The Rake Magazine

Year: 2005

  • Seven Weeks on the Mean Streets

    My brother recently had a job that required him to purchase 231 gallons of gas in seven weeks. Ben was behind the wheel of his 1997 Honda Accord ten hours a day, seven days a week, and he covered 5,500 miles without ever leaving the metropolitan area. But this was no trucking or courier gig; he was getting fifteen dollars an hour to drive his car along every single street in the Twin Cities and their first-ring suburbs.

    Ben had answered a Craigslist ad posted by a technology start-up. They were looking for people in various cities who were willing to spend their days driving. Like Pac-Man on wheels, he trolled every avenue, lane, boulevard, and road, with a Palm Pilot suction-cupped to his windshield, scanning neighborhoods for wireless Internet activity. The company that hired Ben was apparently attempting to create a map of wireless signals on top of a GPS grid.

    Ben is twenty-four years old, and is comfortable whether he’s jostling at Atmosphere shows or shaking hands with real estate pooh-bahs in his present job for a developer. He grew up in St. Paul and thought he knew the Twin Cities pretty well. While driving the streets and neighborhoods, however, he discovered that, beyond the familiar, high-density areas most of us regularly travel through (Uptown and downtown Minneapolis, St. Paul’s Grand Avenue, the lakes, and the Mississippi River) was a largely foreign territory. He circumnavigated downtown St. Paul’s airport, encountered the aftermath of a murder, peed at the shores of lakes you’ve likely never heard of, and witnessed a funeral parade with a crowd of mourners, on foot, trailing the coffin down the street.

    For the most part, however, Ben was mostly a passive observer in the neighborhoods through which he drove; most of the time when he actually got out of his car it was to download his data at a Starbucks. He also discovered that public bathrooms tended to be readily available in affluent areas and virtually impossible to find in poor neighborhoods. He was financially strapped during this odyssey—he wasn’t reimbursed for his gas or mileage, and ended up making about ten dollars an hour—and subsisted primarily on gas station granola bars.

    For the last leg of his journey—driving the remaining un-highlighted stretches on his map—Ben allowed me to ride along. We began our run in a tony Minneapolis neighborhood with elaborate brick pillars at its borders and a number of identical white cantilever porches. From there we swung into Bryn Mawr, with all of its quaint signage (Bryn Mawr Chiropractic, Bryn Mawr Coffee, Bryn Mawr Pizza), and headed out to Robbinsdale, before eventually ending up back in Minneapolis. There, we drove through suburban-style subdivisions with Mercedes in the driveways, hard by scrap yards where men delivered cans piled into garbage bags and stacked onto shopping carts.

    Even on a Tuesday night, downtown Minneapolis was chaotic and bustling with people. Ben recalled his cruise through the streets of downtown St. Paul, where it was so deserted that he drove five blocks in the wrong direction down a one-way street before noticing.

    After three hours, the Honda began to feel like a Tilt-a-Whirl from which I couldn’t escape. The car was constantly changing direction, pivoting, juking, and U-turning as Ben retraced his steps and searched for tiny hidden streets. Long stretches of straight avenues were welcome, but rare; more common were the one-ways, dead ends, and streets bisected by parks or office buildings. “There’s an art to this,” Ben said, and claimed that he’d developed an almost intuitive navigational sense. “It’s become second nature to drive with a map in my hand.”

    Areas that departed from the usual grid—places with lots of single-block streets and dead-ends—required him to drive through multiple times in order to map all the sections. He occasionally got weird looks from people who saw him repeatedly passing by. “There’s definitely some suspicion, particularly in neighborhoods that are real homogenous,” he said. “And especially on cul-de-sacs; everyone knows who lives on their cul-de-sac.” Fortunately, he said, his Honda is an inconspicuous ride.

    As we swirled through a cul-de-sac somewhere in the haze of inner suburbia, we passed a sign that read, “Tube Forming Factory,” another industrial site set incongruously among neighborhoods of low ramblers. One thing that really struck Ben on his travels was the amount of industry in the Twin Cities. “As a consumer, you’re so focused on retail and residential that you never really ask, ‘Where do things get made in the city?’” he said. “And it’s everywhere—places that you don’t normally go or think about, stuff is always going on and things are happening that are different. Everywhere you aren’t is somebody else’s reality.”—Alexandra Kerl

  • Cleaner and Greener

    Tucked into an out-of-the-way corner in northwestern Minnesota, Alexandria is a small town known for its twenty-eight-foot-tall Viking statue and a famous runestone museum. What most of the rest of the state doesn’t know is that this is where a mass slaughter of one of the humblest species of fish is taking place. Each year, a company called Bio Builder Inc. liquefies more than one hundred thousand carp that it procures from commercial fishermen and area municipalities. The fifteen-person outfit, in fact, owes its very existence to the bottom-feeding, lake-degrading fish, which it uses to produce fertilizer products.

    Bio Builder launched five years ago, after its precocious principal and founder, Joshua Zeithamer, hit upon an unlikely idea. The then-nineteen-year-old Zeithamer found that combining nutrient-rich liquefied carp tissue with dried distiller’s grain (a corn byproduct of ethanol processing) made for an environmentally friendly, phosphorous-free lawn fertilizer. Rural revitalization grants and a national award from the Future Farmers of America followed, and what started as a high school FFA project evolved over a couple of years into a company that sells a line of ten boutique fertilizer blends to high-end nurseries and agricultural supply stores.

    On October 30, 2003, under the bright stage lights at the FFA National Convention in Louisville, Kentucky, Zeithamer was presented with the organization’s American Star in Agribusiness award. The prize, which netted him two thousand dollars and a ten-day trip to Costa Rica, recognized Zeithamer’s carp-and-corn fertilizer innovation and lauded the young entrepreneur for his business savvy.

    Zeithamer first saw a market opportunity in the late 1990s, when several Minnesota communities banned the use of lawn fertilizers containing phosphorous, because runoff from treated grass was shown in some studies to spur an unnatural rate of algae growth in lakes. Unchecked, such growth can result in the suffocation of native fish species. At the time, most fertilizers contained some level of phosphorous. Then, on January 1, 2005, Minnesota passed the Phosphorus Lawn Fertilizer Law and became the first state in the nation to institute an outright ban on the use of lawn fertilizers containing phosphorous. Zeithamer’s foresight was sealed and validated with a legislative stamp.

    Lately, however, sales have reached a plateau at Bio Builder Inc., and the company’s phosphorous-free fertilizers now account for only three percent of its annual sales. Zeithamer says big fertilizer companies like Scotts Miracle-Gro have jumped on the phosphorus-free wagon, which has brought increased competition. There is also a general lack of public awareness about the ban, and, as there is little or no enforcement of the law, hardware stores still commonly sell fertilizers containing phosphorous. Another challenge, Zeithamer believes, is that the people who care most about the environment—the people who’d be more attuned to the concerns surrounding phosphorus—are not big fertilizer consumers.

    “Organic people and tree huggers prefer to go au naturel with their lawns,” Zeithamer said. “They don’t want their yards to be golf-course green.”

    This catch-22 for environmentally minded fertilizer companies like Bio Builder is unfortunate, says Brian Horgan, a professor of horticulture science at the University of Minnesota. The perception that all fertilizer is bad for the environment is unfounded, Horgan says; using the right kind of fertilizer to keep your lawn healthy is beneficial to local ecosystems, because rainwater filtered through high-quality dirt is cleaner.

    At the other extreme, people who cherish highly manicured, glowing-green grass may have the wrong idea about the importance of phosphorous in lawn fertilizer, according to Jerry Spetzman, a water quality advisor at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. Most lawns in the Twin Cities already have adequate natural phosphorous levels. In fact, Spetzman points out, nitrogen, not phosphorous, is responsible for a healthy green luster.

    Despite these proverbial snakes in the grass, Bio Builder has managed to expand and diversify its business. In addition to fertilizers, the company sells grass seed and erosion-control products and provides landscaping and aerification services for businesses around Alexandria. While his business is sound, Zeithamer says he may have partially miscalculated the market when Bio Builder was getting off the ground.

    “I learned that most people will simply buy the fertilizer that they believe will make their grass the greenest, without looking at many other issues,” Zeithamer said.

    Spetzman thinks Zeithamer’s carp concoction may simply be ahead of its time. At a recent conference, Spetzman met with representatives from one of the world’s largest fertilizer companies, who had big news: The corporation was considering a nationwide rollout of a new, phosphorous-free fertilizer.—Stephen Regenold

  • Mr. Fixit

    If you need guidance in repairing the clutch in your ’57 Ford pickup, quieting your stuttering Edsel, or locating the lubrication specs for that turn-of-the-last-century Stanley Steamer in the garage, here’s a suggestion: Check out the Minneapolis Public Library. The Central Library downtown is the proud possessor of an automotive manual collection that is second in size only to Detroit’s. Considering that the libraries in that city are in dire financial straits, Minneapolis’ Automotive Manual Collection is probably the most accessible and well maintained on the planet.

    Its provenance remains unknown. Suffice it to say, the collection was built slowly at first, in the early decades of the last century, when some librarian with an eye for modernizing decided to obtain both the glove-box manuals and the thicker, more technical repair tomes used by mechanics. The library’s holdings grew as the automobile exerted its presence throughout the country, and ultimately exploded in the car-crazy 1950s. Since then it has been vigilantly maintained. The most recent manuals are about two years old. There is obviously little use for a repair manual for a car under warranty.

    On Saturday mornings an influx of patrons, almost exclusively men, queues up before the library opens in order to peruse volumes from the collection. “These guys are here to get answers for the questions that are taking up their weekends,” said Walt Johnson, a Patent and Trademark librarian who oversees the collection. These repair guides are not your typical Chilton manuals, but the same ones dealers and mechanics use. You could dismantle a car, literally from top to bottom, and rebuild it based on the information between the covers of these books. Because they’re expensive, often running more than a hundred dollars apiece, the library’s policy about adding to the collection is utilitarian: It acquires primers for popular models, such as Fords, GMs, and Hondas, while eschewing Maseratis or Hummers. “Those guys,” said Johnson, referring to owners of such exotic vehicles, “can hire people to fix their cars.” The collection also includes the fascinating Parts and Time Guide, which allows you to determine exactly how long it takes to remove and replace any automobile part, thus keeping time-padding mechanics honest.

    Surprisingly, the manuals are in outstanding shape. They are crisp and clean—nothing like my dad’s old Chiltons, marred by greasy fingerprints, torn pages, and dog-eared corners. They’re also charming to look at, even for someone who can barely change a tire. The old owner’s manuals are delightfully earnest, thanking the buyer for his or her brilliant decision to purchase, say, the “Finer” DeSoto Six. “We have endeavored by illustration and diagram to make these instructions perfectly clear to everyone,” this manual boasts, and then proceeds to baffle with instructions for the simple act of locking the car door. The guide includes instructions for opening the front windshield with a crank, for cleaning the curtains (!) in the rear of the vehicle, and for using hand signals when turning or stopping, which must have been a joy in the winter. Some of the auto manuals are as small and sober as a Bible tract, with minimal information in an art-deco script. Included are advisements to refrain from driving your new automobile at more than forty miles per hour for the first hundred miles, fifty miles per hour over the next hundred, and no more than sixty miles per hour up to five hundred miles. After that, the sky’s the limit. And every manual before 1970 displays the automaker’s generous ninety-day, four-thousand-mile warranty.

    Then there’s the whimsy of the cars themselves: the DeSoto; the Overland Whippet from Toledo; the Hudson Hornet, with its “Weather Eye” climate control system; the Flying Cloud, built by Reo in Lansing, Michigan; the Studebaker, manufactured in the “friendliest factory in the world!”; and my personal favorite, Hupp Motors’ Hupmobile, from the Motor City itself. Paint colors included Juneau gray, Bimini blue, and black. Not Nighthawk Black, like my 2004 Civic, but black. Just black.

    Some of the collection’s most intriguing patrons come in to reference repair manuals for ancient tractors, from Fords to International Harvesters. Johnson has observed that the people who are working on old tractors aren’t just collectors, and they aren’t simply being frugal—they have an intense emotional attachment to these machines. He recalled riding an old Ford on his father’s Christmas tree farm. “This was back in the late sixties, when I was nine and ten years old, before all the land was developed up in the area around Big Lake and Zimmerman. I want to say it was a 1948 model, and we used that tractor nonstop from late spring until early winter. A few years ago I came across an old book in the collection that featured old Ford tractors and I got very nostalgic.”

    The collection is amazing, really: a trip back in time, a tonic for those longing for the days of choke knobs and whitewall tires, a valuable reference tool for people who need more than Car Talk. For now, it is wintering in a basement at the temporary library, waiting for loving hands to shuttle it across the street to the new Central Library. Come May, when the library reopens, no doubt those Saturday-morning lines of do-it-yourself mechanics will be especially long.—Peter Schilling

  • The Truth About the Abominable Snowman

    Name: Jerry

    Color: Off-white

    Habitat: Though he’s been spotted as far south as
    New Mexico, as far east as Vietnam, and as far north as the Arctic Circle, the Abominable Snowman spends most of his leisure time in rural Wyoming. But when he wants to go on a real bender, he frequents the taverns and hotel bars of downtown Winnipeg.

    Diet: Deer feces. Also Funyons and wild blueberries.

    Preferred clothing: A loincloth. It’s actually a leather apron. Okay, it’s a saddlebag he stole from a Harley outside of Boise, Idaho. It protects his “little snowman.” He also wears an old burlap tuxedo to galas and awards ceremonies.

    Is he made of snow? Nope. Flesh and blood. Fur. Filthy fangs. Ears like an old science teacher.

    Is he related to BigFoot? No. Bigfoot isn’t real.

    Just how big is he? Ten feet? Two tons?

    The Abominable Snowman weighs about 475 pounds.

    And he is five foot seven. Crazy, huh?

    How fast is he? In 1963, he could run 30 miles per hour for roughly one city block. He gets side aches.

    Will he attack humans? Probably not. He’s real O.C.D. about poring over census figures, studying local law enforcement, quick getaways. He almost never acts on his fantasies anymore. He also has a pretty successful (nonviolent) chimney sweep operation. He hasn’t converged on a town and mangled people for about fifteen years.

    Does he have an opinion of the Loch Ness Monster?
    “Total drag queen.”

    Where does he sleep? An old canoe. It’s been insulated
    and wired for cable.

    Misc. Facts: Allergic to penicillin. Frightened of bears. Hated Night Court but still creeps up on rural cabins at night and peers in the window, hoping to find reruns on television.

  • Brave New World

    If there is a single structure in Northeast Minneapolis that captures the neighborhood’s long history and rotating cast of immigrants, it’s the flesh-colored ARCANA building at the corner of Lowry and Central. Home to several chapters of the mysterious Masonic Lodge, including the “Order of DeMolay,” the “Order of Eastern Star,” and the “Cryptic Masons,” the building also houses the eclectic and friendly Aardvark Records, the ancient Lowry Central Bowlers Supply, and Two Amigos Bazar, a hole in the wall that sells Spanish music CDs and heavy metal T-shirts.

    Throw in Moler Barber School of Hairstyling across the street—home of the seven dollar haircut, a place that has a constant throng of young black guys smoking and talking out on the sidewalk—and you’ve got a genuine culture jam. Cities can’t plan this sort of serendipity, where, among people waiting for a red light to change, you’ll see canvas bowling bags and track suits, Masonic top hats and sideways baseball caps. It only occurs organically.

    Northeast is Minneapolis’s oldest neighborhood, and, in fact, was a separate city until 1872, when it merged with the newer settlement across the Mississippi. Originally named St. Anthony, Northeast was home to Polish, Ukrainian, German, Lebanese, and Russian immigrants who worked in the grain and saw mills along the river. The area’s streets were named after the U.S. presidents, in the order in which they served, to help newcomers study for their citizenship exams. Nowadays, a more recent wave of immigration includes Somalis, East Indians, Hispanics, and Asians, along with plenty of white refugees escaping the high cost of housing elsewhere in Minneapolis.

    These new demographics are quite evident on Central Avenue, which is not only Northeast’s main commercial corridor, but also, with its abundance of colorful, hand-painted signs and wide, tree-lined sidewalks, one of the city’s best old-fashioned shopping streets. You can get an African hair weave, try on a pair of Indian shalwar, stock up at Pakistani, Indian, and Asian groceries, as well as the newer Eastside Food Co-op, enjoy a Swedish massage, or buy a statue of the Virgin de Guadalupe. As far as restaurants go, the variety of ethnic eateries is mind bending. Aside from the venerable Holy Land Bakery, Grocery, and Deli, offerings include Caribbean dishes from the Palm Court, the “Best Afghani pizza and kabob on earth” from the Crescent Moon Bakery, and authentic Mexican pasole, barbecued goat, or tacos al pastor from the charming La Tortuga.

    Of course, if you’re looking for something more solidly American, stop in for a burger at Sully’s Pub and Restaurant, which is full of old-timers and down-and-outers watching television, yanking pull tabs, and hashing over the good old days.

    —Jennifer Vogel

  • Diamonds in the Rough

    Karl Commers was first up. The earnest mail carrier went through a door behind the stage and came out a few minutes later in a comprehensively sparkly shirt, the spitting image of … James Taylor. He gets that a lot, he said, but has no immediate plans to impersonate James Taylor. Firing up the fog machine and an expression of modest greatness, he hopped up onto the stage and let loose the voice of a sixty-four-year-old megastar in less-than-perfect acoustical circumstances. About sixty people were trying to reconcile James Taylor’s face with Neil Diamond’s voice. “Kentucky Woman” turned the trick.

    Commers, a local Neil Diamond impersonator, took the stage at the Withrow Ballroom, over in Hugo, just north of Stillwater, as one half of a double Diamond extravaganza. The other Diamond was Theron Denson, from West Virginia, who is known in the business as “Black Diamond.”

    “He starts right on time. He’s got the mannerisms down. He’s good,” Denson observed. A natural raconteur, the Black Diamond interspersed his back-story with gracious comments about his co-Diamond, as Commers lit up the stage with the big-star arm sweep and foot stomp that white people recognize as dancing.

    Since he was eleven years old and singing in his church choir, ladies who knew were telling Denson he sounded just like Neil Diamond. “Eventually I started wondering who this Neil Diamond guy was. I thought he must be someone in our church,” said Denson. “I felt pretty bad when I found out he was a forty-five-year-old white guy. My mom tried to make me feel better. She said, ‘Honey, don’t worry, you don’t sound like him.’ A few years ago she admitted, ‘You really did sound like him.’ God has a sense of humor, you know.” A churchgoing boy, Denson accepted the gift and went out and bought The Jazz Singer. It was no Donna Summer (his favorite artist), but he came to appreciate the way the lyrics touched people.

    In 2000, Denson was fired from his job at the Marriott for singing to the guests—the guests loved it, the management did not. “As I walked out to my car, I thought, This is between God, Neil Diamond, and me.” Since then, he’s made the Black Diamond Show his full-time gig, making calls, pounding the pavement, and memorizing the lyrics to at least ninety songs during the day, and cracklin’ rosie at night. “I didn’t work much on mannerisms because I’m probably never going to fool anyone with looks. It’s all about the voice. In fact, in my shows, I sing other songs—Beatles, Elton John. People don’t think I’m impersonating John Lennon. They come up and say, ‘Oh, that’s what the Beatles would sound like if Neil Diamond sang it.’”

    The Black Diamond Show debuted at a birthday party and is now a national act with eight to ten performances per month. His resume includes a fundraiser for John Kerry, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Show, an opening slot for the Village People and, oddly, an Elvis impersonation contest with three hundred Elvises. And one Neil. Denson was recently contacted by Oprah’s O magazine and The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

    When he played Hugo, Denson was hoping to at last meet the real Neil—both were scheduled to play St. Louis at the same time the following month. “He”—the real Neil Diamond—“has a really gracious attitude toward impersonators,” according to Denson. “He thinks it’s kind of weird that people want to imitate him, but it’s flattering, and he acknowledges that it helps keep his music alive.”

    Both Denson and Commers admit that meeting their muse would be huge, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. Vegas is. “Ultimately I’d like to bring my show to Las Vegas or Branson, Missouri, or Atlantic City,” said Denson. Commers totally agreed. According to Denson, Vegas’ current resident Neil Diamond impersonator draws nightly crowds at fifty to sixty dollars per ticket.

    As Commers wound up his first set, Denson slipped backstage to get into character—that is, into a purple shirt that seemed to be made of tinsel. With hardly a missed beat, the white Diamond exited stage left, and the Black Diamond fought his way past a fog machine to lay down “Holly Holy.” Being a relative newcomer to the world of cubic zirconia, Commers kept one eye on the Black Diamond as he told me about his mail route (Brooklyn Park), his initial success doing Diamond (at karaoke bars), and his first Neil Diamond tribute show (a little over a year ago, at Arizona’s in Shakopee). “It was three hours long with forty songs. It nearly killed me,” Commers recalled.

    He hopes to be able to quit mail carrying within two years and, like anyone contemplating a career change, he’s gone back to school—“I’ve been to the College of Neil Diamond. Study, study, study.” Not only does Commers listen to Diamond’s music, he studies videos of the Solitary Man and other impersonators. Noting how Denson jumped off the stage and worked the crowd, pointing, reaching out and touching, Commers added, “I get out into the audience more in my second set.” He figures he studies the facets of Diamond at least an hour per day, sometimes while he’s walking his route.

    Vocals are his ticket, but sartorial styling also helps. Diamondwear is not readily available off the rack. Commers bought two Calvin Klein shirts and painstakingly glued sparkles on them, one bling at a time. “It took two hours per shirt.” He figures if he’s going to do Diamond, he’s going to do it right—“I’m putting everything into this.”

    Commers and Denson found each other on a website dedicated to Neil Diamond, www.soultones.com. They arranged this Diamond doubleheader after a year of long-distance correspondence, but met in person only a few hours before the show. Denson took the Greyhound from Charleston, West Virginia, to St. Paul, a twenty-four-hour trip on a good day. But it was not a good day—the bus broke down twice en route.

    The consummate professional, the Black Diamond left the dust of the road backstage. He was in his element. (“I came all the way from West Virginia to party with you tonight!”) The audience was warmed up; some were dancing. Denson started in low and gravelly, but by the refrain, at least fifty-nine off-key voices joined in at top volume—Sweeeeet Car-o-line, bah bah bah. Good times never seemed so good (so good so good so good).

  • The Light Here

    Asha listened to the knocker fall against her door again and flipped onto her stomach, wiping her nose on the couch cushion as she turned. She was wearing the unwashed green robe she’d been using as a housedress since November. The robe had begun to stiffen, especially at the bottoms of the damp sleeves, which triple soaked whenever she triple-washed her vegetables. Her hands were chapped and gnawed and smelled of onion. In September, when Asha was thirty-six years old, she’d broken off with James, and in November she’d moved to Minnesota. To study botany, she’d told her friends, but really it was to get away from everything James; like the ocean he had permeated the buildings and the air for miles inland, and she wanted to be someplace that never smelled like salt, someplace with a long memory of frozen winter faces and decorum, someplace that had never heard her scream.

    The knocker could only have been Bean from 3A. She’d met him by the snack machine in the laundry room. Bean had recently broken his television, and in exchange for being her only visitor and weekly grocery shopper, she’d given him control of her remote. Bean was twenty-nine and played hip and dumb and therefore was, Asha figured, a good influence.

    “Nobody’s home.”

    “You know what time it is, Biznatch, so hurry it up. Crimebomb is on and I brought ice cream.”

    “It’s open.”

    Bean threw himself against the door and fell into her living room, a pint in either mittened hand. One jean leg was tucked into a white moon boot; the other dragged snow on the wooden floor. His coat was open and he had on the satin yellow shirt she’d advised him never to wear in public. He didn’t look her in the eye. Self-sabotage ran in the building.

    “I was called before the committee today. They say there’s a seven-year limit, even if you change your thesis multiple times. What a foul practice.”

    “And you wore that shirt because … ”

    “The shirt is irrelevant because I forgot to take my coat off until practically the end when they were asking me to leave. Then it came in handy because I looked lavish and cheap and out-of-place all at once, just like you said. The salad ready?”

    “Finished ten minutes ago.”

    “I hope you did the onions last. Otherwise the zing goes missing and the chop salad becomes more of a nudge.”

    “Check.”

    Bean was a master’s student admitted to the university at the behest of his father, a day trader who had given the money to replace the clouded windows of the cafeteria. Bean had begun his studies convinced that the secrets of the platypus could offset modern infertility. “Mammals are mammals, right? One hole in the platypus carries urine, feces, and eggs. It’s ingenious. Once humans are laying eggs, man, everything else will be solved.” He’d been forced to abandon his thesis, he conjectured, because Asha and the rest of her sex weren’t as practical as he’d been led to believe. After several thousand hours of televised crime osmosis, a new thesis had emerged. Bean theorized that since most of the prison killings he’d seen had occurred in the laundry room or shower, the murder rate could be substantially reduced with an every-other-week washing routine. Today he’d blamed his lack of evidence on the county prison, which when pressed had offered only a control group.

    “How could I possibly have conducted research without an experimental group? It’s like the committee wanted me to fabricate results. Nobody cares about ethics, these days, man. Or inmates for that matter.”

    Bean wasn’t the worst person in the world to have TV dinners with, but his lips made an “O” before each forkful, so he always looked like he was going to talk. Asha had never interrupted the possibility. She regretted that now.

    “Asha, come outside or something.”

    “I can’t. It’s too cold.”

    “It’s going to be cold for months. Aren’t you sick of it in here?”

    “Are you going to stop buying my groceries?”

    “I’ll still buy them. But I feel guilty.”

    “You aren’t keeping me indoors, Bean. You’re just helping me eat something other than vending-machine food.”

    “You know what I mean.”

    “Bean, I’ve tried, okay? But I cried just chipping the ice away from my windshield. Then the tears froze on my face. Everything is too hard here.”

    “Put on my coat and my gloves and my hat and my boots. You won’t even believe how happy being outside’ll make you. We’ll just get some coffee. Then I promise we can come back.”

    Asha gave in, simply because she lacked the resilience to fight, and trudged in the snow behind Bean. Her family and friends were still on the Atlantic; none of them knew she lived in a one-bedroom apartment overlooking nothing but a bus stop and that her windows rattled every twenty minutes during the day from the bus and all night from the wind; she’d told none of them she was almost out of money, or that she couldn’t focus without a horizon at her window, and no one had remarked on any emptiness in her voice or asked her if anything was missing. She’d come here to grow into someone else, but the people here had no idea that she existed and couldn’t help her change.

    Asha took her eyes from her feet to gauge her distance from Bean, and slipped on a sheet of ice. She felt a scrape to her forehead, and heard a moan not unlike her own. Beneath her face the ice was bleeding; someone invisible was hurt.

    When she was six years old, her family had moved to a high-rise apartment a few blocks from the ocean. She’d waited every night until the sky got so murky she couldn’t make out where it met the sea. When the water and sky were one, she could sleep, knowing her family was grounded in one holy place, and in the mornings when she woke she could see gulls pecking in the sand. Here it felt so dark from her window that there was nothing but to let everyone she’d known endlessly fall.

    Asha reached up to touch her face. She was embarrassed, and her blood accused her from Bean’s stained mitten. He didn’t know she’d fallen; winter had absorbed the sound, and she couldn’t see him from where she lay. She could feel her face chapping. She wondered if Bean had ever felt invisible, she wondered if she only felt that way because she’d lost her vision of herself. He’d be circling back for her soon. Asha didn’t want to be seen that way, a woman left bleeding and alone. She dug into the marrow of the night, steeling herself in Bean’s large and ugly clothes, and stood up.

     

  • The Journey Home

    LAKE MICHIGAN—MONDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2005

    Second Mate Patrick Pettit was in the map room as the American Spirit sailed out of sight of the Upper Peninsula and eased its way into Lake Michigan. Pettit was chatting up a visitor while hunched over a map on the drafting table, charting the boat’s course with a pencil, triangle, and plastic compass. Unlike oceangoing ships, Pettit noted, boats on the Great Lakes don’t make use of celestial navigation or Morse code.

    Like the other mates, Pettit has a first-class pilot’s license. He is a big guy with glasses, a beard, and a long pony tail the color of steel wool. He laughs loudly and often. Raised in Chicago, he grew up cruising around Lake Michigan on sailboats. He started racing yachts as a young man, and recalls the time when he was out in the middle of the lake during a trans-Superior race. “I saw one of these big ore boats out there,” he said, “and I thought to myself, that’s what I should be doing for a living.”

    By 1979, Pettit was working regularly on ore boats—“Getting paid for sailing,” he calls it. As the American Spirit made for Indiana Harbor, he had been on board for fifty straight days, and was slated for a vacation when the boat docked on its return leg, at which time he planned to jump on a plane for his winter place in Florida.

    We were standing near the windows in the pilothouse, staring down at the waves boiling up around the deck, when Pettit observed dryly, “That water temperature’s forty degrees. If you go overboard out here, by the time we get the boat turned around to come back for you, you’re a goner. You probably aren’t going to drown, strictly speaking. What will happen is first you’ll go numb, then you’ll get a little giddy and you’ll lose all feeling and go into shock, and then your heart will stop. That’s what you call a very slow way of committing suicide.” I don’t believe these words were meant to scare me exactly, but rather to impart a simple fact of Great Lakes seamanship. Either way, the scenario Pettit described sounded almost comforting compared to straight-up drowning.

    Once the boat was out on the lake and socked in by fog, I ventured down to the galley to grab a snack and see if I could catch up on the news. A couple of crew members were engrossed in an Eddie Murphy movie, however, so I perused the modest library in the lounge. There, tucked in among the paperback thrillers, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and a copy of Milton Berle’s B.S., I Love You, was a hardcover edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The book, which was missing its dust jacket, didn’t appear to have ever been read.

    As was often the case, things were a lot more interesting below deck. Under the American Spirit’s engine room, there are innumerable dark and noisy labyrinths that spiral downward via a series of narrow catwalks, staircases, and tunnels—four cramped and infernal layers tucked away in the bowels of the ship. Storm tunnels run the length of the boat, along with a system of massive, automated conveyors (some of the belts are more than a quarter-mile long and nine feet wide) designed to unload taconite from the thirty-six ore hatches lining the deck. I spent an hour or so exploring this netherworld in the company of head conveyor man Mike Kruse, a guy who spends much of his time on board covered with ore dust. Considering the noise of the machinery and the congested atmosphere of the hatch tunnels, Kruse would seem to be a man facing some serious occupational hazards, yet he appeared unfazed by the weird and perilous conditions in which he worked.

    The wind was really blowing on the lake, causing the boat to rock and roll. As Kruse and I staggered along the catwalks and down into the tunnel at the very bottom of the ship, the close metal chamber echoed with ghostly creaks and moans—the strain on bolts, beams, and hatches—along with a persistent and chilling high metallic cry that sounded alternately mournful and human and like the songs of whales. I’d never heard anything like it, and when we paused for a moment to listen, Kruse smiled and shuddered. “It puts a spook in you,” he said. “There are guys who don’t like to come down here.”

    All the way down, at the very bottom of the hull, there is an opening where you can see the boat’s bow thruster—sort of a propeller inside a tube. I have absolutely no idea how the thing works, or why, but right there in the bowels of the ship I peered through the opening and straight into the blackness of the churning lake. It was dark down there, and creepy, and roaring with strange noises. And I realized that if I stepped over the rail into the hole, I would get mulched up and whatever was left of me would sink into the water and be eaten by fish.

    At pretty much all times of the day or night, the engine room is the liveliest place on the American Spirit. Part of that impression is undoubtedly a product of decibel level, but there also is a sense that it serves as a communal haven for the men who work below deck. Other than those times when the boat is in port and unloading, much of the onboard action—such as it is—takes place either all the way up top in the pilothouse or down in the engine room, where the essential technical and operational gear is located.

    Tom Sufak, the chief engineer, seems to have a remarkably close and symbiotic relationship with all of his assistants, and there were always several members of the engine room crew assembled in the booth whenever I visited. Sufak has been at it a long time—he got his first boat job in 1966 and is now number three on the seniority list for the entire American Steamship fleet. Like so many of his colleagues, he seems straight out of central casting: big, scruffy, deadpan, and something of an agitator. Sufak started working on the Great Lakes as a deckhand when he was sixteen years old. “My dad had a career sailing,” he said, “and then he busted up his back and my mom had a heart attack, so I went sailing basically to support the family.”

    Sufak is responsible for all vessel maintenance and oversees the boat’s ballast tanks. He also acts as the American Spirit’s unofficial, and somewhat unlikely, social secretary, organizing the ship’s football and Powerball pools, as well as, once upon a time, softball and basketball games (these were often played on deck, but I also heard tales of the boat’s crew taking on local teams when in port). Besides those considerable chores, he runs an overworked meat smoker just off the engine room—the engine crew produces formidable quantities of jerky. “We’ve run a bear through that smoker,” Sufak said, “and in a couple weeks here there will be a deer hanging out there on the deck.” Every year, it seems, somebody from the boat manages to sneak away to the woods long enough to lay in a store of venison for the smoker.

    The chief engineer’s grandest scheme—a plan to race pigs in the American Spirit’s storm tunnels—has yet to come to fruition, but as he talked excitedly about the idea, it was clear that he had not yet given up hope.

    Later, after dinner (pizza and chicken wings and eggs Benedict), I settled into the rocking recliner in the penthouse lounge and tried to read a collection of William Trevor’s stories. The boat lurched and heaved through the waves, which seemed to grow larger by the hour. The clouds had lifted and we were treated to a full moon that illuminated waves crashing over the bow and rolling down the deck. The spectacle got to be mesmerizing after a while, like watching fireworks. I sat there until the early hours of the morning, waiting for the next big wave to explode off the bow and shatter into millions of dazzling fragments that caught glints of moonlight as they scattered and dispersed along the deck.

    CHICAGO—TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2005

    The morning was pretty much all lake—high skies, sunshine, wind, and endless blue. Early in the afternoon, though, the spectral skyline of Chicago came into view, a jagged, extended silhouette looming in the smog on the horizon. As the boat crept slowly south, the skyline became longer and more detailed, until finally I found myself on the bow, staring out at the almost terrifying sight of the Lake Michigan shore, stretching from Chicago some thirty miles southeast to Gary. The horizon was clogged with huddles of belching smokestacks and blast furnaces from steel mills, oil refineries, ore docks, and scrap yards.

    As I stood on deck looking at this smog-shrouded vision, Stuart Klipper, the photographer who was on board with me, raised one of his cameras to his face and muttered a line from William Blake: “And was Jerusalem builded here/Among these dark Satanic mills?”

    Somewhere out there among the industrial sprawl was the Mittel Steel factory, where we would unload our 62,000 tons of taconite, a process that was supposed to take eight or nine hours and during which there would apparently be absolutely nowhere to go. Between the dock and gates of the steel factory—beyond which there was supposedly some version of the free world—were several miles of zealously guarded and densely packed factory grounds, and these were purportedly surrounded by dodgy neighborhoods. Leaving the premises, we were told, was pretty much out of the question, and as the unloading process would be loud and dusty; there wouldn’t, crew members insisted, be a whole lot to look at or do.

    By four o’clock, the industrial shoreline of Lake Michigan was splayed out like a grubby toenail before the bow of the boat. We gradually sailed out of the clear sky and into the hazy, gray atmosphere, toward our port, Indiana Harbor.

    Just as the sun was about to set, we eased into the dock channel—a sort of narrow, utilitarian canal carved off the lake to allow access to the ore piles—churning along in the muddy, shallow water between two gargantuan steel mills. With the crepuscular twilight creating wild shadows and exaggerating the color scheme of black, gray, and rust, this grimy, dystopic landscape was beyond the imaginations of even the most visionary filmmakers and harebrained futurists: an Erector set gone haywire; everywhere towering, architecturally inexplicable structures. There were flame-throwing smokestacks, giant, iron-spoked wheels, huge cables, rusted corrugated tin towers and sheds, and miles of black and ochre trellises, girders, and catwalks; blunt, phallic silos and sinister-looking networks of ducts and pipes and elevated train tracks along which crept a steady procession of piecemeal contraptions that looked like crude armored vehicles from the Mad Max movies. Despite the constant scuttling of these strange machines, there were no actual humans to be seen anywhere on the landscape.

    I wandered up to the bow to watch the early stages of the unloading and take pictures. The American Spirit is a remarkably self-sufficient operation, and much of that self-sufficiency is a product of economic necessity (downsizing and the inevitable consolidation of jobs) as well as a testament to the boat’s massive self-unloading conveyor system that carries the ore from the hatches, along the length of the hull, and then shuttles it up the boat’s two hundred and sixty-foot boom, from which it gets dumped onto piles onshore. The ship’s crew supervises every aspect of the unloading process; deck hands are floated over the side of the boat aboard a boatswain’s chair, a primitive conveyance that resembles nothing more complicated than an old-fashioned tree swing. Once on solid ground, the hands secure the boat to the dock and keep an eye on things.

    Mike Kruse runs the conveyor operation below deck, while Dave Greig, the boatswain, or deck foreman, supervises most of the activity up top. Generally, one of the mates—whichever is on watch—will be on hand as well, monitoring the unloading from the catwalk out at the end of the conveyor boom. The whole seemingly complicated process clips along at a brisk pace. The disgorgement of the more than 60,000 tons of taconite from the hatches is carefully staggered so as not to create structural strain and to avoid throwing off the balance of the boat.

    As the boatswain, Greig strolls the deck, stands at the rails, and maintains regular communication via a handheld radio, while the taconite rolls up the conveyor. Greig is among the younger crew members on the American Spirit, and he’s been working the Great Lakes for fifteen years. With his long hair and huge and elaborately tattooed arms, Greig looks like he’d be right at home working as a bouncer at a rock bar, but he grew up on the Detroit River and fell in love with boats.

    “There wasn’t much shipping going on when I got started,” he said, “and it was a lot more complicated to get a job. Those days you had to have a letter from a captain or a steamship company telling you they intended to hire you, and you took that to the Coast Guard in Ohio to get your shipping papers. There was a lot more paperwork in the hiring process. Now you can just buy your shipping papers—I think it’s ninety bucks—and there’s not even a test involved.” While this would seem to make it easier to get work on the Great Lakes, at least at the entry level, things are inevitably balanced out by the relative scarcity of jobs under present economic conditions.

    The steel mills presented an even more striking and almost fearsome spectacle in the dark, and I have no idea how many hours I spent wandering up and down the deck in a sort of mesmerized stupor. That stretch after the sun set was, I believe, the closest approximation of a conscious dream I’ve ever experienced.

    Days earlier, on the way out of Duluth, when I was told that any escape from the American Spirit would be unlikely during our time aboard, I experienced a wave of slight panic. I’m not generally claustrophobic by nature, but I am restless, and I assumed I’d be stir-crazy by the time we reached the port. The restlessness never did materialize, however, and after a time, exhausted by all the walking and visual stimuli (not to mention all the ore dust I’d inhaled), I retired to the penthouse to read for a bit and try to sleep before the boat’s departure from Indiana Harbor.

    LAKE MICHIGAN—WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2005

    The gale warnings—which go into effect when winds on the lake reach thirty-nine miles per hour—took effect shortly after the American Spirit had backed out of the channel, gotten itself turned around in the harbor, and moved out into Lake Michigan. It was two-thirty in the morning, and the wind was ripping between thirty-five and fifty miles per hour, kicking up whitecaps and causing the deck of the boat to ripple and writhe like a Chinese parade dragon. It was disturbing to sit there watching the thing buck and hump and undulate as the waves exploded again and again off the bow. Earlier in the trip, the captain had assured me that this phenomenon was not an optical illusion. The boat, he said, was designed to flex in just such a manner; it’s built sort of like a giant shock absorber to minimize structural stress. All the same, as I sat there staring out at the long deck shimmying through the waves I couldn’t help but be reminded of Patrick Petitt’s words: First you’ll go numb, then you’ll get a little giddy and you’ll lose all feeling and go into shock, and then your heart will stop.

    I tried to lie down to read, but my tiny bed was rocking and creaking like a cradle and the wind was howling through the ship’s ventilation system. The shuddering from the cavitation was so violent that everything—books, pop cans, notebooks, and pens—on the nightstand kept sliding off and crashing to the floor. I’d put it all back only to watch it go tumbling across the room again a moment later. Eventually I decided to let it all go, and I got up and wandered around the boat, to get used to the motion. Apparently, nobody else could sleep, either; I kept encountering other wobbling zombies staggering down the narrow hallways and up and down the stairs. I noticed that when things got rough, no matter the hour, guys tended to congregate in the galley to eat leftovers.

    Aside from when they’re loading or unloading the boat, I was never quite sure what most of the twenty-seven crew members did with their time. For the most part, they retreated into the privacy of their tiny cabins between meals and watches. There were long stretches out in the middle of Lake Michigan where, other than in the pilothouse or down in the engine room, I never encountered another soul anywhere on the boat.

    Because of a late start and two days of wind and heavy weather that required slower speeds, we were running behind schedule. Destinations and timetables get shuffled all the time out on the Great Lakes, and by midweek it was apparent that we wouldn’t make Two Harbors by Thursday night, when the American Spirit was slated to dock and take on another load of ore. It wasn’t even clear, in fact, that we’d be returning to Two Harbors at all; at one point our return port had been switched to Duluth, and then, eventually, Superior, Wisconsin.

    Dan Bartels, the captain of the American Spirit, was clearly the cautious, prudent sort, an apparent departure from the boat’s regular skipper, “Hurricane” Bob Gallagher, whose name was regularly invoked by crew members with a combination of good humor and head-shaking respect. Seeing as this wasn’t Bartels’ usual boat, he admitted to being a bit wary of the way the thing handled in rough water (or even under decent conditions), and was inclined to take it slowly. These thousand-footers don’t get up much of a head of steam no matter who’s at the helm; when they’re navigating in harbors or in rivers or channels they creep along at five miles per hour. Out in the middle of the lake they might crank it up to seventeen miles per hour, but tend to average between nine and fifteen.

    All day there wasn’t a thing to do but stare at the water, walk the decks, and read. I went up and watched the sun set into the lake from the deck outside the pilothouse, and then went back to my book and my rocking.

    LAKE HURON—THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2005

    By the sixth day out on the water, I’d lost all track of the calendar, and found myself sort of numbly following the progress of the boat on the maps in the pilothouse. I have a difficult time sleeping under the most ideal and comfortable conditions. Yet while onboard the American Spirit, I found myself so exhausted from the fresh air and my routine treks up and down the deck that at night I often sank into an immediate and deep sleep. I never managed to sleep for more than an hour or two, however, before being jolted awake by a sudden lurch, something tumbling across the room, or a loud and startling noise (there always seemed to be loud and startling noises). Inexplicable alarms and sirens went off at odd times, usually, I was assured, signaling some routine concern from the engine room or bridge. Even so, these clangs and whooping sounds always came as something of a shock. Because my cabin was beneath the pilothouse, I didn’t miss a thing.

    At four o’clock in the morning, we once again sailed out of Lake Michigan and into the Mackinac Straits, essentially retracing the route we’d followed on the initial leg of the trip. This time around, it was dawn when we cruised under the Mackinac Bridge—already strung with green and red Christmas lights—and by the time we moved into Lake Huron the sun had risen. The American Spirit entered the St. Mary’s River under clear skies, and the view, with a string of islands, picture-postcard lighthouses, and vivid fall colors along the shoreline, was markedly different from when we had crept through in lifting fog at sunrise a few days earlier.

    It was also startling to go through the locks at Sault Ste. Marie in daylight, under bright sun, after making our first pass in the dead of night, when the place was virtually abandoned and eerily quiet. During the day, the locks bustled with activity, with boats of various sizes queued up for the various slots and people milling about and strolling the footpaths along the U.S. side of the St. Mary’s.

    All day we’d been crossing paths with other boats coming and going. Traffic is heavy on the Great Lakes late in the season, and there always seemed to be at least two or three other vessels popping up on the American Spirit’s radar screen. Everybody is in a race to lock positions on docking and unloading slots, because if too many boats get ahead of you, you’re likely to either spend a good deal of time waiting or get dispatched to another port altogether.

    The American Spirit, originally slated to pick up a new load of taconite in Two Harbors, had experienced several itinerary changes since leaving Duluth, and now, from Sault Ste. Marie, we were once again supposedly heading back exactly the same place we’d started. The scheduling was, as I said, all very fluid.

    Back out on Lake Superior, the wind came up again, and the boat labored through choppy waves. After sunset, I walked laps on the deck, waddling into the wind that inflated my jacket. For the first time aboard the American Spirit, I strapped on headphones and cranked up the volume on my MP3 player to drown out the wind. The first song when I hit “shuffle” was Wilco and Billy Bragg’s take on Woody Guthrie’s “Airline to Heaven,” which was exhilarating and perfect; I felt that with a good running start and a ecstatic leap into the air, the wind would have carried me miles out over the lake.

    I finished my three miles to Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” and then went back up to the penthouse to rock and read through the night, as the American Spirit continued to heave westward across Lake Superior.

    LAKE SUPERIOR—FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2005

    I sat up all night, alternately reading and staring out into the darkness, at the pumpkin-glow of the hatch lights running down both sides of the deck.

    The sun rose on a hazy morning, and the deckhands were outside winterizing the boat, covering the winches with bolted sheet-metal boxes, in preparation for the onslaught of ice that would come in another couple of months. With the shipping season now extending well into January, boats on the Great Lakes require constant assistance from icebreakers in stretches of shallower water—in the Mackinac Straits, for instance, and the St. Mary’s River. At the tail end of the season, and also early in the spring, ships can spend hours, even days, stuck in the ice waiting for Coast Guard icebreakers. There have been occasions in recent years when four or five freighters were trapped in the ice of Whitefish Bay, waiting to enter the locks at Sault Ste. Marie.

    As things eventually sorted themselves out, the American Spirit would return to port in Superior, but after taking on fuel in Duluth. We approached the port late in the afternoon, under low skies and a light mist. Duluth, huddled on the hillside with the Enger Tower rising high above the city, is a marvelous-looking place when viewed from out on the lake. The Mackinac, a handsome Coast Guard vessel being prepared for retirement, was docked in the harbor, and crowds of people lined the break wall under the Aerial Lift Bridge at Park Point. It seemed quite a large crowd for a Friday afternoon in late October, but, apparently, people always turn out to greet the ships in Duluth.

    “We used to go out and throw them candy,” Bartels said. “But it just seemed to confuse people more than anything else—they’d be ducking and covering themselves; I guess they didn’t know what the heck we were doing, so we pretty much gave up on that.”

    As the American Spirit idled at the fuel station in Duluth, Stuart Klipper and I said our hasty goodbyes to the ship and crew—most of the guys were bustling around preparing for loading or holed up in their cabins, so there was something of a feeling of anticlimax to our departure—and hauled our gear down the gangway. Pam Samways, the wife of Randy Samways, the first mate, was waiting for the boat’s arrival and volunteered to give us a ride to dock six, on the other side of the harbor, where we had parked our car a week earlier.

    Pam was in high spirits, and looking forward to having her husband home for Christmas for the first time in twelve years. Crew members are allowed to bring family onboard for the occasional trip, though, so the Samways haven’t always been separated at the holidays. “We’ve celebrated plenty of Christmases on the boat,” Pam said. “That’s always been fun—we’ve had a tree, opened presents, the whole bit—but it’s going to be so nice to have Randy home. It’ll almost be strange.”

    When we pulled away from the fuel dock in a sport utility vehicle that felt cramped compared to our cushy quarters on the boat, the deck of the American Spirit was bustling with activity as the crew readied for another 62,000-ton load of taconite and another week-long stretch across the Great Lakes.

    For me, the trip had been one of constant surprises. I hadn’t known what to expect when I’d climbed aboard. There had been plenty of vague fears—of seasickness, restlessness, claustrophobia, drowning in the middle of the Great Lakes, drowning in the middle of my life—and I was thrilled that not a single one of those fears had materialized. For a week I had lived without all the things I had come to believe I couldn’t live without, and I felt newly balanced. The boat had afforded me solitude and engagement in equal measure, a routine in which the wholly familiar and the absolutely unfamiliar had been in perfect proportion. I’d spent my time on the lakes ceaselessly rolling, yet it wasn’t until I set foot back on solid ground that I sensed a wobbling beneath my shoes.

    I thought of something the steward, Mark Hosey, had said to me in the galley a couple of days earlier. “I don’t know if anyone really starts out thinking this is going to be their life,” he said. “But it grows on you. After thirty-one years I’m still blown away by the things I see all the time. People don’t realize that one-fifth of the world’s fresh water is sitting right here in the middle of America, and I don’t think you can truly explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it how incredibly beautiful it is.”

     

  • The Once and Future Past

    A lot of people think they should envy Nancy Gross. Her job is to make sure that the shop at Walker Art Center is arrayed with ultra-gorgeous and ingeniously designed things—things that, above all, you’re unlikely to find elsewhere. “When you say you’re a buyer, people think it’s glamorous, like you just run around and shop all day,” she said. In fact, “buying for retail is part art and part science, a combination of creativity, analysis, and people.” Gross believes that she inherited a knack for the business from her parents. During her childhood in Detroit, her father was a buyer for Ford Motor Company and her mother a model for Hudson’s, in the days when department stores had tea rooms and runway shows.

    One might imagine that a fair number of the items hunted down by Gross and her staff would end up in her home. Instead, though, she leaves them at the Walker Shop, a sort of living room-away-from-home for her. “I see a product here from birth to death,” she said, referring to the incoming, testing, pre-peak, post-peak, and outgoing phases of its life cycle. “I live with it here, so I don’t want to have it in my home.”

    Gross’ classic 1910 Minneapolis four-square, which she shares with her husband, Ron Fergle, and their two-year-old son, Elliot, is furnished almost entirely with antiques. Portraits of her great-grandparents hang over the fireplace. A shortwave radio from the 1920s stands in one corner of the dining room, and in the living room, an icebox serves as a bar. Elliot rides a tiny, weathered wooden trike. What’s unusual about Gross and Fergle’s antiques is that virtually all of them, right down to the copper washtub in the hallway, were once used by family members; they were cared for, preserved, and passed on. Though they’re not necessarily precious or rare, they are meaningful. Gross’ great-grandfather—the man above the fireplace—was a coal miner in Pennsylvania who fathered eight children and died young; she describes her parents as “Depression-era savers” (another trait she says she inherited).

    While her home serves as a living record of a family’s history, there are some modern touches, especially in a recently built addition designed by Fergle, who is an architect. The pair splurged on the kitchen, even installing his-and-her sinks, because they both love to cook. And the marble floors in the back hallway became a labor of love for Fergle, who selected, cut, and laid the tiles himself, carefully considering the interplay of their lines with the room’s refurbished leaded-glass window and a salvaged radiator that could be a minimalist sculpture. The overall result is strikingly simple, just shy of stark. Ultimately, it’s not so surprising that this home is furnished with things that are not just familiar, but lovingly worn. Back at the Walker, Gross has the whole day to contemplate the cutting edge.—Julie Caniglia

  • Bukowski in the House

    It’s one month and counting until the Twin Cities release of Factotum, the Minnesota-made film based on a semi-autobiographical book by Charles Bukowski. Since filming of Factotum wrapped late in the summer of 2004, anticipation in the local film community has been eclipsed by other higher profile, more star-studded projects—with the fall release of North Country and last summer’s giddiness about the St. Paul filming of Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, it’s not surprising that the relatively low-key Factotum fell off a few radar screens. But since the film’s mastering, earlier this year, Factotum and its stars—Matt Dillon, Marisa Tomei, and Lili Taylor—have started picking up accolades. The film was warmly received at its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last May and was later selected for the Sundance Film Festival, where it will screen this month.

    Locally, the Twin Cities release of Factotum kicks off with a preview screening, hosted by Lili Taylor, at Walker Art Center on February 3. It opens elsewhere on February 24. When they finally see it, Minnesota filmgoers likely won’t be following Factotum’s job-jumping, binge-drinking, womanizing protagonist as closely as they do its characterization of their home state. After all, while Bukowski’s book was set in Los Angeles, the movie version was adapted for a Minnesota setting. The actors speak in the local patois, for example, and one day soon, a jury of Minnesotan film fans will submit its decision on whether that makes the natives look as goony as some thought it did in 1996’s Fargo (which was made by Minnesota natives, unlike Factotum).

    Film boosters were successful in luring Factotum’s Norwegian director and New York producer here, at least in part, because of our surfeit of dumpy buildings. Location manager Shelli Ainsworth, a local, sought out area relics—places she likens to “skid row”—to help paint the film’s vintage, slum-bunker aesthetic. Bars, of course, house many of the film’s key scenes, and Ainsworth put them at Nye’s and Cuzzy’s in Minneapolis, as well as the Dubliner in St. Paul, all of which feature an atmosphere similar to that found by Mickey Rourke’s character at Los Angeles’ the Golden Horn in Bukowski’s 1987 film Barfly.

    In Factotum, Matt Dillon plays yet another incarnation of Barfly’s main character, Henry Chinaski, the self-styled writer and drunk at the center of four Bukowski novels. Dillon’s version of Chinaski hops between blue-collar jobs at such Minnesota mainstays as Green and White Taxi and Island Cycle Supply, and makes his home, appropriately enough, at Hennepin Avenue’s ramshackle Fairmont Hotel (made famous by the Tom Waits song, “9th & Hennepin”).

    Jim Stark, Factotum’s New York screenwriter and co-producer, thinks the film is something of a time capsule for all these old buildings, many of which find themselves at risk of being bulldozed or refurbished into condominiums. Stark, a big Waits fan, was particularly passionate about capturing the Fairmont. “Look at this place! It’s almost gone,” Stark said, with feeling. It was the summer of 2004, and he was standing on Ninth Street just outside the old hotel as scenes for the movie were being filmed inside. (Within weeks of the project’s completion, a giant orange sign appeared along the Fairmont’s Hennepin Avenue façade, announcing that it soon was to be renovated.)

    Many concessions were made to adapt Factotum to its new Midwest digs. For example, in the book, Chinaski takes a job as a janitor at a Los Angeles newspaper, where he’s assigned the task of polishing a brass rail. In the movie, however, because the scene was shot at St. Paul City Hall, Dillon instead finds himself polishing the highly visible Vision of Peace statue, which depicts a Native American. And, of course, Bukowski’s version of Chinaski wasn’t fluent in the dialect of our North Star state, nor did he work a stint at the Gedney Pickle Factory in Chaska.—Christy DeSmith