Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey

by Colby Buzzell

  Back at the Park Avenue Hotel. Mrs. Harrington greeted me with a sweet smile, and introduced me to her husband of fifty years, an older white gentleman in his early eighties who was born and raised here in Detroit. With his enthusiastic knowledge of Detroit, Mr. Harrington reminded me a bit of my own grandfather, who was a great storyteller and historian of Maine, where he was born and raised. He knew everything Maine inside and out and loved it so much that he wanted his ashes spread there when he died.

  In the lobby Mr. Harrington told me a bit about the history of the hotel. Ground was broken for the building in 1927, and it was finished in 1928. The architect was a guy named Louis Kamper, who also designed several other historic buildings here in town, such as the Book Tower and Book Cadillac. The people who built this building, as well as a couple others here in Detroit, all went bankrupt in the crash of 1929.

  We stepped out on the sidewalk, and Mr. Harrington pointed out the Detroit Life Building, diagonally across the street. Detroit Life was all boarded up, vacant, and had a FOR LEASE sign on it. The Detroit Women’s City Club right next to it was also vacant, boarded up, and had a FOR LEASE sign on it. “At one time that was the elite club for the women, you follow me?” he said, and explained to me that all these parking lots around his hotel once had bustling buildings sitting on them, but they had all been torn down.

  He stopped himself for a moment, thought, and then told me that it was good that they’d saved the automobile industry, because “a lot of other countries would love to have it.” He added, “Where else can the not smartest guy in the world get a job and have almost a middle-class living?”

  After that I walked back to the front desk and paid my rent to the guy working the desk, who also works for a nearby bail bondsman as a bill collector. I asked him a little bit more about the area, and he told me that as long as I didn’t cross the freeway after dark and stayed mostly downtown, I’d be fine. Mrs. Harrington was also there in the lobby, and she told me that even during the day I shouldn’t head over across the freeway. Right here in downtown, she explained, “We’re like the Baghdad Green Zone,” and if I looked at and thought of it that way, I’d be fine. But if I took my shit anywhere else, I’d be taking my chances. Across the freeway was what we called in the military “outside the wire.”

  Being no fan of the Green Zone, I thanked them both, stepped outside the hotel, and walked across the freeway.

  It’d been a while since I’d stepped foot outside the wire, and the one thing I noticed was that there weren’t a whole heck of a lot of grocery stores in the downtown area of Detroit. In fact, I hadn’t found any other than a couple liquor stores that sold corn chips, canned food items, Obama gear, and that was it. I had no idea how in the world the people here got their food, and I remembered seeing a location over by Martin Luther King Boulevard with the word GROCERY painted on the exterior, near remnants of a burned-out building. So I decided to head that way.

  A couple vacant lots nearby, homeless people were hanging out on benches and chairs. A nice handful of people were just hanging out in front of the building, and as I made my way toward it, I wondered if these were just ordinary people doing extraordinary things. I had my camera slung over my shoulder, and I thought about removing it and placing it in my backpack, but chose not to so as not to offend anyone. These guys were totally staring at me, and if I did put my camera away it would look like I did so because I thought they were criminals or up to no good just because they were black. Hanging out in front of a corner store on MLK Boulevard mid-workday didn’t mean they were going to gank me. That’s racist and feeds into a stereotype, I thought to myself. But as I walked toward the entrance, I still noticed that all their eyes were fixed on me, and it was a bit late to turn around or go the other way. As I got closer to them, they started taking a couple steps toward me. They didn’t look happy, and when I got really close, one of them finally said, “What you need?”

  What did I need? Good question. I needed groceries. Actually, no, what you guys here in Detroit need is a fucking grocery store, a Trader Joe’s or something like that. For some weird reason I didn’t tell them that, nor did I ask them for recommendations or directions to a decent supermarket that they might know of in the area. It didn’t seem like that kind of relationship. And honestly, this whole scene had the makings of an ABC after-school special in it, and so instead I just kind of froze there for a split second, looked at them all, and then I did it. I said, “You guys seen a badge?”

  “What?”

  “I’m looking for my badge. I was here earlier, and I think I lost it here. Have you guys seen anything like that lying around here?”

  “Muthafucka, what?!”

  His sidekick then exclaimed to his friend, who was standing there on the corner, “Nigga here say he lost his badge?!”

  Guy on the corner replied back, “Lost his badge?! Nigga, what?!”

  Others looked over.

  I again told them all, “Yeah, I’m looking for it. Excuse me.” And I made my way between them and inside “Grocery.”

  Back home I live in the Tenderloin District, which in ways is kind of similar to this neighborhood. A friend of mine says that whenever he finds himself in situations like the one I was now in, he tells a joke, and they laugh, and everything is okay. And the joke he uses all the time is the I-lost-my-badge routine, but I think I completely fucked it up. I delivered my lines the way Clint Eastwood might have, when I was supposed to say them like maybe Will Ferrell or Dave Chapelle. Instead of laughing, these guys thought I was an obviously unarmed cop on foot with no backup.

  Still in character, with my head down, walking around the aisles looking for my badge, I noticed that the only items that they sold were canned goods, a lot of which had a thick layer of dust on top of them, since they’d probably been on the shelves since Detroit was prosperous. No one was shopping for food here. People were dumping cans into these huge dishwasher-looking machines to get money for them, but the only thing sold inside this “grocery” was alcohol. Arabs worked the store, of course operating behind bulletproof glass, and when I looked back outside, the guys were pointing to me and telling another buddy that I was looking for my badge. When I stepped outside, I kind of scanned the parking lot and area around me, noticed that they were all just staring at me, heads cocked, with these really confused expressions on their faces, and I proceeded to walk away as quickly as possible without appearing to be walking away as quickly as possible.

  Not too far away, while I was walking across a couple empty lots that used to be buildings, I noticed a black guy with several empty beer bottles in his hands. He looked like he was in a good mood, and the two of us were headed in the same direction, so when he started to veer his way over to the corner liquor store I asked him if they took cans. He told me that they did. I thanked him, and a couple steps later, walking across another vacant lot with my head down again, I came across dozens of empty bottles of hard liquor just sitting there. They were all over the place. Free money. As I was gathering them up in my arms so I could do what he just did, he showed up again, and I asked him if they’d take these as well. He told me no, they just take empty beer bottles. Bummed that there was no financial incentive for me to recycle, I let all the empty liquor bottles clang back to the ground. He then asked me where I was from. I told him California, and he extended his hand for a handshake that ended with a soulful hand snap.

  “Welcome to Detroit,” he said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mission from God

  “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

  DOROTHY PARKER

  “What is the difference between exploring and being lost?”

  DAN ELDON

  I brought a camera with me on this little road trip of mine, and I’d hardly pulled the trigger to it till now. Here in Detroit I was dropping memory cards like dropping 5.62 M4 mags during a Mosul firefight. I w
as shooting all in black and white. When I think of the word beat, I think weathered and run-down to the point where it’s beautifully depressing. And black and white just seems to fit perfectly here in this environment.

  After a long day of amateur wannabe photojournalism, I called it quits. When I walked in to the lobby, the doorman buzzed me in through the heavy steel gate, and from there I took the elevator up to the third floor. I had some cheap wine with me, since earlier in the day I had come across a going-out-of-business sale downtown and picked up a couple bottles of red. I unlocked the door and walked in. The door self-locks when you close it, and after turning on the lights I released my keys from my hand, dropping them clanging to the floor. Instinctively I did this behavior as well back in my old studio apartment in San Francisco so I don’t lose my keys or spend thirty minutes looking around for them whenever I want to leave. I just bend down and pick them up.

  I had purchased a roll of toilet paper earlier in the day, which I placed in the bathroom, and after that I set my backpack on my desk, opened it up, put my laptop on it, turned it on, and, while waiting for it to start, grabbed a corkscrew from my backpack and opened up a bottle. Since I have no cups or silverware I drank straight out of the bottle, which is fine. I then walked over to the window, cracked it, and lit up a smoke.

  While drinking, I downloaded all the photographs that I had taken onto my desktop. I looked at my watch. I had a couple minutes left till last call. Since both bottles of wine were now expired, I picked up my keys off the floor and went back downstairs to the bar on the first floor.

  I then spent the night sleeping on the blue two-seater sofa in my room, because I had gotten so wasted that I couldn’t find my bed. I took a shower—although the hot water was lukewarm at best—then I put some least-dirty clothes on and decided to go downstairs so that I could “Buy Local” and support Mrs. Harrington’s café by ordering breakfast. I’m socially conscious that way.

  The cook was a young black guy in his twenties, and he seemed friendly. Ordered an omelet and coffee, tipped a couple bucks in the jar, and then went back to my room to grab my journal and camera.

  During the day, there was always a lot of action going on in the lobby, people coming and going, and nine times out of ten Mrs. Harrington would be down there working on something. Today when I was on my way out some new furniture was being brought into the building, all wrapped in plastic, and a couple of people who lived in the building were helping to bring it inside. Mrs. Harrington asked me what I was up to today, and I told her that I was just going to go out and explore for a bit. She asked about my room and my stay in her hotel, and I told her that everything was great, perfect even.

  For me it was, and if it wasn’t perfect, I don’t think that I could ever tell her it wasn’t.

  In the lobby I thought that’d be it, how’s your room, oh it’s great, that’s good, let me know if you need anything, will do, thanks, kind of small talk, and that’d be it and I’d be off and on my way. Instead, Mrs. Harrington had a story to tell me.

  The story that she had for me today was an incident that had just recently happened; a couple days before, in fact. What happened was there was such a bad smell coming from one of the rooms that the other tenants on the floor were actually complaining about it. So she went up, found out what room it was coming from, and saw that the person had a bunch of decaying food in her fridge, which wasn’t even plugged in. So Mrs. Harrington tossed all the old food out and removed the fridge, brought it outside so she could wash it thoroughly. Well, the tenant came home, saw that her fridge was gone, and called the cops. When the cops showed up, they told Mrs. Harrington that they could throw her in jail for what she’d just done, that you legally couldn’t just go inside somebody’s room like that. Well, she couldn’t believe it. Something smelled like death, and the other tenants were up in arms about it—she couldn’t just do nothing about it! And so with great pride she told me what she told the cops, which was, “Fine, go ahead and throw me in jail.” Which they didn’t, of course. But she told her husband that if there was a next time, she’d happily go to jail, and she even told him not to bail her out, that she’d do the time.

  I smiled and wished her well, she did the same back to me, and I exited the hotel, imagining at the same time my Korean mother operating a motel such as the Park Ave. I could see her running it in the same fashion, which made me chuckle to myself.

  On the other side of the freeway was a neighborhood called Brush Park, and you could tell that it was a historic district just by looking at the houses, which were now all boarded up, vacant, and half dead. Victorian, Georgian, Italianate, French Renaissance, Gothic Revival—all built in the late 1800s, all situated on spacious lots with front and back yards, and each had a “Building Detroit’s Past into the Future” sign posted in front of it, with an image of what the house would look like if restored. A homeless guy slept in an entryway. Most of these mansions appeared left for dead, as if an artillery shell had gone off in the living room. I wondered why that was. Only one or two of them were fixed up and had people living in them. The rest sat there like old tombstones in a battered cemetery.

  After taking photos of a castle, I continued walking along the street and came across a front porch where an old black couple were hanging out. The black guy was a bit older, wore a sun-faded old Detroit Lions hat, and the lady had bright red lipstick and a phone book sitting open on her lap. She was calling up places, trying to locate a part or something for her Ford. I said hello to them, and since the two of them had seen me taking snapshots of the castle, the guy told me that it used to belong to the infamous Detroit Piston Dennis Rodman.

  “Really?” I said. “He used to own that?”

  “Sure did,” he said. “And he would buy some shit like that, too.”

  I looked back over at it; it was virtually destroyed.

  “If he bought that, why in the hell didn’t he fix it up then?”

  “Ha!”

  The man had a nice infectious laugh, which made me laugh. I looked around, and you could tell that at one time this neighborhood had been the Beverly Hills of this city.

  “How did this neighborhood turn to shit?” I asked. “How come people aren’t moving in and fixing these houses up?”

  The lady on the phone, interrupting her call by telling the other person to please hold on, told me, “Because they wanted to turn this neighborhood into a parking lot for the two stadiums and destroy a historic district without being accountable.”

  All nonchalant, she unflustered herself and went back to talking to whomever she was talking to.

  “Where you from?” the guy asked me. “And how long you been here?” With his head cocked and one eyebrow raised, he then asked what I’d heard about Detroit, and more specifically from whom. Everything I said was the funniest thing the guy had ever heard.

  “I heard on the other side of that street is called the Cass Corridor.”

  “And what they say about that?”

  “Don’t go there.”

  Hysterical laughter.

  “Yeah, I’m serious, everyone’s told me that whatever I do, don’t go over there.”

  Laughing so hard he can hardly speak. “Who say that?” Laughing. “Who told you that?”

  “Umm, you know. . . .”

  I knew where he was going with this, especially when he stopped laughing and gave me a serious look. “What kind of people you talking to?” he asked.

  “You know”—I had a difficult time answering—“people. . . .”

  Then I pointed over toward downtown with my finger.

  With his head cocked again, he asked, “Mainstream white people?”

  “Yup,” I told him. “Mainstream white people.”

  More hysterical laughter.

  Well, a couple of black people had told me the same thing, but I completely forgot about that since I was laughing along with
him. After he was done laughing, he told me all about how the Cass Corridor back in the day was an area mostly frequented by white people, and that it was somewhat of a red light district back then. That’s originally how it got its bad reputation, “from white people.” Since it was also somewhat of a bohemian neighborhood, blacks didn’t really hang out there too much because they weren’t welcomed there. When the riots happened in ’67, “the whites exodused the city—their conscience bothered them about treating black folks so wrong for decades and centuries, and after the riot they flew outta here like it was an epidemic. But they still have this social need to come back to the city almost on a daily basis to the football games, to the baseball games, so it’s somewhat of a psyche thing with most whites when it comes to the city, especially the inner city.”

  Wondering if white folks were moving back down here, he told me that the city was trying to entice them. “It’s a rebirth now, on the rebound. They cleared out most of all the crack houses and projects,” he said. “You see, they moved the blacks out of this area. They’ve done all sorts of wicked things to get the blacks out—they’ve busted pipes, DTE came in and cut black peoples’ lights off, made them move, they tricked this one woman here, you see that big place over there?” I looked over; it was a beautiful Victorian house, now boarded up. “They tricked her out of her property; she’s in a convalescent home now. They’ve been doing this for the last fifteen years here.”

  The lady then turned away again from her call to inform me, “They’re all a bunch of crooks, thieves, and liars! They’re pimping the federal government for federal funds, and that’s what the whole game is about. That why Obama is giving money—the people don’t get the money, only the wealthy and the ’fluent get the money, and it never trickles down. All it is a rape of the federal government of federal funds, and they use poor people as a red carpet to get it. They pimp ’em, they say you sit here and you gotta stay here and you gotta be poor so I can keep asking the government for more money. It’s a vicious cycle.”