Falling In and Out of Love with Profanity
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I confess to loving good profanity. Profanity that counts. Profanity, that when used at the perfect moment, adds the chef’s kiss to linguistic triumph. I can remember the exact moment I fell in love with profanity. Let me tell you a story.
Up until I was 16, profanity only fit two categories of use: the mean and the gratuitous. You used curse words to either hurt people’s feelings or to sound cool for your friends. But then I got my very first part-time job, working at “Super Duper,” a supermarket chain in Buffalo, New York. Let me assure you of two things: yes, it was indeed named “Super Duper,” and no, it was neither “super” nor “duper” in any capacity.
I entered working life as a “stock boy.” I carried the plastic price-tag gun of the pre-scanning era, swiping it over and over each box of cereal and can of soup. Eventually, my superior double-bagging skills got me promoted to “dairy frozen,” which meant the managers locked me in the freezer until everything pulled off the truck had been neatly stacked and labeled.
But, no matter how far you climbed in the Super Duper heirarchy, there remained one duty no regular employee could escape: bringing in the shopping carts from the parking lot. This was before the futuristic utopia of today’s cart corrals and motorized cart pushers. In my day, “getting the carts” was the wild west. People left them everywhere, simply pushing them away from their cars when they finished unloading. The carts rolled away wild and aimless, like dogs off their leashes.
Sometime during your shift, a manager would stride toward the microphone at the front of the store—it looked like the kind that police often sport on their shoulders, attached to a twisty cord—and then send an unfortunate soul into the night, alone, to gather all the shopping carts. The call would come over the speakers, loudly and with a hint of shame, like you were being sent to the wall in Game of Thrones.
“Chuck, go get the carts. Chuck, carts.”
No “please.” No manners. Just, “Get the carts.” The other employees would laugh and give you the look that said, See you in an hour! This is where our story truly begins.
So, I’m out in the lot, a large lot, alone, shopping carts strewn everywhere. The Super Duper parking lot, also not super or duper, was an undulating tarmac with a long walk to the bank at the lot’s end; this seemed as far away as Tierra Del Fuego. The most you could really bring in at one time were 10 carts or so, with their collection of “one lame wheel” and having to alternate pushing uphill and downhill. Sometimes a few carts would break away and you’d chase them down before they pulverized someone or their vehicle. Winter was impossible. You’d come in from getting the carts and it seemed you’d been gone for months, just returned from a polar expedition.
But windy days. Windy days provided the greatest hazard of all and are also how I fell in love with profanity.
On a windy day at Super Duper, unattended shopping carts blew around the lot like bumper cars with no drivers. You’d look out Super Duper’s massive front windows and see them speeding with apocalyptic menace, unmanned and ready to mow down some senior citizen or maul a perfectly fine Buick Electra. You know that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Nazis open the Ark and ghosts swirl all over the place melting people—it was just like that.
One biblically windy day, the call descended from the Super Duper speaker system: “Chuck, get the carts. Now.”
I did my best. I chased carts like an urban shepherd whose lambs all had rabies and ran frothing around the parking lot. In a strong Buffalo wind, a cart could pick up a good deal of steam and smash into a car with enough force to do damage. We would always do our best to look away and bring the offender indoors before the vehicle owner returned.
And then it happened. I could see it unfolding frame by frame. A cart, before I could reach it, went into full Jaws mode, tearing across the lot like a hungry shark with its metal mouth open and then WHAM! Right into something I’ll call a Mercury Grand Marquis. The owner, of course, was already outside (pushing yet another cart) and had witnessed the whole drama. She heard the crunch of impact. Deniability would be impossible. The white-haired woman, who looked like a grandmother who could still fist fight if she had to, let me know how terrible I was at my job (a fair critique). I stood there and took it, all while other rogue carts blew around the parking lot and smashed into Oldsmobiles and Chryslers. I didn’t say much of anything beyond, “If you want, you can go talk to the manager.” She scrunched her face further inward and got into her car. This was not the end.
Once I had 10 to 12 carts in a line, heading back toward the whoosh of automatic doors, the woman pulled up beside me, window down (I bet she had to crank it down by hand to make the effort). She leaned out of the window, one arm in the air, fist shaking, and yelled, “You little cocksucker!” Then she drove off.
Stunned. It was as if my own grandmother had slapped me across the face twice with a glove. And the word felt tangible, like she had heaved it from a bucket and drenched me in “cocksucker.” It was so incongruous. The world would have made more sense if a chimpanzee on roller skates cruised by and gave me the finger while snapping its suspenders.
Then I stood there and laughed and laughed. Of course, everyone in Super Duper could see into the lot, including the managers, and there I was, laughing and not “getting the carts.” I finally finished my job and went inside, trying to explain that I wasn’t slacking, that an 80-year-old woman had just called me a “cocksucker” and I didn’t know how to respond. The manager, a short man who drove a Pontiac Fiero with a special parking spot, pivoted on the heel of his dress shoe and clicked away with flushed cheeks.
This is why “cocksucker” has always been my favorite curse word, though I don’t really use it. The word itself has no literal meaning to me, no connection to actual definitions—it might as well be a Chinese ideogram. You know, like if someone randomly called you “fucknuts” or “shitbird.” What do those mean? They sound bad but at least provide good assonance. But, like “cocksucker” in the moment I was declared one, it’s a banner for a country of its own, a word that means nothing more than bad intentions.
Ah, the good old days of a perfectly timed profanity. Now, when I watch films or listen to music, I feel like we’ve lost touch with the art of meaningful, non-gratuitous profanity, with everything boiled down to basic weak broth of “F$%ks” and “F$%k you,” entire films where the only adjective or adverb available is “F$%king.” We live under the tyranny of the F-word. It’s like if all of profanity had a party and then one of the guests said, “Sh#t, look who’s here; it’s F&%k; now we’ll never get a word in, always the attention wh#re.” Shakespeare would despair at the paucity of our profanity.
Now, I make a deliberate effort to never include profanity in my writing. If I wrote a screenplay for a gangster film set in prison I wouldn’t include a curse word. I’d be better off with “rat,” “weasel,” and other vermin-based epithets.
In some ways this saddens me. It feels like a loss. Where are you now, old lady at the helm of the Grand Marquis? I imagine her as Ahab, shaking her fist somewhere at yet another adversary and calling it a name that would make even a white whale blush.