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Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fictions from the Flyover

Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fictions from the Flyover

Overview

Do Midwesterners have a peculiar way of looking at the world? Is there something not quite right about the way they see things? For such a normal place, the heartland has produced some writers who take a most individual approach to storytelling. And the result—to the delight of readers everywhere—has been stories that reveal the mystery, joy, and enchantment in the most ordinary and incidental moments of life. These 33 exceptional tales showcase the peculiarly wonderful vision of some of the region's best-known or soon-to-be-celebrated writers. Each invites its readers to see the world through different eyes and see it anew.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780253210227
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publication date: 08/26/2009
Pages: 328
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Michael Martone is Professor of English at the University of Alabama–Tuscaloosa. He is the author of seven works of fiction, including The Blue Guide to Indiana and Michael Martone; two collections of fiction, The Flatness and Other Landscapes and Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art; and an anthology, Double-wide (IUP, 2007); and editor of six volumes.

Read an Excerpt

Not Normal, Illinois

Peculiar Fictions from the Flyover

By Michael Martone

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2009 Indiana University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-21022-7

CHAPTER 1

Patty-Cake, Patty-Cake ... A Memoir


* * *

MAX APPLE


1

WHEN HE TOOK WALKS, G.R. HUMMED "Cruising down the River." Now and then he munched on red pistachio nuts and spit the shells over the curb. I had to trot to keep up with his long steps. Once we got to the bakery, he'd go donut wild. Cream puffs, eclairs, even the cherryfilled Danish were nothing to him. He headed for the plain brown donuts, what my father called fry cakes. He ate each one in two bites, coming down exactly in the middle of the hole everytime. Daddy would give him a couple dozen like nothing. Everybody on Franklin Street gave things to G.R. There wasn't a housewife who didn't feel proud to fry him a few donuts herself. And why the hell not? He raked their leaves, carried groceries, opened doors, and smiled at the old folks. He was an Eagle Scout. I was just his nigger sidekick but people liked me for being that. Much later I got good jobs, loans, even my own business because of being his sidekick. But when we started, it was G.R. that needed me. He used to think my old man gave him the donuts because he was my buddy. He didn't know for a long time how much people liked him.

"Christ," I used to tell him, "Daddy would give you fry cakes even if you stomped me once a week. He likes you, G.R. You're his neighbor."

In fact we were sort of double neighbors. Our houses were on the same block, and his father's paint store was just down the street from the American Bakery, where my dad was the donut and cake man.

G.R. and I hung around the Bridge Street branch of the public library. He read the sports books and I did the science fiction. Then we'd go to the bakery and he'd start to wolf down the fry cakes. He ate all he could, then stuffed his pockets. My old man just used to laugh and throw in a few more. A dozen was a light snack to him. After football games, he always had his twelve fresh ones waiting in the locker room. He never shared, although he was generous with everything else. He ate them with his cleats and helmet still on and sometimes mud all over his face.

When my father died, G.R. and I were in college. He came over to the Alpha Kappa Psi house, hugged me, and said, "Sonny, you know how he did it, you've got to take over." And like a dumb ass, I did. I made them at night in the big Alpha Kappa Psi deep fryer. But G.R. always paid for the ingredients.

You've got to remember that this was 1937, and he was the social chairman of the DU's, the best of the white houses, and a big football player, and I was still his nigger sidekick from home to everyone except the brothers of Alpha Kappa Psi, where I was the house treasurer.

It only took about an hour once a week or so, and he liked them so much that I just couldn't stop. It would have been like weaning a baby. I didn't want to put up with all his moping. G.R. wasn't unhappy much, but when he was, the whole DU house could burn up and he wouldn't leave his room. I was the only one he let in. He'd sit and stare at a 12 × 5 of his father and mother in front of the paint store. He'd say things like, "Sonny, they did a lot for me and no goddamn girl is going to ruin it." Or if it wasn't a girl, it was a goddamn professor or sometimes a goddamn coach.

After a mope he'd be good for two dozen and a half gallon of milk. The brothers used to call me his mammy. "The big old ballplayer needs mammy's short'nin' bread," they used to say when they'd see me starting up the deep fryer after an emergency call from someone at DU. That's why half the house called me mammy, even though my actual nickname was Sonny. In the Michigan Ensign for 1938, there I am in the group picture of the only black frat house in Ann Arbor. "Sonny 'Mammy' Williams," it says, "Treasurer." G.R. is all over the book with the DU's, the football team, the Audubon Society, the Student Union, the Intrafraternity Honor Council. I counted him eight times and who knows how many I missed.

I think the only reason I ever went to Ann Arbor instead of JC like my sisters was that he was going and he got me a piece of his scholarship somehow. But when he went to law school, I said, "No dice, ace, I'm not hauling my ass up to Harvard." And I got a job back in Grand Rapids working for Rasberry Heating. Law School was the first time he got by without the fry cakes and he said he was a grump all three years.

"I lost seventeen pounds and almost married a girl I didn't love," he told me when he came back. "I lost a lot of my judgment and some of my quickness. Harvard and Yale may have class, Sonny, but when you come down to it, there's no place like home." He came back from Harvard as patriotic as the soldiers shipping back from Guam a few years later. I met him at the Market Street station with a sign that said, "Welcome back, Counselor," and a dozen hot fry cakes. His Ma and Dad were there too and his brother Phil. He hugged us all, ate the donuts, and said, "If you seek a beautiful peninsula, look around you." Then he said it in Latin and we thought it was lawyer's talk and we looked the train station over real good. Then he told us it was the motto of the state of Michigan, which was founded in 1837 and was the first state west of Pennsylvania to have its own printing press. He said he wasn't leaving Michigan for a good long time, and if it wasn't for the war a few months later, I don't believe he would have.

The war started in December and he came back from Harvard in the June before that. The first thing he did was make me take my two weeks from Rasberry and head up to the Upper Peninsula with him. "To the thumb, Sonny, to the tip of Michigan where three great lakes sparkle and iron and copper dot the landscape."

I still couldn't say no to the guy so I went along even though I knew the Upper Peninsula was for Indians and not for Negroes.

We drove two days in my '35 Chevy, up through Cadillac, Reed City, Petoskey, Cheboygan. The roads were bad. When we had a flat near the Iron River, it took an hour for another car to come by so we could borrow a jack. I wished all the time that we were on our way to Chicago or Cleveland or Indianapolis or someplace where you could do something when you got there. But old G.R. was on a nature kick then. I believe Harvard and no fry cakes had about driven him nuts. While I flagged down the jack, he stood beside the car and did deep knee bends and Marine push-ups. He took off his shirt and beat his chest. "Smell the air, Sonny, that's Michigan for you," he said. People were suspicious enough about stopping for a nigger trying to flag them down without this bouncing Tarzan to scare 'em worse.

When we finally got the ferryboat to take us to Mackinac Island, I knew it was a mistake. The only negroes besides me were the shoeshine boys on the boat, and here I was in a linen suit and big straw hat alongside Mr. Michigan, who was taking in the Lake Superior spray and still beating his chest now and then and telling everyone what a treat it was to live in the Thumb state. Everybody thought I was his valet, so when I caught some real bad staring I just went over and brushed his jacket or something and the folks smiled at me very nicely. I didn't want trouble then and I don't now. I've been a negro all my life and no matter how hard I try I can't call myself a black.

Another thing I tell people and they can hardly believe is that I don't think G.R. ever once said anything about my color. I don't believe he ever noticed it or thought about it or considered that it made a bit of difference. I guess that's another reason why I didn't mind baking his donuts.

But Mackinac Island was a mistake for both of us. I was bored stiff by talking about how good the food was in the hotel and taking little rides in horse-drawn carriages. G.R. seemed to like it, so I didn't say much.

One morning he says, "Sonny, let's get clipped," and I go with him to the hotel barbershop without giving it a thought. After being there a week, I must have lost my sense, too, to just go along like that. He sits down in one vacant chair and motions me to the other. There are a couple of thin barbers who look like their scissors. I'm just getting my socks adjusted and looking down at "Theo A. Kochs" written on the bottom of the barber chair when my thin man says almost in a whisper, "I'm sorry, sir, but we don't do negro hair." G.R. hasn't heard this because his barber has snapped the striped sheet loudly around him and is already combing those straight blond strands.

I step out of the chair. "No hard feelings," he says.

"None," I say, "I didn't need a haircut anyway. I'll just wait for my friend here."

"Fine," he says, and sits down in his chair to have a smoke while he waits for another customer.

When G.R. gets turned around and sees this little barber lighting up, he says, "Sonny, c'mon, I thought we're both getting clipped this morning."

"I'll wait, G.R.," I say, hoping he'll let it go.

"No waiting," he says. "It's sharp country up here, we've got to look sharp for it, right, boys?" He looks at my little barber who blows some smoke and says, "I'm sorry, but we don't cut colored hair here. In fact, I don't think there's a spot on the island that does. We just don't get that much in colored trade."

"What do you mean you don't cut colored hair?" G.R. says.

"Just what I said." The barber is a little nervous. He stands up and starts to wash some combs, but G.R. is out of his chair now and facing him against a row of mirrors.

"What do you mean by colored?" he asks the barber.

My barber looks at his partner. I am getting pissed at G.R. for making something out of this. I should have known better. At home I wouldn't just walk into the Pantlind or the Rowe Hotel and expect to get a haircut.

"It's okay, G.R.," I say. "Sit down and let's get going. We've got lots to see yet, Indian villages and copper mines and remnants of old beaver trappers' lodges."

"I want to know what this man means by colored," he says, crowding the little barber against a display of Wildroot Cream Oil. The other barber, G.R.'s, says, "Look, mister, why don't the both of you just take your business someplace else." G.R. is a very big man and both barbers together don't weigh two fifty. He says it again. "I want to know what this man means by colored." He is trailing them in the white cover sheet with black stripes and a little paper dickey around his neck. He looks like Lou Gehrig in a Yankee nightshirt. My barber is afraid to say anything but the other one says, "Well, look at your friend's teeth real white, see, and the palms of his hands are brownish pink, and his hair is real woolly. I couldn't pull that comb I just used on you through that woolly hair now, could I?" G.R. looks surprised.

"And when you've got white teeth and pinky brown palms and woolly hair and your skin is either black or brown, then most people call you colored. You understand now?"

"But what's that got to do with haircuts?" G.R. asks. Nobody knows what to say now. The barbers don't understand him, so I step up and say, "They need special instruments to cut my hair, G.R. It's like he says, those puny little combs don't go through this, see. I got to go to my own kind of barber so he'll know how to handle me."

G.R. was edgy all through his haircut and he didn't leave a tip, but once we left the barbershop I believe he forgot the whole thing.

But the way he was with those barbers, that's how he operated with girls too. What I mean is, he didn't understand what they were getting at. And this was a shame because he really attracted the ladies. They didn't all come at him like ducks to popcorn, but if he stayed at a school dance for an hour or so, the prettiest girl there would be over talking to him and joking and maybe even dancing with him. He never did anything but talk and joke them. He'd walk home with me. I'd say, "G.R., that Peggy Blanton was giving you the eye. Why'd you pass up something like that?"

"Training," he'd say, or "Hell, Sonny, I came to the dance with you and I'm leaving with you." If there'd ever been a good-looking colored girl there I sure wouldn't have left with him. Don't get me wrong, G.R. was a regular man, nothing the matter with his glands; he just wasn't as interested in girls as most of us were. One weekend in college he drove to Chicago with me and some of the brothers of Alpha Kappa Psi. The brothers wanted some of that good jazz from down around Jackson Avenue and G.R. wanted to see the White Sox play baseball. He took a bus to Comiskey Park for a doubleheader and met us about eight at the Blue Box, where those great colored jazz groups used to be in those days. G.R. stood out like a light bulb. We'd been there all afternoon just mellow and strung out on the music. G.R. came in and wanted to talk baseball. Don't forget that in those days the White Sox really were white and the brothers could have cared less what a group of whites were doing that afternoon up on Lake Shore Drive.

"You should have seen Luke Appling," he was saying; "there's not a man in either league who can play that kind of shortstop." Nobody paid any attention to G.R. He didn't drink and the music was just noise to him. He had taken a book along and was trying to read in the candlelight at the Blue Box. You had to feel sorry for him. It was so dark in there you couldn't see your fingers at arm's length. The atmosphere was heavy with music, liquor, women. I mean the place was cool, relaxed, nobody doing more than tapping a glass, and he sits there squinting over a big blue book, underlining things and scratching his head like he's in the library. He was alone at a table so he could concentrate, but I kept my eye on him just in case anything came up. Pretty soon two really smooth numbers come over to his table. Now you'd call them "Foxes." They were in evening gowns and very loose, maybe even drunk. He was the only white man in the place and they kind of giggled at him and sat down. I couldn't hear a word they said but I watched every move. I could see because they'd started using a spotlight for the small stage and G.R. was a little to one side of it.

One of the girls starts rubbing the spine of the blue book. The other one takes his finger and puts it on the page. She uses his hand like a big pointer. Maybe she's asking him what some of those big words mean. They're both real close. I start to get a little jealous. I've been there all day with nothing like that kind of action. But, it's like I said, he had a way with the girls. They seem to be talking a lot. The girls are real dreamy on him, one under each arm. It looks like he's reading out loud to them because one of them is holding the book up for him to read from. Whatever he's reading is really breaking the girls up. One of them is kind of tickling his belly with a fingernail between the buttons of his shirt. Sam Conquest and his combo were doing a set then that really had us going. I mean, as much as I was keeping an eye out for G.R., I was into the music too and couldn't really be sure about what my buddy was getting himself into. All I know is that I slipped into the music for just a couple of minutes and when I looked back he was gone. So were the girls and his book. What the hell, I thought, anyone else would, why not G.R. too?


(Continues...)
Excerpted from Not Normal, Illinois by Michael Martone. Copyright © 2009 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Introduction: In the Middle of the Middle of Middletown
Patty-Cake, Patty-Cake... A Memoir, by Max Apple
Childhood; Detroit; Michigan, by Joel Brouwer
Beginnings, by Robert Coover
Some Notes on the Cold War in Kansas, by Robert Day
The One Marvelous Thing, by Rikki Ducornet
Visions of Budhardin, by Stuart Dybek
River Dead of Minneapolis, by Mark Ehling
Fuck With Kayla And You Die, by Louise Erdrich
All You Can Eat, by Robin Hemley
13 Remotely Related to South Bend, by Lily Hoang
Happy Film, by Laird Hunt
Long Walk, by Sandy Huss
Round, by Lily James
Anton's Album, by Janet Kauffman
A History of Indiana, by Jesse Lee Kercheval
Still Life with Insects, by Brian Kitely
Mobile Axis: A Triptych, by Clarence Major
The Digitally Enhanced Image of Cary Grant Appearing in a Cornfield in Indiana, by Michael Martone
Talking to my Old Science Teacher about Drawings in which I Killed Him, by Brian McMullen
A Harvest, by Glenn Meeter
Other Electricities, by Ander Monson
The Mausoleum, by Susan S. Neville
Submarine Warfare on the Upper Mississippi, by Lon Otto
Wednesday Night Reflections, Edited Thursday, by Erin Pringle
The Great War, by Josh Russell
July Snow, by Scott Russell Sanders
The Red Bow, by George Saunders
Medieval Land, by Steve Tomasula
Natural Citizens, by Deb Olin Unferth
Session,, by Kellie Wells
Metaphysics of the Midwest, by Curtis White
Luna Moth, by Michael Wilkerson
Baby; Pornography, by Dianne Williams

What People are Saying About This

"Just as the Midwest, this vast, various, and unclassifiable place, is not nearly so conventional as it's reputed to be, the literature of the heartland has a long tradition of original, innovative writing that is flourishing today more than ever."

Florida State University - R. M. Berry

This anthology is an unusually insightful one and serves an important purpose in the context of American fiction writing.

Porter Shreve]]>

Just as the Midwest, this vast, various, and unclassifiable place, is not nearly so conventional as it's reputed to be, the literature of the heartland has a long tradition of original, innovative writing that is flourishing today more than ever.

Brain Fever, 1996 - Valerie Sayers

Google Earth notwithstanding, those of us who live in the Midwest know it is not really a flyover zone but another intriguing planet, and the writers in this volume understand that. They have developed new fictional forms for new life forms—their stories are surprising, funny, moving, challenging, and weird in equal measure. I plan to use this collection in the earthbound classroom and hereby nominate Michael Martone for intergalactic editor-in-chief.

Notts and Criminal Tendencies - William O'Rourke

Here's a real carousel of a collection, stories that rotate, more or less, around the midwest of most of their settings, though "settings" would imply fiction of a more traditional sort and these outings are bright and flashy constructions, conceptual and timely to a fault, but full of fun and pathos, erudition and outrage, 33 whirling rides, all exciting and illuminating, by a number of familiar practitioners, such as Rikki Ducornet, Robert Coover, George Saunders, and some newer kids on the block, like Lily Hoang, Erin Pringle, Michael Wilkerson. The amusement continues in the contributors' notes — all brought together by that most accomplished of literary midway barkers, Michael Martone. Climb aboard! You won't regret it.

Porter Shreve

Just as the Midwest, this vast, various, and unclassifiable place, is not nearly so conventional as it's reputed to be, the literature of the heartland has a long tradition of original, innovative writing that is flourishing today more than ever.

Intercourse: Stories, 2008 - Robert Olen Butler

As a Midwestern-born-and-reared writer myself, I have always wondered where the New Stories from the Midwest and its ilk are. Michael Martone's wonderful anthology, Not Normal, Illinois, explains this void in a way I've always instinctively suspected: rather than being too bland, we Midwesterners are too profoundly and intimidatingly whack. This is a funny, scary, challenging, sublime book. The Gothic South ain't got nothin' on us.

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