Bus. Fair.

It’s been three days now since my car has been in the body shop recuperating from a front-end “kiss” she received last fall in St. Ignace, when a mid-1980s red Chevy van – driven by someone still wily from the Wild Turkey bath he took the night before – “didn’t see” my Prelude behind him when he backed-out to leave the remote cabin on the Lake Michigan shore.

The van did have mirrors, but I doubt the poor chap’s eyes were doing him much good, especially after the mid-morning nips he took to take the edge off, a tactic that actually sent him even further off “the cliff.” As he pulled away, I felt bad for his lady passenger and all the drivers on U.S.-2 that sunny morning.

Now, because of my procrastination, my car had been enduring this black eye for months. But on Monday, I took her in because I didn’t want to see her sad anymore. Oh, and Mr. Turkey’s insurance company was starting to hound me.

And the weird thing is, I kinda hope she dies on the operating table.

You see, we take our cars for granted. When you have one, you don’t really realize you own a vehicle. Driving is kind of like pissing. You do it every day, but don’t really remember the particulars of any one session. It just kind of happens.

Not having a car – or more specifically, having a car and then losing it for a while – can throw things a bit out of whack. And for me, that shift happened, and I like it a lot.

But of all the benefits of not having a vehicle at your disposal – the added exercise, no carbon emissions, no irresponsible trips to IHOP at 3:30 a.m. and through a “DUI enforcement zone” – the best is having to use public transportation.

Kalamazoo is no metropolis. There is no need for rail, or light rail or rickshaws. In the winter, I sometimes wish I had eight huskies and a sled, but like many cities of about 100,000, we have buses, and I boarded one today for the first time in years. I felt like a kid when I put my $1.35 in the cash collector and took my seat. I’ve ridden on subways, buses and trains all over the country and in Europe, but there is something about riding the bus in your own city when you rarely ride it at all. You feel like a stranger in your own town.

I was on my way back to downtown from an errand trip when I saw the bus turn the corner and come to a stop before me. I stepped inside and met eyes with the driver, a large black woman with arms that looked like droopy hams.

“You need a transfer?” she asked me.

“Uh, no,” I replied.

“Then go sit down,” she said.

The ride was only about 5 minutes, but I took in so much. It was like my eyes were at a buffet and they just got voted off Survivor.

There was a little boy, maybe two years old, his skin the color of creamed coffee, looking out the window as the world flew by. He was wearing a camouflage jacket and a black New York Yankees baseball cap too big for his head, its bill perfectly straight. His hair fell out of the sides of the hat like little springs.

We glanced at each other.

“Hi,” he said, and I said “hi” back, smiling.

Then again, and again, as relentless kids do, we said “hi” to each other.

I shut my eyes.

“Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi,” he said in a sweet voice that reminded me of a kitten. Soft and innocent.

His mother picked him up and held him in her lap, never breaking her conversation with the bus driver.

“I think I’m going to Chicago in a little bit and then maybe move there then get out, go someplace else,” the mother said.

“How ‘bout Africa,” the driver replied.

Sitting calmly across from the mother was an old woman in a red electric wheelchair. The chair was strapped to the floor with four, heavy-gauge straps that looked like seatbelts on steroids. She had large, meaty ears that looked like marshmallows.

She was dressed all in yellow – yellow coat, shirt, pants, shoes. Her hair was done up and she’d put little purple hair clips the shape of butterflies all around the top of her head, like a crown. I thought that a girl of 5 or 7 or maybe 10 would do the same thing and I smiled as genuine a smile as I have in days.

Every 30 seconds or so, she’d take a sip from a huge cup of frozen coke, holding it delicately with her left hand. Her index finger was wrapped in dirty gauze, but that wasn’t what made her hand noticeable. No, that was the nearly neon green nail polish on each fingernail.

I don’t know where she was going, maybe a doctor’s visit, maybe a friend’s house, but she oozed confidence and peacefulness and I felt like I knew her.

In the rear of the bus, four young black men sat silently, each one looking out the window with a blank stare. One in particular – the kid wearing the earmuff-sized headphones and an orange t-shirt that read: “I have multiple personalities and none of them likes you” – caught my eye.

He looked young but seemed old and I couldn’t understand why. Maybe it was the look he had, the face that he was showing: tight lips, eyes too intense for someone with no lines stretching from their outer edges – at least not yet. I wondered where he was off to as well, but more than that, where he’d been.

We pulled into the bus station. The boys in back got out quickly and scattered. I stayed on for a few moments.

The driver got out of her seat – slowly – using her hands to lift her legs out of the cubby-hole area beneath the steering wheel.

“Hi, baby,” she said to the little boy. He waved back like little kids do, opening and closing his hand.

“When does the Portage No. 2 come?” the old lady asked.

“Half an hour,” the driver said.

Then she bent over and began to the release the straps from the wheelchair, exhaling as she reached for the straps’ ends.

“Lord have mercy,” she said. “Lord have mercy.”

Middle-Aged Mastur-Peace

The Michigan News Agency is a place like no other in Kalamazoo. From its neon sign to the uber-friendly staff (who will hold your newspaper if you’re on vacation) to the wealth of print materials available even as the digital revolution threatens to gobble-up all things paper, it’s a small business straight out of The Baldwins.

But it wasn’t today.

I entered through the front door and, being in a cheery mood from the warm weather and plentiful sunshine, I smiled for some reason as the little bell attached to the door handle did a cute “ding, ding” as I took my first few steps inside.

The store’s owner, Dean Hauck, crept out from behind a tower of dusty boxes and saw me. Our daily back-and-forth – as scripted and predictable as the bad paperbacks that line the center aisle – began.

“So it’s 10:10 p.m. tonight,” she said. “I hope anyway. It’s drizzling in Seattle.”

“I think there’s a dome, or a semi-dome there,” I said. “Anyway, we need a good outing from Verlander. I mean, he’s the ace. He’s gotta step-up. And what’s the deal with Zumaya? When is he coming back?”

“I heard he threw well at Triple-A, but who knows,” she said.

And so it went for a few more moments, a quick, Cliffs Notes breakdown of Detroit Tigers developments and happenings over the past 24 hours.

My eyes moved from Dean’s thinning brown hair and whirling hand gestures to the table behind me, a buffet of different newspapers. I thumbed through a Kalamazoo Gazette, some story about high-speed rail. I went to the jump page for five seconds and then put the paper down. I can’t buy this product anymore, not since I had become the victim of the Gazette’s Secret Service, but that’s another story for another time.

I reached for a Free Press and noticed a black hand with thick, wrinkled fingers enter my field of vision. A watch was attached to the wrist; gold face, small diamonds in place of numbers, black, faux-alligator skin strap.

The hand picked up a Gazette and the man attached to it stood in line. He and I were the only patrons in the store, which I remember at that moment smelling musty and sweet, the kind of scent that can only ooze from a place of significant age.

The man stepped to the counter.

“Do you have “Hometown Housewives?” he asked Dean nonchalantly. Shit, he was so calm he could have been asking if they had “Yes, There Really is a Kalamazoo” coffee mugs (they do).

“Oh, let’s see,” she said, taking him back to the plexiglass-covered Display Case of Porn, or D-COP. There, between the Rolling Stones and Homemaker’s Journal, an salacious smorgasbord of pornographic materials both innocent and depraved are arranged, staring out at the browsing public. Each one has a plastic cover them, which allows potential patrons to view the title of each magazine (Club, Stuff, Stacked and Oui – doesn’t mean “yes” in French? Weird) but not the “goods” underneath.

It seemed the stars were not aligned for my line buddy this afternoon. “Housewives” was out of stock.

“Well, lemme have a “40 Something’s,” he said. “Oh, and this paper, too.”

Apparently, he likes to inform while viewing his porn. Killing two birds with one stone – or killing two stones with one hand, in this case.

I felt a bit awkward, so I brought up the Tigers again and Dean and I talked while she slipped the porno into a thin paper bag.

“What we need to do is get dem Lions back own track,” the man said.

“Really?” I thought to myself. Then I realized that his sports commentary was not meant to divert my attention from the porno purchase that had just taken place. He just really wanted the Lions to get better. The porn could wait – for at least a bit.

“Well, we’ll see ya,” he said.

The man left and I asked Dean how porno sales were lately. She mentioned that since the economy started tanking, sales of “teen” magazines were “exploding.”

“There used to be only one or two of them, you know, Barely Legal, stuff like that. But now there are like 30 of them. Hot sellers.”

I got an image of a middle aged man, laid off from his job, sitting at the dinner table with his family – wife, teenage daughter and 10-year-old son – counting down the seconds before he could get back in the bathroom and meet-up with Candi, Brooke or Riley.

I shivered for a second. But then I felt, well, I don’t know, honored that I was in the presence of an uninhibited porno purchase. For such transactions are fast becoming things of the past as the digital revolution sucks all this filth online.

I should have shook the man’s hand. Well, maybe not.

Spring has "Sprung"

I was walking down one of our downtown’s dirty streets this morning on my way to a greasy, cholesterol laden omelet when I came across a terrifying springtime scene.

Near the library, in the shade, two birds were struggling with each other, a flapping, noisy ball of bird that kicked-up clouds of dust it moved and hopped along.

In one moment, one of the birds was strangling its partner with its beak. In another moment, they danced together, their fragile little bodies bouncing up and down on pogo stick legs.

Then they rolled in the dust, and a screeching came from one of the birds as its wings flapped violently, making it look twice as large as it is. I thought for a moment that the bird was being killed. A violent death at the hands of a comrade who became enraged after his counterpart stole a twig from its nest.

But then a beam of mid-morning sunshine shot on my face and I felt a warming inside me.

Now, I’m no ornithologist, but I do know what happens in the early spring as the earth thaws out and begins to be baked by that ball of flame that we forget about for four months or so.

Birds do get boners at this time of year, it’s as simple as that. The sun does something to them, and other species as well. It thaws their libido, which had been cooped-up in an icy hold all winter long.

I was witnessing a bird scrumping.

That, actually, was kind of beautiful, the circle of life that was taking place before my eyes.
But what was this?

As the bird ball became more and more intense, another bird came hopping along, positioning itself just a few feet from the feathery fucking.

It stood there, gazing at them and hopping from side to side, sometime uttering a barely heard “chirp, chirp.”

If there are perverted voyeurs in Bird World, this guy fit “the bill” perfectly.

I got the feeling he wanted desperately to join in. A ménage “caw” if you will.

But the bird ball didn’t even notice it, so the Perverted Parakeet stood, looking a bit dejected. I bet he wished he had hands, though.

'Tis (almost) the season

Full of enigma, emotion and sentimentality of the highest order, baseball is the most beautiful game.

No other sport can match it; the history of how the game developed and grew into our nation's collective conscious. Or the memories that it elicits from a fan's childhood. Or the pastoral nature of it, and how it seems so organic, so able to be related to, to be touched.

It engages the senses, from the searing heat of an early afternoon sun on an exposed back to the smell of blue collar fare wafting from the concourse to the sound of the crack of bat against ball, the sight of 5 ounces of cork, string and white leather soaring into the late night sky and the stickiness of dried beer under your feet.

The 2009 season is almost upon us. Opening Day is an unofficial holiday in our country and for good reason. Deep down we all, I think, have an affinity for baseball, whether we know it or not.

With every new season - started in the early spring - new hopes are made, new beginnings are charted. Baseball follows the ebb and flow of our lives.

I was fortunate enough to have attended Game 4 of the 2006 American League Division Series between the Detroit Tigers and the New York Yankees. The Tigers won and eliminated the Yanks and I felt a soaring within me after the final out. I clapped so hard my hands grew blisters. I yelled so hard I swear I could have coughed blood. I kissed strangers and they kissed back.

And I cried so hard because of what this game means to me because of how it's shared, passed down from generation to generation, father to son, like some kind of precious family heirloom meant to be held close to the heart and then passed on again.

I wrote the below story when I got home. Play ball!


DETROIT – As Game 4 of the American League Division Series was about to conclude, the sun was setting over the right field grandstands, giving way to a milky moonlight that shone through the city’s skyline.


And much like the sun that set giving way to that hazy harvest moon over Detroit, the years of Tigers ineptitude and heartbreak had set. There was a feeling of re-birth in the Motor City that special Saturday night.

It’s been said that baseball is a game of moments, and Saturday’s incredible victory will surely be etched into the memories of not only those at the game, but of all those who have rooted for the Tigers for years, but never had a chance to celebrate.


It was a victory for Detroit, a city that has not had much to cheer about for decades. It was a victory for Michigan, a state that has endured so much economic woe in recent years. It was a victory for all those who believe that passion and grit still matter. It was a victory for all of us.

The Tigers beat a team with a payroll of nearly $200 million, and one that most believed was one of the most potent of all-time. The Tigers, a team with players that most outside of Michigan have never heard of, knocked-off the Bronx Bombers like they wanted it, like they stole something. Desire beat out decadence.


When the Tigers lost Game 1 of the American League Division Series in New York, 8-4, most everyone wrote them off, including nearly all of the national sports media.


The Yankees are too much, they said, their lineup a modern day Murder’s Row, capable of not only hitting the ball out of the park, but of taking away an opposing team’s will to even play the game.


Welcome to the “D.” Welcome to Michigan. Welcome to a place where we don’t lay down and whimper in the face of adversity – whether it’s a struggling economy or being down one game to none to the mighty Yankees in hallowed Yankee Stadium, where the spirits of the team’s baseball heroes of decades past loom large, picking and probing at opposing teams.


If any one moment in the game epitomized the Tigers’ perseverance and passion more, it was the post-game celebration which ensued after the final out.


Most teams who win a game like this head to the clubhouse and relish the victory with their teammates. The Tigers went in, and then came out, brandishing bottles of champagne, drenching their fans with the same stickiness that was supposed to be meant for only themselves.


But not this team. The fans deserved it. It might have been one of the most populist moves in modern sports history. The champagne spray into the stands meant that we were all in it together. All were part of the magic


Like a great symphony, the game built to a crescendo. Sure, the Tigers hit the ball around all afternoon, scoring eight runs. Starting pitcher Jeremy Bonderman was stellar, pitching 8 1/3 innings of 2-run ball.


But it took a full eight innings for the crowd to reach a point where they could believe exactly what was happening, and the sheer emotion seen after the game’s final out could have only come from fans that had been bottling it up for the past 19 years.


It was a release of explosive, unbridled emotion.


Beer was spilled and strangers hugged and kissed one another. Jovial fans streamed onto the streets surrounding Comerica Park and shook hands with Detroit cops, horns honked in a chorus of joy.


The glow of the stadium’s lights seemed a bit brighter as giddy fans, who had just witnessed a bit of history, headed out into the city to celebrate the night away.


Baseball is back, not only in Detroit, but throughout all of the Great Lakes state.

Now let’s bring on the A’s.

Butt, wait

Everyone of them has a story to tell, but seldom do we ever stop to think about what they can tell us. It might seem queer to most to ponder a cigarette butt. But for such an omnipresent component of daily life, it serves as appropriate for the more inquisitive amongst us to stare for a while at these cylindrical castaways.

They can be found on any street corner in any city of any size. They are like dead leaves, rolling in mud or dust or water, thrown off in reckless abandon from the place from which they came. The wind blows them tightly together in alleys and the corners of buildings. They huddle upside-down in heavy glass ashtrays in dive bars and dingy coffee shops, or they make their own lonely sojourn down a no named street, helped along only by the wake of air conjured up by a passing car.

Some come in speckled brown, others in bright white. Some are ringed with a thin gold strip, others in a circumference of deep red. And like leaves or snowflakes, no cigarette butt is like another.
One might by stained with a heavy magenta coating that reveals the wrinkles in the lips that had pressed against it, tossed by a woman as she drove to a first date or had a smoke outside a bar with a no smoking rule or took a smoke break outside her office.

But I’d most like to believe that these butts made their way from the lips of a woman who was waking down the street, clad in a form fitting black dress, and propped up in five inch black heels that made the concrete pop as she walked on the sidewalk in a rhythm of intimidating femininity, her hair and breasts bouncing with each measured step. She smokes as she walks, head held high. She takes a drag, and pulls the cigarette quickly from her lips. She holds the cigarette between her right hand’s middle and index finger, attached to an arm that swings as she walks, like a pendulum gone awry. After five or six drags, she flicks the butt and a thin streak of smoke extends from the lit end into the air as it arcs toward the street, like a falling bomb. She walks away and the butt sits there, slowly smoldering, longing to be abused by her again.

Another might be crushed in an ashtray, smoked until the smoker’s throat was burned by the heat from the filter’s cotton. It lies there, twisted and degraded, like a used condom worn during a night that someone wants to forget about. These butts are usually the end product of thriftiness or anxiety. But I’d like to believe that they are the result of someone who was smoking alone at the end of a bar made of dark cherry wood.

The smoke-stained vertical blinds that hang in the bar’s only window cut the early afternoon sunlight into slats. An old man sits at the bar and lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, then spews a long stream of smoke from his lungs. The smoke moves from slat to slat, invisible in the void between them, then reappears in each measured light box before it seems to give up on itself, evaporating into the bar’s stained rectangular ceiling tiles. The light boxes elongate and thin as they move into the bar’s cramped expanse, like it doesn’t want to go any further. What would the point be? Even light can’t illuminate some places.

The old man’s droopy face oozes toward the bar’s top. He doesn’t put the cigarette down in the ashtray, instead it rests gently between his fingers, just inches from his right ear. He takes drags, and twists off the ash in the ashtray before placing the cigarette back in the initial position. When every last bit of tobacco has been burned away, he crushes the butt in the ashtray. It squeaks under the weight of his pushing as he moves it in quick half circles, putting out the frustration of his life with every twist.