Detroit, MI
Waking up in Warren, Detroit is about as exciting as waking up in a bank lobby on Christmas Morning when you're 9. Across the street from us stood an enormous complex that stretched, what would have been, five city blocks or so, but the complex had fenced off, barb-wired, and blocked any kind of through-ways that would have let the city keep any of it's cityness. Instead, it looked like a commercial prison where inmates were kept, but at the same time business men could meander around the hospital-style interior begging for coffee and vending machine snacks. They had a Starbucks in there somewhere, or their corporate equivalent.
I'm sure this worked out well for the company, having a completely self sustained business environment from which your workers had no need to ever leave, or couldn't. I felt a little depressed, and it reminded me of grown men wandering down hallways on their way past pasty cream colored offices, identically lit, on a closed campus. I was curious how long it took a new employee to memorize the lay out. I wondered how often people got lost. From the outside, for me, they were trapped in a sickening re-happening of high school, only this time they supposedly wanted to be there: this was their life goal, and they had achieved it far beyond anything they could have imagined when they were younger. This is where material and characters for office scenes in movies comes from, right here. A Hawaiian shirt day is happening in one of these buildings, a group is violently debating whether to go to Chili's or TGIF for lunch, and the IT guy is belittling someone next to their computer because they pulled him away from his computer cave. Right here, now.
I sat, still mildly depressed, staring at this worker-school-prison, and I remembered I could move; I could leave. I wasn't stuck here with them. I was just passing through on the way to anything I wanted. More important things were at hand, we needed a new tire, we needed our wheels to keep rolling, and I felt, after my zombie-gazing across the street, that needing a new tire was a problem I was only too happy to deal with. Detroit should be teaming with them.
You see, much like tumble weeds skitter lazily across the desert in Nevada, car parts and tires happily float and frolic through the abandoned parking lots and homes of Detroit. Well, not really, but really. If you were to go a mile or so south to 8 mile, you'd see more abandoned buildings than actual homes or businesses, and it has the same vibe as Gotham City: with gangs loitering in the alleys and, you know, tires bouncing down the street.
So we went a mile south and started roaming around. Unfortunately my theory that tires were uncaged and roaming was a little off. I decided to take Lotten and Jon on a scenic tour through the sad, and still saddening, neighborhoods of Detroit which are the real combined results of the car industry collapse and the mortgage crisis. After bouncing down broken roads pointing at dilapidated, leaning, houses with unowned meadow-lawns, women pushing groceries in baby-strollers, and men sitting in doorways where the boards had been ripped off, put back on, and back off again, we ended up at a Discount Tire back up around 10 mile.
I parked the van, dropped the shredded tire onto the parking lot with a clang, and dragged it over to the garage. A Russian man walked up to me, far too well dressed to be working in a tire garage, and asked what he could do for me.
I asked, "think you can fix this?" pointing at the long strips of rubber on the ground with metal wire, frayed, poking out and scheming to cut your fucking finger off.
"No," he replied. There was nothing humored in his voice. You could tell people came in and, legitimately, asked for this often enough that it actually annoyed him.
"Okay, seriously though, I need a used tire to replace my spare." And this is why I love seedy parts of towns: his eyes lit up, his face brightened and he spun around motioning for me to follow. He led me into a back room that was little more than a huge pile of tires that looked liked they had been chopped off parked cars and hidden back here. Then, he began digging through the pile - tossing the undesirable...wherever. It only took him 5 minutes to find the right one, and considering how many different tires there are, and how many were in this pile, I was actually quite impressed he navigated through a stack of tires this size so quickly, especially being so well dressed - in that Russian-Guido way.
"40$," he tells me.
"Deal."
He rolled the tire back into the garage and dropped it on the floor. Then, onward, to the salesroom to do get down to business time. While waiting for a register to open up, a BMW pulled into the front parking lot and a super-Guido steps out. This guy is night club material, he's on the list, silk shirt clad, and probably knows the owner. Only, it's 1 o'clock in the afternoon, at a tire garage, and we're in inner Detroit. The guy is obviously, in my mind, part of the Detroit mob. No one gets to cruise around inner Detroit in a BMW dressed like that unless they have some firepower to back their shit up, and in a foreign car no less. In general, from a city-wide sense, he's just pissing everyone off. And here, anyone within viewing distance already wants to slap a baton across his face and break his sunglasses/face; he hasn't even started talking yet.
He peels his glasses off as he enters the door, and already everyone is poised and ready to hear what egotistical bullshit escapes from his mouth first.
"I need 4 of the best tires you have, and I need them put on immediately," he tells the clerk who, surprisingly enough, stares back at him with a contemptuous face and says,
"It'll be an hour. We're busy."
"How much?" He responds back shrugging off the wait time. The salesman clickty-clacks on his computer for a moment and comes back with,
"890$, installed." Silky mutters something in Russian and waves his hand dismissively.
"Too much, let me talk to him." He points to a skinny kid who looks about 24 leaning against the wall behind the counter. They spit some Russian back and forth for a few minutes before he finally pulls a macho-man stunt and simply decides to swear at everyone, storm out the door, and squeal out of his parking space only to be forced to stop 50 feet away trying to merge back on the street. At this point everyone on the sales floor is giggling and pointing at the BMW which is trying to angrily edge it's way onto the freeway, unsuccessfully.
Amongst the giggle fest, a mechanic came into the salesroom and informed us that the tire wasn't the right size after all. Shit. I asked them if they had anything else, and they both shook their heads. They tried to sell me a new tire for about 100$, but I eventually left, determined to find a used tire somewhere.
By this point, communication with Howard, our Detroit ride-share, had begun. He was still at work and would be getting off around 2 or so. It was about 11am; we still had plenty of time to get a tire. We tried a Goodyear shop, a Michelin place, and even went back down to 8 Mile and roamed around for a bit without luck. In fact, none of them even carried used tires. Around 1, I called Howard and told him our dilemma and said it'd probably be a little bit later than 2. He didn't seem worried about it. From what I could tell, he hadn't exactly prepared before hand, and still needed time to ready himself for our mighty presence. Howard did however recommend Wal-Mart for a tire. I hate Wal-Mart, but I had to cede to him that he was probably right.
We parked at a coffee joint, and Jon and I grabbed a bagel while Lotten slept in the car.
"So do you think we should go to Wal-Mart?" Jon asked. I shrugged. I really didn't want to go, but I did really want a fucking tire, and Wal-Mart usually has some cheap Chinese stuff.
"I don't know...I hate Wal-mart. I just want a fucking used tire, we used to have piles of them at my grandpa's shop in Algonac. They used to be popular. Guess it's just all new shit now."
"If we were in Raleigh...they have used tire shops everywhere," Jon said.
The mention of Raleigh reminded me that my registration on my car was due to expire on the 25th, and that I should probably get that taken care of before we leave Michigan. The closest Secretary of State's office was on the border between Warren and Sterling Heights. Oddly enough, so was Wal-Mart. Knowing that it would take a couple of hours to get the registration done, and that we still needed a tire, for time's sake - I conceded. We got back in the van and drove up to Sterling Heights.
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