Blue Collar: Chapter Four

Blue Collar: 

Chapter Four-Thomas

Thomas knows what it means to be alone. He has spent most of his life that way. Thomas just never has been able to get in step with everyone else. Even now.

When his friends were driving their parents’s cars, loaded with girls, to school, to their part-time jobs, to parties and back home again, Thomas was trying to figure out how to make a left-hand turn.

He would drive for miles trying to figure out how to get home with a series of right-hand turns rather than just make one left-hand turn.

Keeping a car between the ditches in the country was out of the question. Thomas kept his hands at 10-and-2, shaking, half-burnt down cigarette in his mouth, beat up Detroit Tigers hat on his head paying attention to everything that was going on around him. Unfortunately that meant he didn’t have a lot of time to figure out what was going on in front of him.

Fenders and bumpers often paid the price.

Years later Thomas admitted he had been afraid to wear glasses. Thought they made him look weak.

Maybe that’s what set Thomas back. But it could also have been all the pot he smoked.

“Doctors are saying that there is a part of the brain that doesn’t develop until you are like 19 or something and that’s the part of the brain that gives you judgement,” Jim tells Carolyn one afternoon.

“When that part of your brain doesn’t develop you are trapped with the brain of a 16-year old, and pot shuts down that development.”

“You read that where? On the Internet?”

“Don’t be so anti-technology. It’s true.”

Thomas doesn’t think about that much. He can’t afford the Internet. But he does has a lot of time to think every night watching Dancing with the Stars or whatever prime-time show his mom wants to see. Thomas has been a homebody since Stevenson Tool & Die closed three years ago. No work anywhere for someone with Thomas’ skills, which are limited to showing up for work on time every day, day in and day out, for fourteen years.

“That’s gotta count for something,” Thomas tells Jim on the day that it all ends. 

“I was there every day, sick as a dog, hangover from hell. It didn’t matter. I always showed up.”

“And you always gave at least 50 percent,” Jim reminds him.

“Yeah,”Thomas laughs with that peculiar snort that has been part of his persona since high school. He still has a Detroit Tigers hat too, just not the same hair under it.

Thomas, as always he has a burning cigarette in his hand, ready to find his mouth, as soon as he delivers his punchline.

“It’s on my resume.”

“Do you even have a resume?” Jim asks as they grab a couple of quick coffees at the McDonalds they’ve been going to since high school.

It’s on Twelve Mile, one of the arteries that has taken auto and defense factory workers and the engineers that plan their day back and forth from home to work to overtime, double-time and triple-time.

There aren’t as many cars flying by as there used to be. Jim looks out of the window, leaning back to get out of the way of Thomas’s cigarette smoke.

When did it all go wrong? 

“We were like those lobsters at Charlie V’s restaurant. Sitting in a pot of water, Charlie turning up the heat slowly. The poor things didn’t know they were cooked until they were cooked,” Jim says. “Just like us. We didn’t know it was over until it was over.”

“Too bad about Charley,” Thomas says and Jim grimaces, knowing what is coming next.

“One day he’s selling seafood. The next day his boat sinks in the FLOR-ida KEYs,” Thomas says stressing the same syllables every time he tells the joke.

Now his cigarette rim shot is ready for the punchline. Jim, too. And they say it together.

“One day Charlie V’s selling seafood, the next day he is seafood.” 

Thomas breaks up with a deep, cough and laugh sending smoke to the ceiling that drifts away, out the window just like the dreams he had in high school.

Thomas never saw himself sitting in a MacDonald’s talking to Jim about where it all went bad, how it all got away. Thomas never saw more than a day or two into the future. Okay. A day was the limit. But even if Thomas could imagine, he never would have imagined this. 

No one ever imagined this.

“So what are you going to do now?” Jim asks the question that nobody in Warren wants to hear. “What’s next?”

Thomas stares at the table top tracing a stain left by a pickle that must have fried in the sun. 

“I really don’t know. Everything has passed me by. Even before we shutdown I couldn’t keep up,” Thomas says looking up his wet, blue eyes locking onto Jim and Jim flinches a bit. This is  unusual. Thomas hardly ever looks anyone right in the eye.

“Those f-ing kids that ran their daddy’s shop just pushed me to the back. I worked the oldest machines, never got a chance at the new CNC equipment,” Thomas says. “So it’s all a mystery to me.”

Some teenagers walk into MacDonald’s laughing, joking, punching each other, playing to the girls, just like Thomas and Jim has done four decades before.

“Life’s a fucking mystery to me,” Thomas says taking another hit on his smoke. Jim notices that Thomas’s been rolling his own lately.

 “I wish I could do something to help him,” Jim tells Carolyn. He’s looking at the floor, still sitting in the Lazy Boy that he calls home most evenings. Coffee cup on the small wooden table on his right-hand side. Twenty-five years ago there would have been a cigarette slowly burning in his ashtray on the left. 

No more. 

Jim never really gave it up. 

Habit. 

Addiction.

Smoking. 

Coffin nails. 

Nobody quits for good. 

“You just quit again every day,” is how Jim explains it to Thomas and Michael one afternoon at Regal Lanes, where they learned to bowl, walking in from the parking lot where some learned to ball.

“One day you realize your car will go into reverse without a cigarette in your mouth. You also realize you are never going to lose the urge, no matter how self-righteous you get about it,” Jim concludes with a sigh that just isn’t the same without nicotine.

 Jim never really quit. Now he smokes in his mind and wishes there was a cigarette in his hand, just like Warren. It never really changed. It just wishes the tool-and-die shops would start up again and black smoke would fill the sky.

 Jim picks up a pen that was laying on the table to his left, holds it between his fingers, gives the end a flick with his thumb like he used to do with his Marlboro (box only, pack tastes different), looks at Carolyn and says, “I’m as lost as he is.”

 “Now wait a minute,” she says with that look on her face, that look that could quiet a roomful of eight-year old heathens at Sunday school if she believed in church, which Carolyn most certainly does not.

“You are not lost. You almost lost the business, but you saved it,” Carolyn says knowing that story too well.

Like many tool-and-die guys, Jim was an artist. But he was no businessman. He might have understood the math of industry, but he didn’t get he math of accounting. Even though Jim loved everything about the shop, he never bothered to do the dollars and cents to find out how much it cost to create his art.

 Carolyn helped him with that. She did more than help. She did it. Carolyn knew enough about math to explain it to high school kids. Explaining it to Jim was a different story. 

“I realize that it was time to stop teaching and start doing.” Carolyn told her best friend Sally about five years ago, right when Michigan had its foot on the lever that would open the lid on the shit can its economy was doomed to fall into.

 Carolyn worked in the shop alongside Jim. He did the industry. She did the math. Together they saved the business. Together. That’s the way it had been since community college. As far as she is concerned, that is the way it always will be.

 However, it was time to teach Jim another hard fact of life.

 “Honey, I promised to live you in good times and bad, for better or worse, in sickness and in health,” Carolyn said as she takes his face in her hands. “But, not for lunch.”

“I never promised to have lunch with you every day.”

 “It is time to stop worrying about Thomas and go to work.”

(c) 2014 Lyons Circle Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved

Blue Collar is a serialized novel.  To read Chapter Five, click here.

Sometimes Things Break is the first novella in the St. Isidore Collection series. It tells the story of one young lover and one middle-aged lover, one with love in his heart, one with murder in her soul. 

Bree wants her parents dead. Tim wants Bree. You can see where this is going, right?

Sometimes Things Break is available wherever books are sold including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and your favorite indie book store.

For more books, articles, and essays by Rod Kackley click here or download the free Rod Kackley app through Google Play or the App Store.

Blue Collar: Chapter Three-Jim By Rod Kackley

Blue Collar

Chapter 3: Jim

Looking out the picture window of the house he grew up in, Jim sees the old neighborhood is as broken up as he is. It should come as no surprise. Jim and his neighborhood are the same age, just about fifty-eight years old.

The streets are cracked and crumbling. Jim along with his family, friends and neighbors, have become accustomed to bouncing their cars, trucks, and SUVs through potholes that could swallow a child. Water pipes freeze and break in the winter before the snow melts and the roads flood. A cold snap hits and it all freezes before another hot, dry summer bakes out the relief of spring.

It all used to seem so good. The lawns were greener. The houses were fresher. The people were nicer.

So it seemed.

Then again, Jim used to be able to get a hard-on whenever he wanted. Didn’t even have to think about it much. Just a wink, a nod, and his one-eyed, blind horse was ready to go

Fifty-eight years is such an awfully long time.

“Hi honey," Carolyn says, Jim's wife of all these years.

“What’s with the blanket over your lap? Feeling old today?”

"It's cold in here."

"You weren't falling asleep?"

"No, just thinking, remembering."

"Your dad?"

"Yeah."

 Jim’s dad, was the first one in the family to graduate from high school, then college after World War Two. The G.I Bill was there, why not use it? Nobody else in the family thought that way. 

“Everyone thought I should just get a job in the GM plants,” Jim remembers his father saying in the last few months of his life. Old people, Jim found out, love to tell stories toward the end. It’s like they are putting all of their books in alphabetical order on the shelf before they lay down to sleep. Forever.

“Your grandmother had been in the plants for years, ever since we moved up from Missouri. If you had our last name you had a job with Generous Motors we called it. Simple as that.”

“Why not you too?”

“I got out of there. Went to World War Two. Needed some peace and quiet,” he laughed as if he hadn’t told that joke at least five times in the past month.

His dad was on the porch, waving goodbye as Jim backed out of his driveway. It was the last time they saw each other, alive.

They always did a Michigan goodbye. Say, “So long” in the house. Go out to the porch together, say, “goodbye.” Get in the car, back out of the driveway and honk the horn.

Felt good to say goodbye like that. Pissed off the neighbor across the street too. His dad and Jim both enjoyed that.

Jim was glad they did it the last time.

A few months later, Jim was back, picking up a paper bag filled with his dad’s ashes from the crematorium. 

Heavier than I though he would be.

***

Jim sighs and gets another cup of coffee as the winter wind blows down the street where he grew up. The kids told him moving back into the house that went up the same year he was born, 1955, was really nothing but moving into a museum of his childhood. It was more than that to Jim. It was the place where he felt safe. It was home.

He’d been in Grand Rapids for more than a quarter century. It never felt like home. He had a house, but not a home. This, Warren, the Green Acres subdivision, this was home.

The auto industry was everything back when the house was built and Jim was created. If your dad didn’t work for Ford, GM, or Chrysler, the father across the street did. If it wasn’t the Big Three — they might as well have been the Only Three — that put food on the table and at least one car in the garage, it was one of the companies that made the pieces and parts that went into those cars and trucks.

It was a three-shift-a-day life in Warren. The cars and trucks, the horns, the exhaust rising into the blue sky of day, the search lights cutting through the dark sky of night to attract shoppers to the newest shopping center to open, never stopped. The traffic was always moving on Mound Road and Van Dyke, the two north-south arteries that took the fathers to work in the plants of Warren and Detroit, and then back home again.

Flash forward to the twenty-first century through 57 years of life. Traffic still moves. When the GM Tech Center’s first shift is on the move the Mound Road rumbles. 

Nothing is the same, yet nothing has changed. Not really. It is a different generation behind the wheels of those cars. They still want to raise families. They are still working for retirement and while they do that they were damn proud of what they were making.

Still, something is different.

Their confidence is gone.

The dreams are not there.

They can’t imagine their sons and daughters will have it better.

***

Back in the day, everyone had that confidence. Nobody ever imagined the good times could end. 

“Well, we did worry about The Big One,” Jim tells Carolyn, at the small breakfast nook in their Green Acres house. “Remember the nuclear attack drills we did? Hiding under our desks one week, out in the hallway sitting down, covering our heads the next.”

“Don’t forget when Russia moved those missiles into Cuba,” Carolyn says. “It stopped being a game then.”

He and Carolyn might have only been seven-years old then, but both were at the top of their class when it came to eavesdropping on the parents.

“It’s only Baby Boomers like us who remember going to the place where they designed bomb shelters to find out if we could get one in our backyard,” Jim chuckles.

“But that was just part of life.”

 “Nobody really worried about it,” Jim says. “We just lived our lives.”

Kids were everywhere in the neighborhoods. Moms, too. They were always at home. They were watching, always looking out the kitchen window or maybe the front picture window of their 800-to-900-square-foot houses that all went up the same time, the same way. Cookie-cutter houses that all looked the same on the outside, but on the inside, they were all different homes.

After breakfast and a a morning cartoon, it was out the door and into the world. Sometimes Jim would take a lunch, sometimes not. He might come home for lunch, maybe not. Mom wasn’t worried. If she wasn’t watching, someone else’s mother would be. This village called Green Acres was raising its children.

Jim and his elementary school friends would all be on bikes, Schwinn Sting Rays or Huffy bikes, pedaling as fast as they could, owning the streets riding, two or three abreast. Nobody wore a bicycle helmet back then Jim remembers. “You know why?” he tells Carolyn.

“Why honey?” she says with the tired patience of someone who knows the solution to this riddle only too well, but loves the person telling it so much that she doesn’t want to let on.

“Because they didn’t exist,” Jim laughs. “Who needed them? Not us. We had Detroit Tigers baseball caps to keep us safe.”

Well, it is true that David Trent went over the handlebars a couple of times and landed face first on the pavement, which is why everyone called him “Sidewalk Kisser,” but other than that there were no serious injuries.

So, with Tigers hats on their heads and baseball gloves on the handlebars — because you could never tell when a game would break out — off they went on another adventure.

There were not that many adventures to be had in the cozy confines of the Green Acres subdivision — and nobody but the people who built those houses could tell you why it was called Green Acres. But that is what everyone called it.

The kids all went to Green Acres Elementary School, which was parked safely inside the neighborhood, walking and or bike riding distance for everyone, and the Green Acres Shopping Center, only a walk or a bike ride away.

Still there were adventures to be had even if you had to invent them, which is what Jim and the gang were really good at doing. If nothing else, you could always stop and play a baseball game.

Kids could just ride as fast and as far as they wanted. Even if they got hungry, nobody went home until they heard the moms start calling everyone home for dinner. Then it would be time to go back. Just like when the street lights started coming back on after dinner. Time to call it a night.

“You know who brought that life to you?” Jim says to Jeremy a guy sitting beside him at the Club Chevelle. “It was brought to you by the Big Three. Wait. This is better. It was brought to you by the people who worked for the Big Three.The blue collars. And they were the ones who spent the money they made on the line for two cars every three or four years, a cottage up north, a summer vacation for their families and college for their kids. The people who spend the money, those people are the job creators, not the people who own the factories.”

“And nobody knows who owns them anymore right? It’s not like you’re going to stand behind them in line at Kroger’s.”

“You know what, else?” Jim says to Jeremy for the God knows how many times, “Some of our Dads who were in the Marines and Navy had tattoos, but not a single woman had one.”

Neither Jim nor Jeremy had done as much verification of that as was humanly possible and took the rest on faith.

There were many things nobody checked back in those days, Jim admitted to himself. It wasn’t until the neighbors started dropping dead that the kids-now-adults started finding out what was really going on in those one-story, brick and wood homes,where everyone had a doughboy swimming pool in the backyard.

“We all ate big, charbroiled steaks at least once a week,” he says. “And our dad’s were dropping like flies in the 1980s.”

“Old man Flynn did get drunk and shot up his car with a rifle,” Carolyn says. “And the Timmerman kids set a record for vandalism  inside a school building.”

“So it wasn’t perfect,” Jim said.

***

The veil was lifted high when Lillian Williams ran down the street one night  in the early 1990s wearing nothing but an old cloth nightgown screaming,”He’s going to kill us all!”

Her husband, Dan, the nicest guy in the neighborhood, had been beating her and their sons every night for the past three decades.

This was the night Jim and the rest of the neighborhood figured out why the boys never took their shirts off at the swimming pool. 

Too many bruises.

Green Acres and Warren never looked the same to Jim after that day. The veil had been lifted.

There were too many bruises.

(c) 2014 Lyons Circle Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved

~ RK ~

Blue Collar is a serialized novel available on this blog, on Wattpad,and  in the Reading Room of the Rod Kackley app, on Google Play and the App Store.

To go to Chapter 4 on this blog, click here

Sometimes Things Break is the first novella in the St. Isidore Collection series. It tells the story of one young lover and one middle-aged lover, one with love in his heart, one with murder in her soul. 

Bree wants her parents dead. Tim wants Bree. You can see where this is going, right?

Sometimes Things Break is available wherever books are sold including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and your favorite indie book store.

For more books, articles, and essays by Rod Kackley click here or download the free Rod Kackley app through Google Play or the App Store.