You Don't Have to Live Like This

by Benjamin Markovits

  “But you’re here now because of this Meacher business.”

  “That’s part of it,” he said. “I want to hear what you think.”

  We talked about Meacher and eventually I said, “What happened with Obama, by the way? I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I got the feeling there was some bad blood.”

  He frowned a little, in a good-looking way. “I wanted to let him know that what we were doing in Detroit could be reproduced.”

  “So now he knows.”

  “That’s right.”

  Kurt Stangel walked over with a Frisbee in his hand. His T-shirt had a picture of Mel Lozano on it, in a sports bikini. Robert put up with him for a while, then when Kurt went inside to get coffee Robert said to me, “Listen, Marny. I’ve got a favor to ask you. You’re friendly with a guy named Nolan Smith?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Tony told me. Is it true?”

  “I know Nolan.”

  “The thing is, he’s starting to cause us a little trouble.”

  “Oh, Nolan’s all right. He just talks a lot.”

  “Well, now he’s talking about Meacher. There’s a criminal process, which I’m not especially worried about. But Smith is talking to his family, too, he’s making promises to the mother which I don’t suppose he’ll be able to keep. There’s going to be a civil suit, which we expected, but Smith seems determined to make it into a public event, which won’t necessarily help their case.”

  “What do you care?”

  “I have a duty to the people who come here . . .”

  “Come off it, Robert.”

  “What’s happening right now to Tyler Waites is ninety percent to do with the situation we put him into.”

  “So far as I can tell, Tyler Waites is doing fine.”

  “That’s because you haven’t thought very much about what this kind of public legal process can do to you.”

  “It’s Dwayne Meacher I’d be more worried about if I were you.”

  “I am worried about him. The people who really lead the field in brain trauma are the US military, but there are good people in private practice, too, who work closely with the military, and I’ve brought them in on it.”

  “I haven’t seen anything about it in the papers.”

  “I didn’t want it in the papers. But if you’re willing to talk to Nolan Smith about what’s going on, we can fill you in.”

  “Why don’t you tell him yourself?”

  “We’ve tried. There’ve been some misunderstandings.”

  “Robert, I don’t want to be your middleman. Anyway, there’s not much I can do. He’s been looking for a chance like this for a while.”

  “Tony tells me you’re pretty good friends. He says your girlfriend’s an old friend of his, too.”

  “That’s enough of that,” I said.

  “Marny, I don’t think you appreciate how delicate our position is. In Detroit generally. We really don’t want to turn this into a racial thing.”

  “It is a racial thing.”

  We sat in silence in the spreading sunshine for a few minutes. The reflection off the metal tables was bright enough to make me squint; salt kept getting in my eyes. But it was nice to dry up in the sun, I felt good.

  “What happened with you and Obama?” I said. “Is this the kind of thing he was worried about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because it felt to me more personal than that.”

  “He’s suspicious of people like me. He thinks we don’t like him.”

  “What do you mean, people like you?”

  “Hedge fund guys,” Robert said. After a minute, he went on: “Tony told me something about this Nolan character. He says he’s a very forceful personality.”

  “Why don’t you just say it? He’s an angry black man.”

  “Oh, get over it, Marny. You got a black girlfriend, and now you’re standing up for all the brothers?”

  For some reason, this made me blush. “Fuck you, Robert,” I said.

  He gave me a minute to calm down—he went to take a leak, and moved like a thirty-something man after his jog, feeling his weight on the steps. “We’re all paid up,” he said, coming back.

  I stood up stiffly and Robert walked me to my front drive, which is where he’d parked his car.

  “This is not how I wanted the conversation to go,” he said. “The thing about you, Marny, is that you’re the kind of guy who falls in love with guys. I don’t mean like a gay thing, but you get ideas about them and you can’t see straight. You were the same about Tony at first. This guy could do real damage if we don’t watch out.”

  I said I’d talk to him.

  BUT I TALKED TO STEVE Zipp first. I sometimes helped him look after his boy. The kid was about a year and a half now and fun to be around. He looked like Steve, pale and serious; his hair was cut like Steve’s, too, and he had skinny red knees and walked around like a guy late for work. Neil Lyman—Lyman was his mother’s name. Neil was a bad napper and Steve often drove him to sleep in the afternoon. Sometimes I drove with him. Then we sat in the car and talked or parked by Joe’s and got a cup of coffee with Neil in the car.

  “Tell me about Tyler Waites,” I said.

  “He’s one of those loud guys people like. Like in high school he would have been the class clown, but the kind of class clown even the teacher got along with. Funny, not mean. If you go around with Tyler he talks to everybody and you just stand around and watch him work.”

  “Is he a racist?”

  “Let me put it this way. I’m willing to bet that around the wrong people he’s gone along with some jokes that are a little off. Maybe he even makes these jokes himself. But it’s also true that if you walk into 7-Eleven with him, and the lady working the counter is one of these big black ladies, with five-inch fingernails and artificial hair, you know, someone you and I have basically nothing to say to, he’ll have a fifteen-minute conversation with this woman, where she laughs her head off, and you have to drag him out of the store.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Too tall. Good-looking, but doesn’t mind looking stupid. Slightly preppy. I think he’s a decent golfer. I like him. He calls me Nerd Man. Why do you want to know?”

  “Gloria and I have been fighting about this whole thing.” I also told him about Nolan Smith, that he was planning to raise a big stink about Tyler Waites. “Robert James asked me to talk him out of it.”

  “Okay, well,” Steve said. “Tyler’s got a thick skin. Let me show you something about Robert James, though. I maybe figured out why the numbers add up.”

  We were driving around in his Oldsmobile, not really going anywhere but just driving around. Neil had just about fallen asleep in the back. It was another fine blue May afternoon, with a bit of breeze to make it cool in the shade. But the car got hot in the sunlight, which was clear and direct. Those big leather front-row bench seats get hot pretty quick.

  At one point he pulled into the parking lot of the twenty-four-hour McDonald’s at the corner of Conner and Mack. “I had breakfast here once,” I said, “the night after Gloria and I got together. There were all these guys coming off shift, and me with zero sleep, you know, when you feel real cold and it was cold as hell out anyway. For some reason I walked back from her place and got lost. Then I came across this McDonald’s and just sat there feeling kind of spaced out and at peace with everybody.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “I don’t know. It’s all new territory. I keep doing things I haven’t done before and saying things I haven’t said before.”

  He turned the car around and drove back slowly the way we had come. “I’m happier now than I’ve ever been in my life,” he said.

  “How much of that is to do with the kid?”

  “Some of it. And it doesn’t hurt I only have to see him every other weekend. But the main thing is I’m not working very hard, life is cheap, and there are people arou
nd who want to have a good time. The Internet is a beautiful thing. I get to have sex with actual women, it’s amazing.”

  “I can’t tell when you’re being serious anymore.”

  “Look, my whole life I lived conventionally. I got an accounting degree, for Christ’s sake. And it turns out this is a crazy, crazy way to live. Because there’s all kinds of stuff you want to do, let’s face it, there’s stuff you’re actually doing, that you can’t say anything about to the people who love you. So it starts to get weird—you start to get weird. This is how I came across. I don’t want to give all the credit to coming here. There are things I’m doing now I couldn’t have done if my mother were still alive. A couple of months ago, for example, I had a date with a guy—he posted something on the E-change along the lines of, if you haven’t tried it, you can try it with me. Some gay guys get their kicks out of turning you around.”

  “So what happened?”

  “You see that, you’re paying attention now. You want to know.”

  “So tell me.”

  “Well, this is something I can do, gay sex is something I’m capable of. But it wasn’t for me. I’m too competitive. I don’t mean physically. Emotionally the kind of person I want to be intimate with is the Other. I want differences, I want allowances, I want explanations.”

  “Maybe you didn’t meet the right guy.”

  “Well, I tried it once, maybe I’ll try it again. But I don’t think so. You don’t get points for scoring guys, that’s not what you dream about. I mean, when you’re thirteen years old and covered in zits. At least I didn’t. I wanted girls. And then you get to college and girls are everywhere, they’re in your bathroom, taking a dump, they’re coming out of the shower, they’re eating food, and none of them will look at you. I still didn’t have a chance. Now I do, that’s all. But what I want to know is, who’s paying for all this? It’s the accountant in me, I can’t get rid of him. Look, this is what I wanted to show you.”

  Neil was asleep by this point, and Steve parked by the gate of the big industrial plant under the bridge. There was still a pile of garbage in the forecourt, rubber tires, shopping carts, dirty clothes, but there were also a couple of cars, including a security vehicle with a siren on the hood.

  “What’s security doing in this dump, right?” Steve said.

  “There’s nobody there.”

  “Just stay in the car,” he said.

  I watched him get out and walk up to the fence. In spite of the sunshiny weather, he wore long pants and a buttoned-up white-collared blue shirt. Pants always looked too big on him. He needed to belt them in and his legs showed up only at the knees.

  There was a locked chain holding the gates shut, and he tugged on that a little, but they wouldn’t budge. The fence had barbwire on top but the gates didn’t, and for a minute he tried to climb up the vertical bars—he jumped and tried to pull himself up. When that didn’t work he started calling out, “Hey, hey, anybody home?” But nobody came. I saw him looking around in the dirt and then he picked up a loose brick and threw it over the fence. When it landed a few pieces broke off.

  Eventually a side door opened, and a guy came out.

  “What the fuck you doing?” he said. He was black and about six foot three and maybe fifty pounds overweight.

  “Just fucking around,” Steve said.

  “Well, go fuck around somewhere else.”

  “How come they make you work Sundays?”

  “Because of assholes like you.”

  The car window was rolled down so I could hear all this. The guy had a Triton Security cap on, loose blue jeans and big white brand-new sneakers.

  “What’s the plan for this building anyway? They gonna fix it up?”

  “Look. I get paid to sit here so I sit here.”

  “Is there something inside? I just want to see.”

  “I’m gonna go back in now. If you’re still standing there when I sit down, I’m calling the police.”

  Steve walked to the car and got in. “Let’s just sit here. He’s not going to call the police.”

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “I bet he won’t,” Steve said, but he turned on the ignition anyway and backed out.

  On the way home, he explained himself. Neil sometimes woke up very early in the morning, as early as four a.m., and to get him back to sleep Steve put him in the car and just cruised. A couple of weekends ago he drove past this place—another Sunday morning, predawn. The gates were open and there was a container truck backing in. So he hung around to watch them unload.

  “So what was it?” I said.

  “Aluminum. I’m almost certain. There were wooden shelves and bins, which is what they usually store aluminum in, to prevent scratching. But I couldn’t see anything else.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The price of aluminum has gone up almost two hundred percent in the past year. Partly because of new technologies. But it’s also one of those commodities people buy up in a recession. So I started looking around for storage depots—empty office buildings, factories, warehouses, that kind of thing. I don’t need to tell you how many there are. You think the police presence is for us? Somebody’s buying up aluminum, and they’ve done a deal with Robert James to store it. After all, that’s what Detroit is good for, cheap real estate. And it’s all going in—nothing’s coming out. They’re driving up prices. We’re just the window dressing here, what’s really going on is big business.”

  I couldn’t tell anymore how crazy he was. Indications from various quarters suggested that my view of reality was pretty limited.

  LATER THAT WEEK I DROVE to Linwood Street to fire a few rounds with Mel Hauser. We had lunch first in the canteen and I heard a lot of cop gossip. Nobody had much sympathy for Dwayne Meacher.

  “Look,” one of them said to me. “There’s no case there. You steal somebody’s phone, you’re on a bike, you’re trying to get away. Then you get hit by a car. If the kid isn’t black, believe me, none of this is even an issue.”

  He had a good head of gray hair and a spongy old-guy’s face. His nose was bulbous; he had trouble getting food out of his teeth. I had my first Coney that day, a hot dog covered in chili, which tasted like it sounds.

  “What do you think?” Mel said.

  “It’s school-lunch food.”

  “This isn’t a particularly good example.”

  “The civil suit is more baloney,” the guy went on. “Michigan has a no-fault law, which basically means, since the kid didn’t have insurance, the driver’s insurance has to pay damages. It doesn’t matter whose fault it was—that’s what no fault means. Everything else is just a publicity stunt.”

  “But the kid is black,” I said. “So it is an issue.”

  “You’re the guy who lives around there. As far as I’m concerned that’s looking for trouble. When they burn down your house I’ll say the same thing. You asked for it.”

  “Do you think they’ll bring charges against Tyler Waites?”

  “Is Larry Oh up for reelection?”

  Mel’s old buddies were all white. But I liked them; they liked to piss each other off in a friendly way. I asked Mel how his kids were and one of them said, “What does he know?” A few of the other guys had retired, too. They didn’t talk as much as the rest, they seemed happy to be there, they went up for seconds. Mel didn’t talk much either.

  Afterwards, on the way to the range, I asked him why it took three minutes for the cops to arrive and twenty-three minutes before an ambulance showed up.

  “How do I know?” he said. “There was probably a car on patrol.”

  There were five or six guys ahead of us, but the duty officer brought out a couple of Smith & Wessons and Mel took me through the process of cleaning them. Since the weather was fine, we went to the outdoor range, which looked like a parking lot surrounded by concrete walls. But over the walls you could see trees, already summery with leaves, blowing back and forth. The clouds in the sky got pushed along a
t a good clip, but it wasn’t cold. Pop pop pop—the background noise was full of gunshots, but the open air made everything sound a little farther away.

  “So you don’t think it was a racial thing?”

  “This is Detroit,” Mel said. “Nothing works. We don’t have enough ambulances, which is why for some parts of the city they use private companies. It’s up to the dispatch operator when you call 911. They have to make sure everybody gets to the scene on time. Police, ambulance, fire services. And let me tell you something else. Nine out of ten of the people on the phones are black.”

  “What about the cop. The one who said that Tyler admitted to him he tried to hit the kid. How come they suspended him? Doesn’t that look a little like a cover-up?”

  “You know why. For fucking tweeting about it. They should have fired him. Blame him if you want to blame anybody.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “I know guys like him. There’s a real hot dog element to these people. But he pissed on his own doorstep this time. And by the way, twenty-three minutes is par for the course. Twenty-three minutes is nothing to ask questions about.”

  Shooting handguns is fun. But you need strong arms—just holding your arms out straight is heavy work, and Mel suggested I put two hands on the gun. I did okay in the beginning and managed to pepper a few in the chest area, but after that the holes started spacing out. Even with my earmuffs on I could hear the contact with the cardboard, a kind of thwuck sound after the pip of the shot.

  You put one foot in front of the other. If you’re right-handed that means your left foot first.

  Mel said, “Keep your eyes open. Both eyes.”

  Apparently I’d been closing one of them. But it’s like I could feel different parts of my brain getting tired. After a while I started seeing double images, or silhouettes around the figure lines, and my hands and the gun waving gently in front, superimposed. When I breathed they moved; I could hear my heart in my ears. Five minutes is a long time to stare at something. We were standing in direct sunlight, and the ground was a pale gray concrete, which reflected it back. By the time we stopped I had a light sweat going.