The Narcissism of Small Differences

  For my friends

  Boxed in, pulled together, touching my tomb with one hand and my cradle with the other, I felt brief and splendid, a flash of lightning that was blotted out by darkness.

  —Jean-Paul Sartre

  "Tell me exactly what happened. Did you do any heroic act?"

  "No," I said. "I was blown up while we were eating cheese."

  —Ernest Hemingway

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Part 1: Detroit, 2009

  Chapter One: The Two of Them

  Chapter Two: The Law of Random Sync

  Chapter Three: The Midlands

  Chapter Four: Be Careful

  Chapter Five: The Detroit Way

  Chapter Six: The Daughter She'll Never Have

  Chapter Seven: Ruin and Other Porns

  Part 2

  Chapter Eight: The Little Visitor

  Chapter Nine: Gentlemen

  Chapter Ten: Carpe Per Diem

  Chapter Eleven: Is Selling Out Even a Thing Anymore?

  Chapter Twelve: Getting into Cars with Strangers

  Part 3

  Chapter Thirteen: Full-Time Jobs and Other Petty Crimes

  Chapter Fourteen: The Mythos of the Broken Hipster

  Chapter Fifteen: Cool in Europe and the Tao of Funny

  Chapter Sixteen: What Would Jesus Drive?

  Chapter Seventeen: The Imitation-Wood-Grain Nightmare

  Chapter Eighteen: Knowing Your Enemy

  Chapter Nineteen: Heart of Tiki Darkness

  Chapter Twenty: A Grand Rapids of the Mind

  Chapter Twenty-One: Out Come the Freaks

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Semi-Infidelities and Interim Campaigns

  Part 4

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Irony Loves Company

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Irish Car Bomb

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Attempted Dinner

  Chapter Twenty-Six: The Exterminating Angel

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Verity of Decay

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Attempted Dinner, Part 2

  Part 5

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: A New Sincerity

  Acknowledgments

  About Michael Zadoorian

  Copyright & Credits

  About Akashic Books

  1

  Detroit

  2009

  1

  The Two of Them

  "Are we weird?"

  Joe closed his eyes and quietly sighed. Not another one of these conversations. "I don't know, Ana," he said, his voice belying a complete lack of enthusiasm in this subject. "What do you mean by weird?"

  She was sitting on the floor of the living room of their town house, leaning back against the couch. She scooted her knees up until they were under her chin. "I don't know. Weird."

  Joe was perched on a sixties lowboy chair directly across from her, paging through the latest edition of the Detroit Independent, the local alternative paper for which he wrote. He had wanted to look over the piece he had written on the works of Donald Goines, Detroit's bard of blaxploitation, but instead he was doomed to have this conversation. "Look, you tell me what weird is and I'll tell you if we're it."

  "I don't know."

  He folded the newspaper and tossed it in a vintage black wire magazine rack. "Okay, what's up?"

  "I don't know. I just feel like we're weird."

  "Really?" he said. "I don't know what to tell you, but trust me, we are definitely not weird. There are lots of people who actually live different, crazy, interesting, weird lives—they go live on ashrams or tour with Sun Ra tribute bands. They go off the grid. They travel the world seeking knowledge. They go tripping on yage with a shaman in the Amazon. We, on the other hand, have jobs. We live in the suburbs. We go to Target, for fuck's sake. We are not weird. We are nowhere near weird. In fact, it makes me sad to think of how not-weird we are."

  Ana's turn to sigh this time. "I disagree. First off, Ferndale isn't some affluent suburb. We're a mile from Detroit. We're an inner-ring city. And I don't know if what you have could be considered a job."

  He was going to ignore that last comment. "Fine, okay then, I guess we're weird." Maybe this would end if he just agreed with her.

  "People think we're weird because we've been shacked up for fifteen years." Ana wasn't letting him get off that easily.

  "That's not weird, Ana. That's monogamy. Very common and nonweird."

  "It's a little weird."

  Another loud exhalation. "Is that it? You want to get married?"

  Ana peered at him over her glasses, brow canted above the smallish cat-eye frames, as if he had just casually suggested a murder-suicide pact. Joe usually thought she looked wonderful in glasses until she did that.

  "No," she said. "Why in god's name would we need to get married?"

  He shrugged. "I don't know. Because that's what most people consider normal?"

  She laid her head back on the cushion of the couch and gazed at the ceiling. "Hm."

  "People have an extremely low tolerance for weird. They think everything that's not exactly like them is weird. Trust me, we're disgustingly normal."

  "Please stop talking, Joe."

  "What? What do you want me to say? Truly, if we are what passes for weird, then the world is in big trouble."

  She sighed again. "I don't know. Just forget it. I'm going upstairs to read."

  After she left, Joe had an unsettled feeling in his stomach, a burning that only a couple of beers would help extinguish.

  2

  The Law of Random Sync

  Ana did not know why she was saying these things. She didn't used to worry about being weird. Weird used to be a good thing, something she aspired to but never really achieved. So why was she complaining about feeling weird? She really just felt like complaining about something. It was true that she didn't feel normal. She felt in-between, in a boring, helpless, semicontented, semidisgruntled place. Neither here nor there, in a sort of no-woman's-land of the psyche.

  Maybe she felt this way after ten years in a cramped two-bedroom town house in Ferndale (getting more cramped by the day, what with Joe's pack rat tendencies seemingly getting worse as he got older, making her worry that the two of them would someday be found dead after some sort of Collyer brothers hoarder avalanche). Maybe it was her still bringing in the bulk of the income for the two of them (which, admittedly, was irritating her more and more these days). Maybe it was the fact that Joe seemed to be walling himself off from her lately—out boozing with his friends or spending long periods of time in the study or falling asleep on the couch and not coming to bed until it was practically time to get up. Either that or getting up so early, there was little chance for face-to-face time, no time in bed, no time to talk about what was going on in their lives.

  Ana missed when they used to cobble together a dinner out of what was in the fridge or pantry, open a bottle of cheap wine, light a candle, and sit at the table all night, just talking. It seemed like years since they had done that. And most every night had been like that at the beginning, at least when they weren't going out to some show or event or to meet up with friends.

  There had been a lot of things going on back then. Maybe it was just their youth or that particular moment in Detroit or the fact that she had just gotten started in advertising and going out every night was just what everybody did at that time.

  It was how she and Joe had met—a party at a photographer's loft in Eastern Market, someone with whom Ana had just shot one of her very first print ads.

  The photographer, Michelle, had set up a makeshift set so she could shoot Polaroid portraits of all the guests. Ana had sat down on the so-tacky-it
-was-fabulous crimson crushed-velvet couch from Lasky's in Hamtramck, to wait for her friend Lena (now married with a sweet brood, living in the far suburbs, at what felt like 108 Mile Road) to join her. Lena was taking too long, so Michelle the photographer told Joe, who was standing nearby, to sit down next to Ana. Joe looked around and behind him as if she couldn't possibly be talking to him.

  "I'm sorry? Excuse me?"

  "Sit down next to her," said Michelle, who was obviously accustomed to arranging people and personalities for photographic purposes.

  Joe continued to bumble and stammer. "Oh, I, um. Okay." He plopped down on the other side of the couch.

  "What's your name?" said Michelle.

  "Joe," he said, blushing furiously.

  "Okay, Joe," said Michelle. "Move over closer to Ana."

  Joe scooted over, looking worriedly at Ana, as if he was concerned about violating her personal space.

  "That's better. That's it. Now look interesting."

  The resulting Polaroid revealed Ana covering her mouth in faux shock and Joe with eyes frozen wide and mouth slightly agape. A photo that when viewed now, with its slightly faded color and mottled edges, gave that moment and the life together that followed a retro feel, a strange, anachronistic sense of midcentury spontaneity.

  When Joe saw it, he said in a deadpan, "Well, I definitely look interesting."

  Ana nodded, trying to keep from laughing. "Yes. Very interesting. You look freshly taxidermied."

  Joe glanced up from the photo and smiled at her.

  Lena still hadn't appeared, so they walked over near the bar to look at Michelle's fine art photography (gritty but respectful portraits of the men and women who sold fruits and vegetables at the market) that was mounted and displayed there. After five minutes of talking to this sweet young man, with the floppy dark hair and furry secondhand cardigan, who was talking too fast, so excited about everything—about photography, music, art, and suddenly, obviously about her—Ana was already feeling something. She felt relieved. Yes, definitely relief. Was that strange? Was that actually love she was feeling right then, five minutes after meeting the guy? Probably not. It was too easy to look back at these things through a soft-focus romantic lens and think that, yet at that moment she had known she was capable of loving him.

  Those first months were a lot of going out—events, performances, art openings, raves, poetry slams—whatever the hell was going on back then, they were there. Joe was quite the man about town. She liked that he was invited to everything and that he wanted to go everywhere and experience things and write about them. We've got to see this band here, that play there, the book-release party over here. They were together all the time.

  But even with all the going out, there was also a lot of staying in, a lot of laughing. They genuinely seemed to amuse each other. Even when Joe wasn't in a good mood, he was still pretty funny. She came to appreciate his mild curmudgeonliness, his brand of gentle grouchiness. She found it amusing how he loved being in a dark, deserted, chilly movie theater on bright summer days, when everyone else was outside enjoying the beautiful Michigan weather. When she asked him about it, he said, "Sunshine is overrated. It's like the climatic equivalent of a conventionally attractive blonde. You're obligated to think it's pretty." He stifled a smile, then held his index finger up to make one of his proclamations. "I refuse to be subject to the tyranny of so-called good weather!"

  Oh, and there was a lot of sex. A lot of pretty darned amazing sex. When she would stay over at his place (which, while cluttered with books and CDs and VHS tapes and vinyl and cassettes and zines, was always surprisingly clean) on the weekends, sometimes he would blow off all the events he was invited to and they wouldn't leave for forty-eight hours. They would eat carryout, watch movies, listen to music, lie in bed and read (he always had something good around that she would come to appreciate—Dawn Powell, Terry Southern, Carl Van Vechten), and make love. They couldn't keep their paws off each other during that time.

  Ana was just getting started as a junior art director, and while working on her very first television commercial, she heard a term from a producer that she couldn't help but to apply to her and Joe: "the law of random sync." Which meant that when you put a piece of existing music up against a rough cut of a commercial, sometimes, just once in a while, everything accidentally matched perfectly. All the beats were there, the music changed at just the right points in the edit; even the energy was right, as if the music was scored specifically for the commercial. Yet it wasn't. It was all pure chance, but everything fit just right.

  That was the way it felt between her and Joe, physically and every other way. They had randomly been thrown together and somehow everything fit.

  And now, it had certainly been months since they'd had sex. That was one she didn't know how to explain. That was one she kept coming back to when she thought about the big birthday coming up. Was this it? After forty, no fucky? She knew it didn't have to be like that, but it sure felt like it was shaping up that way.

  The only fun she'd been having lately was at work, which was strange since work hadn't been fun in a long time. Detroit advertising was hurting. The car companies were fleeing the agencies of their birthplace. Luckily, Ana was working at one of the few places in town that wasn't dependent on the automotive business. New accounts had actually come into the agency recently. Nothing fancy—vacuum cleaners, office-supply superstores, spark plugs—but she and her partner were doing good work and actually getting stuff produced. In a few days, she was going to LA for a week, which sounded pretty wonderful. Getting out of Detroit in January was its own kind of blessing for anyone struggling through an endless, lightless, near hopeless Michigan winter.

  3

  The Midlands

  Joe bundled up and headed out into the bitter January cold to the Midlands, a bar whose name obliquely referred to what Ana had mentioned about Ferndale: the town directly bordered the city limits at 8 Mile Road, but it was a town that was not quite Detroit, with its 138 square miles of abandoned buildings and unrelenting poverty and deserted, pheasant-strewn urban plains; but nor was it the whiter, wealthier, more insular suburbs of the north. Ferndale was in-between, an interzone amalgam of white and black, gay and straight, blue collar and no collar, that had enjoyed a brief period of gentrification a few years earlier, but was now suffering along with the rest of the state after the collapse of the auto industry. The new condo complexes and manufactured lofts hadn't quite gotten a chance to get built. Thus the bad economy and suddenly sinking property values had made it possible for people who would normally be forced to move out—working musicians, teachers, public radio employees, and the few artist types who had amazingly figured out how to make a living doing their thing—to hang on awhile longer.

  The Midlands had somehow managed to open its doors during that flourishing, fleeting period between creative-class boon and real estate boom. It was too nice to be a dive, too rough-hewn industrial to be uptown, with its burnished plywood booths and polished concrete bar, its walls full of local art, taps full of local beers, and jukebox full of local bands. The place was family friendly early in the evening, yet lousy with slouching scenesters after eleven o'clock. Joe preferred the time in-between.

  Once settled at the bar, Joe shed his Carhartt but kept his beanie on, which he'd been doing more lately since his hairline started its slow but steady decampment northward. Still recovering from the icy walk, he treated himself to a microbrew, a Bell's Two Hearted Ale (after that he'd switch to a mass-produced and decidedly cheaper Stroh's), and began to read his book, Revolutionary Road. After a short while, his stomach started to calm as the beer worked its magic on those troublesome centers of his brain. Joe loved reading about fucked-up bourgeois types. And the novel felt like even more proof that even what was deemed "normal" wasn't necessarily good.

  He couldn't stop thinking about their conversation. Weird indeed. It was disgusting how normal he and Ana were. Of course, their families didn't think so. He knew t
hat there was much shaking of heads, aggravated exclamations of, Well, I just don't know, among the respective parents. Living together for fifteen years without matrimony, procreation, or a mortgage bewildered most Michigan parents. To them, he and Ana existed in some state of suspended maturation, and would do so for the rest of their selfish, soon-to-be-middle-aged, progeny-free lives.

  He started to read the next page, but was distracted by a flyer on the bar.

  THE MIDLANDS PRESENTS CHIN TIKI NIGHT!

  OUR ANNUAL RITE OF SPRING

  POLYNESIAN CELEBRATION

  ZOMBIES—MAI TAIS—PU-PUS—

  HULA—FILMS—VENDORS

  EXOTICA MUSIC BY DJ DAVE DETROIT

  MARK YOUR CALENDARS!

  It was for the Midlands' yearly spring Chin Tiki party. Where the local bohos shed their winter parkas, donned aloha shirts, grass skirts, and coconut bras to ironically celebrate the arrival of spring. It was a big thing in Ferndale. A few years ago, Joe had written a feature on Detroit's burgeoning underground tiki culture and had completely fallen under the sway of the whole wonderfully ridiculous idea of it. Looking at the flyer, he couldn't help thinking of what fueled the popularity of tiki culture in midcentury America: the repression and conformity of the times, i.e., being too normal. It was a way for gray-flannel types to shed their inhibitions, go native, and get weird—uninhibited boozing, semierotic dancing to faux-exotic music, gaudy flowered shirts, sticky finger foods, unclad maiden flesh, and phallic tiki idols. At one point, Detroit had three Polynesian palaces, but when the city started bleeding honkies after the '67 race riot, all of them eventually closed. Only one building was still standing, albeit shuttered: the Chin Tiki, after which this shindig was named.

  Joe had gone for the past two years. It was always filled with interesting people: artists, musicians, performers, writers, filmmakers, zinesters, photographers, drag queens, performance artists, aging punk rockers, sundry eccentrics, all people whose normalcy Ana might call into question. Joe often felt a little outclassed because so many of them seemed to be doing so much—performing, making art and music, getting grants and fellowships—while he was still a mere freelancer for the Independent, as well as some websites and a few other (now dwindling) print publications. Jealousy aside, it wasn't unusual that he would end up interviewing people from this crowd, which resulted in substantial pieces that actually made Joe feel like a real writer.