Tim Jeffrey has been published in every form and has written for newspapers and magazines from time to time. He has chosen a selection here of representative pieces, including some still unpublished articles and some blog-like rants.

Going Back
The Triumph of Saints and Heroes
Park Is Again the Place To Be
Detroit News Editorial Submission


GOING BACK
Timothy Jeffrey©

 

The clearest pictures of that time, black and curled from the chemicals of my father’s basement dark room, show striped canvas awnings over sitting porches of modest two bedroom bricks and a mix of simple close-together two-story clapboard flats. High above the street arches a cathedral vault of healthy maples, elms and oaks, stippling the peaceful lawns. It is Turner Street, the early fifties, the Livernois-Puritan area. Long before the wholesale devastation set in, I lived in an idyllic, magical Detroit that in my memory still holds rich, thrumming life and promise. That is how I remember it: a photo, fixed in time.

The green grocer, the butcher, the barber...a shoe repair shop, a Chinese laundry, the pharmacist - even the doctor was at the end of my block. It was my Penny Lane. But the people, the adults after the war seemed to me gray as the photographs of that place do now, under-saturated, hollowed out. Disoriented. They were beginning “normal” life for the first time in the American Century. They were young first generation, English-speaking Americans who’d won a war, and the sudden abundance encouraged them to imagine they had engineered an American economic miracle. Especially in Detroit, where we made things. But I saw ghosts all around them.

Detroit had just started building cars again after stopping in 1942. People from families that had never had a high school graduate were attending college on the GI Bill. My father tells me there was “an air of elation.” People were breathing again. Especially in Detroit, the engine of the war, the cradle of the industrial revolution.

No one had ever lived in this kind of world, so we were starting over, new. New inventions, new-looking buildings downtown, new conveniences in the kitchen for mother. Most people walked or took the bus, but my father bought an almost new, sleek ‘53 Ford for our family. He ran his photography business out of the house, so he was often able to play with us.

One day, he told his four kids that he had found something. Had one of us dropped it? He produced a piece of paper, singed on three sides, and yellowed. There were drawn lines, a compass north. We told my father excitedly it was a map! Son of a gun, he said. You’ve got something there. That was Detroit and this...our neighborhood? Wait just one minute: our yard? By golly.

He had us step it off. Father said he half remembered a story about this area being a big old body of water long ago, when pirates roamed the seas. We had to walk it off several times because we were so shook up, we were starting to confuse each other. Back by the alley fence, three feet from the neighbor’s garage, he put the shovel in. When he hit the box, we jumped ahead and dug with our hands.

We pulled out an ancient-looking jewelry box. Inside, we beheld pearls, other shiny things, a pin, a broach... Father told us he and mother would save it all for us until we were old enough to take care of it all.

Our backyard was ever after a hallowed, magical place.

But even at four, I would climb the fence and set off down the alley in search of my real parents. I suspect this was because my parents always told me they didn’t know what to do with me, or why I wouldn’t behave - but it could have been simple inherited wanderlust: both grandfather’s had migrated here from other places, and to this day I have never stopped moving.

I began back then, shadowing a rag picker who towed a rusty Radio Flyer full of recovered detritus from the years of the city’s discarded production: odd rusting implements and car parts, chip canisters, bullet casings, spoons, tins, condiment bottles with colored remnants, bits of fabric, switch covers, lead pipe, and so on. He took it all to his garage and he kept it there, and people said he made things with it. Some people, my elders said, never got over the shock of the Depression and just kept collecting - against the chance of another collapse. They had lost their ability to trust the new city’s wealth or anybody’s words. I had seen pictures of the European rabble piles and my glittering, rutted alley looked like that, so I dug for lost treasures: Barbasol cans, good rocks, liquor bottles (still containing a finger of amber liquid), knife handles. I filled my pockets with history.

Still, that pall on everyone: I am told now by my parents that this is only my fanciful invention - digging for clues by planting them first. But I am well-read, and I have concluded that the sudden abundance and the optimism of that time only resurrected the differences between neighbors that had - however miserably - linked all of us in food lines, union movements and victory gardens barely a generation before. Something of that common despair saturated the very air I was breathing. Even then, I knew what the Bomb was, that it could come at any time and despoil, maybe obliterate the humming, industrious vitality that excited my senses. Someone far away could take it from me and my Detroit.

Detroit would be targeted first - I’d heard the adults say so, almost proudly. The war wasn’t over; they were eternally vigilant. So I was. When they wanted to cheer each other up, they drank Stroh’s beer and made Polack and Jewish jokes that I wasn’t supposed to repeat. We Americans didn’t trust everybody, I knew, even if I didn’t know who it was I should distrust. Plainly, someone wanted to undermine us - my family, me - someone who had never agreed with us, who secretly had more and wanted us to have less. Serious men in echoing shadowed rooms speaking uncomfortably into microphones on the new invention, our television, a wooden Muntz box with a brass-rimmed porthole that gave the impression we were eavesdropping on the outer world through a private telescope. The adults around me were serious like that at times, spoke of “them” - in a lower register so I wouldn’t hear - of the Ones who would soon come and would spell the end of my neighborhood. Another war was coming...

I exploded popsickle stick machine gun nests of toy soldiers in the alley, tossing rock/whistle bombs from behind bushes to simulate unerring American air assaults.

The Chinese didn’t like us, they said. Jimmy (whose family ran the laundry and lived upstairs at the corner) could talk Chinese with his parents... maybe about us. The Russians were already here, too, near Michigan Avenue. For sure, the Germans were mad at us. We were Irish, and until very recently, when we became cops and then politicians, no one would let us work. My grandparents on my father’s side spoke with a Scottish brogue, and that meant they would squeeze a penny till it screamed.

Adults acted nice to me, but they laughed too urgently at their jokes, I felt, for people under siege. I knew they were covering. My parents’ friend Cy, a cool “swinger” who called me “Daddy-o” and wore alpaca sweaters, chewing on a match - even Cy argued politics with my uncles so vociferously he spit a little. I associated that with Tony and Maria, the Italian neighbors who also spit unintelligible venom in their constant turmoil. It was a neighborhood: everybody knew each others’ business, but I was already noticing that right-acting people didn’t publicly acknowledge such things. Instead, everything they thought about other people came out in my living room when the adults gathered. I was trying to put this all together, to keep “a sharp look out, hep cat,” as Cy told me to do. My brother became a scout; their motto was: “Be prepared.”

Sam, Charley the Barber’s colored “shoeshine boy,” chased us out and into the alley when we sneaked in through the back door of the shop to play boo through the hall curtain. But Sam didn’t laugh like the barber and the customers; we never heard him speak to the men in the chairs, who also never addressed him. Maybe he wanted to hurt us. Jimmy said he did.

At church I saw bomber jackets, or those Chinese silk baseball jackets with bright colored piping - on the backs of which were stitched battalion names and wars, red dots on a lighter field cut in the shape of Korea. They weren’t like us. So, we were exploding them.

 

* * *

I ran away a lot. Exploring the alley, I would eventually be found at my uncle’s bar, under a beer truck, on the next block. My mother says they didn’t worry much because whoever found me would bring me home. Everyone was acquainted and no one would allow a child to be hurt. Maybe to reassure herself, my mother told stories of how I was safe, living in the same place my mother had been raised. Our house was still owned by “Pop” - my lanky, taciturn slightly alcoholic grandfather who I considered my childhood buddy (and would learn years later found me an unnerving, hyperactive nuisance). He had moved upstairs to give us the main floor of the cramped house. A lot of people lived like that.

I was on the look-out (the ice cream man by my school whose protruding glass eye looked like an opaque funhouse mirror... adults cruising by in cars: kids were snatched somewhere in the city). I’d heard the parents say “they” were coming soon. In Cowboy movies, the Indians descended from blue-shaded, tall stands of pines, and I could see the same kind of trees over there, where I had never been, several blocks beyond the schoolyard. They would come from that direction.

I would shoot them, to protect us. My city, my family. Me.

My home, Detroit, of the first paved street, the first expressway, the first radio broadcast. Just then the first shopping center was being erected on the edge of town.

Cars. We got to see the new models earlier than anyone in the country and the corporations often permitted employees to test futuristic prototypes in Detroit first. So, when Chrysler began developing turbines, we kids looked for them. Suddenly, just another day on the playground, twenty feet away in normal traffic, the hushed, paranormal mechanism would ghost past us like some galactic invader.

The future. Our playground - at least the boys - stopped cold, entranced. History being made before our eyes. We were the ones who knew something no one else did. We told each other what we had seen, then we told our families. I wanted to grow up to be the one telling, because then everyone would look admiringly at me and be quiet and listen, like they did for my funny uncle.

My own penchant for “telling” began, really, when Pop, who apparently wanted me out of his hair, used to take me out to the porch glider to sit with him and distract me. We made up stories. Our stories were of two make believe down on their luck goofballs named Charley and Jake. They were forever in trouble. Their lives played out before us on the block, where we were sure newer neighbors who we didn’t know so well were frustrated with the two.

Pop would get it going: “Well doggone it, what are those two doing this time?” Then I had to pick that up, name some trouble (I remember “roller skating in the back alley...” as one repeated theme), then he would name the next outrageous incident and we were off. They never had money and someone was always chasing them. Neither of our clownish creations ever talked much, even to each other, or had a handle on how to fix their dire straits.

But maybe that’s how the world looked to me: we had live theater in my neighborhood. Tony and Maria, who had lived three doors down since my mother had been small, were an ever-unfolding human drama. Though their broad front porch was a veritable proscenium, the small wooden back porch and yard served well as theater in the round if you happened to be out hanging clothes. They wore their old country tempers like millstones about their lives, never averse to letting the neighborhood know their most intimate thoughts on a host of subjects. Their debates were legend. But they were a comfort to me, because my parents said I had no self-control, either. I sneaked over the fence and watched them from the alley.

Maria was from a wealthy Boston family, as it turns out, and Tony was not. A dark and eruptive - if gentle - man, he was road-apple brown (from years of hard outdoor labor) heavy about the eyes, and ham-handed. He looked scary.

Their bouts - Olympian shouting matches punctuated with dishes smashing like a Laurel and Hardy film - boomed through the walls of their first floor until Tony burst into the backyard ahead of an astonishing string of Italian gutturals. As Tony knew when he escaped, Maria came no further, for some reason unable to step that far into the yard, a kind of demilitarized zone. She never descended into the yard. Superstition, perhaps. No one ever knew.

Engorged, putting her not-so-fine-point on her arguments, she stood on the porch gesturing wildly, Tony answering with somewhat less vitriol and using similar hand signals until she was the only one talking and he stood waiting. But Tony never fought back, never hit her; and these were the days when no one would have objected. When he saw me or anyone else watching as Maria bellowed, Tony twirled a finger at his temple: Maria was nutty. Tony was trying to reassure me. So I was part of their lives. I found them fascinating because I knew them now, better than anyone else.

After a little while, Tony hopped the fence and headed down the alley to my uncle’s bar. Like Charley and Jake, he was in hot water and using the alley for his getaway. He would come home, liquored up, when everything had blown over.

People were no longer obliged to live in the city flats and apartments where they’d had to endure each other’s families, or had to share hallway bathrooms. These were not the peasant market streets of Tony’s youth. Now you could retire the matter to your own private space. Americans suddenly had money, and options. Things had changed. The most obvious was that no one had to bother with each other any more. They had already made Tony and Maria invisible.

A physical manifestation of the chasms developing between us all, an expressway ditch was suddenly laid across our street, cutting my paternal grandparents off from us. My parents told us they would move us out to the suburbs. I dreamed of a big empty field, no one around, the opposite of a city. Past the line of trees. Over There. A place like in westerns.

I did not want to go.

 

* * *

In subsequent years, the exodus and sprawl continued apace. I was estranged, orphaned from a Detroit that was becoming all places instead of a company town with a fairly identifiable network of extended families, cultures, architecture, history.

And I learned that “they” - with some terribly potent authority - had come. They chased out everyone I knew, and soon we all lived in contiguous Catholic parishes in the suburbs. City neighborhoods imploded. Whites scurried in new, fast and shiny, rocket-motif automobiles toward the borders of town like settlers in Manifest Destiny, or manned travel to a culturally featureless moonscape. Our parents said we were going to have more land and we did, kind of: home lots backed into one another, reclaiming alley space, covering traces of the pre-war past, breaking with any remaining vestige of “city.” At our back fence in the suburbs was a crumbling brick barbecue pit and a gnarled apple tree. My father cut it down and landscaped it. He cared a lot about how our lawn looked. He painted the clothes pole.

 

Not until high school did I come back to the city, where I attended the college-prep that only accepted me because my father had gone there. I hated it, especially that I was in the company of kids who possessed more than I did, who didn’t have to work two jobs like I did, to pay their way. Hitchhiking the ten miles in and out of the city each day, I studied its decline: stores closing, homes and neighborhoods gone to shit.

Our school instigated fights with cross town rivals at sporting events where (despite a popular misconception) whites jumped “them” far more often than otherwise. Weirdly, my “greaseball” white classmates and friends who hated “them” the most nonetheless wore thick and thins, Cuban heels, sharkskin pants and pinkie rings. Also, imitating inner city males, they smoked Kools, listened purely to Motown music, and said “man,” at the end of their sentences. Wanting the edge, to be the outcasts, they became what they hated. One Italian psycho east-sider I knew formed a band with three buddies who called themselves, “The 13 Screaming Negroes.” Brothers loved them. Rock and roll united the races.

A secret had been kept from us, I remember feeling, and I hated the adults I had known for failing my trust. I was headed for the counterculture. I identified with blacks; I was an infiltrator. At least, saying so made me different from my contemporaries. That seemed important.

But a place is what you are, and I would learn I was no better than any other white: One afternoon of my senior year, after “they” had arrived at the school, I had a psychology class that one of “them,” an advanced student, was allowed to attend with several other underclassmen. The teacher had left the room and I had wandered to the window as a few guys mumbled here and there.

I was making fun of things and getting my share of attention. I had a reputation for skipping classes and serving time after school. That moment, one of the women who served us lunch, a slight, animated black granny, was heading across the parking lot as I looked out. I tapped the window and waved. She smiled, as she always did because she liked us, and waved back.

Then, without her knowing, I said: “Bye-bye nigger lady...”

And the sudden, shocked vacuum behind me brought it home: one of them was here. He was a kid I had greeted several times in the hall - because I wanted him to know we were not all alike, that I did not even enjoy these rich bastards, but especially, that I did not want him to feel uncomfortable. I wanted to protect him.

I turned now. His frozen dark features were closed; he stared at his desktop. I sat down in the desk, dry-mouthed and scalded. After a space, the teacher returned.

I never apologized. I never spoke to the kid again.

 

* * *

 

That summer in 1967, we watched the sky turn crimson toward the river and the curfew was announced and parents sat on their porches talking in disgusted whispers about them and their violent stupidity. Many of us were told we couldn’t ever go into the city again, even to see the Lions, Tigers or Red Wings.

I was eighteen and disposed to anarchy. I needed to be where everything was happening. Blacks were always at the top of the list of forbidden delights for white kids and so, desirable attractions. They were new, they were happening, they meant trouble - like we stood for a cause, had an actual viewpoint.

The City, therefore, held mystery, danger, and promise, especially if you could say you’d been around them. We drove down that night, watching the inhabitants set fire and loot.

When “I Got Friday On My Mind,” our anthem, came on the radio, we blasted it:

 

 

It’s going to happen in the city

I’ll be with my girl, she’s so pretty.

She looks fine tonight, she is paradise to me

Tonight: I’ll lose my head... Tonight: I’ll spend my bread...

Tonight: I’ve got to get --



The following spring, Martin Luther King was killed, right after making his “I Have A Dream” speech in Detroit. Then Robert Kennedy.

Then, a little over a year after the riot had divided us all, the Tigers won their first World Series since the end of World War II and the city blew wide open again. Within minutes that afternoon - horns honking, toilet paper streamers hanging off trees everywhere and people with transistors pressed to their ears, jumping on the sidewalks and slapping backs and hands - I headed downtown.

I have never seen the city like that before or since: surging, ecstatic throngs in love over being Detroiters. Buses marooned in the human river became party parlors which people entered and left through the windows. The bars literally dried up and more people spilled into the streets. Blacks and whites danced together there sharing bottles. Though some cars tried to make their way out of town on Michigan Avenue, it was hopeless. As one white driver inched along, a young brother mounted the hood and was joined by an equally blitzed white guy who scrambled to stand next to him. Both struck proud, indomitable poses reminiscent of famous warrior bronzes in Campus Martius downtown - a double racial ornament for the Future Detroit: two drunk fans. People all around cheered.

I met a girl and we hastily repaired to my ‘65 Mustang where, in the back seat, we steamed things up. The door suddenly popped open; a black kid jumped into the driver’s seat and put the grab on my 8-track player.

Our hands were occupied, so we were pretty much compromised. “Hey! You mind?”

He swung around - not particularly disappointed or in a hurry to leave. Then, a sport, he said: “Sorry, man, didn’t know nobody in here.”

“No big deal,” I said, ever the good citizen.

It was a nutty Detroit night. We were all making charming mayhem together. Another first for the city: blacks and whites rioting with a common, peaceful cause.

 

I worked at the time in a restaurant where gamblers, Mafioso bookies and hit men met, which was also where the sports heroes of the day and television personalities frequented. The owner was a spoiled suburban college business graduate with a flashy roll who desired like so many of them to act like a tough Detroiter, since that alone could get you laid in the right circumstance. He let me drive his Mark III all over town. I cruised the ghetto, where I got genuine respect, where they knew a boat when they saw one.

My obnoxious country club boss wore alligator shoes and golf sweaters, but he was out of date now. He knew it, saw that my hair was getting long; I looked like the new direction. He asked me one night if any of my friends had some pot he could try. The barriers were coming down. I hear that he is now something of a comic legend in Detroit: after he lost a game of cards to the hoods one night, he spent the next 20 years opening restaurants that mysteriously burned down every other year. He got strung out on stuff. They hung him on a meat hook one night in an Eastern Market walk-in freezer by way of demonstrating a point.

But I had quit him by then. I escaped my family, my town. I wanted to be somebody else, somewhere else. I hitchhiked around the country, bummed for a while, and when I told people where I was from, got a strange, in some cases awed, respect - even in California a month after the Manson murder. So I told the dweebs stories of my life “in the gangs” - of course, this time I was winning all those fights. I made up my Detroit for them, the entertainer.

A lot has intruded since I went away to college: I dropped out. I drove cab. I was drafted. I refused to go. They were going to put me in jail. I’m a Detroit boy, I don’t scare. For some reason, they never prosecuted.

Then I moved back into the city.

 

It was a scary place by then. Streetlights rarely worked and cop helicopters ran their floods down my street almost nightly while sirens wailed. I was the only white guy for miles and the low-key coke salesman in the downstairs flat said to just stamp my foot and his boys would come up and take care of business any time someone gave me trouble. He meant the ones who were always trying to break in, sometimes as I sat there fronting them off from behind the door, shouting at them to go away. My dealer liked me: white boys were always of legal and practical use if you got stormed by the narcs. Of course, he was paying off a judge and some cops, and a state congressman regularly brought his girlfriend by for the occasional fix on the house, but you couldn’t overestimate the advantage of having a white boy on the premises.

Guns went off all the time at night. Bodies were found in my alley. Almost every night, some crackpot down the street, as a ritual apparently conducive to good sleep, came out to his lawn in the dark, shouted: “Night, e'rebody!’ and squeezed off a couple rounds into the air to signal the end of yet another meaningless day. A drunken, well-dressed crooner in the rain walked under my street lamp in the deepest hour of night and put on a show, begging a lost lover to forgive him.

The guy across the street inexplicably blew out his windows with a double barrel and still spent the winter there, appearing stolid but harmless in an empty lightless frame from time to time, peering out silently at his Detroit from a blanket burnoose.

I thought of Maria, who regularly went to the front porch to lecture the neighbors regarding their insensitivity, bellowing: “You theenk ama craze? Eeza you! You acraze!” After a while, people put out cigarettes and went inside from their porches, closed their drapes.

Today suburban homes have recessed postage-sized porches, and massive, largely unoccupied elaborate decks in back that cost more than most homes did twenty years ago. We turn away, go to the back room, to the back yard...

That’s where Tony went when he left Maria, doubtless to preserve his health. No further than the garage, though. He rag picked a cook stove, a mattress and some other things, and he lived there. Divorce? Unthinkable. Put Maria away? Why? She was his wife. He would never have left her. She was bananas, but she was his world. This was his place, in this life.

* * *

I started a family, and finished two degrees, and ended up where I had always been going: I worked as an institutional counselor for juvenile delinquents. Wherever I moved the family, I have always returned to Detroit. I am good with kids, especially black kids, who I perceived as the fallout from my once-cherished Detroit, which had become society’s alley. They don’t trust any officials and they have heard all they’re going to listen to about everyone’s faith in them to change, to be better than they have been. They have a hard time trusting words. Most of the kids I worked with had no families or had patched-together ones, smattered wrecks with strewn or lost parts. Like my forbearers, I’m a mechanic from Detroit, a fixer of families ruined by the Great Escape.

As time passes though, I am less drippy about it all; I have become instead a wizened Gabby Hayes, offering the boys cantankerous social and political observations in the form of storytelling, like this one I tell you now. For them, I retell the Detroit boy-wanderer’s transit and place them within an historically sound context that gives them a reference point. A lot of them don’t know who or what they come from. I give them a city.

Your attachment to a place, what you identify with, is what you tell yourself it was.

So, on Jefferson Avenue, hanging on a tripod that faces out to the river and the world (as tribute to our favorite son, Joe Louis), is a facsimile of the Champ’s curiously detached, extended arm and power-driving fist. Welcome, neighbor, to the city that has always devoured itself, arising again from self-immolation. Enclaves and bedroom communities that coincidentally butt up against each other, Detroit became a segregated killing ground defined by what has been taken from it rather than what it has become. True Detroiters as a result have a generational inferiority complex not unlike Palestinians - reactive, sure of themselves almost only when threatened. When we tell people we are from Detroit, we brace for the inevitably jocular or derisive rejoinder before demurring: “Well, I don’t actually live in the city itself, of course.”

Or: we might brag reflexively that we are Hockey Town, The Bad Boys, Motown, Tommy Hearns, Aretha... (how can we make you love us?) Gilda Radner, Robin Williams, Lily Tomlin, Tom Selleck, George C. Scott...(Do you see us?) Once the center of a stove industry and the fur trade, Big Timber, Iron, Chemical, Mineral, Railroad and Automotive...they all pass through, bankrolling their escapes. Detroit, built and still surrounded by Big Money, into whose coffers our mayors still dutifully deposit architectural treasures and plumb city contracts, defacing the landscape, as if Detroit were merely a luckless aging whore, trading her jewels for a warm coat and a temporary fix.

And I come back home.

But the Bomb seems to have been dropped. A friend from out of state told me Detroit is the ugliest place he has ever seen. “Looks like the illegitimate offspring of a dalliance between Trenton, New Jersey and Los Angeles.” I could tell him that Detroit is rebuilding at a ferocious rate (roads, stadiums, the African/American Museum, bridges, buildings, neighborhood developments), that he doesn’t know our spi

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