Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [21]
Sammy Good had been given a record player for Christmas—yes, the Goods celebrated Christmas, their house beautifully decorated with colorful outdoor lights and blinding white angels with trumpets. The coolest thing about having your dad working at a department store was that you got all the greatest, newest gadgets first—the first Admiral dryer with separate settings for different clothing, the first Westinghouse frostless refrigerator, and the first Silvertone reel-to-reel tape recorder (which was my gift from Santa that Christmas).
When the winter snows subsided in May of ’64, Sammy moved his stereo out to the screened-in back porch along with some 45 rpm records. The label on the record said “MOTOWN.” Each record had one song on the front and one on the back. Motown had many labels and artists, including the Miracles and the Marvelettes, the Vandellas and Little Stevie Wonder. Sammy said they all lived near us, in Detroit, a place we knew from driving to Tigers ball games and movies at the Music Hall Cinerama.
We would look across the yards and see him on the back porch every day after school, playing his Motown records and… dancing. We had seen this kind of dancing on TV, on American Bandstand and Shindig. But we had never seen it in person. And there he was, dancing up a storm, in a world of his own, Sammy Good’s Afternoon Dance Party, Live from Lapeer Street.
This created enough curiosity among the rest of us boys in the neighborhood that we would wander over to watch and to listen. The music was catchy, but it seemed exotic, almost… alien.
And thus it was the sounds of Motown and their girl groups that outed Sammy to the older boys who knew exactly what his deal was. He soon began to feel the occasional shove or bump or trip in the hallway at school. And that only intensified. But Sammy’s dance party carried on. A bloody nose wasn’t going to stop in the name of love.
Sammy invited us in one day, something we didn’t expect. The older boys in his age group, the seventh and eighth graders, usually wanted nothing to do with us unless we were needed to fill out two teams for a game of baseball. Sammy showed us his stack of records and some fan magazines that had pictures of the singers and groups. It was a foreign world to us younger boys, but for Sammy it was Dreamland. As he would tell us about this land of Oz called “Motown,” his hands would make these exaggerated motions, as if they were catching air and waving it like streamers, so that we would understand not just its importance but also its beauty. And if we didn’t, we’d be dismissed with the quick flop of the hand, as if his wrist had gone into instant catatonia. “Shoo, shoo, you li’l brats,” he would say when we were too stupid to understand what he was conducting. He tried to school us on what it all meant, how it was all about “the beat” and “the look” and “the style,” and why everything was “fabulous” to him.
So whenever we heard the music we would come running over to be part of his dance party. No girls were allowed, which was just fine with us. Soon he had us dancing with him and with each other, and probably around the time he brought out his mother’s rouge and eyeliner to show us how we could “do ourselves up,” the older boys in Davison, who had been keeping a wary eye on these proceedings from afar, had decided they’d seen enough. It was time to shut this dance party down.
The boys in town stepped up their ground assault on Sammy. He became a victim of multiple slappings, punchings, beatings, and “face washings” with dirt or snow.
Sammy did not take kindly to such treatment and would always fight back, something that seemed to catch his fellow junior high students by surprise. First, he would go right for their eyes, like a cat trapped in the wild. He was serious about gouging them right out of their sockets. He was always able to get his longer-than-normal nails implanted into their cheeks and he would