Detroit: An American Autopsy (2 page)

ONE

FIRE

G
RA-
SHIT

I
PULLED INTO
the station, the needle riding on “E.”

It was a mistake. In Detroit, if possible, you don’t get your gas on the east side, not even at high noon. Because the east side of Motown is Dodge City—semilawless and crazy. Many times citizens don’t bother phoning the cops. And as if to return the favor, many times cops don’t bother to come.

It was gray and moist on Gratiot Avenue—pronounced Gra-
shit
—a main artery running from the center of the city into the eastern suburbs and up farther still into the countryside. Six lanes wide and not a soul. Not a car. Not a bus. Just steam clouds billowing from the sewer caps. I went inside the gas station, paid $10 to the Arab behind the bulletproof glass and went outside to pump my gas.

A man crept up from the grayness. I didn’t make him until he was standing at my front bumper. Another mistake. You always keep your back to the gas pump, eyes on the horizons.

The dude’s eyes were dead, cold, flat-black like a skillet’s underside. His hair was nappy. He was thin like a stray and his coat was dirty.

“My man,” he said too cheerfully. “You got a smoke?”

I pulled a pack from my jacket pocket and gave him one, hoping he’d beat it.

He put the cigarette behind his ear, lingering, offering no thanks.

“You’re welcome,” I said, hoping to put a period on the meeting and that he’d just walk away.

Another mistake. Charity can be dangerous. He’d made a mark.

“My man,” he said, in a tone not so friendly this time. “Got some spare change?”

“Spare change?” I said. “This is America, bro. There is no such thing anymore as spare change.”

“HE SAID MONEY MOTHERFUCKER!”

The command came from the rear bumper, where a second man had stalked up without me noticing. He was bigger, darker, more wild-eyed than the first. He had two gold-framed incisors. Cheap work, I thought, like the Mexicans get.

“I spent my last ten on gas, dog,” I said, trying to recuperate some of the shattered cool. “Lemme check in there.” I pointed toward the glove box.

I bent into the car, reaching for the glove box latch. There was a 9 mm inside. Not mine. It belonged to a reporter who had forgotten to store it in his desk on his way to a press conference. He had asked me in the parking lot to hold on to it and I laughed about a journalist carrying a concealed weapon. Correspondents don’t do that even in war zones, I told him.

“Well, how many of those war reporters do you know who’ve been to Detroit?” he asked me.

I couldn’t name him one.

Now here I was on the grubby east side—a war zone in its own right. A place of Used-to-Haves. And a Used-to-Have is an infinitely more dangerous type of man than the habitual Have-Not. This type of man is waging his own war. Not against the power but against his own, a fight much easier to find at the gas pump than on Wall Street.

I emerged from the car and pointed the barrel square toward the man’s face.

I said nothing. No Dirty Harry line. No crime novel metaphor. I didn’t even know where the safety was or if there was a safety or ammunition in it. I pissed myself a little.

“Okay now,” Goldie-mouth said, backing his way into the mist. The other ran like a jackrabbit. The Arab behind the Plexiglas came to the front door after they were long gone.

“You all right, bro?” he shouted.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I don’t mean to sound funny, bro,” he said, giving my vest and tie the once-over. “But what’s a white boy doing getting gas on Gra
-shit
?”

N
EWSROOM

T
HE MOVERS WERE
packing my house in Los Angeles when the news broke from Detroit. Someone had slipped the
Free Press
a cache of text messages showing that the city’s mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, was a criminal and a pimp.

Kilpatrick had denied in a court of law that he had fired the police department’s chief of internal affairs because he was getting too close to an alleged sex party at the mayor’s mansion—where rumor had it that a stripper named “Strawberry” was beaten silly with a high heel by the mayor’s wife.

Strawberry—real name Tamara Greene—later turned up murdered.

Kilpatrick had also denied in court that he had had an adulterous affair with his chief of staff, an old girlfriend from high school. The text messages, however, confirmed that not only was Kilpatrick carrying on with his chief of staff, he was a crook who was looting the city and a letch who bagged more tail than a deer hunter.

Worse still, the texts revealed that Kilpatrick secretly spent $10 million of the people of Detroit’s money to make the internal affairs whistleblower go away.

It was a huge scoop that cemented the
News’
lowly, stepbrother standing to the rival
Free Press
. My stomach dropped. I called the paper’s deputy managing editor back in Detroit.

“What the hell happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“This is bad.”

“It isn’t good,” he said. “But don’t worry about it. We chased it and got something up on the Web.”

Don’t worry about it? Chased it? Got something up on the Web? What the hell had I done?

* * *

My career with the
New York Times
died in the mountains of Vermont. I was on a story and did not receive the prior evening’s voice mail until early in the morning when I arrived at the Burlington airport.

The message was hysterical.

“Charlie. Amy’s in the hospital. She went into early labor. Where are you?”

I didn’t want to be that guy, the self-absorbed man who was never around for his children. I didn’t want to be my father or my first stepfather. It didn’t matter that I was working on assignment for the paper. A workaholic is the same as an alcoholic when you get down to it.

“I’m sorry, sir, but your flight is for
next
Sunday,” the counter attendant said. “There is nothing available today.”

I vomited.

A Latino came and cleaned up my mess. The frantic attendant typed through the computer and found an emergency seat for me out of Burlington to Los Angeles with a change in Chicago.

My baby girl came in at four pounds and I got there to cut the umbilical cord. She was small but strong, and after the second night we were able to go home.

As my girls took a nap, I shaved my whiskers and washed away the smell of puke and cigarettes. Then I filed my story about the Green Party candidate for governor of Vermont, who pranced around town dressed as Ethan Allen, the eighteenth-century American patriot. His platform was a unique one, I thought. It tapped into a smoldering populist anger: screw the federal government and the state police and the big banks. Vermont should secede from the United States.

Looking back on it now, in light of the Tea Party phenomenon, General Allen was ahead of his time. The guy made me laugh anyway, posing for my video camera with a horse he couldn’t ride, getting dragged through the mud and dung of the paddock. I smiled at the thought of him and hit “send.”

The next day I got an e-mail response from my editor in Manhattan.

“This guy is a loser,” she wrote. “He doesn’t say anything. What happened to the professor you were going to write about? We have to talk.”

I was now writing and producing a video column called “American Album.” The conceit was simple. Go across the country and find regular Americans and make stories and videos about them using their language and point of view and post it on the Internet. The work was popular with readers but not with the editor. And at the
Times
, it is not the reader who matters so much.

The editor called the farmers and hunters and drive-through attendants and factory workers I wrote about losers. Say the word slowly enough and it sounds like you’re spitting.

Losers.

Losers. That was 80 percent of the country, and the new globalized economic structure was cranking out more. I could see it in my travels. I could see it when I went home to Detroit for the holidays. Hell, I could see it in the box stores on Sunset Boulevard and the
FOR SALE
signs in the Los Angeles foothills. Walmart was crowded and factories were empty. This was 2007 and people were scared. It felt like the warm mundane bliss of house-rich America was slowly unraveling. I could see it like an oncoming storm. In New York City you could see it too if you bothered to venture above Ninety-sixth Street. We were crumbling under the weight of our own abundance.

I grew bored with the intellectual mud wrestling and the oblique putdowns. Losers. I quit the
Times
.

I also grew bored with Los Angeles. I no longer belonged since I was no longer a writer. I had become a stay-at-home dad, isolated in my Hollywood bungalow with a howling baby and dirty diapers.

I realized how cut-off and disconnected we were. We had to cross two major boulevards just to find a park. We had no family out there. We barely knew the neighbors.

Los Angeles may have the weather, but we were isolated in the rush-hour traffic that seemed to run from dawn till dawn. I had no desire to raise an only child in the City of Angels. I was convinced she’d grow into a self-centered little devil, walking the sidewalks of Melrose Avenue at too early an age, wearing too much blue mascara and a halter top, showing off her undeveloped breasts.

I wrote about it for a glamour magazine. Big Shot Quits the Big Time, Sits Home with a Baby and Feels Sorry for Himself.

The governor won’t call anymore. Neither will the old colleagues. There will be no more Hollywood parties. No expense account. No action. It will be just you and the kid. And the kid will have no idea how good you were. And worse, in the mania of your empty house . . . when the afternoon sun is bright and debilitating and that old deadline time, that hour of adrenaline, is upon you, right about then you will wonder whether you were really any good at all. You will find yourself staring into a dirty diaper as though it were tea leaves, trying to augur some story about the failings of the last immigration bill.

None of the old colleagues did call. But a letter arrived at my door in mid-November, a few weeks after the story ran. It was from Governor Schwarzenegger, whom I’d met on the campaign trail, the postage paid by the taxpayers of the Golden State, who were drowning in a sea of red ink.

He had read the lines for what they were: a rambling confession of self-doubt. And if there was one thing Schwarzenegger did not possess, it was self-doubt.

“I know you got all kinds of advice from friends, from Oprah-like wisdom to complete ignorance, so I don’t have anything to add to that,” he wrote. “Just know that what you’re doing will be more fulfilling than any of your wild adventures—in fact, it might be your wildest yet—and any father would die to have the life you have.”

He told me in essence to follow my gut, do what I thought was right for myself and my family and go snatch life by the throat.

He closed with this: “If you ever start to feel unimportant, you’re wrong. But you can always relive the glory days, tell people about your buddy who can lift you up with a finger and runs the biggest state in the world, or give me a call. I’d love to hear about your new assignment.”

Far be it from me to take life advice from a guy who starred in
Kindergarten Cop
, but Schwarzenegger only confirmed what I had already known. It was time to go home.

Part of it was for my daughter. Back in Detroit, there were grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins. There was a culture. A family.

Part of it was for me. I felt like wood sitting there at four o’clock in the Los Angeles afternoon, with nothing to do and no one to talk with but the Armenian next door who could barely speak English.

In the meantime, the wheels were starting to fall off the American party bus, even in Los Angeles. When I first arrived, the average house would sell in less than a week. Now it was six months if it was a day.

Circling back to Detroit was instinct, like a salmon needing to swim upstream because he is genetically encoded to do so. Detroit might be the epicenter, a funhouse mirror and future projection of America. An incredibly depressed city in its death swoon.

But it also could be a Candy Land from a reporter’s perspective. Decay. Mile after mile of rotten buildings, murder, leftover people. One fucking depressing, dysfunctional big glowing ball of color. One unbelievable story after another.

Why not admit it? I am a reporter. A leech. A merchant of misery. Bad things are good for us reporters. We are body collectors of sorts. To tell the truth, it is amusing to be a correspondent, the guy who drops in with his parachute, proclaims to know everything, makes outrageous proclamations, types it up, gets drunk in the hotel lounge, folds up his parachute, packs up his hangover and heads to the next spot of human misery.

I’d been everywhere in my decade for the
Times
, looking for the weird. I’m in the weird business. In Detroit, I guessed, I wouldn’t have to go looking hard for weird. Weird would find me. I’d treat it like the parachute correspondent, get my nails dirty for a year or two, let my mother hug the kid and then move on.

In the weeks and months that followed, I pitched all the big media outlets from my home in L.A. How about Detroit, I asked? Detroit is a good story.
The story
. A train wreck.

No thanks, they told me. Detroit was nothing. Besides, the newspaper and magazine businesses were crumbling and the last thing any executive editor was willing to do was spend the money to open a boutique bureau in Dead City.

Finally, I swallowed my big-shot pride and called the
Detroit News
. A paper so broke, it didn’t even put out a Sunday edition anymore. Surprisingly, they had an opening. Come do what you do, they told me. Chronicle the decline of the Great Industrial American City.

I accepted the offer. And I made myself a promise. I’d build a castle of words so high on the banks of the Detroit River that they couldn’t help but see it from Times Square.

* * *

The day I began work at the
News
in March 2008, half the lights in the newsroom were off. I was told half jokingly that it was an effort to save on the electricity bill. I was shown to my desk, where I was greeted by a broken chair, a broken phone and a large stain on the carpet that reminded me of one of those old chalk outlines at a homicide scene. The computer would not boot up. The four cubicles that surrounded mine were empty, the papers and pens from the last occupants still there. Like the
Times’
newsroom, the place was as quiet as a meat locker, but there was no doubt, this place was in a lower ring of hell.

A loop of the thirty-eight-year-old Kilpatrick—who fancied himself something of a player and preferred white homburgs and diamond earrings—was playing over and over on a row of television sets embedded in the wall above the editors’ desks. Speculation was rampant that the prosecutor was going to file charges against the mayor any day now for his alleged perjury, among other things.

The television images of Kilpatrick were dark and murky since the sets were failing from continual use and the company was too broke to replace them. The screens were doing to the mayor what
Time
magazine editors did to O. J. Simpson—making him appear darker and more sinister.

I got the feeling then that those TVs were bellwethers, canaries in a coal mine. Once they went black, the final grains of sand in the 135-year-old
Detroit News
would run out.

The television reports intimated that the mayor ordered the killing of the stripper Strawberry because of what she knew about the party and the powerful men who attended.

And Kilpatrick was crumbling under the pressure. During his State of the City speech the evening before, he had taken a bizarre detour from his script, ripping the president of the city council as a “step ‘n’ fetchit” and liberally dropping the “N” bomb, saying he was getting threats and hate mail—ostensibly from the crackers out in the suburbs.

In the best of times, the out-of-town news coverage of Detroit is never very good. There was once a story about a murderer who had to go to Toledo to turn himself in because the Detroit cops wouldn’t pay attention to him.
Forbes
had recently named the Motor City the most miserable town in America. But this guy Kilpatrick was taking it to a whole new level. Strippers? Murders? It was a reporter’s dream. Suddenly I didn’t mind the busted chair so much.

Did the mayor really kill a call girl? I asked the reporters around me. I was told the rumor was five years old but had taken on new life as the central plot in the text-message scandal of the incredible shrinking mayor.

I needed a home run. A calling card. A sizzler that announced: CHARLIE IS HERE.

A murdered stripper on an ordered hit from city hall would fit the bill!

I called a detective I knew.