In a sleepy apartment complex in Auburn Hills, a cowboy resides, whose trusty steed is a golf cart. His cowboy-cut Wranglers — worn since high school decades ago, long before any Gen-Z TikToker declared them fashionable — hang with one leg off the cart, as if to spur it faster. A cigarette dangles from his lips, its position somehow defying gravity.
His expression defies reason.
“You never really know what you’re going to get, and that’s part of the fun of it.”
This is Steve Geck, head maintenance manager at Meadowbrook Village Apartments.
In winter, his work becomes uniquely pivotal. Michigan’s storms are less weather and more tempest, an unrelenting force that turns each hour into a duel with the elements.
“We recently switched contractors — better deal, better timeliness. Still leaves us shoveling sidewalks and stairs,” Geck said. “In past years, we’d leave buckets of salt out, but they don’t let us do that anymore.”
Dissident souls once cast salt haphazardly — no restraint, no regard — as if warding off demons.
Ruined it for everybody.
“It’s left us fighting the clock even more each snow.”
Seasonal struggles are only one of the bulls Steve wrestles in his apartment pasture. Over his years as maintenance manager, he has learned that maintaining a community demands some of the responsibilities — and burdens — of a family.
His eyes curl slightly.
“Some of the hardest calls I get are when the same elderly person calls for silly things,” he said.
They tighten a little more, Clint Eastwood-style.
“Not that they’re calling — that I love. But when it’s the same things over again. Small things,” he said.
He looks at his cigarette.
“Like water spots in a sink. You can get ’em with a rag. You tell ’em that, and they’ll know,” he said.
He ashes.
“Then, they forget,” he said.
It hits him hard. He is not just a cowboy, but a warrior-poet. It is the sort of thing a person should only have to witness with their parents.
And it kills them then, too.
He’s a hero to the elderly, but not only to them. On a ride around the pasture, he can regale you with tales from his time as this sleepy community’s resident cowboy-tech.
He has saved cats.
He has assisted police with violent tenants.
He has performed emergency heat repairs at 4 a.m. in December to keep families warm.
Every day is a different “Fistful of Dollars” to him.
And like every hero in a Western, Geck has a sweetheart.
Back in his warm home waits Audrey Bickmore. After even a brief conversation, it becomes clear they are a couple who cares deeply for their community.
Bickmore, like Geck, can weave a yarn for hours. She can hold quite the conversation — her proficiency with social nuance is immense, overshadowed only by how thrilled she is to brag about Geck.
“He is on call any hour,” she said. “Like an ER doctor, they have him working. I feel bad for him — he can be totally at rest, and then suddenly he’s back at it.”
One of their two cats races past Bickmore’s leg. The other sits guard at the master bedroom doorway like a gargoyle in a Gothic cathedral.
“Some days, especially in the extreme hot or cold, he just comes home completely worn out,” she said, “Everything fails in that weather.”
Looking outside their window into the frosted crystalline forest over the parking lot, it is clear to see why.
The very salt and ice of the Earth wear out the body’s strings. Stay out too long, and your muscles get sore.
Clear disharmony.
“I wish he got more time for his music. That’s what really makes him happy.”
Winding into their guest room reveals little room for guests at all — a music studio, loaded with equipment.
More fit for Paisley Park than a sleepy apartment complex.
But here, the cowboy becomes a magician. He enters a trance. He is briefly free from all the chaos of the complex. He turns that rugged chaos into soul.
The cowboy retreats to the campfire and plays harmonica.
“I actually can play harmonica too,” Steve says. “And violin. And guitar. I’ve got an old 12-string here, my dad used to play with Travis Tritt when they were stationed together in the war.”
The lights of the soundboard, the twists of knobs, the pluck of strings — everything collides into a baroque, bebop-tinged techno. Something you could hear in an expensive nightclub in Chicago.
A cowboy with a six-string instead of six bullets. A helping heart and an armory full of instruments.
Except he only has the soundtrack for the standoff.
He sells it to no one. Streams it nowhere. His music is an interest he has maintained since childhood, having picked it up from his father. He has never toured, yet the music is purer than anything people buy concert tickets for.
A true cowboy does not make anyone pay to sit by his fire.
But you do have to be there.
“It used to be a lot harsher,” he says. “They’ve added more help the longer I’ve worked here. But it’s still a lot. I’m lucky if I get an hour any given day in this room.”
His hand hovers near his pager — quick-draw.
Always ready, in need of a break.
Yet there are groundhogs with other plans. The wind howls.
Record-breaking February Arctic cold points its cold barrel at the Midwest.
A cowboy ought to be able to ride off into the sunset occasionally, but in the current labor market, even the most skilled workers struggle to find a meaningful balance. For real men like Geck — part cowboy, part social worker, part technician, part rock of the home — one can tell they need that moment of rest every so often to keep everyone else’s world turning.
Until then, he rides on into the sunrise, golf cart at full blast, hair blowing in the wind, grinning. Those tires on his steed, that old golf cart, grip what little traction they can from the frugal ice. Always riding to the next problem to solve.
