Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir

by Paul Clemens

  His hot rods were a vacation from such headaches. He worked on them because he enjoyed working on them, in the way that making a dessert can still please a woman who otherwise resents the demands of cooking. The State Fair swap meet, populated by men similarly dispositioned—cars were frequently both their work and their hobby—was the meeting of what seemed to me, at ten and twelve and fourteen and sixteen, a secret society, one dedicated to the lofty goals of increased horsepower and better low-end torque. The swap meet lasted two days—we’d put a tarp on our table overnight—but the second day was always a disappointment, with our best stuff already sold and other people’s picked over, too. Day two was dominated by the creeping thought of how much we hadn’t sold and would have to cart back home. “Well, how’d you do?” my mother would ask when we got back. “Hmm? Oh, a few hundred,” he’d say. “Did you at least get rid of some stuff?” “Some,” he’d say, declining to mention the things he’d picked up over those two days, keeping the number of parts in his possession, like the amount of matter in the universe, a constant. Whatever pieces my father might have sold at swap meets over the years, the floor of the garage never got any less crowded, and the wooden rafters up above continued to bow beneath the weight of my father’s automotive ambitions.

  For me, I knew, he had academic ambitions. “I’ll get a scholarship, Pop,” I promised.

  Why I wanted to go to the University of Chicago so badly I wasn’t sure; this was before I’d come to associate the school with the Great Books, and with a Jewish-American intellectual tradition I’d come to admire. I think I liked the directness of the name: Chicago. Where do you go to school? Chicago. You could say you went to school at Michigan, but Michigan was a state, with an upper and lower peninsula, and it didn’t seem to me that you could be schooled by something as large as a Midwestern state. A city, on the other hand, could serve as a classroom, as London had for Boswell. By attending Chicago, I was looking to trade up.

  It was a warm summer day when my father and I took a walking tour of the Chicago campus, and the place was sparsely populated, except for our tour group of parents and their sons and daughters—my prospective classmates. “You’ll probably change your major a couple of times,” our guide said, in response to a question about the university’s general education requirements. She herself had switched from philosophy to chemistry, or vice versa, after taking an introductory course in the new subject and falling for it. “Professors consider it a failure if they can’t get you to change your major at least a few times,” she said. While others in our group smiled at this testament to our guide’s intellectual curiosity, I could see my father making mental calculations about the lost credit hours, the cost per credit hour—Christ Almighty.

  Aside from campus landmarks and academic concerns, our guide also spoke of opportunities for extracurricular involvement and discussed different ways of volunteering in the surrounding community—which, from the looks of it, needed the help. “Never underestimate the power of liberal guilt,” she said. Everyone laughed.

  It was the first time I’d heard the term. More guilt? Who needed it? I sure didn’t. I still had Catholic guilt in spades. In later years, I’d come to think of liberal guilt as a luxury item—something you needed money to afford, and to feel.

  When it came time to meet with the admissions counselor at Chicago I walked into his office alone while my father waited outside. There was a file on the counselor’s desk: my PSAT scores, presumably, along with some personal information—name, address, and so on. I was surprised, slightly, to see that he was black, and he was somewhat more surprised that I was white. The address in my file said “Detroit.”

  About our conversation I remember next to nothing. I recall his being friendly and remarkably free of cant, particularly for someone working in higher education. He looked me in the eye and told it to me straight. “You’ll more than likely get in, depending how you do this coming year, of course”—smile—“but I can’t say that the odds are too good you’ll get a scholarship. You’re very bright, but we get a lot of very bright kids. There’s financial aid, of course. Most families find a way.”

  I told him that I could possibly be first or second in my graduating class and asked if there were any scholarships for valedictorians or salutatorians. He laughed at this. Many of the university’s students were valedictorians or salutatorians; and did I have any idea how low the ACT scores were of some of the valedictorians of Chicago inner-city high schools? “Fourteens and fifteens,” he told me. “We can’t give scholarships to kids like that. We can’t even accept them. Not even close.” I found this refreshing; a white counselor, I suspected, would have engaged in much hand-wringing over “underserved student populations” and whatnot. (“Underserved!” my father would have hollered in the hallway. “Do you have any idea how much tax money I’ve paid into the Detroit Public School system! I’ve been serving those bastards for decades!”) The counselor told me of Vietnamese students whose parents purchased Laundromats, where members of the extended family worked sixteen-hour days to put the child on whom familial hopes were riding through the prestigious American school. “It can be done,” he said.

  My acceptance letter arrived the following spring, and my financial aid statement shortly thereafter. At the top of the page are my mother’s scribbled notes, condensing the somewhat baffling statement to its basics. “Total, 23,400. Parent, 8605. Paul’s assets, 145. Work—summer, 1000. Work—school year, 1800. Student loan (we are eligible), 1800, or max of 2600, lowering our contribution by the diff of 800. School grant, 10050.” Though this doesn’t quite tally, the picture was clear enough, and plenty bleak: my parental contribution was more than half of my mother’s yearly salary. My father’s imminent return to school meant that my mother, who’d taken a full-time secretarial job, would be the family’s sole source of income for the foreseeable future. There would be precious little money coming in; but the aid package had been based on the previous tax year, when my father was fully employed and, relatively speaking, did rather well.

  My personal worth, $145—“Paul’s assets”—was, I had heard, more or less the value of any human body, broken down to its constituent elements. Was this how they’d arrived at that figure? “This acceptance letter seems a lot like a rejection letter,” I said. “Hey, at least you got in,” said my father, who seemed surprised, and not a little proud. He’d since heard that this Chicago was supposed to be a pretty good school.

  As we prepared for commencement at the end of senior year, practicing our slow, straight procession and orderly filing into rows, the priests consistently pulled me out of such exercises, along with our valedictorian and Student Council president, who would be seated onstage during commencement itself and thus not marching in with the rest of the graduating class. I thought, at first, that this was to spare me the pain of walking—I’d developed a stress fracture in my left hip during the spring track season—but it soon became evident that the priests had other designs.

  Our valedictorian was a grade school friend, and though part of our common training had been those yearly poem contests, he was terrified of public speaking and so was asked by the priests to deliver the shorter address at commencement, typically reserved for the class salutatorian. I was asked to deliver the longer, valedictory address. “If you speak half as well as you write,” our principal, Father Louis, said to me in his office, “you should be fine.”

  I suspected something was up but didn’t know for certain until after commencement, when I opened the report card I’d been handed along with my going-away gifts. Below my final semester’s marks was my cumulative class rank: 3. “Congratulations! Salutatorian, Class of 1991!” it said at the bottom of the report card.

  Bullshit. I’d known from the beginning whose place I was taking on stage, who it was who should have had his photo, as salutatorian, in the May 1991 issue of the Michigan Catholic with Archbishop Maida on the cover. No other kid’s parents—no other kid, period—would have tolerated th
is demotion. Everyone else would have stormed the priests’ house and demanded an explanation. When, on graduation night, I found myself at a party and heard the host explain to his father—to lend an air of respectability to what would turn into a rather disreputable get-together—that both the valedictorian and salutatorian were present, I felt like a fraud, advanced on the basis not of who I was but who I wasn’t.

  There were rumors: that Kurt had been asked by the priests not to attend commencement, that he’d been kicked out of school at the last minute, that he’d taken an incomplete in a course and so wasn’t graduating. Though possible, each of these explanations struck me as overworked; they missed the essence of Kurt’s character, which was that he just didn’t care. Like the men in Sal’s barbershop, he’d chosen, at whatever cost—minuscule, incalculable—to not give a shit. It was his strategy, and he was sticking to it.

  I never saw him again.

  Not in Detroit Anymore

  MY ONLY CRITERION for choosing a college, after my experiences with Michigan and Chicago, was that I not go to a school with a direction in its name: no Western Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Central Michigan, or Northern Michigan for me. I briefly considered attending the University of Detroit, the Jesuit school, which offered me a full scholarship—I’d already earned eight credits at U of D as part of my high school calculus course—but the thought of four more years in Detroit, and four more years of Catholic school, was killing. I eventually accepted a full scholarship, covering tuition, fees, room and board, and books, to a directionless school, where for four years I felt likewise. It was a state university on Michigan’s west side, a school populated by kids from the outskirts of Flint and Kalamazoo and Saginaw, semihicks with bad haircuts who’d grown up in the no-man’s-land between the outer suburbs and the country and who, for some reason, seemed to fancy themselves city kids, despite the cow shit on their shoes.

  The first time I filled up at the service station across from campus I tried to pay the cashier before I’d pumped any gas. “What’s this?” she asked, looking at the twenty that I’d put on the counter. “It’s for number four,” I said, specifying the pump. “No. Why are you paying? You haven’t gotten any gas yet, have you?” I told her that where I came from, 180 miles to the southeast, every gas station had a sign demanding that customers PAY FIRST. “Well, sweetie,” she said, “you’re not in Detroit anymore.”

  That was clear. My roommate, Shane—named, he said, after the Alan Ladd character—had received the same scholarship I had. He came from a small town in the southwest corner of Michigan, ten minutes from the Indiana border, a proximity that caused him to set his watch to Central time, a habit he maintained even when he was on campus, a couple hours north of the state line. Half of the year—though I could never remember whether it was after we’d sprung forward or fallen back—Michigan and Indiana time were in sync. The other six months Michigan was an hour ahead, so I had to add sixty minutes to whatever time he’d quoted me. I learned early on in our first semester not to ask.

  The first night in our dorm, Shane began to set out pictures from back home, perhaps a dozen in all. I chalked this abundance up to small-town sentiment—the sort of thing you heard about in John Cougar songs. I hadn’t put out any pictures of loved ones, but was happy to use his as a conversation starter. The problem was that the circle of people pictured was small, as Shane himself was in each and every one. In many of the pictures there was no one but Shane—shooting a basket, hitting a serve, smiling at graduation. He would join the crew team first semester, so soon there were pictures of Shane in his singlet, part of the lightweight four. To make weight, he was out of bed each morning before dawn, to run, row, and lift weights. He was an achiever—he had come out of a hick high school and, money aside, could have gone to any university in America—and he had a work ethic, so I’d let him handle such humdrum details as renting our room’s minifridge and signing us up for cable. Because no cable providers would come south of 8 Mile, we’d never had it.

  I hadn’t heard of Shane’s hometown before getting his name, address, and telephone number on a postcard the summer before. His area code was 616. At the time, Michigan had three area codes—313 for the east side of the state, 517 for the central part of the state, and 616 for the west side. Phoning across area codes was like jumping across continents to me, and his hometown may as well have been Outer Mongolia. I pictured it as a place populated by non-Catholic people who attended church services in aluminum-sided buildings—the First Assembly of God, the United Church of Christ—visible from the interstate. Neither of us called the other, and I couldn’t begin to sound out his last name, which was rendered unpronounceable not through an excess of vowels, like the names I was accustomed to, but through a collision of consonants bunched at the back of the alphabet.

  Whereas I was unfamiliar with his hometown, Shane was all too familiar with mine. He was less than thrilled, he said, when he saw that his soon-to-be roommate came from Detroit. Looking back at the brochure for our university’s convocation that year, which carried both of our names and hometowns at the top of the list of the day’s honored students, I see “Detroit” and think, Okay, who’s the affirmative action kid?—only to look above those seven letters and see my own name. During our first week on campus, at a get-to-know-you meeting in the dorm, everyone on our floor introduced himself and said something about where he was from. “Detroit,” the guy before me said, a black kid from the east side—Finney High School—who’d come over the nearly two hundred miles on a football scholarship. “And just let me say that I’ve never seen so many white people in my life.” “I’m also from Detroit,” I said, when my turn came next, “and just let me say that neither have I.”

  The RA on the floor of our freshman dorm was a junior with the musical name Dontrelle Dell. That his name rhymed was fitting: he was a rap fan, his fondness for the music being such that it was not just his life’s head-bobbing soundtrack but its organizing principle. He was often to be seen wearing T-shirts for N.W.A.—Niggaz with Attitude—and Public Enemy, whose albums Fear of a Black Planet and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back I could frequently hear blaring through our dormitory walls, his room being next to ours. When I met him on my first day, while my dad was helping me carry in boxes and my mom was organizing my dress shirts by color in the closet, I was a bit taken aback. I had picked this school, the campus of which brought the word bucolic to mind, in part to get away from this sort of thing. I was eighteen, a city kid who had never seen a deer and wanted to. Niggaz with Attitude was not a part of this deal. When I waved to him on campus in those first few weeks, he returned my greeting with a fist held aloft.

  My racial education in Detroit, college soon taught me, had been incomplete, and tragically skewed. I learned that, due to institutionalized racism, African Americans—or blacks, as we’d called them south of 8 Mile, at a savings of six syllables—had to be twice as good as whites to get anywhere. In Detroit, where the institutions were black-controlled, the widely held white belief had been that blacks didn’t have to be half as good. (Well, I remember thinking, someone’s off by a factor of four.) College, too, marked the first time that I’d heard the word white used as a sort of sheepish, shrugging pejorative: “Now, I’m just a white guy, but it seems to me . . .” The priests had taught me, or had tried to teach me, to speak articulately, to talk like a man. And yet here were men of considerable education purposely stammering and stuttering, pretending to be less articulate than they were in order to achieve a feigned harmlessness.

  But it took me a while to get used to all those things I was no longer supposed to notice. Shane, possessed of what I’d come to think of as rural reserve, had much less trouble not noticing—or, rather, he was able to notice without caring. I began to call him “Mr. Detachment”—nothing touched him. This was altogether different from Kurt’s indifference back home, which came with an almost unsustainable intensity. Shane’s detachment was surrounded by perfect calm. As with most good
kids, he’d learned early on the wisdom of a little bit and no more. He’d observe, and think, and then let the thoughts and observations go. Strong emotions he left to others, while he went about the business of getting his life properly situated.

  As students in the school’s honors program, Shane and I had overlapping freshman-year schedules. I was struck, in one of these courses—a yearlong team-taught survey of Renaissance European literature—by the reaction of the white professors to the class’s sole black student, a guy from Saginaw who sat in the back row and said very little. Perhaps because of this, anything he did say was greeted by the professors as if he’d just succeeded in squaring the circle. This was an eye-opener for me, and served as my introduction to the world of liberal guilt, which I’d heard about during my campus tour at Chicago. “What’s that all about?” I asked Shane after one class. “It’s standard,” he said. “The teachers at my high school were always that way with the black kids. Weren’t they like that at yours?” I said, with some pride, that they were not. The priests would never have stooped to that sort of thing.