Here Comes Trouble (24 page)

On the day that I knew they were leaving, I went to school as if it were any normal day. But my mind was elsewhere. One’s thoughts don’t normally drift toward Buffalo, but I couldn’t do much else that day but worry about my best friend’s safety and well-being.

It was after dinner when the phone rang. My sister answered.

“Mike—it’s Tucker.”

I went to the phone, knowing that they had returned by now.

“Hey.”

“The
abortion,
” he said, whispering, out of breath, and, if it weren’t Tucker, I’d say he was crying.

“They botched it. We never made it to New York. We didn’t go to Buffalo. We’re in Detroit.”

“Shit!” I said, a bit too loud. “What are you doing in Detroit?
How is she?
”

“Not… not good,” he said, now clearly in tears. “
Mike—help me!
She’s bleeding pretty bad. I don’t know what to do.”

“Where are you?” I asked, trying not to scream or cry myself.

“I got her to a hospital… somewhere here in Detroit. It was just awful. Awful. Oh God… I don’t want to lose her!”

I was unable to swallow. The lump in the throat grew into a full choke. I cupped my hand over the phone and swung the cord around the wall from the dining room and into the kitchen so no one could hear or see me. I tried to keep it together and figure out what I needed to do.

“What do the doctors say?”

“They say she’s lost a lot of blood. She goes in and out. They won’t let me in there. I’m fifteen, and I’m sure they’ve called the cops by now.
I don’t know what to do!
” He broke down uncontrollably.

“OK, listen! Pull it together! I’m getting in the car right now. I’ll be there in less than an hour. If the cops show up, say nothing. Say you want a lawyer and keep repeating that. And if they’ll let you in there, hold her hand and let her know she’s not alone—and tell her I’m coming.”

“OK. OK. I’m so sorry. This was my idea. We didn’t have the money for Buffalo. Someone told us about a safe place in Detroit. Cheap. It was wrong from the minute we got there and I just should’ve turned her around and left. I’m so sorry. Please… forgive me.”

Right now none of that mattered. I shouted upstairs that I was going to go hang out with Tucker and Zoe and I’d be back in a couple hours.

“Back by ten,” my mom shouted.

“Yes. Ten. Bye!”

I tore down M-15 to Clarkston and got on I-75 and hit the gas. At times the speedometer read ninety. The V-8 on the Impala had me in Detroit in fifty-two minutes. I followed the signs to the hospital, parked the car in the emergency room lot, and ran in. Tucker was there, his eyes all red.

“It’s OK, it’s OK,” I told him, as I hugged him. I asked the nurse if I could go see Zoe, and she said no. I asked about her condition.

“Are you a relative?” she asked.

“I’m her brother,” I said, without thinking.

“And where are your parents?”

“Where are
yours?
” I snapped back at her, realizing instantly that this was not going to serve me well. I changed my tune immediately.

“Look, I’m sorry. I’m upset. I’m nineteen, she’s eighteen, and we don’t want to involve or upset our parents with this, if that’s OK. I hope you understand.” The BS flowed smoothly enough, but the tears that had formed in my eyes were real.

“OK, fine,” she said, filing away my insult for later retribution. “Just sit over there, and I’ll see if a doctor can come out to speak to the two of you.”

We waited nearly an hour before the resident came out looking for us.

“Which one of you is family?”

“I am,” I said.

“OK. Let me just say this was the stupidest thing you could have done. These back-alley abortionists are not doctors. They have no medical training whatsoever, and they do this only to make money and take advantage of people like you.”

“It’s all we could afford,” Tucker inserted unnecessarily. The doctor paused as he assessed who exactly this hoodlum was.

“It is illegal,”
he said, hitting every word like he was hitting Tucker’s face. “You may have killed her. But you didn’t. She’s going to recover. You took an enormous risk.”

“What exactly is her condition right now?” I asked, hoping to end the lecture.

“She’s cut up inside, her uterus and her cervix. It also looks like they used some form of ammonia, so there seem to be burns in there, too. We’ve stopped the bleeding and are caring for the inner wall linings, and she’s in a bit of shock. We have her resting now and sedated, and she’s getting the proper attention she needs. Are your parents on their way?”

“Yes,” I lied. “They should be here soon.”

The doctor shot another look at Tucker. “You care at all to know if she’s still carrying the baby?” he said, without adding the implied “punk” at the end of the sentence.

“Yeah, sure,” Tucker said without looking at the doctor.

“The baby’s gone,” he said, using the word
baby
for the second time for effect, to hurt Tucker. It hurt me.

“It’s not a baby,” I said quietly. “She was ten weeks pregnant. It was a fetus. If Michigan wasn’t so backward, she wouldn’t be lying in there like that. That’s all I’m mad about. Thank you for helping her.”

He did not appreciate my diatribe and simply turned away and went back into the ER.

“Are her parents really coming?” Tucker asked, panicked.

“No. But we have to call them. She’s going to be here for at least tonight, and they are going to be frightened when she doesn’t come home. I’ll call them. And I’ll try to help when they get here.”

I went to the pay phone and called her parents collect. I told them not to worry, Zoe was OK, but she was in the hospital in Detroit as she had come down here to terminate a pregnancy. There was crying and cursing, and I told them I was sorry, I didn’t know, I thought Tucker had called them, I drove to the hospital as soon as Tucker called me. I said I would stay with Zoe until they got there.

When they arrived I stood between them and Tucker to ward off any violence, and I asked everyone to try and focus on Zoe and we can yell at each other later. Her mother spoke to the nurse, then the doctor, and they allowed her and her husband back in the room. In a few minutes, they sent for her “brother.” I looked at Tucker, who just seemed lost and more in need of a babysitter or a mother of his own at the moment. I followed the nurse into the room, and she pulled back the curtain to reveal Zoe, half awake in bed, her hand being held by her mother, her dad still glancing my way, wanting to punch someone.

“Hi Zoe,” I said, and went over to her other side and took her other hand.

“I’m… so… sorry,” she mumbled. “We… made… a… m–mistake.”

“Don’t think about that now. The doctor said you’re doing fine, you just need to rest. And your mom and dad are here and everything’s gonna be all right.”

“Thank… you,” she whispered, her throat all raspy. “You’re… my…” She broke down crying. There was no real word with which to finish that sentence, none that adequately described our relationship—or if there was, it could not be spoken in this room. I helped her finish the sentence.

“Friend,” I said, smiling.

“Yes. Always.”

Zoe soon broke up with Tucker. After we graduated, I became consumed with my first year of college and all things political, but Zoe and I still hung out a lot, still listened to music and shared our most intimate feelings with each other. She signed up to go to community college, but halfway through the second semester she dropped out, and she and her family moved out West. We stayed in touch by writing letters, but she was into adventure and wandering with hippie friends she met along the way. Soon, there was no contact, and life went on.

I last saw Zoe over a decade ago. She was playing in a recital in Chicago, and she told me how she got part-time work playing in various orchestras and symphonies (they made her wear shoes). She had lived in LA for a while and played in the back-up string sections on pop and rock records. It was good to catch up and go over old times. The man she was with seemed nice but of few words. I did notice that he had the same chain that Tucker used to have, hanging from his belt loop. I left our reunion feeling good about Zoe and the life she had carved out for herself, and I was somewhat relieved when I saw that her boyfriend’s chain was clearly connected to something substantial in his pocket.

Getaway Car

T
HE WAR WAS NOW
in its sixth year and I was running out of time. I had just turned sixteen, and the possibility of being drafted felt like someone’s hot puke breath all over the back of my neck. Nine boys from my high school—
nine
—had already come back from Vietnam in flag-draped boxes. The best thing you could say about that back then was: at least the box was American made.

I had long ago stopped standing for the National Anthem at the Friday night football and Tuesday night basketball games. Fortunately I wasn’t alone in this reckless protest. Hippie membership had grown significantly by the fall of 1971 at Davison High School, and the jocks who desperately wanted to throw us off the Main Street bridge and into Black Creek were now outnumbered. But they could still break any of us in two like a matchstick if they got their hands on us. So we hung in packs. If a jock or a redneck wanted to dish out a dose of swift justice to a hippie, he was forced to lie in wait and grab one of us walking home alone after staying late for French Club or choir.

Two of the Davison Vietnam dead lived on my street. Statistically that had to be an outrageous percentage, considering the residential portion of my street extended for only four blocks. If every four-block street in America was required to cough up two young boys for The Sacrifice, then how many of us across America would be dead by now? Millions, right? I became convinced that my street, South Main Street, was a marked boulevard, singled out by Nixon or that creepy Angel of Death for some reason I couldn’t quite comprehend. I was determined there would be no offering made to their cause from my house.

It was back on the morning of May 5, 1970, that I snapped. Earlier in the year, I had convinced my guidance counselor to let me take Government class as a sophomore, a required credit usually reserved for seniors. Mainly, I wanted to get out of gym class. Two years of gym was required to graduate, but I lied and told my counselor that when I was in the Catholic seminary they made us take two gym classes a day so therefore I had, in effect, already taken my two years’ worth of gym, see? She approved the waiver to let me take Government class.

On May 4, National Guardsmen at Kent State in Ohio had taken aim on and killed four students while wounding nine others. This unglued me. “OK, so let me get this straight—I don’t have to go to Vietnam any more to get killed, I can do that right here at home?”

The next day, our ultracool Government teacher, Mr. Trepus, skipped the lesson plan and had us discuss what had happened in Ohio. Many of the senior boys in class agreed that the future looked mighty shitty. Some were quite angry, and one student suggested a walkout. As I was two years younger than the rest of the room, I kept my head down, doodling in my notebook. On one loose-leaf sheet of paper I began drawing little crosses on graves, the kind I had seen at Arlington Cemetery, just nothing but rows upon rows of crosses, so many crosses that they bled into the horizon.

On one 8½ x 11 sheet of paper I drew 260 crosses in 26 straight rows.

“Whatta you doin’?” asked Bob Bell, the long-haired senior in moccasin shoes who sat next to me.

“I was just wondering how long it would take to draw one of these for every grave of every soldier who’s died in Vietnam.”

“Ain’t that a lot?”

“I think Mr. Trepus said it’s like almost fifty thousand.”

“Huh. I’d like to see that,” he said with a curious smile on his face.

And so I began. I had about a hundred sheets of paper in my notebook. One by one, I drew the little grave crosses. At some point, Mr. Trepus noticed I was doing something and walked down the aisle to see what it was.

“I want to see what fifty thousand dead looks like on paper,” I told him, hoping I wasn’t in trouble.

He thought about it for a minute. “Good. I’d like to see that, too.”

It took the better part of the next couple days to complete my project. When I was done I had 49,193 crosses laid out in neat rows on 188½ sheets of three-hole-punched loose-leaf binder paper. Word spread that I had done this, and many wanted to see it. Others thought it best I eat lunch alone in the cafeteria (“freak!”). Those who wished a peek were treated to me flipping the pages one by one quickly in front of their eyes like a zoetrope machine. The crosses didn’t dance or move; it was more like seeing thousands of crosses piling up on top of thousands more. It made one girl in class cry.

“I don’t want to end up under one of those crosses,” I told her.

The following year, junior year, the war still raging, the hair a bit longer, the anger burning more intensely. With the draft lottery for me now less than twelve months away, it was time for decisive action.