Chapter Two: The Conference Room Windows
Part B - Cheeseheads and FIPs
Note: If you’re a new reader, start with CHAPTER ONE: A GOOD LIFE RUINED or even the ABOUT page—and see you back here soon. This is Chapter 2: Part B. If you haven’t read it, here’s Part A. To access all contents on the site, click on the rose icon in the upper left corner or HERE.
Part B - Cheeseheads and FIPs
Every workday as Steve steps onto the State Street Bridge, he pauses briefly and gazes across the Chicago River at Bertrand Goldberg’s curvy, lush Marina City and Mies van der Rohe’s stark boxy IBM Building, towering on the north bank, staring each other down in an architectural face-off across State Street. Then he snaps out of it and starts across the bridge.
Steve Bertolucci is exactly what his name sounds like. His Nonna and Nonno’s families came from rural Anzio and Calabria respectively, at the turn of the 20th century, searching for jobs and a better life for their children. Nonna’s family of miners was so desperate to feed their children, they were willing to leave their entire world behind an ocean, perhaps forever, for the men to spend their short lives underground digging coal in an alien land. Nonno’s father was a smartass who made a dirty joke at the expense of a local member of the Black Hand, and the first ship the family could jump on happened to be headed for America.
Steve steers diagonally over the IBM Building’s riverside plaza…
…toward the revolving glass doors on the Wabash side.
Head down, briefcase brushing the side of his dark blue chalk-stripe business suit.
The Sun-Times he’d read on the train tucked under one arm, a Tribune inside the briefcase for later, when he has room to spread out.
Eyes on the dull pink-black-grey speckled granite tile paving the plaza.
Through the revolving door, past the Mies van der Rohe bust to his right. The most primal part of Steve’s brain, the part that still thinks it’s on an African savannah where a prowling lion might be hiding in the high grass, registers Mies van der Rohe as a conscious entity even though Steve knows Mies is a sculpture.
Steve walks briskly across the lobby, eyes now on the shiny, polished pink-black-grey speckled granite inside. It’s the same granite as the plaza outside, giving you the feeling the building was wholly constructed elsewhere without a floor and then plunked down here. A little trick Mies van der Rohe liked to use, integrating the building with its environment.
As he stares at the granite, Steve reflexively looks for patterns. It’s a childhood habit. He can’t make out anything, though. The granite looks like the Andromeda galaxy seen through the Hubble telescope, too many stars to count or arrange into constellations.
Steve’s view as he walks across the lobby, minus the picture border and copyright symbol:
Steve approaches Michael’s security desk, his mind bent on making it to the elevator bank without interruption. Steve enjoys unusually good peripheral vision, so even as he studies the granite, he’s acutely aware of the random dust particles still swirling about the lobby air in the strong morning sun. The particles remind him of something, but what? He shakes off the thought. Focus. Must…get…to…elevator. In Steve’s head, that sounds like Star Trek’s Captain Kirk fighting some alien force that’s trying to control his body and keep Kirk away from the elevators. It feels that way, too.
“Morning, Michael,” says Steve, a few feet from the desk. “Good Bear weather,” he adds as he starts passing by.
The observation is patently untrue. It’s a gorgeous fall day. “Good Bear weather” means subzero temperatures with a mean wind whipping off Lake Michigan--game conditions that fans hope will intimidate visiting football teams grown soft from sunny climes and domed stadiums. The Chicago Bears play outside, in Soldier Field, mere yards from a body of water that is a lake in name only. In reality, gigantic Lake Michigan is often a surging, wild inland ocean. Inured to the punishing Chicago winters, Bears players welcome anything up to and including a new Ice Age on Sunday afternoons.
“Good Bear weather” is just the first thing Steve thought of, the shortest statement he thinks he may get away with. He knows Michael will be suspicious if he offers no conversation at all.
Michael looks at the top of Steve’s head of short dark brown hair moving past the desk. He sees something else entirely.
“Oooh, buddy. That’s rough!” whistles Michael.
“What?” says Steve, caught by surprise. He automatically looks up.
Wow. I see it now, too. Steve’s two black eyes are, indeed, rough. His eyes are dark purple, lumpy lakes of bruises, surrounded by marshy green and yellow puddles.
“Know what the Buddha would say?” says Michael. “’You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.’”
“Then my anger was inside somebody else’s fist,” says Steve.
“Yeah, I know man,” chuckles Michael. “Buddha’s cool, but he doesn’t always apply in the real world.”
Steve nods and continues toward the elevator bank. It is not a morning on which he feels inclined to make small talk.
“Hey Steve, I shoulda seen the other guy, right?” Michael calls after him.
Steve looks back, one eyebrow raised questioningly. He can’t raise an eyebrow without thinking of Spock, especially since he was just thinking about Captain Kirk. His confused mind is now split between images of Star Trek and trying to figure out what Michael is talking about.
“Way to go, Steve!” Michael laughs and pumps a fist in the air. “Way to go man!”
Steve squints at Michael, trying to decipher the meaning of his words. He finally gets it as he pushes the elevator call button with his index finger. He starts to turn back again to Michael, to say something, but we will never know what. The elevator doors instantly open and he loses the chance.
The elevator is packed with people in suits and dresses coming up from the parking garage, all wondering if they can get to their desks before anyone notices what time it is.
Everyone stares at Steve’s two black eyes. They shrink back, as if Steve might take a sock at them.
He is daaann-ger-ous, Steve thinks to the tune of the high priests’ song in Jesus Christ Superstar.
Steve wishes he’d been able to find his sunglasses before he left home. Then again, people seldom consider him dangerous. Seldom? Make that “never.” It’s kind of fun, actually. He decides to go with it. He swaggers onto the elevator as if daring anyone to pick a fight. The phrase I’d rather fight than switch crosses his mind, unbidden, and he struggles to remember where it came from.
“I’d rather fight than switch,” Steve proclaims to the elevator people, just for the hell of it. Everybody cracks up.
“Well, they all know what that’s from,” he thinks.
By now Steve has turned to face the elevator door. The elevator people’s laughter trickles away and they all go back to being strangers. Steve watches the silver halves of the elevator doors glide together an inch in front of his nose and black eyes. He thinks of Get Smart and reflexively draws his head backward, just in case. He’s never quite sure if he grew into his nose, which sprang from nowhere when he was about nine. He did grow into it, around age 22, but he’s never quite sure.
As Steve stares at the elevator doors, the phrase America’s favorite cigarette break floats through his mind, and he’s not quite sure what that’s from either. Visions of broken cigarettes dance in his head.
Of course it’s another cigarette ad. Steve doesn’t smoke, but like anyone born before about 1980, his umbilical cord might as well have been a hooka. His childhood wandered in a wilderness of cigarette advertising, under a haze of adult cigarette smoke. Thick clouds hung just below the ceiling in everyone’s kitchens and front rooms, like bad smog days in Los Angeles or Beijing.
A brown loafered foot slams between the elevator doors just before they whisper shut. Now a long brown-pantsed shin violently forces its way through above the loafer, and finally Bill Pulaski, 40, shoves an even longer arm into the elevator and pushes the doors back open.
Bill Pulaski is Steve’s best friend at work, up on the 14th floor in the accounting offices of Rose & Rose. He too is exactly what his name sounds like. His Polish grandparents came here searching for jobs and a better life for their children. His grandma was born on a tiny farm in Zakopane, outside Krakow. She likes to say she watched World War I fought in her backyard. Afterward, she decided America could not be worse, and set off. Bill’s grandpa isn’t sure what country his family came from, technically, because their village was in one of those parts of Poland that was always being taken over by somebody else. All Bill’s grandpa knew for sure was that if he stuck around, somebody else’s army would forcibly draft him. Bill is irritated every year when people refer to Paczki Day as “Mardi Gras.” He also hates it when someone pronounces it “Punch-key Day” with a short ‘u.’ It’s “Poonch-key Day,” goddammit.
At Rose & Rose, Steve is head of the tax department. Bill is head of forensic accounting. Outside work, they attend White Sox and Bears games together. This is what best friends do when they are men, at least for their generation. If you should ever see them at a Sox game, Steve is the one covering his face with one hand while Bill swears at the top of his lungs at the players, even when small children are sitting right in front of them. Especially then. Bill takes children as a personal challenge and refuses to be muzzled. Their parents should’ve known what they were getting into, bringing a kid to Comiskey Park. Where are they from, the North Side or the suburbs or something? Enough with all the mollycoddling. Bill is a South Sider, which means he’s a Sox fan goddammit, not a fucking Cub fan, and they ain’t at namby-pamby Wrigley Field. Ordinarily Bill would never use the word “namby-pamby.” He doesn’t even realize he knows that word, but somehow it springs to his lips when he speaks or thinks of things Cub-related.
Bill swears at Sox players who don’t perform well, and at any opposing player who performs at all. If Bill sits close enough to the field, he has a good chance of baiting an opposing player enough to run over and try to take a swing at him. Bill doesn’t do that at Bears games. He’s seen enraged football players scale stadium walls to go after mouthy fans, and he’s not a complete idiot.
“URRRUGGGGGGGHHHH,” Bill wheezes as he pops through the elevator door, stumbling into a grey-suited lawyer next to Steve. The lawyer makes the sort of face that happens involuntarily when your toddler wipes snot on you. Next she holds her briefcase as far from Bill as possible and uses the other hand to brush off her suit, as if Bill were a stain that should not be allowed to set. Perhaps she’ll look for some club soda for that when she gets to her office. You really can’t blame her.
Bill tries to turn around, but now his briefcase is caught in the elevator doors. He continues a string of unintelligible grunts as he tugs viciously at the briefcase handle. The elevator people watch, flinching with each of Bill’s grunts and tugs until the briefcase breaks free and he bounces right back into the poor grey-suited lawyer, who resolves to change into the spare suit she keeps at the office for emergencies. Bill halfheartedly tries straightening his shirt and tie over a stomach threatening to break free as well. Now the elevator people pretend to ignore him, which isn’t easy, because when Bill shops at the Tall and Big Man’s Shop, he personifies both adjectives in the name. The elevator doors didn’t do anything to Bill’s clothes, by the way. Bill would look exactly the same if he’d been beamed to work by the Starship Enterprise’s transporter, with Scotty himself at the controls.
From under his black overgrown bangs, Bill can’t see anything else while he struggles with buttons and the knot in his tie. Still, he vaguely understands it’s Steve standing beside him as he struggles to make sure his fly is up and his belt is at least approximately where society expects it.
It’s a Monday in football season, and therefore the only thing on Bill’s mind is what the Bears did yesterday: They played the Green Bay Packers, archenemy of every Bear and Bears fan, at the Packers’ far northern Wisconsin home in Lambeau Field. The Bears won, or Bill wouldn’t be speaking to anyone before lunch.
“Stevie, how ‘bout those fudge-Packers yesterday hunh?” snickers Bill, wrestling with his belt. Business camaraderie dictates that short names be lengthened, long names shortened. “Steve” becomes “Stevie.” If Rose & Rose office culture tended toward last names, “Bertolucci” would have morphed into “Bert.” Then when everyone got used to calling Steve “Bert,” since that’s short, it would have mutated further into “Bertie.” But Rose & Rose goes by first names, so Steve is “Steve” to most of his coworkers and “Stevie” to his closest business associates.
“Those bastards!” laughs Bill. “Tell ya why I really feel sorry for ‘em though—they gotta go back to Green Bay! Can ya imagine livin’ in that shithole? With all those cheeseheads?”
Steve has instinctively covered his face with one hand, knowing the unrest Bill’s conversation must be sowing among the elevator people. A minute ago, Steve had that audience in the palm of the hand that now hovers over his face. Now he feels the hisses and boos the elevator people yearn to let loose.
“It’s a nice little town, actually,” says Steve wistfully, forgetting the reaction his words will provoke from Bill. “I took the kids there once. They loved the Vince statue.”
“WHAT?” squawks Bill. His head jerks in outrage from his belt to Steve’s face. Steve can’t help peeking up at Bill from underneath the hand hovering over his face. “Whoah,” says Bill, now face-to-face with Steve’s two black eyes.
“You should’ve seen the other guy,” Steve blurts, desperate to distract Bill from the image of the Bertoluccis kneeling at the very altar of the Packers temple.
“Wow, when did it happen?”
“During the game,” says Steve. “Third quarter.”
“Was there a cheesehead there or something?”
Bill means, “Was there a Green Bay Packers fan there?” Bill assumes the presence of a Packers fan would immediately lead to a fistfight. Remember, Bill is a White Sox fan as well as a Bears fan. “Cheesehead” is a derogatory term for anyone from Wisconsin, a state known for its abundant and delicious cheese products. In return, people from Wisconsin (and Michigan) call people from Illinois (mostly Chicagoans) “FIPs,” which stands for “Fucking Illinois People.” There are a plethora of variations on both slurs. Humans are so creative when it comes to insulting and killing one another.
Here is a happy, proud cheesehead, though not the cheesehead who watched the game with Steve. Looks like a nice guy you’d have fun throwing back some beers with, right? If Bill looked at this picture, he would think, incorporating some harsh profanity: “Typical cheesehead. Typical hat.”
So anyway, Bill takes one look at Steve’s black eyes and asks if there was a cheesehead there when it happened. “Yeah,” says Steve, so surprised at Bill’s correct guess that he unconsciously lowers the hand protecting his eyes from the elevator peoples’ silent disapproval. Steve doesn’t remember telling Bill about Eric, his new neighbor from Wisconsin. “He was even wearing one of those hats,” Steve recalls now, his mind suddenly sheathed in the glowing golden yellow of a Packers cheesehead hat.
A cheesehead hat is a rubbery pockmarked triangle about six inches thick, with a half-sphere indentation in the bottom to fit on a Packer fan’s head. Steve suddenly realizes that with those pockmarks for holes, cheesehead hats must be Swiss cheese, so they should be milky white. But they’re not, as you can see from the picture above. Instead, Steve further realizes, cheesehead hats are the unearthly yellow of Kraft American cheese, or a Juicy Fruit gum label.
Steve follows Bill down the hall toward the lobby doors of Rose & Rose, debating an appropriate response. Behind them, the elevator doors close over the grey-suited lawyer, who is almost imperceptibly shaking herself like a dog after a bath, getting off the last drops of Bill.
“Stevie, you rule,” yells Bill before Steve can decide what to say. Bill pumps a fist in the air. “Fuck those cheeseheads!” he whoops.
“Um, Billy--” says Steve.
Bill glances back.
“Nothing, thanks,” mutters Steve. He stops to retie a shoelace. It’s not undone, but it could be tighter.
“OK buddy, fuck those cheeseheads!” says Bill, a phrase that rolls off his tongue as naturally as “Merry Christmas!” and with the same heartfelt bonhomie. He disappears through the swinging lobby doors into the offices of Rose & Rose.
NOTE: Due to email constraints, this chapter is split into four sections, A-D. This is the end of Part B. Go on to Part C - Meet Eddie Rose, That Fuckstick if you’d like to find out why this chapter heading includes a picture of a lovely piece of butterscotch candy. A tiny rose will signify the absolute end of each chapter.
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