Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [72]
My speech was occasionally cited as a spark for this march forward in racial fixing in the great American experiment, but there were other speeches far more eloquent than mine. Most important for me, I learned a valuable lesson: That change can occur, and it can occur anywhere, with even the simplest of people and craziest of intentions, and that creating change didn’t always require having to devote your every waking hour to it with mass meetings and organizations and protests and TV appearances with Walter Cronkite.
Sometimes change can occur because all you wanted was a bag of potato chips.
Zoe
HER BOYFRIEND CALLED ME from the hospital.
“The abortion, Mike. They botched it. We never made it to New York.”
Abortion was illegal, a crime, in Michigan in 1971, as it was in most states. If you got pregnant, nine months later you had a baby. And that was that.
I was closer to Zoe than I was to perhaps any other girl in high school. She was what you would call a best friend. She had a big curly fro of hippie hair that landed wherever it damned well pleased. She played piano but was also a prodigy on the violin—which she would only play while barefoot. She smoked pot on occasion in her parents’ house, and on rare nights would take LSD “to free myself from the Fascist cop inside me.” Zoe was a free spirit, well read, and not afraid to speak her mind. I thought, some day she will change this world.
Which made her choice of a boyfriend in Tucker all the more puzzling. Tucker was completely clueless and looked like he’d be happiest sticking a blade between your ribs, or drag racing. He was from the “tough neighborhood” in town (such as it was for Davison). His favorite pastime was picking fights, and though Zoe tried to reform him, his love of fisticuffs kept his dance card filled with numerous school suspensions. He treated basic common sense as if it were a “sissy thing,” and he knew little of the world outside his trailer park; I’d be surprised if he had ever traveled more than five miles from his home in his lifetime.
But Tucker had the smile of the Sundance Kid and the eyes of James Dean, and Zoe loved him madly. He wore leather shit-kicking boots and had a chain attached to his belt loop—but with nothing on the end of it, as he was too broke to afford a wallet and poorer still to have anything to put in it. A cigarette was always dangling out the side of his mouth, and he had the uncanny knack of being able to inhale and blow out the smoke without ever touching the Camel.
Tucker would wait on Zoe hand and foot, and she was generous with her body in return. This won Tucker the designation by most guys as the Luckiest Dude at Davison High—and he was still a freshman! But not just any freshman: he came in at six-foot-three and weighed 180 pounds. Zoe was a senior, like me, and I was crazy in love with her.
I made sure that she never detected even the mildest inkling of my feelings. And if Tucker ever suspected how I felt I would surely see the sharp end of his jackknife being flung my way. But he had no clue. Either I was that good an actor, or it was just pathetically unbelievable that someone like me would ever even think of having any designs on Zoe. And it was even more implausible that she would ever see me as anything resembling boyfriend material. After all, I came from the pack of guys who were usually seen in flight from any oncoming females. I was no James Dean; I was more Jimmy Dean, the sausage king. One day, to impress her, I told her I could play cello when she was putting together a “protest