by Paul Clemens
By the fall of 1990, Detroit was national news. “We’re talking about Detroit,” Diane Sawyer says, introducing a Prime Time Live piece that aired the first semester of my senior year, “once a symbol of U.S. competitive vitality, and some say still a symbol, a symbol of the future—the first urban domino to fall. And standing at the center of it all, a controversial mayor, facing charges that a lot of the blame lies at his feet.”
The words “Detroit’s Agony” scroll across the screen. Then, over an oft-repeated scene of abandoned homes and burnt-out city blocks, rises the voice of reporter Judd Rose. “This,” he says, “is a racist story.” That is the opinion of Mayor Coleman Young, who believes that the following report is an attack on him and on the city he governs—and so is, by extension, antiblack.
“Every city has arson fires,” Rose says during a nighttime scene, houses burning behind him, “but only here is there one angry night like Devil’s Night.” Other cities have “trick-or-treating and window-soaping,” while “Detroit is engulfed in an orgy of arson. It’s a holiday tradition, a mean-spirited Mardi Gras.”
Rose is in Young’s office. “Are you proud of Detroit?” he asks the mayor. “Certainly I’m proud of Detroit,” Young says. “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.” Beneath his Coke-bottle bifocals, Young is jowly and mustachioed—editorial cartoonists tended to emphasize the walrus resemblance—and below his double chin his tie is enormously knotted. His mayoral desk is large enough to create a chasm between him and Rose.
“Is it a safe place to live, a good place to live, a good place to raise a family?” Rose asks. Young answers halfheartedly in the affirmative—“It’s as safe as any other”—and then gets visibly angry. “So don’t bring me that crap about Detroit’s . . .” He doesn’t finish the thought, but motions with his hand as if to push that negative crap away. “We’re no different,” he says. “We have the same problems as any city in America.”
Rose stands in front of an empty lot, the skyline of Detroit in the distance behind him. The building that dominates the shot is the Renaissance Center, the downtown skyscraper that was to signal the city’s rebirth when ground was broken on it in 1973. A couple blocks from our house, at the 8 Mile and Kelly border crossing, was a sign that said: WELCOME TO DETROIT, RENAISSANCE CITY. FOUNDED 1701. Rose grants that other cities have even worse problems than Detroit. “America’s cities are on a dark and dangerous road,” Rose admits. “But you come here and you get the feeling that this, this is what the end of the road looks like.”
Back to the mayoral office. “In my time in Detroit,” Rose says to Young, “I have driven past mile after mile of decayed, rotting neighborhoods that look like war zones.”
“Those were there when I became mayor,” Young says.
“There are also people that say that any white mayor who had developed the downtown area and let the neighborhoods collapse would have been kicked out of office a long time ago.”
“Well, that’s [bleep]. The neighborhoods collapsed,” Young says, pointing his finger at Rose, “because half the goddamn population left!”
Newspaper headlines of Young administration scandals float across the screen, including information about William Hart, Young’s chief of police, who was then being investigated for stealing police funds.
“Look, man,” Young says, “I have been hounded for ten goddamn years with allegations, rumors, and not one concrete charge. Now, after ten years, you get tired of that [bleep].”
“But your police chief?” Rose pleads.
“I wouldn’t give a [bleep] who it is!”
“A federal grand jury,” Rose’s voice-over says, “is investigating charges that Young had a secret business that sold Kruggerands, the gold coins that symbolized South African apartheid.” On screen is a shot of Young standing behind Nelson Mandela at a speech and applauding. “We tried to bring it up,” Rose’s voice-over concludes, “but the mayor cut us short.”
Young, glasses off, leans across the mayoral desk. “You came in here to do a chop job, obviously.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Oh, [bleep]. Okay, I’m through now.” Young waves the interview off.
Immediately after Young concluded the interview—not before closing with a final “Who the [bleep] do you think you are?”—I began to write the article that would appear in our school paper. “Well, Prime Time Live has spoken,” I began. “Mayor Coleman A. Young has spoken (sworn?). Every person who lives in Detroit, around Detroit, has heard of Detroit, or can spell Detroit has spoken. Now I will.” I first listed my credentials—“I was born in Detroit and have lived within the city all of my life”—and then, over the next six paragraphs, proceeded to say nothing whatsoever. In the last paragraph, I took Young to task for dismissing Detroit’s troubles by saying that all big cities have these problems. “If the mayor doesn’t do something to turn things around,” I wrote, “he won’t have to worry about Detroit being a big city for much longer.”
What would Coleman Young have thought? I entertained the happy notion—believing, with Kurt, that it was better to be a smart-ass—that he would have said what he’d said to Rose on national television that night:
Who the fuck do you think you are?
By the spring of senior year our thoughts were actually less about high school than about college, less about Detroit than about East Lansing and Ann Arbor. Of all of us, Kurt talked about college the least. If he had plans, no one knew what they were.
In my case, applying to the University of Michigan had been perfunctory, part of what any moderately bright kid from metropolitan Detroit did by default. Infinitely more important, to my mind, was my parents’ permission to apply to one or two “prestigious” schools. I’d set my sights a couple hundred miles past Ann Arbor, to the big city to our south and west. I saw its name on highway signs along the westbound side of the Ford Freeway, past downtown, on the way out to Metropolitan Airport: ANN ARBOR 28. CHICAGO 262.
During my junior year of high school I had taken the PSAT and placed in a smart-kid percentile. The predictable result was that my family’s mailbox was stuffed, every day for months on end, with application packets from many of the best colleges and universities in the country. Brown, Duke, Chicago, Northwestern, Bowdoin: all wrote to congratulate me on the promise I seemed to hold as a student and scholar, and to wish me the best as I embarked upon the important process of choosing a college. The sense of possibility those packets represented, particularly to a kid who’d never, for any length of time, left his corner of Detroit—“Greetings from beneath the pines of Maine!” the letter from Bowdoin began—was considerable.
The first piece of mail that I received from the University of Chicago, in the spring of my junior year, contains some scribbles at the bottom in my mother’s handwriting. She’d followed up this letter with a phone call, clearly trying to get the lay of the economic land. In her cursive: “Tuition, 14,500. Rm & Bd, 5400. College Honors Scholarship (40) btw half & full tuition. Top 5% of class, etc. Separate form over & above application.” My mother went ahead and made an appointment for me with an admissions counselor at Chicago.
The summer before my senior year, then, I drove along I-94 through Ann Arbor, Jackson, Battle Creek, Kalamazoo, and Gary, until, four hours later, accompanied by my father, we arrived on Chicago’s South Side. Coming from Detroit’s east side, Chicago’s South Side seemed familiar; its deterioration had history, depth. As with my hometown, it was a place where there was something serious at stake; its seediness said as much, and said, too, that much had been lost. I immediately longed to call Hyde Park home. “Chicago isn’t the only place,” my father said. “There are other schools.” He sounded like a concerned father lecturing his love-struck daughter about an unsuitable boyfriend.
“If you want to go to college,” my father had told me a few years before, as we were driving up Gratiot Avenue toward Custom Speed, “you’re going to have to get a scholarship. Otherwise, community college is the best I can do for y
ou.” He was already contemplating a return to school, one that would cause him to quit work and would preclude his continuing to make tuition payments for me.
I took this in stride, barely having started high school by this point. And though it was a college prep high school I’d begun to attend, neither of my parents had graduated from college—my mother hadn’t even attended—and the word itself held little magic for me. Neither did it matter a whit what qualifier went before it: state, private, Ivy League, community. My father took an occasional class at Wayne County Community College while I was growing up—usually something on electronics, at the campus by City Airport—and I saw no problem with following in his footsteps.
My attending a community college was brought up in the context of a larger conversation we were having about work—about its being a bitch, and a bear, and something for which one must be sure to be fairly compensated, because it’ll take up most of your life, not just the work but the worrying about it. “Don’t take anything less than thirty,” my father said, citing a figure—I took him to mean thirty thousand—that struck me as outlandish. It was about what our house was worth. “It’s just not possible to live on less,” he said. I didn’t know if he was suggesting that I get a good-paying job straight after high school or if, instead, I should be keeping that figure in mind for several years down the road, after I’d finished with the rest of my schooling.
I had a fear that it was the first. My father had a tendency, when discouraged, to throw the baby out with the bathwater—or, in his case, to throw the car out with the carburetor. There were times in the garage when, if he couldn’t fix whatever part it was he was working on, he’d curse the whole goddamn machine, declaring it a shit-heap unworthy of his trouble. Perhaps he was thinking along the same lines: If I can’t send the kid to a good school, well, then the hell with it.
Two miles north of Custom Speed on Gratiot was the epicenter, on Friday and Saturday nights, of adolescent cruising on the east side. It was between 10 Mile and 12 Mile that the Macomb County kids hung out windows, blasted stereos, and tried and failed to get laid. Shop students with wispy mustaches, bad complexions, and bitchin’ Camaros, they were suburbanites with fewer prospects than I had, kids whose futures were circumscribed in a way not unlike that of my father’s. Twenty-five years before, my father had been one of these kids, though his strip of Gratiot had been farther south, in the heart of the city. Detroit’s car culture had since moved to Macomb County, and it was Gratiot Avenue, more than any other thoroughfare, that had conveyed that culture northward.
It was a culture that made more sense in the city, where life came in three dimensions and one’s days cast a shadow. The car culture in Macomb County felt flat—flimsily suburban. When my father and I drove out to car shows at 16 Mile Road, the sight of the forty-something couples huffing and puffing in their “Heartbeat of America” jackets made me homesick for the city. The same Chevy logo that had looked natural next to the 396 decals on my father’s Nova in the garage at 6 Mile and Gratiot looked just like any other corporate emblem when worn on the back of satin jackets by middle-aged suburbanites.
My father had been offered a job fixing broken-down Detroit city buses stored in a lot in a warehouse district by City Airport, in a tableau that resembled the abandoned airplane sites that dot the desert landscape. “What do I know about buses?” “More than anyone else,” my mother said, confident in her husband’s overwhelming mechanical competence. He never gave himself enough credit, to her way of thinking. His modesty, coupled with his obvious expertise, produced an oddly immodest effect—a sort of self-deprecating cockiness. When, bent over the hood of someone’s stalled car, he launched into a bout of earnestly bumbling modesty—boy, it beat the hell out of him what the problem was here; honestly, he wouldn’t want to have to say—you wanted to tell him to cut the shit.
He declined the bus repair offer and continued to work at a shop in the suburbs, making the opposite commute of most metro Detroiters by driving out to Macomb County each morning and back south of 8 Mile each evening. The shop was started by a friend of his who had hired my father and a handful of other guys who’d been nuts about cars from the time they were kids and in no need of a college education to teach them what was what. As the business expanded, however, the owner had hired one or two younger guys with engineering degrees from the General Motors Institute in Flint. “They don’t know their posterior protrusions from an earthly depression,” my father said of these credentialed young fellows.
And yet, while mocking their college educations, he was making plans to return to college to study computers, in hopes of securing work a little more white collar. He had those thirty-year-old credits from the Detroit Institute of Technology, along with his occasional electronics course work from Wayne County Community College. Thirteen years of Catholic school tuition payments would be the extent of his outlay for my education; such an investment should make of me a scholarship boy, after which he would be free—freer, at any rate—to complete the education he should have finished long ago.
For the time being, however, we were still blue collar, and I continued to help him set up his table each January at the State Fair Swap Meet at the Michigan State Fairgrounds, between 7 and 8 Mile at Woodward Avenue. While the strobe lights drew auto executives, television crews, and the local black-tie crowd down to Cobo Hall for the yearly unveiling of sparkling new models at the Auto Show—another January ritual in automotive Detroit—my father and I carted cylinder heads and rocker arms, camshafts and lifters out of our garage, loaded them in the back of the truck, and then carried them into one of the Fairgrounds’ enormous unheated hangars, our breath so visible before us that it looked as if we were blowing steam off the top of a cup of coffee.
Inside the hangar, manning hundreds of similar tables, were urban men—factory workers, construction workers, tool-belted climbers of utility poles—who handled hot drinks in cold weather with a reverence that others reserved for the Eucharistic wine, men whose ability to tolerate scalding hot beverages seemed to be matched only by their ability, while standing out of doors in frigid weather, to tolerate full bladders. I was impressed by the wads of bills these men had in their pockets, not yet understanding that those rolls of tens and twenties bespoke nothing but their possessor’s pennilessness.
“Go help your dad,” my mother often said when my father had been at work too long on whatever family car was giving him trouble. “It’s Sunday, and he’s been out in the garage since Mass. It’s supposed to be his day off.” I’d trudge out the side door, and as I neared the garage I’d hear the sounds of a Tigers game on WJR, the local superstation. I would stand by silently and watch my father stare for a while at whatever was broken, tilting his head this way and that to get a read on it. “Mom told me to come out,” I’d explain, to break the ice. He’d nod and ask me to hand him something.
It was ridiculous, of course, to think that I could help my father; what my mother meant was that I should keep him company and perhaps learn something in the process. What I learned early on was that, no matter what might be broken, it was often just a matter of swearing at it right. “Goddamnit,” he’d say, as he lost his grip and his hand slipped off a socket wrench. “Come on, you bitch,” he’d say, trying to break loose a lug nut from a rusty rim. Or, during a delicate bit of surgery, his head under the hood: “Oh, you bastard—Paul, hand me those pliers, will ya?—aw, this piece of shit. Hold that light up, will ya? Because I’ve just . . . about . . . got—oh, hell. I almost had it there. If I could have just hooked that mother of a valve spring—” We’d sigh, in unison, and take a step back for perspective, hands on hips. “Oh, well,” he’d say. The Tigers game was long over by this point; the day had come and gone. “I give up for the night. This goddamn thing. Go inside, it’s all right. Tell Mom I’ll be in in a sec.” But he never did give up, and I never went back inside, and before going to bed whatever had needed to be fixed was fixed; the sun would not have risen otherwise. Though I n
ever did much of anything on such occasions aside from holding the droplight for him as he peered under the hood, I always finished exhausted. “Did he help?” my mom would ask when we got back inside, turning on the oven to reheat his dinner. “He sure did,” my dad would say. I’d shrug.
Cars, I sometimes thought, would kill him—not in a crash, but from the insistent, wearying demands of their upkeep. There was always something wrong with one of the “By Owner” wagons or hatchbacks he’d seen sitting in a vacant lot on 8 Mile and had bought for my mother as a grocery-getter. From years of racing he knew how to make a car perform; but he also knew how to make a car last, how to minimize wear and tear, and he tried to impart this knowledge to his family. If you just listened to him, everything would be fine.
At work he tested racing engines on a dynamometer, stressing them to check water temp, fuel temp, water flow, and oil flow while also measuring more important things like torque, on the basis of which horsepower could be calculated. Like a British Invasion guitarist with a famously loud amp, my father was slowly going deaf from running engines on the dyno. After the races, where he sometimes worked in the pit crew, he’d tear the engines down and check them over. The road-racing team that he built engines for, sponsored by General Motors, had two drivers; his favorite was the guy who got the most out of the car while doing the engine the least damage.
My mother was not among his favorite drivers. She never had a middle gear, figuratively or literally. “We have plenty of time,” she’d say on Sunday mornings before Mass. And then, five seconds later: “We’d better get going—we’re going to be late!” Life was a constant hurry-up, and she hated to wait. She accelerated toward red lights—stop signs, too. She revved the engine and gunned it from standing starts. Worst of all, in cars with manual transmissions, she “rode the clutch,” meaning that she didn’t fully remove her left foot from the pedal after shifting gears. There was, my father insisted, no better way to burn those things out. I received this warning when I began to drive, along with its unspoken, half-pleading subtext: If you ride the clutch you’ll burn out the clutch; then I’ll have to replace the clutch, either after work or on the weekend—so could you please, for the love of Christ, when you’re done shifting, just remove your foot from the goddamn clutch? In the old days, my father said, there was an Indy car driver who, if he didn’t like the engine he’d been provided, would “clutch it”—that is, depress the clutch at full throttle, blowing the engine. My mother’s sin was venial rather than mortal, but in the same vein.
