You Don't Have to Live Like This (24 page)

—So what did you do?

—Man, I took off, too. But this is what I’m saying. Black man isn’t being killed by Tyler Waites, not in this city, not in Detroit. Black man being killed by another black man.

—So why didn’t you stay to help your friend?

—If the cops come, everybody guilty.

The other voice was Astrid’s. She used subtitles for the man’s speech but not her own, which annoyed me. And then the music came back and the screen went dark. The words
A Conversation about Race
started moving across it.

“I’m not interested in this kind of thing,” I said. “It’s banal. The only interesting thing is ordinary life. The rest is boring.”

“The people I talk to, for them, this is ordinary life.”

“I mean people living well, how to live well, that’s the question.”

“You don’t want to see the rest?”

“How long does it go on for?”

“Thirty minutes.”

“Okay, I’ll watch it. Give me another drink.”

There were six or seven other interviews, with a crack dealer, an auto worker, an elementary school teacher, a single mother, etc. Afterwards the camera zoomed in on Astrid’s own face, with the white wall behind it. Her bottle-blond hair looked dark at the roots and carefully messed up.

“These stories are our stories,” she said. “Everywhere is Detroit. We all risk transforming ourselves into human monsters, at any moment in our lives. And everybody is responsible, because we let it happen.”

She turned off the TV and we sat looking at it. By this point it was close to midnight and the air coming in through the opened windows felt almost cold. I was shivering slightly.

“I may be too drunk to drive home,” I said.

“Do you want to sleep on this couch? It’s small,” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to see my room?”

I felt a little frightened of her. I couldn’t tell if anything she said was true. At the same time, there was something glowing or burn
ing in my stomach, like the blood in your hand when you shine a flashlight against it.

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” she said.

“Why are you talking like that? It’s not a big deal. Fine, let’s go see your room.”

I almost hoped that we’d run into somebody downstairs, so I could sober up or change my mind, but we didn’t. When we got there she said, “You can sleep in my bed, it’s big enough. I don’t mind.” She undressed in front of me, she let me use her toothbrush, it was all very normal. But in the dark, when the lights were off, I couldn’t help myself, I started touching her, and she responded quickly. It was strange, I felt very gentle towards her, when all night long we’d been scratchy and sarcastic. But afterwards I slept okay.

In the morning I had to pick up my brother from the airport. My car was still parked in the road outside the bar, and I worried something might have happened to it. But it was fine, and I drove to meet him in last night’s clothes.

D
etroit’s got a nice airport. It’s on the way out to Ann Arbor, and it has a kind of New South vibe—like money’s been recently spent. These days you can’t meet anybody at the gate, so I waited by the baggage claim for my brother to come out, and then he did, wearing Dockers and a pair of crappy deck shoes and no socks.

“What do you look like?” I said.

“You mean the shoes? This is one of the all-time great pairs of shoes.”

Brad either wore a suit and tie or he dressed like a frat boy on Spring Break. It didn’t matter he was thirty-eight years old and had three kids.

His ten-year law school reunion was in Chicago that weekend, and he planned on renting a car in Detroit and driving to it. Then dropping off the car and flying home from Chicago. I told him over the phone this is a crazy idea, it’s like a five-hour drive, but he said, look, when you don’t have the kids along, any kind of travel is a holiday, and he wanted to see me. I figured he wanted to check up on me, and this was his excuse.

In fact, he wanted to persuade me to move back to Baton Rouge.

“Listen,” he said, when we got in the car. “I’m just going to say this now, to get it out of the way. And then we can talk about it or not. But I think you should go home to Mom. She’s not doing so hot. Dad has moved out of the Wenzlers’, he’s got an apartment in the Quarter, and Mom says he’s living with some public health student at Tulane. She’s like twenty-five. Meanwhile Mom feels too ashamed to see their old friends. She says they mean well, but they’re basically embarrassed by her, and the truth is, when Dad was around, everybody wanted to talk to him. She was just deadweight. That’s a direct quote.”

“Why don’t you move home if you feel so strongly?”

“Come on, Greg. I’ve got three kids in school. I’ve got a life in Houston. I’ve got responsibilities. As it is, I’ve been driving back a couple of times a month, which isn’t fair on Andrea. She’s got the kids all week and then she has to take them on the weekend, too. I don’t want to make a big deal out of this but it’s putting a strain.”

“What are you trying to say, that I’m just playing around? I’ve got a life here, too. I’ve got a job, I’ve got a girlfriend. I’m actually a part of something, for once in my life.”

“Okay, then. Show me,” he said.

He arrived Wednesday morning and left on Friday afternoon. Thursday I had to teach, and Brad had some clients based in Detroit he wanted to see, but the rest of the time we hung out and talked. He slept on my sofa bed and turned out to be a good guest. The only thing he traveled with was a garment bag, in which he kept his suit for Saturday night. He borrowed my toothpaste, he wore the same clothes every day, he took up very little space. And he was curious about everything and asked smart questions. Mostly he liked what he saw.

“This is a great neighborhood,” he said. “Solid middle-class turn-of-the-century American architecture. They knew how to build. What do they sell for now, do you know?”

“Nobody’s selling. At least if you do the consortium takes most of the money. It’s part of the deal.”

“So when do people make money out of this?”

“It’s not about money.”

“Okay,” he said.

On Thursday night Gloria came back with me after school, and the three of us went out to dinner. There was a Polish place in Hamtramck I wanted to try, but since it didn’t take reservations, we had to wait half an hour at the bar. I got a little drunk, I let them talk.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said to her at one point. “What are you doing with this bum? You’re clearly much too good for him.”

“Is this like a big-brother thing?” she said. “I never had a brother. Is this what they do to each other?”

“Well, what does he say about me?”

“Oh, he never talks about you.”

For two days I had felt like the tagalong kid, even while I showed him around. I liked hearing Gloria stick up for me, but I’m not sure the comparison did me any favors. Afterwards, when the bill came, I said, “Give it to the big shot here. This one’s on him,” and Brad took out his wallet.

“Come on, Marny,” Gloria said. “This is our treat. He’s the guest.”

“No, he’s good for it. He likes throwing his money around.”

We had a quiet fight about it but Brad just paid. They gave us vodka shots on the house. I drank Gloria’s, too. She decided I wasn’t sober enough to drive home, so she took the keys and I ended up sitting in back while she talked to Brad. My thoughts felt a little soft-focus, but I liked listening to them talk. Gloria said to him, “How’s your mom doing?” and Brad said, “That’s partly what I wanted to discuss with Greg. Not great.”

“I know what it’s like,” Gloria said, “when you feel responsible. I had it my whole life. I don’t know if Marny told you, but my father died when I was seven, so it’s always been just me and Mom.”

“He did tell me. He said you live in the same apartment building. He said it mostly works out.”

“That’s pretty much accurate,” she said.

It’s a twenty-minute drive to Johanna Street and I fell asleep. You go about five miles on I-94, and in the dark and the highway noise I just closed my eyes. Gloria dropped us off, then switched to her own car and drove home. She had to teach in the morning and didn’t want to get in the way of our catching up. But it seemed to me something else was going on, too—that she didn’t want to sleep in the house while my brother was there, for some reason.

“Come on,” I said, “it’s his last night.”

“That’s why.”

“What are you teaching tomorrow anyway. The school year’s basically over.”

“There’s a lot of stuff I still got to take care of. Just hang out with your brother. I’ll come over tomorrow night.”

This put me in a bad mood. I was annoyed with her and didn’t want to talk to Brad about it. I didn’t want to explain or justify my annoyance but I couldn’t think of anything else to talk about. So we went to bed early. That short nap in the car made it hard for me to fall asleep. I just lay in the dark shifting around.

Brad couldn’t sleep either. I heard him turn on the television, and then I heard him on the telephone, talking to Andrea—Houston’s an hour earlier. Eventually he got off the phone and turned off the TV.

It seemed strange to me that my brother was lying about fifteen steps away. Until I was eleven years old we shared a bedroom and
I used to fall asleep watching him read. Sometimes he woke me up in the night by going to the bathroom; afterwards, he made more noise, looking through his closet for new pajamas. Later I realized he was probably having wet dreams. Even then, when we were kids, we had these private lives, which we didn’t talk about. Sometimes I got scared in the night and wanted to climb into bed with him, but he always kicked me out. Then my parents built the extension and I moved into it, and a few years later he left for college. But we were never as close after I moved out.

In the morning, I walked to Joe’s to get a newspaper—there was one of those sidewalk dispensers outside his café, which carried the
Free Press
. I bought a few pastries, too. We sat around my kitchen table drinking coffee and reading. There was a front-page story about the Wayne County prosecutor. He hadn’t decided yet whether to bring criminal charges against Tyler Waites.

“We’re still taking evidence,” he told a reporter. “In some cases, you don’t have to rush into anything, and this is one of those cases. It’s not even clear yet what the charge would be. We have every hope that Mr. Meacher will make a full recovery.”

But the article was really a profile of this guy, Larry Oh. He was the first Asian American to serve as Wayne County prosecutor. And the piece focused on his ability to “present himself as a compromise candidate, whose appeal could cross the color line between the suburbs of Wayne County and the city of Detroit itself.” The writer quoted a freelance political consultant who said: “This Meacher case is the last thing he needs, with the primary coming up. If he charges Waites, he loses his funding base. But if he doesn’t, then the black vote disappears. He doesn’t need much but he needs a little, and last time around he got fifteen percent.”

I gave the front page to Brad and said, “This might interest you.
Maybe you can help me out. There’s a guy I know stirring up a lot of publicity and I’m supposed to talk him out of it.”

Brad took the paper and read for a few minutes. “It amazes me that people still consider this news.”

“What are you talking about?”

“One of the Ford heirs just gave a lot of money to SETI. You know, the intelligent life in outer space people. Harvard scientists, and so on. Anyway, he’s on the board at Concordia, and some Christian group wants him to step down.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I mean, of course there’s life in outer space. Do they think we’re the only ones?”

“No, I meant the piece about Larry Oh.”

He read that, too. “What are you supposed to do about it?”

“A friend of mine has been agitating against Waites. Robert James wants me to talk to him.”

“Who is this guy?”

“Some artist, a friend of Gloria’s.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“Why not?”

“Nobody mentions him. I’m going to take a shower.” And he threw me the paper.

But I looked through the rest of it and found a piece about Nolan in the Arts section. He had recently won a $50,000 grant from the Kresge Foundation to “pursue a civil law suit, on behalf of Dwayne Meacher and his family, against Tyler Waites.” It was the first award of its kind, arts funding for a legal action. But a spokesman at the Kresge Foundation said they had no knowledge of the grant and did not support the views or the activities of Nolan Smith. The money had been channeled through Art in Action, a community
group based in Detroit. The Kresge Foundation planned to review their support of this organization.

“Ignore it,” Brad said, when he came out. His body looked like my dad’s, pale fat muscular and blond. His cheeks had gone pink from the heat of the water, he looked like a big happy boy. “Nobody reads the Arts pages.”

“Well, I promised to talk to him. Do you want to meet him or not? He lives just down the road, literally. He’s one of those guys who grew up here.”

“Sure,” he said. “I got nothing else to do.”

So we went to see Nolan. It was humid out, the air felt wet. The sky was not so much cloudy as vague, and the sunlight had a kind of depth to it. It looked like rain in the afternoon. Summer storms in Michigan can be pretty bad, and my brother had a five-hour drive to Chicago ahead of him.

The doorbell didn’t work so I knocked on the door, which was a screen door and clattered in the frame. Mrs. Smith came out, moving slowly.

“Is Nolan around? This is my brother, Brad.”

“You boys want to come over and play?” she said. “Come on in.”

“Is Nolan around?”

“He’ll be back this minute.”

She led us into the kitchen and made some coffee. It was hot in there, too. One of the windows caught the sun directly. There were fruit flies on the bowl of grapes by the sink.

“If you like Nolan’s coffee you won’t like this,” she said. “I make it so you can drink it.”

When Nolan came in with the dog, he said, “Who is this?”

“My brother.”

He smelled his mother’s coffee in the pot. “I’m going to pour this out and start again.”

“I’ll be upstairs if you want me,” Mrs. Smith said. “I’m taking a nap.”

“Nobody wants you,” Nolan told her. He started fussing around with coffee grinds, tamping them down in the filter and making a mess. The dog kept getting in his way; his paws made slippery tapping sounds on the linoleum floor.

“I met a friend of yours yesterday,” Nolan said.

“Who?”

“German girl. At least she said she knew you. We had an open house at the studios, and she came by.”

“I don’t understand. How did she know you know me?”

“You know who I’m talking about?”

“Yes.”

He started steaming the milk and for a minute we just listened to the machine. “How come your brother doesn’t look like you?” Nolan said afterwards.

“What does he look like?”

“The Dutch Boy paint kid.”

“I still don’t understand how you figured out the connection.”

“She asked me where I lived and I told her and she said her ex-boyfriend lived on the same street. She seemed like the kind of girl who gets excited by coincidences.”

“She’s a very bad artist.”

“I believe that.”

“She makes videos. She made this film about race relations in Detroit.”

“I believe that, too.”

Mrs. Smith had left the radio on, and you could hear the talk show voices arguing and laughing underneath the other noises. Nolan switched it off.

“There’s this rap she uses as a voice-over,” I said. “Maybe you
can tell me where it’s from.
“All of my brothers live by the trigger. But nobody cares so long as . . .”
I stopped. “I can’t remember the rest.”

“What, you don’t want to say it? Pussy. What are you smiling at, Dutch Boy?”

“I’m just enjoying the pregame show.”

“Whatever.” He kicked Buster into the garden and said, “If you want some real coffee you can make it yourself,” and carried his cup into the living room.

“I guess we follow him. What are you smiling at?”

“He got you whipped, boy,” Brad said.

“Where’d you learn to talk like that? River Oaks?”

“You can sit here,” Nolan told us, when we came in. “But this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to finish my coffee and then I’m going to do some work.”

The living room was shaded by the balcony over the front porch, so that even on hot days it felt pleasant. The windows looked bright, though, against the daylight. They were open, too, and you could hear some of the trees outside.

“Robert James asked me to talk to you about something,” I said. “About this Meacher business. If there’s racial tension, the people who get hurt won’t be the people you want to hurt. You should lay off Tyler Waites.”

“Tyler Waites isn’t the problem, Tyler Waites is the symbol. You people are the problem—Goddamn colonizers.”

“I don’t want to start an argument about the whole thing. But you have to admit, your life has got better since we moved in. Just ask your mother.”