Michigan
1991
Back up a little bit. Not all the way back. Just to when I was nine years old. Right after it happened. By that time, I was pronounced more or less physically recovered, except for that one little oddity they couldn’t quite figure out. The not talking business. After being shuffled around to a few different beds, I was finally allowed to go live with my uncle Lito. The man who had such a studly Italian lover’s name, even though he was anything but. He did have black hair, but it always looked like he was one month overdue for a trim. He had long sideburns, too. They were turning gray, and from the amount of time he spent fussing with them in the mirror, he must have thought they were his best asset. Looking back, those sideburns, the clothes he wore… hell, the whole combination would have been impossible if he had ever gotten married. Any woman in the world would have blown him right up and started from scratch.
Uncle Lito was my father’s older brother. He didn’t look anything at all like my father. Not even close. I never asked him if either or both of them had been adopted. I think the question would have made him uncomfortable. Especially now that he was the only brother left. He lived in a little town called Milford, up in Oakland County, northwest of Detroit. I’d never spent much time with him when I was little, and even when I did see him, I don’t remember him ever taking much interest in me. But after everything happened, hell, it had obviously changed him somewhat, even though he wasn’t directly involved. It was his brother, for God’s sake. His brother and his sister-in-law. And here I was, his nephew… eight years old then and officially homeless. The State of Michigan would have taken me away otherwise, put me God knows where with God knows whom. It’s hard to even imagine how my life would have worked out if that had happened. Maybe I’d be a model citizen right now. Or maybe I’d be dead. Who knows? The way it worked out, it was Uncle Lito who took me to his house in Milford, about fifty miles away from that little brick house on Victoria Street. Fifty miles away from that place where my young life should have ended. After a few months giving it a try, they let him sign the papers and he became my legal guardian.
I know he didn’t have to do it. He didn’t have to do anything for me. If you ever hear me complain about the man, don’t lose sight of that bottom line, okay? Here’s the first problem, though. If you want to start your life over, you need to move more than fifty miles away. Fifty miles is not far enough to get away from your old life, or to avoid having everyone you meet still know you as the person you were.
It’s not nearly far enough if you’ve already become famous for something you want to forget forever.
And the town of Milford itself… well, I know it’s a yuppie little “exurb” now, but back then it was still just a working-class little hick town with a Main Street that ran cockeyed under a railroad bridge. No matter how many flashing lights and big yellow signs they put up, they probably averaged two or three accidents every month. Just from the drunken idiots who couldn’t negotiate that sudden little jog in the road that took you within inches of the concrete embankments. Hell, just my uncle’s customers alone… because his liquor store was right next to the bridge. Lito’s Liquors. On the other side was a restaurant called the Flame. If you’ve ever eaten at a Denny’s, just imagine that same dining experience except with food that’s about half as good. You’d think I wouldn’t have ever eaten there more than once, like most people, but because the Flame was so close to the liquor store, and because there was this one waitress my uncle had a thing for. Anyway, it sounds like an old joke, but if there was anything that would have ever gotten me to finally speak up, it would have been the food at the Flame.
Beyond that, there was a park down Main Street with rusty old swing sets and monkey bars you’d be a fool to touch without a tetanus shot. The park sloped down to the Huron River, which was littered with old tires and shopping carts and stacks of newspapers still in their bindings. There was a bank against the river where the railroad ran over it, and that’s where the kids from the high school hung out at night, blasting their car radios, drinking beer, smoking pot, whatever.
I know, you think I’m probably exaggerating. If you saw Milford now, you’d think I was crazy, with all the upscale housing developments they’ve got there now, and Main Street with all its antiques and healthy sandwich wraps and salons. There’s a big white gazebo in the park now. They do concerts there in the summer. If you tried to smoke a joint under the railroad bridge now, the cops would be there in three seconds.
It was a different place back then, is what I’m trying to say. A lonely place, especially for a kid just turning nine years old. With no parents. Living in a strange house with a man he barely knew. Uncle Lito had this little one-story thing behind the store, this sad little house with mint green aluminum siding. He took the poker table out of the back room, and that became my bedroom. “Guess we won’t be playing poker here anymore,” he said as he showed me the room for the first time. “But you know what? I was losing money most of the time, so maybe I should thank you.”
He reached out his hand to me. It was a gesture I’d come to know well. It was like a playful slap or maybe the way you’d knock your best buddy on the shoulder. You know, a little horseplay between two guys, but more tentative, like he didn’t want to touch me too hard. Or like he was leaving open the possibility that I’d step closer and he could turn it into an awkward sideways hug.
I could tell Uncle Lito was trying hard to figure out what to do with me. “We’re just a couple of bachelors,” he said to me on more than one occasion. “Living off the fat of the land, eh? What do you say we go to the Flame and get a bite to eat.” As if the Flame’s food qualified as the fat of the land. We’d sit in the booth and Uncle Lito would run down his day to me in great detail, how many bottles of this or that he sold and what he needed to reorder. I’d sit there completely silent. Of course. Whether I was really listening to him, it didn’t seem to matter much. He just kept up his end of a one-sided conversation, pretty much every waking moment.
“Whaddya say, Mike? You think we need to do some laundry today?”
“Time to go to work, Mike. Another day, another dollar. You feel like hanging around in the back while I clean things up a bit?”
“Getting low on supplies here, Mike. I think we need a trip to the store. Whaddya say we pick up a couple of honeys while we’re out, eh? Bring ’em back here? Have a party?”
This habit of his, this jabbering on and on all the time… it’s the kind of thing I’d run into a lot, wherever I went. People who naturally like to talk, it takes them a minute to get used to me, but once they do they just turn it on and never turn it off. God forbid there be one moment of silence.
The quiet people, on the other hand… I usually make them uncomfortable as hell, because they know they can’t compete with me. I’ll out-quiet anybody, in any venue for any stakes. I’m the undisputed champion of keeping my mouth shut and just sitting there like a piece of furniture.
Okay, so I had to feel sorry for myself for a little while there. Put the pen down and lie on my bunk. Stare at the ceiling. That always helps. Try it sometime if you don’t believe me. Next time you find yourself in a cage for a few years. Anyway, back to the story. I won’t drag you through all the doctor visits I sat through. All the speech therapists, the counselors, the psychologists… Looking back on it, I must have been the ultimate wet dream for these people. To every one of them, I was the sad, silent, totally lost kid with the messy hair and the big brown eyes. The Miracle Boy who hadn’t said one word since that fateful day he cheated death. With the right treatment, the right coaching, the right amount of understanding and encouragement… that doctor or speech therapist or counselor or psychologist would find the magic key to unlock my wounded psyche, and I’d end up bawling in their arms while they stroked my hair and told me that everything was finally going to be all right.
That’s what they all wanted from me. Each and every one. Believe me, they weren’t going to get it.
Whenever we’d leave a new doctor’s office, Uncle Lito would have a new diagnosis to recite to himself on the way home. “Selective mutism.” “Psychogenic aphonia.” “Traumatically induced laryngeal paralysis.” Really, in the end, they all amounted to exactly the same thing. For whatever reason, I had simply decided to stop talking.
When people find out I grew up behind a liquor store, the first thing they ask me is how many times the place got robbed. Every time, guaranteed. The first question I get. The answer? Exactly once.
It was that first year after I moved in with him. One of the first warm nights of that summer. The parking lot was empty, aside from Uncle Lito’s ancient two-tone Grand Marquis with the big dent in the back bumper. This man, he came in and took one quick lap around the store, making sure the place was really as empty as it looked. He stopped dead when he saw me standing in the doorway to the back room.
Now technically, I wasn’t supposed to be on the premises at all. I was nine years old then, and this was a liquor store. But Uncle Lito didn’t have a lot of options, at least not in the evenings. Most of the time I’d sit in my little spot in the back room. My “office,” as Uncle Lito called it, with walls made from empty boxes stacked five feet high, and a reading lamp. I’d sit back there and read every night, mostly comic books that I’d get from a store down the street, until it was time to go home to bed.
So even though I wasn’t supposed to be there at all, let alone every night, who was going to bust us? Everybody in town knew my story. Everybody knew Uncle Lito was doing the best job he could with me, with no real help from anyone else. So people left us alone.
The man stood there for a long time, looking down at me. He had freckles and light red hair.
“You need any help back there, friend?” Uncle Lito’s voice from the front of the store.
The man didn’t say anything. He gave me a little nod of his head and walked away from me. That’s the exact moment I knew he had a gun.
You’re going to have to go with me on this one. Nine years old, and somehow I knew this. You’re thinking I’m just looking back at it a certain way, and because I was about to find out what happened next, somehow in my mind I’m filling in this detail. That in my memory I’m adding this part. But I swear to God. You can freeze time right there and I already knew exactly what was about to happen. He was going to go back up and he was going to take the gun out with his right hand and he was going to point the gun at Uncle Lito’s head and tell him to empty out the cash register. Just like in one of my comic books.
As soon as the man turned away from me, I closed the door. There was a phone in the back room. I picked up the receiver and dialed 911. It rang twice, and a woman’s voice answered. “Hello. Do you have an emergency?”
An emergency. Maybe that’s what it would take. When it was time for me to speak, when I really needed to… the words would come.
“Hello. Can you hear me? Do you need help?”
I held the phone tight in my hand. There were no words coming out. It wasn’t going to happen. I knew that. I knew that without any doubt at all, and in that same moment I knew something else. The sick feeling I had been living with… the living, breathing fear I had been feeling, every second of every day… it was all gone. Every bit of it. At least temporarily. For those next few minutes, when I did what I did next. It was the first time I didn’t feel scared about anything since that day in June.
The operator was still talking, her voice fading to a faraway squeak as I dropped the receiver and it hung swinging by its cord. Turns out that was enough to get the police there, by the way. You call 911 like that and leave the line open, they have to come check it out. But on this night, it wouldn’t be soon enough to stop the robbery.
I opened the door and walked out into the store. Down the long aisle of bottles. I could hear the man talking in a quick, high voice.
“That’s right, man. All the money. Right now, man.”
Then Uncle Lito’s voice, an octave lower. “Just take it easy, friend. Okay? Nobody has to do anything stupid here.”
“What’s that kid doing back there? Where’d he go?”
“Don’t you worry about him. He’s got nothing to do with this.”
“Why don’t you call him up here? I’m getting nervous. You don’t want that.”
“He can’t even hear me if I tried. He’s deaf and dumb, okay? Just leave him out of this.”
That’s when I turned the corner and saw them. I can still remember every detail in that scene. Uncle Lito, paper bag in one hand, bills from the open register in the other. The wall of sample bottles behind him. The coffee can on the counter, my picture taped to the rim, above it the sign asking for money to help out the Miracle Boy.
Then the man. The robber. The criminal. The way he stood there with the gun gripped tight in his right hand. A revolver shining in the fluorescent light.
He was scared. I could see that as clearly as I could see his face. This gun in his hand, it was supposed to take the fear away, to make him the master of this whole situation. But it was doing exactly the opposite. It was making him so scared he could barely think straight. This was an instant lesson for me, even at nine years old. It was something I’d remember forever.
The robber looked at me for the first two seconds, swung the gun my way in the third.
“Michael!” he said. “Get the hell out of here!”
“I thought you said he was deaf,” the robber said. He came over to me and grabbed my shirt. Then I felt the barrel of the gun pressing against the top of my head.
“What are you doing?” my uncle said. “I told you I’ll do anything you say.”
I could feel the robber’s hands shaking. Uncle Lito’s face had gone white, his own hands outstretched like he was trying to reach me. To pull me away. I didn’t know which one of them was more terrified at that point. But, like I said, I wasn’t scared myself. Not one little bit. It’s the one advantage you have maybe, being scared all the time. When it’s time to really be scared, when all of a sudden you’re finally supposed to be scared… it just doesn’t happen.
My uncle fumbled with the money, trying to stuff it all into the paper bag. “Take the money,” he said. “For God’s sake, just take it and get out of here.”
The robber pushed me away, grabbing the bag with his left hand while he kept the gun aimed with his right, swinging it back and forth between us. Me, my uncle, me again. Then he backed away, toward the door, passing right by me. I didn’t move. When he was two feet away, he took one quick look down at me.
I didn’t try to stop him. I didn’t try to take the money away from him, or try to take the gun. I didn’t stick my finger in the muzzle and smile at him. I just stood there and looked at him like he was a fish in an aquarium.
“Fucking weirdo kid.” He pushed the door open with his left elbow, nearly dropping the bag of money. He recovered and ran to his car and drove away, spinning his wheels as he hit Main Street.
Uncle Lito scrambled out from behind the register and went to the door. By the time he got there, the car was out of sight.
He turned back to me. There was so much adrenaline pumping through his body by now, he was practically vibrating.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he said. “What in goddamned hell…”
He sat down, right there on the floor, breathing hard. He stayed there until the police showed up. He kept looking at me, but he didn’t say anything else. So many questions in his mind, I’m sure, but why bother asking them when he knew he’d get no answers?
I sat down next to him, to keep him company. I felt a tentative hand on my back. We sat there and waited, sharing the silence.