Charlie LeDuff at The Corner.
By Charlie LeDuff
I am a handyman at a downtown diner. I plunge toilets clogged by constipated junkies. I scrape grease from days gone by. I vacuum mummified hot dogs. Currently, I am on my knees repairing and painting the foundation of the American Coney Island where the walls meet the sidewalk.
Charlie LeDuff at The Corner.
Often people recognize me from my time as a TV reporter. The cops, the bus drivers, the construction workers, the priests, the housewives, even the former Emergency Manager who is a big fan of the hot dogs here.
"What the hell you doing down there?"
"Working," I say. "What's it look like?"
"Didn't know you types had it in you."
"Someone in the media has to get his loafers dirty."
Like the guy bagging groceries at a New Jersey Trader Joe's -- the guy used to appear on "The Cosby Show" -- I get job-shamed sometimes. One smart ass from the East Coast wrote "Former Pulitzer Winner Falls on Hard Times." Even the top manservant for the mayor of Detroit recently wrote that my career was "deteriorating badly."
Maybe. Or maybe I'm waiting for criminal indictments to come crashing down on hizzoner's administration, while I continue to track and report about him on this scrappy website in between scraping gum from the sidewalks. They don't like me in City Hall. But that doesn't hurt my feelings any.
Out here. Down here, valuable things can be learned about real life in an American City.
The dusty work boots tell me there is a real estate bubble. Money is cheap to borrow. Federal short-term interest rates are lower than inflation. That means you make money by borrowing money and make more by getting the public bank to kick in on development projects. That's profit without even trying. As a consequence, there is a building boom downtown, despite the fact that the city's population continues to drop and wages continue to fall when inflation is taken into account and banking jobs are factored out. Stacking the money, the hardhats in work boots tell me. The bottom will drop out. It always does.
And while the billionaire developers get billions in public subsidies, the lunatics maraud the streets in numbers I've never seen before. I keep my head on a swivel. These wretches have no medication, no place to sleep but the occasional cot in the county jail. One madman recently tried to hang himself by stripping his belt from his trouser loops, wrapping it around his neck, and holding himself up by his arms. This, he eventually realized, defied the law of physics. He was sent on his way with a box of warm food and a tasty slice of pie. Let him eat cake! Government investment in the care of the deranged is shrinking because we're told there isn't enough money.
Needles and Stale Band-Aids
It is dirty on the street. There are needles and stale Band-Aids and the occasional semi-rare penny. But it's the cigarettes that get me. Good economic times would suggest that they occasionally go half-smoked. The more money, the longer the cigarette butt. That's how it is on Wall Street. But people here in Detroit do not feel rich, if their cigarette debris is to be believed. They smoke their Newport 100's and Winston Lights down to the butt. I don't care what the Consumer Confidence Index says. The Cigarette Barometer tells me people are expecting a rough ocean ahead.
Monday is the worst day. That's trash pickup day. The chicken bones and onion boxes litter the streets and bums paw through them. Garbage collection, I've noticed, is increasingly tardy, since one of the main trash haulers in the city was caught up in a cash for contract bribery scandal. Some things never change around here.
And then again, some things do change. The first Monday of the month is worse than your average Monday. The government checks come then. People get high, flop out at the bus stop and mutter to themselves. This fuels the disconnect between the destitute and the new brown shoe crowd and the hipster hurtling around on rental scooters. "I ain't gonna hurt you," the poor man complains as the rich man walks widely around him. "I'm a human being."
The head of the political beast may be in Washington D.C. But the heart and stomach of that beast are here in the middle of the country: places like Detroit and Chicago and St. Louis. Capitol Hill is the clubhouse where the spoils are divided and taken home, but here on the street you don't taste it. Consider that Detroit went bankrupt in order to provide better public safety.
But the bullets still fly, and the police are taking jobs in suburban jurisdictions where the pay is better. While on my knees the other morning, a cop blared to a motorist over his loud speaker "You're blocking traffic, move the car." The motorist ignored him. The cop again: "Move your car or I'll ticket you for expired plates." It was a barter. The cop was too busy. The motorist was too poor. Where else does that happen? The motorist moved his car.
Still, Detroit is an excellent place. Cosmopolitan and diverse. A world destination despite all its troubles past and present. Automobiles roll by blaring all sorts of music: Arabic, Bengali, Greek, Hip Hop and Classic Rock all banging up on each other. Troubles, yes. But, this is no backwater. This is the Motor City. This is the corner.
"The Corner" With Charlie Leduff by Michael Lucido on Vimeo.
