Here Comes Trouble

by Michael Moore

  An entire generation of us were introduced in our very first week to the concept that phony was better than real, that something manufactured was better than something that was right there in the room. (Later in life, this explained the popularity of the fast food breakfast burrito, neocons, Kardashians, and why we think reading this book on a tiny screen with three minutes of battery life left is enjoyable).

  I spent a full week in the maternity ward at St. Joseph Hospital in Flint, Michigan, and let me tell you, from some of the conversations I had with the other newborns, no one was digging the fake rubber nipple—and this made us a miserable, cynical bunch, with most of us looking forward to the day when we could strike back at this generation with our long hair, crazy-massive amounts of premarital sex, and Malcolm X. The Bottle created Woodstock and flag burning and PETA. You can quote me.

  On the day of my release from St. Joe’s, I was taken outside for the first time and the sun hit my face and it was good. It was a rather warm day for Michigan in April, but I didn’t seem to mind, all wrapped up in a comfy new baby-blue blanket, content to be in my mother’s arms. She and my dad got into the front seat of their two-tone 1954 Chevy Bel Air sedan. My dad started the engine. My mother said she was feeling “too hot.” Me, I was fine.

  She suggested that he open up the fresh air vents to cool down the car. And when my dad obeyed, all the gunk that had built up during the winter came spewing out of the vents, and a black, sootlike substance spread all over my baby-blue blanket and me. My little face was now blackened, and I started to cough and wheeze and cry. Take me back to the hospital! My mother let out a yelp of horror, and my dad quickly turned off the fan and began to assist in my cleanup.

  Within twenty minutes we were at my first home, a tiny, two-bedroom apartment upstairs over Kelly’s Cleaners, a dry-cleaning establishment in downtown Davison, Michigan. Davison was a small town, five and a half miles from the city limits of Flint. My mother’s family had lived in the Davison area since Andrew Jackson was president—in other words, since pretty much before anyone, save the native people. Hers was one of the first families that founded the local Catholic parish. My father, who came from an Irish-American family on the east side of Flint, enjoyed the quiet, homespun nature of Davison, a far cry from the hardscrabble existence he was used to in the city. His only prior experience with the town of Davison was when his Flint St. Mary’s High School basketball team came out to play the Davison High School Cardinals, and the crowd started taunting the players with anti-Catholic slurs (“Hey, fish-eaters!” was the main insult being hurled by the Davison fans). That was enough for Father Soest, St. Mary’s pastor. He stood up, pronounced the game over, and hauled his team out of the gym and back to Flint. Other than that, my dad liked Davison.

  The store that housed our apartment was owned by my mother’s father, my grandfather Doc Wall, who, for a half century, was known as the “town doctor” of Davison. Doc Wall, and his wife, Bess, lived in the two-story white house that my mother was born in, just two doors down from us. Every day the good doctor would climb the twenty-one stairs up to our apartment to see how his grandson was doing. I think he was also intrigued by the new device sitting in our living room: a Westinghouse nineteen-inch television set, and he would spend the occasional hour or two watching it. My grandmother would comment that I was already taking after him, and he liked that. He even had his own name for me—“Malcolm”—and he would make up songs and sing them to me (“He’s a nice little fellow, and a fine little lad, and we fixed up his buggy, with a nice little pad”). He would pass away before my third birthday, and I have only two vivid, but wonderful, memories of him: him building me a tent made of blankets in his living room, and the lively music he played for me on his Irish fiddle while I was perched precariously on his bouncing knee.

  It has been reported that my first few hours in my new home were uneventful. But as the evening wore on, so did I, and thus began a nonstop crying jag that, despite the best intentions of my mother to comfort me, did not cease. After an hour or so of this, she became worried that something might be wrong and phoned over to her parents for advice. Grandmother Bess came right over and, after inspecting the crying baby with the adult-sized head, she asked, “When was the last time you fed him?”

  “At the hospital,” my mother replied.

  “Why, that was hours ago! This baby is hungry!”

  Thank you, Grandma Bess, for saying the words I did not yet possess in my vocabulary.

  My mother found the baby bag they gave her at the hospital and looked inside for the bottle—but there was none to be found. No bottle, no formula. But, wait a minute… isn’t there a breast in the room?! Helllooo!

  My mother must have heard me, and so she attempted, with her own mother’s instruction, to breast-feed me. But either the plumbing wasn’t working, or I was already hooked on the Carnation Sugared Milk-Like Fatty Liquid Yum-Yum Substance, because I was having none of it. The crying continued, and Bess instructed her daughter to wake up my dad (who was already asleep; first shift at the factory began at 6:00 a.m.) and send him into Flint to get some formula at the only all-night drugstore.

  As for me—I was convinced these people were trying to starve me to death! And I didn’t know why! The wailing continued. Dutifully, my dad put on his clothes and took the two-lane road into Flint to buy some formula and a bottle. He returned an hour later, and they quickly prepared it and gave it to me. I grabbed at it with what little strength was left in me. And I didn’t stop gulping until it was all gone.

  For some reason, I never found my way to the path called “normal,” and it was a good thing that science and business had not yet conspired to invent ways to sedate and desensitize a little soul like mine. It’s one of the few times I thank God for growing up in the ignorant and innocent fifties and sixties. It would still be a few years before the pharmaceutical community would figure out how to dope up a toddler like me and have the teachers and parents send me off to the “timeout room.” I have often imagined what the pediatricians of today would have done to me had they lived back then and witnessed my bizarre behavior.

  For instance, the way I would transport myself in my initial years. Crawling and then walking, like most babies did, wasn’t good enough for me. I had other plans. To begin with, I refused to crawl. I would not crawl for anyone. My parents would set me down on the floor and I would go on strike. Motionless. “I’m not going anywhere. You can stand there and look at me allllll you want ’til the cows come home, but I ain’t movin’!”

  After a while I could sense their disappointment, so around my ninth month I decided to crawl—backwards. Put me down and I would just go in reverse. Never forward, only backwards. And I mean as soon as I hit the floor I would shoot in the opposite direction. But I never ran into anything. It was weird, like I had eyes in the back of my diaper. My little body was somehow stuck in reverse, and if you wanted me to come to you, you had to point me in the opposite direction so I could back my rear end toward you.

  This became a source of amusement for the adults—too much amusement, I thought, as people were now stopping by just to see the backwards-crawling baby—so I decided to change it up. I began slowly, methodically, crawling forward. Not all slaphappy-forward like most babies. Just a very determined, thoughtful, one hand in front of the other—and not before feeling the texture of the floor first (a little here, now a little there) and then picking just the right spot that was acceptable to my aesthetic and my taste. And then I would crawl. If I felt like it.

  Walking seemed overrated, and as I watched the other toddlers in the neighborhood lifting themselves up and hanging on to furniture and pant legs in order to steady themselves before crashing down a few hundred times, I preferred to wait out this phase of my life.

  It became quite the standoff in the household. There was already another baby on the way, and even after Anne, my sister, was born and ready to crawl herself, I still hadn’t walked. Why? Why did I need to expend useless energ
y? I could already see what most of life involved: A third of it was lying in a bed, sleeping. Another third of it was either standing on your feet in one spot all day on an assembly line or sitting at a desk. And the final third of the day was spent sitting either at the dinner table or on a couch watching TV. And why did a baby need to walk as long as there were strollers, scooters, walkers, bouncy walkers, tricycles, and parents to carry you? Give me a break! Plus it wasn’t like I had anywhere to go or someplace to be.

  This attitude was not winning me any praise from my parents. A one-and-a-half-year-old needs love and adoration, and these seemed to be quickly fading away. So one day, in my seventeenth month, I thought it best to rise up and show them what I was made of. I leapt off the floor like an East German gymnast and walked straight as an arrow over to the fan and tried to stick my tongue in it. The parents were overjoyed and horrified.

  You want me walking? This is what it looks like!

  My mother knew that I was different, and so she decided to share a secret with me when I turned four. She taught me how to read. This little bit of empowerment was not supposed to take place for a couple of years, and for good reason: If you could read, you knew shit. And knowing shit, especially in the 1950s, was a prescription for trouble.

  She began with the daily newspaper. Not a kid’s book (of which there were plenty in the house), but the Flint Journal. She first taught me to read the daily weather box. This was useful information, and I appreciated knowing something the other kids didn’t, like whether it was going to rain or snow tomorrow. I also was fixated on the pollen count. I would proudly tell whomever I saw on the street what today’s pollen count was. I believe Davison became the most pollen-proficient town in the county thanks to me. To this day, you go to Davison, Michigan, and ask anyone, “Hey, what’s the pollen count?” and they will happily give it to you, without hesitation or prejudice. I started that.

  After the weather box and pollen count, it was on to teaching me to read the front-page headlines, and after that, the daily astronomy forecast, followed by the sports scores. My mother didn’t teach me the ABCs. She taught me words. Words connected to other words. Words that had meaning to me and words that had me stumped but eager to learn what they meant. Every word on the page became a puzzle to solve—and it was fun!

  Soon, we were going to the library once a week and I would always check out the maximum limit—ten books. Usually I would try to slip an eleventh into the pile, and it was my good fortune that the kindly librarians were either poor at math or, more than likely, they saw what I was doing—and the last thing they wanted to do was discourage a kid who wanted to read.

  Now here’s where the child abuse came in: my parents sent me to school! I was instantly bored outta my cotton-pickin’ mind—but I was careful not to let on to the other students that I could already read and write and do math. This would have been the kiss of death, especially with the boys who would have constantly beaten me up; for safety, I tried to sit by the smart girls like Ellen Carr and Kathy Collins. If the teachers suspected anything, they would have issued an Inquisition to find out who was teaching me all of this OUT OF ORDER.

  So I played along, and picked up an additional skill set: acting. As the other kids sang “A-B-C-D-E-F-G,” I “struggled” right along with them, while secretly reading Dr. Seuss under the cover of my desktop. Oh, the places I would go, as long as Sister Mary didn’t know!

  “Where did you get this book?” the friendly nun asked me the day she caught me.

  “A third grader let me look at the pictures,” I said, with a face so straight it would’ve made Beaver Cleaver proud.

  But the nuns were on to me, and yet far from condemning me for being literate, they did the only reasonable and nurturing thing they could do.

  “Michael,” Sister John Catherine said to me one day before the morning bell rang, “we’ve decided that you already know what we’re teaching you in first grade, so beginning today we’re moving you to second grade.”

  My eyes widened with victory.

  “Now, you know, if we put you in second grade, you won’t be the smartest boy in the room like you are here. Do you think that will be OK?”

  “Does this mean I won’t have to sing the ‘ABCs’ anymore?”

  “Correct. There will be no more ‘ABCs.’ In fact you’ll have to learn cursive penmanship right away. Are you OK with this?”

  “Yes, Sister, thank you!” It was like the warden telling a prisoner that he’s being moved from solitary to, I dunno, Disneyland? I couldn’t wait to get home to tell my parents the good news.

  “They did what?” my mother quietly shouted, not believing she had just heard what I told her.

  “They put me in second grade! I spent the whole day in second grade! It was great!”

  “Well, you’re going right back to first grade!”

  “What? No! Why?!”

  “Because I want you to be with children your own age.”

  “But they’re only a year older!”

  “And a year bigger and a year ahead of you, and if you stayed with them you are going to get shortchanged a year in your education.”

  I could not understand this logic. Years later my sister Anne would say it was because Mom was a traditional Republican and she figured, I’m paying taxes for a full twelve years of schooling, I want my kid to get the entire twelve years! But we paid tuition to go to a Catholic school. Had I known anything then about family finances, I would have pointed out to her that skipping me a grade meant that she’d be saving a whole year’s tuition! Regardless, she didn’t want the older kids beating me up.

  “I’m calling the Mother Superior,” she announced, as she headed toward the phone in the kitchen.

  “No, Mom— Wait! I can’t stand first grade! I already know everything they’re teaching. Sister will tell you!”

  And now for the trump card, my final hope:

  “The Catholic Church says I should be in second grade! You have to obey the Church!”

  She stopped and turned around for a split second and shot me the look of “you’ve got to be kidding me” and proceeded into the kitchen. She picked up the phone on the wall, asked the neighbor who was using our party line to please get off, and then she shut the sliding door and dialed the convent. I listened through the door while she respectfully, but forcefully, informed the Mother Superior that I was not to be moved up a grade. There were long pauses during which the nun was obviously making the SANE and CORRECT case to her as to why I was bored and getting into trouble and how I should have been in second grade (if not third!).

  My mother replied that her mind had been made up and that was that. She closed the conversation by politely asking the Mother Superior not to make any other “unilateral” parenting decisions without her in the future. I didn’t quite know what that meant, but I knew what it felt like. Ouch. You don’t talk to the Mother Superior this way. I would pay for this, for sure.

  Idle minds are either the work of the devil or the handmaiden of revolution. Although I was loved by all my nuns and lay teachers, they would be the first to tell you that I was also a bit of a handful. I had my own ideas about what the school should be doing and how it should be run. I would crack jokes in class and play pranks when necessary. As an altar boy, I would make faces at people during Communion while I held the gold plate under their chin so they wouldn’t drop the Lord. One time, Father Tomascheski caught me doing this and he halted the Communion and told me in a loud voice for the whole congregation to hear: “Wipe that smirk off your face!” It was the first time I heard the word smirk.

  I had my own pretend TV show at school (complete with theme song), and I would involve the other kids in it as characters (I would tell them that hidden cameras were filming the show). I started my own paper and I wrote poems and plays. In eighth grade, I volunteered to write the Christmas play for the school pageant. When the authorities saw the dress rehearsal, it was decided that the show would not go on. In the play’s key sce
ne, all the nation’s rodents came to St. John’s school in Davison and held their annual convention in our aging parish hall. The rodent situation was so bad in this place that in second grade, a mouse ran up the habit of Sister Ann Joseph—which jolted her out of her chair and had her doing the Watusi in order to shake the mouse out of her. So I thought it would be funny to write about this. In the final act, the parish hall collapses and kills all of the rats. The students and the nuns rejoice. Good triumphs over rodent. Joy reigns throughout the land.

  The priest suggested the eighth grade just stand there and sing Christmas carols on the stage instead. I got most of the boys to join me in protest by not singing the first song. We just stood there, mouths shut, looking straight ahead. That was a bad idea because we stared straight into the Fear-of-God glare emanating from the Mother Superior. We were all singing by the next song, to be sure.

  My mother should’ve just let me skip a grade. There would’ve been much less trouble for all concerned.

  Search Party

  FEW STREETS IN AMERICA are structured so that no matter whether you make a right turn or a left turn, you end up at a dead end.

  Such was the street where I lived and grew up: East Hill Street, a one-block-long dirt and gravel lane with two dead ends. The only way to get onto this double-dead-end street was by taking another dead-end dirt lane known as Lapeer Street. Lapeer stretched from the railroad tracks on one end to smack dab in the center of Hill on ours, forming a T and thus our own little tucked-away neighborhood. Beyond Lapeer Street was a field that led to the town’s lone movie palace, the Midway. Behind Hill Street was an adventure-filled swamp and a large, mysterious forest.