by Paul Clemens
At some level I always preferred my father’s pessimism, his sense that things may be all right—for now. Contentment was always precarious, temporary. Neither could I ever really abide being in the presence of an authority figure who had nice things to say about me, even when the compliments were coming secondhand. “Your Paul is doing wonderfully,” the nuns would sometimes tell my mother as she picked me up from school, and I came to fear such moments the way thuggish kids from single-parent homes fear spelling bees and state exams. Later in life, during discussions with the boss, any turn in the conversation toward “I don’t need to tell you how pleased we all are with the work you’ve done here,” and it seemed a certainty that I’d end up on the floor in the fetal position, my fingers stuffed in my ears to drown out the unholy sound of positive reinforcement. Such bucking up might work on the kids in public school, where the culture of self-help seemed to hold sway. But though my mother scolded him for it, my father was right to be so impossible to please. Why send a kid to Catholic school for thirteen years, after all, if not to cultivate, at least a little, the tragic sense of life?
While most of the kids who went to Sal’s for haircuts came from Detroit, the men split more or less evenly between city and suburb, with a handful driving a substantial distance, coming in from the subdivision known unofficially as “Mafia Meadows,” which was out at 16 Mile Road and Moravian in Macomb County. Most of the men no longer living in the city came from Grosse Pointe, however; this meant, in many cases, that they now lived quite a bit closer to the barbershop, which was located just a couple miles up from the Grosse Pointe border, than they had when they still lived in the city itself. In Grosse Pointe, with its tree-lined streets and well-maintained colonials and Cape Cods, it wasn’t too hard to imagine that one was in some college town out East, a place populated by rich kids with winning personalities and progressive social ideals and professors in aged Volvos, listening to National Public Radio.
When I was younger my mother would often drag me to Grosse Pointe garage sales in search of clothes, once worn by rich kids, that her little boy could grow into. I’d reluctantly try on shirts and sweaters in driveways while my mother tugged at fabric and talked, much too loudly, about things like crotch room and putting a stitch in the pants’ legs. “Now it says you’re asking a dollar,” my mother would say, pointing to the tag above the alligator on a faded Izod shirt, “but it’s a little worn. And see the stain, right up here by the pocket? Will you take fifty cents?” My embarrassment at her bartering over two quarters was keen, as the whole of Grosse Pointe seemed to me to float above such concerns. The smell of fresh flowers, a scent I believed the rich produced from their armpits and fundaments, permeated the entire suburb.
Though I began at Sal’s with a crew cut I switched over, during high school, to the Princeton, a popular hairstyle among the preppy Grosse Pointe boys I both despised and envied. Though the bangs hung over my forehead in the appropriate rightward waterfall, the hairstyle failed to attract the long-limbed girls I invariably saw on the arms of Grosse Pointe boys with identical haircuts. If I’d ever given voice to these frustrations the older men in the barbershop would have sympathized, for they too had grown up in the city and had similar unrequited longings. Grosse Pointe was the citadel, and there were few Detroit kids of whatever generation who hadn’t wished to crack it, to enter into the world of pretty girls, private parks, and ivy-covered public schools.
Even those customers who still lived in Detroit—who hadn’t yet abandoned the city—had long since abandoned the present tense when discussing it. Detroit was history; the city they were referring to when they said “Detroit” no longer existed. It could be recaptured only through talk, and barbershop conversations were a way to compare notes in a congenial atmosphere. The customers who said the most tended to possess an absolute, unwavering belief in the truth of what their years in the city had taught them, and if those years had taught them anything at all, it was that the city of Detroit was better off before.
On prominent display in Sal’s shop, along the back wall, was a By Appointment Only sign, which could be confusing to new customers, as Sal, as a matter of unbending principle, took no appointments. “I got one in the chair and two waiting.” He’d say this, picking up the phone, three or four times in the course of any ten-minute span, typically to customers who lived nearby and were trying to time their arrival just so. Some callers would ask an additional question, to which Sal would respond: “Till seven. How long you been coming here?” These two customers-in-waiting could quickly become six, or zero. Customers tended to arrive at the barber’s in waves, with three or four character actors showing up within a couple minutes of one another; it took Sal about sixty minutes to get these bit players in and out of the shop.
Each hour, then, started afresh and followed a predictable pattern. The initial fifteen minutes, while the first fellow was in the chair, would consist of a discussion of the day’s events or just general banter, the what-you-been-up-to of barbershops the world over. But after the first customer had been powdered by Sal, had put on his hat, paid, and left, those still waiting—men who saw what the neighborhood had looked like on the drive in and, their minds following the first customer as he pulled away, were envisioning what it would look like on the way out—would begin to get angry.
“It breaks my heart,” the second customer would say as he settled himself into the chair, “seeing what they’ve done to my old place.”
“At least yours is still standing,” the third customer, now in the batter’s box, might offer. “My old house? Burnt to the ground.”
“My parents’ old place is purple,” the fourth man, face hidden behind the morning newspaper, would add. And then, as an afterthought: “Who paints a house purple?”
This was the intended audience for that By Appointment Only sign: the sort of people who would paint a house purple. It was rare that things ever progressed to this point, but by the late eighties the neighborhood surrounding the shop had begun to change, and the foot traffic had become more Baptist than Catholic. So, from time to time, a black customer walked in and asked Sal if he knew how to do a Dee-troit fade. He sure did, but (turning toward the sign) you needed an appointment to get one, and (motioning to the packed shop) he was booked pretty solid for the rest of the week. Sorry.
There would usually be a moment of smirking silence after the man had left, followed by some earnest self-justification and finally a bit of generalized laughter at the silliness of the entire Detroit enterprise. “Didn’t get a lot of that way back when, did you, Sal?” No—snip, snip—he sure didn’t. Not way back when.
This, then, was the sum total of people’s political position: Detroit was once better off—before the riots, before Coleman Young, before affirmative action and a black majority, before The Fist went up, housing prices went down, and people started painting their homes purple. Perhaps political is not the right word; it was so all-encompassing as to resemble a system of philosophy. White Detroiters of a generation or two before mine acted as if the city from which they came had become, against their will, a universe lost, and thus the yardstick against which everything else—sterile suburbs, slum cities—would forever be slightingly judged.
My father was not among the men in the barbershop. This was rare, since the place was typically filled with fathers and sons. These were men—breadwinners, heads of households—none too terribly enamored of excuses: yours, mine, theirs. They may have bitched about Coleman Young, but they wouldn’t blame his affirmative action program for their inability to rise to the rank of sergeant or to ascend in the city administration. Excuses, whatever truth lay behind them, always sound like bullshit once publicly articulated. The only thing that mattered in life was success—or its poor relation, survival—whatever mollycoddling nonsense our mothers said to the contrary about the importance of doing one’s best. My baseball coach, the father of a grade school friend and a Detroit police officer, had a strategy for teaching the game that w
as as revealing of his philosophy of life as anything else. If, during infield practice, you bobbled one of the ground balls he’d hit your way, he immediately hit another one at you, this time much harder. If you thought that last one was bad, he seemed to be saying, just wait, boy: it gets worse.
It’s nearly impossible nowadays to speak of the primacy of the family—by which I mean a mother and father, with children over whom they exert some control—without sounding like a conservative columnist or politician, a humorless man with a severe rightward part in his hair. And yet, when I think of our corner of Detroit, I visualize first its homes, to the front doors of which I mentally tack a family tree, in much the way that genealogies are sometimes slipped into the opening pages of magic realist novels. Mr. and Mrs. So-And-So are always sitting on the top branch (we never called adults by their first names), below which are the children and occasionally, on an awkward outgrowth, a senile aunt or retarded cousin. All the kids were sent to Catholic school. Each August, the mothers would drag us to a nearby department store that stocked Catholic school uniforms and buy us an exact replica, in a slightly larger size, of what we’d worn the year previous—navy blue corduroys and light blue dress shirts for the boys, new white blouses and plaid skirts for the girls. Because there were slight variations between schools—a different plaid pattern in the skirts, for instance—the store would mark the racks accordingly: ST. VERONICA, ST. MATTHEW, ST. PETER, ST. BRENDAN, and so on.
Families were fundamental to the way the area was organized, which is not to say that anyone spent much time getting sentimental over them as a concept. Families were viewed like most other things in this life, which is to say as sometimes dreary and ultimately disappointing, but preferable to a long list of even less desirable alternatives. (Exhibit A being most of the rest of the city, where the out-of-wedlock birth rate was astonishingly close to 100 percent.) Though they cursed aloud while doing so—and, internally, likely cursed the days they’d wed our mothers and fathered us—the men in our neighborhood, whether in hats and gloves during the dead of winter, or sweating and swearing up a storm in the middle of summer, somehow managed to fix broken carburetors, replace drafty windows, and keep basement furnaces going a little bit longer, while their wives bought box after box of whatever was on sale and saw to it that their children didn’t waste all their money at McDonald’s, like the children south of 7 Mile did, having been born—and this, our mothers knew, was the real root of the problem—to women who couldn’t keep their men. With nothing more than a phone book, a nail file, and a few hours at her disposal, my mother, like all the mothers in the area, could quite effectively have arranged the fate of the planet.
I was driven to Sal’s while still in grade school by my mother, who would sometimes wait with me and sometimes, after checking to see when he’d be finished, run a few errands. In front of my mother, the talk in the barbershop was decidedly toned down. There was, after all, a lady present—this was rare—one whose family history was of more than passing interest to them. Where did she grow up? By City Airport, you say? Hey, so did they. She went to St. David’s? Hell, them, too. (Well, the fellow in the corner went to St. Joe’s, actually, but same difference.) What was that little nun’s name who taught at St. David’s there? Sister what’s-her—? “Sister Marcia Saulino?” my mother would suggest. “That’s it! That’s the one!” “She was my aunt.” “No shi—I mean, no fooling? You hear that, Sal, this little fellow’s the nephew—” “Grandnephew.” “—the grandnephew of one of my grade school teachers. How about that?”
After hearing such stories, secondhand, my father simply shook his head. This was his first reaction to almost everything, even to news that was unarguably good: immediate, mild disapproval. If, growing up, I had told my father that I’d just won a million dollars, he would have shook his head and proceeded to explain, with massive seriousness, that the taxes on such winnings were sure to be a bear. I was never certain why he did this, but I gathered that it had something to do with his disposition, which was geared for disappointment, and which had decided, as a way to ward it off, to do the superstitious headshake, as if the blow had already been absorbed.
He was also, I think, suspicious of the Italian thing—that in the barbershop most of the men were Italian, and as such were prone to talking a bunch of bullshit, talk to which his son, whom for years he had tried to steer clear of such nonsense, was privy. Not that he was prejudiced against Italians. My father had married a Saulino girl, after all, and his best friends from high school had last names like Carnaghi and DiLaura. But my father had serious misgivings about the backslapping and bluster that featured so prominently at Sal’s, and that he believed could never be a life’s building block. It was as if his son was being presented with another option, an infinitely easier path than the one he’d prescribed, a shortcut that was frequently, infuriatingly successful: that of not giving a shit. Put up a By Appointment Only sign, point to it as necessary, and what happened? Nothing. No repercussions. Blacks left; they just walked away.
Better Than Being a Dumb-Ass
A GOOD EXAMPLE of the kind of kid who lived in the area around Sal’s, and toward whom I began to gravitate as a teenager, was Kurt Ketchel. The smartest student at our high school, he had been a classmate of mine for more than a decade, and a friend—if that’s the right word—for even longer. We’d gone to grade school together, and during our senior year I gave him lifts to and from school at a rate of ten bucks a week. He had two sisters, both younger, two parents, seemingly absent, and absolutely no talent for intimacy. I never really knew how he felt about anything; he had no intention of telling me, and I wasn’t about to ask. Violence hovered around the edges of his personality, and during his darker moods, which were frequent, took on a greater centrality. A good Catholic kid he was not. “When you’re growing up, if you know someone crazy-daring and half-admirable, you don’t wonder how the beautiful nut got that way,” Pauline Kael wrote in her review of Mean Streets, speaking of Robert De Niro’s Johnny Boy character. “He seems to spring up full-blown and whirling, and you watch the fireworks and feel crummily cautious in your sanity.”
Kurt didn’t blow up mailboxes, as Johnny Boy does in Mean Streets’s title sequence, but existence bored him, and he was always on the lookout for similar ways to set the plates spinning. His favorite pastime was to steal statues of the Virgin Mary out of backyards. In our Catholic corner of Detroit, such statues were everywhere: walk down any side street and you’d see a dozen in old ladies’ flower gardens. The statues were light blue and white, and a few feet high. The Blessed Mother stood with her arms outstretched and her head tilted to one side, looking down upon humanity, or at least Mrs. Assisi’s daisies, with utmost tenderness.
After hopping the fence, making his theft, and hopping back over, he would place the statue in the middle of a busy street—Mack, Cadieux, East Warren—and wait in the bushes until one of the swerving cars, responding too slowly, crushed it beneath its wheels. The Virgin Mother may have ascended bodily into heaven (as Pope Benedict XIV declared ex cathedra, Pius XII declared infallibly, and the Second Vatican Council confirmed), but for her ceramic likeness there would be no such pomp; she simply lay atop the concrete in shards. In eighth grade, during a violent spring thunderstorm, Kurt had taken the string from one of our classroom’s window shades and tied it around the neck of a statue of Jesus, hanging it out to soak in the downpour and hoping for a lightning strike. Such were his feelings toward Him.
Our eighth grade teacher, a layman, read to us each morning from a book called God Is for Real, Man!, which sought to make the teachings of Christ accessible by translating them, disastrously, into teenage argot. The book’s further problem was that it was published circa 1969 and the argot of that era was Happy Hippie Horseshit, a tongue more foreign to us, in 1986, than French-Canadian or Basque. The book was replete with cool cats, crazy kittens, soulful sisters, and bell-bottomed hipsters muttering absolute, irreligious drivel, you dig? Kurt could never stop
laughing, and it was infectious. He was the sort of kid who could get you in trouble by mere proximity.
“Is that welfare cheese?” Kurt asked a classmate of ours during a lunch hour shortly before eighth grade graduation. His target was a Lebanese Catholic kid, Philip, who in earlier years had suffered from the speech impediment in which a great gob of spit seems always to be stored in the speaker’s cheeks, making every s sound come out sh. Thus, when seeking permission to take his seat, Philip asked: “Can I shit down?” He was an easy mark. “Every day this guy brings a cheese sandwich,” Kurt said, looking my way. “I bet it’s from one of those five-pound blocks of welfare cheese. What do you think?” Philip’s feelings were clearly hurt, so I decided to join in. “Looks like welfare cheese to me,” I said. “I’ve never seen him with peanut butter and jelly, or even bologna. Just cheese sandwiches, and always the same bright orange. Mighty suspicious.” Philip, the pantywaist, teared up, and later in the day turned us in.
Kurt and I were sent to see the principal, Sister Caroline, with whom I had a history. Back when I was in second grade, her yappy little dog, which she let roam the school’s halls, had taken a dump outside our classroom, and I had been the one to step in it. The school’s floors were ceramic tile, and my foot had nearly slid out from under me. Sister Caroline instructed me to clean up the mess, not just from the bottom of my shoe but from the floor as well. At home that night I told my mother what had happened. “That bitch,” my mother said. “It’s what happens to women who don’t have kids. Their pets become their babies. They go a little crazy. I’ll talk to her.” My mother did, which made everything worse. By the time my sister, Beth, hit the fourth grade, Sister Caroline was harassing her about the color of her sweater. While it was green, in keeping with the dress code, it was really more of a hunter green, and the dress code clearly stated that sweaters must be kelly green, to match the plaid pattern in the girls’ skirts. “She doesn’t have a kelly green sweater,” my mother told Sister Caroline, furious. “Well, maybe Santa can bring her one.” Santa didn’t bring her one, however, and when Sister Caroline called home with news of my bullying my parents couldn’t have cared less. They were still stuck on the dog crap from six years before.