Here Comes Trouble (43 page)

But, forgive me—I think I’m a bit ahead of myself.

Let me begin again:

I used to think all liberals and lefties were the same: good hearts, good politics. It took a real wake-up call in the capital of liberalism, San Francisco, for me to realize that there were various forms of “liberals,” and the one I had never encountered back in Flint was the Wealthy Liberal Who Loved Humanity But Hated People. He’s the liberal whose conscience is eased by the generosity of his checkbook—just as long as you, the recipient of his largesse, look the other way and not consider how he came to have that money in the first place.

But I’m ahead of myself again.…

For the nearly ten years I edited and published the
Flint Voice
(which, in 1983, became the
Michigan Voice
), I never earned more than $15,000 a year. On two different occasions, the
Voice
was so broke I had to lay myself off. It was not unusual for me to be late on paying the $200 a month for my rent. There weren’t a lot of businesses interested in advertising in a muckraking paper that was constantly raking the muck out of the very businesses being asked to advertise.

Case in point: the local Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge. They had a policy of not hiring blacks and refusing to rent out rooms at night to anyone who was African-American. How did I know this? A clerk who worked there told me. One thing I learned as a journalist is that there is at least one disgruntled person in every workplace in America—and at least double that number with a conscience. Hard as they try, they simply can’t turn their heads away from an injustice when they see one taking place.

Such was the case with Carole Jurkiewicz, the head desk clerk at the Howard Johnson’s Motor Inn on Miller Road in Flint. One day she walked into my office and brought with her a number of applications filled out by people looking for a job at Howard Johnson’s. Many of them had a star marked in pen at the top.

“These are the white people who apply,” Jurkiewicz said. “I was told by management to star the application of anyone who was white. I would then see the manager rip up any app from someone who was black.” Out of 130 employees, only seven were African-American (in this now majority-black city)—and four of them were related to each other.

Jurkiewicz was told by her manager on various occasions that: “Black people don’t mind being called niggers… They drive big cars… They’re lazy… They usually make trouble… They talk back, have no respect… They all look alike.”

This was the 1980s, and this story simply seemed too rotten to be true. This was not the South of the 1950s. This was Michigan, a state that bordered Canada. And this was Howard Johnson’s, a respected national chain of restaurants and hotels, not Billy Bob’s Grits and Grinders. I asked Carole if she would sign a sworn affidavit attesting to these facts, and both she and another employee did so.

To further verify it, I decided to see what would happen if a black friend of mine went over to Howard Johnson’s to apply for a job. Lamont went in, filled out an application, and left. Then Dan, a white guy, went in a half hour later to also apply for a job.

The next day, Carole brought me copies of both apps, and sure enough, the white applicant had a big red star plastered on top of his form. Lamont’s, though, had none.

It was then time for part two of the sting. George Moss, an African-American teacher at Flint’s Beecher High School, walked into Howard Johnson’s the following evening, and asked for a room. Outside, on the lawn, I lay facedown on the grass so no one inside could see me. I crept closer to the window where I had, with my long-lens 35mm camera, a clear view of the front desk. And, sure enough, as I snapped through a roll of film, George was turned away after being told that there were “no vacancies.”

Ten minutes later I motioned for Mark, a white guy, to head in to try and get a room. “No problem,” the man behind the counter said, and signed him up for a single with a double bed—all of this, of course, captured by my camera.

I put it all in the
Flint Voice,
and it wasn’t long before the civil rights commission brought the hammer down on Howard Johnson’s (they were ordered to pay a $30,000 fine to one of the black women who had applied for a job and been denied). There would now be one less business that would discriminate in Flint—and one less business to advertise in the
Flint Voice.

Doing stories like this every month for ten years had the uncanny knack of depleting advertising revenue, and I began to see why the larger media is loathe to tell the public the truth about
anything
that may cost them cash. Before long the
Voice
was the pariah of not only the business community in Flint but also of its political establishment (which was owned by the business community) and the local media (also dependent on the same advertising revenue).

By the end of 1985, with unemployment in Flint well above 20 percent, there were fewer and fewer ways available to fund the
Voice.
Our main benefactor had been the wonderful folksinger Harry Chapin. Years earlier, I had snuck backstage at a concert of his in Grand Rapids. A security guard grabbed me as I approached Harry’s dressing-room door.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he barked at me.

“Oh, I’m just stopping by to see Harry,” I said matter-of-factly.

“The hell you are,” he said, as he started to drag me away by my collar. The commotion was loud enough to cause Harry to open his door.

“What’s going on out here?” Harry asked.

“This guy says he was coming to see you,” the bouncer said.

“Well—let him come see me!”

The guard reluctantly let me go and I walked into Harry’s room.

“So, you wanted to see me?” Harry asked, smiling.

“Uh, yeah, I’m so sorry about causing a ruckus. I just wanted to ask you a favor.”

“Shoot.”

“Well, a bunch of us in Flint want to start an alternative paper and we were wondering if maybe you could help us by coming to Flint and doing a benefit.”

As I said the words, I could not believe how presumptuous and ridiculous they sounded. “Hey, rock star—you’ve got nothing better to do—come to Flint and perform for us!” Jesus.

“Tell me about your paper,” he said. And so I did. I told him about how the local daily was in the pocket of General Motors and that we wanted to present the news that wasn’t being covered.

“Sounds like a worthy effort,” Harry said. “Here’s my manager’s number. Give him a call and I’ll see what I can do.”

Dumbfounded, I left the backstage area on cloud seven (for some reason, my eternal pessimism about myself always kept me from getting any higher). I returned to Flint to tell the staff what happened. Within months, Harry Chapin was in front of a sold-out audience in Flint, and we now had the money to fund our paper.

And for the next five years, until a tragic accident on the Long Island Expressway took his life in July 1981, Harry Chapin came to Flint each year, doing a total of eleven benefit concerts for the
Flint Voice.
Those proceeds kept us afloat, and after Harry’s death, his brothers, Tom and Steve, and his band would continue the tradition of playing the annual concert in Flint.

But by 1985, it was not enough to sustain the paper, and the struggle to continue its publication was worsening.

It was at this time I received a phone call from a man in San Francisco. He was Adam Hochschild, the multimillionaire liberal who ran the foundation that owned
Mother Jones
magazine, the largest circulation publication on the left. He said he had been following the
Flint Voice
and liked what he saw, and he wondered if I would be interested in doing what I was doing in Flint, but on a national scale.

The offer sounded too good—and it was. I closed up my beloved
Voice,
sold everything I had, and moved to Parnassus Avenue in the Upper Haight district of San Francisco. It wasn’t long, though, before I realized what a huge mistake I had made. I wanted to turn
Mother Jones
into a magazine for the working class (the namesake of the magazine, after all, Mary “Mother” Jones, was a radical union organizer from the nineteenth century). Hochschild (whose family fortune and inheritance came in part from the mines of the then-apartheid South Africa) wanted a more erudite and “sublime” periodical of commentary and reporting that would rival the
New Yorker
or the
Atlantic.
In fact, his second choice for his new editor had been Hendrik Hertzberg, an instinct he should have gone with. (Hertzberg later became executive editor of the
New Yorker.
)

I was a true fish out of water in San Francisco. I didn’t understand the way things were done at this magazine, and my efforts to make changes were met with much resistance. They wanted neo-nudnik Paul Berman covering the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. I had wanted Alexander Cockburn. They wanted to do an investigative piece on herbal teas; I wanted to give a monthly column to an autoworker on the assembly line in Flint. They were Mars and I was Bluto. On the day after Labor Day, after just four months on the job, Hochschild fired me. He said we weren’t “a good fit.” He was right. I sued him for breach of contract and fraud and won $60,000.

There was now no newspaper for me to return to in Flint, and all attempts to seek employment with other lefty/liberal publications on both coasts were met with the embrace one gives a leper. No one on the left wanted to upset
Mother Jones.
No one wanted this guy from Flint. Other than the people who worked at Ralph Nader’s office in D.C., there was no one who would offer me work.

And that, my friends, was supposed to have been the last you were to have heard from me. My fifteen minutes on the national stage were over.

After a month of lying in bed and bemoaning my fate, I got up one day and went to a bookstore. There, while mindlessly roaming through the racks of magazines, I ran across a notice in a business publication that caught my eye. It said:

“
EXPO MAQUILA
’
86
”

PRESENTED BY

UNITED STATES DEPT. OF COMMERCE

AND

THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE IN MEXICO

DISCOVER HOW TO USE MEXICO TO BETTER YOUR BUSINESS

‘
MOVING PRODUCTION HERE SAVES JOBS AT HOME!
’

BY INVITATION ONLY    CONTACT USDOC

Huh. I wondered what this was about. I contacted the Department of Commerce to find out.

“This is a three-day conference in Acapulco to assist American businesses and help them grow,” the woman’s voice from the Department of Commerce on the phone said. “It is only open to business owners and executives, not to the general public or the press.”

“I see. I own a small auto parts company in Michigan,” I said, making it up before I knew what I was doing. “How can I get more information?”

She said she would send me a packet.

I didn’t know what I would do with the packet but it sounded interesting. I had been talking to the people in Ralph Nader’s office about coming to Washington to do some work for them. They had two dozen public interest projects going, including a magazine called the
Multinational Monitor
that did pretty much what its name implied. I told them about this crazy conference happening in Mexico, that it had to be some sort of joke, because why would our own Commerce Department be helping to eliminate jobs here in the U.S. and move them to Mexico?

“The Reagan administration,” said John Richard, Nader’s chief of staff. “They’ve been on a mission to do this since they took office.”

“Yes, I know—but this seems to really cross a line, doesn’t it?”

I had covered this issue back in Michigan: how GM was using tax breaks to move jobs offshore, but back then I couldn’t get anybody to listen.

“We’ll send you to Acapulco if you want to sneak in there and tell us what they’re planning to do,” Richard said. “Then maybe write something up for
Multinational Monitor.
”

Wow. An international mission, me in disguise, the intrigue! A paid job! My wife took me to a used clothing store and got me fitted in the appropriate resort apparel. I bought a couple golf shirts, some linen slacks, a Hawaiian shirt, and a cheap yellow seersucker suit. That was one whole week’s unemployment check. She gave me a corporate-looking haircut and some of her hair gel. I purchased a little American flag lapel pin. I put on some man jewelry I bought on a street corner in the Tenderloin. I did not look like me.

I signed up as the CEO of my small manufacturing company (“less than 50 employees”) and headed to Mexico to learn how I could throw them all out of work.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit how nervous and scared I was when I deplaned in Acapulco in my seersucker suit. I did not want to be discovered. People go missing in Mexico. Bodies aren’t found.

I walked onto the penthouse floor of the Excelaris Resort, high above the beautiful golden beaches of Acapulco. The sign over the door read: W
ORK
M
AKES
E
VERYTHING
P
OSSIBLE
(for you German speakers, that’s
Albrecht Acht Alles Möglich!
).

I overheard two men talking about how the Commerce Department had to be “not so public” in its support of this weekend as apparently some Democratic union-sympathizers in Congress found a clause in some “ridiculous law” stating that it was illegal—
illegal!
—for U.S. tax dollars to go toward anything that promotes jobs being moved overseas. So Commerce was here, just not officially, leaving it to the Chamber of Commerce and the Mexican firm of Montenegro, Saatchi & Saatchi to be in charge of running the show.