The Madison Heights Syndrome

Potomac State college Keyser, West Virginia

There's this tape I have that I watch from the 11-o'clock news, Bernie Smilovitz doing the sports, talking about the Tigers down at the stadium tonight taking on the White Sox. "We have highlights," he begins, and there's Cliff Spab standing on the pitcher's mound, about to toss out the first ball to Mike Heath, standing by the backstop. "Now watch this," Bernie says as all of a sudden Spab takes off for center field, the camera catching him from behind as he runs with that ball, focusing on the Spab 15 on his back, a real jersey the Tigers made for him, and when he gets out in center field, he rears back and flings that ball, just pegs that motherfucker into the upper-deck bleachers.

The crowd goes nuts. I remember walking back to the infield, across the greenest grass in the tricounty area, and it felt good. Watching it makes me feel good.

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But I'm not in Tiger Stadium now, I'm in Colwood, Michigan, living in the R Street Theater. It's a pretty cool building. They don't show movies here anymore, though the place is intact. The seats are still all here, facing a big blank white screen.

My room is on the second floor, above the lobby, across the hall from the projection booth. The owner, Streeter, promises to show me how to run the projector someday. He thinks he has some old stag movies, smokers, sitting around somewhere.

The window in my room overlooks the theater marquee. At night, I turn on the blank sign from a nearby switch and lie down and watch the lights move across the ceiling.

I don't leave the building. Streeter brings me food. The other day, he brought me a newspaper. The Detroit Free Press. Headline, page 1A: "Cliff spab still missing." I barely glance at it before going to the sports. As I do, I look up at the old man and he's grinning at me. "What the fuck," I mutter. "I ain't missing, I'm right here."

?

I don't know what's going on anymore. There's nothing wrong with that. That was cool once, back when my life was simple. Working at the Oakland Mall Burger King, I spent my days waking up, punching in, slopping up, punching out. I didn't give a shit, and on a job like that, that's the only way to go.

Then came the weekend and me and my buddy Joe Dice would go out cruising the northeast suburbs of Detroit in my green '73 El Camino. We'd be out there, driving around, picking up chicks, cranking up the radio, laughing our asses off.

Working and cruising. Like I said, things were simple.

And that's what we were doing, Joe and I, the night of the now-famous hostage crisis in Madison Heights, Michigan. Friday night, the two of us punched out at the Home of the Whopper and hit the streets. Two a.m. or so, we figured on getting some beer and heading home, so we stopped in that 7-Eleven on John R between 13 and 14 Mile.

Inside, they got us. Stuck guns to our heads, handcuffed us. It would be 36 days before I left that goddamn store.

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I know Streeter's daughter, that's how I know Streeter. Stacy Streeter. Nice chick, good-looking, she's got a decent apartment, makes some decent money; she's a few years older than me, no big deal.

Let's just say we met at a party.

Stacy, having seen the whole thing on TV, knows more about the Madison Heights hostage crisis than I do, but I can't get her to believe that. I haven't seen her since I got out, but I've talked to her on the phone.

"What happened in there?" she asks me.

"Nothin'," I say.

"Bullshit," she tells me.

Well, what the fuck am I supposed to tell her? That I drank a lot of beer, ate a lot of burritos? "What happened in there?" she asks. I think I went nuts in there, that's what I think happened, but I'm not sure.

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Now Streeter's bringing me a copy of Time magazine with my picture on the cover. Again. Not a photo this time--but a goddamn painting. "Where is cliff spab?" the cover reads.

I read the article about America's newest folk hero and his cult following; I read their analysis of the Spab phenomenon. They say I'm "indicative of the growing dark side of the Pepsi Generation." Gee, I can't wait to show this to my grandkids.

I'm watching TV with Streeter now and a commercial for Time comes on. When they flash an 800 number, I dial it.

"Yo," I say. "Cliff Spab here. Tell your bosses they can have an exclusive interview for one million dollars cash."

The operator hangs up. Streeter snickers at me as I stare at the receiver. I sort of shrug, hang up, get myself another beer.

?

In the 7-Eleven, they had a video camera, these guys with the panty hose on their heads. Every day or so (though none of us knew what day it was or even if it was day or night), they'd come in with that camera and we'd sit there and say something. I don't know how, but the cops would get the tape and then they'd show it on the news.

Eventually, Joe and I and Wendy Pfister, this Hazel Park chick stuck in there with us, started cutting loose for the camera. Joe would reel off a couple of dirty jokes. Wendy might talk about how wonderful this whole experience was, how she was finally at peace with herself. I did lots of weird shit, but the tape that caught everyone's fancy was when I dared the panty-hose guys to blow my head off.

I don't know why I did it, I just did. Look at that tape. There I am in that now-famous black Doors T-shirt, my left wrist handcuffed to the metal folding funeral-home chair I'm sitting in, screaming into the camera, "What's the matter, you chickenshit or something? Come on, ya fuckin' pussy, kill me, I fuckin' dare ya. Blow my fuckin' brains out, come on. You chickenshit or something?"

That made the evening news, of course, and when one of the panty-hose guys hit me, hard, in the mouth and I'm spitting blood all over the place, it didn't hurt my standing in the public eye.

Streeter tells me those black Doors T-shirts are selling out all around the country.

(continued on page 144)Madison Heights(continued from page 82)

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At the beginning, there were five hostages, including myself. I got to know them all pretty good, I guess, which isn't to say I liked all of them. Kim Martin was a bitch. Not just a bitch, either, but a whiny bitch. She was the one working at the store the night the panty-hose guys showed up. Oh, Christ, she drove everyone nuts; she just didn't know how to shut up. She didn't like the guns or the cigarette smoke or the language or the beer or the handcuffs, and she didn't deserve to be in here, because she was a woman and she had a husband and a kid and on and on....

We must've been in there a week when a couple of the panty-hose guys came into the little office where the five of us were sitting in a circle and announced that they were going to let a hostage go. We got to pick who it was, we were going to vote on it; we just couldn't vote for ourselves.

Kim Martin received four votes, I got one.

So one of the panty-hose guys all of a sudden whips out his gun and blows Kim Martin's brains out. Shot her three times in the left ear. Just like that.

They brought the video camera in then and took some pictures of her body, then they stuck her in the freezer.

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Another guy, this rich old white guy named Milton Morris, lasted about another week. Oh, he was cool enough, for an old guy. Smoked three free packs of Vantage 100s a day and drank his fair share of beer.

Then, one day, Morris is just sitting there with us, just hanging out, and he drops dead. Natural causes, a heart attack, probably. The panty-hose guys went nuts, whining about how it wasn't their fault, and finally they figured, Fuck it, and shot him like they did Kim Martin, three bullets in his now-dead brain. Dragged in the video camera, took some pictures, then stuck him in the freezer.

That left three of us.

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Stacy calls me, seeing if I'm doing Ok, telling me she's coming up to Colwood next weekend. Asking me when I plan to return to the public eye.

I'm happy where I am, I tell her. Someday, sure, I'll put the black T-shirt back on and do the Cliff Spab bit for everybody, but not now.

When?

Never?

I tell Stacy about how when I went home after I got out, when the cops were through with me, they drove me to my house and everybody on the fucking block is there and all the trees got these fucking yellow ribbons all over the fucking place. And at my house, the mayor of Madison Heights is standing there on the front porch, waiting to give me the key to the city or some bullshit. I say to him, "Who the fuck are you?" and then blow him off, go into the house. Go into my room, put on a Stones album I've been craving for the past month, lie down on my bed, and then my old man comes storming into my room and he's pissed.

He's going on about what the hell am I doing in here, don't you know that's the goddamn mayor standing out there, get your ass out there and hold a press conference, now.

I'm, like, Hey, guy, fuck you. I don't need this shit. If I don't go out there, what're ya gonna do? Send me to my room without dessert? Why the fuck don'tcha just stick a gun to my head, handcuff me to a chair? That'll accomplish a hell of a lot.

The motherfucker hit me. In the mouth, same as those panty-hose guys did. I started spitting blood like I did that time.

My old man just left the room after that, just left me alone.

The neighbors went home, but those fucking reporters stayed in the street, waiting for me to come out.

?

I saw Wendy Pfister being interviewed by Barbara Walters last night. Now, Wendy Pfister is, like, the all-American girl, an extremely courageous young woman, role model for teenagers everywhere. It also helps that she's willing to talk to the media, unlike some ex-hostages I could name.

Oh, Jesus, yeah, it's the scam of the century, Wendy sitting there looking good, really good, sitting across from Barbara Walters in a comfortable chair, legs crossed, hair fluffed, smiling behind a $1000 make-up job or whatever, talking about God, country, telling kids to "Just say no," with a perfectly straight face. Acting so fucking wholesome you just wanted to puke.

Streeter's watching this with me, wondering why I'm laughing. "Look at her," I'm saying, "look at her. Do you realize this chick listens to Zeppelin albums, that she put away two packs of menthols a day, drank at least as much as I did?"

"No," Streeter says.

"Do you know what she had in her purse when she walked into that store? Huh? I'll tell ya what she had; she had two ounces of marijuana in her purse. Two fucking ounces. I'm talking teenager on drugs and she's probably gonna get a medal next week from Nancy fucking Reagan or something."

"What's the point?" Streeter asks.

"I'm sayin' I heard America's newest sweetheart use the F word, that's what I'm sayin'."

"I know what you're saying, Spab. I'm asking you what's the point?"

"Who gives a shit what the point is?" I say.

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So I stayed in my house for a week or so, my parents pissed at me, all those reporters outside, and then I went to that ball game. My brother took me. Scott Spab. He set the whole thing up with the Tigers, got them to make me that jersey.

He was cool about keeping me away from the reporters. Hustling my ass out of the stadium before the game started, before anybody could catch us. The reporters really pissed him off when I was in that store, the way they kept on sticking cameras in his face, expecting him to cry for them or something.

After that game, I stayed in his apartment for a few days. He lives in Center Line Gardens, in Warren, which is cool, because the whole complex is private property and the cops would keep the reporters at the gate if they ever found out I was there. Which they did--my parents told them.

But eventually, I got sick of it, so one night, I got into the trunk of my brother's car and he took me out to the Somerset Mall parking lot in Troy, where Stacy had left a car for me. The keys were in the ignition and I shagged ass getting to the R Street Theater, driving up to Colwood.

My brother went back to his apartment, found I wasn't there and called the cops.

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Stacy's with me now, here in Colwood for the weekend, and we're watching Night-line, a special show on Cliff Spab. First up was FBI special agent Shawn Parsley, the Fed who took my statement at the Madison Heights police station after I got out of captivity. "We are treating Cliff Spab's disappearance with the utmost seriousness," he said. "Mr. Spab is a disturbed young man in desperate need of help."

The prick.

Then my parents came on and I'm thinking, What is this, This Is Your Life or something? They gonna have on my second-grade teacher or some shit? So my folks are saying how much they miss me, mentioned as how they thought I needed help and how all is forgiven, as if this isanybody's business to show on network TV and all.

Then they brought on some shrink who talked about the Stockholm syndrome, how I was probably fucked up because I missed my old panty-hose buddies from the store. Then he started on about stress. And then he explained the Spab phenomenon, how kids look up to me because I got to live out my fantasies of youth and I represent something to this country and whatever. Huh?

And then, oh, Jesus, Wendy Pfister came on. Oh, God, she was looking good. Every time I see her, I think, Goddamn, she's looking good. Smiling at the fucking camera, oh, God, she looked good.

"Spab, if you're watching this," she says, and I blink, surprised--I've been watching her, not listening to her--"call me. Your brother has my number. Call me, we'll talk and I won't tell anybody we did."

Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God, and at that point, Stacy and I go down to my room and I turn on the lights of the marquee and when we finish, I fall asleep watching those lights move across the ceiling.

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Do I trust her? I know Wendy Pfister, I was in that store with her for 36 days and I see her on TV now and think, That's not Wendy Pfister, that's just a character on TV just like Archie Bunker or Lucy Ricardo or Hawkeye Pierce. But than, what about this enigmatic, larger-than-life guy from Madison Heights who made those wacky videos in captivity, tossed a baseball into the bleachers? Now I worry, What if that asshole really is the real me?

I'm starting to feel like I'm in over my head. Suppose I did come out of hiding. Would I be able to keep the scam working? Could I act like the mythical figure I've become? Do I want to?

Stacy knows me. She says the Cliff Spab they know is the real me. So does Streeter. He reminds me about the time I called Time magazine, how that's just the sort of thing Cliff Spab would do.

Stacy talks about the Free Cliff spab now T-shirts and the Spab rules bumper stickers, shows me a copy of my first Time cover, me in that black Doors T-shirt daring a panty-hose guy to blow my head off.

"Enjoy it while it lasts," she tells me, "and, for Christ's sake, at least make a few bucks out of it.

"I can't support you forever," Stacy says, "even if I can afford it."

I'm nuts, Stacy. I can't take this shit. Oh, God, anonymity would be so sweet right about now.

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But now Stacy's pissed at me. There's a story in the National Enquirer, a chick saying she fucked me in the ladies' room at the Ram's Horn in Warren, on Dequindre between 12 and 13 Mile. This story is, fortunately or unfortunately--take your pick--true. After Tiger Stadium, my brother and I stopped by the Ram's Horn because it didn't look too busy. It wasn't; the waitresses, three of them, were standing around doing nothing. They recognized me, went nuts, asked for autographs, and then I took one of them back to the ladies' room and she yanked up her brown polyester skirt and we had two and a half minutes of decent sex. Something like that, I was pretty drunk. What the fuck do I know?

So now this chick's made more money off my name than I have.

Stacy's left Colwood, told me to fuck off. Streeter's being cool, but I think he's pissed at me, too, fucking around on his daughter like that. So I guess I can't stay in Colwood much longer. I don't want to, either. I need to find a new hiding space.

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Joe's the one guy I need to hang out with for a few hours. The two of us need to go out cruising all night. Need to cruise the northeast side until the Camino's out of gas, need to find a chick or two and feed lines of bullshit out into the world in general.

That's the way it was, back when things were simple. We owned that goddamn city, Joe and I. Three a.m., all alone cruising Dequindre or Van Dyke or some shit, passing beneath those yellow streetlights, we owned, owned that fucking town. It was ours for the taking.

Those nights were the best. Madison Heights was the greatest city in the world to me. I could feel it in the night, that charge in the air. Cruising was the only thing I ever wanted to do, cruising all night long.

I say that and I turn to Joe, sitting in the passenger seat of the Camino, and he gives me that goofy Joe Dice grin and says, "Hey, guy, fuckin' you know it."

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I call Wendy late one night, waking her up. I'm drunk, again, and as it turns out, so is she. Her mother went to bed early, leaving Wendy to scarf her vodka.

"You're fulla shit," I tell her.

"Yeah, right," she says. "Look who's talking. Mr. I Am God, Fuck All of You."

"That shit wasn't my idea."

"Yeah, right. You think this was my brain storm, this Miss Apple Pie bullshit? Christ, my mother's the one behind the whole thing, running my life, picking out my clothes, telling people I'll be on their sorry-ass TV show."

"That's too bad. How much they pay you for that Pepsi ad? Or was it Coke?"

Wendy sighed.

"Two hundred and thirty-six thousand dollars, plus some change every time they show it."

"Sounds cool. Come on up and visit me. You can buy the beer."

"I'd like to."

"Of course, I'll need a note from your mother."

"No problem. I got my own car now. I'll do what the fuck I want. I think you got the right idea, Spab, disappearing like that. Don't these people realize I just want to forget the whole thing, the whole fucking thing?"

I say nothing. Jesus Christ, I think, she's hit it right on the head.

"Spab?"

"Sorry, Wendy."

"No problem."

"I've finally figured it out," I say, "you know? I mean, Jesus, Wendy, why didn't I think of it before? All I want to do more than anything else is forget the whole thing. It all goes back to being in that goddamn store. I keep dwelling on it; I'm sitting here whining about everything else and, Jesus, Wendy, it's driving me nuts...."

"You remember that shrink on TV the other night?" she asks.

"On Nightline?"

"Yeah," she sighs. "Spab, he got it all wrong when he started going on about the Stockholm syndrome. That's bullshit. What we're talking about here is something new, a disease only two people in the world have, and do you know what it's called?"

"What?"

"It's called the Madison Heights syndrome. The only people who caught it were the people in that store. That means you and me, Spab."

"Oh, Christ, Wendy."

"And that asshole shrink, he'll never know what the Madison Heights syndrome is, because he wasn't in that store with us, and if you weren't in that store--"

"You can shut the fuck up," I say.

"Right," Wendy says.

Nobody says anything. "I want to see you, Wendy," I say finally. "I gotta see you."

"If I come see you, they'll follow me and find you, wherever you are."

"Let 'em," I say, and I realize that the scam, the fame, the hiding, none of it matters.

I tell her how to get to R Street, say good night, hang up, open another beer. Put on my black Doors T-shirt and cue up that video tape of me at Tiger Stadium. It feels good. Oh, Jesus.

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On the 36th day, the beer ran out.

Joe, Wendy and I, when we were in that store, if we weren't drunk, we were stoned, and often we were both. And then the beer ran out and we had to come up with a plan.

On the 35th day, Wendy had asked one of the panty-hose guys one more time when we were going to get out of there, and he said, again, "When there is total nuclear disarmament in the world."

So we weren't the only lunatics in that store.

So the three of us came up with a plan. And it worked. Sort of.

They came in with that video camera on the 36th day. Wendy's sitting there across from me and she's talking to the camera and all of a sudden, I stand up, dragging my chair from my wrist, I turn around and pull down my pants. Just yanked 'em down. Yeah, guy, there they are, motherfuckers, both cheeks of the famous, hairy Spab ass. In your face. Kiss 'em, why don'tcha?

The panty-hose guys go nuts, Wendy's talking, my ass is hanging out, the camera guy doesn't know where to point the camera, all this out-of-control shit going on, and nobody's paying attention to Joe, and then Joe picks up his chair, chained to his wrist, picks it up and brings it down on the head of one of the panty-hose guys. The panty-hose guy goes down, Joe Dice grabs his gun. The panty-hose guy starts bleeding, blood seeping through the nylon covering his head.

Now the other panty-hose guy, the one with the video camera, is reaching for his gun, can't get to it; he doesn't want to drop the camera, and Joe shoots him in the head, kills him, just like that. Oh, Christ.

Joe's going to the door of the office now, the office he hadn't left in 36 days, stopping to kill the guy that he hit with the chair, shoot him in the brain. Wendy and I are freaking and Joe's at the door, firing shots into the store, and I grab the cameraman's gun and Joe sees me with it. "Give it to me!" he screams, and I'm about to hand it to him when--bam!--he doubles over, falls back, shots coming from inside the store and Joe's bleeding on the floor now, on his back, and like a fucking idiot, I'm still trying to hand him the gun, but he just looks at me, grins and shakes his head no. Just gives me that goofy Joe Dice grin and shakes his head no.

He's fucking smiling at me. Oh, God. Oh, shit.

I get a good look at his stomach then as it begins to leak all over the floor, Joe Dice's intestines, and then I look at Wendy standing over Joe and the two dead panty-hose guys and then the police knocked on the door, asking if everything was all right.

And then Joe Dice died.

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Things change when the reasons for doing them change. That's what happened when we were in that store for 36 days. The rules of the game were tossed out the window; survival no longer depended on working, learning, morals, values, none of that. Survival depended on eating, drinking, sleeping, shitting, pissing. Thinking.

That's what I learned in the 7-Eleven. That's what you gotta understand. The rest of my life, I'll play that life game I learned in school, also from my folks; I'll be lying, just bullshitting.

Sure, I wish things could be the way they were. Like I said, waking up, punching in, slopping up shit, punching out. Cruising. Simple shit like that.

Sometimes, after cruising all night, Joe and I would walk over to this schoolyard and hit rocks with a baseball bat as the sun came up. I'd swing and really connect with one of them stones and I'd imagine that I just cranked one over the 365-foot mark in left center field down at Tiger Stadium.

But now I've been to Tiger Stadium, I could have really done that, cranked one over the 365 mark. I could be doing that today, hitting a home run to win the world series or whatever, but even if I did, as I did it, I'd be imagining, just wishing I was back in that Madison Heights playground, knocking a pebble into the rising sun.

Play Boy's College Fiction Contest Winner

"One of the panty-hose guys whips out his gun and blows Kim Martin's brains out. Just like that."

Other prize winners in Playboy 's College Fiction Contest: second, "Claims," by John McNally, University of Iowa; third, "Dead Horse Blues," by Lee Durkee, University of Arkansas; "Night Sound," by Robert Schirmer, University of Arizona; "Audience," by Tsivia Susan Cohen, University of Iowa; "The Answering Machine," by Paul Lawrence Tremblay, Columbia College, Chicago. Would you like to enter next year? See page 150.