The Lost Tiki Palaces of DetroitBy Michael Zadoorian |
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Reviewed by Stacy Muszynski
Quick story about Detroit:
When I first moved away from Michigan I landed in a small Texas office waiting for an interview. It was a sunny afternoon—they always are. Guy came in to drop off some paperwork, saw me waiting, took in my blue-white complexion and my black on black on black getup, said, Where you from?
I remember thinking the guy looked so wholesome to me with his baby smooth skin, his brown belt and matching shoes.
Maybe that’s why out from my mouth popped Detriot—the way my dad, bless his Polish heart, sometimes pronounces the name of his (our) city.
The guy nodded, opened a file drawer. I was in Detroit once, he said. In winter. Just long enough for friends to drive me up and down a couple streets then take me back to the airport.
Yeah? I said. The A/C was thrumming full blast in that little office, the guy’s buttons ricocheting Texas summer sun when he moved. What’d you make of it? I said. Your tour?
I was scared, he said. There was a car on fire. And some guys standing around warming their hands by it.
Well, I said. What else you do with a car on fire?
He slipped the file where it fit in the drawer, closed it till it latched.
I’m just a small town boy, he said. The people were nice.
And that’s how it goes. Everybody’s Detroit story: strangely scary and evocative, usually fiery, always funny in that ironic way. And the people are nice.
That guy’s story made me homesick for Detroit five years ago and it does now in the retelling.
I mean, sure, on the one hand the city is 138.8-square miles of eerily quiet, bombed-out and left-for-dead.
Like this.
Like this.
Like this.
Like this.
Like this.
And like this.
It is a place abandoned. Its scenes—the ones we stumble upon, like my Texas friend, did—are ghosts so filled with lost life they strike you dumb. Or push you to react emotionally, immediately, as to the profane, or sacred. Then comes the laughter.
Pain sometimes has that effect.
How might you guide a visitor to understand such Detroit moments? You might offer a “sum up” with a factually true and trite statement like, Strange things happen when the City of Champions, the fourth largest in the nation in 1950, watches its population decline from nearly two million to barely one million now even as its metropolitan area has grown to five million.
You might.
But I prefer the way Michael Zadoorian’s narrator tells us in the title story of his new short story collection, The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit:
To the rest of the world Detroit was just a place where Japanese film crews showed up every year to photograph the house fires on Halloween Eve, a.k.a., Devil’s night. Other than that, they hardly saw us. We don’t even show up on the city temperature listings on the Weather Channel.
This from a white narrator who’s taking the city bus to work, passing the detritus of a city that once was, including the shell of the once fantastic Chin Tiki restaurant, where “our parents ate […] (when they dared venture downtown), as well as the stars: Streisand, DiMaggio, Muhammed Ali.”
On that bus, too, is a black guy, a vagrant who “could be smelled but not seen.” He’s yelling, “That’s right! I’m invisible!” Everyone aboard refuses to acknowledge him, especially a mother with her two-year-old son.
The white narrator is impressed, thinking the vagrant “strange and existential—an awl to the heart. It made [him] think—he understands his condition. [It made him] think about Ralph Ellison.”
But the narrator is not so invisible to the vagrant, who demands an explanation for his presence on the bus, refusing to back down when the narrator explains he’s only going to work:
“What you on our bus for?” […] Motherfucker on our bus.”
“Shut your mouth,” says the woman with the child in front of him. She’s not sticking up for me, I know. She means that language in front of her child.
“Motherfucker.”
Slowly she turns back to him, eyes like smoldering carbon. “You want to be invisible? I’ll make you invisible.”
She says it in that way that many black women have, that way that makes most anybody shut up if they know what’s good for them. It certainly works on me, not that I invite that sort of thing. I mind my own business. It’s the only way to be when you’re the only white person on the bus, the cue ball effect, as a friend of mine calls it.
Coolly and patiently as defusing a bomb, Zadoorian ratchets up tension, examining and unpacking and exposing his characters’ and readers’ fears, expectations, and stereotypes. All those things we hold close when we’re feeling threatened and powerless.
In true Detroit style—ironic twist included—the narrator “hear[s] a startled inhalation, a collective huh! roll through the bus. [He] turn[s] to look at the invisible man and [he] see[s] that he now has dropped filthy trou and is displaying his [speckled] penis to me and everyone else on the bus.”
Eventually, with a little help from the bus driver and “[w]ith great dignity, the homeless man pulls up his pants, turns, and exits.” The smaller moments that follow display Zadoorian’s deep understanding of human experience: His narrator notes, even with the vagrant gone, “the smell of him” remains, while “[t]he woman with the child looks sternly at me. She is holding her child closely, protecting him, her lips squeezed shut.”
Zadoorian teaches us that what’s special about judgment and terror is that it’s a personal one-two punch, a tiny universe, and very real. That feeling of enclosure—of being set-upon, invisible for so long, then all too visible—guarantees that the coming through it overloads our haywire circuitry with connection, catharsis, as on our narrator’s bus:
For a moment I try not to laugh about what just happened, but I can’t help it. [The woman] puts a hand over her mouth, but soon her head is shaking and she can no longer hold it in. Everyone on the bus starts laughing. Up in the rearview mirror, I can even see the driver smiling.
For as many other moments of fear that move throughout Zadoorian’s collection—the aging junk collector reacting to anonymous death threats, a cuckolded husband finally resorting to a .38, the urban hipster who can’t wait to get his hands on his mother’s kitchy furniture when she dies, the humane society worker who euthanizes animals and cannot sleep except to have bloody dreams—there are as many inexplicable moments flush with life as a bus filled with laughing strangers.
It’s this space between tragedy and catharsis that Michael Zadoorian subtly, painstakingly excavates, so that the movements—read in the context of the Detroit they describe—might move us like this.
Like this.
Like this.
Like this.
Like this.
Like this.
Like this.
And like this.
Each of these sixteen deceptively simple stories are character studies of a city and a people left behind. They’re struggling to be visible and viable. They often can’t define why they do what they do or feel the way they feel. They admit they’re lost. Zadoorian ferrets out the strange beauty in their loneliness, where they’re stuck and obsessed, between life and death, dream and waking, memory and now. His stories and his people revel in the terror of the moment, its irony, its absurdity. Like his Humane Society worker in “To Sleep,” who can’t sleep herself but to see when she closes her eyes the “polack blue” walls her “polack” mother would call her Euthanasia Room, and, inside these walls, the countless thousands of animals she has put to sleep:
There are thousands of them, all sizes, breeds […], more Heinz 57s than you could ever believe. I never wanted to think about how many I put down—crazy street wild, beautifully groomed purebred, scabby with mange, feral, piddled on the rug and I don’t want him anymore, steel traps clamped to their legs, poisoned by a bowl of antifreeze the neighbors left out, in a home for five years then out because she didn’t go with the furniture, thrown out of car windows on the freeway, genitals stumped off with pocket knives, we just got tired of her—unwanted, unneeded, beautiful, fucked-up, blessed animals.
Throughout this collection, Zadoorian puts his characters in similar positions, readying them to wake up, to recognize themselves, their “deserted, broken place,” all their “cool stuff left to rot.” His collection will guide you through their Detroit, that lost-and-found space where decades of dreams and desire still live and the graffiti is still wet on the walls, and where the fire has already been set to allow for the scare and the laughter.
Zadoorian’s a real Detroiter that way: Nice.