Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  “The little boy,” she’d conclude later, “had the devil inside him.”

  Turning twenty-one in late September started it all. Even the heroin couldn’t numb the truth. She couldn’t look at her own body in the mirror. She’d sold herself in pieces to a thousand men, but the parts of her she valued most she’d given away no charge to John Fry. Cheryl wondered if she had a year left, let alone a normal lifetime.

  One day, Cheryl remembered seeing a place in Petoskey called the Women’s Resource Center that advertised a safe house for battered women. She decided she would have no trouble proving she met the criteria. All she had to do was take off her blouse.

  On the morning of October 23 she found herself in the Cass Corridor one last time. She had a couple of hours to kill before catching the Greyhound to Petoskey. She spent them sitting in the White Grove, gazing through the wire-mesh windows at everyone caught in one form of slavery or another on the street. Mark Bando spotted her there, came inside, and arrested her on an outstanding warrant. She had enough money on her to cover the $150 bond.

  “I’m leaving, Bando,” she said as she walked out of Police Headquarters. “I’m leaving Detroit and I’m going to get clean.”

  “Whatever you say, Cheryl,” the cop said.

  She knew he didn’t believe her. But as she boarded the Greyhound later, she really didn’t care. She knew she was going to go to the safe house in Petoskey.

  She knew she was going to get clean—not for Mark Bando, for Lucky Fry, or for Frank McMasters.

  Not for anyone else.

  As the Greyhound left the Detroit skyline in a blast of black diesel exhaust, Cheryl Krizanovic leaned into the backseat and closed her eyes.

  This time, she thought, I’m going to do it for myself.

  56

  The two addicts timed their approach with the Buick’s arrival at the curb. They made their move when the driver got out of the car.

  John Fry could see the shakedown unfolding through the kitchen window as Dawn went outside to meet Al. When one of the junkies held a blade under Al’s rib cage, John shoved a kitchen knife in his back pocket and headed out the door. He decoyed his intentions by approaching in a lazy gait.

  “Hey, what’s happening, mon.”

  “Nothing that concerns you.”

  “Any fucking thing that happens in this yard concerns me. You gonna do somethin’ with that knife, motherfucker, you better do it to me.”

  One of the men didn’t like what he saw, spun, and sprinted up the street. The other walked away slowly. John still was glaring when he looked back.

  “I’m glad you were here, John,” Al said.

  He wasn’t grinning. Dawn got in the Regal and the two of them drove off. Less than an hour later the three of them sat around the kitchen table, sipping coffee. Al said that he and Dawn had a good talk.

  “John, she tells me she’s had problems with those two guys before,” he said. “Are you doing anything right now?”

  John said he’d been working as a truck driver for the past few months, but now he was laid off.

  “Would you consider hanging around and making sure nothing happens to her? I can’t be here all the time. My job keeps me away.”

  “Don’t have nothin’ better to do,” John said.

  After Al left, Dawn told John that she had laid the groundwork to get him back in the picture. She told Al the entire neighborhood knew he was bringing her money. That made her an easy mark for thieves. If he couldn’t be there to protect her, somebody should.

  “Well, I guess you could say that it was a setup,” John later told a friend. “The robber was real, OK? But at the time I didn’t really know she had buzzed him up about all this. Let me tell you somethin’ about this girl. She’s good, mon. I can’t take credit for it. I take credit for some of it, but she was a con artist when I met her. I’m not knocking her. It paid off for both of us.”

  57

  Part of a child’s ability to develop feelings of trust and mistrust are based on his ability to have a tantrum and have his mother go along with the tantrum or accept the fact the child has normal emotions of anger and rage.

  —W. ALAN CANTY,

  Concordia College lecture

  Jan Canty hated to admit it, but she really wasn’t looking forward to another Thanksgiving at Al’s mother’s house. She’d never felt comfortable with her husband’s family. With her own parents in Arizona, she would have loved to have another parental homestead nearby where she could kick off her shoes. But the Canty home had never been that kind of place.

  The bungalow always felt like a museum to her. It wasn’t only the antique square grand piano and the pristine knickknacks in the living room. The house was always uncomfortably quiet. She wished someone would turn on a stereo, or even the TV. Instead she knew the three of them would sit quietly in straight-backed chairs in a semicircle. There was a casual family room in the back, but the door was always closed. There was a screened-in porch, but she’d never seen it used, even on summer’s hottest days. Everyone just stayed in the living room and perspired.

  When Al Sr. was alive she’d often sat in one of those chairs and sweat through what seemed like interrogations. Where are you working now? Aren’t you glad Al supports you in school? How much does your tuition cost? Is that a new sweater? Did Al buy it for you?

  “What kind of car do you drive?” Al Sr. once asked.

  “An old Volkswagen bug, a convertible.”

  At first he seemed relieved; then came the follow-up.

  “I suppose you want to get a Cadillac now, huh?”

  She tried to fight back. She always suspected they thought she’d married Al for his money.

  “I have no interest in Cadillacs. I don’t even like them. I mean, they’re big hogs.” Then she realized Al Sr. drove one.

  Even with Al Sr. gone, his presence still seemed to dominate the household. There was much talk about the family’s professional stature and the good Canty name. But Jan also sensed underlying conflicts that never really surfaced. She was never really sure how mother and son felt about Al Sr. They seemed to idolize him but have underlying negative feelings. They seemed incapable of resolving their ambivalence.

  Typical of that was an odd conversation she watched them have one afternoon about Al Sr.’s contribution to an athletic scholarship fund at Syracuse University. She recalled it along these lines.

  “Oh, Ma, you know Pa was a very generous kind of person.”

  “He certainly was, Bus.”

  “And, Ma, that’s why he endowed the scholarship fund for athletics.”

  “But Bus, I never was aware of that.”

  “But Ma, that’s why he did it, out of generosity. Don’t you think it was good?”

  “No, Bus, I don’t. I never did approve of it.”

  “But Ma.”

  “I was livid with him, Buster.”

  And that would be it. Subject dropped. They often seemed to be criticizing Al Sr. and protecting him at the same time.

  Mother and son often had little spats like that. They had a singsong way of bickering. “Oh, Ma” and “Now, Bus” signaled something was cooking. One Thanksgiving they argued about where the turkey should be carved. Mother wanted it on the table. Son wanted it on the stove. It started with “I’ll help.”

  “No, Ma, I’ll do it.”

  “No, Bus, I’ll do it.”

  “Oh, Ma.”

  “Now, Buster …”

  The dispute escalated as the two of them tugged at the turkey. Their tension was mutually contagious, but their anger was always restrained. There was never any shouting or profanity. That day they did let go as they bickered—of the bird. The turkey thudded to the floor. Al started to raise his voice.

  “Now, Buster,” Mrs. Canty snapped. “That’s no way to talk to your mother.”

  Their disputes often ended with that line. It always stopped Al cold, sending his shoulders into a hunch. Why, Jan thought, doesn’t he just stand tall and tell her
he’s madder than hell? He seemed no more capable of that kind of natural response than a preschool child.

  Despite the proper veneer, Gladys Canty in many ways still infantilized her son, Jan had observed over the years. Jan’s first hint came when they bought the big Tudor. When Gladys toured the home she noticed they had moved their things into the master bedroom.

  “Why, Bus, you’re not going to sleep in here, are you?” she said.

  Who, Jan thought, did she think she was?

  His mother’s perception of him—of both of them—revealed itself in other ways. She was always pushing children’s food on them—sweets such as cookies, cakes, and chocolates. Not only was there the nickname Buster, but Gladys was fond of calling her Jannie, or “little Jannie.” Once Gladys bought Jan a sweater. When she returned it because of her allergy to wool, she found it came from the children’s department.

  “Does she see me as a child?” she asked Al.

  “Oh, you know how Ma is,” he said. He often dismissed any of his parents’ quirks as insignificant.

  But she could tell he had some uncomfortable memories. When Jan took up photography as a hobby she discovered her husband had an aversion to the camera.

  “I love what you’re doing,” he said. “But do me a favor. Please don’t take pictures of me.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “ ’Cause every time I turned around I was getting my picture taken as a kid. I was so sick of it.”

  One night they watched a half-dozen 8mm movies taken of Al in intervals from age nine months to six years. The black-and-white films were full of what were now classic cars and scenes taken in the backyard of the family’s old place on Chalmers. Some were filmed at outside parties. One thing struck Jan in all of them. Al usually was the only child, even at the backyard parties. He looked out of place in close-ups as he toddled among the skirts and pant legs of adult giants.

  Al Sr. always was impeccably dressed in tailored three-piece suits in the films. Gladys had a fondness for modest dresses and flats instead of heels. Her tastes in grooming and clothes for her son, however, were more elaborate.

  In one film, at the age of three, Al had long golden curls that fell to his shoulders. Such was boys’ fashion at the turn of the century, but the year was 1936. Al was embarrassed by the image. Later he told Jan that Al Sr. finally ordered his wife to “cut those goddamn things off.”

  As he approached school age, young Al sported the look of a proper English schoolboy rather than the typical Detroit youngster in dungarees and Tshirts. She saw photos of shorts-and-blouse ensembles with white embroidered collars. Al told her once that on his first day of school his mother dressed him literally like Buster Brown—the lad in the shoe with the round hat, big silk bow tie, and long Dutch-boy haircut. Al even had a bulldog for a pet.

  “My God,” she said. “What a way to send a boy to school in Detroit. This isn’t the early 1900s. That’s kind of insensitive.”

  “Well, you know Ma.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t do that to my kid at five.”

  “Yeah, it was kind of weird.”

  Then Al fell into a very strange kind of laugh, as though he was outside of himself, chuckling at a secret memory.

  Where, she thought, was Al’s father’s influence in his childhood? The only input he ever seemed to have concerned Al’s quest for a Ph.D. Jan could easily imagine how her own dad would have reacted if her mother had emasculated her brother that way.

  But she knew Al’s mother’s influence in clothes continued well into later life. When Al moved from his old house on Fisher Road, Jan helped him pack. She came across one box that she thought had been left by his ex-wife. It contained a bright green-and-black plaid jacket and a plaid smock in bright yellow, red, and black. All looked as though they belonged to a woman.

  “Here, Maggie left some of her clothes, Al,” she said.

  He had a chilled look on his face.

  “Those … are my clothes,” he stammered.

  “I’ve never seen you wear those.”

  “No, I never did.”

  She knew he was embarrassed.

  “They sure are ugly for a man,” she said, trying to back out of her previous words.

  “Well, my mother bought them for me.”

  Then he changed the subject. He usually did anytime Jan tried to initiate a meaningful discussion about his childhood. However, through his veiled complaints over the years she detected her husband had spent a lot of time listening to lectures on what was proper and what was not.

  Jan detected little of that tone on this Thanksgiving visit, but she couldn’t help but notice how tense her husband was as they waited for the holiday turkey. He spent less time talking and more within himself. The house seemed more silent than ever. Jan might have welcomed even one of their tiffs to liven everything up.

  At one point Jan felt sorry for him. He seemed almost pathetic as he hunched in one of the living room chairs, his body slanted away from her and his mother. He was nibbling on a cookie and staring out a window.

  “Al, what’s wrong, honey?” she asked him after they left.

  “Jan-Jan, I’m working on it in therapy,” he said.

  58

  Compensation is the choice of an equal, but different, goal. For example, the 5-foot-4 teenager who can’t make the football team, so he becomes captain of the school debate team. Overcompensation, such as doing it to feel superior, is a symptom of neurosis.

  —W. ALAN CANTY,

  Henry Ford Community College lectures

  A computer room supervisor named Ray Danford glanced at the calendar and decided to phone his old friend Alan Canty. No matter where their lives took them over the past thirty-five years, they always found a way to get in touch in late November, when their birthdays fell only five days apart. Al suggested they meet on a Saturday for lunch.

  “Where?”

  “How ‘bout Marcus? It’s still there, you know.”

  “The Original” Marcus Hamburgers, Ray thought, one of the old hangouts from their late teens. That would be nostalgic. He wondered if the food was still the same.

  Not only was the diner dishing up the same small burgers when they met two weeks later, the place looked as though it hadn’t been redecorated since 1949. They sat on stools at the counter and ordered up a bunch.

  “The waitress even looks the same,” Al said.

  “She may be the same one,” Ray joked.

  The two friends had covered a lot of life’s territory since the summer of ’49, when they met. They could have spent the whole lunch reminiscing, but Al’s mind was on current affairs.

  “By the way, Ray, I’ve met this girl named Dawn,” he began. “Yeah, a prostitute. She’s from Harper Woods, in fact, but I found her in the Cass Corridor living in an apartment with her boyfriend.”

  Al offered up a few more sketchy details of the relationship. He saw this girl frequently. Dawn and her boyfriend were drug addicts. He said he’d worked out a pretty sophisticated schedule to enable the escapade. He’d been seeing her a year.

  As the story unfolded, Ray felt as though the oxygen was being sucked from his chest. He sometimes got those attacks. A doctor once told him it was hyperventilation. Finally he had to interrupt.

  “Uh-oh, Al,” he said. “I’ve lost my breath.”

  When Al saw the frightened look on Ray’s face he started laughing. Soon he was cackling like hell, while Ray struggled to put the brakes on the panic attack. Seeing Al’s reaction helped him pull himself back together.

  “What’s so goddamn funny about me losing my breath?” Ray asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

  Al Canty always did have an odd sense of humor, Ray thought. But his laughter had a manic ring to it, as though from someone under heavy stress. Then Al jumped back into his story.

  “Ray,” he continued, “they think I’m Al Miller, Dr. Al Miller.”

  Al grinned widely. It was an inside joke. Ray knew Al Miller a
s the race driver Al Canty used to cheer on at the old track at Schoenherr and Eight Mile Road. Miller and his black stocker won most of the races they saw in their teens on the quarter-mile oval. Back then it was billed as the fastest dirt track in the country.

  Marcus Hamburgers wasn’t the only thing that hadn’t changed over all these years, Ray thought. He and Al had talked about that as psychology majors at Wayne University.

  “Nobody ever really changes that much, even in analysis,” Al used to say. “The basics are still there.”

  And the way Ray saw it, the Dr. Al Miller masquerade was basic Al Canty, another in a series of many charades. In their early years, Al had always compensated for what he lacked in basic masculine bravado with scams of intrigue and psychological daring. But Ray could only think of one that involved a hooker.

  Then they were both college students in their early twenties. One Friday afternoon, Al came by with two hundred dollars he said he’d stolen from a girlfriend. He’d heard about a place in Chicago called Rush Street. In no time the two of them were off to see it in Ray’s black Volkswagen bug.

  They booked into a Chicago hotel. Al procured a prostitute and brought her back to their room. Actually, soliciting her was one of the more normal aspects of the trip. At least he paid her. Al blew most of the stolen money on food and drink. When they left the hotel, Al distracted the clerk so Ray could sneak out with their suitcases without paying. Then Al sent a postcard from the Chicago YMCA to his mother, writing they were staying there.

  But Al overlooked something. He’d put his home address on the hotel’s registration. When the hotel bill arrived at his parents’ house, he wrote “not at this address” and sent it back.

  “If you’re going to break some rules, you should use a fictitious name,” Al later said.

  Most people would have written that off as a youthful prank if it was his only one as a young man. But there were many others. With women, especially, Al seemed to be more intrigued by his schemes to seduce girls than by sex itself. Ray spent hours listening to Al analyze ways to find angles on attractive girls in bars, but his friend never once left his seat to make an introduction. Once Al posed as a veterinarian to secure a drug believed to be an aphrodisiac from a druggist. He rented and furnished an apartment to try it out on the date. Another time he assumed the role of a private eye to find out about a girl he liked. He tailed her, kept logs of her daily schedule, but never did ask her out. Once he stuffed his cheeks with cotton and told a girl he was dating he was terminally ill. As a dying man’s request, he asked her to make love. She caught on and dumped him.