Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey

by Colby Buzzell

  After taking a slow swig from his beer, he said, “Those days are over.”

  He told me that he’d never seen Detroit as bad as it was now; this was the worst he’d seen it.

  “Call it what you want to call it, but it’s a depression here in Detroit. You see we put all our effort into the auto industry, and when the auto industry fails, then where do you go? We put all our eggs into one basket. They could have diversified years ago, but they didn’t. Young people don’t know what a depression is. People were jumping out of their windows back then because they got broke and lost all their money. But there was a lot of people who survived. Right now, I don’t know how many people are jumping out of windows, but there is a survival situation going on. You should read about it. The rest of America is beginning to feel what we felt nine months ago.”

  I then left this bar to walk over to another one down the street. Ordered a couple beers and shots of whiskey at a bar called AFB, which as you could have probably figured out on your own means “Another Fucking Bar.” Their slogan was: “Exactly what Detroit needs.” Kind of a fancy joint inside, a bit upscale—keep in mind that’s upscale by my standards. A patron next to me at the bar told me that it was once a popular punk venue before they cleaned it up. After that I set off to walk around and explore, semi-drunk, since I hadn’t eaten all day. I started taking photos of dark streets and alleys, empty lots, garbage on the streets, houses boarded up. Some halfway burned-down parts of the area felt, especially at night, as if nobody lived there at all and I was the only person left on earth. I walked over to two tall old buildings that looked like they had both been hotels at one time and stood there, wondering what had happened to them. I took pictures. They looked as if they’d been vacant for years; one was called the Harbor Lights Center, and the other the Hotel Eddy Stone. Some clever jokester had hung up on the Eddy Stone a huge MOVE IN NOW! banner followed by a phone number to call.

  This area was totally dead—way more dead than downtown—and in a lot of ways reminded me of my neighborhood back home, the Tenderloin district. There we have roughly four to six crackheads along every street, whereas here there were maybe only one or two crackheads every three or four city blocks. This is a statistic of civic comparison that you never see in the brochures. Colby Buzzell: travel writer.

  With my black beanie pulled down almost over my eyes, I was wondering where in the hell everybody was when I came across two guys smoking outside a structure that looked operational. They were both staring at me as I walked over to them. An American flag was sticking up from the building they were standing in front of, so I asked the two of them what the place was exactly, and they told me that it was a shelter for veterans.

  One of them immediately asked me if I was a vet, since I was wearing my backpack. “You homeless?” he asked. I told him that I was kind of living out of my car right now—which was partially true; I had spent many a night sleeping in the Caliente—but I was planning to stay at an army buddy’s place for a couple days up in Troy, and then after that I’d be back. He told me that I should stay here when I came back, and that they had a good bunch of guys living here. It was warm, and they served three meals a day. He then asked what I was doing here—more specifically, in the location where I was now standing—and I told them just checking out, walking around, taking pictures, that kind of stuff. He advised me not to be walking around in this area with a camera around my neck because the people here would look at that as ten crack rocks and gank me for it. I looked around, not seeing anybody, and asked him if this was a bad neighborhood. The one guy furrowed his brows and curiously asked me, “Do you know where you are?”

  I had a couple shots of whiskey running through my veins, and that one GN’R song where Axl poses that very same question started playing in my head. He informed me that I’m in the murder capital of the state of Michigan, and not only that, “You’re in the Cass Corridor.”

  I told him that I’d never heard of it, though it did sound kind of tough, and he advised me that I really shouldn’t be walking around here late at night all by myself, especially with a camera around my neck, and since I was a vet, he told me that I should stay at the shelter for the night, that if I did I’d be safe. “Nobody fucks with us here,” he proudly told me. “One time one of our guys got fucked with, and we had three teams of guys go out with baseball bats, and ever since then nobody messes with us.”

  I thanked them for their time and told them that I’d check it out in a couple days, after I visit my friend from the army up in Troy for a couple days. They wished me luck and again told me to be careful. I thanked them.

  Hung over, the next morning I called the front desk and told them that I’d be a bit late checking out, since I was having difficulty locating my wallet. I thought I might have lost it in the bar or on my way back to my room or something like that. They said that was fine, and forty-five minutes later I found it hiding tangled in a bed sheet.

  Heading to the elevator, I thought back to the night before, about how the neighborhood was rumored to be rough despite the fact that it’s relatively close to Wayne State University. I’ve lived in areas on the cusp of gentrification, I guess contributing to it—for better or worse—but this didn’t feel the same; the random hipster in a sea of dilapidated buildings, but not the same. On my way down I noticed that this hotel didn’t have a thirteenth floor, and when I finally made my way to checkout, a band on tour looked like they were checking out at the same time and moving on to the next city. Lucky bastards. They at least knew where they were going next. While waiting for my receipt, I asked the guy working the front desk if it was hard to find a job here. He told me no, as long as you’re willing to work for whatever pay, which is the exact answer I’ve been getting all across the country. He then told me that just this morning, while installing cable at his new apartment, the Comcast guy tried to recruit him, and I should just go online and apply if I was looking for work. Cable guy in Detroit, that could be interesting. So I asked if it was bad here, and he released a laugh and told me that he was actually late to work this morning because some idiot decided to go up and down deflating all the tires of every single car parked on his street.

  Over by the freeway was a huge old cement building painted light blue, selling nothing but used and rare books. It was like the Powell’s Books of Detroit; you could spend hours if not days inside and not be bored. It’ll be a sad day indeed when bookstores no longer exist. So I went to check it out while it still stood.

  I instantly got absorbed in the vision of old Detroit offered by the store’s vast collection of old linen postcards. Detroit looks nowhere near the same now. Those two hotels I’d looked at in the Cass Corridor the night before were once beautiful, with retail spaces on their bottom floors, and these Technicolor portraits of yesteryear were plainly of a different city altogether, a city of state-of-the-art architecture and young men in a hurry. Most of the cards had two or three cursive sentences on the back, saying things like, “Dear folks, we are in Detroit and I am working at my trade. Nice weather for this time of year. All are well. Mom has sold the chickens, Love to all.” That one was mailed November 25, 1910.

  Another one depicted “The Heart of Detroit by Moonlight,” and on back in an elegant cursive you just don’t find anymore, it read: “Everything is okay except I don’t have a job yet. Things are pretty slow all around here. Most of the shops are laying men off right and left, but look for it to pick up soon. I hope so. Rabbit season has been in for 3 weeks but haven’t gone yet. Well, so long.” The ink stamp said that it was mailed from Detroit on November 6, 1937, at 4:30 p.m.

  Another had a gorgeous image of Capital Square Park from that same era, which looks nothing like that now; all the vegetation in the square is gone, and half the buildings around it are gone as well. The card read, “I am so busy I can hardly find time to write. Wages are low in Detroit. One has a hard time to pay for their board and room. Hope you will like these po
stcards of Detroit. Will send more soon.”

  While I was lost in old Detroit, a young employee who looked like an artist came by and told a coworker that a kid just came in asking if they had any books on how to make an IED. I remember one time back in high school I was once called down to the principal’s office for doing a book report on The Anarchist Cookbook, and since it was pre-Columbine and pre-Osama when I wrote it, all that happened was my parents received yet another phone call from the school administration telling them how much of a fuckup I was. “Hey,” I asked the clerk, “do you sell The Anarchist Cookbook?” She told me no, and that when she first started working here twenty-three years ago, she thought the book was just recipes that were staples of the anarchist diet, but then later on she found out that it was instructions for how to make bombs. She told me that people didn’t really ask for that book too much now, maybe partly because you could find all those recipes online now.

  I then asked her if she had the WPA book that was done on Michigan. The Works Progress Administration was a New Deal thing that Roosevelt did. Unlike chain mega bookstore employees who ask you, “Who wrote that?” when you ask if they have a copy of Men Without Women, and then ask you how you spell Hemingway, this lady knew exactly what I was talking about. She told me that they did actually have a copy, behind the counter, and handed it to me to check out—green cloth hardcover, no dust jacket but a cool deco-style imprint on the front of an automobile and a factory behind it, the sun beaming down on both. I opened it up, saw that they were asking $35 for it, as is, and that it was first published in 1941. I started flipping through all the pages. The section on Detroit began, “A visitor may spend weeks in Detroit without receiving the impression that he is in a city of more than 1,500,000 inhabitants.”

  Seventy years later, Detroit’s now at 900,000, and dropping like a rock. I told the bookstore lady I’d take it.

  Chapter Twelve

  The End

  “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

  KURT VONNEGUT,

  Mother Night

  While I spent the day walking aimlessly around Detroit taking pictures, my sister sent me a text informing me that our father had decided that he was going to sell the house that we all grew up in. I didn’t respond because I didn’t know what to say or think of that, though I saw it coming and don’t blame my father at all.

  Knowing that the house I grew up in will no longer be there when I get back made me want to drink in a bar. All the memories—Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc.—that we shared at that house would be no longer. In a way, I was homeless now. Equally important, that house had also been the place where I always ended up whenever I hit rock bottom and needed a place to stay for a while as I tried once again to get back on my feet. I always knew that it would be there. Yes, as I got older the welcome arms of home weren’t as welcoming. There was never a “Welcome Home, Colby!” banner strung across the living room when I moved back in. But still, it was there for me in case of an emergency. My mother lived and died in that house. All of a sudden I felt that I was about to jump out of a plane behind enemy lines without a parachute.

  My phone started to vibrate; it was Callahan. He said he was out of class and wanted to hang out. I was near downtown, and my watch told me it was close to five. When I asked him how bad traffic would be at this time of day, he told me not to worry. “You’ll be fine. Nobody’s working anymore, so there’s not as much traffic.”

  Before leaving I stopped back inside a dive bar. A sign posted outside the bar advertised free wireless, and I needed to pull up directions to Callahan’s place, so I stepped inside, ordered a pack of smokes from the bartender, tipped her a dollar, made my way to a corner table, and pulled out my laptop. While I was looking up directions, a tall old black guy with a white apron around his waist walked slowly over to me and silently placed a tray of onion rings on my table. When I told him, “I’m sorry, I didn’t order anything,” he said in this really deep voice, perhaps the deepest voice I’ve ever heard, “I know.” And then slowly he turned around and walked away.

  When I pulled my car out of the parking garage, the same guy was working. I handed him my ticket, and he told me that would be $18.00. Jesus Christ. No wonder nobody went downtown anymore. As I was handing him the money, he asked me what I thought of Detroit. I told him that except that they charged way too much for parking, I liked Detroit a lot, actually. While getting my change ready, he told me that he wasn’t surprised to hear that. He explained that the world makes it out to be such a bad city because “Detroit is a dark city. A lot of us blacks live here, and some people don’t like that, that’s why they be sayin’ what they be sayin’.”

  Callahan lives north of Eight Mile out in the ’burbs, past Sixteen Mile Road up in Troy, which is about a good half hour drive north of downtown Detroit. He and his girlfriend live at her parents’ house; both are in school, his girlfriend studying hard to be a nurse.

  After he left the army, Callahan moved with another buddy of ours, Sergeant Todd Vance, down to San Diego. When I used to live in Los Angeles I’d go down there every now and then to hang out with them. Callahan was having difficulty finding work, and one day he’d packed up all his belongings in the back of his pickup truck and driven straight through to Michigan, where he has family. He’s lived there ever since.

  The room I was sleeping in was down in the basement, which had been converted into a full bar with bar stools, neon beer signs, mirrors, TV, liquor, the works. After dropping off my stuff we stepped outside for a smoke, and while we caught up, Callahan said hello to the girl standing and smoking outside the house across the street. She was about my age—early thirties. It was cold out, and I know some people don’t like to smoke in their own house, so I didn’t really think much of it until I looked at all the driveways on the street. The house across the street had four cars parked outside it, the one to the right of it, six, the one next door, four, and so on. I asked Callahan about the girl smoking across the way, and he told me that she also was back living at her parents’ house.

  We decided to hit the bars that evening, and on the way Callahan told me that he was a student right now, living off the GI Bill, and that they’d recently raised GI benefits so that he got slightly more now every month than he did before. He worked one day a week as a bar back for tips, and the tips that he made working Friday nights, always close to $100, pretty much lasted him for the week, “My gas tank is always on red, but I’ve got enough to live on right now.”

  When I asked what his plans were after school, he told me that he didn’t know yet, he might try and get a job at the VA hospital working with other veterans, or he might continue going to school and take out student loans once his GI Bill money dried up. I strongly advised him against doing this because the one thing about student loans is that it’s not really “free money,” like a lot of people think it is. You have to pay that all back, along with the lovely interest they throw on top of it, and I know many educated people back home who are totally fucked because they took out these huge student loans, graduated, couldn’t find a job, and are now totally poor because all of the money they are now making in their restaurant server jobs goes straight to paying back all their student loans. The days of “Well, I’ll take out loans to go to school, and when I graduate I’ll get a job in that field making the lavish salary I require” are gone. Or maybe I’m just rationalizing the fact that I forgot to go to college, and so had no use for student loans. I will have to think about this.

  Callahan said that most of the people that he knew were either in school, living off student loans, or on unemployment. While driving around looking for a parking spot, I noticed that we were passing by a lot of hair salons, and that these hair salons were all packed with people, and that all the people were getting their hair done, and that they were all getting their hair done in the same exact hairstyle as each other, and all the girls in Orange
County, in New York, in Austin, in Kalamazoo, and in Poughkeepsie, too.

  At the bar everybody had a beer in hand and was drinking heavily. One guy at the end of the bar had a textbook out, reading while drinking, and a lot of people were doing multiple shots of hard liquor. I looked over at the guy sitting next to me at the bar. The sleeves on his shirt had been physically removed, and he was easily about four hundred pounds. He ordered another pitcher of beer, and he was drinking out of it as if it was a pint glass. I asked him if he was unemployed, and he told me that he was, actually. He’d been driving trucks, got laid off several months ago, and was living off unemployment.

  Callahan was sitting at the bar to my right, and I pointed this out to him. He told me, “I told you.” A guy then came between us to order a drink—white guy, early thirties, frosted tips, Red Wings hockey jersey, silver chain around his neck—and I asked him if he was working. He told me that he was at the GM plant and, with no worry or concern in his voice whatsoever, that he’d be getting laid off next month. “You nervous?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “Not at all.” He’d been laid off four times in the last nine years, and he said it was no big deal, that’s just how it was when you worked in the auto industry. He said he’d find something, even if it was minimum wage, and he picked up his drink and walked off. Everybody in this bar was getting completely trashed, drinking nonstop like it was one big unemployment party. Didn’t these people know how fucked they were? They all had a “This too shall pass” attitude about their lives and our current economic situation, and when Callahan’s friends started showing up at the bar, I found out that all of them—all of them—were living back at home and unemployed or going back to school.

  At the bar one of Callahan’s friends started asking me about the book that I was working on. He asked me what I thought of the country so far, and since I had a couple drinks in me, I asked him if he’d ever been inside a Walmart. I was starting to think that if Kerouac were alive today, he’d probably go to China to write On the Road.