My cousin dragged me to Detroit to meet his fiancé and for some reason—ill or well-intentioned, I’m not sure, though sureness is what I’m seeking—they paid for my flight from Seattle where the rosemary shrubs in front of craftsman homes were imparting a Sunday roast odor to my entire block, potent enough to penetrate into my illegal basement studio but not strong enough to prevent me from this visit to Detroit, his fiancé’s hometown. I’m loathe to travel more than 100 miles from the Puget Sound (the marine layer lies over my frantic brain like a weighed blanket, soothing, cozy) and consider all else, including California and New York, to be flyover country but my cousin is suspicious. We’re not close yet he’s always trying to create or fabricate or force a sense of closeness. He’s a spy, I’m certain. A former Staten Island Assistant DA who suddenly learned Farsi for some vague legal purposes and now spends time in the Gulf doing “legal” work.
We had dinner in a booth made from the repurposed bench seats of an old Dodge truck. High-end bar slop. $24 burgers with a cheese I can’t pronounce. Then, because he knows I like the 80s, was born in the 80s and have some intense nostalgic-psychologic-pathologic ties to the 1980s, a 1980s of the mind, America rising triumphant from a tumultuous 1970s of Carter and crises, the Commies crumbling behind their wall, the unipolar moment about to crown out of the 90s birth canal like a longed-for prince destined to bring glory to the American bloodline. Because he knows this—through elliptical, faux-friendly questions and other, less scrutable means—he and his fiancé (let’s call her Bridgette; this isn’t her real name but I see no need to further endanger my privacy and freedom by using her real name and Bridgette is close enough; it doesn’t share many letters with her real name but has the same texture, I assure you) took me to an 80s pop revival performed by the local symphony. A nice gesture? A ploy?
Orchestra seating. Three singers trot out. A brunette in a sparkly bodysuit starts singing Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” and despite my concerns—deep and valid—I’m moved. Because Cher looks like my mother? Like my mother did in the 1980s: wild dark curly locks, pale skin, and risqué outfits? Or because I can see how much energy and sweat the main singer is committing to the performance despite the half-empty hall and the bored looks of the violinists behind her? This was my mother’s divorce anthem. What was my father’s? Did he have one? Will I ever have one? I’d need to get married to get divorced and to get married I’d need to date someone. Could my cousin, with his NSA connections and clandestine training and acumen, set me up?
I side-eye my cousin. His seat is next to the aisle, to my right. His fiancé is to my left. Why am I between them? He’s half Persian. She’s half Syrian. I’m—well, that isn’t relevant here. But I’m between them. A symbol? The US weighing whether to support Iran, Obama with his nuclear deal, reproachment to exterminate ISIS? Or Bush and Trump courting the Arabs, the Saudis? Here’s a World Cup, a Kentucky Fried Chicken, 78 tanks and nine destroyers now give us some oil.
The Cher cover ends. The singers bow. I ask my cousin: “So if you’re merely a lawyer now, what sort of cases do you represent? In what sort of court do you argue or defend?”
He tilts his head at me pretending he can’t hear me over the applause.
“Why Detroit? Are you trying to make comparisons between my pitiful career and interpersonal and romantic failures and our deindustrialized heartland?” I ask. The next tune is starting. “Take My Breathe Away” by Berlin from the Top Gun soundtrack. “Isn’t this auspicious?” I ask. “Hm. Top Gun. Tom Cruise. The nexus of Scientology and Hollywood charm and American militarism and who do we find, eh, standing smack dab in the middle of this intersection? In the video for ‘If I Could Turn Back Time,’ wasn’t Cher on an aircraft carrier?” I say all this to prove to my cousin I’m not some rube, some civilian he can dupe. I’m capable of making the necessary connections. I press my pointer finger into the meat of my cousin’s shoulder to drive the point home.
I lean back and let the ballad wash over me as my cousin is certainly chewing over my question. Sure, it’s a foolish lover’s game so why shouldn’t I, too, watch every motion? Can’t I be haunted by notions about love in flames? Maybe the 80s, my formative years, are one long melancholic divorce anthem and this marinade has made me the paranoid, perennially single mope that I am? “Wouldn’t you say so, cousin?” I ask as if he can hear my thoughts and maybe he can. Who knows what sorts of devices and technologies the CIA is cooking up with Musk and Zuckerman and co.?
Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone.” The conductor says it was one of the, THE, hits of the era. The horn section is working hard to reproduce the box office success and patriotism of the original film. Is that a bassoon? Are we further on the edge? Is the intensity hotter? What is this zone we inhabit and how is it dangerous, exactly, and for whom? I don’t know. I ask my cousin. No response. I ask his fiancé. A smile, a finger to the ear signaling she can’t hear me. “Kif halyk?” I ask her. That’s Arabic for “how are you?” I googled it before the show started. The same smile, ignorant, beatific. I like her hair. It’s black as Cher’s. Curly too. But short. I elbow my cousin and say “haletoon chetor-eh?” That’s Farsi for “how are you?” I googled this too. He’s not the only one with access to information. I’m sure he can’t hear me. The orchestra is revving up. The Cher lookalike and her two lackeys are beseeching the audience to join them on the highway to the danger zone. If I merged onto said road, what would I see? Is my mother cruising along in a red Ferrari convertible? Are her curls set free in the wind? She’s at the wheel but looking not as she did at the end of her life, tumor-riddled, irradiated, and gray beneath the hospital lights, but just after her divorce, in the 80s, flush with rage, fulminating with all the regrets and the yearnings repressed by her marriage, by the noose-tightening responsibilities of motherhood—a godlike, coked-up driver, a hippy reborn in the coals of inflation and the flames of austerity to become a greedy, hedonistic Neocon, fingers gliding along the leather wheel of her fate and mine while tapping along to these familiar tunes.
I turn to my cousin and he’s giving me a thumbs up. Does he agree? Do the spies and wonks and analysts at his beck and call concur? The song ends. Again, the singers bow. More applause. A hit-hat peals. “Is this the danger zone?” I ask my knowledgeable cousin. “Have you set a date for the wedding? Do the Iranians have nukes yet? Do you think my mother died with regrets? What will happen to Syria? Was I a good son? Will the US ever have time-traveling capability? Will anyone ever take my breath away?”
The next number is starting so I get no answers, of course. But intermission is coming up.