Tow Up

I spent Christmas Eve with Gianni. We ate at Honest John's, under the neon glow reading "Men Lie."

Afterward, we went to Gianni's apartment across the
street and I started drinking a bottle of Caxasa I had
bought in Brazil.  Maybe if I got really drunk, I
could write down the events of the past few months. 
After a paragraph and half the bottle, I saved a draft
of nonsense and gave up.  

I asked Gianni if he wanted to chill at my new place
on 4th St.  We walked to my 94 Plymouth Sundance, two
door, four cylinder, manual transmission.  After a
couple attempts at pulling out, we discovered that the
most we would do is spin tires in that far right lane.
 The car was trapped by the hardening of a plow-made
snowbank powdered by a fresh onslaught of snowflakes.

I can only imagine that the mix of exhaust, smoking
tire tread and steam attracted them.  We were a lost
cause until an 83 Chevy pickup appeared beside us in a
cloud of smoke, trailing through the snow a rusty chain
tied to a strip of canvas.   "Merry Christmas" introduced
us to Thomas and Rebecca, Ghetto Extraction Service
Limited, working Christmas Eve and anytime it snows.

Thomas backed up through the snow and attached the
hook to the underbelly of my car.

"Gotta get some money somehow," he said. He and his
wife had been driving around all day un-sticking
people, collecting their due, doing their duty.

"Hey man, I only got $2," I said.

"How much?" he asked incredulously. The air was dead.
By the look on his face, this was challenging the
man's integrity.  Then, with a half-priest, half-Rambo
demeanor, with his callouses balled in a fist raised
to shoulder height, he exclaimed, "Fuck it, it's
Christmas!"

On his first attempt, the canvas untied from the
chain.  He double knotted the canvas strip, but then
the truck stalled and wouldn't start. Thomas was under
his hood yanking something to rev the engine, his wife
turning the car over.  Gianni was fidgeting.

"Dude, I'm going upstairs," he said, perhaps
suggesting that I should go with him. I was too drunk
to give up.   As if in answer, the pickup roared to
life.

A second attempt with the chain failed. The truck just
couldn't pull us through the hardened snow bank.
Thomas jumped in the pickup and exercised a doughnut
in the middle of 2nd St.

"Ain't happenin." He had given up and wanted to at
least push my car back into its space. Rebecca was
half cheerleader, half air-traffic controller, guiding
him in this task.

In a moment of stillness, Thomas pondered, haloed by
thumb-sized snowflakes.  He was a visionary
approaching a point of revelation.

"Give me your keys," he commanded, his yellowed eyes
fixed far in the distance, not on the car, not on
anything in this world. 

He majestically stepped into my Sundance, sat and
paused with his arms held stiff like deer antlers.

"Shit, this is a stick, this ain't shit! Watch this."

Rebecca was like "Go baby, you got this shit. Hell
yeah!"

And then he did it. The instant Thomas put his holey
sneaker to the gas, my car turned into a snow Porsche.
Rebecca was cheering in the middle of the street.

"You almost got it baby! This ain't shit!"

The car whipped out into the middle of 2nd St amidst
whooping and sighs of relief.

Thomas jumped out, slammed the door and strutted "You
know it, You know it, that wasn't Shit!" 

Rebecca said matter-of-factly, "You can do anything
with a stick.  GOOD JOB BABY."

Thomas collected my two dollars and Gianni's loose
change, the victory dance guiding the swing of his arm
into his pocket.

He gave us a big hug, each of us in an arm, and said
"Merry Christmas" through missing teeth.  He was more
drunk than we were. 

As they pulled out, going the wrong way down one-way
2nd street, Rebecca yelled,

"You can do anything with a stick!"

because great problems of humanity can be so easily
rectified.

Piston's Destiny Theory

I didn't grow up here, but I have this weak theory that maybe Detroit is a better place to live when the Pistons win. We've given up on all the other sports teams, except the Redwings, but let's face it, not enough of the actual residents of Detroit proper could give a rat's ass about hockey. The Pistons are enthralling. They are the toss outs, the second choices, the lame horses, the most underpaid bad-asses. They represent everything Detroit is and wants to be, and, when they lose, Detroit loses. I have this nice old Nishiki, painted matte black, so that with it's old school handlebars it looks like something from the fifties in India. A friend gave it to me because he didn't feel safe about me riding the Grand River bus. He had gotten into two fights in the past year on that very bus, and every time I rode it (three days a week) there would be something sketchy happening. One time a man sat behind me and started muttering "I'm going to fuckin kill you, you fuckin honky." I ignored him. The bike was an appreciated gift. So I was cruising up 2nd St, past Martin Luther King and past the Coronado on my left, where my friend Gianni lives, when the light pop, pop of gunshots and the twang of ricochets started registering in my ears. I was on the phone with a Chicago girl I had recently become romantically entangled with, so I said "Hold on, someone's shooting," ducked my head and rode faster through the intersection. When there was a solid concrete building between me and the firefight, I picked the phone back up and said "Ok, I'm past it." "WHAT THE FUCK, ARE YOU OK?" She seemed rather perturbed by these circumstances. "Of course, they weren't shooting at me," I said, which seemed like a reasonable response. I've been learning about acceptable and unacceptable circumstances for years in this city, from the time I lived in an apartment on Schaeffer close to 96, where bullets would spray the bricks close to my window almost nightly, to the time I was driving down Grand River and a two story building fell across the lane in front of my pickup. I just drove around it. Sometimes I think that, had the Pistons won in 2001, nobody would've been shooting at my apartment complex wall. Had the Pistons been fated to win in 2005, that building would still be standing. I got off the phone when I arrived at my house. The Chicago girl told me to be careful. They have working streetlamps in her city. The traffic light on my corner had been out for two months. One time, someone broke into an apartment on my street, and a neighbor of mine, Dan, jumped out of his house naked, chased and beat the thief and duct taped him to a tree. The police, when they arrived, said they loved our neighborhood because we liked to take care of our own problems. I bathed, got in my truck, and started on my way to the Coronado, to pick up Gianni to go watch game 3 of the playoffs. On my left going down 3rd St., I saw a circle of police officers, all looking down at a certain dead someone. I don't know if they had killed him. I assume they arrived shortly after that shooting had stopped. Cops here don't much like to get involved. I suspect most of them are hockey fans. The Pistons lost that night.

Guitar Pickin'

Chris would say that, even though he's a five foot 7 white kid in shorts living in the Cass Corridor, no one would mess with him. He said that a crackhead had summed it up something like "We know you got something going on, oh yeah." What he had going on was an obsessed depth of knowledge in German philosophy, more dangerous than crack. I had been misinformed that my friend's band Gaytar, was going to play at the Old Miami one evening. I went to Chris' apartment and had the opportunity to meet Chris' building manager, a bald martial arts master who had crashed his motorcycle headfirst into a car going 85 mph the wrong way on the highway after his wife had divorced him. On rainy evenings, he would go on his roof and practice with a katana. Chris' building had relatively few problems with theft. Sheila and Gianni showed up at Chris' and we set of for the Old Miami. As we walked under that green awning, we were teleported into a sort of drunken twighlight zone. There were two men in overalls sitting in front of the stage. I asked the white-haired one if there was a punk band playing there tonight. "Now I don' know bout all that but if ya wanna see some good guitar pickin music, just stick around." Were we in Kentucky suddenly? He even had a toothpick stickin out of his mouth. We decided to stick around for the guitar pickin. As we were waiting, relaxing on the twenty year old couches and talking trash, a black girl in urban camo pants, a black tank top and wire-rim glasses confronted us. She was sex incarnate. "Are you guys the band?" I pointed at Chris. "He's the band." "Please don't say your rappers," she said, placing her hand on Gianni's arm. She changed the subject... "I just got out of prison, and I'm just lookin to get fucked." She was staring at me hard, even with Sheila half wrapped around me on the couch. "My name's Keisha." She was rubbing Gianni. "It's my birthday." Neither Chris nor Gianni were looking very receptive. "It's because I'm black isn't it." "No, no, of course not." It wasn't that. She was beautiful, dangerous, and a little too horny. "Oh, don't tell me you guys are gay. Man, I just want something up inside me, with some creams..." I interjected "Some motor oil." "Ohhh, you know what I'm talking about. You dirty." At about that moment, a man walked out of the bathroom into the corner of the bar. She sat on his lap as the guitar pickin started. The first song was entitled "Dealin with the Devil," and was half an hour long. It featured the backup stylings of a woman in a crocheted top. She would dodge away from the microphone after each vocal harmonay she sang, as if the guitarist had accidently head-butted her in practice some time in the past.