You Don't Have to Live Like This (21 page)

T
hat was on Friday night. Gloria stayed for the rest of the weekend. On Sunday a seventeen-year-old kid named Dwayne Meacher, riding his bike, stole an iPhone from a man talking on the sidewalk. Not far from Johanna Street, in fact; two blocks away. Meacher got hit by a car immediately afterwards and cracked his head on the asphalt. The roads were still slick; he didn’t have a helmet on. There were differing accounts of what happened, including a disputed confession by the driver to a cop who showed up at the scene three minutes later. For whatever reason, the ambulance took another twenty minutes to arrive.

The first I heard about it was on the local news. Gloria had gone home and I watched the Sunday-evening roundup by myself.

Meacher was knocked out by the fall and remained unconscious in the hospital. The TV report listed his condition as critical; the
Detroit Free Press
described it as a coma in the morning. I usually took a copy of the paper to class with me, to show my students that history is not only happening all the time but happening locally. Meacher made the front page, but I can’t say anybody mentioned him in the cafeteria until Thursday lunchtime, after
The New York Times
ran a leader on the story. The
Times
’ piece, if you read past
the jump, had as much to say about Robert James and his “development model” as it did about Dwayne Meacher. Then
The Huffington Post
picked up on it,
Slate
ran something,
NewsHour
did a story, and the whole shooting match started.

Part of what attracted the talking heads was easy symbolism: the kid on a bike, the vintage car (an old Saab 900 convertible), the iPhone. The fact that the kid was black and the driver was white. Everybody at the scene turned out to be white, except for Meacher and the cops. Columnists and editorial writers used the story to talk about New Jamestown—which is apparently what some people called the new neighborhoods. But after this the name stuck. Robert got a lot of publicity, not all of it bad.

The trouble was, too many people saw something. It was the first warm weekend of the year. There was a yard sale on the block and somebody had put the Tigers game on the radio, probably to show that the radio actually worked. Spring training. People stood around and listened to the game. The guy whose phone was stolen shouted, “Hey, hey you,” and everyone turned to look. Several eyewitnesses insisted that Meacher, trying to escape, biked straight across the road and in front of the car, which swerved to avoid him. Other people said the car swerved into Meacher.

The driver, Tyler Waites, described himself as an “Internet entrepreneur.” We ended up learning a lot about him.

One of the cops reported that Waites had said to him, “I was just trying to get in his way.” But Waites denied this. He said the cop was confusing him with the other guy, whose phone was stolen. I happened to know him—Sandy Brinkman, the playwright from Seattle. Sandy was pretty torn up about the whole thing; his boyfriend was Venezuelan and could pass for black. He said to me a couple of weeks later at Joe’s, “Look, I know what discrimination is.”

“So did you say that Waites was trying to get in his way?”

“Who knows what I said, I was distraught. You know the first thing I did when the kid got hit? I went and picked up my phone—the screen was broken. I’m an
asshole
. Maybe he’s right. I said to Tomaso, it’s time to atone, baby; it’s time to change our ways. I should fast, I should do something. When you pick up your fucking phone instead of going to the kid. Whatever the papers say about me is right. But I should shut up at least—I’m not supposed to talk about the case.”

But the cop insisted it wasn’t Sandy, it was Waites who told him, “I was just trying to get in his way.” “I know what I heard,” the cop tweeted, after the story ran. He got in trouble for that and was eventually suspended with pay. What nobody wrote about, but what you couldn’t help noticing, was the extra police cars on our streets, driving slowly, even in the middle of the afternoon. The atmosphere was changing, people were taking sides.

GLORIA AND I HAD A
drawn-out fight about the whole thing. I mean, it just simmered away, and sometimes it boiled over.

There were all kinds of stories coming out about this Waites guy. His father was a Bircher, a lawyer in Memphis, which is where Waites grew up. He went to law school in Memphis, too, but dropped out after a year to go into real estate. His business partner was another law school dropout, an African American, as it happens, who used to play power forward for the Memphis Tigers. They had big-name backers, including some local sports personalities, ex–NFL players, and they made some money at first and then overextended themselves. Waites and his partner had a falling-out; the company was still involved in litigation.

Then Waites launched an Internet business, a website that organized people’s online lives. The idea was, you set up one
account with him and used it to access and pay for all other services on the web. You had just one username, one password, one set of payment details. In practice, it turned out to be a front for people who wanted to look at hard-core pornography and cover their tracks. The
Times
quoted Waites as saying, “You can’t blame me for the human condition. I offer a service. What people use it for is their business.” He was still running this site from Detroit and the
Times
piece gave him a lot of free publicity. (They ran a follow-up story about it.)

The implication was, these are the kind of people who moved to Detroit. Law school dropouts, shady businessmen, porn pushers; rich kids who couldn’t make it on Daddy’s dime. Life’s unattractive failures. Steve Zipp knew Tyler Waites—he helped him out with his accounts. What Steve said to me is this. Once the press starts looking at your life, forget about it. We all look like jerks. Tyler’s not so bad.

But would he run down a black kid in his car? That was the question, and for some reason people wanted to answer it biographically. They made a big deal about the Bircher connection. For Gloria, it was the end of the story. Of course, he ran him down.

“You can’t have a daddy like that and not be poisoned by it. It’s a split-second thing. You hear somebody shout, Stop, thief, and you see this black kid, and he’s getting away. So you put your foot on the pedal, a little bit.”

“But he didn’t shout, Stop, thief,” I said. “He shouted, Hey, you. There’s a difference. Who knows what
hey, you
means. And Tyler wasn’t on speaking terms with his father.”

“Oh, that’s just because— That’s not because Tyler hated him, or anything like that. That’s just because his daddy thought he was a loser and a borderline criminal. He didn’t want to have anything to do with Tyler, not the other way around.”

“How can you say such things so confidently about these people? You never even met him.”

“Believe me, I met a few Tyler Waites.”

“And the reason his father wouldn’t speak to him is that he went into business with a black guy. And dropped out of law school. So what if he did. I’ve quit a few things in my time.”

“That’s all this is,” Gloria said. “You think I’m mad at you.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Little bit,” she said. “For taking his side.”

“I’m not taking anyone’s side.”

“Sure you are. You just don’t know it yet.”

There was a columnist at the
Chicago Tribune
who argued that anyone who had moved to the “Communist-style society of this Detroit development” must be considered “innocent of any connection to the Birchers.” He went on: “In this place, the State (by which I mean one Robert James) controls all the rents, heavily subsidizes the local bus service, offers universal health care and even employs a number of its citizens on a nationalized urban
farm
. They may as well put up a sign on the Freeway exit: No Bircher Need Apply.”

I wasn’t so sure about that, either. A lot of my neighbors were left-wing hippies, it’s true, potheads and Marxists and VW-caravan kind of mommies and daddies. But there were some NRA nuts, too, Tea Party types who thought the only solution to America’s problems was to get out and start over. One of the things I liked about New Jamestown is that most of us got along pretty well.

My real argument with Gloria was this. You can’t ever know why anybody does anything and this was a crime that depended almost entirely on motive. Did Meacher run into Waites’s car or did the car run into Meacher? Witnesses on both sides were willing to swear one thing or another. The simple fact was, car and bike had collided, and they might just as well have hit each other if
Waites was trying to swerve out of the way and misjudged the angle. Which is why the whole thing came down to motive. To mens rea, as they put it in the papers: a guilty mind.

But what kind of guilty mind were we talking about? Could Waites have
planned
to knock Meacher down, for the sake of some preconceived idea of long-term personal advantage? Of course not. So what do we mean by guilty mind in this case? A racist inclination? Because every white American male of his generation who grew up in a town like Memphis was going to have something in his past, a connection or relation or association, something he did or said or somebody he knew, that suggested a “racist inclination.” If that was the test then Waites was always going to be guilty, then we were all guilty, even if Waites had tried to slam on the brakes he was guilty. And a test that everybody fails is no test—it doesn’t help you sort anyone out.

So what else could guilty mind mean? A spur-of-the-moment impulse to bump the kid? But how can you measure an impulse? Even if Waites
did
say to the cop, “I was just trying to get in his way,” that doesn’t mean he was right. This is the kind of explanation we come up with after the fact, but motive isn’t a fact, it’s an interpretation, the only fact in this case is that Meacher got hit.

“Please,” Gloria said. “This is starting to upset me. And last time, when it was just the same kind of thing, you took my side.”

“What do you mean, last time? About your father? Of course I took your side. But you’re the one who’s flip-flopping. In that case you tried to tell me it
wasn’t
about race, those people would have left a white man dying by the side of the road just the same.”

“Don’t bring him into this,” she said. “Don’t use him like that.”

“But you brought it up.”

“I guess you didn’t understand me because that’s not what I meant. I was talking about me. If I hadn’t a been scared, I’d have knocked on somebody’s door and got help. It’s all about race.”

“That’s not what you said. You’re changing your tune for some reason.”

“Are you seriously telling me that if Meacher is white, if the kid on the bike is white, that Waites would have
hit him with his car
? Because he stole somebody’s phone? Are you telling me that?”

“I don’t know.”

“
Changing my tune
. What does that mean.”

“It means you’re picking a fight with me about this for some reason.”

“Oh, you haven’t even seen me pick a fight.”

“I have to be able to say what I think to you. You have to trust me.”

“You can say what you think, you just got to think better. Or put up with the consequences.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. You’re holding back on me. What you’re saying to me is, watch your step. You can go this far but no farther.”

“Are we talking about what I think we’re talking about?”

“I don’t know. But at some point I want to talk about that, too.”

“Because I thought we were talking about Dwayne Meacher.”

“Okay, all right.”

“Tell me this then. How come it took three minutes for the cops to come and twenty-three minutes for the ambulance to arrive? Let’s talk about that.”

“But Gloria, you’re mixing everything up. I don’t know why the ambulance took so long, but that’s not Tyler Waites’s fault. That’s not my fault. But you’re acting like it is.”

“That’s right,” she said. “
Because you taking his side.
And don’t speak to me like that again, not now, not ever. Tell me I’m mixing—things up. Get out of my sight and don’t come back till I’ve calmed down.”

“How will I know that you’ve calmed down?”

“Because I won’t throw something at you when I see you.”

SOME FACTS STARTED TO EMERGE
about Dwayne Meacher, too. He was a junior at Macomb, another 4A high school, and a basketball rival of Kettridge. A solid B student, he played trumpet in band, which is what I used to play. His father was serving a fifteen-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter at the Mound Correctional Facility—he got in a bar fight and killed someone with a bottle. Dwayne lived with his mother and three sisters. His mother had medical issues and didn’t work; she was described in the papers as a former nursing assistant. One of the sisters was quite a lot older and studying health care administration at Wayne State. The other two were still at home.

The principal at Macomb, Dr. Selena Brown, characterized Dwayne as “kind of a nerdy kid, but popular, a tech-head.” But he had a history of extracurricular “issues.” She had to keep the police from intervening when Dwayne got caught selling prescription painkillers to his classmates. He agreed to do forty hours’ community service, at a substance abuse treatment program, which meant in practice visiting people in prison and going around with one of the caseworkers to make sure guys on parole showed up for their drug tests. His caseworker described him as “always very punctual and respectful, pleasant to be around, a nice kid.”

It probably wasn’t the first phone he stole either. iPhone theft was getting to be a problem downtown. There was a much-mocked op-ed column in the
Free Press
called “Why Stealing a Phone Isn’t Just Stealing a Phone.” The point of the piece was to explain why people got so attached to their phones. “It’s where you keep not only your bank details but your text messages and your photographs of
family and friends. It isn’t just a technological gadget or status symbol. It’s your home, it’s where you live.” But the truth is, as one police officer said, “These gangs aren’t interested in your bank details, and they don’t care about your photographs either. They wipe the instruments clean and ship them to Africa. The phone Meacher stole has a street value of about fifty bucks. Fifty bucks is what he was after, that’s what the risk was for.”