Dad said that Mom usually got her way, especially when she wouldn't speak to him for days at a time. My aunts and uncles went camping in Irish Hills. It was about a hundred miles away. And for as long as they stayed away, peace would reign, but they eventually returned and the parties continued. Mom said she didn't know how much more she could take. She wanted a different life, but Dad seemed content with the one he had. It was the harbinger of a divorce.
2
Last Chance for Romance
In front of our trailer was an old fashion farm-hand water pump with a long cast-iron handle. I liked helping my older brother pump until the water gushed from the spout. It took both of us to carry the five gallon jug back inside. I couldn't believe that water could be so heavy. Ricky could have carried it himself, but he let me help because he knew I was sad he was going away.
Boys Camp was just up the hill and in the woods, but I wouldn't see him again for two whole weeks. He said he was going to get away from me, but I knew he went for the merit badges. Last time he got one for fishing, rifling, horsemanship, and cowboy crafts. I wished I could've gone too, but you had to be ten and I was almost five.
I hated the taste of well water. Mom said I'd get used to it, but even with wild-berry Kool-Aid mixed inside it tasted like the time I got my tongue stuck to the swing set in the middle of winter.
On my last night before going to prison, my brother Rick took me into Detroit to buy me a hooker. As we made the forty-five minute trip downtown, Donna Summer's "Last Dance" played on the radio of my brother's van. We sang along, modifying the lyrics to suit our adventure, laughing and enjoying our last few hours together.
It was my last chance for romance, and Rick knew where to take me. I was nervous about going downtown. I didn't know anything about Detroit, except for the Hudson's Thanksgiving Day Parade and vague recollections of the Boblo Boat down on the riverfront. But that was before things started to crumble at home and our parents got a divorce. The boat would take us up the Detroit River to Boblo Island, an amusement park somewhere between Michigan and Canada. That was also before the race riots of the late 1960s, from which, Detroit never seemed to recover. The city was now mostly black.
As we exited the expressway, we drove past a row of burned-out buildings. I had always thought Race Riots was an odd expression, since there was only one race involved, but Detroit was a city that had been looted-gutted of jobs and money. What was left behind continued to decay, but the city's problems started long before those separations.
The whites had moved to the suburbs, where it was thought of as safe, and the mayor of our town was determined to keep it that way. Keep Dearborn Clean was the slogan displayed on the sides of police cars, which really meant Keep Dearborn White.
Mayor Oriville Hubbard was the longest serving mayor in the history of Dearborn, a small working-class suburb that bordered Detroit. He was an outspoken separatist, who once told the New York Times, "I don't hate niggers. Hell, I don't even dislike them. I just don't think whites should have to live with then-that's all."
Dad said that if blacks got caught driving through Dearborn after dark, they were arrested and held in the jail for seventy-two hours-the maximum allowable by law until the police had to charge them with a crime or let them go. It was supposed to send the message that even if just driving through, they weren't welcome in Dearborn.
Fortunately for my brother and me, the police in Detroit were still mostly white, so we didn't run the same risk as the blacks did for just driving around at night.
Rick was five years older than me. He was bigger and stronger, and had always looked out for me. And this last night was no exception. He intended for this to be the best night, given the circumstances, wanting to send me off in style.
He had Mom's Irish freckles and Dad's sense of humor. As he tapped on the steering wheel to the beat of the tune, the tattoos on his knuckles danced under the strobe of the passing streetlamps.
I had always worshipped him. When I first started school, they let the kindergarten class out five minutes earlier than the older grades, so I ran as fast as I could to the other side of the building and into his fifth grade classroom.
"Is Rrrrricky heeeeerrrrrrrrre," I'd sing, hanging onto each syllable as if each one gave comfort until the time passed and we could walk home together. The first time I did this, the kids in his class stared at me in a stunned silence, before erupting in laughter, which I mistook for encouragement. Rick complained to Mom and Dad, but otherwise he was a pretty good sport about it, and I learned how to wait for him, silently, just outside the door. It was the same way we used to hide, underneath our beds, when Mom was mad at Dad and smashing things all over the house.
Sometimes, Rick and cousin Gordon would ditch me by running into the woods next to our school. I wasn't allowed to go into the woods, so I'd sit down on the grass and wait for them to conic back to
