My Milwaukee Misadventures

1. The first interesting aspect of my Milwaukee trip happens before I even get there. I’m sitting at the gate, waiting for my plane, and, frankly, I really have to go to the bathroom. But there’s no one there to watch my stuff, and I sure don’t want to gather it all with me and then try to find someplace to put it down in the bathroom. On the floor? No thank you.

My first concern is that if I leave it there, my stuff might not be there when I come back. But I look around and think, “alright, I know I have no way of knowing this for sure, but these all seem like decent people with honest faces. I think I can trust them.”

I’m not sure what part of me was making this decision – my instincts, my naiveté, or maybe just my urge to justify what I want to do. I mean, sure, everyone says you’re not supposed to leave your stuff alone at the airport, but we’re only talking a couple of moments here. What’s the worst that could happen?

The very instant that this thought – “what’s the worst that could happen?” – goes through my head, an old man sitting across from me says to me, excuse me, do you know whose stuff that is?” as he points to the chair next to mine.

“I don’t know the guy,” I say, “but I’d recognize him if I saw him.”

I look around, but the guy who had been sitting next to me is nowhere to be found.

“He was here a few minutes ago,” I add.

“He’s been gone for a while,” the old man observed. “Excuse me,” he says to a nearby airport employee, “but somebody left a whole bunch of stuff just lying around here, and it looks like it’s attached to some wires!”

I’m about to point out that the wires are just the guy’s headphones – I saw him listening to his iPod earlier – but the airport people are already in action.

“Don’t worry, folks, we’ll take care of it.”

“We better call T.S.A.”

Next thing I know, the gate is swarming with police officers and TSA agents. Then I spot the guy who owned the stuff in the first place.

“There he is!” I say, trying to calm everybody down. “He’s right over there!”

One of the airport people tells the guy that he’s not allowed to leave his stuff unattended, and warns him that in another moment, it would have been confiscated by security.
As if on cue, the automated message that has been repeating itself all day again announces over the p.a., “do not leave your luggage unattended.”

The old man hears this, looks at me, and gestures at the guy next to me, as if to say, “can you believe this guy?”

I gesture back as if to say, “I know, right?”

2. Despite the fact that my doctor and I both consider me of “average” build, I seem to be remarkably thinner than the average airplane passenger. So I don’t take up much room in my seat. Still, the asshole next to me – who isn’t fat, but who has broad shoulders – keeps elbowing me in the side. Each time, I skooch over a little bit to my right, without even realizing it, until I suddenly notice that I’ve managed to squish myself against the wall of the airplane – and the idiot next to me is still elbowing me in the side. What the fuck?!?

3. No matter where you are in the country, the first things you notice when looking out the window as your plane descends are landscape features – land/water barriers, large clusters of trees, mountainous ripples, that kind of thing. The second thing you always notice is farm land. The third thing is baseball diamonds. Trust me on this. It happens with every single plane ride, no exceptions. So here we are, descending, and I’m seeing landscapes, farm land, farm land, and more farm land. But where are the baseball diamonds?

“What the hell does Milwaukee have against baseball?” I think with sincere anger, which is sort of a weird reaction, considering that I don’t give a damn about baseball myself. I guess it’s just human nature that once you get used to a pattern, you’re honestly disturbed when that pattern is disrupted. Anyway, I guess I was just impatient, because the next thing I saw: a whole cluster of baseball diamonds. I’m not sure, but I probably had a big grin on my face.

The last thing we fly over before actually landing at the airport: an office building with a truly large parking lot. I notice that, despite the fact that it’s a weekday, not a single car is in this gigantic office parking lot.

“That’s odd,” I think to myself. I don’t dwell on it at the time, although this moment will prove significant as the weekend goes on.

4. At first, I really like our hotel room. I find it charming, although it’s difficult to explain why. Sure, it’s a little chilly, and the view isn’t that great, but I like something about it.

As time goes on, we realize that the hotel ain’t so great. The carpet is buckled. The coffee pot doesn’t work and looks dirty. The television power button has to be pressed several times for it to work. The thermostat insists it’s 80 degrees, even though it’s freezing. The towel racks are crooked and look like they’re about to fall off. Even the elevator indicator lights don’t work, which is more disconcerting than you’d think. Maybe because, just the previous day, I had watched an episode of Homicide, in which Giardello muses, “watching lights in an elevator is one of life’s simple, unspoken pleasures. You can monitor your progress. In an elevator, you always know when you’re going somewhere!”

Not at the Ramada City Center.

5. Friday night in a new city, time to go out on the town!

The problem is, the town is already out. And it’s apparently not coming back. According to the map, we’re in the center of downtown, so where is everybody? Where are the bars, movie theaters, restaurants, stores, video rental outlets, etc.? We search for hours, and find very, very few places of interest – and all of those places of interest are closed. In the early to mid evening. On a Friday night.

We stumble upon the theater district, where we find four theaters right next to each other, back to back, each one bigger and with more glamorous architecture than the last. But they’re all closed too.

“Maybe everything’s closed for Halloween,” Shu-Chuan suggests, even though Halloween is still a few days away.

“That’s not how Halloween works,” I tell her.

We later retreat to the hotel restaurant, where the food is bland. I mean everything is tasteless, even the root beer. But it’s the only place we could find that’s open.

“Hey, what is there to do in Milwaukee?” I ask the waitress.

“You want something to do in Milwaukee?” she repeats, as if it’s the strangest question ever asked by anybody ever. “Ummm . . .”

“Nevermind,” I eventually say, as we can tell that trying to think of something to do in Milwaukee is short-circuiting her brain.

On our way back to our room, we stop in the lobby to pick up a Milwaukee travel brochure, hoping to get some ideas. Among the suggestions are theaters that we’ve already found to be closed, and festivals that ended a few months ago. Not much else.

That night, as Shu-Chuan is in the shower, I look out the window, watching the traffic from our lovely view of the parking lot and street intersection beyond. The traffic is very light – as it should be, considering the late hour – but oddly steady.

“It’s weird,” I point out to Shu-Chuan. “Even this late at night, there’s constant traffic. But nothing in this damn town is open. So where are they going?”

I think about it and then add, “Maybe they’re going to New York.”

6. Call me crazy, but I’m actually starting to enjoy these sociology lectures! One man discusses Chinese religious discourse, noting the simultaneous fall of Marxism and rise of Confucianism in standard religious conversations in China. Another guy claims to have discovered that whether you believe in life after death directly affects your physical health. Still another guy – talk about narrowing your field of specialization! – reveals his findings while researching the religious beliefs of Chinese immigrants in the town of Turin, Italy. Interestingly, he discovered that most Chinese Turinians claim to be “too busy” for religion in their daily lives, but actually do practice various forms of religion every day. How to explain this discrepancy? Partially because the Chinese immigrants and the Italian researchers interviewing them have completely different concepts of what is religious and what is sacred. And, most intriguingly to me, even those Chinese immigrants who later agreed that they are religious, explained that they had initially denied it because they felt the desire to fit into the Italian concept of the Chinese as a productive, secular people.

7. Saturday night – another boring, lonely weekend night in Milwaukee. Even the buildings we pass are boring. Until my visit to Milwaukee, I never realized how colorful cityscapes are in the northeast. Our buildings are a delightful mixture of brown wood, grey stone, red brick, and multi-colored billboards and signs. In Milwaukee, every damn building is the exact same shade of dull tan.

Okay, I shouldn’t complain too much about the boredom, because truth be told, Shu-Chuan and I are enjoying each other’s company a great deal. But the city is beyond boring, it’s abandoned to the point of outright creepiness. Here’s perhaps the weirdest thing of all: the city is host to over 500,000 people, at least according to Wikipedia, but the reason it feels so empty is because it was clearly designed to hold, not thousands, but millions of people.

Everywhere we go in our vain search for something to do, we find hotels, easily more than a dozen hotels, each one enormous. I have never seen hotels this size in Stamford or New York. But add up all the people we saw throughout the entire extended weekend (not counting the people at the sociologists’ convention) and they might, just might fill up one of those hotel floors.

Similarly, the downtown area has dozens of parking lots. Great, enormous, multi-storied parking lots. And not a single car in any of them. Add up all the cars we saw throughout the weekend, and they might fill one level of one of those parking lots.

The most interesting thing we found was a staircase in a courtyard by the Frontier Airlines building. After climbing these stairs for a few steps, you find yourself at the top, and nothing is there except for a single, pathetic, tiny apple tree, withering in the cold wind. We started calling these stairs “the Milwaukee Stairs,” as the embodiment of all things Milwaukee, because, like the city they’re in, they lead nowhere. Case in point: I’m here explaining that the most interesting thing about the whole city is a staircase that leads nowhere.

8. Jim Beckford – President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Shu-Chuan’s mentor, and a really cool guy. He’s charming, intelligent, humorous, and thoroughly friendly. If I was a woman and three decades older, I’d probably fall in love with this guy.

9. At the airport with Shu-Chuan and her two colleagues. We’re walking at a slow but steady pace, weighed down by our luggage. A TSA agent shoves past us, shouting at us, “walk, people, walk, goddammit!!” That was uncalled for.

10. On the plane home, again at the window seat. A flight attendant offers us drinks, and the guy on the aisle seat immediately spills his coffee everywhere. For some reason, we’re all in a good mood, and the three of us, as well as the flight attendant, start joking about it much more than it’s worth. But the whole time, I’m thinking, “I’m glad it was him and not me, because I’d feel like an idiot.” Then I spill my ginger ale everywhere, apparently not learning from the cautionary tale of The Man in the Aisle Seat who Spilled his Coffee. “Wait a minute!” says the woman in between us, trying to wrap her head around the fact that she’s surrounded by morons.

11. Home. Remember when all the passengers used to clap at the end of every flight? Whatever happened to that little tradition? When did people stop doing that?