Been Caught Stealing
Last Pages: a Prologue
Nigel knew I shoplifted.
“Did you know that women are three times more likely to develop kleptomania than men? But I’m not a kleptomaniac. I’m a shoplifter.”
“Same difference.”
“Not even close. For once in your life, admit you’re wrong. Shoplifters can’t help themselves. But me, I’m not impulsive.”
“Ha, that’s like a serial killer bragging about being polite.”
While he worked on my fries, I was conscious our waitress had been eavesdropping. This was just one of those things you became attuned to when you stole shit.
“She probably thinks I’m gonna steal the goddamn silverware,” I muttered, inspecting my fork before cleansing it with a napkin.
“Duh,” Nigel said a little too conspicuously. “What do you expect? They’re on to you.”
“Oh, f that,” I countered. “I’m on to you. You worry about that.”
Breaking up with Nigel was in effect ridding myself of an aspect of Flint I couldn’t swipe.
Thoma’s Coney Island was the essence of the East Side. The pungent aroma of chopped onion and frying grease wove strands through your hair, thinly coated your clothing and hung on your breath. Attempting to torpedo its sanctity was just more proof that I hadn’t become an honorary East-sider. The mistake, of course, was to pretend you were when you weren’t. On New Music Night at El Oasis, or while shooting pool at the Nail, if some lame guy asked where was I from, I always responded, “Grand Blanc, dude. You know, where the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan lives?”
Throughout the 80s, Flint had led the country in unemployment and homicides per capita. In the 40s, a massive southern migration of people looking for work in GM’s factories had arrived. Honesty about your lineage was the best pose because the toughened folks of Flint flushed out poseurs like a police dog sniffing out a bag of cocaine in the glovebox of a Buick LeSabre.
In 1986, after my sophomore year at Generous Motors Institute was underway, the first thing Stuart did when he met my hot housemate was to run her through the wringer.
“So, where ya from?”
Of course, she just had to say, “Flint.”
Stuart grilled her like a Koegel Vienna, the only brand of hot dog Thoma’s serves. “Uh, I hate to tell ya, Fenton is a far cry from Flint, sweetheart.”
Fenton is an affluent village twenty minutes south of Flint.
“You’re not actually from Flint.” He was actually talking to her, but he was also talking to me.
*
So I come from a family of reticent men who have all studied engineering at General Motors Institute, located just west of downtown Flint. The campus is a cluster of brick buildings and tennis courts on a bend in the Flint River which is how I came to find myself within the city limits. My father laid out a blueprint. He was more than happy to finance a practical education, and therefore by extension, a solid career with GM.
“If you’ve got other ideas,” he said, “then by all means, let me get out of your way so you can get to work on that.”
I sometimes wonder how that moment would’ve gone down if I had said, Well, I was planning on studying contemporary American poetry, or, I was considering sex work.
At GMI, students alternate semesters between the classroom and internships sponsored by the flagship companies of Generous Motors. I was fortunate to be chosen by Buick early on. My college plans were settled long before most of my high school friends had begun filling out college applications. I was just happy that for once I wasn’t the last kid on the playground picked for kickball.
For me, the transition from high school to college was little more than driving over a speed bump at the Dort Drive-In, out on Dort Highway, where we used to smuggle each other past the entrance in the trunks of our cars. At GMI you started your program in the summer, almost immediately after high school ended. For me, it hardly felt like anything had ever ended, or like anything worthwhile had ever begun.
*
Nigel had flown into Flint’s Bishop Airport which usually had good deals between Flint and Washington, D.C. I certainly couldn’t have known, standing in my bedroom in my student-shared house on Chevrolet Avenue after a wicked night of drinking and dancing, staring at his dimpled ass, that today might be the day I acquired that one good story which enabled a person to settle into the legitimacy of being from Flint.
What I decided this blurry winter morning, yawning and staring at Nigel’s butt cheeks, was that I was done mothering him or any of these other damaged goon boys from Flint. They didn’t deserve me. But why, oh, why, I asked myself, as pain momentarily contorted my heart, couldn’t they get their shit together and deserve me?
*
Thoma’s was one of those destinations that lured East-siders out of their beds on hazardous icy mornings. Its familiar inner sanctum of chopped onions, fried grease and bottomless cups of coffee encouraged routines which were hard to break. Some people might say such routines were ruts. A fear of ruts was one of the reasons Nigel had moved away.
“You’re ordering chocolate pie with whipped cream for breakfast? Awesome.”
“Whaaat?”
“Chill out.”
I asked for a cup of coffee and a plate of fries with gravy, even though it was early. The waitress didn’t bat an eye, bellowed the order out over the hunched shoulders of everyone bundled up at the counter while I finished reapplying long-lasting red lipstick to my mouth. The gold compact snapping shut in the palm of my hand had been stolen.
There was a moment when I would have dropped out of GMI and moved to Washington, D.C., with all of its museums and fountains, despite whatever my father might have thought, to chase Nigel who had been gone for a year. In an attempt to gather relevant data—I was, after all, a marketing major—I visited him, uninvited, to see what was up. But an invitation to stay was never extended. As far as I can tell from reading between the lines of Nigel’s letters, he has been both relieved and tormented since leaving Flint. He drinks harder, now, but secretly, living in a tiny apartment with his hyper, chain-smoking, coffee-slurping mother who does not approve of alcohol.
“Do you remember the first time we met?” I asked, twirling on my stool. “It was at the GMI library. You were stamping books. Did anyone ever really check out books at the GMI library?”
When I was a freshman, Nigel stamped return dates into books at the front desk of the GMI library with the rugged mindlessness of a riveter on the assembly line at Buick and the flaming scorn for management of a union man. He was a drone, unconsciously abusing the ink pad and rubber stamp.
He was—in those early days—my scope.
“I preferred shelving books. The stacks really were the perfect place to hide, weren’t they? God, that job sucked.”
“Do you remember what I said to you?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be hilarious if you got to the end of a book you had invested a lot time in and discovered that someone had ripped out the last page?’ And then I smiled and danced away.”
“Damn, now that I think about it, that was a bold move. A flying squirrel move in chess speak. But at the same time, very coy. Damn you, Karen.”
“Coy, my ass. And then you wrote that story.”
“You mean ‘Last Pages.’ It was a hit.”
“Yah, everybody loved it, but you never gave me any credit. You stole my idea, but you never gave me credit.”
“That’s pretty funny coming from you.”
He had only flown back to Flint to defend his City Of Flint chess title against Five O’clock Shadow Brian. These geeky boys and their chess, I tell ya. All the mental masturbation. Those who could not play sports played chess. When his mother transferred to a new job, in the midst of Flint’s economic free fall, I should have known he was already as good as gone.
When I tried to initiate conversations, he said things like, “I live in squalor with my mother. It ain’t pretty, Karen. You don’t wanna witness this.” This was an exaggeration. “I’ve hung my English degree from U of M-Flint in the bathroom above the toilet. My future’s being flushed down the tubes.” This was partially true. My favorite, however: “I found a job making photocopies in a downtown law firm. Now that they’ve discovered I can juggle, they’re sending me to a circus for professional development. I’m being trained to be a Xerox machine tamer. It’s a lot like being a lion tamer, only way more dangerous.”
Our waitress mixed a batch of milkshakes. One thing I had learned about East Side boys like Nigel and Stuart was that they worshipped these women, but I was wary. After all, they were working for tips.
When she pressed her boobs up to the counter, snubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray I’d been passively thinking about stealing, flicked her hair aside, and said, “C’mon, hon. Follow me—” I choked on a fry.
Nigel’s head shot up. “What did I do?” He lifted his long bang out of his eyes. It was surprising to me that the D.C. law firm hadn’t made him clean up.
“Nothing,” I said, swiveling around on my stool to hop into the flow of traffic. “Cool your jets. She’s talking to me.”
I was equal parts horrified and intrigued. The place was bustling, the floor wet from all the tracked in snow. I minced my steps. What was I thinking? My vintage ermine coat was damp. Despite a queasy feeling snowballing in the pit of my stomach, the waitress possessed a pure magnetism which seemed to be scrambling my brainwaves. Why was I obediently following her into a dark, cramped passage cluttered with deliveries and stacks of milk crates?
Stuart, who boiled everything down to sex and death—who mythologized the violence of Flint—had conditioned me to believe that violence and the East Side of Flint were synonymous. Fight culture, he called it. There had been many nights when we had had to listen to the stories of the violence he claimed to have witnessed growing up on the East Side in the 70s and 80s: all the disagreements settled by fists, the times he was jumped in high school, the crime, homicide and unemployment statistics, which he blamed on Reagan. But I was smart enough to know that none of that shit had directly affected me. “Just keep your hands open and slap the shit out of ‘em,” he once instructed, during a drunken tutorial on self defense, in a dark parking ramp. “Kick. Pull the hair. Gouge the eyes. Spit if you have to.”
None of it came naturally to me. My dad was firm but mostly quiet. My brothers had not fought (it wasn’t allowed). My mother was upbeat and religious. The waitress turned to confront me in the passage. She wore what appeared to be an engagement ring but was probably a birthstone to keep the slobs at bay. Her heavy blouse had a light coffee stain near her right breast. Her polyester slacks were snug. Her earrings were simple. She paused to light a cigarette. The lighting here was poor but that was a good thing because it hid the years of grime a wet mop could no longer strip away.
The thought, “If she takes me outside to fight for some bizarre reason, I will finally have some legit street cred,” flapped through my mind on black wings.
“That guy’s not the drug dealer, is he?”
“What? Nigel? Nooo, God, no.” My armpits moistened. She knew about the drug dealer.
“That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t sure.”
“I don’t have any drugs,” I said, shrugging apologetically.
“Girl,” she said, “What do I look like?”
*
It had never occurred to me that Thoma’s might keep customers’ items left behind in a lost and found box.
“I thought you were taking me outside to kick my ass,” I confessed. “I was prepared to run into traffic like a headless chicken.”
“And break these nails? Shiiit.”
Opening a utility closet, she lifted a dainty pair of gloves—a white pair of vintage gloves with keyholes and bows at the wrist—from a cardboard box on a metal shelving unit.
“Pretty sure these are yours, hon.”
I realized now that while eavesdropping, she must have been deciding whose side she was on—and whether I deserved any of her East Side generosity—as if calculating a tax.
“They do look familiar.”
“You left them in a booth one night, when you were with the drug dealer.”
“Ah, yes, the drug dealer.”
She smiled at the floor and shook her head, a sort of sad benediction, or perhaps an indictment—scooted back out into the winter light trying to push its way through the sweaty, steamed up windows—before I could thank her.
“What was that all about?” Nigel asked as I returned to the counter.
I showed him the gloves. “I think I’ve just been pigeonholed by the working class women of Flint.”
He had finished my fries.
I straddled the stool, adjust my coat and waited for the waitress to refill our coffee cups, but she didn’t. I wondered if we stood in solidarity now, like auto workers, or if she thought I was just another poseur.
“Jesus Christ, my head’s killing me,” Nigel whined, hungover. “What would the Surrealist poets do in this situation?”
I ignored him. After the damn chess tournament, he’d return to D.C. His CNN news-hyped mother would continue nagging him to get out of the apartment and make new friends. He would continue hiding beer bottles under his bed.
Several years ago, when my GMI acceptance letter had come to the house, my mother had informed me that my father had had plans to send me to GMI before I could walk.
“Get out of here!” I shouted, tearing the envelope open.
He would have preferred I had lived at home these past three years though, which is why he had bought me a car—a Chevette the dingy brown color of the polluted Flint River—but that part of the scheme had backfired.
Now, it was Buick’s turn. Soon, I would load my Chevette up with all my shit and kiss this place goodbye.
When I told Nigel that the hot shots at Buick were sending me to Houston, Texas, after graduation, I got no response.
It was one last heat check. The coffee had cooled off.
I pulled on the gloves, paid the bill and tipped the waitress more than usual.
“We’re over,” I said.
“What, another flying squirrel move?”
“You heard me, goon boy.”
I walked out, stranding him at the counter before he could finish a second slice of chocolate pie.
1985: Dorm Rooms, Mixtapes and Keepsakes
The president of Statistics Club invited me to an icebreaker, but Stuart wanted to make a mixtape. There was a double-wide window open above my bed, facing the tennis courts. Separately, we stared up at the warm square of sunlight giving the flimsy curtains a glow neither of us possessed.
“When did high school end?”
“Did it end?”
“I think it did. Are you going to make a mixtape?”
“Yeah, but I thought we’re going to the movies.”
“Not sure.”
“Did you talk to your friends?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call them friends.”
“Well, what then?”
“Classmates. Are you making a mixtape or what?”
“Well, not if we’re going to the movies, duh.”
“I think everyone wants to see St. Elmo’s Fire.”
“Jesus Christ.” He was a whiny little bitch.
It was getting late and the sun was going down. The curtains were pink now.
“So, which member of the Cars sang lead vocals on their biggest hit single?”
“I really don’t care.” I did not want to give him any false hope.
“I’ll give you a hint. Their biggest hit single was on the album Heart Beat City.”
“Really?”
“Actually, that’s not fair. Two of their four Billboard Top Ten singles are from Heart Beat City.”
“Get out of here! You mean to tell me what’s-his-face with the black shag you tried so hard to grow didn’t do all the singing? I thought there was one lead singer. Like didn’t they break up? I mean how can a band have two lead singers?”
“Uh, the Beatles, duh.”
“Oh, fuck the Beatles.”
He turned to his side to scowl at me with a look of death while flopping around as if fending off hot skewers until he was on his back again.
“I’m a huge Ric Ocasek fan, but Benjamin Orr sang lead vocals on a lot of their biggest hits—‘Bye Bye Love,’ ‘Just What I Needed,’ ‘Let’s Go,’ ‘Moving in Stereo—‘“
“No, way! ‘Moving in Stereo?’ Get out of here. Not ‘Moving in Stereo!’“ I was messing with him, now.
“Way, dude. So the Cars biggest hit was ‘Drive’ and Benjamin Orr sang lead vocals. And by the way, the band is still together.”
“Hunh.” It was hard to keep up with the inner workings of Stuart’s archive of alternative music.
“So just what exactly is your favorite Cars song, anyway?” He couldn’t help himself.
I could have played along, but my mood was shifting.
“Don’t have one.”
“What? Jesus Christ, are you serious! How can anyone not have a favorite Cars song? It’s a sin of omission. It’s an existential crisis.”
He had gone from slipping into a Ritz cracker coma on my bed to foaming at the mouth.
“What about nuclear war?” I asked.
“What about it?” he replied, beginning to distance himself from the room already.
“When they launch the nukes, no one will fucking care about the goddamn Cars.”
He rolled over so that his back was to me, and although I thought about poking him in the ribs, I just lay there sandwiched between his back and the wall. There were a lot of things I just didn’t do. A lot of things I just hadn’t done. And poking Stuart in the ribs was one of them.
I thought about the movies. I thought about what my father would think about random boys flopping around on my bed while I was in it. I had never been disowned. Stu had. And he’d had to swallow his pride and apologize to get back into his father’s good graces.
There was an empty box of Ritz crackers on the floor and a pile of crumbs. Way too many crumbs.
A box of Pop Tarts on my night stand.
Eventually, Stuart sat cross-legged on the floor in front of my stereo in a mangled whirlpool of killer crumbs, suffocating lint, stressed out bras and gouged shoes and made a mixtape, playing songs from the records he had been buying from the new shop on the second floor of Windmill Place and stashing in my room because his father would not have been pleased to learn he was wasting his money on music.