Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  The Quality Dairy was in the middle of Lansing’s central drug business district. Less than two weeks before, a Latino man had been shot to death at the car wash across the street as he tried to drive away from what was probably a drug deal gone sideways. If you idled your car on one of the side streets, someone would run over, tap on the window, and ask, “What you need?”

  Jimmy was gone about ten minutes. At the dealer’s house, he’d bought seven grams for $150, which meant he’d clear $50. Jimmy bought a box of baking soda at Quality Dairy. As we drove away, he pulled a tiny plastic bag from his coat pocket and dropped it in my hand.

  “This is it,” he said. There was a lot of power in that little pouch. Cocaine inspired armed robberies, prostitution, murders, and just plain desperation. A guy had once offered to sign a $600 car over to Jimmy to pay for less powder than this.

  “I know men that have sold their bodies for rock,” he said. “That’s thoroughly pitiful.”

  On the way to the drop, Jimmy stopped at my house, set up the beams on the kitchen table, and cleaved off three-quarters of a gram, replacing it with baking soda. That was his finder’s fee, but Joey wasn’t supposed to know.

  Joe’s Diner was on West Saginaw Street. Lansing’s broadest thoroughfare, it passed another GM plant that has since been demolished. Back then, the factory lamps were the only constellation visible from the diner parking lot. On the way, a police car appeared in our rearview mirror. I spent more time watching the rectangle that showed us where we’d been than the one showing us where we were going. Nothing in life would have terrified me more than seeing the rack atop that cruiser suddenly turn red, white, and blue.

  The restaurant was closed. Joey and his friend were waiting in their car. Jimmy parked alongside and Joey climbed into his backseat, where he received the scales and the bag. This place was too public to weigh the coke, but he did open the bag to smell it. Satisfied, he stashed it in his pocket.

  When you write about factories closing, you can’t just write about the forty-year-old guys who lost their jobs; you also have to write about the twenty-year-olds who never got jobs. Honest work, or even honesty, may have been too much to expect from Jimmy or Joey. They traveled lower paths than most, but they came from familiar Lansing stock: guys who graduated from getting high and fucking up in high school drafting class to getting high and fucking up as a janitor or a lawn-care worker. Guys who lived with their divorced moms and disappeared into the dark every evening when a friend’s used Impala pulled up in front of the house, who rode off somewhere to get drunk on Mickey’s or Boone’s Farm, or high on pot and crack, then reappeared at two in the morning and slept ’til ten. They floated at the edge of maturity’s whirlpool, waiting to be sucked in by a pregnant girlfriend, a fed-up mom, or just the realization that it might be cool to have a job and money and a house. A generation earlier, GM would have taken them in. The General had taken in Jimmy’s ex-con pops. But in 1990, they were slinging drugs to supplement their $4.75-an-hour jobs.

  Back at Jimmy’s house, we headed down to the basement, which had once been Jimmy’s bedroom. Now it was his smoking den, its furnishings and accessories illustrating the threadbare disorder of a crackhead’s life. Blankets, clothes, couch cushions, and wooden pallets were jumbled on the concrete floor. Jimmy unzipped a leather case and pulled out a truncated rifle.

  “This is my sawed-off twenty-two,” he said. “I’ve rode with this across my lap many a night; it made me feel a lot better.”

  On the way home, Jimmy had picked up a box of Chore Boy scouring pads and a bottle of rubbing alcohol, two items necessary for cooking and smoking cocaine. The rest of the equipment—an old T-shirt, a glass pipe, a glass El Producto Queen cigar tube, a square of silk, a hemostat—was as essential to the basement as pots and ladles to the kitchen.

  Jimmy rocked up his three-quarters of a gram and prepared to smoke. The pipe was a glass tube, wide open at both ends. It belonged to Jimmy’s mother’s boyfriend. The Chore Boy pads were a filter to prevent him from sucking in the melting rock. He burned off the brass so he wouldn’t inhale “a poison hit.”

  Jimmy lit the wick, lifted the tube to his lips, held the fire under the glass. When the flame hit the pipe, the chip crackled, and Jimmy sucked hard, pulling cocaine smoke into his lungs. Like a pot smoker, he pursed his lips to hold in the cloud until he could hold it no longer and exhaled a colorless puff. Suddenly, Jimmy looked as free and relieved as a diver who has just broken the surface and is breathing sweet air. He hit pipe after pipe—over a dozen draws. He called it “Chasin’ Jason,” smoking until he found that orgasmic hit that melted him into the chair.

  “Chasin’ Jason’s simple,” he’d explained to me once. “It’s catchin’ him that’s a bitch. A couple of times I’ve caught him, had him stuff a mud-hole in my ass and take off again.”

  As he chased Jason—lighting, inhaling, holding in the smoke—an inner storm generated raindrops of sweat on his forehead and temples. Leaning into the pipe, he looked intense, determined, even businesslike, as he pursued that big rush. Finally, on about the tenth hit—bam!

  “That’s the one everybody wants,” Jimmy said. “They call ’em ringers, ’cause it makes your ears ring.”

  After Jimmy inhaled the last big blast of the night, he still had a good-sized chunk of crack left over. It was two in the morning. The day’s work was done. The night’s rewards rattled in Jimmy’s head. Everything was tied to the rock.

  “I’ve got this in my pocket, “he said. “I can do one of three things with it: I can smoke it up and it’ll be gone in ten minutes, I can go get sex with it, or I can sell it.”

  Jimmy was already high, and he’d copped fifty bucks on the deal. That left the middle option.

  “I know hundreds of girls who will trade some draws for this stuff,” he said. “Good, bad, and indifferent.”

  Before he sold to Joey, Jimmy had sworn he’d made his last deal, at least until he got off probation for that marijuana bust. It’s rarely that easy to leave the game though. In the months after, he was still setting up acquaintances with small amounts of cocaine. He was still on the pipe, too. In fact, he’d smoked up coke he was holding for dealers and was waiting for the income tax return from his janitor job so he could pay them back.

  Unemployed, in debt, and living with his mom, Jimmy was a long way from the days when he’d rolled with Johnny and the Mexicans and sampled every hooker who came through Lansing—over two hundred in all, he said. But of the million dollars that had passed through his pocket, he didn’t think he’d wasted a cent.

  “For as much money as I’ve made and spent and burned, I’ll have a lot to show for it,” he told me that night in my kitchen. “I’ve got memories, good times, parties that seemed like they’d never end. I haven’t got shit now; I ain’t even got a car. I’ll probably be like the rest of the leftover hippies. Sittin’ around, gettin’ high, thinking about all the things I could have done with my life, and remembering all the things I did.”

  IN 1990, Michigan elected a Republican governor. In his first budget, John Engler cut heating assistance, medical care, aid to families with dependent children, day care, and aid to senior citizens. He eliminated General Assistance, a welfare program that supported 83,000 childless men and women. The cuts took effect on October 1, 1991, just as autumn began to turn crisp. In 1991, the entire nation was in a recession. Michigan was always hit hard by economic downturns. This one was no exception.

  “There are jobs out there,” the governor told our four hundred thousand unemployed. At the same time he claimed work was available, Engler eliminated Job Start, a training program for ten thousand youths who would otherwise have been on welfare. His director of social services called the cuts “a really interesting social experiment.”

  In Detroit, the newly homeless crowded into abandoned buildings, occupied a vacant housing project, and built a tent city, which they called “Englerville,” in a public park. The Detroit police tore Englerville down tw
ice before it was reconstructed outside a Methodist church. In Copemish, a village in northern Michigan, a woman died of an aneurysm after cutting her dosage of high blood pressure medicine in half, trying to stretch her supply after the state stopped paying. Two Detroit men tried to heat an abandoned building with a barbecue grill. They asphyxiated in their sleep. And in Pontiac, a family dried its clothes on the space heater they plugged in after their gas was cut off. The clothes caught fire. A two-year-old, a four-year-old, and a six-year-old burned to death.

  The state capitol—a soft-boiled egg wearing a Prussian helmet, surrounded by Civil War statuary and northern catalpas—rose to its ovoid pinnacle above a green common in the center of Lansing. But of course, it belonged to everyone in Michigan, from Monroe in the Lower Peninsula to Ironwood in the Upper. In early December, during a whirling snowstorm, a group of homeless men from Detroit pitched a tent on the capitol lawn. A large sky-colored tent, the sort raised by a one-night-stand circus, it was equipped with cots, food tables, a TV, a radio, and, for warmth, old-fashioned propane heaters made of tin. They called themselves Michigan Up and Out of Poverty.

  “Englerville USA” looked like the camp of an army that had buried its dead after a battle. It was nicknamed Operation Michigan Storm, after the previous winter’s invasion of Iraq. The men who lived in the tent wore camouflage combat fatigues and carried walkie-talkies, looking like a troupe of cold-weather Schwarzkopfs.

  “We wear these uniforms, one, to be visible, and two, because it’s war on the poor,” said the group’s minister of information, James Ford. Ford had been a $3,000-a-month cologne salesman at Hudson’s, until he’d quit to take a job as a regional representative for Aramis, a career decision that would land him on the streets. Aramis laid him off before he had worked long enough to qualify for unemployment. By August, he was evicted from his high-rise apartment. For months before discovering Michigan Up and Out of Poverty, Ford slept in cars, abandoned buildings, and shelters. Homelessness had not fully abraded his salesman’s polish, so he was appointed spokesman.

  When a delegation from Tent City tried to visit Engler’s office, its members went in uniform. The camouflaged emissaries were met by members of Engler’s staff, who asked the group to write a letter requesting a meeting, and, oh, to leave their address.

  “They had the audacity to ask us for our written address,” an incredulous Tent Citizen named Kenneth Shaw said later. “We’re right across the street. Englerville, USA.”

  That winter, I was unemployed myself. In the two years since I’d graduated from college, I hadn’t been able to find a full-time job. So I’d pieced it together. I wrote newspaper articles for $25 a byline. I chopped weeds in a parking lot, rented movies in a video store, delivered magazines and telephone books door-to-door, and chauffeured a shady “trader” who had lost his driver’s license for speeding. I wasn’t afraid of work, but money, it seemed, was afraid of me. Tent City was the most exciting thing to come to Lansing since a women’s bowling tournament three years earlier, so I hung around, taking notes that I hoped to turn into another magazine article. (Like my article about Jimmy Oliver, it would appear in Z, under the department heading “The Streets.”) I was standing outside the tent, a week or so before Christmas, when Engler walked past with a posse of aides.

  “Mr. Ford says ‘Merry Christmas,’” Kenneth Shaw called out.

  “Merry Christmas,” the governor replied.

  “When are you going to come out to the tent city?”

  Engler walked on, probably weary of browbeating. Earlier that day, twenty-five nuns had serenaded him with songs of faith and protest, including “Kumbaya.”

  Tent City had a five-hour permit, but once it went up, its leaders vowed to keep it up until Engler restored money for health care, job training, and education and instituted a “Helpfare” program to encourage people on the dole to work. Engler’s spokesman (one of my high school classmates) called Ford and his lieutenants “professional activists.”

  “They’re not really homeless,” he said. “If they are truly homeless, then they could be in a shelter.”

  This enraged Ford. After only a few months on the street, he looked healthy and smooth featured but whenever someone questioned his poverty, anger bled through his fraying salesman’s manner.

  “There’s only one man in here who’s not homeless,” Ford shouted when I quoted the governor’s spokesman to him. He hit me with a Chuck D stare. “If this tent was knocked down, I’d have a long walk back to a city I’m familiar with. If you don’t think there’s homeless, talk to this guy over here.”

  Ford motioned to a thin black man with whittled cheeks and crooked, gapped teeth. The man, dressed for winter in Velcro sneakers, green polyester trousers, and a thin black jacket, walked over with a rickety gait.

  “Talk to this reporter, man,” Ford said.

  “Naaaaw, I can’t do that,” he groaned.

  “Yeah, you can. You got as much right to talk as I do.”

  So the man sat down on one of the wooden folding chairs that ringed the propane heater and told me his story. His name was LeVerne Boone. He had fought in Vietnam, then worked on the assembly line at a Ford plant in Mount Clemens. Debilitated by physical and psychic combat wounds, he collapsed on the line in 1978. Unable to continue working in the shop, he found a job at Burger King but was eventually fired.

  “I’ve been homeless ever since ’89,” he said in a quiet voice. “I had all my stuff set out on the street two times last year, two times the year before that.”

  Boone pulled a letter from a stack of worn papers he carried in his waist-length winter jacket. (The fabric was too thin, he said, but he used “psychology” to will himself warm.) It was from the Michigan Department of Social Services. Dated September 22, 1991, the letter informed him that his welfare benefits had been cut from $173 a month to $51 a month.

  “I never did see that fifty-one dollars,” he said. Until the cuts came, he had been living with a girlfriend, but then she kicked him out.

  “I guess she wanted someone else,” he said, shrugging.

  Boone slept in parks and under bridges, or stayed up all night in a hospital waiting room. When the tent city rose on the capitol lawn, he was one of the first Lansing homeless to take shelter there.

  “It gave me a lot of positive ideas about myself,” he said. “Gave me hope. It opened the door where I met some very important people from the House [of Representatives], and they listen to me, and know what’s going on with the brothers and sisters. Any time you get somebody with political office to stand up with you, that means a lot. That’s the greatest feeling in the world.”

  Since the Detroiters had their own tent city, at the Methodist church back in their hometown, they hoped Lansing’s homeless would eventually take over the capitol tent. Ten days after the raising, the locals had begun to take on some responsibility. LeVerne Boone especially experienced a revival. He had become a spokesman for the protesters and pointed proudly to a newspaper article in which he’d been quoted. When the Detroit chapter of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade asked to march outside the tent, Boone told them no.

  “We don’t need that kind of trouble here,” he lectured a young man. “We got homeless people in here and if you young people want to be with our coalition, you got to follow our agenda. You’re just gonna be be-boppin’ around here in your leather jackets.”

  To a man slumped in a chair, Boone said, “You can’t let them tell you you’re nobody … a man who has a wife and four kids. Come on, man, hold your head up! You got nothing to be ashamed of ’cause you’re homeless.”

  This was on a Saturday afternoon. The tent was thronged with newspaper reporters, Young Communists in berets and Yasser Arafat scarves, homeless men in military uniforms, middle-class fellow travelers who worked as legislative aides and social workers in the surrounding state office buildings. A folksinger led a chorus of “Amazing Grace” (Lansing was said to have the second-most-vigorous folk music sce
ne in the nation, after Cambridge, Massachusetts, probably because it has a similar concentration of academics, earnest liberal Protestants, and lesbians). Local sympathizers donated food, which the homeless wrapped in foil and cooked on the lids of the propane heaters.

  By night, though, the tent was nearly empty. Most of the Detroiters had slipped away to motel rooms rented by the American Red Cross. A small group sat around a heater, watching TV, while others stretched out on cots. The wind outside was stinging. Gusts shook the canvas and blew through the tent’s seams. Everyone’s breath was frosty and everyone’s toes were numb, even men who could afford boots.

  At eleven thirty P.M., the tent flap opened and Lauro Valles entered, leading a shivering giant who had been sleeping without coat or gloves in a parking ramp. The man looked as though he’d been rescued from a snowbank. His face and hands were blush red and he held his arms stiff, as though he were in chains. He was laid on a cot. Several men piled blankets on him, then began massaging his limbs. A fellow homeless man took down the giant’s story: He was from Battle Creek and had accidentally boarded a bus to Lansing, forty-five miles away. Lacking the fare to return home, he had spent the last three days on the street. (Later, a woman would recognize the drifter as a Vietnam veteran who had been in and out of mental hospitals since the late 1960s.)

  “Do you need anything?” he was asked.

  “Coffee and a cigarette,” he said weakly, clutching himself and shivering.

  “All the shelters were closed,” one of the Detroiters said. “They close at six. If this man didn’t come into Tent City, he’d have froze to death. Because Tent City is open twenty-four hours to people in need.”

  Valles, the man’s rescuer, was a Latino wearing a tall Bolivian hat. The others called him “Chief,” because of his deadpan face. Between nine o’clock and one in the morning, he took four people off the frigid streets.

  Less than a week after that cold night, Tent City was dismantled by the state of Michigan. As had happened to them many times before, the homeless were evicted by a landlord. Their tent’s owner refused to accept another week’s rent, which was being paid by the campaign fund of a Democratic legislator. The capitol’s groundskeeper also said the propane heaters, along with 230 bales of hay stacked outside the canvas walls for insulation, were the makings of “a barbecue situation.”