Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey

by Colby Buzzell

  Mr. Harrington would step out from the back office with a phone in his hand, and he’d tell me that the call is for me, that it’s Hollywood on the other line. I’d ask him to tell them to fuck off, which would cause the lobby to erupt in crazed cheers.

  I should also contact the girl who invited me to the Harvest Festival, and tell her that I’m returning the favor, inviting her and her friends to my party, and how I think the theme should be “Rags to Riches,” and for all to dress accordingly.

  A female bartender who works at the Town Pump, the bar on the first floor of the Park Avenue Hotel, would walk gracefully into the lobby. She’s the one that looks like a model from France and the same exact bartender who cut me off the night before. Her eyes would be fixated on me as she glided toward me in her high heels. I’m being congratulated by everyone in the building, receiving pats on the back, shaking hands, signing autographs, kissing babies, group photos taken on cell phone cams, etc. She’d have sex radiating from her as she walks up to me and seductively says, in her best Marilyn Monroe voice, that the word around the bar is that I got a writing gig for Time, that all her regulars were gossiping about that, and she was wondering if there was any truth to any of it. I’d tell her it was true, that I was going to write something for them, and she’d take off her shirt, she’s wearing no bra underneath, her tits are perfect.

  “Take me to your room and fuck me.”

  “What?!”

  “I want to have your babies.”

  Oh, shit. That reminds me. I have to call my wife and tell her the good news as well. I’d then tell her, “Sorry, babe, I’m already taken,” as she burst into tears and stormed off sobbing.

  I then excuse myself from everyone and make my way up to my room. People are chanting my name over and over again, and I do the Joe Namath victory finger pointed skyward as I make my way into the elevator.

  I also have to call up all my friends back home as well, all four of them, and tell them the good news, that I got a gig at Time, that I’ll be staying at their house here in Detroit, and to all come and crash with me, that it’s cool, a two-story, and bring whoever they wanted with them as well.

  “Dude, you’re staying at the Time magazine house and you’re going to be throwing a party the entire time you’re staying there? Don’t you also have to write an article for them on Detroit or something to stay there? When are you going to find time to do that?”

  “Oh, yeah, don’t worry, I got that all under control. Check it out, the last time I was in China I met this guy, his name’s Calvin, he showed me around for a bit and told me that he wanted to be a travel writer someday. We have been communicating ever since via email, so I let him know I got a gig for Time and asked him to write the article for me.”

  “What?! You got some guy in China to write the article for you?”

  “Oh, yeah, so I can party, I’m totally outsourcing it, baby! Nothing’s made in America anymore anyway, you know that. I’m paying him three cents a word. No idea how much rice that can get him, but he seemed happy about it and said that was cool. Told him to just Wiki Detroit, read about it, and then do a couple Google searches and just write something up, something positive, not negative, we always hear the bad, never the good.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “Yeah, they want a two- to three-thousand-word article by Monday, they’re paying me three dollars a word, I’m paying the guy in China three cents a word, it’s perfect.”

  When I got back to the Park Avenue Hotel, Mrs. Harrington was in the lobby, and she asked me how it’s going. Kind of depressed, I tell her fine, and I talk with her about staying here longer. I’ve been here in Detroit for a month now, and since I have to be in New York City in a couple days, I want to pay in advance for another month before I leave. She tells me that’s no problem at all and even jokes about me staying here at the hotel forever and never going back home. I smile and joke back to her, who knows, that might be the case.

  Chapter Twenty

  Love Thy Neighbor

  “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”

  CHARLIE PARKER

  After another night of heavy drinking at a dive over on the other side of the freeway, I woke up hung over and after a shower was all set to go. Instead of taking the elevator down I took the stairs. I saw that Mr. and Mrs. Harrington were seated at a table inside their café. The door was open, so I waved hello, and Mr. Harrington informed me that I just missed it, that the police were just here. When I asked what happened, Mrs. Harrington told me to take a seat, which I did.

  She told me about a tenant who was moving out, and when she checked the room to make sure that all the belongings are still there, she saw in the closet her three-hundred-dollar vacuum for the tenants that has been lost now for several weeks, and it was under a coat. She took the coat off it and said, “You have my machine,” and he said, “Oh, I didn’t know it was there.”

  Mr. Harrington looks like he’s been through this a million times before and calmly mentioned, “He also had the towels in his car.”

  “Oh, yeah!” she snapped. Later when the tenant comes downstairs, she gave him his hundred-dollar deposit back, and said, “Now, please leave the lobby.” And it became really ugly. Everybody started screaming and yelling, she told me, and there was a scuffle, even spitting in the face. . . .

  I should wake up earlier—the things I miss while sleeping in.

  When the police came, they listened to all their stories, and there’s confusion over the vacuum cleaner—specifically who owned it. The tenant moving out claimed he was given the vacuum, and when they started believing that scenario, Mrs. Harrington started raising her voice. “The police are now saying that we have given him the three-hundred-dollar vacuum cleaner. Yeah, just gave it to him, that’s what he said and the police believed it!” So more police came—“to arrest me! To arrest me! I mean, this is why Detroit is dying, honey, it is in the grips of death. I said to the police that every place, every parking lot around here, used to be a building, and look, you’ve destroyed the city, but they are going to arrest me?! Well, let them arrest me! I was going to go to jail for that.”

  I like this lady a lot.

  Frustrated, she explained that this is what they are up against, “this is why the city is dying, that’s why we’re the only ones standing. . . .”

  She then was up and about, as the restless energy inside her often propels her from conversation to garden to paying proper attention to some tenant, back to conversation. Mr. Harrington is somewhat less active; and when she left, he told me a story meant to illustrate a recent decline in the neighborhood:

  A guy from England had a bus ticket and got as far as Detroit before running out of money. Somehow he ended up at this hotel. From talking with him, Mr. Harrington realized this guy was a mental case. So he called the health clinic over at Wayne State, and told them he got this guy, a mental case who needs help, and that somebody should take him down there. But the guy wound up staying at their hotel for a couple weeks, and he would walk from here off to the hospital every day for his appointments. One day, he was crossing over the bridge, over the freeway here, “And there’s this stocky black guy standing in the middle of the bridge who used to rob people all the time there, and so the black guy says to him, ‘Stop, I want your money, your watch and wallet, or else I’ll throw you off this bridge.’ ” The guy told him, “Pardon, what do you mean?” Mr. Harrington explained that he couldn’t understand his accent, so he leaned over to him and said, “Pardon me, I don’t understand,” and the guy said, “Motherfucker, I want your money,” and the guy said, “You want what?” Now the guy’s shouting at him, but then he just tells him to go away. And when he walks in here, he says, “Mr. Harrington, there’s a black folk at the bridge and he’s saying terrible things. I think he’s saying terrible things about my mother.”

  Mrs. Harrington is back now, and catches the
tail end of his story, and must have heard the story a bunch of times before because she corrects her husband by saying, “You don’t say it right, you screw up all the stories! He said, ‘He said something indecent about my mother.’ ”

  And then she says, “There is an exodus, a total exodus of people leaving. Everybody is leaving because they are being robbed in this neighborhood.” And then, just like that, she excuses herself again from the table, saying, “I have work to do.”

  It seemed that the café might not make it. They couldn’t find a reliable cook who didn’t have creative differences with them, or hit up the tenants for money. I wondered what they were going to do with this space, and Mr. Harrington told me that the reason they started the café was because there wasn’t any other place to get breakfast.

  The idea was to get them to provide a very good inexpensive breakfast for everyone whose rent was paid up. If you’re paid up, you’d get two eggs, hash browns, one sausage, or one piece of bacon. And toast. The breakfast and café was to create a lively place where people can interact with each other, livable for those here. And it makes the hotel more of a desirable place. Mr. Harrington told me that his wife creates an atmosphere in this place where she’s got everybody laughing, everybody talking, that makes it a nicer place to live than someplace else where nobody even knows each other.

  Just then, Mrs. Harrington, who was chatting with another person who lived in the building, peeked her head back into the café and asked Mr. Harrington about one of their tenants—if he’s gay or not.

  “Yes,” her husband told her, “he is.”

  She asked, “He’s in the closet?”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Harrington said that this particular person was a really nice guy, and Mrs. Harrington agreed but said, “A real sweetheart, but he brings those dirty cats in from Cass Corridor.”

  Mrs. Harrington then went back to her conversation, but peeked her head back into the café again and asked me if I’d like a piece of cake. I told her no, thanks, and like my mother, who would always ignore me when I told her that I wasn’t hungry, she said, “I’ll get you a piece of cake.” She came in shortly after with a piece of pumpkin cake for me on a white plate, silver spoon. She asked if I wanted coffee, and before I could answer, she said, “I’ll get you coffee.”

  With tenants coming and going, and the police action still heavy in the air, Mrs. Harrington whirling like a dervish, Mr. Harrington remained calm and collected. He was in the middle of telling me the story of the neighborhood when Mrs. Harrington dashed into the café again and asked her husband, “Why do you always talk? Why don’t you ever let him talk?” and stepped back out.

  Mr. Harrington ignored her, the same way my father used to ignore my mother whenever she would talk to him like that. Mr. Harrington continued. “So anyways, Tiller built this building, and 1929 came and he was wiped out, so there was a Jewish fellow who bought this—”

  Just then Mrs. Harrington whirled into the café and excitedly told us what she’d just heard: “You know what I heard this morning? America is the most segregated country in the world, where everybody is in their own little corner, you know, and it is so the truth. I lived two doors away from a Jewish family but never knew they were Jewish . . . it just doesn’t even register with me, okay? And—”

  Mr. Harrington pleaded with her, “Can I just finish this story? Please?”

  “Okay,” Mrs. Harrington quickly snapped back to her husband. “But when I married you, I told you I did not want to live in Detroit!”

  Only days later, there was another upsetting morning at the hotel.

  I asked Mrs. Harrington what happened, and she told me they’d been suspecting that the guy running her café was stealing, and so she told her son and he installed a hidden video camera, and sure enough they found him stealing, so they fired him. Thus their café no longer had a cook, nor a person to operate it. Mrs. Harrington was so proud of her café, and now she seemed distressed.

  This spurred another story of how she once got her back broken here in the very same lobby where Mr. Harrington got shot at. An abusive male relative of a tenant grabbed her and slammed her against the elevator.

  I was starting to think that I wasn’t sure if Detroit could survive without the Harringtons, but I was equally unsure that the Harringtons could survive Detroit. Right then, this black guy who lives on my floor walked into the lobby, and he heard us all talking about Mrs. Harrington writhing on the floor in pain and indignation, and told me that he remembered that day, and that when he walked into the lobby and saw her on the floor, “I just about cried.” There were people in the lobby who witnessed all this go down, and he said to them, “ ‘Why y’all let this happen?’ And everybody looking at each other just scratchin’ they heads.”

  I told him it seemed that the cops treated them the same way, and he said, “She’s very nice to everybody in here, she’s not racist or none of that. How in the hell is she racist if eighty percent of the people in her building are black? She doesn’t care what color you is, she just trying to be nice to everybody.”

  She heard this from him and thanked him by giving him a hug and a peck on the cheek.

  “We come from the same people,” she said quietly. “We’re all the same.”

  The black guy then told her, “Me and you, we grew up in church.” And then he pointed to me. “He didn’t.”

  A look of shock appeared on her face as she asked if this was true, if I wasn’t raised in church. I told her that it was true, and that my parents didn’t raise me in a church.

  “You don’t believe in Jesus?”

  “Umm . . .”

  I hemmed and hawed, thinking about what to tell her. I didn’t want to break this lady’s heart by telling her no, I don’t believe in God, it’s a good story but I’m more of a nonfiction kind of guy. I flashed back to being at the hospital and my mother asking me if I believed in God, and I answered by telling her, “No, I don’t,” and it’s bothered me ever since I said that to her. I think I should have told her yes to spare her feelings, because really, what does it matter?

  Still in a state of shock, Mrs. Harrington then asked me again, with such searching in her eyes, “You do believe in God, right?”

  “Umm . . .”

  I was about to break into a sweat, squirming. Mr. Harrington could see where this was going, and he touched my arm and asked me if I’d like to go next door with him for a drink, which seemed like some sort of divine intervention. I of course told him I’d love to, and followed him outside. While standing outside for a second, he told me a little bit more about what happened with the guy running the café.

  The guy lived in the building but never paid his rent, so Mr. Harrington had given him a notice of eviction, but the guy had appealed to Mrs. Harrington, and she had agreed to let him live in the building rent-free if he helped out in the café in the mornings, on account of his being a Christian.

  “He gives my wife his bullshit, that he’s Christian. All you have to do is cry or tell my wife you’re Christian and you want to do better, and she’ll bend over backward for you.”

  He told me that he confronted people like that all the time, but shouldn’t have to. “I’m eighty years old,” and the people are up to no good around here. They pick on old people and cripples and just beat the shit outta them and take everything they have. One of the things for Detroit to survive, he told me, is that it has to be safe; that this simple concept is such an important thing. He asked me why would somebody from the suburbs come down here to patronize anything or do any kind of business if they’re risking their life? Good question. “You know,” Mr. Harrington said, shaking his head, “we need all this like a hole in the head.”

  I love the people of Detroit.

  If I was ever going to operate a fully automatic machine gun in a combat zone again, my wish to God would be that my ammo bearer be an individual
born and raised in Detroit.

  I was a heavy weapons machine gunner in the infantry. Loved that job. Best job I ever had. When I was first put on “the gun,” I was also issued a pistol, a Beretta 9mm. My understanding was that I was issued a pistol so that I’d have a weapon to fire in case my machine gun jammed. A good friend and brigade mate of mine, Spc. Horrocks, informed me of a different explanation for why a machine gunner in the infantry carries a pistol. He said that the real reason is so they have a weapon to threaten their ammo bearers with in case they get scared and get ideas of running away if they are being overrun. The Harringtons’ position had been long ago overrun, and they have stood and fought.

  We took a seat at the bar, and the cocktail waitress addressed him very formally as Mr. Harrington. He ordered a water, and I ordered a gin martini, straight up, and he told me that there has to be some kind of morality in this world, that his wife really believes in God, “I don’t.” He felt that we needed to learn how to live together. “Someone I once knew used to say we live on this spaceship earth,” he told me, “and that we’re all astronauts together.”

  This was probably the best martini I’d ever had at a bar. I liked being in Mr. Harrington’s company on spaceship earth. I’d much rather have a drink with him than with any celebrity featured on TMZ.

  He looked around the bar, then up at the ceiling, and told me about a police officer who came inside this bar once, got drunk, pulled his gun out, and started firing rounds up in the air. Maybe it’s the futility of being a cop in Detroit; just too much after a while. We stood up and he brought me over to the elevator, and sure enough, three bullet holes, probably 9mm.

  We took the elevator up, and he asked me if I’d like to take a look at some of the rooms on the top floor. There were two business suites, both of course empty and for lease. Everything was clean and modern. He showed me the bathroom and told me that during the election, Mrs. Obama stayed in this very room for a night. I looked at the toilet in awe: “Mrs. Obama took a shit on this toilet?” This was historic. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who would love to purchase a toilet seat that our first lady once sat on, since that is absolutely the closest your ass is ever going to get to hers.