by E. J. Olsen
The bus driver turned, scowled, but said nothing.
I glanced away just before the homeless man saw me looking. He knew I had looked. Luckily, the child distracted him again. When I turned back, I saw him smile again at the child, wider this time, a grisly green and yellow smile, the school colors of the university we were now passing.
Then the child's mother, reading her own paper, realized what was going on. She sat the little boy straight down in his seat, flashing a harsh glance behind her.
This set the man off. His gestures suddenly grew more animated. It was if he had decided he would show us what an invisible homeless man on a city bus could do. He pointed out the window at a young woman in a short skirt and yelled to everyone in the bus: "Look at the titties on her! Lookit those titties! Let me off!"
The bus didn't stop. Everybody stayed quiet. An older man across the aisle from me sighed and looked out the window. A cane was leaned against the empty seat next to him.
As we continued down Woodward, we approached the Fox Theatre. A block or two behind it, down Montcalm, I could catch a glimpse of the old Chin Tiki. By all rights, I should not have been able to see three blocks behind a major building to spot another, but behind the Fox, save for a fire station and an abandoned party store, there are mostly empty fields, now used for parking for the new stadiums, baseball and football, on the east side of Woodward. For that moment, I could see the Chin Tiki's Polynesian façade, its doorway arched and pointed, the shape of hands praying. To whom? Some great invisible Tiki God? Perhaps Chango: God of fire, lightning, force, war, and virility.
That would be a good guess. For Marvin Chin actually opened his Tiki bar when the riots were going on, around the same time as the Mauna Loa. Fires were everywhere in the city then, but not at the Chin Tiki. It would survive to become quite the popular place. Our parents ate there (when they dared venture downtown), as well as the stars: Streisand, DiMaggio, Muhammad Ali.
It held on until 1980, when it too closed up. But unlike the Mauna Loa, which suffered an ignoble end as a lowly seafood restaurant that eventually burned to the ground, the Chin Tiki was simply shuttered, all its Tiki treasures packed up and mothballed inside. To this day, it is still sealed up, a Tiki tomb of Tutankhamen, still owned by the Chin family, who are supposedly waiting it out, waiting for the inevitable gentrification. It will happen. Or it will become another parking lot. In the meantime, the place had a brief resurrection when Eminem used it to film a scene for 8 Mile.
Chango works in mysterious ways.
"Hey, white man!"
Without thinking, I turn and look at the homeless man. Apparently, I'm not so invisible to him.
"What you doing here?"
Everyone on the bus is obliquely looking at me now. I have to say something.
"I'm going to work," I reply coolly.
"What you on our bus for?"
"I'm just going to work," I repeat, then turn away and look out the window at the old Tele-Arts. It was a newsreel theater in my mother's time, but now it's been turned into some sort of swanky nightclub.
"Motherfucker on our bus."
"Shut your mouth," says the woman with the child in front of him. She's not sticking up for me, I know. She means that language in front of her child.
"Motherfucker."
Slowly she turns back to him, eyes like smoldering carbon. "You want to be invisible? I'll make you invisible."
She says it in that way that many black women have, that way that makes most anybody shut up if they know what's good for them. It certainly works on me, not that I invite that sort of thing. I mind my own business. It's the only way to be when you're the only white person on the bus, the cue-ball effect, as a friend of mine calls it.
The homeless man quiets down for the moment. We're further down Woodward now. I look out the window at the storefronts, façades ripped off, gaping wide open into the street. They are being gutted for new lofts, many of them right across from the old J.L. Hudson's site, where the behemoth department store was imploded. It is now replaced by a giant new skyscraper built by a software billionaire.
When things like this happen, the world starts to pay attention. Detroit is a city again! Back from the dead! Rising from the ashes! They can see us again. We were always there, but transparent, the way you can see right through the exoskeleton of the Michigan Central Train Station.
To the rest of the world, Detroit was just a place where Japanese film crews showed up every year to photograph the house fires on Halloween Eve, a.k.a., Devil's Night. Other than that, they hardly saw us. We don't even show up on the city temperature listings on the Weather Channel.
Further up, through one of the construction sites, I catch a glimpse of the old Statler Hilton Hotel, once proud home of Trader Vic's. The building has been ignored for so many years, the windows are no longer even boarded up. The Michigan weather is not kind to a man-made tropical oasis. Inside, columns of bamboo once seemed to shore up rattan-wrapped walls. Glowing blowfish and a native kayak hung from the ceiling, along with colored globes encased in fishnets. At the front door, where a stoic Moai once stood sentry, there is rubble. Long pieces of terra-cotta tile still surround the front door, ragged with metal mesh, depicting the faces of Tiki gods, mouths contorted, faces squinched into impossible, pained grimaces.
A Tyree Guyton lavender polka dot has now been painted on the door. He of the Heidelberg Project, a block-long art project composed completely of discarded objects: a gutted polka dot Rosa Parks bus, a backyard of vacuum cleaners, a tree of shoes. These dots appear on abandoned buildings all over the city. Cheery carbuncles that make sudden art of blight. What else can you do?
The story for Trader Vic's is much the same as the Chin Tiki and the Mauna Loa. When the white folks disappeared from downtown Detroit at the end of the workday in the '70s, the clubs and restaurants foundered. The building is now slated for demolition, but it's been a ghost for decades. "Demolished by neglect," as the preservationists like to say around here. They say it a lot.
I am chagrined to relate that I have been part of that demolition as well. One night, in a drunken Tiki frenzy, some friends and I brought crowbars to this very site and ripped terra-cotta tiles from the façade of the building. No one was using them anymore, right? That's what we told ourselves. It was wrong, and I knew it. I think of my offense to the Tiki gods when I look at my filched tile, which now resides in my backyard. Shame on me, I say. Shame. Yet these agonies of all our pasts will soon be ground into dust in the middle of the night, the preferred time to start the demolition of historic buildings here in Detroit.
Down one street, there is a sign on the side of a car wash: HAND WASH TO THE GLORY OF GOD.
"Motherfucker on our bus," I hear the homeless man mutter. I really wish he would stop saying that.
We pass by more construction sites. Things are changing here. New buildings push out the grand old ones, like bullies in a big rush. When you go downtown at night there are people there now, suburban people, city people, doing things, spending money.
"Hey, white man! Why don't you go back to Livonia?" says the homeless man.
I ignore him. Nothing bad is going to happen—for some reason I know this. Yet it alarms me when I hear a startled inhalation, a collective Huh! roll through the bus. I turn to look at the invisible man and I see that he has now dropped filthy trou and is displaying his penis to me and everyone else.
Frankly, I'm kind of relieved. An act of aggression, but a harmless one.
"I ain't too invisible now, am I, motherfuckers?" he yells, waving his spotted peter at everyone on board. To be on the safe side, I clutch my thermos, figuring it will work well as a cudgel if I need to use it that way. Taunt me, yes. Piss on me? I don't think so.
Still, it's a relief when the driver pulls the bus over right next to a construction site, stomps down the aisle, and tells the now-veryvisible homeless man to walk his raggedy ass off his bus. Right now.
With great dignity, the homeless man p
ulls up his pants, turns, and exits. When the pneumatic doors close behind him, there is only the smell of him left. The woman with the child looks sternly at me. She is holding her child closely, protecting him, her lips squeezed tight.
For a moment, I try not to laugh about what just happened, but just can't help myself. She looks at me, puts a hand over her mouth, but soon her head is shaking and she can no longer hold it in. Everyone on the bus starts laughing. Up in the rearview mirror, I can even see the driver smiling.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
MEGAN ABBOTT is the author of The Song Is You, Queenpin, and the Edgar Award finalist Die a Little. Born in Warren, Michigan, she grew up in Grosse Pointe Woods, a suburb of Detroit. She lives in New York City.
CRAIG BERNIER became enthralled with Detroit—its culture and nuance, its dread and hope—after returning from a stint in the Navy to attend Wayne State University. Most of his published works have focused on the city's denizens. He teaches composition and writing on the adjunct faculty of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.
JOE BOLAND was born in Detroit, and has lived and worked in the area his entire life. He is currently writing a crime novel.
DESIREE COOPER is a columnist for the Detroit Free Press, a frequent contributor to National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and cohost of American Public Media's Weekend America. She did anticrime and affordable housing advocacy work for New Detroit, an urban coalition that addresses the city's social problems. She lives in the city with her husband and two children.
LOREN D. ESTLEMAN, a Michigan native, has received four Shamus Awards from the Private Eye Writers of America for his Amos Walker, Detroit P.I. series, which he's been writing for twenty-seven years. In addition, he is the author of a historical Detroit series that includes Whiskey River, Motown, King of the Corner, Edsel, Stress, Jitterbug, and Thunder City.
LOLITA HERNANDEZ, born and raised in Detroit, is the author of Autopsy of an Engine and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant, winner of a 2005 PEN Beyond Margins Award. She is also the author of two chapbook collections of poems: Quiet Battles and Snakecrossing. Her family hails from Trinidad &Tobago and St. Vincent.
JOHN C. HOCKING obsessively reads, writes, edits, and collects pulp and noir fiction. He lives outside of Detroit with his inspiring son and superhumanly tolerant wife. He thinks more people should read Dan J. Marlowe's The Name of the Game Is Death.
CRAIG HOLDEN grew up in the shadow of Detroit and went to sleep most nights with a transistor radio under his pillow— listening to the Tigers and Red Wings or experiencing the late '60s via the old CKLW. His most recent novel is Matala.
ROGER K. JOHNSON is a native Detroiter who still lives in the city with his beautiful wife and their three lovely daughters. A graduate of Wayne State University and a middle school science teacher, he is committed to making sure that all the children he encounters realize their full potential.
PETER MARKUS is originally from the southwest side of Detroit. He now works with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, which sends writers into Detroit public schools. He is the author of three books of short fiction, Good, Brother, The Moon Is a Lighthouse, and The Singing Fish. His novel, Bob, or Man on Boat, is forthcoming in 2008.
JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. Author of the national best sellers We Were the Mul-vaneys, Blond, and The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina, Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In Detroit, she lived on Sherbourne Road north of Seven Mile, 1962–1968.
DORENE O'BRIEN was born and raised in Detroit and currently teaches writing at the College for Creative Studies and Wayne State University. She won the Red Rock Review Mark Twain Award for Short Fiction, the New Millennium's Fiction Award, the Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award, the Bridport Prize, and she is the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
E.J. OLSEN comes from a long line of sturdy Michigan folk, and has lived in the Detroit area for most of his life. He works as a freelance writer and editor and is currently writing his first novel.
P.J. PARRISH, the New York Times best-selling author of the Louis Kincaid series, is actually two sisters, Kris Montee and Kelly Nichols. Their books have been nominated for multiple Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony awards, and they have won an International
Thriller Writers Award. They were born and raised in Detroit, and return home as often as possible—both in person and in their fiction.
MELISSA PREDDY traces her Detroit ancestry to the late 1800s and grew up absorbing family lore about mid–twentieth century life in the city's working-class neighborhoods. She is currently a business editor for the Detroit News.
NISI SHAWL is a native of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her short horror story "Cruel Sistah," which first appeared in Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine, was reprinted in the nineteenth volume of Th e Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.
MICHAEL ZADOORIAN is the author of the novel Second Hand, and his stories have appeared in Literary Review, American Short Fiction, Beloit Fiction Journal, North American Review, and ARARAT. A graduate of Wayne State University, he grew up on the northwest side of Detroit.
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