Riverine (16 page)

Three Chinese men sat outside the hostel in the early dawn. They offered me a joint. I hesitated, thinking it a trick for a moment—
Are they cops? Will it be these men who hurt me? Is the joint laced with PCP?
—but then accepted. We sat on a bench together, our four sets of hips colliding, and blew long, straight trails of smoke into the air. I showed them my sketchbook—the spade-shaped bridge in Central Park, the gazillion windows of the city skyline—and they asked me to draw them. I drew each man, one by one, as they taught me words from their language. I didn’t know what we were saying, but I took it to mean, “We are all here together now and everything is all right.” Sometimes the differences in where we are from and where we are sitting are irrelevant.

Biological Theory of Deviance

As we were nearing the top of Grandfather Mountain on a hiking trip in North Carolina over my summer break from college, my aunt Eileen told me she sometimes felt a compulsion to throw herself from heights. Most any were problematic for her, she said— bridges, balconies, the top of the Sears Tower. “Do you ever want to jump?” she asked, and stepped nearer to the edge of the mile-high overlook bridge.

“Too conspicuous.” I checked for signs that she was kidding. “Dramatic. If we’re talking about ways we could kill ourselves, I’d rather find a cave to crawl into. Starve. Rot away quietly. Eat poison berries. Avoid the free fall and the newspaper article afterward.”

As we trekked upward toward the highest point, I watched her. Though it was rarely if ever spoken about openly, a clear pattern of depression ran through my mother’s side of the family. There were also incidences of schizophrenia, and I suspected that there were other undiagnosed mental health issues as well. Deviance was once believed to be phenotypically linked, but today’s biological theories of deviance associate certain brain functions with deviant behavior. Maybe we were on the biological fringe of deviance. But maybe we were just human.

My aunt and I silently convinced one another not to play out those potential ends—knowing glances, pretend lurches toward the edge in an attempt to laugh away the seriousness of the implication—but I saw the way she eyed the spray-painted arrows pointing toward paths that led to the edges of cliffs.

I understood her compulsion. But for me, the lure was the locked cellar, abandoned and untouched by light or humans for decades. Empty structures of any kind with the suggestion of a ceiling would do—the warehouses that lined Chicago’s South Side with rows of broken windows screaming skyward and graffiti mural walls. I didn’t want this cursed attraction; I wanted to be a person who embraced mountain overlooks—who found those sorts of places life affirming and rejuvenating. Mind quieting. I was hell-bent on trying, anyway. Is it possible to best a psychological ill though willpower? Whenever I’d had a cold, my father would look at me scornfully and tell me to stop coughing. When I had chicken pox: just stop itching. “Mind over matter,” he’d say.

On the last upward thrust of the hike, perched on a ladder climb that had us scaling a mile-high cliff, I panicked. A familiar paralysis took over me, and I couldn’t breathe. Aunt Eileen, three rungs below me on the ladder, coached me upward. She was a paramedic, level-headed and at her best when she was faced with trauma. If there was anyone you wanted around in a medical crisis, it was her. It took several minutes for me to make it up the last few rungs with her verbal assistance, and when I reached the top, I collapsed and curled into a ball. I sobbed and she lay over me and held me. “You’re all right,” she said. “You’re having an anxiety attack.” She held my hands and face, soothing me until I could inch my body away from the edge, still pressed fully flat against the rocky ledge.

I didn’t know if I could make it back down the other side of the mountain after that. “We’ll take our time,” she said. “Don’t stand up until you’re ready.”

I realized then that what I experienced on the cliff was the same “heart attack” I’d had as a kid. Only now did I realize it was connected to fear. On the descent, I tried not to wonder about what in my childhood had been bad enough to give me anxiety attacks. I looked to the trees for solace. I constructed poems in my head. Anything to keep me from thinking backward—to keep me rooted in the present moment and in the flat land that awaited us at the bottom of the mountain.

On the way down, we saw a dried gourd hanging from a barbed-wire fence line. How I wanted to steal it and take it with me. I wanted to weave a blanket of thatch in there, curl into it, and fold my wings. A tiny bird prison that left no room to expand into the air around me.

Differential Association Theory

My great-grandmother lived near Seven Mile Road in Detroit until she died when I was in college. She was Hungarian and tough, with a real mouth on her as I recall. She had been married to an Irish man who drank and gambled and left her. She had several children, each of whom was struck with one of the classic, stereotypical Irish ailments: drinker, gambler, physical abuser. I’m told that my grandfather had an inclination toward two of the three, and though I never met him, I know that my mother and her siblings suffered.

In contrast to biological theories of deviance, the differential association theory said that behavior was learned, communicated primarily through the nuclear family. Even if people who witnessed deviant behaviors didn’t become deviant themselves, they may learn the rationales anyway. That made sense to me. My mother and her siblings were raised in an abusive home, a consequence of my grandfather’s alcoholism. It accounted for my mother’s willingness to let things happen that ought not to happen, to explain them away. I worried I was repeating the same behaviors—letting things happen in my life as though I had no choice. I wondered what marks, what effects of witnessing my grandfather’s deviance, had carried over, inadvertently passed down to me.

Seven Mile Road and the surrounding blocks are notoriously known as Detroit’s deadliest neighborhood. The city’s Mile Road system, made famous by Eminem’s biopic,
8 Mile
, is fraught with disproportionate crime and blight within a city that is known for its crime, abandonment, and blight. When you google Seven Mile, page after page populates with links to violent crime reports, news articles about the atrocities that have occurred on Seven Mile, and statistics about murders. The numbers are staggering. It was recently dubbed Carjack City by local police, who cite carjacking as a serious issue in the area, with incidents annually numbering in the hundreds in recent years. We were told as children that her neighborhood was too dangerous for us to visit. My mother had told us stories of visiting there herself as a child, when they’d more than once had to drop to the floor during a drive-by shooting, and it had gotten worse since then. That my father wouldn’t allow us to visit I found most disappointing. I felt they were hiding the real America from me, and I loved peering into those unfamiliar cultures, which to my young eyes were like dystopian snow globes. There was the shake and wonder as we sped by in our car, my mother white-knuckled at the wheel, having taken a wrong turn; the litter like a futuristic urban snow; and the wide black streets a plastic bottom that held up an insular world that might shatter if it was dropped. My great-grandma’s funeral was held in a Catholic church near her home—it was the only visit I ever made to the city. My mother made us duck and run from our car into the church, but again, nothing happened. I had seen worse things in our own neighborhood.

In the film
8 Mile
, the place where Eminem grew up is both a physical and a symbolic barrier to his achieving success as a hip-hop artist and, more generally, as a productive member of society who is not simply rendered irrelevant and unsavable by his own past—his lack of privilege and his familial instability. Eminem has a dichotomous relationship with the neighborhood where he was born and raised: it’s both the source of his art and the limiting factor in his personal wellness. The film itself depicts pure transition, a big reach for a golden dream, retelling in a way that is contemporary and culturally relevant the classic American story of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps. It reflects an ongoing struggle to shed the past, shed place, shed experience derived from place. Pack the memories and move somewhere better. Differentiate his association. Never mind the bootstraps, which haven’t been worn for decades. But I bet even Eminem goes back home. I bet even Eminem lets slip a few learned behaviors in the presence of his daughter. I felt a kinship with him—both limited and empowered by my river home, like a strange new species trying to jump out of a koi pond of overgrown goldfish even though it was the only place I’d ever known or would know as home. Cursing it even though it was part of me.

Defensible Space Theory

Near Indianapolis’s downtown, a now-defunct Eli Lilly laboratory facility stands three stories tall beyond the enclosure of a chain-link fence. I first visited this building with a young man named Dustyn. I’d met him at my second job, where I was working evenings at a café after putting in nine-hour days as an intern at a nearby government association. Dustyn wore a mustache before mustaches were cool again. He looked like a disheveled Salvador Dalí, with his slick black hair and the detached air of an artist. He rode a stunt bike to and from work at the café, even in the winter. On a cold night in October, I’d insisted on giving him a ride home, which was more for my peace of mind than for his convenience—he had no problem with the temperature that I had noticed.

We set the café’s leftover food on the bistro table in front of the restaurant, where each night a handful of the city’s homeless would pick it up to distribute among one another. Dustyn and I wedged his small bike into the backseat of my car and set off for the city’s near south side. We turned onto Orange Street, a name that had inexplicably been assigned to the cheerless gravel alleyway that ran parallel to a string of businesses whose operations weren’t apparent upon first glance.

The defensible space theory, similar to the broken windows theory, was also about discouraging criminal behavior through property management and a place’s projection of a certain type of image. The theory asserted that building design and layout that created naturally defensible spaces, a layout that allowed people within to watch what was going on outside, for example, would deter criminals. The building on Orange Street featured none of the theory’s cornerstones. Its first floor had virtually no windows. The parking lot had no streetlights to speak of.

I was suddenly unsure of my decision to drive Dustyn home. Once at home in an environment that bespoke neglect, I had somehow grown afraid of it. Experience and age and the American media had ingrained in me a kind of fear of the nonsuburban, of being alone with a strange man in the middle of the night. Dustyn was, actually, more or less a stranger to me. He asked me if I’d like to come up and take a look. Though I was skeptical, recalling those moments in which the first fatal violence occurs in your average horror flick, I could not resist the opportunity to enter the building. I wanted to see what was inside.

The building’s foundation slid at a diagonal into the ground, crumbling on one side. Several of the windows—small rectangular inlays that composed a larger plan of windows on the second and third floors—were broken. Dustyn opened the heavy metal door and led me inside. One lightbulb swayed slowly in the center of the entryway, a dull yellow orb. He told me that the building had once been part of the pharmaceutical company’s sprawling campus. Now it was pieced out and sublet to so many folks—four artists to a room in some cases—that none seemed compelled to bear responsibility for its common areas. The place smelled of mildew and finger paint.

“This way,” Dustyn said over his shoulder as he walked toward the freight elevator. “Lights don’t really work.” He had devastating brown eyes, a perfect pink mouth. But he himself was a kind of defended space—designed to keep people out. It was obvious that he made an effort to avoid embracing his natural good looks, what with his unkempt beard and haphazard appearance, his greasy hair, though I couldn’t understand why. He would not blend into any setting no matter how he tried.

Once we were both inside the small elevator, he grabbed hold of a dirty rope and pulled. A wooden door crashed down, whacking the floor with a thud. I jumped. “You get used to it,” he said. We were forced to stand close together, which seemed to make him uncomfortable. He smelled like basil, not unpleasant, but earthy. I decided I could get used to his aroma, though I wasn’t particularly drawn to it.

On the third floor of the building, I followed Dustyn down a dark hallway. He pointed to a few vacant rooms, whose walls were the color of verdigris. “This is where they used to test syphilis drugs. This one over here was for Prozac.” I wanted to stop to look longer, but he kept walking. He led me into a room at the end of the hallway. It had high ceilings and big windows. The blinds were drawn up, revealing row after row of single-paned windows, arranged like wall-sized checkerboards that overlooked the industrial south end of Indianapolis. The night skyline was the best view of the city that I’d ever seen. When he turned on the lights, I saw the rest of the room. Every surface was covered with poster-sized works of graffiti art. Easels and worktables and empty spray paint cans and stacks of art in various stages of completion littered the floor area. On the walls, brilliant sprays of color formed finished portraits of men and women, their images layered over detailed graphic designs. It was some of the most striking work I’d ever seen. It was electric, and it made a strange logic against Dustyn’s blasé nature. I wanted to dip my fingers into whatever swirled inside his mind.

“I’ll show you something else,” he said. “A little field trip. Follow me.” He grabbed a flashlight and we walked out the building’s back door, down an apparently unused set of train tracks, and beneath a bridge. He turned on the flashlight, directing the light against the cement underside of a bridge. He was not only an artist, but also a vandal.