Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey

by Colby Buzzell

  “How will your wife know?”

  I hadn’t even thought about that one. She then made me write my wife’s cell phone number down on a piece of paper and give it to her and the front desk guy in case something happened to me. I did and thanked her sincerely. “You have to let me know when you leave like that,” she said. She paused, rubbed her dirty hands together, and her expression softened. “I was so worried.”

  I promised her that I would, and when I got in the elevator to go up to the third floor the guy who I was sharing the elevator with told me she was freaking out while I was away, telling everybody I was missing.

  “I was just out of town for a couple days.”

  “That’s what I told her, but she was all, No, he’s missing!”

  My mother used to always freak out if she didn’t know where I was or hadn’t heard from me. Sunday was the day where I was always supposed to make a phone call and check in with her to let her know I was alive, as well as tell her never when she asked me, again, when I was going to go back to school or, “When are you going to settle down and raise a family?”

  If I didn’t call on Sunday, she’d inevitably think I was dead, in jail, or kidnapped.

  I’ve stayed at hotels such as this where they really don’t give a fuck if the people who are staying there live or die. Sometimes, like the place I was staying in Denver, they kept in the lobby several garbage bags completely filled with clothes left behind from somebody who just left without saying good-bye.

  This place, the Park Avenue Hotel, is feeling a lot like home to me, and it’s making Detroit feel like home, as well. I’m even catching myself calling it home now when I talk to people. I have lived my life resisting such feelings—of acceptance, or belonging, or maybe what humans might even call love. But that’s the feeling the Harringtons have made me feel, in spite of my very best efforts.

  I decided to renew at the Park Avenue Hotel for another month. That month would pass in much the same way as the rest of my time in Detroit, and by the end of that month, I would begin to feel the pull of my other “home”—and wife, and child—with both anticipation and dread.

  Soon would be my moment of truth, and I’d been fantasizing about walking down to my bar on the other side of the freeway—the one where the bartender knew me and most evenings plied us both with shots; often he was more plastered than I was—and stepping inside the door, seeing Kerouac seated all by himself down at the end of the bar. At the beginning of this road trip of mine I probably wouldn’t have said anything to him. I don’t know him and I really wasn’t that kind of guy. But now that I’d gotten a taste of what it was like to be on the road, I’d probably take a seat right next to him, order a shot of whiskey and a beer, slam my shot, and once my beer was mostly gone, I’d look over and if he wasn’t too drunk and would listen, I’d say hello. I’d pretend I didn’t know who he was and tell him all about how I left my wife and son to hit the road. He would have said he knows exactly what that’s like, that he himself has spent a fair amount of time at large in America. Only then would I ask him for advice.

  If he were me, I’d ask him, would he go home or keep on going? Now, this fantasy comes with full knowledge of how Jack himself answered the call of home and responsibility. He floored it and blew right through.

  But, in my fantasy, he tells me to go back to San Francisco and look for a job. Which is ironic, I guess, because when I visited Kerouac’s gravesite several years prior, I’d felt awkward, on the verge of giving up writing altogether, and I remember mentioning something to myself while standing over his grave about how I was going to give up writing and look for a regular job when I returned to San Francisco.

  But before I left Detroit, there was something I wanted to do, and that was find a job here. Again, if you can dream it, you can try to achieve it. Nothing’s going to stop you. Right?

  Chapter Nineteen

  Failing Journalism 101: A How-to Guide

  “I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are.”

  WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN

  Waking up at around noon, hung over, I turned my laptop on to do a couple searches on “Time magazine Detroit House.” Armed with some intel, I exited the hotel lobby with my bike. I’ve forgotten his name, since I’m terrible at that, but the one guy with a white beard that’s always wearing the Tigers hat was outside watering the plants around the hotel, and asked me what I was up to today, so I told him I was just going to check out the Time magazine house, and asked if he’d heard of it.

  Time magazine is one of the largest circulating periodicals in the country, and this year they’d bought a house here in Detroit. Not a bad editorial decision. Since every other industry here in this city is dying, why not have another one die here as well? Supposedly, the magazine is sending their journalists to stay while they did stories on Detroit. In one of their recent issues, they’d made a big deal out of this purchase.

  “Oh, yeah,” he says, “I heard they got people staying there and I saw something about it on Good Morning America or something, where’s it at?”

  “I think over by West Village or Indian Village. One of the two. I don’t know exactly where it is yet, but I’m gonna find it.”

  He then gave me directions to those neighborhoods: “You go down quite a ways, and then you’ll see signs that say Historic Indian Village, it’s all beautiful mansions.”

  “Really? Is it a nice part of town?”

  “It is but it isn’t. It’s a nice part of town that’s right next to the bad part. Indian Village itself has beautiful homes, old homes, old-old homes—it’s a pretty nice place, and right now it’s a lot of young upbeat professionals, you know, doctors and lawyers. You know, young professionals that have bought the homes and restored them. There’s still some old money in there, but it’s mainly young folks, you know it’s a ride, it’ll take you a good forty-five minutes.”

  Ah, the Green Zone. Hopefully the neighborhood would have a new temporary resident. Me. I thanked him, and as I got on my bike he called out, “Good luck.”

  Pedaling along on my bike, I wondered to myself, “How does one write for Time?” I’ve read Time before, mostly while taking a shit, and it’s like all those dorks in high school who wrote for the high school newspaper, all grew up, went to college, and got jobs at a magazine and pretty much continued writing the same bullshit articles they all wrote in high school, but at a much higher level. Circulation-wise, that is. Same kind of writing, really. “What’s Wrong with Cafeteria Food, and What We Can Do to Make It Better!” or “An Inside Look at School Spirit: Why It Still Matters and How It’s Changed (It’s Not What You Think!).”

  I thought about bringing a box of wine as a nice gesture, but chose not to. I’d have had to go all the way out to Walmart in Dearborn to purchase that, and since my car was still out of commission, parked in her parking lot over by the hotel, at least I hoped it was still parked there—I got to thinking that it would be a good idea for me to check up on it sometime soon.

  For a split second the thought of printing out a couple writing samples so that I’d have something to show them crossed my mind—maybe I’d even print out a résumé and cover letter—but I chose not to do either, since that might be a waste of paper. Like Time would let me write for them. Instead, what I thought I would do was just step into character and tell them I’m a writer who just recently moved to the area, and it’d be cool to write an article for them in exchange for a place to crash. Stay at their house while I’m writing it. It’d be nice to sleep on a bed with an expensive mattress and be able to take hot showers in the morning.


  While riding my bike, I thought about what I would do once I found the Time magazine Green Zone house. I’d done door-to-door sales before, and sucked at it; I wasn’t ever good at selling anything, especially myself, and maybe that was my problem. Maybe I needed more confidence. Maybe instead of waiting for people to bang on my door for writing assignments, I needed to start banging on theirs.

  Soon enough, after I’d passed by a couple run-down neighborhoods, just like that, like turning the page onto an entirely different book written by an entirely different author, The People of the Abyss by Jack London on to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, I came across a street filled with houses straight out of an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous: Detroit, huge mansions, front and back yards, sprinkler systems, a BMW parked next to a Lexus, trees manicured, lawns freshly mowed, jars of Grey Poupon in the refrigerators.

  It didn’t take me long at all to spot the house that I thought was Time’s Green Zone house. It looked exactly like the photo I’d come across online. I stopped my bike in front and stared at it, and as I did, I was envisioning my 1964 Mercury Comet Caliente parked, dripping oil onto the driveway. I wanted to call that house home. I stared at all the other houses on the street while the smell of cut grass hit me and the sounds of peace and quiet, set to birds happily chirping, provided the sound track. I sighed as I imagined how wonderful it must be to write for Time. Lucky bastards. I hated them.

  On that very same street was a white lady raking leaves and dumping them into a trash can. I approached her and asked, “Is that the Time magazine house?”

  “I don’t know if I should answer that.”

  Oh, really? I was thinking, since waterboarding is slightly illegal, to ask a couple of questions instead. I then relayed what I did know about the house: “Gray, six bedrooms, right?”

  She appeared offended at the mention of six bedrooms and said four was more accurate.

  Okay, cool. So I did have the right house. Now that I had the right house, I thought about coming back later on that night so I could egg it. Then I remembered there was no grocery store over by where I lived, so I couldn’t do that, but I could sure as hell teepee it. What am I, in junior high again? Snap out of it, Colby, I’m in my early thirties, I came here to knock on the door and see if I could write for them, not to vandalize the joint.

  Feeling myself chickening out from knocking on their door, I asked if she lived on the street.

  She informed me that she did. Then she released a laugh as she told me, “Why, do I look like hired help?”

  Wow. She was white, so no, I didn’t think she was hired help, nor was I in any way trying to insult her, no way. I could also tell that she was slightly kidding around, so I started asking her about the neighborhood, and we got to talking. She was friendly and told me of a restaurant nearby that was no longer there, where Henry Ford used to eat, how the old apartment buildings in the neighborhood had always been where a lot of reporters lived over the years, and how they first started building homes in their neighborhood in the 1800s.

  She went on to tell me that a lot of young people had moved in, bought houses here and were redoing them. The young and the lucky. People my age buying property.

  Maybe my mom was right. Maybe my problem was that I didn’t think big, and instead of always finding the most depressingly cheapest possible place to live whenever I did something, I should be more like Time, think big, crash in the nice part of town, live here, live nice, and write about have-nots that way.

  When I asked if they had a grocery store, she told me that they did have one close by. “You know what, it ain’t great shakes, but we’re all really happy it’s there. We really are.”

  Now I was totally jealous. I should buy my eggs there, I thought. When I told her that I’d been staying downtown, and one of the frustrations with living down there was no grocery stores, she told me that was exactly what the article that the guy who’s staying there now was about, about how there were no grocery stores and how there were hardly any chains anymore.

  We chatted for a bit; she was a kind lady. I told her about the historic street I came across over by Wayne State and how when I spoke to that one lady, she told me that she’d had problems with people trying to break into their house, so I asked her if she’d had the same problem here.

  She told me that they do because they view it as an affluent area, “yeah, they still kind of view this as kind of the place to go to shop.”

  “Shop?! Really?” I frantically looked around. “There’s shops around here?”

  “No,” she told me, “I mean the free shopping, the breaking-in kind of shopping.”

  “Oh.”

  Since I didn’t want to take too much of her time, I thanked her.

  Hearing a lawn mower, I looked down the street to see where the noise was coming from, and I quickly pedaled over to the guy mowing. I didn’t ask if he lived at the house where he was mowing, not because he was black—that’s racist—but because I could see his white van parked in front of it. I asked if he was from Detroit, which he was. I made a comment about how nice this neighborhood was, and he told me that all the neighborhoods are nice. “A lot of times a lot of things happen from outside forces, not necessarily from the neighborhood.”

  When I asked him how the job market was here, he told me that it was lousy. If times got worse, I imagine that he’d be affected by it, since the less money people have, the less money people have to hire other people to mow their lawns. When I asked him, he told me yeah, it had affected him; that it’s slowed it down a lot, as far as the economy goes, “the economy is lousy. I don’t really worry about it because I know when things are good, it’s good, and when things are bad, it’s bad for me too. It’s bad for all of us.”

  For now he told me that he got by. In regard to the future? “My opinion is, it’s going to get worse before it gets better, anyways.”

  I checked out the neighboring Indian Village, which was just as nice, after heading back downtown.

  I wondered, now that I knew where to find the house, should I go back sometime and knock on the door? What if somebody was inside? What if it was an editor? What if he was kind and invited me inside, told me to take a seat on the sofa, asked me if I’d like anything to drink, like a glass of wine? I’d tell him kindly, “No, thank you, but a glass of ice water would be mighty nice. I don’t think the sink water at my hotel is distilled and it tastes kind of funny whenever I drink it, kind of lead-y,” and he’d be telling me that’d be no problem, he’d get me a glass of purified tap water, and once seated in the living room he’d excuse the noise that the hired help was making while they were mowing the lawns and gardening in the front yard. I’d tell him it was no big deal, nothing like the freeway that I lived next to. He’d then start off by asking me, “Why, how can we help you, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Oh, yes, Buzzell. The last name is Buzzell.”

  He’d nod, while I could see the Rolodex in his head, frantically flipping through cards to see if he knows that name, and just before he figured out that he’d never heard of nor seen that name in any byline whatsoever, an editorial intern wearing an apron would appear. The apron looks familiar, it has the magazine’s logo embroidered on it, I think it’s one of those items they give away for free when you subscribe. I could also see that he’s wearing a Columbia School of Journalism alumni sweater underneath, and in his hand is my glass of water. I’d gratefully thank him, but then shoot him a look. “What the fuck is this?” I’d yell. “I can’t drink this!” I’d shove the glass back in his hands, spilling some of the water onto his apron, and tell him, “I said ice water!” He’d frantically apologize for his blunder multiple times, and quickly go back into the kitchen to get me some water with ice. I’d pretend not to be insulted and unfluster myself.

  “I swear, these kids nowadays, full of entitlement and the-world-owes-me mindset, straight-out-of-journalism-
school, fucking prima donna, spoon-in-their-mouths pansies! They can’t do anything right.”

  The editor would smile while telling me that he likes my style. We’d then proceed to talk business.

  “What can we do for you today, Mr. Buzzell?”

  “Oh, yes, I want to write a piece for you guys.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. You know, there’s been so much negative press lately in the media in regards to Detroit. . . .”

  “Oh, we know.”

  “And nobody hurts quite like the poor. . . .”

  “Oh, we know.”

  I notice a subtle erection forming from his tan pleated khakis as he folds his legs, and I continue.

  “And I was thinking—”

  Just then, Columbia shows up with my ice water. I rudely ask him, “Where the fuck is the sliced lemon?”

  He quickly leaves the room again, and after convincing the editor that I am the guy they’re looking for, and how I should write a positive uplifting piece for their publication on Detroit, focusing on all the good, and not the bad, we’d shake hands, and he’d tell me that I could move into their house the next weekend, and he is really looking forward to seeing my first draft in his in-box on Monday morning.

  I’d pedal back as fast as I can to the Park Avenue Hotel, where I can act like a crazy who’s just won the lottery and is going to spread the wealth and buy drinks for everyone until all the money is gone! Mrs. Harrington would be in the lobby when I got there, and I’d tell her that I did it! I got a gig writing for Time! She’d give me a hug: “I’m so proud of you! You did it!” and she’d tell me how great that news was, and while cracking open a bottle of champagne in the hotel lobby, passing it around to everybody coming in and out of the building, I’d tell her to put the word out to everyone and post flyers up in the elevator telling everybody that they’re all invited to stay with me and party at the Time Green Zone house, that it’s going to be a house party the entire time I’m there!