hippie import clothing store (I)

The hippie import clothing store was located not far from the state street theater, quite close to what I came to think of the multidimensional used book store (it had more rooms than it seemed it should or, I believe, could have had). The hippie import clothing store was right next door to to the dance club which according to my brother's recollection is alternately either named "The Mango" or "Tangerine".

One afternoon, my co-workers at the hippie import clothing store told me Leaf would be working with us that week.

"I hate it when Leaf is here," Sam said. "She sits on her ass. She doesn't DO anything."
"Wait, her name is [leef]? Is that 'L-e-i-f' like viking?" I asked.
"No, no...'" said Eva who was standing under the extremely large mermaid, picking through the cherry vanilla incense. Eva said "It's Leaf like tree," and held out her aromatic hands, fingers stretched into branches which she wiggled stiffly for emphasis.
"They named their kid 'Leaf' like tree? That's fucking horrible."

While we spoke of Leaf's arrival, I contemplated the girl's situation. Sure, she might suck to work with as much as the other employees seemed to think she did. And she might even be a rotten person. But how much of this could really be laid only at her feet? I mean, if ever there was a situation of mom and dad setting the kid up for shit, this was it. By this point, I'd been working at Leaf's parents' store for over a month. I'd heard and personally witnessed not good things about our employers, store owners N____ and B____. But finding out they had burdened their child with the name Leaf was up there for worst things I knew about them yet.

Maybe it's because I had grown up where I did - which very much wasn't here - that I thought giving your child a name like Leaf was a signal at least to the sensitive adults of the world that you were selfish to the point of cruelty. But maybe here it was ok, or at least less bad, to name your child something like that.

Here was Ann Arbor MI in 1996. We were downtown but away from the extremely undergraddy part. "The City" as people from the pokey towns around it called it. And why not? If they didn't come in for the congested football game days, they came during other super packed times like the annual art fair or hashbash. To them, I'm sure it looked like a city.

Here was where you were more likely to get hit by a spandex and hemp wearing bicyclist whizzing down the sidewalk than actual motor vehicle traffic since most of the time, the cars were caught in a web of perversely arranged oneway streets and power-pedestrians.

Here, there was a working class but it wasn't much like the working class culture where I grew up. Here there seemed to be a very large number of 18-25 year old refugees from the boring MI suburbs who were pissing off their parents simply by not being in college, simply by working a working class job for a working class wage, growing pot in the basement of a house shared with 4 to 7 other young people, and spending most evenings smoking happily on porches throughout town. Here you had some folks born into the working classes, raised in less suburban suburbs, people who were older and younger, but who collectively showed signs of having a larger degree of tolerance and wider range of social attitudes than what I was accustomed to from my rather parochial Irish/Italian south of Boston former ship building town.

Here, the working class households were the primary motivators for all the cool shit in town, like a 24 hour diner, bars without TVs, native plant nurseries, neighborhood/community art and writing projects, cooperative gardens, and those corner bakeries where if you volunteer to help out a couple of hours a week, you can get free bread. It had pockets of anarchists, open atheists, and self-proclaimed artists. Maybe, I thought, in a place like this, they could abide names like "Leaf". Where I grew up, if you'd named your kid that and sent her to public school, the kid was gonna get hit, physically or emotionally at least every week if not every day for no reason other than the residents' intolerant xenophobic inferiority complex attitude which caused them to necessarily hear names like "Leaf" as "My parents think they are better than you and yours (so please feel free to fuck with and/or smack me)."

I'd been living in Ann Arbor long enough to know that the exact context for judging the cruelty of her parents, my bosses, N____ and B_____ might need some adjustment. I hadn't thought I'd get culture shock moving from south of Boston to Ann Arbor. I knew the "r" thing would be a problem, but I had assumed it would be one way. I wasn't prepared for things like completely failing to understand a nurse's declaration to me that "mrrstrrr strrjrrs in room threethrrrrtifrrrr wants a vrrrrnrrrrs"

"So you go to school with Leaf?" I asked Eva. Eva filled me in on how Leaf was tormented by people at school and how Leaf herself was in fact quite mean to the few people who tried to be friends with her (like Eva). I couldn't help wondering if Leaf would've been less mean and less tormented had she been named something else. Spoiled, being raised by people who never matured past 17, and named as she was, it seemed to me Leaf was pretty much fucked from the word go.

I looked around the store, noting the nearly life-sized llama ("it's an alpaca!" N_____ had corrected), the half strung balinese instruments, the grateful dead batik-like printed wall hangings ("tapestries"), and the many mermaids, mercats, merdogs, and frogs holding mirrors hanging from fishing line from eyes N_____'s husband and store co-owner B_____ had screwed into the ceiling.

When they swung, I wondered how much coke B____ had done the day he installed them. I hardly ever stood under the large mermaid. Seeing others under it as its cracked and puttied body swung lazily over them made me feel a little funny, like the way you get when you're too close to the edge of a building.

Who the fuck would name their kid "Leaf", like a tree? These people would.

* = "Mister Sturgers in room three thirty four wants a Vernor's**"
** = Vernor's is a kind of ginger ale.