Devil's Night (3 page)

Even as a teenager, Charles was treated with respect by the men and boys who hung around The Corner, the basketball courts and the other places we frequented. In the beginning, my presence there aroused curiosity, but Charles defused it, saying that we were “goin' for cousins,” or introduced me as his “play brother.” After a while people came to take me for granted. A few of them became friends.

Jesse Stephen, the preacher's son, invited me to his father's church, where I first heard live gospel music. It was Jesse who taught me to replace my
American Bandstand
clap with the sanctified slap, and also once processed my hair. Ralph Grandberry, an overweight pool hustler with an artistic touch, helped me forge my first fake ID,
which we used to buy and drain a fifth of Peppermint Schnapps. And Roy Ray Jones, an incipient radical who later became one of the first American deserters in Vietnam, gave me a recording of Malcolm X's “Message to the Grass Roots.”

Roy Ray notwithstanding, politics played a very minor role for Charles and his friends. It was the height of the civil rights movement but we rarely discussed segregation or the Freedom Riders. When Martin Luther King came to Detroit for a march, in the summer of 1963, I couldn't convince Charles to attend. “I ain't left nothin' in Alabama,” he said, dismissing the matter. I went alone, and was thrilled by the moral seriousness of the event.

A few months later, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. We heard the news over the high school PA system. As we filed solemnly out of the building, the Pontiac attitude was verbalized by a skinny friend of ours named Jewel. “Um, um, um,” he intoned. “Shot that motherfucker in the ass. No school on Monday. Um, um, um.”

Charles eventually dropped out of high school. I graduated, and he came to the ceremony, inordinately proud of an accomplishment I took for granted. As a gift, he invited me to LaRoaches Tea Room, where he presided over dinner with the pickish good manners of a rich uncle.

After graduation I attended the University of Michigan. Charles got drafted, an event he called “going to the war,” although he wound up at a fort in Kentucky. For more than a year we lost touch with one another, and I missed him. In his honor I wrote a whimsical paper for a philosophy class: “Plato, Republican or Democrat?” More than once I successfully applied his courtship techniques to Big Ten coeds. And one evening, at a bull session dominated by a black power bully who was trying to impress my date, I cut off his harangue with a “Get your face out of my face,” that came right off The Corner and won me a respectful double take.

Then, one day, Charles turned up unexpectedly at my small apartment in Ann Arbor. He was accompanied by an extremely pregnant girlfriend, and informed me that he had dropped an engine block on
a racist corporal and was on the run. Since my place was too small for all of us, I gave him my keys and told him to stay as long as he wanted. It never occurred to me that I might be harboring a fugitive, and it wouldn't have mattered if it had. Charles and I had been play brothers a long time.

After a couple of days, Charles stopped answering the phone when I called. I went to look for him, and found he had gone, taking a television set, radio and my only suit with him. I was puzzled but nothing more, figuring that he must have had a good reason. But a week later I still hadn't heard from him, and it began to dawn on me that I had, in the current phrase, been ripped off.

I called Charles's mother in Pontiac, and she gave me the address and phone number of a flophouse in Detroit's Twelfth Street ghetto, where he was hiding out. I called, but he refused to come to the phone. I called again and again, but there was no answer.

I really didn't care much about the suit and the appliances, but I was devastated by the idea that Charles had stolen from me. If he had asked, I would have gladly sold the stuff myself to give him money. I had long since stopped thinking of Charles as specifically black, but I regarded his betrayal in racial terms. I saw it as a message that, despite our long friendship, I was still one of
them
, a rich white kid, fair game.

There was only one way to prove otherwise. Late on a rainy Saturday night I drove an hour from Ann Arbor to the flophouse on Twelfth Street. I walked into the lobby and asked the rheumy-looking desk clerk for Charles's room number. The clerk gave me the number but looked alarmed. “No trouble now,” he said, and for the first time I considered that there might be.

If there was, I had no doubt about how it would end. Charles was one of the most fearsome street fighters I had ever seen. Once I watched while he beat four white high school football players into bloody submission, cracking one over the head with a brick for good measure. “Don't fight to fight, fight to kill,” was his dictum on the
subject. I knew that if he felt like it, he could easily toss me out the window.

Still, I went up and knocked on the door. It was instinct, not bravery, that propelled me up the stairs. Even after he took my stuff, I couldn't believe that Charles would do me any physical harm.

“Charles,” I hollered through the wooden door. “Let me in.”

There were muffled sounds, and I hollered again, banging on the door. Afer a long moment it opened and he stood there, shirtless and barefoot, wearing only a pair of shorts. The pregnant girlfriend lay in silence on the bed.

“You took my things,” I said, hoping he'd deny it, or explain. Instead he looked at me steadily for a while. Finally he reached into his wallet, which he called his “secretariat,” and produced two pawn tickets, which he handed over.

“I can't believe this,” I said, unwilling to let it go. “If you needed money, all you had to do was ask. You stole from me, man. You're a fucking thief.”

For a second I thought I had gone too far, but then tears welled up in Charles's eyes. It was like seeing Superman cry, and I covered my astonishment with anger. “Why?” I demanded. “Why in hell did you have to steal from me? I would have given you anything you wanted, don't you know that?”

“I didn't want to ask,” he said. “I didn't know how to ask for any help.” Tears rolled down his cheeks, but I was dry-eyed. My best friend had let me down, but he had also let me off the hook. I didn't have to care about his problems anymore.

We stood facing one another in silence. “Don't tell your mother,” he said finally.

“My mother couldn't care less,” I lied.

Charles said nothing. Then, from the corner of the room, the pregnant girlfriend spoke for the first time. “He's desperate,” she said. “Can't you see that he's desperate?”

I looked at him hard and I saw that it was true; Charles, the baddest young blood on The Corner, was terrified. Standing there facing
him, I sensed a subtle but unmistakable shift in the balance of our relationship. Charles was no longer a charismatic idol; he was just a young black man on the run, and he knew that when they found him he was going to catch hell. I belonged to the class of white people who would soon be running his life—federal agents and lawyers, judges and wardens. Mixed with my anger and sorrow, I felt a guilty, undeniable surge of power.

I turned to go, and remembered that there were only two pawn tickets. “How about the suit?” I asked.

“I wanna keep it, wear it to church tomorrow,” said Charles.

“Man, I can't let you keep it, you know that,” I said. “I learned that from you.” He nodded at the justice of the remark, opened the closet and handed me the neatly pressed suit. I was on my way out the door when the girlfriend spoke again.

“Don't seem like you learned a thing,” she said in a quiet, venomous voice. “Seems like you didn't learn one damn thing.”

When I got back to Ann Arbor, I told several white classmates about my encounter with Charles. Their attitude was unsympathetic; what did I expect from a black kid from the projects? It was 1966, and they were University of Michigan liberals. None was ill-mannered enough to blame Charles himself. Instead they talked about his socioeconomic background and the forces of racism that made such behavior inevitable.

At first I resisted this analysis. Charles was my friend, not some case study. I thought of him at my bar mitzvah, tipsy on champagne, proudly wishing a long-practiced “mazel tov” to my parents; gently wiping the blood off my face after forcing me to fight the kid who tried to take my lunch money; lying next to me on the grass near the basketball court, singing snatches of Drifters songs and talking dreamily about what life would be like when we grew up. I knew Charles; I knew him well enough to blame him, personally, for betraying our friendship and his own nature.

And yet, despite this knowledge, I gradually came to see what happened in the same impersonal way my classmates did. What
can
you expect? I asked myself. It's not his fault, it's the way society made him. It was the easiest way of understanding what had happened, a thought that helped me forgive Charles and dismiss him from my life.

I didn't see Charles again after that night. A few months later I moved to Israel. I was able to take only a few things with me from The Corner: a dozen gospel albums, my Malcolm X recording, and some memories. Occasionally something from the old days would pop up. I was in the Israeli army, for example, when I read in the paper that Roy Ray was now living in Sweden. But after a while the records became scratched, and my memories faded. Detroit, The Corner, Charles—it was all part of another life. Until Devil's Night, 1986.

Chapter One
 
“WHITE PEOPLE DON'T
KNOW A GODDAMNED THING”

I flew into Detroit in early July 1988. From the air the urban sprawl seemed as intricate and harmonious as a Persian carpet. The sun glinted off the Detroit River, which separates the city from Canada, and winked back from the tops of skyscrapers in the compact business district. At thirty thousand feet there was no hint that many of the tall buildings were empty, the streets deserted and the little houses full of people divided by fierce tribal rivalries.

As the plane flew over the city I could see the wide boulevards that fan out, like the fingers of a hand, from the city's riverfront center. I picked out Jefferson Avenue, which runs parallel to the river past the Chrysler factory out to the WASP stronghold of Grosse Pointe; Gratiot (the name an homage to Detroit's origins as a French trading post, but pronounced locally as “Grashit”), leading to the
Polish and Italian suburbs of the northeast; Michigan Avenue, which passes Tiger Stadium on its way west to the Ford plants and the Arab and redneck enclave of Dearborn; and, bisecting the city, the grandest boulevard of them all, Woodward Avenue, heading due north past the mile roads—Six, Seven—all the way out to the city's border, Eight Mile Road.

The geography of Detroit has not changed since my childhood. It is the demography that is different. In 1960, there were 1,670,000 people in the city, about 70 percent of them white. Poles and Italians lived in neat little boxlike homes along quiet streets on the east side. Jews and WASPs inhabited more substantial brick houses on the other side of Woodward Avenue. Blacks, who made up less than a third of the population, were crowded mostly into small neighborhoods downtown, near the river.

Detroit in those days was less a big city than a federation of ethnic villages bound together by auto plants, a place with more basements and bowling alleys than any other metropolis in the country. The only hint of sophistication was downtown. Woodward Avenue was lined with impressive mock gothic churches, an art museum and library, fine shops and grand theaters. At the heart of the hub were skyscrapers, citadels of commerce, where the paperwork for the Motor City of the world was signed and filed. Detroiters felt an awe and affection for their downtown that was unmatched in other, more urban cities.

The touchstone was Hudson's Department Store, a block-wide emporium that was the site of an annual winter pilgrimage for the city's children. Every year in December our mothers took us to the toy department, where we sat on Santa's knee (a pleasure only slightly diminished by my yearly admission that I was Jewish, and didn't really want anything for Christmas). Ask any white Detroiter over forty about his childhood, and he is likely to mention Hudson's.