Motor City Burning (2 page)

He was jolted from his reverie by the shriek of a traffic cop's whistle. This edition of Detroit's finest, an Irishman with a cranberry nose, was holding up traffic with a big white-gloved paw so pedestrians could cross Trumbull. Even now, the sight of a Detroit cop sent a hot flash of terror through Willie. He hunched his shoulders and kept his eyes down as he hurried across the street.

When he made it safely to the other side he exhaled, then looked up and saw the great sooty iceberg of Tiger Stadium looming in front of him. It was lovely. Then came the smell of a charcoal fire warming bags of peanuts, tended by a whiskery old man in a hooded sweatshirt. “Roasted peanuts here!” he barked, bouncing from foot to foot to keep warm. “Gitcher hot peanuts!” The man was wearing gloves with the fingertips cut away, just like the gloves people wore to pick cotton back home.

As Willie waited in line at the ticket window, new smells came to him—wind-borne ash and cinders from the city's smokestacks, a vaguely briny smell off the river, diesel exhaust from idling buses. And then, after he paid fifty cents for a bleacher seat and began ascending the switchbacks that carried fans from the street to the upper deck, he realized he was climbing into a symphony of smells, a single complex aroma that had been composing itself since the first baseball game was played fifty-six Aprils ago in this, America's oldest big-league ballpark. It was equal parts mustard, sweat, stale beer, urine, popcorn, wet wool, vomit, perfume, cigar smoke and boiled pork. It was that musty smell iron gives off after it has stood in one place through fifty-six scorching summers and fifty-six Arctic winters and an unknowable number of sleet storms and baseball games and football games, half-time pageants and fistfights and pennant drives, after it has absorbed the shuffling of millions of pairs of feet, heard the guttural animal roar of cheers and boos and taunts, after it has housed the whole range of human emotions, from ecstasy to scorn to despair, that touch the lives of people who live in a sports-mad city like Detroit.

He was winded when he reached the upper deck. Pausing to catch his breath, he told himself winter was over and he needed to get back out on the basketball court. He noticed something on the concession stand menus called “Red Hots,” and the cryptic words CRUSH ALL CUPS stenciled on the walls at regular intervals. He had entered a house of mysteries and secret codes. The bleachers were reached by long catwalks suspended by cables from riveted iron girders. Looking down gave him a mild sense of vertigo, so he lifted his eyes to the rectangle of blue sky before him. He saw seagulls. And then he stepped into the sunshine.

Arrayed before him was the most beautiful room he'd ever seen. It was painted green, this irregular open-air room, its upper-deck seats sheltered by a tarpaper roof, the field a luxuriously cross-hatched emerald carpet. The infield dirt was tinged with something black. Coal dust? The bases glowed like sugar cubes.

He climbed toward the big black scoreboard at the top of the bleachers, toward the huge A.C. spark plug shooting through a ring of fire. From up there he could see the spires of downtown, but he turned his back on the skyline and studied this lovely open-air room. The longer he gazed out at the park, the smaller it seemed to become. It was hard to believe the place could hold upwards of 50,000 people. It was so . . . so intimate.

The American flag on the roof behind home plate was at half-mast, as he'd expected, and the pennants of the American League teams rimming the roof were all crisply horizontal from the river wind that cleared the roof on the first base side and galloped across the outfield. He was glad he'd worn a sweater under his nylon windbreaker. He wondered how it was humanly possible to watch the Lions play football in this place in the middle of December.

By the time a fat man in a tuxedo stood behind home plate and sang the National Anthem, the bleachers were nearly full. It was not going to be a sellout, but it was a fine surly crowd. After a minute of itchy silence for Martin Luther King, everyone stood and roared as the Tigers were introduced and sprinted out to their positions. The loudest cheers were for Al Kaline, the veteran right fielder, and Willie Horton, a home-grown hero, a powerful black slugger who tipped his cap as he jogged to his position in left.

A black pitcher named Earl Wilson strode to the mound and began warming up. Of course Willie knew there were black pitchers in the major leagues. He'd listened to St. Louis Cardinals games on KMOX radio since he was a boy, and he would never forget the seventh game of the 1964 World Series. He had just returned to his apartment in Tuskegee to write about the fires he'd walked through during that so-called Freedom Summer, and the Series came as a welcome distraction. A bunch of his old college buddies crowded into his apartment for the seventh game because he had the best radio reception and the coldest beer in town and because Bob Gibson, the intimidating black pitcher, was starting the game for the Cardinals. Surely Gibson understood that there were brothers crowded around radios like this all over the country, hanging on his every pitch, hoping he could put down the vaunted Yankees, the whitest of dynasties, and lay to rest the myth that black people were lazy, that they weren't as mentally tough as whites, that they couldn't be trusted with jobs as momentous as pitching the deciding game of the World Series. Gibson pitched brilliantly, then gave up two runs in a tense ninth inning before getting the Yankees' dangerous second baseman, Bobby Richardson, to pop up, sealing the Cardinals' victory.

Sitting in the Tiger Stadium bleachers now, watching Earl Wilson throw his last warm-up pitches, Willie remembered feeling a flood of elation and relief when Bob Gibson got that last out. So he was aware that there were black pitchers—black stars at every position—in the major leagues. But knowing this and seeing it with his own eyes for the first time were two very different things.

Just before Earl Wilson threw the first pitch of the 1968 season, two brothers came up the aisle and sat on the bench in front of Willie. One was middle-aged, very dark-skinned, almost blue, what Willie called “African black.” White hair boiled out from under the upturned brim of his Panama hat. He was sucking on a toothpick. He nodded to Willie, who felt an instant kinship with this man, his deep blackness, his warm-weather hat, his silent gesture of greeting. Without thinking, Willie let slip a southernism: “Hey now.”

“A'ight—and y'sef?” the man said.

“Fine, thanks. Got Earl Wilson on the mound.”

“I seen that,” said the other man, who was younger, fairer, tea-colored. He wore a tan trench coat with epaulets over a brown pin-striped suit, his yellow necktie loose, his shirt collar unbuttoned. His brown oxfords were laced tight, deeply creased but polished to a high shine. They looked elegant and businesslike and comfortable, three things that rarely went together. He looked like one of those rich oats you see in Esquire magazine, a successful businessman who could afford to duck out of the office in the middle of the day to catch a ballgame or drop in on his girlfriend.

“Ain't no flies on Earl,” said the older man, motioning to a beer vendor. He turned to Willie. “Care for a Stroh's?”

“Um, sure.”

“Three,” the man told the vendor. He paid for all of them and passed around waxed-paper cups with foam spilling over their brims.

“Much obliged,” Willie said.

“Ain't no thing.” The man took a long drink of beer. “So where you from, Cuz? You ain't no Michigan boy. Your manners is too good.”

“I'm from Alabama. Down around Mobile.”

“No shit. My homeplace in Lurr-zee-ana, not far from Lafayette.” He let out a yelp when Earl Wilson struck out the leadoff batter.

“What brings you up here?” Willie asked.

“Work, same as everybody else. Been at Ford's the past twenty-two years. Right now I'm a second-shift foreman at the Rouge. Name's Louis Dumars.” He and Willie locked thumbs, stroked each other's palms. “And this here's Clyde Holland—the famous barrister with the even more famous brothers.” The two friends shared a laugh, and Willie locked thumbs with Clyde, brushed the offered palm. His hand was softer than Louis's.

“Willie Bledsoe. Pleased to meet you both.”

After Wilson retired the side in the top of the first and the Red Sox took the field, Willie said to Louis, “So do you always get Wednesdays off at the Rouge?”

“Fuck no, man. I called in sick—just like half the rank-and-file all over town. You know you shouldn't never buy no car made on a Monday, right?”

“No. Why's that?”

“Cause—half the guys on the line's working with a hangover and the other half's at home sleepin theirs off.”

Clyde laughed.

“Same goes for the Tigers' home opener,” Louis went on. “I pity the fool buys a car made today. Half the bolts is gonna be missin and the other half's gonna fall off fore the car's a month old.”

Clyde roared at this. Then he said, “How bout you, Alabama? How come you so far from home?”

“Work, same as everybody else.”

“So what is it you do?”

“I work in a private club.” Willie was going to leave it at that, but Clyde seemed to be waiting for more. So Willie said, “Bussing tables.”

“A busboy.” Clyde clucked his tongue, a sound Willie knew well, the sound of the native Detroiter's scorn for all the poor unhip country hicks who kept pouring in from the South and gobbling up the lowliest jobs simply because they thought they'd arrived in the Promised Land and hadn't learned the score yet.

Reggie Smith singled and a rookie named Joe LaHoud walked to start the Boston second. When Rico Petrocelli laced a double that rolled to the wall in left-center, scoring both runners, the mood of the fans turned sour. A greasy-haired white guy, his thick arms protruding from the rolled-up sleeves of a T-shirt, leaned over the front railing of the bleachers and bellowed, “Come on, Horton! Get your fat ass in gear! You coulda cut that thing off!”

Everyone within earshot guffawed.

“Damn,” Willie said. “Fans're tough up here.”

“Ficklest motherfuckers in the world,” agreed Clyde, draining his beer and crushing the cup with the heel of an oxford. Watching him, Willie remembered the stenciled command on the walls. Clyde, seeming to read his mind, said, “Easier to sweep up after the game if they flat.”

“Ahh.” One mystery solved.

Boston added a run in the third, which ignited fresh grumbling about the quality of Earl Wilson's pitching. He won a brief reprieve by lofting a high fly to left in the bottom of the third, a ball that looked like a routine out until the wind off the river caught it. The crowd erupted when the ball sailed over the fence into the lower-deck seats.

“Earl my main man!” Clyde shouted, standing to applaud with everyone else as the pitcher trotted around the bases. “Motherfucker can stone
play
!”

But in the sixth inning the wheels came off for Earl Wilson. The Red Sox loaded the bases with nobody out. Even way up in the bleachers, some 500 feet from home plate, Willie could taste the doom in the air.

“Take him out,” Louis pleaded softly when the Tigers' manager, Mayo Smith, marched out to the mound. The greasy-haired heckler was joined now by a small gang, including one guy who'd stripped off his shirt. He was as pink as a Smithfield ham. Obviously fueled by vast doses of Stroh's, they began to chant, “Lift the bum! Lift the bum! Lift the bum!”

But Smith left Wilson in, and the next batter, pesky little Rico Petrocelli, hit a sharp single, scoring one run and sending Earl Wilson to an early shower. As he trudged off the field, boos cascaded down from the stands in physical waves.

“Shoulda took him out,” Louis said, shaking his head.

“That shit-ass had no bidness leavin him in,” Clyde agreed. “His arm obviously tired. Any soda cracker could see that—even one named after
mayo
nnaise.”

By the seventh-inning stretch Boston was ahead 6-1 and fans were beginning to shuffle to the exits. But Louis and Clyde were staying put, and so was Willie. Despite the racial tension, Willie wanted this game, this moment, to last forever, just as he'd wanted Earl Wilson's lazy home run to stay airborne forever. He realized this was the first time he'd felt truly at ease since arriving in Detroit.

He was looking at the scoreboard when a roar went up from the crowd. A muscular black player had stepped out of the Tigers' dugout and started twirling a cluster of bats like they were toothpicks. The hecklers sprang back to life.

“Hey, Gates! You remember to visit your parole officer this week?”

“Gates! Looks like you got along pretty good with that prison food!”

Willie turned to Louis. “What're those freckle bellies bellering about now?”

“That's Gates Brown coming in to pinch-hit. Best in the game, you ax me. Them crackers is giving him shit cause he did a little time. The joint's where he got the nickname Gates.”

“What'd he do time for?”

“Burglary,” Clyde said. “I represented him.”

“And you didn't do a very good motherfuckin job!” Louis said, and the two friends laughed and slapped hands.

Damn, Willie was thinking, the Tigers even had black ex-cons on their roster. His love for this team was growing deeper by the minute.

Gates Brown yanked the first pitch into the right-field corner and sauntered into second base with a double. Didn't even break a sweat or get his uniform dirty. That took care of the hecklers. But the mention of prison had reminded Clyde of something.

“Du, check this out,” he said to Louis. “Got a call this morning from a client a mine, name of Alphonso Johnson. Po-lice woke him out of a dead sleep and hauled him downtown for questioning.”

“What for?”

“That's the amazing thing—for an unsolved murder during the riot. That's been almost a whole year ago. I didn't know the D-troit po-lice worked on nothin for a year.”