Ted: “The guys in charge.”
Me: “You like the other guys better?”
Ted: “No. All politicians are liars.”
So much for George Will.
A Northwestern University study of people who do not vote—compiled into a 1999 book, Nonvoters: America’s No-Shows, by Jack C. Doppelt and Ellen Shearer—confirms some intuitive impressions about the group. Interestingly, Ted seems to be remarkably typical. So does Kim. She doesn’t vote, either, and for a lot of the same reasons.
Like the majority of nonvoters, Ted and Kim are between the ages of eighteen and forty-four, are white, have below-average incomes and high school educations. Moreover, they seem to fit into not just one but three of the five categories of nonvoter that the book identifies: They are “irritables” because they don’t like the way most things in the country are going. They are “alienateds” because they mistrust and disbelieve politicians. And they are “unpluggeds” because they tune out the news.
Me: “What have you heard about the presidential campaign?”
Ted: “When I was watching the farm report on TV this morning, they mentioned something about it.”
Me: “What was that?”
Ted: “I don’t know. I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth.”
Me: “Why don’t you guys watch the news?”
Kim: “Too much war and crap.”
Ted: “It’s too depressing. They’re always talking about everything bad.”
Kim: “Like whose head got chopped off.”
Ted: “If something’s good, it doesn’t make the news.”
Ted takes a bite of the fried-onion appetizer: “They usually get the weather wrong, too.”
Ted has a likable laugh, a heh-heh bark, punctuation to acknowledge irony.
Slate is winsome, an Opie Taylor type just shedding the last traces of a little-kid lithp. Kim, a green-eyed blonde, is disarmingly straightforward and friendly. Of the three, Ted is the most reserved. He is wiry-handsome, and with the baseball caps he favors, he’s got the look of a veteran middle reliever, down to the stoic demeanor and the requisite mustache-and-goatee combo.
Many weeks, Ted pulls in less than $500, and Kim—who used to manage a video store—hasn’t worked steadily since Slate was born. During times when construction work is light, they sometimes subsist on what Ted brings home from fishing and hunting and scavenging for wild mushrooms. The fungal forays are often done with Slate in tow because, being low to the ground, he’s a better morel hunter.
It’s a rule of thumb that mushrooms with insects crawling on them are the safe ones to eat. In Ted’s world, that’s just one of those homely facts of life you accept and live with if you’re a survivor. Another is that life isn’t always fair.
Ted and Kim live in Twin Lake, a blue-collar Muskegon suburb of 1,600. Until recently, their home was an apartment above John’s Market, right under the big wooden sign advertising CHOICE MEATS COLD BEER WINE LIQUOR. Some months ago, the store got a new owner. John’s is now owned by Deedar. Deedar Singh.
“Foreign guy,” says Ted. He does an excellent imitation of the voice of Apu, the Indian convenience-store proprietor from The Simpsons.
Ted is not altogether happy with the influx of foreigners into the United States. He’s heard that they don’t even have to pay taxes for the first five years they live in this country. He’s not sure where he heard it, but he’s pretty sure it’s true, and it just doesn’t seem right.
No, it’s not true, but Ted doesn’t seem convinced. He is not easily shaken from his view of the world as an uneven playing field, and things keep happening to confirm it. Pretty quickly, Ted got into a rent dispute with Singh. It wound up in court, and Ted and Kim had to move.
To Ted, life is something that happens to you; sometimes it’s good, sometimes not. And, as it happens, this turned out fine. Ted and Kim wound up buying a house together a few blocks away. Kim was married before, but this is the first home she’s ever owned. Ted, too. It’s a humble starter house—a two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow, less than 1,000 square feet, all told. The price came to $72,000, counting closing costs. The thing Ted remembers most about the closing is that when it was over, he got a check for $497. “They gave me money to buy my house!”
Ted doesn’t know much about the intricacies of home financing, or cash-back transactions, and he never asked about this sudden bounty. It was just one of those things that happen.
The house may be small, but it’s cozy, and the back yard is big—nearly an acre. So they’ve gotten themselves a pup, a friendly chow mix named Buddy. “We bought Slate a video game, but it’s stayed on the shelf ever since we moved,” Ted says. At first, it sounds like he is grumping about Slate’s ingratitude. But then he says, matter-of-factly, “My son has a back yard now.” Ted doesn’t readily show emotion, even pride.
It’s hard for me not to like Ted and Kim; they seem almost entirely without pretension.
The Chili’s waitress delivers our entrees. They’re still sizzling, served in cast-iron skillets, the handles of which are sheathed by cheerful little potholder sleeves.
“Look at those,” Kim says. “That’s a great idea. We could use those things on our frying pans.”
I observe that Chili’s is a big company and probably wouldn’t mind losing a couple of those cheap little thingies.
Ted looks at Kim. Kim looks at Slate.
Probably happens all the time, I say. They probably just throw them out when they get dirty, anyway.
“No,” Kim says.
“It’s not worth feeling bad all the way home,” Ted says.
“I can make us some,” Kim decides.
As we leave, they ask me what my story is going to be about. I tell them I’m not really sure, that it’s getting a little complicated.
Sunday morning, six-thirty. Ted and I meet to go fishing.
Other than his family, fishing is Ted’s life. The rivers and creeks around Muskegon are churning with tasty life—trout, salmon, and walleye, mostly. Ted was born around here, in Hesperia, and he’s been fishing since he was Slate’s age. The area is still pretty much Prusville—driving around, Ted points out one home after another belonging to uncles and cousins and boyhood friends. You grow up here, you hunt and fish.
A few years ago, one of Ted’s friends shot a 300-pound bear. He brought it home and skinned it, but he couldn’t eat it, because lying there, naked, it looked like a big fat man. Worse: Bear hunting is illegal; someone ratted him out, and he got popped. State agents came to the door. Ted adopts an official-sounding voice: “We know you got a bear in there, sir.” They took his hunting license for five years, so for five years, the poor guy would go out in the woods and watch Ted hunt.
After high school, Ted left for the Army and worked his hitch in Europe as a mechanic. When he came back, he moved to Tennessee, got married, had a son. Allen is now twelve and living with his mom in Tennessee, who remarried after the divorce. Allen visits Kim and Ted from time to time. When the boy’s schoolwork began to slip, Ted refused to let him come until he improved. “He’s in advanced math now,” Ted says laconically in that same prideless tone that is full of pride.
We set out in the dark for Ted’s secret fishing spot. Ted is happy to talk about politics, but he just frankly doesn’t have all that much to say. If someone frog-marched him into a voting booth with a gun to his head, he says, he’d probably go for John Kerry over George Bush. That’s because, as Ted sees it, Bush got where he is strictly on account of his father. It’s just another example of the world being stacked in favor of the haves. “It’s the same with NASCAR drivers,” he says. “Just ’cause your dad was good at something doesn’t mean you’re good at it. Other people could do better, but the son gets the shot.” Ted is no particular fan of Dale Earnhardt, Jr.
I point out that if Ted favors Kerry but doesn’t vote, he’s really voting for Bush. Ted doesn’t see it that way. The way he sees it, a vote for either man is a vote for a liar, a member of the privileged class w
ho will promise whatever it takes to get your vote and then do whatever it takes to keep the country safe for the privileged class. Screw ’em all.
What about voting as a moral issue? The only moral issue, Ted says, is the immorality of the guys asking for our votes: “I feel fine about myself. I can look at myself in the mirror and not feel bad about not voting.”
I ask Ted if there are any circumstances under which he’d actually cast a ballot. Let’s say, for example, that one of the candidates for governor of Michigan was a pantywaist animal rights activist who wanted to outlaw fishing. Would that, at last, bring Ted Prus to the polls?
Ted considers this: “No, because I wouldn’t have to worry about that guy. Michigan wouldn’t vote for him in the first place, because there’s too much tourism based on fishing.” If he’d lose anyway, Ted figures, why bother to vote against him?
And if, somehow, he won, and made good on his promise to ban fishing?
“I’d fish anyway.” Heh-heh.
We stop for coffee and fishing tackle at a Twin Lake gas station owned by a friend of Ted’s. On the shelves are Zig-Zag cigarette papers, which I’ve seen plenty of, and Zig-Zag tobacco, which I’m stunned to discover actually exists. A lot of people here roll their own. It’s more economical.
The gas station seems to sell everything but gas. The pumps are closed. After we leave, Ted explains: Some months ago, the owner got into a price dispute with his gasoline supplier, and rather than cave in, he just turned off his pumps. He may be losing some money, but he sure got satisfaction.
Ted likes Twin Lake. He likes the people, especially.
Ted once actually tried voting. It was 1992, and he liked what he heard from Ross Perot. Perot seemed to be the only guy who was a straight shooter. So Ted registered, but when he got in the voting booth, he got confused. “The way they got it set up, with all kinds of levers and buttons, I’m not even sure who I voted for. And I didn’t know half the names.”
Didn’t voting make him feel powerful, in a way?
“No, it made me feel stupid. I don’t consider myself a stupid person, but I felt stupid.”
We’ve left the blacktop and are jouncing over rutted paths on the back roads. I ask Ted what is the worst thing that ever happened to him.
“When my mom passed away. I was twenty-six.”
Ted takes a sip of coffee.
“She shot herself.”
It’s quiet, out here in the woods. Only the shuddering of the truck over the ruts in the road. “She didn’t die right away. She blinded herself. Afterwards my dad set up ropes from the sliding door on the back of the house to the lake, so she could still fish. She liked to fish, and that was one of the few things she could still do. She died a few months later.”
Why did she do it?
“She was an alcoholic, and she was taking Prozac, and they don’t mix.”
That’s all he knows. His mother wrote a suicide note, but Ted never saw it. Ted says he asked, but the cops said no, and he accepted that.
Ted’s father has remarried; he still lives in the area. I ask Ted how his father took his mother’s death.
“I don’t know. We never really talked about it.”
And Ted? How does he feel about it?
“I try to wipe it out of my memory.”
We pull into Ted’s secret fishing spot. It’s getting light now.
“So, yeah, I guess that’s the worst thing that ever happened to me,” he says, grabbing the fishing gear from the bed of the truck.
AS WE WALK along the bank of the salmon stream, Ted’s eyes are reading the water. They’re a lot busier, his eyes, than when he was reading the menu at Chili’s.
“You see that eddy over there?”
“Where?”
“There.”
I see water.
“You see that dark spot?”
“Where?”
“There. The dark area where the rapids and the still water meet.”
I see water.
“It’s cold and deep. Something is hiding in there.”
Ted baits my hook with a lure, helps me cast. As instructed, I reel it in, slowly. I cast again, reel it in. Again. One more time. Then Ted baits his hook and casts. The lure plops squarely into the area Ted was eyeballing.
All conversation has stopped. Ted is slowly drawing the lure back, the way I was, but a little faster and with more purpose. Also, he’s holding his fishing line away from the rod, in his left hand, the line resting lightly against his fingertips, which are splayed as though he were playing a C chord on a guitar. He’s feeling for nibbles at the other end.
Then he tenses, whips up on the rod, and zzzzzzzzzz, the reel starts spinning. Ted whoops and starts bringing in his catch. It fights tenaciously. He’s breathing heavily by the time he draws it up onto the bank and into a net. She’s a 32-inch, 10-pound salmon, so gravid her eggs are literally spilling out of her.
We fish for a while more, without luck, and Ted decides we’ve taken what this part of the stream has to offer. He heads farther downstream. He’s carrying more than I am, but it’s hard to keep up. Ted is uncannily sure-footed on the muddy riverbank.
As we are walking, I ask him if he has any thoughts on what happens to us after we die.
“After we die?” he says, not breaking stride.
“Right,” I say. “What’s after death?”
“Well, I am gonna be… what do they call it—incinerated?”
“Cremated?”
“Right, cremated. I’m going to be cremated after I die.”
Apparently, that’s all Ted has to say on the topic.
In a while, we find ourselves at another spot, beneath a bridge. Once again, I make a few futile casts. Then Ted tries. The ripples from the lure hitting the water haven’t yet subsided when Ted gets a bite. Another whoop, another fight, another big fat salmon, 31 inches, this one male.
For the rest of the day, when passersby ask us how the fishing is, Ted impassively shows them the two monsters in the cooler in the back of the truck. He anticipates compliments and deflects them, simply reporting that he was using 25-pound test line and a Hottentot-type lure, as if that explains it. Out here in the woods, there is nothing confused or tentative about Ted. Magnanimously, he informs everyone that I, also, almost caught a fish, which is a mighty considerate lie.
Ted spends a lot of weekends here, alone or with friends. Sometimes, if he’s feeling bad, he doesn’t even fish. “I’ll just dangle my foot in the crick. It’s real cold, spring-fed, and I’ll just relax and drink a beer, and the bad day goes away. I consider myself lucky, really. I got two healthy sons, and I get to hunt and fish.” As he walks, Ted bends to pick up someone’s discarded snack food wrapper. His truck is full of other people’s garbage. He’d rather it be there than in the woods.
I ask him if he has any particular dream for the future. He says he’d love to be an outdoor guide, charging people money to take them hunting and fishing. He knows a man who makes $350 a day doing that, a figure he relates with near disbelief. Three hundred and fifty dollars a day, just to hunt and fish! But that requires a boat, which Ted can’t afford, and it takes clientele, which he’s not sure how to go out and get. Plus, Ted says, characteristically blunt, he’s just not certain he’s got the kind of swallow-hard-and-risk-it-all nerve to try something like that.
Ted’s happy enough with the job he has. His dad has urged him to consider factory work, because it pays better and often has benefits. But factory jobs—“shop jobs,” Ted calls them—keep you indoors, and he finds that asphyxiating. So he’s holding fast at $15 an hour. He’s pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and worries about meeting his $550 mortgage payment. That’s just how it is, and Ted concedes it isn’t likely to change very soon.
After the fishing is done, Ted takes me to a small dam in Hesperia, the town in which he grew up. He used to come here all the time back when he was a kid, and he still visits now and again. The dam is Hesperia’s claim to fame.
It’s quite a sight, actually. The dam controls the flow of the White River, which is the same river we’d been fishing downstream. Just a few feet past the dam wall, there’s a two-foot-high concrete step over which the released water cascades. If you wait here long enough, on this far side of the dam, you’re apt to see a sight most people never see in their lives.
We’re standing and waiting, and there it is. It happens a couple of times. Salmon, swimming upstream to spawn, ignited by instinct and powered by unimaginable determination, will every so often make a run at the concrete step. In an instant, they flash out of the water and fling themselves up over the top of it.
It’s glorious. But their triumph lasts only seconds. In front of them now is the dam wall, which no leap can surmount. So they just wash back over the step, plopping futilely down into the puddling river.
ON THIS SUNDAY evening, like many Sunday evenings, there’s a party at Ted and Kim’s house. Guests start arriving midafternoon, bearing beer and potluck dishes. Today, the main course will be fish—walleye that Ted caught the week before, and the two salmon he pulled out of the White River this morning. Cooking is usually a family affair; Kim prepares the side dishes, Ted bakes the fish, which Slate seasons with gusto.
The decor in their home mostly reflects Kim’s tastes, which mostly reflect Kim: They are cheerful knickknacks and curios, unapologetically hokey—smiling trolls and lamps in the shape of owls and squirrels. Ted’s touch is the plastic clock on the wall; it’s got a picture of star NASCAR driver Mark Martin. Martin is an older guy who claims he once got cheated out of a lot of money by a sponsor; he failed, then came back strong.
Both Ted and Kim are NASCAR fans. Recently, they packed up a motor home and drove to Brooklyn, Michigan, for a NASCAR event with their friends Anna and John and Patty and Mike. Someone sneaked under the motor home and affixed a cardboard sign to the chassis that flapped down when it got jostled by the rumble of the road. It said HONK IF YOU’RE HORNY. Ted and Kim thought it was the darnedest thing how many people were waving and honking at them, until they figured it out. Some people might have been angry, but there isn’t a touch of self-importance to Ted and Kim. They stopped and took a picture.
The Fiddler in the Subway Page 27