By Rose White
Ghosts (Tom)
August 2004
When I first met Tom, the only instructions I got were, “Don’t mention his ex-wife. Ever.”
But Tom was a true gentleman. He was shy, never smoked or drank. He was a deeply religious man. We went to the same church on the East Side. We both liked the rowdy, demonstrative service: black churches give you a show for your money. “This is the God I know,” he had said.
Tom was so tall that whenever he went in the basement office, he had to stoop, but he never complained.
We’ll never know if he killed himself on a Sunday on purpose or not, but here are the facts: he laid out his identification and the contents of his wallet neatly on the kitchen counter, taped his unused ticket to the ballgame to the front door, and went out to his new truck with a shotgun.
It was true that he had a haunted vibe about him, but his divorce was a few years ago, and I never could have imagined that it would come to this.
After his death, more and more things came out about Tom that I hadn’t known. I knew of him as a truck driver and union reformer. Did I know he had also been a pastor? A Harvard graduate with a degree in theology? A commentator on NPR? What I still didn’t know was how such a gentle person could have inflicted such a violent death upon himself.
I was telling Lauren, I have a recurring waking dream, and I’m sure she has a similar one.
In it, I go down into the basement office after hours, and Tom is hunched over his computer.
“Oh, hi,” he says, as if nothing had ever happened.
“How are you?” I ask, or maybe I suggest that he take a break, or go home.
“Oh, pretty good, pretty good,” he says. “But you’ll have to excuse me,” he says, turning away from me and back to his desk. “There’s so much more to get done.”
Tom died on August 9, 2004, outside his home on Hubbard Street in Detroit. He was 49.
He was also a commentator on National Public Radio, and, several years before, said the following during one of his programs:
“When we go it alone, when we deny out interconnectedness, and miss the opportunity to mean something important to each other, we throw away the chance for real satisfaction and real beauty.”
Another Ghost (Richie)
July 13, 2005
Richie the Dog Guy across the street died yesterday-from AIDS, I guess. Lorene told me this in her usual bunt way: “Well, girl, you won’t be talking to Richie no more.”
I had always thought he was invincible because he walked his four big black dogs barefoot down the alley behind 51st Street, oblivious to the broken glass and used condoms littering the way.
He sometimes carried a big stick, so, along with the dogs, I always thought of him as a sheperd. The dogs were pit bull-Rottweiler mixes, but docile, and he controlled them with a series of whistles and calls. If I was across the street, he’d whistle at them so that they would run over and swarm me to be petted. Then he’d whistle for them to come back, and cry in a high, singsongy voice:
“Come on, my babies! Come here, babies! Come on!” Now, I imagined, the babies were in the pound.
One day last winter, I approached his house, hoping to pet the dogs. Instead, I found a handwritten sign, made of cardboard, blocking the gate.
“FLU SEASON-FLU-STAY AWAY,” it read.
“Weird,” I had thought, shaking my head and walking up the street to work. “Everybody on this block is weird.”
Everybody did have their quirk; I figured that this one was his. It was only much later that I realized he must have been trying to protect his compromised immune system.
I also learned that it was best to approach him from close range, otherwise he couldn’t recognize me.
“Hang on a minute,” he would say, squinting and tilting his head as he walked closer.
“Oh, it’s you! Hi! You know, my vision’s like the camera on ‘Cops’! Bounces up and down all the time! They say it’s the back part that got damaged when I was in a car accident about six years ago. So it’s hard to tell who it is from far away, since they’re always moving!”
“Richie, how do you make the dogs do whatever you say? My dogs would run away if I took them out without a leash.”
“Well, they was born right here on the couch, so the way I see it, I’m the only god they know. Sure, their daddy was a pit and their mama was a Rott, but they ain’t got a bad bone in their body! They ain’t got a bad bone in their body!”
Richie died at his home on 51st Street in Detroit in early July, 2005.
Dead Dog on Avenue
July 28, 2005
Last night was spent dealing with a dead dog. At dusk, a happy dog with its tongue hanging out emerged from a sidestreet and began trotting blissfully down Michigan Avenue. I knew what would happen next, and couldn’t not watch: a car, making no real attempt to avoid the dg, hit it and drove off.
They drive off when they hit humans, too: I remember picking Randy up at the hospital with his blood-soaked clothes in a plastic bag, and picking Drew up at the hospital with his hair caked to one side with blood, a row of fresh staples in his head.
So the dog: I had to fix it. I put my finger on its neck where I thought its pulse should be, and, finding that inconclusive, carefully touched a boot tip to its furry stomach.
Then I noticed that its neck was twisted around in a strange way, and a perfectly shaped pool of blood was forming on the concrete behind its head. No, definitely dead.
A lady drove up and got out.
“Did you do this?”
No!
“Got a shovel?”
“No.”
“Well, I got some boxes.”
We use them as tools to push the dog out of the road, but the dog is heavy and limp, so now it’s harder than we thought; we leverage ourselves by kneeling down to push, oblivious to the cars now swerving around us, and then, of course, blood starts smearing everywhere and gets on me; I realize that I can’t get blood on jeans that aren’t mine; this requires even more delicacy.
Finally, the dog is out of the road, asleep next to the curb, and she arranges its paws so that they aren’t so grotesquely pointed in the wrong directions.
“You know,” she says, “I just wanted to, you know, get it out of the.. you know, I couldn’t.. got a cigarette?”
“No.”
“I just wanted to… you know what I mean?”
“Thanks.”
Jesus on Avenue
October 16, 2005
Mike, from the mattress store across the street, gave me another card today. He gives me cards on all the holidays, even the ones I don’t know exist, like today’s: Sweetest Day. “Rose – a very nice lady,” it read. “From, Mike.”
Mike is a rogue mattress-store man with a fondness for prostitutes. Real women only break his heart, he says. He’s always getting arrested, or his car impounded, for these dalliances:
“I told them, take the car, it only cost me four hundred dollars!”
He started out working at the mattress store across the street, but then got in a fight with them and boldly opened up his own mattress place, one block from the old one. That closed, so now he’s back working for the original store.
“For a minute!” he shouts. This is an important distinction. “Only for a minute, honey! Ahhh!”
Mike is my dad’s age, with a long grey ponytail. The constant business with the cards is a bit goofy, but the fact is, if Mike didn’t stand nearby on the days I wait for the bus, I’d be pelted with rocks. In fact, one day last week when neither he nor Booker was out there, I was pelted with rocks.
He also gave me a business card, for the guy who does his teeth. “In case your parents ever need them or something!” Taking his dentures out, he shows me how good the work is. Saliva comes off his fingers in long strands, drooling onto the business card he hands me.
As crazy as he is, there are those odd days where I feel that of all the people I know, Mike is my best friend.
Leavin’ Here
November 2005
In Detroit, I learned how to fuck in early-model American-made cars and to spot abandoned houses by the snow on their roofs. But every time I leave — increasingly, it becomes harder and harder to come back.
I’ve decided that Harlem is the key to happiness: like Detroit, but inhabited. In the meantime, I entertain myself by tossing off one postcard after the other from our ghost town into the void, counting up the nickels and dimes until I can disappear, without a trace, into the crowds and the streets.
A Coney Island sideshow performer profiled in the New York Times last week said that each of the tattoos covering his body was a reminder of a place or episode from his past. How can I remember Detroit?
I think about a bird inked onto my skin, a graceful, delicate thing. A scavenging seagull would be the most accurate choice. Like all tattoo birds, it should be clutching something in its talons, something like…what, exactly?
A wrench? A lugnut? An empty bottle, a paper bag, a banner reading, “I’m just tryin’ to be real with y’all, you know what I’m sayin’?”
That’s the thing about Detroit: you can’t pin it down with a single, iconic image. Instead, there’s only littered detritus, debris blowing across the parking lot of my mind. Detroit is a smashed bottle glittering rainbow colors in the sun. Tattoo that.
When I’m grown up, or just rich, I’ll live somewhere else, but own a dilapidated mansion here. Maybe on Grand, maybe on the East Side. Keep a white Cadillac in the garage. I’ll come visit every now and then, light a joint, and drive it around.
Excerpted from Old Weird America #1