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.