A Coke and a Smile (names changed)

“If I can’t be the tablecloth, I sho’nuff ain’t gonna be no dishrag.” Not soon to be forgotten words from a wise, experienced, elderly, spicy, eccentric-possibly-bordering-on-paranoid-something lady who use to come up to the law office where I worked in my 20’s while finishing college. Her name was Ada Shields. She was a tiny black lady with sometimes-wild hair, and she had a thing of some sort with the building’s maintenance man, Jerry. Jerry was a roundish, elderly man with a completely different disposition from Ms. Shields. He had an easy way about himself, and he had a kind smile for me every morning, riding the elevator with me on many occasions, all the way up to the 8th Floor. He talked about this and that but never anything real personal. While I always considered him to be the sweetest and friendliest person in the building, it was he who told me one day, “There you go, as always, with a coke & a smile.” I love people who quote movies and songs in normal speech, because I do it too, and here he was quoting a commercial in the most endearing way. I have never forgotten this exchange, and I can see his face and hear his voice as clearly today as I did when it happened close to 20 years ago… his voice was scratchy but soft, rugged but gentle. I don’t think I ever knew Jerry's last name. I often wondered about his life… back when he was a young black man in this small, southern town. There’s a lot of history there… there’s a lot of history on that very street. I couldn’t help but wonder what he might wonder about me and who I was on the inside. Looking back, I hope he saw my genuine spirit the way I saw his.

Over my 2+ years working there in that old building with a bank on the bottom floor and law offices, accounting offices, and who knows what else in all the other offices of each of the 10 floors, I came to know the stories of many people, most definitely just in parts, and over time was able to put pieces together to form a more complete puzzle of their lives. Some of the pieces would never be available to me because my only interactions with them were in the confines of the law office during that particular season of their lives. But in the same way people will share and overshare with people at a hair appointment, people who are entrusting their very personal business in a law firm will often show you some of their other layers… or at least they did to me in that office. Ms. Shields talked to me like I was - if not her close friend - someone she felt familiar enough to talk to about her men troubles. She talked to me in the way that my Grandma Driver talked to me, when she told me way too many things that were really sort of inappropriate to tell your granddaughter. That being said, I also think Ms. Shields just might have been the type to tell her life story to anyone who happened to be listening… I preferred to think she felt an affection for me as I did her and all of her quirky self.

At first I took Ms. Shields' every word seriously. And then, after a time, well after I learned that the Jerry she spoke of was MY Jerry… my friend from the elevator and hallways of that old bank building, I ended up hearing enough of her stories to begin seeing them both through another set of lenses… still rooting for them individually, caring about them individually, seeing their layers, individually, of course, but wondering if they saw the sides of each other that I did from my outsiders view and wondering if one or both of them was as batshit crazy as some of her stories implied. There were days when all I heard were loving stories of him wooing her, going to her house to help her with a honey-do list, bringing her flowers, spending time with her. And then there were days when she told me about the ladder that she found against her house, and poison in her sugar container. I remember thinking there was no way that my Coke-and-a-smile-Jerry was climbing up a ladder to her house and he damn sure wasn’t putting poison in her sugar bowl. Jerry seemed like the type to tinker around a toolshed when he wasn’t at work, rocking back and forth a bit when he walked to balance his round frame in his elderly years. If a person can actually have a twinkle in their eyes, he had a twinkle in his eyes. Was he some sociopath who was able to sell himself so believably as a sweet old man? Or was he really just a sweet old man who was handling his lady friend with kid gloves in order to manage her crazy as best as he could? I never found out then, and I still don’t know now. And, sadly, when I googled Ms. Shields' name to see if I could find out anything about her, I saw her obituary pop up at the top of the Google results. She died 7 years ago at age 74… it’s amazing how when I met her in the late 90’s I thought she was already at least that age.

I have always had this thing for peoples’ stories… wanting to learn every little nugget about them. My favorite sort of book is a good non-fiction, a memoir, an autobiography, a historically accurate piece. And when I was a kid and Iistened to someone's stories, I believed everything they said, assuming that, even if there were inaccuracies, they were true to that person’s point of view. It took me telling an amazing story to my babysitter when I was 10 years old, to hear myself say words that I realized for the very first time didn’t make sense out loud, to suddenly - right there where I sat - realize that a story my Grandpa Driver had told me over and over could not possibly be true. While it was a face palm moment, slightly devastating that I had so believed something that wasn’t true, it was also a moment of realizing that my Grandpa had an amazing imagination and brilliant storytelling skills. I had visualized every word he’d spoken, as he told me about the reason his Chihuahua, "Tippy", was so mean and pissed off all the time. I knew from my Grandpa’s very detailed stories that Tippy was was once an Indian Warrior who was shot in the heart by an arrow, leaving the scar that I saw on his chest and asked my Grandpa about… that he nearly died but a Medicine Man healed him and brought him back to life… as a Chihuahua. Even to type this, it’s hard to imagine how naive someone has to be at any age to believe a story like that… but maybe it has less to do with that and more to do with the fact that I thought my Grandpa was larger than life and would never, ever tell me something that wasn’t true. Well, that and the fact that I was very gullible as a kid. It’s why I sat on the floorboard of his truck, trembling in fear, not daring to raise my head above the seat or speak a single word, because the Indians were searching for little blonde girls to scalp, and they were peeking out from the rocks along the highway with their bows and arrows… I couldn’t see them, but they were very skilled and very perceptive, and they would find me if I uttered a word. We have a lot of Native American blood in our family, and so why wouldn't I believe that my Grandpa had some inside information on this topic?

Looking back, I think it’s clear that I was probably chatting that old man’s ear off, and he just wanted a break, some peace and quiet. Sure, he chose a pretty racially insensitive way to shut me up, but, you have to admit, it had a stroke of brilliance to it. I was quiet, if only for the stretch of highway that had rocks alongside it. I have little kids now, and I know that feeling of sometimes just needing to not hear anything for a few minutes. I could say that my Grandpa’s stories are one of the reasons I have been slightly speculative about things I hear and prompted my permanent need for some sort of physical evidence, but, all in all, it probably just made me a more discerning listener, truth be told.

So as I listened to Ms. Shields' stories that got more and more unbelievable over time, I constantly wondered whether any of it was true. Unlike my Grandpa’s stories, which were clearly just stories to him, I do believe that SHE believed it was true. Nevertheless, I learned plenty from her. I saw an elderly woman with needs - emotional, physical, and, yes, sexual. In my early 20’s, I hadn’t reached a point of recognizing that there’s no age cut-off where sensualism and emotional and physical desires are concerned. One still feels the need to be loved, to love, to touch and to be touched, to feel intimate and to be intimate at any age. I think it was from Ms. Shields that I learned of this truth. I recall the alarm bells going off in my head as she talked about her "relations" (yes, those) with Jerry… I certainly didn’t want these visuals, but just like one of those dirty novels you find on your aunt’s bookshelves, with their ridiculous descriptives of body parts and forbidden sex, you can’t shut it off and you just continue to take in the words, through an uncomfortable curiosity, with your top lip pulled to one side waiting for it to be over but kind of wondering how it went. What I learned from Ms. Shields is that in the version of Jerry that she felt she knew, she understood what it was she wanted to feel. She wanted to feel important and loved, respected and desired, cherished and special. So when she told me the story about how Jerry went from helping her with a little bit of money here and there to eventually just leaving her bed, getting dressed, and leaving money on her bedside table, she knew it was unacceptable. She wasn’t about to feel like “no hooka”, “no prostitutin”. And she told me one day, while she was walking out the door waving her hands over her head, “If I can’t be the table cloth, I sho’nuff ain’t gonna be no dishrag.” And, ladies, if that doesn’t show you the wisdom of this wacky lady… I mean… we should all walk away from any situation where we feel like the dishrag. Wise, experienced, elderly, spicy, eccentric-possibly-bordering-on-paranoid-something Ada Shields. She still makes me smile.
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