Here Comes Trouble (21 page)

“I don’t understand,” I said, still hurting from the rug being pulled out from under me. “Why would you ask me not to come back? I’ve gotten straight A’s, I do all my work, I haven’t been in any serious trouble, and I’ve been forced to endure living in the juvie room with those two delinquents for most of this year. What grounds do you have to expel me?”

“Oh, that’s simple,” Father Duewicke said. “We don’t want you here because you upset the other boys by asking too many questions.”

“Too many questions about what? What does that mean? How can you say such a thing?”

“That’s three questions right there in less than five seconds, thus proving my point,” he said, while giving a mock look at his nonexistent watch. “You do not accept the rules or the teachings of our institution on the basis of faith. You always have a question.
Why’s that? What’s that for? Who said?
After a while, Mr. Moore, it gets tiring. You either have to accept things, or not. There’s no in-between.”

“So, you’re saying—and, sorry, I’m asking another question, but I don’t know any other way to phrase this—that I’m somehow a
nuisance
just because I want to
know
something?”

“Michael, listen—this is never going to work for you, being a priest…”

“I don’t want to be a priest.”

“Well, if you
did
want to be a priest, you would cause a lot of trouble for both yourself and for whatever church you’d be assigned to. We have ways of doing things that go back two thousand years. And we don’t have to answer to anybody about anything, certainly not to you.”

I sat and glared at him. I felt indignant and deeply hurt. This must be what it feels like to be excommunicated, I thought. Abandoned by the very people who are here on earth representing Jesus Christ and telling me that Jesus would want nothing to do with me.
Because I asked some stupid questions?
Like the one that was passing through my head, supplanting the fleeting thought of choking the smug out of Father Duewicke.

“You mean like why does this institution hate women and not let them be priests?”

“Yeeeesss!” Father Duewicke said with a knife of a smile. “
Like that one!
Good day, Mr. Moore. I wish you well with whatever you do with your life, and I pray for those who have to endure you.”

He got up, and I got up, and I turned around and walked the long walk back to my room. I shut the door, lay down, and thought about my life—and when that became pointless I reached under the bed and consoled myself for the next hour with the latest issue of
Paris Match.

Boys State

I
HAD NO IDEA
why the principal was sending me to Boys State. I had broken no rules and was not a disciplinary problem of any sort. Although I was a high school junior, it was only my second year in a public high school after nine years of Catholic education, and not having nuns or priests to direct me still took some getting used to. But I thought I had adjusted quite well to Davison High School. On the very first day of my sophomore year, Russell Boone, a big, good ol’ boy who would become one of my best friends, took his fist and knocked the books out of my hands while I was walking down the hall between fourth- and fifth-hour classes.

“That’s not how you hold ’em,” he shouted at me. “You’re holdin’ ’em like
a girl.
”

I picked up the three or four books and looked around to see if anyone had stopped to laugh at the boy who carried his books like a girl. The coast seemed clear.

“How’m I supposed to carry ’em?” I asked.

Boone took the books from me and held them in the cup of his hand with his arm fully extended toward the floor, letting the books hang by his side.

“Like this,” he said while walking a manly walk down the hallway.

“How was I holding ’em?” I asked.

“Like this,” he barked as he mocked me, holding my books up to the center of his chest like he was caressing breasts.

“That’s how girls do it?” I asked, mortified that for the first half of my first day in public school, everyone had seen me walking around like a pansy.

“Yes. Don’t do it again. You’ll never survive here.”

Check. So, half a day impersonating a girl. What else had I done to deserve Boys State?

Well, there was that time a few months later on the band bus. Boone had fallen asleep with his socks and shoes off. Honestly I can’t say he had socks. But there he was, barefoot, his leg propped up on the armrest of the seat in front of him. Larry Kopasz had his cigarettes with him and it was decided that in order to solve the riddle “How long does a cigarette take to burn all the way down if being smoked by a foot?” he lit one and placed it between Boone’s toes to find out. (Answer: seven and a half minutes.) Boone let out quite a yell when the hot cinder of the Lucky Strike reached his toes, and he didn’t miss a beat from dreamland to wrestling Kopasz to the floor of the bus, which caught the attention of the driver. (In those days, as most adults and bus drivers smoked all the time, student smoking often went undetected because their smoke simply went into the same smoky air we were all breathing.) Somehow I got implicated in this brawl, as Boone held us all collectively responsible. (On that same overnight band trip, we snuck into Boone’s room to run another science experiment: “Does placing one’s hand while asleep in a warm bowl of water make one piss himself?” Answer: yes. And this time we took a Polaroid so we’d have proof to hold against him should Boone, the bedwetting tuba player, turn us in.)

But that was it. Seriously. I got good grades, was on the debate team, never skipped school and other than a skit I wrote for Comedy Week about the principal living a secret life as Pickles the Clown, I had not a smirch on my record.

As it turned out, Boys State was not a summer reformatory school for hoodlums and malcontents. It was a special honor to be selected to attend. Each June, after school ended, every high school in the state sent two to four boys to the state capital to “play government” for a week. You were chosen if you had shown leadership and good citizenship. I had shown the ability to come up with some very funny pranks to play on Boone.

Michigan’s Boys State was held three miles from the Capitol Building on the campus of Michigan State University (the girls held a similar event called Girls State on the other side of the campus). Two thousand boys were assembled to elect our own pretend governor of Michigan, a fake state legislature, and a made-up state supreme court. The idea was for us boys to break down into parties and run for various offices in order to learn the beauties of campaigning and governing. If you were already one of those kids who ran for class office and loved being on student council, this place was your crack house.

But after campaigning for “Nixon-the-peace-candidate” as a freshman, I had developed an early allergy to politicians, and the last thing I wanted was to be one. I arrived at the Michigan State dormitories, was assigned my room and, after one “governmental meeting,” where a boy named Ralston talked my ear off about why he should be state treasurer, I decided that my best course of action was to hole up in my room for the week and never come out except at feeding times.

I was given a small single room that belonged to that floor’s resident advisor. He apparently had not moved all of his stuff out. I found a record player and some record albums sitting near the windowsill. I had a few books with me, plus a writing tablet and a pen. It was all I needed to make it through the week. So I essentially deserted Boys State and found refuge in this well-stocked fifth-floor room in the Kellogg Dorms. The album collection in my room included James Taylor’s
Sweet Baby James,
The Beatles’
Let It Be,
the Guess Who’s
American Woman,
and something by Sly and the Family Stone. There was a big coin-operated snack machine down at the end of the hall, so I had everything I needed for the week.

In between listening to the records and writing poems to amuse myself (I called them “song lyrics” to make them seem like a worthwhile endeavor), I became enamored with a new brand of potato chip that I heretofore had not encountered. The snack machine offered bags of something called “Ruffles” potato chips. I was amazed at how they were able to put hills and valleys into a single chip. For some reason, these “hills” (they called ’em “ridges”) gave me the impression that I was getting more chip per chip than your regular potato chip. I liked that a lot.

On the fourth day inside my NO POLITICS ALLOWED/FIRE AND RAIN bunker, I had completely run out of Ruffles and made a run down the hall for more. Above the snack machine was a bulletin board, and when I got there I noticed someone had stuck a flyer on it. It read:

BOYS STATERS!

SPEECH CONTEST

on the life of

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Write a speech on the life of Abe Lincoln

and win a
PRIZE
!

Contest sponsored by the

ELKS CLUB

I stood and stared at this flyer for some time. I forgot about my Ruffles. I just couldn’t get over what I was reading.

The previous month, my dad had gone to the local Elks Club to join. They had a golf course just a few miles from where we lived, and he and his linemates from the factory loved to golf. Golf, the sport of the wealthier class, was not normally played by the working class in places like Flint. But the GM honchos had long ago figured out ways to lull the restless workers into believing that the American Dream was theirs, too. They understood after a while that you couldn’t just crush unions—people would always try to start unions simply because of the oppressive nature of their work. So the GM execs who ran Flint knew that the best way to quell rebellion was to let the proles have a few of the accoutrements of wealth—make them think that they were living the life of Riley, make them believe that through hard work they, too, could be rich some day!

So they built public golf courses in and around the factories of Flint. If you worked at AC Spark Plug, you played the I.M.A. or Pierce golf courses. If you worked at Buick you headed over to the Kearsley course. If you worked at the Hammerberg Road plant, you played at Swartz Creek. If you worked in “The Hole,” you played the Mott course.

When the factory whistle blew at 2:30 p.m. every day, our dads grabbed their bags from the car and started whacking balls around (they’d play nine holes and be home for dinner by five). They loved it. Soon working class became “middle class.” There was time and money for month-long family vacations, homes in the suburbs, a college fund for the kids. But as the years went on, the monthly union hall meetings became sparsely attended. When the company started asking the union for givebacks and concessions, and when the company asked the workers to build inferior cars that the public would soon no longer want, the company found they had a willing partner in their demise.

But back in 1970, thoughts like that would get you locked up in the loony bin. Those were the salad days (though I’m certain it was illegal to offer a salad anywhere within a fifty-mile radius of Flint). And the guys in the factory grew to believe that golf was
their
game.

The Elks Club owned a beautiful course that was not as crowded as the Flint public courses, but you had to be a member. So it was with some disappointment when my dad went out to the Elks Club to join that he was confronted with a line printed at the top of the application:

CAUCASIANS ONLY

Being a Caucasian, this should not have been a problem for Frank Moore. Being a man of some conscience, though, it gave him pause. He brought the form home and showed me.

“What do you think about this?” he asked me.

I read the Caucasian line and had two thoughts:

1. Are we down South? (How much more north can you get than Michigan?)
   
2. Isn’t this illegal?
   

My dad was clearly confused about the situation. “Well, I don’t think I can sign this piece of paper,” he said.

“No, you can’t,” I said. “Don’t worry. We can still golf at the I.M.A.”

He would occasionally go back to the Elks course if invited by friends, but he would not join. He was not a civil rights activist. He generally didn’t vote because he didn’t want to be called for jury duty. He had all the misguided racial “worries” white people of his generation had. But he also had a very basic sense of right and wrong and of setting an example for his children. And because the union had insisted on integrating the factories as early as the 1940s, he worked alongside men and women of all races and, as is the outcome of such social engineering, he grew to see all people as the same (or at least “the same” as in “all the same in God’s eyes”).