Here Comes Trouble (23 page)

They drove off and I finished the lawn. It dawned on me that doing something political had brought me both a lot of grief
and
a girl who stopped by to see me. Maybe I was too harsh on the class officer types who populated Boys State with their geeklike love of all things political. Maybe they knew a certain secret. Or maybe they would all just grow up to populate Congress with their slick, smarmy selves, selling the rest of us out at the drop of a dime. Maybe.

The following year was not a good one for the Elks Clubs of America. Many states denied them their liquor licenses (the unkindest cut of all). Grants and funds became scarce. Various bills in Congress to stop them and other private clubs were debated. And then the federal courts in D.C. dealt them a death blow by taking away their tax exempt status. Facing total collapse and the scorn of the majority of the nation, the Elks Club voted to drop their Caucasians Only policy. Other private clubs followed suit. The ripple effect of this was that now racial discrimination
everywhere
in America, be it public or private, was prohibited.

My speech was occasionally cited as a spark for this march forward in racial fixing in the great American experiment, but there were other speeches far more eloquent than mine. Most important for me, I learned a valuable lesson: That change can occur, and it can occur
anywhere,
with even the simplest of people and craziest of intentions, and that creating change didn’t always require having to devote your every waking hour to it with mass meetings and organizations and protests and TV appearances with Walter Cronkite.

Sometimes change can occur because all you wanted was a bag of potato chips.

Zoe

H
ER BOYFRIEND CALLED ME
from the hospital.

“The abortion, Mike. They botched it. We never made it to New York.”

Abortion was illegal, a crime, in Michigan in 1971, as it was in most states. If you got pregnant, nine months later you had a baby. And that was that.

I was closer to Zoe than I was to perhaps any other girl in high school. She was what you would call a best friend. She had a big curly fro of hippie hair that landed wherever it damned well pleased. She played piano but was also a prodigy on the violin—which she would only play while barefoot. She smoked pot on occasion in her parents’ house, and on rare nights would take LSD “to free myself from the Fascist cop inside me.” Zoe was a free spirit, well read, and not afraid to speak her mind. I thought, some day she will change this world.

Which made her choice of a boyfriend in Tucker all the more puzzling. Tucker was completely clueless and looked like he’d be happiest sticking a blade between your ribs, or drag racing. He was from the “tough neighborhood” in town (such as it was for Davison). His favorite pastime was picking fights, and though Zoe tried to reform him, his love of fisticuffs kept his dance card filled with numerous school suspensions. He treated basic common sense as if it were a “sissy thing,” and he knew little of the world outside his trailer park; I’d be surprised if he had ever traveled more than five miles from his home in his lifetime.

But Tucker had the smile of the Sundance Kid and the eyes of James Dean, and Zoe loved him madly. He wore leather shit-kicking boots and had a chain attached to his belt loop—but with nothing on the end of it, as he was too broke to afford a wallet and poorer still to have anything to put in it. A cigarette was always dangling out the side of his mouth, and he had the uncanny knack of being able to inhale and blow out the smoke without ever touching the Camel.

Tucker would wait on Zoe hand and foot, and she was generous with her body in return. This won Tucker the designation by most guys as the Luckiest Dude at Davison High—and he was still a freshman! But not just any freshman: he came in at six-foot-three and weighed 180 pounds. Zoe was a senior, like me, and I was crazy in love with her.

I made sure that she never detected even the mildest inkling of my feelings. And if Tucker ever suspected how I felt I would surely see the sharp end of his jackknife being flung my way. But he had no clue. Either I was that good an actor, or it was just pathetically unbelievable that someone like me would ever even
think
of having any designs on Zoe. And it was even more implausible that she would ever see me as anything resembling boyfriend material. After all, I came from the pack of guys who were usually seen in flight from any oncoming females. I was no James Dean; I was more Jimmy Dean, the sausage king. One day, to impress her, I told her I could play cello when she was putting together a “protest recital” outside the Army recruitment center in Flint
(how hard could it be—it had only four strings!).
I borrowed a cello and used the bow to run it back and forth at random, and she looked at me and laughed and accused me later of eating all the special brownies.

Tucker had nothing to worry about with me, and Zoe appreciated having one guy in the school who wasn’t hitting on her. I didn’t want to let her down, and there was something
noble
about being different (better?) than the other boys in her eyes. Of course, there was nothing noble about denying your feelings, sexual or otherwise, but who was I going to share
that
with? Ann Landers? The cafeteria lady?

Having now admitted to possessing such desire, I will also admit that having a friend like Zoe was a blessing, a greater blessing than one could hope for in trying to survive the misery of adolescence. I could call her anytime, day or night, and if she wasn’t banging Tucker I was free to talk to her as long as I wanted. I lived in town, so I could easily walk over to her house anytime—and I was there far more than Tucker ever was, since he lived out in the country and did not have a driver’s license.

Zoe and I grew very close and shared everything the way you do with that special friend in high school as you lie around the rec room—or the bedroom—for all hours of the day or night, pouring through every subject imaginable: who was “bonin’” who, which classes sucked, ways to avoid the parents, how to help the kid down the street who was being punched by his dad every night, how to remove Nixon from office, playing the new Moody Blues album, sneaking into an X-rated movie (
Midnight Cowboy
), taking turns writing verses of poems that would become lyrics to songs that she would write the music for and sing to me. Here’s how close we were: one day, she informed me that the lips of her vulva were unlike most women’s because her labia minora was larger than her labia majora, thus causing her inner lips to fold out on top of her outer lips. She told me this as if she were reading me something from the
TV Guide,
and the look on my face conveyed nothing more than my desire to watch another rerun of
Mayberry, RFD.

There were those times that she and Tucker “broke up” for days at a time—and I would momentarily contemplate the opening presented to me. And on one such tear-filled evening, for a second (or maybe the whole night), she “contemplated” it, too.

It was never spoken about again.

Tucker would return and their strange saga would continue, the couple that had nothing in common other than the perfection of their own bodies.

It was a Sunday night when Zoe called and said she needed to meet me somewhere private. I drove over and picked her up and we went for a drive out to the Hogbacks.

“I’m pregnant,” she said, as soon as the door slammed shut. I carefully backed out of the driveway, my heart racing, and she started to sob. “I can’t believe I was this stupid. I can’t have a baby.” She then fell onto my shoulder.

“I am so sorry,” I said, the way a best friend would say such a thing. And then I paused to catch my breath and do the math. It seemed OK.

“Don’t beat yourself up,” I said. “This happens. Even to smart people.”

Her sobbing continued. I tried to keep my eyes on the road. “Shhhh. Don’t cry. I’m here.”

She continued to cry and so I pulled over and held her tight, the way a best friend would hold her tight.

“I have to end it,” she said, sputtering out the words.

End
what?
I thought. Tucker?
Her… life?
Please, God.

“You mean the pregnancy,” I said in a tone that did not make it a question.

“Yes,” she said. “But how’m I gonna end it?” She looked up at me with those eyes. “How?”

She told me that when she got the pregnancy test at Planned Parenthood, they explained to her that abortion, at least in our state, was illegal.

“Maybe your parents know a doctor who could…”

“I can’t tell them! I can’t let them down like this.”

“
Your
parents, more than any others, would understand.”

“No. This would crush them. I have to take care of this myself.”

“You can’t try to abort the fetus yourself,” I said.

“I wouldn’t do that,” she assured me.

“You know,” I said, “abortion is legal in New York.”

I had no moral conflict in making this suggestion. I knew a fertilized egg wasn’t a human being.
⁶

“I will help you, if that’s what you want to do,” I said.

“Thank you, Mike,” she said as she dried her eyes.

“We could drive to Buffalo,” I said. “It’s probably not that far.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Or we can go to New York City. I know the city pretty well.”

Of course, I was making offers I had no clue if I could deliver on. For instance, how would I get to New York City and not have my parents notice?
That
was never going to happen.

But Buffalo was possible. I started to plot it out in my head. I could leave for school at 7:00 a.m. and we could be in Buffalo by noon. How long would the procedure take? I didn’t even know exactly what the “procedure” would be, but let’s say three hours, then another five hours back—I could be home by 8:00 p.m.—late for dinner, to be sure, but suffering no more than a stern word or two.

“I have to tell Tucker,” she said, as the Bad Idea buzzer rang in my head.

“Yes. Sure. He has to know.”

I drove her over to Tucker’s trailer and waited outside while she went in to deliver the news. Fifteen minutes later they emerged from his trailer, arm in arm, and I sighed. They got in the front seat with me, with Zoe in the middle.

“Thanks, man, for offering to help,” Tucker said as he reached out to put his arm on my shoulder.

“Hey, no problem. I’m sure you guys would do the same for me if I got pregnant.”

Zoe laughed. Tucker continued: “I was thinking we should keep the baby,” the high school freshman without the driver’s license said, loving the swagger and the idea that he had actually produced something in his life.

“Yeah, well, that’s not happening,” Zoe said, shutting him up and relieving me.

We went over to the A&W for root beers and fries and further planning on how to end the unplanned pregnancy.

In the coming days I did the research and found the most reputable abortion clinics in New York City. I planned out our entire trip—one that we would take with my parents’ permission, though they would know nothing about the abortion. We would stay at my aunt’s on Staten Island. I told my mother that I wanted to go to New York for the weekend because I was considering going to college there.

“We can’t afford that,” she replied without shame.

“I’ve checked into scholarships and I think I might have a good chance. I’ve looked into Fordham. Jesuits! Good!”

Here I was, playing the Catholic card again, and dang if it didn’t always work. Her sister had married a man who went to Fordham, and I told her that would open a door for me. I promised I’d be gone just for the weekend and would miss no school.

“And you’ll stay with Aunt Lois?”

“Absolutely.”

My parents liked Zoe and, as their radar could detect no carnal scent in either direction, they did not consider her a threat.

I got Zoe and Tucker all excited about the fun time we could have in New York. You would have thought we were going there to have a tooth pulled—and then it was off to Times Square to see
Hair
and the Village to see Joni Mitchell. Maybe I could even score some tickets to
Dick Cavett.

But my parents had too long to think about this odd trip, and within days the kibosh was put to it. I put up quite a fight, but there was no way to win this one.
And who was this Tucker fellow?

“Hey,” Zoe said, “don’t feel bad. You gave it a good shot. Maybe we should go back to the Buffalo plan.”

“Sure,” I said, somewhat defeated. “Sounds good.”

At this point Zoe and Tucker began to realize that in going to get an abortion, three’s a crowd, and so they told me they would take over from this point going forward.

I would have said something to them about an umbilical cord being cut here, but this wasn’t the time for bad puns, although it certainly was the way I felt. There was nothing I could do other than accept the situation for what it was. Tucker was being very good to her, and she had calmed down and was now pretty matter-of-fact about their trip. I lent them all the cash I had—fifty bucks—to add to the stash of what they were scrounging together to pay for it.