You Don't Have to Live Like This (6 page)

Sometimes, after dinner, we watched the outtakes in Robert’s home cinema. There was Clay on the wall, spread out on a flat white roll of screen, and Clay sitting beside me, and both of them were talking, explaining.

Detroit seemed to him a textbook case of the need for private-public partnerships. Most people assumed that the failure of state and market forces meant that Detroit itself was doomed. Urban studies theorists like Richard Florida suggested abandoning the Rust Belt altogether. But Clay believed that a highly directed combination of the two could solve many of its problems. He was very interested in China. The Chinese had been trying to combine free market capitalism with democratic centralism for several years, and
had managed to regenerate a number of cities in much worse shape than Detroit. Of course, the government took on a lot of short-term debt. You needed someone willing to play God, or king.

This, as Clay liked to say, was Robert’s job.

He had a dry, cordial host-at-a-cocktail-party TV manner, which wasn’t entirely humorless. Let me introduce you to a few ideas, very dear friends of mine.

“This city,” he said, posing for the cameras in front of Michigan Central Station, in his tasseled loafers and holding lightly onto his linen tie, to keep the wind from blowing it in his face, “lies at the center of so much of what America is talking about and worrying about today: the death of the middle class and the rise of social inequality, the collapse of the real estate market and the decline of manufacturing, the failure of the American labor movement and the entrenchment, almost fifty years after Martin Luther King led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, of a black underclass. Detroit at its peak had a population of almost two million people—it is now roughly a third of that, which means, let me put it this way, that for every family still living here, their neighbors on either side of them have moved away. And their houses—you can see this for yourself because we’re going to show them to you—sit either empty or boarded up, or half burned down, or they’ve been destroyed altogether, and grass and trees are growing in their place. What we are about to witness is a small experiment in regeneration—an attempt to repopulate these neighborhoods, to rebuild these houses, to revive these communities. It is, by its nature, a very local solution to some of the deeper and broader problems America faces today. But if you can fix it here, you can fix it anywhere.”

In practice what all this meant is that Robert and a consortium of investors were buying up a section of the city—about two thou
sand houses, six hundred acres’ worth of empty plots and a handful of derelict industrial sites. A few hundred homeowners refused to sell. Even a landgrab like this was small potatoes compared to the scale of the problem. Part of what’s wrong with Detroit is that it’s too big. Physically, I mean. Almost 140 square miles big. So five square miles don’t add up to much. At best Robert hoped to add ten thousand economically active residents to a city that had lost almost a million in the last forty years. Which is why the business model needed to be profitable, so that it could be reproduced in Cleveland, Buffalo, Erie, Milwaukee, East Baltimore, etc.

The consortium planned to rent out the houses, business units, and land very cheaply, not just to individuals but also to groups of people who would organize themselves over the Internet and put in bids. Starting-from-Scratch-in-America was the name of the site—it showed houses and plots of land like an airline check-in chart. Of course, part of what he was selling was just the organizational tools. People who wanted to start over might hesitate to go it alone. But if they stayed long enough, and the neighborhood went up, they also got a share of the profit. That was the other part of the deal, a right-to-buy scheme.

Robert worried that no one would bite, but in fact Beatrice kept having to add capacity to the server. At its peak, Starting-from-Scratch-in-America received a hundred thousand fresh hits a day, from all around the world. Mayor Bloomberg in New York had just suggested opening up Detroit to international immigration. Robert had his lawyers talking to the ICE as well. A bid was “full” when every house and plot in a particular neighborhood had been spoken for by the members of a group. This is when it came to us in committee.

In other words, we sat around all day looking at Facebook, deciding who would get to join our village. Like a bunch of assholes,
as Tony kept reminding us. There were Beatrice and Tony, Clay Greene and me, Robert himself sometimes, Johnny Mkieze and Bill Russo. Johnny was living in Grosse Pointe, three blocks away from his childhood home, having followed his father into a job at GM. Bill was just then running for reelection to the Michigan House of Representatives. His district happened to include the section of east Detroit that his old college buddy had been buying up. Robert gave a lot of money to the campaign. It was all very cozy.

But Robert also brought in a team of consultants, specialists in urban renewal, and the truth is, they called most of the shots. I remember a black woman named Barbara—Barbara Stamford from Stanford, this is how she introduced herself, one of these women who jogs eight miles a day and lives off cottage cheese. She wore cheerful bright-rimmed Prada glasses. I asked her once what got her interested in Detroit, and she said her work at Stanford was on “optimal inefficiencies.” Efficient economies need to adapt instantaneously to changes in the market, in technology, but there’s a measurable human cost to all this. People don’t want to adapt all the time, they want to not adapt. What economists do is put a value on everything; you can calculate the cost of adaptation, too, and what she liked to think about was the optimal rate of change. Not too slow, not too fast. Detroit was like a poster child for getting it wrong. But I could tell she was talking down to me.

Once or twice a week we met up in the big dining room, with printouts and laptops cluttering the table. Sometimes I came straight from the house, with the leathery smell of gardening gloves on my hands and paint scabs spotting my hair and pants. The contrast made a deep impression on me, and maybe explains why from the beginning of this whole business, I felt like an outsider.

M
eanwhile, the weather improved. Baton Rouge doesn’t make much of spring, but over the Detroit sidewalks trees bloomed and lawns, pushing off the snow, broke out in daffodils. On Robert’s block gardeners in dirty overalls produced expensive and colorful displays of hydrangea, lilac and rose. But even in the overgrown yards of burned-down houses bindweed and dandelions blossomed.

Robert and I went running sometimes on Belle Isle Park, along the river, where the wind was cold but not bitter. A skyline view of Detroit, as clean as you like, stood up straight-backed on the far shore. There were cold blue days busy with clouds and hot white afternoons and gray mornings where the rain came down as hard as if it fell off a roof. But Robert didn’t care what the weather was. He liked to get out of the house and ask me questions about what was going on inside it. Also, he thought I spent too much time with Tony Carnesecca. In his hard-to-read conscientious way, which was partly ironic, he said, “Tony’s a bad influence. Has he given you any books to read yet? This is the kind of thing he does.”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“You know, more than one.
Cultural Amnesia
, by a guy called Clive James.
The Confessions of St. Augustine
.”

This was true. Tony wanted to raise his kid a Catholic, like he was raised. He planned to give his son everything he himself had as a boy, including some of the misery. Both my parents are Catholic, though my dad gave it up in college, without a second thought. Like you give up mowing the lawn when you move out of home. And my mom found it hard to persist with after they started going out, which she sometimes reproached him for. Tony took her side and kept bugging me to show my face some Sunday morning at St. Barnabas, one of those bungalow-type churches with a sloped roof and yellow-brick front. He pointed it out to me once, from the car. He promised to pay for my pancake breakfast if I went, at the IHOP in Roseville, which is where he always took his wife and kid. But I’d resisted.

Maybe Robert had some Scot Calvinist beef against all this, or maybe he just felt left out. Tony and I had developed a manner, as boy roommates do in college, which was quick, abusive, satisfying and hard to butt into, for an outsider. When he didn’t feel like writing he picked me up in his Buick LeSabre and we drove around. Sometimes we drove back to his house in Eastpointe, where I met his wife. She was four or five inches taller than Tony and an unusually beautiful and confident woman. Her dark hair and cheerful healthy color reminded me of the old Irish Spring soap commercials. Tony took a lot of sexual pride in her; he couldn’t help showing her off. Her name was Cris, short for Cristina. Her parents on both sides were Italian American, and she regularly visited her grandfather who owned a bakery in Clarkston and spoke almost no English.

Cris herself used to be a lawyer, for one of the Big Three, which she hated. She gave it up to become a yoga instructor, which is how
she met Tony—he had a bad neck. Motherhood for her was like an excuse to abandon all previous adult restraint, and even though her son was three years old, she still comfort-fed him when he asked for it. “I want booby milk,” he said. Sometimes I had to avert my gaze while she picked up this big talky stir-crazy boy and held him on her lap, pulling back one side of her dress to spill a breast in his mouth. His feet almost reached the floor, and dangled. Her skin was the color of panna cotta. I thought Tony was the kind of guy who would mind if I looked. But I liked Cris—she didn’t take him too seriously.

Tony was house-proud, too, and talked up his neighborhood to me, even if he blamed himself for leaving the city. His writer’s block was connected in his mind to comfortable living. He didn’t feel like himself in the suburbs, he felt like somebody else. The trouble was his natural feelings included a high percentage of racial rage and violent fear. Which were useful for work but less helpful to family life. He knew practically everybody on his block. Once, while preparing an omelet lunch for us, he ran out of eggs, so we knocked on a neighbor’s door together—really Tony was just showing off. He couldn’t help boasting about his happy-families kind of setup.

This neighbor was a retired cop whose wife had left him to move in with her parents in Florida. Their three daughters were all grown up and living out east. Her mother had diabetes and her father couldn’t drive or count out pills or shop or cook or change the bedsheets because of forgetfulness issues. The diabetes was what tipped his wife over the edge, but in fact what this guy realized was that their whole marriage for her was just an interruption of her real life. (He told me all this while working his way through a six-pack of Labatts, which he brought over along with the six-pack of eggs when Tony invited him to lunch.) They married instead of going to college. He joined the force.

“I guess we were too young,” he said.

And fifty years later she decided she wanted to spend her last days with these people, her parents, who she preferred to him anyway. He didn’t even blame her particularly but he missed the kids. They never wanted to fly home to Detroit; they preferred Florida.

His name was Mel Hauser and Tony said, “Marny here is about to move into a house on Johanna Street. I thought maybe you could give him some advice.”

“Does he have a gun?”

Mel wore a fishing vest and camouflage pants; his head was balding and grizzled, and even in this mostly smooth state not particularly clean. There were liver spots on it and scabs of dry skin. But his manner was straightforward and attractive.

I said, yes, I bought a shotgun from Walmart, on the drive up from Baton Rouge.

“Don’t let the first time you fire it be the first time you need it. Have you played around with it any?”

“No.”

“I tell you what. Sometimes I hang out at the academy on Linwood Street. A lot of retired cops still use the canteen. There’s a shooting range there, and if you want, I’ll book you in. Where do you keep it? Have you got a license?”

“In my car. No.”

“I can help you out with that, too.”

Then Cris came in with the kid half asleep in her arms. He’d conked out on the drive back from Clarkston, and she carried him into his room and fussed around noisily in the dark to get him down for his nap. The three of us listened to her singing for a while—her voice had been trained by ten years of Catholic school. I guess she knew we could hear her. Eventually Mel said, “All right, all right,” and pushed himself up with his hands on his knees and walked out,
taking with him the rest of the six-pack. Afterwards Tony gave me a ride back into the city.

“Mel’s okay,” Tony said, “and I’ll tell you something you don’t want to hear. The reason our neighborhood works is that everyone’s white. Except for Raymond Chu, who happens to be our family doctor, and Amit Patel. Amit went to Michigan and works at the Chrysler design lab. Both are middle-class professional types. These are the people who are taking over our block. Mel’s old-school Eastpointe, but the reason he doesn’t mind is because of guys like me, working-class white guys who moved up in the world, and because guys like Amit and Raymond have to fit in with everyone else and not the other way around. You can’t be a cop in this city for as long as Mel was and not pick up some racial information. And don’t expect me to say that some of my best friends are black. My best friends
aren’t
black, and there’s a reason for that. I know some brothers, and like a few, too, but there’s a point beyond which I don’t really understand or trust them, and to be honest, the black guys I respect are the ones who feel the same way about me.”

“I don’t know why you’re telling me all this,” I said.

“How many black kids grew up on your street in Baton Rouge?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“I want you to realize what you’re getting into. Detroit is a black city. They don’t want you living there.”

I GOT MY FIRST REAL
taste of this fact a week later, just a couple of days before moving into Johanna Street. I wanted to spend a night in the house before Walter came down, just to prove that I could. This was around the turning corner of May/June. The weather was cool and sunny, with tall clear skies, good roofing weather, and
I spent that last week in work boots and overalls, supervising the Mexicans I brought in at the last minute to help me finish the job.

The Mexicans probably need some explanation. By this point Robert had signed off on the first group of bidders, a network of Latinos, spanning classes and generations and even nationalities. There were families waiting over in Windsor for their visas to come through and lots of back-and-forth traffic across the water. (Canada was softer on immigration.) Part of the deal Robert struck with these people had to do with the fact that they promised to bring skilled labor to the project—painters, carpenters, contractors, electricians, plumbers, roofers and gardeners, who offered to help out on other sites when they could. Their own neighborhood was about twenty blocks north of Johanna Street, towards Hamtramck, and you could hear the sounds of hammer, mower and drill as far as Gratiot. Anyway, a bunch of these guys showed up to lend me a hand.

I met Hector Cantu, who put their bid together, a short, baby-faced dude with thick black hair cut in a Ken-doll perfect haircut. He was maybe forty years old and had left a pretty good job at J. P. Morgan to set all this up. His people worked hard and gave us time to talk together. There was a Spartan grocery store about five blocks away, run by some Iraqi guy, and we often walked over together to bring back coffee and hot dogs for the men. Hector was a good organizer, planner and fund-raiser, but the kind of work he was good at wasn’t the kind that dirtied your hands. So I kept him company some, and we watched his buddies sweat.

They laid roof tiles and bathroom tiles and plumbed the kitchen to fit a dishwasher. They laid down grass. They painted the outside walls, where I couldn’t reach, in white and green. They rewired the living room and fixed the connection to the Detroit grid, which involved shutting down the street for several hours while
they dug up road. It occurred to me that none of this would have happened if Robert James weren’t my particular pal. Sometimes Hector and I stopped at one of the few bars still open on East Vernor and had a beer. He was one of these confessional types, always in a good mood, and I heard a fair chunk of his life story.

What Hector wanted to talk about was New York, where he used to work about ninety, a hundred hours a week just to pay the rent on a one-bedroom apartment in Alphabet City. He ate out every night and got drunk on Saturday so he could sleep in Sunday and start the whole week up again on Monday morning, like some cranky old car.

All this was “about a million miles” from the world he came from. He grew up in Farmers Branch, Dallas County. His mother worked in a grocery, where she also cooked, and his father mowed rich men’s yards. His whole life long he was this scared nerdy cat who hung around a bunch of crazy kids, mostly friends of his big sister and cousins and friends of cousins. They were better at having a good time than he was but put up with him anyway. Then he got a scholarship to Rice, where he minored in business studies because he wanted to be the guy “who paid my father to mow his lawn and not the guy on the John Deere.” At one point a couple of years ago he realized that the only time he had any interaction with the kind of people he grew up with was when he ordered in and the restaurant sent somebody over with his bag of food.

Was he happy? He wasn’t unhappy. He had a good job and money to spend on himself. He sent money home, too, and bought his father for his sixtieth birthday a 1987 Mercedes 190E, with wood-panel trim. His father liked messing around with engines on the weekend. Sometimes when he went to bars tall white girls paid attention to him because of the way he dressed. But there was nobody he thought, you could be a mother to somebody, “a mother
like mine.” And eventually he realized (this is what he told me), you have been blessed with many talents and gifts, and out of all this blessing and good luck, this is the life you have made. “This stupid life. That’s what I felt. I wanted to start from scratch.”

He had a disturbing habit of using language from Robert’s website. People who talk a lot eventually run out of their own thoughts and phrases and have to borrow materials from other sources. Not that he cared. He was one of those people whose smile says nervously, Life is good. I realized soon enough that none of his Mexican buddies respected him. They liked him okay but thought he had his head up his ass or in the clouds. The jobs they sent us on were the kind we couldn’t fuck up, like buying hot dogs.

When Angelo, one of the electricians, had to shut off the electricity on the street, he told me and Hector to explain what was happening to the neighbors. So we walked down the road together, knocking on doors.

Already a few people had started to move in. A guy called Eddie Blyleven who used to work in insurance, an ex-jock, blond-haired, recently divorced, whose daughter came at weekends. There were a couple of single dads, in fact, with weekend kids. Steve Zipp had a six-month-old baby, his first. He looked about forty-five, a nervous, badly dressed, pale, black-haired midwesterner. His shirt collars were too big around his neck, he wore cheap suits, but I’ll get to his story later.

There was a house at the end of the block where a family of holdouts lived, a mother and son, and Hector knocked on their door and the son came out.

“Yes?” he said. He had kind of a faggy accent, but he was a big black guy, built like a linebacker, with muddy-looking skin and lots of little pigtails of kinky hair hanging down to his shoulders. Maybe he was thirty-five years old—some of the muscles were turning to fat.

“This is just a courtesy call,” Hector told him. “We got to shut off the electricity for a couple of hours. I wanted to let you know.”

“The fuck you do.” A dog came out between his knees, a brown-faced pit bull, and the man took hold of his collar.

“Look,” Hector said. “I should have introduced myself first. Hector Cantu—I live about thirty blocks up Van Dyke from here. My guys are just helping out a friend. This is Marny.”