Even in Detroit, though, there was always a stage for the blues: in a storefront, in a soup kitchen, in a vacant lot.
“We could take a picture and say, ‘This is a blues festival in Mississippi,’ and now people wouldn’t know the difference,” he said.
It was July, summer’s lushest month. John’s Carpet House was surrounded by green fields crosshatched by cracked side streets, like township sections in miniature. Across the many squared-off meadows, a food processing plant resembled a ruined castle. Standing in line for a Porta-John, I was advised I could do my business more quickly in the “slop house,” a wild stand of brush growing on the grave of a bungalow.
As evening came on, the streets teemed with bikers, drinkers, and smokers, all attracted to the East Side’s only free entertainment (although Big Pete passed a bucket to pay the house band). I saw Al and Greg, the Packard plant’s odd couple. Greg supported his wizened legs by leaning against a lawn chair. And just when the scene could not have looked any more like Ernie Barnes’s Saturday-night dance party painting “Sugar Shack,” a half-dozen men on horseback rode through the crowd. They were dressed as Civil War soldiers, members of a drill team that had performed elsewhere in the city that afternoon. Big Pete tolerated plenty of wild human behavior at his weekend joint, but at that species he drew the line. He grabbed the microphone, interrupting a hot trumpet solo.
“Lookie here,” he shouted. “We got five or six horses out there, bucking at people. We can’t have them horses here. They could hurt somebody and then we’d be in a world of trouble. Please get them horses off the lot.”
By showcasing African-American culture in a setting that was at once inner-city and pastoral, John’s Carpet House is not just quintessentially Detroit, it is uniquely Detroit. These blues, this barbecue, the empty fields, the cars, the horses, composed a scene that could not exist anywhere else in the world. Detroit is a great place to spend a summer vacation, if you know where to find the empty spots on its map.
BY MONDAY, at noon, Anthony Hardy had set up his canopy in a weedy parking lot on Chene Street. The red hots were plumping in the hot water basin of his stainless steel food cart. I’d met Anthony the day before, selling hot dogs at John’s Carpet House. Since there was no restaurant on Chene, Anthony decided to improvise his own. His only competition was the deli near the plant, but Dan and Vi’s didn’t sell hot dogs or Coneys, and how could you call yourself a real Detroit restaurant without serving Coneys? Also, it was owned by Italians.
“I came out here because between the freeway and Gratiot Avenue, Dan and Vi’s is the only place to get something to eat,” Anthony said. “The Coney Island burned down. It used to be a Comerica Bank. I’m fifty-eight going on fifty-nine years old. I’d rather sell hot dogs and sausages than dope. I don’t have time to do time, so it’s easier for me to sell hot dogs and sausages.”
Anthony was most worried about competition from “the camel jockeys,” as he called Detroit’s Arab merchants. As immigrants, he believed, they were exempt from taxes for their first seven years in America. He’d also heard they demanded fellatio from female customers.
“The Chaldeans here, they have this philosophy that they can do what they want, say what they want about our women, but if you say anything about the women in their religion, they’ll cut your head off.”
(Chaldeans are actually Maronite Christians, but even in metro Detroit, which has enough Arabs to support an Arabic radio station, people who should know better think they’re all Muslims.)
Two men wearing Wesco Oil patches on their work shirts bought two Coney dogs apiece, squirting fluorescent pools of mustard into the greasy chili. Then two men from the neighborhood sat down on coolers. Anthony’s canopy was the only respectable hangout on the street. The park and the wall outside the liquor store were for unemployed drunks. When John Givans (who is quoted elsewhere in the book, talking about the riot and the crack trade) told me he had lived in the same house since 1961, I knew immediately which house he meant.
“It’s that one with the cyclone fence and the peaked roof, near John’s Carpet House, right?” I said. “The best-looking house in the neighborhood.”
“That’s it,” he said. “My grandfather built it. He was the first black wrecker in Detroit. When we moved in, it was all Yugoslavian and Polish. It was us and one other black family in the neighborhood. I’m the last one left.”
John had two daughters, aged seven and eleven. He wanted to move them to a farm in the country, where the schools were better. But his house wouldn’t fetch enough to buy a farm, and he was suspicious that the white people were trying to clear out the East Side to provide cheap land for the condo dwellers.
“This neighborhood is like a jungle,” said Lester Guyton, a young exmarine (the judge said it was the military or jail, for selling weed) who had shown up to provide the extra mouth necessary for three-cornered bullshit. “It’s like Guatemala. The property here is too rich. They’re trying to get the black people that live here out of here, to make room for white people from downtown.”
“My gas bill is eight hundred dollars a month in the winter,” John complained. “They tell me confidentially there’s no way I can burn that much gas. They’re trying to drive me out.”
Anthony, who had a conspiracy theory about the Arabs, joined in on the conspiracy theory about the whites.
“When they ran the I-75 freeway through Black Bottom, a lot of people screamed foul,” he said. “An old white lady done tole me. I said, ‘I’m gonna get me a house in Detroit.’ She said, ‘You can have it, because we’re moving out. But we’ll get it back later.’ They’re trying to shut the East Side down, to get everybody who’s not of the Caucasian persuasion out of here.”
John Givans grunted.
“The city services out here are nonexistent,” he said. “It’s almost like a farm now. I got rabbits, pheasants, raccoons. If I could get rid of the crime, I’d never leave.”
15.
Flintstones
The 9/11 Memorial Corner occupies three of the four lots at the intersection of North and McClellan Streets, on the vanishing North End of Flint. A cross between folk art and patriotic kitsch, its backdrop is a pentaptych of the Manhattan skyline, with the Twin Towers still the tallest stalks in that architectural garden. A ceramic angel spreads her plaster wings atop the middle panel, while in the grass—more tightly barbered here than in any of the surrounding yards—a statuette of the Virgin Mary bows her head toward the ground. Written on a billboard are the names of every police officer and firefighter who died that Tuesday morning. A winding path of cinder blocks bears a hand-painted roll call of all the soldiers who never came home from Afghanistan. “OUR (heart) AND (praying hands) GO OUT TO THE WORLD. GOD BLESS 9-11-01 AMERICA,” reads the message on a concrete foundation, road-mapped with weeds. I wasn’t walking long among this roster of the dead before a small, tattooed woman appeared on the porch of one of the block’s three remaining houses and walked across the street.
“I just want to take some pictures of this,” I explained. “I’ve got a camera in the trunk of my car.”
“Take all the pitchers ya want,” she said. “This is fer the public.”
Suzie Fitch curated this site, checking the Internet for casualties every day, recording the sad news with a fine-tipped brush.
“We just lost two this weekend,” she said. “We lost forty-seven in April.”
“What about the soldiers in Iraq?” I asked.
“Iraq din’t have nothin’ to do with 9/11,” Suzie said. “I can’t wait until the war is over. I wish we never gone into Iraq. We should finish Afghanistan first. We had to go there, no ifs, ands or buts. They’re the ones who kilt us.”
A pickup truck pulled up across the street. Suzie’s husband, Moose, home from hanging drywall, walked over to join us. Moose wore a ponytail, a graying beard, and a T-shirt with the face of a similarly bearded man still at large in the Middle East. “WANTED,” it read. “OSAMA BIN LADEN.”
Before the Fitches built their memorial, “the neighborhood was using that corner as a public dump site,” Moose said. “We still find a lot of stuff down there. You get tired of looking at garbage because people just don’t care. They don’t take pride in their country that I saw as a child.”
Moose and Suzie had met in Chicago, her hometown, then returned to Flint, his hometown, because he needed to be close to his children by an earlier marriage.
“When he brought me here, he’s like, ‘Wait ’til you see Flint,’” she said. “‘It’s happening. It’s goin’ on. It’s a mini-Chicago.’ And I come here and I’m like …”
“I was embarrassed,” Moose confessed. “The whole time I was gone, it went to hell.”
“We’re gettin’ out of here,” Suzie said. Then she jumped in the air and stamped on the sidewalk. “I am not gonna die in Flint, Michi-kin!”
Moose had appeared in Michael Moore’s anti-Iraq War film, Fahrenheit 9/11, after the filmmaker discovered the 9/11 Memorial Corner on a hometown visit. Unsophisticated Moose didn’t know Moore from D. W. Griffith, but he’ll show off his Corner to anyone, so he allowed the director to film them driving around the North End in Moose’s pickup.
“They said they were taking pictures of memorials to 9/11, and the movie was going to be about honoring those folks of 9/11,” Moose would say later. “He came up to my wife: ‘This is the best thing we’ve seen in the city of Flint.’”
Once the movie came out, though, Moose felt he’d been a victim of journalistic trickery. This was Moose’s quote as it appeared in Fahrenheit 9/11: “Look at the neighborhood I live in. Most of ’em are abandoned. That’s not right. You want to talk about terrorism? Come right here. President Bush, right here. He knows about this corner.”
Moose’s words give the impression that he was talking about the North End, and blaming gangbangers for terrorizing the residents. In fact, Moose said, Moore combined two unrelated quotes. The second half was a response to the question, “Who do you want to visit this corner?”
As a result of his Fahrenheit 9/11 appearance, Moose was tracked down by another Flint documentarian. Kevin Leffler had grown up in Moore’s hometown of Davison, and even worked with Moore in the early 1970s as an operator on the Davison Hotline. But like a lot of Flintstones, Leffler thought Roger & Me depicted Flint as a pitiable parade of dreck, terrifying investors who might have brought in businesses to replace General Motors. So he self-produced Shooting Michael Moore, a combination of interviews with every Flintstone Moore had dicked over on his way to the big time and an attempt to interview Mike, employing the stalker journalism Moore introduced in Roger & Me.
In the film, Moose tearfully demanded to know how Moore could misrepresent his patriotic display. There was no cynicism or irony at the corner of North and McClellan, and Moose seemed hurt that a Hollywood director could introduce such notions into his carefully tended garden of Americana.
“Mr. Moore,” he said, his voice welling, “how can you do this when you say you love this country and you talk for the small man? Mr. Moore, you broke our heart, just like 9/11 broke this country’s heart.”
Moose got emotional over two subjects—America and his wife. In his mind, Moore had violated both.
There are two high holidays at the Corner: Memorial Day and September 11. Memorial Day was coming up. If I wanted to see what the Corner meant to America, and to North Flint, I should come back then, Moose suggested.
THE BIKERS ARRIVED FIRST, a gray-haired iron cavalry called the Christian Motorcyclists Association of America. Their “Riding for the Son” vests were embroidered with Indian arrowheads—Flint’s emblem—identifying them as the Flint Area Good News Riders. A biker pointed at a young woman’s peace-sign tattoo.
“Do you have an Islamic boyfriend?” he asked. “That’s an Islamic peace sign. A Christian cross upside down, with both arms broken. When the Jews are dead, when the Christians are dead, then the world will be encircled by Satan. They’ve used it since Saladin.”
Moose, who was patriotic without being political and religious without being sectarian, wore a T-shirt that read, “I SUPPORT MY COUNTRY AND OUR TROOPS. PRAYER FOR THE PRISONERS AND MISSING.” As the impresario of this event, he had strung fleece marine corps blankets along a wire, lit candles inside glowing cutaway milk jugs, set up a video camera on a tripod, and was now walking along the improvised plank benches and folding chairs, recruiting veterans to fold the flag. (Moose had never served in the military himself, which may be why he admired veterans so.)
“There’s plenty of seats up here,” he told his late arrivers. “Remember, we’re all Americans, so don’t be afraid.”
When the audience numbered three dozen—a good crowd for an outdoor vesper, which is what the ceremony in the long late-spring Michigan evening felt like—Moose made a speech.
“Will all the veterans stand up? We’re here to honor the fallen veterans, the veterans still fighting, and the families. We need to start supporting our veterans, because they give us the freedom to do this.”
A rotund young pastor sanctified the Corner. “Bless this property that has been set aside for a memorial,” he said. “Bless the hands that have set every stone and raised every flag. Bless our veterans. Bless the families and those that are longing after their loved ones on a foreign shore. Bless those that have paid the ultimate sacrifice. The just died for the unjust.”
The biker who’d called the peace sign a Muslim brand rose to express himself. That morning, he’d marched in a Memorial Day parade. Only one person had stood to salute the flag.
“And he was in a wheelchair!” the man bellowed. The consequence of such disrespect for the Stars and Stripes: “Sixty-one thousand Vietnam Veterans have committed suicide since the war! Twenty-one thousand are in our jails or prisons!”
Moose, who just wanted peace, seemed disconcerted by the biker’s outburst, so he tried to change the mood of the gathering with a clueless-husband joke.
“Thank you,” he said. “I didn’t know that, but I don’t know a lo
t of things. I’m married.”
The biker cocked his arm in a sharp salute as three fellow veterans lowered and folded the flag. It was changed each Memorial Day. Flint’s four seasons are hard, even on polyester. The biker handed Moose the tri-corner folded flag.
“On behalf of our government, thanks for what you’ve done for our veterans,” the biker said.
“Thank you,” Moose replied. “And welcome home, vets.”
Even in late May, Michigan sunlight doesn’t last forever. It mellows and dissolves. As the infiltrating darkness grayed the evening beyond the balance point between day and night, Suzie laid lilies at a wooden cutout of a soldier’s silhouette, then read a poem she’d clipped from the newspaper. (“Memorial Day is a day of tears / For those who died over the years.”) Finally, she led the congregation across the street to her memorial and asked everyone to recite, in unison, a name she’d painted atop a cinder block.
Most of the Good News Riders had grown up in Flint, but almost all had moved away to the old farm towns that absorbed the city’s white working class—Flushing, Clio, Mount Morris. Before stomping their kick-starters, they stood around for a few minutes and talked about their hometown with a mixture of old-neighborhood nostalgia and suburban disdain.
“Highest murder rate in America,” one lamented. “Fifty-nine point five per hundred thousand. The next is forty nine.”
“Where do they get the money to buy drugs?” a woman asked. “Who’s got money anymore?”
“They sell themselves. It’ll be fifty dollars. Twenty-five for the pimp, twenty for the drug dealer, and five for them.”
“This used to be one of the nice streets in town,” a man said with a sigh. “When the shop was going.”
Nothin' but Blue Skies Page 38
