In the early 1950s, old Mr. Hill sold off his farmland, and it was turned into this plat of twenty-seven homes on these two mostly invisible and nondescript streets. The houses were primarily of a post-war Levittown nature: small, quaint, necessary. They were filled with the families of the new middle class. There was hope and hostility in these 900-square-foot structures. There were big backyards that, in the early years, all blended into each other, but eventually had to be sectioned off with wood fences and thick hedges. “We” became “me” in less than a decade, but for a while the entire neighborhood felt like one big summer camp.
At each dead end of Hill Street lay an open field. In the field to the west we would have “dirt clod” fights: the goal was to pick up hard-packed pieces of earth and hurl them into the eyes of your friends. Each spring we would take my dad’s riding lawn mower and carve out a baseball diamond, where we would meet every day of the summer and play baseball until sunset. The field on the east end of the street was where we would set up “camp” with makeshift tents of our dads’ discarded tarps and blankets, the neighborhood headquarters where all things delinquent were planned.
The forest behind our houses on Hill Street was vast and seemed to extend so deep that none of us ever found the end of it, no matter how many hours we trekked through its tall pines, thick maples, and white birches. The “woods,” as we called it, was an amusement park of nature where we could fish, hunt, trap, camp, get lost. To get to these woods you had to cross through the open backyards of four neighbors and none of them ever seemed to mind. A large swamp separated the yards from the woods, and the swamp itself held much sway over us. We learned to leap from one fallen tree to another to avoid getting a “soaker.” The water wasn’t more than knee-deep, and there were no critters that might cause us harm. There were hundreds of frogs, though, and we did our best to catch them, though usually the frogs were faster and smarter. There were flowers of all kinds and a requisite number of mosquitoes that appreciated our presence as little walking blood banks for their dining pleasure.
After crossing the swamp you found yourself at the foot of a hill that, frozen in the winter, became our sledding playground. At the top of the hill began the footpath that took us deep into the infinite woods. We would hike for hours, though no one used the word hike, as that implied a planned activity. None of what we did in our free time as kids was ever planned or structured in any way. It just was. An hour of homework and then “git outside and git the stink blown off ya!” were the orders from our dads.
We stalked deer and rabbits and coons; we had BB guns and bows and arrows, and occasionally the boys next door brought out their bird gun so we could shoot pheasants. And we were ten. Heaven. The adults left us alone, and we went on many expeditions in those woods, packing lunches of Spam, which we would cook on our “buddy burners,” empty tin cans with a wad of cardboard tightly stuffed inside and covered with the wax we would melt and drip over it. Later, we would light our buddy burners, and the waxed cardboard would burn slow enough to grill our Spam. More Heaven.
Girls were excluded from all these activities, except the sledding. Our parents would make us take them up the hill and force us to ride the sled down the hill with them. After all, who but a boy was qualified to do the steering? We actually enjoyed this immensely, as we were able to scare the bejesus out of the girls by pretending to steer the fast-moving sled into a tree—but pulling out at the last instant. Usually. There was the occasional crash and crying baby sister, but even that brought us great happiness.
Other than these sledding memories I have no recall of ever seeing any of the neighborhood girls anywhere, and if you were to press me I could make the case that there were, in fact, no girls at all in the neighborhood. Years later, it would turn out, we learned they had spent a lot of time reading, and playing instruments, and making things, and telling stories to each other and to Barbie. This would serve them well once they left childhood behind, but for now they were invisible to our existence, and I guess we thought we were all the better without them. Boys will not only be boys, but boys like to be with boys. And some boys like to be with certain boys a lot.
Sammy Good was different. In 1965, you could be different—to a point—and that was considered OK. For instance, you could have blue eyes while the other kids had brown eyes. Your hair could be a rusty color while others’ may be sandy or dark. There were tall kids, short kids, kids who rode on bikes, fat kids, skinny kids, even kids with chicken pox (and, yes, they all loved hot dogs).
What there weren’t were boys who fell in love with other boys.
Of course, there were those boys, but we didn’t know that in fifth grade. It’s not that anyone was opposed to homosexuality; it’s just that there was no need to oppose it because it just didn’t exist! It would be like opposing unicorns or Atlantis or men without nipples—I mean, you couldn’t hate what isn’t real.
This made it all the more critical that if you were a boy who liked boys (or a girl who liked girls), you had better guard that secret like it was your own personal Fort Knox, sealed airtight and impenetrable. You had to behave knowing you were an alien who landed from another planet, but in human form. No one knew you were an alien, and if they ever found out who you really were, they would annihilate you. The knowledge that you were not “like others” was so scary to possess that if you came across another boy-loving alien, you could not let on to that homosexual who you really were.
But, of course, the other alien would know. Yet you dare not risk making contact with each other, for if you were caught by the Normal People, they could ruin you. Sometimes you had to turn in one of your own just to prove you weren’t one of “them.” It was an often devastating existence to be gay in the fifties and sixties (and seventies and eighties, and… ), and it made you sometimes do very cruel and unnecessary things to yourself and to others.
Such was the case with the boy three doors down from us on Lapeer Street. The Good family seemed like educated people, which immediately made them stick out. There were many fathers in the neighborhood with no college education and some had even barely gone to high school. But in those days, being educated or smart was not considered a drawback. It was something that was admired, respected, even aspired to.
Also in that time, the educated and professional class was not separated from the lowly wage earner and the factory serf. As their income differential was negligible, they lived among each other and shared their knowledge. The college professor down the block tutored the neighborhood kids in math, and in turn the garage mechanic father would be “over in a jiff” to fix the professor’s carburetor. The dentist was available to pull an emergency tooth for the plumber’s kid, and the plumber was on call to fix the leak in the dentist’s house on a Sunday night. That’s just how it was.
And so on our two democratic, egalitarian dirt streets, this was who lived there, going from west to east: Presbyterian minister, manager of the five-and-dime, spark-plug assembly-line worker (our dad), steelworker, postmaster, shirt salesman, the osteopath and his mother. On the other block: truck driver, retired couple, department store manager, high school teacher, janitor, disabled elderly person, grocery store checkout-line bagger, retiree, city councilman, single mother with son, banker. It was the American middle class. No one’s house cost more than two or three years’ salary, and I doubt the spread in annual wages (except for the osteopath) exceeded more than five thousand dollars. And other than the doctor (who made house calls), the store managers, the minister, the salesman, and the banker, everyone belonged to a union. That meant they worked a forty-hour week, had the entire weekend off (plus two to four weeks’ paid vacation in the summer), comprehensive medical benefits, and job security. In return for all that, the country became the most productive in the world, and in our little neighborhood it meant your furnace was always working, your kids could be dropped off at the neighbors without notice, you could run next door anytime to borrow a half-dozen eggs, and the doors to all the homes w
ere never locked—because who would need to steal anything if they already had all that they needed?
But, dear reader, before you start playing Stephen Foster and “The Star Spangled Banner,” I need to remind you what you may already know: This idyllic existence (so aptly documented on shows like Donna Reed and Father Knows Best) had its dark side. Beyond the fact that women were still years away from a liberation movement, and beyond the fact that had a single black person moved into this neighborhood the FOR SALE signs would have grown like poisonous weeds, there was the insurmountable fact that you simply could not love who you loved if who you loved possessed the same genitalia as you. You didn’t even exist to begin with, so therefore you became either very quiet or a very angry actor performing each day on the heterosexual stage.
Mr. and Mrs. Good had three children: Sammy, Alice, and Jerry. If you wanted to pack up a family and send them around the world so people in other lands could see what a nice American family looked like, the Goods were it. Mr. Good was the manager of the local department store. Sammy was the oldest child, about four years ahead of me in school. He had been adopted when the Goods did not know if the stork would come with any of their own. But then they had Alice, who was my age, and Jerry, who was three years younger.
The Goods lived in a spritely brick ranch house with a large, screened-in back porch and a backyard that stretched a decent 150 feet. Mr. Good’s comfortable income, just slightly better (though not by much) than the rest of the street, allowed him to have a maid who came to the house once a week to do laundry, iron clothes, and clean. She was black and took the bus in from the north end of Flint. Her presence did not cause any “discomfort” in the neighborhood other than making most of the women wish that they had one of them, too.
The Goods were not flashy people, and if there was any other sign that they had some extra income it was that each winter Mr. Good had men come and flood his backyard to create a free neighborhood ice rink for all to enjoy, any time, day or night. He had large floodlights that lit the rink, and if you were to ask the neighbors for one of their fondest Hill/Lapeer Street memories, it would be that of a man who turned over his backyard so that anyone could go skating there for hours on end.
Mr. Good always drove a new-model car, usually a Buick. He was friendly but reserved, a bit shorter than the other dads on the street. He was different in two other ways: he had a black mustache on a street devoid of facial hair, and he was a Jew.
Sometime around the summer of 1964 a sound started coming out of the normally staid Good house. It was a thumping noise, a low, vibrating thump that occurred in a repetitive rhythm, sorta like the beat to a song, but no song any of us were familiar with. BOOM-boom-boom, BOOM-boom-boom, BOOM-boom-boom, BOOM-boom-boom.
It could have been Mr. Good working on something with his new Craftsman tools. It could have been a new kitchen they were putting in. Maybe Hamaad, the local exterminator, had been called in to root out some pesky termites or a possum that got under the crawl space.
But no, it was none of that. It was black people’s music. Specifically, the Supremes, a group none of us had heard of. The song was “Where Did Our Love Go,” and where it went was across the three backyards of Lapeer Street, in through our living room window, and straight into my tapping toe.
Sammy Good had been given a record player for Christmas—yes, the Goods celebrated Christmas, their house beautifully decorated with colorful outdoor lights and blinding white angels with trumpets. The coolest thing about having your dad working at a department store was that you got all the greatest, newest gadgets first—the first Admiral dryer with separate settings for different clothing, the first Westinghouse frostless refrigerator, and the first Silvertone reel-to-reel tape recorder (which was my gift from Santa that Christmas).
When the winter snows subsided in May of ’64, Sammy moved his stereo out to the screened-in back porch along with some 45 rpm records. The label on the record said “MOTOWN.” Each record had one song on the front and one on the back. Motown had many labels and artists, including the Miracles and the Marvelettes, the Vandellas and Little Stevie Wonder. Sammy said they all lived near us, in Detroit, a place we knew from driving to Tigers ball games and movies at the Music Hall Cinerama.
We would look across the yards and see him on the back porch every day after school, playing his Motown records and… dancing. We had seen this kind of dancing on TV, on American Bandstand and Shindig. But we had never seen it in person. And there he was, dancing up a storm, in a world of his own, Sammy Good’s Afternoon Dance Party, Live from Lapeer Street.
This created enough curiosity among the rest of us boys in the neighborhood that we would wander over to watch and to listen. The music was catchy, but it seemed exotic, almost… alien.
And thus it was the sounds of Motown and their girl groups that outed Sammy to the older boys who knew exactly what his deal was. He soon began to feel the occasional shove or bump or trip in the hallway at school. And that only intensified. But Sammy’s dance party carried on. A bloody nose wasn’t going to stop in the name of love.
Sammy invited us in one day, something we didn’t expect. The older boys in his age group, the seventh and eighth graders, usually wanted nothing to do with us unless we were needed to fill out two teams for a game of baseball. Sammy showed us his stack of records and some fan magazines that had pictures of the singers and groups. It was a foreign world to us younger boys, but for Sammy it was Dreamland. As he would tell us about this land of Oz called “Motown,” his hands would make these exaggerated motions, as if they were catching air and waving it like streamers, so that we would understand not just its importance but also its beauty. And if we didn’t, we’d be dismissed with the quick flop of the hand, as if his wrist had gone into instant catatonia. “Shoo, shoo, you li’l brats,” he would say when we were too stupid to understand what he was conducting. He tried to school us on what it all meant, how it was all about “the beat” and “the look” and “the style,” and why everything was “fabulous” to him.
So whenever we heard the music we would come running over to be part of his dance party. No girls were allowed, which was just fine with us. Soon he had us dancing with him and with each other, and probably around the time he brought out his mother’s rouge and eyeliner to show us how we could “do ourselves up,” the older boys in Davison, who had been keeping a wary eye on these proceedings from afar, had decided they’d seen enough. It was time to shut this dance party down.
The boys in town stepped up their ground assault on Sammy. He became a victim of multiple slappings, punchings, beatings, and “face washings” with dirt or snow.
Sammy did not take kindly to such treatment and would always fight back, something that seemed to catch his fellow junior high students by surprise. First, he would go right for their eyes, like a cat trapped in the wild. He was serious about gouging them right out of their sockets. He was always able to get his longer-than-normal nails implanted into their cheeks and he would scratch and claw until he drew blood. And he would kick, wildly kick, whatever part of the body he could reach. This was not the Sonny Liston fighting style that these boys were used to. His attackers would subdue him in the end, but it did not come without a price. Soon the neighborhood and school bullies considered him to be too much work to put down and not worth the energy (or the scars) to beat him into submission. They also discovered that, for the life of them, they couldn’t beat the queer out of him. Surely if one of these faggots was just pummeled enough, like over and over and over, the gay would somehow spill out of them and they would be made Normal. But it wasn’t happening, so the bullies gave up and returned to the more entertaining tradition of humiliation via taunting, ridiculing, and calling Sammy names.
All this drove Sammy into a dark place. The phenomenal hate toward him did not, in turn, make him want to love others. And so he took it out on us little ones. We weren’t quite sure at our age why the older boys were so mean to him, but we soon learned that Sammy
saw us as just shorter versions of his tormentors—and he never missed a chance to give any of us a good vicious slapping.
Anything could set him off—seeing us chew gum, mismatched pants and shirts, forbidden attempts to sing along with the songs on the 45 rpm records—and he grew more violent toward us with his punches and throwdowns. One day he tied little Pete Kowalski to a chair for “being bad,” and his mother had to come over and get him released (after giving Sammy a good whack across his face). We quickly stopped going over to the Afternoon Dance Party, but that didn’t stop Sammy when he saw one of us on the street. He’d push us down on the ground. Whenever passing by, he’d give us a good slug. After a while, we did our best to steer clear of him. We were kids; we didn’t understand the hurt he was carrying and how he needed to act it out. Even the adults seemed incapable of grasping such a concept in 1965.
One Saturday afternoon, I was riding my bike down the sidewalk on Lapeer Street and Sammy was walking toward me. I tried to cross on the patch of lawn between his sidewalk and the street, but when I did he screamed at me to “get off my lawn!” He then took the stick he had in his hand and threw it into the spokes of my front wheel—which caused it to stop suddenly, throwing me into the street. He just stood there screaming at me to “never, ever, even look at our lawn” and “don’t give me any lip!” Then he started laughing wildly as I brushed myself off and went running home with my bike.
When I got to our house, my Aunt Cindy and her husband, Uncle Jimmy, were there with their sons paying a visit. They were the relatives known as the Mulrooneys, and their brood consisted of three very tough sons, all much older than me. They lived on the east side of Flint, and I am certain these three boys were much feared in their own neighborhood. I myself was scared to death of them—and I was related to them!
I came up the front steps of our house and went inside, my elbows scraped and bleeding, and tears streaming down my cheeks. The cousin-thugs wanted to know what happened. I told them and they said, “Point him out.” I looked out our picture window and there he was, still standing down the street. “That’s him,” I said, knowing full well what was going to happen next. Unfortunately, I felt no remorse, only a sense of justice. That is, until I saw how justice was being meted out.
Here Comes Trouble Page 5