Big Dumb Eyes: Stories from a Simpler Mind

Bargatze and Michael Clay moved into a small, cheap basement apartment in Chicago to pursue comedy. Both were in their early twenties and didn’t have much money, and they had never spent time outside of the South. The people they met in Chicago often couldn’t understand their accents. Bargatze and Michael are both Christians, and they were surprised to learn that most people in Chicago were not religious. Bargatze writes, “I’d never met anybody who didn’t believe in God before” (111). Bargatze met a man who asked him if he believes in dinosaurs, because he believed that most Southerners didn’t. Bargatze lied and said that he didn’t believe in dinosaurs in order to seem more interesting.

Bargatze and Michael didn’t have a car and used a shopping cart to transport groceries to their apartment. Eventually, they both started working at a new bar, which Bargatze referred to as “the closest thing I’d done to skilled labor in my life” (115).

They found a rat infestation in the basement apartment and tried to plug the hole in the wall with a baseball glove. They put the TV in front of it, but overnight, a rat chewed through the glove and knocked over the TV.