Unblinking

by Lenzo, Lisa;

  Well, who am I, then?

  Not He, but s~he. I often present as a lateral hermaphrodite: testicle on the right, ovary on the left, small penis or large clitoris—call it what you want—hormones from both gonads coursing through my blood. At times I look human: half man and half woman. If you’re wondering whether I’m white or brown, remember that race is your invention. And that I take a variety of other forms: from dinosaur to whooping crane, from blade of grass to black-eyed pea.

  If you still want to call me god, fine. But if you’re going to think of me as God with a capital G, then think Honeybee with a capital H and Elephant with a capital E. And for those of you endlessly waiting for my return, open your eyes and look around! I’m back on your planet almost every day. One of the reasons I return, again and again, is to play another game of basketball, on the streets of Manila and Detroit. I come back to feel that sting of sweat and pleasure, and to call it mine. But that’s all that belongs to me: my perceptions and sensations. The rest of you belong to each other and to yourselves. I never made any claim on you, or on those who came before you. Anyone who says differently is lying or deluded.

  While I’m at it, I’d like to dispel a few other myths: I’ve not condoned a single war. I’ve never caused a hurricane. Not one of your religions or governments has earned a place in my regard. Do I seem bitter and angry? Are you wondering why? It’s because you are the destroying angels of this Earth—which, by the way, is among my favorite planets.

  The only reason I haven’t wiped you off the face of this globe—well, there are two reasons, really. One, because it looks like you’re going to do it all by yourselves, and sooner rather than later; and, two, because whenever I look at a human baby, I’m filled with agape and awe. If only there were someone other than adult humans to raise these lovely creatures. They are such promising little animals, and yet gradually, you taint them, you turn them into replicas of yourselves. I used to think that atheists were my favorite humans, but really, I like babies best. Babies hungry for the world and drinking it in, through their mouths, eyes, hands, and skin. “Da-da-da,” a human baby says, and no, she is not saying “Daddy” or “Papa”—that’s just you fathers appropriating a child’s first exclamation. She is calling out to me: her true father, her first mother. She is saying, I’m here, with you—are you here, with me? She is proclaiming her existence, hoping she’s not alone. And she is the reason I put up with the rest of you: why I have never, or at least not yet, given up hope.

  Spin

  On the weekend of the winter solstice, Murray and I drive across the state to celebrate an early Christmas with my parents. The main event the four of us are looking forward to is a show by James Carter, a native Detroiter and world-renowned sax player. We saw him at the Jazz Fest over Labor Day weekend, we heard his bright, swift notes stream out into the blue summer sky, and we also heard the rocking group that will join him on this night, a Django Reinhardt–inspired quintet called Hot Club of Detroit.

  Now it is forty degrees colder, a huge snowstorm hit Detroit yesterday, and the streets have not been plowed. All except the ones most traveled are filled with ridges of slush and snow; higher mounds of snow rise between the sidewalks and the streets. We think we might have trouble parking and then walking to the club, especially since my dad is unsteady on his feet, so I suggest we take a cab. But first my mom calls the club and asks about the parking situation. “Oh, wonderful,” she says. “Great.” Then she hangs up and announces, “We can drive there—they have valet parking.”

  We ride down in the elevator of my parents’ condo, and I leave my mom and dad and Murray in the lobby and walk out into the garage to retrieve my car. It’s a good car for slush and snow—a Subaru with all-wheel drive. The man I bought it from secondhand gave me an extra key and said, “This is the valet key.”

  I turned it over in my palm.

  “It’ll start the car, but it won’t open the trunk,” the man explained. “So when you use a valet service, you can lock your valuables in the trunk.”

  What valuables? I thought. And I never use valet service. Now, three years later, I can’t remember where I’ve put the key. But the only things in my trunk are a rusty shovel, an old umbrella, and some flattened cardboard I’ve been meaning to recycle.

  As I near the far end of the parking garage, I feel a little nervous, as I often do when walking alone by rows of cars at night. But I remind myself that my parents’ garage is surrounded by high walls, has a gatehouse at the entrance, and is watched over, day and night, by security personnel. Upon reaching my car, I unlock it with the remote, get in, and drive up and around to the doors of the lobby, where the pavement has been plowed and the sidewalk shoveled and salted. Murray grips my dad’s arm and helps him into the back seat. The seat belts are a little tricky, and what with the darkness and my dad’s slow fingers, my parents can’t get my dad locked in. “Oh, forget it,” my dad says. “It’s only a mile from here. You’re not going to crash tonight, are you, Annie?”

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  Then we are off down the slushy, snow-rutted streets, with more snow falling and my mom and dad and I arguing about what’s the best route to reach the club. Murray looks out at the bright towers of the Renaissance Center and the stone tigers of the new baseball stadium and keeps his opinions about how to get there to himself. But then, he doesn’t know Detroit like we do. He grew up an hour east of South Bend, Indiana, where the roads run between fields of beans and corn and where you can still spot Amish buggies, and he’s only been a part of my life and my trips to Detroit for the past couple of years.

  The tires of cars have sculpted the snow and slush on the city’s streets into waves. I drive in the troughs of the waves, the ruts of the slush, and turn left onto Gratiot. When my parents first moved to Detroit, a half century ago, my dad stopped several people to ask them where Gratiot was, using its original French pronunciation: Grah-tee-oh. Finally, the third person he stopped told my dad to spell the street’s name.

  “Oh,” the man responded. “You mean Grass-shit. Grass-shit’s right over there.”

  We turn right onto Brush. I lived two miles north of here for most of my childhood. We turn left onto Adams and pass Grand Circus Park, where as a teenager—most of my lifetime ago—I used to hang out after taking the bus downtown. Next we turn right onto Woodward, Detroit’s main street, which I traveled by foot, bike, bus, and car thousands of times. Then we turn left and left again, and finally I pull up as close as I can to Cliff Bell’s, stopping behind a car idling right outside the club’s door. Cliff Bell’s opened a little over a year ago, and my parents came here last Christmas, but Murray and I have never seen the place until now. It’s on the left side of a one-way street, so my dad has to get out in the middle of the street rather than by the curb. Not that there is a serviceable curb—it’s buried under heaps of snow. But at least there is a shoveled space right in front of the club’s entrance.

  Murray gets out of the car and strides toward the club to locate the valet. I open my window and call him back. “Murray!” He doesn’t seem to hear me. “Murray!” I say again. My dad, who doesn’t like to ask for help, has pulled himself out of the back seat and is standing in the two-lane street, tentatively shuffling his feet as he tries to gain a firm footing in the slush. “Murray!” I shout. Murray turns around. “Come help my dad!” I call. “Take his arm!”

  Murray hurries back toward the car, and I keep my gaze on my dad, hoping he won’t fall, until his arm is interlocked with Murray’s. My mom, who is almost as sure-footed as I am, is carefully making her way from the car’s other side through the waves of slush.

  As I continue to watch the three of them, a man appears at my open window, says something about parking my car, and holds out his hand for my keys. I set the keys in his open palm. He opens my door, and I gingerly step out into the slushy street.

  The valet is a head taller than me, about Murray’s height. His brown skin is a shade lighter than his ins
ulated coat, and he has a scruffy look about him, like the parking attendants who work the downtown lots. A skinny cigar, burned halfway down and no longer lit, sticks out from his chapped lips. He could be my age—just over fifty—or ten or fifteen years younger, smoking, cold weather, and other rough elements having taken their toll. I glance past the valet to my father and am relieved to see that he has made it onto the cleared sidewalk. My mom also is standing where the pavement is cleared.

  “It’s twenty dollars,” the valet says.

  I return my gaze to his face. Freckles or age spots speckle the skin below his eyes. If I were here with only Murray, I would say, Forget it, I’ll park it myself. But I don’t want to create a stir while out with my folks, especially since they are treating us to the rest of the evening, so I take out my wallet, pull out a twenty, and give it to the man. I’ve looked past him again to Murray, who is heading toward us, when the valet says, “You need to come with me.”

  I glance around and then down at the man—while I was looking away, he slipped behind the wheel of my car. “Why?” I ask.

  “So I can give you the keys.”

  I frown down at him, squinting. What the hell does he mean?

  Murray looms beside me.

  “She needs to come with me,” the valet insists.

  “Why?” I ask again, still confused and starting to get irritated.

  “So I can show you where I park and give you the keys.”

  What lousy valet service! Not really valet service—just crappy parking service. And how stupid does he think I am? No woman in her right mind would drive off into the night with some man she doesn’t know, not even in the little town I live in, let alone in Detroit.

  “She needs to come with me,” the valet insists, gripping the steering wheel and looking out through the windshield, impatient to get going.

  Still scowling, I turn to Murray and say, “I’m not going with him—you go with him.”

  “Okay,” Murray says, obliging as always, and he walks around to the passenger door and gets in. I turn my back on them and navigate my way through the ridges of slush toward the club, wondering if I should complain to the management about the club’s parking arrangements and the valet’s attitude. But when I step inside the door, the employee stationed there—a pasty young white man wearing a black suit and round black hat with a narrow brim that makes me think of the Amish—is attending to other patrons. I look around, see where my parents are seated, and start toward them, still a little angry. As I pass the front window, I hear a horn blare and look out at the street and see my car. Is that my horn? I sometimes toot or honk but never lean on it, so I’m not sure what sound leaning on it would make. The valet’s cigar is still between his lips, and he looks angry. Beyond him, I can just barely make out Murray sitting in the shotgun seat. The valet cuts sharply around the car in front of him, and then they are gone from the window’s frame.

  ⊙

  My parents are sitting at a table up near the front of the room, which is still three-quarters empty. James Carter always draws a large crowd, so we arrived an hour and a half early to make sure we snagged good seats. I pull out a chair and sit down across from them. “They have terrible valet service here,” I say. “They make you ride with them, and then they give you your keys. So all they’re really offering is to show you where to park.”

  “That’s not true valet service,” my mom says.

  “And the guy was really rude to me—he kept ordering me to go with him. I finally said to Murray, ‘You go, I’m not going.’”

  My parents look back at me sadly but don’t respond. They are used to people finding fault with their city. Sometimes my parents defend Detroit, and other times they keep quiet.

  I take off my coat and drape it on the back of my chair. Cliff Bell’s is a fancier place than I thought it would be—brass rails by the bar; classy, dark wood trim; low, elegant lighting. Each of the waitresses wears a different style of dress, all of them edgy and hip yet somehow sophisticated. The young black bouncer watching over the bar has on a blue and yellow silk jacket, and the young white man greeting patrons at the door, in addition to his black suit and round black hat, sports trendy, thin strips of dark beard along his jaw line and retro, thick-framed black glasses. Judging by the valet I expected that Cliff Bell’s would be more of a dive.

  “What would you like to drink?” my dad asks. “We should order wine for Murray, right?”

  “Chardonnay for Murray,” I say. “I’ll have water for now.”

  A waitress stops to take our orders. As she speaks with my mom and dad my thoughts return to the valet. Besides being rude, he was extremely unprofessional. An image returns to me: my last sight of the valet, his angry profile as he drove off with his skinny cigar clamped between his lips. A lot of people don’t like you to smoke in their cars, I think. The word unprofessional comes to mind again. Then the image returns, as vivid as a snapshot: the man’s angry face, and Murray, in the dark beyond him, mostly obscured—more a sense of him than a sight. I couldn’t see Murray well enough to tell if he was worried or frightened. I look up from the table and around the dark room with a disturbing thought: maybe the valet looked unprofessional because he wasn’t a valet. Even without the half-burnt cigar, he seemed kind of disheveled. What if he’s just some guy on the street, unconnected to Cliff Bell’s, out there scamming people or even robbing them? Murray has been gone for ten or fifteen minutes. A lot could happen in that time. My car might be stolen; Murray could be lying in the street somewhere. An even darker thought crosses my mind: what if my last, blurry sight of Murray is my last sight of him ever?

  “I’m wondering if that guy wasn’t really a valet,” I say to my parents. They stare back at me as if they don’t quite know what to say. Each time I visit them, they seem older and smaller. I explain my doubts. Then I say, “I’m going to find out,” and I stand and walk toward the man in the black suit and hat greeting patrons at the door.

  ⊙

  I’ve taken only a few steps when Murray strides in through the door, obviously stirred up but unhurt. Towering above the manager, he points behind him at the street. I hurry toward Murray, but slow down a few feet off, stopping outside the perimeter of his agitation.

  “Your valet,” Murray says, “your valet is doing an incredibly lousy job.”

  The manager looks at Murray blankly.

  “Is that your valet out there?” Murray demands.

  The bouncer, whose muscles fill out his blue and yellow silk jacket, has sidled up next to the manager. He and the manager exchange hesitant looks. Then the manager speaks. “We have a valet. But he’s not here yet. He’s not due for another fifteen minutes.”

  “Well, there’s someone out there parking cars for you and he nearly fucking killed me driving around the block.”

  “What?”

  “There’s some guy out there claiming to be your valet and he’s crazy and he charged me twenty bucks. I got in the car with him, and he tore off down the street with his foot to the floor. Then he went racing down this alley, swerving all over the place, almost ramming a dumpster, barely missing buildings and fences.”

  “What does he look like?” the manager asks.

  “He’s about my height and he’s scruffy, with a cigar dangling from his mouth.”

  I speak up from the edge of their circle. “He tried to make me go with him,” I say. “He kept saying, ‘She needs to go with me.’”

  The manager looks at me, and his pale face darkens. “We’ll take care of him,” he says grimly, pulling on his coat. He isn’t nearly as tall as Murray or the wannabe valet, and his hat, beard, and glasses look a little goofy, but the determination in his voice and his youthfulness seem like they might make up for his lack of stature and his costume.

  I return to my parents, and the manager and the bouncer walk outside with Murray. Ten minutes later, Murray comes back in and joins us at our table. “We found him,” Murray says. “He was back out there, trying to park anoth
er car. The club guys tried to get the twenty back from him, but he insisted he didn’t have it. Started pulling bills out of his pockets, and all he came up with was seven dollars. They said it wasn’t legal for them to shake him down, so they called the police.”

  “Are the police coming?” I ask.

  “They’re out there right now.”

  Murray picks up his wineglass and takes a slug. “I thought we were going to crash for sure. I thought there was no way we wouldn’t crash.” I rub Murray’s thigh, and he pats my hand. “It happened so fast,” he says. He leans across the table to include my parents. “You should have seen this guy. First he floors it and tries to swerve into an alley, but he misses and plows right into a huge snowdrift. He keeps gunning the engine, as if he’s going to drive right through the drift. I tell him he has to put it in reverse, and he starts fumbling with the shift. ‘I don’t know how to work this thing,’ he says. So I pull it into reverse for him, and he starts spinning the wheels like crazy, burning down to the pavement. Finally, he manages to get unstuck from the drift. But then he blasts off down the alley, just missing this giant dumpster, almost hitting a row of garbage cans, fishtailing back and forth between all these buildings and a half mile of chain-link fence. I’m asking him, ‘Where are you going? What are you doing?’ And he keeps saying, as if it were obvious, ‘I’m taking you to your spot. I’ve got the perfect spot for you, man, all picked out.’

  “Finally we shoot out of the alley, spin a three-sixty in the street, and then he punches the accelerator again, and we take off at sixty miles an hour and swerve again and fly across this empty parking lot and slide to a stop beside an empty parking booth.

  “‘See?’ he says. ‘Here it is. Your spot.’

  “I say, ‘Yeah, thanks a lot, man,’ and I get out of the car.

  “And he says, ‘Hey, man, don’t forget to pay me.’

  “I say, ‘We already paid you,’ and he says, ‘No, you didn’t.’ I say, ‘We paid you twenty dollars,’ and he says, ‘You paid me, but you took it back. And it’s thirty dollars—see?’ And he points up at a sign above the parking booth that says: Parking—All Day—$30.