Fran Ross: Oreo

Cincinnati

My Worst School Assignment: Mr. Storch, criminally insane English teacher, told our class that we should get to know our city more intimately. “I volunteer to fuck Market Street,” whispered Joey Hershkowitz, class clown. This was my assignment: to do a first-hand report on all the statues in center city, from river to river, from Vine to Pine. Yes, he did mean first hand. Yes, “river to river” did refer to our beloved Schuylkill and our renowned Delaware. Yes, Vine Street is not exactly cheek by jowl with Pine Street. Yes, it was the dead of winter. Yes, I did freeze my kishkas . Yes, Storch is probably still at large in the Philadelphia school system.

New York

Advantages Philadelphia Has Over New York: Fairmount Park (more than four times bigger and better than Central Park). The park’s colonial houses: Strawberry Mansion, Lemon Hill, Belmont Mansion. The weeping cherry trees of George’s Hill, the Playhouse in the Park, Robin Hood Dell. Hoagies (more than four times better than heroes). Steak sandwiches (they don’t make them here the way they do at home: layers of paper-thin beef smothered in grilled onions; melted cheese, optional; catsup, yet another option!). People who wait for you to get off the subway before they try to get on. Smoking on the subway platform. Row houses. The Philadelphia Orchestra. Mustard pretzels with mustard (in New York — would you believe? — they sell mustard pretzels plain ). Red and white police cars so you can shout, “Look out, the red devil’s coming!”

Things I Miss About Philadelphia That Are Long Gone: Woodside Amusement Park. The Mastbaum movie theater. The Chinese Wall. Schuylkill Punch (no soup in the country is as chunky, as stick-to-your-ribs as the witches’ brew we called water). The raspy spiel of a huckster named Jesus.

Detroit

We have had two ashtrays for as long as I can remember. One says: Honi soit qui mal y pense . The other one is my favorite. It says: De robe flétrie/nul ne souci . The flêtrie ashtray is off-white ceramic. Two brown slashes at each of the corners accent the four depressions for cigarettes. Rounded red and green leaves sprig each of the four rim sections. The message is on the floor of the ashtray; it is painted in two lines in brown handwriting. Another sprig of rounded red and green leaves is just under the words. Touch it, children, and think of me.

Chattanooga

A Job I Had Before Going on the Road: I am working in a dry cleaner’s. A member walks in. She is huge and powerful. She is permanently ready to take offense. Her eyes slit in indignation, her lips form a sullen pout.

SHE (with eye-slitting and pouting) : Where mah clo’es? They been here since Tuesday! (This is Wednesday.)

ME (placatingly) :The tailor will get to your alterations as soon as his fracture heals, his wife gets out of the hospital, and the baby’s funeral is over.

SHE (the standard slit/pout) : Don’ gimme no scuses. Y’all must think I’m simple. They better be here t’morra, two-three o’clock. (She lumbers out.)

The expression on her back shows that she likes me, else I would now be on the floor with a broken nose. I close the shop and walk across the street to catch the trolley. I am standing directly opposite the shop when along comes Mr. Johnson with a huge pile of dirty clothes. I can smell them from where I stand. I stagger and hold on to a telephone pole for support. Mr. Johnson looks disconcerted. The shop is obviously closed. He stares at the door. Obviously, the thought of turning around and going back home, a matter of about fifty feet, does not occur to him in his disoriented condition. Oh-oh. He spots me. A relieved smile lights up his face. I look down the trolley tracks. I can see the trolley coming, but I can’t quite hear it. Meanwhile Mr. Johnson has dashed across the street.

HE: Hi.

ME: Hi.

HE (smiling) : Glad I caught you.

ME: Oh?

HE: Could you do me a favor?

ME (trying to get downwind of the funky shmatte he is waving under my nose) : What?

HE: Could you check these in for me?

ME (flabbergasted) : Look, Mr. Johnson, the store is closed. I’ve had a hard day and I’m anxious to get home and my trolley’s coming.

HE (considering the reasonableness of my speech) : I see. Well, couldn’t you just open the door and throw them in on the floor? I don’t mind. They’re dirty anyway.

ME (lying) : If I open the door any time between now and eight o’clock tomorrow morning, the alarm will go off.

HE (disappointed) : Oh. (Then, brilliant idea!) Tell you what. Why don’t you just take these home with you and then bring them in with you in the morning?

The trolley rattles toward us, its metallic jig fortunately out-clamoring my words as I tell Mr. Johnson where to go, what to do, and what to kiss. He is still standing there cradling his redolent bundle as I settle back and watch him recede until he is a raggedy blue dot.

Davenport

Pensées d’Hélène : I used to think that Rudy Vallee was short for Rudolph Valentino. He is.

Minneapolis

Jobs I Have Had (cont’d) : I once demonstrated fill-in painting at a ten-cent store. I would gather a crowd around me and take out my Sylvan Scene Number 10 cardboard with its jigsaw of shapes, all numbered. For about three minutes, I would do my cyborgian routine, showing the shoppers how to put bleeding-gum crimson in all the 5’s — never in a 7 or a 2. Then, all of a sudden, I would go crazy. I could not bring myself to stay within the lines. My blind-man blue would stray from the 52-to-75 lower-sky section, where it belonged, and would begin to invade the cavity yellow of the 45-to-48 cloud tinge. But the management kept me on. They merely warned against sloppiness, saying prissily, “Neatness counts, neatness counts.”

I kicked at the traces. I started to seek out the potential artists among the old men and housewives who were my students. I told them not to bother with these shlock paints, to save up and buy some real oils or watercolors or even crayons. I showed them how to mix pigments, stretch canvas, keeping just ahead of them by studying at night. For my first life class, I invited the harridan whose regular mooch was ten feet on either side of the double doors of that Woolworth’s to come in and pose for us. Each of my students gave her ten cents. The total take was more than she could have hustled outside in the cold. In the middle of their first fumbling attempts at what critic Bernard Mosher has called “gesture drawing,” I was fired. “Don’t stay in the lines!” I managed to shout over my shoulder as I was thrown out.

Because of my experience with painting-by-numbers (I didn’t bother to mention that I’d been fired), I had the perfect background and experience for my next job. Heshie Herschberg, dress wholesaler extraordinaire , was faced with a Chicken Little disaster. A five-thousand-lot shipment of sky-blue summer cottons had arrived with a piece of sky missing. With an empty display of resistance, each of the dresses, stewing in celestial juices, had refused to dye. There it was — a bull’s-eye about the size of a dime that would, if given a chance, ring the size 12 average whatsis of the size 12 average shopper (the biggest market for this simply cut basic that you could shop anywhere in).

As Heshie outlined it, this was my job: “Listen closely, girlie, this particular number, it’s my bread and it’s my butter. And to me a life isn’t a life without it should have bread and butter. If, God forbid, I shouldn’t be able to unload this number as per usual, my wife Sadie will never let me hear the end of it that ‘Revka-down-the-block-she-should-drop-dead was able to go to Florida and get a nice tan and me — whose husband is supposed to be such a big deal in the garment world, yet — I can’t afford to go around the corner.’ Now, this number is going to roll past you at a rate of, oh, one every five seconds, but we can adjust — faster, slower, you name it. I want you should wash your hands real good. I want people that they are walking down the street and never saw you before in their lives that they should take time out to pass a remark that such clean hands they have never before seen on a person, except maybe on a surgeon as he slips into the rubber gloves, and what with the dope and dreck that they had when they saw it on the surgeon, his hands were pretty blurry, but on a bet they would say yours were cleaner. With these clean, clean hands, I want you should gently grasp each of these number 12 regulars here, pull it tenderly toward you, and then with these No. 2 Magic Markers that my brother Morris, he should live and be well, has seen fit to provide me with at a special discount, with these No. 2 Magic Markers, you should with a swish and with a swash fill in that little dime-size white spot just below where the pupik should be. Sam Spade — pardon me — with an X-ray machine should be able to look at this dress and not see dark edges from where the Magic Marker overlapped onto the part that’s already blue. He should not be able to see one little hint, one little breath, one little zephyr of a white spot left over from where the No. 2 Magic Marker, God forbid, missed. Have I conveyed the importance of this task? Yes? Well, then, begin. I will stand here until I see that you’ve got the hang of it, the swing of it, the art of it. Good, good. I knew you were the one for the job when I saw you walk in. I will come back in an hour to check on your progress. I figure that with hard work and steady effort, you should be able to say to me at six o’clock on the dot, just before I am ready to lock up and go home to Sadie the nudzh , ‘Mr. Herschberg, I have the honor of informing you that I have finished my appointed task and the number 12 average is, thank God, ready for shipment.’”