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j Happy Dean Bakopoulos W hen he was twenty-nine years old, Charlie Pappas left Vermont and moved back to Detroit after suffering from what—in a more innocent, big-bandplaying , hat-wearing era—would have been called a crack-up. The many factors leading to the crack-up included Charlie’s disillusionment with teaching in private schools, a tendency to selfmedicate with six-packs of Blatz, and his fiancée Jana’s affair with a prominent sculptor named Harris Mills. One day, a little drunk on after-school martinis, Charlie was searching for the checkbook in Jana’s backpack. There, he discovered a note that said: Jana, I know we were meant to be together, because after we make love, I dream of God and his angels, and they are dancing and they are made out of the most beautiful clay. He waited for her all night. She often worked late in the studio and sometimes came home after Charlie had fallen asleep. That night, however, Jana did not come home at all. It was if she sensed that Charlie had discovered the note. Charlie finished a case of Blatz; he stayed awake, watching the darkness slip out of the sky. In the morning, Charlie crumpled to the floor in the middle of teaching a lesson on the Transcendentalists. He began to whimper, then turned on his stomach, slowly and softly pounding his head against the tile floor, murmuring, There is no Oversoul, there is no Oversoul, there is no Oversoul. The children in his class, sensitive, wholly tolerant, and intellectually gifted offspring of wealthy ex-hippies, ex-activists, and exorganic farmers, sat in silence for a moment, and then, led by Skye Nelson and Prairie Masterson, they joined Charlie in his mantra. Some students even tapped their foreheads on their desk, so that, minutes later, when the headmaster arrived in the doorway, he found the tenth grade American literature class tapping their heads on desks and denying the Oversoul in unison. And there was Charlie, twitching on the floor. Charlie arrived in Detroit during a May that was still damp with the last chill of winter, carrying all his belongings in a duffel bag. His 288   289 Happy father, Jimmy Pappas (The Restaurant Supply King), to whom he had not spoken in three or four months, picked him up at the airport . Charlie had spent very little time with Jimmy since the age of twelve, but his father had money and a house, and Charlie did not. On the way home from the airport, Jimmy Pappas’s driver, a college student named Ray, talked more than Charlie did. There was not much to catch up on between father and son; they barely knew each other anymore. Charlie moved into his father’s five-bedroom, three-bathroom home in Elk Ridge, a ridge-less, elk-less subdivision in Livonia. Now that Charlie felt himself without options, he figured it was time to accept his father’s invitation to visit. Jimmy had been sober almost two years. Ever since Jimmy had gotten out of his six weeks in rehab, he’d been asking Charlie, his only child, to come home for a visit. The first night of the visit, just before bed, Charlie looked at his father’s bare white skin and noticed the small black band around his ankle. His father was still under house arrest for four drunk-driving convictions. He had to wear an electronic tether to prove to the police that he was home by dinnertime each evening. There was a whole year left on his sentence, but he’d avoided prison and was allowed to keep working. Jimmy had a lot of friends. Charlie looked at the red light of the tether as he followed Jimmy up the stairs and down the hallway. Jimmy flipped on the light to the room at the far end of the house. “See, you’ve got your own can,” Jimmy said, showing Charlie to a white-carpeted guest room. “You can’t beat that.” There was something poetic in convalescing in his estranged father’s guest room, spending the summer largely in the climate-controlled indoors, reading novels from the public library, and watching documentaries on PBS. He felt a bit like an eccentric, weak poet in an E. M. Forster novel, and for weeks, he shuffled around as if he were a bastard cousin in a Merchant & Ivory film, grimacing and trembling , exaggerating his mood swings for dramatic...

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