Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir

by Paul Clemens

  Occasionally I’d work alone, driving around in an old green truck—it was a stick, with three on the tree—with a two-thousand-gallon drum loaded in the back. I could spend the better part of a morning filling the drum with water, with the afternoon dedicated to driving around to the planters that dotted the campus. I’d stop, hop out, grab the hose, and water the flowers as heavily as I could without drowning them in the process. The soil was often cracked from dryness.

  The truck was wide, and the drum in back filled the rearview mirror. I had to rely on the side mirrors to see behind me, but the width of the truck was such that I couldn’t see anything in them that wasn’t a considerable distance off my back bumper. One afternoon I parked along the I-94 service drive, climbed down from the truck, and watered a planter full of dying marigolds. When I got back into the truck there was no one behind me, so I put it in reverse and backed up. “Stop!” a man yelled, running along the sidewalk toward the back of the truck. “Stop!” When I got out of the truck the owner of a tiny Ford Festiva, the front fender of which was totaled, explained, at unbelievable decibel levels, exactly how he was going to go about collecting damages.

  I drove back to the shop and told the steward what had happened. I was afraid that the damages would be taken from my paycheck and that I’d end up owing the shop money, having to work the rest of the summer as a way of settling the debt. “He parked on your back bumper?” the steward asked. “The bumper of a truck that big? The hell with him!” He went over and told the shop’s repairman, a white guy, what had happened. “What the hell was the guy thinking?” the repairman asked. “Don’t worry, kid,” he said to me. “It was his fault, the asshole. And we’re insured.”

  My partner made an enviable supplementary income moonlighting. Many times he’d take the truck and, on company time, go cut the lawns of homeowners who’d contracted him to do so. This made perfect sense, given the poor wage groundskeepers were paid, and I admired his entrepreneurial spirit.

  Other workers with whom I was paired left campus for no better reason than to buy lottery tickets or beer, or to drive back home and watch television. One older, southern fellow—he was “a Georgia black,” and proud of it—actually did all three: he stopped at a liquor store, bought ten dollars’ worth of scratch-off lottery tickets (all losers) and a forty-ounce malt liquor, and then drove both of us back to his house at I-94 and Chalmers. There were bars on the front and side windows, and I was fairly certain I was about to be killed. All he did, however, was tune his TV to one of Detroit’s UHF channels, and for the next several hours we sat together in silence, watching the morning lineup of sitcoms: Jeannie, Gilligan, the Hillbillies. He had us back to the shop in time for lunch.

  There were a couple of Indian graduate students on the crew, summer help like me. They were both studying computer engineering; both were effeminate and often taunted. “Hey, want some of my cheeseburger?” a black crew member once asked the weaker of the two over lunch. Without missing a beat another black worker came in: “Naw, man, you know they worship the cow and shit. Could be eating their cousin.” It was with one of these students, Trilochan, that I once drove to a photo shop on Woodward Avenue. I’d cut out a picture from a running magazine of the great John Ngugi, the Kenyan distance runner who’d won the World Cross Country Championship five consecutive times. I wanted this picture blown up, the idea being that I’d tack it to the wall of my off-campus apartment to inspire me to hit the trails when I went back to school in the fall. Trilochan snickered. “Why do you want that picture bigger?” he asked, making a bad face. “This,” I said slowly, “is John Ngugi, the greatest distance runner the planet has ever seen. He can run ten thousand meters in—” “He’s a black.” “He’s not an American black,” I said, unsure if the drawing of such distinctions was an act of open-mindedness or its opposite. I pressed ahead anyway. “He’s Kenyan. An East African. Most American blacks are West Africans.” “He’s a black,” Trilochan said again, ending our little talk.

  There was a basketball hoop in the grounds department parking lot, and in the fifteen minutes before the end of work, when everyone had brought the mowers back but it wasn’t yet time to punch out, we played games of pickup basketball. I could hold my own on the court, which helped my standing with my coworkers, but my stock rose immeasurably one afternoon just before the Fourth of July. There was a discussion of the upcoming fireworks display downtown in Hart Plaza, and the relative merits of attending the celebration (which draws a million people a year) in person as opposed to watching it on TV. “You wouldn’t catch me down there for anything,” a fat white worker, a Warren resident, piped up. “People get shot down there.” This was met with silence, for its logic was easy enough to follow. There had, in fact, been several racial incidents in years past.

  These were tense times, and not only because of the L.A. riots and the Malcolm X Academy. Something—you could sense it—was set to go off in the city. A few months later, in November, two white cops, nicknamed Starsky and Hutch in the neighborhood they patrolled, would kill a black man during a struggle after a traffic stop. The deceased had his fist closed, and the cops fought to get him to open it—for fear, they claimed, that he was carrying a weapon. According to the prosecution, death resulted from repeated blows to the head, courtesy of the officers’ flashlights. The defense cited the cause of death as cardiac arrest, resulting from the drugs in the deceased’s system at the time of the struggle. In a nationally televised interview before the trials began, Coleman Young made his views known, calling the death a “murder.” A Detroit jury agreed; at the end of my second summer home, the cops were convicted of second-degree murder and sent to prison in Texas. My sister’s soccer coach of a year before the murder occurred was the daughter of the officer who’d received the lighter of the two sentences.

  As the “people get shot down there” comment continued to hang in the air, I felt it contingent upon me—a white Detroiter, and so a bridge between the two camps—to lighten the mood. “Oh, go back to the suburbs,” I said to the white guy, getting a big laugh out of those within earshot. My partner particularly appreciated the line, as it reminded him that I too was a Detroiter.

  “Where you stay at?” he asked me. When I told him that I stayed on the east side, not far from where he lived, our friendship became a fact, and the white kid, not for the first time, became something of a mascot. He began taking me to the weight room where he and a few other black guys on the crew worked out on their lunch hour. “You’ve got a good build,” he said, slapping my pectorals, “but we need to bring out that chest a bit.”

  The next summer, as he and I were driving along I-94 to the east side so that he could cut somebody’s grass while still on the clock, a radio news report informed us of Coleman Young’s decision not to run for reelection in the fall. It was the summer of 1993, and Young had been Mayor of Detroit for as long as I’d been alive: twenty years. “What do you think of that?” I asked. “Oh, you know, he’s had a good run. It’s time.”

  Outside the truck, at the end of Young’s good run, Detroit’s rate of decline was like the sun’s daily progress across the sky: you couldn’t actually see it, on a second-by-second basis—you’d go blind from the staring—but you knew it was happening, if only because it kept getting darker. It dawned on me that, though it was a right I’d yet to exercise, I was now of voting age, and that his retirement meant, among much else, that I’d never get a chance to cast a ballot against the mayor.

  For Sale by Owner

  AFTER CATHOLIC SCHOOL, nothing academic would ever be difficult again. I eased my way through my junior and senior years of college, taking my required classes, continuing with the required reading list that I’d made up for myself. The list was preparation for graduate school, which my English professors were pushing me toward. “You’ll need a Ph.D. in English if you want to cut my grass,” my father said. Why, with my talent for them, I hadn’t gone into math or science was beyond him.

  “The neighborhood’
s changing,” people kept saying over summers home, and no one ever bothered to delineate how because everyone knew how—the only way anything ever changes in working-class areas: for the worse. It was time, you heard again and again, to get out, and this meant out of the city itself. From 6 Mile you could still move to 7 Mile; after 7 Mile there was still 8 Mile; but once your neighborhood abutted 8 Mile Road and that neighborhood itself began to go, the suburbs beckoned. We began saying goodbye to more and more people. It was hard not to feel left behind. There was a bumper sticker, as ever, that said it best: DETROIT—WILL THE LAST ONE TO LEAVE PLEASE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS?

  We stuck around a little while longer, and my third and fourth summers home—over which I continued with that reading list—I worked at a machine shop on Trumbull Avenue, a mile north of Tiger Stadium. My father had worked at the shop, where performance camshafts were ground, in the early 1970s, back when the business was thriving. He would sometimes take me down to the shop, the proud father of the little boy in the blue baseball hat with the “STP” decal on the front. The boss’s German shepherds slept inside the building, and I’d pull their tails and use them as pillows while my dad talked business with the big men with booming voices who shared their thoughts about the new Edelbrock intake and the aesthetic as opposed to performance benefits of dual exhaust, which provided minimal boost on a four cylinder but was a bit more advantageous on a V-6 or V-8. Back then, the business was located in what could rightfully have been deemed a bad neighborhood. By the mid-1990s, I was working behind bulletproof glass.

  But it was still in the same building, with the same boss, who was descended from a long line of Galician Jews and brilliant in the skewed way lunatics often are. A big believer in conspiracies he couldn’t begin to articulate, an intellectual who couldn’t be bothered to read a book, a one-track mind that was always untracked, a drug-addled health nut—a Noam Chomsky fan, in short—he spent a good deal of each day defending the former Soviet Union, about whose policies he believed himself an expert, and answering those few customers who still called the shop and politely asked how he was doing by invoking the specter that was, at any rate, still haunting him: “Struggling!” he’d yell into the receiver, half a dozen times a day. Not “fine,” not “not bad—yourself?” It was always the same answer, delivered with the same laugh, one that came down, just barely, on the sane side of hilarity.

  Things hadn’t always been such a struggle. At one point during more prosperous days another of my father’s former bosses, a man who owned a place in the suburbs, had offered the Communist machine shop owner a million dollars for the building on Trumbull Avenue, along with the machinery and stock. He declined the offer. Years later, as business dwindled, he considered seeking a share of the Federal Empowerment Zone grant money that Coleman Young’s successor, a bespectacled lawyer not much given to public cursing, had received from the Clinton administration. The grant to individual businesses was reported to be two hundred thousand dollars a throw, but it was earmarked for new business development; the machine shop owner had been in the area for three decades as the neighborhood imploded around him. He toyed with the idea of closing the shop and opening under a new name—he’d done this before, after declaring bankruptcy—but no dice.

  He lived in the house behind his business, having only to walk through his backyard, where dog shit grew instead of grass, and cross the alley to enter his shop’s rear door. In the early 1970s, an eighty-page company brochure had described his operation as “the fastest-growing camshaft maker in the industry,” with the popularity of its cams “evidenced at every drag strip throughout the nation by the growing list of satisfied users. . . . A favorite in the winners’ circle!”

  Seventy pages follow, listing the camshafts on offer and providing a description of each: “Really hot street/strip cam. Requires at least a 4-bbl carb; headers recommended.” “Street/strip terror. Revs to 6800 rpm.” “For ultimate street engine. Low duration provides low end torque.” “Wildest cam considered streetable.” My father wrote the descriptions and my mother typed up the brochure, which ends with a photo gallery featuring the cars of satisfied users at the drag strip. Checkered flags, the logo of the cars’ sponsor, Gratiot Auto Supply, are painted on their sides.

  I could, in a pinch, change the oil on a car, dumping the old oil in the far corner of our backyard, but that was about the extent of my automotive know-how. I made deliveries for the shop. “Oh, you must be Bob’s boy!” other machine shop owners would say (to use the name my father gave himself) when I walked into their offices, carrying performance camshafts and assorted components in boxes under my arms. I’d nod, acknowledging that I was indeed Bob’s boy, while they talked at length about the parts I was delivering. They were under the mistaken impression that I had the same appreciation for valve springs and steel retainers that my father possessed, an enthusiasm that many of these men, overseeing what were now family operations, had managed to pass on to their own sons. “It’s just a summer job for me,” I wanted to tell them, “not a way of life.” But my disclaimers were quickly dismissed. “Oh,” they’d say, “I’m sure you picked up plenty, hanging out in the garage with your old man.” Aside from his expertise, they thought that I’d also inherited my father’s modesty. “No, really,” I wanted to say. “I don’t know shit.”

  Some of the shops where I delivered or picked up parts were still in the city, situated in similarly down-at-the-heel buildings on Chene, Mt. Elliott, and West Grand Boulevard, their street addresses spray-painted on solid metal doors. But the majority were out in the suburbs, with the preponderance in Macomb County industrial parks, where the roads curved every which way and branched off in half a dozen directions before ending in identical-looking cul-de-sacs. I was provided the use of an old Chrysler station wagon without working windshield wipers—during rainstorms, I drove with the driver’s side window down, using my left arm to wipe water from my line of sight—and with brakes that locked up if any pressure above a light tap was applied, sending the car into a dangerous skid. My predecessor had been the owner’s own mother, an elderly Jewish woman who continued to drive around Detroit and make deliveries well into her nineties. She lived at 6 Mile and Livernois, near the University of Detroit, and remembered me from my boyhood trips to the shop, right down to my baseball hat. She despaired of her son—no wife, no kids, a business going bust—but never ceased to help him while her health held out.

  If I’d been at the shop a few years before, I’d have made deliveries in one of the fleet of company cars—four in all—that the owner had purchased for a total of fifteen thousand dollars, cars imported from Eastern Europe and so fantastically cheap that reverse was said to be an option. None of them was still functioning when I started work at the shop. The only employee who remained from the 1970s was the head of the shipping department. After I was done with deliveries, or on days when there were none to make, I’d help him stamp the cams that were being shipped that day—this involved driving a steel punch into the end of the cam with a heavy hammer—and fill out the invoice slips before boxing the cams and stacking them up, pyramid-style, on a cart, which we’d push to the shop’s back door. Everything had to be ready to go by four o’clock, when the UPS truck came by, honking up a storm in the back alley, after which the shipping manager would relax and enjoy a joint, his workday done.

  By the mid-1990s the business was unable to generate the crime-preventing antibodies that prosperous enterprises use to repel lawbreakers and bar undesirables, so a revolving cast of characters hung around the shop in its final days: drunks and drug addicts, the diseased and the deformed, violent criminals and harmless kooks. Some of these folks actually managed to make it onto the payroll, particularly the neighborhood kids who, like me, were hired as gophers and (unlike me) spent their workdays dealing drugs out of the shop’s back door. Though this sort of permissiveness angered the guy in shipping, who claimed to care more than the boss about whether or not the business stayed afloat, the boss himself wa
s in no position to throw stones where drugs were concerned. Before stumbling into work around eleven o’clock or so, he’d often snort a line or two.

  A drunken cabbie who sometimes helped us make deliveries had the distinction of not only being a permanent fixture at the shop, where he drank wine out of Styrofoam coffee cups, but of living with its owner in that house behind the alley. He was legally handicapped, suffering from a mental disorder—nothing too severe—that made him eligible for aid checks from the government, which his roommate, the shop’s owner, skimmed before passing along. This was done both to cover the cabbie’s room and board and to prevent him from spending the entirety on booze. The cab company also withheld a portion of his pay, as a means of recovering the money it had lost on cabs he’d destroyed while driving under the influence.

  Such stories were either true or they weren’t. One either believed them or one didn’t, and it wasn’t altogether clear which was more gullible, to believe or not to believe. They certainly sounded like bullshit, but take a look around the place. Take a look around the city, and at the people who stepped in off its streets and crowded the shop: a burn victim who rode around on a ten-speed with bent rims and bore a serious grudge against one person this day, another the next; a Native American in sunglasses and cowboy boots who always seemed to have something cooking; a mathematician with massive Popeye forearms who claimed to have been molested by the Jesuits at the University of Detroit and who sent me letters describing, in single-spaced detail, the airborne diseases that could prove problematic on military submarines. Nothing in this city could be ruled out. According to my father, the owner of the shop—a card-carrying Communist, whose scattered copies of the Nation and the Worker’s World enabled me to continue my periodical reading over the summer—had once run a successful business. Impossible, but there it was.