/ Fiction /
Only moments before, I had been driving towards a fiery ball glowing like a distant beacon on the horizon. Now the highway up ahead seemed to disappear into a darkening smear of orangish-red sky.
The air flowing through the car’s open passenger-side window scattered Lynn’s newly feather-cut hair as she pulled the neckline of her polyester print blouse away from her damp body. She half turned in her seat as she spoke.
“Finally.” She used a manicured fingertip to intercept a bead of sweat rolling down the side of her face. “I thought I was going to roast. Maybe things will cool off a little now with the sun gone.”
I knew that was an empty wish. Summer twilight out in Michigan’s shrinking farmland always seemed to hold the promise of a cooling breeze, but it never came. Unless an unexpected thunderstorm rolled in, the blanket of heat would weigh on us through the night and still be there in the morning. Nothing would change.
“I just hope the restaurant is air conditioned,” she said, whether to me or herself I wasn't sure. I stared ahead, not answering, my sweaty hands gripping the steering wheel. I really didn’t care whether I had dinner in some refrigerated room or not. Truthfully there wasn’t much I cared about lately. And I wasn’t alone.
It was hard for most of the people I knew to work up any enthusiasm that summer of ‘73. Those age of Aquarius passions we had all embraced so tightly only a few years ago now were all but dried up. My generation had joined the rest of the country, moving in slow motion, marching in line with no real understanding of where we were going or why. Maybe Nixon would be impeached. Or not. Maybe the war was over. Or not. The nightly news was filled with stories that ended with “we’ll just have to wait and see.” Which was pretty much the theme of my own life, as well.
For the last several months, I had been passing the time working the graveyard shift out at Ford’s River Rouge plant. From 10 at night until 6 in the morning, I stood in line, mindlessly stacking glass sheets on a conveyor belt to be carried into the maw of a furnace and melted into so-called “safety” glass (as if it wouldn’t slice you to pieces in a head-on crash).
I took the job right after I dropped out of school, but that didn’t matter to the lifers who worked there. The older guys on the line still called me “college boy,” if they spoke to me at all. Strangely enough, they eventually turned out to be right. To my own surprise, I had gone back this past week and registered for some classes again. I signed up for an American Lit lecture I somehow missed the first time around, and a poli-sci requirement I dropped in the days when I was too stoned to get to class. Look at me, going back to college.
I had been thinking about it for a while. Taking some courses, finishing up. It wasn’t as if I wanted a degree, or had any real thoughts for the future. It just felt as if I should get back to the same routine I had before everything went to shit. Besides, Lynn thought it would be good for me. Truthfully, it might have been her idea. And right now, pleasing her was the nearest thing I had to a plan in life.
From the very beginning the counselors at rehab had warned me not to get involved with her or anyone else. At least not for a while. “You’re vulnerable right now,” they said. “Wait until things settle down.” They were probably right, but life had been lonely after I stopped getting high. All the doper friends I used to hang out with were off limits, of course. Too much temptation. And my old girlfriend and I had split up not long after I got straight.
Janice had been my wild girl. The one who loved her freedom too much to worry about coloring between the lines. To be honest, her lack of boundaries had made me a bit crazy at times.
“What are we?” I once asked her. “Lovers, friends, what?”
She smiled and shook her head at my denseness. “Why does it matter? We’re together. Isn’t that enough? Why put a label on it? We don’t need to fit into a category. It’s our life. We can live it however we want.”
She would sit cross-legged on the floor of her tiny apartment, her long, curly hair hanging loose, her bare feet poking out of flower-embroidered bell bottoms. She would make sketches of me as I wrote and sometimes read my latest poems out loud, tears running down her cheeks. At night we’d lie in bed and read Hesse’s Siddhartha to each other by candlelight. And we would talk about getting away, heading west. Denver maybe. Or Portland. Anything was possible then.
But Janice wouldn’t or couldn’t follow me down that rabbit hole of getting high. It scared her. So, we began drifting apart, and by the time I ended up in rehab we were barely holding on. I remember the day we broke up. She was pacing her little rented room in a house just off campus, going on and on saying that since I was no longer getting stoned all the time, the two of us had a second chance and should get away to someplace new, where she could paint and I could write.
“I was thinking about where we should go when I was tossing the I-Ching coins this morning and…”
“Stop,” I said, practically shouting the word. I took a slow breath and then told her there would be no more I-Ching. No more poetry. No more daydreams about running away to live in the country. I tried to explain. I had put my parents through enough. I didn’t want to disappoint them again. And it was time for me to grow up. Everyone agreed on that.
She stared at me, standing beneath the brass temple bells that hung from the ceiling’s light fixture that never worked. For a moment the only sound was the rain on the painted-over skylight. Finally, she spoke in a low voice, as if she were speaking to a small child she didn’t want to frighten.
“You know, just because you’re not a loser junkie anymore doesn’t mean you have to turn into a robot. What do you care about what your family wants? Or anybody else? You got high to get away from everyone trying to run your life for you. Why would you let them do that again?”
I said something about how this might be my last chance to make something of myself.
“You are something already.” She was the one shouting now.
“Not what I’m supposed to be.”
After that, I didn’t hear from Janice anymore. She stopped calling, or I did. All I knew for certain is that it ended. Then Lynn happened along.
It was actually a bit of a set-up. My folks knew her folks, and introductions were made. Yes, she was young and naive. She still had a year of college to go, after which she wanted to be a teacher. Or maybe a social worker. Or go to grad school. One thing for certain, she wanted to “help people.” I suspected I might be her first salvage project.
She started talking about “our life together” practically on the first date. Every conversation since had been about how I should do what normal people did—work, school, and marriage. I was way behind on planning that kind of life, but Lynn was willing to help me make up for lost time. She was perfect for me. Everybody said so.
The last fading glow of the sunset was overwhelmed by the white-hot glare of the street lights lining the expressways off ramp. Our destination was the new Sizzler on the outskirts of Ypsilanti, the small college town where we lived. It offered glorified fast food with a salad bar where customers queued up to choose a meal. Out in the sticks, it was the height of fine dining. I turned into the crowded parking lot.
“There’s one.” Lynn pointed to an empty place between a rusty VW bus and a shiny black Eldorado taking up two spaces. Pulling in, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a figure approaching. In one hand he clutched a dirty rag and in the other a spray bottle.
“I can clean those windows for you. No charge,” he called as I was climbing out of the car. “Whatever you think it’s worth.”
“Not today, buddy,'' I said, waving my hand dismissively as if shooing an insect away from my face.
Walking around the car to take Lynn’s arm, I started towards the restaurant. “Should you give him something?” she asked in a low voice. I shook my head. I could barely cover dinner and had nothing to spare for some stranger.
“Hello?” The guy yelled after us, but I ignored it. He yelled again, louder this time. “Tony? Tony is that you? It’s me. George Miller.”
It’s involuntary, that sort of automatic coming to attention when you hear your name called. Even as I thought keep going, I was suddenly standing still.
I hadn’t looked at his face. Like a lot of people, I get embarrassed by panhandlers. Maybe we’re ashamed of their need and uneasy with our own comfort. Whatever the reason, we rarely make eye contact. Here’s some money, now please go away. This time I turned and took a look.
I saw the dull, greasy, black hair, the unshaven stubble over pockmarked cheeks. Skinny, with sunken eyes, he wore a wrinkled cotton shirt with khaki pants that drooped over a pair of worn tennis shoes.
“Who is that guy?” Lynn whispered. “Do you know him?”
I used to. A long time ago.
* * *
“This shit’s gonna kick your ass.” George had spoken over his shoulder as he led me down the hallway of his apartment to the living room. Once inside, he sat cross-legged on the floor behind a scarred wooden coffee table that held a small pile of heroin and a razor blade.
The drugs had come from Southeast Asia, smuggled in the personal items of a kid returning from Vietnam. Once he was home in Detroit, soldier boy sold it for enough money to buy his high school sweetheart a wedding ring. The heroin’s new owner was a young street hustler who added baking soda and a couple other goodies to the mix and had that very evening brought a plastic bag full of the clumpy powder to George’s off-campus apartment.
Like me, George was a student at a small state college set among the cornfields just beyond the reach of Detroit’s urban sprawl. The youngest of a family straight from Appalachia, he never had much interest in education. But when George heard the university offered probationary admission to local high school kids, he signed up the next day. He was smart enough to know it was easier to carry books than an M16.
College not only kept George out of the Army but also supplied him with a new marketplace for his chosen profession of selling drugs. There would be no more back alley or side-street midnight deals for him. He would now meet his customers in the Student Union Lounge or between the book racks of the library. He sold the drugs to his classmates—the sons and daughters of Detroit’s suburban middle class who had neither the smarts nor the connections to make it into a Big Ten school. I was one of his most regular customers, which is why I received an invite to this particularly special evening.
By the time I showed up, George had already poured the heroin onto a Doors’ album cover that he was now using as a cutting board. The record itself played on a nearby stereo. Into this house we’re born, into this world we’re thrown. Jim Morrison’s blue-black baritone spread throughout the room.
I lowered myself to the floor, facing George. Behind him a thin guy with a tight-cropped afro sat on a threadbare couch. He wore an oversized dark blue t-shirt emblazoned with the orange D of the Detroit Tigers and held a burning joint between his thumb and forefinger, which he occasionally put to his lips. “That’s Lester,” George said by way of introduction. “He scored this shit for us.”
I raised a hand in greeting. Lester looked at me from half-closed eyes without acknowledgment, not even pretending I was worth his time.
I knew him by reputation. He had been supplying George with weed and other street drugs for a while. George’s changing description of his companion in crime reflected the growing strength of their connection. He had gone from referring to Lester by the foulest of racial epithets to calling him “this cool spade I know,” and finally to the supreme elevation of “my brother.” Lester, on the other hand, never called George by anything other than his name.
Lester passed the joint to our host who in turn held it out to me. “Here you go. We’re gonna start with a nice smoke to get ready for the real show.” As I took the cigarette, George went back to work using the razor blade to divide the powder into thin white lines.
I had been coming to sit on this very floor at the same table for over a year to smoke grass and hash, guzzle cough medicine, and swallow sedatives. I was part of a small group of George’s friends—all middle-class boomers who thought ourselves too cool for school. We hung around, digging on being different from the frat crowd, pretending we weren’t scared shitless about life, getting high on whatever George supplied. I took my first trip on LSD in this room. And cried like a baby. I had been sitting on this floor while my grades dropped, my old high school friends wandered away, and my poor parents grew frantic over the changes they saw in their baby boy.
My fall from grace had taken everyone by surprise. People had such expectations for me. And not without reason. I had been a good kid. Decent grades, no rebellion. I wasn’t very ambitious or any kind of social dynamo. But I always did as I was told and was never trouble for anyone. There was a bright future waiting for me down the road. If I didn’t screw up.
Who the hell knows why things went bad? Mom was of the opinion Dad had put too much pressure on me to do what he wanted. “A writer? Don’t be stupid. What kind of job is that? Advertising. That’s what you should do.”
Of course, Dad saw my failings as Mom’s fault. According to him, she had always coddled me, making excuses for whatever I did wrong. “I don’t care, Jack. He’s still my baby.” And my older brother, already head of his class in law school, said I was just a loser.
Everyone seemed to have an answer, except me. All I knew for certain was that I’d managed to derail my whole well-planned-out life. In a way, it was the only decision I had ever made for myself.
So there I sat, getting ready to use heroin for the first time. Smack. Scag. The great boogieman of the drug world. This was the big leagues. It was exciting. I had never been big league anything before.
George finished his work and jerked his head up to look at me. “It is fucking Howdy Doody time.” Picking up a dollar bill rolled into a tube, he held it out to me. I hesitated. “I, uh, I thought, you know…aren’t we going to shoot it up? Or something.”
“Fuck,” said George, mixing the word with a laugh. “You think you’re a badass, huh?”
“Must be a bad motherfucker if he wants to be using points the first time.” The voice came low and sarcastic from the couch.
“Nah.” George spoke to Lester but kept his eyes on me. “He just doesn't know.” He spoke directly to me now. “You need to taste this shit before you ever think about putting a point in your arm. You’ll be lucky if you don’t puke your guts out. And that’s just from snorting it.” He shook the rolled bill still in his hand. “Now do you want it or not?”
“Yeah,” I heard my voice say.
“All right!” George thrust the tube at me. “Put this fucker up your nose and snort. One line. Then suck it back into your throat.” He demonstrated by making a sniffing noise. “Then do a second one.”
I did as I was told. My nose and throat caught fire. My eyes filled with tears that rolled down my face. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. I was suddenly up and running for the bathroom to vomit for so long and so hard I thought I would pass out. Afterwards, back in the living room, I remember George laughing and telling me to do another line. I did.
The edges of the room began to blur and soften. I started to feel lightheaded and then simply floated away. Unseen loving arms embraced me and rocked me to the edge of a mindless sleep. Slipping into the warm darkness, the joy of feeling nothing overwhelmed me.
I went back a few days later to do it again. There would be a lot more of those days. School, my family, even my girl Janice—they all took a back seat to getting high.
But after a while, and I don’t really remember exactly when, things started to change. People I knew went to jail. Others got hurt. And I got scared. More and more, in the moments before nodding off, I began to see my life fading into the distance, leaving me too far behind to catch up. Leaving me alone. Sometimes at night I would find myself sitting up in the darkness, crying. So, one day I made a call to an old friend from my high school days and asked for a ride to the county’s substance abuse clinic.
I guess I wasn’t ready for the big leagues after all.
* * *
“How have you been?” I asked as George walked up beneath the parking lot lights.
He laughed, still the breathy, high-pitched giggle I remembered so well. “Oh man. You know me. Always hustlin’, baby.” He suddenly seemed to remember the rag and bottle he held. He lifted them up. “This shit? Just fuckin’ around. Scoring some easy money until I get settled. I’m just outta county lock-up, you know.”
I did know. I heard on the grapevine that George had been busted for stealing a prescription pad from the university health center. The first time he wrote his own script for sleeping pills, the pharmacist picked up the phone and called the cops.
“What about you?” George looked me over. “I almost didn’t recognize you without the beard. I heard you went into some program. Chilled out for a while. Is that right?”
I said it was, steeling myself for the expected condemnation. But he surprised me.
“Yeah, well, that’s cool. Everybody needs a break now and again.” He made a punching motion with his hand holding the rag. “It gets you ready for round two.” He glanced over to where Lynn was waiting for me. “That’s not Janice, is it?”
“No. Janice moved out to the west coast.”
George’s face hardened for a moment. “Yeah, I get it. Fucking bitches. Sheila split on me, too, while I was inside. I got no idea where that whore is now.” He broke into a grin. “But man, it is good to see an old friend. We should hang together. I’ve got a couple of things happening. Good times are comin’ back around.”
I knew I was supposed to say no. This was my chance to announce, “I’m done with all of that. I’m clean.” But instead, I promised I would try to look him up when I had some time.
“That’s great. I’m in the basement of that two-story gray place down on Emmett Street. You know, the one Big Mike lived in for a while. You remember it?”
I said I did but that right now we had to go and grab some dinner so I could drive down to my job at the Ford plant. George nodded as if that explained everything. “Working the night shift for Hank the Deuce. Oh yeah, you’re gonna need to stay high if that’s where you're at these days.”
When I didn’t respond, he shrugged and looked around. “Okay, I guess I’ll see you later.” With a wave he turned and headed towards another car that had just pulled into the lot.
I called after him. “Whatever happened to Big Mike, anyway? Is he still around?” I liked Mike with his smiling eyes and crooked grin, always quoting Alan Watts or some other guru every time we got high together.
George half-looked back over his shoulder as he kept walking. “He’s dead. OD’d, the stupid motherfucker.”
Over dinner, a confused Lynn peppered me with questions. Did I really know that creepy guy? Wasn’t I glad I hadn’t turned out like that? Did I really plan on seeing him again? I assured her I was just making conversation in order to get away. She asked three more times on the drive home and got the same answer each time.
After I dropped her off at the apartment I headed for work, driving east to Detroit, the center of the world’s asphalt heart. Flat, open fields gave way to lookalike strip malls and subdivisions. Then came the industrial parks and dead, abandoned neighborhoods. Finally, the largest assembly plant in the world loomed out of the darkness.
I took a frontage road to the entry gate where I flashed my employee badge. For a few minutes, I cruised the mammoth parking lot looking for a space. In my headlights I saw the ever-present black soot blowing across the ground like charcoal-colored snow. A sour smell filled the car. Eventually I found a narrow, empty space that seemed to be waiting just for me. But I didn’t pull in. I stopped the car in the middle of the aisle and looked at my watch. It was a quarter after ten. Late again.
I should have parked and rushed inside. If I moved quickly and acted sorry enough, I might be able to save my job. But instead, sitting there in the sweltering darkness of the motionless car, I started thinking about Janice.
It had been only a couple of weeks ago when she shocked me by calling out of the blue, asking me to stop by her place. She had some stuff I had left behind, and she was getting ready to move. If I wanted it, I should come by.
I didn’t say anything to anyone about the call—not my counselors, not Lynn. I just got in the car and headed over to the little apartment house on Cross Street. Walking through that front door and standing in the musty hallway, I found not much had changed. The familiar smell of Patchouli-scented incense seeped out of her apartment. The handwritten copy of Desiderata continued to hang from a thumbtack in the door’s molding. From the turntable inside I could hear the Stones’ latest, with Jagger demanding to be called a tumblin’ dice.
I knocked, and Janice was there, her hair falling unencumbered around her shoulders just like it always had; the wrists and fingers still shone with rings and bracelets. She gave me that smile. The one that made me want to lie down and stretch like an old cat. We fell into an embrace that should have lasted forever. Finally, she stepped back.
“I’m leaving town,” she said.
California was going to be her new home—a little town in the hills north of San Francisco where she was going to live and sell her paintings on the street. “The dream is still alive out there,” she explained as she handed me a paper bag of my old t-shirts and a dog-eared notebook full of my scribbled verses.
“Yeah? What dream is that?”
“Whichever one you want. Your own dream.” And then she asked if I wanted to go with her.
I said no. “I don’t have dreams anymore. I just want my life back on track.”
She gave me a faint smile, her eyes glistening. “Tracks run back and forth in a straight line. They cover the same old ground over and over. Is that what you want?”
When I didn’t say anything, she kissed me goodbye, tucking a paper into my shirt pocket. “This is where I’ll be staying when I get out there. In case you change your mind.”
A shrieking buzzer from inside the plant interrupted my thoughts and brought me back to my car and the heat. The cogs within the factory’s giant machines were either shutting down or starting up. People on either side of the assembly line were being told to stand by or move up or back away.
“Hey you!” A security guard stepped out of a little hut near the front gate, his uniform stained with sweat from his neck to his protruding stomach. Waving his arm over his head, he yelled across the rows of parked cars. “Are you going or staying? Make up your mind.”
I did. I headed out of the lot and pulled back onto the expressway. I drove in a kind of trance until my headlights splashed over the official green and white traffic sign. Huron Street—Downtown Ypsilanti. 2 Miles. That was my exit.
I knew Lynn would understand. She always did. She would say the job hadn’t been right for me and I would find another. My folks would throw a fit, but they would come around. Dad would call his friends and ask if any of them had a position for me. My counselor would sigh and talk about the need for commitment and structure in my life. In the meantime, I could keep on sleeping through classes I didn’t care about and listening to Lynn’s plans for our future. And if I couldn’t handle all of that, well, George was back in town, wasn’t he?
I also knew if I kept on driving past the exit, I would reach Chicago in a few hours. From there I could follow a never-ending concrete stream that flowed all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Out to the California coast, where the sun really sets. To where the night’s fog brings cooling breezes to green hills. And to where, I had been told, dreams can come true.
I gripped the wheel hard as the car moved down the highway, the lights of the off-ramp growing brighter.