Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey

by Colby Buzzell

  She went back again to talking to whoever she was talking to on the phone, and the guy schooled me by saying, “Now you got to remember that urban renewal means blacks removed. It means move all the blacks out and bring in upscale middle-class mainstream white folks. By whatever means necessary.”

  Taking note, I thanked the couple for chatting with me, and while I was going on my way the lady hung up her phone and called after me, and what she told me would be the pearl that Detroit graciously handed to me. “Now, let me tell you something—never believe what people tell you, young man. Always seek out knowledge and truth for your own self and never believe what they say about a person. You learn about that person for yourself, and never, ever be afraid to go somewhere. That’s a bunch of bull crap. When somebody tells you don’t go—you go. How you going to know if you don’t go?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Unsuccessful Men with Talent

  “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

  MOHANDAS GANDHI

  Walking and talking on my iPhone, the daily check-in phone call to my wife, assuring her that I’m still alive and/or not in jail, while passing by gray burned-down houses and houses that appear to be boarded up and empty, I could hear our son crying in the background. I was reporting to her that everything was cool and that I was doing well, people here were great, when I spotted a huge cement structure a couple blocks away over by the train tracks. It was concrete block, ten or so stories high and wide, just sitting there, of course, like so much else in this city, abandoned. Once I got closer, I saw “Division of Beatrice Foods Co.” on the side of it. I told my wife that I had to get off the phone because I wanted to go inside and explore. She told me to be careful.

  I climbed up into the building through a loading dock. Inside, it was dark and cold. I looked around to see if there was anybody else here. It was silent, and I didn’t see anybody. I stood there listening; all I heard was emptiness. So I started walking. The deeper I got into the building, the darker it got, to beyond pitch-black levels. I had no idea what in the world I was stepping on half the time, could have been a dead body for all I knew, but every so often pinpricks of light would penetrate from the sides. I could hear each crackling step echo and bounce off all the cement walls, and the temperature was a lot cooler in here as well; I found it all to be very peaceful, calming even. Of course, it looked like a couple Scud missiles had gone off in here. Enormous chunks of gray concrete were scattered throughout, parts of the cement roof that had caved in. As I was taking snapshots of the freight elevator amid this decomposing carcass of a structure, I suddenly froze. My pupils immediately dilated as my heart rate skyrocketed. I was not alone.

  I listened. My ears heard footsteps; I slowly turned to look. I didn’t see anybody or anything, so I listened again. The sound was coming from around a cement pillar and wall.

  I should have been scared, but I wasn’t. I was curious, and in my curiosity, which hopefully wouldn’t lead to my death, I found myself walking slowly, as slowly as possible, one soft step at a time, toward the sound. I walked with my heels gently touching the ground first, slowly rolling the rest of my shoe’s sole forward, cringing at every sound that a pebble or shard of shattered glass made while I stepped over it. It took me nearly ten minutes to walk forty meters, since noise discipline was my utmost concern right now, so as to not give up my position. When I reached the corner the sound was coming around from, I stood there for a second, then slowly turned the corner.

  A black guy wearing a beanie stood in front of me with what seemed to be several greasy jackets. Next to him was a hole in the cement that measured about fifteen by fifteen feet and went into the ground at least twenty feet, filled at the bottom with filthy water, and he appeared to be getting ready to go to work, though I didn’t know exactly what that was yet.

  He was rolling up his sleeves, and was not one bit alarmed when he saw me. I saw him, he saw me, and we both said hello to each other, the same way two strangers would if they ran into each other at a bus stop. He looked me over for a second, then asked if I had any smokes. I handed him one which he thanked me for and after giving him a light, to spark up conversation I asked about Detroit. “Bad, really bad here,” he told me.

  As he was obviously a man of few words, I tried to pry more out of him by asking, “How did you end up here?”

  “It happened, man.” He shrugged while exhaling. “Really, it was all my fault. You know?”

  The hole he was standing in front of was near pitch-black. If you strained your eyes, you could make out that it was full of murky water, and that there was scrap metal and jagged debris down there. I hate to be using Star Wars references, but it looked exactly like the Star Wars garbage compactor down there, the scene where the walls start coming together. I stood there silently watching as the guy made his way down into the hole, using an old wooden ladder. Where he was going, to me, looked like an ideal location to stash a dead body, and I had a bad feeling about what I was about to witness. I asked if it would be okay to just hang out and watch him do whatever he was about to do, and he said sure.

  In horror I watched as the guy lowered his body all the way into the hole, more than 80 percent of his body submerged in the filthy water at the heart of this massive abandoned concrete building. He started running his hands underneath the water, looking for something. “Pipes,” he said, which you could hear rattle and echo throughout the building whenever he found one. One by one, he began to pull them dripping out of the murk and set them over to the side.

  These copper pipes were about ten or so feet long, and looked heavy. As I was taking pictures and hoping that this guy has gotten his TB shots, a buddy of his rolled up with an industrial belt to help gather up all the pipes. Black guy, old and weathered, just like his old sun-faded Detroit Lions hat, and he was wearing thrashed clothing from head to toe. He also was unfazed when he met me and also greeted me with a kind hello. “Got any smokes?” he asked. I handed him one, and since now I have to know, I asked, “What are you guys doing?”

  “We’re pulling pipes out.” Copper piping is pretty valuable, which answered my question of why they are doing this. He explained, “What they do is, they put acid on them, kill all the bacteria. They got to redo them because if they don’t they can’t sell, because they be toxic.”

  Okay, if those pipes were extremely toxic, and this guy was submerged in that water to get to them, then he was pretty much fucked and probably wouldn’t be bouncing grandkids on his knee.

  We stood and watched the man in the pool of water. My eyes adjusted to the surreal scene. His friend didn’t seem inclined to join him down there. His demeanor was very calm, and he smoked his cigarette the very same way that he talked, which was long, deep drags and slowly. And slowly he explained why they had to do this. “They took all the jobs away. People got to do day labor and sometimes you can’t do day labor so you just have to make your jobs—make pallets, you know, you get two dollars a pallet and you have to make everything just about the way they was if they brought them off the factory, you know? Say you go buy a house that cost fifty, forty thousand dollars, how in the hell can you pay over six or four hundred dollars a month? So you gotta get out here, out in the streets, and sell metal, you gotta pick up bottles, you got to go build pallets. It’s all kinds of stuff, man. Some guys can hardly eat, man, really. They get them little foods at them food banks and it’s not enough to last more than one day and the guy’s starving again if he got two or three kids. Shit. He got to buy shoes, clothes for them and try and send ’em to school. That’s why these little kids are so bad, man. They half starving. It’s worse here than in any foreign country.”

  “What’d you do before?”

  Slowly exhaling, he sadly told me, “I worked at GM, man.

  “I’ve been here all my life, and I don’t know. I’m thinking about going to Toronto. I like it up there. It ain’t bad u
p there like it is down here, man. People still working, you can work in a cannery or on a tuna boat, stuff like that. I work at the market part time on Saturday and that still ain’t enough to pay for nothin’ ’cause utilities are so high that’s what eats everybody’s money up. Gas, electric, and all those expenses, man, you work all day and you ain’t got nothin’.”

  Since I was now out of smokes, I asked them if they knew of a corner store. They gave me directions to one a couple blocks away, and when I asked them if they needed anything like a pop, they both said yeah, but then quickly changed their order over to beer. The guy pulling the pipes out wanted a Bud, the guy hanging out chatting with me wanted Milwaukee’s Best. After I took their orders and told them I’d be right back, they told me not to go quite yet, and that they’d give me a ride. They were expecting a ride to show up any second now, and sure enough, after a couple minutes, one did. A beat-to-hell bombed-out Ford Taurus that looked straight out of the junkyard was driven by this really skinny, tough-looking black lady with these really intense eyes and crazy hair. She pulled up and honked her horn. The guy who was pulling the pipes out of the hole, drenched, threw on his coats and ran over to the car while telling me to hurry and jump in. So I did, the other black guy came as well, and we arranged ourselves in the back seat, which was completely thrashed. The lady who was driving turned around in her seat and just glared at me. I said hello, nervously waved even, and she didn’t respond. She then looked over at the guy who’d been pulling the pipes out and was now sitting in the front passenger seat, still completely drenched and dripping into the upholstery, and shot this look at him, this look that clearly said, Who the fuck is this off-duty police-officer-lookin’ muthafucka who is now all up in the back seat of my muthafuckin’ car?!

  He told her to relax and soulfully said, “He’s with me. It’s coo. We go to the stow real quick.” She didn’t respond till he exclaimed, “Come on, let’s go!” She then angrily put it in drive, still looking not one bit happy about all this, and just like that I was off with my new friends. People here in Detroit are nice.

  On our way to wherever they were going to take me, I heard the doors lock, and my friend sitting next to me in the back seat leaned over and told me that where we were going, “Don’t be taking no pictures if I was you.” I thanked him for the advice. Told him not to worry about that. That I was a professional, and I knew exactly what I was doing.

  We passed by a truck-stop-looking white lady wearing old faded blue jeans and a thrashed flannel shirt, kind of tweaking out, just standing in the street in front of an abandoned house, scanning every car that drove by with the same look in her eyes that most hookers who are strung out on whatever illegal substance have in their eyes when they’re working. On the other side of the street from where we parked was a row of chairs all along the sidewalk, with people sitting in them, just hanging out, drinking alcohol out of brown paper bags. At least a dozen of them. It was midday. I wondered about open container laws here in Detroit, and I had to think hard: What day of the week was this? Except for the laborers I was with, nothing in this neighborhood would tell you whether it was a day of work or a day of rest. I liked that. On the opposite street corner, a couple young black youths were hanging out. They looked tough, and there was a girl standing there on the opposite street corner, kind of hefty, tight jeans, heels, and wearing a tight pink tube top, which wasn’t doing her any favors. As much as I wanted to take photographs of all this, since it was all sooo beautifully authentic, I chose not to. Which sadly made me realize that I don’t have what it takes to one day become a photojournalist for National Geographic. Instead I tucked my camera inside my coat and zipped it up. The guy seated in the back seat next to me leaned back over to me and said, “That’s a good idea.”

  We parked over by a liquor store. The record then kind of skipped as I got out of the car, and the people sitting down all in a row in their chairs alongside the road seemed to stop what they were doing and just stare at me. A part of me wondered if they really were staring at me, or if that was just my self-consciousness, thinking that they were staring at me. So I stared at them to find out. They all looked pissed. Yup, they were staring at me.

  My friends and I all walked into the corner store together. On a wall inside was a mural devoted to Obama, and of course the Middle Eastern guys working the counter were behind bulletproof glass, and the two guys I was with changed their minds on the beer and asked instead if they could have sandwiches, since they were hungry. I told them that was no problem at all, and after I picked up my pack of smokes and paid for everything, we drove back.

  The lady backed the car up alongside the building, collapsed the back seat down, and opened up the trunk, and the three of them started shoving the copper pipes into the back of the car with their bare hands.

  As I took pictures, the black lady grabbed a pipe and asked me if I was from Detroit.

  “No, I’m from California.”

  “Oh,” she said. “You probably don’t see this out in California, now do you?”

  I think about that for a second and then tell her that we recycle, too.

  She laughed, but it wasn’t really a laugh-at-a-funny-joke kind of laugh, but one of those tough-as-nails laughs, a those-people-ain’t-shit-out-in-California kind of laugh.

  “If Californians came here, they wouldn’t know how to survive, now would they, huh?” she said.

  I told her that she was probably correct on that one. Probably all starve to death, since there’s no Whole Foods within Rollerblading or Razor scooter distance.

  With the copper pipes filling the back of the car, she drove off, and the guy pulling the pipes out, who went by the name Popcorn, went back into the hole to pull more pipes out, and the guy wearing the old Detroit Lions hat and I sat around, smoked, and talked a bit more.

  I asked him how much they made doing this, and he told me that he got paid by the weight. He estimated that today they might make sixty dollars. He told me they could make a whole heck of a lot more if they had the right tools, or any tools for that matter. He then looked up at the ceiling. There were all sorts of piping and tubing and metal up there. “You see, that’s good money right there. You see that up there, all the way to the end, you looking at five or six tons, but you need the right kinds of tools to cut it.” He told me they could make a fortune if they just had the right tools.

  “The guy that owns this building, he don’t mind for us to take stuff outta here,” he said, “because he want it out to make way for the demolition crew. He’s a good guy.”

  He had a cloth sack slung over his shoulder, and after I’d said good-bye and thanks for letting me hang with them, he took off walking.

  As I was leaving, I took some exterior shots of the massive building. A black guy just walking along the road by himself saw me, and I thought he was going to ask me for a smoke, or if I had any change, but I was wrong.

  “Great building, ain’t it?” he said as he passed.

  “Yeah, it really is.”

  On my walk back, I came across Detroit’s meatpacking district, which converts on the weekends into a farmer’s market, and after passing an Islamic slaughterhouse, I spotted an Ethiopian buffet. Ever since realizing you could eat Ethiopian food with your hands I’ve been a fan, and since I was a bit hungry, I walked inside. The lone girl working, who seemed about my age, told me that it was ten dollars, eat all you want, so I did. I sat down at a table in the back corner, and my camera was sitting there on the table. As I was eating, the girl came over and asked me if I’m a photographer.

  I didn’t know how to answer that one. With digital cameras, everybody is a goddamn photographer now, so I told her no, I wasn’t a photographer, I was just an enthusiast who liked going inside all these abandoned buildings here in Detroit and taking photos of the beauty I found, and that gave me a reason to explore inside them. She sat down at my table, introducing herself, and told me that she enjoyed
doing the very same thing. She told me of a couple other spots nearby that were good to explore, as well as an abandoned school over by where she lived, and that when they shut it down they left everything inside it—all the desks, books, everything—and she couldn’t understand why they did that. They could have sold or donated everything inside the school, but instead they just left it all there for people to take. She herself had grabbed a couple desks. The books, which were all expensive and could have been put back into circulation or donated to the library or to another school, were just left there to rot. “Sad,” she said. When I left, she invited me to a Harvest Festival in her neighborhood later that month. I thanked her and made my way back to the hotel.

  At the hotel, Mrs. Harrington was hanging out in the lobby, talking with the guy working the front desk. I was greeted by her warm smile. She curiously asked me what I’d discovered today here in Detroit. I told her all about the guys I met inside the abandoned building, and showed her a couple of the photographs that I took inside. She put her reading glasses on, looked at them, and her smile disappeared into a look of grave concern for my personal safety.

  In a motherly way, she gasped while putting her hand over her heart and warned me sternly several times to be extremely careful doing this, it was not safe for me to be exploring in and around these places, especially all by myself.

  I ignored her the same way that I ignored my mother every time she put in a request for me to quit smoking. “It’s fine, Mrs. Harrington,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen to me.” That wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear, and that look of concern was still cemented on her face as I made my way to the elevator and took it up to my room.