Here Comes Trouble (8 page)

So whenever we heard the music we would come running over to be part of his dance party. No girls were allowed, which was just fine with us. Soon he had us dancing with him and with each other, and probably around the time he brought out his mother’s rouge and eyeliner to show us how we could “do ourselves up,” the older boys in Davison, who had been keeping a wary eye on these proceedings from afar, had decided they’d seen enough. It was time to shut this dance party down.

The boys in town stepped up their ground assault on Sammy. He became a victim of multiple slappings, punchings, beatings, and “face washings” with dirt or snow.

Sammy did not take kindly to such treatment and would always fight back, something that seemed to catch his fellow junior high students by surprise. First, he would go right for their eyes, like a cat trapped in the wild. He was serious about gouging them right out of their sockets. He was always able to get his longer-than-normal nails implanted into their cheeks and he would scratch and claw until he drew blood. And he would kick, wildly kick, whatever part of the body he could reach. This was not the Sonny Liston fighting style that these boys were used to. His attackers would subdue him in the end, but it did not come without a price. Soon the neighborhood and school bullies considered him to be too much work to put down and not worth the energy (or the scars) to beat him into submission. They also discovered that, for the life of them, they couldn’t beat the queer out of him. Surely if one of these faggots was just pummeled enough, like over and over and over, the gay would somehow spill out of them and they would be made Normal. But it wasn’t happening, so the bullies gave up and returned to the more entertaining tradition of humiliation via taunting, ridiculing, and calling Sammy names.

All this drove Sammy into a dark place. The phenomenal hate toward him did not, in turn, make him want to love others. And so he took it out on us little ones. We weren’t quite sure at our age why the older boys were so mean to him, but we soon learned that Sammy saw us as just shorter versions of his tormentors—and he never missed a chance to give any of us a good vicious slapping.

Anything could set him off—seeing us chew gum, mismatched pants and shirts, forbidden attempts to sing along with the songs on the 45 rpm records—and he grew more violent toward us with his punches and throwdowns. One day he tied little Pete Kowalski to a chair for “being bad,” and his mother had to come over and get him released (after giving Sammy a good whack across his face). We quickly stopped going over to the Afternoon Dance Party, but that didn’t stop Sammy when he saw one of us on the street. He’d push us down on the ground. Whenever passing by, he’d give us a good slug. After a while, we did our best to steer clear of him. We were kids; we didn’t understand the hurt he was carrying and how he needed to act it out. Even the adults seemed incapable of grasping such a concept in 1965.

One Saturday afternoon, I was riding my bike down the sidewalk on Lapeer Street and Sammy was walking toward me. I tried to cross on the patch of lawn between his sidewalk and the street, but when I did he screamed at me to “get off my lawn!” He then took the stick he had in his hand and threw it into the spokes of my front wheel—which caused it to stop suddenly, throwing me into the street. He just stood there screaming at me to “never, ever, even
look
at our lawn” and “don’t give me any lip!” Then he started laughing wildly as I brushed myself off and went running home with my bike.

When I got to our house, my Aunt Cindy and her husband, Uncle Jimmy, were there with their sons paying a visit. They were the relatives known as the Mulrooneys, and their brood consisted of three very tough sons, all much older than me. They lived on the east side of Flint, and I am certain these three boys were much feared in their own neighborhood. I myself was scared to death of them—and I was related to them!

I came up the front steps of our house and went inside, my elbows scraped and bleeding, and tears streaming down my cheeks. The cousin-thugs wanted to know what happened. I told them and they said, “Point him out.” I looked out our picture window and there he was, still standing down the street. “That’s him,” I said, knowing full well what was going to happen next. Unfortunately, I felt no remorse, only a sense of justice. That is, until I saw how justice was being meted out.

There in the street, the three Mulrooney boys were beating the holy crap out of Sammy Good. They first formed a circle around him. I knew that Sammy’s trapped-animal instincts would instantly kick in. He threw the first slap, and with that I couldn’t see any more of Sammy. The Mulrooneys pounced on him like piranhas on raw meat. Let’s just say the Mulrooneys weren’t “slappers,” and the velocity and ferocity of their fists going up in the air and then slamming down on him was a fierce sight to watch, something akin to a
National Geographic
special. You could hear Sammy’s screams for help, and while my Uncle Jimmy Mulrooney was taking it in with pleasure, my dad, perhaps later than he wished, opened up the screen door and shouted for my cousins to “knock it off!” By that time, Mr. Dietering, who lived next door to the Goods, had also come out to break things up. The Mulrooneys put in a few more kicks and then turned triumphantly in our direction. Sammy lay on the street all crumpled up, crying.

“Sissy!” “You fight like a girl!” “Go put on your dress!” were the words they left Sammy with as Mr. Dietering helped him up. Sammy didn’t want any help. He limped back to his house. I was
pleased
that my cousins had taken care of him.

My dad was not so happy. “You can’t use your cousins to defend yourself. You need to learn to fight. I’m sending you down to the Y for boxing class.”

What? No! Oh God, I’d rather have taken my sisters sledding—in July! Why was I being punished? Sending me into downtown Flint so Flint kids like the Mulrooneys could beat me up—legally? I begged my mom to intercede.

“Whatever your dad thinks is best” was all she could muster. I can swear to you I had never heard her utter those words before because, in our house, it was always what
she
thought was best, and Dad concurred with that line of authority.

All this because I had to come home crying! Because I saw the Mulrooneys’ car there! I wanted revenge. I knew what they would do. The only thing that would have made me happier is if they would have also smashed every single Supremes record in his collection.

About three months later, around ten o’clock one night, there was a knock on our front door. It was Mr. Popper, a large but soft-spoken man who lived across the street from the Goods.

“Frank, the Good boy’s gone missing. His parents think he mighta been kidnapped. Taken out to the woods. They called the police but we thought we’d go searching for him. Can you come?”

“Sure,” Dad said, though it was already past his bedtime. He went and got our large flashlight and a baseball bat.

Within minutes most of the men from the neighborhood had gathered on our lawn, each of them with flashlights and sticks or clubs and wearing the kind of hunting jackets one wears in the late Michigan fall. My sisters and I, already in our pajamas and in bed, came out to the living room and watched this scene unfold. What was going on? Kidnapping?! We got instantly frightened. It was the only crime against a child short of murder that they would arrest you for in those days. There was no such thing as “child abuse,” or “neglect,” and nearly all children were accustomed to a healthy dose of spankings and whoopin’s—and worse. Even the school sanctioned it, and teachers were allowed to use a large wooden weapon against the area known as your rump.

The one thing you could not do as an adult was
steal
us. If you were not a parent or a relative from the extended family, you could not just take us away without permission. The line had to be drawn somewhere, and this is where it was.

It was believed that Sammy Good had been taken away (lured?) by someone who was “like him” but “older.” We didn’t know what this meant. Frankly, it was hard to imagine anyone able to pin down and then transport Sammy anywhere, unless they had no use for the eyes God gave them.

It was determined that if someone
was
going to molest him (“Mom, what does
molest
mean?”), it would probably be done in the woods behind our house. And so off the search party went. One thing that struck me about all these men—most of whom probably didn’t appreciate the fact that Sammy was the neighborhood homosexual—was how genuinely concerned they were for Sammy’s safety and well-being, and how they hoped they would find him alive and well. The mothers had come out, too, in order to comfort Mrs. Good, who was standing in the street fighting back her tears. The men assured her they’d bring him back—after all, he probably just ran away and might even be watching us right now! They said this as they tightly clenched their clubs and baseball bats, either ready to roll into action or perhaps scared themselves of going into the deep, dark woods. Yes, they were willing to put themselves at some risk, and if I could sum up their collective feeling, it was,
Well, he may be a faggot—but Goddamn it, he’s our faggot—and nobody better touch a hair on his head!

As the men left on their search, my sisters started to cry, thinking the kidnappers might hurt our dad, too. Our mother told us to go back to bed and that, with more than a dozen men, no harm was going to come to anyone. At that moment, the police chief showed up with one of his officers and proceeded to catch up to the makeshift posse.

I went with my sisters into their bedroom, which had the best view of the woods. We watched the dads cut through the yards and around the swamp and into the woods, where the silhouettes of their frames disappeared—but the sweeping motion of the twelve flashlights allowed us to know exactly where they were. The movement of those lights looked weirdly choreographed—Sammy would have been proud—as they went up and down and across the trees, crisscrossing each other like the klieg lights at the summer carnival or the Chevy dealer’s Fourth of July sale.

After what seemed like hours, the dads returned, dejected and empty-handed.

“He’s not back there,” we heard Dad tell Mom. “No telling where he is. But he ain’t back there.”

The cops delivered the bad news to Mrs. Good and she broke down again. Her husband put his arm around her to comfort her, and they walked slowly back to their house, as did everyone else to theirs.

The next day Sammy Good was found near Pontiac, Michigan. He had either hitchhiked or taken the bus. He was wandering the streets and he was hungry and he didn’t want to go back home. He was tired of the insults and the bullies and the beatings and the inability to enjoy his dance party in peace. He had made it more than halfway to Hitsville, U.S.A., and it was said later, after he had run away again, that he had wanted to meet the Supremes and help them with their “styling.” I’m sure he could have made a significant contribution, and I’m certain that a more open and diverse place like Detroit might have suited him better.

We never saw Sammy again. He went to live with an aunt, and that was the last anyone wanted to discuss the subject. One month before his high school graduation, Sammy made his way to New York City, perhaps a more accepting and forgiving place, and it was where he went for a stroll one night, down West 13th Street to pier 54, and threw himself into the Hudson River.

The Canoe

W
HEN
I
WAS YOUNG
, my grandmother (my mom’s mother), sat me down to tell me the family history. She had an old, musty book of notes and clippings, and stacks of albums with faded photographs. As I was the oldest of the three kids, she wanted me to have this information so that it would be passed down to future generations. But for her, it was not just about handing over the printed material that had been handed to her. It was also about the Irish tradition of sitting the wee ones down and letting them see your face and look into your eyes as you told them “the stories of your people.” My grandmother explained that these stories were the closest thing we had to family jewels. They were who we were, where we came from, how our lives and values and beliefs came to be. In the generations that came before us, they understood that their good fortune (or tragedy) was not just a series of random happenings. They were the result of how one behaved, what integrity one had, and how carefully each of them made the decisions they made.