Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey (20 page)

Chapter Eighteen

A Portrait of the Writer as a Young
Artist

“All children are artists.
The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

PABLO
PICASSO

W
hen I
typed the address into the search bar on Google I hoped that Google Maps would
pop up so that I could get directions that way to the Harvest Festival, the
party that Ika, the girl from the Ethiopian restaurant, had invited me to.
Instead, what came up was a bunch of search listings for that address, and the
very first listing on Google was a link to the financial history for the place.
I really shouldn’t have clicked on the link, because it really wasn’t any of my
business, but I did anyway.

I then made the mistake of immediately calling my
wife to ask if I could please have her permission to purchase a house here in
Detroit somewhere near that location. I should have gone ahead and just done it.
It’s always better to ask forgiveness than to ask for permission, since word for
word, her response was, “
Don’t. You. Dare!
We are
not
moving to Detroit!” She then reminded me
that we have a son, and there’s no way in hell she’d allow him to go to Detroit
public schools. Head bowed in defeat, my white-picket-fence fantasy at the
epicenter of America’s greatness was unceremoniously shot down, and of course
she was right. Detroit needs people moving in, not away, if it is to have any
kind of chance. But your kid is your kid, and not some social experiment.

Something fundamental had shifted in her: she was a
mother. My fatherhood, I guess, is lagging somewhat behind. Oh well.

T
he
Harvest Festival was located deep in the heart of the East Side, and when I
turned off Gratiot onto Mack on my bicycle, I pulled out my scrap paper from my
pocket and looked around for a street called Elmwood. I couldn’t find it.

On the corner where I was with my bike was a
Marathon gas station with a Detroit Police car parked, door open. Two black
police officers were standing outside the car. The one, a pretty big guy, was
yelling at this young homeless-looking white guy for hanging out around the gas
station and looking into other people’s cars while they were trying to get gas.
The cop told him several times that he couldn’t do that and that he should get
lost, which he reluctantly, did. When the police officer was done yelling, I
approached him and asked if he knew where Elmwood was.

Without saying a word, he pointed me in the right
direction and gave me this funny look. I could tell he was about to say
something to me, but for whatever reason he chose not to. I thanked him, and as
soon as I turned onto that street,
Do Not Enter
and
Wrong Way
started screaming in my head. I kept
on pedaling. It was night, dark, and especially dark on this street; the
streetlamps seemed not to shine as brightly around these parts. A stray dog
walked by, groups of three or four kids with hooded sweatshirts stood on street
corners, no cars were driving anywhere, many houses had all their lights off,
then I saw the old abandoned brick schoolhouse she had mentioned.

I’ve been down many a street in my lifetime, both
ones I should have gone down and ones where I shouldn’t, both in this country
and in others. At night, riding a single-gear vintage beach cruiser down a
street where even in a car you’d be like, I ain’t going down this street, fuck
that, I’m turning around, I kept pedaling, slowly. Once I started getting closer
to where the Harvest Festival was, just to make sure, I reached in my pocket to
pull out my hand-drawn map, while three black guys my age were hanging out on a
street corner, watching me. I looked down and saw I’d accidentally pulled a
twenty-dollar bill out of my pocket instead of that piece of scrap paper with
the map on it. God must hate me. My bad. I quickly shoved the twenty back into
my pocket, pulled out my map, and found my way to Farnsworth Street perfectly
fine, no problems.

Basically, the way to describe Farnsworth Street is
that I felt like I had turned onto a street in the best part of Berkeley,
California. The street was clean, all the houses were freshly painted and well
kept, nice cars were all parked along the street—I couldn’t believe it. The
street had “NPR story” written all over it.

Stunned, I got off my bike and walked slowly up and
down the street. I would totally live inside any of these houses, two-story,
with front and back yards; one house even had an American flag posted on the
outside of it, as well as a red Marine Corps flag. I’ve seen so many of these
across the country, houses with both of these flags. It’s like the guys who get
out of the Marine Corps can’t wait to purchase a house just so they can raise
those flags.

W
hen I
got to her house, I saw she was dressed nicely. She told me that she had to run
down to the store real quick but would be back soon. She told me to go around to
all the other houses on the street, which had Christmas lights all around, that
all the backyards were hooked together, so it was all one big backyard behind
them. She told me of a house with a keg of beer at the back of it, so of course
that was the house I went to first.

When I got there, a couple dozen kids were running
around, playing with each other, half of them black, the other half white.
Chairs were set up in a circle around a campfire, where people were seated,
eating and drinking. The kids were going nuts waiting to go on the hayride—a guy
driving up and down the street in a tractor with a trailer.

The back patio was where the keg was located—local
brewery, of course—next to a table with a pitcher of sangria. Around the keg
gathered a bunch of artist types, as well as some older-looking art teacher
university professor types socializing with one another, everybody getting
along, and this huge feast was going on inside the house.

As I walked inside, people were constantly coming
in through the front door with food in their hands. There were various breads on
the cutting board, dips, chili, soups, and other edible items on the dining
table in the kitchen, and people were grabbing plates of food, standing around
eating, complimenting the cooks, talking about how great this was, and how great
that was, there were people drinking wine in the living room. I kept telling
myself, Don’t get drunk! Don’t get drunk! Don’t get drunk! over and over again
as I picked up a red cup and made my way back over to the keg. I really didn’t
want to get drunk at all here, because I didn’t want people the next day going,
“Who in the hell was that idiot who got all wasted and drunk-drove the tractor
all over the gardens ruining all the crops while singing ‘Old McDonald Had a
Farm’?”

“I know! What a fucking dick! I don’t know who that
idiot was, but I saw him throwing away his keg cups in the nonrecycling trash
can. Asshole. We need to find out who invited this idiot and have a serious talk
with that person. Somebody else told me they think he’s the one who stole all
the liquor from that one house across the street when he left.”

I didn’t want to make her look bad, since it was
mighty kind of her to invite me here, a person she’d just met, so again I told
myself over and over that tonight I was going to be on my best behavior and not
get drunk.

I filled my cup, and after that I took a couple
steps over to the side and just stood there for a bit, sipping my beer. I then
sat and waited, hoping that somebody would come up and talk to me. Nobody
did.

I sat there for a while, and I saw people walk in,
and they said hello to the others, people they didn’t know, and after a warm
greeting would usually ask, So what do you do? I studied their body language:
they’d lean in and listen, and once they were done, they’d reply by saying how
interesting that was, comment, ask a couple questions, maybe even go so far as
to say that they knew somebody or had a friend who did the same thing, and then
the other person would comment back on what they did, and then they’d talk.

As I listened to their conversations, I noticed
that a lot of them were using these huge long-ass words I’d never heard before;
some people were wearing glasses, and they were talking about what wines go with
what, installation art, documentaries that they saw on PBS, collective art
galleries, experimental music, theater and screenwriting. I realized that these
people were all highly educated, and I freaked out. I got all self-conscious and
even checked to see if my fly was open. It wasn’t, and I found myself drinking
at an accelerated pace. Back at the keg, a girl my age then walked up, holding a
red cup. She looked confused, and with a European accent asked me, “How do you
do it?” I told her it was easy—grab the tap and pour into the cup—explaining
that it was best to pour at an angle so you got less foam. She thanked me and
walked away.

I went back to being a wallflower. I went from
missing my wife and son to missing my mother. If she was here right now, she’d
be pissed; she’d grab the red keg cup out of my hand, throw that away, tell me
that I didn’t need that, that I drink too much, nobody likes a drunk, and then
smack the cigarette out of my mouth, ask for my pack so she could crumple that
up, and with her Korean accent ask, “Why you standing there all by yourself in
the corner? Why you slouching? Keep your back straight, head up! You always have
your head down, what you looking for? Nothing down there, no good. Smile! You
never smile, why you never smile? Go, go talk to people, people are good,
everybody here is having a good time, why not you? Go have good time, talk to
people, have fun, back straight, head up, smile!”

I
refilled my keg cup to the brim, corrected my posture, and walked over to a
bohemian-looking guy standing next to another and said hello. He said hello
back, and I asked him if he lived here; he told me that he did, and quickly, I
don’t know why, became uninterested and kind of walked away. Perhaps he saw
somebody more interesting to talk to. I don’t know. I drank more and edged over
and talked to another guy; this one was a bit more chatty and talked to me for a
while. He also looked like an artist type—unkempt hair, flannel, and jeans with
paint smudges on them—and I said hello and asked him if he lived here. He did,
and he asked me who I knew here, and I told him the long story in a nutshell. He
thought that was pretty cool—“She just invited you here, just like that?
Wow”—and then he asked, “So, what do you do?”

What do I do? Jesus Christ, that’s a good one. I
told him, “Oh, I’m a . . . artist.” “Oh really? You’re an artist?”
“Um, yeah.” I couldn’t believe I just fucking said that. Since it seemed like
everybody here was an artist, I guess I thought I’d do the same. When I’m wasted
and somebody asks me that question, I’ll sometimes tell them I’m an artist, and
whenever they ask what kind of art I do, I tell them that I draw and then wait
for them to say, “Oh you do, what do you draw?” which I’ll answer by saying, “I
draw my own path in life.” But I wasn’t that wasted, yet, so I went and took a
huge swig of beer from my red keg cup. I noticed that it was almost all gone,
and I said, “I’m a writer slash photographer.”

“What do you write about?”

Okay, obviously he didn’t give a shit about my
photography. That was another good question that he’d asked me, and I could feel
myself breaking a sweat now. God, I wish I knew the answer to that one.

“I’m writing about traveling across the country
right now, and uh”—since I didn’t want to talk about writing, I switched the
subject—“right now I’m going around documenting Detroit, doing a lot of urban
decay kind of stuff, shooting black and white, you know, more dramatic, it
really is like Disneyland out here for photographers.”

“Oh, yeah, it really is here. You ever heard of
Robert Frank?”

“Robert Frank? Oh yeah, he’s amazing, love his
work, very . . . inspirational.”

I decided to change the subject once he started to
ask me about darkroom techniques, so I asked how he liked living here, and he
told me that he liked it a lot. “I was living in Portland, Oregon, for a summer,
and I couldn’t stand it over there.”

“You couldn’t stand Portland? Why not?”

I like Portland. Why didn’t he like it there?

“Oh, I couldn’t stand Portland. It’s too
comfortable. Everyone there is overeducated, unemployed, white, creative, and I
just couldn’t live there.”

I nodded in agreement. Yes, this place, especially
outside of this street that we’re on, was definitely the opposite of Portland,
definitely a lot more “edgy” and “real,” out there like an episode of
Cops
. When I asked about personal safety, he told me,
“You have to be careful, but for the most part, people here are really friendly.
But we don’t go out after dark, alone. Because I’ve had nothing but positive
experiences here, I think I’m getting a bit stupider. Like, oh, those guys on
the corner that are just staring me down, they like me, what up guys!”