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.
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.
Funny. Always a worthwhile read. I love how your brain thinks.
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