Keeping Things Whole (9 page)

In a novel, you wouldn't
believe that the skyline of Detroit, failed Motor City, was bookended by an enormous, abandoned municipal train station at one end and by a police station/courthouse at the other. Every single one of the six hundred windows of Michigan Central Station is smashed out, and none ever emits light. The marble-rich station and hotel, once the bright smile of the city, has six hundred missing teeth. With its vaulted ceilings now home only to pigeons, and its acres of marble abandoned or covered in five kinds of feces, the ghostly station is the city's tombstone for the death of public transit (or, to many a Detroiter, public life). Only dust, birds, and the mad commute within it now. The skyline's other end is 1300 Beaubien, a courthouse and police station filled, not emptied, by civil strife. Together, they're the bookends of the Detroit riverside. A failed way out at one end of my horizon and a lockup at the other: I couldn't make up my life. Can you? (Have you?)

Borders: here vs. there. Cross from Greece into Turkey and you'll meet every manner of bureaucratic intrusion, five pairs of hands going through your passport and half a dozen yelled insults demanding to know why you would ever want to leave beautiful country A for that dog's asshole of a country B (that dog's asshole of a country with, at the border crossing, an identical landscape). Snarling soldiers stand in towers and behind painted or fenced lines, hate and machine guns ready. Greece and Turkey. Haiti and the Dominican. Bosnia and Croatia. Windsor and Detroit have none of that. Our hands are too deep in each other's pockets (pockets of various kinds) for anyone to raise a fist. But still, every border does its fictitious
here
and
there
. As Kate used to say, then finally showed, “You see a jurisdiction best at its edges.” Too true. And in the D, most of the edges you see are black.

Everything I'd done with weed in Windsor was meaningless over in the D. The profitability of my loose jays, the connect I'd paid for through Claire, the flinging treb—small change in the wrong currency. And let's call a non-spade a non-spade: in the D, I was cracker white. Over there, my skin said more in advance than I ever could with my mouth.

Windsor's as multicultural a Canadian city as you can get. With war, kleptocracy, and drought spinning a changing planet like a roulette wheel, every generation of immigrants that Canada has ever attracted has settled in Windsor. Meanwhile the D has been losing one colour for fifty years.

Polite Canadians (excuse the redundancy, and the Cuban) want to say that race is irrelevant, a non-issue, a source of national pride not problems. Right: we're all one race, all white, rich, and liberal given the right chances. Some part of you knows otherwise. What percentage of your lovers have been of a different race? Can the adventurous even claim 10 percent? How many Canadians know that Canada also had a slave history? While I'm at it, did you know that John Newton—the man who wrote “Amazing Grace” and led, against all odds, Britain and arguably the world's fight against the slavery of blacks—was a daily opium user? Prohibition chases inhibition.

Anyone who believes humanity is just one race should visit their nearest correctional facility. The plaque at America's Statue of Liberty, that “Mother of Exiles,” famously reads “Give me your tired, your poor / your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Those tired, poor masses have disproportionately high representation in prisons, pharmacies, and morgues. When I wanted to smuggle pot internationally, a courthouse was a job fair.

I was a white Canadian looking for pot dealers in Detroit. With 1300 Beaubien weighting down the skyline, I could let someone else round up the applicants for me, all without a headhunting fee. Even the street name had elastic borders.
Bow-been
, we'd overhear locals say in Detroit's clubs and restaurants before we drove by street signs our school French had us pronounce
Bow-be-en
.
Goodwell Street
. Not for most of the people there.

Every defendant was black, and the only white people were judges and lawyers, a few police. The bailiffs were black, the stenographers, most of the cops and lawyers, the families of the accused, all the custodians. Walking from public courtroom to courtroom I could hear complete resumés of crime. Young Tyrell Jones minored in assault before moving on to major in armed robbery. Jephrey Johnston joined the court one day after three busy seasons with community programs. Strapping young Wardell Jones was no stranger to moving keys of green, but he liked to crack jaws and ribs along the way. I skipped lunch to hear more about Lester Davis, a promising green prospect, only to find that two of his former places of legitimate employment had gone up in flames. On my third day I got a glimpse of Carter Stewart, a man neck-deep in drug and gun charges. The weapons charges didn't stick, so Carter stayed in my sights. By then I'd sat through so many dockets and listened to more than three centuries' worth of incarceration get handed out. When a visibly terrified witness finally changed his testimony, Carter was found not guilty and already knew his way to the exit. I followed him out through the large courtroom doors.

There are places where your name is the last thing you want to hear. I caught up with Carter at the elevators. “Hi, Carter, I'm Trevor Reynolds. I wonder if we might chat a little.” I was another white line on the road telling him to stay in his lane. He took a long look at me, eyes as static as coal. Still, no place where he was more likely to keep his hands at his sides, and at 1300 I could be certain a prospective employee wasn't exercising his right to bear arms.

“How about I show you some ID,” I said before the elevator even arrived, “show you which team I'm
not
working for?” I slid a passport out of my pocket, cover out for him to read.
CANADA PASSPORT/PASSEPORT
. I'd never been more grateful for official bilingualism, that capital
E
a big glowing sign saying,
Not from here.
I shrugged and slid the passport back into my pocket.

Carter and I remained immobile until the elevator finally arrived. I stepped inside first, was grateful and terrified when he clomped his Timberlands in after.

“I'm Trevor Reynolds, a Canadian looking to talk a little business.”

“Man, what this shit about?”

“Weed, Carter. Pounds of Canadian Chronic.”

We walked out into a parking lot in one country and looked over at another, greed, etc. driving each of us.

“C'mon, I'll buy you a beer. Propose terms.”

That courthouse networking was done long before I ever met Kate, yet when we were together I burned to tell her about it. You only get courage by doing something that tests your courage. I felt every hair on the back of my neck as Carter and I stepped into an old bar, peanut shells on the floor, pressed tin ceiling above us. To you I admit that I've generally put my courage into making money, not relationships. (Until this blog, anyway.)

Kate did the opposite.

Live on a border and
the new year has twice as many places to start. Or to grind to a halt. My Christmas
live with me, live with me
invitation didn't win the response I'd been hoping for.

In Windsor, we all grew up with carloads of afternoon smuggling. Everybody had “border shoes.” When your runners ran down and split apart, you'd set them aside rather than throw them out, saved them for the next crossing. This pair was only to be thrown out on the other side, crammed into some fast-food restaurant bin, so you could come back with two new pairs, one on your feet and the other hidden in the car to avoid duty. Local moms prided themselves on how large an article of clothing they could fit into their handbags. Everyone followed the Clark Kent dress code and would drive home with newly purchased American clothes under the old clothes they'd gone over in. Otherwise safe and conscientious parents would remove spare tires from the bottom of trunks to better stash dog food or new power tools or sporting equipment. Now I say spend it where you make it, buy jobs when you buy products. That wasn't the local lesson.

Immigration law and Kate's having been born here weren't the only reasons she came back to Windsor. Detroit was the third. No sense training to be a lawyer outside the country where you'll practise law, but how else could she make her second degree different from her first? As she joked, “If I can't study abroad, I'll study abutting.”

I'd always been over for movies and concerts, then was over even more for the Kate dates. Restaurants there meant less likelihood of bumping into someone we knew. We made regular trips to the Rivera murals, swore we saw different colours in different seasons. Once we toured Barry Gordy's original house, birthplace of Motown. Not a replica, not an architectural homage—the actual house. In one upstairs room, singers had been placed beneath an opened attic hatch for a more echoey vocal track. When I told Mom and encouraged her to go see it, I had no idea that echoey Motown attic would become a hidden hatch in her own tunnel offensive.

Initially Kate and I also did a little cross-border shopping. Somehow a city with a perpetually draining population still has a better lingerie selection. After I proposed we live together, Kate took us over for some cross-border stopping.

At Christmas, when I first said
live with me
, she'd been a puddle on two legs, all wet love. But as soon as the new year got under way and I tried to discuss our looking for a place together, she clammed up. Only when she emailed to say she'd be spending the night at her place one Tuesday did I acknowledge that she hadn't returned my calls all day.

What?
I replied.

I'm studying.

The cold e-shoulder. That night, as she deigned to send one brief reply to every three emails or phone messages from me, I fell into one trap after another. I felt fair and reasonable sending off
Don't I deserve to know why we're fighting?
then like a maudlin little eunuch when her response quoted my own question.
At 11:13 p.m., Trevor Reynolds wrote…

Then:
I need some time to think
.
Respect that.

Right, my asking why we were fighting was another infraction. My insensitivity. My barbarous lack of telepathy. By the time I was finally fighting mad it was too late to head out, yet because of her I couldn't concentrate to read. Everywhere I turned in my apartment there was some little thing of hers. Boots and belts. Her dirty travel mug. Fucking hairpins. My place was our place but her place was just hers.

The next morning—no email from her, no messages—I was merely a house painter. The tedium of it, moving molecules, fighting time, bandages for entropy. I wasn't stupid enough to accelerate my next lob with the treb just because I was in a romantic spat. Back then, my first three rules of business were: (1) make money, (2) make it so you can keep it, and (3) stick to rules 1 & 2. A drop because I was bored? Pissed off? Dissatisfied? Please, I am my mother's son (and possibly the great-grandson of William Williams, tunneller near-extraordinaire). The grow must go on. If you have a brain and self-control, crime isn't chaos. Just because you step over the legal line doesn't mean you step over the rational line. Should be the opposite. Crime is pure adulthood, life without insurance. Only you look out for you.

After her second night away I didn't need a morning coffee to shoot my blood up the thermometer. I asked her to live with me and she got mad? Now I was pissed off, doubly. Bring it on.

As always, the fight went meta, yet another fight about fighting. Communication, emotional goals, change—all of it gave way to trench warfare. Duck, rise to fire, stay alive. I'd rehearse insults while painting. Careful with that 10-megaton
Parent-pleaser
. Easy with that heat-seeking
Drone lawyer
.

Work, just work. Fourteen hours painting a swivel servant's living room in “wild sage.” To me it was the colour of bile mixed with toothpaste, but hey. Over lunch I used a germy payphone to send and receive four coded messages and arranged a drop, schemed my way to a month of Mom's salary for forty-two minutes of work. Fuck Kate. Stick with the money, the privacy of profit, that narrowing mirror that showed only me. Or so I told myself until I got home to her email.

Can you meet me tomorrow in the D? 7:30 @ The Foundry.

I went to bed extra horny, sure that my arms and bed were only temporarily empty. I was half right.

Another difference between a law
student and a student, between a second degree and a first, is twice the experience with men. Date someone close to twenty, and she'll probably have met nothing but takers, baseball cap dudes who'll barely undo their own pants. These doofuses (doofi?) think,
Cunnilingus
is
that toga senator guy with the sandals and shit
. Mid-twenties, a woman's more likely to be getting the sex she wants. (You won't believe me yet, but mid-thirties is usually more accurate.)

Kate's men. Blair, her high-school dude, her hunk of football youth, her life-support system for a hemp/coral/shark's tooth necklace. Christian, her (first?) bad boy, her emotional criminal, the man who taught her, however negatively, that selfishness is part of life. If she wasn't devoted to herself and her clit, why should anyone else be? Then Charles, her
sensitif
, her attentive and caring partner who encouraged her growth, a growth so unencumbered she eventually discovered she needed more than safety and someone who cleaned up after himself. Inevitably, for her at least, a pet artist: David was good with everything, except the rent. Computer programming, soldering, video editing, handmade pasta—he could teach himself anything save the fact that the world didn't owe him something. Ryan, her scholarship pirate, her challenge junky, her bounder. Richard, her older guy, bit of money (as amateurs go), but he had too keen an eye on appliance deals and shared too much of his intricate knowledge of income tax.

Me? Well, don't we always think our current lover is an amalgam of our past lovers? Accurately or not, we see a chain, not isolated, possibly ill-fitting, links. Thing is, chains end. After three days of near silence and zero sex I was keen to test the strength of our chain, but not so happy to do it in a Detroit restaurant. If our Foundry date was to be a genuine reconciliation, all shaved legs and strategic underwear, why complicate a race home with a border crossing? (Isn't make-up sex one of the secret reasons couples fight?) And the border would throw off my relationship radar. Arriving separately, what would be fashionable lateness, a border delay, or manipulative spite?

Kate was the second thing I noticed when I stepped into the crowded, mid-sized Detroit restaurant. She was there and dressed to induce cardiac arrest, flesh here and tight fabric there. The spiky cascades of hair I loved. She smiled slightly in my general direction before edging her nose into a fishbowl-sized glass of red. The colour of her shirt matched the wine. With a pair of crisp black pants, the burgundy shirt made her look like a waiter or a hit man with tits. The sight of her was multiply inviting, so clean, so together. Memory and fantasy both tickled my palms with the curves of hip and breast I could see twenty feet away.

She stirred me entirely, but the half-packed restaurant did not. At each table around the perimeter of the room sat a well-dressed woman with a glass of wine and a pen. Sheets of notepaper sat stacked in front of them. A three-sided bar thrust forward from the rear of the room. I gravitated to it, not Kate. Men in adult pants who didn't live exclusively in running shoes huddled around the bar. Everyone was older than we were, thirties, forties, almost exclusively white.

Three waitresses in white shirts rode herd, ushering late arrivals to a table or the bar. Eventually one of them stepped to the centre of the room and addressed us. “Good evening, silent singles of Detroit.”

WHAT!?

Kate did an excellent job pretending to be interested in anything other than my incredulous stare.

The emcee marched on. “You've no doubt read about silent dating in Manhattan or Chicago. You certainly didn't
hear
about it.” The younger staff chuckled. “Now it's time for the Motor City to quiet down. Quiet down so we can let romance be heard. We all live with so much noise. Ring tones stabbing at us. TVs blaring. Cars with their thump thump. You're here tonight to quiet all that down and meet others who want to hear better things in life, who want to quiet down before we open up. Welcome to Detroit's chat room with bodies.”

“And drinks!” the bartender yelled. Relieved laughter sloshed around.

Kate's eyes found mine across the room. Prosecutor's smile. Little duellist's toss of the chin.

The emcee stepped back to throw a thoroughly condescending look at the men. “All right, the rules. For the next ninety minutes,
all
of your talking will be done with a pen. Silence. Silence. Silence. Exchange notes, exchange looks, exchange anything you can with a pen. Now go on, mingle. Enjoy each other's quiet.”

Crossing towards Kate I tried to be a sport. Fine, we'd make up with pens.
I'm sorry. / No,
I'm
sorry. / You're even prettier than I remember. / Let's get out of here.
But I wasn't the only bee flying towards that burgundy flower. I got cut off by some button-down hustler keen to fill the passenger seat of his Stock-Market Utility Vehicle. And she was all smiles. For him.

Let her cross her Rubicon. I didn't pause what had been my walk towards her but pretended to be intent on getting paper. This was war, so I sought out the most attractive blonde that could keep me in Kate's sightline.

Hi.
Hi.
What
else
do you do for fun?

Glore often joked about my “taxi-metre brain. ” She never did get me stuffed into an actor's pair of tights, but that doesn't mean I hadn't learned from the countless rehearsals I got hauled to as a kid. Like it or not, I'd endured eighteen million household conversations about stagecraft. Blocking. Floor plan. After scalping my blonde I went with a classic stage trick: I found a woman (older; line-of-credit hair) who was facing Kate so I could sit with my back to her. By hiding my face from Kate, she would have to infer how much and how well I was flirting by looking at Ms. Salon, not me. If my table companion gave me a bedroom smile, it would ricochet across the room.

I'm not actually looking for a date. Should I move on?

Lady Manicure checked the traffic, then scribbled.

Not yet, but you'll understand when I ask you to leave. So what are you looking for then?

Get my girl back. She's behind me. The long black hair.

And the chest. So what did you do?

Asked her to live with me.

I'd heard about silent dating on NPR and thought it pure twaddle, another Moleskine fantasy. We scribblers all. Actually trying it, though, I put honesty in and got honesty back.

Asked without a ring?
We've only been together six months.

Would she say
only
? You asked one question. Maybe she wants to hear a different one.

I don't really think she's the marrying type.
Is there another?
Yes, I was raised by one.
A bit hard, was she?

You date by exam, you learn a few things. Around us the confessional allure of a chat room was shaken liberally with the eye and body work of a bar.

Oh, you're off. I see a fresh divorce walking around.

I headed for a drink, trying not to notice that the oak bar was crowded almost exclusively with men. Even at the bar, silence reigned. The dude to my right, oh so very sports TV, nudged me to reveal three separate notes.
2 bad we cant cut and paste
read the note in his left hand while in his right he carried two identical notes, each of which read,
Looks like you don't need help getting dates at any volume
.

Finally I got my place in Kate's royal court. I began with invitations.

Do you want to
a) tell
b) hear
c) ask

She laid a note over top of mine.

Hi. I'm Kate. What do you do?

Kate but not my Kate. The old re-seduce me game. Right, let's pretend we don't already know what's beneath the zippers.

Buy low. Sell high. Lived in Detroit long?

Live near here, not here. You guess where? ‘Buy low, sell high.' You mean stocks?

Buy everything low. Sell whatever you can high.

I tried to squeeze out some time with my pun. Could I guess where she was from? Running me all over the court. Who's ever going to guess Scottish-Chinese Canadian? Maybe she was trying to bait me into posing that contemporary racist question,
No, no, where are you
really
from?
Was she a Kate I didn't know or a new Kate? Kate 2.0?

I think I know where you're from. The State of Gorgeous, right?

Lethal little half-smile.

Maybe did your undergrad at Articulate and Intelligent U.?

A dismissive reach for her wine glass.

Now you've got your first apartment alone in a little loft district called Likes to Laugh.

Stonewalled.

Not afraid to travel on the Fighting Expressway if you need to.

Actually @ law school across the water. Live in a district called Definitely Not Jail.

They have parks over there? I have a scampish dog.

‘Have' or ‘am'? No, no parks. Not a lot of
green
in the area.

That's too bad. Have never met a law student who didn't like her green.

Nice place to visit. Wouldn't want to live there.

What's a home without plants?

So, what, you
lie
on a bed of poison ivy every night?

People live more lies than they tell.

Let's step outside and talk about lies.

Let's step outside.

A line from a parking lot nose-breaker. With fists, at least you know when the fight's over.

I didn't hide the fact that I gathered up the pages of our silent date and tucked them into my suit jacket as we exited. Always destroy the evidence, even the fake evidence.

“So have you finally agreed to talk to me?” I asked as the doors swung shut and the cold January night clamped itself around us.

“And then some.”

“Look, you don't return my calls, you drag me out here for some charade all because I asked—”

She whirled and came at me. “Because you might go to jail, you liar.”

Our eyes locked, not pleasantly.

“I don't
lie
to you, Kate. I keep things from you, yes, but I do not lie.”

“You're clever and careful to not tell me exactly what your ‘night job' is. But if you ask me to live with you, I need to know, and you need to tell me,” she jabbed my chest, hard, “whether what you do could put you in jail for a decade.”

I glanced around. Abandoned stores. Some chute of pitted freeway visible in three different directions. Billboards advertising anti-anxiety prescriptions and HMOs. Of course. We were in Detroit not for romance or adventure, but because it was a different jurisdiction.

“Kate, I want us to live together. In a bigger apartment.” Up and out went my hands. Pale invitations. Peacemakers.

This time she hammered me in the chest, no more jabs. “Never, ever, ever—god damn you—ignore what I'm saying. Could your ‘job,' your ‘work,' your
you
put you in a cage? Try, for once, to be honest.”

That brought me off the ropes. “
Honest?
You want
honest
? Yes, the life I live, the life I want to live, could put me in jail. Just like living here”—big theatrical inhalation—“could give us cancer or entomb us in the 401 or throw shrapnel through our skulls if some nutter buys a van and some fertilizer. You want to talk about
lies
? You and your friends all smoke dope. Judges, lawyers, cops—the whole profession is chrons. Everybody drinks. That drug's okay, but mine isn't? What emergency room, what courtroom, isn't fuelled by alcohol? Legal, illegal, sold by the state, policed by the state—don't tell me about lies. Pharmacies sell opium. We run a plant harvested by some of the poorest people on the planet through some of the richest corporations, that's medicine. We grow a plant, that's a drug. Sell muffins at a local market and the law requires you to list what's in them. Your classmates swill pitcher after pitcher of factory beer with no idea what it's made of. Why? Because the government makes tax selling it. The war on drugs is a war on truth.”

I could feel my voice fading in the cold air. You think something five hundred times, it sometimes comes out in a bundle.

She hooked her fingers into the back of her pants and threw some jaw at me. “Yes, yes, yes. You don't eat bullshit for breakfast, that's abundantly clear. But you say
live with me
, you've got to acknowledge that some day our door could get kicked down. We pretend otherwise and
we're
lying.”

“No one's going to kick our door down.”

“Sweetheart, I always do the homework. Queen and Rowbotham—twenty years for hash, just hash. Queen and Raber—the first thing the police did after they kicked the door down was shoot the family dog, dead. This was at the afternoon birthday party of a seven-year-old. Three bullets, one dog. You think they're going to kick our door down then talk soothingly to Voodoo?” Her eyes were a little shiny, but her voice wasn't.

“So what,” I asked, “we shut up and obey? Everybody has pot. But don't sell it, no. Be another obedient Canadian! Or maybe just let someone else do our dirty work for us. Pay the immigrant to clean my toilet. Let the hog manure ruin a distant water table so long as my bacon's cheap. The more people smoke, the more likely we'll collectively choose to end this ridiculous prohibition. You're not the only one who does homework. We spent ten million dollars putting Rowbotham away, and our taxes market booze.”

“Choose your battles. I'm talking about us.”

“So am I. Think of how many people make money in shitty ways. Insurance. Consultants. Let's say it, some of the law—how much of this is rationalized piracy? Oil. Chocolate. Diamonds. Purposefully obsolete electronics—”