Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis

by Mark Binelli

  There were nine other students, six of them women, everyone black but for a towheaded, Polish-accented man who looked about six foot five. Pastel watercolors (floral bouquet, covered bridge) adorned the thin walls. Ector stood at the front of the room, forty-two years old, fit, conservatively dressed (blue slacks, tucked dress shirt), with short hair and a five o’clock shadow. By day, he worked as a systems analyst for a company whose major client was one of the Big Three auto companies.

  Ector’s pedagogical style seemed the product of a Dale Carnegie–inspired handbook on effective public speaking. He projected his crisply enunciated words toward the back of the room and made deliberate eye contact with each of his students, occasionally underlining a point with a sudden and intense grin. Unlike Carnegie, Ector was wearing a pair of bulky handguns, visibly holstered on either hip, which made his telegraphed confidence appear sinister and slightly unhinged. (There is something unnerving about a motivational speaker whose motivational purpose is to convince you to carry a weapon and understand precisely when it is legal under state law to use that weapon to kill.) Ector told the class the reason to carry two weapons was so you’d have a backup in case one of the guns misfired.

  Among the other students, there was one young couple, a paunchy retirement-aged man wearing a UAW cap, and a compact, fussily made-up woman in a camouflage Detroit Tigers cap. The woman had brought along her own handgun in a black carrying case. Seated directly beside me, a pretty, broad-faced woman with a regal posture took copious notes on a yellow legal pad. Even the students who didn’t take notes listened raptly as Ector worked his central thesis: the crucial necessity of constant vigilance and hyperawareness of one’s surroundings, sleep being the only exemption. If you’re a heavy sleeper, Ector recommended buying a dog.

  Ector laid out a number of “be aware” scenarios where a crime might occur. Some seemed universally applicable (a car following you home), others specific to Detroit (a car stopping next to yours at a red light after dark). Whenever Ector wanted to emphasize a point, he narrowed one end of his mouth and cocked it sharply, at the same time puffing his cheek and making a clicking noise with his tongue.

  The class covered practical gun-related concerns—the pluses and minuses of various-calibered handguns,3 the inefficiency of certain pistols, how the difference between store-bought and home-swaged bullets was akin to the difference between an off-the-rack and a custom suit (perhaps as a nod to the number of women in the room, Ector noted he typically pressed his bullets while watching Oprah), and how hollow-point bullets tended to “solve the penetration problem.”

  “At what point does someone stop being a threat to you?” Ector asked the class.

  A woman in a faded teal sweatshirt raised her hand. The effort seemed to exhaust her. “When they can’t move?” she asked.

  “You shoot until he stops!” Ector shouted, his eyes flashing as if lit up by gunpowder. Lowering his voice, he continued, “You may have to shoot a person more than once. You may have to shoot a person a lot of times. It’s getting colder, so people wear a lot of clothes. A person might be high on drugs.”

  His voice turning grave, Ector told us it was better not to carry a gun at all than to have one and not be prepared to pull the trigger.

  “Do you have it in you to defend yourself?” he asked. “Or would you pull out your gun and wave it around and hope they magically disappear?” The “they” referred to a would-be assailant. He paused, arranging his face into a disgusted look, before continuing, “This is ripped from the headlines: what if your assailant is twelve years old?” A few months earlier, a twelve-year-old boy had, indeed, been arrested in Detroit for murder, after shooting a young woman during an attempted carjacking.

  “What if,” Ector went on, “a twelve-year-old with a shotgun in his pants rolls up on a bicycle? Would you have it in you to shoot him?”

  A low chorus of yeses rose from the seats, though one of the women, demurring, began, “Well, it depends on how big—”

  “He could be a runt!” Ector interrupted. “If you are not prepared to shoot a twelve-year-old, you should not carry a handgun!” Shifting to a faux-whiny voice, he said, “‘Ooh, Rick’s hard-core. He’s talking about shooting children.’”

  The woman in the teal sweatshirt said, “If he’s big enough to point a gun in your face, he’s big enough to take a bullet.”

  A plurality of my classmates nodded approvingly.

  Eventually, Ector introduced the attorney who would lecture us on the specific instances in which we could legally defend ourselves. You weren’t allowed to shoot someone for trying to steal your car. But if that same person made the mistake of breaking into your home, you, the home owner, could assume that person meant you bodily harm and so you had permission to shoot to kill, thanks to a law passed in 2006 eliminating a gun owner’s so-called duty to retreat. The catch was, the home invader had to be inside your home, not simply, say, standing on the front lawn throwing a brick through your front window.

  A copiously freckled woman wanted to know if you should drag the dead body of someone you’d shot into the house before the cops arrived.

  The lawyer said, “That would be a bad idea.” He spoke through his nose.

  “A police officer told me I should do that!” the woman exclaimed, sounding annoyed. Her question had not exactly been hypothetical, as a few of us learned during a break, when she explained how a group of her nephew’s friends tried to break into her home one afternoon. They’d expected her to be at work when she’d been home sick—a severe miscalculation. “When I heard people running up my back door, I put my baby girl in the bathroom and came out blazing,” she said, the pitch of her voice rising with recalled excitement. “They got to running, I got to shooting and chasing!” She’d followed the would-be burglars into the street, firing after them, but nobody ended up hit. Still, the body-dragging question had possible utility for the future.

  When the lawyer finished this section of his talk, he said, “Okay, so that’s how you get to shoot someone.”

  He went on to discuss “overkill,” which basically meant shooting someone an excessive number of times, after they no longer posed a threat.

  “Unfortunately, you can shoot yourself out of the right to kill,” the lawyer said. “If he’s on the ground twitching and bleeding, you can’t stand over him and shoot him.”

  A smattering of awwws rose from the class.

  “You just ticked off a few people, man,” Ector said from the back of the room.

  My note-taking neighbor, who, later, when we graded one another’s written tests, would receive a perfect score, raised her hand. She spoke in a crisp tone befitting her posture. “Let’s say I’m sitting in my living room with all the lights off and Pookie and Ray Ray come in the dark,” she said. “Is that an ambush, if I’m waiting with my gun? Am I allowed to put a cap in their ass? Because I’m about to move back to the hood and I’m gonna have two guns with me. It’s a neighborhood where things happen.”

  The lawyer indicated that a shooting in this instance would likely be justified.

  My neighbor muttered, “I know those Negroes gonna try me. I got a vacant house they keep messing with.”

  Ector resumed his portion of the lecture, this time to discuss marksmanship. “This is where you want to shoot the bad guy,” Ector explained, pressing an 8½ × 11 sheet of paper to the center of the lawyer’s chest. The lawyer stood still, making no indication of any discomfort in his role. “No aiming for the arm or the leg because”—Ector shifted to his mewling, effeminate voice—“you don’t want to hurt them. You’re not a sharpshooter! That’s why we have this area—” He tapped the lawyer’s chest, rustling the paper. “So you can put them down.”

  Near the end of class, Ector issued a final warning: “Just because you have a CPP”—a concealed pistol permit—“does not mean you can carry that throwaway. Get rid of it.”

  The freckle-faced woman who’d chased her nephew’s friends down the street raised her
hand and asked, “All of them?”

  * * *

  During one of the breaks, Ector stepped outside for a cigarette and I joined him for a chat. He said he’d been uninterested in guns until seven years prior, when he’d been robbed in his own driveway. He lived in Rosedale Park, a neighborhood on the northwest side that holds a reputation as one of Detroit’s more stable. One night in October, he’d arrived home after dark and, exiting his car, found two teenagers waiting in the shadows, one packing a gun. The kids ordered him to sit down in his driveway and empty his pockets. Ector had so little cash, they attempted to force him to drive to an ATM, but he managed to convince them he had wildly overdrawn his account after a long night at a bar.

  “They weren’t that big,” Ector told me. He did his thoughtful cheek-puffing thing. You could still detect the sting in his voice. “Average kids. I think I could’ve took ’em. But I’ll never know. Because they had a gun and I didn’t.”

  Ector had kept a twelve-gauge shotgun in his home for protection, but he’d never used a handgun before. The next day, he went to his local police precinct and asked about acquiring a permit. “They tried to discourage me,” Ector said. “‘The solution is not everyone getting a gun. That only adds to the problem.’ It incensed me a little bit. I thought, ‘You were not there when I got robbed.’”

  That same day, driving along 8 Mile, Ector spotted an ad for a CCW class on the side of another car. It wasn’t that much of a coincidence: such ads are common sights all over the city. Still, Ector took it as a sign and called the school and learned that the next class (Basic Pistol) was scheduled for the following day. He took it. Six months later, he’d become a certified instructor.

  Today, Ector evangelizes for gun rights with the zeal of a recent convert. Sometimes, just to test himself, he’ll attempt to get through an entire day without allowing a single stranger to get within ten feet of him. (He allots himself one point if he spots the stranger approaching and penalizes himself ten points if someone “sneaks up” behind him.) Citing more Detroit crime statistics, Ector went on, “You know, there’s no civil liability if the police don’t respond in a timely manner. You’re officially on your own. The chief of police called Detroit the Wild, Wild West. Detroit gets picked on a lot, sometimes unfairly. But a lot of the criticism is justified. It’s really bad in the city now. If the city is this bad, I’d think, as a public service, they’d come out and say, ‘Go buy a gun for your protection until we get it together.’”

  Ector also pointed out that some of Michigan’s earliest restrictions on gun possession came in direct response to the Ossian Sweet case. In September 1925, Sweet, an African American doctor, moved into a white neighborhood on Detroit’s east side with his wife and infant daughter. The booming automobile industry had resulted in severe housing shortages in the city’s black ghettos, forcing Sweet—upwardly mobile and ambitious but no rabble-rousing activist—to risk crossing Detroit’s clearly demarcated lines of segregation. Shortly after the family’s move, a mob of angry whites gathered in the street and began to pelt the home with rocks and bricks, eventually storming the front door. In the ensuing melee, shots were fired by either Sweet or one of his dinner guests and two white men were wounded, one fatally. Sweet, his wife, and seven other men present were arrested and put on trial for murder. The defendants’ eventual acquittal, after a pair of sensational trials in which they were represented by Clarence Darrow, is considered a milestone of the modern civil rights movement and has been chronicled in gripping detail by Kevin Boyle in his 2005 book, Arc of Justice.

  “He was a very successful doctor who wanted to move to a nice diverse neighborhood where he wasn’t wanted,” was how Ector put it. “That law was designed strictly for the purpose of denying people of color from getting firearms.” Ector admitted that the NRA had an “image problem” when it came to race. “People hear NRA and they think militias, rednecks,” he said. “But there are other black people in the NRA. Not many walk around with a black NRA cap, like me.” He smiled ironically, then recommended a book called Black Man with a Gun.4 “Actually?” Ector told me, “I don’t think the NRA goes far enough.”

  * * *

  On an unseasonably balmy fall afternoon, a couple of weeks after the gun class, I took a walk downtown to check out the site of the original French settlement of Detroit, Fort Pontchartrain. A twenty-five-story hotel called the Portchartrain had been built on the footprint of the fort in the midsixties. The hotel had been one of Detroit’s most luxurious upon its completion, but in 2009, Mutual Bank had initiated foreclosure proceedings on the property, which had been steadily losing what little Detroit hotel business remained to the newer casino hotels, and now “the Pontch,” the affectionate local diminutive for the place for as long as I can remember, stood empty.

  Since it was such a lovely day, I decided to stretch out on a grassy embankment overlooking the river and read. A pair of homeless men sat on a bench on the promenade; a Middle Eastern tourist was taking his wife’s photograph. To the east, Belle Isle smoldered in seasonal auburns. The absence of people made it easy to stare at the river, pixilating brilliantly in the sunlight on this cloudless autumn afternoon, and imagine Cadillac’s convoy emerging from the distance, the stoic oarsmen fighting back grins at the sight of land, Cadillac himself assuming a Washingtonian prow stance on the lead vessel.

  At some point, a couple appeared on the river walk. When the male portion of the couple spotted me, he waved and called out, “Hey! What are you reading?” Before I could answer, he began jogging up the hill in my direction.

  The man was African American, probably in his forties, average height, slender build, wearing jeans and a black Marine Corps sweatshirt. He looked like he’d had experience sleeping outdoors, and I pegged his curiosity as an unsubtle opening bid for loose change. Upon reaching the top of the hill, though, he surprised me, saying, “I’m only asking because I love to read.” From his back pockets, he pulled out a pair of battered paperbacks: The World According to Garp and something called Algorithms. “Man, I love John Irving,” he said. “I see one of his books, I’ve got to read it.” After giving me a demonstrative, brotherhood-of-readers handshake that incorporated a slapping of fives, he introduced himself as Tony and picked up my book, a doorstopping history of Detroit. Flipping open to a random page, he began to read aloud, assuming a mock-declamatory tone: “The electric industry would set off a new boom in the copper mines, and make Michigan’s Calumet and Hecla the most lucrative mine in the world. But it was lumbermen who were coming almost to rival the wealth of their railroad acquaintances. It was, in fact, the unparalleled expansion of the railroads that created the demand for lumber.”

  Tony frowned, seeming unimpressed, and closed the book. He told me he used to read all the time in jail, despite the fact that one particular drill-sergeant-acting corrections officer (Tony said “C.O.”) always wanted to be messing with him. But Tony had been in the Marines, so he knew how to handle real drill sergeants, who, granted, also generally tended to be assholes, but you couldn’t ever back down, that was the key. Tony spoke fast, and his voice had an edgy, intense quality, though his eyes remained cold and disengaged.

  I started to tell Tony how my brother worked at a place called Children’s Village, a juvenile detention center for kids under eighteen who had been accused of crimes and were awaiting trial. Tony interrupted me and said he knew the Village, that he’d been through O.C., meaning Oakland County’s lockup, and then proceeded, under the assumption (incorrect) that I had a deep familiarity with the local criminal justice system, to rattle off references to numerous judges and jails and probationary terms, making use of increasingly cryptic jargon and undecipherable acronyms. I nodded as if I knew what he was talking about. In what sounded like a non sequitur, Tony mentioned how he wasn’t prejudiced and told a story about a recent bus ride on which he’d overheard three white boys calling each other nigger, and how this had offended some of the black bus passengers but how Tony had told his wif
e, “They from the ghetto. They hustling just like us.” Then he gave me what seemed like a pointed look and added, “Now, not everyone can say it.” I agreed that that was the case.

  Then Tony told me about how he’d been shot eleven times and stabbed three times. He began to display his various wounds, something I’ve noticed people with multiple wounds like to do—suddenly, shirts and pant legs start getting yanked up and it’s like being around tattoo enthusiasts showing off their ink. “This is my .38 watch,” Tony said, pointing with some pride to a jagged circular bullet wound on his right wrist. Rolling up his left sleeve, he flashed another entry wound farther up his arm. “Here they had to cut me to relieve the pressure,” he explained. Tugging the sleeve up even higher, almost to his shoulder, revealed a long knife scar. Then he pulled down the neck of his sweatshirt to uncover his most cherished engraving, a gnarly slug of discolored skin curled up to the edge of his jugular. “Someone tried to cut my throat,” he said, obviously pleased with himself at having survived such an attack.

  All of the wound talk prompted Tony to return to the theme of how it was not a good idea to fuck with him. As he spoke, he began to lift his sweatshirt. For a moment, I thought he was going to show me a gun. But instead, tucked into his pants, he had a butcher’s knife, alongside the scuffed, silver blade of an even larger hatchet. (The hatchet had been pantsed handle-side down.) “See, I’m not allowed to carry a gun, because of my record, but I do carpentry work sometimes, so I can carry my tools,” Tony said, deadpan.

  I didn’t get the sense that Tony was preparing to attack me with the axe, or even that he meant any sort of implicit threat. He quickly readjusted his sweatshirt and went on with whatever he’d been saying. I nodded, acting unmoved. Eventually, Tony asked if I had eighty-three cents he could borrow.