In Mike We Trust (5 page)

“The storage place is way far away. It takes, like, an hour to get there,” he exaggerated. “Why? What do
you need? We've got a hammer and a couple of screwdrivers here.”

“A bit more than that. Tell you what—do feel like going for a drive? We can go to a hardware store, pick up what I need, and then you can give me a mini-tour of Richmond.”

“Sure,” Garth said. “Oh, wait. I sort of told my friend Lisa I'd hang out with her this afternoon.”

Mike shrugged. “Bring her along. You guys can tag-team tour-guide.”

When Garth called Lisa, she sounded less than enthusiastic. “I thought you were going to be over here by now. I have this new CD I want to play you—a British import of a band called Kazooster. I've listened to it fifty-four times in the past two days; it's amazing.”

“Sorry, I—I just had all these chores. Why don't we do the mini-tour first and hang out later? Mike says we can swing by and pick you up.”

“‘Mike'? You're not calling him ‘Uncle Mike'?”

“He doesn't want me to.”

“Oh. Well, I guess Kazooster can wait.”

The sharp blue Camaro was, by far, the coolest car Garth had ever been in. He rode shotgun; Mike steered with his right hand and hung his left arm out the window. In Lisa's driveway, he did his shave-and-a-haircut tap on the horn.

She came out a minute later, her camera hanging around her neck.

“She's going to take pictures of us?” Mike asked.

“No. It's her thing, though. Photography. She rarely goes anywhere without her camera.” Garth opened his door and leaned forward so she could climb into the backseat, but Mike put the car in park, left it idling, and got out to officially meet her. “I'm Mike,” he said, extending his hand.

She seemed caught off guard by the formality. “Lisa,” she said, and shook the hand.

“Lisa, it's a pleasure to meet you. And clearly it was destined to happen, because of our shirts.”

Garth peered through the windshield—they were both wearing Pink Floyd T-shirts. Lisa's was fairly new, the decal deliberately scuffed up to make it look old; Mike's
was
old, and falling apart, right down to the collar that was separating from the shirt in places.

“
Dark Side of the Moon
is awesome,” she said.

“I couldn't agree more.”

Garth waved her over, and she climbed in.

“So you're a photographer?” Mike asked, glancing at her in the rearview mirror as he pulled away from her house.

“I'm an artist,” she replied.

“Good for you,” Mike said. “I'm not, but people
like me need people like you to open our eyes to the world, you know? Most of us go through life in a…vacuum. When, really, there's amazing stuff happening all around us—and not just beautiful stuff, but horrible, twisted, or sometimes achingly mundane stuff. A million missed moments every day, because we can't
see
them. Artists help us do that. Particularly photographers, who deal with such concrete subjects. They help fill that void.”

Garth himself couldn't have scripted a statement that would have pleased Lisa more. It was as if Mike had been coached on the subject of
her
and was giving his oral exam. He turned around and glanced at Lisa in the backseat. She was nodding her head slowly and appeared a little stunned. After a moment she said, simply, “Yeah.”

“So where's this hardware store?” Mike asked.

“Turn here. We'll go to one on Broad Street,” Garth said. The last store his dad had owned had been across the James River, on the south side of town. It was a greeting card and party supply store now. He hadn't been inside but had ridden past it with his mom once; neither one of them had remarked on it as they'd passed.

Mike told them he'd only be a minute, and disappeared into the Broad Street store.

“So,” Garth said when they were alone. “What do you think?”

“About what?”

“My uncle.”

“I think it's completely spooky how much he looks like your dad. How can you stand it?”

“The more I'm around him, the more I can see little differences. I don't even know what they are, but I see them.”

“His personality's a lot different from your dad's.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, your dad was a salesman, right? He had a store; he sold things.”

“So?”

“But he didn't
talk
like a salesman.”

“And Mike does?”

“I don't know yet. I'm still getting a read on him. He seems a little…slick.”

“Give him a chance,” Garth said. He liked Mike, and he wanted Lisa to like him. After all, they were the only two people he could truly be himself around.

Before long, Mike emerged with a bag in each hand. He put the bags in the trunk, then got back in behind the wheel.

“What's all that?” Garth asked.

“Necessaries,” he said. “So—where to now? We
don't have to get out of the car; you can just point out the good stuff.”

“That may be a challenge,” Lisa muttered.

At Garth's suggestion, they made their way downtown to Capitol Square. They showed him the Capitol Building and the surrounding grounds, the governor's mansion, the conglomerate statue of various American icons topped by George Washington. From there, they directed Mike past the grand Jefferson Hotel, and finally they cut back over so that he could drive down Monument Avenue—a wide, brick thoroughfare with a tree-lined median and stately houses lining either side.

“The pride and joy of Richmond,” Lisa droned from the backseat.

They rounded the monument to J.E.B. Stuart, his horse reared up as if a mouse had startled it.

“He was one of the head honchos?” Mike asked.

“He was a general,” Garth said. “Kind of stubborn. I think I read that somewhere, or saw it in a documentary.”

They carried on, and soon came to the traffic circle surrounding the massive monument to Robert E. Lee.

“The guy from the news!” Mike said, leaning sideways to get a look at the statue.

“Yep. Facing south, because if he were facing
north,
the earth would crack in half or something.”

“What a strange place this must have been—maybe still is,” Mike said. “I mean, look at him. How high up he is on that marble base. The people who erected that must have revered him like some kind of god.”

“God of the racists,” Lisa offered.

Mike grinned and glanced at Garth.

“We sort of get the Civil War stuff shoved down our throats around here,” Garth told him.

“That makes sense, given the location.”

“Yeah, but the whole what-it-stands-for thing is just kind of…depressing.”

“It's sickening, is what it is,” Lisa said. “I mean, what are they celebrating, anyway? Southern pride? Pride in what? Losing the fight to keep
slavery
alive?”

“Hindsight is not always twenty-twenty,” Mike said. “Sometimes people look back at a situation, and they still don't get it.”

“Not only that; they stage reenactments of what few battles they won!” Lisa said. “I mean, how pathetic.”

“Who's that?” Mike asked, pointing up ahead.

“Jefferson Davis,” Garth said. Davis—a somewhat gaunt, unbearded man—stood atop a column, flanked by a semicircle of other, taller columns.

“Why doesn't he get a horse?”

“Because he was the president. He wasn't in battle.”

“Ah,” Mike said. “Like most politicians. They should have cast him in bronze behind his desk, with a cup of tea in his hand.”

They crossed the Boulevard and rounded the monument to Stonewall Jackson.

“How come all the horses are in different positions?” Mike asked.

“It means how they died—in battle, or afterward, or whatever.”

“It means he was a big racist pig who killed a lot of people,” Lisa groaned.

“You should work for the bureau of tourism,” Mike said, grinning at her in the rearview mirror. “You could give the anti-Richmond tour.”

“Any day,” she said. “I mean, it's not the worst place in the world, but this Civil War stuff is just morose.”

“Well, what else is there to look at?” Garth asked her. “Want to drive out onto the interstate and gawk at the Philip Morris plant?”

“No, thank you,” she said. “I'll suffer my ancestors' past with utter humility, like any other intelligent twenty-first-century person.”

“Jackson had to have his arm sawed off in a tent hospital,” Garth said, turning back to his uncle. “When I was in the eighth grade, we took a field trip to the Museum of the Confederacy, and they have his
uniform in a glass case—
and
the saw they used to cut off his arm!”

“Do they have the arm?” Mike asked.

Lisa cracked up. “That would be perfect.”

“And who's that bald guy with the world on his back? Don't tell me it's Atlas.”

“He's some mapmaker. And
that
”—Garth pointed up ahead—“is the monument to Arthur Ashe.”

“He fought in the Civil War?” Mike asked.

“Very funny. There was this really huge stink about whether or not they should put him on Monument Avenue or tuck him away in some tennis court.”

“Where he wasn't even allowed to play because of his
color
before he became famous,” Lisa added.

“Well, the South in general isn't known for its progressive thinking,” Mike said.

He turned a block past the Ashe monument and headed back toward the Fan District on Patterson. The houses were nice and well kept, for the most part. In one window, a Confederate flag hung as a curtain.

“See?” Garth said, pointing. “How crazy is that? And I still see bumper stickers that say things like ‘Dern tootin' I'm a Rebel.' What's ‘dern tootin,' anyway? It's not even English.”

“It must be a special language called Southern,”
Mike said. “Very popular with the boondocks residents of Richmond, apparently.”

“Richmond isn't the
boondocks,
” Lisa said. “It's a city.”

“I guess by
boondock,
I meant ‘backward.'”

“
Some
people are backward,” Lisa clarified. “That's why it's so depressing to be smart and live here.”

“Some people, of course.” Mike shrugged. “But you made the point yourself: it's the South. I mean, I've been all over the country, and people from the South are a particular…breed.”

“And what breed are
you
?”

Garth could detect a slight agitation in her voice. Her combative side was always ready to surface, in any situation. Maybe Mike had taken his South bashing too far—even though she was the one who'd started it.

“Midwestian,” Mike said. “And I don't have a lot of good things to say about
that
breed, either.”

They were turning onto Robinson Street now, on their way back to Lisa's house.

“Oh!” she said suddenly, leaning forward with her camera in her hand. “It's Mudpie! Can you slow down so I can get a shot of her, before she sees us?”

“Who's Mudpie?” Mike asked.

“An ex-drag queen who does nothing now but sit around on benches staring at people. Slow way down!
But don't stop. I want to get a candid shot.”

Garth was uncertain as to how Mudpie had gotten her name (and was pretty sure he didn't want to know) and had never spoken to her, but she always seemed to be around. Or was she a he now? Drag queens, he knew from movies, liked being referred to by feminine pronouns. But did a drag queen who stopped doing drag go back to using the masculine pronoun? He had so much to learn. Mudpie was usually dressed in shorts and a dirty wifebeater, had an enormous belly, a filthy and apparently permanent plaster cast on one foot, and hair that sprang out from her head in arcing, twisted strands. Her face was set in a permanent scowl and she sneered at every passing car. He couldn't picture her back in her “show biz” days: on a stage, working to please an audience.

Mike slowed down and Garth bent into the dashboard so that he could fold his bucket seat forward. Lisa leaned into the opening and took one, two, three shots of the oblivious subject. Then Mudpie turned and caught sight of the Camaro—and the camera. A string of profanity spilled out of her mouth, most of it too raspy to be understood—and she raised her middle finger. Lisa took one last picture as Mike hit the gas.

“Fantastic!” she said. “Especially that last one.”

“You can title that one ‘Mayor of Freakville,'” Mike said, laughing.

Garth laughed, too, though Lisa fell silent in the backseat.

 

Mike dropped them both off back at Lisa's house. In her room, they put on the Kazooster CD and downloaded the pictures from her camera onto her laptop.

“I might shop in a little color,” Lisa said, studying one of the images of Mudpie.

Garth flipped idly through a folder of printed photos. “Try brown. Wasn't Mike's reaction hilarious? He couldn't get over the fact that someone would go by the name Mudpie. He kept saying, ‘Only in Richmond!' I think ol' Mud was his favorite part of the tour.”

“I think he's a little full of himself, if you want the truth,” Lisa said.

“Mudpie?”

“Your uncle,” she clarified. “‘Mike.' I think he's a little on the snobby side.”

Garth hesitated. He knew Lisa could be judgmental; still, her comment surprised him. “What do you mean?”

“For one thing, he cast a pretty broad net with his comments on the South.”

“You brought it up! And besides, you totally agree
with him. He didn't really say anything that you haven't already said to me—and to a lot of other people.”

She clicked on the mouse, resizing the image. “The difference is, I'm
from
here. So I can trash it
and
know that a lot of people—including you and me—live here and aren't part of the…wave of dumbness, so to speak. He was just writing us
all
off as hicks.”