Detroit: An American Autopsy (14 page)

T
HE
F
IFTH

D
RINKING WAS THE
only thing that would make Detroit go away. My life was populated with dead men and liars and desperate people who would call me at all hours of the evening, and the only door of escape I could find was at the bottom of a bottle.

One evening my wife and I dropped our daughter off at her grandmother’s and we got good and loaded on red wine. Then the phone rang. It was a cop buddy of mine with another piece of nasty news. Three men dead on a lawn and nobody had bothered to call the authorities for four hours.

Entranced, I ignored my wife. A mistake. When I hung up the phone, she was eating a piece of cold pizza.

“I’m getting sick of this.”

Apparently she was fed up with the stories of murder victims lit on fire in abandoned houses and women who found their boyfriends hanging dead from a pair of pantyhose while dressed in their lingerie.

“Fucking deal with it,” I said. “It’s putting pizza in your fat mouth.”

“Fuck you,” she hissed.

“Fuck me?” I jumped out of my chair, took her by the wrist and smeared the pizza in her face. She slapped me.

“I’m calling 911, you fucking asshole.”

“Go ahead. I’m going to bed.”

I was upstairs sleeping, nude except for a pair of striped underpants—my own—when the cop knocked on our door.

“Charlie,” my wife yelled. “The police are here.”

She had called 911 and then, like a spoiled sorority girl, hung up the phone. Apparently no one informed my wife that the cops come anyway in the suburbs. I poured myself down the stairs in nothing but those electric striped underpants. I was surprised to see the cop—not on the porch but standing in my living room, the blue lights from his cruiser lighting up the neighborhood.

He had tricked my wife into letting him in.

“Yes, Officer?”

He was a short, stout guy with a round, slightly oily face like a ham hock sealed in plastic.

“Put some clothes on,” he ordered.

I tried some drunken legalese. “Is there justifiable reason why you have entered my domicile, Officer? Do you have reason to believe there is imminent danger here? Have I made a furtive motion?”

He shined a light on my wife. “She has blood on her face.”

I don’t know where the bitterness comes from, but when provoked, I spew like a warm can of beer. It causes problems.

“It’s pizza sauce,” I sneered. “Taste it.”

“Put your hands in front of you,” ordered Officer Ham.

I did as he said. He slapped handcuffs on me.

“Go upstairs and get him some clothes,” he told my wife.

“Do no such thing,” I ordered her.

“You don’t want clothes?” he said with an arch of the eyebrow.

“Officer, I wish to invoke my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent so as not to incriminate myself.”

“Just put some fucking clothes on.”

“Officer, I wish to invoke my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent so as not to incriminate myself.”

“Suit yourself.”

The cop led me by my shoulder across the lawn into the back of the squad car. I could see a neighbor peering out the window at the spectacle of the wife-beating redneck with the feral alley cat and church-bell wind chime being led to the pokey, barefoot and in striped blue underpants.

I woke up in the morning in a jail cell, shivering in my striped underpants. There was no one else in the cell except a cockroach tending to a half-eaten egg sandwich lying near the stainless-steel toilet.

I felt bad, hollow. A middle-aged fuckup crumbling under the bulk of a dying city. It had infected my private life, which was no longer separate from my public one. People took photos and said shitty things about me that were mostly true, but the annoying thing was they were only guessing. And now I probably had two court dates: one with the criminal judge, one with the divorce judge. I thought about my little girl and wondered what I had done bringing her back to this shit hole.

I tried to place a collect call to Frankie on the jailhouse telephone. It was one of the few numbers I had committed to memory. But the jailhouse phone was malfunctioning, the wires crossed or something. I could hear the woman’s conversation in the next cell.

“Tell him when I see him again I’m gonna put a knife in his neck,” the woman was telling her son. “Tell that motherfucker I’ll finish the job, soon’s I get outta here.”

I laughed. It was like a bucket of fresh water for my spirit. No matter how bad I had it, I wasn’t that crazy bitch in the next cell plotting to finish her boyfriend off with picnic cutlery or the sharp end of a No. 2 pencil.

“Hey,” I shouted, knocking on the one-way glass above the wooden bunk. “I want my phone call.”

“Stop beating on the glass, asshole,” came the response through the intercom. “They know you’re here.”

“I want some shoes,” I shouted back. “I’m cold.”

“There’s a pair outside the door, asshole.”

“I want a Koran,” I shouted one more time. “It’s my constitutional right. I want a Koran.”

“Put a cork in it, asshole,” said the voice in the box. He may not have had an extensive vocabulary, but he was consistent if nothing else. I suppose that’s what you want in your peace officers.

And he was right. I was acting like an asshole because deep inside that chasm I could hear my own echo: You
are
an asshole.

The cell door opened about twenty minutes later and there sitting near the threshold was a stack of clothes and a pair of sneakers. “Put those on,” said the sergeant. He was different from the guy who’d arrested me.

“Your wife refuses to file an official complaint, so you get to go.”

“I appreciate it,” I said.

“Don’t thank me, thank her,” he said. “Look, we got a lotta guys like you coming through here lately. You know what I’m saying? Things are hard. People have a few pops to wash it away. Things get out of hand. All of a sudden we got you here. That sound about right?”

“Yes sir, it does,” I said, breaking my Fifth Amendment boycott, pulling up my trousers.

“Let me give you some advice,” he said. “The next time it starts up, pick yourself a place in the house and go there. You understand? ’Cause we got your name in the computer now.”

“Thanks, Sergeant,” I said, really meaning it.

I stepped out into the Sunday morning light, hungover and ashamed. I wondered if I was going to make the Sunday papers.

I wasn’t sure where I was. I was in another town, picked up by a neighboring police force, another jurisdiction. My wife was idling in the parking lot looking sad. I waited for an emotion before deciding what to do. Finding it, I walked to the car and she rolled down the window.

“How’s the baby?”

“She’s at my mom’s. She’s fine. I’m sorry.”

“Not more than me,” I said.

I kissed her and told her I’d walk the miles home. Instead, I walked to Frankie’s rented house nearby. People mowed their yards here. You could hear the wind and birds. When I got to Frankie’s house, his girls were playing in the front yard, unattended. I had never seen that in his old neighborhood. Maybe things were turning around for him.

As for me, I didn’t know who I was fighting anymore. Probably myself, and I was killing him. I lay down in Frankie’s backyard in the tall grass under the catalpa trees and fell asleep.

THREE

FROM

THE

ASHES

B
OOM

D
ETROIT WOULD NEVER
have been if not for the beaver.

Louis XIII, the ambiguously homosexual king of France, who had a double set of teeth and a pronounced stutter, was fond of prancing about the streets of Paris wearing a beaver-pelt hat.

As it is with Europeans, the king of England decided he too enjoyed prancing about the streets of London in a beaver-pelt hat. The style caught on and the beaver became all but extinct in Europe.

The next king of France, Louis’s son Louis XIV, dispatched men to the New World to procure more beaver skins and instructed a man who called himself the “sieur de Cadillac” to establish a fort in the lower Great Lakes to block the English advance on his fur monopoly.

On June 5, 1701, Cadillac and two hundred men shoved off from Montreal in twenty-five canoes. Commandant Cadillac was a hustler. His real name was Antoine Laumet, and it is believed he had stowed away on a ship to escape debts in France, arriving in the New World in 1683.

He quickly learned the land and the customs of the natives, which made him invaluable to the crown. Cadillac also illegally trafficked in liquor and furs with the natives and was for a short time thrown in prison. That would also make Cadillac Detroit’s first dope dealer.

Cadillac chose the strait—
détroit
in French—that connects Lake Erie to Lake Huron, the gateway to the entire Great Lakes basin and its copious beaver, as the site of his new Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit.

And thus Detroit was born in July 1701.

My family was here from the earliest days. It began with my ancestor Joseph Chevalier, a Frenchman from Normandy who came to Montreal to carve a life out of the wilderness. He took as his wife Françoise-Marthe Barton, one of the
filles du roi
, or king’s daughters, a group of eight hundred women sent under the sponsorship of Louis XIV to marry French settlers and populate New France.

She gave Joseph Chevalier thirteen children including Jean Chevalier, a
coureur de bois
, literally a runner of the woods—a wild breed of man who lived among the natives, drank and smoked heavily, could paddle a canoe at fifty-five strokes a minute and thumbed his nose at the authority of the crown.

Chevalier arrived at Fort Detroit in 1705, not four years after its founding by Antoine Cadillac.

Detroit was a dangerous frontier town with three bands of rival Indians living on its outskirts. In 1706, a priest and a soldier were killed in an Indian uprising, making my great-grandfather Chevalier a material witness to the first recorded murder in Detroit. And like tens of thousands of murders in Detroit since then, the priest’s homicide remains unsolved. A cold case.

* * *

Detroit in the nineteenth
century was the center of the nation’s carriage and wheel and stove industries because of its lumber and the rich ore deposits in the upper reaches of Michigan. This set the stage for tinkerers like Ransom Olds, who was among the nation’s largest carriage manufacturers before he turned to cars. Henry Ford, a farmer, built his first automobile plant in Highland Park in 1899. Detroit would rapidly become the world’s machine shop, its factory floor, growing in population from 300,000 to 1.3 million in the twenty-five years following Ford’s grand opening.

General Motors was founded in 1909, and a host of other car companies blossomed: Chrysler, Packard, Studebaker, Hudson, Olds, and Dodge among them.

In 1919, the young and hungry men of GM devised an ingenious scheme to supplant Ford as the number-one carmaker in the world.

Credit.

Ford, a notorious miser and social ascetic, did not believe it was a good idea for Americans to buy consumer goods like automobiles on credit. He opted for the layaway plan, allowing a buyer to pay a little each month until he had the car paid for in its entirety. The problem is this took five years, and it was hard to hold on to a factory job for that long.

So General Motors came up with a financing arm: the General Motors Acceptance Corporation, or GMAC.

Over the next decade, most durable goods like cars and refrigerators and washing machines were bought on a down payment and a monthly installment payment plus interest. The first credit card was issued in 1950 by the Diners Club, and by that time General Motors had overtaken Ford as the number-one carmaker in the world. American dominance as well as consumerism and debt were in full bloom.

Nearly a century after its founding, GM had more than $1 trillion loaned to car buyers and had expanded into other businesses like home mortgages.

During the Roaring Twenties, fueled by growing assembly lines, the population of the Motor City surpassed those of Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore, old East Coast port cities that were founded on maritime shipping when the world moved by boat.

The Europeans marveled at the rapturous whirl of making and spending in the new America. At the center of this economic dynamo was Detroit and its flaming smokestacks.

“It is the home of mass production, very high wages and colossal profits, of reckless installment buying and shifting labour surplus,” wrote the British politician and author Ramsay Muir in 1925. “It regards itself as the temple of a new gospel of progress to which I will venture to give the name Detroitism.”

The air over Detroit was ashen and sooty, the color of a filthy dishrag. The water in the river was so poisoned, it was said you could bottle it and sell it as paint thinner. Detroit was choking on industry.

In 1934, the last beaver was sighted in the Detroit River.

B
UST

O
N
J
UNE 1, 2009,
General Motors declared bankruptcy, following Chrysler, which had done so a month earlier. Ford was teetering.

For the first time in anyone’s memory, every auto factory in Michigan sat idle. Plans were made to reconstitute the companies, phase out models and close dealerships. More than 300,000 people in Michigan lost their jobs. In a town founded by a man named Cadillac, you could no longer purchase a Cadillac.

It was a historic day and I took a swing by the Renaissance Center downtown, GM’s headquarters. Japanese and German media crews were camped across the street, waiting to beam live to Tokyo and Berlin the news that they had finally won.

I gave a German the “welcome to town” thumbs-up and he gave me a self-important frown. Funny, foreign journalists are even bigger assholes than their American counterparts.

Regardless of their national origin, most of the media knew nothing about the machinations in the boardroom, but that never stopped them from pretending they did.

If the German had bothered to ask I would have told him the Renaissance complex was half empty and the executive suites faced Canada, so the GM executives wouldn’t have to look down on the devastation of Detroit.

Sniffing for a story, I jumped in my ’73 Checker cab—made in Kalamazoo, Michigan—and headed for Hamtramck, remembering the American Axle plant located there.

The plant, which straddles Detroit and Hamtramck, was the largest in Axle’s sprawling worldwide manufacturing complex. It mainly produced axles for GM’s heavy-duty pickups, which accounted for about three quarters of its sales.

Beleaguered Hamtramck, an industrial hamlet of 22,000 people that is completely surrounded by the city of Detroit, was increasingly becoming a town with too many mice and not enough men. A welfare office opened on Joseph Campau Street, an almost unthinkable concept in this once Polish, once working-class town.

The mayor had her car stolen, and an elderly city councilman tried to beat off a carjacker with a cane. He failed, and the carjacker made off with his jalopy. And his cane.

Since American Axle was spun off from General Motors and reconstituted in 1994, the UAW negotiated with American Axle, not General Motors.

When I had arrived back home the previous winter, Local 235 here was on strike. It was a cold, bitter dispute, complete with old-school fires in the oil drums. The unionized workers, numbering nearly two thousand at the time, lost. They gave in to deep wage cuts, in some cases from $28 an hour to $14, in exchange for keeping their jobs. Apparently it was not enough.

In contrast, Dick Dauch, the CEO and chairman of American Axle, was given an $8.5 million bonus by his board of directors after the strike and gave assurances to the workers and the city of Hamtramck that he would keep production there. It was lip service.

* * *

At six
A.M
., with the streets of Hamtramck all but empty, Bill Alford, the president of Local 235, shambled up the street to punch in for work at Plant No. 8. He cut a pathetic figure, one shoe untied and dressed in a hockey sweater with a large
C
embossed on the chest.
C
is for captain, but Alford was now the captain of almost nobody.

As GM planned to officially declare bankruptcy, more than five hundred workers employed at the plant quietly received a letter by FedEx informing them that they had been indefinitely laid off.

Normally, presidents of local unions do not go to work at the plant, as management prefers not to have labor agitators on its factory floors. But when there were too few employees to do the work, Alford was required by contract to return to the plant.

And so Alford was left with the humiliating task of having to pack up his workplace and load crates of tools and machinery onto a truck bound for Texas and Mexico.

“They don’t want a middle class,” Alford told me as we stood in the rain outside the plant, his shoestring still untied. “I see that in the future people will have to move to Mexico for a job. This is a dark day for the American laborer.”

I went to see about an interview with Dick Dauch at his corporate headquarters down the street. I was thrown off the property by security.

I went back to the union hall, where workers were flowing in trying to find out what the hell was going on with their jobs.

“I’m not ever going to buy another Chevy,” said a hard, lean man named Jeff Johnson. Johnson received the layoff notice on Saturday, his birthday, mistaking the FedEx package for a present.

“I’m not buying another new car because I’m not ever going to be able to afford a new car.”

Johnson laughed. “It’s a good thing they ain’t letting us back in there. I’d fuck up all that machinery that I could, motherfuckers.” And with that he was gone.

Dauch had betrayed Hamtramck and I wrote the story that way. Nevertheless, my paper was the voice of the business class and our executives belonged to the same social clubs as our masters of the universe. One of them stopped at my desk to explain to me Dauch’s thinking and his unhappiness with my story.

“Look,” he said to me, taking a chair next to my desk. He was wearing a starched blue shirt and suspenders. “Dick believed in the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing and he tried to make it work. But he couldn’t, not with the absenteeism and the entitlement mind-set of the Michigan worker.”

Apparently one third of Axle’s workforce was out sick on any given day of the week, he explained.

“How do you know that?” I asked. “You just going to take his word for it, or does he have paperwork to back it up? Tell Dick for me, I’ll meet with him any time of the day, but if he’s going to make claims like that, I need to see the proof.”

“Okay, Charlie,” he said, patting me on the shoulder. “Try to be a little more discerning in your assessments.”

Upset, I went outside for a cigarette. The city, what’s left of it, burns night after night. Nature—in the form of pheasants, hawks, foxes, coyotes and wild dogs—had stepped in to fill the vacuum, reclaiming a little more of the landscape each day. The streets were empty and cratered. The skyscrapers were holograms. I stood and admired a cottonwood sapling growing out of the roof of the Lafayette Building. This was like living in Pompeii, except the people weren’t covered in ash. We were alive.

By the end of the year, with Hamtramck on the verge of bankruptcy and an official unemployment rate near 15 percent in the state of Michigan, the price of stock in American Axle had tripled. Dauch got a $1 million raise.

And if you needed a metaphor for how retrograde things were becoming, a beaver was sighted nesting in the Detroit River for the first time in seventy-five years.