Read Online Never Street by Loren D. Estleman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Loren D. Estleman
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temperature and humidity like the lid of a pressure cooker. By the time I found a parking space around the corner from the main branch of the Detroit Public Library, my shirt was shrink-wrapped to my back. The air-conditioned atmosphere inside the building went down inside the back of my collar like an icicle.
I walked past the big globe, passing up the line waiting to play with the computer terminal for the card catalogue section, which since my last visit had moved six feet closer to the back door and oblivion. I’d miss it when it was gone. It would mean allowing an extra ten minutes per trip for the electronic convenience.
The Media section was chock full of information on Neil Catalin’s favorite subject. Most were big glossy picture books. There was a file box stuffed with publications targeted at noir buffs, both expensive slicks and amateur jobs photocopied and stapled, part of a shelf devoted to race and gender bias in the genre, and one scholarly tract, Dark Dreams: Psychosexual Manifestations of Hollywood Crime Movies Circa 1945-1955, by Asa Portman, Ph.D. This was a thick volume wrapped in a dead black dust-jacket with its title printed in white capitals like typewriter characters, published that year by the University of Michigan Press.
I lugged the book over to a reading table and waded in. After ten minutes I went to the Reference section and came back with a dictionary. When that didn’t help I turned to the author’s biography at the back of the film book. Asa Portman, it said, taught courses on psychology and popular culture at Michigan.
I used a telephone on the main floor to call the university switchboard. A series of voices covered with ivy put me in touch with Portman’s department, where a student intern laid me down to wait. I had just fed the coin slot a second time when Portman came on. I told him what I was about and he agreed to see me in an hour. I wrote down the location in my notebook.
The German was too modest. In addition to the engine and transmission, he’d replaced the suspension, improving upon the slip-slop system that in 1970 had not progressed beyond the engineering of the family car under Eisenhower. The Cutlass cornered like a Formula I racer and capped the hills as if it were screwed down. On the Edsel Ford expressway west of Romulus, I shot past a state trooper parked on the median, doing eighty, and got nothing from him but a yawn. Those dents and that chalky paint made me invisible.
Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan and the five-dollar fine for possession of marijuana, has variously been called the Arcadia of America, the cultural capital of the world, and the last great refuge for artists and philosophers in the age of the music video. It has been called all these things by itself. In fact the city’s chief contribution to the twentieth century is the invention of the parking meter.
It has more trees than people—hence the arbor —and six traffic lights for every tree. It’s a sickly egghead kid with a passion for Tolkien, touchdowns, and tofu; a place where the cop who stops you for running one of its nine million red lights might recommend a book while writing up your ticket; a doddering hippie with a haircut and floral throws over the avocado velour chairs in the den. Every state has one, and each one thinks it’s unique.
On campus I negotiated one-way streets, jaywalking students, and a throwback in a tie-dyed shirt hawking copies of an underground newspaper and found a space only a mile or so from my destination. This was an imposing brick hall a city block wide, constructed sometime during the Era of Good Feeling. The chimes in the university tower were just striking three when I threaded my way among a scattering of students sunning themselves on the front steps and heaved open one of the big front doors. Inside I found an acre of veined marble cordoned with Neoclassical pilasters and more steps. Only the discovery of an antique Otis elevator
I walked past the big globe, passing up the line waiting to play with the computer terminal for the card catalogue section, which since my last visit had moved six feet closer to the back door and oblivion. I’d miss it when it was gone. It would mean allowing an extra ten minutes per trip for the electronic convenience.
The Media section was chock full of information on Neil Catalin’s favorite subject. Most were big glossy picture books. There was a file box stuffed with publications targeted at noir buffs, both expensive slicks and amateur jobs photocopied and stapled, part of a shelf devoted to race and gender bias in the genre, and one scholarly tract, Dark Dreams: Psychosexual Manifestations of Hollywood Crime Movies Circa 1945-1955, by Asa Portman, Ph.D. This was a thick volume wrapped in a dead black dust-jacket with its title printed in white capitals like typewriter characters, published that year by the University of Michigan Press.
I lugged the book over to a reading table and waded in. After ten minutes I went to the Reference section and came back with a dictionary. When that didn’t help I turned to the author’s biography at the back of the film book. Asa Portman, it said, taught courses on psychology and popular culture at Michigan.
I used a telephone on the main floor to call the university switchboard. A series of voices covered with ivy put me in touch with Portman’s department, where a student intern laid me down to wait. I had just fed the coin slot a second time when Portman came on. I told him what I was about and he agreed to see me in an hour. I wrote down the location in my notebook.
The German was too modest. In addition to the engine and transmission, he’d replaced the suspension, improving upon the slip-slop system that in 1970 had not progressed beyond the engineering of the family car under Eisenhower. The Cutlass cornered like a Formula I racer and capped the hills as if it were screwed down. On the Edsel Ford expressway west of Romulus, I shot past a state trooper parked on the median, doing eighty, and got nothing from him but a yawn. Those dents and that chalky paint made me invisible.
Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan and the five-dollar fine for possession of marijuana, has variously been called the Arcadia of America, the cultural capital of the world, and the last great refuge for artists and philosophers in the age of the music video. It has been called all these things by itself. In fact the city’s chief contribution to the twentieth century is the invention of the parking meter.
It has more trees than people—hence the arbor —and six traffic lights for every tree. It’s a sickly egghead kid with a passion for Tolkien, touchdowns, and tofu; a place where the cop who stops you for running one of its nine million red lights might recommend a book while writing up your ticket; a doddering hippie with a haircut and floral throws over the avocado velour chairs in the den. Every state has one, and each one thinks it’s unique.
On campus I negotiated one-way streets, jaywalking students, and a throwback in a tie-dyed shirt hawking copies of an underground newspaper and found a space only a mile or so from my destination. This was an imposing brick hall a city block wide, constructed sometime during the Era of Good Feeling. The chimes in the university tower were just striking three when I threaded my way among a scattering of students sunning themselves on the front steps and heaved open one of the big front doors. Inside I found an acre of veined marble cordoned with Neoclassical pilasters and more steps. Only the discovery of an antique Otis elevator
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