Unorthodox Angles/Andrew Gramling

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Tales Across Time: The Unstoppable Ripple Effect Part 2

Without any warning, Gina took off into the crowd to continue watching the brawl that had just exploded nearby and had begun to move away from us.

“Gina, wait!” I shouted, but it had no effect on her decision-making process, assuming she even heard me over all the commotion that was going on all around us. If she had heard me, she blatantly ignored what I said and prioritized her own interests over my concern for her safety. She was fueled on alcohol, adrenaline, and birthday excitement, and was too amped-up to care anything about the danger that was present in this situation.

Without hesitation, I ran after her, attempting to find her before she herself became a victim of the rumbling men on the block. As I hurried past someone who was watching the fight, he quickly pushed me to the side. I turned around to look at him and he wasn’t focused on me at all. He was completely focused on the fight and displayed the body language of someone who was thinking about jumping in. He wasn’t alone in that regard. I thought about retaliating, but realized it wasn’t anything personal, and that I didn’t have time to deal with him because the most important thing was finding Gina, so I left him to his own karma and continued through the crowd.

By the time I caught up to Gina, it was already too late. Some girl about the same height as her with scraggly blonde hair took a swing directly at her head. Gina was able to duck out of the way of the punch, causing the blonde-haired girl to instead hit another girl I had previously gone to school with named Maria in the face who was standing behind Gina. Maria immediately retaliated by jumping on the attacker right in front of me and started pulling on her long hair. I nonchalantly stuck my hand out and caught them just before they both hit the sidewalk, as the two seemed to be inseparably entangled. They appeared to have no awareness that I was even holding them up. After several seconds I started getting bored and decided to let them hit the ground, but softer than they would have. Maria, intensely angered by the other girl’s unjustified and unintentional blow that was meant for Gina, was clearly dominating the fight as she was the one on top the entire time. After a couple of minutes, the two girls got pulled apart from each other by other members of the crowd.

“Hell nah! She shouldn’t be pulling on people’s hair like that in a fight!” the “victim” proclaimed. Once the fuse was lit, a chain-reaction of violence spread all around and threatened to light the whole block up. The scraggly-haired blonde, trying to regain her composure after being dominated in the fight, had some words with a young man who was standing just around the corner of Burger King, and he reached his arm around the corner and started slapping her angrily in response to whatever she said to him. She wanted violence, but it came in a package different from what she was expecting to get. People had something else planned for her instead.

I finally caught up with Gina, who then told me exactly what happened. She said the girl called her a racial slur (Gina being adopted from Brazil and having an olive skin tone). She then tried to punch Gina, and the rest was exactly what I had witnessed. Gina wasn’t able to let it go, so the problems hadn’t ended yet. The girl who tried to punch Gina was talking to a group of police officers near the edge of the sidewalk. Gina, armed with her empty Nitty Gritty birthday mug, headed right over to them like a gangster, stating that she was going to break the mug over the girl’s head.

“Gina! There’s five cops RIGHT THERE! If you do it, you’re going to jail!” I said as I jumped in front of her.

“I don’t care! I got two thousand dollars! I’ll be out by the end of the weekend!”

Gina wouldn’t listen to logic and kept repeating over and over about her two thousand dollars. I kept her occupied long enough, though, that she eventually calmed down and forgot about her vendetta, and those of us who she invited out were able to pull her away to safety, and we eventually left the chaotic scene.

A bunch of us crashed at Gina’s house that night, and in the morning after waking up, I had only one question for her.

“Do you really have two thousand dollars?”

“No,” she replied without any hesitation and almost ashamedly.

I was grateful that Gina didn’t get into more trouble than she did, and I realized that if I wasn’t sober, things might’ve turned out slightly differently. My ability to make wise decisions would have certainly diminished, and I might’ve joined the ranks of everyone else in the crowd who was enjoying the chaos. I sure picked a good night to remain sober. I traded fun and excitement for ensuring my friends and I didn’t end up being the ones in the back of the ambulance that was usually picking people up at that location on the weekends.

My one goal that I was sure would lift me above the chaos, since I didn’t have the clarity or willpower to leave behind this old lifestyle yet, was my planned trip to New Mexico. The reason I chose that particular place was because my old friend Cameron, who I had known since middle school had moved there just after sophomore year. My father and I visited him once on the way to California during a road trip in the summer of ‘97, so I had an idea about the kind of terrain I would experience there and welcomed the opportunity when he invited me to come out there for an extended stay. My means to be able to afford such a venture was working at Pasqual’s and saving money. This was my third time working for the company. It wasn’t exciting or inspiring work, but the thought of being able to leave and never look back was all the inspiration I needed to continue on.

Among the other kitchen workers were a couple of familiar faces. A young man named Ian and another named Richard worked alongside me in the kitchen. I first met them both in sixth grade at Van Hise Middle School. I met Ian because we sat at the same table in shop class. We got along well enough. We were all ranked by size, and out of the four of us who sat at the table, I was nicknamed “Little Dude” and Ian was nicknamed “Ultra Dude.” I had since then gained significant ground on him. Richard was also in the same class, but I didn’t have much interaction with him until the following year. He was one of those kids that seemed to hate me for no reason other than I lived, and then the year after that, whatever issues he had with me were gone without any explanation. I even ran into him at West Towne Mall one night and we talked like we were old friends. It certainly made dealing with him in the present much more of a smooth process.

Richard was married to one of the owners of Pasqual’s sister named Claire. Claire also worked at Pasqual’s in the deli. The first time I ever saw her, her face lit up like no other person’s ever had with an open-mouthed smile that shined. I quickly realized she was very kind and an upright person of distinguished character. Her brother, Ben, one of two owners, was a livewire. He was very energetic, verbal and talkative, and he also had a sense of humor as an added bonus. He would work with the kitchen staff sometimes on weekends when it was busiest, and he was very forgiving of mistakes as long as they weren’t repeated too often. There also seemed to be little if any barrier between him and staff and was easily approachable. He didn’t display the kind of behavior I typically think of when I think of the owner archetype. He almost had the presence of a friend.

Most of the remaining Pasqual’s staff were no less quirky and animated, and that would probably include me, though I can’t truly say that objectively. Several of the kitchen workers were from Mexico, with varying English-speaking skill levels ranging from fluent to very basic. There were a lot of crude jokes made all throughout any shift, including some that were actually funny but unmentionable, and sometimes there would be posturing over who was the real man of the kitchen. I was both equally entertained and equally frustrated by people’s careless and uncensored mouths.

Around the Fourth of July of 2003, one of the deli workers named Lindsey invited all staff to a picnic just outside of her apartment which was across the street from Pasqual’s. I and several others attended. We eventually made our way into The Laurel Tavern nearby, which later became our official meeting place on Saturday nights after the busiest shift of the week was over. We ordered drinks and played pool doubles in the back area. Lindsey kept trying to distract my shots by pretending to be seductive and hanging all over the pool table, but then wanted no part of it when I called her on it, to my embarrassment.

After a couple of hours, everyone else left, and I remained playing pool with whoever challenged me, like I usually did. A father and son duo entered the bar and began playing pool with me after a while. The son was close to my age, so I asked him where he went to high school and what year he graduated.

“Middleton High School, class of ‘97.”

“Oh! I graduated in the class of ‘98!” Did you know a girl named Jenny Leightske who went there?” I asked.

Jenny was the first real girlfriend I ever had. I met her through an old friend named Scott at Edgefest in the fall of ‘95. Her friend, Lindsey (a different Lindsey), who was the girlfriend of Scott, suddenly and unexpectedly asked me if I wanted a hug from her. She was about three inches taller than me and very beautiful, so I wasn’t turning down that offer. Later on in the evening, I saw her talking to another boy for a minute. She gave him a hug and then returned to our group. The next day, Scott was talking to Lindsey on the phone and mentioned that Jenny was wondering if she should go out with the other boy she hugged or not. Without hesitating, I said, “She can go out with me if she wants to.”

It was truly the boldest thing I had done until that point, and I didn’t even know until that moment that I liked her like that. Some switch inside me got flipped by her mention of going out with the other boy. Surprisingly, she agreed to it. Jenny and I met up one day at Lindsey’s house in Cross Plains and talked on the phone for hours almost every day since then. I experienced no indications that she was unsatisfied with our relationship, except for her mentioning once that it was a shame that we lived so far away from each other and never got to see each other. After only a couple of months, Jenny had another friend of hers break up with me over the phone, which left me shell shocked. My first relationship and first breakup happened so close to each other. It was probably the first time in my life I ever experienced a sensation of depression, as I pondered why she gave up on me so easily and questioned my own self-value, losing much sleep over the torment.

Surprisingly, a few months later, after I had gotten over the situation and moved forward, Jenny and Lindsey both called me in a three-way conversation, first remarking on how much my voice had changed in such a short time, but part of it was due to the lack of emotion I felt from distancing myself from Jenny emotionally rather than any effect puberty had on me. “There’s something I wanted to ask you, but I can’t remember,” Jenny said to me several times during the call. My assumption was that she wanted to ask me back out, but I didn’t give her any signs of encouragement, and we ended the phone call without her “remembering” whatever it was she wanted to ask me.

A few months after the unexpected phone call, Jenny and Lindsey invited Scott and I to visit them at Middleton High School on a day we had off but was a regular school day for them. We met them outside of the school during lunch hour, and I said hi to Jenny and absolutely nothing else. This was the first time I remember ever being cold to anybody, and it was the last time I ever saw Jenny, despite talking to her on the phone a couple of times after that and her questioning why I was so silent towards her and appearing emotionally disturbed.

The last I heard, Scott told me that she became a model and also a single mother. She definitely was beautiful enough for that kind of work. Of all the young ladies I grew up around, she would’ve been the most qualified to play the role of an angel in a production because of her cherubic face.

The young man who I was playing pool with paused for a moment and looked down at the ground to think after I asked him if he knew her.

“Yeah, I knew her,” he said finally, almost sighing, and then paused again, all the while without looking up.

“She died a couple of years ago. One night she went to sleep and never woke up,” he finished.

I felt stunned. Besides family, I hadn’t known too many people who had died. I no longer resented her for leaving me but now felt sad that her life ended so early, and my empathy extended to her daughter who I never met that no longer had her mother in her life and perhaps her father as well. I never heard about what happened to him.

Without explaining how exactly I knew Jenny, I continued to play pool and pretended not to be fazed by the tragic revelation. As selfish as it may have been, a part of me felt relieved that I wasn’t with her all of that time, only to lose her suddenly like that, but after I went home later, I shed a couple of tears over her memory, knowing that her story had ended, and she would forever be a part of mine..

As if news of one death wasn’t tragic enough. After working at Pasqual’s for about five months, the owner Ben’s sister Claire died suddenly and without any warning due to a problem with her liver. Everyone was shocked, understandably. We were all invited to Claire’s memorial service, and I remember seeing the old owner of Pasqual’s, Libby, who I had personally worked with two years earlier, once again tying the past to the present.

Claire was described by the pastor as a bright light in this world, and based on the short time I had known her, I thought that was the perfect way to describe her. She was a person of little or no malice who never saw herself as better than anyone else despite the fact that others in her position may have easily felt that way. The next day at work, I saw Ben in the front area before we opened. He was totally destroyed after losing his sister. I gave him a hug of support, and he thanked me for attending her memorial service. Without speaking, I gave a deep nod and walked off. It was a combination of not wanting to say anything stupid and not always being the most verbal person out there.

Despite losses and troubles, there was no direction to move but forward. The past was gone, leaving nothing to return to.