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CHAPTER 1
Circling Squares
Brick-box houses. Boom. One, then another. Car-clunk over concrete rectangles of street divided by tar spacers. Trip over cracked sidewalk squares lined with weeds to the front door. Boom. Slabs. No dreaming here, baby. No hidden jewels. Just red brick, orange. Blank dominoes not falling. Already played. Four walls. Boom. Streets not plowed nor salted — not in the budget. Snow rutted by bald tires. Ice crust. Bumper-hitch for kicks. Detroit and Warren side-swiping each other daily on Eight Mile Road. Boom. Cost of doing business. Boot hockey. Broken Nose/Fat Lip/Black Eye/Red Slush — street names. Signs of love to keep bodies warm, mark territory. Boom. Stop. Too late. Nostalgia for blood! Boom. Drive slow. Nobody behind you. Lost yet? No. Yes. No payoff in breaking in. We're the ones breaking in — further from the city: bigger houses, bigger yards, more cover. More doors, windows. More stuff. Blood for its own sake. Sighs of affection. Signs of infection. No Vote For signs. No For Sale signs. For Sale sighs. What they asking? 50s tract housing. Stuck zipper of the assembly line. Boom. Kids. Boom. Boom. Boom. Who's giving in/up? Against signs. Cruising for a bruising. Will the old names drift off in bitter wind, ripped from identical mailboxes? Nobody changing up houses crammed onto cloned lots. Boom. Tour guide. Engine. Caboose. Cranky crossing guard with a heart of bile. Hi, Hi, Hi, Hi. Bye, bye, bye, bye. You got a vein like that? Insider on the outside. Roll down the window. The old curses swarm. Old names flattened into a litany of slabs. Rectangles and squares. Rotary-dialed phone numbers of the dead. Graffiti prayer. We used to. We don't anymore. We roamed streets copying house numbers on torn sheets of loose leaf. Our streets. For comfort. Boom. Nothing to loosen. Nothing to lose. Cement streets crack, crumble. Not in the budget. See ya. Wouldn't wanna be ya. But I am am am ya. Boom. Why stop, why yield? Why idle? New dogs tricked with the same barks sniff each other's butts at the fence line. Boom. No bite. The butts of all our jokes forever.
CHAPTER 2
They Swim
"My mom and dad don't fuck!" Sliver said. Sliver — he hated the nickname, so it stuck. We stood gathered in the weedy field behind Bronco Lanes off of Eight Mile and Ryan where we'd carved out an asymmetrical baseball diamond in the weeds — to get from second to third required good wind, and we'd started to smoke, so we hit a lot of doubles.
It had come up — fucking — and Sliver had jumped in without thinking. His father was a deacon at their church, his mother obese and foulmouthed. If I hadn't read about it in the slim pamphlet my mother slipped me years earlier — something she picked up at the doctor's office where she worked as a receptionist — I might've thought he had a point.
Sliver — short, scrawny, baby-faced, slow, shy — an easy target for our snowballs, slingshots, peashooters — the relentless cruelty we relied on, thinking it made us cool. Didn't every cluster of friends in every neighborhood have one, the butt of, the Sliver of all jokes?
* * *
So much I don't recall, but I remember Queen Anne's lace and milkweed, the stagnant, humid smell in that field in summer heat before we had paper routes or jobs, when we had all the time in the world to sharpen our sticks, to try out swear words in our mouths like a new spicy communion host, like some adult religion we weren't supposed to know about or participate in. Like prayers our parents had memorized for secret adult services we weren't invited to, a language we were supposed to ignore.
I can tell you who was there, I can sing the innocent names of our freckled, gap-toothed faces — or maybe we already had our adult teeth? At least some of them. No one was named Opie. Our fathers steered clear of sheriffs and their deputies.
* * *
We might've looked like some cute-movie kids or a B group of Little Rascals, but we were too big for our britches. We wanted to burn our britches but were still figuring out what that meant, what we might wear in our next lives as teenagers — all of us except Angelo, an older boy of some undetermined age who was not quite right. Was not right at all, so not right that we could tease him without hurting his feelings, which was no fun, so we quickly turned to Sliver instead. We protected Angelo, included him for many years in all of our summer games. He went to a special school on a special bus.
"What do you mean, they don't fuck?" I said. "Of course they fuck."
"How do you know?" Sliver looked around at the rest of us with those wide eyes of sincere wonder the girls would come to love. His older brother Gene slunk off into the weeds to hit stones with his bat.
All of our bats were from Free Bat Day at Tiger Stadium. In fact, Sliver's stepfather Paul — Gene's dad — had arranged the excursion, gotten us tickets donated by his church. At the time, we did not know we were Underprivileged Youth.
* * *
"They swim," Miss Bohinski said, red flaring up her high cheeks like in an ancient cartoon. We all had secret crushes on her. How do I know, if they were secret? She was the only young, single female teacher at St. Mike's who was not a nun. Not everybody would've labeled it a crush, but we acted weird in her classes, either listening to the angel on one shoulder or the devil on the other, instead of ignoring them both and being our normal selves. The girls noticed, and their own angels and devils responded. Miss Bohinski — we learned her first name was Brandi, and we didn't know anyone who had an i in place of the standard y — in retrospect, probably had an eating disorder. Her thinness — severe, alarming, alluring — made her look younger, and she was already younger, so in our imaginations, she almost looked like one of us. Was there a Saint Brandi?
* * *
They swim. But we could not. Our sperm could swim to the egg and make a scandal, a disaster, a disappearance, a premature wedding, a black eye, and, in one sad case, a murder at a wedding. Oh, they were all sad cases, weren't they, Rita?
* * *
My friend Rita and I have a kid out there somewhere who must be grown now. Me, the one who knew how it all worked, who mocked Sliver. Kid must be twenty-three. Perhaps already experiencing male-pattern baldness and a sensitivity to latex. What did they name him? Him. We knew it was a boy. They who adopted him.
"Are they fucking now, Sliver?"
"If you run home, maybe you'll catch them."
"The Immaculate Conception of Sliver."
"Ever seen a stork, you dork?"
Gene had disappeared entirely, so the game was called off due to imbalanced hormones and teams.
* * *
They swim. And we had no place to learn how, crowded by cement and filth, enormous factories and stifling box houses. You can't swim in a sprinkler, and we'd outgrown those sweet water-dances of childhood. We preferred sweating and swearing. Somebody must have learned how to — it doesn't make sense that a whole neighborhood couldn't swim. Once we were old enough to learn to drive, Brad, Rita's older half-brother (we were full of halfs and steps — even now I get them confused), got a transportation special that his father had fixed up in the alley behind their house and sold to him for $100. A Plymouth Fury. We piled in the car, and Brad drove us out to Metro Beach on Lake St. Clair, squeezed in without seatbelts. At least seven of us. The kind of ride that seemed to end up in the newspapers: Teenagers killed in single-car crash on straight road. We'd all learn firsthand about that when he drove a carload into a ditch on Outer Drive, killing some lonely, clueless freshman who'd hopped in the car for his first and last joy ride.
We wore our cutoff jeans for the trip, scissored crooked above the blown-out worn-out knees. We usually wore our long jeans and suffered. You could take your shirt off, but wearing shorts was wimpy. T-shirt, jeans, tube socks, sneakers. Sneers.
I could write a book on my neighborhood — or maybe more of a pamphlet, like the one my mother gave me about sex — to explain how things worked there, things that seem ridiculous, but were our facts of life.
We ran down to the beach with its sludgy, trucked-in sand, suspiciously muddy between our toes. We walked in up to our waists and splashed water off our white, white bellies, shouting out odd barking noises, intoxicated by how they carried in that open space over water. All good until a group of three girls who had been eyeing us got up off their towels — all Mickey Mouse towels, which seemed weird to me, like they were in some cult, though I'm sure we also looked like we were in a cult with our matching cutoffs and truckers' tans.
The girls splashed through the water next to us and swam out to the wooden raft anchored in the roped-off swim zone. One of them laughed as she climbed out of the water onto the rocking deck floating on empty oil barrels. She saw me staring and waved, shouting, "Come out and join us!" She gave me a wet, brilliant smile. They wore string bikinis, not the modest kind our sisters wore. Pale flesh threatening to be revealed by a loose knot. Our shoes randomly untied themselves, so why not bikinis? They were our age, or older — maybe even college students. Metro Beach, the closest one to Warren, was about twenty miles away from Eight Mile Road. Anything was possible out there where nobody knew what jerks we were.
After she yelled again, "C'mon you guys, join us!" the other guys noticed.
I can't say what the distance was, though it did not matter, the water out there clearly over our heads. Despite knowing that they swim, we knew we could not. Gene began wading toward them, all the way up to his neck. He briefly lost his footing and slipped under, then frantically splashed his way back into the shallows where we waited. We burned quickly in that sun.
* * *
Our high school, Eight Mile — we called it Hate Smiles, the best nickname we could come up with (sorry, Sliver, we should have done better by you too) — had a swimming pool, but it was closed for future repairs all four years I attended. Our parents had voted down a millage increase to fix the pool and turn the football field from cinders to grass. Wait — did we really play on cinders? It wasn't grass. Mostly dirt and weeds — they put something in it to keep the mud down.
We broke into the school once. That's how sick we were. Probably drunk. Often, we'd end up in the school parking lot on weekend nights. Cars full of teenagers waiting for other cars to pull up. We'd roll down our windows and say, "Hey, what's up?" And "Where's the party?" We were always looking for a party, but there was no party. Or, we weren't invited. Or, if there was a party, it lasted thirty seconds before the police arrived to break it up.
The Warren Police Department seemed to consist of Vietnam veterans or angry punks too young or too old for Vietnam but angry nevertheless. When not harassing black youths who mistakenly wandered across Eight Mile Road from Detroit, they contented themselves with harassing local white teenagers.
We contented ourselves with the knowledge that at least we weren't black and thus were far less likely to get thunked on the head by one of those giant flashlights. Detroit had their police helicopters, so Warren got a couple old ones donated by the Army. One of the pilots, a vet, bought his booze in Max's, the party store I worked at during high school. The way his fingers danced on the counter waiting for me to pull down his bottle of Kessler's, I could imagine him pulling the trigger on a helicopter machine gun, mowing us down on concrete streets. The helicopters were underutilized and eventually mothballed. All they could do was hover and spray their searchlight down on our parties until the landlocked cop cars arrived.
* * *
Sliver left us while we were in high school. When I think of it these years later, I'm still shocked by stone-cold fear hollowing out my insides to create an ice cave of shame and cowardice.
Vietnam hovered like helicopters above those pockmarked streets. Some of us got beamed up and never returned. Some of us were too young. Some of us were named Angelo and never went anywhere. The local juvie judge was notorious for offering the choice of either incarceration or military service. When somebody got busted, we knew they'd be getting that buzz cut pronto — everyone chose the Army. We were amateur soldiers who got along to get along, who never admitted fear yet felt it constantly. We could not make a baseball diamond with ninety-foot bases or swim.
* * *
We climbed up a thick, black, ropy wire stapled up the side of the school all the way to the roof. We did not get electrocuted. We found a hatch open and climbed down. We shot baskets in the gym. We made announcements over the PA system. Someone threw up on the principal's desk — I'm not saying who. We weren't sure how much trouble we wanted to get into. We sobered up. We climbed down the ladder into the empty swimming pool, a big crack in it where cement had shifted.
The diving board had been removed. We walked down the slope into the deep end. We moved our arms in swimming motions. We puffed our cheeks out and held our breath. We smoked waterproof cigarettes. We played Marco Polo, a game explained to us by Oscar, who had cousins in Sterling Heights with a backyard pool. Drunk on the echo of our own voices off tile: Marco! Polo! Marco! Polo! we shouted, long after the game was over. I still don't know who Marco Polo was, and don't bother telling me.
* * *
They swim. Life begins to turn with two words in a fifth grade classroom. Were we really that old? That young?
Within eight years, most of us were working in the auto plants — not just the guys either. Some of the Future Homemakers of America joined the Future Shoprats of America, and we warily coexisted — with each other, and with the blacks who crossed Eight Mile every day to punch in with the rest of us at the Chrysler plant at Eight Mile and Mound.
If we were swimming, we were inside a tiny fish tank, butting our noses against the glass while kids on a field trip pointed at us and laughed, not a clue to their own futures, despite the mirror we were offering.
If we were swimming, who was sprinkling the little food flakes on top? Who was tapping at the glass, shouting at us to get busy?
* * *
How many of us escaped? How many of us drowned? This is where my metaphors break down, where I join Angelo in inarticulate limbo. Even now, I am walking down the streets of the old neighborhood, limping like he did. Limping and singing sailor songs taught to me by those who walk on water. Escaping a fish tank is perhaps the most temporary of escapes — shorter than even those botched prison breaks I read about in the paper that seem concocted by felons who watched too many bad Hollywood movies.
* * *
You might be thinking Sliver — Steve, Stephen, that's his real name — died for his country in Vietnam at this point, but the shame is that he died for an even less clear and purposeful reason. It doesn't do justice to Denny Smolinski to say he was a bully. He was mean from day one, and thus sent to Vietnam by our juvie judge. The mystery for me is, why did he come back to school after two years away? I ripped out a sheet of looseleaf paper from my spiral notebook and gave it to him to take a test in the required American Government class, then gave him my answers to boot, glad that some of them were right.
He was so vicious that I ran from his smart and pretty sister who literally threw herself at me one night at a helicopter party. In the high school parking lot behind auto shop one day, Smolinski called out Sliver's stepdad who the night before had tried to scrub some racist graffiti off the wall, then decided it wasn't right for Sliver to not fight back, defend his family, so he — oh man, I stood frozen — stomped on Sliver's — Steve's — face with his thick black boots, metal horseshoe cleats hammered into the bottoms. We scattered and ran — some of us back into the school to rouse the security guards at either end of the long hallway. Some of us just kept on running.
* * *
Angelo wore a metal brace on one leg and limped when he walked. He referred to himself in the third person like a star athlete:
"Angelo has to go bathroom."
"Angelo happy. Angelo good."
The last day we played with him, he said "Angelo mad" and swung the bat at Gene, chasing him around the field. Lucky the brace slowed him down. We convinced him he was more valuable retrieving foul balls, and while he seemed to accept that, he soon stopped showing up altogether.
How slow was Angelo? He used to pick up dog shit from his yard and throw it over the fence into the field, but only after it had time to harden, so that's a slow somewhere between using a shovel and trying to pick up the soft stuff.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Perp Walk"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Jim Ray Daniels.
Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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