Dan
When I was in Detroit recently, my sister and I stopped at a restaurant at the Ford mansion. When we sat down, I heard a deep voice say my name. I looked up from the menu, and it was you, the maître d’. Forty years earlier, we met in a bar in Hamtramck. The Sun Messengers were playing. At the time, you were their agent, and I was with my friend Anne—her boyfriend was the lead saxophonist and band leader. You sat beside me, and we started talking and flirting. You wanted to come home with me, you said. I wasn’t interested in a one-night affair. What about a week, you asked. Two weeks? Three weeks? We agreed to stay together for one month. We ate together, slept together, and all day long you played your guitar and our piano while I went back and forth to class. You took Linnée downstairs to the playground, not letting the boys tease her. She loved you for that. On the phone you told me, “I liked how you were living back then, reading, studying, going to school. Your poetry group would meet, and I’d wait in the other room.” Your father was a pilot and when you were fourteen, while landing, he crashed his plane. When my mother was ill, I once found her lying on the floor after taking a bottle of pills. In ’83, we drove to New York City together and stayed at my friend Sally’s on 6th Street. You two knew each other from high school. I remember driving home through the mountains listening to the Human League, “Don’t, don’t you want me? Don’t you want me, baby.” Sometimes we were in sync, but other times we weren’t. You tell me now that you couldn’t do what I did—“Just take off just like that and move to New York.” That was forty years ago when I was in my thirties. When you said my name in the restaurant, I almost didn’t recognize you, the boy in my ghost poems. “Dessert’s on me,” you said. I ordered a chocolate torte.
Rich
When I finally found your phone number, you said you were married to a veterinarian. You asked if I was still skinny. Your wife was skinny like me, you said. Sex still on your mind even during a phone call. We first met in the parking lot of Big Boys. It was 1968. We went to a motel. We went to a car race the next morning. You had a boat. You kept it on Anchor Bay at your sister’s cottage. On summer weekends, with your family, we played poker and touch football. You taught me how to water ski. I loved the spray of water, my body alive in the sun. I still have the ring you gave me, but years ago, the stone fell out. We were together for three years. We could have married, but instead, when I was in the hospital with a virus, you screwed around with someone my sister knew. I remember lying in the bathtub smoking marijuana and looking at the bubbles. You were a beer guy. You disapproved. I packed up, moved downtown and registered for college courses. Last summer, when I was in Detroit, we met for lunch out by the marinas. You said I was always easy to talk to. You talked about your boat. You said something nice about our bully president. I stood up to leave. It was clear we didn’t have much in common anymore, even though fifty years earlier, we had sex together almost every day for three years.
Ray
Janet and Jim used to pick me up and we’d go to your house in Roseville where a group of friends hung out in the basement, smoking and drinking. I remember being alone there once with you. It was the first time I made out with a guy. Later Janet fixed me up with you for the prom. Afterwards, we drank a lot of beer and stumbled around Metropolitan Beach. Then most of the boys in our group were drafted. We didn’t know what was going on with the war. I don’t remember anyone talking about fleeing to Canada. Or if they did, it was a joke. You didn’t want to go, but you went, and you came home early, injured. When I stopped by to see you, you were lying in bed with both legs in casts. In the side table you had a drawer full of hash and speed. A few years later, I phoned, and you said, “Barbara, I’m different now. I’m a woman.”
Barbara Henning is the author of four novels and nine collections of poetry. Her most recent book, Girlfriend (Hanging Loose Press, 2025), is a collection of prose poems about her girl and women friends from childhood through older age. In 2023, the Library of Michigan awarded her a Notable Book Award for Ferne, a Detroit Story, a novelized biography of her mother and the city of Detroit (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022).
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