Alex Burger

The last time we came to Detroit we learned how to count the dead. A woman in a second hand suit explained the methodology: always go in teams, block by block going west, get a simple inventory, report back. After the explanations Jeff, Juan, and I drive through swaths of neighborhoods: burnt out and abandoned homes, survivors only here and there. Jeff and I silent, Juan offers a running commentary from the back seat, his favorite character Sherlock Holmes, a ramble of hypotheses on what the hell happened. After awhile I have to look away from the living and dead so I mostly watch the dogs, packs of them, they said 10,000 roaming the city. I watch them from the car window, always on the move, as if they await the city’s imminent collapse, at a moment’s notice ready to move in droves across the bridge into Canada.

This time, five years later. Detroit is strangely alive, or as the man in the t-shirt shop says “Detroit got high-falutin.” Money streaming into downtown, a new GM center, high tech work spaces, new york fashion in renovated factories . . . .the downtown artists? . . . .well I think they’re all gone. You break out of the downtown renovation and it’s more the Detroit we saw before. Jeff and I spend most of our days chatting in these hinterlands:

– We stop at a gas station / converted into a corner church / now a thrift store. The old man in track pants and a parka gives us a flier and I scour the junk for old Aunt Jemima cookie tins, complaining why they sold the last ones. Jeff knows me well enough to just stand back and watch.

– We wander through a neighborhood of polka-dot houses and households items made into sculptures. We talk to the artist Tyree’s sister who tells us for decades that tourists came until the neighbors got jealous and burned most of them down. She tells us how Madonna was there last week, sitting in the road meditating with her new 32 year old boyfriend, but that didn’t stop her from hollering at the brothers on the corner which made Tyree’s niece mad ‘cause one of them was her fiancée.

– We wader through an outdoor African sculpture park and bead store. “Iron teaching stone to rust” it’s a metaphor about colonialism, the artists tells us, “’cause stones don’t’ rust, those are African, but Europeans keep trying to show them, it’s a metaphor about assimilation.” Jeff ooh and ahhs, and I don’t’ get it, I query the artist at length, but I mostly get an explanation of how mirrors don’t appear in nature.

– And then, my favorite place, an old haunt from last time, worn red carpet, a roaming DJ, a smoky mirror dance floor. After a few misses, we connect with a professional lesbian hydroponic weed grower who sits on a stool by the dancefloor. She shows me pictures of all her girlfriends: one in Detroit, one in ATL, one in LA,. . . Jeff says he got a woman for her in DC, Greek, nice hips, she says good, she only likes them light skinned. I ask her where all her woman are tonight, she says she pays for her pussy, so they be thinking about her. . . . We roll joint after joint, at first Jeff and I think we should hide in the bathroom, but she doesn’t care. We close down the club. I haven’t done this since I was 20.