You Don't Have to Live Like This (35 page)

“So what happens next?”

“That’s partly what I want to talk to you about. I think it’s a good idea you take a break for while. Maybe go back home.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean back to Baton Rouge.”

“Are you kicking me out? Did people vote on this?”

“Marny, I just think it’s a good idea. I’m worried. I don’t know what happens next. I don’t want you caught up in it.”

“Something’s not right. I don’t feel right. I can’t feel anything.”

“Maybe you should sit down. It’s been a long week.”

“No, I can’t feel anything,” I said. “I can’t feel my face.”

Cris came down from putting the kids to bed and took my temperature. It was raised, but not especially high—maybe 101. But she made Tony take me to the hospital.

“I don’t want to go,” I said. “People will recognize me there.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m in the news.”

“Just hold an ice pack to your face. No one will look at you.”

And eventually I let them put me in the car. My health insurance was only valid for the DMC, so Tony had to drive me into Detroit—against the rush hour mostly, but it still took an hour. He was drunk; he didn’t want to get pulled over. There was a three-car pileup on I-94, and we didn’t make it to the exit in time. Vehicles with sirens kept pushing past us on the hard shoulder. But we got off at last and he dropped me outside the emergency unit and went to park. There was a big green space opposite, with people drinking outside, under the trees. The weather was changing. The cold air had a spring smell instead of a winter smell. You could see stars and clouds, the street lamps were lit.

I wandered through the automatic doors. There was a reception desk, but it wasn’t the right one, and eventually I found the right one. The woman behind the desk had a tear tattooed on her cheek and chunky rings on her fingers. She could type very quickly, clicking the whole time, and told me to take a seat. About fifteen minutes later Tony found me, and then we sat there waiting maybe another hour. It was a busy night.

The chairs were these plastic chairs, but you couldn’t move them, and they were spaced to make it difficult to lie down. So people kept fidgeting—all kinds of people. Big floor-to-ceiling windows at one end looked onto a hospital corridor with kids’ pictures on the wall—you could tell they were kids’ pictures from the bright colors. At one point I stood up to take a closer look. Art from the leukemia unit. The waiting room itself was a kind of /files/06/34/20/f063420/public/private space. People talked on their cell phones. They bought snacks from the snack machine and spread out the food like a picnic. There was a kiddie corner with plastic toys, including several of those sit-down cars you have to push along, but the kids kept pushing them outside the gated area, which was a problem, because many people waiting had canes or crutches or some kind of motion aid, including wheelchairs.

People went out to smoke and came back in. Some of the time you could tell what they were waiting for, but not always. I saw a lot of preexisting conditions: guys with splints or stitches or substantial bandaging. Pregnant women. Crying kids, black eyes, bloody noses. Burn victims. I had the usual thoughts you get in a hospital, like, would you have sex with this species? The answer is generally no. From time to time the receptionist read out a name, or a couple of names, and people shuffled up to the desk. Then a nurse came to take them away.

I felt hot and shivery, and sometimes the ice pack helped and sometimes it didn’t. The room itself was probably too hot. There
was a young man with his shirt off, a good-looking white guy, well built, maybe college age or a little older, pacing back and forth and talking. He was either high on something or coming down from it. “You need to hook us up,” he said, loudly but not at the top of his voice. He wasn’t shouting. “You have to medicate the people.” But he kept repeating himself.

In one corner of the room, opposite reception, there was a TV fixed to the ceiling, not much bigger than the kind of TV you get in a motel. I couldn’t hear it but I could see it. They were showing the local news. A reporter stood in front of a camera van in front of a burning house. The house looked more or less like the houses on Johanna Street, and I picked my way through people’s legs and bags and kids to get a closer look. At the bottom of the screen a news ticker ran through the day’s stories, but there were also captions for the hearing impaired. You could see the reporter moving his mouth, and you could see the words appear on the screen below, not always perfectly spelled but clear enough. This is how I found out about the riots.

T
hey lasted three days. Most of the damage was confined to New Jamestown, but there were shops on the periphery, on East Jefferson, on Gratiot, where a few big chains had moved in, that also took a hit. They started a little after six o’clock, when WDIV reported the verdict in Nolan’s case. But the truth is, preparations must have been made beforehand; there was an organized element.

Houses and cars were burned, and in some cases the fire spread across entire blocks. That first night was clear, cool and windy, the second day was overcast and slightly warmer, and it finally rained around four in the morning and continued raining for the rest of the third day. But on that first night the fires just jumped around.

Mrs. Smith’s house was one of the ones that burned. I don’t think she was hurt, though I haven’t seen her since the trial; I’m not sure. The fire took out the inside and the second floor fell in, though the walls and the roof survived. From the outside it almost looks livable, except the window frames are charred holes. There’s no glass. But the roof on my house went up in smoke. My bed was soaked with rain, and my clothes and books and shoes lay over the
open stairs—that’s how I found them later. For some reason the living room in Walter’s apartment came out okay, but the flames reached such a high temperature in his kitchen that some of the plastic toys in the garden melted on one side.

There were more than a hundred arrests. Seven people died, one of them shot by the police, which came in for a lot of criticism afterwards. Some of my neighbors said it was basically a looting situation, nobody wanted to hurt anyone. It was kids, teenagers, young men; girls and women, too. They just wanted to burn stuff and steal stuff. But it depends who you talked to, I also heard arguments on the other side.

Steve Zipp got hit by a stolen car. The driver was a kid named Kwame Richardson, who tried to help him. He drove him to the emergency room at Henry Ford, and police outside the hospital arrested the boy. Later the charges were dropped. Steve turned out to be okay—two broken ribs and a deep tissue bruise, just above the knee, that made him limp for a month.

While this went on I waited in another hospital to see a doctor. Tony had a hangover already. We talked about his book. He was halfway through the fatherhood memoir, but this Beatrice deal had thrown him. Maybe he was on the wrong track. For years he’d been trying to write a novel about Detroit.

When the doctor, one of these good-looking, rich-looking old white guys, a very competent person, saw me, he said, “You picked a bad night to have an accident.”

“My one-year-old hit him with a telephone,” Tony said.

Then the doctor sent me off for an X-ray, which meant another half-hour wait. Tony stayed with me the whole time and even stuck around for the X-ray itself. A technician guy sat me down in a kind of dentist’s chair, covered my chest with a heavy gray vest and turned on the invisible forces, which made a quick buzzing sound.

After that we waited some more for the results—Tony kept stocking up on chocolate and potato chips from one of the vending machines. It was ten o’clock by this point, but I didn’t eat anything. I still had a fever, I kept drinking cans of Sprite.

Then the doctor came back.

“You’ve got a fracture, there,” he said, pointing at a spot on the transparency. The bones and shape of my face were clearly visible; there was a white glowing scar under one of my eyes. And beneath the skull, with that grin you can’t help, my brains, my thoughts, like jam in a jar.

“So what do we do?”

“You’ve got two options. You can do something, or you can do nothing.”

“What happens if I do nothing?”

“I don’t know yet. The fracture hit the nerve—he got you right on the money. But what we can’t tell from this is if it’s still exerting pressure. I also can’t tell how badly the nerve is damaged. Sometimes you just get a pinch. We could operate and try to relieve the pressure, but it’s a very delicate little bone, we might make things worse. There’ll be a scar, we do what we can to minimize it, we come up from under the line of your jaw like this. But even if everything goes beautifully it might do no good. How bad is the loss of feeling?”

“About the size of my hand. Half my lip. Even drinking this soda feels like pouring something into a container.”

“Well, it’s your choice. If you want, I can book you in.”

“If everything’s fine when will the feeling come back?”

“That’s hard to say, too.”

But I let it go—I let Tony take me home, back to his place. Another two hours in the car. I-94 was closed, Gratiot was closed, we had to go north on 75. There was a slow river of cars. I fell asleep on
the way. Tony did all the driving, perfectly sober by now. When I opened my eyes I saw his forearm on the wheel. I felt like a kid, my temperature must have been close to 103. The Tylenol they gave me at the hospital was wearing off. But I slept anyway. Then around one in the morning he woke me up. We were in his driveway, it was a cool night, I walked inside. Cris had made up the sofa bed.

ABOUT A WEEK AFTER THE
riots, Walter and I walked around the neighborhood and looked at the house, to see if there was anything we could salvage. He and Susie were staying at Bill Russo’s place on Lake St. Clair. They had a little baby—all of that went through. We drove over in Walter’s car and managed to fill up the trunk with clothes and toys and books, but I didn’t care about any of this stuff, I was just going along. We saw a few people trawling through the rubble, not all of them familiar faces.

About half the houses on Johanna had burned down, the rest had broken windows, some of them were boarded up. I said to Walter, “Well, this is more or less what it looked like when I got here.”

Robert’s neighborhood didn’t look much better—we walked around there, too. On the night of the riots, he drove home from Tony’s and saw what was going on and didn’t get out of his car. He drove straight through the night, heading south and east, through Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and New Jersey and the Lincoln Tunnel. He ended up in Manhattan around breakfast time, parked in the street and bought croissants and cups of coffee from one of the delis around there to surprise Peggy with. We talked on the phone the next day, I heard the whole story.

For the first two months I couldn’t feel my face, and for the next two months I couldn’t tell if I could feel anything, and after that there was a kind of tingling that eventually turned into feeling.
Most of the time I don’t think about it now. When I pull at my beard, there’s a very slight sensitivity on one side, like a mild sunburn.

Walter and Susie couldn’t stay at Bill’s place forever. Anyway, they felt isolated out there with the kid. So they moved into Robert’s old house, which was more or less intact, and eventually I moved in with them. It’s pretty intense, having a baby around. She’s present everywhere. You can hear her crying, her toys are on the floor, there are mush stains on the kitchen table. Sometimes I take the night shift, to give them a break. Shawntell sleeps on top of me in bed, and I lie there and try not to move. In the dark like that, my thoughts seem to expand—into the room, into the night. It’s strange to think she won’t remember any of this.

There are a lot of hands on deck; it’s a full house. “You’re going to have a happy childhood,” Susie says to her. “Everybody loves you.” But I don’t know how sustainable it is. Steve Zipp lived with us for a while, then went back to Ohio. The Wendelmans are here now. Bert’s son, though, has gone to live with his ex-wife in Grand Rapids. It’s not really a place for school-age kids. If a room is free, people hear about it, they knock on the door, and we usually let them in.

Franklin’s farm survived the riots, though Franklin himself moved to Boston, which is where he studied law. A lot of us pick over his land for things to eat, asparagus, corn, zucchini, beets, tomatoes, not to mention apples, pears, plums and blackberries, and pumpkins later in the year. I used to make a little cash by going through some of the burned-out houses and looking for things other people overlook. The electronic equipment was all gone, whatever could be melted down was gone, door handles, pipe work, etc. But sometimes I found old books in decent condition. Pictures or picture frames, toys can be worth money, flowerpots, even plants.

It’s a different place these days. Nobody has anything to show off. Guys help each other out, but there’s also a lot of petty theft—there are very thin boundaries.

My brother came and tried to take me away. He gave me two days of his time; I let him buy me dinner. When he couldn’t talk me into leaving, he flew home. As soon as he left (I watched his rented car drive off), the old confused feelings returned. I don’t know how anyone reconciles childhood and adulthood, it can’t be done. He said, “I’m going to leave you alone, but you have to call your mother once in a while.” I can’t call, our house doesn’t have a phone, and anyway, I don’t want to hear her voice. But sometimes I go to the public library and send her an email.

The fact is, I keep expecting my mother to turn up. I walk around like a runaway, looking over my shoulder. But either she can’t face me or Brad has talked her out of it.

I haven’t got a job, though I do some day labor, fruit picking, furniture removal, leafleting, yard work. As little as I can get away with. I still see people, Tony and Cris, for example. Walter and I joke that our fifteen-year reunion is coming up. Maybe we’ll go. I sold my car, I don’t know how I’d get there unless he drives me. Basically I’m treading water, but what you don’t expect from this kind of life is how many shifts of feeling it involves. My point of view is undergoing an alteration, and when your point of view changes you see things you couldn’t see before, different aspects of reality become available.

When Beatrice knocked on the door I didn’t recognize her. This was sometime in August, a hot gray day, in the nineties, sweaty and overcast. Robert’s house has a big front yard; in the summer it gets completely overgrown. The grass was seeding, mallow had run wild and flowered, bamboo was invading the lawn. My synapses had to adjust themselves to make sense of her face. I felt this almost
physically. Her cheeks and her eyes, her forehead, realigned themselves until they fit again somewhere in my brain.

“I found you,” she said.

She was wearing a summer dress and sandals. I could see the beginning of her thighs, and her bony knees, and her ankles. She had the calves of a woman who jogs and a redhead’s pale tough skin. She looked successful and attractive and almost forty.

“I haven’t been hiding. Do you want to come in?”

“I want to get you out,” she said. “What are you doing to yourself? Is this some kind of penance?”

“Where are you staying?”

“Not with you.” This was a joke—she smiled a little too hard to prove it. “At Bill’s place, on the lake. He’s there, too. You’re welcome to join us, he says. I’ve rented a car.”

“For how long?”

“We’ll think of something. Is this some kind of penance?” she said again. “Has it worked?”

“I don’t know. How are you doing?”

“All right. There’s been a lot going on in my life, some of it good. I keep talking to you, Marny, in my head. I’m really very happy to see you. Come for the weekend. You can see Bill. And if you want afterwards you can come back here. I’ll drive you myself.”

“So I eat his food and sleep in his clean sheets. This isn’t what I need, I need my own private life.”

“Nobody will ask you anything you don’t want to talk about.”

“That’s not what I mean.” We stood like that for a minute, staring at each other. “I feel like I’m starting to get a grip on some important questions, but this may be just another stage of delusion.”

“Look,” she said, “I’m not going to leave you like this.”

“Like what?” I said and saw myself suddenly through her eyes. But I wouldn’t go with her; she eventually left in tears.

But that was months ago and it’s getting cold again. Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. That always struck me as a very funny line. Maybe my brother is right, you need to build fences. You need a wife, you need kids, you need private school. Okay, so you worry about money. Worrying about money is what you pay for. It stops you from worrying about everything else.

I keep thinking about Beatrice. If she can make six figures by writing some novel about me, what should I get for writing this? I could start over. I could move to New York. Robert James is still there. Beatrice told me she was buying an apartment, a studio on the Upper West Side. So she’s living alone, I thought. With time on your hands you get all these ideas; you imagine things. But if I stay in Detroit I might run into Gloria, too. This is something else I think about—what to say. If I say the right thing, who knows.

A few of the guys kick a ball around at Butzel Park on Wednesday afternoons. Soccer is one of those recession games, it’s cheap, you only need a ball. Even in the cold, so long as it isn’t raining, they head out. A couple of hours before dusk, but sometimes they play into the dark, too. Most of us don’t have anything else to do. I haven’t played soccer since my mom was a soccer mom and used to drive Brad and me every Saturday morning to the Southside YMCA. But maybe once a month I go over to see if there’s a game. All kinds of memories come back to me, nothing is lost. Orange wedges and Capri Suns in the ice chest. Grass in your cleats. God knows what the parents are talking about. Their kids. You keep starting over. Somebody kicks the ball away from your feet. And for a few seconds you watch them passing it up the field. While your breath comes back, you just stand there, hands on hips. Fuck this, you think, but then you put your head down anyway, and when it’s probably too late to catch them, start running.