by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)
“I don’t think I’m going to stay at KU,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. I was sitting in my back writing room and I glanced up, out my window, at Terry’s bedroom in the back. It had been a long time since I’d heard him practicing that trumpet.
“I appreciate what you did. What you were trying,” he said. “And I also—you know, I just . . . I don’t want you to be upset with me.”
“I’m not, Terry,” I said. “I’m not.”
“It’s not that I don’t think it’s important. School. I like it. I can do it, I know I can do it, it’s just that . . . even with the scholarship, I can’t afford it. I’m working full time and I’m still five thousand dollars in debt.”
“That’s fine, Terry. That’s fine. It’s my fault. I didn’t see that. I should’ve been able to anticipate that. I mean, there’s other places we can look. You can take a year off. We can reapply—”
This was the opposite of the advice that I’d previously given him, because it was the opposite of the advice that my college counselor had given me. Taking a year off was suspect. I’d argued that it was crucial he apply to college right away.
“No,” he said.
“No?” I understood then, by the quality of his silence, that he wasn’t just informing me of his decision about KU. There was something else, some kind of help he wanted from me. “Well, that’s fine. But you’ve got to have some kind of backup plan. You can’t just stay around here and do nothing. You’ve done too much work for that.”
“I’ve got a plan,” Terry said. “I’m going to join the air force.”
“What?”
“I know you’ve been all worried about the war. I know you’ve been writing about it. And Granny, she’s a little worried about me doing this, so she asked me to call you. Before I signed up. So I promised I would.”
I’d had no idea. Terry was right, though. I had been writing about the war in Iraq. My desk at that moment was covered with notes, transcripts, and news articles about some infantry soldiers who’d executed Iraqi detainees and were now in jail.
“Holy fuck,” I said.
Terry’s soft, shushing laugh whispered to me over the line. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what she thought you’d say.”
“What branch is it again?” I asked.
“Air force.”
“Not the army?”
“Not the army. So if I go—”
“No, when you go.”
“When I go,” Terry said, agreeably. “I’ll be up in the air. In a plane.”
When I got off the phone with Terry half an hour later, my eyes were wet. I’d given him the third degree, talked over every option, listened to the details of his contract. He’d thought things through pretty damn well. Worried over details. And he was right—the air force was a lot less dangerous than the army, especially if he wasn’t going to train to be a fighter pilot, which he wasn’t going to do. He’d have a staff position. He’d learn a language. And the air force was harder to get into than the army. More exclusive. More elite. The grades he’d worked so hard on had come into play.
I couldn’t have described then the emotion that I was feeling. Loss? Concern? Failure? No, not exactly. It was much fuller, much more painful, than that. I made calls to my military contacts. I asked questions. And then, a few days later, I knocked on Jackie’s door when I knew Terry wasn’t home, sat with her on her porch, overlooking our street, and told her that I thought Terry should accept the offer from the air force.
Jackie cried. She was a tough person. I’d never seen her cry over anything. I sat across from her and held her hand. “I know he’s got to do it. I know he’s gotta be happy. I just don’t want to see him get hurt. I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m afraid.”
At that moment, I understood why I was there. This was the one true, useful thing I could do for Terry. The one thing he had asked: lie to his grandmother. Guarantee his safety, even if I couldn’t really do that. Even if I was afraid.
“I checked it out,” I said. “There’s nothing to worry about. I promise. He’s gonna do great.”
■ ■
I’ve stayed in touch with Terry during the many years that have passed since that summer. As it turned out, he did go to war, flying missions in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. He was a crew member, not the pilot, but still he was there. He won’t tell me what those missions were about, either. What he did, why he was there. As it turned out, I went to the war, too, as an embedded reporter in Iraq during 2006 and 2010. There were times when I wondered if Terry was up there in the sky above me, invisible, reading his instruments, and, in an inversion of our fortunes, somehow watching out for me.
I still own the house next door to Jackie’s place. My first son was born when my wife and I still lived there, right around the time that Terry went away. I wrote two novels there. I loved it. I loved my neighbors, the day lilies, the tall, calming, majestic white pine that shaded both Jackie’s house and mine. I live in a different house that’s only seven blocks away, so I still visit the old place, tend the yard, clean the gutters, light the pilot light for the renters when winter comes. I go over and talk to Helen Palmer, who still lives across the street. When I look up at Jackie Eason’s porch, I sometimes wonder if maybe the two of us weren’t afraid for Terry. We were afraid for ourselves, for getting left behind. Which was why that fear felt so different, fuller, like happiness, in a way.
In that sense, Jackie was right to be afraid. When she got sick, in 2011, I was on a fellowship in another state. Terry was overseas, though he made it back before she died. And now? Terry’s a grown man. He’s still in the air force and lives in Washington, D.C.
He’s not coming back, I don’t think. Which makes him a stronger man than me.
Here in a State of Tectonic Tension
Its geography similar to Istanbul’s—
read for Lake Huron, the Black Sea,
for the St. Clair River, the Bosporus,
for Lake St. Clair, the Sea of Marmara,
for the Detroit River, the Dardanelles,
and for Lake Erie, the Mediterranean—
a natural place for Ford and Olds to open factories,
strategically near the Pittsburgh steel mills, Akron
rubber plants, Mesabi iron ore range.
Here, in ultimate concentration, is industrial
America—Chrysler, Continental, Budd, Hudson,
in an area not much larger than two square miles,
ninety to one hundred thousand employed on two
or three shifts—the capital of a new planet, the one
on wheels. Whacked-out, stamped-out connecting rods,
the steady blown-out flare of furnaces, hammer-die
brought down on anvil-die, oil-holes drilled and oil-
grooves cut—Fordism was Gramsci’s word to describe
mass assembly based on systems of specialized
machines operating within organizational domains
of vertically integrated conglomerates fed by small
and medium-sized units coordinated by methods
of marketing exchange—an epical, systemic violence.
Anonymous’s eyes pop as he laughs and says
“dragged the old coon from his car, kicked him till
he shit himself, and then we set the auto on fire—God
Jesus was it a show!” How many summers after that
the Motor City burned to the ground? Soon several new
regimes of redistributed wealth would alter the way
capitalism proceeded, a squad of police breaks down
the union hall door, swinging crowbars and tossing canisters
of Mace—around the time the long depression started.
There are stalks of weeds in sunlit snow, an abandoned
house surro
unded by acres of snow. The decay apparently
has frightened the smart money away. Metaphorically
underwater—more is owed on properties in Detroit than
they’re worth. His hands and feet were bound, found
beaten in a field near Post and Fort, he’s in intensive
care at Receiving Hospital, says Sergeant Ollie L. Atkins,
investigators yet to ask him who he is or what happened.
Notice that on the high school baseball diamond is a herd
of goats—attended by whom? Notice, a few doors down,
the stucco plastered house painted baby blue, walking in front
in a red stocking cap, green specks on his shoes—what
do you think he is thinking? Drive Woodward to Seven Mile,
west on Seven Mile to Hamilton, Hamilton south to the Lodge
Freeway, then the Lodge downtown, and measure the chaos,
drive Mack Avenue east to Seminole, south on Seminole
to Charlevoix, then west on Charlevoix to Van Dyke, south
on Van Dyke to East Jefferson, and remember what isn’t.
Ionic pillars carved with grapes and vine leaves no longer
there, deserted houses of gigantic bulk, in which it seems
incredible anyone could ever have lived, no longer there,
Dodge Main’s nocturnal gold vapors no longer there,
the constellated bright lights reflected on the Rouge River’s
surface no longer there. Narco-capital techno-compressed,
gone viral, spread into a state of tectonic tension and freaky
abstractions—it’ll scare the fuck out of you, is what it’ll do,
anthropomorphically scaled down by the ferocity of its own
obsolescence. Which of an infinity of reasons explain it?
Which of an infinity of conflagrations implode its destruction?
—Lawrence Joseph
ONCE THERE WAS A SPOT
Larry Watson
I’M NOT SO idealistic or naïve as to suggest that the Bismarck, North Dakota, that I lived in from the age of five to the age of twenty (1952 to 1967) was a classless society. Not at all. It was a largely middle-class community, and it certainly had people living in poverty, just as it had people of wealth. But here’s the thing: While the poor aspired to a middle-class life, so did the wealthy.
Let’s say you were a lawyer or you owned a lumber company or you ran a construction company or you owned the city’s taxi service or you were a successful real estate developer. (These were the occupations of homeowners on my parents’ block; my father was one of the lawyers.) You could afford a nicer house than a schoolteacher or a cigarette salesman, yet the homes of all these families looked the same. When my wife moved to Bismarck with her family in 1958 they lived on the same block as the governor of the state, and I’d defy anyone who didn’t already know which house was the governor’s to pick it out from its neighbors. Later her family lived across the street from the mayor, and his house was as ordinary and unpretentious as any on the block.
The city had its grander houses, to be sure, but for the most part those had been built in an earlier era; they were older houses clustered near the center of town. The dwellings of newer construction were invariably modest, and almost all single-story ranches or split-levels.
In the company of friends, I entered more than a few of those houses, and once I was inside I could see that some had features that made them nicer than others—a plusher carpet, a paneled basement rec room, an extra bathroom, a console color television, a sectional sofa. But these touches were for the comfort, convenience, or taste of the residents; they didn’t affect the impression of the house—or of its inhabitants—from the street.
How to account for the middling effect in that place and time? Perhaps it was a collective memory of the Depression, which so many of our parents lived through. Since they’d witnessed what it was to lose everything, they might have believed it was better not to accumulate too much. Maybe it was ethnic influence. The ancestors of many North Dakotans came from Norway and Sweden, and to Scandinavians ostentation was a sin only slightly less grievous than murder. It was all right to keep up with the Joneses; it wasn’t all right to show them up. Many of the men had served in the military during World War II, and in the military almost everyone lands in the middle ranks. Maybe it was some strange influence of setting, of place and time, that made people believe the middle was where they belonged; they lived, after all, in the middle of the continent in the middle of the century. Or perhaps this was an era when the citizenry still took to heart their Christian religion’s lessons on humility. Whatever the cause, the city could have had a credo: Don’t try to show you’re better than your neighbor.
When did it change? I’m not sure. My wife and I moved away, but on one of our annual trips back to Bismarck, probably in the mid-1970s, we noticed that on the once-bare hills that surrounded and looked down on the town, houses were being built, grand houses, many of them, and over the years there were more and more of them, and they became bigger and more imposing (“big-roofed houses,” my architect brother-in-law calls them). At some point the houses that our parents had bought with the idea that they would live out their lives in them (true for my mother; she died in the house she’d lived in for more than fifty years) weren’t large enough for school principals or doctors or oil company executives or heads of state agencies. Families believed they needed more. One bathroom certainly wasn’t enough. Three bedrooms wouldn’t do. A triple garage was a necessity. Soon Bismarck became a city with houses that grandly declared that their occupants belonged to the higher socioeconomic classes. Anyone driving down this block had to know that the people here had more money than the people on that block.
Of course matters of social class are always complicated by culture, region, ancestry, history, politics, race—to say nothing of the eyes of those making observations and coming to conclusions. It’s entirely possible that when I recall a city that tried to show itself to the world as a community of equality of class I’m completely full of shit. But maybe, just maybe, on the wind-swept, heat-blasted, blizzard-besieged northern Plains, once there was a spot . . .
HURRAY FOR LOSERS
Dagoberto Gilb
AT THE BEGINNING I took auto shop because it didn’t make me yawny or sarcastic to be there, and Uncle Willie—what kids called the teacher—might yell now and then, but mostly he left us alone, talking, doing. I liked cars, especially driving them instead of walking or the bus. And better when they were bad looking. Also for work, yes, but of course there was after work, cruising the starry boulevards, eyeing girls, the summer wind blowing through open windows all year round. These were the best times, the very best, all the older, mature veterans of life would say. I remember, I listened. None talked college years or the kind of jobs that were for them. All my friends, ones who weren’t into glue, or likely headed to county a few times, or fantasizing too much about music careers (because they listened, not out of talent), talked about jobs and income as soon as they got out. Loading docks and trucker training, fireman, bartender, carpenter, plumber, jet mechanic, butcher. I had one high school friend who came from New Zealand. Poor, his mom and younger sister (his dad, an abusive drunk biker, didn’t live with them) were set up by the Mormon church. He planned to go to BYU but in my mind that was because it was a Mormon thing, nothing to do with normal. Like me. Another friend, a girlfriend, she had a cousin who started college, but when her mom went to Mexico for her sick mother, she had to take care of the family instead. Another friend I made had come from Colorado. The Rocky Mountains. That was impressive to me in itself. He lived with his mom, a secretary at a parts factory. One day his dad came to town. He’d never mentioned him before. His dad, unemployed, was once an engineer. Of course, yes, I thought railroad. I knew older people who worked at the yards. Not t
hat, though. And more, he had a master’s degree. I didn’t know what that was, where it ranked in the educated order. It was out there and up high special, like from another land. One day my new friend got horrible news. His dad had shot himself. I don’t remember if I even asked what kind of weapon, if I only imagined a shotgun. And my friend had to go to his apartment and clean it up. Brains and blood on the wall and floor is all I heard of it that one day he told me, and never again. Educated people were unusual.
Then, tenth grade (though it didn’t change in eleventh or twelfth), the only colleges I knew of had headlining football teams. In L.A. it was USC and UCLA in the sports pages. I didn’t know where either of their campuses were, had never seen a campus even, only that they both played at the Coliseum. Nobody I knew of went to a college like that. Actually, any college at all. Excluding the few off-the-books types, people I knew of, older, had jobs in construction, shops, factories, or delivering things in trucks. I had a friend whose mom was an executive secretary. A “rich” girl in high school’s dad delivered the U.S. mail. Before she married the one after my dad, my own mom had a job at a dentist’s office because she was pretty, not because she knew anything about offices or teeth. She dated lots of culos whose employment I didn’t care to learn until she married one that became a temporary stepdad. My dad had worked full time at an industrial laundry since he was thirteen. I got to start working there the summer I turned fourteen. And during school I worked four hours every day and eight on Saturdays. Most adults I knew and spoke to worked there. Around 30 to 40 men and women where at least 150 were employed, all minimum-wage level. About a fourth of them whose origins were the Deep South, who knew about sports in town, the other three-fourths, who didn’t follow any college sports local or national, from Mexico and Central America. They of course didn’t talk a lot about any high school days, let alone the prep for what came after.
Nobody ever told me to go to college. That I should. Not one adult, in an office or on the street or in my home—or my father, who I only saw at work. Nobody expected me to go to college. Nobody discussed what it took to go to college. I remember—not even sure of the language then—that when asked on a form, like that, I picked college prep as my plan. Maybe it was the other options that were so bad. But the reason, for me, that I picked it was that it was the best choice. The top. Because I was aspiring to be, if not already, an elitist. I wanted more, better, the best possible at whatever it was. I didn’t know what that was exactly, or at all, or how you made it happen, but I had confidence in my abilities, whatever they were supposed to be once they were in front of me. I liked cars, but no way I wanted to be a mechanic.
