Some fries with that...
There is no racism at DonKay, and that's because we get entries like this every day. There is just nothing to hide behind when you have everybody's private thoughts laying around in notebooks and napkins, their quiet confessions between themselves and paper. This is why we labour, and in obscurity as well, because we are working at a pretty sweet level of self-representation. For instance there is the self-rep of the usual blog, which is self-to-world and is in gerenral worse than talking to someone face-to-face. But DonKay shit, baby, is self-rep that's self-talking-to-self, with varying degrees of the world kept in mind. This is why Donkee archivists are so angry with 1430's project, trying to shut us down and seize our file cabinets and making failed attempts to persuade our delivery man to allow poison put into our Chinese food (gotcha bitches! They ain't YO new good friends.) They think we are breaking the trust of our members. But really we are just putting that trust on display. For instance, Kevin Pulosky finished high school in the late 80's, 3 years after this post, and seems like a nice enough guy.
The second year in a row that we take our big class field trip to a hospital in Saint Louis, and second year in a row that we stop in the same restaurant in southern Illinois, which is southern for real if you hear the way that people talk. Anyway this place is probably the weirdest place ever. Not to sound bad but I think that it is a place mostly for black people, especially at night when it is also a dance place. During the day it is huge and half of the tables and couches are empty except when our whole grade shows up.
Anyway just like last year I made a big mess of ordering. There is plexiglass between you and the people working there just like a bank, and it's yellow with age and grease, the white light shining from the signs above their heads and it seems hard for them to hear you. I first asked just for three big things of fries; I thought it would be easy and cheap. But then I remembered that they have other good things like fried fish, which I could see there in the tub of oil with bubbles all around it.
The cashier had a funny policy with the money. Pete right in front of me ordered a hot dog and two fries, and gave some money over, but then the cashier, when all his food was ready just gave him one fries and some of his money back instead of saying before that he didn’t have enough. I gave Pete some change and then the guy gave him his second fries, but then the same thing happened with me when I tried to change to a fish sandwich.
I hate myself when I try to order, especially when the person talks different than me, for some reason I always change my own voice, trying to sound clear I guess, but I end up talking like an old man from like England, loud and slow but tortured in some way that makes it impossible to understand. I mean, I asked for a fried fish sandwhich, and the guy gave me a little travel box of Kellogg’s All-Star cereal and a carton of milk. I didn’t even know if he was insulting me or making fun of me or if our miscommunication was that huge, but I just took it, thinking I could save it for later on the bus ride.
Once you get past the little room with the food counter there you turn into the huge dance-floor restaurant part of the place. As I said there are couches and tables and there was even rap music playing. Some of the stupid guys from class who had already eaten were dancing in a stupid way to the music, making fun of it. Me and Pete said that those guys needed their asses kicked. We walked up some stairs onto wooden balcony and found a lot of half empty couches there, and there was also people not from our school.
Me, Derrick and Pete sat there, and Derrick started talking to this guy that didn’t seem much older than us. He was friendly but a little scary too, his eyes were all wet like he was constantly misty eyed about the world, and he talked really like poetically too about things as if it was all a mystery. Soon he was asking us if we knew how to dance to this kind of music. We said sort of, that at least we watched MTV and sometimes danced it with our friends. Somehow at this moment it was me that was talking to him and our eyes were kind of locked and so when he got up and started demonstrating the way to dance I saw that it was something that maybe I could do ok so somehow I found myself getting up and trying to dance with him.
I can admit that the dancing looked a little like fighting just in the way we were pumping our hands, but there was no way it could be thought we were actually fighting, but suddenly this guy who works there, who surprisingly was white and had a microphone on his ear came up to us and said that there was no dancing on the balcony. Then some girl not from my school but like greek or something got up and acted all traumatized and said that the last time she came up here some one dancing accidentally punched her in the head when she was sitting there and she was like going to faint from remembering and it was all a fiasco of people surrounding her and the guy disappeared.
I sat back down with Derrick and Pete and said, see what happens? Whenever I try to do something that’s out there, things get fucked up. Its like god punishes me and is making me the way I am. They just looked at me like they didn’t know what to believe.
The second year in a row that we take our big class field trip to a hospital in Saint Louis, and second year in a row that we stop in the same restaurant in southern Illinois, which is southern for real if you hear the way that people talk. Anyway this place is probably the weirdest place ever. Not to sound bad but I think that it is a place mostly for black people, especially at night when it is also a dance place. During the day it is huge and half of the tables and couches are empty except when our whole grade shows up.
Anyway just like last year I made a big mess of ordering. There is plexiglass between you and the people working there just like a bank, and it's yellow with age and grease, the white light shining from the signs above their heads and it seems hard for them to hear you. I first asked just for three big things of fries; I thought it would be easy and cheap. But then I remembered that they have other good things like fried fish, which I could see there in the tub of oil with bubbles all around it.
The cashier had a funny policy with the money. Pete right in front of me ordered a hot dog and two fries, and gave some money over, but then the cashier, when all his food was ready just gave him one fries and some of his money back instead of saying before that he didn’t have enough. I gave Pete some change and then the guy gave him his second fries, but then the same thing happened with me when I tried to change to a fish sandwich.
I hate myself when I try to order, especially when the person talks different than me, for some reason I always change my own voice, trying to sound clear I guess, but I end up talking like an old man from like England, loud and slow but tortured in some way that makes it impossible to understand. I mean, I asked for a fried fish sandwhich, and the guy gave me a little travel box of Kellogg’s All-Star cereal and a carton of milk. I didn’t even know if he was insulting me or making fun of me or if our miscommunication was that huge, but I just took it, thinking I could save it for later on the bus ride.
Once you get past the little room with the food counter there you turn into the huge dance-floor restaurant part of the place. As I said there are couches and tables and there was even rap music playing. Some of the stupid guys from class who had already eaten were dancing in a stupid way to the music, making fun of it. Me and Pete said that those guys needed their asses kicked. We walked up some stairs onto wooden balcony and found a lot of half empty couches there, and there was also people not from our school.
Me, Derrick and Pete sat there, and Derrick started talking to this guy that didn’t seem much older than us. He was friendly but a little scary too, his eyes were all wet like he was constantly misty eyed about the world, and he talked really like poetically too about things as if it was all a mystery. Soon he was asking us if we knew how to dance to this kind of music. We said sort of, that at least we watched MTV and sometimes danced it with our friends. Somehow at this moment it was me that was talking to him and our eyes were kind of locked and so when he got up and started demonstrating the way to dance I saw that it was something that maybe I could do ok so somehow I found myself getting up and trying to dance with him.
I can admit that the dancing looked a little like fighting just in the way we were pumping our hands, but there was no way it could be thought we were actually fighting, but suddenly this guy who works there, who surprisingly was white and had a microphone on his ear came up to us and said that there was no dancing on the balcony. Then some girl not from my school but like greek or something got up and acted all traumatized and said that the last time she came up here some one dancing accidentally punched her in the head when she was sitting there and she was like going to faint from remembering and it was all a fiasco of people surrounding her and the guy disappeared.
I sat back down with Derrick and Pete and said, see what happens? Whenever I try to do something that’s out there, things get fucked up. Its like god punishes me and is making me the way I am. They just looked at me like they didn’t know what to believe.
posted by M.N.V.L. Local 1430 at 1:16 PM
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