One of the big moments in 2024 was when I began working on my third novel set in Flint, Michigan, during the second half of the 80s. This novel picks up where Phil’s Siren Song left off. This time, one of the central characters of this trilogy (Your Silent Face, Phil’s Siren Song…) yet to really weigh in, narrates the story. I’m talking about the enigmatic character, Karen. It’s her turn to play the hand of cards she’s been holding. Her turn to give us her spin on Nigel and Stuart and Phil and the downtown scene.
Here’s a teaser which appears early on in the novel. It has been established at this point that Karen is a student from the suburbs attending Flint’s own General Motors Institute, on the west side of downtown Flint, and that GMI students start school in the summer, almost right after their high school graduations, and, unbeknownst to Stuart (a Flint East-sider Karen has been close to since high school), she has already met the mysterious Nigel (in a premeditated, consensual fashion) who works at the front desk of the GMI student library.
There was a decent GMI student contingent at the Rusty Nail that night, thanks to Phil baby opening the shots bar in my dorm room before the poetry reading, although it would never happen again. The Nail would never become a GMI hang out like St. Elmo’s Bar in St. Elmo’s Fire.
Nigel seemed to be in control of a crowd he seemingly lacked any interest in controlling as he slouched at the microphone. His preliminary banter was self-effacing. Eye contact was minimal at best. The wry smile on his face was revealing. I got the impression that if he had been a guitarist in a band, like the Cure or New Order, he probably would have turned his back on his adoring fans throughout the whole show. Despite the apathetic pose, though, which could have been performative, the moment was his. There were lots of chuckles. Loud laughs piercing the bubble, all the disconnected and unchoreographed parts of a bar crowd suddenly syncing as everyone leaned in to listen.
Then, as the next discovery kicked in, I could feel my eyebrow involuntarily arching while Nigel continued reading his story into the sudden calm taking over the Nail. The story was all too familiar. My mind raced back to the exchange at the front desk of the GMI library which had become its inspiration, obvious only to me.
“What if you were reading a classic which you were heavily invested in like Moby Dick or Crime and Punishment or some shit. You’d been reading the damn thing for months. But when you finally got to the end something was wrong. The last page was missing. And you could tell somebody’d ripped the damn thing out.” I had punctuated the rhetorical diatribe by popping my gum.
He had fumbled with the stamp on his first attempt to pound the date onto the due date page of a book on economic fluctuations and unemployment.
“What?”
“Hunh? Hunh? What about that shit? Wouldn’t that be a hoot?”
“Uh, yeah. I guess.”
Clearly it had become more than a goddamn guess. Clearly my electrifying inquiry—a jolting opening better than any opening line he’d ever thought of, better than the best pick up line ever uttered in any fucking bar by any drunken goon boy—had captured his imagination. Clearly the son of a bitch had stolen my idea which in time, I might be able to use to my advantage.
I breathed hot breath on my glossy nails, shining them on my thrifted cashmere sweater.
In Nigel’s story, a rakish character went around to the local libraries, dressed in goth attire, tearing the last pages from all the classic tomes, some of which we’d had to face in high school, others which Stuart would tell me about after he arrived at college and enrolled in English courses he didn’t need. Books like Lord of the Flies, Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby. Of course, Nigel was careful not to suggest any of the ones I’d mentioned.
The story went off like a hand grenade. First he pulled the pin and got a few chuckles. Next, with some development, he held the bomb in his hand away from his body and the hilarity of some black-clad wraith slipping in and out of the stacks of a library to rip out the last pages of the classics became infectious. The rebellious stance of the situation was not lost on the local literati. When the hero was caught toward the end of the story, the bomb was lobbed into the laps of everyone present, the chuckles rumbling, the drunken laughter erupting.
The story was victorious. He was their unwilling champion. He couldn’t help himself. The son of a bitch could write. He’d sketched out a humorous glimpse of a disgruntled anti-authoritarian streak within themselves which they couldn’t express, except in the mosh pit at Danver’s Hall.
It was sexy.
There were more readers after that, but Nigel had taken up all the air in the bar. They struggled to breathe. By the time Stu worked up the courage to step up to the mic, the crowd was restless. I’ll be damned, though, if he didn’t rise to the challenge.
“The only motherfuckers anybody ever remembers are the top dogs. Or the ones who fought them.” He and Nigel were still a year away from a summer of drinking more beer than he had ever seen anyone consume in his entire life despite Flint’s reputation as a hard-drinking factory town. “And I ain’t talking about the gangs. No, I’m talking about the downtown legends. The scenesters. It’s kick ass or disappear, man. Generally speaking, we’re invisible.”
*
I remembered noticing as Stuart winced and hobbled up to the microphone as if he were an old Hobbit—his unsteady approach influenced by pitchers of anxiety and fear which would later be replaced with beer—that Joe, who was leaning on a wall with Phil and Nigel near the front of the crowd, had an ass in perfect ratio to the absence of round cheek and skinny boy-in-faded Levi’s I often found appealing. More appealing than poetry, anyway.
Stuart squinted into the light like one of the tweed hat wearing old guys sitting on a stool at the counter at Thoma’s Coney Island. His voice was shaky. His hands were possessed by tremors. His voice caught in his throat at first until he cleared it.
“This is called Existential Punch in the Balls,” he managed to croak on his second attempt to introduce the poem.
It was a terrible poem and nobody paid any goddamn attention whatsoever.
Next, he read an account of a gleaming emerald fly as it buzzed through the air in graceful scallops only to splatter on the windshield of a station wagon. This poem—obviously ripping off Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a fly buzz-when I died”—drew some sharp belly laughter, but not because it was funny. It was so damn cliché. Poor Stuart was bombing. Falling flat on his face. Dying. Gasping for air. But then he launched into a truly original poem in which the speaker was melting in bed like a popsicle in a kid’s fist on a sweltering summer night on the East Side, cataloguing the nighttime sounds of the neighborhood, the nearby parts plant, the expressway in the distance. The lines were long and elegiac, unlike the clipped lyrical bullshit which had been hollow and lifeless.
The damn thing worked well enough.
I absorbed the shift, which wasn’t very noticeable at first, for Stuart’s sake because I knew he would pelt me with a million questions after the reading. In his mind, in place of his memorable splash with the U of M-Flint literati, a void would spread like an oil spill, as if he had been blackout drunk. He might as well have been trashed.
“Did I have them? Were they with me? What did their faces look like? Did they pay as much attention to me as they did to Nigel? What about the sirens, Delores and Beth? Were they listening? Were they watching me? How did I sound? Did I sound too nasally? Did I read well? Oh, Christ, I bet I sucked.”
No longer leaning against the wall, Nigel and Joe stood at attention. Phil was making a comical face at some slut in the crowd with the face of a horse. More heads had turned in Stu’s direction. The jukebox launched into the guitar solo of “Hotel California” by the Eagles. Voices trailed off at the bar. Conversations disintegrated in the crowd, although laughter coming from the pool room still filtered in.
As he continued to read, the crowd began to lap up against him like waves on the shore of Lake Michigan.
Over the years, I have mentioned once or twice to deaf ears that the success of that moment gave Stuart the confidence to introduce himself to Nigel when the reading was over.
The lights came on. I stood beside him, smiling like a smug, crazy fool.
“Hey-y-y, man,” Stuart said, stammering. “I, uh, like, really liked your story. ‘Last Pages.’ Great title, man. It was brilliant.”
“Thanks,” Nigel replied. That was it, the son of a bitch. No reciprocal praise. Stuart launched into a ramble, as if nudged, about seeing Nigel walking up Leith Street on the East Side after seeing him sitting at a bus stop on the corner of Chevrolet and Third. There was telltale awe in his voice, and in his eyes, as I hovered at his elbow with both of my hands clutching his skinny tricep, anchoring him to the spot. Nigel eyes darted back and forth from Stuart’s to mine like a silver pinball stuck between bumpers while I smiled seductively.
Phil and Joe joined us. The boys shook hands all around, injecting the moment with a feeling of camaraderie and familiarity which Stuart had been unconsciously pining for all summer.
It was the moment Stuart and Nigel discovered their whole East Side childhoods had been separated by only a handful of blocks. It was the moment their friendship took off.
It was the goddamn moment I reset my relationship to these boys and took back my command of the situation.
