by James Hynes
Or—as he turned away from the gloom of Molotov’s window—there were his less cringe-worthy Big Star days, when he had an arrangement with the bouncer of Second Chance across the street—he gave Danny advance copies of reggae records and Danny comped him into shows—and he saw the Ramones for free. Those were the days when he took the Philosopher’s Daughter to see R.E.M. not once, but twice—once at the Blind Pig and again at Joe’s Star Lounge—and she spurned his advances both times. Once because he wasn’t tender enough, and the other because he wasn’t sufficiently passionate. Stop! he nearly says aloud, and reminds himself that most nights at the Pig or Joe’s, he could buy a girl three or four beers in a plastic cup and at least count on making out with her later on, sometimes even right outside the club in the narrow back seat of his yellow Pinto. “A Pinto?” she’d say, half-drunk. “Aren’t you afraid it’ll, like, blow up?” And Kevin, tugging at the strap of her tank top and clumsily trying to find her nipple with the tip of his tongue, would pause to say, “Kinda adds to the thrill, doesn’t it?”
But the thing is, standing here now in the heat, twenty-five years later and fifteen hundred miles from Michigan, he knows he couldn’t say a word about any of this to any of the girls he’d meet in a lounge like Molotov; they wouldn’t give a shit that he’d seen the Police at Bookie’s on their first American tour. Or that he once drunkenly yelled, “I wanna have your child!” to Patti Smith in Second Chance and that Patti gave him the finger. Or that once, in the Fleetwood Diner at two in the morning, he sat next to James Osterberg, aka Iggy Pop—a tiny little guy in eyeliner, Ypsilanti’s favorite son—and that Iggy accepted a steak fry from Kevin’s plate. Hell, apart from their first conversation vis-à-vis the Rolling Stones and the Black Crowes, he couldn’t even have this conversation with Stella, even though she isn’t quite as young as she said she was. The thing is, Kevin thinks, still sitting in the shadow of the lounge’s awning, Stella would like Molotov, just like she likes watching reruns of Sex and the City over and over again. They usually watch from his bed, Stella clinging to him like a limpet, tapping his chest with her red nails, asking him, what does he think of the shoes Carrie’s wearing? Or does he ever wonder if Miranda is too much of a bitch? Or is Samantha empowered, or just a slut? She asks him like it matters what he thinks, but then shushes him when he tries to answer. So he has no doubt she’d love this pretentious little lounge in Austin: she’d want to live in a hideously expensive condominium in one of the new blocks, right up at the top, and she’d doll herself up every night and come down here and drink too much and laugh too loud, her eyes swimming in Absolut, and she’d wriggle her delightful ass in that awful La-Z-Boy like a happy little girl in the teacup ride at Disneyland, because to her a La-Z-Boy is funny, wonderfully retro, not a stomach-churning reminder (as it is to Kevin) of the suburban anomie of the hideous paneled basements of his youth. That’s what a twenty-year difference in age (okay, fifteen, if we’re going by Stella’s driver’s license) does to a relationship: artifacts that make Kevin suicidally despondent—a recliner, his mother’s cocktail glasses, his father’s golf trophies, his sister’s Partridge Family 45s—are exotic objets d’art to Stella, like African masks or Indonesian batik. Kevin’s depressing Ice Storm boyhood is Stella’s theme park.
He sighs. In the bright sunlight ahead, Joy Luck has crossed a bridge and started up a hill toward the redbrick fortress. She’s dwindled in the sunlight from a flesh-and-blood girl, with muscles gliding beneath her skin, her apple tattoo winking over her jeans, to an incorporeal, impressionist squiggle that means Girl, a couple of charcoal lines narrow in the middle and wide at the hips. He stands and steps out into the sunlight again and starts after her. Stella, Stella, Stella, he’s thinking, how’d that happen? She’s even met his mother, once, through no fault of Kevin’s, the day his mother asked him and his sister to come sort through the junk in the basement in Royal Oak. At last she was selling the old house and moving into a condo—“If you want any of this stuff,” she warned him over the phone, “it’s speak now or forever hold your peace”—and Stella invited herself along, as pert as Sarah Jessica herself in white tennis shorts and a ball cap with her bushy pony tail tugged through the back. She and Mom yakked it up in the kitchen, drinking highballs at one on a Saturday afternoon while Kevin and Kathleen sweated and sneezed in the basement, going through mold-spotted cardboard boxes full of nameless crap that Kevin, honest to God, had hoped never to see again.
“Ohmigod!” he heard Stella cry as he stumbled up out of the basement. “You’re not getting rid of this, are you?” Through the archway he saw Mom in the living room, swinging her leg in the rocking chair, dangling her second or third highball from her bent wrist. He got himself a glass of water at the kitchen sink, then came in and saw Stella bent over the back of the sofa, running her palms sensuously over the nubbly fabric. It used to be white, but now it was dirty white like an old dog, kind of gray, really, with cigarette burns and other unidentifiable stains that no combination of flipping the cushions could disguise.
“If you want to haul it out of here, hon,” Kevin’s mother said, “it’s all yours.”
Stella characteristically overdid her gratitude, dropping her jaw and widening her eyes at Mom. “No way,” she said, stamping her foot. “You are not.”
Mom shrugged and swiveled the tall glass up to her lips. Even backlit, with the afternoon light pouring in the picture window behind her, Kevin could see the lipstick print on the glass. “Take it,” she said.
Stella pivoted to Kevin and theatrically batted her eyes, a little girl who wants a pony. But before she actually said a word, Kevin slumped in the archway—God, he hated that fucking couch—and said, “Where you gonna put it?”
Not “Where are we going to put it?” He was careful never to say “we” with Stella, not like Stella ever noticed. But Mom did.
“Well.” Stella actually shifted her hip and cupped her elbow and put a forefinger to her cheek—just like Jack Benny, though she wouldn’t have had the slightest idea who Jack Benny was. “We could put it in my place,” she said, watching him, “until you get rid of that awful futon, slash sofa, slash whatever in your living room.”
Kevin’s mom gave him a look, and they each drank from their respective glasses, like a salute.
A little later, as Stella was squealing with delight over God knows what in the basement with Kathleen, Kevin’s mother asked him, “So how old is this one.” Very flat, more a statement than a question.
Kevin hesitated, because he didn’t know what Stella had told her. “Early thirties?” he said, like he wasn’t sure himself. He knew better than to try to lie to his mother. “Never kid a kidder” was her motto.
“How do you do it?” she said.
“Do what?” This was an old routine, Mom sounding more like an ex-wife than his mother.
“You don’t make that much money,” she said. “You’re not the best-looking guy in the world.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Well, you’re not bad,” she said. “For your age.”
Kevin drained his water and set the glass on an end table, pointedly missing the coaster.
“And how did you meet her?”
“I told you, Mom.”
“Tell me again.”
Kevin crossed his arms. “She’s my tenant.”
“Your tenant! You mean, she pays rent?”
“That’s what a tenant does, Mom.”
“What do you charge her?”
Now she’s just messing with me, Kevin thought. “She’s on commission, Mom. She makes more money than I do.” He wasn’t actually sure about that, but it sounded good, and it made Mom pause for a moment.
“So she’s in sales.”
“Yup. She’s a saleswoman.”
“What’s she sell?”
“Books,” he said. “Textbooks.”
“Hm.” Mom held her glass up to the light and regarded the level. He knew what she was thinking. She doesn’t seem like a reader to
me. Never kid a kidder, bub. But instead, turning the glass in the light, admiring the stream of bubbles and the swirl of Dewar’s amidst the melting ice cubes, she said, “Now that Beth, she was a neat lady.”
“A little louder, Mom, I don’t think Stella heard you.”
“I’m just saying,” his mother said. “You shouldn’t have let that one go so easily.”
“She let me go, Mom, remember? She moved out.”
Things were about to get uglier when they were interrupted—rescued, really—by Stella herself, thumping quickly up the basement stairs. She had erupted into the kitchen beaming like a kid at Christmas, bearing in both hands his father’s old ice bucket, the silvery round one with the embossed penguins on it.
“Look at this!” she’d cried. “Isn’t it gorgeous?”
Joy Luck is nearly at the redbrick fortress. Kevin crosses a bridge over a creek bed of bleached stones and a stagnant trickle of water, unwholesomely green, the banks overgrown with untrimmed bushes and trees and clotted with weeds full of sun-bleached trash. The walls of the fortress up ahead turn out not to be redbrick at all, but some sort of reddish panels. The sun stings the back of Kevin’s neck; his shortening shadow glides ahead of him up the sidewalk. Joy Luck has crossed a little street that runs between a vacant lot and the building, and she’s passing under the lee of the building itself, which rises seven stories above Sixth Street. But by the time Kevin gets to the corner, Joy Luck has vanished. Kevin stops dead in his wilted shirt and hot, heavy shoes, dangling his limp suit coat over his shoulder. She’s vanished into thin air, squirted from the universe (as McNulty used to say) like a watermelon seed. He could swear he feels the thick soles of his shoes melting into the pavement, and he knows it’s only a matter of time before he’s a mere puddle himself, running back down into the dry creek bed behind him. He turns, looking wildly around him, but he’s the only pedestrian in sight. He looks up at the big block of building looming over him, where a sign says GAIA MARKET, and it slowly dawns on him where Joy Luck is going. Up ahead an SUV turns left off Sixth and disappears into the building itself, and Kevin breaks into a run despite the heat. A moment later, pouring sweat, a little light-headed, he’s in the echoing, exhaust-scented parking garage under Gaia Market, and there she is again, crossing the garage toward a bank of sliding doors.
Of course there was going to be a Gaia Market here. Hadn’t Kevin heard that Austin was just like Ann Arbor, only bigger, hipper, hotter? His eyes adjust to the shadowless fluorescent light of the garage, and his ears to the starship hum of ventilators and the echoing percussion of car doors. Kevin weaves between Beemers and Mercedes and high-end SUVs, zigzagging toward the sliding doors where Joy Luck is just now slipping through. In Ann Arbor every car from junker to luxury auto is marked by the stigmata of a Michigan winter—patches of rust, a rime of road salt—but here even a lowly Corolla has a gleaming finish and tinted windows, like a B-list actress with perfect skin and impenetrable sunglasses. Just as in the Gaia lot in Ann Arbor, many of the vehicles display Obama bumper stickers.
Just as Kevin gets to the glass doors, they slide shut, breathing a puff of cool air into his sweating face. Even though he craves the arctic AC, even though he sees Joy Luck gliding up the escalator within, even though she’s doing the thing with her hair again that pierces his heart like a blade, he hesitates. She’s nearly at the top of the escalator, her head rising between the twin ramparts of a massive floor display of red wine. But Kevin stands just out of range of the photocell, warded off like a vampire by a sign on the door that commands
Love
Where You Shop
Or what? thinks Kevin. His stomach clenches. The peevish professional in him wants to put a period at the end of that sentence, but his inner suburbanite—the guy who goes to Gaia Market in Ann Arbor only when his girlfriend drags him there, the defensively proud patron of real grocery stores like Kroger and the late, great Farmer Jack’s—that guy immediately resents the poster’s imperative voice, its implicit superiority, its barely disguised snob appeal. You’re not just shopping for groceries at Gaia, you’re making a political statement, a moral choice—no artificial colors, flavors, or sweeteners, say the signs, no exploited farmworkers—and you’re also proving that you’re not one of the lumpen, morbidly obese proles in synthetic fibers waddling under unflattering lights up the aisle of Meijer’s, filling your vast cart with family-sized packages of chicken, five-pound bags of frozen french fries, big plastic tubs of chunky peanut butter. Does your lumbering prole, stuffed into jeans and a gaudy sports jacket like a sausage in its casing, love where he shops? Because if you don’t love where you shop, then where you’re shopping isn’t good enough. In fact, if loving where you shop doesn’t matter to you, then maybe you shouldn’t shop here. That’s right, the sign’s telling Kevin, I’m talking to you, Mr. Royal Oak, Mr. Bachelor of General Studies, Mr. Non-Tenured Staffer, Mr. Maybe You’d Be Happier at Sam’s Club. It’s the same thing Kevin hears in his head every time he parks his five-year-old Accord among the Volvos and Subarus at the Gaia in Ann Arbor out on Washtenaw, where there used to be cheap motels and discount carpet emporia and the Ponderosa Steak House where his mother always took him to dinner when she came to visit him in college. It’s the voice that’s telling him that he’s an underachiever in every way he can imagine, professionally, personally, financially.
But it’s not just the snobbery that gets to him. He grew up with snobbery, he spent his teens hanging out at Somerset Mall and making time with rich, smart-mouthed Jewish girls from Franklin or Huntington Woods, or even richer Kingswood School girls, spooky-intense WASP princesses from Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe, and by age sixteen he was used to being cut dead for his store-brand jeans or his haircut or his shitty Pinto. Hell, he wasn’t just used to it—he wore their condescension like a badge, he thought it was funny. (And it’s even funnier in retrospect, because in the years since, he has gone to work in academia, which means that on a daily basis he’s condescended to by experts.) It’s just that once upon a time, Ann Arbor was different, Ann Arbor was above all that suburban class-warfare bullshit. Okay, maybe it never was, not really, maybe it’s the soft-focus blur of mid-life nostalgia, maybe he’s been soaking for too long in Ann Arbor’s marinade of pretension and infinite self-regard—but he remembers his college days and a few years after as a time of great leveling, when even the mouthy daughters of Southfield furriers and the guilty-rich daughters of GM executives found the lanky son of a middle manager from Royal Oak exotic; when everybody he knew voted for the Rainbow People’s Party candidate for mayor, a sexy manager from Borders; when the owner of Big Star Records used to hold parties in the basement of his house in Burns Park and supply the weed himself; when the term “politically correct” was a joke that lefties told on themselves. Sure we were smug, thinks Kevin, sure we were superior, but I was part of something then, I belonged in Ann Arbor in a way that I never belonged at Somerset Mall or in Bloomfield Hills or even Royal Oak for that matter. I was one of them.
Of course, even if you were one of them, Ann Arbor’s righteousness could be a pain in the ass. Kevin can still hear the humorless whine of some grim little rich girl whose painter’s pants he tried to get into one summer evening, the painter’s pants that she wore just tight enough to make her unattainable ass perfectly round. They were toking up on the battered couch on the porch of her communal house on Greenwood Street, and she told him that the personal is political, that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, that she’s sure he’s a nice guy and all, but has he read Shulamith Firestone on love? (He had, and it depressed him for a month, not because he believed a word of it, but because every girl he had a crush on did.) And besides, she continued, sadistically pressing herself closer to him on the ancient sofa, she was thinking maybe it was time for her take a woman for a lover.
“I’m just not that into penetration anymore,” she said, calibrating to the fucking millimeter exactly what effect that kind of talk has on a guy.
But Kevin knew the drill, he knew the speech by heart by now, so he said, “I hear you. That’s cool.” And they each took another hit off the joint, thigh to thigh on the swaybacked couch during the long midwestern twilight, the girl weighing her lust against her ideological purity, and Kevin wondering—as the weed tugged at his dick with little silk strings—what would happen if he put his hand on her breast.
Without realizing it, he’s already floated through the doors of the Gaia Market in Austin as if on a little cannabis cloud, as if he’s tapped into some long dormant reserve of THC stored deep in his body fat. Frosty air smelling of produce curls around him like a big mitt, reeling him in, chilling the sweat all over his body, and he glides past three more iterations of the sign: LOVE WHERE YOU SHOP, LOVE WHERE YOU SHOP, LOVE WHERE YOU SHOP. The repetition is intended to plant the slogan deep in his medulla oblongata, making it instinctive like fear or hunger, while at the same time rendering it functionally meaningless to his conscious mind, like saying “cat” over and over again. That’s exactly what bothers him the most, in fact, and he wants to dig his heels in, but his feet aren’t even touching the ground, he’s floating up the escalator now under the big posterboard banners that proclaim Gaia’s brand identity with Newspeak directness: ORGANIC, PURE FOOD, QUALITY, WELLNESS. At the top Joy Luck is talking to one of Gaia’s whole-food jihadists, an überfoodie, a lean boy with biceps and a wispy beard, wearing a green Gaia T-shirt and matching ball cap. Maybe it’s Ian, about to have his ass handed to him, and Kevin thinks, you tell him, sister, because when you’re done, I want a piece of him, too. Kevin wants to dig his fingers into that smug green T-shirt and rock that grinning, gentle, clueless boy back on his heels and tell him what the problem is with Gaia: that they’ve taken everything that was both special and obnoxious about the Ann Arbor Kevin used to love—the food, the politics, and the attitude—and they’ve packaged it, art-directed it, and marketed it to Kevin at three times the price he used to pay at the Packard Food Co-op. It’s just like Wal-Mart crushing small-town pharmacies and hardware stores, only it’s worse, because the stores that Gaia is exterminating weren’t like the mom-and-pop grocery stores that never knew what hit them, no, Gaia’s victims actually had a political analysis of consumer culture, and now here’s this national, centralized, corporate simulacrum of everything co-opers held dear and it’s successfully wooing away the co-op’s clientele on the same principle as Office Max or Home Depot. And because the brainy Chomsky readers who run the co-ops have a political analysis, they know exactly what’s happening to them: it’s the last reenactment of the Battle of Bertrand Russell—first time as farce, second time as tragedy—as the gentle vegans and pacifists who thought they could wear down corporate hegemony like water on a rock find instead that corporate hegemony has opened wide and is eating them alive, and they get to watch their own death, kicking and screaming like Robert Shaw in Jaws.