Tim Lane's Blog, page 4

A Sneak Peek of the Third Novel from the Flint Trilogy

 

Last Pages: a Prologue

Breaking up with Nigel, who often feels untouchable within Thoma’s aroma of onions and grease, makes perfect sense to me. Admittedly, I might feel different about altering my memories of this place if I were an East-sider, but I’m not. I didn’t grow up in Flint. I mean, come on. We can’t all be from Flint. The mistake is to pretend you are when you’re not. When I’m in the club on New Music Night, or shooting pool at the Nail—and I’m introduced to some dude who ultimately asks where I’m from because the night is just so lame—I always respond, “Grand Blanc, dude. You know, where the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan lives?”

The truth is boring but I practice honesty because people from Flint flush out poseurs like a police dog sniffs out a bag of cocaine in the glovebox of a Buick LeSabre. They can’t help it. They’ve been groomed to protect their turf.

During sophomore year, after I moved out of the dorm, the first thing Stuart did when he met my hot housemate was to run her through the wringer.

“So, where ya from?”

Of course, she just had to say, “Flint.”

Stuart grilled her like a Koegel Vienna, the only brand of hot dog Thoma’s serves. “Uh, I hate to tell ya, Fenton is a far cry from Flint, sweetheart.”

Fenton is an affluent village twenty minutes south of Flint.

“You’re not actually from Flint.” He was actually talking to her, but he was also talking to me.

*

I come from a family of gentle men who have studied engineering at General Motors Institute. GMI’s campus is a cluster of brick buildings and tennis courts on a bend in the Flint River which is how I came to find myself within the city limits. My father laid down a blueprint. He was more than happy to finance a practical education, and therefore by extension, a solid career with GM.

“If you’ve got other ideas,” he said, “then by all means, let me step out of your way so you can get to work on that.”

At GMI, students alternate semesters between the classroom and internships sponsored by the flagship companies of Generous Motors. I was fortunate to be chosen by Buick early on. My college plans were settled long before most of my high school friends began filling out college applications.

I was just happy that I wasn’t the last kid on the playground picked for kickball for once.

For me, the transition from high school to college was little more than driving over a speed bump at the Dort Drive-In, out on Dort Highway, where we used to smuggle each other past the entrance in the trunks of our cars. At GMI you start your program in the summer, almost immediately after high school ends. It hardly felt like anything ever ended, and anything worthwhile ever began.

*

This morning when I looked at Nigel, sprawled across all four corners of my twin bed in my student-shared house on Chevrolet Avenue, I shivered, which is odd because the heat is jacked up to eighty degrees in our place. I certainly couldn’t have known, standing in my bedroom doorway, staring at his dimpled ass, that today might be the day I acquired that one good story which enables a person to settle into the legitimacy of being from Flint.

*

I point out to Nigel that our waitress is watching me like a crow. She probably thinks I’m going to steal another ashtray. For Christ’s sake, who needs another ashtray? Give me a break.

What I decided this blurry winter morning while yawning and staring at Nigel’s butt cheeks is that I’m done mothering him or any other damaged Flint boy. They don’t deserve me. But why, I ask, why? Why can’t they get their shit together and deserve me?

*

Thoma’s is one of those destinations that drags people out of their beds on hazardous icy mornings. Its comforting inner sanctum of fried grease, chopped onions and bottomless cups of coffee encourages life long routines which are hard to break.

“You’re ordering chocolate pie with whipped cream for breakfast? Awesome.”

“Whaaat?”

“Take a chill pill.”

I ask for a cup of coffee and a plate of fries with gravy, an order the waitress bellows over the hunched shoulders of everyone bundled up at the counter. I finish reapplying long-lasting red lipstick to my mouth and snap the compact shut. There was a moment when I would have dropped out of GMI and moved to Washington, D.C., with all of its museums and fountains, despite whatever my father might have thought, to chase Nigel who abruptly put Flint behind him one afternoon. In an attempt to gather relevant data—I am, after all, a marketing major—I traveled there to see what was up. But an invitation to stay was never extended. Since leaving Flint, my observation is that Nigel has been both relieved and tormented. He drinks harder, now, but secretly, living in a tiny apartment with his mother who does not approve of alcohol.

“Do you remember the first time we met?” I ask. “It was in the stacks at the GMI library. You were on your lunch break. I think you were hiding.”

When I was a freshman, Nigel stamped return dates into books at the front desk of the GMI library with the rugged audacity of a riveter on the assembly line, and the scorn for management of a union man. He was aggressive and contemptuous. Occasionally, somebody would have to tell him to take it easy.

He was my scope.

“The stacks really were the perfect place to hide, weren’t they? God, that job sucked.”

“Do you remember what I said to you?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be hilarious if you got to the end of your book and discovered that someone had ripped out the last page?’ And then I smiled and danced away.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right. Damn, now that I think about it, that was a bold move. A flying squirrel move in chess speak. And very coy. Damn you, Karen.”

“Coy, my ass. And then you ran with my idea and wrote that story.”

“You mean ‘Last Pages.’ I read it at the Nail at a poetry reading. Everybody liked it.”

“They loved it, but you never gave me any credit. You stole the idea from me.”

“That’s pretty funny coming from you.”

Nigel is one of the few people who knows about my shoplifting.

“Did you know that women are three times more likely to develop kleptomania than men? But I’m not a kleptomaniac. I’m a shoplifter.”

“Same difference.”

“No, that’s where you’re wrong. I’m not impulsive.”

“Ha. That’s like a serial killer bragging about being polite.”

He has only flown in to defend his city chess title, nothing else.

When his mother transferred to a new job, in the midst of Flint’s economic free fall, I should have known it would only be a matter of time before the chess geek followed. When I have tried to initiate conversations, he says things like, “I live in squalor with my mother. It ain’t pretty, Karen. You don’t wanna witness this.” This is an exaggeration. “I’ve hung my English degree from U of M-Flint in the bathroom above the toilet. My future’s being flushed down the tubes.” This is partially true, but Nigel is totally content with a long distance relationship, so he’s on his own with that. My favorite, however: “I found a job making photocopies in a downtown law firm. Now that they’ve discovered I can juggle, they’re sending me to a circus for professional development. I’m being trained to be a Xerox machine tamer. It’s a lot like being a lion tamer, only way more dangerous.”

As he works on eating my fries, I am conscious that our waitress has been eavesdropping. This is just one of the kinds of things you become attuned to when you shoplift.

“She probably thinks I’m gonna steal the goddamn silverware,” I mutter, inspecting my fork before cleansing it with a napkin.

“Duh,” Nigel says. “What do you expect? They’re on to you.”

“Oh, f that. I’m on to you.”

Our waitress mixes a batch of milkshakes for the waitress calling out take-out orders at the cash register. Eventually presses her boobs up to the counter in front of us, snubs out her cigarette in the ashtray I’ve been passively thinking about swiping, winks at Nigel, flicks her hair aside, and, looking deep into my eyes, as if searching for my soul, says, “C’mon, hon.”

“What did I do?” Nigel wants to know.

“Nothing. Sit your ass down,” I say, swiveling around on my stool to hop into the flow of traffic.

The place is bustling, the floor is wet from all the tracked in snow. I mince my steps. My vintage ermine coat is damp. Despite a queasy feeling snowballing in the pit of my stomach, the waitress possesses a pure magnetism which seems to be scrambling my brainwaves. Why am I following this woman into a dark, cramped passage cluttered with stacks of milk crates and deliveries? Although it is true that I am curious about many aspects of human behavior, which is a requirement in my field, I have to say that I am not obsessed with violence. Certainly, I’m no fighter. These days I am hardly a lover.

Stuart, on the other hand, who boils everything down to sex and death, mythologizes the violence of Flint. There have been many nights when we have had to listen to the stories of the violence he claims to have witnessed growing up on the East Side in the 70s and 80s: all the disagreements settled by fists, the times he was jumped in high school, the crime, homicide and unemployment statistics, which he blames on Reagan. But I am smart enough to know that none of that shit directly affected me. “Just keep your hands open and slap the shit out of ‘em,” he once instructed, during an unsolicited drunken tutorial on self defense, in a dark parking ramp. “Pull the hair. Gouge the eyes. Spit if you have to.”

Following behind the waitress, I quickly review what slapping the shit out of someone might look like in my imagination.

It doesn’t come naturally.

This careful woman, who has tried to hide the dark circles under her eyes with a few pats of powder, turns to confront me in the passage. She is wearing what appears to be an engagement ring but is probably a birthstone, most likely to keep the slobs at bay. Her heavy blouse has a light coffee stain near her right breast. Her polyester slacks are snug. Her neon pink, stacked plastic geometric-shaped earrings stand out well. She has lit another cigarette. The lighting here is poor but that’s a good thing because it hides the years of grime that a wet mop can no longer strip away. The thought, “If she takes me outside, I will finally have some legit street cred, if I don’t catch pneumonia and die first,” flaps through my mind on black wings.

“That guy’s not the drug dealer, is he?”

“What? The guy I’m with at the counter? Nooo, God, no.” My armpits are moist.

“That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t sure.”

“Uh, I’m afraid I don’t have any drugs.” I shrug apologetically.

“Girl,” she says, “What do I look like?”

*

It has never occurred to me that Thoma’s might maintain a lost and found box, but this, too, makes perfect sense.

“I thought you were taking me outside to the parking lot through the emergency exit to kick my ass. I was prepared to run into traffic like a headless chicken.”

“And break these nails? Shiiit.”

She takes a dainty pair of gloves from a cardboard box on a metal shelving unit in a utility closet: a white pair of vintage gloves with keyholes and bows at the wrist.

“Pretty sure these are yours, hon.”

I realize now that while eavesdropping, she was deciding whose side she was on, and whether I deserved any of her East Side generosity, as if calculating a tip.

“They do look familiar.”

“You left them in a booth one night, when you were with the drug dealer.”

“Ah, yes, the drug dealer.”

She smiles at the floor and shakes her head, a sort of sad benediction, or perhaps an indictment—scoots back out into the winter light trying to push its way through the fogged windows—before I can thank her.

When I return to the counter, Nigel says, “What was that all about?”

I show him the gloves. “I think I’ve just been pigeonholed by the working class women of Flint.”

He has finished my fries.

I straddle the stool and adjust my coat and wait for the waitress to refill our coffee cups, wondering if we stand in solidarity now, like auto workers, or if she thinks I’m just another poseur.

“Jesus Christ, my head’s killing me,” Nigel whines, hungover. “What would the Surrealist poets do in this situation?”

I am silent.

Graduation is right around the corner.

When my GMI acceptance letter came to the house, my mother informed me that my father had had plans to send me to GMI before I could walk.

“Get out of here!” I shouted, tearing the letter open.

He would have preferred I had lived at home these past three years, which is why he bought me a car, but that part of the scheme backfired.

Now, it was Buick’s turn. Soon, I will load that car up with all of my shit and kiss this place goodbye.

When I tell Nigel that the hot shots at Buick are sending me to Houston, Texas, after graduation, I get no response.

I pull on the gloves, pay the bill, tip the waitress more than usual and dump his ass before he can finish a second slice of chocolate pie.

 

We Ate in Our Cars: a New Watercolor

It’s been a minute since I made a watercolor. I’ve been focusing on the larger canvases. As always, attracted to the purples, pinks, emerald green.

Please check out all yoursilentface has to offer, including the links to my two novels. Thank for stopping by.

We Ate in Our Cars, 2024, 9"x12" $65.00

Taken in direct sunlight. Above capture taken in overcast natural light.

The Shop Phil's Siren Song By Lane, Tim Buy on Amazon

Stellar Nursery: a New Painting

This painting went through many phases, and I learned some new techniques along the way.

Stellar Nursery, 2024, 24"x30" $500.00 Phil's Siren Song By Lane, Tim Buy on Amazon Your Silent Face By Lane, Tim Buy on Amazon The Shop

Stellar Nursery, 2024

Lady in Red, 2024

Has This Film Been Made Yet? I Don't Think So.

Adding this frightening theme to the series. Thank you for visiting the site. Please browse.

The space theme continues, but I’ve begun to think about the mind as a phenomenon within the universe, such as a black hole, wormhole or star.

The concept of the mind is almost as impossible to grasp as space.

What If Our Minds Were the Wormholes, the Intrusive Thoughts the Invasion, 2024, 24"x30" $325.00 The Shop Phil's Siren Song By Lane, Tim Buy on Amazon Your Silent Face By Lane, Tim Buy on Amazon

Mother & Son: a New Painting

This painting was born out of a keen desire to make an artwork completely out of oil paintstick and pastel, all in one go, no preliminary drawings, just go. It is hard to eliminate the sheen when taking the photo. The black hole as mother of the universe is a theme to which I continue to return. On this painting, the paint is thick, and the black is bolder than I was able to capture in this pic. But it’s a very decent capture for a cell phone camera.

Mother & Son, 2024, 24"x24" $300.00 The Shop

Invasive Species: a New Painting

I’ve had ideas, and I’ve been working them out. I like the moody, nightmarish colors, and I like the tension between the soft and hard edge elements. Overall, I am happy with this painting, and I leave it to you to interpret. Thanks for stopping by the site. Please check everything out.

Invasive Species, 2024, 24"x24" $300.00 The Shop 2024: New Work

A Distortion in Spacetime: a New Painting

It’s been a while since I’ve turned to the watercolors, but the ethereal nature of the medium lends itself to paintings of space.

A Distortion of Spacetime, 2024, 12"x9" $100.00 The Shop

Writer Aug Stone Reviews Your Silent Face

Aug Stone writes up Your Silent Face in his Substack, the Counterforce. I really dig Aug's writing on music, bands and books. He also chronicles his book tour travels and other shenanigans.

Regret that we could not connect in Hamtramck when he breezed through. Check out his review of YSF below.

"When I was in touch with Book Suey in Hamtramck, MI setting up my reading, Cat there recommended Tim Lane’s writing as we seemed to share similar interests. I was immediately intrigued by the title of Tim’s Your Silent Face, being a New Order song I love. We traded books (I love doing this) and was quickly drawn into the story. Anyone who grew up listening to all the brilliant 80s British bands will find something to appreciate here. And although I’m a little younger than protagonist Stuart Page - the book takes place mid-late 80s - Lane captures that late teen angst perfectly, specifically that summer after your first year of college when you’re back in your hometown, still quite tied to it though having begun to branch out beyond, dealing with your limited surroundings while faced with what calls to you from the wider world, here especially Joy Division’s legacy. Drinking too much, working a crap job, heading to strange places at strange hours, tied to old friends and lovers whilst yearning for others, dazzled by folks who offer that bridge to the life you want, this last presented in the character of Nigel, with his poetry, record collection, and minimal family drama. There’s the local club night with the good music but same old songs, the making of mixtapes, the awkward and brief romantic encounters. Lane makes you remember what was great and what was awful about being in your late teens and early 20s, the sapping ennui and the promise of brilliant dreams. There are also a few mentions of Van Halen, which I truly appreciated. Lane has a new book out, Phil’s Siren Song, dealing with the same scene, though through a different focal point, that I’m very much looking forward to reading."

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Your Silent Face By Lane, Tim Buy on Amazon Phil's Siren Song By Lane, Tim Buy on Amazon

Delivery of the Silver Discs (Mountains on Fire): a Study

I don’t usually put a study in the shop, but I am fairly pleased with how this turned out. So I added it to the shop with an appropriate price.

Delivery of the Silver Discs (Mountains on Fire), a study, 24"x18" $40.00 The Shop

Content Creator (Star Formation): a New Painting

I’ve been very focused lately—working fast and intuitively and a bit recklessly. I have to say that I love the fluorescent colors right now. I guess they are what I need.

Content Creator (Star Formation), 2024, 24"x18" $200.00

Content Creator (Star Formation), 2024

These three so undoubtedly companion pieces.