Detroit City Is the Place to Be (35 page)

“‘What you doin’, man?’

“‘Well, I’m
blind
, now. Could you take the flashlight out of my face? I ain’t going nowhere.’

“‘You being smart?’

“‘I’m always smart. I went to school, man. I’m just hoping you’ll take that flashlight down so we can have a conversation.’”

Shifting back to his own voice, Kilpatrick said, “They used to
hate
me.” He meant the cops. After falling silent for a moment, he turned to me and asked drolly, “Mark, have you had positive experiences with police officers?”

I said, “Positive? I don’t know. Probably not.”

The mayor said, “Heh.”

I said I guessed my experiences had been pretty neutral. Then I asked, “What about you?”

“I was getting hassled during the campaign,” Kilpatrick said. “The police department was against me.
Vehemently
against me. So that was going on. But I had a real bad experience with a police officer once. I thought he was going to kill me for no reason.”

I asked what happened. The mayor went quiet again, and seemed to be considering whether or not to tell the story. When he spoke, his tone had become more serious. “It was about three years ago,” he began slowly, “He told me I robbed something. This is Seven Mile here,” he said to the driver, before continuing: “I was standing in my driveway. I was trying to tell him that I lived there. A house down the street had been robbed. I was coming outside with my friend and we were about to go to the store and get some food. My wife was going to cook dinner. It was after church, so I was pretty well dressed.” The mayor cleared his throat. “The police pulled up and, to make a long story short, he put a nine-millimeter gun to my head, told me to get on the ground, or he was gonna shoot me.”

There was a long silence. Finally, I began, “So when he figured out you weren’t the guy—”

“No apology,” the mayor interrupted. He gazed out the window, shadows flickering across his broad face. “There were like four police cars by that point. Matter of fact, he was yelling, ‘I was following procedure, I didn’t do nothing wrong!’ He was such a bad officer. He’d been cussing at me the whole time. ‘I swear to God, you move, I’m gonna kill you.’ Another officer grabbed my friend and threw him in the car. I was this calm, talking to him just like this, but with a gun in my face. I said, ‘Just put the gun down. My license is in my pocket. This is my house.’ It was like three or four in the afternoon. Kids were riding their bikes, skipping up the street.” Kilpatrick chuckled mordantly. “It was a
nice
day.” Kilpatrick said the reason he didn’t get on the ground right away was because his two-year-old twins were standing in the doorway.

Later, of course, I wondered how much of the story had been bullshit.
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*   *   *

I visited Gary Brown one afternoon at his home in Sherwood Forest, a neighborhood of handsome brick estates with its own private security patrol. Brown’s political career had been the one thing Kilpatrick had inarguably bequeathed to the city, and the council president pro-tem was certainly the most impressive of the new lot of Detroit politicians. We chatted in a sunny Florida room in the back of the house, where African masks hung on the wall above a Bose stereo system. Brown, dressed like a suburban dad, wore a zippered sweater and a pair of loafers with no socks.

Brown’s lawsuit had made him a well-liked public figure in Detroit,
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and once in office, Brown proved to be the most hard-headed of the new council, training the forensic obsessiveness he’d honed as a narcotics and internal affairs investigator on Detroit’s budgetary crime scene. Almost single-handedly, Brown pushed the council to propose far deeper annual spending cuts than the Bing administration—in 2011, $50 million more than Bing had proposed—not out of right-wing austerity-mindedness but because Brown understood the very real threat of a state takeover of Detroit.

By April 2012, when it became clear that Detroit, drowning in $12 billion of debt, would have to accede to some form of state control, Brown and Charles Pugh led the council in crafting a responsible compromise “consent agreement” in which a nine-member financial oversight board would oversee budgetary reforms. The consent agreement opened the door to more public-service union concessions and deeper governmental cuts, but also staved off the appointment of an emergency manager, which would have sidelined elected representatives like Bing and the council. Brown and Pugh came off especially well in comparison to Bing, who spent much of the budget crisis either engaging in dubious accounting tricks or seemingly angling to be appointed emergency manager himself, and to longer-serving council members like Kwame Kenyatta and JoAnn Watson, who played to their base with righteous-sounding but ultimately fatuous obstructionism.

At times, Gary Brown and Charles Pugh felt like two sides of the Kilpatrick persona, Brown embodying the wonk, Pugh the great communicator. If Pugh seemed weak discussing specifics of policy—the first time we met, he brought up his idea to bottle and market water from the Detroit River—he nonetheless assembled a smart, young team, and was generally upbeat and forward-looking rather than fixated on the racial and geographical battles of the past. In a city like Detroit, where so many citizens had felt disenfranchished for so long, the ability to clearly and effectively speak to one’s constituents, as Pugh could, masterfully, struck me as no superficial tool.

To that end, Pugh spent an hour or two most Friday afternoons riding the city buses and mingling with the electorate. Using public transportation as a means of proving “relatability” has always been an easy PR stunt, but in Detroit, the very act of riding the harrowing, unreliable bus system became a deeply empathetic act of shared sacrifice. One Friday, when Pugh invited me to join him in the field, a woman at the bus stop glanced at us as she wandered by, then came to a full stop. “Hi, Pugh!” she called out. “What you doing out here?”

“Talking to people like you,” Pugh said enthusiastically.

When one of Pugh’s staffers informed him of the arrival of his bus, a look of concern spread over the woman’s face. “You gonna catch the bus, Pugh?”

“I ride the bus every week!” he called over his shoulder.

The woman snorted, seeming both skeptical and anxious for the young man.

On board, the driver recognizing the council president, evinced similar incredulity. Staring back at us in his wide rearview mirror, he shouted, “When was the last time you been on the Iron Pimp?”

Pugh said, “I ride the bus two or three times a month.”

“For real?”

Pugh said, “The very first time we rode the bus, it broke down on Woodward! Just so you know.” Then he added, “I love it because it keeps us connected.”

The driver said, “You about to get connected with some kids in a minute.”

Pugh’s staff laughed nervously.

We’d started at the central bus terminus, named for Rosa Parks, one of the few examples of ambitious and aesthetically pleasing new architecture to appear in downtown Detroit in the past several decades—most strikingly, the curved white awnings sheltering each bus stop, looking from the street like the billowing sails of a grand seafaring vessel, and appearing from directly below like the underside of a row of dirigibles, docked and awaiting take-off, either conjured image working as a fitting tribute to Parks, hinting as they did of the moment before an epic journey.

Over the course of our two-hour ride, I was the only white passenger, save for a single man with a ponytail and camouflage jacket who boarded for a brief stretch near Highland Park. On the bus, Pugh took a seat near the middle. It was not very crowded yet. One of the first passengers we picked up, a middle-aged man, took a seat in the handicapped area near the front, then spotted Pugh and shouted back a greeting. He told Pugh they’d met once at Eastern Market. Pugh asked if the man shopped there. “No, I
work
there,” the man said. When they’d met, he told Pugh, he’d been fixing a broken HiLo (a type of forklift), which seemed to puzzle Pugh.

“Hey, you got a pencil?” the man called out. “Write down this number. I want you to call my mama.”

Pugh wrote down the number and promised the man he would call his mother and tell her that he’d met her son on the bus.

As we meandered up Woodward, Pugh occasionally switched seats to chat with other passengers. His team members had spread out, too, distributing flyers with information about the council, including phone numbers and Internet addresses related to various city services and departments. The interactions highlighted, in a pitiless way, the difficulties many in the city faced. Pugh approached a pair of weary looking men and handed them flyers, asking brightly, “Y’all know anybody looking for a job?” The flyers contained information about city employment programs.

“Yeah,” one of the guys muttered, barely glancing at Pugh or the flyer. “Everybody.”

Another man in a knit Carhart cap took the seat behind Pugh and leaned forward. “I wonder if you can help me,” he asked. “I have a felony, fifteen years old, but they discriminate against me now when I’m trying to get work.” The man was gaunt, in his fifties, with a toothpick in his mouth and a nasty-looking bruise under his left eye. Pugh chatted with him for a few minutes, then asked if he ever used the Internet. The man said yes and Pugh handed him a flyer and told him to go to his website, where there was an entire section devoted to constituents with criminal records.

And so it went. One teenage boy turned out to be returning from a visit to his lawyer for a charge he didn’t want to discuss; he’d also been temporarily expelled from school. A group of high school girls discussed
Raisin in the Sun
with Pugh, who recommended various colleges and argued gently with the one who said she couldn’t wait to get out of Detroit. I noticed that one of the staffers, a stocky older man, stuck close to Pugh whenever he moved around, always sure to position himself in a seat nearby, no doubt acting as a sort of bodyguard. I wondered if they thought Pugh was in danger of being mugged while riding a bus in broad daylight.

During a lull, Pugh told me that he hoped to see more regional cooperation with the suburbs, that he would love for the planned light-rail line to connect Detroit with surrounding communities. Most of the constituent interfacing had gone well up to this point. But then an older man sitting behind Pugh perked up and noticed his famous neighbor. The man had an old-fashioned pair of oversized headphones hanging around his neck, and he reeked of booze. Leaning forward, he introduced himself to Pugh, then said, “I have a lot of questions for you. Why are you hiding back here?”

A glimmer of annoyance crept into Pugh’s voice, sounding odder because he couldn’t turn off its chirpier inflection. “I’m not hiding!” he said. “You just got on. You don’t know what I’ve been doing.”

The man nodded and said, “So, in regards to the change issue, I’m wondering, ‘What is our destination?’ For instance, this dumping right here.” The man nodded out the window to his left. On the other side of the street, there was a rubble-strewn lot.

“No, no!” Pugh said. “See, that’s not dumping. That was an abandoned building. It was taken down. That’s a good thing.”

The man considered this response, pursing his lips, then said, “So what you’re saying is, I’m not viewing urban blight. I’m viewing urban progress.”

Pugh didn’t seem to know if he was being messed with or not, but he stuck with his argument about abandoned buildings needing to be demolished.

“I’m part of your constituency,” the man interrupted. “And what you’re not hearing is, a couple of days ago, I saw trucks illegally dumping. These guys are making sixteen hundred dollars dumping in the city, and they’ve got no overhead. Man, in this area I’m talking about, you see mounds and mounds and mounds. It’s Trumbell and … and … Well, I’m an old man. I forget.”

“Elijah McCoy Drive?” Pugh asked. As the man spoke, Pugh had taken out his BlackBerry and pecked out a memo regarding the dumping location, or at least pretended to. “There are a lot of abandoned fields over there. It’s not far from where I grew up.”

“Do you remember Maryanne McCaffery?” the old man asked, referring to a beloved city council member from the Coleman Young era, now deceased. He asked Pugh about a specific bill McCaffery had championed. Pugh obviously had no idea what the man was talking about. “See, I read history,” the man said. “It’s important to know history.”

As he spoke, we pulled back into the Rosa Parks Terminal, and Pugh rose abruptly, his patience all used up. “When she was elected, I was seven years old, dog,” he noted sourly. “I wasn’t following politics then. Sorry.”

*   *   *

Dave Bing had initially pledged to serve only a single term as mayor. But by December 2009, in a year-end interview with the
Free Press
, the mayor reversed himself, declaring, “I never considered myself a one-term mayor. My nature is to finish what I start. Can I do that in this job? I don’t think so. It’s a ten-to-twenty-year process. I don’t know if I have that kind of time, but I’m not coming to this job saying I’m only going to do it for one term.”

The backpedaling was both unsurprising—he was a politician, after all—but also not, as Bing hardly struck anyone as enjoying his job or being particularly engaged with it. The
Detroit News
reported that Bing’s workdays rarely extended past 5:00 p.m. As a public speaker, he remained leaden and stultifying, unerringly tone-deaf to the expectations of his audience. Even his storied managerial skills didn’t appear to be so hot. He bragged in an early interview about not “believ[ing] in emails,” preferring to walk down the hall and look a person in the face, which, while presumably meant to convey old-timey virtue and simplicity, came off rather like a stubborn and bizarrely inefficient personal quirk. And in truth, becoming a wealthy auto-parts supplier in Detroit doesn’t necessarily prove any sort of genius-level business acumen, especially when you happen to be a local basketball star potential clients would be eager to meet.
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