It's pouring rain on a mid-Saturday afternoon in Farmington Hills, a bleary spring day fitting for the many First Communion's of the day. The windows are fogged over in the backseat of Bryan's old blue Ford Fusion, the result of car heaters that should have been retired for the season weeks ago; it's the same vehicle we drove to East Lansing, South Bend, and Ann Arbor in the years immediately following college, bouncing around from town to town, bar to bar in between benders. All five of us squeezed in uncomfortably in tight-fitting wedding dress. Scribbling these notes on computer printout paper borrowed from a Farmington gas station, strung out from a long night of travel and a frantic morning, on our way to Kegan's wedding -- the first actual wedding gathering from the original Millwood gang.
We're driving past my old law firm up in the glass Citizen's Bank skyscraper, now. "That was only two years ago," it occurs to me, thinking out loud, "but that was another lifetime." I used to drive 696 to the Coleman A. Young Center downtown, spent many work days digging through records in the dank corridors of the records room in its basement.
The longer I'm away from my hometown and the surrounding suburbs -- perhaps the further I veer from that career course -- the more this place feels like a different universe. It's been storming and thunderstorming on and off since we arrived last night, and actually since about Flint on the seven and a half hour drive south from Marquette. Always a frenetic pace, here, what with the mad soccer moms and pickup truck warriors racing like zombies all over the freeways; utterly stupefying. Narrowly avoided two accidents with the drones since I've been home already, and I don't think either faulty party had any clue of it. Always too much on the agenda for a homebody writer, too -- places to be and people to see.
Back in Millwood this morning we watched the E:60 documentary on Ryan Leaf, whose precipitous fall from Heisman contender to NFL bust and then ravenous pill addict brought up strange memories of the past. In college Leaf had led Washington State to a Rose Bowl birth against my Michigan Wolverines in 1997, the same year he lost the Heisman Trophy to Charles Woodson. Drafted second overall in the 1998 NFL Draft -- behind only Peyton Manning -- Leaf burned bridges in his first year with the Chargers in a meltdown of a rookie season. He bounced around several franchises thereafter, and the downward spiral in his personal life was a topic of close interest to me in law school, specifically, when I started grappling with my own addiction issues in the lonely cubicles of the law stacks. At one point Leaf had been arrested twice in twenty-four hours.
"My first AA meeting I walked in and sat down and said, 'Yep. You guys are all me,'" Leaf recalled in the documentary. The scenes from prison in Montana are terrifying, as an addict. "But not for the grace of god," goes an old Alcoholics Anonymous saying that I've heard many times.
It was a rush thereafter most of the afternoon. F wanted to leave by 2:15, so we showered, had more coffee, fought traffic. Powered up, put in eye drops, piled in Bryan's little Fusion. It's about a ninety minute drive out to the Schwartz Creek/Sterling Heights area, listening to Bryan's mainstream country music on the radio. Saturday traffic in the burbs, hell incarnate. Had to piss like a racehorse by the time we found the Brookwood Fruit Farm out in the middle of nowhere.
Brookwood is hidden from the highway by means of a line of oak trees and a dirt road. Like most farm areas in Michigan, it is hunting territory; hunting shacks hidden in the woods and no trespassing signs posted everywhere along the dirt road. For the wedding the barn was converted into a reception hall; the ceremony was held out beyond the pastures, in a little clearing among the blossoming apple trees. It turned into a perfect day for a wedding after all. Blue skies materialized from rain clouds almost simultaneously upon arrival, nature's blessing. Hay stacks served as church pews, with a friend strumming the guitar with the birdsongs.
Back at the barn, there's a long winding line to the bar for alcoholic beverages. Spirits and beer were free flowing thereafter, and other kicks were widely available in smoking form in front of the barn -- cigars, cigarettes, chewing tobacco, weed pens, joints. Most of my friends were some level of fucked up by the time dinner tables were called for the buffet. Most of them, too, sported cowboy hats and bolo ties, and I delighted in the discreetness their lack thereof afforded me throughout the night. I like the wallflower view, usually, meandered frequently out to the back of the barn to lay in the grass and stare into the darkening sky.
Minus my own parents, the whole Millwood crowd was there: the Fideler's, Schildberg's, Durocher's, Hodges', all the Millwood boys. In the barn and around the orchards I had several genuine conversations about how interesting it is where we all wound up -- the Millwood boys. Whenever I think about our various trajectories in life I think about "The Kids Aren't Alright" by the Offspring, one of the more popular bands amongst our gang growing up in the nineties and early aughts. In fact I mentioned it to Kegan: "at least none of us are dead or in prison". Steve expecting in Detroit; he's escaped the QL while F is now there. Biebs a part-time pilot, overeducated like me, living alone on Walled Lake. P just bought a house -- "a real straight shooter," he joked to me. B is the same old B. A wins drunkest man at the wedding. That's the crew, now, varying levels of adult boys. Not the one I remember almost daily in my writing, but the one time has wielded. Once upon a time we were innocent little Indians in the woods behind Millwood.
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