When Frogs Grow Feet
By
G. Louis Jackson
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
G. Louis Jackson on Smashwords
When Frogs Grow Feet
Copyright©2007 by G. Louis Jackson
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrievable system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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Acknowledgements go out to family and friends, for all of you have been invaluable in your own unique way.
In the year 2015 there’s this saying, “when frogs grow feet.” The meaning behind it is similar to “a snowball’s chance in hell” and to that of, “when hell freezes over.” In jail and with nothing better to do, Malcolm George was leaning toward naming his first novel, “when frogs grow feet,” but so far hadn’t made a firm commitment to any title.
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WHEN FROGS GROW FEET
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Prologue
This work is dedicated to the two young women whom I care deeply for, and love. It is also dedicated to the likes of Empress Achiva, the famous talk show hostess, to Tess McMillan, the renowned novelist, and to the rest of those women owing their notoriety and fame to the bashing of men and anything that is male. Not knowing for sure whether it is a fitting thing to do or not, yet I’m hopeful that it is in fact suitable on the one hand to offer up the contents of a book to women the likes of which The Empress and Tess McMillan represent and on the other, to love ones.
Recognizing within these pages that there are some harsh words, I pray that Kim and Burgundi, and other young women like them, will understand how sometimes one must say what’s on his mind. But if those of you whom I do not wish to offend find it difficult or impossible to understand why I found it necessary to write this story, then I do beg for your forgiveness.
Since most of you who might read this account of our times do not know me, perhaps it would be helpful to provide some background information on myself that might offer up some insight into why the story was written in the first place? Well, my real name and where I live and work or where I went to college, I believe, are not of significance whereby such information would provide any deeper understanding of this work which cannot be obtained in some other way.
You see, I’m just the messenger. The name I’m using, Malcolm George, is fictitious. I don’t mind telling you honestly, though, that I just had a birthday; my forty-third, and I’m twice divorced, is true, and I have a twenty-one year old daughter. My fictitious job is with the State of Michigan as a probation officer. At the moment I’m in jail, locked up for refusing to reveal to the court the whereabouts of Burgundi Jones.
“Burgundi” is not her real name. That is if you think of real as being the name given at birth. The name given to her at birth was “Keisha,” “Keisha Jones” to be exact. She gave herself the name “Burgundi.”
“Burgundi,” as she likes to be called, is an unaborted baby on Malcolm George’s caseload. Burgundi has a birthday coming up; her seventeenth. Until then she is subject to the whims of the state’s Child Welfare System, its Department of Juvenile Justice and that of the Family Division of the Thirteenth Circuit Court of Wayne County.
All of which will change after her birthday.
At seventeen, Burgundi will be able to make up her own mind about where she wants to live. Until then she’s being hidden. For my part I was found in contempt of court and thrown in jail for refusing to give the court information on her whereabouts. The judge, John Michael Lance, ordered that I not be allowed the privilege of having visitors. He wrote in his order: “No member of the Organization calling itself, The Brotherhood of Steele Pandas, or any similar group having professed sympathetic views as that Organization will be allowed to enter the county jail on the basis of fraternizing with the inmate, Malcolm Lawrence George, and thereby have an opportunity to encourage his continued disobedience of this Court’s order to deliver the Subject, one, Keisha a.k.a. Burgundi Jones, into the custody of this Court.”
The judge was persuaded to modify his order after an appeal by my attorney on the basis of my not being allowed any visitors as “cruel and unusual.”
Now I’m able to have up to three visitors per week, but no one from the Brotherhood. Kim, my daughter, is the only family member who visits. Then there is Vanessa, the woman in my life. There’s also Ace McLeod, a very close friend. I‘d say Ace is my “best friend” but Brenda Easley another “best friend” would have something to say which would probably burn the hell out of my ears, if she ever heard I’d said that.
Ace resigned his membership in the Brotherhood so his name could be placed on the visitor’s list.
I’m writing to pass the time. I’m writing after several days of boredom and moments of despair which seems to grow deeper each day. I believe this to be the best chance I’ll ever have at writing this novel I’ve been talking about for the past two years. How many people do we know who say they’re gonna write a book but never do? Well, for the next ninety days, with nothing better to do, and time on my hands, rather than let the lack of freedom gnaw at me and make what I stood up for more painful than it otherwise has to be, I’ve decided to busy myself by writing this damned book. It’s a job I’d never complete if I were able to come and go as I pleased.
Because Kim (of course not her real name) and I don’t see eye-to-eye, the book does not have a firm title. It is however about the times we live in and a guy who, like me, is not uncommon in his basic instincts and approach to life in the 21st century.
Part One
Chapter 1
As a state probation officer assigned to the Department of Juvenile Justice for the State of Michigan, Malcolm George first met Keisha Jones at the Washtenaw County Juvenile Court, in the courtroom of Judge Concepcion Rivera. There to transport her back to the Wayne County Juvenile Detention Facility, in Detroit, Keisha persuaded Malcolm George to let her go unescorted to the bathroom.
They were on the third floor of the court building, and while his attention had been on guiding her through the crowded corridor, she was busy adjusting the handcuffs so as to increase the pressure on her wrists, causing redness and the effect of bruising. Her skin was quite sensitive. Halfway to the bank of elevators her expression changed from defiance to a pouty look of discomfort. The skin under her eyes appeared puffier than it had been the last time he’d looked. She had tears in the wells of her eyes. Limply holding out her wrists, she invited Malcolm George a closer look at the problem.
She asked, “Can I go to the bathroom without these?”
Seemingly unmoved by her discomfort, Malcolm nevertheless took a closer look at the redness. He then looked her in the eye; she looked back. Stoned-faced for a moment, Malcolm George figured that a little trust on his part might in return mean more cooperation from her during the ride back to Detroit.
His detainee had other ideas.
Many times told to “Smile or people won’t like you,” Keisha had learned to fake more than a smile, and not necessarily so couples looking to adopt would notice her. For her own reasons she’d learned to accept the advice of adoption workers whom were only doing their jobs, when they said, “Smile Keisha.”
So she did.
She learned how to smile and do whatever it took to gain the upper hand in a situation in which she felt threaten or merely just didn’t like.
Authority was a thorn in her side.
Standing about as tall as Malcolm George, though weighing no more than one of those supermodels seen on giant billboards along the side of expressways and on website posters, there was little thought on Malcolm George’s part of Keisha Jones escaping through the narrow bathroom window fortified with a tough, heavy-duty wire meshed screen.
Besides, they were on the third floor.
Yet it took all of a minute and a half for Keisha to pry open the screen; another few seconds it took to twist her angular shoulders so she could slide through, out onto the window’s ledge, and a few more seconds to shimmy down the drainpipe and leave Malcolm George in a lurch. He was none the wiser as she strolled across the lawn, slip through the bars of the black wrought iron fence and disappear into the pea soup of fog that had taken hold of Southeastern Michigan on Wednesday.
Warm for a day in February, Malcolm had allowed his mind to wander for a moment in thoughts of the unusual weather pattern for this time of year.
Close to five minutes went by before he asked a tall female sheriff deputy, escorting a male youth in handcuffs from another courtroom, if she would check the women’s bathroom. Wasting no time at all the deputy handed over her charge to Malcolm, whose identification and status as a fellow officer was plainly in sight, before storming through the bathroom door with the force of a police search.
The deputy of course came back empty handed. Slack-jawed, her arms were slightly extended outward, her palms turned upward as she approached Malcolm George with the news. “She’s gone,” reported the female sheriff deputy, “out the window!”
Malcolm’s dark-skinned complexion saved him from the red-faced embarrassment a lighter skinned Brother or White counterpart would undoubtedly have suffered upon returning to the office at 1801 Canfield Avenue to report the incident. It was the policy of the department to record in detail what had transpired in what would be called an “unusual incident report.” The report was a document that would be thoroughly read by his boss and his boss’ boss.
But rather than drive back to the office in Detroit, Malcolm called in the escape and went home to Oak Park. He would write his report from there and then email it to his supervisor.
Home by 3:05 in the afternoon, Malcolm George had shed his dark tie and white shirt a few minutes later. Ready to settle in for the rest of the day, he was discouraged by his own gullibility. He felt like he’d gotten played by a fifteen-year-old girl.
His job not being in any kind of jeopardy offered up little comfort. It was just that the reason he’d lost a detainee rekindled some bad old feelings, feelings that actually had nothing to do with his job. Like his two ex-wives, Keisha Jones had spotted a weakness in him and then took full advantage. His professional pride hurt most of all. In nine years as a Wayne County probation officer with the 13th Circuit Court, and five as a state PO, he’d never lost a detainee placed in his custody.
By four-thirty the fog had finally begun to lift from its three-day hold on Southeast Michigan, and rather than wallow in self pity, Malcolm decided he’d give Keisha time to hitchhike back into Detroit. Then he’d go looking for her in all those places mentioned in the social report on her. Staying home, he conceded, would not rid him of feeling like a fool as oppose to someone trained to keep track of the states population of unaborted babies.
Chapter 2
At fifteen, Keisha of course, was hardly a baby.
“Unaborted babies” happens to be what they’re called or “UABs” for short. As a society of the twenty first century, America had little desire to deal with these kids who were fast becoming another ugly pimple on its public face. It was a blemish America would prefer to ignore but difficult to do when the youth detention centers all over the country were overflowing with UABs, or so it seemed.
Like most of her kind who’d been adjudicated as a delinquent, Keisha had committed a string of petty thefts and, as a constant runaway, she seemed naturally incorrigible. With a history of going AWOLP (Absent without Leave from Placement) and a knack for committing petty larceny, Keisha was just the latest hardcore case assigned to Malcolm George.
No one knew what to do with these kids.
The unaborted was the most recent delinquent problem from which the country was reeling. And since the first ones had reached their mid-teens, there was already an anxiety spreading through the criminal justice system over what it would mean when they reach the age of majority. A quarter-million strong, and growing, it was for certain they would impact the social order of things, if for no other reason than because of who they were and the struggle that had preceded them into existence.
Distinguishable from most other Americans made their everyday problems a visible struggle.
Of our own making, the UAB seemed similarly disposed as had been African-Americans when they were freed from slavery in that there was no consensus on what would be their place in American society, either. The decisions which brought into existence the unaborted were not yet settled in spite of the fact fifteen years had passed since Bill 333 had been enacted into law—a law that abruptly ended legal abortion and created a new breed of Americans, the status of which was still up for debate as well as what to do about the incorrigible ones, and those remaining on the public dole, and that happened to be most of them.
For his part, Malcolm George did not concern himself with what should be done about the UAB. As a state probation officer, his job duties were clearly defined. Malcolm George tried leaving the important questions surrounding the UAB to the men and women shaping policy with the unaborted in mind. He had tried giving the country’s leaders and their experts the benefit of doubt in knowing what they were doing when it came to the unaborted. But one thing he’d learned early on about the UAB, which was not what most experts were saying about them, and that was they did not seem to hold an allegiance to any racial group regardless of their ethnic appearance.
Whereas Keisha looked the part of an African-American, having a caramel skin color and tightly curled, kinky hair, David, one of her running buddies, typified a Jewish youth, who appeared to be perhaps a year or two beyond his bar mitzvah, while in the slope of Saigon’s oriental eyes were the folds of the Vietnamese or some similar group in close ties.
Saigon was the smallest and youngest of the threesome.
Malcolm came to know David and Saigon as companion cases when Keisha was placed under his supervision. The three were so closely linked “assumptive supervision” over David and Saigon had been unavoidable.
Like most of the previous UABs he’d supervised, Malcolm understood why the three saw themselves as different, even though in their heart of hearts, they wanted to be just like any other kid. They wanted what every child wants and deserves, which was a home and a family. The emotional dilemma the unaborted seemed to be constantly wrestling with lent credence to Malcolm’s “false” guilt related to Kim, his own daughter, who’d almost been a victim of abortion. Only after considerable anguish had Malcolm and Sheila decided to let their daughter come into this world, with its uncertainties and troubles—the very same troubles and uncertainties the UAB faced while knowing from early on their origin-mothers had rejected them.
As if growing up was not hard enough, the unaborted carried excess baggage throughout childhood. It was a predicament far from enviable. Malcolm’s “false” guilt aside, Kim grew up without the excess baggage of feeling rejected. She was spared the alienation Malcolm imagined that ran through the veins of every UAB, like a disease of the blood from which there was no escape.
In the day-to-day business of supervising the wards on his caseload, Malcolm’s sympathy ran deep but not so deeply whereby it got in the way of doing his job. His belief that the experts did not have a clue when it came to predicting how the UAB would turn out ran almost as deeply as his compassion for these children birthed through a womb of man’s creation.
Believing the UAB would “eventually melt into the backgrounds of their adoptive families” was not an event Malcolm held out much hope for either. The well-rehearsed theories of sociologists, child psychologists and other theorists on childhood development that were given exposure in the national news media and over the Internet news services seemed to overlook much that was different about the unaborted.
Not that Malcolm George held out any less hope for the UAB becoming productive members of society. He was not a gloomy Gus. At least not when it came to the unaborted, for on a daily basis he saw the resiliency in this newest ethnic group to America, and to the world.
Like so many other forms of new technology coming onto the world’s stage, America had been first to bring to realization the unaborted. On behalf of the unaborted, Malcolm George would be host to a bad taste in his mouth whenever he heard mention of them in the same breath as “new technologies” of the twenty-first century. He would privately argue against the experts’ assumptions when it came to whether the UAB would assimilate into an existing ethnic group or melt into the backgrounds of their adoptive families.
Taking into account what he’d learned by being so closely involved with the unaborted, he’d come to believe that their unique reasons for being on this earth would keep them apart, as would their physical differences.
Malcolm George’s private thoughts were based on commonsense, and he’d begun to think that if the unaborted were true to themselves…
…They’ll follow a direction which sets them apart like, like bi-racial people and…every other group in this country that saw themselves as different long before the rest of us could accept the obvious…
In a position to see what the UAB faced in their everyday lives, Malcolm George saw how their experiences were like no other group in America. How they related to the endless cadre of professionals and paraprofessionals out to make them over into the image of everyone else did not suggest to him they were like everyone else or that what the system had in mind for them, would work, at least not in the way intended.
Chapter 3
Before leaving home, Malcolm read Keisha’s case file from beginning to end. He made a note of the places where she had been known to hide out. Calls were made to the agencies responsible for Saigon and David. He found out from the Michigan Human Services foster care office that Saigon was accounted for, and when he called Star Cresta, the Community Management Organization (CMO) responsible for David, he was told what he’d hoped to hear from them: David, who happened to be in the final phase of the adoption process, was on grounds.
“David’s been in my office,” reported Michelle Scott, director of the CMO, “it seems, several times in the last hour. He’s too excited over his adoption to spoil his changes. I doubt we have David to worry about any longer. We hope you find Keisha.”
Malcolm hung up thinking Keisha was likely on her on. The girl had done it before—gone AWOLP without her buddies. Every time she’d taken off had been recorded, and it had not always been in the company of her two cohorts. The girl had proven she could take care of herself. There was little doubt she knew how to survive on the streets alone, it was just that like any caring adult, Malcolm’s concern lay in the fact that she was still a child and he would not rest until word came letting him know she'd been found and was safely back in the hands of authority.
In the state own Chevy Cavalier he headed for old Tiger Stadium. The dense fog, which had been around for the last seventy-two hours, had pulled back from the earth, but like a gaseous mass hovering at the level of low-lying clouds, it kept the sun from shining through.
Occasionally casting an eye skyward for signs of the fog’s return, Malcolm drove south to Detroit on the Lodge Expressway; his mind otherwise on the UAB. In particular he thought about Keisha and her two cohorts, David and Saigon, whom although were on their way into individual families—such a thing was rare. Rare because UABs with delinquent records hardly ever got adopted or permanently placed into single-family homes.
…If they just went along with the program…behave themselves…if they did…they’d eventually get what they want in return…a home…family, thought Malcolm.
Sometimes bothered by the lack of success in finding a home for a deserving UAB, Malcolm halfway blamed them for failing to get what they deserved. It was this kind of thinking he harbored as he sped past the new Wonder Bread Bakery; he intended to come up on the Tromble Avenue ramp, the first exit south of the bakery.
Entering the Tromble Avenue exit ramp, he had Keisha Jones in mind as he further blamed the UAB for the lack of success in finding them permanent homes…
This girl…is full of drama…running away is her pet drama. Maybe if she stopped running away… acting-out…
A moment after parking the car in front of the old ballpark, Malcolm paused while calibrating the lock disruptor to gain access through Gate 16. And, as he did so, blaming the UAB stayed on his mind…
…If they just follow the program…is that too much to ask?
Making his way inside Tiger Stadium, he had more thoughts of blaming the kids, themselves, for there not being enough suitable homes available to take them in.
But the question, “Is that too much to ask?” was one he’d known the answer to long before becoming a PO. The answer was no big mystery, not complicated at all. He’d figured it out way back when he was Keisha’s age.
“Hell, Yes! It’s too much to ask! Shit!”
He’d known at Keisha’s age he wouldn’t “just follow the program.” Most young people his age, back then, wasn’t about to “just follow the program,” either.
Around the time he’d reached the age of majority he understood why. He understood how rebellion was part of growing up. Now, some twenty-two years later, he thought…
…If anybody got reason to rebel…it’s the UAB…
As he searched the shadowy, columned underbelly of old Tiger Stadium, for signs of Keisha, Malcolm further thought…
…Who could blame them? For…for being the way they are, if nobody wants you…not even ya mama?
Approaching an area which could be a hiding place, it occurred to Malcolm how ironic that so much money was being spent toward the welfare of the unaborted…
…When what they really want, money can’t buy. Like they say, money can’t buy everything.
Looking around the space where he stood, he saw no sign of it having been used, not recently anyway.
Ruminating thoughts about the human condition occupied his mind as he made his way further into the gray hollowness shaped by the distance he’d traveled from where he had entered the old stadium. Brushing aside cobwebs, Malcolm kept looking. With a little detective work he discovered an area arranged like a campsite.
There were discarded food wrappers. He found three dusty rolled up knapsacks tucked underneath the bottom most tier of the blue and white section of the bleacher seats. Continuing to look around he spotted a capacitor heater hidden beneath a rickety old, candy-striped hotdog stand. Shaped by four concrete pillars and the undersides of seats, the space where he stood, lay undisturbed.
Nothing suggested Keisha had been through here lately.
Pitching the loose food wrappers he’d picked up from the concrete floor, into a rusty waste can nearby, Malcolm thought …
Why care about anybody…when you’re nothing but a throw-away, yourself…taken not from your mother’s womb like it’s been done forever and ever and…born into the world for no other reason than it meant political victory for one side in an age-old conflict?
Satisfied Keisha had not been here, he made his way back to Gate 16. Using the lock disrupter a second time, he retreated from the old stadium.
Driving away, he stopped for the light at the corner of Michigan and Tromble. Waiting on the light to change to green, thoughts of a VA hospital as the birthplace of the unaborted and government interference in people’s lives, occupied his mind …
…Babies…part of a political deal…a pork barrel agreement…saved from disposal… placed in artificial wombs…in old rundown hospitals…so women can go guilt free…free of legal consequences and…moral ones. Yet lives are being saved…children’s lives…which would be otherwise lost. Not a perfect world.
Chapter 4
In his five years as a state probation officer, Malcolm George had become aware of how the UAB had not adjusted very well in foster care placement or in the group home setting, and knowing not many had been adopted, he’d concluded that there was little for them to look forward to in life. Being saved from the abortion knife had not brought about the American Dream for the majority of the UAB.
It was not unusual to move an unaborted child from one group home to another and to foster care placement and back into a group home setting, and then back to foster care until by the time they were Keisha’s age, the number of moves could number ten, fifteen, even twenty.
With so much uncertainty in their lives, as a result of being uprooted time and time again, and placed elsewhere, it didn’t take an expert to recognize how trust might be an issue for the unaborted. Or, as a condition of childhood, how uncertainty would cancel out any sense of belonging, thereby denying them a feeling of attachment.
Understanding how as a consequence to feeling unattached that rather than “melt into the mainstream of one ethnic group or another,” like most experts predicted, Malcolm thought it wouldn’t exactly be a big surprise if someday the unaborted decided to seek an identity of their own. Choosing to set themselves apart, on their own terms, from a world that had failed to give them what they need, seemed to Malcolm George, to be the natural thing for them to do someday. No matter how much money the government spent to feed, cloth, house, educate and provide them the best medical care, it was doing a piss-poor job of raising the unaborted.
And, as much as Malcolm George disliked the thought of himself as being part of the problem, the truth was, in many respects, the system set up to care for the UAB did more harm than good, a system in which he played a role.
Sometimes giving into his sympathy for what most kids had to face, in today’s world, Malcolm George could not blame the unaborted if they didn’t give a shit about anyone who didn’t look like them.
He could hardly blame Keisha for that big chip on her shoulder or fault her if she had some kind of an allergic reaction when it came to contact with people like him. Owing to what he saw as the shabby treatment she and her kind got from the state, he could not imagine how much more worthless it made the unaborted feel when they were told the circumstances of their birth.
And, eventually, every last one would come to know the truth. Each and everyone would come to realize that living and breathing had little to do with right or wrong, or morality for that matter.
The unaborted would be forced to face the cold reality behind their existence; the reality of being alive had to do with a political contest won by one side over the other, a contest decided after a long protracted struggle. They would learn how this political contest had been waged since the middle of the last century, and had the political winds been blowing in a different direction, they would have wound up as nothing more than a pile of flesh and blood, ripped from between the legs of a mother who did not want them and disposed of in a medical waste bag like leftover, unwanted entrails from a slaughtered animal.
Back when abortion had been legal, Malcolm, like most people, had come to accept it as a way of life. But over the years, after being affected by the reality of the new law, his outlook on things had changed. Thoughts of what would be the fate of the kids referred to today as the unaborted, under Rowe v. Wade, filled him with disgust.
The bloody image of a woman with her legs spread apart, about to have an abortion, sent a chill up his spine as he pulled up and parked on Columbia Avenue, one of the side-streets leading up to a secondary entrance of the Ponchatrain Hotel in the heart of downtown Detroit. The downtown hotel was his second stop in his search for Keisha. Aware through the reports on file that Keisha and her two buddies had in the past hidden out in the enclave of dumpsters behind the Ponchatrain on Jefferson Avenue, Malcolm wanted hotel security to do a sweep of the hotel’s back fenced-in area.
Malcolm noticed the streetlights coming on just as he entered the hotel. Dusk had begun to creep around the edges of skyscrapers and into the shadows of alleys. Out front of the hotel, across Jefferson Avenue, shimmering like a black silvery ribbon, the waters of the Detroit River lay calmer than usual. Taking note of the fact that it was Friday, Friday evening, he then headed for the security desk.
The weekend was here and he had found reason to still be on the job, out looking for a runaway.
Perhaps foolishly still on the job—out looking for a runaway.
His job, though, had uncommon flexibility and latitude. Able to work out of home or from the office, Malcolm’s hours to a large degree depended on how he wanted to work them. Outside of scheduled meetings, like the obligatory teaming meetings, the twice a year educational enhancement seminars, the infrequent departmental conferences and supervision once a month, as long as he documented forty hours per week, what hours in the day or night Malcolm might spend checking up on the kids on his caseload, was his call.
A kid gone AWOLP under his supervision had been a troubling concern of his ever since the days of working for the court. And if it happened to be a girl gone AWOLP made it even more worrisome. A girl out there in the streets was an added reason peace of mind would remain elusive until he’d done what he could to find her, and by then the hope would be she’d turned up safe and sound.
In the least, Malcolm felt it important to check out the places where Keisha had been known to go, before calling it a day.
Chapter 5
At the security desk, Malcolm identified himself as a state PO in search of a runaway UAB. Wearing his lined, navy blue, hooded windbreaker, Malcolm took from the inside breast pocket two black and white photos. A profile shot and a front pose of Keisha Jones. The guard—tall, slim and dressed in a crisp, well-creased CINTAS uniform for security guards—explained there’d been a sweep of the dumpsters outback less than an hour ago. Casually he mentioned the reason for the sweep. He said the homeless liked to sleep under the dumpsters, where there was about eighteen inches of space between the bottom of the dumpsters and the ground. Just like the homeless, runaways liked to take advantage of the relative safety provided by the area out back, and to eat the leftovers that were creations of the hotel’s trio of master chefs.
“Some of the priciest cuisine…the most delicious of entrees, desserts and gourmet dishes get thrown out. Some of it never even touched,” said the guard, whose intelligent look and professionalism suggested to Malcolm, he’d missed his calling, for he appeared to have what it takes to be one of Detroit’s fineness.
“Why? You might ask?” went on the guard. “Well, for one reason or another, people don’t always eat what’s on their plate. No matter how good it tastes, no matter how much it costs.”
Three kids, Malcolm was told, had been escorted to the street during the last sweep, but not a girl fitting the description in the two photos of Keisha he had laid on the black and tan granite, countertop. The guard seemed confident that at least for the next several hours the area out back, which he indicated by gesturing with his chin toward the door to his left, would be clear of riff raff. Toward midnight said the guard, there’d be another sweep.
Passing on cursory information the guard said ordinarily days went by before the back area got checked for vagrants. The homeless, he said, were especially drawn to the hotel during the cold season when the enclave out back acted as shelter against the strong winds off the river, which he called, “The hawk.”
Why the area currently was more closely watched had to do with the political dignitaries in town, including Senator Oscar Levine.
Senator Levine was a guest in the hotel.
“The Senator is speaking at the upcoming President’s Day shindig in Ford Auditorium.”
Politely Malcolm listened, although he knew of the problem downtown hotels had keeping runaways and the homeless out. All the hotels with walled-in enclaves in their back areas were having much the same problem. The Ponchatrain just happened to be the one Keisha and her companions had staked out to molest when taking an unauthorized leave of absence from foster care placement.
There were several locations where the threesome had been known to hide out. Old Tiger Stadium and the Ponchatrain happened to be just two. Another was off Mack Avenue, near the Chrysler plant region; another, the Mt. Elliot warehouse district.
As it was getting late, Malcolm decided against fumbling around those eastside locations in the dark. Besides, on a Friday night, there was a more likely place she would go, a place where she could hide out in the open and not worry about being spotted.
He left his business card and asked to be notified if a girl fitting Keisha’s description was seen in the area.
Outside, back on Columbia Street, Malcolm noticed the lights in the tall buildings going out. It signaled an end to the day’s corporate activities. The penthouse headquarters of GM, of Edison and CompuServe were being silenced as the weekend nightlife began to unfold on the streets and sidewalks below.
Detroit as a favorite place to hangout was back in the minds of people looking to have a good time. What the city had to offer had once more begun to ooze from its upper Midwest seams. Ready to be tasted not only by its own citizens—the ones who’d stayed through the good and bad times, now good again—but also by a constant stream of suburbanites visiting the city, looking for enjoyment, entertainment, fun. Reopened after over a half-century of being in mothballs was the city’s tourist bureau. Tourists were coming to Detroit on a scale unseen since the fifties and sixties. Suburbanites and tourists alike found reason to spend their money, and their time, as they wandered among the numerous attractions the city had erected on their behalf.
The two pestilences, crime and decay, which had plagued the Motor City, and always had gotten in the way of its return to prominence, in the past, were either being aggressively eradicated or already buried beneath a determined and ongoing effort of urban renewal. Like the rest of its sister-cities in the Midwest—cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Toledo, Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Gary, St. Louis and Cincinnati—the Big Motor once again was brightly lit at night, a place where people can rub elbows on a social basis in the countless ways people seek assembly.
Alive with the commerce of peddlers, street vendors, budding entrepreneurs and space watchers (those business types out there hustling to sign people up for space colonization) the designated entertainment areas of the city boasted of having, “A lot something for just about everybody!”
Chapter 6
A barrage of business interests have come to co-mingle on the streets of the Big Motor after dark in the areas designated for entertainment and fun. On any given street corner there’s some form of music playing; there’s dancing and drinking wherever you might look. In the designated areas, the food choices seem endless, from a simple burger and fries, to any gourmet cuisine you might wanna try.
They say if you can name "the dish," food or otherwise, it can be yours, for a price of course.
Some church leaders and many concerned ordinary citizens had started to think of the city as descending into the depths of hedonism, after dark.
“The gods of hedonism and their disciples of sin, temptation and vice have come to rule our city after dark,” preached Pastor Emmanuel Eberhard of the Inner Faith Ministries, the same church Malcolm George happened to be a member of.
The same gods of hedonism could be said to rule most of the other big cities found in what used to be called the “rust belt.”
Like their counterparts in those other Midwestern cities, Detroit’s political leadership had decided to spend its municipal dollars catering to "the young and fun seekers of all ages.” But to those opposed to what had begun to take place after dark, the phrase, “the young and fun seekers of all ages,” was just a substitute slogan for “hedonism.”
Unlike his pastor, catering to “the young and fun seekers of all ages” was not a decision Malcolm was altogether opposed to but did not necessarily agree with it either. For a time Malcolm carried around in his head a list of entertainment venues he had trouble accepting. Many of the sites the mayor and city counsel had put in place for the purpose of entertainment, Malcolm saw as wasting taxpayer dollars.
When his twenty-four year old nephew, Ty, came to town for a week’s visit last summer, Malcolm’s knowledge of all those attractions put up to attract the young and "the hedonistic" came in handy, though.
Malcolm did not say to his nephew “there’re hedonists coming here...” Rather than call visitors “hedonists” he made use of the slogan, “fun seekers of all ages.”
In spite of how he truly felt, during Ty’s visit, Malcolm tried not to badmouth the city because of his disagreement with the leadership on how taxpayer money should be spent. He was far from “hatin’ on the city” when he showed his nephew around to check out many of the very sites he didn’t care for. Instead of finding fault he, rather bragged to Ty how the city had done a lot to keep people coming to the city whose taste for fun was like “a New Year’s Eve party and the Fourth of July all rolled into one,”
Citizens like Malcolm and Pastor Eberhard were not against people having fun. They were not diehards about how they wanted to see things done. Pastor Eberhard and a sizable percentage of other people who, like Malcolm, believed the city would be better off, in the long run, if there were more conventional offerings of cultural activities and the kind of entertainment amenities that had stood the test of time; they didn’t want to see so much money spent on the type of glitz and glamour found on the east and west coasts. The city administration however had demographics on its side, and during those heated city council meetings leading up to the decisions on what trends in entertainment to invest, it sponsored more than one slick presentation showcasing what was needed, “To keep those who’re likely to come to our city and spend their money, coming back again and again and again.”
The age-group identified fitting this description was under forty. The mayor’s point man argued that, “the under forty ought to be the targeted group, if revitalization of the city is to be successful and…ongoing into the future.”
The forces behind keeping the targeted age-group happy, steam-rolled the opposition and before the opposition could re-inflate itself, the city fathers and mothers, whom were seen as only a grassroots rubberstamp for Mayor K. Kilpatrick, had already hired topnotch social engineers to draw up plans for what they had already envisioned. Then they enthusiastically endorsed their own experts’ handiwork.
The mayor gave his much publicized approval through other means. With one stroke of a pen, His Honor gave a big boost toward making sure the experts hired by his grassroots organization were not wrong. By signing an executive order to extend the hours of the popular River Front Promenade, from a 10pm closing time to remaining open until 2a.m., the mayor increased the odds of more and more suburbanites coming downtown to patronize the late night celebrity-owned businesses along the riverfront walkway, and with the casinos so close by, His Honor undoubtedly had to believe there’d be a spillover affect onto the gaming tables of the neon lit gambling houses.
Some say the spillover was a political payback to the casinos for contributing big time to his reelection campaign.
Starting in Double-ott-8, Hart Plaza began hosting open air concerts and mixing in outdoor theater from late spring until the middle of fall. The activities at Hart Plaza though were often secondary to other events like the Taste Fest, the Winter Fest at Campus Martius, Tiger Baseball, Lion’s Football, Redwing Hockey, Grande Prix Auto Racing, Detroit River Boat Racing, a Ten-K Run, the Free Press marathon, the Dream Cruise—all of which had a turn overlapping the seasons so there was always more than one reason to be in the city at any given time.
One or more “you can’t miss” events seemed always to be going on among the skyscrapers downtown. The same could be said for the midtown region where there’s the Foxtown District, Comerica Park and Ford Field.
Something to Get Excited About Right Here In Detroit! Was the slogan approved by the city council. Placed on billboards and seen on the VS these ads featured happy young people having a good time, while giving chorus to “Something to Get Excited about Right Here in Detroit!”
“Going to the city,” began to be spread by word of mouth. “Whassup!” came to be synonymous with “going to the city.”
Especially if you were young, young at heart, or just a soul searching for enjoyment or wanted to escape into fantasy, “The city!” became the place to be; the place where you could “step to the street” and “handle the butt on the moon.”
The slogan Whatever Turns You On was said to have its promise of fulfillment among the sky scrappers of downtown or waiting for you and me, after dark, in one of the other designated areas of entertainment.
Whatever Turns You On! began bearing fruit sooner than expected, and for the most part disbelievers like Malcolm George came around to promoting “Our city” like New Yorkers and Chicagoans do; they were just not always willing to give credit where credit was due.
The catchphrase, Detroit Has Something for the Fun Lover in You, became part of a privately sponsored ad campaign put out by the business community. The rest of that same ad bragged of “a whole ‘nother country just sittin’” on our shoulders.
In other words, Canada was that “‘whole ‘nother country…’”
Visitors and citizens alike were persuaded to travel to Canada by way of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit/Windsor Tunnel; or by way of the more recently constructed Skywalk. Indeed, businesspeople quickly recognized that what Canada and “Our City” had to offer, in collaboration, made for an entertainment and cultural package unparalleled on the North American continent.
“Come and Feel us!” said a slogan on the Internet News Service about the Motor City. And Michiganders from all over the state began feeling the city again. So have tourists from as far away as Europe and Asia. In a three year stretch booking tours to the Motor City jumped by one hundred fifty percent. Where once and for a long time there’d been only skeletons shadowed by ghosts of a grand old past, Detroit, like the downtown districts of many big cities all over the Midwest, was back in style. In some people’s eyes the city had taken a leap forward to a place where it had never been; a leap forward in style and vitality.
Taken back from the sameness of the suburban mall were the souls of many urban dwellers.
Chapter 7
To many it was not surprising why people from all walks of life flocked to Greektown and its namesake, the Greektown District. From its quaint little shops at one end of Madison Avenue to the gaudiness of the Las Vegas-styled casino, at the other, Greektown has a little bit of everything “for everybody.” There’s literally a cloud hanging over that district to prove it. Around for some time now, this hovering cloud is mostly caused by an overabundance of oriental cuisine cooked to perfection 24/7 in the kitchens of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai and Korean restaurants along what is called, “The oriental food court.”
The foods on the “The oriental food court” come spiced but very tasty and the prices are cut on the weekend so that a full belly can cost as little as the few dollars the average young person has in his pocket, which makes Greektown a favorite spot for the younger crowds to hangout.
If only temporarily.
When satisfied by the ethnicity of food and entertainment offered up by Greektown, a young person, or anyone for that matter, can for a quarter take the People Mover to one of the other two casinos or to the Foxtown District where Comerica Park and Ford Field are no longer the sole headliners.
Choosing to go from Greektown to the Foxtown District, passengers will experience a five-minute ride, which parallels, in altitude, the sixth floor of the closest skyscraper. Up so high passengers momentarily are witness to a breathtaking view of the city, of the river and the vistas offered up by downtown, Windsor, Canada. Near the end of this short but cost-worthy ride the three-linked cars of the People Mover descend out of the sky. Slowly alighting at the corner of Woodward and Alexandrian the coupled cars make the sound of cheeeese! As they settle, but never quite touching the ground; the passengers are then allowed to safely disembark.
They say the People Mover can incite the imagination of young children and that the unsophisticated are left in awe when for the first time they see the sleek formation of cars, up in the sky, appearing among the clouds while the backdrop is blue sky. The cars distinctively dyed in a coat of glossy silver-gray with a Hawaiian blue streak of color, in a slash across the sides, appear to be a celestial body moving across the firmament, which is the blue sky.
Afloat on air, while whisking along a few inches above its guide beams, the People Mover is propelled electromagnetically on superconductor rods. And, when loaded with a fresh load of passengers, the three-linked cars ascend slowly, murmuring softly as they gather momentum. When the People Mover accelerates, it does so like a quiet whisper and as it breathlessly whisks its way toward the Penobscot Towers, it soon disappears around the Towers, on its way to its next destination, one of nine stops along way.
On weekends, a round trip token costs a dollar.
You can ride the extent of the line, which loops around the downtown business district and travels out to Foxtown and stopping at all the stations along the way, before returning to where you got on, and you don’t have to pay another red cent!
Just east of Foxtown where you can find a concentration of clubs, small eateries, souvenir shops, vendors of all sorts (even a rogue parking lot attendant who’ll take your money and disappear in a flash if you don’t watch out!) is where you’ll find the music the loudest; it’s where the strobe lights act as a beacon to the young, hip-hop crowds; though, these days, it seem not to matter the age, as young and old alike enjoy bumping to the beat of hip-hop and Rap music.
Last time Malcolm had noticed, there were Blues Rap, Pop Rap, and Gangsta Rap; and, if he could recall…
…there’s Mainstream Rap. MSR…for short…
~~~
A newly released MSR cut by Eminem happened to be playing; the cigarette smoking crowds on the east end, where Madison Avenue and Beaubien Street cross, were caught up in its bluesy, hip-hop lyrics when Malcolm George arrived in Foxtown. Wading through a throng of young people, Malcolm came up on several kids in the middle of the sidewalk doing the dance called the Hoop-de. He wondered if Keisha could do the Hoop-de. Kim could. Last summer, she tried teaching it to him at Greg’s barbecue. Greg’s barbecue was an annual family picnic happening up in the City of Pontiac.
The Hoop-de reminded Malcolm of the Cabbage Patch, a dance that had been out when he’d been about Kim’s age.
Malcolm had parked the Chevy Cavalier on a side street and walked down from Woodward Avenue.
As the night sky above the lighted midtown region of the city grew darker and starless, he posted up across from the Comerica Park marquee where he could see anyone entering or leaving the fenced off area behind the 36th District Court building, which was known as a place where the unaborted hung out. Already he’d spotted several. Knowing where there’s one, there were likely others, he waited just out of sight.
He watched.
He waited.
But became less and less convinced he would ever spot Keisha in the growing size of the crowds. In this part of town the partying had already begun to spill out into the streets, and the young people, so many of them dressed in wild getups, worse than he could ever imagine, were seemingly coming out of the woodwork.
After a good hour’s watch, Malcolm gave up. By then into the twelfth hour of a workday (actually nine work hours if the time spent at home was not counted) he made his way back to the Chevy. Driving home with the window partially rolled down, and the breeze on his face, Malcolm George believed he would not see Keisha again until she turned up in the detention facility.
The watchtower thermometer at Woodward and Grand Boulevard gave the temperature as sixty-one degrees.
It felt warmer.
Chapter 8
He was right. A few days later she was spotted by police officers from the eleventh precinct as they turned onto Palmer Street off St. Antoine. The officers were patrolling the new storefront condos which had been recently completed and cost upwards of three hundred thousand bucks.
The section of St. Antoine and Palmer Streets where she happened to be spotted was the 7000-block-area and part of the Chene Park subdivision. Occupying that partial of land bound by the I-75 Expressway to the east and the service-drive of I-94 to its north, the Chene Park subdivision is not all that great a distance from Foxtown.
A stylish mixture of the old and new, every detached condo came with a redbrick face, overhanging eaves and gabled rooftops. A few have a redbrick arch over the driveway. All of these condos have tinted windows made of unbreakable glass, constructed from the latest materials, allowing for maximum privacy and security. Much sought after as living space the condos were ahead of schedule. The push was on to complete the contractual landscaping, which mostly had to do with the planting of trees and the beautification of the curbside.
The curbside was that narrow strip of dirt between the curb and the sidewalk, where people used to stand to board a bus or hail a taxicab back in the 50s and 60s. For these newly developed condos once had been storefront businesses which faced one another across Chene Avenue. In the old days, Chene Avenue thrived as the hub of the neighborhood-shopping district. Businesses along the street sold similar goods and services which could be found for sale in the downtown business district, only on a smaller scale.
Buyers of these storefront condos were poised to snap them up ASAP.
Where derelicts once had gotten high off drugs and alcohol, and the area blighted with overgrown weeds, boarded up abandoned buildings—Chene, and the adjoining streets, nowadays, radiated freshness. These streets which had once been filled with potholes that could rattle perfectly sound teeth were newly paved, newly white-lined. Streetlights, stoplights, yield signs and stop signs alike were all new and designed to function in an ergonomic environment.
An ideal picture of what urban renewal can be, Chene Park set poised to take its place as one of the latest high points in the city’s revitalization.
Caught up in a mood that was perhaps influenced by her unspoiled surroundings, Keisha retrieved the McDonald’s hamburger wrapper she’d thrown down. She deposited it in the nearest waste receptacle, which was brand spanking new as well—unused until she threw in the food wrapper. On her way to the Mt. Elliot warehouse region, Keisha was not yet out of the subdivision when two unmarked police cars rolled up on her, and despite being fast on her feet and able to leave in the dust situations she had an urge from which to escape, the girl was easily cornered with nowhere to run.
Twenty minutes later, Keisha was being processed at the Wayne County Juvenile Detention Facility at 2610 St. Jude. The following day she would have a preliminary hearing in the onsite courtroom. Her “prelim” would be at 10:00a.m., before Referee Richard Dunlap. Recalcitrant while locked up, Keisha refused to answer to her birth name.
Before this time there’d been no indication Keisha Jones had a problem with her birth name, though she was likely aware of the growing number of her kind who’d begun to make a point of rejecting the names given to them at birth. To what end no one knew.
Keisha had been among the first batch of the unaborted brought into the world. At fifteen this senior group of UABs was unlikely to have figured out the reasons behind their own actions. No different, behaviorally, in most respects from their naturally birthed brethren, the unaborted had a tendency to act on impulse and not know why they did the things that got them into trouble.
And as young people are inclined to imitate one another and, in so doing, become the originators of trends which often evolve into fads and fashion, so it happened that when the detained unaborted youths started to reject their VA hospital given names, the name-change began to spread among the other incarcerated youth. Acceptance of the name switch and then a gung-ho rush to make up a new name for themselves, by all or most of the inmates, appeared to be just another way of “trying the patience” of the adult authority running the detention facility. But for the UAB, the name-change seemed to carry a different meaning. What they were doing had the “smell of somethin’ else.”
What they were doing seemed to be more than just another episode of adolescent rebellion.
Perhaps without realizing it, the UAB, on a subconscious level, had already taken that first step toward defining themselves and, in so doing, it was a personal step taken by Keisha, though she did not insist on being called by her new name, at the preliminary hearing, presided over by Referee Richard Dunlap. The preliminary hearing was merely a “show cause” inquiry after a police arrest and a juvenile has been detained in the detention facility.