"This minister is really wonderful," my mother said.
I was staring at my plate, shoveling food in my mouth, and letting everybody else talk. I drained my second beer and got up for my third. My mother's eyes were on my back as I went to the fridge, and her eyes were still on me when I sat back down and flipped open the can.
"Kolya, maybe you want to tell Mikey your news," my mom said.
Kolya looked across the table at me. He took a huge drink of milk. He was a real lummox now, had failed his final year of high school because of his ADHD, and was now the biggest and oldest kid in school. He was six foot four and two hundred forty-five pounds. He played halfback on the football team, captained the swim team, and was a star pitcher for the baseball squad. I wondered if he dreamed about finding the bullies who used to pick on him before he had his growth spurt and inflicting a stern and swift justice.
"He won't care," he said. "He'll have some problem with my decision."
"Oh, now," my mom said.
"Boys," Mack said.
"Try me," I said.
"I've enlisted in the army," he said.
"Oh, you stupid shit," I said. "How could you?"
"See?" Kolya said.
"Boys," Mack said.
"Michael, we happen to be very proud of your brother. He feels very strongly about this."
"Not enough action in Northville, huh? You stupid shit."
"This is an important step for your brother," Mack said.
"Of course, we'll worry about him," my mother said.
"He's a stupid stupid stupid shit," I said. "After everything I've taught him."
"Fuck off," Kolya said. "You've never taught me shit. You're a pussy."
"Typical absent-father macho bullshit," I said.
"Did you learn that in college?" Kolya said. "You pussy."
"Everybody stop," my mother said.
It was October. It was 2001. The nation, including the crowd at my mother's dining room table, was stunned by tragedy and awash in patriotic fervor. I set down my fork and napkin and left.
"I told you," I heard Kolya saying. "He's got major fucking problems."
"Watch your language," Mack said. "Let's just finish this nice dinner."
"It is wonderful," my mother said. "I don't know how you do it, Mack."
I WAS WORKING AS the writer for the morning drive-time slot at a twenty-four-hour news radio station. The previous summer, after I'd finally finished my bachelor's degree at Dearborn, I had quit the bookstore, where I had clawed my way up to weekend supervisor. Mack had helped me land an internship at the station.
The internship was minimum wage, and it was weird to be a twenty-six-year-old working with a bunch of nineteen-year-old kids home for the summer from schools like Michigan and Northwestern and NYU. But when one of the station's writers quit in late July, Roger Rhodes, the general manager, called me into his office.
"You want a promotion?" he said.
"Yes, sir," I said.
"Herschel quit. Herschel made sixteen bucks an hour as a morning drive-time writer. But he had experience. How old are you?"
"Almost twenty-seven," I said.
"Herschel was thirty-seven, fifteen years of radio under his belt."
I nodded.
"Times are tough," the general manager said. "Really bad. Worst ever. I might have to let some people go. Can you do his job for nine bucks an hour?"
I'd recently heard that you should never accept the first salary you were offered. "How about ten dollars?" I said.
"Get out of my office," he said. "I got other interns to choose from. You're just the oldest and your copy is clean, but that doesn't mean everything."
"Nine dollars is fine," I said.
"Good. Be here tomorrow morning at four. Gunderson is your producer. Report to her."
The first few weeks, the job felt too good to be true. I had to crank out more than two dozen new stories in an hour, but radio stories were swift and compact. True, they weren't exactly hard-hitting, Pulitzer-contending pieces, but sometimes the pleasure of being able to compress the announcement of a tax cut or the initiation of a military campaign into eight sentences that could be read in thirty seconds was a thrill. I made sure all the nineteen-year-olds knew I was no longer a fucking intern. After working retail and other shit jobs for years, I was pleased to have a title: news writer. At nine fifty-two every morning, my name was announced on the air during the credits: "Our writer this morning is Michael Smolij." My mother tuned in to hear it. So did Ella, when she wasn't at work. And I was actually making money by writing. I started at four o'clock in the morning, but I usually showed up early just to read the wire stories from overnight, so I could crank out copy even faster than they could use it. It's embarrassing to admit it now, but for those first few weeks of work, it was hard for me to sleep. I was that excited.
IT WAS A MONDAY MORNING. I woke up at three, showered and dressed in about ten minutes, and drove down Warren Avenue to Telegraph Road. I stopped at Three Brothers for some coffee and then moved toward the freeway. All along the street, the Arab-owned party stores and gas stations flew giant flags and crudely drawn banners urging God to bless America.
Gina Gunderson was smoking outside the station's entrance when I pulled up. She was wearing a blue Michigan sweatshirt and gray sweatpants, and her gray hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was too thin, and in the morning, despite a shiny set of blue eyes that hadn't aged, she sometimes looked a little skeletal. The good thing about radio was that you could wear jeans or sweats and nobody gave a shit, and you didn't have to comb your hair or work out or wear makeup like the TV idiots down the hall. This circumstance attracted the overweight, the bad-skinned, the prematurely bald, the chain-smokers, the yellowed drunks, and the chronically fatigued to the radio newsroom, and I liked being with them. It took the pressure off.
Gunderson was in her fifties and had produced the morning newscast for almost thirty years. She'd raised three kids during those three decades, married and divorced three husbands, and spent three weeks the previous July drying out at the same clinic in Brighton where Tom had gone. She drove a 1976 Ford pickup with a ladder rack, and in the summers she rode a Yamaha motorcycle to work. She was a legend at the station. She'd been hired right out of college, and even as her life fell down a little every year—the bad marriages, the kids in trouble, the drinking—she stayed on, making her way in to work every morning. She had never had a promotion, but despite her alcoholism, it was said that she had never been late to work in her life and had never missed a deadline. She might drink off the clock and all weekend long, but never at work. She was on the wagon now.
"Not one goddamn second of dead air in my career," she would say to me. "Not one goddamn second."
Dead air was the mortal sin of radio broadcast. An error in the newscast, the wrong tape, or a miscued commercial could lead to the anchor's confusion, which could lead to fifteen or twenty seconds when nothing was happening, when the broadcast went silent. A good producer knew how to avoid dead air at all costs. Dead air made people change stations.
My job was to crank out twelve new scripts and tapes every thirty minutes, which Gunderson would then arrange into a twenty-two-minute newscast and run down to the anchors in the studio.
It was like a literary assembly line and I was well suited to it. I took pride in my work. It was the closest I was going to get to Hemingway.
That Monday morning, I passed Gunderson on my way in. It was still early, so I kept my eyes down. Gunderson didn't like people talking to her until she'd had her two cups of coffee.
"Look what the cat dragged in," she said.
"Good morning, Gunderson," I said.
"So did you know her name when you woke up this morning?"
"Whose?"
"Whoever's naked ass was in your face when you got up today," she said. She laughed until she had a minor coughing fit.
Monday mornings were usually slow, but in recent weeks, there were always stories
to write. Terrorism was good for the round-the-clock news business. I wrote a few pieces about a party store on Evergreen that had been raided by the FBI. The Palestinian man who had owned the Beer Wine Bungalow for ten years was denying any links to terrorism. I wrote some more pieces, recycling wire copy on cleanup efforts in New York City and Colin Powell's statements on yesterday's telecast of Meet the Press. I found some tape from an interfaith rally at a Dearborn mosque and started to work a script around the sound bites.
And then something happened. I passed out on my desk. Gunderson was kicking at my shin when I woke up.
"It's five minutes until five," she said. "Where the hell is my lead story?"
"Oh, fuck," I said. I shook my head. I'd fallen right to sleep, my face on a legal pad, a pen jammed into my forehead.
"I won't tolerate drunks on my shift," she said. "When I drank, I kept it out of the office, you understand? Are you hungover, Michael, or are you still drunk?"
"No. No, not at all," I said. I handed her a hastily arranged set of scripts and tapes. She started eyeing them, checking them over for fuckups. "I guess I'm just tired."
"Tired?" she said. "Thirty years. I'll show you tired."
Then she winked at me and smiled, smacked me lightly on the back of the head with the stack of scripts. "Get some coffee, hon," she said. "You've got another seven hours."
WHEN I CAME HOME from work, my mother was in my kitchen. She still had a key, and though I had repeatedly told her that she shouldn't bother, she would sometimes come over while I was at work and drop off food for me. Sometimes she cleaned the kitchen or the bathroom.
"It was so filthy, I couldn't stand it," she would say.
Once my mother found Ella sitting at the kitchen table in nothing but her underwear, eating a pint of ice cream. I had already left for work, and Rusty was at school. Ella stood up, placed one arm over her breasts, and, as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, offered my mother a spoon.
Ella had none of my concern for rules and I loved her for it, but I had not been spending very much time with her since I'd been promoted at the station. During the week, I went to bed around eight thirty in order to get up by three. Rusty was usually awake until nine o'clock, so Ella and I didn't have much time alone together. Sometimes it didn't seem worth the trip over there just to sit around and eat dinner while listening to Rusty recap the adventures of a first grader. I know that sounds bad, but there it is. This is how I sometimes think.
Today my mother had found an empty kitchen. No Ella. Something was cooking on the stove when I walked in.
"How's my little newsman?" she said.
"Fine," I said. I knew she would never break her habit of referring to me as her little this or that. She would never stop calling me Mikey. She would never stop bringing me food. I accepted these things. After all, she had been through a lot in her life. And she had never gone anywhere without me knowing where she was. She had never been unavailable to me, not even for one minute.
"I was sorry how it went yesterday," she said. "I brought you some leftovers. Are you hungry?"
I wasn't, but I said I was. She started to fix me a plate.
"You need a real set of dishes," she said. "It's time you ate off real dishes. I saw some on sale at Target."
"How's Kolya?" I said.
"I think he was pretty upset by your reaction to his big news."
"How could you let him, Mom? Why would you let Kolya do that?"
"What choice did I have?"
"I don't know. Couldn't you have stopped him or something?"
"We tried. In our own way, we gave it our best shot. Now we can't do anything but be proud of him."
"Please," I said. "Ma, don't you realize he could go into the army and never come back?"
"No, Michael," she said. "That thought has never crossed my mind."
She stopped spooning out mashed potatoes from the Tupperware bowl and slammed the spoon on the counter. Then she quickly wiped a spattering of potatoes from the wall with a paper towel.
"Please, Michael. Give me some credit," she said.
She set the warm plate on the kitchen table and I sat down in front of it.
She sat across from me. "Here's two other things I brought you," she said.
She slid a book over to me. It was a copy of The Best American Short Stories 1984.
"Are you still collecting those?" she said. "Mack found it at a garage sale."
"Thanks," I said. "That's great. Thank him for me. That's an old one."
"Do you still write?" she said.
"Just at work," I said. "News stories."
She nodded. "There's something in the book, too."
I opened the book and found a pamphlet inside. On the front cover, a frowning handsome young man, hands in his pockets, was staring down at his shoes. A pretty blackhaired woman was resting her head in her hands and staring off into space. In red block letters at the bottom of the pamphlet were the words, "Are You Depressed? A self-quiz about your emotional state."
"Mack was worried about you," she said. "You're acting different lately. He was at the doctor for a check-up and happened to pick this up for you."
"Fuckin-A, Mom," I said.
"Don't you want to eat?" she said.
"I do," I said. I looked down at the pamphlet in my hands. I was exhausted again. I was having trouble even staying on my feet. "But I'm just not hungry."
I flipped through the pamphlet and looked at the checklist: "Loss of appetite. Difficulty doing things done in the past. Feeling of hopelessness, pessimism."
"Mom," I said, "I'm fine."
NICK CALLED. He woke me up from an afternoon nap.
"What are you doing?" he said.
"Sleeping. Taking a nap."
"Why?" he said.
"I had to be at work at four this morning," I said.
"That's sad," he said. "I'm unemployed."
"I know."
"Your mother told my mom that you're depressed," Nick said. "Are you?"
"No," I said. "I'm just tired. Busy and tired."
"Sunny doesn't have class tonight," he said.
"When does she have class?" I said.
"Very funny," he said. "She'll be home with the kid. Let's get some beers tonight. I'll call Tom."
"Fine. Good. Fine."
Nick and Sunny's baby, Natalie, was four months old. Sunny was still trying to finish her Ph.D. in women's studies and Nick had been working sixty hours a week at Liberty Bell Subs. Aunt Maria had moved back into the house in Maple Rock for a few months to help with the baby, but she kept the condo in Livonia she owned with Clyde Borin'.
Around the time Natalie was born, the man who owned Liberty Bell Subs suffered a stroke. Within a few weeks, a Subway had replaced Liberty Bell Subs. The new owners offered Nick a job at four bucks less an hour and no benefits. He passed on it. Tom Slowinski (who was still working at the juice stand but—now on the wagon—no longer offered his Miami Mambo specials) told me later that you could hear Nick yelling all through the food court "Go fuck yourself and your Subway! I'll give you six dollars an hour right up your franchised ass."
I met Nick and Tom at Happy Wednesday's, where we hadn't gone for a few months. Tom had gotten married to Tanya Jaworksi after rehab, and she was six months pregnant with their first child. He was sober now, and working a double shift at the juice stand and the Hot Dog Hut. He and Tanya lived in the Slowinskis' old house around the corner from me. Mrs. Slowinski lived with them.
The three of us had a few drinks and ordered nachos and some Wednesday Wings. Tom ordered a Coke. I know I should've been proud of him, but something in the way that once-heroic drinker said "Just a Coca-Cola, please" broke my heart. I thought Nick might even tease him about it, but I guess we'd gotten too old for that kind of thing.
We bitched about our jobs, or in Nick's case, lack of a job. It felt good to be there, even though the restaurant had some bad memories for me—my mall job, Nick's failed labor movement, my current girlfrien
d, broke and without options, walking half naked across the bar to the cheers of countless men. I tried not to think of these things. I thought of how different we were all starting to look, older, a little thicker, our stubble darker. I had the warm glow of a full pitcher inside of me, and I had not felt this good in weeks. My face went numb, and I thought how fine it would be if my brain could go numb like that too for a few weeks or months.
"I have a little business proposition for both of you," Nick said. "Rather, a business opportunity."
Nick had just bought a used Dodge Ram with a snowplow and a trailer. He was planning to open a lawn care and snow removal business, like the one his father used to run. If Tom and I wanted to invest some money in a second truck and trailer and a little equipment, we could get in on the ground floor.
"When it's warm, we cut lawns, do landscaping, clean pools, whatever," he said. "In the winter, we sit in our trucks, listen to the radio, sip hot coffee, and push snow around. We dump some salt on the walkways. There's real money in all of this, and you'll never work for anybody but yourself again."
"No way," Tom said. "Not with a kid coming. I need something more reliable."
"I figured you'd be too dumb," Nick said. "What about you, Mikey?"
"I don't know," I said. "I mean, I just got a promotion this summer."
"Look," Nick said. "In a way, it's the perfect job. You're helping people, really. By making their yards look nicer, by making it easier for them to get to work in the morning, you're doing a great service. It's a true vocation, boys."
We just looked at him and laughed.
"I know, I know," he said. "Nobody wants to get involved with me and my plans anymore. You all too mature for that?"
Tom said, "God, I hope so."
"I'm just really happy working as a writer," I said. "I guess that's it."
"That's not writing," Nick said.
"It makes me happy," I said.
"You're happy?" Tom said. "My mom ran into your mom at Kmart last week. She said you were depressed."
"Oh, for fuck's sake," I said.
Please Don't Come Back from the Moon Page 16
