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The City Of Detroit Is Inside Me
These are real rough people in the downtown area. You can't get close to them. They protect themselves from about five feet out, big and dilapidated. They are thousands of times bigger than an outback town. The cities within cities are deserted, with stories of violence blowing through the centres from the river and the lake. Detroit's skyline stands across the Detroit River as viewed from the Canada side in Windsor. The Boy and I view the apocalypse from this safe clean vantage point. There is a silentness and a desertedness about it. It shouts as big as the buildings with that tough exterior, and burns itself up just to stand in your way. 'Mother fucker! What you starin at? What you doin' here? Get outa town! Get offa my side of the river!' Detroit is defiant with its burnt out windows. But you can see its heart crumbling and cowering in there. Detroit is the refuge for neglected people that live five feet outside themselves. If you try to get close to them and you will find them trembling inside, a reflection of the city that they live in. Detroit is the dilapidated city that they have contributed to, each and every one of them aided by the government of The United States of the Apocalypse. Here you need to be on guard and in your quieter moments employ some coping techniques. After the angry dero approached us in the ghetto, we moved off quickly, scanning the dilapidation from the corners of our eyes. It wasn't that he frightened us with his rough accent and his violence. It was that there could have been two people listening a little further down the way, that might have come to join in. In Detroit you feel outnumbered for no reason, when no one's there. The funny thing about violence, is that it's like going into a slow spin in a car accident. It strikes you down out of the blue and it can escalate, and before you know it you are dead or raped. It's during that moment of escalation that can take just a few seconds, that you go onto the slide where you realise that you are in trouble. 'But too late, arsehole,' says the city with four murders a day as an acceptable rate. I am passing this group of big black guys on the street. No matter how close they are, I feel like I have to squeeze through them. They are as big as the buildings with that tough exterior and burnt out feeling inside. Their eyes are old windows into the world, that have been recently knocked out. Detroit protects its devastation from kilometres out. You can squeeze in there, in order to scurry around and never know when it's gonna happen to you. We sat in this nice leafy Greek restaurant in the centre of town. It was a third filled up my business men, a lunch time crowd. I felt that they all knew each other, and that they needed each other in this strangely deserted city. Someone has let it go and it has been left standing like a child, that has to defend itself in the wilderness of this country. Rather than dying only parts of it have died. There is an anger inside that makes it defiant. Some good people have stayed behind to open the theatres, or to colour it into life with brushes and small tins of paint. They stay back and work hard, in order to try and capture and understand its truth, and its potential for escalation and this sinister deserted feeling. The artists carry the equipment that constructs and resurrects, on their sleeves and in their pockets. It is also important to remember that everyone here carries guns. And even if you had one they know how to use them better. They knew the buildings and the vantage points, the gangs and hideouts. When the dero approached us, he was yelling out and calling us mother-fuckers. He was saying, 'Why did you take the fucken photo of me mother fuckers?' The Boy tried to calm him down by clouding his forehead with light. I said, 'Man you weren't in my fucken photo! I haven't even got a fucking camera!' I wasn't even interested in yelling down an ugly old dero. He just happened to get in the way of a building I was looking it. I thought I had seen a small black cat rush into it. She had a slight sway to her run and may have been pregnant. But it was a rough old area and the dero kept on hollering. He was black and I was not black and it was beginning to attract attention. We ended up taking off to avoid the escalation. Then a few blocks away another guy approached us. I was checking out the pigeon colony on his building. It was over fifty storeys high and he was quite proud of it. He said, 'We're fixing this up.' He defended it with a gun. I wondered how he could live in two hundred apartments at the same time, the quantity replacing the quality. When he approached me and asked me what I was doing, I said I was an artist. He sneered and said, 'Right and artists see beauty in everything don't they?' He hated what he thought was me. He thought he hated me, for being an artist, my white skin on my white face. But he didn't know me, so it wasn't me he didn't like. What he hated was himself and his situation, and everything that blocked the path to self hatred, that he saw simply as a reflection of himself. But rather than destroy himself he ended his world around him, and then he had to walk through it. We must all eventually eat our own waste. It was really nothing to do with a colour war, like they said it was, and if it was it had nothing to do with me. As far as the racism is concerned, I didn't hate anyone at all. I acknowledge that they have an enemy. I just wish they'd pick their targets more carefully. The city of Detroit appears to take on a life of its own. But it is really the life scurrying through it that lifts it up two inches from the ground. The rats are deserting the city. Detroit is carried away on the backs that go screaming and running into nowhere. As far as the defender of the building was concerned, I didn't hate him, but I wasn't interested in knowing him either. He hadn't proven himself to be anything to me beyond Detroit, and just another tough gun carrier. The disease is of guns shooting out the windows of buildings. I have let go of all power to be here, and accept that the city must run out of steam of its own accord. Detroit is the city of the future. It has moved out of itself for good but has left part of itself behind on Erie Street. Detroit is the grandfather and teacher of the great cities. All great cities of the future plan to go this way. I will cross the Windsor bridge into Canada. The boy and I expect to keep heading north to Churchill until the blizzards rage all around my backpack. We wont stop until we get to where polar bears are sleeping in the Arctic sun, tiny flurries of snow falling past their eyes and melting on their noses. |
