Author: Katie Quirk

Most everyone who has stepped into The Purple Onion coffee shop in Dinkytown has noticed William “Bill” Grimes IV, a regular for nearly a decade who whiles away the hours sipping mochas, reading Kierkegaard and science fiction, and “flapping with cats.” You can’t miss him: Grimes is a 6’3”, 170-pound man in his early 30s of half-Bohemian (as in Bohemia, near the Czech Republic), and half-African American descent. He sports an enormous afro, a mustache which extends into the crease of his chin, and oversized 70s-style glasses. He frequently wears a vintage polyester shirt hanging open to reveal his naked chest.

More than a few stuffed shirts suffer from Grimes-envy, or at least admiration. This fondness is most often construed in what Grimes calls “differential treatment,” demonstrated through free admission to concerts (comped by various bands including Fat Lip and Greazy Meal), a free trip to Chicago with the Honeydogs (a gift of a bar owner intent on having Grimes’ mere presence at the band’s show), and, most strangely, an autograph request from another audience member at a Jimi Hendrix tribute show Grimes attended. When a bemused Grimes protested, iterating his mere fan status, pointing out that he wasn’t in any of the bands and noting that he didn’t even play an instrument, the clean-cut, suburban man became insistent. He wanted Grimes to sign his Hendrix poster.

Grimes suspects it’s the hair that commands the initial attention. So much so that his life’s timeline consists of “before hair” and “after hair” experiences. But it would do Grimes an injustice to attribute his charisma merely to the massive afro, which is often adorned with a peacock feather above his right ear. People were drawn to him even in his Army Reserves days, when his head was shaved. They were baffled by how he could stay up all night reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and chain-smoking in the latrine. They were astonished by this 18-year-old Minneapolis kid who had been “tricked” into joining the reserves, by the man who would grow up to claim on his census form that his race is “Nietzsche’s übermensch.”

It is not surprising that Grimes is a font of progressive thought. Although soft-spoken and even introverted, he is forthcoming with his ideas. He wrote a book documenting his beliefs. The Mystified Sojourn: Resurrection of the Meaning of Spirituality and Religion is an exploration of alternative spirituality and capitalistic conundrums. At 189 pages, the self-published tract is dense enough to rival a semester’s worth of discussions in an entry-level cultural studies class, and original enough to have sold 270 copies.

Some people admire his derring-do. Others, like one Purple Onion regular who has repeatedly complained to employees that he caught Grimes “looking at him,” seem unaccountably threatened by him. Grimes cannot help but be amused. After all, he’s always looked different, from the days of his gangly, buck-toothed adolescence to his still-gangly, retro-stylin’ self. He says any attempt at conformity always fails, regardless of his hair.

Bill Parreault owes his life, or at least his current livelihood, to Big Tobacco. Of course, at his current rate of smoking two packs a day, the 62 year old may eventually also owe them his death. But he can’t quit. And judging from the number of cigarette butts he sweeps up during his daily rounds as Uptown’s custodian, neither can you.

It’s been 15 years since Parreault took the part-time, $8-an-hour job sweeping the streets and picking up trash. He works for a private contractor hired by the Uptown Association. When he started, they would power-wash the sidewalks every night, the most efficacious way to remove all the chewing gum that ends up there. He took a pay cut—and a cut in respectability—when the Association decided they no longer wanted to shell out so much cash for those clean-as-a-whistle sidewalks. Now, Parreault sets out in his pick-up truck six days a week, stopping every few blocks to get out and hand-sweep the bus transfers, removing the soda bottles and cigarette butts that frequently lay just a few feet from one of the area’s numerous trash cans. Parreault doesn’t really mind the public’s laziness, he says. It’s not really in his demeanor to get angry, not since he quit drinking about ten years ago, anyway. But people who throw butts at his feet are another story. “It’s as if they don’t even see me,” he said, his ever-present accent not a wholesome Minnesota twang but rather a gentle Maine roll.

It’s possible that people don’t see him, although anyone who has ever stopped at Lagoon and Hennepin for a morning coffee (or a pack of smokes) has most likely crossed paths with the short, gray-haired man in the blue coveralls and the baseball cap emblazoned “Sturgis 2002.” He’s slight, almost gaunt, and his face is a cartographer’s dream, with endless rivers and tributaries of wrinkles, running every which way across his tan, impossibly soft skin. He’s quiet, polite, and looking forward to retirement at the end of the month, which will bring great things: a respite from his afternoon job fixing motors, work he enjoys but would rather be doing on his own. But Uptown will continue to owe its clean sidewalks and empty trashcans to him.

Parreault owes his relative poverty to hourly jobs, an affinity for the lottery, his appetite for smokes, and two of his grandkids, who took a liking to their grandparents when they fell out with their next-of-kin. He wasn’t always a custodian. Over the years he’s been a farmhand, a Marine, a lobster and crab fisherman, and, most often, a truck driver. To trucking he owes his bad back and his residence in Minnesota; it was a cross-country-trip-gone-bad that found Parreault prudently unloading here, with $25 in his pocket and nothing else, while his beer-drinking, pill-popping partner carried on westward. Parreault found a place to crash, and pretty soon it was back to work as usual.

He hopes retirement will mean more than free afternoons. He’d like to start his own business, a sort of motorman-on-wheels who makes house calls to fix small engines in lawnmowers and maybe even cars, a craft in which he earned a degree from the Dunwoody Institute. Five clients have already signed up for the service. What he’s lacking is a van to haul all the necessary tools and the generator. Unfortunately, no one owes Parreault any money.

There are a few people who notice Parreault’s hard work, like the retired military man who sips coffee at Starbucks and the waitress at Lucia’s who greets him with a sunny “Good Morning!” One woman gives him a hug every morning before she gets on the bus and heads downtown for work. She doesn’t owe him anything—but he collects it anyway.

We battled it out for 17 hours at a teardrop-shaped table in a dimly lit conference room in Eagan. The three day seminar was called “Wings,” the hosts were employees of Northwest Airlines, the goal was to help students overcome their fear of flying. They came from all over—Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and a few coastal states. Every one of the 10 participants had flown before, and some flew all the time. One woman had even boarded a plane in Tacoma, Washington, to come to the class. Yet each of the six women and four men (standard for this bimonthly class, whose female-to-male ratio is usually about 60:40, facilitator and retired captain Tom Roberts informed me) experiences panic attacks, stress, and anxiety prior to air travel and often throughout the flight.

This is not an uncommon fear, according to resident psychologist Ruth Markowitz. At the Friday evening meet-and-greet, Markowitz said that 1 in 6 people feels anxious when flying. These are bright, creative people who let their imaginations get the better of them and thus spend their time at 35,000 feet expecting the worst, hands clenched to the armrests instead of cocking their heads into the aisle hoping to get a glimpse of the meal cart.

Of course, it’s an irrational fear, since flying is—statistically speaking—safer than driving, dancing outside in a thunderstorm, and eating fast food. Yet on Saturday afternoon, after Roberts’ two hour presentation detailing the meticulous safety measures, flight techniques, and crew training airlines use to ensure the utmost quality, and after inspecting both the cockpit and the exterior of a DC-9 grounded in the airline’s hangar, the class was still collectively showing the tight face of stress. Even my usually composed mind was beginning to wonder if, ridiculous as it seems, these people know something I don’t.

By the time Sunday morning arrived, the class had been through hours of deep breathing, visualization, and the safety briefing. We’d sat on an airplane and in a flight simulator. It was now time to face the fear.

Our flight to Chicago’s O’Hare airport left at 9 a.m. One man, a quiet Iowan who hadn’t flown in 15 years and was hoping to take his wife on the honeymoon she’d never had, called it quits before the security check. He promised to return in September and take advantage of the second-time free policy (a nice option on a $495 tuition). We met the captain at the gate and pre-boarded. Normally, of course, pre-boarding is for those challenged by infirmity or infant, but in our case it was to get everyone on the plane with plenty of time to get comfortable. Ours was a regularly scheduled flight, but it was empty—a 110-passenger DC-9 with 45 seats booked. Half the seats were reserved for the class. No general announcements were made, so the dignity of the students was spared in case there were any jaded, professional travelers present on the flight. While Markowitz calmed one man, an airline mechanic who begged to disembark, Roberts talked the tense but outwardly calm group through the pre-flight noises and offered reassurances and kind words. Seated a row ahead, smiling what I hoped was a compassionate smile, I couldn’t help thinking about that absolutely miniscule, not-gonna-happen risk and the horrible ironic potential of this flight. Fifty minutes and one beverage service later, when NWA Flight 126 touched down smoothly and safely and nine fearful flyers celebrated, I too was relieved.

In the terminal, the flyers checked in with each other. Not everyone thought it had gone as well as they hoped, but everyone had successfully utilized some or all of the half-dozen techniques Markowitz had recommended for a more relaxed experience. The flight back to the Twin Cities, with the same plane and its familiar noises, was relatively uneventful. Victory, in this case a broad and sweeping term, was declared.