John Fry had seen Dawn act that way before. She was sashaying her sweet ass around the apartment while he coveted the comfort of his couch and a night’s supply of heroin mix. Then he prompted her for the news.
“How much?”
“I didn’t even have to get the money up front.”
John cradled his high hairline in his paw and shook his head. He was too stoned to get mad.
John “Lucky” Fry’s body looked as though it had been customized to fit a chopped Harley-Davidson. He was two inches short of six feet, 180 pounds, and had tattoos running up arms well developed by years of pumping iron in prison. But when Fry’s body chemistry was where he preferred it, he looked as docile as a grizzly darted by a tranquilizer gun.
The best he could do was roll his eyes upward and lecture through his graying red beard.
“I told you about that, man. It’s what causes problems. Next thing the guy’s got his rocks off and he’s gone. Then what are you going to do? Next thing you’ll be draggin’ your little ass back here and saying ‘Aw baby, I got no money,’ ”
Dawn stuck out her tongue and unrolled the cash in his face.
“Seventy dollars and a thirty-dollar tip,” she said.
She snapped the money once.
“And I think I just found me a sugar daddy.”
5
Emotions are caused from within rather than from without.
—W. ALAN CANTY,
Henry Ford Community College lectures, 1972
The electronic alarm clock split the bedroom’s silence like one of those throbbing police sirens in Europe. Jan Canty strained to push the covers off her body and fought her way to consciousness. She looked around in the darkness, first struggling to remember where she was, then why she was up.
Jan shuffled to a seat at the kitchen table, the room illuminated only by the miniature Christmas lights her parents had strung around the cacti outside a large window. Her head cleared as she gazed at the little lights twinkling on the sharp spikes. Then she picked up the telephone and called her husband Al. She sang softly over her sore throat.
“Happy birthday …”
She thought it was long-distance static at first. Then she discerned it. Al was crying. The only time she’d ever heard Alan Canty cry was during a purging moment of grief after his father’s funeral seven years ago. It just was not like him. And now she felt a little foolish. She wasn’t sure what to say.
“Al … Gee, I didn’t mean to be that sentimental.”
He was quick to respond.
“Well, I just wish you were here because I’m worried about you. You’ve been so sick, Jan-Jan.”
There he goes, she thought, concerned about me again. Jan assured him that the bed rest was producing miraculous results. She wanted to change the subject. She asked him what he had done for himself on his fiftieth birthday.
“I treated myself to dinner at Chung’s.”
Jan could have guessed it. Then she had to bite her tongue. Al already knew how she felt about that.
Chung’s was in the heart of the Cass Corridor, and Al’s outings into that area south of Wayne State had always made her nervous. But she also knew Al’s love of Chinese food. Chung’s servings and its proximity to the Fisher Building made the restaurant too difficult a temptation for her husband to resist.
It was one of his many little quirks she’d noticed over the years. Though he balked at baseball games and other urban outings, often she found herself cautioning him about venturing into Detroit’s most dangerous neighborhoods without hesitation. He seemed too relaxed about it, as though he fancied himself really streetwise.
She remembered Al’s old habit of stopping at a twenty-four-hour gas station on his way home from work after dark. It was within the Detroit city limits. Another mile and he could gas up in Grosse Pointe. But Al opted to stop where the cashier took his money from behind bulletproof glass. And Al rarely carried his wallet, opting instead to keep a wad of bills in his pants pocket, usually a hundred dollars or more. Many times she had visualized someone clubbing him to death after a fill-up. She got him a Mobil credit card, and he promised he wouldn’t stop there anymore.
Al’s brick-collecting excursions also concerned her. Sometimes when he returned, she was surprised when he told her where he had found his latest trunkload. The neighborhoods often were Detroit’s worst. Sometimes there wasn’t any neighborhood left at all. She feared him an easy mark in Hush Puppies and a corduroy jacket as he rummaged among the burned-out houses and demolished warehouses. But Al had to go where nothing was left but bricks, bums, and vacant lots, as though the bricks were worthless unless he pulled them out of the gutter.
“Please don’t do that, Al,” she would say.
He’d respond in that Shakespearean baritone of his.
“Jan, there’s simply no reason to be so concerned.”
Al didn’t seem to have a healthy respect for danger. But then she wondered if she was just being classically overprotective. She thought, what am I going to do about it, anyway? Tie him down?
She was glad he was home OK. She wished she was. She told him she loved him very much. After she hung up she gazed for a while at the lights and the cacti.
She found it difficult getting back to sleep.
6
It is the person who is unable to manage his affairs … who is in need of professional help.
—W. ALAN CANTY,
Principles of Counseling and Psychotherapy
John Mosey’s closest friend made his point clear over lunch.
“You’ve got several options,” he’d said. “One, do nothing, and stay miserable.
“Two, we can go down the street and find a gun shop, buy a .45, and you can blow your brains out.
“Three, we can go across the street to the bar. I’ll buy the first drink and watch you get shit-faced.”
Some choice between two and three, he thought. Die quickly or spend a lot of time and money trying. Alcoholism had already cost him dearly, including a marriage and the daily companionship of his two daughters.
Sober for four years, at thirty-three he’d broken the forty-thousand-dollar barrier in his field, and the door no longer slammed behind him when he exercised his weekend visitation rights. Sobriety meant some self-respect, and he valued it more than a free shopping spree in a liquor store.
But Mosey felt himself slipping. People he respected were fed up with his moping. Even strangers were noticing it. “Don’t you ever smile?” God, he had heard that one again. The last time he faced that line of questioning, he was hoisting five fingers of straight scotch.
“Then,” Mosey’s friend continued, “There’s a fourth option. Why don’t you get your butt into therapy? But John, you’re an alcoholic. So let me suggest you don’t turn your head over to just anybody.”
“Who did you have in mind?”
Mosey was sure he’d heard the name Alan Canty somewhere before, but he couldn’t remember where as he drove to his office a couple of weeks later. He didn’t need to ask the psychologist for directions. The Fisher was a Detroit landmark.
The John DeLorean biography was titled On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors, but after dark most eyes were captured by the Golden Tower of the Fisher across the street. GM was a squatting bulwark; the Fisher Building reached for loftier heights. At night, gold spotlights illuminated its terracotta roof. The Golden Tower looked like a heaven-bound sanctuary above the city’s spotty darkness.
On the lower floors inside, tenants and visitors could bank, dine, buy art, get a shine, be tailored for a suit, and get it cleaned for an evening at the Fisher Theatre, Detroit’s Broadway showcase. Cars were kept gassed, washed, and waxed by attendants. The Fisher even had its own historical marker, citing the building as the city’s “largest art object.” There were 430 tons of bronze, intricate carvings of solid walnut, and forty different types of marble from around the world. Architect Albert Kahn had earned international acclaim with the design in 1928.
Mosey wouldn’t argue with that. The building’s six-hundred-foot arcade demanded the attention of visitors who arrived for an appointment with a Fisher business executive, doctor, or therapist. The artwork in the barrel-vaulted ceiling was awe-inspiring. Cherubs, eagles, and muses soared above.
Mosey took the elevator to the ninth floor and the Detroit Guidance Center.
“I’m Al Canty,” said the man who greeted him in the waiting room.
“Hello, Doctor.”
“Oh no, don’t call me Doctor. I just won’t have it, John. Just call me Al.”
Al Canty looked like the archetype of his profession. He was wearing Hush Puppies, tan cords, and a green turtleneck sweater. Mosey guessed him to be in his early forties and was surprised when he later found out Al was fifty. The psychologist reminded him of the actor Michael Caine.
Al’s office seemed out of step with the opulence of the Fisher. Mosey expected to see a big display of degrees and professional memberships on the wall. He noticed only three, tightly grouped in a corner. One proclaimed a doctorate in psychology from the University of Michigan.
There were about two dozen books, all hardcovers. They were held on end by African sculptures in ebony and other hardwoods. They looked like dark muses of the id, put to work propping up all the accumulated knowledge. Later he learned one artifact was a gift from Margaret Mead. One of Al’s old mentors was a good friend of the anthropologist.
Al sat in a big overstuffed chair, Mosey in a smaller one. The room felt comfortable, like Al, Mosey decided. He liked the print of a flaming-red vintage Mustang hanging on the wall. He inquired about the auto. The psychologist said he liked old cars. In fact, he had an old Packard he was restoring in his garage. An intellectual who was good with his hands, Mosey thought. He liked exceptions to stereotypes.
It didn’t take long for the anger and frustration to come out. Mosey had sat around enough Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to know it didn’t do much good to hold back.
Good, Canty said. He said he liked working with AA members because of their openness. Self-honesty was half the battle of therapy. Mosey’s AA membership was worth twenty-five dollars off his regular seventy-five-dollar charge for a forty-five-minute session, Al said.
“I’ve just ended another relationship with a woman and I’m angry as hell,” Mosey began. “I get into these goddamn relationships and I’ve got this inane ability to pick women that aren’t worth a damn for me.”
He’d helped the last one rebuild her life after she was dumped by a boyfriend, only to find himself turned into her verbal dumping ground. The territory seemed too familiar. After fourteen months he walked out in the middle of their vacation in northern Michigan.
“I tend to pick these women who are always in jams,” he continued. “But the payback is always me getting beat up: ‘Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you do that?’ ”
He just couldn’t assert himself during the browbeatings, he told Al. Then when he filled up, he blew up, and it was over.
“I’m looking for some answers, Al,” he said. “I’d like to know what the hell my problem is.”
“Well, self-esteem and guilt often play a role. What kinds of things do you feel guilty about in your life?”
His divorce. How, he thought, could he be a good father to his girls one day a week? That wasn’t fatherhood. But he felt as though he’d gotten what he deserved.
“Sometimes back when I was drinking I used to wish my daughters were never born,” Mosey explained. “Now look, I don’t have the girls. Those thoughts were sick thoughts, but I thought them. Now I’m sober, but I still can’t forgive myself for the way I felt about the girls.”
“We all suffer from guilt,” Al said. “Look, it’s natural. I used to feel guilty about the time I saw a prostitute back when I was in college. But it was one of those things young men do. As long as you’re not doing it now, it really doesn’t count.”
Mosey spent a lot of that first session trying to psychoanalyze himself.
“You know, my mother did a lot of crap to my dad,” he streamed on. “She always wanted to change him. I grew up hearing it. Maybe that’s why I’m so attracted to these—”
Al finally stopped him.
“Your mother is not your problem,” he said.
Al explained that he was a proponent of rational-emotive therapy, a school of psychotherapy that lends little credence to such notions. The answers were available in the present, not the past, Canty said. In time, he would help Mosey find the answers for himself.
“There’s something you’re doing right now that gets you into these relationships where you can’t pick the people who are good for you. Most people are usually pretty healthy in their lives. But they hit periods of time where they just become disconcerted, confused, lost. We’ve got to end that confusion and set you back on the right course.”
The talk reminded Mosey of books he had read years earlier by psychologist Albert Ellis. Canty said he had studied under Ellis. Mosey was impressed. Canty suggested A New Guide to Rational Living by Ellis and Robert A. Harper. He also gave Mosey a copy of his own Therapeutic Peers, Al’s account of his work with autistic children.
But it was Al’s demeanor, rather than his reading list, that impressed Mosey on that first visit. Mosey never saw him take notes. Al seemed a study in serenity in the big chair.
By December, after eight months of weekly therapy, John Mosey valued Al Canty as an old friend.
“Al just had this aura of comfortability,” he later told a friend. “He just seemed to take everything in stride. With Al, the whole damn Fisher Building could have come falling down around him and I don’t think he would have gotten shook.”
7
Their apartment house was called the Homewood Manor. Its address, 644 Charlotte, was well known among those who processed the paperwork at the Wayne County Morgue.
John Fry and Dawn Spens sometimes bitched about the dead intercom, the flaking lime green paint, and the torn hallway carpeting that had ceased to resemble any color. But it was close to work, and it wouldn’t always be that way.
They often told each other that.
The couple had already picked out their future address. That happened on a Sunday, just after they hooked up in the summer. John borrowed a Ford Escort from a friend and secured a handful of Dilaudids, 150 milligrams of methadone, and a half-dozen bottles of Asti Spumante for the outing. John wanted Dawn to see Walled Lake, where he grew up.
They mainlined a couple of the Dillies and aimed the Escort north on the Lodge Freeway. It took them past the New Center and the predominantly black neighborhoods between downtown and the city limits at Eight Mile Road. They drove past the mirrored office buildings in Southfield and into the affluent environs of Oakland County. John swigged on the Asti, talking nonstop as he wheeled the Escort along roads that wound through the hills and small lakes of affluent West Bloomfield.
They were nearly twenty years apart in age, but Dawn Spens had fallen in love with the balding former biker. Sometimes she was quite maudlin about it, like a heartsick pubescent girl. Many nights later, during a time when they couldn’t be together, she would write:
“My love for you grows stronger with each passing day … I love you baby, so much it hurts me deep inside. It feels like someone is tearing my heart out. You are and always will be the love and light of my life … I yearn to lay in your strong arms. The arms that have protected and supported me … You’re my whole life and you will continue to be my whole life, for as long as you wish.”
John was attracted to Dawn’s more mature qualities. He considered Dawn Spens exceptionally smart. He told others he’d finally found a partner who could think on his level.
“I guess you could say she was the first woman I met in years that I considered an equal,” he’d say of her. “A woman that I could sit down and talk to. None of that simple-time bullshit.”
They were following a cattail-lined back road that Sunday when the couple spo
tted a new custom home sheltered by wild oaks and maples. They found the four-bedroom house for sale, open, and unattended. Dawn ran her hands over the oak-and-white-marble veranda, and John imagined burning logs in the fireplace. They explored the master bedroom upstairs, with its balcony overlooking a woods. When they came in from the upper deck, they had sex on the floor.
Later the realtor arrived. John made small talk with the agent and inquired about a price.
After they drove off, John calculated Dawn’s yearly earning power and announced that the home’s $160,000 cost was entirely within their reach. All they had to do was save most of what she earned, toss in his miscellaneous deals, and cut down on the drugs. Dawn was quite taken by the idea.
“Babe, I want that house.”
Any goal was attainable. At least that’s the way John talked. He told Dawn he once owned four gas stations in Oakland County. At the age of twenty-one he was “clearing $7,000 to $8,000 a week.” It was an often told story:
“I got married, had a kid,” he explained in one version. “I woke up one morning, looked around me, and said, ‘What the fuck!’ Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it had something to do with all those years of my youth, helping my mom and my brothers.
“I called the company up one morning and said, ‘I’m through, man, come check me out.’ So they came out, checked me out. I owed them $26,000 or $27,000. I had about $32,000 in the bank … I wrote them the check. But I went to the bank, drew all the money out, and got started. I went on a nut. It was my first conviction in Oakland County. I got two years’ probation on it.”
John told Dawn they could avoid old pitfalls. Besides, she had a “natural talent,” as he liked to put it. He had invested considerable time making her believe that after they met.
“If you sell yourself as a $15 whore, you’re going to look and act like a $15 whore,” he often said. “It’s always been my feeling that if you feel you’re worth $50, then that’s what you’re worth. In your heart and in your mind you have to feel qualified to get that money.”
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