Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (15 page)

"When we look at you," they say, "it's as if your eyes and your minds are somewhere else, it's as if your thoughts are in outer space, as if you refuse to listen to us and connect to the things we say. You are incapable of love!"

We do not fight these accusations. We allow the women to leave without much pleading. We've long ago lost the idea of permanence as a possibility. We stagger around for a few days, drinking too much, finding their pink razors in our showers, their long brown, red, black, or blond hairs on our sheets, their washcloths drying by our sinks.

We do not discuss these women when we are sitting happily around a table at the Black Lantern, drinking pitcher after pitcher. The women seem to happen and then disappear. Eventually their scents, their strands of hair, go away.

When I think about you, the disappeared men of Maple Rock, I sometimes wonder if you all are capable or incapable of love these days. For the record, if you are now capable of love, we consider that unfair.

W
HEN GEORGE BUSH'S SON
was running for president, he did not come to the Polish-American Hall in Maple Rock. We did not see George W. give any campaign speeches, though he did speak at a closed luncheon of the Detroit Businessmen's Club, which wasn't really in Detroit. It was in Livonia.

Still, we would boo W when he appeared on the television in the bar, throwing pretzels and popcorn at his smug, self-important little face. We did not want him in Maple Rock.

We despised him, the way he sauntered all over Washington, D.C., alongside his father. We hated watching him work the crowds at his campaign stops, his father—who had been president the year our own fathers disappeared—beaming with pride, shaking the hands of the Yale men who would get his son the job. We knew his father pulled all the strings, paved all the roads to get him where he was. When we got fired from a job or arrested for urinating behind the bar, or when the insurance rates went up on the rusted-out cars you used to drive, and when you, our fathers, were not there to help us, we hated George W. even more.

When George Bush Sr. would talk about his son, George W., he'd always say about how proud he was of his boy. Fuck him!

We didn't imagine you were proud of us. What did we care?

BY THEN WE WORKED
, all of us, at the new Maple Rock Mall, on the west edge of town that used to be Rotary Park. The city had sold off the park to a developer because of the economic impact the mall would have on our region. Nobody seemed to care much. It was one less place for high-school kids to drink and screw.

So when the mall was finished, we got jobs there, as promised. Our grandfathers used to work the afternoon shift at Ford Rouge and Dodge Main, carrying busted-up metal lunch pails. At six o'clock they'd sit down to dinner far from their kitchens, eating cold cabbage rolls and city chicken, drinking lukewarm coffee from their thermoses. Our fathers walked into factories and warehouses and fluorescent-lit buildings every morning, brown bags stuffed with Fritos and bologna sandwiches and an apple or a banana. We ate our lunches and dinners every day at the Maple Rock Mall food court—chili dogs and cheddar beef sandwiches and Taco El Grandes—with the buzz of shoppers and elevator music around us.

We were walking into the food court. It was nine in the morning. We'd stayed at Happy Wednesday's well past midnight, drinking union-made Miller Lite, and my brain was a piece of steel wool scratching around in my skull.

"Be proud of what you do," Nick said. "That's what the man said."

"Who?" I said.

"Bill Clinton. Do you remember? When he was running for President and he came to Maple Rock? That's what he said: 'Be proud of what you do.'"

"We work at the fucking mall," I said.

"I know. But we work. We should be proud of that," he said. "At least."

"Okay," I said. "Fine. What brought this up?"

"It's an election year," Nick said. "I was just thinking about it. About pride."

"All right," I said. "I'm proud."

"But that's not enough. You need to take pride in your work, or at least in the fact that you get up for work every day."

"Okay, I'm proud."

"No. Not just proud, Mikey. You're a Knight of Labor."

"Okay," I said. "I'm a Knight of Labor. Will you shut up?"

"This will make us famous," he said.

The last time he had said that, we were twelve years old and he was trying to climb a TV antenna outside Channel Two. I was hoping his vision had evolved.

"What will?" I asked.

"You'll see," he said. "The wheels are spinning, Mikey."

***

OUR PAL TOM SLOWINSKI
worked at Top Banana Smoothies and Shakes. He was the assistant manager. Most days, he worked alone, and he made up a special batch of Miami Mambo, a strawberry-banana-pineapple concoction that he spiked with vodka. If you wanted to partake of this special formula, you just asked for the Mall Employee Special. It cost five dollars. Tom wasn't greedy or stupid: he'd put three bucks in the register, to cover the cost of a regular Miami Mambo, and keep two for himself. Good weeks, he made an extra two hundred bucks in cash and nobody noticed. If you came to Maple Rock Mall in the late afternoon, there was a good chance that your sales associate was spinning pretty hard on a Miami Mambo buzz. It made the days go by with ease. It made $6.50 an hour seem almost worth it.

That was the year Spiros had a stroke and his nephew finally gave up on the Black Lantern. The bar became a falafel restaurant owned by some brothers from Yemen. We were well past twenty-one, however, and we did not need Spiros to serve us our liquor anymore. We drank in the new fern bars around the mall: George Monday's, Ruby Tuesday, Happy Wednesday's, TGI Friday's. I finally had an associate's degree in liberal studies from the community college and had moved on to taking night classes at UMDearborn. That was enough to land me a job as a shift supervisor at the Book Nook. Bookseller was a plum mall job and I knew it. Nick sold Philly steaks at Liberty Bell Subs in the food court and had to wear a patriot's hat. Still, he wore it with swagger and looked good in it.

Our other friends worked at places like the Sunglass Hut, Ingenuity Unlimited, and American Pants. We flirted with the Maple Rock girls who worked at Victoria's Secret and Bath and Body Works, but nothing much came of it, because very few of the women who worked at the mall wanted to date guys who worked at a mall.

When the bars closed, we drove home at night, because we lived too far from the mall to walk there. That was something to miss about the Black Lantern, its proximity to our bedrooms, but we lived in the old part of Maple Rock, where there was nothing worth walking to anymore. Nick drove, and I rode and controlled the radio, our heads swirling, music blaring. I guess we knew we shouldn't have been driving, but we didn't care. We were careless. We were kings.

NICK AND I WERE
sitting in Happy Wednesday's after work. It was Hump Day, so it was packed with mall workers like us drinking two-for-one margaritas and Mega-Mugs of Miller. The weekly Hump Day Honey Bikini Contest was about to start. The winners got $250 cash plus gift certificates. You could win every week if you were good enough—the favorite honeys kept customers coming back each week—and there were a lot of repeat performers. The year's all-stars, as determined by the managers of Happy Wednesday's and customers' votes, could compete in the national Hump Day Honey Spring Break Bikini Bash in February, with a grand prize of $100,000 cash plus a trip for two to Jamaica.

People were cheering. David Lee Roth's version of "California Girls" came on the stereo. The first contestant walked across the bar in a silver bikini. I had to stand to see, the place was that crowded.

Nick stood up and blocked my view.

He was looking at me, not at the stage.

"Have you ever heard of the Flint sit-down strike?" he said.

I moved him out of my way. The next contestant was walking up the stepladder. It was Ella Davis, a co-worker from the Book Nook. We had always been fairly friendly at work, and I knew a little bit about her. I knew, for instance, that she had a five-year-old son at home who had no father in the picture, and I knew that she wasn't on speaking terms with her parents. The only family she had was an equally beautiful sister, Margaret, a graduate student in Ann Arbor who would come over to help with child care on Wednesday nights and the occasional weekend.

Ella was wearing a white bikini that gleamed against her olive skin and long black hair. She was fairly short, about five foot three, with a slight but muscled figure and full, natural breasts. She'd have a tough time against the rail-thin tanning-booth fake-breasted blondes. Some of the women who entered the Hump Day contest were strippers who worked the airport bars in Romulus, and they were no strangers to the moves to make while walking across a bar top in heels and a bikini. Ella was a little less polished, and her eyes had a glimmer of anger when she smiled. But when she got on the bar, the crowd went wild. She twirled around so the men could see all of her and walked up and down the bar three times.

Nick said, "In 1937, a group of autoworkers at the GM factory in Flint..."

Later, when Ella had been crowned the winner and was taking her victory lap along the bar, Nick was still talking. "I mean, in the thirties," he said, "this kind of shit happened all the time."

I looked at him, then looked at Ella. "Do you think she'd ever go out with me?" I said.

He stopped talking and turned to see Ella accepting her check.

"Fuck no, Mikey," he said. "Besides, if you had sex with a girl that hot, your dick would fall right off. It would go into shock. Now, listen, I want to tell you more about this sit-down strike at GM."

As I listened to him, I saw Ella Davis turn down the free drinks that about ten different men were offering. She took off her high heels and put on a pair of flip-flops. She slipped on a pair of gray sweats and a black sweatshirt, and threw a backpack over her shoulder. Some guy grabbed her arm and tried to give her a high five, which she met, slowly, as if it was causing her pain to raise her hand in the air. The man said, "You rule!" and finally let go of Ella's arm. When she was gone, the two hostesses at the Wednesday Welcome Wagon whispered to each other and laughed.

"Hey, Mikey," Nick said. "Are you listening?"

NICK HAD NEVER BEEN
political. Really, nobody in Maple Rock had been political. We voted for Catholics when possible, Eastern Europeans when possible, and usually settled on pro-labor Democrats. But we didn't always vote. I didn't even know if my father and his friends had been Republicans or Democrats.

Recently, however, Nick had brought politics into our lives. He was spending his days off in Ann Arbor, attending free lectures, book readings, poetry slams, whatever he could get into without buying a ticket. I had pretty much soured on Ann Arbor after my application was denied, and I also had outgrown the crowded house parties that used to seem so interesting and wild to me. But even after we stopped going out there for the keg parties, Nick continued to spend his days off wandering around the campus. Then, after Sonya Stecko had started her Ph.D. at Michigan, she introduced Nick to a bunch of graduate students there and he started to date the kind of women who would take him to gallery talks or art films or folk concerts. He invited me along, but I never went. I knew enough to know where I belonged and where I didn't, but Nick had a great gift. He never cared.

My mother once said, "If you could ever harness all of Nick's wild energy, you'd be unstoppable."

Lately Nick had begun to channel that wild energy by himself, and he was determined to bring me, and everybody else, along for the ride. He had met somebody in Ann Arbor—"just some woman," he said, which I knew wasn't true, because Nick had never called any of his girlfriends
women
before. He called them babes or chicks or girls, but not
women.
This one was always "this woman I've been seeing." When I asked who she was and when I would meet her, he said, "I will never bring her to Maple Rock. God willing, she will never have to see any of your sorry asses."

He had shaved his head and grown a goatee, and he worked out obsessively, lifting weights, running, and studying aikido at a gym in Royal Oak. He had acquired an earring and a jazz habit—he was always talking about some classic album he'd picked up for a quarter at Goodwill. And he started to read—history, philosophy, poetry, and anything by anyone he'd heard somebody talking about. He bought all of his books through me because I got a big discount, so I was able to keep track of his intellectual growth.

That night at Happy Wednesday's, he was telling me how he was sitting in on a class his girlfriend had turned him on to: History of the Labor Movement in America.

"It's a lecture of maybe two hundred people, and my girlfriend is the TA," Nick said. "I can just sit there and take classes at Michigan for free. Nobody knows who anybody is."

"You could get busted eventually," I said.

"No way," he said. "Besides, what would they bust me for? I ask more questions at the end of class than anybody. The professor loves me."

It was good to see Nick's interest expanding past driving around, drinking beer, getting high, and looking for fights. Still, the world of books and education had always been my turf. Nobody else in Maple Rock had really cared about it before, and I'd liked it that way.

"I'm thinking of going to college like you, Mikey," he said. "And then I'm thinking about law school."

I started laughing, and beer foam came out of my nose.

"No fucking way," I said.

"Fuck you," he said. "You'll see."

THE NEXT DAY AT
the Book Nook, Ella was pricing a giant stack of remainders and I was trying to think of something to say to her. It was hard not to picture her in a white bikini and heels, walking across the Happy Wednesday's bar top. So I just said, "Congratulations."

She looked at me like I was a bug she'd forgotten to squash.