I met Chase, Peggy, and Marge at Union Stripe just as Happy Hour was in full swing and turning into the dinner pre-symphony and theater rush. Because Marge and I used to work there, the hostess treated to the front table in the window facing Woodward Avenue.
“This is great, but where are our drinks?” asked Marge, who stiffly smoked some long, slender cigarette. “The movie starts in an hours.”
The movie was My Dinner with André, 1981, directed by Louis Malle, with Allen Shawn and André Gregory, and it was about Shawn and Gregory having a philosophical discussion all through dinner at a French restaurant. It was showing at the Detroit Museum of Fine Arts Film Theater in thirty-five millimeter, and although it sounded like watching paint dry, Avie said she’d seen it and loved it. So, a group of my cultured friends were planning to catch a bite then walk up Woodward Avenue and see the flick.
Our waitress, Nancy, a girl with magenta hair who had been a former lover of mine, had taken our drink and appetizer order, but had disappeared into the usual crowd of medical and cultural center denizens that routinely packed the Union Stripe on a Thursday night, the early start to the weekend. We hadn’t seen her since, and Marge was getting antsy for a drink.
I was more interested in getting Chase’s reactions to the two paperbacks I had brought along: Ryerson S. (Silbert) Lee’s Nadir Non-Stop and Juan Philippí Herder’s Jock London: His Revelatory Adventures. Chase looked them over with less-than-enthusiastic diffidence. “As far as the Garnookian Butt-Worms of Rott,” said Chase, who had used the phrase to describe the villains he drew battling the fictional Ms. Megatronica in a comic strip he was pitching to Hurling Scream—or was it Screaming Hurl—magazine, “I thought I was ripping off some punk song’s lyrics,” not Lee’s phrase, “Gothic Hookworms Up My One-Dimensional Butthole.” As far as Jock London was concerned, Chase said he’d read a few of the paperback reprints of Sylvester Stuyvesant’s original novels as a teenager, but not Herder’s epic pseudo-biography of the character.
Peggy, who sat next to chase, glanced over his shoulder at the paperbacks but refused to touch them, as if they were dead rats I’d brought to the restaurant table. “Where do you artists get your crazy ideas?” she asked, in a way that suggested she had no interest whatsoever in finding out where artists got their crazy ideas.
Chase quickly returned the books to me, and I tucked them into my book bag. “So, you know about the Criminality Clinic?” I asked Chase, above the restaurant din.
“Isn’t that where ol’ Jock took his captured villains to demagnetize their brains, turning them into law-abiding, productive citizens?” he replied, having to nearly shout. “Yeah, but even more cool was his Fortitude of Solemness, his top-secret retreat in the arctic circle, where he kept all his secret weapons.”
Chase had organized this supposedly platonic gathering of friends at Avie’s suggestion, although she was attending some other theater event, in the hopes of getting into Peggy’s pants again later than night. Holding a conversation with his ex-squeeze—me—about adolescent fanboy interests like old pulp characters probably wasn’t helping Chase’s cause; he quickly changed the subject to local art galleries and how he planned to conquer the world of contemporary art, now that his conquest of Screaming Hurl was all but assured, engaging Peggy and Marge.
“I’ll go see what happened to our drinks,” I said.
***
Having worked at Union Stripe as a waitress myself, I wasn’t surprised the place was packed. Mostly serving a lunch crowd from the Medical Center, Thursday through Saturday evenings around this time were probably their peak business hours. I had to navigate through the crowd of overdressed office workers, medical professionals, and culture mavens to finally reach the bar. Because I’m not that tall, seeing over heads and getting the attention of the bartender, or spotting Nancy even with her magenta hair, was a challenge. As I was craning my neck, a guy seated on a stool at the bar swiveled around.
“Hey, Clarissa. Can I buy you a drink?” It was Berke Kornbluth, administrator of the Acculturational Studies Program at Warren Woodward University. When I had met him in his cubicle, which was shoved between the Womyn’s Studies and the Modern Linguistics programs, he had seemed like the typical, harried, postdoc academic, twenty-five pushing forty. But shaved and dressed in a blazer, he seemed relaxed and much younger, even a bit dashing. Still, there was something about his come-on I didn’t care for.
“Oh, hi, Berke,” I said. “Thanks, but I’m with some friends.” I pointed back to my table.
He looked skeptically toward the front window, struggling to get a clear view of it through the crowd. “Friends? Can’t you lose them?” he asked.
“It’s kind of a double-date,” I said. “We’re seeing My Dinner With André later.”
“Boring movie,” said Berke. “Very static, just talking heads for two hours—canned theater. And stiffly acted theater, if you ask me. I like a more dynamic, visual style of cinematic storytelling myself. Have you ever seen Touch of Evil by Orson Welles? The highly baroque compositions and bravura camera moves really take what is rather trite, banal material and transforms it into an elegiac commentary on American racism and gender norms …”
“My sister recommends it highly,” I said. “My Dinner with André, I mean. And she knows acting. She thinks Orson Welles can only be watched when you’re high.”
Someone else had joined my table across the dining room in the meantime; I couldn’t make out who it was, but I could see Berke counting up the party. “Anyway, I thought we could talk about your conference paper some more,” he said. “Make sure you’re on the right track. Have you considered what topic you plan to pursue? You know, the judges can be very selective, and it’s bound to be very competitive this year. You’ve got to frame your critique in just the right way …”
Nancy came by, squirming through the crowd from the drink station, lofting a tray of cocktails and a platter of fried mushrooms. “I’ve got your drinks, Clarissa,” she said. “I’m on my way.”
“I gotta go,” I said. “We’ll talk about the baroque style of Orson Welles some other time, I promise. Good luck with your bravura camera moves tonight.”
Berke was miffed that I blew him off, but I would deal with the ramifications for my possible Acculturational Studies certificate later. What a creep, I thought—hitting on a grad student under his administrative oversight. Flagrant violations of non-fraternization policies were not uncommon, either at Warren Woodward University or my old school, Arbor State. I knew of several cases involving friends, and it wasn’t always the underling who initiated the liaison. But the idea never sat well with me.
I struggled back through the crowd. Not one but three people had joined Chase, Peggy, and Marge at our table—I guess they were planning to see the movie, too. The first was Scott Shapiro, one of the waiters at the Union Stripe, who had the night off. Scott, short and stocky, had dark, wavy hair and a direct manner. He was accompanied by Dirk Means, a younger, more waifish waiter, a naïve innocent of the gay world who seemed something of protégé of Scott’s. Tom Grimes, a more a slightly older man, a bit heavier with a receding hairline, was also a waiter, at the Grub Street Grill over on Third Street.
They were all acquaintances of Peggy and Marge, and I knew them from waiting tables myself, but Chase was meeting these men for the first time. He was more than a bit uncomfortable; I don’t think he had been around as many gay men at one time, and I don’t think he’d counted on our stealth double date to turn into an entourage.
Everybody introduced themselves, and when Chase was introduced as an artist, Tom immediately asked, “So, are you gay?”
Chase blushed and looked like he wanted to crawl under the table. “Uh, no, I’m straight.”
“But I thought all artists were gay,” said Tom, matter-of-factly.
Chase helplessly watched his romantic prospects with Peggy going completely sideways.
***
After we finished the fried platter and round of drinks, we stuffed ourselves into a cab— a rarity on Woodward Avenue in those days—Peggy and Marge in the front seat, and me lying across the laps of four guys in the back. “How do you like your double date so far?” I asked Chase, who didn’t find it funny. We made it to the film theater in the back of the museum in plenty of time to see trailers to The Mother and the Whore, Fanny and Alexander, and Jerry Lewis’s The Nutty Professor, all arthouse coming attractions.
Afterward, we strolled back down Woodward to Peggy and Marge’s apartment at a leisurely pace, after taking in the lighted fountain in the front of the museum. “You know, that movie cost less than half a million dollars,” said Tom. “And you can see every penny on the screen.”
“I kind of liked the part about reality being the same everywhere,” I said.
“Have you ever seen Passion by Jean-Luc Godard?” asked Marge. “I never saw a crowd hate a movie so much in my life. I thought they were going to tear the theater apart. That’s what I call a philosophical movie.”
“Was it violent or political?” I asked.
“No, it was just like the director was saying, ‘Why are you wasting your time watching a movie? What wisdom do you expect me to tell you? Go and live your life.’”
“Did you ever see Every Man for Himself?” asked Marge. “Those shots of Nathalie Baye bicycling down a Swiss road were just mesmerizing.”
“Yes, but what’s the point of that?” asked Tom. “Sounds more boring than watching two guys talk about the failure of the nineteen-sixties for two hours.”
***
The party adjourned to Marge and Peggy’s spacious apartment, upstairs from Chase’s. Dirk played “Darkness” from the Human League’s vinyl album Dare repeatedly, switching only intermittently to the title track from Lindsay Buckingham’s Go Insane album, which had come out just a month or two before. While Dirk danced near the record player, Scott and Tom, seated on dining room chairs, held court while the rest of us sat on the sofa or on chairs—I sat on the floor. The topic was sexual identity.
Scott was discussed being bisexual. “Whenever I walk into a room, I always notice the men first,” he remarked. “I notice the women, too, of course, what they’re wearing and so on, but always after the men. I’ve had relations with women, but I’ve always known I was more gay than bi.”
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“I slept with a woman once,” said Tom. “I came three inches from losing my virginity.”
“Does it have to be a vagina for it to be hetero?” I asked. “In that case, I know a few guys who are still virgins.”
Chase, sitting next to Peggy and but too afraid to hold her hand, turned beet red. “I’m straight,” he reiterated.
“There’s no such thing as a straight man,” Tom insisted. “They just haven’t met the right man yet.” He gave Chase a little wink.
Marge looked at me funny. “How do you know?” she asked. “I mean, how do you decide whether you like one or the other more? I mean, if you do have feelings for both, that is.”
Peggy looked at Marge uncomfortably.
“I just feel it,” said Dirk, whose eyes were closed as he swayed to the hypnotic synthesizer line from “Darkness.”
“We all aspire to androgyny,” said Scott. “I think this group is all agreed—we all want to do away with sexism and gender roles altogether, don’t we?”
Everyone nodded in general consensus. I thought to myself, I’ve got to get this think tank together with the Y+Thems.
“My Dinner With Androgyny!” said Dirk, who giggled at his own joke.
“So, what are you, Clarissa?” asked Peggy. “Do you feel like you’re more one than the other? Gay or straight? Black or white?”
I was used to hearing the biracial question all my life, but the abrupt way Peggy asked it felt like a slap in the face, seeing that I was the only person of color in the room.
“I thought we were talking about sex, not race,” I said.
“I thought we were talking about identity,” said Peggy. “What a person identifies as. I’m definitely white and straight,” she said, glancing over at Marge. “I can’t help that. It’s the way I was made.”
I wish Avie were here. She’d remark, “So nice to be secure in your Grosse Pointe elitism.”
“I think it’s too late for me to become mulatto, to use an archaic term,” said Tom. “I’m Hillbilly white trash Irish, English, and Welsh—a mutt, in other words.”
Luckily, Scott chimed in. “I think we’re all overeducated snobs. In fact, the only reason each of us find ourselves in midtown Detroit is for our education, and the cheap rents—isn’t it?”
“And the gay nightlife,” said Tom.
“And the gay nightlife,” said Scott. “God, to be marooned in the suburbs. It’s unthinkable. Jewish Southfield—I couldn’t get away fast enough.”
Scott was still going to WWU along with Peggy, Marge, and Me, while Tom had already graduated; Chase had dropped out of the East Kirby Center for Visual Studies, otherwise known as the Self-Important Art School. “I’m just sticking around for the museums and libraries,” said Chase.
“So, what are you, Clarissa?” Peggy insisted. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“You don’t have to answer that, Clarissa,” said Scott.
“No, it’s all right. I feel I’m both black and white—both at the same time. And neither. When I’m with black people, they regard me as too white, and when I’m with white people, if they see a trace of color at all, they see non-white. I’ve never fit in exactly anywhere; that’s just the way it is.”
***
Preschool was the first time I ever heard the N-word, believe it or not. My black Mama and white Cajun Daddy had managed to carefully shield us girls from the worst racist indignities going on outside our Boswick-Addison home, even with the 1967 Detroit race riots practically on our doorstep. But when I found myself alone among children, the topic of race was raised bluntly and cruelly, in the sandbox and on the playground, and you found out what other children were being taught in their homes from their parents. It wasn’t always polite or enlightened.
When Daddy came home and found me crying in my bedroom after my first day of preschool, he asked what was the matter. I told him what had happened. “Daddy, am I white or black?” I understood at least that my parents had different color skin, and that I was a mixture. But did I have to choose?
“You’re a fusion,” said Daddy. “You’re both at the same time. You’re either one you want to be. You don’t have to choose.”
My sister Avie, who was lighter-skinned than me, had already gone through a similar situation with some black playmates in the neighborhood. Three years younger, she was almost as big as me. Strapping and broad-shouldered, she laid into kids who used racial slurs. She beat them up when they called her names. Later, at a company picnic for Daddy’s auto plant, Avie almost sparked a race riot a year before the real one by punching three white boys from the suburbs in the nose. If Daddy hadn’t been a foreman and the other fathers men on his line, things might have gotten ugly. Instead, the boys were just humiliated they’d gotten bloody noses from a girl.
Funny that I turned out to the Megahero instead of Avie, since I was always the scrawny one. Mama and Daddy always encouraged my reading and school studies, to which I was naturally inclined; it never occurred to me that they were protecting me from the outside world.
“I just want to be something other people won’t hate,” I said, as Daddy dried my tears. “But how can I do that?”
“That’s not the way to think about it,” said Daddy. “You just be yourself, and don’t you worry what other people hate or don’t hate.”
Daddy spoke with a decided New Orleanian Cajun accent; Mama, at home, spoke a more vernacular black, with traces of the south, where she was born. At work—she managed a Civix Savings and Loan—she affected a more formal English articulation she’d picked up in business school, but still a pronounced black cadence.
I, for some perverse reason, talked more like the white actors on television and my white playmates. As soon as I started reading, which was before kindergarten, I spoke more formally correct grammar. All through the seventies, my black friends criticized me for trying to sound white; that’s why I didn’t have too many friends of any race at all, except a girl named Marcie, who was Asian, and moved away at the end of junior high school. Avie naturally spoke with a more urban lilt, halfway between me and Mama, although she could mimic Shakespearean, French, and other accents whenever she wanted. I think she was a human tape recorder.
I took Daddy’s advice to heart. I became used to being in-between, occupying a ground not just racially but in most everything that was neither here nor there. On top of which, I was a late bloomer generally. This outlook made it easier for me to navigate my later romantic attraction to both men and women. It also made it easier for me to cope with being a Megahero while also remaining a Civilian, I suppose; after all, my real father wasn’t Cajun like Daddy, but he was white and the Silver Age Megaton Man as well. Mama was definitely a Civilian, although my Mama from another dimension had been a costumed crimefighter, although not megapowered.
The more I thought about it, the more confusing it was.
What was I? White or black? Straight or queer? Megahero or Civilian? Daddy would say it didn’t matter, but it always felt like I could never make up my mind.
One thing I knew, I didn’t like being put on the spot.
***
“Well, I’ve got recitations to teach tomorrow,” I said, picking myself up off the carpet. “I better call it a night.”
“Wait, I’ll walk you down the stairs,” said Marge.
In fact, we walked out of the apartment building into the courtyard before we said a word. Marge lit a cigarette. “You’re not going to walk all the way home at this time of night, are you?” she asked.
I had just assumed she knew I was Ms. Megaton Man. After all, I hadn’t exactly every guarded my secret identity very well. But apparently not. Or perhaps I hadn’t been Ms. Megaton Man for such a long time, everyone just thought of me as Civilian Clarissa. In any case, her concern was unexpected.
“I should be okay,” I said. “The streets are vacant at this hour. Even the criminal element is too scared of Detroit to come out. I’m not worried … unless you feel like walking me home.”
She did feel like walking me home, so we walked down East Willis to Woodward Avenue.
“There was something I wanted to talk to you about,” said Marge.
“Is it about the other night, when I showed up at your door naked?” I asked. “Sorry about that. That was just me and Chase playing a goofy game …”
“No, it’s not that,” said Marge. “Not exactly that. Clarissa, have you ever fallen in love with your roommate?”
I immediately thought of Trent, my housemate in Ann Arbor, the father of a child with Stella, his platonic partner. He also happened to be my second cousin, and formerly the Bronze Age Megaton Man. I hadn’t thought of him in quite a while. “Actually, yes. And it was kind of awkward. Don’t tell me you’ve fallen in love with Peggy?”
“I don’t know if it’s love,” said Marge. “We’ve been friends since high school, and living together as roommates since we began at Warren Woodward; that’s going on three years now. It was never really an issue, because we were both dating a lot of guys. But you know how you don’t necessarily wear clothes when you’re at home in your own apartment? Peggy never wears a stitch unless our parents are coming over. I realized I was starting to find her really attractive, fantasizing about her, even when guys were screwing me …”
I thought of Stella Starlight, the See-Thru Girl, whose stunning body I glimpsed on more than one occasion, even before I realized I liked girls, too. “Yeah, I know what that can be like.”
“It’s just that I found myself thinking about Peggy all summer while I was in Europe with the French club,” said Marge. “And when I came back, I was more eager to see Peggy than I was to see my boyfriend. And then, when I saw you … well, I realized I like girls.”
I thought, How in the world could Margie find a stuck-up cunt like Peggy attractive? Although I had to admit Peggy had a nice, tight body.
“That’s not the worst thing in the world,” I said. “But Peggy’s pure straight, isn’t she? I mean, it’s only a matter of her choosing the right mate from among prelaw, premed, and MBAs, and then which mansion in Grosse Pointe. But weren’t you and your boyfriend planning to move to Toronto for grad school?”
“I think I’m going to have to break that off,” said Marge. “You see my dilemma.”
“Aw, heck,” I said. “And here I thought I might get laid tonight.” I put my arm around her like I would Avie. “But you’re lovelorn for your straight roommate.”
“You may still,” said Marge.
***
At the corner of East Willis and Woodward, Marge and I stopped. Across the eight-lane avenue, we saw a figure coming from the Union Stripe, now closed, weaving along the sidewalk in front of the liquor store on the corner. He was singing “Owner of a Lonely Heart” badly out of tune.
“Someone’s had a few too many,” said Marge.
“Wait a minute, I know that guy,” I said. “Berkeley Kornbluth.”
The poor sonuvabitch must have been sitting at the bar striking out all night and slowly getting stewed.
With apologies, I left Marge on the corner to finish her cigarette and return home as I dashed across the eight empty lanes. I caught Berke just as he was about to careen headlong into a lamp post.
“Steady, tiger,” I said. “Which way to the beach?”
He mumbled something about Canfield, so I aimed him as best I could in that direction. We took a left along West Willis, Berke still trying to sing, past the Detroit thermal plant, across Cass and up Second Avenue. Progress was slow, and I thought maybe he was going to stop and puke several times, but he somehow held it together.
“Know what the problem with this town is?” he asked. “Can’t find an intelligent conversation.”
No, I thought, not if all you can talk about is yourself.
He prattled on about his failure to secure a tenured teaching position, his research interest in the salt mines below Detroit, and the novel he was planning to write. “You know, Clarissa, you’re a very pretty girl.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s almost charming.”
We came to West Canfield Avenue, a cobblestone street with the distinction of having been declared the tiniest historic district in the United States—whereas the neighborhood I grew up in, Boswick-Addison, had the distinction of being the largest. Canfield had quality over quality, however; its Victorian-era mansions were mostly well-preserved and easily being gentrified.
Berke rented an upper floor of one stately house converted to apartment units. I managed to haul him up the outside cast iron, fire-escape-like stair, which wasn’t so difficult because of his weight as for his lack of coordination. He fumbled with his keys, but we finally unlocked the door. When I got him inside, I was astonished at how well-appointed the living space was: cozy antique wooden furniture, sumptuous bookcases lined with rare volumes, tasteful paintings on the wall. “Heck, if I knew this is how you lived, I would have let you pick me up,” I said. “It would have been better than that movie.”
I got him into the bathroom and made sure he took a leak. Considering how much alcohol he must have consumed, I didn’t want to just flop him onto his featherbed and have him wet himself. I got his pants down and sat him on the toilet, then waited outside the closed door as he took a racehorse-long piss, still singing Yes. I heard him flush the toilet, buckle up, and wash his hands.
“You done in there?” After a minute, the sink water was still running.
When I opened the door, he was lying comfortably in the dry, freestanding enamel bathtub, fully clothed, sound asleep.
“How dignified,” I said to myself, turning off the tap. “Poster boy for the Acculturational Studies Program.” I just left him there to sleep it off.
***
As I walked up Second Avenue, past the Bottleneck & Tie-Up Bar, which was also now closed, a white van swerved around the corner at Prentis. It came screeching to a stop in front of me. The window rolled down and Gene Griffin peered out, his gleaming smile and bright eyes in contrast to his handsome, dark skin. Next to him, behind the wheel, was his white partner, bald-headed white guy Allan Jordan.
“What’s a nice girl like you doing walking around alone at this hour?” he said. “Don’t you know it can be dangerous?”
“Not with the West Forest Knight Riders on patrol,” I said. “I assume they handed over some more candidates for the Criminality Clinic to you?”
“Got ‘em tied up in the back,” said Gene. “We’re heading over there now. Care to ride along? You’re bound to become familiar with it eventually.”
“I’m only teaching recitations tomorrow,” I said, looking at my watch. “I guess I don’t need any sleep.”
Gene opened the door, and I climbed in.