Where was Michael in all of these remarks?
He was not there. Not in those words, nor, in fact, in his casket. We’d had a viewing a few days earlier. I’d been set back, seeing him, his still face so somberly in repose, with a slightly grayish tinge. There he lay in the satin-lined casket, in the very suit he’d worn to my wedding a month earlier. For the first time, I saw how big he looked. At five feet eight he was two inches shorter than I am, and I had never thought of him as big. But as I looked at my little cousin’s settled face, I was astonished by his solidity. I had never noticed how much he had bulked up. In the casket, there was no smile. The light was gone and with it, I suppose, the lightness.
Later, much later, writing this, I’ve had to face the fact that on that day at that viewing I was looking at “Big Mike” lying there, not at little Michael. A poet’s line runs, adjusted, through my head:
The great grounding
events in your life
. . . the great grounding events that left you so changed
[I] cannot conceive your face without their
happening. . .
Learning to see when and how Big Mike replaced Michael has been the hardest part of my journey of coming to grasp what happened to my cousin. The old song says, “we’ll understand it by and by,” and the photographic record does show us when the light went out. We’ll get to that eventually, a little further on in the story, but only after we have hit the great grounding events.
At that dismal funeral, so dispiriting, I realized Michael was no longer there; he was not on his rooftop. After the viewing, he was cremated, so there was not even a casket. And Pastor Rinehart’s eulogy also obliterated Michael’s spirit. Yet the pastor had enough remaining intuition—that something had been left undone—that he invited anyone who wished to come to the dais to testify. My younger brother, Marc, a six-foot-four loose-limbed leader of men, unfolded himself from the pew and showed us all, for the very first time, that he could orate.
“I really loved Michael,” he began, and paused, waiting three heart beats.
“Didn’t you?”
He painted a picture of the loving, lively, impish Michael he had known. He prayed for his soul. So love rose, in my brother’s words and radiant face, and Michael was there after all.
After the service, a woman with small children whom my aunt Karen didn’t know came up and tried to press into her hand a wad of money.
“Big Mike was so good to us,” she said.
“He always looked after us. He made sure we were okay.”
This is how we began to get glimmerings of so much we didn’t know.
After the service, we went to Aunt Karen’s house for one last homecoming celebration for Michael, gone now for good like so many other millions. Next to that postage stamp of a lawn, we all gathered round folding chairs pulled up to portable tables, laden with fried chicken and sweet tea, to celebrate the baby of the family once more.
We had lost him at fifteen to jail. Then eleven years later he was restored to us. Now at twenty-nine, we had lost him again. We were commemorating, really, what we called not his homecoming but his homegoing, how he’d gotten over to the promised land.
How I got over,
How I got over, my Lord
And my soul looked back and wondered
How I got over, my Lord?
Oh, Jordan’s river is so chilly and cold
It will chill your body but not your soul
And my soul looked back and wondered
How I got over, my Lord.
The adults were tired and slack. My first and second husbands had a chance to have their first extended conversation. Lunch and talk and afternoon went long enough that they made their peace with one another and, by and by, the kids fifteen and under, those too young to remember the preincarceration Michael, were running races in the narrow street between the parked cars, with two uncles marking the finish line and calling out the winner. Michael’s niece was the fastest, a future champion. We all stood round to watch and took some pleasure in it.
“She’s fast like you were,” her dad, Michael’s brother, my cousin Nicholas, said to me.
9.
APARTMENT, August 2006
In the weeks after Michael’s release, he and I worked together, constantly, assembling the pieces of a possible life, as if doing a jigsaw puzzle. First we laid the job piece in. Then the piece with the school shape. If this new beginning was going to work, everything would have to nestle just so.
We both knew that. We both knew that the next necessary piece was a place to live. It was the chance for him to be an adult on his own, not to live with his mother. I also knew that it needed to be close to school or work. I was clear-eyed that the whole arrangement would take only if the three core pieces—home, work, school—joined perfectly, but the place needed to be cheap enough that Michael could manage it on his scant Sears wages. Each of us scoured the listings. Together, we drove by the addresses, made calls and appointments, and began to sort through our options.
And then we found the perfect place. On Ethel Avenue in Valley Glen, a few blocks north of the community college, someone was advertising a studio apartment in a converted garage behind a modest home. We phoned—I don’t remember which of us placed the call—and the studio was still available. They were prepared to show it to us. Michael practiced telling his story.
The home was impeccable, a modest white bungalow, typical of a certain vintage of Los Angeles, with a mid-torso-high white iron fence surrounding the house, broken up at each twenty feet by a whitewashed stucco column. White concrete had supplanted the front lawn so there was enough room to park two vehicles. Alongside the fence stood some small, neatly tended shrubs and rose bushes spraying white roses.
I went up to the house by myself. Two women met me at the door, a mother most likely in her sixties, and her daughter, in her thirties or forties. They were Latinas, or maybe Middle Eastern. For all of the outdoor brightness of the white house on its white concrete yard and pearly white roses, the inside was dark and cramped, though neat as a pin. Dressed in linen trousers with a black t-shirt and comfy sandals, I introduced myself.
I was a professor, I told them, and I was helping my cousin who had recently been released from prison. He had just enrolled at Los Angeles Valley College and gotten a job at Sears. I would be paying his deposit and guaranteeing his rent. He’d gone to prison as a young person and this was his second chance. He was ready for it. Were they willing to meet him and to let him tell his story?
They agreed, and this time I sat outside while Michael spoke to his prospective landlords. He could charm anyone with his bouncing gait and toothy, flashing grin. Finally, the three emerged, now with smiles on all their faces, and they took us around to the back to see the studio. It was whitewashed just as cleanly as the house. It had a hotplate, and an electric heater. Probably it wasn’t insulated. But it was clean and peaceful. Had it been for me, I could have imagined being comfortable there. And it was walking distance from the school.
Michael said, yes, he wanted it. We all shook hands in the gaze of the late afternoon sun. Since the day was nearly over, I agreed to bring a cashier’s check the following day. As we drove back to South Central, my mood was all melody. I imagined Michael felt the same. When those two women looked at us and said, yes, we could rent the studio, I experienced their act of trust and generosity as a gift beyond comprehension. I experience it equally so to this day.
So we had done it.
Little more than a month out and here was Michael, now with a driver’s license, a bank account, a library card, and a job. He was enrolled in college, with an affordable, convenient, clean, safe, and comfortable place to live. These were the concrete, material, nonillusory basics, a starter set for a life. We had established the realistic possibility of a future, even if Michael had had to move back to the asphalt jungle that is Los Angeles instead of going straight to a fire camp. We had begun a passage through the gates of horn, I
was sure of it.
In my white BMW, I dropped him off in South Central and headed back to Hollywood, expecting to sleep soundly for the first time in a spell. But then Michael called. He wasn’t sure he should take the apartment. I felt a stone drop from a great height to the bottom of a well.
Why not, I asked?
He just wasn’t sure it felt right.
Didn’t feel right, I asked?
He couldn’t explain, he said. He just didn’t feel quite right about it.
I told him to sleep on it. We’d talk in the morning, I said.
Morning came, as it must, and I called Michael. He wanted the apartment, he said. Relieved, I headed off to do the necessary banking, and Michael headed off under yet another cloudless sky to his job at Sears. He called me at midday. Had I taken the check over yet, he wanted to know? I said I had not, because I had imagined picking him up after work so that we could do it together. He had, he said, changed his mind yet again.
He didn’t think he wanted the apartment after all.
“What?” I expostulated.
I was shocked. I peppered him with questions.
“What do you mean you don’t want the apartment? Michael, what on earth are you talking about?”
Michael responded that he wasn’t sure what it would be like if his associates came by.
From a remove, I recall that the word surprised me, but I didn’t ask him what he meant by “associates.” The purpose of the word, somehow, was to insist on his privacy, and it brought me up sharp. I didn’t understand all of that then. I just paused, sucked in my surprise, didn’t ask questions. I told him to go ahead and think about it some more. Disagreement was rare for us.
He called me a few hours later. He said he would take the apartment and that I should pick him up after work.
But then, just before we were to meet, he called again. “I’ve made up mind,” he said. “I don’t want the apartment.”
I was stunned. I could not imagine any possible grounds for walking away from a viable set of arrangements. And we had, I thought, developed all the details of the plan together, based on his desires and my advice. Michael had not given me any glimmer of a suggestion that he had hopes or fears that might derail the plans we were developing. Perhaps I wasn’t listening well enough, but I don’t think that’s it. I think he had finely honed his skills at seeming to be wholly present while also holding significant parts of himself out of view.
I’m sure we exchanged some sharp words. I must have asked some angry questions. But I don’t remember any of that last conversation other than his decisiveness.
What was his plan instead? I must have asked at least that much. His plan was to live with his mother and to ride the bus from there to Sears and from there to Los Angeles Valley Community College. This was a triangle of 8.6 x 9.8 x 21.9 miles. For someone who didn’t have a car. Through the worst of Los Angeles traffic.
It was clear, though, that there was nothing I could do. It was by now well into August. School would start soon. I would have incoming students to welcome, new faculty to orient, and budgets to plan. I bought him more khakis and button-down shirts, spent as much time with him as I could, and headed back to Chicago when I had to.
Over the course of that summer, though, I had decided to leave my job as dean. I would take up a less time-intensive research position in New Jersey. When I got back, the first task on my checklist was to tell the university’s provost and then the president.
10.
HITTING BOTTOM, November 2006
Because he had us—his family, his clan—I believed Michael could defy the pattern of parolees. College was the first element to fall out of the plan. The commute was, not surprisingly, just too much. Michael may not have made it through even two weeks of classes. The job lasted until November, and then I got a nearly hysterical call. Michael was drowning. He couldn’t do it, he said. He wasn’t going to make it. When I had left L.A., with plans to return over the winter break, I had promised him that if, in the meanwhile, he ever called and said he needed me, I would be there. Receiving his call, I went straight to O’Hare. I flew across the country west of the Mississippi in a cold panic, trying to forestall speculation about what I might find. Arriving just in time to take him to dinner, I found Michael teary and despondent. With only twenty-four hours to spend in Los Angeles, I tried to lift him off the bottom.
His account of what had happened was that one day after work some of his Latino coworkers had called him nigger. He fought them in the parking lot, and walked away from the job, never to return. He never told his bosses or coworkers that he was quitting. He just didn’t go back.
So now he was back to square one, or less than that, since now he’d proven himself unreliable to an employer. He was mostly spending his time at home, in the house, playing Football and Basketball Workout video games with Joshua and Josh’s little brother.
This is, in fact, the best recipe for safety in rough neighborhoods: stay inside at all times with young kids for companions.
Sometimes, though, craving adult company, Michael would hang out at the little informal restaurant around the corner from his mother’s house.
Now he didn’t see a future. Didn’t know what steps to take next. The world hadn’t yielded up the fruits he’d fantasized at the end of the summer.
Nor was it supplying those I had dreamed of.
I didn’t have much to offer. I tried mainly to listen. I could promise to get him into an apartment, if he could get another job. But I wasn’t in a position now to stay in Los Angeles and help him pursue new job possibilities. I had too many obligations in Chicago. November was tenure review time, with mounds of scholarly papers to read and discuss in an unending cycle of meetings that the dean, in particular, is not supposed to miss. If anything, the very definition of being a dean is to be at those tenure review meetings. My own professional reputation was at stake. Michael would have to make the next push for himself. I would be back in a few weeks for the Christmas holidays and would be able to spend more time with him then. So I did keep my promise and come when he called, but I suppose in the end I wasn’t there for him as I had promised.
Just before the winter break, the university made the public announcement of my decision to step down at the end of the academic year. Bob and I flew out to L.A., both feeling newly unburdened, happy to escape Chicago’s precipitous chill, and looking forward to winter oranges and nuts. Shortly after we arrived in L.A., I got a good-news call from Michael. He’d found an apartment. He was ready to put the deposit down. Could I come and see it? Michael and I visited the fourth-floor unit, in a vintage 1920s building with Craftsman-style features, overlooking the 101 Freeway, just off of Fountain. It was big and spacious, with gleaming wood floors, and Michael began describing to me how he and his girlfriend Bree wanted to move in.
I was taken aback. I had had no idea he was seeing someone, let alone making plans to move in together. I imagine that my face must have conveyed surprise, although I think I tried not to react too strongly. Learning how to suppress visible emotion is an occupational hazard of deaning. What I wanted to know, I said, was what the job situation was. Had he lined up a new job? What did Bree do? Did she have a job? Our voices were echoey in the empty apartment, Michael leaning against a windowsill with the sky and freeway backdrop.
This was the one and only time in my life when my interaction with my cousin had an edge. There was somehow something shamefaced in him as he answered. No, he didn’t have a job. Bree was into hairstyling but, no, she didn’t have one either. What exactly were they thinking, I found myself asking? He didn’t have much of an answer and plainly the plan involved some degree of taking advantage of me.
In that moment, I encountered a different Michael from the one I knew. I saw something calculating, which I had never seen and would never see again. I didn’t ask to talk to Bree. All I was able to say was that, no, I couldn’t possibly pay the deposit plus some number of months’ rent plus cosign for an apa
rtment when neither of them had jobs.
Michael’s face tensed.
He said he understood.
And that was the end.
I had believed that I could help. I had hoped we were entering the gate of horn, the passage of true dreams. Now, and only now, I realized that my dream of standing my baby cousin up on his own two feet was a fantasy. It had always had, perhaps, too much of me in it. From this point on, Michael ceased confiding in me. Our phone conversations never crawled below the surface. I no longer knew a way of helping. I couldn’t have, really, because I no longer knew what was going on.
I later learned that in the following months Michael had started working as a plumber’s apprentice for a friend of his mother’s. He had earned several vocational certificates while in prison. And he spent time with Bree. We would learn her possessiveness was violent, yet Michael spent increasing amounts of time with her. According to Karen, Bree cut him three times between December and May, and each time Michael tried to pass the cuts off as the result of someone attempting to rob him.
His mother would, almost kiddingly, tell him, “Michael, I really have to get some life insurance on you,” but he did not say no.
Not quite a year after his release, in May or June 2007, Michael got into a fight with one of Bree’s lovers. He suspected Bree of cheating and thought that if he could catch her and confront her, he would have a way out of the relationship. Late one night, he sneaked up under her window to catch them.
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