Please Don't Come Back from the Moon Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1. Please Don't Come Back from the Moon

  2. Some Memories of My Father

  3. Summer 1992

  4. The Calming Effect of Jelly Doughnuts

  5. A Newcomer's Guide to Ann Arbor

  6. The Boy with the Backward Chakra

  7. Capable of Love

  8. Knights of Labor

  9. The Warning Signs and Symptoms of Depression, 2001

  10. Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (Reprise)

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2005 by Dean Bakopoulos

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval

  system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work

  should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department,

  Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bakopoulos, Dean.

  Please don't come back from the moon/Dean Bakopoulos.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-15-101135-4

  1. Single-parent families—Fiction. 2. Working class families—Fiction.

  3. Fatherless families—Fiction. 4. Runaway husbands—Fiction.

  5. Teenage boys—Fiction. 6. Michigan—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.A593P56 2005

  813'.6—dc22 2004011237

  Text set in Janson MT

  Designed by Linda Lockowitz

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition

  C E G I J K H F D B

  For Amanda

  and

  in memory of Gregory Smolij (1916–2000)

  We all drink from a leaking cup.

  —WILLIAM MATTHEWS, "Memory"

  The title of this novel comes from a composition

  by jazz great Charles Mingus.

  1. Please Don't Come Back from the Moon

  WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN, my father Went to the moon.

  He was not the first man from Maple Rock to go there; he only followed the others on what seemed to be an inevitable trail. My uncle John was the first to leave.

  The last time we saw John, we were in the parking lot of the Black Lantern, the bar on Warren Avenue where my father and his friends did their drinking. I was there with John's wife, my aunt Maria, and their son, Nick. It was the first day of June, just before midnight. I suppose I should remember if the moon was in the sky that night, but I honestly can't recall. The moon was not yet important. The bar owner, a big Greek named Spiros, had simply called my aunt and said she should come and take John home. Nick and I had been hanging around watching a movie, and she made us come with her.

  When we got there, a half circle of men stood in the parking lot, all of them wearing grease-stained work shirts or rumpled dress shirts and loose ties. In the middle of the circle was John, standing with his shirt off in a weary boxer's stance. He was soaked in sweat and his face seemed to be darkened with bruises or dirt. He had not been home for a few nights.

  My father, too, was there. Across the crowded lot, I saw him under a streetlamp, still wearing his tie, two or three pens in his pocket. He looked green in the weak and forced light, as if he might be sick.

  Across from John was an enormous man, red-haired and fat-faced. He was wearing coveralls and his skin was dark with grime. He had a crescent wrench in his hand.

  My uncle reached into his pocket, and then I must have turned to look at my father again, because the next thing I knew the crowd was screaming and laughing and John had on a pair of brass knuckles. The red-haired guy was on the pavement. He had wet himself. People started to scatter.

  My uncle, in the chaos, disappeared. By the time the police came, he and his truck were gone.

  "Does anybody know who the assailant was?" an officer yelled at the crowd, which was jeering at him.

  Just as my aunt was reaching out to the officer, about to wave her hand and say something—I don't know what—a woman wearing a red halter top and black cutoffs came forward. She was barefoot, and some men whistled at her as she walked in front of the mob. She turned to the crowd and flipped them off, then turned back to the officer and said, "I know him. He's my boyfriend."

  My aunt Maria walked away. We followed, because we had been waiting for a way to retreat without cowardice. We were too young to join in the fight but too old to flee from it.

  FOR A FEW WEEKS that summer, Nick and I positioned ourselves around the city and waited to run into my uncle. We went to the Black Lantern for lunch and sat for three hours, picking at a plate of nachos, looking at the face of every man who came into the bar. We sat outside the mall and drank frozen orange drinks most of the evening, watching girls and waiting for John to walk by eating an ice-cream cone, a shiner darkening each eye. We rode our bikes around the parking lots of motels, strip bars, and movie theaters, looking for his rusted Ford truck, the one with "Kozak's Sun & Snow: Quality Pool Maintenance, Lawn Care, and Snow Removal" hand lettered on each door.

  Uncle John didn't come home. The speculation was that he'd gone off to hide somewhere, maybe Canada, perhaps because he thought he had killed the fat red-haired man in the parking lot. But he hadn't. That man simply got a row of stitches and went on his way.

  It was a few weeks later that Walker Van Dyke's father left for a fishing trip, muttering something about killing the President, and didn't come back. J.J. Dempsey's dad, who had worked at the night-light factory, tried to rob the Ukrainian Credit Union the week after the factory went down. He left town directly afterward. Michael Pappas' father, Gus, owner of the recently bankrupted Gus's Coney Island Restaurant, left too.

  Our neighbor and my father's best friend, a pipe fitter named Norm Nelson, whose son Jimmy was about my age, also vanished. His Corvette, which his wife had been trying to get him to sell since he'd been laid off, was found wrapped around a tree in Hines Park. Norm was nowhere to be found. There was no blood in the car—it was as if he'd vaporized out of the driver's seat and floated away just as the car wrecked. My father went over and showed Mrs. Nelson how to start the lawn mower, change a fuse, set the thermostat. I went with him, and Mrs. Nelson kept looking at me and laughing, saying, "Isn't it silly, Michael, that a grown woman like me doesn't know how to do a goddamn thing?"

  By August, as Detroit stewed in a steamy layer of ash and grit so toxic that breathing made you feel stoned or delirious, many of my friends' fathers had disappeared, and as we played baseball or hung out at the bike racks near Wonderland Mall, all of a sudden, some kid would blurt out, "My dad's gone."

  Some men left in the traditional fashion, slipping out at night, a note left behind. Sonya Stecko, my sometime girlfriend, said her father wrote a rambling sixteen-page letter before he left, in which he affirmed that he loved her, her mother, and her siblings, and in which he offered advice about marriage, money, and other subjects. It was as if he planned to miss the next thirty years of her life.

  Some men left in broad daylight, giving goodbye kisses to their children in the driveway as their wives watched from behind the curtains, furious and brokenhearted. We watched Sharon Mills give her father a kiss goodbye as her mother threw pots and pans at his truck.

&
nbsp; Peter Stolowitz's father owned Sol's Shoes on Six Mile Road. One day he left the store unattended, the front door propped wide open with a rock. Across the front windows he had lettered FREE SHOES in huge strokes of brown latex paint. He'd taken all the cash from the register and the safe and left a note: "I'm going to the moon," it said. "I took the cash."

  Everyone in town went and helped themselves to a new pair of sneakers. We opened the boxes in the stockroom like it was Christmas, tossing lids aside, tearing out white tissue paper. Some people left their old shoes behind: a formidable pile of castaway footwear grew by the fire exit. Old men took home shiny wingtips, young women took high-heeled sandals. Nick and I helped ourselves to some Converse high-tops.

  I was friends with Peter Stolowitz. I stood there in my new shoes as he walked into his father's store, holding his mother's arm. She wailed and he wept. "All that we worked for," his mother sobbed. "All that I worked for."

  Peter glared at Nick and me. I pointed to the FREE SHOES sign and shrugged. The gleam of the white sneakers was too much to resist. I left with the shoes.

  After that, other men began using Mr. Stolowitz's line. "We're going to the moon," they'd say, walking away from us. "I'll be on the moon," they'd say, their eyes staring through us.

  ALL OF THE DISAPPEARED men were from Maple Rock, a working-class suburb tacked onto the southwest side of Detroit. Our little neighborhood was made up of Poles, Ukrainians, Greeks, Italians, and other ethnic groups that came from Europe after the Second World War. The disappeared all knew each other, from church or the Black Lantern or bowling league. Our fathers did not golf. They did not wear pressed khakis or docksiders. They knew how to throw punches, and they did throw punches when a situation called for it.

  Most of them had facial hair, beards, or at least a mustache. Most of them were not raised by English-speaking parents. Some of them had been in Vietnam, but few of them ever mentioned it. They liked to fish and hunt and left the city for long weekends in Michigan's vast and sandy north. Many of them were out of work.

  The factories seemed to vaporize in Michigan, big factories, small factories. With the factories gone, engineers, sales reps, and marketing specialists lost their jobs too. Newly unemployed men hung around their children's schools, working as crossing guards and cafeteria monitors, chaperoning field trips and driving buses. I could remember Ronald Reagan appearing on television when I was very young, saying, "We face an economic calamity of epic proportions." By 1990, we still hadn't recovered in Maple Rock.

  George Callas had been a factory rat. After he was downsized, he became our health teacher. Most of the time, Mr. Callas would talk about lifting weights (a good thing) or smoking (a bad thing). One time, he showed us a film about domestic violence that featured a lot of unfocused shots of women in shadows, looking out of rain-streaked windows while Roberta Flack sang "Killing Me Softly." Mr. Callas, a darkly handsome, powerful-looking man, cried through the whole thing. When the film ended and the lights flipped on, he hid his face and told us we could leave early.

  By far the most disturbing disappearance was that of our parish priest, Father Walter Gorski of St. John's Ukrainian Catholic Church. He was last seen late on a Saturday night, in his clerical collar and black smock, buying a carton of cigarettes, a case of beer, and three hot dogs at a 7-Eleven on Middlebelt Road.

  We arrived for Mass the next morning, sat straightbacked in our pews, prayer books ready, the choir standing at attention, waiting for the altar doors to open, for the smell of incense to fill the sanctuary, for Father Walt to emerge in his robes.

  We sat for fifteen minutes. No one moved. No one said anything. Finally, it was my aunt Maria who cried out, "No, God! Not him too!"

  The next morning, the archbishop had the police looking for Father Walt. Cops skulked around the neighborhood looking for clues, but this was old hat for them already, looking for men who would not be found. A few cops had even disappeared that summer—Slim Kowalski, Jim Owesko, Big Teddy Lukens.

  We heard that a clerk at 7-Eleven told police that Father Walt had offered him a ride.

  "I don't even know where you're going, Father," the clerk had said.

  "The moon," Father Walt had said, leaning in closer and winking. "You know, the moon."

  ***

  AFTER FATHER WALT'S disappearance, we stopped going to church. Another priest was brought in to replace Walt, but my mother said she no longer wanted to sit through Mass every Sunday morning. If all these men could simply go free, could let go of their social and cultural obligations, then why couldn't she?

  So instead, on Sunday mornings my mother would play her violin. My mother may have been the most educated and cultured woman in Maple Rock. Very few of the women in our neighborhood had been to college. My mother had a B.A., spoke three languages, had studied Russian literature and Latin and music. As a young woman, she had played in orchestras around the city. She had also played backup at Motown studios on some marginal albums of that era. One Sunday morning my mother played "Eleanor Rigby" and "The Great Pretender" while my father sat at the kitchen table, tearing apart the newspaper, tears streaming down his face.

  My mother stopped playing and tilted her head at my dad.

  "I need a job, Eva," he said. "I lost mine."

  My father had been a draftsman, and his job was considered a good secure one.

  My father said he'd been out of work for three weeks, and instead of going to work, he'd been spending time at the Black Lantern or the bowling alley or the mall.

  The admission seemed odd from him, because he was a slight man, known more for reading science-fiction novels and watching nature documentaries on PBS than for drinking and bowling. My father was always more refined than his friends in Maple Rock. He did not waste his time drinking one-dollar taps, throwing a sixteen-pound ball down a wooden lane. He did not fit in well with his peers. Most of the time he looked the way I had seen him that night outside the bar—shaky and green, nervous, like he might be sick.

  After my father made his announcement, he took his newspaper and went into the bathroom, and my mother began to play her violin again. I did not yet realize the tears in his eyes were not for what had happened to him but for what would eventually happen.

  My little brother, Kolya, was in the room. He was nine years old, and his belly hung over his belt as if he were a man in his fifties. He looked very somber all the time and was not prone to talking. He stood, always, with his hands in his pockets.

  I looked at him that morning to see if he had any idea what was going on, to see if the idea of unemployment and marital discord had any effect on his small brain. It did. His face was shadowed with sadness, and his eyes appeared so faraway and pensive that it seemed like he could see the future better than any of us adults. He stood, hands in pockets, looking at me, his blond hair sticking up like matted straw.

  THE VERY LAST MEN LEFT, it seemed, out of a sense of duty. For a while, you'd see them in their garages on Saturdays, puttering with old car engines, dragging old toilets to the curb. Some of them still had work; their lives were following a plan and a purpose, and their horizons, if not bright, were certainly visible. Still, it was almost as if by hanging around, they were obstructing the natural order of things. They were like robins that wander stupidly through the snow in January.

  And so they disappeared.

  Later my mother said that all men have it in them, the capacity to leave behind, at a moment's notice, the world they know. My mother said that the last men left because they felt they had to, because they had to prove they were capable of acting on that buried impulse as well as any other man. My mother said she'd like to take me to a doctor and have my synapses reconfigured, lest someday the abandonment impulse would fire up inside of me and then I too would be gone.

  Did I think my father was immune? My father was only human. How could he not leave?

  My father was in the driveway when I came riding up on my bicycle. Nobody else was home. It was a Saturday, and
my mother and brother were out shopping. He was loading a few duffel bags and a box into the trunk of his Oldsmobile. He wore a blue Oxford shirt tucked into faded jeans, and he was red-faced and puffy-eyed.

  "Dad," I said, standing at the edge of the sidewalk, "where are you going?"

  He stared back at me, squinting and tight-lipped, as if my head had suddenly burst into a ball of fire and the brilliant light was blinding him, as if my voice were the voice coming from a burning bush.

  He drove away at a crawl. His speedometer must've not even reached ten miles per hour. Every few seconds I could see him glance in his rearview mirror and then avert his eyes quickly, as if my head were still behind him, burning and flaring up into the sky.

  I stood alone in the driveway, throwing sycamore pellets down the wide, empty street. They sailed over the concrete and then bounced and landed, exploding into fluff like crashing birds.

  When my mother and brother came home from shopping, I said nothing.

  At dinner, my mother set out meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and gravy. She called my father. "Roman! Dinner!"

  He didn't come. Kolya and I sat and watched each other, waiting. Kolya seemed to know the score. He didn't look worried or confused, just sad. My mother went to the fridge and took out a bowl of tossed salad, a bottle of Italian dressing, and a jar of pickles.

  "Roman!" she called. "Dinner, honey!"

  She went back to the counter, got the salt and pepper shakers. She went to the fridge and brought out some butter and some slices of Wonder bread; she called again. When he still didn't come she went to the fridge and got mustard and ketchup, some leftover macaroni and cheese, some lunch meat that she arranged on a paper plate. She called again. She brought to the table a jar of beets, some olives, a bottle of vinegar, and a jar of mayonnaise. "Roman, come on, honey! Dinner!"

  Her voice trailed around the house and floated up the stairs where nobody was waiting to hear it. She brought out honey, marshmallows, and chocolate sauce.