Week Fiction 06: The Bay City Rascals

When you move to Bay City, most people won’t tell you about Walleye MacDougal. They won’t tell you how there’s gangs of seniors who trick out their Rascals and Amigos with lawnmower blades or nail guns to terrorize and rob the young or the tourists. People up here, they don’t like to talk about the nasty parts.

Mostly they’ll tell you about Madonna. They’ll tell you how when the metal crisis was literally tearing Detroit apart in 2018, she came home to Bay City and they gave her the Key to the City. They’ll tell you how she decided to stay and how everybody from Jack White to Barack Obama to Tom Hanks would come and visit. They’ll tell you how she turned the old General Motors engine plant into the finest concert hall in Michigan and how people would come from all over the world to visit the art galleries and the nightclubs and the Madonna museums, and how so many of them got to meet her and her family.

People won’t tell you about how the old UAWs lost their health care and got mean, but they’ll tell you how Madonna sweet-talked the governor and the power company into building the biggest nuclear power plant in America right here in Bay City. And the power plant brought in new jobs and an educated workforce and fancy subdivisions that they could build without anybody stealing the copper or the aluminum or the steel.

I don’t think Madonna or anybody else thinks about the old coal plant – dirty coal, the last and greatest of its kind – that still churns out its towers of black smoke down the bay where the water turns gray as the sky and the black muck still clings to the shore and the moss grows up out of all the cracks in the road. Part of town we call Smokey. The coal plant is a place nobody’s too proud to work anymore, but it’s also a place where a no-good scrapper from Detroit could earn a paycheck and maybe a second chance.

Follow one of those potholed streets or cracked sidewalks a couple blocks up from the power plant, and there’s a bar called the Body Shop. Not all fancy like Vogue or Material over in Madgetown – hell, it used to be a real body shop. The bar owners just hung some neon beer signs on the corrugated metal walls and set up some long tables and a dance floor and a small stage on top of the concrete that still showed some spots from paint overspray. Us boys on the day shift at the coal plant never had much use for the dance floor, we just came on Wednesdays to enjoy $3 cans of Stroh’s and $6 burgers as we waited out the Rascals after work.

You gotta watch your step in Smokey, because it’s all Rascal turf. The oldsters get done with dinner around 5 p.m. and head home around 8, but in that window the streets belong to Walleye MacDougal and his gang. You work the day shift, and your after-work options are to go straight home or hole up in a bar until the seniors pack it in for the night.

It was October, and you’d think people would be talking about the Lions. But they had just come off a nasty loss in Los Angeles, and it was looking like they wouldn’t come close to repeating their 2025 Super Bowl win. Sports was the only thing about Detroit that I ever cared to talk about, but that loss was a sore subject for most. So this Wednesday night in particular, the dayside loading crew was telling stories.

Big Jim, the shift supervisor, had his foot up on the bench and his pant leg hiked. He was pointing at three little scars near his shin. Nail gun, he said. Big Jim had a wife and two kids and two years ago he said he forgot to bring home McDonald’s for dinner. His wife sent him back out, and he got his food in the drive-up before the Rascals cut him off. Old lady pulled her scooter right in front of his truck, and she wasn’t gonna move. Big Jim got out to yell, but all she did was ask if he was a doctor. They shake down the doctors for prescription pads and drug samples, and as soon as Big Jim said he wasn’t, he caught the first nail in his leg from a man he hadn’t even seen. Caught the second when he made a move for the truck and the third when he started running with the bag of food. All 350 pounds of him ran the two miles home with three nails in his leg, two of them in the bone. Thought he heard more shots but none of them hit. Best damn Big Mac he ever had.

When he got back to the car after two hours in the emergency room, they had only taken his stereo and his phone.

Somebody asked was Walleye MacDougal there. A couple of guys carry nail guns, Big Jim Said, but not MacDougal. Mean old bastard just carries a cane for when he feels like walking, but he can swing it hard enough to break bones. Big Jim knew he never would have made it home if MacDougal had been close.

I looked down at my Stroh’s with my elbows on the table and both hands around the can. Why they call him Walleye anyway?

The crew had a good laugh. Shovel don’t know nothing, does he? How long you lived in Bay City now boy? Where the hell you from? I had heard it all before. You don’t get a name like Shovel by asking smart questions. You get it when your cousin gets you a job loading coal in Smokey and you start and everybody finds out you thought your job was shoveling.

Wiry little Stump came to my defense. Maybe because he had a worse nickname – the kind you get when you lose a finger in the pulverizer. MacDougal loved ice fishing when he was younger, Stump explained, and he’d go later in the season until one year his house broke free and floated on a chunk of ice into the bay. Nobody knew he was out there, so they didn’t rescue him for two whole days. By the time they brought him in, he had gained five pounds from all the walleye he at raw out there.

Ten pounds, Miller corrected. I always heard 15, Big Jim said. Raw? I asked. Think about it, Shovel. Try to cook that fish you’re gonna melt the ice you’re floating on. Maybe they should call him Sushi MacDougal, I said. Yeah, you just try that next time you see ‘im.

I looked at Miller. So you seen him? Hell no, Miller said. None of us ever got as bad as Big Jim. Big Jim laughed. That’s ‘cause none of you have a wife who’d rather kill you than miss dinner!

But my brother did, Miller said. His brother was a family practice doctor in Madgetown, but he still lived near his parents in Smokey. A real workaholic and one day he stayed at the office a little too late. A Rascal snuck up from an alley and slashed his tire while he was at a red light. That kind of blade is an easy mod for one of those scooters, Miller said. Anybody could do it.

He stayed in the car until another scooter pulled around the driver side and smashed the window with a cane. Thick glasses and a bushy silver beard, that’s MacDougal. Wears a thick flannel coat with a hood. Asked if Miller’s brother was a doctor. They always ask that.

Miller’s brother hesitated, and MacDougal got up – he got up! – and pulled the man through the car window. Another swing of the cane, and he had shattered the doctor’s hip. They took his keys and his tablet and his access cards, and by 10 p.m. the seniors had looted the whole office for drugs and supplies. Once he could walk again, Miller’s brother moved to Florida where the old people are nicer.

I had to know: Why don’t the cops do anything? Cops are more concerned with the tourists and the Madonna fans, Stump said. Plus all the cops are union, Big Jim added, and they’re as mad as anybody that those engine workers got such a raw deal.

Miller nodded. Even if they wanted to, nobody could find MacDougal. The Rascals incapacitate everybody they attack. They always take phones first. And they got high-torque motors in those scooters, so they can zip away as fast as a car to wherever it is they go.

Right then the waitress brought our burgers and said they could start karaoke early if us boys wanted to sing. She maybe had a thing for Miller, and Miller sure had a thing for singing. Fool flashed his big movie-star smile and sat up real straight and said, I could maybe be persuaded to sing if you have a request.

Big Jim sent the waitress off to order him a second burger, then he looked at me. So what do you say, Shovel? Run into any gangs like that in Detroit? Yeah, I said, the surviving members of the 2008 Lions ride around in wheelchairs and try to steal everybody’s wins. Never catch anybody, though.

Shovel don’t like to talk about Detroit, Stump said. What were ya, Shovel, a scrapper?

Everybody knew about the scrappers in Detroit. Easiest way to get any kind of money during the metal crisis was to steal whatever you could and sell it to dealers. Government finally shut down the dealers after scrappers forced some high-profile solar company to abandon construction on their main factory and relocate to California. But it was too late. Nobody was going to save Detroit. Not the Lions. Not even Madonna.

It was more than just big corporations got hurt, too. I know about at least one sick old lady who would have gotten better if some punks hadn't stolen the copper from a phone switch in her neighborhood.

Who's a scrapper? asked the waitress as she came back with a fresh Stroh's for Miller. I know about some metal right nearby. Some kids left a beer keg out by the abandoned Speedway. Saw it sitting there on my drive in.

Ho ho, Big Jim laughed, you gonna go steal that keg from Walleye, Shovel? Finally pay that cousin of yours some rent?

Go by the plant and scrap the goddamn pulverizer while you're at it, Stump said.

Bastards. I knew I could get an easy 70 bucks out of that keg back in the day. And there were still some dealers, even in Bay City. And my cousin's kid's birthday was coming up and a paycheck was still a week and a half off and I knew exactly which video game he wanted.

I walked back to the bathroom as Stump and Big Jim were laughing it up and Miller was strutting over to the stage. Stared at myself in the mirror above the tarnished steel sink. Beneath the dusty white Consumers Coal uniform was a tall, hungry-looking kid with a close fade. Tattoos of old auto-supplier logos peeked out from under my collar – your stereotypical Detroit scrapper.

When the Lions won the Super Bowl, everybody on TV talked about bringing hope to America's most destitute city. But the Lions didn't even play in Detroit proper – they had moved to Farmington Hills years before. Detroit didn't have any hope because bastards like me stole it and somebody else melted it down and shipped it off to build nice, new cities in China. How could I even think about doing that again?

And then I heard Like a Prayer coming through the bathroom wall. I stormed out of the bathroom, threw a little cash on the table and ran out the Body Shop door before Big Jim or Stump or that damn waitress could say anything. I figured I'd rather take my chances with Walleye MacDougal than listen to Miller's God-awful singing. Madonna seemed like a nice enough lady. She deserved better.

I didn't make it ten feet before I heard the grinding whir of a circular saw maybe a block behind me. I started running for the side lot where my truck was parked, but a Rascal scooter pulled around the corner of the building and sparkled blue in the streetlight. Sitting on top was a man the size of a bear, with a long gray beard and empty silver eyes glinting through a thick pair of glasses beneath the brim of a faded Tigers beanie. He carried a long maple cane across his armrests.

I could hear the sawblade getting closer behind me, but I didn't dare look away from Walleye MacDougal. He raised a massive finger, and the buzzing stopped. The old man just looked at me for a minute, and if he could see anything out of those ghostly eyes, he could tell I wasn’t a doctor.

I just stared back at him, too scared to say a damn thing. All I could think is how sorry I was for all of it – for everything I stole and for even thinking about that keg and for stepping out on Walleye MacDougal’s street when I knew the rules. I was sorry those old engine workers got such a lousy deal and sorry not even Madonna could help them out.

Walleye MacDougal shook his head. Then he pressed forward on his little joystick and rolled right by me. I spotted two blades on the side of his chair, but he didn’t use them.

After that, I never left the bar early. I made damn sure Walleye MacDougal never saw me again. The loading crew never believed me – maybe I saw a different guy, they would say, nobody sees MacDougal and walks away.

I tell the boys MacDougal was afraid, but everybody knows it’s bullshit. My guess is he just saw a no-good scrapper and figured I wasn’t worth the effort or maybe I said all those things out loud and he forgave me. I guess Madonna had it right all along. Life is a mystery.

The Bay City Rascals by Tim Agne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://twitter.com/timagne.

Week Fiction 05: micro23

This story starts with some (presumably) hot sex and ends with me and roommate digging through five pizza boxes filled with shit. His shit. And I want to clarify here that the sex was with a girl — a hot girl — and I videotaped it. But don’t high-five me just yet.

It all started on my 23rd birthday. Twenty-three is a nasty and daunting age, and I was not looking forward to it. People complain about milestones like 30 and 40 because they want attention and they want surprise parties where everyone tells them they look young. Even if people give you shit and call you old, it’s still attention. But 23 is the year when you are no longer college-age. It’s the year where if you did everything you were supposed to do, you should have a bachelor’s degree and a full-time job and a clear picture of the future. It’s where you embrace the responsibility you spent the last decade running from and start making sensible decisions. And nobody sympathizes.

My 23rd birthday was on a Sunday in February, so I wasn’t quite old enough to make those sensible decisions when we threw a college-style house party to celebrate the night before. For example, a few keg beers in I thought it would be a good idea to slay those tequila demons left over from freshman year. My friend Heather brought the bottle for old times’ sake. She used to live in the dorms with me and Carlos (he’s the roommate I mentioned earlier).

When the bitchy Arizona sunlight hit me in the face the next morning, I wanted to keep sleeping. I thought I could do it in spite of the fact that my head was pounding and I was naked and itchy with no sheet between me and the brown and black and white striped comforter I had recently picked up at IKEA. Grown-up bedding for my college futon. I curled up and held a pillow over my head, but I still heard the door open in the next room. I still heard feet flapping on the tile floor and the bathroom fan turn on.

And I still heard Carlos’ drawn-out “Awwww, dude!”

The feet flapped louder, then there was banging on my door. I could have sworn I heard Carlos say, “Dude. Your phone’s in the toilet.”

I moved the pillow. “What?”

“Your phone. Is in. The toilet.”

My phone was indeed in the toilet, and it must have been in there a while because it had sunk all the way to the bottom. Carlos was polite enough to alert me before he took a piss, so all I had to do was reach down into the dark void at the bottom of the bowl and pull the thing out. I was just glad I had cleaned the toilet before the party.

I needed a new phone anyway – this thing was a couple years old and could barely handle its primitive e-mail app, let alone Web browsing. It took surprisingly decent pictures, though. Even low-light shots came through with sharp detail, little fuzz and only slightly muted colors. That’s why I had maxed out its storage with a 2-gigabyte microSD card.

I rinsed the phone in some clean water from the kitchen sink, and Carlos suggested we take it apart and leave it in the sun while we go get burritos. I ate about half of my carne asada and kept it down. Then we cleaned a little, played some Call of Duty and cleaned some more. I carried five pizza boxes out to the recycling (I later learned I had bought everyone pizza on my credit card). When the house was clean, we sat down and watched some basketball.

As the hangover subsided, I tried my best not to freak out about the strange girl I hooked up with the night before. I remembered her name was Candace, she was a friend of a friend of Heather’s, and she was tall with bright red pixie hair and she bit her bottom lip when she smiled at a dumb joke and she liked Mario but not Mario Kart.

And I don’t know how the hell I remembered any of that, because I sure as hell couldn’t remember what I did to charm her into coming back to my room. I can assure you that no videogame collection is impressive enough to seal the deal when you’re a lanky, shapeless dork who doesn’t dress well and whose film/humanities degree only got him a part-time job selling flatscreens at a big-box electronics retailer. Not even if it’s his birthday.

Maybe she just really liked tequila. Maybe we did body shots. That would have been cool.

The worst part was not remembering much of what happened after we went back to my room. Something happened, and whatever it was must have inspired her to throw my phone in the toilet when she left. I was worried she didn’t want me to call.

These were the thoughts racing through my head, but they slowed to a crawl as I kicked back on the couch and stared at a pair of East-Coast college teams playing some bullshit game I didn’t care about. Before long, I was nodding off.

“Holy shit! Holy fuck, Mikey, you gotta see this!” This type of outburst wasn’t uncommon for Carlos. He’d hole up in his room on the computer and then go nuts if he found a funny video or, on occasion, a nude celebrity. I knew he wouldn’t shut up until I checked it out, so I peeled myself off the couch and dragged my ass down the hallway.

Carlos’ room smelled like old laundry and made me realize I was still a little hung over. Smoothed out his comforter so I could sit on the bed, then I rubbed my eyes and looked up at his screen.

The video was dark and muddy, but you could distinctly make out a girl with bright red pixie hair, on her knees kissing and fondling the guy holding the camera.

“Mike, I think I figured out why that girl trashed your phone.” Carlos had the biggest, stupidest smile on his face.

“What the fuck, man? Turn it off!”

“I didn’t mean to, man. I was just trying to see if I could help you recover your photos and contacts and stuff.”

“Dude, it’s hard to appreciate your good intentions when you’re staring at my dick.”

Carlos looked hurt. “I’m not staring at your dick. I’m staring at the things this hot girl is doing to your dick. There’s a difference.”

I looked back at the screen. “She is hot, isn’t she?”

Carlos raised his hand.

“What? No, I’m not fucking high-fiving you.” I tried to reach across him and grab the card reader out of the USB port on his tower.

“Easy, man, you’ll damage the data. I’ll safely remove it.” I backed off, and at roughly half the speed of an 80-year-old using a PC for the first time, Carlos closed the media player and clicked safely remove hardware. He pulled out the card reader, ejected the SD adapter and gently slid the microSD card from inside. Then he held the card between his right thumb and forefinger, as if he were contemplating how such wonders could be contained on a piece of plastic half the size of a dime.

I reached for the card, but Carlos held it back, across his body from me. Then he raised his left hand. “Not until you hit this. Because seriously, that’s awesome. And I gotta be the first to high-five you. Happy fucking birthday, bro!”

I slapped him in the face. I’m not sure where that came from, but it was a hard slap. And loud.

“Ow! Dick!”

“Give me the fucking card.”

“No. You made me do this.” Carlos dangled the tiny memory card above his open mouth, dropped it and swallowed hard.

When the shock wore off, I said as calmly as I could “I hope you die of mercury or lead poisoning. And when you do I’m going to cut that memory card out of you.”

I needed that memory card back. Two years of photos, most of which I hadn’t backed up, and one very interesting, irreplaceable video. I went back to my computer and did some quick research. Wikipedia said human digestion could take between 24 and 72 hours, but I couldn’t find for sure whether I’d be able to recover data from a digested memory card.

Carlos and I worked out a deal. For the next four days (I added the extra just to be safe), he would poop exclusively in the pizza boxes leftover from the party. They could cover the toilet and seemed like a big enough target. We’d keep them in a big trash bag on the back porch, and on Thursday afternoon he would sort through all the loads and find the memory card, which he would then clean, copy to a flash drive and destroy. If he felt it coming out (and God I hoped it would hurt), he had to retrieve it immediately.

The first workweek of my now-official adulthood didn’t start much different from all the weeks I’d spent goofing off since college. I didn’t work on my résumé or even read my any job e-mails. I mostly played video games and ate fast food in between three shifts at the store. I never did get that phone working, but a guy at work got me a deal on a gently used iPhone. I was thrilled when my contacts transferred over from the old phone’s SIM card. Thank God Carlos didn’t eat that, too.

I called Heather Wednesday, the day I got the new phone activated. We’ve been friends long enough that I’m always too honest with her. I told her the whole story. And then, basically, “I feel terrible about what happened, and I really like Candace, so can you put in a good word for me?” She said she didn’t know Candace, but she said she’d make some calls.

I opened on Thursday, so I was home playing oldschool Mario when Carlos got back from work. Bastard had a full-time job, so I made him promise he wouldn’t take a crap at work. In spite of his long hair, the dude looked damn near businesslike in his khakis and tucked-in shirt. I deliberately ran Mario into a Goomba.

“Ready to get to work?” he said as he reached into the grocery bag he was carrying and tossed me a thin box. It was a pair of pink kitchen gloves.

“What the fuck is this?”

“The pink ones cost a little more, but I think they benefit breast cancer. It’s breast cancer month, man, show some compassion. For tits.”

“It’s not breast cancer month, and you’re the only one who needs gloves. So I don’t give a shit what color they are.”

“Listen, man,” Carlos said all businesslike, “I have saved my shit in pizza boxes all week. Every time my stomach makes a noise, I fear I did irreparable damage to my digestive tract. And now I’m about to dig through my own shit, but I will not fucking do it alone.”

Carlos went back to his room and changed into his finest shit-digging clothes. We gloved up, hit the back patio and opened the trash bag that held the stack of pizza boxes. In retrospect, we should have skipped the trash bag. I think the shit would have dried out more and maybe aired out a little. Instead, the smell will haunt me the rest of my life.

Bastard had used all five boxes.

I took two; Carlos got three. We both got down on our knees on the concrete and started digging. And when you start breaking up and sifting through a raw piece of human shit, well, the smell just gets worse as you go. I was about to puke midway into the second log, but I thought about the 20 seconds of video I had seen and soldiered on. The only recognizable thing I found were what appeared to be some flaxseeds in the second log. Fucker must have been eating healthy.

The card wasn’t in either of my boxes, but Carlos seemed like he was really taking his time.

“Anything yet?” I asked, hoping this awfulness would pay off.

“You’re all done with those?”

“Yeah, bitch, and I’m not doing another one.”

“I’ll finish these, but I gotta go inside for a second.” We both peeled our gloves off, and I was careful not to touch my skin with the glove.

Carlos walked back to his room while I washed my hands in the kitchen sink with dish soap and all-the-way hot water. As I toweled off, Carlos strutted into the room, waving a microSD card at me from between his fingers.

I dropped the towel. “Dude, why?”

“You needed to learn a lesson. When it’s time to slap your bro five, never ever slap him in the face.”

“Oh I learned,” I said as he handed me the tiny piece of plastic. “I learned my soon-to-be former roommate is a fucked-up sociopath with a fecal fetish. I’m going to kill you in your sleep.”

“Tell you what,” Carlos said. “You go back to your room and watch that video. I’ll clean up the pizza boxes and then go get my hair cut or something. Give you some alone time with that work of art. All those film studies classes finally paid off.”

“You watched it?”

“Just once. And I didn’t copy it or put it on the Internet or anything.”

“Very respectful of you, Carlos. Let me borrow your card reader.”

Ten minutes later I was sitting in front of my computer, staring at the folder that held the video. That’s when the new phone rang. It was a local number I didn’t know.

“Umm, hey, is this Mike?”

“Candace?”

“Yeah. I just wanted to say I’m really sorry about your phone.”

“You can make it up to me. How about dinner this weekend?”

Awkward silence. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Mike.”

“Listen, the phone thing kind of ruined my week. But I’m not trying to guilt-trip you. I guess I thought turning 23 meant I would have to start acting like an adult, and I feel shitty because I’ve been acting more immature than ever.”

Silence again. I was picturing a lip bite on the other end. “Mike,” she sighed a little, “I just want to pay you back for the phone.”

“No,” I said. “No, don’t worry about that. What I’m trying to say is I want to do grown-up things with you.”

“I think whatever we did last weekend was grown-up enough. We’re kids, dude. Who gives a shit if you’re 23?”

She was right. I had already proven I was even less of an adult at 23 then I had been in college. Hell, the whole reason I thought she was cool was her taste in video games and her one-time willingness to hook up with a guy like me.

“I should go, Candace. We’re about to watch a movie over here. Call me if you change your mind about dinner, OK?

“Goodbye, Mike.”

The sad thing is, if she had said yes to my half-assed dinner date, I was ready to pop that microSD card out and swallow it myself. And, you know, just flush it when the time came. Instead, I double-clicked the video, leaned back in my desk chair and enjoyed being an immature fucking idiot for a little while longer.


micro23 by Tim Agne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://twitter.com/timagne.