by Paul Clemens
There was more: stories that the boss, who claimed to be broke, had stashed seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in a safe-deposit box in the Renaissance Center, along with stories that, for failure to keep up the nominal yearly fee for the box’s rental, its contents had been seized. True? Not true? Sixty years before, just a few miles away, a door-to-door silk salesman had spun a story about an evil scientist who’d been banished to a desert island and, as revenge, had created a devilish, bleached-out race of people, forced to live like savages in the caves of Europe. Laugh if you like: such laughter, in this city, would always be at your own risk.
The shop had an occasional receptionist, a pretty Italian girl in short shorts whose father, one street back, controlled the area’s drug trade. Its only other consistent employee was an old automotive hand who’d come to Detroit way back when and who could still operate, with immigrant ease, any of the grinders on the floor of the shop, supplying the additional grinds needed for competition-only cams. He didn’t speak much, but something about his tired presence brought the names of World War I battle sites to mind. Watching this slightly stooped figure work the grinders, a mass of white hair drowsing atop his head, I recalled schoolbook photographs of deeply dug trenches and muddied Flanders fields, and tried in vain to remember the death toll at Belleau Wood.
By my second summer at the shop his health was bad, and his attendance was no longer all that consistent. He’d begun to live in the boss’s house along with the cabbie, and he limped into the shop with a heavy gauze wrap around his right foot, which was gangrenous. I learned from the boss that the machinist was a diabetic, that his circulation was bad, and that things didn’t look good. I’d sometimes watch him hobble across Trumbull Avenue to the football field, where he’d spend his lunch hour sitting in the sun with his foot propped up. Later, no longer able to walk under his own power, he’d lean his crutches next to him as he sat in the sun. Near the end of that summer, the boss walked into the shop, unhurriedly making his usual late-morning arrival, and asked me to drive him to Receiving Hospital. The machinist, he said, was dying.
The hospital was full of the friends and family of others who were sick and near death. They flipped the pages of old magazines and stared at the television in the upper corner of the waiting room, wondering what else was on. The boss talked, nervously and loudly, his speech punctuated with hyena laughs. It was a mindless, miserable chatter, and more or less nonstop. I wanted to tell him to shut it—a hugely inappropriate response under the circumstances, but something I’d said to him on past occasions. It was something that everyone said to him, sooner or later. He took no offense.
There were two white Detroit cops in the waiting room, and I gathered that they’d brought in an injured suspect. The boss had gotten up to pace, but stopped near one of the cops, a young officer with a blond brush cut and a Polish last name visible above his badge. The boss, whose eyesight wasn’t the best, had to squint at close range to make out the name. “What are you looking at?” the cop asked. At first I thought he was kidding—there’s always a delay of a second or two before belligerence registers with me, a moment when my good nature gets the better of me and I give someone the benefit of the doubt before concluding that the guy is just an asshole. The boss was oblivious. “Karpinski! Oh, I thought it said Kowalski. That’s the name of my accountant, you see. I thought maybe you were a relation.” “What are you looking at?” the cop asked again. “See, I thought your last name—” “I heard you the first time.” “—was Kowalski, which is the name—” The cop thrust out his broad chest, to give the boss a better look. “My badge number is there above my name, if you want to get that, too. I’ll take the badge off if you’d like, and the two of us can step outside.”
I’d gotten up by this point, walking toward the two guys with batons in their belts and handguns in their holsters. Aside from the cop and his partner, the boss and I were the only whites in the waiting room, and this little law enforcement display was a show of strength, one safely freed from any racial overtones. I wanted to say to the cop: Look, I understand you’re frustrated. I understand that you’ll never rise through the ranks. That you make twenty-six grand a year and that your annual increases will be garbage. That you hate the people of the city you patrol and hate yourself for patrolling it. That you hate yourself for living here—or for having to provide a phony address if you don’t. That your life is in danger during every shift and that any attempt to enforce the law, let alone defend yourself, opens you up to charges of police brutality upon a black populace. And so it’s easier to pick on my friend here. But that’s not his fault. His friend’s dying and he’s sad as hell. So give him a break. In other words—fuck off.
“Can you believe that?” the boss said when we both sat back down. He sounded like the nerdy kid on the playground, brushing the gravel off his back, furious at himself for having been knocked down yet again by the class bully. He was going on sixty and sounded six, so full was he of impotent rage. For the first time since I’d known him, he sounded as if he were actually struggling.
I’d come home several months before this second camshaft summer, during the winter of my senior year, to help my parents and sister with their move out of Detroit. It was February, frigid, and I asked the steward overseeing the operation—my mother—about the number of boxes marked DAD’S MAGS that I was expected to carry up one set of basement steps and down another.
“These are all Car Craft?” I asked, surveying the dozens of boxes stacked around the old basement, where I knew each crack in the tile. “Yes, they are.” “Jesus.” “Move them, mister.” By the time I’d finished hauling the boxes, I was ready to write a scathing letter to the editor of Rod Action.
Before any house in Detroit is sold it has to undergo a city inspection, which mandates assorted improvements to the property as a condition of its sale. “They made us put a bar across the back door,” my father said, recalling the inspection. “You know, the one off your sister’s bedroom that didn’t lead anywhere? They didn’t want that door to open at all. Fine. They made me ground the outlets in the bathroom, and do some tuck-pointing—minor stuff—between the bricks around the front steps. What else? I paid a guy to replace four or five squares of sidewalk, which wasn’t bad, since there were about forty squares, total, along the front and side of the house. And in the garage—can you believe it?—they had me disconnect the gas line and cap the heater that was up in the rafters.” My father had spent hundreds of winter nights working in that garage, an impossibility without the heater, but the city inspection was famous for such nitpicky pointlessness. “The first thing the new owner did, I’m sure, was to take off the cap and reconnect the gas,” he said.
My parents had paid twenty-nine thousand dollars for the house in 1979 and sold it, sixteen years later, for forty-five thousand. I said that a 50-percent appreciation seemed pretty good. “What difference does the percentage make?” my father said. “When you go to the store to buy something, do you pay for it with a percentage? No, you pay for it with dollars, and the house went up a thousand dollars a year for sixteen years—less, if you factor in inflation. This place went up peanuts. If you really want to figure it right, factor in the city taxes we paid over the years, and you’re looking at a net loss.”
The For Sale by Owner sign still stood in front of my parents’ new house, and that was because neither the sellers nor my parents could get it out of the frozen ground. I had to rock the sign back and forth for several minutes in mittened hands before I could pull the thing up. I put it in the back of my parents’ new garage—which, I discovered upon opening the door, was structurally unsound. It leaned pronouncedly to the west, preventing the garage door, when I came to shut it, from closing completely; there was a two-foot gap at the bottom. My father, who’d always asserted that garages were more important than houses, had bought a house with a garage that was tipping over. Times were changing. My mother, the morning after moving in, saw a rabbit in the backyard. “It’s lik
e we live in the country now,” she said, standing in the living room of her new house half a mile outside the city limits.
It occurred to me, as I pulled up that sign, that this was how my novel had to end. Except instead of pulling up a For Sale sign, my narrator would be planting one.
Of course we carried things with us out of the city that couldn’t be packed in boxes, that transcended the merely material and went to the core of our identities as belated former Detroiters: a sense that life is, in the main, a movement from bad to worse; a belief that Detroit was a toilet and its suburbs were more so—that there was nowhere to live, but that you’ve got to live somewhere; and the self-congratulatory feeling that, whoever might have destroyed Detroit—the whites who’d fled it or the blacks who’d inherited what the whites had fled—it wasn’t us. We had, on the whole, done our best. We hadn’t left the city in 1955, or 1965, or 1975, or 1985, but 1995—long after all but the smallest percentage of whites, and an ever-increasing percentage of blacks, had done the same. It was hard to shake a feeling of anticlimax; it trailed us out of the city.
Also following us out of the city was my sister’s boyfriend, who’d presented a further complication to a close-minded relative or two around the holidays. In fact, her boyfriend’s race—he was half black—was bound up with our having remained in Detroit: “That’s what happens when you stick around the city too long. And such a nice girl, too.” A couple years earlier, when they’d begun going out, my mother had said to me, in her serious tone, “Your dad just thinks, sooner or later, it’ll be a problem.” “For whom?” I asked, the open-minded English major highlighting the breadth of his worldview by stressing his proper use of the objective case. “He’s a helluva nice guy, Ma.” My mother didn’t disagree; she agreed completely, in fact. He may not have been the best catch—my sister, it was clear, would be the breadwinner—but there wasn’t much bad that could be said about him.
Like most big brothers, I’d spent a good deal of time growing up torn between the desire to put a protective arm around my baby sister and the urge, barely repressible at times, to smack her snotty little face. Long after leaving behind Sister Marie’s second grade class, my sister retained something of the look of the Catholic school angel who’s been told how darling she is just one too many times. During fights as kids, she’d often make me laugh myself into a state of utter defenselessness; as I curled up on the floor, convulsed with laughter, the pint-size menace with the bad bangs—our mother was growing them out—delivered body blows at will.
I was our mother’s favorite, and my sister was the cute one: this was the sibling deal we’d struck. “Mom loves me more,” I’d say. “Well, I’m cuter,” my sister would reply. Sometimes my sister would go first; but regardless of who began it, the argument never went past this point. It was a draw, a wash. In this way, things were kept even, something that was of paramount importance to our mother. The middle child in a family of five, born a mere ten months after the arrival of the only boy, she’d always felt slighted, and was determined with her own children to keep everything fair and square. What is done for one must be done for the other. “Here’s three dollars,” she’d say, handing me the bills on the sly. “What for?” “I just gave your sister five dollars to go to the movies.” “So?” “So, yesterday I gave you two bucks for Mr. C’s pizza. This way it evens out.” “Ma, really, I don’t give a shit.” “Just take it,” she’d say, pushing the bills back into my palm.
Single-sex Catholic high schools had stunted our social growth to such an extent that neither of us had any real means of gauging the seriousness of our initial college relationships. What for more seasoned late adolescents would have seemed nothing more than a Saturday night’s distraction took on, for us, the character of something preordained: to our great good fortune, we’d each met someone special straight out of the gate.
I’d moved beyond this premature monogamy by the time I completed my undergraduate degree, and so at the tail end of that post-baccalaureate summer, before leaving to begin graduate school, I traveled with a new girlfriend through the Northeast. By the time we made it down to Boston after spending a week together in Maine, where she’d taken a three-day kayaking trip in the Atlantic, I and my belongings—a newly bought mountain bike, along with a backpack full of books and dirty clothes—were deposited downtown, near Boston Common. Though we’d spent weeks plotting the trip beforehand, this stop was not part of our itinerary. For a hippie chick she had a temper, and she continued on alone to Cape Cod while I pushed my bike along the sidewalk, plotting my next move.
The priests. The thought came to me as I walked past my second or third church, searching the signs outside them, as I do reflexively, for service times and pastor names. The Marist Fathers, the men who ran my high school, had their headquarters in downtown Boston, not far from where I was standing. I went to a pay phone and called information. The order’s main residence was just blocks away. I called ahead first.
A secretary put me through to the priest heading the order, a man who had been a religion teacher of mine at our high school. In his capacity as dean of discipline, he’d had several run-ins with my friend Kurt—a sadly wasted intelligence, according to the priest—but he had always thought well of me. He offered me a room for the night in the priests’ residence, a several-story brownstone, and cleared his evening schedule to take me to dinner. My stumbling opening remarks, to remind him who I was, he had politely cut short. He remembered, he said, and was happy to hear from me.
“Your hair isn’t dress code, Mr. Clemens,” he said, looking me over as I walked into the priests’ residence with my bike and backpack. Part of his job had been enforcing the school dress code, which did not allow for hair to touch one’s collar. “Neither is his,” I said, pointing to a painting of Jesus on the wall.
Over dinner I tried to explain how I’d arrived at his doorstep in a mild predicament, but he didn’t press me for the means by which I had come to be this far from Detroit with no way, as yet, of getting back. As mine were in some sense girl troubles, it would have felt strange telling them to a priest. He suggested that after dinner I go to Cambridge, where I would find good bookstores, bars, and other things that might divert me. He had a subway map back at the residence. He would also give me the key to the front door, as everyone would likely be asleep when I got back. The room where I would be sleeping was on the third floor, and he’d see to it that there was a towel and wash cloth placed at the foot of the bed. Did I have money for the night? I told him I did.
I got back to the residence in the wee hours only a little drunk, worked the lock with difficulty, and tiptoed up to my room. There were some ancient priests snoring in the brownstone—how many I didn’t know—and a nun or two to tend to them. That I was the only layperson in the house was certain, and something I could sense. I felt coarse, much as I had when I was ten years old and my fourth grade teacher, Sister Edna, walked over to our pew and asked my mother and me to carry up the offertory gifts at a Saturday-afternoon Mass, the family scheduled to have done so having backed out at the last minute. After my mother accepted she remembered, to her horror, that I wasn’t dressed for the occasion. In the rush to make it to Mass on time she’d failed to notice that I was still wearing my play clothes—in this case, a black-and-white jersey T-shirt that one of my older cousins had bought for me at an AC/DC concert. The shirt was emblazoned with the title of the group’s classic album Highway to Hell.
Catholicism, at its best, should retain an element of creepiness, and that creepiness came over me as I climbed the two flights to my room. I felt as if I might faint, and this light-headedness had nothing to do with the alcohol in my system. It was a sudden drop in blood pressure, brought about by proximity to crucifixes and incense and men of the cloth.
As a child I’d passed out several times at Mass. My parents and teachers sent me for tests to check for inner ear imbalances and blood problems (it turned out to be a mild anemia), but my real problem may have been an ina
bility to take anything less than seriously, including Catholic ritual. The stations of the cross scared the hell out of me. Transubstantiation made my head spin. Lines from prayers constantly bounced around my brain as a child, and did so again as I held on to the handrail going up the steps. Of all that is seen and unseen. Born of the Virgin Mary, and became man. Suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day he rose again, in fulfillment of the scriptures. He has spoken through the prophets. He has spoken through the prophets. He has spoken through the prophets.
Once in my room I began to undress and prepare for bed. I decided against brushing my teeth, the search for a toothbrush, somewhere in my backpack, seeming not worth the bother. This hygienic lapse was typical of me on trips. When I was about to settle in, I heard a voice. “Paul,” it said. My name had been whispered, the way one imagines hauntings beginning. To respond, it seemed, would have been to let my susceptibility to mysticism get the better of me. “Paul?” it said again. “Yes?” I ventured tentatively. “I just wanted to make sure you got in all right.” There was, I realized, an intercom somewhere in the room—for elderly priests, in case of emergency—and Father was speaking to me through it. “Yes, I did. I got in fine.” I was being overprecise, as I often am when drunk or frightened. “Did you wait up for me?” “No, I fell asleep, but I thought I heard you come in.” “For a second I thought you were God.” “No,” he said, laughing, “just a priest. Good night.”
In the morning we walked together to an airline ticket counter, on the first floor of a nearby downtown hotel, and I got a terribly expensive one-way ticket to Detroit, purchased with the credit card of a man who’d taken a vow of poverty. I would reimburse him, I assured him again and again, as soon as I got back. I told him that I had enough money to get a cab to the airport, but he said it was no problem for him to take me out to Logan.
