Mary Motor

By James Sarver

Detroit, 1959. Berry Gordy's Motown. His first big star is a beautiful girl with an extraordinary voice. Her name is Mary Motor. You've never heard of her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781678112547

Book preview

1 were strict Communists, dedicated Fellow Travelers who handed out busts of Lenin to their neighbors as May Day presents. Finessa rebelled against their ardent ideology from a young age, particularly after she was told to share and share alike in kindergarten. "These are my raisins, one classmate overheard her growl. You buy your own vineyard, grow your own grapes, suck out the moisture with a mechanical dryer, pack ’em in a one-ounce box, bring some to school, then we’ll talk."

Her parents attempted to explain to her the principles underlying their ideologies, for instance that she herself owned neither a vineyard nor a mechanical dryer, but their words fell on deaf ears. These belonged to Kelen Heller, a friend of Finessa’s who was standing next to her while her parents were explaining the principles underlying their ideologies, but the words also fell on Finessa’s ears. They may as well have fallen on deaf ears, though, for all the effect they had — Finessa was never known to share anything with anyone, throughout her schooling. Even when her mother fixed tuna fish sandwiches, which she hated, she wouldn’t share them with another friend, Gretel Hansel, who loved tuna fish the way some men love carburetors.

"I’ll trade you, Finessa suggested instead. That’s commerce. That’s capitalism. That’s what America’s all about."

Her parents attempted to explain to her that actually what she was describing was the barter system, which predated capitalism by thousands of years, but these words, too, fell on Kelen’s ears. She want the tuna, Finessa sneered, she know how she can get it.

But I have nothing to trade! cried Gretel. "My mother packs only carrot slices in my lunchbox! She says it is all the nutrition I need! But who will trade for carrot slices? No one! No one!"

Carrots, eh? said Finessa. She glanced into Gretel’s lunchbox, where two limp orange slivers lay dejectedly. That’s a real shame, she said, taking a bite of her tuna sandwich. A real live shame. Then, when Gretel turned away to hide her tears, Finessa spit the bite out into a napkin.

Her parents never stopped trying to convert Finessa from her consumerist ways, sitting her down to watch old newsreels of Karl Marx singing The Internationale and forcing her to read The Bolshie Boys, a series of novels for children. Finessa bore it all as best she could — which is to say, not well; Child Services had taken the phone off the hook — but finally, at the age of thirteen, her patience ran out.

And, so did she.

*      *      *

She made her way down from Michigan to Georgia. How she did so was, like her raisins, not something she ever shared with anyone else. But make her way to Georgia she did, presumably because she’d misunderstood the phrase Southern hospitality to apply to black folk.

She showed up in Gainesville on a rainy afternoon in a ragged red dress, soaking wet, her favorite doll in one hand and a bust of Lenin she’d stolen from her parents’ stockpile in the other. Harold Hill, an itinerant minister and musical instrument salesman, saw her standing in the rain and asked the first question that came to his mind, namely, Child, why on earth do you have a bust of Lenin in your hand?

To remind me, Finessa answered, why I left home and walked a thousand miles in the sun and the heat and the rain and the cold.

I’ll give you two dollars for it.

Sold.

Hill, who had eleven daughters of his own, invited Finessa to stay with him until she could find steady work at the local sweatshop.

No funny business! warned Finessa.

I am a pious man! gainsaid Hill. Carnal relations are restricted to my wife, and that only for procreation! Or my birthday.

Just keep your hands where I can see ’em, said Finessa. What denomination you belong to, if you’re such a goody two-shoes?

Harold Hill shifted his left foot behind his right, so that Finessa would not notice that he was, in fact, only able to afford a single shoe.

I believe that the Holy Ghost came down and entered into Elizabeth —

"Gimme the Reader’s Digest version."

Baptist, Hill said.

*      *      *

The Disciples, Hill’s eleven daughters took to calling themselves, once Finessa joined the household. Finessa had a sneaking suspicion that she’d been taken in by this highly devout family simply so they’d have an even dozen, but her greater concern was that, with all the others already taken, she was given the name Judas.

Don’t take it the wrong way, her sister Bartholomew told her. "Judas wasn’t such a bad guy before, y’know, he fingered our Lord and Savior for thirty pieces of silver. I’m sure you’d never do anything like that."

Harold Hill was as true as his word: he was Baptist, and his intentions toward her were those of a concerned father, not a perverted child molester. He was indeed a pious and godly man, whose greatest temptation was that sometimes his hips swayed a bit too revealingly when he lead the congregational hymns. He was like Elvis up there, one parishioner reminisced. I had to hold up my hand to block out his lower half.

Finessa took to her new family’s religion like a plant to sunlight. She loved dressing for church (Hill’s wife Juanita Esperanza had sewn her a new dress from discarded clarinet reeds), attending Sunday School, learning Bible verses, singing in the choir, spooning leftovers into Tupperware after potlucks; she even, in her sophomore year of high school, served as lifeguard for the baptismal.

Her life at home, too, was less quarrelsome and complicated than it had been in Detroit — except for the vicissitudes of living in a two-bedroom house with twelve other women. "You did not, Finessa would later say, want to be on those premises between the first and the fifth of the month."

*      *      *

In the summer between her junior and senior years, Finessa read the Book of Revelations. After which, recalled her sister Jude, everything changed.

She locked herself in her room, poring over commentaries, comparing modern translations with original Greek and Hebrew texts, delving further and further into postmillennial doctrine. She put up posters of the Four Horsemen, the Archangel Michael, the Isle of Patmos — she could quote the entire Revelation of St. John the Divine from memory! Usually without being asked to. She just was not the same Nessita we knew.

Another of her sisters, Simon the Zealot, remembers Finessa’s growing obsession with the (to Finessa’s mind, impending) Second Coming: "Oh my god! She would not shut the f--- up! On and on and on, seven beasts, seven thrones, seven of clubs, I don’t know, just endless hooey about Revelations and how the Lord was returning any day and we’d all better be ready for it. I used to say, ‘Finessa, you tend to your garden, let us tend to ours.’ She’d call me the Whore of Babylon and say I was condemned to eternal Hell. I said, Fine, so long as you’re not there and I don’t have to listen to any more of your claptrap."

Finessa’s fervor began to display itself in other ways, as well. She prayed constantly, sometimes in other languages, sometimes in her sleep, sometimes standing right in front of the people whose sins she was asking God to forgive. She went to church five times a week — services were only held twice — and soon started one-woman services of her own, singing, preaching, even taking up a collection and making birthday announcements to an empty sanctuary. Some members of the church feared for her sanity, but after a while her all-day Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday services began to attract a crowd of the curious — whom Finessa wasted no time in recruiting, putting them to work as ushers, deacons, pianist, Music Minister. She persuaded Ralph Smart, a notorious town drunkard, to deliver the sermon one Wednesday, on the topic of Drink Is Of The Devil! Smart did not give up boozing, but he did take up public speaking, and was elected to Congress the following year.

She was indeed, by age seventeen, the most dedicated Christian since Christ.

Then she went and got pregnant.

*      *      *

Her sister, Anjel Aurore:

"Finessa told this big ol’ whopper about wanting to be such a righteous woman that she prayed nightly for the Holy Ghost to visit her, and one night the Holy Ghost did, and the next morning she had a bun in the oven. She went to the minister, her adopted daddy, and told him all about it, claiming she might have the Lord’s second Son in her belly. The minister told her the Lord didn’t have no second Son, He had His hands full with the first, but Finny stood by her story. It wasn’t no neighborhood boy with the tight pants who’d knocked on her window that night, it was the Holy Ghost. Well, I seen a lotta weird shit go down, and I heard a lotta weird stories, but I can promise you one thing you can take to the bank: It weren’t no ghost who slid that bun in her oven, and if it was there weren’t nothin’ holy about it."

*      *      *

Harold and Juanita Esperanza Hill initially attempted to conceal Finessa’s condition from the congregation, but Finessa herself — whether out of a genuine conviction that she’d been visited by the Holy Spirit, or out of a genuine conviction that for this story to go over, she’d have to sell it like a vaudeville juggler — gave away the game when she started planning for what she called Christmas II, which just so happened to be scheduled for nine months from now.

The congregation was shocked and disappointed by the news. "That’s how babies are made? said one member. I thought Santy Claus brung ’em. Another related that after hearing the news, he never dated again. If Finessa could get in the family way, who was next, the Pope? I wasn’t takin’ no chances, nosirree. Porn all the way, for me. And you know what? It hasn’t been such a bad ride."

Finessa’s adopted parents were horrified, but supportive. They gave her the number of a guy they knew and bought her a Greyhound ticket to Tijuana. Finessa had no desire to leave her new family behind, nor to return to her Comunista parents, but she had little choice. She wasn’t about to go to Mexico, which she’d heard was lawless, dangerous, and, good Lord, have you seen the men? She traded in the ticket for cash value — by the time the transaction was finished she’d paid Greyhound three dollars to take it off her hands — and then pickpocketed five dollars to purchase passage on an apple cart back to Detroit.

She was rolled into town on September 1, 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Poland.

*      *      *

Gordon Gary Motor, who was at that moment working at a Buick dealership as a sign, had trod an equally picaresque path toward encountering his future spouse. He had been born to a circus family, his father a dwarf, his mother a lioness. In early twentieth-century America interspecies dating was among the least respectable choices a human being could make, even among so notoriously libertine a group as circus folk; and even circus folk looked down on children born out of wedlock. Children born with three legs or seven eyes were highly prized, but out of wedlock? Take it back East, my friend. We don’t cotton to such turpitude in these parts.

As a result, Gordon Gary’s mother’s pregnancy was, in a parallel with her future daughter-in-law Finessa’s, hidden for as long as it could be. The excuse given by Gordon Gary’s father was that she ate an emu, which takes a long time to digest. Eventually, however, her pride caught on to the deception when she was found pilfering pickles and peanut butter from the refrigerator late at night.

Her father, Zeus, was furious, but he was also a good friend of Gordon Gary’s father, who’d been one of the few members of the Delbert Brothers’ Traveling Attempt To Entertain You not to treat Zeus, and the other animals in the show, with anything but disdain.

RRRROOOOAAAAWWWWRRRRR! said Zeus when asked about his daughter’s pregnancy in a 1966 interview. What he meant by this has never been made clear.

In the seventh month of her pregnancy, Gordon Gary’s mother married his father in a medium ceremony in the middle of the DBTATEY’s three rings, with a regular weekday matinee crowd of about seventeen attending. Ersine Delbert, the elder of the Delbert Brothers, refused to allow them time off for a honeymoon since, as he put it, They’ve honeymooned already, all over their railroad car, and so Gordon Gary’s parents’ honeymoon was spent in Las Vegas, or the place where Las Vegas would be built in thirty years.

Gordon Gary was born four months later. He was an enormous infant, already nearly five feet tall and sporting a five o’clock shadow. Doctors informed his parents that his hormones were askew — a result of his mixed dwarven/leonine heritage. When his mother questioned whether her son could ever hope to be normal, the doctor shrieked and ran away, for he’d just been spoken to by a lion. When Gordon Gary’s father finally chased the man down and explained that lions weren’t so bad, once you got to know them, except for maybe their breath, the doctor answered Gordon Gary’s mother’s question with, "I’ll never be normal, after this, but the kid’ll probably be fine."

Gordon Gary was not, however, fine. Not even by the standards of circus folk. He grew, and grew, and grew some more. By the age of six he was eight feet tall. By ten, twelve feet tall. By the time he hit puberty, he’d been shaving for a decade. When he entered high school, after his parents settled in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners, he had to register as a hazard to low-flying aircraft and notify the FAA of his whereabouts at all times.

Friends remember him, nonetheless, as a gregarious child, always smiling and laughing, or at any rate that’s what they assumed those noises were, coming from far above.

He went out for the varsity football team when he was three, said one classmate. "But they wouldn’t let him play because of a technicality. Technically, he hadn’t graduated kindergarten."

One might imagine that a gigantically oversized child would face numerous obstacles to normal development, but Gordon Gary appears to have enjoyed a relatively unexceptional childhood. Other than having to sleep in the school’s gymnasium and bathe in the local reservoir.

He was a good boy, said Mrs. Rene Crocker, with whose daughter Gordon Gary went to school. "Not a great boy, mind you, but not bad. Too damn tall, but that weren’t his fault. You can’t mix apples and oranges — you get apanges, or orples. That’s what that boy was. An orple."

From a young age, Gordon Gary was interested in music. Not the calliopic cacophony of the circus, but jazz, and jazz fusion, which wouldn’t be invented until the late 60’s. But then, said longtime associate Cru Robinson, Gigi always was ahead of his time.

Gigi. The nickname was given him by a member of the Delbert Brothers’ troupe, a contortionist called India Rubber. She saw Gordon Gary walking into camp one evening, his footfalls causing small aftershocks. She said, Gee…gee!

It stuck.

*      *      *

Finessa’s staunchly Communist parents were pleased to see her in a fallen condition, for it confirmed their contention that a bourgeois life led invariably to corruption and despair.

This is not despair, Finessa told them. This is a knocked-up chick who could use a hand with the stairs on the stoop.

Her parents gave her back her old room, despite its being, during her eight-year absence, the residence of her sister Anjel. Thus began the continuing conflict between the two girls, and then women, which would go on for the next forty years; from the first night of Finessa’s return, when Anjel wanted to listen to Uncle Joe’s Saturday Night Showcase, while Finessa preferred The Bickersons, their rows never ceased.

Commie drivel! snapped Finessa.

Bourgeois propaganda! shouted Anjel.

Their parents compromised by tuning to a rerun of Father Coughlin arguing with himself.

*      *      *

When Cru Robinson described Gordon Gary as ahead of his time, he spoke metaphorically, yet he was more accurate than he knew. Gordon Gary’s size was not the only anomaly that could be traced back to his parentage — he also suffered from what doctors, who’d never seen such a thing before, called Time Sink.

Gordon Gary did not experience time the same way everyone else did. At intermittent intervals he would freeze for a few seconds, as if someone had hit the pause button, and then he would return to life as if nothing had happened and with no memory of what had occurred during those missing seconds. At other times he would loop back on himself and speak with two voices, as if he had gone backwards in time and was reliving the previous few seconds.

Gordon Gary had become aware of his condition while at Summer Camp in a condemned building in downtown Detroit. Only five years old, he was nonetheless taller than his counselor, Stick Figure Stan, who had played for the Harlem Globetrotters. The counselor was demonstrating the proper technique for a layup when Gordon Gary, practicing, appeared to layup two basketballs, one in each hand, at the same time.

Holy mackerel! yelled the Figure. That’s the best trick I ever saw! How’d you do that, Gordon Gary Motor?

Do what?

Two-ball layup! I wouldn’t a’ believed it, I ain’t seen it with my own two eyes! One eye on each ball! Like my wife — well, never mind that, but how the heck’d you do that, Gordon Gary Motor?

I only laid up one ball, said Gordon Gary. With my left... right...left...

Gordon Gary realized he remembered practicing his layups twice, once with each hand. But Figure had seen him do just the one layup, with a ball in each hand. The first explanation Gordon Gary could think of — which just happened to be correct, but also completely wrong — was that Mr. Stan had been hitting the Colt 45 again. The second explanation he could think of — which just happened to be the correct one in every respect — was that he’d done the layup with his right hand, then gone back in time and done it with his left hand.

I gotta practice that move! cried Figure. If I could layup with two balls at one time, I’d score four points instead of two! This could be the start of a whole new career!

Gordon Gary, petrified at the prospect of his secret becoming public knowledge, quickly learned to scamper for his room at the first sign of Time Sink. Being thirty feet tall was bad enough, but having what in the 1920’s could only be considered the type of mental illness that warranted tar, feathers, and a banjo soundtrack was more than sufficient reason to lock the door and pretend to be masturbating.

*      *      *

What had led Finessa’s parents to Communism? Her father, wearing whiteface to fool the recruiters, had enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1918 and been sent to fight on the Western Front. Not possessed of the best sense of direction, he had one night left the trenches to relieve himself and wound up, ten days later, in St. Petersburg. Accosted by a Bolshevik who believed that all men were equal save the Polish, he was introduced to a group of up-and-coming Russian intellectuals who were to have an enormous influence on him. Mostly this influence consisted of being rounded up and shot by the Red Army.

Didn’t want a bullet in my brain, said Finessa’s father in a 1961 interview. "That’s what led me to Communism."

*      *      *

Gordon Gary’s dream was to be a bass player. He idolized Jimmy Blanton, and Willie Dixon, and John Entwistle, the former two of whom had not yet achieved any sort of fame and the latter of whom hadn’t even been born yet. Gordon Gary’s ambitions, however, were to be frustrated by his enormous size: for him even the largest bass was twenty feet too small. The bow, in his hands, was like a toothpick.

He lived, said his high school best friend Peter Pappaquick, in a dollhouse world. Everything was scaled wrong for him. We take so many things for granted with our size — toothbrushes, soap, books, silverware. None of it’s made for a poor dumb sap who’s ten yards tall.

Gordon Gary’s father plied his circus connections worldwide to locate a bass built to his son’s measurements, but to no avail. He was told that one might be specially constructed, but as no one had ever made an instrument of such a size, its acoustic qualities could not be vouched for. Not to mention it would cost $400,000, which was $399,993.86 more than was in Gordon Gary’s father’s bank account.

Gordon Gary’s parents presented the sad news on his seventeenth birthday. They could not afford a super-bass. Gordon Gary would have to give up his musical dream.

rroaru, said his mother softly, which we may without much fear of disagreement interpret as, i’m sorry, son.

Gordon Gary’s reaction to this news was not what his parents had expected.

IDoesn’tunderstandIt’smatteraLetprincelyitsumbeBtaI’mmillionnotdollars, he said. He had, in his enthusiasm, forgotten to hide the episode of Time Sink he was undergoing. He took a deep calming breath and started over.

I understand, he told his parents. "It’s a princely sum. But I’m not giving up my dream. Not in this lifetime! I’ll work like a dog if I have to — although how many dogs do you know who work all day? Mostly they just lie around doing nothing — but I will get that $400,000 and I will get that big ol’ bass!"

Er, son, said his father, the actual cost, with tax and shipping, was $437,853.74.

Doesn’t matter! said Gordon Gary. "Let it be a million dollars! I will get that bass and I will tap my fingers on its upper bout as I play a Mingus riff! You hear me, world? You hear me? I will tap that bass!"

*      *      *

Finessa would not speak of the father of her unborn child. When asked, she would say, This child’s father was the Holy Spirit.

Upon which, naturally, her sister Anjel seized. Hasn’t the Holy Spirit heard of birth control? she’d ask Finessa when no one else was around. But then I s’pose the seed of the Holy Ghost would float right through a prophylactic.

Finessa, shocked that her seven-year-old sister could be so worldly-wise, threatened to tell their parents on her, but this did not discourage Anjel in the least. Like they don’t know already, Anjel boasted. I know which way the wind blows! I know why the caged bird sings! I know which side my bread’s buttered on! I know about the birds and bees and the flowers and the trees! I knew Jesus before he was a superstar!

Finessa cocked a wrist to slap her, but Anjel was too quick for her.

Fatty, fatty, don’t know the daddy! she laughed.

"I do know the daddy!" Finessa would rage.

But if she did know the daddy — assuming the conception was not, as she claimed, immaculate — Finessa wasn’t saying who.

*      *      *

Gordon Gary got a job as a window-washer. He was a natural, since he could reach, with arms fully extended, the sixth floor of most buildings. In those days a building with two floors qualified as a skyscraper, and buildings with six were known as heavenscrapers. Gordon Gary became a sensation, with folks traveling from as many as two miles away to watch Gigi the Squeegee tackle a downtown high-rise.

He made a production out of it, said Peter Pappaquick. Hired a band, sold concessions, set up bleachers — he inherited that showmanship from his old man, the circus dwarf. And from his old lady, the circus lion. People came to see him and they got their money’s worth, no doubt about it. A thirty-foot tall Afro boy wiping down a six-story office building? Where else you gonna see somethin’ like that?

Window-washing was also solitary work that made it much easier for Gordon Gary to hide his condition of Time Sink. If he spoke two sentences at the same time no one was there to hear, unless they were listening in from the water cooler on the fifth floor; and if he froze for a few seconds as he was washing, folks just assumed he was watching Mr. Wingrove’s weekly assignation with his secretary in the third floor cleaning room.

Gordon Gary had found his niche. In his first three months as a window-washer he cleared over $60. At that rate he would need to work for another 1.7 centuries to earn enough to purchase the bass, but the young lad was undeterred.

He was on his way.

*      *      *

The events of November 17, 1939, are shrouded in secrecy. Finessa Barnes — Nesser, as her father called her (compared to her sister Anjel, she was the Nesser of two evils) — was discovered outside the family house’s back door, which adjoined a darkened alleyway, slapping her palm against the doorframe.

She caused a real ruckus, recalled her Great Uncle Feebo. A noise to wake the dead. But I didn’t see no dead, so maybe it just caused ’em to wake up and go back to sleep.

Finessa’s skirt was wet with blood. She was weeping pitifully, almost wailing.

She was crying, ‘I lost the baby! I lost the baby!’ said Anjel Aurore. "Try sleeping with that ruckus round your back door."

Finessa’s mother and father helped her inside and made to telephone an ambulance, but Finessa wouldn’t let them. She recounted an incredible story, of a visitation by a demon in the alley behind the house — a demon who had reached out and ripped her child from her womb and then disappeared in a cloud of smoke, taking the fetus with it.

Finessa’s father scrambled out the door into the alleyway, but found no evidence of a demonic presence, save for cloven hoofprints and a strong stench of sulphur. I was a good Communist, he would later say. I couldn’t truck with no demon. I was an atheist! Card-carrying! So I kicked dirt over the hoofprints and told everyone I’d eaten too much broccoli for dinner.

Anjel Aurore pooh-poohed her sister’s account, as she pooh-poohed the entire episode. "Sulphur, my left cheek. Demon, my right cheek. I was out in that alley, and the only stench was of Uncle Feebo’s night soil. My sister never met no ‘demon’ in that alley. — Well, let me amend that statement. If she did meet a demon, its first name was ‘Clothes,’ and its last name was ‘Hanger.’"

Whatever the truth of the tale, whether Finessa was devastated or directly responsible — Finessa herself refused to discuss the incident, forever after — the eighteen-year-old was no longer with child.

*      *      *

Gordon Gary had saved up $250 by the end of his first year as a window-washer. But then a change occurred in the window-washing industry — more precisely, in the skyscraper industry. Buildings began to get taller. Seven stories, eight, nine, ten, up and up, higher and higher. Soon buildings had broken the previously inviolable twenty-story limit. (It had been believed that no building taller than nineteen stories could withstand its own weight, a stiff wind, or the wrath of the jealous cloud-god Zephyrus.)

With these new heights came new methods of window-washing, key among them the introduction of the gantry. Lowered on cables from a trestle on the roof, these platforms revolutionized window-washing and put Gordon Gory — who if he stretched tippy-toe could only reach the seventh floor — out of work.

Those was hard times, said Romeo Roundtree, one of the new breed of window-washers. This was the tail end of the Depression. Jobs was scarce. We didn’t know good times was on their way, what with the War and all. Gigi was sure he’d never work again. That’s why he done what he done.

What he done was, he tried to take his own life.

*      *      *

With Finessa’s pregnancy no longer a deterrent, her Communist father’s issues with his eldest daughter’s distinctly capitalist points of view once again stoked tensions within the Barnes household. In late 1939, those tensions reached a boiling point.

Finessa’s father had arranged for the family to attend a Communist Party fundraiser, but Finessa would not budge from the couch in the living room, where she’d been eating Oreos and drinking Ovaltine. According to Anjel Aurore their mother Mao attempted to play the peacemaker, but Josip wouldn’t budge.

Corporate fascist crony! he yelled at Finessa in fury.

Dupe! she yelled back. Useful idiot!

Get out of my house! he shouted. "And don’t come back, even if you’re heavy with a second child! You’re welcome to use the alleyway, but do not darken our doorstep, ever again!"

Finessa burst into, not tears, but laughter. As if I would! I’m a beautiful young black woman and I got pizzazz up the wazoo! I’ll be just fine, don’t you worry!

With that she stormed from the house. She sent for her things two days later. Among them were hair extensions and recipes for chitlins. Anjel Aurore watched with barely suppressed glee. Mao watched in impotent horror. Josip looked on with muddled confusion.

What is it? asked his wife.

He turned to her with a puzzled glance. "Our daughter’s black?"

*      *      *

Gordon Gary chose to kill himself, ironically, by jumping from a tall building. In this he made two miscalculations: first, few buildings could support the undesigned-for weight of a thirty-foot tall man, and second, what signified as a tall building was of course necessarily different for a thirty-foot man than for the general run of humanity. Indeed, he had trouble, after unintentionally collapsing three high-rises while struggling to scale them, even in finding a building tall enough to suit his purposes. Most of the buildings in Detroit that had been constructed over twenty stories tall had toppled with the first stiff wind.

He needed an alternate plan, but none sprang to mind. He couldn’t fit his giant finger to the trigger of a gun, and anyhow what damage would a gun do to his extra-thick skull? He considered poison — pills — electrocution — drowning — reading James Michener’s entire oeuvre — but every method came with its own special problems, given his stature. How much poison? How many pills? How much current? Drowning seemed the most promising solution, but the only body of water deep enough was the ocean, and how could he afford the bus fare?

Well, there was the $250 he’d saved up. He’d impulsively assured the owner of one of the buildings he’d collapsed while climbing it that he’d donate this money to help with the repairs, as if this paltry sum would make a dent in...such a dent...but he hadn’t yet handed over the funds.

On November 25, 1939, he was in the bus station, about to buy a ticket to Los Angeles — intending to smog himself to death — when an artist’s rendering of the Grand Canyon caught his eye. He noted the Canyon’s depth and performed a mental calculation. Would a leap from its edge, at its deepest point, be enough to kill a thirty-foot-tall man?

He didn’t know. But he determined to find out. He boarded the 2:17 for Flagstaff, having made a decision that would, but not in the way he imagined, change his life forever.

*      *      *

Finessa wandered the streets of Detroit, sleeping at night in mailboxes and phone booths, living off the kindness of strangers, although, as she was quoted as berating more than one stranger, Kindness ain’t gonna fill my belly, you cheap son of a bitch!

She lost three pounds in two months. She began using discarded crayons for lipstick. She rubbed her fingers on old newspapers and then applied this color as eyeshade. For mascara she stuck a toothbrush in a tar pit. For foundation she rubbed gravel in her cheeks.

She was the purtiest hobo I ever seen, said Rolex, a homeless man whose path she often crossed. I oncet offered her a portion of my banana — that’s not a euphemism, it was an actual banana, but it was the right size banana to be a euphemism, if you get what I’m sayin’ — and she threw up her hands and said, ‘That banana ain’t gonna fill my bell — wait, yes it will.’ She thanked me, but not in the way I requested. She was a God-fearin’ gal, she tol’ me. ‘Wells,’ I said, ’cain’t you fear God equally good with your lips around my — ’

At this point the author turned off the tape recorder. It should be clear enough that Finessa’s life during these months was a nightmare of deprivation and hunger. She was a young woman in dire need of being rescued.

Rescued, she would be. But first...

*      *      *

Gordon Gary swiveled his legs off the roof of the bus (such was the only way he could travel, strapped in a prone position) in Flagstaff and was immediately met by a cry of, "Lookit that! Would you look — it — that!"

The man speaking these words was a sixty-two-year-old Texan on vacation with his wife and burro. His name was Incline Borger. He was the most successful used-car salesman in the