The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo (12 page)

Audrey’s homecoming from the Kalamazoo detention center, the return from her aborted first year of university education, was not joyous. Even with Grandma Pencil officially banished, the Mori-arty house was repellent to her.

So after six months in her unhappy home, Audrey did what any nineteen-year-old would have done in her situation: She joined the most famous traveling freak show in the country.

Lollapalooza. The alternative music festival had exploded onto the national scene four years earlier and had become a well-oiled (and well-greased) machine—the nation’s most popular touring rock, rap, and punk-vaganza. A blowout of tunes for goons coming soon to a town near you. Slop-happy dirters like Dinosaur Jr., Babes in Toyland, and the Butthole Surfers rocking their wormy psychedelic chili. Fishbone, Primus, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers spewing funk onto the mud-coiffed masses. Ice Cube, Ice-T with Body Count, and Arrested Development kicking it with their verbologic mythic. Massive crowds of nineteen-year-olds dropping acid, smoking reefer, and looking for someone to sweat on. Side stages with the likes of Vulgar Boatmen and Moister Nipples. There were other attractions: jungle gyms; open-mike poetry readings; shallow pits where for five dollars you could whack a television with a sledgehammer; booths where a bald meathead tattooed a Celtic design around your bicep while you breathed pure oxygen for a dollar a minute before getting your eyebrow pierced. Sucks to your commercial sponsors and manufactured boy bands! Lollapalooza was the youth culture of
now
, where the kids could rock to non-radio bands!

It also had the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow.

Jim Rose telephoned Audrey personally. Before she even hung up the phone, she was mentally packed and heading out the door.

The audience didn’t know what to expect when Audrey took the stage. Dressed in non-ripped jeans and a comfortable sweater, she looked like a pretty co-ed. A trim, shapely figure. Someone a guy might turn his head for, but no more than that. Mostly, she looked too
nice
to be there. Not
this
show. This girl couldn’t follow Matt “The Tube” Crowley or Bebe the Circus Queen. This girl’s arms weren’t black with tattoos. This girl’s ears, lips, nose, and eyebrows weren’t disfigured by hoops and studs. (Alas, only her labia.)

Visually, the only thing that made her a freak was her underarm crutches. And then, upon careful inspection, her lack of feet. Most people, though, didn’t examine her so closely. When Audrey maneuvered onto that 10' × 10' stage under the daylight glow of that bright yellow tent, no one felt a sense of danger. Not a single dreadlock-sporting slacker thought he might upchuck from this act—not like when The Amazing Mister Lifto hoisted a beer keg with his nipples!

This becrutched girl was an Alpha Delta Pi, for crap’s sake. Pre-faded Gap jeans? Conditioned, wavy blond hair? Lipstick? Blush? Tasteful eyeliner? A friendly smile? Who
was
this imposter? Was this some kind of
joke
? Murmurs arose from the audience.

At center stage, Audrey mounted the stool. She squeezed her crutches between her knees.

From the crowd came snickers. Whistles and catcalls. A lone request to “Take off your shirt!”

At this point, Audrey would lift one of her crutches—titanium-aluminum alloy—and devour it.

It’s easy to write, “She ate her crutch.” But witnessing this act, live, was another story.

Her eyes were stones. With two hands, she positioned the crutch like a giant hoagie, the narrow end pointed toward her mouth. She bit. Then came the backfire of snapping metal, loud as a rifle. Two or three rapid chews and swallows, and she was onto the next bite. Again the violent report, followed by emotionless, machine-like crunching.

A little-known fact: Metal sings when it’s pulverized by teeth. The stress—the bending, the flattening, the tearing—emanates an eerie, sonorous wave. High-pitched and steady, like the ringing of a triangle. But this tone isn’t warm. It’s an atonal mish-mash, a sickening blend, like an entire scale struck simultaneously on a piano. The varying lengths and densities of the metal fragments create this otherworldly groan while Audrey’s mouth attacks. She looks like a starving rodent—a rat or a beaver—gnawing for its life. Her spittle, like holy water, showers the crowd. Her chest heaves. She pants. Her throat swells until the skin is taut as a balloon—tension, oh man, is it going to pop?—and then it shrinks. Again, it swells. And shrinks. Low grunts and arrhythmic nasal breathing. This savage, strangely erotic scene lasts eight seconds. Then she is finished.

Mayhem. Gasps. Vomiting. Fainting spells. Ecstatic howls. Primal thunder shakes the tent.

Within a month, Audrey’s carefully planned fifteen-minute act, during which she consumes two crutches, four saxophones, five effects pedals, an electric guitar, and, as a finale, a drum set, turns into an unscripted challenge: Bring something The Amazing Audrey
can’t
eat, and you’ll be jamming with Sonic Youth on the main stage to night!

It was an all-request free-for-all. Audience members offered patio bricks, baseball bats, hypodermic needles, the leather jackets off their backs, full bottles of Bordeaux or Jack Daniels (for reasons unknown to this day, the alcohol didn’t affect her), crowbars, tubes of wasabi, radial tires, fish tanks, thermometers, razor blades, oak end tables, and so on.

She never hesitated, not even for dramatic effect, as Jim Rose often counseled her to do. She didn’t pretend that an object frightened her, didn’t feign worry that it would never fit in her stomach, that it might—no, no, NO—kill her! Audrey was no showman. She was a hungry, violent, pissed-off young lady who mutilated everything in her path with her gorgeous chompers. Without flair, without flourish, without sentiment.

Day after day, show after show, the crowds went berserk. These were disenfranchised youth of America—bored suburbanites with no war to protest and no repressive economy to repress them. Freedom had become the oppressive force. Freedom meant skateboarding headfirst into trashcans. Drinking forties and watching syndicated episodes of
Small Wonder
as the sun came up. Stealing hubcaps off police cars. Sucking down balloons of nitrous oxide. Freedom was excess, and these kids turned their hatred of freedom toward anything with flourish—extended guitar solos, hairsprayed bangs, sports cars. They flushed wads of flair down the toilet and giggled when it backed up the sewage lines. Their hearts were full of anarchy, and their bank accounts were full of cash.

But their nihilism was cautious. They wanted, above anything else, to see how fucked up
you
could get, so
they
could seem fucked up by proxy. When they described to their pals, over a bong of chronic, how they’d actually
been there
, how they’d stood ten feet from the stage and watched it all without flinching, how they’d even
cracked up
because this one dude was white as a sheet, how they couldn’t believe how crazy it all was,
that shit was out of hand
—when they narrated this scene in all its gory detail,
they
became kings for a day.

This isn’t news, though.

Nothing this generation did, thought about, laughed at, loved, hated, or rented was worthwhile or original.

Being messed-up to impress people is a primal urge. Think elementary school. Picking up the worm to gross out the girl. Eating it to win her heart. Plenty of schoolboys ate worms for Audrey.

Nobody ate a worm for McKenna.

But the worm-eaters made Audrey a small fortune.

Back to 1988. We last left our motley crew in Bronson Park during a heavily-trafficked dinner hour. Eleven-year-old Audrey was enduring a spirited beating from Grandma Pencil while a gaggle of outraged Kalamazooans looked on. A ponytailed white man with a paunch like a sack of kitty litter earned himself a few hundred Good Samaritan points and a round of ravenous applause by stepping in to stop the abuse.

Then it was up to the Mapes family to regroup and collect what dignity they still possessed. Gradually the crowd dispersed, shaming Grandma with sidelong glares. The picnic was over. Misty repacked the basket, and the family headed toward the walking mall. Audrey and Toby trailed fifty feet behind, Audrey crutching herself and Toby leaning down every thirty seconds to whisper into her ear. They laughed conspiratorially. When the rest of the family stopped for a traffic light, Audrey and Toby hung back until the signal said
WALK
.

Grandma Pencil hadn’t spoken a word since she’d been pulled off of Audrey by a stranger. Her nostrils flared. One side of her hair looked like a snowdrift, while the other would’ve made a nice home for a family of robins. The sour plea sure in her eyes suggested she was running through a detailed scenario of torturing Audrey, or the ponytailed man, or both.

Murray scuffled along the sidewalk in his sandals, pointing at every building, giving a running commentary: “The library? Yep. Looks like a lot of books in there. Pastries and baked goods? Makes more sense than baked bads, I guess. Wonder how much they charge for a muffin. Is it me, or does this town have a ton of crazy people? One, two, three . . . maybe not that guy. Hi, how you doing? No, he’s drunk. Hey, look. That’s where they print the newspaper.” And so on.

Why, Misty? Why wouldn’t you talk to your mom? Why were you incapable of confronting her? Why couldn’t you defend your youngest daughter?

Instead, Misty grabbed Murray’s hand. She rested her head on his shoulder. McKenna sled-dogged luggage behind them. The one thing that made sense to McKenna was her parents’ love for one another. They were best friends. They respected each other. They rarely had a disagreement, and when they did, they worked it out.

In other words, parents who modeled a healthy relationship and provided a modest but stable income—all the basic necessities. So why did day-to-day Mapeshood feel so frayed, so tenuous? Sure, Murray’s hobby stole him away for long periods. And sure, he never tried to include them in his inventions. And sure, Misty was prone to bouts of emotional paralysis and sullen daydreaming. But who isn’t?

As the Mapeses meandered up South Street, McKenna knew, quite suddenly, the reason for the family’s unhappiness.

And as soon as she envisioned it in her mind, there it was in the flesh, ambling up beside her on the sidewalk. The odd person out. Grandma Pencil.

It seemed so obvious now. Grandma hadn’t been bad when they were kids, but since she’d gotten close with the nuns, she had changed. Along with her strengthened faith had come a sense of entitlement. Grandma simplyc ouldn’t let Audrey be—she was determined to make the poor girl suffer for what she perceived as the “sin” of her diet. Never mind that Audrey had no choice. Never mind that it did no harm to Grandma if Audrey lunched on a bag of charcoal.

These things didn’t matter because Grandma knew the “rules.” The body was a temple, and to befoul this temple was to spit in God’s face.

Which made sense, really. Deep down, McKenna agreed that there was something unseemly, something so unnatural as to approach deviance, in Audrey’s appetite. Sometimes at night, when McKenna was sinking into sleep, she swore she could feel the soft weight of baby Audrey upon her breast, could sense that abyssal mouth yawning toward her.

McKenna had stood there, motionless, while Grandma’s hand fell, again and again, upon Audrey’s spine. She hadn’t rushed in to knock Grandma away. She hadn’t screamed at Grandma to leave her sister alone.

In that moment, mixed with embarrassment and anger there had been giddiness and satisfaction.

In that moment, she’d felt joy rushing to the surface like a black-eyed Great White.

A voice whispered amid the spray of water and blood, “Give it to her. Give it to her. Take that. Take that.”

Remember what Henri Rousseau said about beauty?

“To see something as beautiful is to see in it the promise of happiness.”

Very few people saw Kalamazoo as a beautiful place.

Statistics tell part of the story. In 1997, at the time its devouring began, the city itself, located along Interstate 94 in southwest Michigan, midway between Chicago and Detroit, boasted an estimated population of seventy-five to eighty thousand. This number had remained relatively unchanged for forty years. The metro area took up twenty-five square miles. Some 31,000 housing units existed within city limits. Racially, seventy percent of the citizens were white, twenty percent black, four percent Hispanic or Latino; three percent were of mixed racial backgrounds, two percent Asian, two percent “other,” and less than one percent Native American. The median income was thirty thousand dollars a year. For every ten females, there were nine males. The average house hold held 2.3 members; the average family consisted of three.

This information tells one kind of story. There are other stories.

The inside of a clam would be an apt way to describe Kalama-zoo in 1997. Damp, raw, cold. Contact leaves a sticky residue on the skin. Entering this rumpled burg from either I-94 or US 131, visitors were overcome by bafflement: Where’s the city?

The sky was a gray blanket on most days. On other days, gangs of muscular clouds taunted the residents who scurried, insect-like, below. In autumn and winter, trees stood naked, as they do in all northern climes, but here, the maples and cedars actually shivered. Black shadows stretched like bony fingers across the snow. Soon, the winter whiteness became slush. Cars sizzled along streets, their undercarriages rotting from salt. Goop the color of an unwashed nickel clung to the soles of office women who scurried from the parking ramp to the City Hall. Once inside the foyer, they stomped their boots on the rolled-out red carpet, which was already as saturated as a burst artery. They chain-smoked Benson and Hedges Ultra Lights and discussed accumulation, lake effect, and Doppler radar. In thick, morning voices, they bemoaned the fact that City Hall never closed, not even when Kal-amazoo Public Schools declared a snow day.

All of these women, and in fact nearly everyone who worked downtown, was born and raised here—here, or in one of the outlying towns and villages: Portage; Paw Paw (the town so nice they named it twice); Lawton; Parchment; Comstock; Galesburg.

None of these lifers loved Kalamazoo. Unless you count the kind of love we feel toward the moon—a dependable, steady presence that smiles upon us when we fall asleep. Sometimes it’s merely a sliver, but it’s always there. Not necessarily something we
think
about, but it’s not going anywhere. Yes, they loved Kalama-zoo in this way. And when uninformed out-of-towners cast aspersions, they defended it like wolves.

While no romantic love was felt toward the city, its citizens were a sturdy brood, and down to the last, each credited Kalama-zoo for making them this way. When temperatures plunged below zero, when cheeks were cut by the wind, they bore it with grim dignity. Their unsentimentality was born of cheerless, six-month winters with less than a week of sunshine. The city maintained a handful of rich folks, but wealthy ones were scarce. And that’s the way the Kalamazooans wanted it. Sure, they played the Lotto every week, dreamed of owning four or five pickups, of being high-rollers in Vegas, but in day-to-day life, they happily joined softball leagues and bowling teams. They grilled brats and burgers in public parks. Coached third-grade soccer. Enjoyed a nice fritter with their morning coffee. Thought “Why the hell not?” when someone built another sprawling apartment complex on a wooded lot. These folks had a sense of humor that shattered windows. Their peculiar brand of ossification spoke of flooded basements, chemical inhalants, and dead batteries.

And all of this was mixed with a degree of cultural sophistication. There was a strong love of the theater. Local productions were well-attended and enthusiastically applauded. Twice a year, a modern dance troupe squatted and bent its way into peoples’ hearts. Bell’s Brewery and Restaurant offered heady ales and syn-copatic jazz quartets. There was Western Michigan University, a four-year public research institution. Kalamazoo College, the liberal arts school, was perpetually listed on America’s “Top 100 Little Colleges You’ve Never Heard Of (Unless You’re Looking for Colleges You’ve Never Heard Of, In Which Case You’ve Defi-nitely Heard of It, Which Is Saying a Lot).” A few downtown breakfast joints tucked feta cheese and gyro meat into their omelets.

Kalamazoo had a storied history. Gibson Guitars began there. Then it moved away. Checker Motors, makers of the Checker Cab, originated there. Long gone. Kalamazoo Stoves produced high-quality stoves. The Shakespeare Company provided fishing rods and reels. Parchment got its name because parchment was made there. Was.

Nicknames, too, came and went with the industries. Once-flourishing paper mills and cardboard mills earned Kalamazoo the title, “Paper City.” Juicy stalks growing abundantly on outlying farms: “Celery City.” The nation’s first pedestrian walking mall, in 1959: “Mall City.”

In this sense, Kalamazoo was, in the best possible way, like a used tea bag. It had become a soggy, leaden thing. A few squeezes might produce a final spurt or two of usefulness, but really, who was going to bother?

And yet, you could tell that it had once served a purpose. It had once been meaningful and therefore continued to have meaning. It had once been beautiful and therefore continued to be beautiful. It had once been loved and therefore continued to be loved. Kalamazooans loved their beautiful, meaningful teabag, and what, exactly, is wrong with that?