“So, you played ‘Deep Throat’ to Pammy Jointly’s Woodward and Bernstein, then you deep-throated Trent Phloog to alleviate your guilt,” said my half-sister.
“Oh, Avie, cut it out,” I said. “You’re the one who’s always protesting slut-shaming. You’re a hypocrite—the proverbial pot calling the kettle black, Avie. For your information, I just sucked him off, regular.”
I don’t know why I ever told my sister anything, since she only used it to taunt me. But I didn’t tell her everything; for example, I didn’t tell her I had seen Pamela Jointly drive up and go into a motel room where her biological father’s pickup was parked—that she was the mystery woman with whom he was cheating on our mama.
“Could he taste himself when he kissed you?”
“Oh, Avie, please. I don’t know. I didn’t ask him.”
Our raunchy conversation took place as we packed up Meals on Wheels in the kitchen pantry of the First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City, where Avril lived with a bunch of Youthful Permutations. The Y+Thems—a tiger-man called Sabersnag, and tele-empath called Tempy, and dominatrix named Domina, a powerful telekinetic named Kiddo and her newborn, along with Jasper Johnson, a not-so-youthful Malleable known as Rubber Brother—earned room at board by taking turns watching over the building. The church with its vintage Gothic revival architecture featured a sanctuary with great woodwork and stained glass and an exterior of rusticated stonework including a stocky bell tower. But it had become an increasingly high-priced insurance risk as the fortunes of the Motor City declined in the sixties and seventies—particularly after the riots of 1967 and White Flight—and as the once elite neighborhood surrounding it slid into decay.
But urban blight was nothing new to Detroit. As in most northeastern American cities, it was as process that had been going on since before the turn of the century, well before the rise of the auto industry, and had only picked up steam after the racist, anti-Semite Henry Ford moved his main automobile factory to Dearborn in the 1920s. Disinvestment and deindustrialization, as I was learning in school, hit the Rust Belt particularly hard after World War II, as Japan and the Pacific Rim caught up to American know-how. By the early eighties, the North Cass district had settled into comfortably shabby off-campus housing for Warren Woodward University, but was surrounded by even more dicey districts sometimes riddled with crime and drugs. It was worth it for the church to house a group of full-time residents in a connected building that could keep watch over the property and keep it from burning down—literally—or at least make sure robbers didn’t make off with the irreplaceable stained glass and antique pipe organ, as had happened elsewhere to churches throughout the city.
The church’s immediate neighborhood, once a wealthy enclave that boasted its own elite high school—a rarity at the turn of the century—was buoyed by the rise of Warren Woodward State College, which originally held classes in the Romanesque revival high school. Eventually, the college took over the entire building, transforming it into its “Old Main”—every college and university seems to have one—before claiming several Victorian homes and commercial buildings from the surrounding neighborhood, which it converted to ad hoc classrooms. After World War II, the college became a university, this disjointed jumble of spaces gave way to a planned campus north of Warren Avenue, adjacent to Detroit’s nascent Cultural Center—comprised mainly of the city’s main public library branch and museum of fine arts, neoclassical piles that straddled Woodward Avenue a block to the east. But Old Main remained, its clock tower a landmark that still rose above the University-Cultural Center. All this development effectively turned the church’s neighborhood—my neighborhood—into off-campus housing immediately to the south of the university campus, which nonetheless remained mostly an urban commuter university serving a student body that drove in from Detroit’s outlying lily-white suburbs during the day but evacuated midtown well before dark.
Cass was a name that held particular urgency in Detroit—and not because the street was named after some historic old white politician, Lewis Cass, second governor of the Michigan Territory. To the south of our North Cass neighborhood, below Canfield and Alexandrine and certainly below Mack—renamed Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard—was the Cass Corridor. Throughout the 1970s, the Cass Corridor was infamous as Detroit’s most notorious high-crime area. Even in the early eighties, the Corridor was still a rowdy place, although its Chinatown and red-light district of hookers and skid-row hotels were destined to become a ghost town later on.
Thus our North Cass neighborhood wore its designation with pride. It was a gritty, liminal zone between the University-Cultural Center to the north and the deadly Cass Corridor to the south, home to those hearty souls willing to live around the clock in a city that had a well-earned reputation as the murder capital of America. It also had its share of unemployable burnouts—aging freaks, hippies, and squatters who transformed abandoned buildings with art, elbow grease, and grim determination. It was a low-rent Ann Arbor.
Now it had its own megahero team, although no one knew that just yet. The Y+Thems earned their keep by watching over the church building, as I said, but they also did a lot in the community, immediately taking over a number of social services that were run by the church for the surrounding population, and setting up some new ones as well. The church building, more than an architectural masterpiece, held a sixteen-millimeter arthouse movie society, a food bank and Meals on Wheels, an active Sunday school and summertime Vacation Church School and other events for kids, a literacy program for adults, a free reproductive services clinic for the needy, and other stuff. Jasper even brought in a friend of his, whom I hadn’t met yet, who was licensed social worker. She convened a group therapy session on Tuesday nights—mental healthcare being a commodity in short supply among the local underclass not affiliated with the universities.
The biggest summertime community event, as far as the neighborhood was concerned, was the North Cass Ditty in the City, and the First Holistic-Humanist Church—at least Avie and the Y+Thems—were gung ho on this as well. This was a street fair modeled on Ann Arbor’s, which had already been emulated by other communities around the country. The Ditty, as it was called, was held only a couple streets away from where I lived, in the expansive alleyway in the center of a block surrounded by apartment buildings and houses. This space was unusually big, forming an interior courtyard of sorts with trees—almost the size of a small park—interrupted only by a barnlike garages, in one of which the Dodge brothers had reputedly built their first car. This space became the venue for a week-long, low-rent version of Ann Arbor’s street fair, complete with a performance stage for local musicians, open-air barbecues and food vendors, picnic space, and setups by local artists and craftsmen selling their wares. A local underground artist designed a poster with some cats in zoot suits and miniskirts blowing hot jazz that were tacked up all over the University-Cultural Center.
Naturally, Avie reconstituted her street-theater troupe, drafting Kiddo as well as a reluctant Dana—who wasn’t all that into performing in Grand Guignol trappings—to fill parts left by friends that had moved on. The flamboyant Kav ran a face-painting tent for the kids, and Jasper’s—Rubber Brother’s—social-worker pal offered free services through the church to conduct a five-cent therapy clinic that I swear was right out of the comic strips. My magenta-haired artist-friend Nancy sold a ton of her paintings—violent, graffiti-spattered canvases—although she priced them too cheap. Nonetheless, it left her wondering if she should even return to art school in the fall at all, but rather turn pro right then and there.
The alley was teeming with families young and old, black, white, Mexican, and every other ethnicity in Detroit. In the midst of all these insane happenings, I took my turn on the social worker’s couch. Jasper’s friend was a slender, white woman—Jewish, I thought, with a prominent nose—and short, spikey black hair. She didn’t have any obvious tattoos or piercings, but her cut-off T-shirt tank top and jeans worn through at the knees gave her a punk aesthetic—she could have been Pammy Jointly’s head-bashing cousin—unexpected for a healthcare worker. Sabersnag had carted out a ratty, second-hand upholstered swivel chair and long, flat couch into the middle of the scrubby patch of grass. With her notepad and pencil poised in the midst of the brick-paved, gravel-strewn alley, she looked like a postmodern Lucy van Pelt.
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As I lay on the couch, looking up at the scraggly branches of the trees over the alley, I explained to the social worker I felt a lot of pent-up anger toward my mama.
“A lot of us do,” she said. “What do you suppose accounts for yours?”
“I’m not angry because she didn’t marry my real father,” I said. “She found a great guy instead. Daddy—my adoptive father—couldn’t be more wonderful. Except now he’s sleeping with another woman, a woman I trusted, who used to be my housemate.”
“You lived with your mother and father and this woman?”
“No, no; she was my housemate in Ann Arbor. When he was helping me move in, Daddy got one look at her legs, and—well, I should have known it would be trouble. But he never cheated on Mama before, not that I know of.”
“Sounds like you’re disappointed in your father, too.”
“I am,” I said. “But I mostly blame Mama. After all, she keeps too many secrets—from me, and I’ll bet from Daddy, too. I can’t blame him for betraying her. But I can’t forgive people who keep secrets; I hate people who keep secrets. People should tell the truth to each other.”
“Sounds like your parents had a productive union for many years,” said the therapist. “People grow apart—the things that keep people together sometimes dissolve. Maybe it’s just time for them to move on.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “But I can’t help thinking if everybody was honest and above-board a lot of these problems would go away—they wouldn’t occur in the first place.”
“Sometimes it’s hard being honest,” said the therapist. “Sometimes we hide the truth because we’re afraid it will hurt the ones we love. Sometimes keeping secrets is not a bad instinct.”
“The truth can’t hurt any more than the dishonesty of this situation,” I said. I could feel myself starting to cry. “Can’t people see that keeping secrets is what’s splitting them apart? I don’t want my family to be apart. They’re the only people I trust. They know my secrets…”
“They aren’t secrets if you’ve told them.”
“I’ve only told them to my family,” I said. “They’re still secrets because I haven’t exactly told the world. They’re open secrets, you could say…. Don’t you have any secrets?”
“Plenty,” said my therapist. “But I don’t have a family to keep secrets from, or to tell them to. I don’t have anybody.”
“Not even Jasper?” I sat up and looked at her.
“Rubber Brother? Yes, he knows. People like him are the only ones I can trust.” She was staring off into space as she said this, but not as if she was feeling sorry for herself. I noticed her biceps were very developed; she was lithe by very fit and athletic. I wondered if she was a megahero, too; I tried to picture her in a cape and leotards, but I couldn’t. But I had the feeling that she and I were going to be sharing our secrets with one another, and very soon. But not in the alley at Ditty in the City.
My free fifteen minutes were up, and I had to surrender the couch to other folks who were lining up. I thanked her for her time and told her I would see her around—which I surely would. Because she was Jasper’s friend, and because of her association with the church, she was often around the North Cass neighborhood.
And that’s the first time I met Donna Blank.
Although the Y+Thems lived at the church for free, or in exchange for their watchman services to be more precise, and volunteered their time to the community in other ways, they still needed to eat. Therefore each Youthful Permutation had at least one or more part-time jobs, and in some cases, full-time jobs. Dana soon found work as a bouncer at the Bottleneck & Tie-Up Bar, a well-known lesbian biker hangout, a role she was born for. She could even wear her Domina outfit—her studded leather G-string, leather brassiere, and red gloves and boots—on duty, although she adopted full biker leathers as the weather turned colder. She also worked part-time alongside me at the Union Stripe Café, although that wasn’t as successful, since serving doctors and nurses from the Medical Center didn’t usually call upon her megaheroic powers. She also never appeared comfortable in the navy slacks, blue button dress shirt, and apron that was our Union Stripe uniform. Domina also found it frustrating that our medical-professional customers tipped for shit; she occasionally had to get rough with some of her diners.
Soren Sneed, being a saber-toothed tiger-man, found a ready market for his services making personal appearances at kids’ birthday parties, business luncheons, and other social affairs as, of all things, a saber-toothed tiger. He wore a baseball hat and uniform from the old Negro leagues, and carried around a baseball bat, and I guess people mistook him for Moe, animal-costumed mascot of the Motor City Saberteeth, the local minor league mushball team. Before long, he got a letter from some lawyers telling him to cease and desist. But when he presented himself at their law offices downtown and snarled at them, and they realized they were dealing with an actual humanoid-saber-toothed tiger who might possibly eat them, they hired him on the spot to appear at Saberteeth home games, too.
Kav Kavanaugh, the tele-empath we called Tempy, found work as a hairdresser, at first working out of the church residence, then taking over a vacant storefront not far from the Warren Woodward campus. He may have been the most flamboyant, effeminate man I ever met, but at the same time he was among the fiercest, most determined people I’ve ever known. He ran off petty crooks and local hoods from the protection rackets who dropped by the storefront with equal aplomb, armed only with a hair dryer and a blood-curdling scream.
“I’m one tough broad,” he used to say of himself, clapping the dust from his hands after chasing off a miscreant. When I laughed, he sensed I hadn’t gotten the joke in quite the way he intended, and became slightly perturbed. “What, you think I’m weak because I’m girlish?” he scolded. “Are you weak because you’re a girl? Of course not. You think your daddy’s all macho—what good is that?” I had told him about Daddy and Pammy. “He sneaks around and cheats on your mama—that’s just cowardice. Get over these masculine-feminine categories, Missy”—they all called me Missy—“It’s about being human, and truthful to who you are.”
Kav was a one-person lesson in gender studies, in a day when things weren’t as progressive as they seemed later. I suppose that’s why the Youthful Permutations had been known as the Uncategorizable X+Thems before, and under Yarn Man adopted the “Y” for Y+Thems. The “X” may have signified some unknown factor in their genetic makeup, but the “why” better suited them, since it was their personal motivations that were the source of their strength. Although I hadn’t yet glimpsed exactly what megapowers Kav wielded—or for that matter, Dana’s—I got the sense these Y+Thems, even on the lamb and down and out in Detroit, were ahead of their time, and a highly dangerous bunch.
That left Kiddo, who I knew could take care of herself—I had seen her survive the Devastation Chamber which even I, Ms. Megaton Man, had a hard time beating back.
One day, Jasper and I were cleaning up the kitchen in the church basement after a food bank event. “So, what’s it like, living with all these Youthful Permutations?” I asked.
“Not much different from living with a bunch of regular megaheroes,” he said. I’d almost forgotten that he was Rubber Brother—in fact, none of us had had any occasion to actually use our megapowers in a full-blown way; we were too busy with school and community stuff. “Why? What did you expect?” he said. “Do you think we all live in glitzy, high-rise headquarters with fancy science-fiction laboratories in the middle of major East Coast cities?”
No, I certainly did not. I had seen where the Y+Thems lived in Brooklyn, in an old, converted warehouse in the Navy Yards, and I’d seen the Devengers headquarters in Bayonne, New Jersey—a nineteenth-century textile mill turned into the Doomsday Factory. These were mostly run-down, shabby places that would have been at home in Detroit, certainly not the high-tech palaces I imagined megaheroes in Megatropolis lived in.
“Well, there’s a lot more to fighting crime and righting wrongs than getting your name mentioned in one of Pamela Jointly’s controversial columns,” said Jasper, somewhat resentful that he’d been snubbed. “There are a lot of people doing good in the world, and they don’t always make the front page of the Manhattan Project. They walk among us. You’ll meet a few of them, if you hang around this old town long enough.”
“What’s your friend Donna’s story?” I asked. “She alluded to some secrets of her own. Is she a nocturnal crime buster as well? With those biceps, she sure could be.”
Jasper chuckled. “I suppose old Donna can tell you what she wants to tell you in her own good time,” he said, stacking cookie sheets over the stove. “People fight the good fight in a lot of different ways, and they have their own reasons for keeping certain information to themselves.”
Jasper did mention that Donna lived in Ferndale and kept an office in Royal Oak, a township just north of Detroit’s city limits, presumably for her therapy practice. I remarked that this made her another white suburbanite with a guilty conscience who did volunteer work in the inner city.
Jasper chuckled again. “Oh, Donna Blank is much more than that.” But he declined to elaborate.