You Don't Have to Live Like This (29 page)

“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.”

I
n 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.”

After Clarence left, Nolan basically shut down our relationship. I hardly saw him, except sometimes at his mother’s house. And even then he found a reason to leave the room, he took the dog out, he went upstairs.

But Tony came in for a hard time, too. The
Chicago Tribune
ran a piece about his Detroit memoir, which gave a big boost to sales. Tony himself showed up at my house one morning, waving a printout of the Amazon page—he’d gotten to 133 in the charts. But the case put his memoir in a strong light, and people started looking at it for other kinds of information. There was a
Slate
blog that picked out three or four passages and considered them for racist content. Tony’s line on all this is that we’re all racist and it’s better to be open
about it; that was the point of the book. He didn’t present himself as an authority, he presented himself as kind of a fuckup. There was a confessional element. But that’s not how the excerpts came across.

Tony always said he liked being disliked, he was used to it. But some of what showed up on social media sites was pretty scary. There were threats, and a guy from the Eastpointe police department came by the house to talk to Cris and Tony about security. What kind of threats they took seriously, the kind they let go, what they should tell their kids. It was very upsetting for her; for Tony, too. At least, the male protective instinct allowed him to express some of his anxiety by directing it at his family. “I’m just glad Michael is four and not six,” he said to me. “At six he might start taking shit in the playground. But at four he doesn’t have a clue. He just knows that Mommy and Daddy keep fighting about something. I mean, go figure. The guy takes my kid and I’m the guy all the trolls want to take a potshot at. I guess the world is full of motherfuckers.”

But it didn’t look good—Tony kicking Nolan in the head, knocking him out. There was a lot of national news interest. Robert, for example, was worried that pictures of me and Obama playing basketball might reach the Internet. Afterwards, under the garage lights, Bill Russo got one of the catering staff to take a group photo. That was easy enough to track down. But these days anybody with a mobile phone can turn into a problem. People take pictures they don’t even remember taking. Robert went through the guest list, making phone calls. He called Gloria, too.

“What did he say?”

“He wanted to know if I had any pictures of you and the president. He wanted me to delete them.”

“Do you?”

“Just one. He’s boxing you out.”

“Did you delete it?”

“What do you think?” she said.

But they came out anyway. You can’t keep these things down anymore, and suddenly there was a picture of me on the cover of
USA Today
: in a half crouch, looking up at Obama, while he squared to shoot. Snow in the background, the lights reflecting off it, and Secret Service guys ranged along a fence. Robert’s driveway. The press didn’t know what to make of it. It’s an odd story. Witness in a racial confrontation played basketball with the president at a Thanksgiving fund-raiser. “In Detroit, the lines are being drawn, and crossed, and redrawn,” the article said. I spent a lot of my time online, reading the news.

Gloria thought the case was taking over my life; this was another one of our fights. She went back to work and I stayed home, screwing around on the computer. And often when she came back she found me on the computer, too, sitting at the desk in the living room, which overlooked the front yard. She could see me on her way up the steps, around six o’clock at night, with my face in the digital glow. I tried to explain myself to her. That this thing had put me in a moral dilemma, the kind you read about, where you have to do something, you have to make a choice. I’ve got loyalties and duties on opposing sides. I’m trying to think all this through.

“If you’ve got to do something,” she said, “how come all you do is stare at that screen?”

And it’s true, there was something unhealthy about my curiosity. I kept finding out new things about my friends, about Nolan’s ex-girlfriend for example, in the public media. Clarence’s mother used to work at the Hooters in Troy—she was one of these women ballplayers date. And in fact her current husband started out pitching for the Lansing Lugnuts, a Class A affiliate of the Blue Jays, before moving into sales at Daikin. (Korobkin: See, it all comes
down to baseball in the end.) But Nolan never mentioned her to me, or the fact that his kid was moving to Arizona. And here I had another source of information.

The media puts people in interesting lights. It shows you angles you don’t usually get to see, but there’s a kind of glare, like flash photography. Everything looks a little lurid. And you try to square what you find out with what you already know, and it never adds up. So your friends become contradictions, and let’s face it, a part of you is always willing to suspect even your best friend of any kind of dubious past or practice. You’ve got all these grounds for resentment anyway, little doubts and uncertainties, and the news seems to justify them. Tony once glassed somebody in a bar fight and spent the night in jail. The charges were eventually withdrawn. In his journalism days, he got caught up in one of these plagiarism scandals, and lost his job at the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
. Pittsburgh is where he went to grad school, his dissertation was on Emerson, he dropped out after two years. These are the kinds of things I learned.

But I was also looking for something else, stories about the five neighborhoods, about Robert James. Because a number of commentators took Nolan’s trial as a larger trial of the whole idea. Nolan stood for the old black Detroit, Tony stood for the old white Detroit, I stood for the new guys. It didn’t go unnoticed that I was the only one in the clear. There were stories about my guns, too, the Remington and the Smith & Wesson, and my connection to Mel Hauser, and Mel’s connection to Tony. But Robert James was like the icing on the cake—since Nolan thought it was
his
kid, and the whole thing started at Robert’s big rented house in Indian Village. We saw photographs of this place dressed up in party mode, with the lights on and guests arriving, and pretty waitresses standing in the floor-to-ceiling windows. And I would stare at these photographs, trying to recognize people.

This is a kind of self-obsession, and part of what pissed Gloria off. I wish I could write what happened from her point of view, because something was happening to her, too. For one thing, she got stuck defending me at work. The stories about my guns were particularly upsetting. She didn’t know about them. One of them lived under my bed, the handgun was in my sock drawer, but when she stayed over I had no reason to bring them out, and I never mentioned them. I guess I was ashamed. And then there’s the fact that I retreated to my bedroom while Nolan and Tony were fighting. People wanted to know what I was doing. Getting a gun? No, just sitting there, keeping out of it. But this didn’t look good either. And what about when Tony kicked Nolan in the head and knocked him out. What was I doing then? Nothing, watching, I was too slow. And why did I leave Nolan like that, lying unconscious? Because Tony didn’t know the way to his mother’s house. Who called the police, who called the ambulance? Tony. What was I doing?