Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey

by Colby Buzzell

  Basically, the way to describe Farnsworth Street is that I felt like I had turned onto a street in the best part of Berkeley, California. The street was clean, all the houses were freshly painted and well kept, nice cars were all parked along the street—I couldn’t believe it. The street had “NPR story” written all over it.

  Stunned, I got off my bike and walked slowly up and down the street. I would totally live inside any of these houses, two-story, with front and back yards; one house even had an American flag posted on the outside of it, as well as a red Marine Corps flag. I’ve seen so many of these across the country, houses with both of these flags. It’s like the guys who get out of the Marine Corps can’t wait to purchase a house just so they can raise those flags.

  When I got to her house, I saw she was dressed nicely. She told me that she had to run down to the store real quick but would be back soon. She told me to go around to all the other houses on the street, which had Christmas lights all around, that all the backyards were hooked together, so it was all one big backyard behind them. She told me of a house with a keg of beer at the back of it, so of course that was the house I went to first.

  When I got there, a couple dozen kids were running around, playing with each other, half of them black, the other half white. Chairs were set up in a circle around a campfire, where people were seated, eating and drinking. The kids were going nuts waiting to go on the hayride—a guy driving up and down the street in a tractor with a trailer.

  The back patio was where the keg was located—local brewery, of course—next to a table with a pitcher of sangria. Around the keg gathered a bunch of artist types, as well as some older-looking art teacher university professor types socializing with one another, everybody getting along, and this huge feast was going on inside the house.

  As I walked inside, people were constantly coming in through the front door with food in their hands. There were various breads on the cutting board, dips, chili, soups, and other edible items on the dining table in the kitchen, and people were grabbing plates of food, standing around eating, complimenting the cooks, talking about how great this was, and how great that was, there were people drinking wine in the living room. I kept telling myself, Don’t get drunk! Don’t get drunk! Don’t get drunk! over and over again as I picked up a red cup and made my way back over to the keg. I really didn’t want to get drunk at all here, because I didn’t want people the next day going, “Who in the hell was that idiot who got all wasted and drunk-drove the tractor all over the gardens ruining all the crops while singing ‘Old McDonald Had a Farm’?”

  “I know! What a fucking dick! I don’t know who that idiot was, but I saw him throwing away his keg cups in the nonrecycling trash can. Asshole. We need to find out who invited this idiot and have a serious talk with that person. Somebody else told me they think he’s the one who stole all the liquor from that one house across the street when he left.”

  I didn’t want to make her look bad, since it was mighty kind of her to invite me here, a person she’d just met, so again I told myself over and over that tonight I was going to be on my best behavior and not get drunk.

  I filled my cup, and after that I took a couple steps over to the side and just stood there for a bit, sipping my beer. I then sat and waited, hoping that somebody would come up and talk to me. Nobody did.

  I sat there for a while, and I saw people walk in, and they said hello to the others, people they didn’t know, and after a warm greeting would usually ask, So what do you do? I studied their body language: they’d lean in and listen, and once they were done, they’d reply by saying how interesting that was, comment, ask a couple questions, maybe even go so far as to say that they knew somebody or had a friend who did the same thing, and then the other person would comment back on what they did, and then they’d talk.

  As I listened to their conversations, I noticed that a lot of them were using these huge long-ass words I’d never heard before; some people were wearing glasses, and they were talking about what wines go with what, installation art, documentaries that they saw on PBS, collective art galleries, experimental music, theater and screenwriting. I realized that these people were all highly educated, and I freaked out. I got all self-conscious and even checked to see if my fly was open. It wasn’t, and I found myself drinking at an accelerated pace. Back at the keg, a girl my age then walked up, holding a red cup. She looked confused, and with a European accent asked me, “How do you do it?” I told her it was easy—grab the tap and pour into the cup—explaining that it was best to pour at an angle so you got less foam. She thanked me and walked away.

  I went back to being a wallflower. I went from missing my wife and son to missing my mother. If she was here right now, she’d be pissed; she’d grab the red keg cup out of my hand, throw that away, tell me that I didn’t need that, that I drink too much, nobody likes a drunk, and then smack the cigarette out of my mouth, ask for my pack so she could crumple that up, and with her Korean accent ask, “Why you standing there all by yourself in the corner? Why you slouching? Keep your back straight, head up! You always have your head down, what you looking for? Nothing down there, no good. Smile! You never smile, why you never smile? Go, go talk to people, people are good, everybody here is having a good time, why not you? Go have good time, talk to people, have fun, back straight, head up, smile!”

  I refilled my keg cup to the brim, corrected my posture, and walked over to a bohemian-looking guy standing next to another and said hello. He said hello back, and I asked him if he lived here; he told me that he did, and quickly, I don’t know why, became uninterested and kind of walked away. Perhaps he saw somebody more interesting to talk to. I don’t know. I drank more and edged over and talked to another guy; this one was a bit more chatty and talked to me for a while. He also looked like an artist type—unkempt hair, flannel, and jeans with paint smudges on them—and I said hello and asked him if he lived here. He did, and he asked me who I knew here, and I told him the long story in a nutshell. He thought that was pretty cool—“She just invited you here, just like that? Wow”—and then he asked, “So, what do you do?”

  What do I do? Jesus Christ, that’s a good one. I told him, “Oh, I’m a . . . artist.” “Oh really? You’re an artist?” “Um, yeah.” I couldn’t believe I just fucking said that. Since it seemed like everybody here was an artist, I guess I thought I’d do the same. When I’m wasted and somebody asks me that question, I’ll sometimes tell them I’m an artist, and whenever they ask what kind of art I do, I tell them that I draw and then wait for them to say, “Oh you do, what do you draw?” which I’ll answer by saying, “I draw my own path in life.” But I wasn’t that wasted, yet, so I went and took a huge swig of beer from my red keg cup. I noticed that it was almost all gone, and I said, “I’m a writer slash photographer.”

  “What do you write about?”

  Okay, obviously he didn’t give a shit about my photography. That was another good question that he’d asked me, and I could feel myself breaking a sweat now. God, I wish I knew the answer to that one.

  “I’m writing about traveling across the country right now, and uh”—since I didn’t want to talk about writing, I switched the subject—“right now I’m going around documenting Detroit, doing a lot of urban decay kind of stuff, shooting black and white, you know, more dramatic, it really is like Disneyland out here for photographers.”

  “Oh, yeah, it really is here. You ever heard of Robert Frank?”

  “Robert Frank? Oh
yeah, he’s amazing, love his work, very . . . inspirational.”

  I decided to change the subject once he started to ask me about darkroom techniques, so I asked how he liked living here, and he told me that he liked it a lot. “I was living in Portland, Oregon, for a summer, and I couldn’t stand it over there.”

  “You couldn’t stand Portland? Why not?”

  I like Portland. Why didn’t he like it there?

  “Oh, I couldn’t stand Portland. It’s too comfortable. Everyone there is overeducated, unemployed, white, creative, and I just couldn’t live there.”

  I nodded in agreement. Yes, this place, especially outside of this street that we’re on, was definitely the opposite of Portland, definitely a lot more “edgy” and “real,” out there like an episode of Cops. When I asked about personal safety, he told me, “You have to be careful, but for the most part, people here are really friendly. But we don’t go out after dark, alone. Because I’ve had nothing but positive experiences here, I think I’m getting a bit stupider. Like, oh, those guys on the corner that are just staring me down, they like me, what up guys!”

  I chuckled at that, and told him that I could relate, I felt the same way. We talked for a bit, and when I noticed that I was getting low on cigarettes, I asked if there was a liquor store anywhere close by, and he tells me of a corner store a couple blocks away that they all go to, but they always walk down there in pairs, never by themselves. “It’s pretty shady.”

  “What would happen if I walked there by myself?”

  “It would be . . . risky.”

  As I walked alone with my thoughts over to the corner store, I couldn’t help but think, Okay, here you have this street that a bunch of people moved into, converting the street into something really great. They cleaned it up, they got gardens in their backyards, their houses are all extremely nice and well kept both inside and out, and I look at all the other houses on the streets in the surrounding area and wonder why the people who live on those streets don’t do the same thing. Like they don’t go, Hey, wait a minute, if they can do it, we can do it too!

  I’m thinking maybe I should look into why that might be the case as I make my way inside the liquor store, which is pretty lively inside, with people purchasing both hard liquor and beer. The guy working behind the glass was Middle Eastern. I noticed that they also sold knit beanies, and since I had lost mine, I asked the guy if they had a black one. There was a bit of a language barrier going on between us, and when he pulled out the Obama beanie and asked me if I wanted that one, out loud, in a store full of at least half a dozen blacks wanting to get alcohol, in the ’hood, I said, “No, I don’t want an Obama beanie!” in a way that was unintentionally rude. I paused because I hadn’t realized what I’d just said and where I’d just said it until I did, and then I said, “I just want an all-black beanie with nothing on it. All black.” He told me he didn’t have any, so instead all I purchased was a pack of smokes. Returning to the Harvest Festival, I went back to the keg, filled up another red cup, and just hung out by myself, listening to the conversations going on all around me.

  Bummed, I decided to leave. I walked over to her house; she was in the kitchen cooking, talking to a lady seated in a chair holding a baby, and I thanked her for inviting me, that I had a blast, everybody was cool, and just thank you. She said no problem, and even quickly introduced me to her friend, said I was a writer, and complimented my photographs of Detroit, telling her friend that even though the places that I’d taken pictures of had all been photographed a million times, the ones that I took were good. She told me to stop by anytime I wanted to and also stop by the Ethiopian restaurant before I left. I told her that I would, and then I grabbed my bike and pedaled around the neighborhood for a bit, since I was feeling a bit blue.

  She was right: there was absolutely nothing original that I was doing, all my photos had been taken a million and one times before, I wasn’t a photographer, and what about my writing? Was I saying or doing anything that hadn’t already been done or said before, and done and said way better than I ever could or would? No. I wasn’t an artist. I felt like a failed artist. All this made me want to cut my ear off and give it to one of the girls working on the corner of St. Aubin and East Warren. Feeling suicidal, since the thought of being shot didn’t bother me as much as it had before, I pedaled around and took some more pictures of some more burned-down houses and a couple more interesting streets I really had no business going down, and then I pedaled back home, to the Park Avenue Hotel.

  When I turned my bike back onto Gratiot, I came across that same homeless-looking white guy that the police officer earlier had been yelling at for peeking into people’s cars at the gas station. He was back, and he looked about my age, walking aimlessly around the Marathon gas station again. I pedaled over to him to get his story, and since I was a bit drunk I started off by asking him what in the hell he was doing here, walking around East Detroit all by himself.

  This guy was totally lost. I couldn’t quite tell if he was mentally ill, or slightly drunk, or even both. I could barely make out what he was saying half the time, since his voice was also kind of soft, but when I asked what he was doing here, he slowly told me, “I’m fucked up, man. I just got out of the navy, and I ended up here.”

  Cars passed by us as he then asked me a question that I’ve asked many here, but hadn’t been asked myself: “Do you like it down here in Detroit?”

  “Yeah,” I honestly told him, then I asked, “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s nothing to look forward to.”

  “How so?”

  He then mumbled something, no idea what, totally inaudible. I even asked him a couple times to repeat himself, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what in the hell he was trying to say until he said something else: “You got fifty cents, man?”

  I told him no, I didn’t have any change. Then I pedaled home.

  When I got to my room, I opened up my door, walked in, poured myself a “glass” of wine from the box of red that I purchased at Walmart, into an empty Gatorade bottle, lit a smoke, turned the laptop on, listened to some Glenn Miller on iTunes, and sat down on the sofa. I could hear the cars tear by on the freeway next door. I looked up at the “Press On” quote that I’d found inside the old Packard auto plant a couple weeks back and still had hanging on my wall. I stared at that for a bit, and then I passed out and went to asleep.

  I had to be out of town for a couple days for some college speaking thing I got invited to. I had a difficult time concentrating while I was away. My mind was on nothing but Detroit, and I couldn’t wait to get back. When my plane landed back at the Detroit Metro Airport, I exited the baggage terminal, looking for a cab. Didn’t see any, so I went up to the ground transportation area, where an angry lady was walking away, saying something about “Only in Detroit!” I didn’t find out why she was so furious until I saw a guy wearing a trench coat standing there in front of the empty taxi stand. When I asked him where all the cabs were, he told me that there weren’t any, and that my only option was to use his car service, which charged sixty dollars for a ride downtown. Something about a dispute between the city and the airport; they couldn’t resolve it, so the city had kicked all the cabs out. Only in Detroit. Now I’m pissed. I explained to the guy that the city should be offering free shuttle buses for people who believe that there is still a functioning city to get to, that if anything, they should be paying peo
ple to come to their downtown. This no-cabs business was bullshit. The man in the trench coat agreed, but stood firm on his price. Just then, a five-foot-something Middle Eastern guy showed up and told me he could take me downtown for forty-five. So I jumped in his car.

  He was from Yemen, and had worked a lot since he moved here, he told me. Once, on the freeway, he kind of drifted in and out of his lane a couple times, and he apologized and told me that he was extremely tired. He said that in addition to working all the time, he was also in school and studied all the time. The talking seemed to wake him up some, we made it safely to my neighborhood, and he dropped me off at the Park Avenue Hotel.

  The next morning I came across Mrs. Harrington outside the building tending to her plants. When she saw me, she stopped what she was doing to ask where in the hell I had been and what I was doing going off for a couple days like that.

  “Don’t ever do that again!” she said, in a tone of voice I had not heard from her before. She wore an expression that was part annoyance and part relief. She had been worried because I was going in and out of all these buildings all over Detroit all alone, and she had begun to think that something might have happened to me.

  “What if something happened to you,” she asked, “how will we know?”

  What would it matter? I thought. I’d be dead.