Kurt
Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI
by Nathaniel Berry
How are you holding up? Martin asks Kurt, when Kurt returns to Adrian to bury his father.
Honestly? I’m fine, Kurt says. We believe him, because he hadn’t spoken to his father the past two years — feeling toward him a hatred so pure that it transcended pettiness or resentment. Kurt’s sad for his mother, for whom each of her dead husband’s effects is a small tragedy. He’s annoyed by his sister, who doesn’t remember growing up the way that Kurt remembers it. He’s glad that his partner gets to see Adrian, and meet us—and we’re glad to meet her, too. She’s kind and sarcastic. She gets Kurt outdoors, away from the screen.
It’s good to see Kurt like it was always good to see him. As a kid, and seemingly as an adult, he’s so solitary and self-sufficient that getting to be his friend feels like being part of an exclusive club. Kurt makes up his own mind about everything; he was an atheist since middle school, in a time when everyone at least pretended to be agnostic (to avoid fights with the Christian kids and concerned looks from the Public School teachers).
Kurt’s father believed in God, in a personal, physical God: a diving presence had manifested itself in Franklin Albert Jones, a former Scientology Employee who changed his name to Adi Da Love-Anada Samraj and preached to his faithful from an ashram in Chicago and, later, a resort in Fiji. Kurt remembers the long drives to Chicago, the hours of meditation and chanted prayer in a stale, crowded convention room. He remembers how his father’s money—when it didn’t go toward semiautomatic rifles or National Geographics or alcohol—went to Adi Da, to build the home of the living god in Fiji.
We never saw where Kurt lived, not for years and years. He’d meet us at his front door, pointedly; shut it tightly behind him.
The indoor porch is choked with salvage furniture; each surface sags below the weight of unopened mail, dogeared magazines, garage-sale treasures gathering dust. And the mass stretches like the arms of a giant squid, from the front porch doorstep through the house, upstairs, to the attic. There are strange, derelict weapons too, besides the guns Kurt’s father began to stockpile after 2016. They’ve found a rusty bayonet and a convincing-looking air gun in the backyard, tossed over the high plank fence from the neighborhood of trailers behind Kurt’s parents’ house. I remember being jealous of all the cool shit Kurt found in his backyard, although I can see how he might have been ashamed, or afraid, of living in that kind of place.
Kurt never talked about his parents all that much. Sure, he answered questions when we found out about the whole Adi Da thing, but he mostly liked to talk about video games. He’s very good at figuring out complicated, rules-based systems. He was the one to read the wikis and the forums. He’d learn all the secret tricks, master games we’d introduced him to only weeks before. Whole summers passed by in the air-conditioned mausoleum of Martin’s bedroom (the good bedroom to hang out in, because it was far from the rest of the house, new-built, and we could be as loud as we wanted.) Kurt, Robby, Martin and me: eight two-liters of Faygo Moon Mist, two boxes of Little Debbies, two trays of steaming Pizza Rolls. We sat buried in Martin’s dirty laundry, spread out across his bedroom floor; Halo, LOTRO, Starcraft, repeat—whole summers passed where we tasted no air that wasn’t filtered through Martin’s window unit.
After a dead-end job at a juvenile correction facility, Kurt went to Korea to teach English. He learned Korean and Salsa Dancing and Krav Maga and came back to the States with laser-corrected vision, slim-fit button-ups, a prowling tiger tattooed in black ink on his left bicep. He attended Martin’s bachelor party with a cockiness that suited his expat glow-up, an attitude that would have been off-putting if we hadn’t all been so sincerely rooting for him. He lives in Denver now with his partner, hiking in Red Rocks, set to become a bartender before all the bars closed down, and he comes back to Adrian only for the funerals.
It’s strange being back now, Kurt says. I know what he means; I’ve just ridden the COVID wave back to my childhood bedroom, trying to fit my adult shape into a house and a town that I remember being bigger.
I like places like Adrian, Kurt says. I think it’s the kind of place I want to live some day, but not here. Not Adrian.
Because you’re from here?
I think so. I remember how awful it used to make me feel. When you and me and Martin and Robby used to stay up all night screaming at each other over fucking video games—just drinking Faygo and screaming at each other.
I don’t exactly remember it that way. Well, maybe I do—teenagers hopped up on caffeine and digital violence, we did scream at each other, we were always at each other’s throats. I remember it as excitement; I don’t remember it with the bitterness betrayed in Kurt’s voice. Maybe it’s because Kurt left and stayed away, dropped out of the timezone as thoroughly as I’ve only ever dreamed of doing, and maybe he skipped the steps — the slowly-into-a-hot-bath transition that smooths out all the wrinkles and contradictions between the children we used to be, and the adults we are now. Or maybe it’s just easier to look back fondly on the kid you used to be, when that kid had a safe, clean home to return to every night. A place where there was always a clear path to a stocked refrigerator; where books and school clothes flowed like water from the tap, and the gods of your parents lived so much closer to home.
Nathaniel Berry is a writer from Michigan, a former domestic violence counselor and current MFA candidate at Columbia University. He’s going to hit the highway like a battering ram in his stealth-gray Pontiac Vibe.
