A Southwest Michigan Memory

Tala Rassool

Parchment, Michigan, is adjacent to a teeming Kalamazoo ghetto. Parchment makes a consistent effort to make a clear distinction between itself and the city of Kalamazoo (which can engulf neighborhoods with its pseudopods of dirty snow). They have the strictest little fascist police force and local mores trying to keep it as-is.

In the wintertime, Parchment being a small town, little snow-clearing activity occurs there. However, you can be fined $100 for not clearing your sidewalk immediately after a snowfall.

Our friend Justin lived in Parchment. He had recently moved in with his mother, who managed his apartment complex. The place was so full of stoners that no one ever cleared the snow. The parking lot became smaller, as tidal waves of ice made it horrendous to exit the building. Often we had no place else to go and didn’t want to travel far due to the slippery roads, so we’d hang out at Justin’s.

Justin was always looking for friends who could withstand his behavior. Sometimes you would hear Justin screaming that he was stuck in the washing machine, or beating on someone’s door pretending to be on a mission to kill them. He had many other more offensive ways to entertain us, though Justin’s mother would take away the hotrod with cherry bombs when he was at work.

Sometimes Justin would lie on the white-caked roads and wait for a Parchment policeman to pick him up. Later we might spend an evening with Justin, enduring director John Waters’s humor, which inspired certain prank calls and led us to be a general nuisance to citizens of the area.

One evening while wailing What’s Eating Glibert Grape-type remarks at the high schooler next door, Justin mooned the cat-calling neighbor (in the process breaking his mother’s plant stand). Instantly, there was a knock at the door: “POLICE! OPEN UP!” Justin was arrested for indecent exposure. His soppy mother pleaded with the Parchment officer, placing full blame on us (not Justin) and ordering us to bail him out.

At the police station, we almost fell backwards as we were chided by the Parchment jail cop for a prank call involving “something about a broomstick and a toilet and peanut butter.” The call, of course, had actually been master-minded by Justin.

We took the ungrateful Justin home for the last time, deciding never to visit Parchment or any of its residents again.