We remembered when you gave us dollar bills or watched baseball games with us or let us hold the garbage bag open while you raked in the grass clippings.
We had these memories of you: What memories did you have of us?
SONYA WAS WORRIED about getting pregnant, and she wouldn't have sex with me anymore after she graduated.
"This is a harsh thing you're doing, Sonya," I would say, when we were in bed, almost naked, and she told me to back off.
"What?" she asked. "Do you want to spend your whole life in Maple Rock, raising a bunch of brats, working at some fucking stupid job, in a factory or whatever? You'll leave me just when parenthood is starting to get tough, and then what, Michael?"
That pretty much killed the mood every time, and deep down, I knew it was risky for her future. She was smart. She had plans.
So when Sonya finally broke up with me at the end of July, I wasn't too surprised. Now she was worried that even being around me might somehow affect her future.
Did I blame her for thinking such things?
"No, I guess not," I said.
She said she would always remember me as her first lover. Wasn't that enough?
"It's something," I said.
She said you just don't go off to college with a boyfriend back at home. It's limiting. Didn't I think so too?
"I guess I do," I said.
I could hear her mother's voice coming from somewhere inside of her. We were in Sonya's bedroom, and there was a framed picture of her father as a young man on the dresser. Then there was a picture of me in my prom tux. There was a picture of her dead cat Hal. It was the middle of the day, and it was hot in the house. Her room was filled with sunlight. I still remember that room as being perpetually full of sunlight.
"You'll be in Ann Arbor. That's, like, forty miles away. I could see you every day," I said.
"Exactly. Wouldn't that be—honestly, now—the worst thing for both of us?"
"How the fuck is your mom going to afford college anyway?" I said.
"Loans, Michael," Sonya said. "Student loans."
"What do you mean?"
"You can get loans for going to school," she said.
"From who?" I said.
"The government, Michael. What is wrong with you? How come you don't know anything, Michael?"
"How come everybody else calls me Mikey, but now you always call me Michael?" I said.
"It's more appropriate," she said. "Wishful thinking, maybe? Maybe you'll grow up if I call you by a grown man's name."
"Your dad's name was Jimmy," I snarled, or tried to snarl, but my lips were shaking too much and it sounded more like a slurp or a sniffle.
"My point exactly. You should go now."
Her hair caught the sunlight and cast a weblike shadow on her cheek.
"I want to go down on you," I said. "One last time."
I knew it was what she liked best.
"Honestly, Michael, I don't know what goes through your head," she said. "You've got to be kidding, right? You're fucking putting me on."
"I'm serious. It's all I can think about. I can taste it sometimes just from thinking about it. I need to do it one last time."
She flopped down on her bed and looked up at the ceiling and sighed a few times. I stood there looking at her exposed navel, getting hard. She undid her jeans, and said, "Kneel down."
I did.
"Don't expect me to do it for you," she said.
"Fine."
I pulled her jeans down, and slid her ankles out of them.
"This is so fucked up," she said.
"Do you want me to stop?" I said.
"No," she said.
I pulled off her white socks, which was the hardest thing to do. My hands shook. She was lying back on her bed in a pair of white underwear. She always liked this, she used to want to do this every day, twice a day. It was why she could do without fucking. She liked oral sex better. She left her T-shirt on, and said, "Close the door and pull down the shades."
I did what she said. When I got back on my knees in front of her, she said, "My mom will be home in an hour."
"Will we need that long?" I said. I saw her almost smile, but it wasn't the same worked-up, ecstatic kind of smile I was used to getting from her. Her smile was tentative, and we were both awkward and afraid of what would happen next.
SONYA LEFT MAPLE ROCK on Labor Day weekend.
At nine in the morning, I showed up at her house with Nick, and we helped her and her mother load the minivan with Sonya's stuff—clothes and books, mostly. They also packed some new stuff they'd just gone out and bought with a Sears charge card—a mini-fridge, a microwave, a small television, a bike.
I wondered aloud if they needed me to drive to Ann Arbor with them, and help them move all of that stuff into the dormitory. Nobody said anything, and when it was time to head off, Sonya kissed me and Nick on the cheek, both of us in the exact same way, and left us there. We watched the van pull out of the driveway and down the street and out of Maple Rock.
"Should we get drunk?" Nick asked.
"Why?" I said.
"Cause Sonya's leaving," he said.
"So?"
"So, dude, she was really hot and she was your girlfriend and I liked looking at her, and now she's gonna be mounting some fucking frat boy from West Bloomfield who is pre-med or something."
"Why do you think you know so much?" I said. "Fuck you."
"Do you want to get drunk or not?"
"No."
"Fine. Suit yourself," he said, and walked away while giving me the middle finger. "You're one miserable bastard, Mikey," he said.
And he was completely right.
A FEW WEEKS LATER, my mother came down into the basement while I was reading The Odyssey. It was way overdue already, but it was checked out on Sonya's card and I didn't care. I was reading three or four hours a night.
"Still working on Homer?" my mother asked.
"Yes," I said. "It's slow going."
"Have you talked to Sonya lately?"
"No. Not really."
"Her mother gave me her address. I ran into her at the store."
"So?"
"So, if you're gonna be a writer, you should learn to write good letters. You should always know how to write letters to a woman."
"Whatever," I said. But my mother left a slip of paper on the bed. I tried to go back to Homer, but everything was ruined. Fuck letters, I thought.
I drove to Ann Arbor that night and asked at a gas station for directions to Alice Lloyd Hall. The dorm wasn't as nice as I expected. The floors in the entranceway were yellowed and dull, the windows were all dirty, and a mass of silver mailboxes on one wall made the place feel like a warehouse. I wandered around until I found the third floor, and then wandered around even more until I found room 313. It was the same room number as our area code in Maple Rock. It was easy to remember, so I didn't have to look at the crumpled-up piece of paper in my pocket.
There was a sign on the door that said SUNNY. There was a dry-erase board with a rainbow on it, and a black marker hanging from a black string. Somebody had written "Hey, Foxy" and somebody else had written "Theo came by. Call me." I knocked softly on the door. I heard a slapping noise and turned to my left. A tall guy with a hairless, pale chest was walking down the hall in a towel and flip-flops, and he stopped at the room across from Sonya's and went inside. "I don't think Sunny is here right now," he said.
"Oh," I said. I had imagined her living with all girls, but here was this half-naked man, who lived right there.
After he'd closed the door—his sign said SWEET JIMMY—I picked up the pen and tried to think of something to write on my ex-girlfriend's door. It was a feeling of wordlessness a would-be writer should not have. I wanted to write something nice, something that would make her sorry that she had missed me. Instead I wrote "Your name is Sonya not Sunny." I walked down the hall slowly, hoping that maybe Sonya would come around the corner and find me, but she didn't.
A FEW DAYS LATER, Bill Clinton swung through the area to make a campaign appearance in Detroit, and he stopped in Maple Rock at the Polish-American Hall. He talked about the bright futures of communities like ours, the communities that built America, the union-made communities. He praised our strength and our resilience. He talked of being raised by a single mother, and he talked of his simple beginnings, beginnings of both grace and grit.
He looked at us with his eyes twinkling and his face brightening with blood.
"There are some things that my hometown—Hope, Arkansas—and your hometown of Maple Rock have in common," he said.
He bit his lip; he made a fist.
Then he pointed his thumb at each and every one of us and said, "You are the future of our great nation. The future of this great nation is in the hands of the people who do the nation's work, who pay the nation's bills, who live in the nation's neighborhoods. You should be proud of what you do. I am proud of what you do. America is proud of what you do."
We exploded in cheers. We were still young and we believed in things. Somebody from the back of the room yelled, "We don't do shit!" But, really, what can you expect in Maple Rock? We just tried to drown out bastards like him with our cheering. We waved our Clinton-Gore banners, and pinned new buttons to our parkas and coats. Bill Clinton ate pierogies and kielbasa with us, he shook our hands, and he played his saxophone with Pauly's Polka Princes when they performed their famous polka version of "Born in the U.S.A."
When Bill Clinton smiled from the stage, we could see our mothers swooning, their cheeks bathed in the flashes of camera light. Later, after he'd won the admiration of our mothers, after he'd won all of their votes, Bill Clinton would do things he couldn't ever take back. He would break our mothers' hearts, and they would not be able to forgive him.
WE WERE DEEP INTO the yellow and melancholy days of autumn and Sunny spent the crisp, dragging afternoons in Ann Arbor, wandering across the Diag with her arms full of books. I could picture her, clearly and accurately, I thought, in her jeans and a thick, hooded Michigan sweatshirt, stopping to talk to some East Coast guy from her philosophy class. They would go to a café and order black coffee in giant bowl-shaped mugs, and he would say something like, "Tell me about the place that you're from," and she would say, "It's nowhere."
Meanwhile, Nick and I rambled, bored and sulking, through our post-high-school lives. We took part-time jobs at car washes and oil-change shops, then came home and watched cable and lifted weights in the basement. We went down to the Black Lantern, where Spiros was still willing to serve us. Sometimes he called us by the names of our fathers; we didn't correct him. We sat at his bar, listened to his stories, smoked cigarettes, and complained about the lack of interesting nightlife in Maple Rock.
To pass the long, aimless nights, we came up with a game we called Auto Theft. We'd round up about a dozen guys and then split into teams of two. We'd drive around the richer suburbs late at night, and we'd steal lawn ornaments, street signs, hubcaps, whatever we could. We stole a bench from the middle school, the mascot from the high school. We stashed all of these things in a wooded drainage area behind the football field. Eventually the police found our stash, and hauled ceramic deer and wooden sheep out of the woods in wheelbarrows.
This made the Maple Rock Observer, COPS FIND CACHE OF STOLEN GOODS IN LOCAL WOODS the headline read. We all secretly hoped you would read the Crime Watch and know that it was your sons who were responsible for the petty thievery. We imagined you'd come home to save us before we progressed as criminals.
But you stayed away.
We progressed as criminals.
We threw a smoke bomb in a crowded Taco Bell because the manager had tossed us out the night before.
We tied a Porta Potti to Kyle Hartley's van and dragged it down Eight Mile Road. In the morning the street was slick with a stream of blue chemicals and sewage.
We destroyed a car with baseball bats.
We "kidnapped" a married father of four, a chemistry teacher who allegedly propositioned one of Nick's girlfriends. We held him, blindfolded and hands tied, at gunpoint until we deemed him sufficiently scared. "Are you scared shitless yet, Mr. Haller?" we said. This went on for five or six hours. Just before dawn, we left him in Rotary Park, still blindfolded. He never told the police, as far as we knew, which meant the allegations against him were likely correct. This was our idea of justice.
Our anger was dangerous.
But we ignored it, laughing like drunks do when they punch their fists through windows and are surprised by the spurting blood.
Eventually there would be arrests, I imagined. Our records would be spotty, our pasts would be checkered. It seemed glamorous. We longed to be captured so we could wear our convictions like badges of honor, the way an amateur boxer wears a split lip.
We were still young, heading toward eighteen and nineteen. It was easy for many people to write us off at that point, to assume that our futures were set irrevocably toward longing and sadness, or worse. Our old teachers, our neighbors, our ex-girlfriends, even some of our mothers, I think, began to believe we were without hope. And if you had been with us then, you might have said the same thing. You might have said we were lost young men too, without goals or courage or aim.
But God, our hopes were high, our visions were glorious and moving. I bet if you could have stepped inside of our squirrelly heads for one minute and seen the impossible futures we were already imagining, well, then your heart would break. You'd weep.
4. The Calming Effect of Jelly Doughnuts
NICK AND I COULDN'T SLEEP. We were up all night, driving around Detroit in his old Pontiac, smoking bud with the windows down, red-faced from the cold. It was February, and Michigan Avenue was empty. We were looking for an auto parts salesman named Burt Nelson, who, somebody had just told me, had slapped my mother in the face earlier that evening outside the Black Lantern.
"We'll kill him," I said.
"Be careful what you wish for," Nick said. "We could kill him, if you want."
"Hell yes, I want to kill him," I said. "He hit my mother."
"I've got a gun in my backpack," Nick said.
"Bullshit," I said.
"I do."
"Let's see it," I said.
"My backpack's in the trunk."
"You don't have a gun."
"I do. I carry one now, for work."
"What kind?"
"A .38 Special."
What did I know about handguns. I shrugged. "That's a good one?" I asked.
"Well," he said, "it's more than enough to do the job."
Nick worked the night shift at a doughnut shop on Michigan Avenue. On his nights off, he had trouble sleeping and I often got stuck staying up with him. The doughnut place was in a rough stretch of city, and sitting behind a cash register all night would have made anyone a little skittish. A lot of night clerks around Detroit carried guns, I guessed. Three Brothers Donutz was nestled between a topless bar and an abandoned pharmacy known as The Shop, where a three-hundred-pound ghost-pale man named Dough, whose father was the retired pharmacist who once owned the building, sold drugs each night from midnight to dawn.
"Have you ever used it?"
"Not yet," he said. "But just wait until some asshole tries to rob me."
We rolled our way through the city. It was almost light out, and the idea of finding Burt Nelson started to seem a little insane. If he'd been willing to punch my mother, a slight woman with a soft voice, he'd have no trouble taking a two-by-four or baseball bat to my head.
"Do you want to go home?" I said.
"What?" Nick said.
"Do you want to go home? I'm tired."
"You asshole!" Nick said.
"What?"
"You asshole. Some fuckhead just punched your mother and you want to go home and get some beauty sleep?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Man, you're such a wuss. You're a fuckhead."
I know it, I almost said. Take me home.
&
nbsp; Instead, I said, "Well, we won't find him now. Let's just go and get him later."
He pulled in front of the doughnut shop. I had registered for a few classes at the community college that winter, and had to be in class by eight.
"Let me pick up something at The Shop first," Nick said.
I wanted to wait outside, but that was no safer in the long run than going inside.
Plywood covered all the windows and the front door of The Shop. You entered through the back door, between two Dumpsters. The place was lit by a single bulb that hung from a busted light fixture above the counter. All around the store were dust-covered shelves and abandoned inventory. Dough was behind the register, all big and fat and white. He had a gun in a holster under his fat white arm. He didn't care what you took from the shelves if you were a paying customer. He liked to joke that he was carrying on the family business.
Sometimes Dough actually rang up your order, gave you the total, and exchanged small talk while he made change. It was like Mayberry gone haywire. You expected Floyd the Barber to be shooting up in the corner, or Barney Fife to come in tripping his balls off.
"Well, if it isn't Tweedledick and Tweedleprick," Dough said. He prided himself on making up nicknames. Last week, we'd been Licky and Dicky. His repertoire of insults lacked variety; they always were variations on a dick theme.
I let Nick go and buy his weed or whatever he was after, and wandered around the dark dusty aisles. I slipped some nail clippers into my pocket, and a pack of Q^tips. I liked the idea of all that free stuff, and couldn't help taking something every time I visited. I was amazed that there was anything left on the shelves at all, but I imagined most junkies didn't get excited about free zit cream or callus cushions.
WHEN WE PULLED INTO my driveway, I put my backpack together. Then I heard Nick say, "Well, look who it is. Right under our noses."
I looked up and saw Burt Nelson in the middle of the living room. He was in my dad's old chair, sipping from a mug and smoking a cigarette.
Please Don't Come Back from the Moon Page 4
