You Don't Have to Live Like This (12 page)

O
ur neighborhood was probably the most middle-class neighborhood in the whole setup. Walter nicknamed us the “burnt ends.” There was Hector Cantu’s crowd, Latinos of one stripe or another, legal and illegal—Robert’s lawyers had fixed things pretty well with the ICE. Everyone called their neck of the woods Little Mexico. Then there was a kind of global village, people from Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, most of them refugees, living cheek by jowl with each other, about twenty blocks east of Johanna Street in the Marina District. That was the smallest block. Probably the weirdest development was out by the old Wayne Conner plant, which had been bought up by a social networking company.

They turned part of the plant into a server farm and filled all of the surrounding residential streets with their employees, who moved from shitty and expensive apartments in the Bay Area to houses in Detroit. Then out by the old airport was another mixed bag of middle-aged dropouts, more burnt ends. People sometimes talked about the “five neighborhoods.” Already restaurants were opening, food markets, street bazaars and bars—you met up in the places getting a reputation. Walter and I used to go for breakfast at a Somalian café in the Marina. It served cheap polenta porridge,
which Walter had become obsessed with. We drank tea and ate the porridge and read the
Detroit Free Press
; Walter was looking for part-time jobs.

The last piece of the puzzle was a stretch of dead land around I-94, not far from Kettridge High, which a guy called Franklin Mayer wanted to turn into an urban farm. Franklin was a friend of Robert’s. His father was somebody at Chrysler. He went to law school after college but dropped out and started using his moderate inheritance to buy up real estate. I met him once at Robert’s place in New York. A big, bluff, red-faced, genial guy, rich-sounding and good-looking, a kind of American gentleman. He had the talking habit of somebody with not enough to do. If you needed to drive somewhere he was happy to come along. But he also had practical talents and saved money by fixing up his properties himself. He taught himself basic plumbing, a little carpentry, something about electrics and gardening. His hands were always chapped and dirty under the nails.

Franklin talked a lot about real estate, he thought about it a lot, and got out at just the right time, before the crash, and ended up with a big pile of dough. More than he needed or wanted, he said. He wanted to do something “real” with this money, something political that didn’t pander to party. So he started this farm. A lot of people I knew made cash in hand by working on it, breaking ground, tearing down houses, building fences, etc. In the early stages there was plenty of work to go around. You showed up in the morning and somebody gave you something to do, and at the end of the day you got paid. Sometimes I worked there, too.

It served a useful community function. A litigator from Chicago might dig ditches with a factory hand from Kismaayo. The farm was one of the places where people from different neighborhoods got to know each other.

This was easy enough on your own street. Living opposite Walter and me was a gay couple, both in their forties. One guy used to work in IT but wanted to write plays; I think he still freelanced to pay the bills. Sandy Brinkman, from Seattle. His boyfriend, Tomaso, was Venezuelan by birth, a landscape gardener. Everyone on our block got to know him—he offered to help us with our yards.

Next door were the Mogfords, Hazel and Jayson. She was a post office administrator; he used to run a construction company. They were both black, she was maybe a little lighter-skinned. Jayson’s company expanded too quickly in the boom and went bust in the bust, just after they moved into a new house, but they managed to get through all that without ending up on different sides.

“It got to that point you all read about,” Hazel said to me. She had a soft southern accent, the kind that made me miss Baton Rouge, and wore her hair straightened and bright red lipstick. “We owed more than the place was worth. I’ll tell you what we did. We packed what we wanted to keep in Jayson’s van, then I walked up to the front door, I’ll not forget this, and put our keys through the slot. Then we drove to my mother’s house in Louisville. If we had stayed
there
much longer we’d have got divorced.”

They had two kids, two boys, and sometimes their football ended up in our backyard. I played a little catch with them. Walter and I had dinner there, too, several times. When my washing machine broke down and started leaking through the ceiling onto Walter’s bedroom, Jayson came by and fixed things up for us, for about fifty bucks. People helped each other out. We had time and didn’t need much money. Their older boy was ten years old, but very advanced mathematically, and sometimes I gave him a hand with his homework. They both went to Bert and Ingrid’s new school.

Robert insisted on keeping up a black presence in the neighborhoods, partly for PR reasons. But it wasn’t just that. I talked to
people who came back to Detroit because it meant something to them, as a black city. People had family here, they wanted to make it work. Jayson’s great-grandfather grew up in Elmwood Park, just the other side of the cemetery, about a half-hour walk away. There were also a lot of mixed-race couples. Kurt Stangel’s wife turned out to be Nigerian, but rich Nigerian. They met at Northwestern Law School. She was shy, attractive, very dark, and also quite religious; they spent their first few months in Detroit looking for a church.

Next door on the other side lived a Jewish family, the Rosens, a dentist and his wife with three kids, including a six-month-old baby. The dad was big, loud, fat and bald. He was one of those guys who looks funny in jeans, because they sit very high on his waist, held up by a belt, but he wore them every day, even when working. Along with New Balance sneakers and a Cornell sweatshirt. Sometimes he practiced “informally,” as he called it, from an office in his den, but the truth is, they had made a reasonable return on selling their house in Orange County, New York. He wanted to sit on his ass and throw a baseball around with his older boy, and take him to Tigers games. Cynthia, his wife, was small, olive-skinned, shrill, with a faint, faint mustache over her lip and more soft hairs along her neck, under the jaw. Their kids were called Benny, Miriam and baby Solly.

Jack, the father, probably had the best description of what we were doing. “We’re settlers,” he said. “There were boys I knew from synagogue in Port Jervis, who when they were all grown up and sick of their American lives, said fuck this and moved to Katzrin, where they sit on their tushes and make more kids. With everything paid for by the Jewish state. I said to my wife, I want a piece of this action, and she said, there’s only one problem. You’re not a religious nut. But here it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Here you just have to be nuts.”

But I talked to Cynthia, too—an intense woman. She said, the way they were living in New York, it’s lucky nobody died. Just to pay the mortgage she started working as a paralegal in the city three days a week. (Apart from all her other degrees she spent a year at law school.) With the commute she didn’t get home until ten o’clock some nights. There were basic things about family life, just to keep the ship running, that didn’t get done. Her kids walked out of the house without a packed lunch. When Miriam was three years old, she caught whooping cough. But you have to have the energy to pay attention to the signs, you have to be prepared to get out of bed at two a.m., and get dressed, and get the kids dressed, and drive to the hospital. You have to be sane enough to recognize what needs to be done, and what can be put off until the morning. But nobody in that house was sane. This is what she wanted from moving to Detroit—she wanted to get more pleasure from her kids, while they were young and still essentially happy animals. That’s the phrase she used.

In fact, most of us were proud of doing what we were doing, and talked about it proudly, which helped us get along. We wanted to say, here, at least, I know who my neighbors are. The Rosens moved from outside Newburgh, and there were a lot of ex-suburbanites on our block who didn’t use to know anybody they could borrow an egg from. So we borrowed a lot of eggs.

Another curious feature was the political mix. You’d expect a lot of left-wing hippies, counterculturists, and we got them, too. But there was also a libertarian streak, and a number of Tea Party types.

Opposite the Rosens lived a childless married couple called the Adlers, Tina and Don. Don was a professional grumbler who worked in insurance and was forced into early retirement a couple of years ago. First they moved to Phoenix (from Kansas City), which was too expensive he said, and not his scene. So he said to
Tina, for once in our lives let’s
do
something with our lives. He used to have political ambitions but the system was hopeless and corrupt. The trouble with any system is that it’s designed to perpetuate itself. There’s no point in getting into government if you want to get rid of government. That’s not how it works. And so on.

He used to walk over the road when he picked up his newspaper and talk to me. He was kind of friendly-miserable. When he heard about this Detroit business, he thought, this is what I’ve been talking about my whole life. The idea of America is a small-town idea, Jamestown, Plymouth, it’s a city-state idea. In his opinion the trouble started with the Constitution. There was nothing wrong with the Articles of Confederation—a confederation is what we should have stuck with. He read history books and liked to explain why he disagreed with them. He also watched a lot of TV and sometimes told me in the morning what he planned to watch later in the day.

Tina was one of these nice women who puts up with unreasonable men. Her whole personality was a defense against male-pattern craziness and also at the same time a kind of supporting act. She was small and made herself up heavily. Her hair was supposed to look blond but looked faded; it couldn’t quite take on the artificial coloring, it had got too thin. In her own way, she was just as crazy as him. But they must have had guts, too, to move to Detroit in their sixties, when they didn’t know anybody. She said to me privately that Don was much happier these days. There were days in Phoenix he wouldn’t leave the house.

“I know he talks too much,” she said. “You’re a good listener. Don’t think I don’t thank you in my heart when I see you together. But he’s one of those men, when he isn’t talking too much it’s worse.”

But Don did more than talk. He started getting involved in the politics of the place. Robert and the rest of us hoped that something
like a town hall mentality would develop, but there wasn’t anything in the charter about local government. He thought it should spring up on its own.

In fact, what happened was this. The first community organization of any kind was the Neighborhood Watch, set up by Kurt Stangel and Eddie Blyleven and a few other early arrivers. (It’s funny, but there was already a slight difference in status between the people who came in that first wave, in late February and early March, and the ones who showed up later, during the summer and after. Walter and I were considered second-wavers.) Eventually the Neighborhood Watch started concerning itself with more than just the roster for patrols. In August, there was a string of burglaries along the streets running off East Lafayette, more violent ones, involving guns. A kid, a nine-year-old boy, was briefly held hostage—forced at gunpoint into a car and then pushed out several blocks later, from where he had to make his way home in the dark. I think they just wanted to scare him, they wanted to say fuck you or watch out. He wasn’t hurt but another time somebody
did
get shot, a Michigan grad student named Shreedhar Patel, who was fixing up a place for his family to move into. Maybe it was the same guys who took the kid, but Shreedhar had a gun, a Beretta 92 that his father had given him when he moved to Detroit, and which he didn’t know how to work. Somebody saw it and shot him in the leg; then they took off. Eddie suggested establishing a couple of checkpoints at night, by the corners of St. Paul and Grand and Jefferson and Van Dyke, and closing off some of the smaller cross streets altogether. Part of the western border was the cemetery wall, and to the north and east the neighborhood opened out into the other new settlements.

For the first time, the meeting was widely attended. People crowded into Eddie’s front room, and since the night was fine eventually moved out into the garden. There were strong feelings and real disagreements. The mother of that nine-year-old boy stood up
to say something, one of these tightly put-together, anxious hippie moms, who bike their kids to school and go shopping in big cars. “These people,” she started to say, “what you have to understand about these people,” before someone shouted over her. What do you mean, these people, why don’t you just say it, etc. You could hear us several blocks away.

Then Jayson stood up. He was short and chubby and even on his feet had to shout a little to get noticed, but when people saw his black face they let him talk. “Wait a minute, wait a minute here,” he said. “This isn’t a race thing. This is a class thing. You’ve got to understand the mentality. It’s about you just moved here and what do
you
know. Let’s get that straight.”

The boy’s mother said, “I will not be shamed out of saying what I want to say. If it was your boy— What you have to realize is that the first person I blame is myself.”

This went on too long in my opinion, the righteousness and upset and self-explanation, on all sides. But we got through it in the end, and afterwards there was a kind of elevated mood, like, this is politics, this is how you talk things through.

The first thing we decided is that the Neighborhood Watch Committee needed to be democratically elected, which didn’t make much immediate difference, since Kurt and Eddie got voted in by a show of hands. But Jayson also put himself forward and won a seat on the panel. So did Don Adler. And the motion was passed. We closed off St. Paul, Kercheval, Baldwin, Seminole, etc., after nine p.m., using old cars, and set up checkpoints along the rest.