by Paul Clemens
In our class picture from that second grade year, the earliest photo of him I can find, Kurt’s face is streaked with tears, and his left cheek gouged and blackened by a length of No. 2 lead. He’d wanted to stand next to me in line on the way to getting our picture taken, as had another classmate. A fight broke out between the two of them, which the other kid ended by punching Kurt in the face, a sharpened Dixon Ticonderoga clutched in his fist. Angry and scarred: a fitting first picture of Kurt Ketchel.
The high school we drove to each morning was two streets down from my house, on the non-Detroit side of yet another boulevard separating city from suburb. It was all-boys and Catholic; next door was an all-girls Catholic high school. It seemed every son and daughter of every white cop, fireman, autoworker, and city employee on Detroit’s east side put on khaki pants and dress shirt, or tartan skirt and saddle shoes, and went off to one of these schools each morning. Nearly every boy in my high school had a sister next door, and every girl next door was dating one of her brother’s friends. There were more near-incestuous unions in our area than there were among the nobility of eighteenth-century Europe, with the difference that in Detroit we weren’t trying to safeguard the royal treasures or maintain the blueness of our blood. The city already had its king.
In truth, there were three schools sitting side by side by side, with a coed Lutheran high school next door to the girls’ Catholic school. But Lutheranism didn’t have the cachet in our corner of Detroit that Catholicism did. It lacked history, weight. It was viewed as having been born about a millennium and a half too late. What was Wittenburg compared to Rome? Where was their Sistine Chapel? Lutherans, damningly, didn’t believe in the transubstantiation, and accused Catholics of a cult of Mary. I remember one anti-Lutheran diatribe, delivered by a priest during religion class, that approached something like brilliance. Five hundred years after the fact, the wound inflicted by the split in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church remained fresh, and he tried to impress upon us the intellectual shoddiness of Protestantism. “The source of the Reformation?” he asked rhetorically, in front of the thirty boys in our junior religion class. “The difficulty,” he said, “Luther experienced when trying to move his bowels. When on the pot—put this in your notes, gentlemen—Luther believed he was sitting on the throne of Satan.” Constipation, we were left to conclude, led directly to the schism. “Painful feces=tacking of theses?” I jotted in my notebook, or something to that effect.
None of this made any impression on Kurt, for whom Catholic school was simply a way to avoid attending the Detroit Public Schools. To get to his house I had to drive past our high school, taking Kelly Road to 7 Mile, at the corner of which was Calcaterra’s Funeral Home. Though the drive was only three miles, it took me through the territories of several parishes—St. Peter, St. Jude, St. Brendan, Queen of Peace. It was also a trip through several socioeconomic strata, one that, roughly speaking, followed a downward slope from bad to worse. Our area, at the top, was working class; Kurt’s, in the valley below, was white trash. In between was a mixed bag.
We lived in a corner house, which is why our cars, parked overnight on the side street, were so often broken into. (My father: “The goddamn car insurance is reason enough to get out of Detroit!”) Kitty-corner from us was a Polish woman whose sons were several grades ahead of me and who, as a means of earning money for tuition payments, cleaned homes in Grosse Pointe, an idea my mother would adopt. Across the side street from us was an old Polish couple whose son, a Detroit cop living in the suburbs, spent the nights before his shifts at his parents’ house, in case anyone should be checking to see if he was in compliance with the city’s residency requirement. In the block behind them was a widower, another man with a son who was a Detroit cop with a suburban address, and who slept over for the same reason.
In the block behind us, one house down, was an old Italian couple whose last name was the city in Italy from which St. Francis came. I used to peer over our backyard fence to see if I could spy them talking to birds or carrying on conversations with squirrels, the way the saints sometimes did in the “Parable of Nature” cartoons we watched at school. My best friends, a pair of twin brothers, lived down the block. Their father was a fireman with Devil’s Night stories and their mother, also in need of income, would occasionally team-clean houses in Grosse Pointe with my mother. Across from them lived a Mexican woman, Yvonne, a working mother whose daughters, Sophia and Louisa, my mother had babysat three days a week from the time they were born; it was a way to make yet more under-the-table money while at the same time satisfying her insatiable need for bambinos. The family was from southwest Detroit, and everyone in the enormous clan had gone to Holy Redeemer, the Mexican parish near the Ambassador Bridge. Yvonne paid by the hour and made us botanas, and we attended the quincenerras of the girls in the family.
The area’s common denominator, Catholicism, was a hedge not just against eternal damnation but against social decay. If you followed the rules, as laid out in two testaments and ten commandments and further codified by two millennia of encyclicals and edicts, chances were not only that you wouldn’t go to hell, but that your neighborhood wouldn’t, either.
It was an area of strivers, and if the striving didn’t improve much at least it helped maintain the status quo. Kurt’s neighborhood, ten minutes away, was less stable, and the house I waited outside of each morning was a shack—seven hundred square feet, tops. He was sufficiently Appalachian in appearance that the memory of his unkempt blond head, bobbing down the sidewalk after my sixth or seventh honk, puts me in mind of Walker Evans’s sharecroppers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His neighborhood, with its deep-set houses and old white couples, was one of those hillbilly sections of big cities that, long after white flight, Black Power, and urban sprawl, somehow manage to retain a rural way about them. The men cut their lawns in overalls, sitting atop a riding mower, and referred to their wives, up on the porch, as “mother.” These mothers called cantaloupes “muskmelons” and suggested mustard plasters as a remedy for the common cold.
With its mixture of black and white, poor and professional, and its proximity to Grosse Pointe, the area was perfect for stealing hood ornaments, a favorite 1980s pastime. The two most prized ornaments of the era were the Cadillac crystal and the Dodge ram, and each abounded in the area. Like a mermaid on a ship’s prow, the ram crested the hood of the rednecks’ pickups, and the crystals came courtesy of two otherwise divergent groups—Grosse Pointers and blacks—both of whom suffered a well-documented fondness for the top of the General Motors line. None of this did me any good, however, as I couldn’t, for the life of me, detach the hood ornaments from their goddamn hoods. “You gotta twist it,” friends would whisper in the dark, tearing their hair at my ineptitude. “Twist and pull, twist and pull.” I had no head for crime, which would haunt me in later years.
Only once, during high school, did I succeed in acting destructively. If my mother happened to be cleaning a Grosse Pointe house on the weekend, I’d sometimes accompany her to that enchanted place on the other side of the tracks where the daughters were better-looking, the boys played lacrosse, and everyone had attractive overbites. My mother let it be known, usually upon entering the marble foyer, that she wasn’t particularly impressed by these people; that, however big their house may be, they lacked responsibility, fortitude, some basic connection to life as it was lived. Money had distanced them from themselves. If they cleaned their own bathrooms (of which they often had four or five) every day for a year they might begin, slowly, to reestablish the connection. But they paid my mother to perform such services instead.
Her tone was similar to the one suburbanites adopted when discussing Detroiters: they were hopeless. Their irresponsibility seemed, at the upper end of the socioeconomic spectrum, to mirror black irresponsibility at the bottom. As I listened to my mother’s stories of Grosse Pointe, a picture began to form in my mind of a place populated by wife beaters, pill poppers, absentee parents, promiscuous d
aughters, wastrel sons, flagrant adulterers, and midafternoon drunks. Those of us in the middle—the white working classes—were the buffer between these two groups and, it went without saying, better than either.
Because she had gone into business for herself, without being attached to an already established cleaning service, my mother had to rely on her considerable resourcefulness and likeability to lure customers. With prospective clients whose last names hinted at an affiliation with the Church of Rome, she traded on her family connections. “Are you Catholic? Oh, really. Do you go to St. Paul? You might know my uncle then, Father Saulino?” It was the best reference in town, and it gave my mother a leg up on the immigrant Polish cleaning women whom Grosse Pointers have long coveted. “People don’t want to work anymore,” a Grosse Pointe matron laments to Chafets in Devil’s Night. “You simply cannot get help. Where are all the Polish people?” This was my mother’s competition, the Bozenas, Wandas, and Jolantas who advertised their ethnicity and “old world” cleaning techniques in the classified ads in the Grosse Pointe papers: “Polish girl looking for house to clean.” “Polish ladies available. Housecleaning, laundry, ironing.” “Polish lady looking for house to clean, honest & friendly.”
Many of the clients my mother managed to land were old women, widows no longer able to reach the cobwebs in the corners of their French colonials and Cape Cods. Before Christmas one year, my mother came home from a day of dusting and scrubbing infuriated by the holiday bonus some old bat had given her. Most folks kept things simple and slipped her a fifty. But this employer handed her a present.
“I can’t show you,” she said, shaking with anger, as we pressed her to share with us the spoils of a year’s worth of floor-scrubbing. But the wrapping was already off, and eventually she held up the prize: a bag of Brach’s Bridge Mix. “Nuts,” she said. “That rich bitch gave me a bag of mixed nuts for a Christmas bonus. These cost a dollar forty-nine at the drugstore. Can you believe it?”
When my mother mentioned this insult to the woman the next time she cleaned her house—“It would have been so much better to just not give anything,” my mother kept saying—she was informed that she should count herself lucky: the woman could easily turn her in to the IRS. (She was forgetting her own complicity in the weekly transaction.) As calmly as I could, I asked my mother where the woman lived. When I had enough information to identify the house, I drove to the nearest 7-Eleven, bought a carton of eggs, and made my way to Grosse Pointe.
The high school Kurt and I attended was run by the Marist Fathers, a missionary teaching order headquartered in Boston that modeled itself more or less after the Jesuits, minus the pursuit of world domination. Tuition, at that time, was thirty-five hundred dollars a year; the cost per pupil, to the Marist Fathers, was forty-five hundred, with the thousand-dollar difference to be made up by fund-raisers and donations. If a boy’s father died at any point during his four years, tuition was waived. Widowed mothers were not expected to keep up payments on their sons’ schooling.
Though there were obvious differences between the student pools at our high school and the Detroit Public high schools—the Marist Fathers could reject applicants, could kick students out on any pretext whatsoever, and could expect a good deal of parental involvement—the fact that the Detroit Public Schools were spending well in excess of this forty-five-hundred-dollar figure, with woeful results, highlighted the fact that money was not the final arbiter of student performance. “They’re just pissing my tax money away,” my father said of the Detroit Public Schools. Because the tax base in Detroit was constantly shrinking, the burden on actual tax-paying citizens was extraordinary, and ever increasing. Young occasionally had to ask the voters of Detroit to approve tax increases to ward off the city’s financial ruin, and, despite resistance from white pockets in the city, the voters agreed. During the city’s worst fiscal crisis, in the early 1980s, black voters approved the proposed increase by an 80 percent margin. “Goddamn, I was proud,” Young said. Some felt otherwise. “They’ll pass any increase,” my father said. “What do they care? They don’t pay taxes. I pay taxes to a city administration that can’t police the neighborhoods, that can’t turn on the streetlights, that can’t plow the snow, and that can’t teach kids to read. If anyone ever comes asking me for reparations payments,” he said, “tell them I’ve been making ’em to the City of Detroit for the last twenty years.”
Though the priests paid the tuition of a boy whose father had died, there was no provision for students who had two parents that were living but apparently out of the picture. As such, Kurt was forced to pay his own way, or at least some part of it. That he was shouldering a load, at seventeen, greater than any of the rest of us was certain. He thus regarded the rest of the world, composed of lesser mortals, as at least a little lazy. His opinions about blacks were par for the white trash course.
He worked, nights and weekends, at Starvin’ Steve’s pizza, and so, in his sleep-deprived way, never had his homework quite done, or his shirt tucked in, or his hair properly cut. His homework papers, which needed to be typed, were handwritten, half in pencil and half in pen, and hurriedly torn from a spiral notebook, with no attempt to tidy the frayed edges. His explanations were sarcastic and slurred, and spoken to the floor. “Are you being a smart-ass?” he’d be asked by a tough lay teacher. “Better than being a dumb-ass,” he’d mumble back, or something to that effect. This meant detention, which meant that I had to return, an hour after school, to pick him up.
Kurt sat in the seat behind me in “Love, Sex, and Marriage,” our junior-year religion class. (“Shouldn’t it be ‘Love, Marriage, and then Sex’?” I once asked, just to be a smart-ass.) An essay question on one test asked us, ridiculously, to describe the baby-making process from conception to birth. Several minutes into the period I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to see Kurt laughing to himself. He spun his paper toward me so that I could see his beginnings of a response to this question. In dark blue ink he had written, complete with comma, “Upon insertion,”. He spun the paper back around, still laughing; not another word, he told me later, was added to this answer. I returned to my response, trying to remember if fallopian had two l’s and one p or two p’s and one l, knowing full well that he’d written a response—still the greatest prepositional phrase I’ve ever read—that was simply unimprovable.
We took Advanced Placement courses in English, physics, history, and calculus our senior year. A disproportionate number of the students in each of these classes came from St. Peter. Though there were at least a dozen east side grade schools that fed into our high school, some of them more well-to-do than ours—St. Joan of Arc, St. Clare de Montefalco—it was the former St. Peter students who thronged the Advanced Placement courses, sometimes making up nearly half the roll. On balance, Polish last names outnumbered Italian.
The only black kid in any of these courses took calculus, and he sat in the desk behind me. He was quiet and reserved, but somewhat famous for his father, who showed up to after-school events in flowing robes and a curved walking stick as tall as he was; it looked like a prop from the set of a Cecil B. De Mille production and made him strongly resemble a black Moses. His son had come from St. Juliana, one of the black inner-city grade schools, along with St. Louis the King and Our Lady Queen of Heaven, that sent students to our high school. These would be among the first Catholic schools of which I was aware to close, a process of door-shutting that would spiral out from the city center at unprecedented pace.
Along with two friends, I’d scored near the top on a state mathematics test and was frequently able to solve equations that stumped Moses’s son behind me. “How the hell’d you know that?” he’d ask, smiling. These were those rarely discussed moments when the defenses come down and one tips one’s hat, however begrudgingly, to the innate talent, not just of another person, but of an entire race. (I myself experienced it, with fair frequency, on the basketball courts at Heilmann.) I liked him for his smile, which managed to suggest bot
h pleasure and a still deeper pleasure kept in check—a disciplined happiness.
I got on well with the black kids, one incident aside. During my sophomore year, as a miler on the track team, I was warming up on the infield grass for a dual meet against Bishop Gallagher when I saw my father in his plaid flannel shirt walk up into the stands. He was, without fail, at every gymnastics meet, tap recital, baseball game, and track meet of mine and my sister’s. I knew that he had had to leave work early to make it on time—the dual meets were immediately after school—so I jogged over to the stands to let him know his support was appreciated. My mother was next to him.
“Ain’t they at every one of these things?” one of the black sprinters, a senior, said when I returned to the infield. He was on his back, stretching. “So?” I said. “So, you’re a daddy’s boy.” I knew, after sixteen years in Detroit, what both black compliments and black put-downs were worth, and was willing to let it go. But he kept on—which, as my daddy’s boy, I should have just blocked out. Any son of my father’s worth his salt would have known that to do otherwise was stupid. But sometimes I was stupid—I got a lot of taps to the side of the head (“Think!”) growing up—and so, after yet another “daddy’s boy,” I decided to speak up. “Yeah, well, at least I know who mine is,” I said. A few seconds later, as I hoped they would, fists started to fly.
