Searching for words
Muscling the pickup into gear, Garry McKay says, "Yeah, you'll get your drink later, girlie." But not now. Now, he's going across town to get beat up.
With a left-hand turn onto Broadway in Rotterdam, he suddenly merges with the sluice of city traffic through a world of words. The Blue Jay Tavern flickers by in perfectly plain English.
"Nope," he says. "Didn't catch it."
Crazy Nick's Video?
"Nope."
Second Chance Consignments?
"Uh-uh."
A whole wondrous, maddening, milelong midway of words winks and blinks with come-hither commerce. Words that promise to repair, pump, bless, buy, sell, save, shear, cook, cool, bake, reupholster, clothe, serve, wash and fold.
Garry's blinded to it all. ...
He reads at a first-grade level, which, in the parlance of reading education, makes him functionally illiterate. Going by his windshield at 25 mph, such words are but a blur of shapes and colors.
He doesn't even look at them.
Instead, his eyes focus dead ahead. He pulls the brim of his baseball cap down tightly over his brow. The letter G is stitched above the brim. It's the G of the Georgia Bulldogs, co-opted to become the G of Garry.
That's how things work in Garry's world. Society conducts itself in a code he doesn't comprehend, so, over time, he has devised his own rules, his own code. How he works, how he goes from place to place, how he shops, how he pays his bills.
Carefully, every day and in nearly every way, he abides by his assembled system, which he places like a transparent overlay upon the literate world. It's a system with a singular style ranging from ingenious to awkward to problematic.
When he needs to know what the day and date is, instead of consulting a calendar, he clicks on the TV news.
"They're bound to say it eventually," he says.
Since he can't read a restaurant menu, he simply decides what he wants to eat and asks for it.
"I figure they got the food and I got the money. They can make me what I want, right?" he says. "You know, lay a price on it, no big deal."
He's a house painter, and in order to find a client's home, he has them give him landmark-laden directions over the phone while he holds a little tape recorder up to the receiver. Out on the road, if lost, he pulls over and rewinds the recorder and plays it back.
"If anyone ever tells you they're the only brick house on the street, that's rarely true," he says. "You get there, and there are 13 brick houses on the street."
In his world, road signs are rarely read. Chain businesses he knows by sight - like Mobil, Kmart, Friendly's or Stewart's - become his North Star in any given town. They are his fixed points in a world of muted, melded symbols so that everything else - clients' homes, say - is arranged in relation.
He held the recorder up to the phone a year and a half ago as a woman explained how to get to the Schenectady County Public Library on Clinton Street.
He found the library, eventually. He knows how to get there by heart now. He's been driving there nearly every week since then to learn to read. That's where he's heading now "to get beat up," as he calls his two-hour sessions with his tutor, Diane Smith. The pain is self-inflicted.
"It's good for me," he says.
Plus, Diane couldn't be any gentler or more patient. She helps him read simple words and points out among other things that n-a-m-e doesn't spell "many," that m-o-v-i-e doesn't spell "move" and that the g in "sign" is silent.
The G of Garry, by comparison, is rarely silent.
"You can go a long way in this world with the gift of the gab," says his son, Garry McKay Jr. of Schenectady. "He's living proof of that."
But Garry has never read a novel or a newspaper. He was never able to help his five grown children with their homework when they were little. When Haley, his 4-year-old granddaughter, asks him to read a story, he can do nothing but pass the story on to another family member.
"So I can't read," Garry says. "But you know what? I'll learn." He operates on the essentials. G is for Garry. D is for Drive. E is for Empty - but not quite.
Gas gauges exaggerate. Everyone knows that.
He's 53. He's not stopping for gas now. He's making up for lost time.
Broadway breaks up at the foot of Millard Street in front of the Stewart Repair Company whose brick building is painted with a very old advertisement.
Stopped at the red light there, Garry looks up at the ad. He ignores the words, "Drink Coca-Cola Relieves Fatigue," and settles on the two symbols easiest for him to decipher: 5.
"Five cents, right?"
He learned his numbers long ago in school. He had to. You can't get too far in life not knowing numbers, not knowing what change for 10 bucks looks like. Reading words was another matter. In grade school, he would come home crying because he couldn't keep up with his classmates. His parents took him to a doctor for evaluation. The verdict was "a mental block."
"A mental block," Garry says now, incredulously.
By high school, when his d's still looked like b's and his q's still looked like g's, his teachers accused him of being a wise guy. Turns out he was - and is - dyslexic. He didn't find that out until years later. But not before his sophomore year in high school after which, frustrated and rebellious, he finally left the written world behind and dropped out. He took his numbers and headed off to make money.
Today, he'll tell you - and then maybe tell you again for good measure - that he paid cash for his pickup, cash for his van, cash for his motor home that he keeps in the lot beside his house. It was all cash earned through his own labor, through his own one-man painting business, which he began in 1982.
"Money is my friend, you know what I mean?" Garry says with a hint of swagger.
But the swagger subsides the minute he puts on his new reading glasses. He admits they make him look like an old lady. He doesn't care. They work wonders rounding off his hard edges.
The swagger also subsides when he explains the reason why two years ago he was compelled to call Literacy Volunteers - Mohawk/Hudson Inc., the Colonie-based nonprofit that provides tutors free of charge.
The world's prevailing equations finally caught up with him. Namely, that reading equals knowledge, knowledge equals power and power equals self-reliance.
His wife, Donna, used to handle his bookkeeping until she died from cancer 13 years ago. Friends have helped him out with the bookkeeping and bill-paying since then. But two years ago, somehow the car insurance bill got overlooked and was never paid. The insurance lapsed. Not only did he have to surrender the plates to his van for 90 days, he also had to pay a $700 fine. That hurt.
"It kind of pushed my buttons," he says. "I don't want to have to be relying on anyone. It's embarrassing."
He makes a left onto Liberty Street - also known as the corner with the Friendly's - then pulls into the library parking lot.
In his paint-splattered black jeans, he climbs out of the pickup and grabs a plastic shopping bag from behind the seat that contains his reading materials. Then Garry walks into the imposing brick building filled with 312,000 titles, none of which he has read.
"Garry shows up," Diane says. "That's a big thing. A lot of people come for a while, expect to learn how to read in five weeks, then give up."
The two settle in a second-floor classroom where he takes off his cap and puts on his reading glasses, leaving behind a world where money matters most, where signs make no sense and where TV newscasters take their sweet time to tell you the day and date.
In this room, the code of calendars and simple storybooks and road maps unravels with meaning. Painstakingly. In fits and starts. Week by week. A year and a half ago, he couldn't read a sale circular. Now he can.
"K-n-o-w," Garry says, slowly, his finger tapping on the word.
He's staring.
After a moment, Diane says, "The k and the w are silent."
He's silent now, too, staring hard.
"Na- ... Na-," he says, barely a whisper.
A minute goes by. He adjusts his glasses.
"Know?" he says.
"Yes," says Diane. "Great. Really great."
He shrugs. "OK," he says.
It's a screwy world. Its rules are irrational. Why would a k or w or g ever be silent? Who knows? Sometimes they are, and there's nothing Garry can do about it.
At lesson's end, he folds his glasses.
"Thanks, Diane," he says.
"Garry, nice job," she says as they part ways in the parking lot.
"See you next week," he says, then climbs back into his pickup.
His cap is back on, pulled down tightly — the hard, indomitable G of Garry.
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