From The City That Always Sweeps

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Art Kumbalek

I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, the other day, Oct. 1, I was wont to flip the page of my National Geographic kitchen-wall calendar (Strumpets of the South Seas) ’cause that’s the kind of guy I am—organized, punctual, a seeker of useful information like which is the correct goddamn month of the year currently underfoot.

My calendar informed me that we had entered the bittersweet month of Foctober. I took a quick perusal of the noted dates to remind myself whether there were any big-time holidays where everyone gets the day off so’s they could visit relatives and drink their beer all day long. The answer was “no sir.” But I did discover that this year Columbus Day fell on Monday, Oct. 11, and my head began to spin.

We’ve still got a Columbus Day? I thought a tribute to that jagwagon had gone the way like the statue on the village green of Gen. Robert E. Jefferson Stonewall Beauregard Johnny Reb Davis Lee. Isn’t it supposed to be known as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, or at least Discovery Day by now? Yeah yeah, Cristoforo Colombo “discovered” the New World whilst sailing the ocean blue, but personally, I wish he’d discovered a cure for the common cold.

The New World. Sounds like one of those fancy theme parks, ain’a? And what a roller coaster—but it only goes down, down and down, so I hear.

And speaking of down, by mid-October I expect to be laid low with the Columbus Day post-traumatic stress disorder. Happens every year—you wait for weeks in anticipation of the big day, it finally comes, you don’t get your mail on that week’s Monday and then it’s over. It’s enough to blow any guy off course, what the fock.

Cripes, I remember the year when the fellas came by and took me out to buoy my sinking spirits with round after round of tall-and-frosty cheer over by the Uptowner tavern/charm school, during which we felt obligated to toast the diversity of mighty members of the pink-skin pantheon—Paul Revere, Vince Lombardi, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Mickey Mantle, Russ Meyer, Marco focking Polo, John Philip Sousa, Soupy Sales, Casimir Pulaski, Chet Baker and James Joyce, to name a few, and of course, Christopher Columbus.

The only thing these guys have in common besides being white is that as far as I focking know, they have never ever before had their names hauled out and stuffed into the same too-long sentence in the entire history of the printed word, I kid you not.

So after lengthy hours of respect-paying, the fellas hauled my sorry ass back to my dinky apartment where sometime later whilst lodged in a dream state—half awake, half asleep, but still wholly in the bag without the foresight to take the monstrous leak my bloated bladder screamed for—the image of a 900-foot golf putter came to me. Yes, the putter, proud symbol of the white man. I dreamt that it was the Great Navigator himself who had invented it, then carried this marvelous tool ’cross the ocean blue, to discover a place where he could use the goddamn thing; but to no avail, he had arrived to this New World on a weekend, and had forgotten to make reservations.

In fact, it would be a few hundreds of years before reservations were invented, so as to keep the brown (some say red, but I’m colorblind) native people that Columbus had stumbled upon off the course—these so-called native people who had yet to assimilate the difference between a 5-iron and sand wedge.

These tawny people were nothing but a nuisance to the white man, ’cause how you going to shoot par with a fairway full of buffalo and guys with bows and arrows on mounted horseback? It is to wonder. Oftentimes, the white man who found himself in the rough not only would lose his ball, he’d lose his scalp to boot—talk about your 1-stroke penalty, ouch!

Dream on, I did. I dreamt that we are all what-you-call universal Indians, that we’re all “natives” on this planet and who knows where the fock else, and that had the so-called New World native people been as adept at sailing big boats as they were riding ponies, in 1492 they may have landed on the coast of Normandy in search of a trade route to the East and then how history would be different, ain’a? You tell me.

And it was then I took that leak I was too tired to take earlier. And so I woke up, wishing the order of those two events had been reversed, what the fock.

But before I awoke, I dreamt the following, I think: A white woman, wife of a Republican congressman, was driving near Las Vegas when she saw a Navajo woman hitchhiking. She stopped the car and offered the woman a ride. During their small talk, the Navajo woman noticed a brown bag on the front seat between them. The politician’s wife said, “If you’re wondering what’s in the bag, it’s a 12-pack of beer. I got it for my husband.” The Navajo woman was silent for a while. She then nodded her head and said, “Good trade.”

Ba-ding! ’cause I’m Art Kumbalek and I told you so.