It is the day after the Detroit Pistons won some championship or other. My friend Charlie calls me from Detroit to say he wants to come visit me. Is that basketball, baseball? I still don’t know. All I know is that following the triumph of the team, the celebrating in the streets left eight people dead. Ecstatic fans brandished bats and bricks and looted stores, and hundreds of people were stabbed, shot, or beaten. Hundreds of people rush out into the streets of Detroit and stab, beat, and shoot each other because they’re happy?
I walk down Damen and the heat makes waves on the blacktop. As I reach the intersection of Damen, North, and Milwaukee, I watch the cars slide up to the stoplight from three directions, big American cars, maybe manufactured in Detroit. The boom, boomboom, boom of their radios moves into me like the heat from the blacktop. Boom, boomboom, boom, it might be my pulse, everybody’s pulse. The noise and the heat of the street drift in through open doors and follow me to the back of the Salvation Army store on Milwaukee, where I see a brand-new foam mattress resting on an old metal frame. It’s priced $30, with or without the frame. I only have $15, and no way to carry the frame the five blocks to my apartment. I feel pretty cheap trying to haggle with the Salvation Army, but they could probably use the frame for a heavier mattress anyway.
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“The corner of Milwaukee and Armitage, the corner of Milwaukee and Armitage,” he is whispering and nodding and waving.
The woman emerges from the store, mattress under one arm, bundle of clothes under another. She is smiling at me.
“I only have a ten,” I say.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Paul Merideth.
