The first sign of things to come was Nolan’s release—someone posted bail. This was great for Nolan, but it meant people were raising money on his behalf, there were powerful donors, and the case was turning into a political football. People on every side kicked us around. There was a guy named Simon Kaplow, a law professor at Wayne State, who had been involved in local politics for years. He wrote an op-ed piece in the Free Press, he showed up on Channel 7 news. There was a vacancy on the city council, Dee Dee McIlvane had just stepped down, and Kaplow tried to turn the election into a referendum on the five neighborhoods. He backed a woman named Molly Brinkley, a former superintendent of schools; Gloria knew her a little bit. She said, “Publicly I like everything about Molly. She’s got a lot of good ideas, I think she’s honest, she works hard, she stands for the right things, but she’s also personally a real mean little person, she’s petty, she bears grudges, she’s manipulative, she’s not somebody I’d like to have any kind of business with.”
It seemed like every couple of days we saw her face on TV, making her pitch. Detroit has got to get better, but who’s it got to get better for? Who are these neighborhoods really helping out? All of this started out innocent enough, but somehow the tone changed. A group of Turkish immigrants had converted an abandoned church into a mosque and community center. There were stories about where the funding came from, there were complaints about the calls to prayer. People said they felt shut out from the community center. Maybe they did, I don’t know. They felt uncomfortable. Molly Brinkley ran a political ad, about the old church and the community it used to serve. There were photographs, interviews with old ladies. She didn’t say anything you could pin against her, she was very careful, but she got her point across, too. If it’s a choice between these two groups of people . . . that was her point. Even Gloria said, “Something is happening to this woman, I don’t recognize her.”
Then Nolan filed charges against Tony, for assault. The only one off the hook was me.
I felt guilty about that, too. And kept thinking about what Tony said to me, “You didn’t do shit.” Like it was some kind of failure of courage or character to stay out of the way of the legal battle. Because in some way, and I felt this strongly, it seemed to me I was in the middle of the whole thing. Yet nobody wanted to take me on. Korobkin was one of Robert’s guys. Apart from anything else Robert worried about a civil suit and wanted somebody checking up on me, on what I said. Everybody had lawyers, Tony had his lawyer, Nolan had lawyers, we had acquired these representatives and advocates and stand-ins who spoke their own language and managed to fight our battles in such a way that we hardly had to be present at all.
Korobkin asked me not to make contact with the other parties, but it seemed to me there were human things going on here I had to pay attention to. So I went to see Mrs. Smith.
By this point it was mid-July, a dripping, not very hot or cold but uncomfortable close overcast summer afternoon. Just after lunch—Gloria was seeing one of her sorority sisters. I had my lunch and then I thought, screw it, and walked the hundred yards to Nolan’s house.
His mother answered the door. “I was wondering when you would turn up,” she said.
“I’ve been meaning to.”
We went into the kitchen and Mrs. Smith put the coffee on. “Clarence is getting into his baking,” she said and pushed over a tray of sugar cookies cut into half-moons and stars. I took a mincing little bite. She fussed around with the coffee and then she poured me a cup and poured herself a cup and sat down. “Let me say first things first. When Nolan dropped that boy off, I had no idea. He said he was helping out a friend. So let me apologize for that. Let me apologize for getting you mixed up. When I heard what he did, I wanted to say, excuse me, I’ll handle this, you come here, son. You are in big trouble. But it’s not up to me. I got no say, and they talking about a life sentence. It doesn’t add up. Nolan swears to me that boy was walking in the city street. He says the kid didn’t know his way home. I can’t bring myself to disbelieve him. Now I am mad as hell about what he did next, but the only one who got hurt here is my son. That’s a fact.”
“I don’t know if you blame me for that.”
“I’m done blaming. I don’t even blame the other guy, Carnesecca. If somebody took Clarence, what do you think Nolan would do. Everybody needs to calm down. But these lawyers, they don’t let you talk.”
“That’s why I came here today.”
And she took my hand, which was on the table, in both her old-woman hands, which were very dry and warm. There was flour on them, that’s partly why they seemed so dry. After a minute she let me go.
At one point Nolan came in with Clarence. They had just been taking the dog to the park. “What’s he want?” Nolan said. Almost two months later, you could still see the scar on his face, a patch of lighter skin, as if it was dusted with flour, too. But that wasn’t me or Tony, that was Kurt Stangel, when they fought over the baseball bat.
“He doesn’t want anything. He’s paying a visit.”
“The lawyer tells me not to see you,” I said.
“I guess you’re all grown up now. Come on, Clarence. Wash hands.”
“Don’t listen to him, Greg,” Mrs. Smith told me, while they went to the bathroom. “He’s just worried. If he goes to jail, how old is Clarence going to be when he gets out.”
In fact, I started seeing Nolan more regularly after that. We even went running once. I had this idea, maybe it was a stupid idea, that Tony and Nolan could work out their differences personally, and leave the law out of it. Korobkin explained to me, the law isn’t interested in them personally. But I had an answer for that, too. The best way to fight cynicism is with deeper cynicism. These guys all know each other, I said. Everything’s personal. Robert and Larry Oh have lunch together, they have mutual interests, they talk about trade-offs. I just have to persuade all the different parties what their interests are. But Korobkin shook his head. You’ve been watching too much TV, he said. And the truth is nobody wanted to work out their differences, they wanted to fight them out.
We jogged around the neighborhood, past Butzel Park, as far as Mack Avenue. I liked seeing the houses at different stages of being worked on, the gardens in progress, guys painting fences or washing their cars on a Saturday afternoon, women outside with the kids and the plastic toys. Of course all this set Nolan off. We didn’t talk about the case much but we talked around it. I wanted to know what made him so angry; I didn’t get it. These places were scary places before people like me came along, the houses were standing empty, nature was taking over. It’s kind of terrifying, I said, how quickly weeds grow; certain trees as well. All of this architecture, which seems like such a permanent feature of the landscape, needs constant updating, home improvement, middle-class pride and ambition, or the landscape swallows it up. After a few years.
“Who said I’m angry?” Nolan said. “You got some guy setting up a roadblock outside my house, and when I complain to him, he beats the shit out of me. Some other guy kicks me in the head. And I’m the one going to jail. But if you want to talk about architecture, let’s talk about that.”
“You complained to him with a baseball bat.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I like these houses. When you all move out, we can move in.”
“Who’s we?”
The truth is, Nolan wasn’t in great shape; he looked heavy, his color was bad, his breathing sounded anxious. When we got to Mack and Conner he had to stop, so we went into the McDonald’s for refueling. I had a cup of coffee but he needed some sugar in his blood and ate two or three little hot apple pies.
We sat outside at one of those metal tables, sweating in the August heat, in the traffic noise. I said, “This city wasn’t always a black city.”
“When the white people made enough money, they moved out.”
“So now they want to move back in. And by the way, it isn’t only whites.”
“How much money have you people brought to this city that you didn’t
spend on yourselves? On your schools and your houses and your neighborhoods?”
“You live in it, too. There have been jobs.”
“Mowing lawns. Security.”
From where we were sitting, we could see the old warehouse across the parking lot; a black guy in a brown uniform sat on a folding chair outside the office door, in the sunshine.
“That’s not just security,” I said. “It’s big business—they’re storing aluminum there. How long was that place sitting empty?”
“And who makes money from that? I don’t see a lot of jobs in watching metal. And where does the money go to? Let me ask you a question. If this thing works out, how many people from Detroit will be able to afford a house in one of your neighborhoods?”
“I don’t know, Nolan. But let me ask you a question. How much is your mother’s house going to be worth?”
“Only if she sells it, only if she moves out.”
On the walk home (Nolan wasn’t up to jogging back), I wanted to say something else to him, something that communicated part of what I felt, sitting with him on the floor and waiting for the cops and the ambulance to show up. Instead what I said was, “You don’t have to lump me in with the rest of them. I don’t need their house anymore. I could move in with Gloria.”
33
In fact, Gloria moved in with me—just for a while, while she was having some work done on her kitchen over the summer. This was two weeks before the start of school. The job wasn’t supposed to last much longer than that. But you know what kitchen renovations are like, they drag on, they become something else, and sometimes I tell myself that part of what went wrong was just that fucking kitchen.
So she moved in, with Walter and Susie downstairs, and we read the paper over breakfast, and sat in the garden, when it wasn’t full of other people’s kids, and ate lunch at Joe’s, that kind of thing. “So this is what the big deal is,” she said. “This is why people move here.” Most years she taught summer school, she’s one of those people who can’t put up with an empty hour, but for my sake she didn’t, and we had a lot of empty hours. Sometimes I worked on the newsletter, she had a little administrative catching up to do, but basically we hung out together like people in love.
I had worried about living with Walter and Susie. Gloria’s first experience of Walter’s charm wasn’t a tremendous success, Jimmy’s baptism and the party at Tony’s house afterwards. Walter could be weird around women, gentlemanly and politely sinister, and sometimes he was honestly weirdly polite and sometimes it served as a mask for ironic superior feelings. Even I couldn’t always tell the difference. But it turned out that Walter didn’t matter much, because Gloria and Susie got along so well. They both have that little-girl thing going on, in a practical good-girl way, not pink and princessy; and they shopped together, and cooked together, and worked in the yard. Walter and I drove them out to some nursery in Rochester Hills, and they came out with armfuls of plants and had to put their seat belts on between the pots. They talked the whole time. Walter and I didn’t say much. If we said anything it was probably negative-sounding and dismissive, a cover for laziness, but the truth is we were both happy to listen in—like men dependent on the women in their lives to keep up their daily interest in the world. I don’t know how much of it was phony or for show—Susie and Gloria’s friendship, I mean—or a way of getting back at us for something, or excluding us. But it wouldn’t have mattered because we were all basically pretty happy.
The first piece of trouble came when school started and Mr. Pendleton returned to work. His leg was fine; he walked with a slight shuffle, that’s all, but then Mrs. Sanchez let Gloria know there probably wouldn’t be any substitute work for me.
“Why are you telling me?” Gloria said. “Tell him yourself.”
Mrs. Sanchez must have felt awkward. I remembered her spider plants, the heating on overdrive, her framed photos of the kids. She tried to explain herself. “I thought you were in contact.”
“What does that mean?” Gloria said to me afterwards. “In contact is not a good phrase for this. Either it doesn’t mean anything at all or it means something that’s none of her business.”
She was sort of making a joke of it, but it pissed her off, too, and somehow the funny side of it started losing out to the other side. “I mean, what does she have to say anything for? She can say something when they need you. Why does she have to tell me?”
“I got a letter, too. She probably figured it’s better to say something to you than nothing. Because I was teaching pretty much full-time by the end of last year. They had to let me know.”
“That is not what this is about,” Gloria said.
She thought it had something to do with Nolan’s trial, and maybe she was right, maybe it did. Every week new stories came out. I was mixed up in the case, there were racial overtones, and if I were Mrs. Sanchez I wouldn’t want me teaching at the school either. The classroom of a public high school in Detroit is hard enough to control anyway, but if the kids have something on you, something they can use, you’re finished. But Gloria took my understanding as a proof of laziness or, worse, a confession of guilt. And the truth is I did feel guilty about something and spent a certain amount of time trying to figure out what.
Tony was my friend, Nolan was my friend. I wanted to stay neutral. But the press didn’t help—they made it hard to stay on the fence. In those first weeks and months, The Detroit News ran a number of articles, mostly about Nolan. I guess they wanted to own his side of the story—for a lot of people, this was an opportunity. The gun Nolan carried with him belonged to his dead brother. He kept it for sentimental reasons; it was never loaded. There was also speculation about what knocked him out, and the long-term health consequences. Nolan had a heart condition. Apparently, this is one of the reasons he quit football. The standard physical exam, which every college athlete goes through, revealed hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. African Americans have a high rate of this disease; athletes are particularly at risk. One piece suggested that maybe he was having a heart attack while Tony and I were at his mother’s house, drinking lemonade.
Other things came out, too. The Free Press published a story about Clarence’s mother, a woman named Martha Brett, who wanted to move to Arizona and had petitioned the court for permission to relocate her son. Her husband (she had a husband) worked for Daikin AC and had just been promoted to the office in Sun City West. Two days before Nolan kidnapped Michael, the court granted Brett’s petition. On the following day, Nolan filed an appeal and later that night he took a baseball bat to Kurt Stangel’s car. The picture painted in the Free Press was of a guy whose life was going off the rails.
“Let’s not take sides,” I kept saying to Gloria, but she said, “Sometimes you have to.”
Robert James said something funny to me about all this. His mom was in town one weekend, and they had me over for brunch. Mrs. James was worried about me, she thought I looked skinny, she wanted to feed me up. Gloria came, too; we ate pancakes. Everybody was on best behavior. We talked about the case in these abstract terms, as if the only thing it touched on was our political opinions. At one point Robert said, “You know who I blame? The air-conditioning companies. They’re tearing this country apart. Who moves to Sun City West? The only way these places are remotely habitable is air-conditioning and irrigation. But there isn’t enough water, which everybody knows. Detroit is a terrific city. So are Buffalo and Cleveland and Pittsburgh. There’s water, there’s transportation links, there’s history and culture, but because you can’t go golfing twelve months a year, everybody is moving to Arizona. These cities they are building aren’t cities, they’re brochures. But air-conditioning is going to wipe them out again, global warming is going to wipe them out. In fifty years’ time we’ll all be heading north.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nolan’s baby mama. They tried to take away his kid, this is what set the whole thing off.”
“Have they moved already?”
“I don’t know.”
Afterwards, on the way home, Gloria said to me, “Baby mama? Where does Robert James get off talking about baby mamas?”
In fact, Clarence moved out at the end of October. I spoke to Mrs. Smith about it; she was in tears. “That woman,” she said, “that woman has a lot to answer for. And her husband is the worst kind of father. They baby that boy, they give him whatever he wants. All he gets is pizza and ice cream in that house. I said to her, this family has a fat problem, we get fat. You need to cook real food, you need to show him what eating is. But she’s one of those mothers who looks at her fat boy and thinks it means love. Like the fatter he is, the more he loves her.”
“How often will you get to see him?”
“Summer and New Year. Two times a year is nothing. Two times a year is just enough to make him mad at you, for trying to knock some sense into him.”
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