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The next morning I shower and wash off the temporary tats, put on a clean set of
clothes and a pair of oversize black sunglasses under a Yankees baseball cap. The sun is shining. I check out of Sleepy Hollow and drive into downtown Bay City, where I browse the many second-hand and thrift stores.
From St. Vincent De Paul’s comes a not-too-bad Brooks Brother’s suit in dark blue. Shows some signs of wear but it’s okay. From the Salvation Army store I pick up a few human hair wigs and a theatrical make-up kit. At the Goodwill store, I score a shoeshine kit and several items of clothing, all at a bargain price.
When my shopping is complete, I step down the street to Mama’s Bar to make a phone call. I call the number for the little rental house and make an appointment with the elderly-sounding landlord for two o’clock.
I pass the time with a drive across the bridge to Zenith City. A tour is in order. It’s a beautiful spring day and I keep the window open, feeling the fast-warming air and soaking up the sweet, fresh smell. It appears that the old berg has changed a lot, at least on the surface. Downtown looks all spruced up and pretty, ready for the tourists. There are old-timey bricks on some of the streets, a bunch of cool street lamps, and newly planted trees on the boulevards.
I keep my eyes peeled for any sign of Carole or Mike. But of all the people I see on the streets and sidewalks, the only one I recognize is a guy in a car next to me at a stoplight. We used to play hockey on the same team when we were kids. He looks right at me without the slightest hint of recognition and I take that to be a good sign.
Emboldened by my anonymity, I stop for lunch at Auntie Loo’s in Canal Park, an old whorehouse turned into a restaurant. The place is full of good-looking strangers. Probably tourists.
After baked salmon and cottage fries, I drive back over the bridge for my meeting with the landlord of the rental property, Arnie Sugstad. He’s waiting for me at the boxy little house exactly at two o’clock. He’s wearing an off-white golf jacket and hideous plaid pants. He seems tired and arthritic but doesn’t hesitate when I offer six months rent in advance, as well as the security deposit.
Keith Thomas has found himself a home.
For the next several days I spend the time enjoying the good spring weather and making my little house a home. I buy modest furniture from one of the many local furniture stores, pots and pans and flatware from the Goodwill store, and a TV and boom box from the Pamida discount store.
The abnormally warm and sunny spring has me feeling mellow, even peaceful. I spend the days working out and reading and practicing moves of self-defense. At dark, I walk the quiet streets and sidewalks; my receptors on full bore.
These excursions bring to mind something I read many years ago. I can’t remember the guy’s name but I do remember finding the book in a cheap hotel room in Florida. Guy was writing about a city he called Hammond, Wisconsin, but it was obvious to me it was Bay City.
The thrust of his comments on Hammond—or Bay City, if you will— was that the town had an inferiority complex. That its sister city on the hill across the bay was the jewel of the area and Bay City was always playing second fiddle, a town where the refuse, be it human or inanimate, collected.
It all seems to make sense to me now.
Over here, the dust shaking loose from the railroad cars carrying iron ore and taconite, the grime of the oil refineries, the stink of paper being processed from wood pulp, as well as other by-products of industrialization, never quite go away. And it serves as a reminder that the Bay City side of the bridge is where the drones reside. The queen bees and the titans of industry built their homes on the hill across the bay, where they could look down on the scurrying creatures below them.
As for me, I sure as hell ain’t doing any scurrying. And I don’t feel much like a drone. But the hangdog attitude is pervasive and contagious here, and it’s hard not to let it sink into you.
Some nights I just walk and look, peering at the warm amber glow of table lamps or the flashing shadows of a television in people’s living rooms. I used to think the occupants of these little homes were somehow happier than I was. But now I know differently, having sat through nights of Survivor or Fear Factor or any of the other brain-numbing television shows currently in vogue.
Most nights I end up in a tavern where I can drink and eavesdrop, checking out the drug scene out of force of habit. I never fail to be appalled at something I hear, the ignorance and pettiness twisting away at my insides.
Strangely though, it feels like something in this environment is good for me. I wake in the mornings curiously refreshed, with nothing to prove. Anger, fear and hatred seem to vanish with the morning light. The porch light of boredom shines up ahead of me but the sweet spring air is still intoxicating. Keeps me sedated, like a lullaby. But I know it’s going to end before I’m ready.
Then on Memorial Day weekend, a cold snap rolls in: Light snow followed by three days of rain and gale-force winds off Lake Superior. And all the negative emotions come back to me in a rush. Rage, guilt, regret, and a longing to see my son and his mother weave through me like angry wasps.
But I’m still too chicken shit to make the phone call.
But I have learned a lot about Bay City in my short time back. The town isn’t as wide open as it used to be but there are still a lot of bars and a lot of shit going down. You’ve got your youth gangs and your biker gangs and three colleges full of students with an appetite for drugs.
And I see plenty with the financial means to satisfy that appetite.
It’s not so much pot and acid and coke as it was in my era, although those things are still around, just like Classic Coca-Cola. These days there are more pharmaceuticals and hard drugs on the street: Xanax, Percodan, Vicodin and Oxycontin, and other shit I can’t even pronounce.
And, of course, the crank is running rampant. Tweekers and spinners surround you. There’s so much cooking going on, some nights it smells like they’ve mopped the sidewalks with ammonia.
Although I’m relatively confident I’m unrecognizable, if I’m going to be out in public for extended periods I always wear a disguise. You just can’t predict what or whom you might run into. I learned a lot from a book titled “The Art of Theatrical Makeup,” that I picked up back in 1980, after being sought as a “person of interest” in the murder of Dana McGuire, a Madison, Wisconsin, high-society woman involved in the making of porn films. A murder I didn’t commit, by the way—hell, I once even thought I was in love with the woman.