Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey

by Colby Buzzell

  “Yeah, we got some beautiful girls here, I got a little bit of money, you know, I’m living the simple life, you know. I’m an artist, I drive a cab, got a roof over my head, food in the ice box, some scratch in my pocket, my studio for my artwork, and that fucking whore in my bed. You know what I mean?”

  I do, and when he dropped me off, I tell him to keep the change, and he tells me to be careful down here at night.

  I thank him for that and after watching him drive off I went back to my room, back to my simple life.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sunday Stripper

  “The most effective way to do it, is to do it.”

  AMELIA EARHART

  I decided to check out the strip club on the corner over by Greektown. Not because I was bored, which I was, but for research purposes. That and it was Sunday. Six-dollar cover, three-dollar mandatory coat check. Not bad, except they rape you at the bar. In the land of Hamm’s, seven dollars for a bottled beer. The place was dead.

  Why was I at a strip club? I was on the road, that’s why. Duh. Let me justify my decision to go to one by stating that it’s what people do when they’re on the road. I found this out back in Cheyenne. One of the guys I worked with doing day labor travels state to state working jobs while living out of motels. He told me one time that when he’s on the road, there’s nothing to do but drink and hit up strip clubs.

  Only about half a dozen men—most were probably like myself, married and here on business. The brunette working the pole up onstage was wearing nothing but a black G-string and ten-inch platforms. From the bar I watched her dance for a bit while drinking my beer slowly. I looked around; everybody looked depressed. The guys were just sitting there silently, also drinking their beers slowly. I noticed everybody was kind of holding on to their money, holding on to what they had. I didn’t see any money changing hands; nobody was throwing dollar bills at the girls or ordering beers one right after another, and the girls looked like models for a before picture for antidepressant medication. They all looked subdued, bored and distant.

  The dirty-blond stripper down at the end of the bar was drinking a stiff drink all by herself, slowly, cradling the drink with one hand and smoking a cigarette with the other. Every time she took a drag, she’d inhale deeply and just stare straight ahead as she exhaled. It was like they all had given up on trying to get money from the men, and the men had given up on giving a shit. It was a standoff.

  She had this vibe coming from her that she was probably thinking something along the lines of: There’s gotta be more to life than this. This was depressing, and though at times I think I kind of like being depressed, this was a bit much for even me. That and seven dollars a beer was way too much. I’d started to think about going somewhere else when the brunette that had been dancing onstage when I first came in walked offstage and immediately walked over to me. I wondered what was wrong. This would be the first time ever that the hottest stripper would come up to me first—usually they don’t, usually it’s the busted-ass skanks that need rent money that come up and ask me if I want a dance. And usually what happens is the girl will walk over, introduce herself, maybe, depending how busy or how bored she is, chat for a bit, then ask me for my wallet, or ask if I want a dance. So I was prepared for all this when she came over and asked me how I was doing. I told her fine, expecting what would follow would be, Would you like a dance? But instead she sits next to me and immediately started talking about tattoos.

  After mentioning that she liked my tattoos, she told me that she grew up out here, but lived in Vegas for six years and just moved back two months ago. From living in Sin City, she told me, she could tell that I was from the West Coast as soon as I walked in the door because I have “rockabilly” tattoos, and that she’d hardly seen anybody here with that style. Out here, she told me that they have the tackiest tattoos she’d ever seen. Rolling her eyes she brought up a woman she saw out here once who had a tattoo on her neck of a hunting dog with a dead pheasant in his mouth. “I was like, Really? You put that on your neck?” She appreciated old-school tattoos, like the ones I have. “I think it’s so hot.”

  “Thank you.”

  Obviously this girl had great taste, which made me wonder why she moved back here.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, why’d you move back to Detroit when things are so bad here?”

  “Long story short,” she told me, “I’m not going to give you a sob story,” but both her grandparents are in hospice, so instead of going back and forth every two weeks she decided to move back into Mom and Dad’s for a year and hang out here, and “get back together with all my old friends, you know?”

  I asked her about the clientele that she had here, and she told me that this strip club was very event-driven, and when there was a sporting event downtown, people would usually come in. Watch a game, drink some beers, and then go see some tits and ass afterward.

  She went on to tell me that she’d been stripping off and on for the last four years; she started in Vegas, where she worked as an event coordinator specializing in retail events but danced on the side and made some pretty good money doing both. When she moved back here, she tried to do what she was doing out in Vegas, but nobody wanted to hire her.

  “Nobody here wants to pay me for anything,” she told me, which is why she was now stripping for tips. In Vegas, the lowest-wage salary she had was sixty grand plus commission, plus bonus if the events went well, and out here in Detroit they’re only going to pay a third of that. “Like, I’ve got friends who are well-educated, well-rounded, smart people, who graduated from college,” she told me, “that are living back at home because they can’t find jobs. They’re delivering pizzas. It’s crazy in Michigan.”

  I wondered if more women were getting into stripping since the economy was so shitty.

  She told me yes and since she’d only just started working here, that this particular club used to have eighty-something girls on its roster. Now there’s only forty-five. A lot of the girls who dance or strip here, she tells me, don’t want to have a conversation with someone. If you notice when you go to a strip club, a lot of girls will go up to every single guy and ask, Do you want a dance? Do you want a dance? My name’s so-and-so, do you want a dance? Here in downtown Detroit, there’s not a lot of people to do that to, so the men go to other strip clubs. Like around Eight Mile. “But I like to talk to people,” she says, “so I don’t have a problem with talking to somebody all night.”

  If she could make more money north of Eight Mile, what was she doing here south of Eight Mile, I asked.

  She released a sigh, rolled her eyes and said, “Well, nobody knows that I do this.” All the people that she went to high school with were still around, and her parents, who never came downtown, “they think I’m a janitor.” Intrigued, I listened in as she told me that she’d rather have them think that she was a janitor who cleans offices at night than have them find out that she was a stripper. To pull this off, she researched the janitorial profession heavily beforehand, she went online and found an office-cleaning company, she knew their address, she knew where they were located, found out what buildings they cleaned and that they went to work anywhere between six and nine p.m. and worked till late depending on how many buildings they had to close, and she even discovered how they had team leaders—what equipment they used and how to use it. She even went as far as to have T-shirts she silkscreened herself with their company’s logo on them, so that when she left the house she was wearing that shirt and she exited with no makeup on. When she came back home every night it was always around the time when her parents were asleep. Proudly she told me that so far, they had no idea she was doing this, and that she was such a good bullshitter that when her parents asked about her job she’d complain all about it to them, “Oh, man, I hate my fucking job,” and go on and on with these elaborate stories about how work last night “sucked” and how “Sam,” who couldn’t clean the
floors properly was torturous to work with and how she had to redo cleaning the floors due to his incompetence as a janitor and again on and on about how she hated her job. “I’ve also found out online—both before and after taxes—how much they make per week, and I’ll complain to my parents about that, too. I’ve got it down to a science!”

  This girl was incredibly impressive.

  We talked for a bit more, and not once did she ask me for a dance, though she did ask me if I wanted to do a shot with her, which I agreed to do and of course paid for. After that, it was her time to dance and she said she’d be right back, and when she excused herself, I watched her dance for a while on the pole while I finished my beer, and again I noticed that nobody was tipping, so I pulled five ones from outta my pocket and put them back into the economy, right there in her G-string. She gave me a hug, which I thanked her for. I then made my exit.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Friendly Fire

  “I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country—Victory or Death.”

  WILLIAM BARRET TRAVIS

  LT. COL. COMDT.

  Letter from the Alamo

  24 February 1836

  After I paid for my omelet and coffee in the café downstairs, something happened that struck me as being kind of weird. I had paid for my meal and was leaving a couple bucks for the cook in the tip jar. Instead of saying, “Thank you,” the cook asked me if he could borrow some money, that he’d pay me back. I’d never before eaten breakfast at a café where the person working the register asked if it’d be cool to borrow a couple bucks, so I was kind of thrown for a second by this request. I told him sorry, I didn’t have any money to lend out, and left.

  This made me not want to patronize the café anymore, but since it was Mrs. Harrington’s café, and something I wanted to support, I shrugged it off.

  While waiting for the elevator, I looked over at the front desk, and for the first time it hit me that unlike every one of these kinds of hotels I’d seen across the country, especially here in Detroit, the Park Avenue Hotel doesn’t do business behind bulletproof glass. Since Mrs. Harrington was in the lobby, I asked her about that. She defiantly said she refuses to have glass, and refuses to have a gun, and that the day where they had to put up bulletproof glass is the day she was out of here. “I will not capitulate to that kind of living. No way.”

  She felt this way even though her husband had been shot at once in this very lobby. The elevator door opened, but I ignored it. “What?!” I said. “Mr. Harrington has been shot at here?”

  She then called her husband out of the back office to tell me about that time where he had to grab a gun from someone.

  He told me that it was shortly before the Super Bowl in 2006, when the city was redoing the street out in front, and these two guys were pacing back and forth in front of the hotel, casing it in broad daylight, and finally they decided to storm into the lobby and rob it.

  One of the guys was wielding a sawed-off rifle that he had stashed inside an umbrella, and the two of them had put stockings over their heads, and Mr. Harrington told me that there was all this screaming, “Mother fucker-this, I’ll kill you-that,” you know, and when he looked up he had a firearm pointed right in his face—

  “And you grabbed it,” says Mrs. Harrington.

  “Well, not at first,” says Mr. Harrington who explained that at first he just pushed it away . . .

  Here, Mr. Harrington pauses, looks down in deep concentration, and tries to remember the sequence of confusing events. Mrs. Harrington looks bored and interrupts the silence, saying that he doesn’t remember.

  While being jabbed with the barrel of the gun—screaming and yelling—they ask Mr. Harrington for his money. So he opened up the drawer and there wasn’t any money. So the one guy went ahead and just punched him, giving Mr. Harrington a bloody ear.

  While he told me all this in detail—I got the impression that Mrs. Harrington thought her husband took way too long to tell his stories, because she had her elbow on the front desk and her head was now resting on her hand, and talking over him, she said, “You’re losing half the story.”

  Mr. Harrington disregarded her comment and told me that when this happened he just got out of the hospital with a quadruple heart bypass and in situations such as this you think of all the things you’re going to do—the first thing being “sticking your fingers in their eyes, you know, but you don’t do anything.” He just grabbed him and the two started wrestling.

  The two of them ended up on the ground wrestling each other, and while that was going on the guy holding the gun was trying to shoot him but couldn’t get a clean shot, and in the back room Mr. Harrington’s son hears them thrashing around on the ground and comes out to see what’s going on. The guy with the gun now fires off a round, but misses, and Mr. Harrington’s son quickly manhandles the gun away from the guy, who takes off, leaving his friend on the ground wrestling around with Mr. Harrington. Finally that guy got himself untangled, and he took off running, too.

  Mrs. Harrington was equal parts amused and exasperated. “Anyway,” she said, with a slight smile, “they tried to shoot my husband, right here in this room.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Artist

  “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

  PABLO PICASSO

  When I typed the address into the search bar on Google I hoped that Google Maps would pop up so that I could get directions that way to the Harvest Festival, the party that Ika, the girl from the Ethiopian restaurant, had invited me to. Instead, what came up was a bunch of search listings for that address, and the very first listing on Google was a link to the financial history for the place. I really shouldn’t have clicked on the link, because it really wasn’t any of my business, but I did anyway.

  PROPERTY FEATURES

  FINANCIAL HISTORY

  Single Family Residence

  Last sold for $282 on 5/30/2007

  Year Built: 1913

  Last assessed at $4,797 on 2008

  2 Bathrooms

  Previous sales

  Approximately 1,736 Sq Ft

  $282 on 5/30/2007

  Parking: Detached Garage

  Previous assessments

  1 spaces

  $4,797 on 2008

  Lot size: 9,583.2 Sq Ft

  $4,797 on 2007

  Stories: 2

  $4,690 on 2006

  County: Wayne

  Source: Public Records

  Heating type: Heating

  Heating detail: Forced Air

  Source: Public Records

  I then made the mistake of immediately calling my wife to ask if I could please have her permission to purchase a house here in Detroit somewhere near that location. I should have gone ahead and just done it. It’s always better to ask forgiveness than to ask for permission, since word for word, her response was, “Don’t. You. Dare! We are not moving to Detroit!” She then reminded me that we have a son, and there’s no way in hell she’d allow him to go to Detroit public schools. Head bowed in defeat, my white-picket-fence fantasy at the epicenter of America’s greatness was unceremoniously shot down, and of course she was right. Detroit needs people moving in, not away, if it is to have any kind of chance. But your kid is your kid, and not some social experiment.

  Something fundamental had shifted in her: she was a mother. My fatherhood, I guess, is lagging somewhat behind. O
h well.

  The Harvest Festival was located deep in the heart of the East Side, and when I turned off Gratiot onto Mack on my bicycle, I pulled out my scrap paper from my pocket and looked around for a street called Elmwood. I couldn’t find it.

  On the corner where I was with my bike was a Marathon gas station with a Detroit Police car parked, door open. Two black police officers were standing outside the car. The one, a pretty big guy, was yelling at this young homeless-looking white guy for hanging out around the gas station and looking into other people’s cars while they were trying to get gas. The cop told him several times that he couldn’t do that and that he should get lost, which he reluctantly, did. When the police officer was done yelling, I approached him and asked if he knew where Elmwood was.

  Without saying a word, he pointed me in the right direction and gave me this funny look. I could tell he was about to say something to me, but for whatever reason he chose not to. I thanked him, and as soon as I turned onto that street, Do Not Enter and Wrong Way started screaming in my head. I kept on pedaling. It was night, dark, and especially dark on this street; the streetlamps seemed not to shine as brightly around these parts. A stray dog walked by, groups of three or four kids with hooded sweatshirts stood on street corners, no cars were driving anywhere, many houses had all their lights off, then I saw the old abandoned brick schoolhouse she had mentioned.

  I’ve been down many a street in my lifetime, both ones I should have gone down and ones where I shouldn’t, both in this country and in others. At night, riding a single-gear vintage beach cruiser down a street where even in a car you’d be like, I ain’t going down this street, fuck that, I’m turning around, I kept pedaling, slowly. Once I started getting closer to where the Harvest Festival was, just to make sure, I reached in my pocket to pull out my hand-drawn map, while three black guys my age were hanging out on a street corner, watching me. I looked down and saw I’d accidentally pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of my pocket instead of that piece of scrap paper with the map on it. God must hate me. My bad. I quickly shoved the twenty back into my pocket, pulled out my map, and found my way to Farnsworth Street perfectly fine, no problems.