Odometer: 87217

  

A mildly hungover moring in Milwaukee, cured by a big lunch at a great old-school Italian restaurant. This place was really incredible, with the kind of Italian food I grew up eating (in other words, none of your foofy “light trendy pasta of the month” bullshit…). The host was a classic “mama” of the sort who pinches your cheeks at the table and asks why you didn’t finish everything. Great.

 

In addition to a tour of the city, I met the neighbor kid, a very out 14-year-old queer who was about to give a class presentation on Truman Capote. I saw the “Laverne and Shirley” building. I saw what used to be the Schlitz brewery. We drove by some Milwaukee resident’s own personal version of the Cadillac Ranch. Pretty interesting place. Milwaukee. I should have given it more time.

It was almost 4:00 by the time I left. I was worn out from too little sleep and too much lasagne. It was starting to rain. I was offered crash space for the night, but I was determined to make it to Minneapolis, so I hit the road.

I got as far as Madison. That big indention in my butt was the result of kicking myself (hard) for being so stupid.

I didn’t even go out in Madison. I checked into the Motel 6 from hell (this place was REALLY bad), got dinner from the sub shop across the street and settled in for some strange voodoo incest movie on HBO, followed by a PBS documentary on the history of the ACLU. All in all, I guess it was a pretty good low-impact rest break. All in all, that’s a pretty good descrition of Madison in general.

Odometer: 86376

I made it out pretty early. Would have been even earlier, but there was cruising to be done at the motel. Seems the “high school/homecoming kid” we’d noticed earlier was (a) a couple of years older than originally pegged, and (b) cruising me really hard. Unfortunately, we never completely connected and we didn’t get to fuck to a background of Judge Judy. Pity…

 

Southern Michigan is not the most exciting place in the world. There’s Ann Arbor, the cute college town, Battle Creek, the depressed cereal town, and Kalamazoo, the town where I couldn’t stop singing that song about “I got a gal…”

I made it through pretty fast, ate somewhere, and all of a sudden I was in Indiana again. There was cheap gas. There were cheap cigarettes. And I made my way through Gary, the dowdy gateway to Chicagoland just a little too close to rush hour for comfort.

Logistics (OK…money…) kept me from spending any time at all in Chicago. I didn’t even drive through the city since I arrived so late in the afternoon. I flew through the far western suburbs on I-294 and didn’t stop ’til I was in Wisconsin.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I was running a day early, and I was hoping this wouldn’t screw up my chance to meet up with Dave in Milwaukee. Fortunately, it didn’t. We met up at the bookstore where he works part time and were soon joined by boyfriend Doug and roomie Davee. At this point, there were far too many Davids in one room. We survived.

 

I’m told Milwaukee has more queer bars per capita than any other city in the country. This is a pretty reasonable notion since Milwaukee is traditionally “Beer City USA”. Strange thing is, all of the bars we hit were tiny sleazy little corner bars. Of course, I liked this aspect of the place. There was This Is It, with the big booth an the strange man who wanted to escort me to the bathroom. At C’est La Vie, Dave and Doug won a lovely porn video playing pob-ball. At the Ballgame, there was wood panelling, strange statuary, and a security camera. And there was also this straight bar which I really loved. Cheap beer all around. I really loved that too…

 

And (again) it was really cool to meet people and instantly feel like old friends. We hung out. We drank beer. We watched demolition video. I was in awe of all the techno toys in the house. I was in awe of all the HOUSE in the house. After Detroit (where I lurked in a house being purchased for an obscenely low price) and Milwaukee, was becoming increasigly impatient with the walk-in closet I call home.

I shot a lot of video in Detroit and tried to edit myself somewhat to fit the text. All the same, I used a lot of pictures and there were still some left which I wanted to use as well. So here they are:

 

 

 

 

Seems the Detroiters I was lurking with are not at all sentimental about the place but are still fiercely loyal to it in a certain way. San Franciscans seem to have no discernible sense of humor about themselves, perhaps due to absolute terror that someone might get offended and deem them “unworthy” of living here. On the other hand, it is quite acceptable for residents to make wry and sarcastic comments about Detroit without being branded traitors. A refreshing quality indeed…

 

A few idiosyncracies I noted:

• Major intersections do not have left turn lanes. They have built-in U-turn zones at mid-block. An interesting experiment which really doesn’t work.
• It’s hard to see much of Detroit’s decay from the freeways. This must be very comforting to the commuting suburban residents who rea most responsible for this decay.
• Grosse Point is very aptly named.
• Hamtramck, described by the Utne Reader as one of the ten coolest urban neighbrhoods in America, vaguely resembles an urban version of a trailer park. Apparently, many of the residents are not totally out of place in this environment, given the large racist skinhead presence, etc.

 

Scott and I spent Sunday afternoon driving around the city taking pictures and discussing what had happened. We toured Grand River Avenue, a once fashionable area of large houses, which now features neat and well-kept homes interspersed with bombed-out shells and vacant lots. Near Woodward Avenue, the headquarters of General Motors, one of the world’s largest corporations, fittingly presides over the decay. The irony is apparently not lost on GM; they’re in the process of moving to the Rennaissance Center.

 

We visited a large pile of rubble which had once been the Cadillac factory which employed Scott’s father and the adjacent neighborod which went to hell when the factory closed. We visited the west side and some suburbs where a midde class still exists. We played “White Castle or White Tower”, where the object is to guess which chain an abandoned white porcelain building used to belong to.

 

 

It’s a strangely emotional thing for me to drive through Detroit, a place which dramatically illustrates the end result of of racism and corpoarate greed. I realized that the Hudson’s building was in some ways a metaphor for the entire city: abandoned, neglected, and a little too big and cumbersome for real adaptive re-use. The massive and majestic train station pictured above is perhaps an even more striking metaphor. It’s a beautiful building which sits on the outskirts of downtown, completely abandoned and gutted, almost begging to be put out of its misery because it will never be restored.

 

I don’t mean to suggest that Detroit is begging to be destroyed. There’s still life here, despite popular opinion. Scott summed up the city very well with one single statement he kept repeating: there’s absolutely no place else like Detroit. And I’m still drawn to the place. Every minute I spend in Detroit makes me crave ten more.

From Windsor ON, downtown looks completely different. The view from the hideous new casino reveals no trace of the dark side of the faded jewel across the river. What it does reveal is just how bad the Detroit waterfront could look in a few years when the casinos open there. Casinos are a really misguided plan for revitalizing a city, methinks. Look what they did for Atlantic City, after all. Thy’re insulated environments which feed of the city and give nothing back.

Sort of like the Renaissance Center. And sort of like General Motors, its new tenant.

 

Time to move on. Scott had to start a new job on Monday and I had to be on my way after another morning drive through a downtown which ones had chain and people and now had one less abandoned department store across the street from the boarded-up Lerner Shop.

Have you ever sat through the Saturday morning teenybopper shows on NBC? All of them seem like warmed-over “Saved by the Bell” wannabes, each with exactly one stylishly-attired member of each major ethnic group (although some have two or three stylishly-attired white kids…audience demographics, y’know…). I can’t imagine watching this crap even when I was a kid. However, I did sit through it on Saturday morning in Detroit.

I should have been visiting the boy in the room next door: the one Scott and I had (mistakenly, it seems) pegged as a straight high school kid throwing a homecoming party or something. More about him later.

Instead, I waited for the abortion protest to end and tried to get in touch with Mike, another email correspondent who was planning to show me around a little. Unfortunately, we never could connect (a problem exacerbated by the fact that the message light on my phone wasn’t working).

 

Soon enough I was off with Scott to downtown Detroit for the demolition of what used to be Hudson’s Department Store, second largest building of its kind in the United States. This is the event around which my entire trip was oriented, and frankly I was pretty amazed that there wasn’t a bigger crowd assembled to see it. All the same, I’m told, there were more people downtown on a Saturday afternoon this day than there had been in years. Specifically, there were more WHITE people. Maybe they felt safer knowing their suburban counterparts were there to protect them.

There was definitely a crowd at Jacoby’s, a cool bar nearby, with a tasty bartender and a good beer selection.

Demolitions of old buildings are always disturbing to me, and since I’m just barely old enough to remember when big downtown departent stores were the rule rather than the exception, I could identify with the old-timers who were sad to see it go. On the other hand, this building could never really have been re-used and its vacant shell was a big slap in the face to residents forced to see it everyday…a constant reminder of what Detroit used to be and would probably never be again. So I could also understand that many people were glad to see it go.

  

After a few delays, we heard the first blasts. Nothing happened. I wasn’t worried, having watched the Hotel Charlotte in North Carolina demolished in similar fashion about ten years before. Eventually, wings started collapsing, the crowd started cheering, and the whole thing was over in a few more seconds.

  

And then came this horrendous dust cloud. I was prepared for this as well, having been caught in it at my last implosion. We even brought masks and offered the extras to a few kids so they could propagate the species. Once the building came down, I grabbed Scott and we ducked into a corner bar (which locked its doors against the dust a few minutes later). When the dust settled, it looked like a gray blizzard had hit.

 

After drinking a toast to Hudson’s, there was time to roam around downtown Detroit (which was now relatively dust-free) for a while. This was a good excuse for food at Lafayette Coney Island, which came highly recommended by my friend Rae. Coney islands (hot dogs) seem to be a pretty high art form in Detroit. This place was incredible. Thanks Rae.

 

I took lots of pictures. Downtown Detroit is such an amazing place, with blocks and blocks of early 20th century commercial buildings and skyscrapers, many of them alarmingly vacant and abandoned, standing like testosterone-deficient phallic symbols (did I really write that?). There is life downtown. You just have to look for it.

 

There was another beer or two later, of course, at Steve’s, this very strange old bar run by the same marginally bitter couple for about 50 years or so. Huge place. Nothing on the walls. Bathroom from the 30’s. Cheap beer. I love hanging out with locals. Afterwards, we retired to the Motel 6 for what was supposed to be a nap (no…I’m not offering any details thank you…) and then off to more Detroit nightlife.

 

We hit a leather bar called the R&R (I think), which allegedly has some backroom action some nights (but not this night) and then a beautiful, huge, new club on Michigan Avenue. This place was your basic top-notch dance club. At 1AM on Saturday night, we were the only customers. I don’t understand…