#we don’t actually like football that much but loving the Packers is ingrained into young Wiscsonsonites

[iamnotthedog]

MORRISON: WINTER 1995

When Jeni finally returned from Africa, she was no longer the innocent, naïve, pudgy-faced college student that she had once been. Mom and Don and Adam and I all drove to snowy Chicago to pick her up at the airport. Her flight came in rather late in the evening, and I don’t really remember the night very well, but there is a photograph of the three siblings that helps things: Adam and Jeni and I are all in front of a large, floor-to-ceiling window in the airport, a waist-high railing running along the window’s length behind us. No planes or vehicles are visible outside; everything beyond the glass is blackened by the night sky. Adam is squinting in the flash of the camera over on the far right side of the shot; he is definitely much too far in the foreground to have been caught there purposely by the photographer, who was more than likely our mother.1 Adam looks young with his shaggy brown bowl-cut and baggy windbreaker—or I should say that he looks his age, as he was only seven—but the thinness of his face and his long arms and bony knees seems to suggest that he is or will soon be entering the first of many awkward life stages leading up to puberty. His already pale forehead and face are whitened even more so by the close flash of the camera, and distract from the actual subject of the photo, who was obviously supposed to be Jeni. I am in the center of the photograph, also distracting from Jeni but back behind her a bit, and unlike Adam, I am definitely locked firmly in the strong jaws of Father Puberty. My arms and legs don’t seem to fit my body, and my long pale face and tall forehead are spattered with red pimples. My shoulder-length blonde hair is tilted to the left, suggesting head movement, and my lips are twisting, contorting, coming out of a smile but not quite there yet. Jeni stands between Adam and I in a beautiful, hand-knit, African-looking hooded sweater, her face far more tan than Adam’s or mine, her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. Both Jeni and I have our arms held out awkwardly, away from our torsos and pointed towards each other, but flaccid—we aren’t reaching for each other, but have just finished a hug and are pulling away. Everything about the photo says, “a bit too late on this one.” A classic mistake in many of Mom’s photographs.

I was taken aback at how skinny and tan Jeni was when we first saw her emerge from the tunnel that night. Her hair was bleached out from the sun, and her eyes were a light and stunningly radiant blue. She smelled of exotic oils, and hugged us all and told us repeatedly how glad she was to be home, then Adam and I mentioned that she probably wanted to eat some good ol’ American fast food, having eaten mostly Ugali for the past two years.2 Whether Jeni actually wanted fast food or not, she went along with the whole thing. We went to McDonald’s or Burger King or Arby’s or Wendy’s. Or maybe it was Taco Bell, though it’s questionable how American Taco Bell is. Taco Bell isn’t Mexican or American. It isn’t anything. 

I remember sitting in that McDonald’s or Arby’s or Burger King or Taco Bell or Wendy’s, watching Jeni as she told us stories of disabling sickness and schoolhouse drama and wildlife safaris and fighting with local tribes over the building of her schoolhouse. She seemed a lot different to me: more independent, more confident, and definitely more boastful. Boastful in a good way, though. She wasn’t trying to impress as she always had when she was a teenager. She was self-assured, and it fit her well.

There are a couple particular stories Jeni told that first week that she was home that I either exaggerated to my friends as a child and lied about enough to actually believe them, or that actually happened and have stuck with me because of just how strange and alien to my sheltered and conservative American existence they had been up to that point. Whether I have been lying about them for all of these years or not, they have most definitely become so ingrained in my second hand memories of Jeni in Africa that they have become true to me, and I’ll even find myself telling them now that I am an adult, even though I have never actually confirmed whether they actually happened or not since reaching an age when I have learned that one doesn’t need to make things up in order to tell a good story.

The first story involved a cheetah and a local tribesman on a rainy July evening. Jeni was living in a very small, rural village at the time. The sun had set, and she was asleep in her windowless hut—the wind howling through the fields outside, rustling the eucalyptus trees—the rain pattering on her tin roof. She was awakened to a young tribesman peeking through her window, hissing at her.

“Psst!” he hissed. “Psst!”

“What?” she whispered, rolling over on her cot and pulling her blanket up to her chin. One can only imagine the thoughts rolling through her head—thoughts of murder, robbery, rape. “What do you want?”

“There is a cheetah on your roof,” the young man whispered back, straining his hoarse voice to be heard over the relentless rain. “Do not leave until I tell you it is okay.”

And that was that. A humid African night, Jeni lying awake on her cot, a young tribesman standing in her window, and a member of the fastest species of mammal in the world crouching on her roof in the rain, hoping one of them would run from the hut so it could give chase and have itself a hot meal. Jeni lay there for hours, her breaths short and quick, her muscles tense, but eventually she did fall asleep. She awoke in the morning to find the cheetah and the tribesman gone.

The second story involved Jeni’s first safari—an amazing journey that brought us pictures of baboons, elephants, giraffes and hippopotami, rhinoceros and zebras, wildebeests, hyenas, and gazelles, crocodiles, bison, and aardvarks. Jeni was in a bus with a dozen other people—mostly English tourists, but a few locals—and a short distance away, just across a wide open field, there were a few elephants walking across the horizon. The group was ogling the elephants and snapping pictures, when the safari guide turned and made a little yelping noise that was obviously an expression of concern. They all turned to find that behind them, on the other side of the bus, was another slightly smaller elephant—a “juvenile male,” the guide said—and he was obviously separated from his herd and not very happy about it. He was flapping his ears and shaking his head, grunting and stomping his front feet and making a whole bunch of racket.

The tour guide told the bus driver to stop creeping forward, and he told everyone else to sit down and stay still as he sat and reached down to the floor under his seat to grab a very, very large gun and a box of shells. “Just in case,” he said, smiling nervously. Then, before anyone could even register what was happening, the elephant trumpeted loudly and charged at the bus with its head held high and its ears sticking straight out to the sides, and the guide dropped his box of shells and everyone on the bus screamed and dove to the side of the bus that was furthest from the elephant, where they buried their heads in each others’ armpits and laps and some of them said short, quick prayers (like “Fuck, Jesus,” and “Oh, God.”)

Miraculously, though, the elephant pulled up just before smashing his head into the bus, then turned abruptly to the side with a heaving huff. He walked around the bus, so slowly, and he was close enough that they could all hear him breathing and look into his one beady eye and smell the strong, musty smell emanating from his skin. And as he walked away toward the rest of his herd some of the tourists noticed a heavy secretion coming from his penis and a couple of them got a nervous chuckle out of that.

The best thing that happened to Jeni in Kenya, though, was that she found love, or at least a few years’ worth. Not two weeks after Jeni had returned from the wild and unpredictable Kenyan countryside, Don and I were again in the car, this time going to pick up Jeni’s new boyfriend from the train station in Rockford, Illinois. His name was Jez, and all Don or I knew about him was that he was an Englishman—born and raised in Manchester—and that he was “really very nice” and had a lot of tattoos.

Jeni and Jez’s meeting is quite the romantic story, actually: Jez worked construction for the Peace Corps, and had been building the schoolhouse that Jeni was teaching in the whole time she lived in that rural little village in Kenya. At 35, Jez was roughly ten years Jeni’s senior, and he was a man’s man—a big dude with shaggy blonde hair and a round beer belly, his sunburnt arms covered in tattoos, and he had a satellite radio in his hut so he could listen to his Manchester United football games, and he kept track of all the stats in all the games and had built himself a little board in his hut that had all the players and the teams on it represented by little multi-colored, laminated paper squares, so he could move them all around to show not only what the teams’ standing were, but also what players had the most goals and assists and shots on goal, etc.

Jeni and Jez had really hit it off, making all their meals together and drinking wine together and Jeni had probably even pretended to care about football, and had maybe tried to tell Jez about her love for American football and the Green Bay Packers, and Jez had probably raised his eyebrows and pretended to feign interest, but had scoffed at the idea of “American football” when Jeni wasn’t looking. I’m sure they had also done all sorts of things that I don’t want to think about because Jeni is my sister. Then, one day after Jeni had been there for about a year or so, Jeni’s old boyfriend from Illinois State University—that poor sucker—had come all the way out to Kenya to see her. I don’t even remember the guy’s name, but he was pretty much the definition of a stereotypical liberal college kid with his ponytail and his necklace and upper-middle-class parents and his open-collared shirts and perpetual Howard Zinn book tucked under his arm. The poor dude had literally spent thousands of hard-earned dollars that he had saved up working in the school library or Applebee’s or Starbucks or wherever the fuck college kids worked in the early ‘90s to take planes and a train and a bus or two out to the middle of nowhere to spend just a few days with Jeni, and Jeni had put up with him for a while, but then had pretty much told him to fuck off so she could be with Jez. Then, before Jeni had left Kenya forever, she had told Jez that he was welcome to come stay with her in the U.S. And now Jez was done with his stint in the Peace Corps as well, and was coming to live in Morrison with Jeni for a while, and Don and I were picking him up and feeling a bit nervous about the whole thing.

Jez wasn’t hard to spot at the train station, as he was the only guy standing around on the sidewalk who looked like he had absolutely no idea where he was or what he was doing there. The first thing I noticed about him was that he looked a lot dorkier and less tough than Jeni’s stories had made him seem. And he was wearing long sleeves to cover his tattoos, more than likely out of respect for our parents, I suppose. He shook Don’s hand very firmly and politely with an awkward look on his face, like he had just been caught taking a shit on the lawn or something. Then he shook my hand and smiled. He seemed really quite happy that I was there, as if he hadn’t wanted to face Don alone, which made sense, I guess. He was meeting Don for the first time, and was probably nervous as hell. He was, after all, not only coming to visit Jeni, but to live with her. That was no small business.

After that initial meet and greet, Jez didn’t say much in the car for the rest of the duration of our ride from Rockford to Morrison. He was a quiet guy in general. A shy type. But it didn’t take him long to adjust to our family, and before long he was helping Don with all of his projects around the house and at the hardware store, and he’d drink some beers at night and open up to Adam and I when we were alone. Over the course of the following few months, I got quite a few stories out of him—stories that influenced me more than anyone could have possibly known at the time, if only because they made me want to leave even more so than Jeni’s stories had—to just plain go and keep going.

Jez’s parents had been really awful, mean-spirited people, and he had dropped out of school and left his home in Manchester when he was only fourteen years old to travel around the world, looking for work. He did an absolutely stunning amount of things to make a buck throughout his teens and early twenties, but the only things I can remember—the things I will, in fact, never forget—are the completely outrageous ones, of which there were two.

When Jez was eighteen, he came to the United States for the first time. He had no money when he arrived, and hadn’t even left J.F.K. before he started looking for work, which he found immediately. A fat, balding man in a bad polyester suit had himself a little crew that was running this pretty smooth operation straight out of the airport. They would drive people’s cars across the country for them so the people didn’t have to pay to have them trucked or flown or taken by boat or whatever. The people would arrive by plane at their destinations, and a day or two later their car would arrive. They’d pay the driver a couple hundred bucks and reimburse him for gas, and that was it. Transaction completed. The driver would then decide whether to fly back to his original place of departure, or to find another car to drive to another destination. Apparently the polyester suit guy had connections at all the major airports. So the day Jez arrived at J.F.K. he had simply walked up to the guy, showed him his papers, and told him he was looking for work, and later on that very same afternoon he had a pocketful of cash and he was driving a Buick Skylark to Los Angeles. He drove all over the United States for the next couple years, saw most of the major cities and took in the scenery in several of our National Parks, and made some relatively decent money in the process.

Right before Jez joined the Peace Corps, he was working as a contractor for a construction company and moonlighting as a bartender, but he had found himself in a tough spot due to some outstanding gambling debts that were a holdover from his pool sharking days—the days that came shortly after his car transporting days, but before his manual labor days. In order to pay off his debts, Jez started to do weirder and weirder things for cash. The strangest thing he ever did—according to him, at least—was to offer himself up as a guinea pig for a drug company.

The way Jez told it, he lived for three months at this little clinic that resembled a nut house—white walls, white floors, barred windows, everyone either wearing lab coats and carrying clipboards or wearing white paper hospital gowns with a light floral pattern on them and looking nervous and/or genuinely insane. There were a few recreation rooms in the clinic that were furnished with couches, televisions, pool tables, dart boards, and the like, and each of those rec rooms had one wall lined with one-way mirrors, so the men and women in the room could be watched by the men and women with clipboards.

The whole point of this clinic was to test the side effects of certain drugs that were to be put out on the market the following year. Each morning, afternoon, and night, Jez and his fellow paper-gown-wearers were fed pills. Most of them would get a placebo, of course, but one person would get the real thing. Jez wasn’t sure what the drugs were, necessarily, but he said some of them were definitely some heavy shit.

“It was a dreadful bore most of the time,” he told me as we sat on the hot tar roof just outside my bedroom one day, smoking cigarettes. “We’d all wake up, eat this disgusting cafeteria breakfast, take a pill, then read the paper or watch the tellie or whatever and hope that we either got a placebo or something good—something that made us high—and not something that made us sick.” He laughed. “Sometimes, though, somebody would get a really wacky drug—really crazy shit—and they’d go mental. I was shooting pool with this bloke one night who was lining up a shot on the eight ball when he just dropped his stick, stood up straight, and then just wandered off. He had this blank look in his eyes—he was totally stoned.”

“Damn,” I said, laughing. “How much money were they paying you, anyway? Was it worth it even on the off chance that you might get brain damage or something?”

“I mean, it wasn’t THAT much. I don’t remember the exact amount. But it was a good amount. Enough for me to pay the bills, so I could use my money from building houses to pay off my debts before I went to Africa.”

So Jez went from driving cars to being a pool shark to working construction and bartending and acting as a guinea pig for drug companies in his free time, and he had several other odd jobs in there, as well—jobs that that he referred to as “too boring to mention.” Then he finally decided one day to do something productive—something for the good of humanity—and he joined the Peace Corps, where he met Jeni. And now this intrepid world traveler was moving to tiny little Morrison, Illinois.

Jeni and Jez moved into Don’s old apartment above True Value Hardware—the same apartment I had visited Don in with my mother as a little boy—and Jeni started substitute teaching around town. The plan was for them to both save money, and then move somewhere together. Pretty soon, though, they just decided to go ahead and get married so Jez could get his Visa.

The wedding was in our living room, and was very small and nice. Since I’m apparently on a photograph kick all of a sudden, I happen to still have a couple of pictures from the thing: one is of me standing between the two grandmas with my hands folded and a smart ass look on my face. I’m wearing a shirt and tie, some seriously baggy brown corduroys—the bigger the better was the trend among teenage skateboarder types at the time—and I have a belt with an alien head on the buckle. The other is of Jeni and Jez at the post-wedding dinner table, Jeni with her mouth wide open and a maraschino cherry on her tongue, and Jez looking genuinely horrified. The great thing about that shot in the context of this whole story is that Jez is on the far left of the picture, so far left that half his body is cut out of the shot, and—just like Adam in the airport picture I described earlier—he is much too far in the foreground. His glasses are nothing but a reflection of the flash—you can’t even see his eyes.

Another of Mom’s finest photographic efforts of a key family event.

After Jeni and Jez got married they moved up to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Jez got a job as a bartender and Jeni got a job teaching at a junior high school and began slowly working her way back to being a good ol’ hard-working American.

 Mom has always been a dedicated but hilariously inept photographer of family comings and goings. ↩︎

 Ugali is a cornmeal porridge, a staple starch eaten with almost everything in eastern and southern Africa. It is traditionally cooked to a doughy consistency so it can be picked up with the hands, rolled into a ball, and dipped into sauce or stew, or used to pick up meat. Adam and I had heard about ugali in Jeni’s letters, and we both definitely brought it up to show our big sister that we had been paying attention. ↩︎

#peacecorps #africa #kenya #ugali #safaris #cheetahs #elephants #stampedes #airports #fastfood #greatbritain #manchesterunited #greenbaypackers #football #weddings #marriage #photography