“entering the clubhouse with your non-initiated pal” 

OCT 2017

That night there was a home football game at my old high school. I went with Ben and we sat in front of my 9th grade biology teacher, who’s son must have been in the game, and that woman and another she was with kept swearing under their breath as the Haslett team failed to move the ball and the DeWitt team, our school’s rivals, prevailed. Fuck, the teacher said. It was the third quarter now and Haslett was down by three touchdowns and three field goals. I asked Ben if he was ready to head out.

In town I thought we should knock on the chapter-house in that neighborhood. It was a while before anyone answered my knock. When we entered we were greeted by a few men of the chapter, to whom I had to prove that I was indeed a member, and then introduced Ben as “my friend, he’s unaffiliated.” We were fairly immediately given Labatt Blues, which is a light beer popular there. The house had that old, many times painted over look, and smelled of smoke. I looked at some of the memorabilia on the walls.  One of the fraternity guys there looked a lot like the high school band director Ben and I had, who must have been present at the football game we had left an hour earlier. I said to Ben, hey that guy looks like Mr. G minus twenty years. Ben said, omigod, that is very true.

. . .  Kelly, I sent you a picture of a crack in the sidewalk that looked like a silhouette of an erect penis ejaculating, which I had taken just off the curb in the lot behind P.T. O’Malley’s. I went home and watched an episode of The Office and fell asleep on a too-small couch. Since Genevieve and I went to Michigan last march my sister had taken over my old bedroom again with her art

When I arrived at the Detroit airport I greeted my father and sister. Dad drove us to the Michigan town of Ypsilanti, “one of those places progress forgot”, which is also home to a supremely phallic water tower. We had a lunch at a diner there where I could feel I certainly was no longer in New York City, for the look and sound of things. Afterward Dad took us around for some of his “perverted sightseeing”.

These were the wrecks of factories-become-rubble and the square mileage of flat concrete where they once stood. He pointed out one such pile of refuse to be the site of the Willow Run facility which churned out B-24 “Liberator” bombers, which helped to win World War Two. It has always been poignant to me, in an Ozymandian way, that much of the hardware that had gone out to see the world change by 1945 was manufactured in now negligible parts Michigan. I was then taking a creative writing class within the writing program at Pratt, which had emphasis on historical narratives, and readings included one called “The History of Bombing” which was a survey of the historical and societal implications of mass destruction via high explosive and airplanes, and such a pilgrimage to dead factories felt appropriate then.

At thanksgiving Aunt Elaine, a Jewish woman originally from New York City, said something along the lines of, “it has been many years since I have visited New York and on my last visit I found little reason why I should return.” That the grit she had come from had been buffed out of the city that now is. It hurts a little to have older people insult “your” New York as being more polished, or less authentic, but I say, “whatever”. Better to have our urban spaces rearranged by Starbucks polity than by bombs. My cousin, who served in Iraq or Afghanistan(?) discussed his to-be-published(?) book about surviving governmental collapse(?) with something like agricultural knowledge and assault rifles(?) while making a million dollars or at least 800,000 (?) from book sales. Another cousin is graduating high school this spring with many honors and a fully stitched up varsity jacket, and that is how the Dutch wing of my family is doing.  

When the semester fizzled out I returned to Michigan for Christmas. I rode my bicycle around until it snowed too much for that. I went to the Walmart and bought a nice-fitting blue shirt for thirteen dollars. I put the shirt on in front of the tall mirror in my parents’ bedroom and thought a brief prayer for the overseas factory worker who made it. I wore the cheap shirt for dinner one night and Dad remarked, “That is a beautiful shirt. Where can I get a shirt like that.” I referred him to Walmart, his favorite, and some days later he got the same shirt from Walmart.

Dad has a copy of a new book detailing in photographs and words the story of the restoration of an old steam-powered locomotive, which was kept captive on the campus of Michigan State University until its restoration by a student club my father was a part of. He opened the book to a photo of a man who taught him and his college friends everything there was to know about the machinery, and a little about life in general, too.