Lucky Stiff

by Elizabeth Sims

  I put down my instrument and threw my arms around him. He hugged me tight.

  "Duane, Duane, Duane!" I laughed. "My God! I can't believe it's you!" Clichés poured out of me. "It's so good to see you. My old buddy! After all these years! I can't believe it!"

  "Oh, Lillian," he said, burying his face in my shoulder, "I never thought I'd see you again." I felt moisture on my collarbone.

  "Duane, it's all right." I stroked his beret. He sobbed a little. I held him out from me. "Hey, buddy," I smiled, "get ahold of yourself. Are you OK?"

  "I—I'm all right," he said, sniffing hard and smiling too. With a brave flourish he produced a silk pocket square and blotted his eyes. "I'm overwhelmed."

  Lonnie said, "Hey?"

  I said, "Lonnie, this is Duane Sechrist, my old friend."

  "Lonnie Williams." He held out his hand and Duane shook it.

  "Pleased to meet you," said Duane.

  I said, "My God, I haven't seen you since—"

  "That summer."

  "That summer day."

  "We were twelve, remember?"

  Oh, yes, I remembered everything.

  .

  When I was born, my father and mother owned a bar on Detroit's southwest side called the Polka Dot, and the three of us lived in an apartment upstairs. The Polka Dot was a shot-and-a-beer type place, a neighborhood hangout not as rough as those around the nearby Ford Rouge plant, but none too cute either.

  I grew up in the bar, and while I picked up bad language and a working knowledge of entry-level racketeering, I witnessed few actual fistfights. Somehow I feel this is significant. My father, who tended bar, didn't tolerate fighting, and he was good at heading off trouble. I like to think he tried to keep the place peaceful on my account.

  Duane lived two blocks away and was in my grade. We were special and we knew it. We set ourselves apart because we viewed the world differently from other kids; we appreciated things other kids didn't. Other kids chewed Dubble Bubble; we chewed Clark's Teaberry. Other kids watched Lost in Space; we watched The Dick Cavett Show. Other kids liked The Monkees or the Supremes (depending); we liked the Weavers and Mel Tormé. Total childhood soul mates. I was different because my parents ran a saloon; he was different because his mother was a recluse and his dad wore military insignia on his everyday clothes. But those were just the surface elements.

  On a deeper level, we recognized in each other a kinship. It was the unutterable galvanization of opposite-sex queers realizing that we could be intense friends through our queerness, and by being friends deflect our own confusion. It was a kinship that brought us closer year by year.

  When not hanging out with Duane, I spent time in the Polka Dot. I'd come in after school and the place would be pretty dead, maybe just one or two guys hunched at the bar, muttering to my dad about their sorry luck. Al and Hiram were two of the regulars I remember—both of them in Ford jackets and dirty fingernails. Al was thin and Hiram was tremendously fat, and they worked midnights at the Rouge plant. My nickname at the bar was "the little bitch," which somehow my parents never objected to, so neither did I. I liked to sit at the smallest table, next to the jukebox, and do my homework. My dad or the barmaid would serve me a frosty eight-ounce Coke and I'd sip slowly as I worked on my story problems and vocabulary words.

  I learned a great many things in the bar that no kid learns in school. I learned to listen in the bar. I learned what commanded the attention of adults, I learned what they liked to talk about. The children in my world were obsessed with candy, roller coasters, and scary movies. The adults in my world were obsessed with money, sex, and death.

  One day I looked up from my science book, open to the chapter on monsoons, to tune in to a debate between Al and Hiram.

  "OK, that much you do know," Al told Hiram. "But when a guy dies, what happens?"

  Hiram said, "What do you mean what happens? He's dead!"

  "I mean what happens to his penis? Do you know? Does it get hard or what? I bet you don't know."

  A famous race car driver had just fatally crashed at the Michigan International Speedway, and this was the topic of the day.

  Fat Hiram looked at skinny Al.

  "When a guy dies," said Al, "he gets a hard-on right at the moment of death, but only if it's sudden. And violent. Or painful."

  Hiram buried his mustache in his beer glass, then came up for air. "That's bullshit." The depth of his jowls gave the word a special fullness; you could almost smell it as it came out of him.

  Al demanded, "Why is it bullshit?" His voice was shorter and sharper.

  "Because you don't know what the hell you're talking about."

  The glasses on the bar jumped as Al slammed his fist. "Bullshit I don't! I say Cookie Callahan died with a hard-on. They even have religions about it."

  I, in my braids and plaid skirts, had become a piece of furniture in the bar, as neutral as the coat tree or the shuffleboard table.

  Hiram said, "So, likewise when a woman dies, do her nipples get hard? Or do they stay soft?"

  Al responded, "Now, that one I don't know." He paused, then mused, "What if you commit suicide? I think—"

  "So you're saying," Hiram demanded, "that you get a reward for dying fast and painful? What about the guys that die slow, like cancer?"

  "They don't get hard when they die, they just slip away, you know what I mean."

  "So you get to say goodbye to your family, but you get no final erection."

  "Right." Al wiped his mouth with his sleeve and addressed my father. "How 'bout another here, boss?"

  "Coming up," said my dad.

  Hiram said, "Well, what good's an erection if you don't at least shoot before you go?"

  Al said, "Well, you'll always be ready, you know."

  My dad said, "Forever ready."

  "That's my motto," said Hiram.

  I paged through my science book knowing I wouldn't find the answer to Al and Hiram's sexual koan, but it was interesting to think about it. I didn't exactly know what a hard-on was, but before that afternoon I had believed it to be something nasty and surreal. Now I felt it must be something desirable yet banal.

  While my dad drew beers and poured shots, my mother kept the books and looked after me, more or less. She made extra money sewing custom bridal gowns for an exclusive boutique downtown. Since she could always work on a gown, and I had the bar and school to hang out in as well as my friends in the neighborhood, she'd essentially wind me up and let me go every morning.

  I did have something of a second mother. Her name was Trix Hawley. Trix was my parents' employee who, she told me, had been born into a family of barmaids and barmen. She worked part-time at the Polka Dot and part-time at Tommy's Char-Grilled in Wyandotte. When she worked at the Polka Dot she'd come in around 4 in the afternoon and stay until closing, mopping the place out before retrieving her purse from the lockbox and going home. Trix was an exceptionally mouthy redhead, and I liked her and she liked me. I liked listening to her mix it up with Hiram and Al. Whenever they blew hard about their inevitable futures as millionaires or kept studs, her favorite thing to tell them was "You couldn't pour piss out of a boot." She liked to tell stories on herself, all of which included the climactic line, "I didn't know whether to shit green or go blind!" There was nobody like her.

  When I'd snap my pencil in frustration over some hellish problem in long division, she'd come to my little table and go over it with me.

  "Lessee, five can go into two how many times? None, right? So you leave that space blank and go onto the next one. Now you've got five going into twenty-two. That's what you gotta figure out. See? That's how she works." Then she'd get up and sneak me a bag of Fritos or another Coke.

  Trix was married but had no kids of her own, and she never spoke of her husband. Just as I couldn't imagine my schoolteachers trying on bathing suits at Hudson's or getting drunk, I couldn't imagine Trix kissing some guy I'd never seen, or going to a carnival with him, going to church.

  She talked a
lot about getting out of Detroit. She'd flip her coppery bangs and say, "I'll strike it big one day and then—p'chew! Outta here! Sitting by a pool with an umbrella in my drink."

  Everybody in the bar talked about striking it big one day. Once I asked her how she thought it might happen for her.

  "Kid," she said, "I'm a very lucky person. Good fortune finds me wherever I go. It's a matter of timing. Pure timing."

  "Like how?"

  "Like you gotta be patient. You wait for good fortune, then you jump on it and drive the son of a bitch for all it's worth. Most people just sit there. You gotta work with luck when it finds you."

  I found that philosophy very impressive. Every time I walked into the bar I expected my dad to introduce me to a new barmaid, saying, "Trix's shoved off. She struck it big."

  I asked my mom to buy me Trix cereal for breakfast. The television ads for it were nauseating, but I liked having the box in the cupboard: Trix are for kids! I imagined trading in my real mom for Trix Hawley. I wondered, if I suddenly became Trix's daughter, would my hair turn red like hers? My hair was ordinary brown, like my parents'. I understood that hair color ran in families.

  A few times Trix baby-sat for me, and those were very good times. No homework, just popcorn and the eleven-thirty scary movie, plus she'd let me sip her highball. Seven Crown and Canada Dry, boy, you couldn't beat it. I first saw Psycho while tucked under Trix's arm on the couch in our apartment. Her commentary was enormously valuable.

  "See, he likes her but she doesn't even know he exists, except as a motel guy…. Now, see who's doing the knifing? You can't see their face. That's an important clue. See how they—are you looking? You can look. Don't be a baby. I swear. It's just a movie."

  In the bar I learned:

  That there is a system for picking winning horses, but nobody's perfected it yet.

  That it's better to take a punch in the face than in the gut because your liver can bleed to death without you even knowing it, whereas your face bones and nose cartilage will act as cushions, absorbing shock as they crack. Then you've got a busted face but you're not dead.

  That if you only commit one big crime and do it right, the cops will never catch you.

  That Marilyn Monroe was a very nice but lonely person.

  Al's and Hiram's arguments haunted my dreams:

  "All I'm saying is, if you're playing one-deck blackjack and the rules say the dealer has to deal to the end of the deck and you know for a fact that the only cards left are three tens, and the dealer has a five showing, you should go out and remortgage your house and put all the money you can get on that hand because even if you don't take a card, the dealer's gonna bust. That's why card counting works."

  "Yeah, but you've already bet on the hand before the deal. You can't re-bet in the middle of a hand."

  "What's the difference? For Christ's sake, that dealer's gonna bust!"

  I remembered all those things, and I remembered the last time I saw Duane Sechrist. That summer. That day. In the morning I said goodbye to him, my bestest buddy, whose parents were about to drive him up to some tough-guy summer camp his dad had picked out after finding Duane and me applying makeup to each other's lips and lids. Duane's appearance was unusual even then. While most pale-skinned children are also more or less fair-haired, his hair was a startling, thorough black. The makeup really accented that interesting hair and his soft eyes.

  Although his mother didn't like to leave the house, she would go for rides in the car if she didn't have to get out and do anything. Duane and I clung to each other and cried, and he promised to write me every day. We were facing puberty, and both of us were unhinged at the prospect.

  I tucked a five-stick pack of Teaberry into his pocket and hugged him once more, then he trudged toward his dad's idling car. I waved through my tears.

  That night I awoke to a horrible crackling roar and thick smoke in my throat, and half an hour later my childhood was over. I remembered every second of it.

  .

  Duane said, "What are you doing here? Are you begging, Lillian?"

  I straightened my spine. "I am not begging. I am busking. I'm playing a musical instrument in a public area for any money the citizens might wish to give. This is not a begging experience. This is a value-added street life experience for music lovers."

  "Why are you doing it?"

  "I like to play music. You know I was always musical."

  Lonnie made a little sound.

  Duane said, "Why are you doing this really, Lillian?"

  "I'm broke, goddamn it, why else?"

  "I see."

  "What are you doing here?"

  "Looking for my mother."

  "What?"

  "Lillian, we need to talk somewhere." When I last saw him, his voice was a squeaky altar boy's. Now it was smooth and pleasant, a sophisticated city man's voice. "We've got some heavy catching-up to do."

  "Where do you live?"

  "I moved back here last year from Fort Lauderdale, I've got a place in Indian Village."

  "And you came here to find your mother? Where is she? I mean, are you literally looking for her on the streets of Greektown, or is this some kind of theoretical quest, or what?"

  "I'm literally looking for her on the streets of Greektown. I have a very weird feeling, Lillian. Like I was meant to bump into you. You've stayed in Detroit the whole time."

  "Yes. Why did you disappear after summer camp?"

  "It has to do with my mother. My mother and father."

  "Did you ever come back to the old neighborhood after camp?"

  "Why…don't you know?" Duane's eyes cut right and left and he dropped his voice. "About my mom going crazy and disappearing? While I was at camp?"

  "My God. No!"

  "Then three years later my dad took off, and I haven't seen him since."

  "No!"

  "Not that I give that much of a shit about him, frankly. But it occurs to me that I ought to talk to your mom and dad about my mom and dad. I remember my mom gabbing on the phone to your mom and the two of them—"

  "Duane, don't you know…about my mom and dad?" His face settled into a mask of dread. I said, "They died that night. The night you went to camp." For the second time, we looked at each other and said, "Oh. My. God."

  Chapter 3

  Duane's spanking-new Thunderbird, in Oxydol white, was parked in the structure at Monroe and St. Antoine; I'd squeezed my nearly derelict Chevrolet Caprice into a street spot a few blocks away. He drove me to my car and I followed him to his house in Indian Village. Indian Village, on the east side, was one of the gorgeous old neighborhoods of Detroit. It had gone to urban blight, then been resuscitated by gentle yuppies, and now the big houses, whole blocks of them, were back to their original elegance and then some.

  Duane's place was a duplex; he'd restored half and was living in it while redoing the other half, to rent out, he told me. He'd used lavish materials—curved copper panels in the entryway, bronze and marble insets in the floors, sleek hardwood trim and bold paints. The air conditioning was running and the place smelled fresh.

  We had so much to talk about, so much pent up. We went to the kitchen and, while Duane brewed a pot of coffee, made small talk in a daze, saving up the big stuff for when our attention would be undivided.

  "Are you seeing anyone?" I asked, glancing around for signs of cohabitation.

  "No," he murmured. "I've made some friends up here, but not…no. You?"

  "To make a long story short, no."

  Our eyes met. I said, "So…you like guys, right?"

  He smiled. "Always cutting to the chase. Yes, Lillian, I like guys. And you?"

  "I like guys too. But not in the same way. You might say I like girls."

  "I knew it. I knew it."

  I smiled too. "We both knew it. For a long time."

  I watched him prepare the coffee, seeing a mature man's face and body superimposed over the weedy lad I'd bombed around the neighborhood with. His face looked good. As a boy,
his full upper lip and especially his ears had overpowered his face, but now the rest of it had caught up. His face was lean, the skin taut and clear, but it stopped short of being bony. His smile stretched bright and wide.

  He'd grown into his body too. The current gay-guy fashion was big muscles, low fat, tight clothes, but Duane had gone retro, in more of a Cole Porter direction. His tailored suit was elegantly roomy, and he wore it with languor. Yes, that was it: His was a languorous body: not slack, but not quite ready for fast action either.

  He was evaluating me too. As he drew water from a chrome gooseneck tap he said over his shoulder, "You look great, by the way. How do you stay so thin? Well, you were always a skinny kid. Of course, so was I, but now as a grown-up I can only eat about three ounces of food a day or I get as big as a house."

  At first there was a weird tension that we talked hurriedly around, but then I began to feel easy with him, like in the old days.

  "Sweetheart, do me a favor and look in the pantry." Duane pulsed the coffee beans in the grinder. "Do you see a package of madeleines? I'm assuming you've had dinner."

  "I'm not terribly hungry. What are madeleines? These cookies?"

  "Oh dear, oh dear. Yes. Those are madeleines." He flipped his fingers through his lanky black hair, exposing, to my horror, streaks of gray. Are we that old?

  I shut out that reality and said, "You know, you've really gone up in style, Cub Scout."

  "Go ahead and say it: I've become effete."

  "Don't know as I'd go quite—"

  "Effete! Effete! Effete! I know I am. Effete and proud!"

  "Whatever. How did you pay for all this? Granite countertops and all?"

  "Oh, you are Midwestern. Taking for granted that it's paid for."

  "You're from here too."

  He pulled a pack of Marlboros and a box of matches from his side pocket and lit one. He blew the match out and pointed the charred end at me. "I'm from here, but not of here. Oh, I'm sorry. Cigarette?"

  "Not right now, thanks," I said. "Come to think of it, I've never thought of you as a true Detroiter. No, I guess you never were."