Free You Don't Have to Live Like This by Benjamin Markovits Page B

I couldn’t reach, in white and green. They rewired the living room and fixed the connection to the Detroit grid, which involved shutting down the street for several hours whilethey dug up road. It occurred to me that none of this would have happened if Robert James weren’t my particular pal. Sometimes Hector and I stopped at one of the few bars still open on East Vernor and had a beer. He was one of these confessional types, always in a good mood, and I heard a fair chunk of his life story.
    What Hector wanted to talk about was New York, where he used to work about ninety, a hundred hours a week just to pay the rent on a one-bedroom apartment in Alphabet City. He ate out every night and got drunk on Saturday so he could sleep in Sunday and start the whole week up again on Monday morning, like some cranky old car.
    All this was “about a million miles” from the world he came from. He grew up in Farmers Branch, Dallas County. His mother worked in a grocery, where she also cooked, and his father mowed rich men’s yards. His whole life long he was this scared nerdy cat who hung around a bunch of crazy kids, mostly friends of his big sister and cousins and friends of cousins. They were better at having a good time than he was but put up with him anyway. Then he got a scholarship to Rice, where he minored in business studies because he wanted to be the guy “who paid my father to mow his lawn and not the guy on the John Deere.” At one point a couple of years ago he realized that the only time he had any interaction with the kind of people he grew up with was when he ordered in and the restaurant sent somebody over with his bag of food.
    Was he happy? He wasn’t unhappy. He had a good job and money to spend on himself. He sent money home, too, and bought his father for his sixtieth birthday a 1987 Mercedes 190E, with wood-panel trim. His father liked messing around with engines on the weekend. Sometimes when he went to bars tall white girls paid attention to him because of the way he dressed. But there was nobody he thought, you could be a mother to somebody, “a motherlike mine.” And eventually he realized (this is what he told me), you have been blessed with many talents and gifts, and out of all this blessing and good luck, this is the life you have made. “This stupid life. That’s what I felt. I wanted to start from scratch.”
    He had a disturbing habit of using language from Robert’s website. People who talk a lot eventually run out of their own thoughts and phrases and have to borrow materials from other sources. Not that he cared. He was one of those people whose smile says nervously, Life is good. I realized soon enough that none of his Mexican buddies respected him. They liked him okay but thought he had his head up his ass or in the clouds. The jobs they sent us on were the kind we couldn’t fuck up, like buying hot dogs.
    When Angelo, one of the electricians, had to shut off the electricity on the street, he told me and Hector to explain what was happening to the neighbors. So we walked down the road together, knocking on doors.
    Already a few people had started to move in. A guy called Eddie Blyleven who used to work in insurance, an ex-jock, blond-haired, recently divorced, whose daughter came at weekends. There were a couple of single dads, in fact, with weekend kids. Steve Zipp had a six-month-old baby, his first. He looked about forty-five, a nervous, badly dressed, pale, black-haired midwesterner. His shirt collars were too big around his neck, he wore cheap suits, but I’ll get to his story later.
    There was a house at the end of the block where a family of holdouts lived, a mother and son, and Hector knocked on their door and the son came out.
    “Yes?” he said. He had kind of a faggy accent, but he was a big black guy, built like a linebacker, with muddy-looking skin and lots of little pigtails of kinky hair hanging down to his shoulders. Maybe he was thirty-five years old—some of the