the shape of the world(s)...

In the late summer of 1986, I quit my paper route in order to become a dishwasher and a busboy at Jerry's Roosevelt Roost, a family eating establishment at the corner of Roosevelt Road and Summit Road in Muskegon Michigan.

I could ride my bike to the restaurant, and did, until Michigan winter invited me to drive my rusty yellow Volkswagen Rabbit instead.

I worked in the dishroom only for a month. Kevin Dantuma and I were the only white people who worked in the back. We were both sixteen. On the other hand, no people of color worked in the front of the restaurat. Those waitress, hostess or salad bar attendant positions were apparently reserved for single moms, jaded divorcees and 25 year old white party girls who couldn't wait for closing time / bar-call. I didn't see the color lines until years later; then -- I loved working in the back with the easygoing, joking dishwashers and cooks. They teased me and we laughed together.

Kevin quit once basketball season began and I became a host and then a waiter in that year before I quit for the Spring Play.

I remember that when I became a host, suddenly I didn't see as much of Flora and Nancy and William in the back. Even when I would go back to chill with them, they would make fun of me in my linen Miami Vice Suitcoats and pink knit ties with blue oxford shirts. I better look out not to get dirty back there. Now that I was so fancy and everything.

After we quit, I occasionally saw Kevin at high school basketball games. We perceived his Western Michigan Christian Basketball team to be our biggest rivals. I'm sure they laughed at our Faith Christian Conquerers (complete with extra long cheerleading skirts and carefully trimmed fundamentalist versions of mullet haircuts -- the party in the back couldn't touch our collars...). They always beat us, but we came close several times. And it always felt like a Holy War. These folks, after all, believed in Evolution!

I was surprised to find out the summer after our sophomore year of college that Kevin and I were both working in the same Factory. The factory workers built Cam Shafts, but we just cleaned up their oil spills with kitty litter.

We drove to and from work together at 5 a.m. and home at 5 p.m., both college boys trying to pay their own way through...

We laughed and told stories about our Manager -- Freney. His jaw and teeth had been rotted away with cancer, but he still always had a huge pouch of chaw in his lip. He spat wherever on the factory floor that he wanted to. He cursed and told lewd stories and laughed gruffly at himself and our awkward polite silences.

I could close my eyes right now and reconstruct exactly the flicker of the flourescent lights in that high wide warehouse of a factory room....the smell of the oil, the smooth purity of the concrete floors, the spartan aesthetic of pipes and metal and concrete, irrigating troughs between the machines that were so filthy with corrosion and oil and residue that they almost looked absurdly soft and welcoming -- like a toxic mudbath....

He and I were so tired in those days that we talked about the fact that we never even drove down to Pere Marquette anymore to cruise the strip with our friends...as the sun set over the vastness of Lake michigan. And we were astonished that work could so colonize our social lives. And such work! Kevin was quiet and kind and a preppy looking metalhead who continued to attend his Christian Reformed Church...

And I saw Kevin one more time six years later and then not since. But it feels funny to me how you can share a particular vision of the world with someone and then they fade from your life like the vision that you shared. Still there. Abiding. But like a ghost that only whispers a reminder about the shape of the world somewhere else...