Fenby’s 3

It had been eight years since I walked this block.  Since I lived in what was now Charlie’s flat. The top front unit in an older building for this block. It used more brick in it’s construction than the tar and gravel, siding covered wood, of the neighboring homes, but had fallen into disrepair sometime in the eighties. I had shared it with Brian and Jess and before them Ric. And when he and I moved in it was an out right dump. At one point the flats door, in an interior hallway, worked it’s way free of the jam and for a month we just propped it in the opening, or picked it up and out of the way to let people in or out. But it was our first apartment and we loved that dump like none since, I’m sure Ric would agree.

Ric Maurer had found it, found Hamtramck for us really. And Planet Ant coffee house, where he worked, became our de facto living room and club house anyway. But that flat on Belmont was special. A small two bedroom that felt full when everybody who lived there was home, let alone when we brought what was left of a 2 am. bar crowd home with us. Brian had come up with stadium couch seating in the living room, a second -second hand sofa was placed behind and above the one Ric left. Built up on milk crates and an extra kitchen chair we couldn’t fit in the kitchen anyway. A brilliant solution to finding a few more drunk girls seats and hospitality.

This genius only matched by his awful choice of discontinued paint color, found at the hardware store at the end of the block. A dark olive that had probably been on the shelf since the Carter administration, “Paint doesn’t go bad…does it Mike?”. It made the room feel even smaller and more smoke filled. That same room that was Charlie’s den was now a light tan, like too much cream poured into weak coffee. They had left, maybe even retouched, our paint job in the bathroom. A tight little closet with a shower less tub that you could rest your arm on when sitting on the throne. In pale yellow and some left over olive green we had used an improvised stencil to make a Charlie Brown stripe that ran around the center of the wall.

In hind site it was probably more silly than hip, our little pad. But I find myself missing summer days on it’s porch that over looked the street and the porches across it, drinking Drambuie from a coffee mug on the third of our second hand sofas or twisting gently in the swing. Another Sullivan invention consisting of one of those ‘papa san’ chairs, satellite dish shaped bamboo with a big round cushion for comfort. Taken off its base and hung from the porch rafters with cloths line, it made a swaying nest strong enough for two. I spent many twilights just  drifting there in the dying light or waiting for some art house chic to ring the ‘door bell’. 

Which was my own construct of a small brass ships bell, rigged with more cloths line and a red plastic lobster as the pull. Found in a antique shop at the end of the block and mounted to the porch column with the lobster hung over the side reaching to shoulder height on the walk way that led to the building entrance. Brian, to this day, is quick to point out that the lobster was lifted from his house in Ypsilanti. Our land lord had sold and moved out sometime after I left Michigan. The new owner had fixed the electric buzzer, but Charlie had ended up with the lobster and it had a place of honor in his own collection of totems and fetishes.

 

  “Where are those guys?” Danny was saying as he caught up to my slow shuffle. I was making my way towards Campau. My head was still spinning a bit and there was an awful taste in my mouth but the grin on my face was meant to assure…well; the world, that I was far from ‘down for the count’. I just needed a ‘reset’ is all, a little chemical aid to even out the swimming. Coffee, a few cigarettes and a moment to collect my head and I’d be ready for round two.

We had only made it a few houses from the flat, as there was a fair bit of swaying and rubber necking to do. And a half formed thought that the limo might  gently round the tight corner any second. Danny’s surveying looks mostly trying to figure out, by following my gaze, what there was to grin about on the roof line and quiet little double decker porches. We were, in fact, just passing a house who’s exterior I knew like the back of my hand, but whose inside I’d only seen through the windows.

At one point, fairly soon after Brian and Jess moved in, he and I were working as vinyl siding ‘engineers’  for this crazy  fly by night (or job, anyway) contractor named Andre Gullivan. And, through the luck of some county run contract, we spent two weeks that summer working across the street and down a few doors from our little ‘Bat Cave’.  With a couple of two story ladders, one fairly old and wooden, and a metal scaffold beam called a ‘pick’ we had clad the outside of our unknown neighbor’s house in palest gray plastic. 

Hanging vinyl siding is the construction equivalent of playing with Legos. Everything snaps together and gets spiked with large headed roofing nails. Using stock molded pieces for the corners and around windows and doors, it’s not very hard work. Even when you have to whip out the ‘break’, which is a long hinged work surface supported on two saw horses for bending sheet aluminum, so that you can ‘trim out’ the last exposed wood, you just need to remember to measure twice and cut (or bend) once. We had caught on quick and by the time this Belmont job came up Andre was in the habit of just dropping us off with materials and leaving for who knows where. If we were lucky he’d come back with our lunch or a ride home at the end of the day. But with the job site six doors away we were on our own after the first day until it was all done. Which suited us just fine.

Hell, we didn’t roll out of bed until the last minute and strapped tool belts on while going down the stairs-still picking sleep from our eyes.  We even had girlfriends to cook us hot lunches and bring us cold drinks. There is a vivid mental photograph in my minds eye of looking up from my second story hammering to see my Karen walking towards us with a plastic pitcher of instant iced tea. She is wearing  tiny little jean cut offs and two, colored, wife beaters making her pert chest…I don’t know, perkier. With a side ways smile she is calling out “Come get it, Bitches”, tea for Brian, tea and kisses for me.  Jessica’s hardy yet short chuckle drifted to us from our porch, her appreciation of Karen’s sailor mouth. Her laughter only broadened after Brian wondered aloud where his kisses were. I could just make out her toes and knees, and maybe a book spine, peaking out between the porch rails.

I met Karen Reid when she was going to Sienna Heights College , a Catholic school in Adrian. I was just a townie with an in at the campus poetry open mic. I’d worked up the pipes to read a few things on a night she had followed her bookish roomie to the meeting room off the student union. She’d accused me later, over coffee at Fenby’s, of not being able to ‘get over myself’ and write for an audience. I think I loved her right then. “So why did you come out for coffee with me?…since I’m such a fat headed tool”, I asked. She giggled, “You still manage to be smooth, somehow” and with a softening, like maybe a very early moment for her, “Or your eyes, maybe”. 

We played at being chums for a few days. Trips to the mall or the movies, or just strolls on campus where we would take too much pleasure in making sport of the other. Our dialogs were peppered with foul language and over focused observations. All with side long glances and horse play. She’d fend off my romantic advances with jokes and tags, only to jump on my back fifteen minutes later and make a meal of my ear. Then one day she took me be surprise and I was unable to stay on my feet after she leapt on me. She gushed apologies through our giggling and was kissing my head, when things changed. Suddenly she wasn’t tittering anymore and a devilish glint crept into her eye. We didn’t get off that floor for an hour. I think that was in her dorm room but little of the inconsequentials like that remain in my memory now.

When Ric came back to Adrian and started talking about Hamtramck, she still had several more courses to take. But after I moved up there I’d drive the hour plus back to get her, just to turn around and bring her back to the flat on Belmont. Where we would while away long weekends bar hoping at night and sleeping in late during days filled with random and energetic love.

We were still together when Ric moved out and Brian and Jess moved in. But by the time I was ready to leave Ham town we were in that on again, off again stage where you can’t think of a good reason to get back together but take pains to avoid cutting it off entirely. I even tried to get her to come with me to California, or follow me after. She never did, and we’d lost touch. It wasn’t until this morning’s confab with my boy that I had heard anything about her whereabouts. As I write now, I kinda wish that I had my ignorance left, that she still lived only in my memory. The ghost of a happy relationship. 

 

Danny and I were finally coming up to the corner of Belmont and Joseph Campau

I could just make out the ten foot bronze statue of Pope John Paul II perched on another twenty or so feet of stone in his little park, arms outstretched in benediction or to signal a touch down. He had visited the mostly Polish and Catholic city of Hamtramck in the early ’80s and this was the second monument to that visit. I looked right (north) and down the street I could plainly see the little hamburger stand, whose interior promised coffee. With a glance over my shoulder….and not seeing the head lights of a car, let alone a limo, we crossed the street.

(more to come)