Please Don't Come Back from the Moon

by Dean Bakopoulos

  "They're the creeps," I said. "Totally. I just feel bad for you."

  "Oh, and none of this Dostoyevsky-inspired stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold shit, okay? I know what I am doing and my heart isn't pure. I saw your staff picks. I saw Crime and Punishment up there. I'm not Sonya."

  "I dated a girl named Sonya in high school," I said.

  "Figures," she said.

  "And I'm no Raskolnikov," I said. "I always imagined Raskolnikov with really greasy hair, a guy who smells like cold tomato soup."

  She started laughing. "You've given this some thought, huh? Why would you think that one customer in Maple Rock Mall would ever be interested in reading Dostoyevsky?"

  "I'm going to kiss you now," I said.

  "No," she said, "you're not. That's all I need, for some dumb-ass jock to see the Hump Day Honey making out in the Happy Wednesday's parking lot. Look, I got to go home. Margaret's with Rusty and she probably wants to get home."

  "I understand," she said.

  "On Friday, Rusty is going to a children's play with Margaret and her boyfriend in Ann Arbor," she said, "and he's going to sleep over. Do you want to do something after work?"

  "What?" I said.

  "Figure something out," she said.

  "What?" I said.

  She looked at me and tilted her head. "Are you okay?" she said, slowly.

  "Huh?" I said.

  "I'll see you at eight?" she said. "Friday?"

  "Yes," I said.

  THAT FRIDAY, I WENT over to pick up Ella at eight o'clock. I was ten minutes early so I had to drive around for a while, and I started sweating as I drove, feeling sick. Ella lived in the Pink Flamingo trailer court in the old section of Maple Rock, not too far from my house. The Pink Flamingo was one of the few remaining trailer parks in Wayne County. Many of them had gone up along the edges of Detroit in the fifties, when the auto industry brought a huge influx of people to the area. They were mostly run-down now, though the Pink Flamingo was all right—it had a reputation of sorts among slumming suburban hipsters who liked the party lights, giant plastic flamingos, and fake palm trees that lined the perimeter of the grounds. The population of the place consisted of the drunk, the down-and-out, the recently divorced, and the young twenty-somethings who worked at the mall. The young people hung out on the porches of their trailers in the evenings, drinking cheap beer and wearing bowling shirts and polyester pants that they'd picked up at the Salvation Army. They wrote poetry or played in alternative bands or made short documentary films with camcorders.

  I parked in the visitor's lot and walked up to Ella's unit, number eighty-six. I passed an old guy asleep on a folding chair on the sidewalk. There was a carton of empty Budweiser cans next to him. There were a lot of empty beer cans everywhere.

  I knocked on Ella's door and a dog started barking. Rusty, dressed in jeans and cowboy boots, answered the door and a young yellow Lab wiggled onto the small wooden porch and started licking my pants. Rusty was holding a small rubber ball, which he hurled at me. The ball bounced off the porch railing and then shot back and hit me in the leg.

  "Ha!" Rusty screamed.

  I didn't blame him. If I'd been just a little bit younger when my mother started dating, I'd have done the same thing.

  Ella came to the door. She was wearing a pair of plaid shorts that looked like men's boxers and a white V-neck T-shirt. She didn't look like she was going anywhere. She looked like she'd just woken up.

  "Hey, I tried to call you," she said. "Margaret has the flu. Sleepover party was canceled."

  "I didn't get the message. I didn't go home."

  "The flu. That means Aunt Maggie is puking," Rusty said.

  "And you already know this charming young man," Ella said.

  "And that's Lucky the Dog," Rusty said. The dog came over to me and leaned hard into my leg, whacking me with his frantic tail. I gave him a good pet.

  Then I put out my hand and offered it to Rusty and the kid shook it, dramatically pumping it up and down.

  Ella laughed. "It's late, Rusty. Go brush your teeth."

  He rolled his eyes and went down the hall.

  "I'm sorry about this," Ella said. We were alone and the dog had gone and curled up under a coffee table with a large ball. "The place is a mess. And I'm sorry about that, too. Maybe I should write out all my apologies before you come inside."

  "I don't care," I said. "It's nice to see you."

  "Should we reschedule?" she said. "I'm not even dressed really. I should at least put on a bra."

  I could feel myself blushing.

  "It's okay," I said. "I've seen you almost naked on a bar top for several straight weeks now."

  She smiled. "Finally you're developing a sense of humor."

  I nodded, pleased.

  "Do you want to watch a movie?" she said.

  We got through half of something that night, a comedy about a therapist and an obsessive patient. We didn't watch much of it. She talked a little about her parents.

  "The funny thing is," she said, "I mean, I've told you that they're loaded. But I think they're really loaded. My dad's in the oil business. He's played golf with Dick Cheney. He'd die if he saw where I live now."

  "You don't see them much?" I asked.

  "My sister talks to them a few times a year," she said. "Not me."

  "Why not?"

  "They're not worth talking to," she said. "They're corrupt souls and their money is corrupt and their souls are bankrupt."

  "I see," I said.

  "New subject," she said. "This is the longest story in the world and an old and boring one at that."

  I asked her how she ended up in Maple Rock, and she shrugged. She said that she had met Rusty's father, Steve, on a backpacking trip through Europe.

  "I'd been at Cornell for two years," she said.

  "You went to Cornell?"

  "Two years," she said. "I married Steve the summer after my sophomore year, after we'd spent one lousy week together in Greece—well, actually it was the only good week we ever had. Steve was from Livonia. He thought it'd be romantic to buy ourselves this trailer with the money I had in my savings account. He had plans to finish a novel, and make us rich."

  "Oh, God," I said.

  "Yeah. I was barely twenty-one. The sex was good. Pissing off my parents was even better. I got careless, then pregnant. I hated being on the pill—still do—so we used the trusty pull-out method. Steve was gone six months after Rusty was born."

  "That's tough," I said.

  "One bad decision after another," she said. "That pretty much describes my twenties. But I love Rusty. I love being a mom."

  "Do you ever hear from Steve?" I asked.

  "No. Not a word," she said. "His parents send a check at Christmas some years. They feel bad, but they live in Florida. His father is on oxygen and can't travel and his mother has MS and can barely walk."

  "So here you are in Maple Rock," I said.

  "What's your story?" she said. "It can't be more pathetic than that."

  I told her my story, which I had told to so many women in my young life that I almost didn't believe it anymore. It sounded like some dumb pickup ploy, a pathetic tale meant to arouse sympathetic lust.

  "When I was sixteen," I began, "my father went to the moon."

  We stared at the movie in silence for a little while. It was supposed to be funny, but neither of us was laughing. Neither of us had followed the plot very well either, but the ending seemed to be happy. Around ten thirty, the credits were rolling and I had nothing to say. The tape reached the end and then started to rewind. The screen went snowy, sending flickering blue light onto the walls of the living room. Ella stood up from the couch and took my hand. I touched her bare smooth thigh with my other hand. She straddled me and we started kissing. After a few minutes, she said, "You should go."

  "Okay," I said. "I understand."

  I stood up and she pointed at the obvious bulge in my jeans and smiled. "Well, good night to you too, Mr. Happy," she said.


  I blushed. Ella walked me to the door and we kissed again on the porch of the trailer.

  "What the fuck," she said. "Rusty's a heavy sleeper. Come back in."

  "I'd love to," I said.

  "But you can't stay the night. No falling asleep," she said.

  Afterward, as I was getting dressed in the dark, Ella, tucked under the quilt, flashed me a thumbs-up and whispered, "Excellent."

  "When you're good, you're good," I said.

  "I haven't had sex in more than two years," she said, "so don't get a big head."

  THE NEXT NIGHT, Ella invited me over again. I didn't stay the night because she didn't think it was a good idea for Rusty to wake up and find me there.

  "Once, I came home to find my mom in bed with a priest," I said.

  "Oh my God," she said. "What did you do?"

  "Well, I was older, it was just a few years ago."

  "Yeah? What happened?"

  "She eventually married him. He was an old high-school sweetheart. They live in Northville."

  "That's almost romantic," she said.

  "Almost," I said.

  It became a habit of mine, waking up in the middle of the night and going home before dawn. After I left Ella's trailer, sometimes, if it wasn't last call yet, I'd meet up with Nick and the guys at Happy Wednesday's. I never got much of a chance to talk to him though. By now, he was swarmed by eager mall workers listening to the gospel of workers' rights. He'd started an e-mail list, and distributed information and rallying cries from a laptop he bought on credit at Best Buy. One night, we used the laptop to search our fathers' names on Google. We tried every variation of their names we could think of, but we found nothing.

  UP TO THAT POINT, our days at the mall had flowed into each other, blurring. We were headed toward thirty, but we still didn't know what we wanted to do. We sometimes thought of moving or finding a new job, but it didn't seem to happen. We considered the bodies of our grandfathers, who died too young, just after retiring, wrecked and spent from day after day with the unstoppable gears of the assembly lines. Perhaps we were luckier than they were. Perhaps we weren't.

  Perhaps we had dreams. To be honest, we couldn't remember them. We tried to imagine what we had wanted to be when we grew up. When we were ten, or eleven, or twelve, did we dream of becoming doctors or lawyers? Carpenters? Teachers? Sportswriters? Auto mechanics? We didn't know. We honestly couldn't remember.

  Perhaps you, our fathers, perhaps you know what we wanted from life. Perhaps you remember something we uttered as kids, some clues: Daddy, I want to be a fireman. Daddy, I want to be a zookeeper. Daddy, I want to be a concert violinist.

  Once Nick said, "What would we be doing if they hadn't built this goddamn mall?"

  And the silence was overwhelming. We didn't know.

  But Nick had found a way, if only for a brief time, to make working at the mall seem interesting and full of meaning. The planned sit-down strike was all anybody would talk about at work. We wondered about media coverage. We wondered if mall workers around the country would follow in our footsteps. Would the Mall of America shut down? There was talk of launching a Web site on the day of the strike, so retail clerks around the country could log on and be inspired. We wondered which liberal celebrities would endorse our cause. Michael Moore? George Clooney? Drew Barrymore? Marlon Brando?

  Managers overheard some of these conversations, and memos began appearing in our break rooms on a daily basis.

  "The organization of a workforce must comply with all federal laws and regulations."

  "Not showing up for work when scheduled is cause for immediate termination. Consider yourself warned."

  "In recent weeks, certain planned pranks have been brought to my attention, and I am not happy. I hope that no employees of American Pants plan to be involved in these insurgent and unlawful activities."

  "Show up to work on the day after Thanksgiving or you'll be shitcanned."

  After work, we'd bring these memos to Happy Wednesday's and laugh wildly at them, letting their condescending tone fuel the fire in our guts.

  ON ELECTION DAY, Nick convinced me to have a party at my house. Aunt Maria had just driven in from her new condo in Livonia and cleaned his place for him, and he didn't want to mess it up.

  "Your mother still cleans your house?" I asked.

  "Oh, come on, Mikey, yours does too. We're the first-born sons of Ukrainian mothers."

  "Yeah, but it's not on schedule or anything," I said. "She just shows up."

  "Same deal," he said. "Besides, your place is bigger and so is your television."

  I had never been to, let alone hosted, an Election Day party. I bought a keg of Sam Adams because it seemed appropriate and patriotic, and the mascot on the bottle wore a hat that looked a little like Nick's Liberty Bell Subs uniform. I felt smart and sophisticated. I told Ella about the party and she said, "Maple Rock becomes an activist hotbed? This I gotta see." She asked her sister to come and baby-sit for her. When I told Nick I was dating her and that she would be at the party, he flipped. He sounded like the old Nick for a second, nineteen and brash and wholly inappropriate.

  "The Hump Day girl?" he asked. "Did your dick fall off yet? I warned you."

  "Don't bring up Hump Day while she's here," I said. She had lost the contest for the first time the previous week. She said the manager of the place gave her fifty bucks so she would keep coming back, but the tide had turned. Two new women, a blonde and a brunette, had shared first prize after they made out on top of the bar. I had missed all of the excitement. I'd been babysitting Rusty so his mother could walk across the bar in a bikini and earn a better life for him. It still was hard for me to think about—Ella half naked in front of all those stupid men. But anytime I brought it up, even jokingly, we'd get into a huge fight.

  Most of Nick's hardcore followers showed up for our party, more than fifty people who worked at the mall. While we watched the election returns trickle in, people talked about the strike. They tried to predict how many people would join them.

  "I mean," Nick said, "how many people will really do this?"

  It was like he was testing the allegiance of his team.

  Everybody started talking at once. They shouted out their predictions—one hundred, two hundred, five hundred—and Nick sat back and beamed. When they called out those numbers, this is what they were really saying: "We won't let you down, Nick. We're behind you 100 percent."

  Suddenly, Tom Slowinski let out a loud, shrill whistle. He was crouched down by the television so he could hear it over the noise of the party. Everybody shut up and looked at him.

  "Gore took Michigan!" he cried, and everyone went crazy. In the days leading up to the election, Nick had instructed us that a vote for the Democrats was a vote for the rich tradition of labor. He'd even handed out copies of the AFL-CIO's endorsement of Gore and plastered them in the break rooms and bathrooms of the mall.

  We were in for a long night. Ella and I were in the kitchen opening some more bags of chips and jars of salsa. She pressed up behind me. "I like your house," she said. "It's very nice."

  "Thanks," I said. "It's pretty much furnished and decorated with my mother's leftovers. I haven't done much to it."

  "Well, it has character. It feels like a family lived here a long time."

  "We did," I said.

  From the other room, a chorus of cheers rose up when another state came in for Gore.

  "Do you think anybody in there would have voted if it wasn't for Nick?" she asked.

  I laughed. "Not a chance."

  "Don't tell anyone," she said. "I voted for Nader."

  "Wasted vote," I said.

  She threw a tortilla chip at my head.

  I asked her if she thought it would really happen, if she thought that Maple Rock Mall would make labor history.

  "Tonight, for the first time," she said, "I do. I don't know why. I mean, maybe not labor history, but if nothing else, it will get some attention. Nick will have done somet
hing, and that's more than all of us can say."

  Just then Nick stormed into the room with a red, shiny face and bellowed, "We're dry! We need more beer!"

  It was strange to hear him shout this phrase, one I had heard him shout so many times in our lives, on this night infused with politics and history and vision. I almost wished the whole sit-down campaign would stop. It felt like we were being people we were not, people we had no right to be.

  Gore had Wisconsin, Gore had Minnesota. We cheered wildly Everybody was good and drunk by the time people started trying to call Florida, which was for the better. It was hard to watch. Tom made a run to the party store for more beer.

  A few minutes later, my phone rang. Tom had been arrested on a DUI.

  Ella and I drove Tom's fiancée, Tanya Jaworski, to the police station. In the car, Tanya leaned up from the backseat and said, "Mikey, I hope you're fucking happy. You and Nick are a train wreck. Nothing you do works out. It fiicks everything up."

  In the early hours of the morning, we watched Tanya post bail for her future husband with a credit card. The ride back to Tom's place was quiet.

  "Fuck," I said, after we'd dropped them off at the door.

  "She was just mad at Tom and took it out on you. You didn't make him drive."

  I drove Ella back home to her trailer. There was a drunk teenager staggering across the road. I swerved onto the shoulder and just missed him.

  "Do you want to come in?" Ella asked when we pulled in front of her door. "Margaret's probably asleep in the bed, but we can crash on the pull-out sofa."

  "I better get back to my house," I said. "Make sure it's still standing."

  She leaned over and gave me a slow kiss on the mouth.

  "I love you," I said.

  "Michael," she said. Then she touched my cheek with her hand and got out of the car.

  THE MONDAY BEFORE Thanksgiving brought with it the first snow of the season. We still had no incoming President. Snow swirled over the roads as Nick and I drove out to Brighton and listened to public radio's coverage of the Florida recount. Nick was distracted and irritable and he kept telling me I was going the wrong way. We were headed to see Tom at the rehab clinic where he'd gone to dry out. Tanya had insisted he check himself in, a proactive step Tom's lawyer thought might get him a lighter sentence.