So many good books; so little time! Original stories, poetry, book reviews and stuff writers like to know.

Sunday, June 5, 2022

I GODDA GNU

 


I Listened to Chris Hall on CBC’s The House this morning. It was all about guns and gun controls and how the government was or wasn’t dealing with gun smuggling from the USA to Canada.

A scenario from the past—possibly a fable or joke—came to mind and I decided to milk it while my thoughts were on the general subject of gun mayhem and the people who cause it.

I was a teller (they weren’t associates then) for 9 months with the Bank of Montreal in the ‘60s, as miscast a role for me as ever there was, so maybe this did, or didn’t happen to me in the lull between real customers. I’m old. Give me a break. We all know that any talk we hear of the autobiographical variety is fictionalized … a little, or a lot.

It was a Friday, a real TGIF kind of an end to the bankers’ week. I was contemplating my balance sheet for the day, knowing I’d served so many customers that it couldn’t possibly balance … as was usual, when I heard a heavy bag containing what I thought would be rolled coins clunk down on the counter in front of my cage. A burly, crop-haired man, apparently in his early twenties, was laboriously printing on the back of a counter check with the pen-on-a-chain tethered there for customers. He shoved the note he’d written through the slot under the barred window to my cage and I read, “GOD a GNU.”

               I looked up, obviously puzzled, and he pointed at his bag lying on the counter, nodded and made a self-conscious fist in a manner that a bad actor might if trying to act out “menacing gesture.”

               I read it aloud, “Godda Gnu.” He repeated the pointing at the bag, menacing fist gesture and leaned in closer. “Cash,” he said.

               I was perplexed, more about the note (I assumed neither God nor a Wildebeest were in the bag) then at the dawning of the thought that I was being robbed by a person extremely dys in the lexic department.

               I would leave the bank to enter Teacher’s College shortly, but my urge to correct people had already been noted in my family. “Do you mean ‘gun?’” I said, and crossed out his “gnu” and wrote “gun” in its place.

               He seemed offended, as well he might be. He showed his indignation in the way he lifted and dropped the bag on the counter again; there was something ominously hard and heavy in the bag. “Cash,” he said again.

               I don’t know why I didn’t trigger the alarm system. All it would have taken is … I better not tell you that; we weren’t supposed to give that away. But boy hoddy,[i] when you’re right, you’re right and for some reason, I was rendered compulsive about reversing this poor man’s faulty education in one fell swoop by teaching him some phonics. I grabbed a counter check and, on the back, wrote a list of sun, fun, pun, and gun. I read it aloud, pointing at each word as I read.

               He grabbed another counter check and began more laborious printing. This time he seemed to do better; I credited my teaching skills. “I KIL YOU. CSHA NOW.”

               I couldn’t blame him for obviously wishing his withdrawal expedited. The bank was emptying; the Friday last-minute rush nearly over. I opened my cash drawer and began counting 20s onto the counter. (It occurred to me in a flash why a counter is called a counter, but that’s another story.) “How much would you like to withdraw from your account?” I asked, loudly enough for my colleagues left and right to hear.

               “All of it,” he said. It was then I triggered the alarm and nothing happened. I learned later that the bank had disconnected my alarm button, probably because I’d twice set it off by accident and they were tired of the police swarms and the lock down and the frightening of their valued customers. Like I said, I was totally miscast as a bank teller. (I didn’t know why teller was the chosen nomenclature for what I did; I asked more than I told.)  

               I’d emptied my twenties, tens and fives slots in the CSHA drawer plus the few fifties and hundreds whose serial numbers had been registered with some head office somewhere in case they should show up as traceable evidence later … (Oops, I wasn’t supposed to divulge that either.) I stacked them neatly on the counter and stood in a pose obviously signaling, “so what do you want me to do with this?” while wondering at the same time why the place wasn’t swimming with cops. My dyslexic bandit tried to shove his bag under the bars of my cage but it wouldn’t fit, not without removing the heavy object inside whose shape was glaringly revealed in the attempt at passing it over. It was decidedly brick-like.

               I shoved the bills through the opening in what I estimated to be $5,000 bundles and he stuffed them unceremoniously and as surreptitiously as possible into the bag on top of the brick gun/God/gnu/wildebeest. I was impressed with the restrained ordinariness in his stroll out of the bank and onto Second Avenue and I thought as follows. My blotter won’t balance tonight and I won’t have to stay late to work on that. My failure to notify that a robbery was taking place will never be divulged, at least not by the bank.

                I'm a g-nu
Spelt G-N-U
I'm g-not a camel or a kangaroo
So let me introduce
I'm g-neither man nor moose
Oh, g-no, g-no, g-no - I'm a g-nu

As a teacher, this nonsense song would come to mind when a student with a learning disability was found to be struggling with concepts or content that just didn’t compute for him/her/them. I sometimes imagine that for one such high school dropout, a start was made on a satisfying life courtesy of the generous clientele of the Bank of Montreal and a mislabeled, misplaced teller/asker who did the world a favour by quitting his job. Perhaps our subject is right now in South Africa, a successful candidate among those answering an ad for persons to man a Gnu Control Program.

               I have also developed an affection for the Wildebeest, that South African mammal that could be mistaken for a buffalo or cow cousin, and who’s “g-neither man g-nor moose, g-nor camel g-nor kangaroo.”

               P.S. In nonsense lore, gnu has two syllables.

Good, good g-night.

 



[i] I’ve no idea what this means, but some people would say this to act—sort of—as a vocal exclamation mark.