by Paul Clemens
He was surprisingly untough. “Moolies never fight fair,” Sal often said. “It’s either five on one, or one on one with a gun.” He expressed concern when he heard stories of white kids fighting one another. “Save it for the smokes,” he’d counsel. The fists that flew missed their mark, so we moved in close and I took the sprinter down in a headlock. We were separated, immediately, by our teammates, who reminded us that we had a meet to run. Such incidents did nothing to alter my opinions about black people. He wasn’t a black jerk; he was just a jerk, albeit in a black way.
Though he never talked about it and I never asked, I suspected that Kurt got into his fair share of fights with black kids over in that white trash enclave, and that he did far more than his fair share of the losing. He’d often sit down in my car’s passenger seat on Monday morning sporting fresh cuts and bruises, along with a look that said: Don’t ask.
Every morning, hanging from the ceiling of our school’s main hallway, there were four words—one for the freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior classes—that we were to write in our notebooks, along with definition, and be ready to be tested on when the time came. These “Words of the Day” were designed to enlarge our working vocabularies, to complement if not altogether supplant the shits, fucks, likes, and you knows that constituted the core of our spoken language. One hundred and eighty words per year, seven hundred and twenty for our high school careers: if we remembered a tenth of them, we might be able to converse as Catholic schoolboys should.
“You can run,” I remember yelling to a friend I was chasing down the hallway, “but you can’t abscond.” Abscond: to depart secretly and hide. In religion class, I was asked by a priest what it meant to do good works without thinking of eternal reward. “It means that we should do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do,” I said, “not because we have any ulterior motivation.” Ulterior: the priest liked that. I developed a reputation, as other boys did in the showers, for the size of my vocabulary.
At the beginning of one of our Advanced Placement English classes senior year I was asked by the teacher, Mr. Conrad Vachon, to define some three dozen words that were written on the board behind him. These were not Words of the Day—he’d taken them out of one of the books we were reading, Lucky Jim or The Immoralist or Dubliners. I got about three-quarters of the words correct, nervous not to have done better, and terribly relieved when I came to a word like tawny, which I knew without hesitation. Tawny: like girls’ thighs in summertime, I remember thinking.
“That’s good, Mr. Clemens,” Mr. Vachon said when I’d finished, making good sound vaguely insulting, like most of what he said. I took no offense. He was one of those charismatic teachers whom eager students long to be insulted by, someone whose wit and sarcasm you want to be deemed worthy of receiving. His voice—and there wasn’t a boy in school without a Mr. Vachon impression—was the Wicked Witch of the West crossed with William F. Buckley. He was one of our high school’s founding teachers, present at the school’s inception in the 1950s, and was said to have studied under Robert Frost at Williams. He was silver-haired, a bachelor in the confirmed sense, and on a couple of occasions showed up to class with a bandaged forehead, leading to much speculation about drinking binges and bar fights. He drove a sports car and coached the track and cross-country teams, of which I was a member. He induced in us distance runners a sort of giddiness. Before his practices, when we all lined up at the urinals to take a last leak before a ten-mile training run, we often repeated aloud our hard-and-fast rule, particularly to the new freshmen runners: two taps. You get two taps, frosh. Any more than that and you cross the line into self-abuse—a mortal sin. Onanism: Do you know what that means, frosh? You’d better. It’ll be a Word of the Day soon.
In a Catholic high school where even the lay teachers tended to be devout, Mr. Vachon seemed to have absolutely no religious sense at all. He was my first introduction to the religion of art and seemed to relish the famous ending of Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” with its great atheistic negations: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name. . . . Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.” He impressed upon us, in light of Jake Barnes’s unfortunate war wound, the irony of the title The Sun Also Rises. “The sun also rises,” he said, again and again. “The sun—also—rises.” He once made us write an opening chapter of a novel in Hemingway style, trying to make us recognize the virtues of simplicity—monosyllabic words, active voice, prepositional phrases, compound as opposed to complex sentences. His Bible was Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, and if he caught us walking down the hallway without the book in our back pockets we received a demerit in his course.
“Now a student in the previous class,” Mr. Vachon said, motioning to the terms on the chalkboard behind him, “was only able to define about half those words.” The previous class was not an Advanced Placement course, but instead a regular senior English class. Words and their definitions, he wanted us to believe, were the key to success in this life, and would separate us, in adulthood, from both our inferiors and our betters, just as surely as they sorted us by skill level in high school. Words might, he hinted, even help us with the girls next door—girls with whom, during the change of classes, we mingled in the parking lot that separated the schools, a spectacle Mr. Vachon referred to as “the meat market.”
In his classroom we sat alphabetically in a square—Kurt was opposite me—and before each session Mr. Vachon made us stand up and recite passages of literature, some of which came from books we’d read and some of which, it seemed, were simply among his favorites. We did the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales in Middle English: “Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote/The droghte of March hath perced to the roote”; we did Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech; we did all four lines of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” a poem that still eludes me; and we ended with Thoreau—“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately”—our recitation finishing with “and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” A few minutes of class time a day, day in and day out, were lost to these recitations, not a word of which I’ve forgotten.
“Isn’t this brainwashing?” a progressive kid in the seat next to me, Don Cleary, asked after we’d stood up, recited the prescribed passages, and sat back down for the hundredth time. He’d go to college at a sandaled school in the Pacific Northwest that didn’t give grades.
“Yes,” Mr. Vachon said.
I began, through books, to grow away from what I saw as the anti-intellectualism of my blue-collar surroundings. I understood that, for me, Catholicism faced far stiffer competition than Lutheranism, that literature could fill the basic human need for the not-so-basic, for something transcendent to give shape to ordinary existence. In addition to what we recited before class, I memorized passages from Fitzgerald, from Joyce, from Flannery O’Connor. My mother would ask me what I wanted for dinner, and I’d think: “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him.” My father would ask me if I’d remembered to fill up the car, and I’d say to myself: “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.” Coleman Young would come on TV, and I’d think: “She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Memorizing passages of literature was nothing new to the kids who’d come out of St. Peter, where part of our grade school training had been yearly poem contests. Such recitations began in the first grade, back when Shel Silverstein was a big favorite. By third grade, I’d progressed to “Casey at the Bat.” “Begin,” my mother would say when we practiced at home. “Theoutlookwasn’tbrilliantfortheMudvilleninethatday.” “Slow down, Paul,” Sister Helen would say, just as my mother had, when we practiced during class time. “Enunciate.” “The . . . outlook . . . wasn’t . . . brilliant.” Every kid got the same advice, because every kid did the same thing: tried to rush through his poe
m, slurring his words so as to finish before he’d forgotten it. Speaking a line unclearly was preferable to forgetting it entirely.
Kurt was terrible at these contests, slurring words despite repeated warnings, fidgeting with his sleeves, and staring at the floor. His face was usually smudged. The kids who excelled had a certain spit and polish, along with mothers who took the contests seriously, choreographing hand gestures and suggesting places for emphasis. “And look up,” they’d say. “Acknowledge your audience.” The friend who won in the third grade was the son of a cop and a ludicrously competent mother, and had done something from Kipling.
By eighth grade the winner was a brilliant Italian girl whose parents spoke no English and on whom I had long harbored a mild crush. While the rest of us were still reciting poems with meter and rhyme, she’d progressed to Shakespeare, taking on the role of Brutus—she’d come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. As I sat on a folding chair in our gymnasium on a darkening evening, three thrilling hours after I’d last seen her at final bell, cookies and parents and punch now surrounding us and permission having been granted her to wear a small amount of makeup, as it was a special, scholastic occasion, I fell in love with literature.
In AP History class Kurt sat in the seat behind me, where he continued to display the disdainful, head-on-the-desk superiority of the smart-ass. When he awoke, it was typically to tap me on the shoulder and whisper some bullshit before falling back asleep.
It was in this history class, the spring of senior year, that the only collective venting of working-class white frustrations that I can recall took place. It was near the end of the semester, shortly before we were to take the AP test itself, and our teacher, Mr. Pyle, had taught us all he could. It was now up to us to impress the graders in Princeton, New Jersey, and to secure the 4s and 5s (the test being graded on a 1 to 5 scale) that would earn us college credit. For a week or more, then, AP History had been turned into a current events class, with each student assigned a topic on which to lead a discussion.
My topic—and I’ll never forget it, for the word itself remains so little employed—was “how to coexist harmoniously in a ‘polyglot’ society such as America.” The class itself wasn’t particularly polyglot, composed almost entirely of clever, quick-tempered, tremendously sarcastic white kids from the city. And it was these sons of firefighter, police officer, and bus driver fathers, the beloved boys of house-cleaning and hair-dressing mothers, whom I was asked to lead through this thick forest.
It didn’t work; there were too many trees, and we quickly lost our coordinates. America may have been polyglot, but we were just happy, at long last, to have a platform from which to air our grievances—grievances, by and large, that we expressed in speeches plagiarized from our fathers. Our teacher tried, in desperation, to steer us back on track by mentioning his niece, who was about to marry a black man, but we wouldn’t bite. This was the concern of an earlier generation, of Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier. We were uninterested in the implications of such a relationship. A black man with a white woman? Go figure.
Discussion quickly turned to Mayor Young—the boss, at several removes, of most of our fathers—and deteriorated from there, bouncing free-associatively from one pet peeve to the next, settling eventually on the affirmative action system the city had set up under Young that so affected our fathers. And then, to cut the specter of Coleman Young down to size, someone mentioned the Chrysler Land Deal.
The sons of a prominent Mafia family parked their jet black Mustang GTs side by side in our school parking lot each morning. Residents of Mafia Meadows, their family had been the beneficiaries, in the late 1980s, of what Coleman Young describes in his autobiography, with uncharacteristic understatement, as “an unfortunate overpayment of around $25 million, for which I must take a measure of responsibility.” The City of Detroit had purchased some warehouses from the family in order to clear the way for the building of the enormous Chrysler assembly plant on Jefferson Avenue, where Jeep Cherokees would be built. The city agreed to pay for the warehouses and the industrial equipment within whatever price an independent appraiser determined was fair. When the appraiser cited the value at forty million dollars, his “independence” came into question; when the press learned who owned the warehouses, many, including Coleman Young, came to believe that the whole thing “had been a Mafia production.” This went over well in Sal’s barbershop, where the Chrysler Land Deal was a frequent topic of conversation—Italians, taking Coleman Young for millions.
Our teacher tried to rein us back in, but it was no use. From Coleman Young and his affirmative action policies we were already half a league onward, into the valley of the University of Michigan’s admissions policies. The previous October, at the beginning of senior year, I’d received a warm, congratulatory letter, admitting me to the university. Very shortly thereafter, the admissions office in Ann Arbor sent another letter (“Congratulations!”) admitting me to the school’s honors program—reserved, the letter said, for the top 10 percent of the entering freshman class. Finally, three months after my admittance, I was sent a letter informing me that I had been nominated for a Regents-Alumni scholarship, for being one of “the top graduates of high schools throughout the state of Michigan.”
I’d also received a call one evening from a young woman who was phoning, she said, on behalf of the University of Michigan. It was her pleasure to inform me that the admissions office had reviewed my transcript and board scores and had seen fit to award me a one-thousand-dollar scholarship to attend the university the following fall. Like all hippie girls, she spoke in painstakingly cultivated northern California tones, though she was obviously from Bloomfield Hills.
The offer fell far short of the scholarship package that a kid a year ahead of me was said to have received. His award from the previous fall, though he was possessed of far lesser academic credentials, had been a full scholarship to the University of Michigan, or so said the hallway whispers. I told the hippie girl on the phone thank you, but I’d likely be pursuing my higher education elsewhere.
About the abilities of this student—his father was white; his mother wasn’t—many of us had firsthand knowledge. During his senior year, he had been enrolled in a course that we were taking as juniors, and though chronologically a year ahead, he was academically in arrears. But this kid, whose academic clock we could clean—he got a full ride. That was the story, and though this was a dozen years before a Supreme Court case made public the University of Michigan’s “point system” admissions policy, we all knew the score, even if we didn’t yet know the specifics of how that score was kept.
This discussion, through which Kurt had either slept or kept his thoughts to himself, was more than our teacher had bargained for. “I didn’t realize how aware you all were of these things,” he said.
How could we not be aware? This was Detroit, where such discussions were mother’s milk. During the fall of my junior year—making this the 1989 mayoral campaign, Young’s fifth and final victory—I’d answered a phone call from a person I took to be a solicitor. When I handed the phone to my father, however, he did not dismiss the caller with his usual, “Thank you, not interested.” Instead he stayed on the line, and so I hung around the kitchen, curious as to whose call at dinnertime my father was willing to take. When I heard him give three answers in quick succession—“White,” “Independent,” “Whoever’s running against Coleman Young”—I realized he was talking to a pollster from the incumbent’s campaign headquarters. The “whoever” who would receive my father’s vote this time around was Tom Barrow, Joe Louis’s grandson. The 1989 election was the second go-around between Young and Barrow, in fact, Young having defeated Barrow handily in the 1985 race. Like his grandfather with Schmeling, Barrow hoped for better luck in the rematch.
My father knew that his was nothing more than a protest vote, to be given to any candidate meeting his rather relaxed criteria for holding the office of mayor. So too did the caller, who asked, in her final question: �
�Is there any way you’d vote for Coleman Young?” To which my father replied: “Only if he were running against Idi Amin,” and hung up.
Young beat Barrow again, of course. “On election day,” as Chafets puts it in Devil’s Night, “the voters of America’s African-American capital returned their verdict, and it wasn’t even close . . . Detroit, the city with the country’s highest rate of teenage murder, unemployment and depopulation, twelve thousand abandoned homes, a Third World infant mortality rate and an epidemic drug problem, had spoken: Four More Years.”
Even our corner of Detroit was beginning to undergo what the middle-aged ladies, referring to our area’s menopause as opposed to their own, always called “the change.” My mother witnessed the first neighborhood mugging, which happened in front of our house. “It’s terrible to say,” my mother said, “but I wouldn’t have watched him out the window if he hadn’t been black. And then, sure enough, he jumped that lady.” The local news showed up, asking for an interview, and the cops on the block urged my mother to avoid this exposure at all costs. “That kid’s friends will come back here,” they warned, “looking for you.” It was something we had no trouble believing. The back bumper of every other car in the city bore a sticker for the most popular radio station in Detroit, WJLB. Beneath the station’s logo—a flexed black bicep—was its motto: “Detroit’s Strongest Songs.” There was little doubt about the terms of the debate in this city, or who was setting them.
