Please Don't Come Back from the Moon

by Dean Bakopoulos

  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.

  "For what?"

  "The Hump Day Honey contest," I said, and then immediately wished I hadn't. "God, you were there?" she said.

  I nodded.

  "Do you go to those every week?"

  "Um, no. Not really."

  "Not really?" she said. She shuffled around a stack of books. "It's easy money."

  "I was just there for dinner. With my cousin Nick. Do you know him? He works at Liberty Bell Subs. Shaved head, goatee?"

  "That's your cousin?" she said. "He's pretty brilliant."

  I had never heard anybody call Nick brilliant before.

  "He's cute too," she added.

  "Brilliant? Cute?" I said.

  "In Brooklyn, he's all the rage," she said. "Tough, hard-working, wears boots and Carhartt jackets. In Williamsburg, he'd be the hottest thing going."

  "Are you kidding me?" I said.

  "No. There was just an article in the Times about men like him," she said. "My sister Margaret e-mailed it to me. It was hysterical. Carhartt guys, they're called. I read all about it in the Sunday Styles section."

  "How ironic," I said.

  "Exactly," she said.

  "What?" I said.

  "What?" she said.

  "Am I a Carhartt guy?" I asked, then couldn't believe I'd asked it.

  "The tough guy thing," she said, "needs work."

  "Thanks."

  "If Nick's ideas come together, he might just be famous," she said.

  "What ideas?" I said.

  Our manager, Eddie Jones, came over and said it didn't take a whole crew to price remainders, did it? He sent me over to put out the new magazines. I tore the covers off the old unsold issues and sent them back to the distributor for credit. I could keep the rest of the magazine for myself. I had a pretty good collection of coverless Playboys going. Suddenly I was embarrassed by the thought of them. I decided to throw them away when I got home.

  Later, I found Ella having a cigarette out on the loading dock.

  "Do you know that in 1937, GM workers held a massive sit-down strike in Flint?" I said.

  "What?"

  "I don't know. It seems workers had more rights then, you know. They were better at fighting against shitty pay and all of that."

  "Yeah," she said. "I've heard all of this. I've already met Nick, remember?"

  She was looking out into the distance, past a silvery stream of cigarette smoke, past an approaching UPS truck, past the vast parking lots and the smokestacks of an empty factory. I'd fucked up her cigarette break, I could tell. She didn't seem like she enjoyed talking to me. I was about to go back inside and get to work before Eddie came out and snapped at me again. Then she said, "You like me, don't you?"

  She was smiling at me.

  "Come again?"

  "You're hot for me, is that it? You see me in a bikini on a bar one night, and now you can't think of anything but me? I don't know whether I should be flattered or insulted."

  The list of appropriate comebacks was long and simple—Don't flatter yourself or Hello, ego problem—but instead I said, "I don't know."

  "Say, Michael," she said. "Can you cover my shift for me this Saturday? Eddie didn't give me the day off because I need more hours to get my forty for the week. Trouble is, my sister is going out of town and I don't have anybody to stay with Rusty."

  It was my only Saturday off that month. I had planned to go to Ann Arbor with Nick for a football game. There was supposed to be a party afterward, at the house of somebody he'd met at a socialist potluck. It didn't sound like much fun. Plus, an extra shift would earn me a day's worth of overtime.

  "Sure," I said. "No sweat."

  "Eddie's threatening to pull my benefits if I don't work a full forty every week until Christmas," she said.

  "Can he do that?" I said.

  "I think so," she said.

  She flicked her cigarette off the loading dock and immediately lit another one.

  "You know," I said, "I could watch Rusty for you. I used to watch my little brother all the time."

  "I don't know," she said. "Do you really think you can entertain a little boy on a Saturday night?"

  "I've got nothing else to do," I said.

  "Okay," Ella said.

  I pumped my fist in the air, like I'd just won a contest.

  "Look," she said, "I'd feel better about it if you just stayed at the mall, you know, in case he needs me or something."

  "Okay," I said.

  "Maybe you can take him to the movies," she said. "And then I'll give you money for dinner and ice cream. You could take him to the toy store to kill time. He'd spend all day in there if you'd let him."

  "I can buy him dinner," I said.

  Ella put her cigarette out in the coffee can filled with sand that Eddie had labeled, BURY YOUR BUTTS HERE.

  "You're sure?" she said. She looked upset.

  "Are you sure?" I said.

  "No," she said. "No sweat." She went back inside.

  NICK AND I WERE smoking pot behind Victoria's Secret. Even as we embraced the intellectual world, we had some old habits that we didn't abandon. Going through the workday with a buzz was one of them. The loading dock for that store was on the far side of the mall, away from the roads and parking lot, and in the evenings, after all the deliveries were done, nobody was back there but a handful of mall workers getting stoned. We had five minutes left in our break, and we were trying to get high enough to survive until nine thirty. I was looking out at the wetlands and field that the mall developer had to leave to comply with state regulations, and all of a sudden this weird-looking dog walked out from some brush and stared at us, its tongue hanging out.

  "Look at that dog," I said.

  "That's a coyote," Nick said.

  "There's no fucking coyotes around here," I said.

  "Bullshit, coyotes are everywhere."

  "No, they're desert animals. They're in places like Arizona and New Mexico."

  "No, they can live anywhere. You just never see them around here. They're afraid of people."

  The creature was thin and matted and looked a little squirrelly to be somebody's stray mutt. It froze when it saw us and then took off, with not even a little wag of its tail.

  "Shit, that was a sign," Nick said. "An affirmation."

  I started laughing and took one last hit off the joint. I was getting pretty bored with pot. It generally made me feel like shit the next morning and aggravated my allergies, but I was way more bored with working at the mall than I was with weed. Still, I had a story to write for my creative writing class, which I desperately wanted to do well in. I wanted the instructor to dub me an heir to the Hemingway magic. The previous week, he'd handed back my first attempt at a workshop story. On top of the first page, in bold red letters, he'd written, There are no more interesting or intelligent stories left to write about drunks. Find a new subject and try again.

  "That was a sign," Nick said. "Talking coyotes, man, talking coyotes."

  "Oh, yeah? Did he talk?" I said.

  "Mikey, you don't listen to spirit animals with your ears. You listen with your heart."

  I was getting a little sick of Nick the guru. I was ready for the old fuckface Nick who communicated by punching the hell out of my arm or throwing bottles caps at my head.

  I walked Nick back to the food court. I hoped Tom was still on the clock. I was feeling depressed after the joint, and was thinking that maybe some Miami Mambo would do the trick. I would write my story the next night.

  As we walked through the mall, a salesgirl from Banana Republic waved at us; a few guys at the Sharper Image and the counter woman at
the Thomas Kinkaid Gallery waved too. At the Arby's, a few guys shouted out, "Comrade!" When we walked by the Successories store, a red-haired guy in a suit came to the entrance and glared at Nick. He was standing next to a Serenity Desktop Rock Garden display, but he looked anything but serene. When we were out of his sight, Nick said, "He's one of the only goddamn Republicans who works at a mall. You make eight bucks an hour and you're a Republican? Stupid shit."

  "How do you know everybody who works here?" I said.

  "Because I'm not an antisocial bookworm," he said. "I get out. I talk to the people. I sell submarines and frozen Cokes. And I find out what makes people tick. People know me."

  "You're fall of it," I said.

  "For instance," Nick said, shrugging off my accusation, "for instance, the girl at the Banana Republic? She's trying to pay her way through college. And the guys at the Sharper Image? One has three kids, the other one has a wife on disability and a kid with diabetes. The art gallery woman? Newly divorced, mother of twins. Her ex-husband lost all of their savings in one weekend in Atlantic City."

  "Man, you could write a book," I said.

  "No way," he said. "I got bigger plans."

  NICK DID HAVE A bigger idea than a book. For a change, I hadn't heard about it first. By the time he told me he already had about a hundred people who supported it. And, for another change, he seemed like he was actually hell-bent on pursuing this idea, not just letting it die out in a series of barroom conversations.

  "On the Friday after Thanksgiving," he said, "the biggest motherfucking shopping day of the American year, Maple Rock Mall will be the sight of the biggest sit-down strike since 1937. We'll be on CNN. We'll be on the cover of Time. They'll want to make movies about us."

  "Why?"

  "Man, if my fucking dad sees this, he'll shit himself. Yours, too. Can you imagine it?"

  "What are you going to do?" I said. I was getting nervous. My thoughts moved to worst-case scenarios: A bomb? A riot? A full-scale invasion?