by Paul Clemens
For all its obvious similarities to the United States, Canada was still a somewhat baffling place to a kid, a place where people purchased petrol, not gasoline, and bought it by the litre, not the gallon. The bank signs told you that it was zero degrees outside when it felt more like freezing, and money was not worth what it said it was: our dollar was worth more than a dollar over there, I learned, while theirs was worth less than a dollar over here. I entrusted all this to the adults, held my mother’s hand, and waited for the man to finish sharpening my hockey skates.
After I got older, and had learned about terms like liberal guilt and reparations payments and equal opportunity/affirmative action employer, Canada seemed to provide a respite from Detroit’s racial problems, which are America’s racial problems writ large. Could it really be possible, I would think when I found myself on the other side of the Detroit River, that had I been born a mere five miles to the southeast my life would have been indelibly altered? That, rather than having been born with not only the Catholic version of original sin but the white American version of it as well, I would instead wear that special glow that gathers around those living in the land of the Underground Railroad’s final, as opposed to penultimate, stop?
Five miles was nothing: drive five miles due west of our house and you were still in Detroit. Another five, and it was Detroit still. Five more: Detroit. My father and I could have driven west along 8 Mile Road in pursuit of those guys with the gun for what would have seemed like forever, and Detroit would have been on our left the whole time. But five miles in the right direction set everything, or at least certain things, right. Visits to Canada—so tantalizingly close you could see it—offered a racial escape, a glimpse of life lived without indebtedness and burden.
But there was no escape. Coleman Young’s constant presence on our television set and the front page of our newspaper saw to that. “White people,” he once said, “find it very hard to live in an environment they don’t control.” This is perfectly true and, if the demographers are to be believed, increasingly pertinent. Whites, a minority in Detroit for many decades now, may some decades hence become a national minority—not to the same extent, or with same stark dichotomy as in Detroit, but still. The Motor City, as ever, remains ahead of the racial curve—a case study, or cautionary tale.
Or incomparable material, as I began to think of it the night my car was stolen. I’d leave for college a year after that experience with grand theft auto, and the goal of my life from that point forward was to write a novel about the city that I’ve been trying, with limited success, to leave behind ever since.
In the novel I wanted to shock, after the manner of the foremost literary influence of my youth, Coleman Alexander Young. Like the mayor, I’d say whatever the hell I wanted, consequences be hanged. “I’m smiling all the time,” Young once said, sounding his credo. “That doesn’t mean a goddamned thing,” he added, “except I think people who go around solemn-faced and quoting the Bible are full of shit.” Damn right, I thought, and adopted the sentiment as my literary doctrine. But behind the bluster, I knew my book’s real burden would be to dramatize the way in which the usual racial dynamic was inverted in Detroit.
There is a theory that goes something like this: blacks can’t be racists, no matter how prejudiced their feelings, because they lack the power—the institutional power—to act on those feelings. This was true of the white minority in Detroit: you might have disliked Coleman Young, but you couldn’t do a damn thing about it. The fathers up and down our street spent each evening sitting in their favorite armchairs, watching the local news, cursing Young’s image on their television screens. Their cursing might have made them feel better—though, in fact, it made them feel worse—but, in any case, it had absolutely no effect. Was this racism, then, or was it something else?
In short, I needed to make clear just what I thought was so funny about my father’s shoeshine crack, and I needed to somehow do so without ruining the joke.
No sweat.
6 Mile
IN THE WINTER OF 1995, my parents put a For Sale sign in front of our house. It was our second bungalow in the city, just south of 8 Mile, and it sold within weeks.
This was how the novel I tried to write always ended, in draft after unsuccessful draft: with a family leaving the city behind long after most everyone else had abandoned it. The brother and sister in the book, young adults parentless in the manner of Peanuts characters, find a card that their mother and father, departed for Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, have left for them on the kitchen table: “The house is yours. Please take as good care of it as everyone else in Detroit does of theirs. Ha-Ha! Love, Mom & Dad.” In actuality, my parents were very much a part of the picture, and I came home from my senior year of college to help them and my sister move half a mile outside the city limits on a single-digit February day.
“Put that bag in the basement,” my mother said, directing traffic from her new kitchen. It was an oversize black garbage bag, puffed with air, and my father’s employment history could be tracked with a fair degree of accuracy by sorting through the T-shirts stuffed inside it. Most of these shirts, for companies with names like General Kinetics, Katech, Booth-Aarons, and Diamond Racing, were ringer Ts—two-toned, with dark stitching around the neck and sleeves—and some dated back to before my birth. The letters were peeling, there were pockets missing or half pulled off, and many had stains on the back from when my father failed to use the creeper and instead slid unassisted under whatever wreck he was repairing, settling on the cement in a pool of oil.
If General Motors gets a cold, the saying goes, Detroit gets pneumonia. My father never worked directly for any of the Big Three, but the succession of car companies that employed him did subcontracting work for GM, Ford, and Chrysler, making our family prone to periodic cases of the sniffles. His working arrangements harkened back to the auto industry’s pre-union days: good, steady, demanding work—but you can be replaced. My father viewed the UAW guys, with their cushy, collectively bargained contracts, as soft. Two doors down from our second house was a father who’d worked the line at Chrysler since the age of eighteen, and it pained my old man to contemplate how much his neighbor made, how little he knew, and how little worry went along with it. “I can’t imagine how much he’s got socked away,” my father often said. He had to live by his wits, and his worries were frequent.
Along with his T-shirt collection, my father kept every issue of every car magazine he ever subscribed to or bought off the newsstand, and I carried thousands of such magazines out of my parents’ Detroit basement and into the basement of their new home in boxes marked DAD’S MAGS. There were issues, in varying quantities, of Super Stock, Rodder & Superstock, Rod Action, Rod & Custom, Popular Hot Rodding, Popular Cars, Speed & Supercar, Car Craft, Hot Cars, Hi-Performance Cars, Super Street Cars, Cars Magazine, Drag Racing, Drag Strip, and National Dragster among many other titles, how-to manuals, and spiral notebooks filled with figures, in my father’s familiar handwriting, on engine displacement, foot-pounds of torque, and camshaft ratios.
In some cases there were duplicate copies. Unable, say, to wait for his April 1978 issue of Car Craft (“Pinto Showdown!”) to arrive in our mailbox, he’d drive with me to Custom Speed, an auto parts place on Gratiot just north of 8 Mile, and buy a preview copy a day or two early. Sometimes, instead of actually purchasing it, he’d just stand in the store and read the magazine, along with one or two others, from cover to cover, until I began to complain about my legs hurting and having to use the bathroom. “Just hold on a sec, okay, bub?” he’d say, rubbing my head. More than one store manager, my mother insisted, instituted a “This Is Not a Library: Magazines Must Be Purchased” policy because of her husband’s reading habits.
These magazines were the sum total of my father’s reading material, and they offer a fair précis of his mental weather. Social context disappears behind these magazine’s headlines. The cover of the August 1967 Drag Strip trumpets the arrival of a “Super
charged Blue Hell Corvette.” The September 1967 Rod & Custom carries this headline on its cover, next to the front left fender of a customized ’63 Chevy: “The Winner! From Detroit’s Autorama.” In few other publications in the summer of ’67 would the words “Detroit” and “winner” appear side by side.
The March 1973 issue of Rod Action carries the usual on its cover—“Tex Smith on Tricking Up Turbo-Hydros,” “Low Buck Powertrains”—but on its editorial page contains a veritable call to arms.
There has been an increasing, almost alarming, number of letters addressed to Rod Action offices these past several months concerning automobile legislation in various states. While the news media has done a presentable job of keeping the average rodder advised of Federal activity in things related to cars, practically nothing has been focused on a far more serious threat to street rodding; i.e., state vehicle legislation. Such a condition is extremely dangerous to the health of this sport.
It’s not just that my father may well have been reading this editorial, with growing indignation, while my mother was in labor with me. It’s that, meanwhile, there’s something called Watergate going on. And the Vietnam War. And the campaign for mayor of the City of Detroit, in which a Democratic state senator named Coleman A. Young, trailing in the early polls, is starting to gather steam. But my father was constitutionally incapable of reading an editorial on such topics. Neither war nor politics would have resonated with him like the mounting threats to the sport of street rodding. Years later, the father of a friend of mine, a man who was starting a side business selling insurance, came to our house, sat at our kitchen table, and talked to my father, who had begrudgingly agreed to hear him out about buying a life insurance policy. My father nodded, and smiled, and agreed to think about it, as one does in such situations, postponing his explosion until after he had seen the man to the door and shut it hard behind him. “Bullshit!” he hollered, before storming out back to the garage.
My mother explained, with her more than maternal patience where my father and his cars were concerned, the reason for his anger. Drag racing was classified as a high-risk activity, one that would result in higher life insurance premiums. A man with a family to support, my father would never have engaged in anything he considered dangerous. Did the insurance people know nothing at all of roll bars, parachute packs, the technology that went into today’s racing helmets? It wasn’t the injustice of these increased premiums (which he wouldn’t be paying, as he had no interest in purchasing the insurance) that inflamed him, nor the evidence they gave of society’s continuing ostracism, as in a fifties movie, of the greasers who got behind the wheel and gunned it. No: it was the ignorance such policies bespoke, an ignorance dangerous to the health of the sport. Every Christmas morning, in his small stocking, flanked by the Italy-size stockings my grandmother had sewn for my sister and me, my father was sure to get two presents: a can of WD-40 and the coming year’s National Hot Rod Association rulebook.
The T-shirt and magazine collections had begun in our first Detroit bungalow, near the intersection of 6 Mile Road and Gratiot Avenue. It was the sort of house you saw all of upon entering: look around for a second or two as you stood in the doorway, politely nodding, and you’d taken the entire place in, the whole scope of its seven hundred square feet. Straight ahead was the kitchen. Up and to the right was the bathroom. On either side of the bathroom, at opposite ends of a five-step hallway, were the front and back bedrooms. And that—“We told you it was small,” my mother would say, smiling—was about it. Not much to remark on, really, or compliment, unless you cared to take as your conversation piece the white aluminum siding that covered the home’s exterior.
A half-mile to our north was Assumption Grotto, the neighborhood Catholic church, where my father had gone for his first few years of grade school and where I would attend kindergarten; a mile to our south were City Airport, Mt. Olivet Cemetery, and De La Salle Collegiate, the storied Christian Brothers high school that was attended, in the early 1960s, by my father and my Uncle Tony and which, during the Depression, had denied Coleman Young admission because of his race. “A Brother in the order asked if I was Hawaiian,” Young once said, recalling his admissions interview of decades before. Detroit’s first black mayor was light-skinned with freckles, and the product of a Catholic grade school. “I told him, ‘No, Brother, I’m Colored.’ He tore up the application form right in front of my nose.” According to my father, Coleman Young may have been better off. The Christian Brothers, in his affectionate telling, were a bunch of heartless Irish bastards given to dispensing discipline in unorthodox ways, like pushing students down stairwells or having them hold heavy textbooks at arm’s length for hours, until the limb became leaden and the spirit was crushed.
I was born a few miles from this bungalow, on the fourth floor of St. John Hospital, on 7 Mile, in the late winter of 1973. There was an ice storm that March, just after St. Patrick’s Day, and so my father drove my mother and me the three miles home from the hospital over slick, dangerous roads. Because he is of that variety of man who believes that we were put on this earth, above all else, to do things right, my father no doubt performed this function as responsibly, as meticulously, as he has performed every other function required of him in the thirty-plus years of fatherhood that have followed. Each March my mother tells the story of my difficult birth, and how, after enduring thirty-two hours of labor, an emergency C-section, and six days of uncomfortable bed rest, she had to suffer through a knuckle-whitening ride back into the inner city in a ’65 Chevy Carryall truck, a baby boy resting on her sore belly. “They used to just hand the baby to you,” my mother said recently. “No car seat. Driving home in an ice storm with no car seat.” My mother was born Margaret Mary Saulino, and over the years I’ve often asked her, when there’s been special pleading to be done, to pray on my behalf, believing that no God worth His salt can deny a sincere request made by a girl so named.
The garage behind our house was two-car, accessible from the alley, and home to my father’s 1970 Plymouth Barracuda. I would watch him work on it from a high padded stool—he had to lift me onto it—and once his work was completed he would pay me a nickel to hop down, grab a push broom, and sweep the metal shavings out into the alley. Because he often failed to wear safety goggles when grinding, he occasionally had to visit an ophthalmologist at 8 Mile and Gratiot and have the shavings ground out of his eye.
My father worked a good many late hours and frequently on Saturdays—the words “time and a half” had a magical ring out of my mother’s mouth—and he returned home in the evening in any of a dozen of his plaid work shirts, his hands stained with oil, his body, which I would bury my head in while hugging him, smelling of hot metal, mineral spirits, and a masculine, earned sort of sweat. The place where my father worked was always referred to by my parents as “the shop.” Some men, I understood, worked at “the office,” or “the station house.” My father worked at the shop. “How was it at the shop today?” my mother would ask when he got home, and I could tell by looking at him how it was: it was tiring.
Until a few weeks before my birth, my mother was working as a secretary at the Uniroyal Tire plant on Jefferson Avenue. Next to the factory was the Belle Isle Bridge (the MacArthur Bridge, officially, though no one called it that), its lovely half-mile span connecting the wooded island in the middle of the Detroit River exclusively to the American mainland. My father had worked at Belle Isle over summers in the early sixties, selling cans of pop and sweeping sidewalks with my Uncle Tony, who had introduced him to my mother, helping to keep clean what the French settlers had originally called Hog Island. Across from the factory, and altogether less picturesque than the bridge—though perhaps more prophetic of the city’s future—was one of Detroit’s first methadone clinics. After I was born my mother tried to go back to work but cried all day from separation anxiety, and my father told her to quit: they’d make ends meet on one paycheck.
My mother, too, knew how tiring my father’s work
day was, especially as he was now the sole source of income, and so always had dinner ready for him, along with some strategy or other to downplay the day’s bad news. These always failed, for my father possessed what Hemingway would say every writer needed: a built-in, shockproof shit detector. My father could detect sugar-coating a mile off and had an absolute, raging impatience for having the silver lining pointed out when it was the goddamn cloud that concerned him.
The summer I was three and a half I walked off with a friend while my mother was on the telephone. When she hung up we were gone, and though frantic she was unable to search for us: my sister, a year old at the time, was sound asleep in her crib. My mother called the neighbors and then my father at work, who sped home, only to pull up at the same time I did, in the back of a Detroit Police cruiser. The cops had seen my friend Danny and me several blocks over, and, as I’d been taught to do, I gave the police my name, address, and telephone number. Danny didn’t even know his last name. He and his older brother lived a few blocks over with their unmarried mother, a woman whose kids ate the wrappers to candy bars and never had clean clothes, children who always stayed for dinner and seemed to be under no instruction to come home when the streetlights came on, as the rest of us were. They were kids, as my mother said, you felt bad for.
Holding my baby sister, Beth, in her arms, she began to cry when the cops opened the back door of the squad car. My father gave me a hug, gave my mother a look, and went back to work. He wouldn’t speak to her for days.
Life, I learned, hangs by the slenderest of threads: this was the lesson of my growing up. Chaos is out there, and only the constant application of common sense—a misnomer, I was to learn: not many had it—could keep disorder at bay. “Think!” my father would say, tapping the side of my head, when my actions made it clear to him that I’d needed to and hadn’t. Fighting tears and swallowing hard, I’d tell him that next time I would, whereupon his tone would soften and I’d receive a hug. The value of a life accrues slowly, or so said the example he set, not through backslapping and bluster but by the daily meeting of one’s responsibilities, however dull they may be. This seriousness, born of worry, was the result of his being the son of a similar father, someone whose childhood in a Catholic orphanage had been harsh and who, as a result, had come to see the two—reality, harshness—as synonymous.
