The Galvin Hat, Part I. . .

Behold, the Galvin hat!


I had a friend many years ago, a co-worker, a brother in arms in the kitchen named Galvin. Galvin was a lean, lanky, sunken-eyed, black man who couldn't have been more than five years older than myself. He and I worked together in one of those steakhouses where you line up with a tray, order your steak by number and select your dessert from the plastic-wrapped slices of lemon meringue or chocolate pie. On occasion we had peach cobbler.

Galvin was a long time cook, a longer time drunk, but a family man also. For heaven's sake, he rode a bicycle several miles to and from work to provide for his family. And his habit too, I suppose. Yet, at least he was holding down a job and making a living, which was much more than some people who worked at our restaurant could claim. A lot of them, out of wedlock mothers, welfare recipients, Section 8 dwellers, would come to work just long enough to qualify for unemployment benefits and then get themselves fired for some reason or another to get more free money.

My buddy Galvin, on the other hand, showed up for work every day and even though he had to sneak off the line during the middle of service to take a few draws from his whiskey bottle he stashed in the bushes, I could always rely on him when the going got tough in the kitchen.

As with all new jobs, the first few days were difficult as the new guy never knows where everything is; most effort wasted trying to learn and remember the location of everything. Galvin was cool to me at first, simple utterances to do stuff, not much conversation. Finally after a few days passed and I was beginning to hold my own as his prep/fry cook, he turned to me out of the blue and asked, "Are you a racist?"

I thought about that for a second, and after a minute of staring emptily at Galvin I responded, "Yeah, I'm a fucking racist. I hate everybody." Galvin's face seized up in surprise and then he let out a huge guffaw, followed by loud hooting and hollering as he danced around in laughter. I guess that broke our tension, if there ever was any.

From then on, Galvin and I made it along famously. We'd plow through our work daily, delicately grilling the #9, the #22 and the tasty #13. Every now and then, we'd intentionally screw up a #3 so we'd be assured of a night's meal to nibble on. He did the grilling and I did the frying, salads, and plating. We had some damn good times and could hammer out a couple hundred steaks or more without much trouble. Well, as long as Galvin had his bottle. Some days he didn't and the work was usually disastrous.

Every now and then after work, particularly the night shift, we'd toss his bike in the back of my pickup and I'd give him a ride home. We always got a couple of 40oz bottles of beer on the way and Galvin began to open up to me about his life.

He had three kids and a beautiful soft-spoken wife. His life had been one disaster after another, drugs, alcohol, countless incursions with the law, time in the county lockup. This explained his bicycle. I think the court has taken his license away for some considerable length of time and for as long as I knew him, he biked everywhere.

And I mean EVERYWHERE.

I'd see Galvin all over, many miles from home. Out at the new mall on the other side of town. Up around north Hattiesburg where he had some family. And of course, on his way to and from work. Some days he declined the offer for a ride home and I suspected that it was he had another woman. Or maybe it was drugs. He'd leave at night sometimes going in the opposite direction from his apartment, but how could I judge him. I never asked either.

As time went on and we had our after-work beer together, we'd get into long, rambling discussions about politics, life, women and invariably, race. Just as he had no idea what's it's like to be white, I had and still have no conception of the life of a black person. Especially a black in a place like Mississippi with such a sordid and violent past concerning race relations.

He would share anecdotes of blatant, anti-black racism and I could share my own versions of the reverse negative. We would laugh, scowl or chastise our respective race as required and in the end we agreed that we were far more alike than different. As best I could tell, our whiteness or blackness mattered nothing to us. We were just two men, struggling to earn a wage and trying our best to survive.

We had needs, we had families, we had problems. Just like everyone.

One evening at work, I invited Galvin to come with my friends and I out to our favorite dance club. All my friends knew Galvin, not personally, but from the stories I shared of our work life together. He was a figure of legend to them. Hammering out steaks in a flash and swilling whiskey by the bottle was Galvin. They, as much as me, wanted him to come along.

Galvin at first was skeptical of my offer and I could tell, a bit apprehensive. I can only speculate that in his mind he imagined a room full of burly rednecks, whoopin' and hollerin', half of them smashing each other over the head with whiskey bottles and the other half tying up nooses in the corner. Who knew what he thought, but I talked him into it anyway. He bravely went where he thought no black man had gone before.

We walked inside the club, Senor Frogs, and the surprise was evident as he saw hundreds of people milling about, throngs of them throbbing and gyrating on the dance floor, gaggles of them lined up at the bar. And not a bar full of burly rednecks, but a fair cross-section of the USM campus present; blacks, whites, Latinos, east Indians, even a one-armed girl who was just to die for.

And boy, once the tension wore off, we proceeded to drink. And drink. And drink.

I don't remember taking Galvin home, maybe a faint memory of him falling out of the truck. I do remember the next day, both of us sick, queasy and moving in slow-motion. We laughed about our great night together and pieced together the parts each of us could remember. Me dancing with the one-armed girl, Galvin doin' the humpty with some big sista! Man, it was a time and I don't think Galvin sneaked outside once that day. He had finally had enough for once.

And then, the inevitable happened.

Galvin invited me to his club.

(. . .to be continued)