The Camp Spikehorn gang lost a chunk of its heart and soul at around 1 a.m. Detroit time on August 21, 2021.
Yeah, that’s just a few days ago as I write this. I found
out about it on the morning of his death. It was waking hours for me when the
note arrived. I was wide awake. It didn’t matter to Marc anymore. They had
already taken his body for cremation.
His soul was long gone.
I knew it was going to happen. In fact, I wrote a blog about
it last week.
I spoke to Marc Champ’s brother, Jeff, for a long time in
the hours before Marc died. Jeff said he figured Marc already was gone,
shooting the shit with dead friends and relatives. Maybe, I reckoned, he was
playing poker with Grandpa Champ. Jeff’s
a deeply spiritual man, so I don’t think he said “shooting the shit.” That’s
just my paraphrase. And Marc doesn’t mind. Still.
Actually, I had called Marc, who I knew was succumbing to a
rampaging attack, a massacre caused by liver cancer, when Jeff picked up his
cell. I was overdue for a dream come
true, perhaps, but I clung or clinged?? to hope. I’d been calling the last few
days.
His wife, Cathy, had let family know a few days before that
Marc couldn’t speak much – his mouth was painfully irritated by the disease treatment
or the damn cancer itself – but he welcomed calls.
She said just to call his number and leave him a voice mail,
and she’d make sure he heard it.
That’s what I did. One night I read him the blog I wrote
earlier in the week that focused on our Camp Spikehorn summers. That was a day
camp that Marc and Jeff and my brother, Eric, and I attended. It was on a road
behind the Grand Rapids Zoo, if I remember correctly. Of course, memories are
just dreams in past tense, a semi-wise old man told himself this morning while
pounding on this keyboard, after watching the funeral on a live stream.
Every summer, Marc and Jeff spent a lot of time with us, in
our house at 507 Elliott Street in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and, before that
they summered with us at our house at 1812 Beverly Road in Sylvan Lake,
Michigan.
That’s outside Detroit. We lived in basic post-WWII
construction there, as my mother and father had purchased their first home
outside Pontiac, where dad coached and taught at an all-Black junior high.
That was not long after WWII, and I know the young men who
my dad coached always worshiped him, one or two even coming down to visit my
dad in his last years down here in Nashville. How my parents got to Nashville
is a different story.
In this space, though, I’m talking about Marc and Jeff. How
much I love them. How much I hurt now that Marc is dead.
We had such fun as kids. Not just at Camp Spikehorn or at
Camp Optimist (we went there one summer as well….) I don’t think it was by the
zoo, or maybe it was the one by the zoo… doesn’t matter. Like I said, memories
are just dreams in past tense.
I remember my mother, gone 22 years now, as she herded the
four of us, skinny little kids, when we walked barefoot from the house on
Beverly Road to the end of the street, where it opened up to Sylvan Lake and
where the neighborhood beach was located.
If it was hot and if we didn’t whine about it, Mom would
allow us to pull off our short pants and go for a swim in our underwear. I was probably 4 back then. So was Jeff. Marc
and Eric would have been 6. I seldom swim in my underwear anymore. Probably not
politically correct, anyway.
The boys spent parts of their summers with us because their
dad, my beloved Uncle Joe Champ, had been severely injured in the Battle of the
Bulge. For you youngsters who think America’s wars were in Afghanistan and Iraq
and grandpa talked about Vietnam, as horrible as those pointless wars were, the
real hell was in Europe and Asia in the 1940s, thereabouts. And Uncle Joe
helped save the world from the Nazis. At a cost. Flamethrower fire burned his
lungs. There was a V.A. sanitarium for such-injured soldiers out in Arizona.
There also was air that was breathable out there. The air in the Detroit area
was flavored by Ford, GM, Chrysler and Packard plants.
I hear Arizona air is pretty damn filthy nowadays, seven-plus
decades later. When Grandpa Champ moved down to Nashville in the 1970s to live
with my parents, after Grandma died, Nashville’s air was good, too. “Clear and
blue as an Arizona morning,’’ Grandpa would say. Wonder how he’d describe it
now?
Grandpa Champ, who would take his son, Uncle Joe, and Aunt
Florence (Joe’s wife) out to Arizona – along with Grandma Champ – had been a
foreman on the line for Nash automobiles. But that’s beside the point. Or as a
friend once said to me: Let’s get right to the point. That friend then offers
up a great suggestion, but that’s for another day.
Anyway, while Joe, Flo and Grandma and Grandpa Champ were
out in Arizona, Marc and Jeff stayed with us. Their big sister, Michelle, must
have stayed with friends.
So, that’s where Camp Spikehorn came in. As did dune buggy
rides along Lake Michigan and trips to the Drive-In movies to see “The Shaggy
Dog” and some stuff by those intellectually challenging Stooges or that
wascally wabbit. (Oops, there goes political correctness again). We’d have a
bag of 12-cents McDonald’s greaseburgers.
What I’ve not gotten much into so far here today is Walnut
Lake, where my grandparents lived in a small house in the hollow, across the
swamp and a bog from the Lake.
We’d all meet up there in the summer as well.
Spending summer days and nights
at Grandpa and Grandma Champ's house in the hollow by the marsh at Walnut Lake,
Michigan, meant that at least half the day was at the lake. And in the evening,
Al Kaline and the Detroit Tigers were always on the radio or the old
black-and-white TV. Grandpa filled his pipe with Prince Albert in the can.
And, he’d climb from his old,
leather chair, first kicking the footstool out of his way, grab his walking
cane, and make it to the round table in the kitchen. When my grandparents died, my brother, Eric,
was supposed to get that table, by the way. Teddy took it, though. The last
time I saw him, Eric was holding me back from killing him for being evil to my
mother, who helped raise him, as well. He was just a cousin to all of us, an
older cousin, Shirley’s offspring. And, as far as we figured, the best thing he
offered us was the speedboat he kept at Walnut Lake.
Marc, Jeff, Michelle, Eric and I
would take that thing out, usually me at the wheel and throttle, and torture it
as the sun rose. I’m sure they all loved us in the houses along the lake.
Sometimes, we’d all load up in
my dad’s car and go down to Briggs Stadium, home of The Detroit Tigers. That’s
where the huge scar on my leg was produced. More on that later, if I decide to
ramble that way.
But this is a story about Walnut
Lake, about Marc, who is dead, and Jeff, who always was a joker. Michelle, who
now lives among Kentucky’s Amish, often was around, at least until she married
John, who is dead now, but was a helluva good guy. That’s not the direction
today, though.
Course, Eric and I almost always
were in Walnut Lake when Marc and Jeff were.
Cigar smoke. Or Prince Albert in
the can jammed in a pipe flavored the air in the little, square house Grandpa built
with help from my Uncle Les, Shirley’s husband. They are dead long ago, having
produced Teddy and Delores. I don’t know whatever became of those two, though I
do wish them well.
Grandpa thought he ruled the
house. Unless Grandma decided otherwise. “Now Bea….” “Well George ….”
Maybe Marc, Jeff, Eric and I would sleep out
on the back porch, screened in and not really locked. Can you imagine that in
2020? Course this was back in the 1950s and maybe early 1960s.
I’d love to be able to sleep on
my deck here in Nashville, but I don’t have a gun. The worst thing I could do
to an intruder would be spray him with skunk repellent or bust him over the
head with one of our tomato plants. Skunk repellent smells almost as bad as a
skunk, but that’s another story that I’ll likely not ever get around to
telling.
Back in the late 1950s, Grandpa
once went out into the woods, pounding pieces of timber together in the middle
of the night, as we slept on that porch.
Scared the shit out of us, as
Marc might say. Well, actually, that’s what I say. We trembled because there
was a killer … or perhaps a monster on the loose … in our eager and
impressionable minds… and he/she/it might be in those woods, among the black walnut
trees and berry bushes.
We didn’t sleep well that night.
It wasn’t until the next day, when he showed off the timber pieces over his
breakfast of pepper and scrambled eggs (mostly pepper) and kippers (sardines)
or fried perch, that we learned the truth. He had been
the monster. Laughed like hell that he’d scared us so. We laughed,
too. We all thought he was the guy who, I think they say “hung the moon.”
Whatever. He was a great man.
I have his pipes and pipe rack
here in my office. I don’t smoke any more. But sometimes I’ll smell one of
them, and it reminds me of Grandpa Champ. And Marc and Jeff. Grandma. Michelle.
Me and Eric at Walnut Lake.
After the sun set, Grandma would
take us out to the vegetable garden, where we'd dig for night-crawlers and put
them in an old cottage cheese carton filled with black soil.
The plan was that we would be
ready to get up at 5 the next morning to paddle out onto the lake and catch
bluegill, sunfish and perch. Cleaning them later at the stump out back while
Grandpa smoked his pipe. If we caught a bullhead, he’d pound a nail
in its head so he could skin it.
Grandpa would bury the innards,
hoping that Topsy, the black beaglish hound, would not dig them up, roll in
them or eat them. She did frequently. Helluva good dog.
When Topsy died, Grandpa and
Grandma got Spuddy, another beaglish dog, who (along with Grandpa) lived with
my Mom and Dad in Nashville after Grandma died. Another story. A dog
story..
I’ve told some of this story
before, I think after Al Kaline, the Tigers’ slugger died, because his heroics
had been the soundtrack when Grandpa taught me, Marc, Jeff and Eric, how to
play poker. Grandpa played for keeps. If it was matchsticks, he’d clean us out.
Play for pennies, boys? Well, Grandpa taught us how to lose with grace. If one
of us occasionally took in a decent pot, though, he’d smile. He would be glad
we’d learned enough to beat him. Then he’d redouble his efforts so he wouldn’t
lose the next hand to those “Gawd Damn Kids.”
I may already have mentioned this,
but in summers, we’d, of course, be barefoot as Huck Finn as we walked along
the path through the bog and swamp and across the oiled roads (They used to
spray oil on dirt roads back then to keep dust down in the summer. I doubt that
they do that anymore. Probably not politically correct.) Our bare soles turned
to black shortly after dawn every day and sometimes Grandma would scrub them as
we were in the bathtub at night.
Grandpa used to work, checking
people in at the beach, as he sat in his chair (he was crippled by arthritis).
If we were good, and sometimes the other boys, at least, were, he’d give us
each a dime to go into the clubhouse and buy penny candy or an ice cream cone.
It was Walnut Lake, so generally I had walnut ice cream. People tell me that
it’s pretty exclusive out there at Walnut Lake nowadays.
Back then it was a blue-collar
town and beach. Now, I think rich people, probably mostly millennial assholes
and their parents and offspring, live there with their fancy speedboats and
lack of sentiment about what that lake meant to us.
I guess I should get back to Briggs Field or was it Briggs
Stadium? Shit, doesn’t matter. It was a real ballpark. Hot dogs and beer and
Coke were sold. Maybe peanuts and Cracker Jack. No raw octopus and sake or
whatever the fuck they serve at ballparks today.
It was in the time of
double-headers, and about halfway through the second game, Grandpa Champ got
tired. I think he waited by the park, because of his arthritis. But
we, Dad, Marc, Jeff, Eric, me, would have to go get the car. Anyway, we were
parked bumper to bumper across that part of Detroit. It was before the chicken
man was blown up in Philly while in Detroit they burned the city down and Roger
Smith killed GM. (I put the chicken man in here, because Marc liked
Springsteen. If you don’t catch the reference, it’s OK. But they blew up the
chicken man’s house, too.)
From the stadium, we had to walk
across the bumpers of the cars to find dad’s white, convertible
Oldsmobile. Unfortunately, one of the cars had a broken headlight
and the sharp glass grabbed my left leg when I dragged past it. Blood spurted
like in a Peckinpah film. Nah, not really, but it bled like hell.
I think my Dad, the only WWII
infantryman who was nauseated by blood… actually, he probably saw too much of
it, caused some I’m sure, while in his late teens and early 20s … panicked. I
think they wrapped my leg in a T-shirt and we went home where Grandma and Mom
tended to it. When Dad died a couple years ago, the family gathered at
Eric’s house, where my Cousin Marc (or Maurice, as the big-city fancies in
Detroit call him) and I were drinking 12-year-old seltzer. He asked me if I
still had that scar.
I showed it to him. The sight of
that 60-year-old scar made Marc happy.
The other day, after Marc’s
earthly remains had been removed from his deathbed, I called his number again.
His voice perked me up.
“I just wanted to hear your voice
again, Marc. I love you.” Hell, I paused a second, hoping, I suppose, that he’d
pick up.
We’d talk of Camp Spikehorn and
Walnut Lake. Four skinny little boys running across hot oil to get to the berry
field or to get into the lake. Or to go fishing, if Grandma felt like taking
us.
Evenings losing five-card draw to
the old man we all worshiped.
Marc, as far as I can tell, had a
regular life, though he fought through tragedy. His war hero dad died early in
his life. A first wife died from too much of the poison that comes in bottles,
if I remember right. He had a stepson he loved who fell from high-iron while
working construction on a Florida skyscraper. A second stepson, child of his
wonderful wife, Cathy, who set up the phone and also took such great care of
her dying husband, also died.
That tragic fabric, though, never
stole Marc’s soul. God, or whatever, took care of that the other night.
Besides that, he found and created
happiness, despite the sad. He loved to play golf, sell siding and windows,
smoke cigars and taste good Scots whisky. His brother and sisters loved him.
So did his cousins, who saw him
infrequently, but when we did, our hearts turned us into those skinny kids from
all those years ago.
And, especially, he had a second
wife, Cathy, who gave him all the love he could handle and missed out on
earlier in life. And, to see them together, you knew that love was reciprocal.
Cathy’s grandchildren became his, too.
And he finally retired simply to spend time babysitting those kids. At the
funeral service, one of his stepchildren talked about how Grandpa Marc made
sure he could watch, through a window, the kids playing in the backyard when he
was confined to bed.
The old scar on my leg sometimes
itches. When scratch it, I always think of Marc.
At least I have my memories, my
dreams in past tense.
No comments:
Post a Comment