Nana, Tires, & Everything’s Fine

Let’s start with Nana.

Nana is my grandmother. Nana was born in the Dominican Republic in 1933. And this past week Nana needed a favor. Usually any and all favors for Nana are carried out by her loving daughter, my mother, but this week my mother was away on a very well-deserved vacation. So Nana texted me, in Spanglish, which I then had to google translate. Why I never learned Spanish is another story for another day. How Nana decides to split the Spanish and English words in her texts is a mystery that will never be solved.

The text read:

Hola mi quierdo nieto, can you llevarme boting tomorrow.

My reply:

Boting?

Her reply:

Si, boting.

My reply:

Like on a boat?

Her reply:

No to the booth.

AHA! She needed to go vote in the New Jersey primary elections that were held this past Tuesday.

Nana emigrated to the USA in the late 1950’s with her second husband, leaving her ex-husband and first-born son in the Dominican Republic. She was not just hoping for a better life for her son, but was actively pursuing it, and what better place to pursue a dream than America? In the early sixties, pregnant with my mother, she finally applied, took the test, and was sworn in is an American citizen. A few short months later my mother was born. The story gets a little sad (and a little convoluted) right around here. A few weeks before my mother was born, her father, Nana’s husband, had traveled back to his home country of Cuba. If you’re a history buff you know that this was a seriously dumb move. In 1959 Fidel Castro took over the country. Whether my mom’s sperm donor father left for his home country and was stranded there or left with the specific purpose of skipping out on his child we’ll never really know because that was the last time Nana or my mother ever heard from the piece of shit man (until the early 2000’s when my mother received an email from an unknown sender – another story for another day).

So there Nana was, newly sworn in as a citizen of the United States of America with a newborn. What did she decide to do? She went to beauty school at night while working in a salon during the day and then opened up a salon of her own in Manhattan. If you dropped me into a foreign country right now, with no knowledge of the language or terrain, I’d most likely curl into a ball and die. I am not built like Nana. I am a spoiled rotten American and there is only one person I can thank for my relatively easy and safe life. That person is Nana. The least I could do was take her boting voting.

There is a reason Nana can’t take herself to bote vote and that reason is she is officially too old to drive. She is so old that when she got in my car and I asked her facetiously who she was boting voting for she said, “The jyoung man Yoe Biden.” We both laughed pretty hard at that one. She went on to ask me why I didn’t bote vote in the primaries and I explained to her that I am gender politically fluid, which means I can’t bote vote in a particular party’s primary. “So jyou not a Democrat?” she asked. “I’m not anything, Nana,” I replied. The disappointment was clear but unsaid.

We walked arm in arm into the building and were greeted by a very nice black man who guided Nana through the next steps. First she would go to the white lady behind the computer to confirm she was registered, then she would go to the Asian woman who would walk her into the booth, and that was that. I had no intention of writing a piece about Nana voting, but this little slice of America had filled my heart with hope. A Dominican woman, a black man, a white woman, and Asian woman walk into a boting voting booth could be the start of a hilarious joke or it could be the confirmation I had always been feeling but rarely found – things are not as bad as they seem when you get off your phone.

So Nana boted voted. Who knows if she pressed the right buttons, but it’s the thought that counts.

This is probably an illegal photo and I expect the boting voting authorities to be at my door any minute.

While Nana voted, the woman behind the computer asked why I wasn’t voting. I explained to her that I was not registered to any political party and she tried to sway me. She said I could do it all online and, if I wanted, I could do it right there. She said next year I could switch affiliations if I so desired. She said it was easy as going online and clicking a button. I wondered how much she was getting paid under the table to sway voters and thought, I love this country. Somehow I was able to hold my ground but I tip my cap to her for trying.

As Nana and I drove home I told her she was more American than I’ll ever be. She smiled.

Now how this relates to Shane Gillis’s new Netflix show Tires is a little farfetched but let me try and rope these two wildly disparate topics together.

Tires is a show about a guy trying to keep a mechanic shop running in the middle of Bumblefuck, Pennsylvania. He is the son of the owner, running one store in a chain of stores, that his dad is intent on selling. I can relate to this character as I too am the fuck up son working for a family-owned business. But what I can relate to even more is the humor. For the first time in probably a decade I am laughing out loud at a show that was made after 2010. Constant, aching, on the floor belly laughing. My wife and I have woken up our newborn twice in the course of three episodes.

If you’ve read previous newsletters you might get the feeling that I have a fucked up sense of humor. This is, in fact, the case. So you can only imagine what can make me laugh so hard that I spit my drink out. In one particularly hilarious scene Shane Gillis’s character Shane (he’s probably too drunk to remember a character name other than his own), a mechanic at the shop, is talking to a local newspaper reporter and asks if he remembers him from his high school days as a football player. The reporter asks him if he was first team all-county and Shane replies “No, honorable mention.” The spat back and forth between the condescending reporter and the equally, if not more so, condescending blue collar Shane is hilarious. What it really reminded me of was Twitter. Everyone has become so cynical, so entrenched in their own hate for the other side, that it’s gotten to the point of parody.

Tires might be the least politically correct show on planet earth, which means it’s ACTUALLY funny. It’s the antithesis of late-night talk shows. It’s the antithesis of trying to please everyone. It’s a ton of jock humor, but the point is – it’s humor!

You tell me if this is funny or not.

Racist, maybe? Hilarious, yes! I laughed. Fucking sue me.

Keep in mind that Shane Gillis was fired from SNL for making an Asian joke just a few short years ago. Now he’s got a Netflix show doing whatever he finds funny. It’s working. I’m sure there are think pieces out there saying how Tires is sexist, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, and every other heinous word under the sun. And guess what? No one cares! The show got picked up for a second season.

Now remember when I took my Nana boting? What’s the difference between me laughing when she says boting instead of voting and the Shane video above? Nothing! It’s the same humor. So what if immigrants don’t speak like Americans? And so what if when they try it’s hilarious? Do you know how hard I would be laughed at if you dropped me off in Guatemala and I tried to speak Spanish to them? Do you know how hard my Nana laughs at me now when I attempt a sentence in her native tongue?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that going to a voting booth and seeing a smorgasbord of different ethnicities taking part in the electoral process by day and watching Tires by night has eased my weariness of where America is right now. There are a ton of wackos out there, the majority are online, and they are loud. They drown out the normal people: the people in that voting booth, the people who laugh at Tires, but those people are real. If you’d just look up, you’d see them. The only thing I wish is that those normal people got a little bit louder. The problem is…that’s what makes them normal. Regular people living regular lives. Very much not online. These are my people. These are Americans. And regular, normal Americans are doing just fine.

P.S. – Nana did get her son into the United States. He was my Uncle Rey. I will blame him for my sick sense of humor. At the ripe age of 11 he sat me down and made me watch Richard Pryor. I never stood a chance.

P.P.S. – Nana went back to the Dominican Republic recently. I asked her if she ever thought of moving back there. Her answer, in plain English, was – “Fuck no.”

P.P.P.S. – Book mark this piece and come back to it when you’re feeling down about the state of our country. Send it to a friend who is questioning, “Has America gone looney?” When election 24’ rolls around, and I am singing a different tune, I’ll come back to this piece to try and remind myself that everything is fine.