Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  Then there was a film he made in college called Wire Home. It served two purposes: It was a serious Freudian drama. It was also an effort by Al to seduce the high school homecoming queen. She was a stunning girl with long chestnut hair. Al hired her as the lead actress. Ray was the cameraman.

  As for the Freudian theme, Wire Home referred to a house held together by wires—the weak structure of the family. The plot featured a young man whose father was always out of town on business while his mother scurried about the city from one bingo game to another. The main character, the son, kills his girlfriend, or she ends up slaying him. Ray wasn’t sure. Al had been promising to show him the film for years.

  As for the homecoming queen, Al got nowhere. Most of his charades failed because of transparency or miscalculation, like his plan to dodge the draft. A couple of nights before his physical, they rented a motel room on Jefferson and filled him full of blackberry brandy. Ray would never forget propping Al’s arm on a telephone and, at his insistence, trying to break it with three stomps of his boot. He only bruised it badly. Ray just couldn’t bring himself to put his weight into it. Al was anxious about what his mother would think, so he came up with some kind of story about the injury.

  Scruples were never an issue in such ventures. Back then Al Canty envisioned himself following a higher order of conduct than common morality. Society’s rules were part of what their intellectual mentor, Sigmund Freud, called the superego. Ray had to admit he felt the same way back then.

  As young men, Ray Danford and Al Canty concocted a chemistry that bonded their friendship and set their worldview. While Ray was raised in a blue-collar household and Al in one of middle-class sophistication, they had much in common. Ray was painfully shy, and he stammered. Al was ostracized as an aloof odd duck. Together, they found deliverance in the essays of Sigmund Freud.

  Back then, they guarded the newfound knowledge as though it was their own private stock. Freud not only gave them a new way of looking at everyone, he’d taken away the world’s sting. Everything could no longer be measured in the black-and-white standards they’d always found troubling. The higher order was the ability to see and analyze the varying shades of gray.

  They developed nicknames for the unenlightened. Freud once called religion “mass obsession with neurosis.” Ray and Al called churchgoers MONs. High school heroes could be as easily discerned. They called swaggering macho types Chuck Need. Ray and Al knew that they needed to be that way.

  They fancied themselves sophisticated intellectuals. They talked with Al Sr. about human behavior and were intrigued by his demonstrations of hypnosis. They saw themselves on the leading edge of the trends of the day. Freudian psychology was invading American culture. Filmmakers had discovered the unconscious. Directors such as Elia Kazan buried Oedipal allegories and other Freudian concepts in films such as East of Eden and On the Waterfront.

  It carried into their studies. Ray took thirty-nine hours of psychology at Wayne State but eventually had to drop out to go to work. Now he had a daughter and son, lived in a Harper Woods bungalow, and cleaned carpets for a second income. Ray had married his high school sweetheart, Jeannie. In fact he met Al at the party where he asked Jeannie to go steady. It was August 4. They still observed the date with an annual gathering of old east-side friends.

  Al took psychology to the limit. He was the only one of the old gang who had really done it, turned his college training into a way of life. Their friendship had fluctuated over the years. They drifted apart when he was with his first wife Maggie. Al was running with a pretty sophisticated crowd. With Jan, he’d become more accessible, throwing a couple of August 4 parties himself at his big Tudor.

  What a shame about this prostitute, Ray thought. He found Jan Canty exceptionally attractive with an unpretentious personality to match. Al had pulled some secret maneuvers on his first wife Maggie. But as far as Ray knew, they all revolved around hiding a half-dozen antique cars in garages around the city. Ray thought Al had settled down after meeting Jan. Now he had this escapade going. Ray guessed his old friend knew what he was doing.

  Al was eager to meet again as they walked out of their old hangout.

  “Ray, let’s meet like this once a month for lunch,” he said.

  Ray Danford agreed. He knew full well that through the years he had been Al’s only close friend and confidant.

  Later that day Ray remembered his daughter, April, talking about a girl named Dawn who had dropped out of sight several weeks before the 1983 graduation. He asked her about the dropout.

  “Didn’t you say there was a girl in the high school named Dawn, who just disappeared?”

  “Yep.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Dawn Spens. Nobody has heard from her since. Why?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  He wondered if she was the same one.

  Part Three

  1985-86

  59

  No matter how hard you try there will be people who will not like you.

  —W. ALAN CANTY,

  Henry Ford Community College lectures

  Dawn Spens ushered in the new year with another trip to the hospital. She took a few swallows of champagne at a party thrown by a cousin, complained of pain in her side, then passed out. When she awoke to 1985, she was jaundiced.

  Dr. Al Miller had cautioned her that her recurring dizzy spells and nausea during the holidays were caused by her drug habit. She and John were not only shooting heroin, they were dabbling in intravenous cocaine as well. Muscle strains from vomiting caused the pain under her right ribs, Al said. He suggested she go easy for a couple of days, and the problem would clear up.

  The advice may have been good, but Al’s diagnosis left his physician’s skills in serious question. When John took his girlfriend to Southwest Detroit Hospital near downtown Detroit, doctors admitted her for chronic hepatitis. It was her third major hospitalization in twelve months.

  That week, Al was scheduled to leave for Arizona for another yearly purging session with the old miner and his mules. But Dawn tried to reach her sugar daddy before he left to let him know she was in the hospital. She got the answering service for Dr. Alan Canty.

  Dawn and John decided to do a little investigating. John looked up the listings for Canty in the telephone book. There was a Dr. W. Alan Canty in the Fisher Building and a residential listing in Grosse Pointe Park. Dawn remembered that on one of their lunch hour drives Al showed her the outside of the house he owned in Grosse Pointe Park, but had been renting out since his wife’s death. The street, Berkshire, matched the listing for Dr. Canty in the phone book.

  “If that’s him, call the punk’s house,” Dawn said.

  The parallels became more intriguing when John dialed the number. A woman answered the phone, saying Dr. Canty wasn’t home. John identified himself as a friend trying to reach the doctor.

  “It’s kind of important,” he said. “Where can I get a message to him?”

  “Well, this is the housekeeper,” the woman said. “And he and Mrs. Canty are out of town for a week.”

  John hung up.

  When Al returned the next week, he was eager to show off a new pair of engineer boots he said he bought in Arizona. They had steel toes.

  “Thought I might need ’em,” he quipped to John. “Just in case we go back to the Gaiety Bar.”

  Al also brought a photo album to Dawn’s hospital room. It contained pictures of his house in Grosse Pointe Park. Since claiming the home was burglarized and trashed in the summer, he had spun an ongoing narrative about the house being repaired and renovated. Now the work was done, and he wanted to show Dawn the results. He left the album for her to peruse.

  Later, John and Dawn studied the collection of photos and peeked into a lifestyle they’d only seen in magazines. There was much carpet, wallpaper, and wainscoting. There were windows of leaded glass and carved cove moldings meeting the home’s ten-foot-high ceilings. John and Dawn gazed at Japanese art and Oriental
furnishings in brass and black lacquer. Room after room featured well-kept antiques: dark armoire with a long oval mirror, a nineteenth-century ice chest, a double bed of brass and wrought iron. They saw a country kitchen in solid oak and an airy sun-room with ceramic tile flooring. They saw a living room larger than their entire apartment back at the Homewood Manor. A leather couch and easy chair faced the fireplace. There was only one exterior picture in the collection, that of a walkway made of squarely laid bricks.

  The album looked as though someone was trying to record all the owner’s belongings. Unaware of their research in the phone book, Al had unwittingly furnished John Fry and Dawn Spens with a tantalizing documentary of his wealth.

  Dawn Spens didn’t last a full two weeks in Southwest Detroit Hospital. She walked out when physicians restricted her visits. John told friends her urine had tested dirty with street drugs.

  On January 13, Al drove her to Receiving Hospital, where again she was admitted for hepatitis. They ordered a subclavian IV line to supply her with nourishment and Demerol. Nurses were told to keep a close watch, but she wasn’t given drug screens.

  Dawn would spend fifteen days in Receiving. John Fry left the trick pad on Clayton and moved into a cousin’s house on the southwest side. Every noon hour except Sunday, Al picked him up there, and the two visited Dawn. Al usually stopped at the gift shop. He still would do anything for the hooker.

  “Whatya doin’?” John asked Dawn one night on the telephone.

  “I’m making up Al’s list. I want to see what I can get.”

  Al took her fingernail kits, makeup kits, coloring books, comic books, cartons of Marlboro menthols, and her beloved crossword puzzles. She spent hours doing crosswords, and staying high.

  Al also provided money for heroin and transportation to the dope house. He always waited in the car while John copped. Dawn complained frequently about the shortcomings of the hospital’s doses of Demerol. John made up the difference in her IV.

  John and Al began to talk quite a bit during their excursions. For the time being, at least, they seemed to be tolerating one another’s roles in Dawn’s life.

  The subjects varied widely. Al expounded on Detroit history, pointing out local landmarks and explaining ethnic origins of various neighborhoods. John told him about his family’s roots in the South. After seeing a TV documentary on James Dean, Al analyzed the actor, adding how much he admired him. John had a lot of memories from the fifties as well. Al talked about old cars, John about vintage bikes. He showed John a picture of a Cord convertible he was having restored. He said he sometimes made trips to Boston and New York to find parts. John remembered Al telling Dawn he used to ride a Harley.

  “If that guy rides a Harley-Davidson, Popeye is a punk, man,” John said at first.

  Now he wasn’t so sure. Al was a bundle of contradictions, John began telling his friends. The affluent intellectual obviously was out of his territory but also had a believable grasp of Detroit’s lawless element. Sometimes he even took on a bit of an accent, as though he was trying to get the hang of street jive.

  One trip they made together particularly intrigued the former biker. The two of them drove to Detroit’s Brightmore district, a westside enclave known for its mix of lower-income white families and motorcycle clubs. While they waited in Al’s Buick for another drug addict to cop in a dope house, Al talked about motorcycle clubs.

  “John, I used to party with some of the clubs. Forbidden Wheels was my favorite.”

  He named others: Renegades, Scorpions, Huns.

  “He knew the language that only a person who had been there or done their homework could know,” Fry later told a friend.

  Another time Al revealed he almost got caught committing an armed robbery of a gas station when he was young.

  “I can identify with some of the things you do, John. Me and a couple of buddies. They got caught, but I got away.”

  Fry later tried to explain to his friends the seeming clash between the bespectacled, duckfooted doctor with the funny grin and the stories he told.

  “This guy is such a contradiction that he makes me look like an asshole when I start trying to explain it.”

  Nothing, however, had Lucky Fry’s attention more than the kind of money Al was spending. One night, John used Dawn’s date book to calculate the amount for the year 1984.

  “Moneywise, he’d bought her six cars—though only two were actually bought,” he would later recall. “The rest were squeeze plays. Counting the lump sums and the money every day the total was between $130,000 and $140,000.”

  At times John inflated that figure to as high as $300,000. The amount changed depending on whom he was trying to impress or what mood-altering substances were swirling in his circulatory system. But among his closest friends, the $140,000 figure remained constant.

  John knew the money just didn’t fit the merchandise. For that kind of cash Al could have the most expensive call girl in Detroit catering to him in a suite on the seventy-fifth floor of the Westin Hotel. He asked Dawn about it one night.

  “Just what is this guy getting?”

  “John, I swear to God. I’ve screwed the guy less than a half-dozen times.”

  Then, she said, after a week or two of no physical contact, Al usually put in a formal request, saying, “Well, are you going to take care of me?”

  Then she gave him oral sex.

  “There’s got to be something this guy wants,” John later said. “At first I thought it was an attraction to Dawn. But she really ain’t that great—not for that kind of money. And the way she treats him, it’s just not normal. If you’re giving a broad $200 to $300 a day and just spending an hour with her, that girl is supposed to say nothing wrong to you in that hour.”

  That wasn’t the case either. Since late fall, John had been watching his girlfriend cop an attitude. The sugar daddy who once was her source of pride now was a source of disgust. “The way she put it. She hated him—hated what he represented.”

  Dawn Spens nicknamed Al “The Pinhead” behind his back, a slur that stuck from the day she conceived it. Her attitude crept into the ways she requested larger sums of money. If Al stalled, Dawn pouted. She might speak to him. She might not. She might go to lunch with him. She might refuse to leave the house. “As far as sex, he could forget it,” John said.

  But Al kept coming back. One day John watched her storm out of the house with Al sitting at the kitchen table.

  “What about Al?” John said.

  “Fuck him,” she said. “He’ll go home when it gets time.”

  Once she brought her sugar daddy to tears over the white Thunderbird he bought her. When the engine began knocking John told her to sell it. Earlier, Al had told a dope dealer named Stumpy who frequented the trick pad on Clayton that he would back Dawn’s line of credit.

  John came home one day to discover Dawn browbeating her regular. Al was sobbing as he walked with slumped shoulders to his Buick.

  “It’s your fault that the car is gone,” she shouted at him. “You told the dope man to give me anything I want. But you didn’t fuckin’ pay him and I had to give him the car.”

  “Please, Dawn,” Al begged. “I’ll get you another car. I will.”

  Later, when Al didn’t produce money for another automobile, she waited until John was present before squeezing him again.

  “You said you could get me a car,” she told him.

  Al looked embarrassed. Then Dawn looked at John.

  “Fuck it,” she said. “I’ll get John to get me a car.”

  The tactic produced more cash. John found a well-used gold Thunderbird to give the squeeze credence. The car didn’t last a month. It was hot and was eventually sold for dope money.

  By late January, as John watched Al run a daily shuttle from the southwest side to the dope house to the gift shop to Dawn’s hospital bed, where he was often met with indifference, John had no doubt Al was hooked. But he couldn’t understand the nature of the bait.

  “So
when I started lookin’ at all of this, I said there’s got to be somethin’ more somewhere,” he said later. “I told Dawn, ‘I think the punk is writing a book—The Life of Dope Fiends, or whatever.’ Because nobody puts up with all that and keeps coming back.”

  60

  We also see many people who are disturbed by feelings of insecurity and inferiority. They sometimes attempt to compensate for their inferiority feelings by attempting to speed, to outwit the police or showing off in some other manner … The Detroit Traffic Clinic unmasks these people for what they really are—social misfits.

  —ALAN CANTY, Sr.

  “The Detroit Traffic Clinic,” 1959

  In other cases we find the youth who violates because, as a result of a hatred for the father, he now commits an aggression against authority or against the police who to him represent a father substitute.

  —ALAN CANTY, Sr.

  “The Youthful Problem Driver,” 1942

  Ray Danford recognized the melody under the lunchtime chatter of the Cadieux Cafe. He was surprised Al Canty hadn’t already acknowledged the old hit from My Fair Lady called “On the Street Where You Live.”

  “Hey, Al, listen,” he said, gesturing to a speaker. “They’re playing your song.”

  He teased his old friend about how he’d worn out his record of the sound track in their midtwenties. Al used to rave about Pygmalion, the Bernard Shaw play that inspired first a movie, then the musical. He was fascinated with the story of the aloof English professor who wagers that he can take a young flower girl out of the gutter, dress her up, and transform her into a sophisticated lady. Everyone else was playing rhythm-and-blues records and going to drive-ins. Young Al Canty saw the musical, hummed the “The Rain in Spain,” and mused about Henry Higgins’s efforts to control the wily Eliza Doolittle. The old gang thought his taste a bit odd.