Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [23]
“Sissy!” “You fight like a girl!” “Go put on your dress!” were the words they left Sammy with as Mr. Dietering helped him up. Sammy didn’t want any help. He limped back to his house. I was pleased that my cousins had taken care of him.
My dad was not so happy. “You can’t use your cousins to defend yourself. You need to learn to fight. I’m sending you down to the Y for boxing class.”
What? No! Oh God, I’d rather have taken my sisters sledding—in July! Why was I being punished? Sending me into downtown Flint so Flint kids like the Mulrooneys could beat me up—legally? I begged my mom to intercede.
“Whatever your dad thinks is best” was all she could muster. I can swear to you I had never heard her utter those words before because, in our house, it was always what she thought was best, and Dad concurred with that line of authority.
All this because I had to come home crying! Because I saw the Mulrooneys’ car there! I wanted revenge. I knew what they would do. The only thing that would have made me happier is if they would have also smashed every single Supremes record in his collection.
About three months later, around ten o’clock one night, there was a knock on our front door. It was Mr. Popper, a large but soft-spoken man who lived across the street from the Goods.
“Frank, the Good boy’s gone missing. His parents think he mighta been kidnapped. Taken out to the woods. They called the police but we thought we’d go searching for him. Can you come?”
“Sure,” Dad said, though it was already past his bedtime. He went and got our large flashlight and a baseball bat.
Within minutes most of the men from the neighborhood had gathered on our lawn, each of them with flashlights and sticks or clubs and wearing the kind of hunting jackets one wears in the late Michigan fall. My sisters and I, already in our pajamas and in bed, came out to the living room and watched this scene unfold. What was going on? Kidnapping?! We got instantly frightened. It was the only crime against a child short of murder that they would arrest you for in those days. There was no such thing as “child abuse,” or “neglect,” and nearly all children were accustomed to a healthy dose of spankings and whoopin’s—and worse. Even the school sanctioned it, and teachers were allowed to use a large wooden weapon against the area known as your rump.
The one thing you could not do as an adult was steal us. If you were not a parent or a relative from the extended family, you could not just take us away without permission. The line had to be drawn somewhere, and this is where it was.
It was believed that Sammy Good had been taken away (lured?) by someone who was “like him” but “older.” We didn’t know what this meant. Frankly, it was hard to imagine anyone able to pin down and then transport Sammy anywhere, unless they had no use for the eyes God gave them.
It was determined that if someone was going to molest him (“Mom, what does molest mean?”), it would probably be done in the woods behind our house. And so off the search party went. One thing that struck me about all these men—most of whom probably didn’t appreciate the fact that Sammy was the neighborhood homosexual—was how genuinely concerned they were for Sammy’s safety and well-being, and how they hoped they would find him alive and well. The mothers had come out, too, in order to comfort Mrs. Good, who was standing in the street fighting back her tears. The men assured her they’d bring him back—after all, he probably just ran away and might even be watching us right now! They said this as they tightly clenched their clubs and baseball bats, either ready to roll into action or perhaps scared