by Paul Clemens
He was one of a group of similar white kids in Detroit’s northeast corner who could do push-ups out of handstands, who regarded street fighting as good clean fun, and whose years in Coleman Young’s Detroit had taught them only that there was enormous solace to be found in sarcasm and a good deal of good sense to be found in prejudice. What I often thought of as such kids’ lack of common sense—their propensity for saying the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and for purposely saying it much too loudly—was, in fact, a failure of will on my part. If I’d had their guts, their builds, their almost complete lack of fear, I’d have done the same. Lacking their fearlessness but still needing to make sense of my hometown somehow, I became increasingly bookish, while these kids did push-ups and pull-ups and beat the shit out of the punching bags they’d hung from basement ceilings, all as part of their preparation for what they viewed, perhaps rightly, as the inevitable.
It is nonetheless fitting, perhaps, that my early, playful interactions with black kids—boxing matches in basements, fall football practices—centered around physical contact: violence, supervised and unsupervised. From these early experiences may stem my frequent surprise, later in life, at the belief of many whites that black folks are to be treated with kid gloves—that they are untouchables, basically, about whom there is a great deal that can’t be thought or said. In Detroit it was different, with a greater respect given to the black ability to absorb physical and linguistic blows. They hit, and you hit back: it’s how the game was played. Coleman Young was quite capable of defending himself.
By the time overcast October arrived I’d learned much that was valuable from the coaches, quite aside from proper blocking technique and how to run a post pattern. “Cold? Put your hands down your pants. Warmest place on your bodies, men, is the family jewels. Remember that. Don’t be wearing no gloves to practice. Don’t need ’em. Hands get cold, put ’em down your pants.” Catholic school was altogether less encouraging about my putting my hands down my pants, but what the coaches said was sound: the family jewels were a furnace.
Have I ever been happier than during those muddy late-fall practices, with drizzle in the air, leaves underfoot, and Halloween fast approaching? Halloween was my favorite night of the year, with all the kids in the neighborhood running from house to house at the first hint of dusk, with no predetermined traffic flow. Some would go up and down the block, some down and up, bumping into one another along the way. At the end of the evening everyone would return home panting, face paint running from sweat, a pillowcase full of candy clutched in his or her fists. It was as if we’d somehow made it back to enjoy the spoils after the safe completion of a dangerous mission, and in a sense we had. The neighborhood’s sidewalks had begun the process of returning to their constituent elements years before, and it was easy to imagine that the geographic center of the holiday had moved from the crumbling castles of Transylvania to the crumbling sidewalks of Detroit. On Halloween night animals of the forest lost their legs, kings and queens collapsed, and more than a few animated heroes and heroines took tumbles. There were always skinned knees in the neighborhood the next day.
Of more pressing concern to our parents, who passed out the candy, was the increase each year in the carloads of children—vanloads—who were being dropped off on our block by outsiders, people who then took up all the curb space to await their kids’ return. Worse still was when they followed after their kids, driving slowly along the curb; even driving at a crawl could be dangerous on a dark night on a street crowded with trick-or-treaters. The increased risk that these cars presented, combined with the fact that these were not neighborhood kids climbing out of such cars but kids from other, less desirable sections of the city whose parents “bused” them to better areas in pursuit of holiday candy—well, this pissed people off. It happened more and more each year, and each year a few more porch lights in the neighborhood stayed off all night in protest, causing us to pass over these houses as if by decree from the pharaoh. “Some of these kids are fourteen and fifteen,” you’d hear people complain. “They don’t wear costumes or say thank you. I don’t mind the cute little ones, but enough is enough.”
The roads of the neighborhood were always slick with wet leaves in October, causing our front tires to spin as my mother pulled away from stop signs on the way to practice, where some of those fourteen-year-olds who didn’t say thank you or wear costumes sat around waiting for warm-ups to start. “It’s sweater weather,” my mother would say every autumn after the first frost, and the phrase began to seem almost magical, a reminder that, after stripping out of my Catholic school uniform, it would be wise to put on a sweatshirt under my shoulder pads. I could almost understand my father’s hatred of air conditioning: this was Michigan, after all, and here we were, at the beginning of the eight months of the year when you didn’t need air conditioning anyway. After I was forced to endure head-on the heat and humidity of a Detroit summer, my feelings toward these crisp fall days were sharpened and my father’s outlook on life began to make a certain sense, granting to our yearly reprieve from the heat the feeling of a well-earned reward. Plus, on the electric bill, he saved a few bucks.
Our home games were played at Edwin Denby High School, the Detroit public school I would have attended were it not for Roman Catholicism, but we met up at Heilmann Field first before driving over. The mothers always bought McDonald’s for us before our home games, and we sat in the Heilmann parking lot on those cool mornings eating steaming, heavily salted hash browns out of their bright red sleeves. I sat on a metal parking rail, feeling the cold through my tail pad, and fought off my nervousness by pretending great interest in my fried potato.
Half an hour later, the hash browns just beginning to digest, our quarterback led us onto the field in a straight line (“Look sharp, men!”) as we buttoned up our chinstraps, preparing for battle. Our rally cry was done to the accompaniment of hand slaps on our thigh pads, on which we pounded out a dum-dum-DUM, dum-dum-DUM beat. “I said a-boom-chigaboom!” our quarterback would holler, in the same voice he used to call out the play count, and we’d echo back: “I said a-boom-chigaboom!” The second time the boom grew louder, and the third time around the levee on the boom broke: “I said a-BOOM-chigaboom!” “I said a-BOOM-chigaboom!” “I said a-boom-chickarocka-chickarocka-chigaboom!” “I said a-boom-chickarocka-chickarocka-chigaboom!” A few times through and we’d line up for calisthenics, spacing ourselves on the chalk marks that intersected the field every five yards, and count out our jumping jacks and toe touches in unison. Warm-ups over, we’d run through some offensive plays in slow motion against our defense, with the nonstarters lined up shoulder to shoulder to block our formations and signals from the opposing team’s view.
After that it was time to walk to the sidelines for a pregame pep talk from the head coach. “They’re coming into your backyard. Your backyard, men. Are you gonna let them take something from you from your own backyard? They coming in here, thinking they’re the tough new guys on the block”—here they’d motion to our opponents huddled on the other side of the field—“but that can’t be right, can it?” No, we’d all holler: we were the tough guys, and we would go out there and prove it. “Son,” Coach Clyde sometimes said, pulling me aside, “what you need to do out there is concentrate. And relax. Just relax and concentrate.” I hadn’t caught a pass in our first three games, and though Coach Clyde hadn’t lost faith in me he had clearly lost some patience. But he still smiled and called me “son,” something the other kids might have needed but that I didn’t. I liked it anyway.
These tough talks and motivational speeches were particularly difficult for me, preoccupied as I was with remembering the words to what I’d taken to calling the Lower Sprint. In my nervousness, I sometimes stumbled over lines I’d said ten thousand times before. While I waited for my teammates to repeat “Give us this day our daily bread” I’d lose the prayer’s flow, and be unable come up with “And forgive us our trespasses.” My mother suggested t
hat, instead of waiting while my teammates repeated the previous line, I say it along with them, so that “As we forgive those who trespass against us” would come more naturally. The strategy worked.
But before our homecoming game that fall against the East Detroit Shamrocks, into which we carried a 2–0–1 record, my preoccupations with non-football-related matters were compounded. Not only would I be prayer leader; I’d be an escort as well for our team’s cheerleaders, little girls who sported pom-poms of blue and gold, our team’s colors, and specialized in “The Funky Chicken” and other mideighties urban dance moves that sent their braids airborne. They’d strut their stuff on the sidelines, turning the traditionally demure pastime of cheerleading into another in-your-face form of urban competition. Solo cheers, which my sister, Beth, memorized from the stands, were frequent: “My name is Latoya, and I’m first on the list; I got my reputation because I boogie like this.” Next up, not to be outdone, would be Tamika: “My name is Tamika, and I’m second on the list; I got my reputation because I shimmy like this.” And so on, each girl strutting her ten-year-old stuff.
The coaches had to pick three players to escort these darlings from the end zone to the fifty-yard line, and I was among the lucky few. Greatly embarrassed—girls—I walked with a flower in one hand and a cheerleader’s hand in the other, slowly putting one foot in front of the other, conscious of my own locomotion as I’d never been previously. I managed to make it through the ceremony without stumbling.
Split left, 900 drop back, from deep in our playbook, was called early in the second half—“on two, on two,” our quarterback said, breaking huddle. We were in our opponent’s end of the field, at their forty-yard line, and down two touchdowns. I lined up in the left slot. The play required me to run a post pattern, which I did, planting hard, about fifteen yards out, with my left foot. I made a beeline for the goalposts, looking back over my right shoulder for the pass, having cleanly beaten my defender. The quarterback got it there, as Coach Clyde had promised.
“Oh!” the announcer said over the PA system. “It hit him in the wrong spot—right in the hands!”
I ran over to the sidelines and took off my helmet, then immediately wanted to put it back on to hide my embarrassment. My mother still recites the announcer’s line happily, pleased that he was talking about her little boy, unable to grasp (football never made any sense to her) that I had dropped a sure touchdown. My father can also recite the line, his candy-ass fears still not quite overcome more than two decades later. How could you not have caught it? It was right in your hands!
I would catch exactly one pass all season, on a split-end screen a week later that went for three yards against the Grosse Pointe Red Barons, a team without a nonwhite player on its roster.
By Appointment Only
THE POLITICS OF THE AREA could be found, in its most distilled form, at Sal’s barbershop. Though a couple miles southeast of our neighborhood, everyone made the trek over to see Sal, whose brush cuts and Princetons were sported by Catholic kids all over the east side. Most of the men who’d filed into the shop were, like the barber himself, vigorously middle-aged, undeniably Italian, and vaguely handsome, in the way of a character actor whose face is familiar but whose name escapes. The younger customers came from the surrounding grade schools—St. Matthew, St. Peter, St. Clare, St. Brendan—and the older boys from the nearby Catholic high schools, all but one of which was single sex.
It seems that it was always the evening before some big holiday that I awaited a trim—the last Wednesday in November, December the twenty-third—and that the inside of the shop, so warm as to be sleep-inducing, was a forest of cashmere overcoats, with big-bodied men trudging in from the cold, blowing warm breath into cupped hands and stamping their feet while swearing away their shivers. The holidays were big-tipping time in the barbershop, when men who’d just gotten down from the chair would put their coats, scarves, and gloves back on before reaching into their pockets and slipping Sal a twenty, or fifty, or hundred, or, best of all, those obviously connected men who would hand him, on the day before Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve’s eve, nothing at all, but instead throw an arm around his shoulder, thank him for the shave and trim, and walk out the door with the mutual understanding that, in the very near future, a behind-the-scenes lever would be lowered that would lighten the barber’s load significantly. A state representative was among the men who got their hair cut at Sal’s, a fact Sal never failed to mention.
Sal’s eyebrows drooped down heavily, like icicles from an awning, and his statements tended toward the oracular. “Better them than you-know-who,” he said in the mid-1980s, after it was suggested that, due to the steep decline of the American auto industry, the Japanese were taking over Detroit. Comments like these could follow a full minute of silence, and it would take a second to contextualize them. But it was worth the intellectual effort. “You’ll learn more in this barbershop than you will from any book”—the man with the scissors was fond of saying this, though it was said less to downplay formal education’s importance than to enhance his own. He was a big believer in school—“Sit there, keep your mouth shut, you can’t help but learn something”—and Catholic education in particular. This belief he backed up in deed, not only because he’d sent his own sons to Catholic school but because he also bought, however begrudgingly, the fund-raiser items for sale by his younger clients. On more than one occasion did I hand Sal eight bucks for the haircut (a dollar tip), only to have him hand me a good deal more than that for a prize calendar or roll of raffle tickets.
I continued to sit there and keep my mouth shut at St. Peter, even though a block behind our house was the neighborhood’s public elementary school, Tracy McGregor. Though we sometimes climbed the school, using strategically placed fences and ledges to make it onto the roof, and though we took daily batting practice at the school during the summer, using the strike zones spray-painted on its side, I’d never set foot inside it and no one I knew went there. Students were bused into the neighborhood until 1988, when the silliness of sending kids from one all-black school to another all-black school farther away finally sunk in and the endless list of things on which the Young administration wasted our fathers’ tax dollars was reduced by one.
My religious progress at St. Peter can be charted as follows: took first communion in second grade, believing that the wafer and wine were chips and pop; made first confession in fourth grade, admitting to Father DeFina that I was sometimes mean to my little sister; took Joseph as my confirmation name in eighth grade, after that model of selfless fatherhood; and basically behaved as my parents, who were forking over the tuition that my mother’s odd jobs and my father’s long hours funded, believed I should. The school was all white and, it sometimes seemed, all Italian. Many of my classmates had last names seen on the side of Eastern Market produce trucks, and many of those who didn’t had mothers, like mine, with Italian maiden names. A few of the more bewildered-looking parents at after-school functions spoke no English whatsoever, smiled often, and smelled of garlic. Two-thirds of the class lived in the city.
The clearest of my grade school memories revolve around those times that were, to a kid, thrillingly out of the ordinary: the days leading up to a vacation or holiday, or those formal functions that brought us back to school after dark, when the hallways looked strangely unfamiliar. The student projects that lined the walls—our very own handiwork—provided unconvincing proof that these were indeed the same halls we’d walked hours earlier, while still in our uniforms. My favorite two and a half days of the school year were those of Thanksgiving week, days given over to construction paper, safety scissors, and lighthearted lessons, the festivities culminating in an all-school Mass during the half day on Wednesday. The altar would be decorated with pumpkins and gourds, and some of the children in the lower grades would be got up like Indians, wearing ponchos and war paint. Near the end of Mass, at the sign of peace, we’d pretend to be smoking pipes.
The nights of parent-teache
r conferences—Thursdays, always—were a special hell. My parents would come home late, my mother smiling in her party dress, my father looking uncomfortable and altogether less pleased as he loosened one of his rarely worn ties. My father never said much of anything but stood watch over these scenes as my mother recited, a bit breathless, my long list of scholastic successes, a litany that had been handed to her, via platter, by my teachers only a half hour before and that proved to her—and this was all anyone could ask, really—that I was doing my best. To my father, whose forearms were folded across his chest, this wasn’t really worth complimenting: I’d better be doing my best, given the kind of bucks he was shelling out for tuition. The Catholic stuff, the religious instruction that the school provided, that was fine—he could recite the Nicene Creed, too—but if I wasn’t going to apply myself to math and science, reading and writing, then I could just as well walk to McGregor, which was visible from our backyard. It was right outside our door, practically, and free.
“What are you talking about?” my mother would ask, looking over at him. “He is applying himself. You heard his teachers.” “I realize that. I’m just saying that if he doesn’t—” “But he does. Don’t listen to him,” my mother would say, turning to me and smiling. As if to compensate, she could have talked all night about the compliments she’d received on her children, and about how this teacher, a nun, knew Sister Marcia, and how that teacher, a layman, attended Sunday services at Father Hec’s parish. Wasn’t it something, what a small place the world was? My sister and I would smile, excited to have a legitimate reason to stay up late, but my father would eventually put an end to all this back-patting. It was still a school night, after all, and we needed our sleep.
