The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit

Also by Michael Zadoorian

The Leisure Seeker

Second Hand 

 The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit

 The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit

stories by michael zadoorian 

Wayne State University Press

wsupress.wayne.edu

© 2009 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

13 12 11 10 09           5 4 3 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zadoorian, Michael.

The lost tiki palaces of Detroit : stories / by Michael Zadoorian.

p. cm. — (Made in Michigan writers series)

ISBN 978-0-8143-3417-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Detroit (Mich.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3576.A278L67 2009

813’.54—dc22

2008037300

This book is supported by the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs.

Designed by Brad Norr Design

Typeset by Maya Rhodes

Composed in Minion and Helvetica 

For Miss Rita

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. west side

To Sleep

Dyskinesia

War Marks

The World of Things

The Problem with Modell

2. east side

Hearts and Bones

Mystery Spot

The Listening Room

Noise of the Heart

3. downtown

Traffic Reports

Process

Spelunkers

The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit

Acknowledgments

The stories in this collection have appeared in the following journals and anthologies:

To Sleep, American Short Fiction; Dyskinesia, The Literary Review and Ararat; War Marks,Hearts and Bones, Beloit Fiction Journal; The World of Things and Process, The Literary Review; Mystery Spot, Panurge (UK), Traffic Reports, The PrePress Awards: Michigan Voices and Peregrine; The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit, Detroit Noir. The West Side prologue was published in Massacre (UK) under the title 308-810 (Dream Book). The East Side and Downtown prologues were published in The North American Review under the titles Camouflage and What Doesn’t Go Away.

Great Thanks and Respect to:

Chris Leland; Sam Astrachan; Charlie Baxter; my editor, Annie Martin; my agent, Sally van Haitsma; Glenn Barr; my friends who have supported me for so long: DeAnn Forbes, Dave Spala, Keith McLenon, Lynn Peril, Tim Teegarden, Andrew Brown, Jim Dudley, Jim Potter, Luis Resto, Michael Lloyd, Terry Hughes, Gail Offen, Dave Michalak, Holly Sorscher, Tim Suliman, Mark Simon, Tony Park, Nick Marine (who is Tiki); my sister, Susan Summerlee; and to the memory of my mother and father, Norman and Rose Mary Zadoorian.

The Mauna Loa, Trader Vic’s, and the Chin Tiki. R.I.P.

Detroit turned out to be heaven, but it also turned out to be hell.

Marvin Gaye

1. WEST SIDE

After a plane crash, people in Detroit play the number of the flight, hoping it will come in. I have never done that, but after flight 244 fell out of the sky, I dreamed about it. Ashamed as I am to admit it, I looked up the dream in my Kansas City Kitty Dream Book and found that the number for Crashlanding was 606.

I played it straight for $3 in the Daily. I guess I could have played it on the street too, but that makes me a little jumpy. Just as well, because I lost.

I don’t really play all that much. But some days I just see numbers everywhere I look—license plates, digital clocks, receipts. The same numbers over and over. If I see 872 on a truck, I’ll remember that just an hour before, I got a receipt for $2.87. When that happens, I have to play it in the box. There’s nothing worse than your number coming in, but in the wrong order.

Doing this, you get good with numbers. They become real for you. You know just what they mean, how far they can take you before you have to give up on them. (Like the number I cross off the calendar every night.) My mother was the same way. Only she didn’t give up on some numbers.

She always used to look for my birthday on the bingo cards she chose. Then, after she set them up, she’d put lucky elephant charms all around the cards, along with a little embroidered picture of Mr. Peanut against a bunch of dancing numbers. I’m A Bingo Nut, it said. She departed this earth playing 43 cards. The priest said, She would have wanted it that way.

All I know is that it never comes in when I play Mother-562.

There’s an old Polish lady I see almost every day at the drugstore where I play. Even when I’m there just to pick up some cigarettes or a quart of Mickey’s, she’s there. Ciocia Clara with her babushka and a wad of tickets in her fist. She must play $8 or $9 worth a day. She tells me her dreams and they always have her kids in them. I don’t know how many times she’s told me to play Stanley-159 or Katty-999.

Every week, I see Clara buying a Skippy’s Lucky Lotto Success Candle.

Nothing but purple wax in a glass jar painted with money bags, a horn of plenty, and a big Fast Luck horseshoe magnet that uncrosses all the forces that keep you from winning. On the side, there’s a white space about an inch square where it says: Write your Desire Here. But it doesn’t look like anywhere near enough room.

The drugstore has a whole section of good luck items—House Blessing Spray, Jinx Killers, 7 Holy Spirit Hyssop Oil. Once I bought a box of "DR.

PRYOR’S alleged fast MONEY DRAWING brand INCENSE. The directions tell you to Read Psalm 23 in the night while the incense is burning. They even give you a copy of Psalm 23 in the box. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want . . ." etc., etc. On the back of the psalm is a tiny strip of paper with five different numbers on it.

The night I bought the incense, I had a dream about it. I dreamed that I had a step van full of incense and was driving down my street, delivering it to every house. They all had special doors in the back where I would shovel the incense. Then, the people came out of their houses and gave me money. I kept sneezing in the dream. I remember because when I blew my nose, what was on the handkerchief was bright green.

The next day, I played Incense-231 and lost $7. The number was 466. Just for the hell of it, I went home and looked up handkerchief. It was 646. At least that proves what I said about playing it in the box.

Sometimes when I open the dream book, I can’t believe all the things people dream about: Slaughterhouse-104, Haberdasher-992, Fetus-369, Catechism-870, Grindstone-029, Herring-757, Thud-189. I guess the idea is you never know what you’re going to dream about. Under my birthday horoscope in the dream book (745-957-842), it says: "Are neat in personal appearance.

You value intuition more than intellect. You are willing to let things happen."

There have been times when I’ve dreamed about myself, Victor-987. I know it is about me because there’s nothing else in the dream. I’m just standing there, looking at the top of my wrist, running my hand through my hair.

I am standing and standing. It is the most boring dream. And that number just will not fall.

My wife tells me I am crazy to waste our money playing numbers. She probably is right. But she hasn’t complained when a number of mine comes in.

One night, I had a dream where she and I were sleeping. I wake up and find some little animal running around our bed. I catch it in a sack and we both take it outside. In front of our house, there is a freeway. (This part is not true at all. I-75 is behind us.) I throw the sack under the wheels of a passing semi.

I never really knew what kind of animal it was, so I played Truck-319, both straight and boxed, and won $496. She didn’t laugh at the dream book for some time after that.

Once in a while, I’ll go to the store to play a number from a dream, let’s say, Run-413. I get there and find two other people in line playing the same number. And one of them will know two other people who are playing it. I think maybe this happens all over the city, because in a couple of days, I’ll see my number on the green sheet that lists that month’s hot numbers. Sometimes, everyone at the drugstore is playing the same numbers, like we’re all dreaming the same. If the number falls, the drugstore is handing out money all night long (not to mention half-pints of Boot’s, Barcardi, and Easy Jesus).

On the inside back cover of the Kansas City Kitty Dream Book is a drawing that looks like it’s from the 1940s. An old diner, filled with black folks dressed in razor-sharp zoot suits, with shiny conk haircuts. There are numbers everywhere in the diner—on the walls and floor, on a box of corn flakes, on the waitress’s behind while she flirts with a customer, on the cook’s hat as he scowls at her from his smoky kitchen, on the tablecloths and backs of chairs, even on the sign that says: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YORE HATS OR COTES.

I like this picture. Sometimes I look at it late at night in bed, when my wife has gone to sleep and I just lie there. I hear popping sounds off in the distance. I count the pops . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4. It’s the bones in my knees when I bend down to pray, to write my desire here, to look for that damn dream book that’s fallen under the bed. I like that picture. Sometimes I think about it before I go to sleep. Those nights when I go through the book, wondering what I will dream about, hoping for something. But those are always the times when I wake up in the morning and can’t remember a thing.

To Sleep

We come only to sleep, only to dream.

It is not true, it is not true that we come to live on the earth.

Netzahualcoyotl, poet-king of Texcoco

The walls of our Euthanasia Room are light blue, recommended to us by some people at a local hospice. The color is supposed to soothe the animals and I suppose it does, even if it annoys me. Light blue has always been my least favorite color. My mother used to call it polack blue. Interesting, considering my mother was the all-time biggest, polyester pants suit, deese and dose, plastic-on-the-crushed-velvet furniture from Lasky’s, Hamtramck polack. But I hate that color for different reasons. It’s a silly color, insubstantial, frivolous. Yes, yes, I know it’s the color of the sky and I could attach all sorts of glorious meanings to it, the animals are floating skyward to heaven, to a better place, blah, blah, blah. But come on. I’m killing these animals here. It’s for a good reason, but I’m still killing them. Let’s not forget that.

I can’t do this anymore I can’t do this anymore I can’t do this anymore I can’t do this anymore . . .

This is your litany while you lie awake at night. But you get up every morning, feeling worse and worse, and keep on doing it, until you start to wonder about yourself. Crazy things, like maybe you enjoy it, or maybe if you weren’t doing it, you’d be packing an AK-47, the first woman to pull one of those fast food massacres. You can’t understand why you don’t just quit. You tell yourself you’re doing it for the animals, but you can only tell yourself this so much before it just sounds trite and empty and meaningless. It sounds light blue.

Gilbert, my assistant, who suffers from dreams, knows what I’m talking about. He feels the same way. Except he likes light blue. At least it is a familiar color to the animals, he says. Out on the street, they look up and see blue.

There in the Euth Room, they look up and see blue. It makes it easier for them. I tell him that dogs are color blind. He says it doesn’t matter, they see their own version of blue. This is where I stop arguing. If you saw Gilbert, you’d stop arguing, too. The Man Mountain, we call him around the shelter.

Gilbert’s the one who carries the dogs and cats to the furnace room and lines them up in an orderly row in front of the door. A pile would be disrespectful, he says, and I would have to agree with him on that.

In Oaxaca, they have blocked off the streets. There are makeshift stands everywhere: small tented tables covered with bright flowered oilcloth, Mexican women rolling and baking tortillas behind them; men tending carts filled with huge loaves of bread blazoned with bones. The streets around the zócalo are crowded with people celebrating, but I’m heading for the grocery store. I have shopping to do.

When I walk up to the woman at the cash register with my phrase book and clumsily say, Donde esta los perros y gatos? she looks a little confused.

I repeat, phrasing it a little differently. Still nothing. Finally, I give up and just walk around the store until I stumble onto what I am looking for. I fill my handbasket with cans. When I get to the cash register, the woman behind it smiles now, finally understanding what it was that I wanted. Tiene usted muchos animales? she says to me. I nod eagerly, and say sí, not so sure of what it is that I just agreed to.

I drop off the cans at my hotel room and immediately set out again, this time for flowers. Marigolds and cockscomb, the traditional flores de muerto, are for sale everywhere, mounds of them, gathered against the stone walls of the marketplace, overseen by leathery, slope-shouldered old women. I have read that marigolds and incense approximate the smell of bones. Do bones have a smell? I don’t bother to ask the old woman from whom I buy the brilliant gold and purple bundles. She barely looks up from her bowl of pulque to take my money.

The worst part is what we call ghosting. That flicker in their eyes just a second after the Pentothal reaches the viscera, that moment, that last hundredth of a second of being as it folds into what comes after. The look in their eyes, during the wiping away of life, burns in on your soul like a klieg light on the retina. You can shift your vision elsewhere, but you still see the shape of the light, an after-image, superimposed on everything you look at—on a stop sign, on the page of a book late at night when you can’t sleep, on your own guilty hand when you hold it before your face.

But unlike the after-image from a bright light, this one doesn’t go away in a few moments. It’s there for keeps. And after you eradicate a few thousand of God’s living, breathing, sentient creatures like I have, you begin to believe that there’s nothing left to burn. But you’re wrong. There’s always more work to be done, more animals to be put down. Before long, you’re thinking that that part of you, the part your parents told you was what made you special, the good girl part, the part that would remain even after you died, is not yours anymore. It’s just a charred, scarred accretion of the ghosted eyes of thousands of animals, the kind of scabby hard stone-cinder that we as children used to call a clinker.

In the village of Anenecuilco, the day before a child’s burial, all the friends of the dead child come to play with the deceased’s toys, while the body lies in the coffin. In this way, with familiar sounds coming from the other room, the parents can imagine for a little while that their child is still alive, giving them a brief respite from the pain of their loss.

Often, I will have to put a mother cat and her whole litter to sleep. We always take the mother first, so she doesn’t go berserk if she happens to hear one of her babies in distress. The strange part is, while we euthanize the mother, the kittens are playing in another part of the room or even sometimes around our feet, chasing one another, tumbling around, so completely oblivious that it makes you envy them.

After the mother is laid down next to the furnace door, we do the kittens, one by one. You try to do it as fast as you can, working efficiently, mechanically, wrapping each one gently in a towel except for their head and paw, shaving a patch so you can find the vein, giving each of them their tiny lethal dosage, leaving your favorite one of the litter for last. (For me, it’s the runt, the one that never got enough food.) You just do them and do them, till there’s none left for that favorite one to play with. Then you do that one.

This is the worst thing that can happen: you do that last kitten, hold that delicate corpse in your palm, and you change your mind. You just plain change it. You want to bring that kitten home and you don’t care if it is your seventh cat or not. I’ve changed my mind, you say, unsure of whether you’ve actually verbalized this or just thought it. Either way, you’re completely serious. Then your assistant comes and takes the kitten away from you and places it over by the furnace with its brothers and sisters. They are all tucked against the belly, against the still milk-swollen teats of their mother.

I search for stalks of sugarcane, but no one seems to be selling them out on the streets. Probably because I’m in the tourist section of town. Still, I’m afraid to ask the people who obviously live here where they bought the long stalks that curl behind them as they walk along the zócalo. Finally, I find one man in an almost hidden corner of the mercado who