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.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Exit Strategy: Hello, I'm leaving. Bye.
Kalamazoo, MI
To be fair, everyone knew it was coming. And with a six foot tall Swedish shaman woman expecting me to run her away to New York, I wasn't about to renege. Lotten held up her end well enough, finding us a guy in Detroit to ride with us until Jersey. With a little under 5 hours before leaving, I thought up the now famous Peace-Out doctrine and drew up my exit strategy: Go find everyone, say hello, say goodbye, give hug/kiss/handshake/bomb, leave forever(maybe). The specifics of this plan...did not exist. The results were however, mildly successful, at least as successful as they can be with a quick-drawn strategy like this. I do not exaggerate its effectiveness when I say I dropped good-byes, like they were hot, to about 100 people in less than a day.
So with most of that out of the way, I had to finish up my computer transfers before everything was lost forever. I got a hold of Laura and she let me shanghai her computer for a few hours while I transferred the files back onto mine. About 5 minutes into the process with 3 flash drives blinking their little mechanized hearts out, I realized that this was not going to happen fast enough. It was already 8 p.m., and Jon and Lotten were, for the most part, set to go. I told them to run back to Avi's place, where Jon had his car stashed, to figure out their final details and I would meet them there a little bit after 10.
I decided to dump my beloved collection of videos and music. Replaceable as they are, it's still hard to push delete on the master piece theater of Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding that is The Mighty Boosh. So cutting most of the replaceable crap out, I was left more or less with my writing doodles and pictures. Sounds simple right? Well it would be, if you didn't have a stack pictures that could bury several pregnant mothers and a dog. Estimated, the time was going to be about midnight before I had them all secured safely back onto my computer.
I called Jon and Lotten and told them we weren't going to be able to leave until midnight. I don't think they minded too much, and they didn't have much of a choice to be honest. As long as we got to Detroit, or somewhere close, so we could pick up our guy the next morning after he was done with work, everyone was happy. Lotten had also talked to our mutual friend Lando in Detroit, (other Nevada BM* folk), and he had a place for us to stay - if we didn't get there too late.
"What's too late?" I asked her.
"I dunno, 1? He has to work tomorrow morning."
"We aren't going to get there at 1, maybe 2."
"Well I guess we'll just be too late."
I figured it'd be nice to have a place to stay in Detroit so I went back inside Fourth Coast, where the computers sat chitchatting it up, and asked them if they could drop a HEMI in their pants and speed things up. They were too busy making out through USB cords and swapping flash drives to listen much, so I let them do their thing. Figured it was worth a shot.
When The files were wrapped up around 11:30, I remembered I still had to ditch the refrigerator-sized bench seat I pulled out of Matt's garage. First things first though, I had to get the computer back to miss Laura Hillen. Texting up a storm, (I've come to realize this is the only communication Laura Hillen will accept most of the time), I figured out she was at Derek and Nikki's house down the street, so I packed up shop and shipped out.
On the way in the door I noticed there was a lonely couch sitting on the curb. I figured it could use some company, like a bench seat. My beat seat was exactly what I had in mind, so I asked Derek if it was okay to drop it off. He said it was, and I kind of wondered why I asked since there was already trashed piled on the curb. Syd, the one the bike was for, helped me unload it out of the van and drop it next to the couch so they could talk before they met their death, being crushed and compacted into the size of a sugar cube, the following morning.
So long story short: I gave a few hugs out and said bye-byes there, picked up Lotten and Jon, and fired the Van up and took of for Detroit, city of industrial abandonment.
30 miles down the road everything was going fine, music was playing, Lotten was in the back doing whatever Swedish girls do in the back of vans by themselves, and I was happily gulping an energy drink hoping it would help get me through all the way to Detroit without stopping. There are only a few sounds that really irk me, the sound of Ex-girlfriend's voices, dogs barking, and, of course, the sound of a wheel grinding against the frame of a car going 70 m.p.h. Well, I thought, it didn't take long for God to swoop down with his glistening talons, scoop us up, and drop our marauding band in to a nice steaming pot of fuck-you soup. I've had wheels falling off my cars for most of my life, and I was pretty sure that this was the case here. A bad case, a wheel falling off usually means replacing 4-5 parts that attach it to the car...and keep it from...falling off and...stuff.
"Oh fuck, what was that?" Jon asked in response to the lovely metallic thudding followed by what I can only describe as a teenage girl's scream paired with the thuds of someone rhythmically hitting her in the face with a hollow pipe.
"Eh, I think our wheel fell off, or something. It's definitely something," I replied as we crossed over the rumble strip and onto the shoulder. After getting the van stopped, and to the side of the road, I popped the door and hopped out. Lotten, distracted by something obviously, was just now noticing what happened.
"Did we hit something? I felt a bump."
"I think we hit a kid," I told her.
"Oh no! really?" she yelled, more panicked, as she popped her head between the curtains separating the back of the van from the cab.
"No, I'm kidding. Hold on, I think something fell off the van." I skipped over to the other side of the van and took a look. By the great unicorn, it was just a flat. "Oh, shit it's just a flat," I said, scoffing. Moving, as Jon would later put it, at the speed of a NASCAR pit crew, I rounded up my gear and had us back on the road within a few minutes. "Well," I started as we all jumped back into the van, "we got the bad luck out of the way." And this was true, we made it the rest of the way to Detroit without incident.
We did however, arrive far too late to meet up with Lando (Awesome name right?). Instead of our expected ETA of about 1:30, we got there in record-smashing slowness: 3:15a.m. And for those of you who haven't experienced the beauty of inner city Detroit at three o'clock in the morning, I highly recommend it. With no Lando, we had to come up with new arrangements for sleeping. First, we heading to the north suburbs, so we didn't have to worry about being shot, then crawled around town for a bit looking for a place open to get coffee. We gave up quickly; hypothesis: there isn't anything open after 10 in the suburbs. Instead, we slid, sneakily, into a hotel parking lot and crashed in the van.
*references to BM, Nevada, or The Desert, are referring to Burning Man.
To be fair, everyone knew it was coming. And with a six foot tall Swedish shaman woman expecting me to run her away to New York, I wasn't about to renege. Lotten held up her end well enough, finding us a guy in Detroit to ride with us until Jersey. With a little under 5 hours before leaving, I thought up the now famous Peace-Out doctrine and drew up my exit strategy: Go find everyone, say hello, say goodbye, give hug/kiss/handshake/bomb, leave forever(maybe). The specifics of this plan...did not exist. The results were however, mildly successful, at least as successful as they can be with a quick-drawn strategy like this. I do not exaggerate its effectiveness when I say I dropped good-byes, like they were hot, to about 100 people in less than a day.
So with most of that out of the way, I had to finish up my computer transfers before everything was lost forever. I got a hold of Laura and she let me shanghai her computer for a few hours while I transferred the files back onto mine. About 5 minutes into the process with 3 flash drives blinking their little mechanized hearts out, I realized that this was not going to happen fast enough. It was already 8 p.m., and Jon and Lotten were, for the most part, set to go. I told them to run back to Avi's place, where Jon had his car stashed, to figure out their final details and I would meet them there a little bit after 10.
I decided to dump my beloved collection of videos and music. Replaceable as they are, it's still hard to push delete on the master piece theater of Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding that is The Mighty Boosh. So cutting most of the replaceable crap out, I was left more or less with my writing doodles and pictures. Sounds simple right? Well it would be, if you didn't have a stack pictures that could bury several pregnant mothers and a dog. Estimated, the time was going to be about midnight before I had them all secured safely back onto my computer.
I called Jon and Lotten and told them we weren't going to be able to leave until midnight. I don't think they minded too much, and they didn't have much of a choice to be honest. As long as we got to Detroit, or somewhere close, so we could pick up our guy the next morning after he was done with work, everyone was happy. Lotten had also talked to our mutual friend Lando in Detroit, (other Nevada BM* folk), and he had a place for us to stay - if we didn't get there too late.
"What's too late?" I asked her.
"I dunno, 1? He has to work tomorrow morning."
"We aren't going to get there at 1, maybe 2."
"Well I guess we'll just be too late."
I figured it'd be nice to have a place to stay in Detroit so I went back inside Fourth Coast, where the computers sat chitchatting it up, and asked them if they could drop a HEMI in their pants and speed things up. They were too busy making out through USB cords and swapping flash drives to listen much, so I let them do their thing. Figured it was worth a shot.
When The files were wrapped up around 11:30, I remembered I still had to ditch the refrigerator-sized bench seat I pulled out of Matt's garage. First things first though, I had to get the computer back to miss Laura Hillen. Texting up a storm, (I've come to realize this is the only communication Laura Hillen will accept most of the time), I figured out she was at Derek and Nikki's house down the street, so I packed up shop and shipped out.
On the way in the door I noticed there was a lonely couch sitting on the curb. I figured it could use some company, like a bench seat. My beat seat was exactly what I had in mind, so I asked Derek if it was okay to drop it off. He said it was, and I kind of wondered why I asked since there was already trashed piled on the curb. Syd, the one the bike was for, helped me unload it out of the van and drop it next to the couch so they could talk before they met their death, being crushed and compacted into the size of a sugar cube, the following morning.
So long story short: I gave a few hugs out and said bye-byes there, picked up Lotten and Jon, and fired the Van up and took of for Detroit, city of industrial abandonment.
30 miles down the road everything was going fine, music was playing, Lotten was in the back doing whatever Swedish girls do in the back of vans by themselves, and I was happily gulping an energy drink hoping it would help get me through all the way to Detroit without stopping. There are only a few sounds that really irk me, the sound of Ex-girlfriend's voices, dogs barking, and, of course, the sound of a wheel grinding against the frame of a car going 70 m.p.h. Well, I thought, it didn't take long for God to swoop down with his glistening talons, scoop us up, and drop our marauding band in to a nice steaming pot of fuck-you soup. I've had wheels falling off my cars for most of my life, and I was pretty sure that this was the case here. A bad case, a wheel falling off usually means replacing 4-5 parts that attach it to the car...and keep it from...falling off and...stuff.
"Oh fuck, what was that?" Jon asked in response to the lovely metallic thudding followed by what I can only describe as a teenage girl's scream paired with the thuds of someone rhythmically hitting her in the face with a hollow pipe.
"Eh, I think our wheel fell off, or something. It's definitely something," I replied as we crossed over the rumble strip and onto the shoulder. After getting the van stopped, and to the side of the road, I popped the door and hopped out. Lotten, distracted by something obviously, was just now noticing what happened.
"Did we hit something? I felt a bump."
"I think we hit a kid," I told her.
"Oh no! really?" she yelled, more panicked, as she popped her head between the curtains separating the back of the van from the cab.
"No, I'm kidding. Hold on, I think something fell off the van." I skipped over to the other side of the van and took a look. By the great unicorn, it was just a flat. "Oh, shit it's just a flat," I said, scoffing. Moving, as Jon would later put it, at the speed of a NASCAR pit crew, I rounded up my gear and had us back on the road within a few minutes. "Well," I started as we all jumped back into the van, "we got the bad luck out of the way." And this was true, we made it the rest of the way to Detroit without incident.
We did however, arrive far too late to meet up with Lando (Awesome name right?). Instead of our expected ETA of about 1:30, we got there in record-smashing slowness: 3:15a.m. And for those of you who haven't experienced the beauty of inner city Detroit at three o'clock in the morning, I highly recommend it. With no Lando, we had to come up with new arrangements for sleeping. First, we heading to the north suburbs, so we didn't have to worry about being shot, then crawled around town for a bit looking for a place open to get coffee. We gave up quickly; hypothesis: there isn't anything open after 10 in the suburbs. Instead, we slid, sneakily, into a hotel parking lot and crashed in the van.
*references to BM, Nevada, or The Desert, are referring to Burning Man.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Fuck it, let's go.
Kalamazoo, MI
I was standing outside 4th coast café in Kalamazoo, Michigan around midnight doing the usual can-kicking that the rift raft around there does. Mostly, we just bullshitted, chased off panhandling bums, and stared threateningly at people who drove into the parking lot the wrong direction. We drank coffee too, but that was more or less an excuse to be there. Welcome.
Anyway, I was leaning up against the grill of my van when my friend Lotten, from the Nevada adventure (also from Sweden), bullied* her way into our circle and said hello. Quickly, she took over and decided the subject. The subject is: let's go to New York; time - now. A bit taken aback, not that I mind spontaneous adventure, I stopped a second to chug my coffee and replied, "Okay, when?" She goes on to say she wants to leave as soon as possible. Normally, I'd pick up and go, but I was in the process of transferring all my photos from a copy of windows, that was performing at about the same performance you'd expect out of a person having a seizure, onto my friend Laura's computer and then back onto mine after a new install of windows, so I told her it'd be a minute before we could leave.
Lotten, not one to let her optimism about things get dragged down by a setback, asked, "okay, when?" We decided on Friday at 10 p.m., and left it at that.
I had a lot of shit to do in Kalamazoo. So my mad rush to do everything began right then and there. I quickly turned to my side and recruited my friend Jon for the trip. The conversation went a bit (or exactly) like this:
Me: Wanna go to New York?
Jon: I don't know...
Me: Fuck it, let's go.
Jon: Oh, alright then.
Other recruiting attempts died about as quick as an ant under a shoe, so I returned my attention to Lotten and put her to work finding a ride share. Then I was off, I ran up to my friend Matt's house, where I had been living in my van/his couch for the past couple of months, and began ripping two bikes, a bench seat, and bits of carpet that were left over from the Van Renovation Project 2010tm, out of his garage. One bike I decided to leave for my friend Anya, and the other was about 50% put back together, but it was eventually for my friend Syd so I took that one down Grant Hill** to her house. Then it was off to Laura's shack to watch random T.V. shows while I entertained myself with a screen full of loading screens as I transferred all my files. I didn't get to finish this entirely because she had to work. I decided I should probably make a list of shit I had to do. I did that, and went to bed early so I didn't wake up at 4 in the afternoon pinch-eyed and pissed off about wasting most of the day when I had bags to tie up.
*Lotten doesn't take a lot of crap, and never let's things get in her way. By bullied, I mean elbows drawn and ready to take over the conversation. She also stands over six feet high which helps.
** Grant Hill is a nightmarish creation that sits in between Stadium Drive and Grant street in Kalamazoo. Its only benefit is that it will build your leg muscles in such a way that they'll resemble a brick. I am unaware of anyone who enjoys it.
I was standing outside 4th coast café in Kalamazoo, Michigan around midnight doing the usual can-kicking that the rift raft around there does. Mostly, we just bullshitted, chased off panhandling bums, and stared threateningly at people who drove into the parking lot the wrong direction. We drank coffee too, but that was more or less an excuse to be there. Welcome.
Anyway, I was leaning up against the grill of my van when my friend Lotten, from the Nevada adventure (also from Sweden), bullied* her way into our circle and said hello. Quickly, she took over and decided the subject. The subject is: let's go to New York; time - now. A bit taken aback, not that I mind spontaneous adventure, I stopped a second to chug my coffee and replied, "Okay, when?" She goes on to say she wants to leave as soon as possible. Normally, I'd pick up and go, but I was in the process of transferring all my photos from a copy of windows, that was performing at about the same performance you'd expect out of a person having a seizure, onto my friend Laura's computer and then back onto mine after a new install of windows, so I told her it'd be a minute before we could leave.
Lotten, not one to let her optimism about things get dragged down by a setback, asked, "okay, when?" We decided on Friday at 10 p.m., and left it at that.
I had a lot of shit to do in Kalamazoo. So my mad rush to do everything began right then and there. I quickly turned to my side and recruited my friend Jon for the trip. The conversation went a bit (or exactly) like this:
Me: Wanna go to New York?
Jon: I don't know...
Me: Fuck it, let's go.
Jon: Oh, alright then.
Other recruiting attempts died about as quick as an ant under a shoe, so I returned my attention to Lotten and put her to work finding a ride share. Then I was off, I ran up to my friend Matt's house, where I had been living in my van/his couch for the past couple of months, and began ripping two bikes, a bench seat, and bits of carpet that were left over from the Van Renovation Project 2010tm, out of his garage. One bike I decided to leave for my friend Anya, and the other was about 50% put back together, but it was eventually for my friend Syd so I took that one down Grant Hill** to her house. Then it was off to Laura's shack to watch random T.V. shows while I entertained myself with a screen full of loading screens as I transferred all my files. I didn't get to finish this entirely because she had to work. I decided I should probably make a list of shit I had to do. I did that, and went to bed early so I didn't wake up at 4 in the afternoon pinch-eyed and pissed off about wasting most of the day when I had bags to tie up.
*Lotten doesn't take a lot of crap, and never let's things get in her way. By bullied, I mean elbows drawn and ready to take over the conversation. She also stands over six feet high which helps.
** Grant Hill is a nightmarish creation that sits in between Stadium Drive and Grant street in Kalamazoo. Its only benefit is that it will build your leg muscles in such a way that they'll resemble a brick. I am unaware of anyone who enjoys it.
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