Dry ice smoked in bowls by the sink. A sound like a telephone off the hook filled the air. A few dozen people sat around on an assortment of ripped-up chairs and a lazy old couch, nodding their heads appreciatively at what turned out to be music. “You think these guys rehearsed?” a guy in a white tank top and mini fauxhawk asked me.
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I was excited to see Hazmat, an Ypsilanti native who hadn’t performed in town in several years. He set up a huge pile of equipment, most of it homemade: a hunk of plastic with a headset sticking out of it looked like a bomb from a late-night made-for-TV movie. There were contraptions made from toy parts, electric tape, exposed circuit boards, and wires galore.
He started off with a loop of a recorded voice coming through a karaoke machine. The only words I could make out were “motherfucker” and “George Foreman,” but dude sounded pissed off. Hazmat talked back to the voice, repeating its words or responding to them. “You wouldn’t say that to my face,” he said.
Kuncetta Di Marco–we call her Grandma Kay–is a shrunken but intensely vibrant 92-year-old Italian woman, a former seamstress who can get down the stairs without a cane, helps out five days a week in a preschool classroom, and volunteers at the local hospital. She lives alone in a one-bedroom town house in an Iowa retirement community, the warm but garishly ornate decor of which has been the same since before I was born. (Her all-pink bathroom features shelving lined with swatches of neon shag carpet, enormous cut-glass decanters of mouthwash and bubble bath, and matching canisters of pink cotton balls.) She’s still kickin’ pretty hard, but we wanted to learn how to make gnocchi while we had the chance.
Back at home we made a meal of salad, corn on the cob, and the gnocchi. Grandma put out some deviled eggs and the delicate anisette waffle cookies she’d baked for us the night before. I expected to take a bite of the pasta and rediscover some part of me buried beneath two generations of non-Italian genes, but . . . nothing. The gnocchi was bland, almost tasteless. Grandma Kay lost all sense of smell and taste when she fell down and broke her nose a couple years ago. I ate seconds anyway.
