He took a few gulps then handed it back to me and when I resumed drinking it I noticed that he watched me with some slight appearance of interest and awe as I resumed drinking off it, as if he had never seen a white guy drink "behind" a black one. 

"Did you see the dirty look that guy in the pickup truck was giving us?" Angela would ask.

"No, I didn't really notice. Why would he be giving us a dirty look?"

She explained, after this incident which would in no way be the last such, that it was "the whole thing" about how people would think that if a white guy had a black girlfriend, there relationship must have the dynamic of the guy being kind of like the master and the girl a slave. It would piss off the blacks who saw us as a couple because they would also make that assumption and would be mad at her for indulging me in such a way.

She never extended her observation to what reasons "everyone" would think a black girl wanted to be with a white guy for, besides love.

Angela was proud of the fact that she could sound white enough on the phone to fool most people. "When I'm calling a restaurant to make reservations, or even the phone company to ask about my bill, they have no idea they're talking to a black lady," she once told me. The biggest feather in her cap, though, was from when she worked as a 1-900 operator on some kind of sex hotline and, using her voice, would be able to get her customers masturbating to what they imagined was a sexy young white lady.

She said that she would never eat watermelon or fried chicken in public. When I pressed her for her reason, she said it was because of the the stereotype that many whites perpetuated about blacks being always eating those two things.

"Well, but do you even like watermelon and fried chicken?"

"Hell yeah, I love me some watermelon on a hot summer day; and I could live on fried chicken; but I just eat them in the privacy of my apartment!"

I stopped short of asking her if she sent someone to the store for the watermelon, and if they delivered it to her apartment in a plain paper bag..

She was Raven Madd, on Facebook et. al.

The other person went by Maggie Fiasco. I never liked that and just the fact, in general, that someone would deem themselves a "fiasco." One girl's fiasco is another's normalcy.  And, I've been being coached by the Affirmation Industry online that to call yourself a fiasco is to send signals out into the universe that will just attract more fiascosity into your life.

But somehow, I had a passing thought or two about Maggie, from Sacramento, California Sunday morning. Had I known how much of a fiasco the trip to the plasma place was going to be I might have drawn a connection to this otherwise random musing.

Sundays can be "a little hectic" at the plasma place. The way they get people to donate twice per week is to offer something like 40 bucks for the first one, in a given week, but then to provide a bonus in the form of say 80 bucks for the second one. These can't be on consecutive days and they have to occur before the week, ending on Sunday, is over. A couple Sundays ago I got there around 2:15 in the afternoon to find about 25 people ahead of me. They were short staffed and I wound up leaving about 6 hours later. That probably won't happen again, I thought. In fact they might have taken drastic measures to insure against such a thing by maybe hiring extra staff, or something.

I got there pretty early. I had somehow succeeded in being awake and having a pretty good energy level when the 8 am. opening time of the place rolled around.

I stayed positive by telling myself that, if I had to spend 5 hours sitting there reading "Under The Dome (a novel)" by Stephen King, well, that is time I wouldn't have to spend doing the same thing at home.

This time, there were about 30 people ahead of me when I walked in the place. Nobody had even donated yet because of what I was led to believe was: "the system is down." The guy sitting next to me said that he had gotten there a half hour before they opened, had stood in a line at the door, like he was waiting to get Grateful Dead tickets for a show that promised to sell out within an hour; and he was barely ahead of me, who had just walked in.

They said that, as soon as the system was no longer "down," they were going to take donors in, in groups of 12, and perform mass stabbings of them (with the plasmapheresis needles, that is). They would catch everybody up; there wouldn't be people leaving at 9 at night, 6 hours after the place closed; like 2 Sundays ago...

I was Grateful for the Stephen King novel. I figured I had about 5 hours to go on it before I was done. And if the story got really good near the end there would be few things I'd rather be doing than sitting there reading and waiting for the system to come up.

Not so, for some of the people around me. Of course, to a man, they were all staring at their phones. A smallish, kind of light skinned black guy sitting across from me kept his knees rapidly bouncing, with a nervous impatience similar to what cats will do in the seconds leading up to their pouncing at a mouse or something.

I was glad that my own state of mind was much more tranquil, and that I had done deep breathing exercises and meditations upon being in the present moment, and that I had brought along a novel 1,070 pages in length.

Sunday being the last day in the week to claim the bonus, there was no possibility of leaving to return on a less hectic day; we were all trapped and doomed to our fates. Then a petite girl and a guy who seemed to be her boyfriend sat to my immediate left, perhaps subconsciously thinking that I represented the white section, since I was the only other white donor there, besides that girl. Her "boyfriend" looked kind of Latino. She was kind of scrawny and pale skinned and looked like she was once much prettier. She had kind of a drug ravaged look about her. Soon, her legs started bouncing up and down impatiently, in time with the guy across from us.

Then, there was a commotion as some staff members entered the front door with a huge cooler almost the size of a coffin. They had gone and gotten pizza, as a token of their appreciation of us bearing with the inconvenience of the system being down.

If they run all the affairs of that place like they handled the giving out of the pizza then that would explain their not getting donors out of there until 6 hours after the place closed.

All they did was to announce something about "pizza." Nothing about forming a line or that everyone can get one slice and then if there is still pizza left over, maybe seconds would be orderly distributed. Just "You're all welcome to some pizza!"

A scene ensued that I can only compare to a flock of pigeons having peanuts thrown to them, or maybe raccoons, after one of them has managed to topple a garbage can, spilling its contents on the ground in front of them all..

A crowd of about a dozen prospective donors of life-saving plasma amassed in front of the table that the pizzas were being set on, with the ones in front almost using the basketball move of "boxing out" to keep people from reaching past them to grab what they were grabbing. The first couple people to get there took entire pizza pies which they treated like a rebounded basketball that they had just grabbed, keeping a low center of gravity and using their elbows to create separation between them and the rest of the herd.They were able to spirit them off to less populated areas of the lobby to eat, because their competitors at the table had their eyes on the prize and seemed just glad to have those front runners out of their way.

Soon there were people munching away here and there with none of them apparently concerned about anyone who hadn't gotten any. I consoled myself with the fact that I didn't really want any pizza. The whole scene had kind of made me sick to my stomach to watch. Thankfully, I had arrived at the place with enough peace of mind to have kept me from saying: "Animals!" too loudly at the sight of the scene. Having run out of pizza so quickly, they decided to order more.It arrived about 45 minutes later, and the whole act was repeated, with most of those who had gotten all the pizza the first time getting all of it again.

I thought you were supposed to arrive at the donation center adequately fed and well hydrated.

I think the lone white white employee, the manager apparently is afraid to say things like: "Why don't we form a single line and then everyone will have a chance to get a slice..."

And, maybe add well rested to that list. I nodded off a couple times while hooked up to the machine and was just able to complete my donation before being warned that if I closed my eyes again they were going to unplug me, and I would only be compensated 5 dollars just for having shown up.

Then, as soon as I walked out of the place I saw the #62 bus go by, so I took my time in WalMart, getting cash back for the bus fare and a 9% alcohol beer that made me fall asleep on the #62. I slept until it had gone all the way to Canal Street and back, waking up when it was back at the same WalMart where I had started. I had to pay another fare and then ride back home again on it.

But I'm not going to start calling myself Danny Fiasco any time soon..