Making History with Crosswords and Prozac

Introduction

The Patchwork of Fate …
Crosswords and Prozac

Life is a quilt with a wild, weaving, wandering patchwork of crossing paths, some that intersect by fate’s design (as with meeting my wife), others indiscriminately but with such consequence that you can’t help but feel it must have been for a reason. My story is one of the latter, a collision of ambition and intolerance, a puzzle whose pieces would only fit the sort of metaphysical framework that comes in the form of a crossword puzzle. According to PBS in the book Faith and Reason, “Metaphysical studies generally seek to explain inherent or universal elements of reality which are not easily discovered or experienced in our everyday life. As such, it is concerned with explaining the features of reality that exist beyond the physical world of our immediate senses.”

In the series of events that led to me being in the middle of such a huge lawsuit, there were many key words I should have been picking up on but couldn’t because of my naiveté to the existence of racism as a feature of my reality. Nor of the depths of prejudice, which it would turn out were rooted far beyond my immediate sense of just how deep that hatred ran. I grew up on a Caribbean island with very few white people, but we were never raised to think of their absence as a positive or negative aspect to our way of life. Later, when I worked at a resort and experienced my first contact with white tourists, they were wonderfully friendly, considerate, respectful people. The same was my experience living in Houston, Texas. It wasn’t until I arrived in the traditionally liberal Pacific Northwest city of Portland, Oregon, that I had my first exposure to the sad reality of racism as part of American culture.

I was a young, ambitious, and—at first— a successful car salesman at a reputable local dealership. It was the kind of business that welcomed the type of energetic go-getter I represented in the sales force. I brought 150 percent to the every potential deal I worked, and before long, was making a very good living. I was told I was a “natural” and would move up fast in the company if I kept my foot to the fire. I had a fire burning inside me, too, a zest for life, with a spirit pushing my sails that began and ended with the mother and children I woke up with and came home to every night after work. A family I prided myself on providing for, along with most of the family men who worked at the auto dealership. We fed off each other’s competitive energy. Even if we were chasing the same sales, it was a good-spirited race where, at the end of the day, everyone seemed to come out a winner because of the synergy we brought as a team to the art of selling cars. Car salespeople are often the butt of jokes on TV, the worst place someone can end up, professionally speaking. But my field was, in fact, a very sought-after one. I was naturally a people person, and I was working at a dealership where the vehicles basically sold themselves. It had seem like the proverbial “American dream” had come true for me as I completed my first six months of employment.

Sadly, that dream would quickly turn into a nightmare, first with the news that the dealership was being sold to a much smaller, corporate dealership, which meant new management, and what would turn out to be an entirely alternate reality to the one I’d come to know as home. It began with the hiring of a manager who proudly introduced himself to the sales staff as, “a redneck from Georgia with a third-grade education.” As the climate worsened, my fellow minority salesmen and I were subjected daily to “redneck” humor by our immediate and general supervisors, who, when they weren’t paying us motivational compliments like “half-black nigger” and “black slave,” were routinely steering sales opportunities with white customers away from me and my minority coworkers. The combination of a loss of dignity and financial stability soon led to stress taking both a professional and personal toll. My fiancée and I began to have regular arguments over the family’s finances.

It wasn’t until the discrimination began that I turned to crossword puzzles to give my mind a break from trying to solve the confounding riddle of why this dark cloud had entered my life. It turns out I wasn’t the first. As according to Times people “less than two weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Lester Markel, the Times’ Sunday editor, dashed off a memo to his superiors suggesting that they consider adding a puzzle to the Sunday paper. The pressures and demands of the war played heavily on his mind. ‘We ought to proceed with the puzzle, especially in view of the fact that it is possible that there will now be bleak blackout hours—or if not that, then certainly a need for relaxation of some kind of other … We ought not to try to do anything essentially different from what is now being done—except to do it better.”

That is the secret science of crossword puzzles: they inspire you toward improvement, first within the context of the puzzle before you in the morning paper, reminding you that there is much turmoil in the backdrop of the coming day. But also providing in the same sense just enough shelter ahead of that storm to get your head into a game you can win if you just apply yourself. Taking that adage into my mind each morning, I was able to grow stronger in both my inner ability to strategize and my mental moxy for resolve—both of which were required to survive the day I faced each morning during those awful months. The conflicting lines that were crossed, the puzzlement my coworkers and I shared over the racist words that were thrown at us in a dizzying hail day after day. After a while, I started framing all that frustration in the context of a puzzle, with many missing pieces that I believed would fit in time as the riddle of why this was happening would eventually be solved.