The Hollywood Bowles

I woke up today thinking of 6-year-old Precious Wellington Flood III. I swear that was his name; his sister’s name was Pumpkin, though I don’t know her middle name. Hopefully not Carving.
Precious went to Detroit public schools, where mom taught for 20 years as a first grade teacher. They say you always remember your first grade teacher. Mine was Miss Parker. Who was yours? Were you a smart pain in the ass then, too?
Mom has all kinds of stories of nascent brilliance. During a book reading about mammals, mom asked the class how a dolphin breathes underwater.
“Through he nostrils!” a confident kid shouted.
Precious wasn’t a shouter, but a handful. Precocious, smart, defiant, arrogant. My kinda kid.
He’d challenge mom. Her primary psychological weapon was the Yes Board and the No Board. If kids were good, they got to go to the front of the board and print their name under a big smiley face and one word: YES. Fuck, you should have have seen those kids beam to make it on the Yes Board.
Conversely, bad kids had to autograph the frowny-faced No Board. Kids bawled to scrub their names off. Genius.
Unless you got a kid like Precious, who must be an FBI profiler now, cuz kid was as sharp as a scalpel.
One day, he woke in a mood and came after mom. During a reading exercise, he stood up and headed to the door.
Mom: “Precious, what do you think you’re doing?”
Precious: “I’m going home.”
“Sit down.”
“I’m going home.”
“I said sit down.”
Precious strolls out the door.
Mom, slack-jawed, gets up, leaves the circle of kids, walks out to the hall to confirm this is actually happening.
It is. Precious is just grabbing his backpack on the way out.
Still not sure this is real, mom grabs Precious by the collar, marches him back into class, tells him to go in front of students and put his name atop the No Board, the most scurrilous of all the day’s offenders.
Precious does it. Slowly. Proudly. On the way back, he informs mom:
“I want to be on the No Board.”
Mom never told him, but admitted to us that night: “He called my bluff. He figured out the system.”
Still, there was a grudging respect between 6- and 60-year-old.Mom knew Precious was just that, if a touch(ton) difficult.

And Precious dug mom. I think all kids did. Here’s why.
Mom taught at tough-ass schools. Homes with two parents were as rare as parents with money. But there was devotion aplenty. At the end of one school year, the parents got together to make mom a patchwork quilt as a thank you. Each kid wrote a sentiment, drew a picture, which was sewn into the blanket.
“We love you Mrs. Bowles!” one read. “Thank you for teeching me how to read!” another  said, hopefully as a joke. From another boy, the precocious Noah, unabashed adoration:

“When I think,” it said beneath two rows of hearts, “I think of you.”

My god! to be that eloquent, so young. I cannot think of him without a catch in this tired throat.

To Precious, Noah, the Yes Board and love despite itself.

FFFFFUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
ever screamed a primal scream in a car, sis? given that you cracked a guy’s head with a beer bottle for trying to take your boyfriend’s bar stool to hit on you, i’m guessing so. i never asked; did the bottle break?
the key, i find, is to give it your all. you gotta really scream it. preferably to rage against the machine, jane’s addiction, any group that hates the world as you. but you really gotta let it go. i try to make my throat sore and my ears bleed. pain is what does it. you startle yourself, get a breath, rasp from the vent. it usually does the trick.
not today. i was wrapped in my world. maybe my stomach hurt. maybe i wasn’t given the freedom to bray about my every pondering in my feeble brain. who the fuck knows.
but i was down, angry, hurt. and the screams weren’t doing anything except a piss-poor job as backing vocal to alice in chains.
so i decided to treat my pity with the best concoction known to the human palate: diet coke and hostess donettes. you know, the little white powdered ones. not the chocolate ones. teddy says those taste like dookie, without the delicious after taste.
i get em at the circle k. one of my many temples to human decay. at jack n the box, they ask about my dogs. at mcdonald’s, they know to put extra ice in the diet coke.
and at the circle k, i’ve gotten to know the faces, not the names, of the cashiers there.
there’s one i find fascinating. she’s tiny, must be about 30, but looks twice that age. i hate to say it, sis, but her demeanor makes me think she has tough mental issues. coke bottle-thick glasses that she looks through askew. walks slightly askew. will engage in conversation waaaay too lengthy for a 24/7 convenience store.
and it’s a tough area. i wonder if it’s frightening to leave work.
but she’s so oddly committed to the job, it seems. once, i was waiting to pay for my donettes, and she politely asked if she could wait on the teenager standing behind me by the cheetos. i hadn’t even seen him. she said he’d been too shy to step up.
i apologized profusely to him. and when he left, told her that was an admirable thing. i can’t think of any of those 7/11 fuckbags giving a black kid a break.
anyway, i was there, filling up my diet coke. and she’s at the register, getting ripped by her boss for cash register receipts that were $1.20 over the printed total. ‘you have to call me when this happens,’ he says. ‘you know better.’
‘sorry,’ she say. ‘it was so busy i must have gotten confused.’
‘then call me.’
‘sorry. it’s 9:45. is it okay to take my break now?’
‘fine.’
‘i’ll be back at 9:55.’
‘fine.’
she walks back to the fountain drinks, where i’m putting the lid on my bucket o’ soda.
‘hello,’ she says. complete smile. complete sincerity. ‘how are you doing?’ i smile, nod, say finehowareyou in rote politeness.
she pours out the remnants of her pepsi from the cup she must keep for refills (i remember from working at theaters that businesses count cups, so you can’t have a free one). she walks to the back of the circle k, where the office must be.
and i drive home, sis, absolutely disgusted with myself.
how do i lose sight so easily? why do i go deaf so quickly? must i lose touch with the world like a psychic quadriplegic, convinced the chair into which i settle is somehow real and rickety and the least bit unfair?
i come home, where teddy and esme bound on me as if i’d circumnavigated the globe and took the Snausages with me. and i let them climb on me and lick my face and fur me the fuck up and stink me out and i feel myself ease as i think about my horrible horrible horrible day. and how that girl, sitting at the office, sipping a flat pepsi and watching as 10 minutes bullet by on a manager’s punch clock that never stops metering your life in spare change, how that girl, if she had a taste of my trouble, would call her mother and wonder how she got so lucky.
fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
i love you today, but i’ll love you more tomorrow.

it’s late, and i’m in the tub outside, lookin at stars, dogs, and trying to think out this silly story.

outside. smells like my uncle’s place in georgia, where my father was born.superman. my uncle guy, after whom i am named, told me he was superman. at night, he would call me to the bathroom window.

guy was a strapping man, a soldier who was injured in an explosion in okinawa. he lost an eye and perhaps, his edge. he was tough as nails, but never married, never talked of the war, had a facial twitch dad believed came from guilt. but you’d never know it to meet him, at least to a boy named after him (i’m guy scott). he could have kept a phone booth in the house and i would have thought nothing of it.

‘watch,’ uncle guy says, whenever i visit. ‘i will fly past the window.’

i watch. too dark. so pitch…wait…what was that?…wasthathim? no, couldnthavebeen. couldit?

guy back in a few minutes.

‘did you see me?’

‘no.’

‘i flew right past.’

‘no you didnt! i was watching. do it again!’

‘you didnt see me? that’s funny. i thought for sure you’d see me this time.’

forever like that.

he died a few years ago. or many. all that blurs untilitdoesn’tmatter.

what does matter is that i see him clear as a goddamn sunrise, cape aloft, arms forward, chest barrelled, soaring past the window with a nod and a smile and a wave for a namesake in a bathroom window.

smells like that now, here with the dogs and the music and the crickets and the water and the…

wait.

what was that?

If you were lucky enough to know Michael Tyrone Ingram, your life was better for it.

Michael was a wondrous contradiction. He wasn’t a socialite, but every relationship he forged meant something, to him and the object of his love. If you liked Mikey, you were going to like people who liked Mikey.

He wasn’t a ladies man, but he had so many who adored him. His final conscious moments were spent surrounded by the women who meant the most to him — Mikki, Jocelyn, Rachel — and who sang him good night.

He didn’t travel much, but he could tell you more about the city you just visited than you could.

He was the kind of guy who’d offer you his kidney.

Below are some memories and anecdotes about a man who touched more lives than he could ever know, and whose life, despite burning out like a Roman candle, will glow long after we’re all gone.

If you knew Michael, please feel free to join the chorus. Share a moment, a laugh, a joke. Michael lived for those.

If you didn’t know him, read on. Michael was as welcoming as a soul gets.

And we will dearly miss his.

—

Michael loved the movies. He worked for years at a theater, then at Blockbuster, and finally as a Hollywood regular at premieres and screenings. He once joked he was going to change his name to Plus One, but there was no need since he was becoming a “studio bigwig.”

Michael and I met at Lenox Mall, where we worked the box office. We were the only college kids at the theater, so the manager put us in charge of the money.

Big mistake. We weren’t going to steal anything, but we were going to goof all day, by his design.

Michael loved the cuties that came to mall, and developed a system where he would knock on the counter when a hottie was coming up to buy a ticket. We knocked so often the manager once came in and asked “who the hell is hitting our windows?” Michael convinced him it was faulty air conditioning.

The system worked fine until Michael, as his nature, got competitive. The guy would dive for tennis balls on an asphalt court, and he turned the box office into an Olympiad for flirting.

If a cute girl were coming up to buy a ticket, but she was behind a sweaty hick tub of lard, Michael would intentionally drop a bill on the floor, leaving the Orca to me while he waited on the girl. I caught on, and soon we were dropping money, coins, paper clips, anything to avoid the uglies. It must have been a sight, the line running the length of the mall outside the theater, while we were stooped over, nowhere to be found.

It should have been enough to get us fired, but we ended our days at the theater for another reason.

New management had the idea of putting high school girls in the box office, thinking guys would be more likely to buy a ticket if it came from a ditz. Michael, never one to duck the moral stand, asked for a meeting with higher management. He said he would gladly go back to selling popcorn, but asked that I stay on box office to keep the lines moving. The manager thanked Michael, and said he would look into it.

Michael was fired by the time he got home.

When I came in that night, one of the scumbag bosses said Michael had been fired, and to keep my mouth shut or the same would happen to me. I waited until the weekend rush lined up, then walked out of the box office and went home.

Michael heard about what happened, found me at the small independent theater The Tara and we worked together there for the rest of the summer. We had to clean the theater after every midnight showing of Caligula, which was the equivalent of Georgia porn.

But it remained an incredible job, because we never had to face it alone.

—

Hobos loved Michael, for some reason. Once he tried to help a homeless woman by letting her sleep on his couch in DC for a night. She would forever love him. Occasionally, she’d leave a chair on the porch for Michael. Or you’d hear her scream from the front door, after leaving a paper bag full of beets and kidney beans on the porch, “Michael, I got some food for ya!!”

Another time, a vagrant sat next to Michael on the bus, pulled out a clove of garlic and began eating it like an apple. The smell was so bad Michael got out and walked 2.5 miles home.

But my favorite came on the METRO commuter train in Atlanta.

We had just come back from a movie, were sitting next to each other laughing, when a sanely-dressed woman in the bench across the aisle began muttering. We couldn’t hear exactly what she was saying, but we began hearing the vitriol boil.

She must have thought we were gay, because she kept saying “fag,” “fucking fags,” “you’ll burn in hell.”

A black guy sitting a row in front of us heard the commotion, and told her to “leave those guys alone.” Perhaps he thought we were gay, too, but wasn’t going to have that bullying.

She got quiet for a moment, then began muttering, now worse. “Fags,” “faggots,” “worse than niggers.”

That was it. The guy stood up, walked to her, spit in her face. Stood there, daring her to say another word.

She wiped the sputum from her face, stood up, walked out at the next stop. As the doors closed, she turned, put her hands to the glass outside our bench and screamed “FUCKING FAGS” as the train pulled off.

We were quiet for a moment, not quite sure what happened. After a minute, Michael looked at me.

“Do you think she liked me?”

—

You could make an album of Michael’s phone messages.

While he wasn’t a drinker, Michael enjoyed the occasional Ambien.

And Ambien enjoyed him. Julie and I kept a voicemail for months he left once after taking the sleeping pill and chasing it with his homemade amaretto sour.

I’m still not sure why he called, because he lived on the second floor of our house and was passed out by the time we got home.

But he loved to chat when was a little stoned.

“Howdy howdy,” he said. “I was just…calling. I took some Ambien and I’m feeling kinda spacey. I’m standing…I’m dizzy. I’m standing and I’m….DIZZY! Anyhooooo, see you in the morning.”

He never once asked us to erase it. Even enjoyed listening to it. Michael didn’t fear laughing at himself, and was usually the loudest one laughing.

One afternoon, when I was in his place, Michael hit the play button on his machine and I was surprised to hear his voice on it. Michael said he occasionally left himself voicemails to remember important chores after work.

“A lot of people do it,” he said, half-defensively. “It’s not weird.”

Except, he conceded, the part where he told himself goodbye.

my only sister,
so teddy doesn’t care for fetching anything that’s not in water. i mean, it doesn’t get his fur standing at all. if he catches the ball, sometimes, when esme and i are playing, he’ll trot inside with it. seriously, esme has to go inside and take it like a bottle from a fussy baby.
and if you try to take the ball from ted, he starts away. might run. weird. just wants to chew it.
but lately, he’s been trusting me. bringing it to the edge of the jacuzzi, holding it over my hand.
not to taunt. if i leave my hand still, palm face up, he’ll put the ball there.
won’t completely release, doesn’t fully trust yet that you won’t just throw away the thing we both love so much. why toss that precious, when you know you’re going to miss it and want it and maybe fetching is just an under appreciation of what we have, he says with such earnestness.
holds the ball there, with me, for me, as if it were fucking waterford crystal.
so what he’ll do, he’ll leave it half in my hand, half in his mouth. and sis, we sit there, maybe 3 minutes (that’s long. time it sometime). maybe through a song. but we both hold the ball, and i just put my face in the side of his and just breathe him in. god that sounds so fucked up when i write it, but we do. sometimes i tear up, there in his nape, thinking these different species, who can never speak, can never know what the sky looks like through the others’ eyes. soso heartbreakingly distant.
but there, right then, holding that toy, coddling it like a baby we’re gonna baptize. man, we are on the same page: let’s just sit here and touch. let me put my face in your hands.
i get so taken by the moment, i don’t want the second hand to move, i want to fade to granite there.
and i really will think this, i swear it even if you don’t believe it true.
i will think: my fucking god, what can be truer than this? there’s nothing i could love more than this.
but you.
like, at least six times more than that.
so, whatever six times infinity is, that’s all the candlepower brightness and rubber ball bounciness i send to you, my better heart.
i love you.

xo

I’ve never imagined myself not being a newspaperman. It’s strange, the drift, since I left daily journalism.

But there’s been this odd calmness to everything. Maybe it has something to do with dad’s death. I dunno, but to have the job come end didn’t fall me like it has others who caught the blade. They’re devastated.

But I don’t have an ounce of anger in me. The New York Times quoted me in the story about the layoffs, and at the end the reporter said ‘you seem awfully composed about all this.’

And it was the first time it occurred to me; I guess I was. But it seems we invert our energy, and I can’t for the life of me get it.

We rail against the inevitable. Yet we idle life when we get to steer.

Perhaps it was the diabetes early on, but i’ve learned to accept the world as she presents herself. When the world is truly revealing herself, truly fixing her gaze on you, it can be no other way. You will look this way. Your heart will beat this way. You will have this as your health. You will have this as your ill. Here is your deepest fear, and don’t forget your undying love; I worked all night on that. You thank mom for the help, though you wish she’d talked with dad first.

Or I treat it like a poker standoff: Check your hand, pair your threes and bluff the fuck out of the table. Sorry for the thematic change; swell of anger.

But so much we do get to choose! What shall I be? What path do I take? What shall I have my ancestors think of me? Where are the goddamn keys?

We get to choose that. Teddy and Esme live the life I tell them to lead. I am their good-meaning-but-naive mom, their mob card shark.

So why do we look at so much of our life as an unstoppable tide? Is it really that? Or is it the fear we’ll look foolish punching at a wave that will probably douse us anyway? I sometimes think it’s the latter, and it becomes an excuse for inertia. Beware inertia. It’s the mirror of life, yet a fiction. anything that lives moves.

Besides, I got no problem looking like an ass. I choose to slap the shit out of those waves. Sure, you may still get wet.

But the water, once you’re in, really ain’t that bad.

“Are you Billy’s son?”

It was always the first question. I had joined the Detroit News, nemesis of my dad’s paper, the Free Press, just down Lafayette Boulevard.
Whenever I introduced myself, that was the response. I learned to answer diplomatically.

“That depends,” I’d say. “What did he do to you?”

There was no middle ground with dad, just as there was no middle ground in him.
If you were a reader or reporter, you probably loved him. I’d hear stories about how fellow journalists used dad as a reference desk, borrowing his notebooks — every page page of every notepad numbered and indexed in handwriting as legible as his Underwood. They say he’d dive into an impossibly high mountain of notebooks, only to emerge with the one you needed on what Coleman Young said outside Cobo Hall in ‘72.

There was the family of Shannon Mohr, who wrote dad yearly after he nabbed Shannon’s killer, David Davis, in a piece that left Davis in prison to this day.

If you were an editor, bureaucrat or privileged, you likely had a different impression. Dad believed he never got to the New York Times because of a confrontation with Sen. Ernest Hollings from South Carolina, who made the mistake of wavering in an interview with dad about getting out of the Vietnam War. When Hollings called a hasty press conference to deny the statement, dad showed up — with his notepad. He called Hollings a liar from the press pit. “Well I’ll be goddamned if I’ll have a reporter call me a liar at my own press conference,” Hollings snapped. “I’ll knock your block off.” Dad rushed the stage, was ushered out by security and made the wires, a story I still have.

Editors didn’t fare much better. As a boy, I once stumbled upon a letter, typed on his Underwood, to his boss for grievous editing changes. Tops on the list: using the word “alleged,” a term dad found wishy-washy. “For instance,” the letter said. “I would never say (insert editor here) is an alleged ignoramus.” It got angrier from there, with references to criminal ineptitude, souls for sale and relations with your mother that were above the grasp of a pre-teen. But I do not use the word alleged.

If you lived at home with him, you got a bit of both worlds. Once dad showed up at a little league football trophy ceremony with a cast: he’d broken his hand after punching a wall when editors refused to run a story he had cold. I was too embarrassed to realize I had the coolest dad in the room.

Dad organized the house like his notebooks. Our basement shelves run the length of the house, and dad put a letter on every one: A, B, C, etc. If you found a ball, you put in on the “B” shelf.

He also created a system of index cards and cabinet shelves, also labeled: A-2, B-5, J-12. If you needed a Phillips head screw, you’d look up Phillips screw, discover it was in cubby C-21, and there’s your screw. At the time I never appreciated it. I assumed all of dad’s screws were loose anyway.

I was convinced when my sister Caroline called once, flabbergasted, after she, mom and dad went to the Hartsfield Airport, one of his least favorite places on earth. Caroline said dad paid the parking ticket to exit the lot, but didn’t pull out before the gate lowered again. When he asked the attendant to re-raise the gate, she said that she was allowed one lift per customer, and she’d need to call a supervisor. After some choice words, dad got out of the car, snapped the gate off, stood it against the attendant station and drove off. No one bothered dad for reimbursement.

Dad never pressured me into getting into the newspaper business, though his confrontations should have dissuaded me. He would tell Caroline and me that didn’t care what we pursued, what our G.P.A. was, as long as we received solid grades for effort.

But watching him work, I saw dad utterly happy. He wouldn’t come home for 36 hours straight when he was working a big story, and he’d collapse on the couch in his boxers for two days when he was home.

But it was his calling. “I couldn’t do another thing,” he would say. “It’s the one job I can tell anyone to go to hell.”

The longer I spent in Detroit, the more I realized the cast of his shadow, the reputation he’d never mention to us. I gave up the notion of eclipsing my father, which perhaps brought me to Detroit. Following his vapor trail would be hard enough.

I went home a few years ago and found my father’s Underwood in the basement, in the “T” shelves. I wanted to make a tattoo of the home row, and pecked it out on a piece of paper. First all caps, then all lower-case. I wasn’t sure which one to put on my forearm, then remembered: dad preached understatement.

Not that he was impressed with my decision. He thought I’d look like a thug. Besides, he said, he wasn’t one for decoration. Particularly permanent ones.

But that’s ok. I burned it anyway. I’m no longer diplomatic in my answers.

“Yeah, I’m Billy’s son.”