Read Online You Don't Have to Live Like This by Benjamin Markovits - Free Book Online
Authors: Benjamin Markovits
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doing in Detroit belonged to the same tradition.
I said, “It means a lot for me to be here. I was going out of my mind in Baton Rouge.”
“You’re one of those crazy guys who isn’t meant to be alone,” Robert told me, tapping the code into the front gate.
That afternoon he flew to Boston, and from there he went on to Geneva and then Hong Kong. A few weeks later I got a peek at his Detroit diary, which Beatrice was in charge of. Flipping through the pages I caught sight of my name. “Take a walk with Marny after breakfast,” it said, under the date.
But even at the time I felt stage-managed. I had opened up to him, in confidence, and he had taken advantage of my confession to give me his opinion. So now I was stuck with it. You don’t often get a sense of what people think of you. And the worst thing about sexual loneliness is that you have no practical and tedious duties and arguments to occupy the hamster wheels in your brain. So this kind of thing goes around and around.
TONY LIKED TO SNARK ABOUT Clay and Robert James and the rest, the whole setup. He showed me around Detroit, starting with the big art deco towers downtown—arched halls, mosaics on the walls and floors, gold leaf. It was like walking around the pyramids, they were monuments, not offices, half dead, except for the tourists, and even the ugly new buildings surrounding them had space for rent signs hanging from the thirtieth-floor windows. You could park downtown, there was plenty of room, and every time a People Mover, one of those funny sky trains, passed overhead, Tony pointed and shouted and tried to see if there was anyone in it.
“This was a fucking great city,” he said, “when LA was just a small town. And the only thing left is four lousy ball clubs.”
We broke into Michigan Central Station together, which reminded me of Sterling Library at Yale. Gravestone architecture, a tall narrow gray slab. Except instead of books it was full of brokenglass, wires, loose stones, graffiti, cigarette butts and beer bottles. Like most abandoned places it showed funny intimate signs of habitation: underpants, a can of shaving foam. I cut my hand on the chain-link fence surrounding it and for weeks afterwards had to resist scratching the scab. We went round the ballparks and the fine arts museum and wandered through the asbestos-lined hallways of an old factory, where the radiators seethed and dripped. Artists had taken over the place and filled it with bad watercolors and large lumpy ceramics. We ate Polish food in Hamtramck.
The house itself was full of journalists, politicians, lawyers, academics and other hangers-on. A documentary crew filmed many of our meetings and sometimes followed us around the city in several cars, recording. Clay Greene was going to present. You couldn’t tell how old he was, that was part of his appeal. Clay was one of these smooth-skinned good-looking guys who might be prematurely gray or well preserved. This was his first venture into TV, which accounted for some of his personal vanity. The mirrors around him were multiplying, and when he opened his mouth the tape recorder clicked on.
Sometimes, after dinner, we watched the outtakes in Robert’s home cinema. There was Clay on the wall, spread out on a flat white roll of screen, and Clay sitting beside me, and both of them were talking, explaining.
Detroit seemed to him a textbook case of the need for private-public partnerships. Most people assumed that the failure of state and market forces meant that Detroit itself was doomed. Urban studies theorists like Richard Florida suggested abandoning the Rust Belt altogether. But Clay believed that a highly directed combination of the two could solve many of its problems. He was very interested in China. The Chinese had been trying to combine free market capitalism with democratic centralism for several years, andhad managed to regenerate a number of cities in much worse shape than Detroit. Of course, the government
I said, “It means a lot for me to be here. I was going out of my mind in Baton Rouge.”
“You’re one of those crazy guys who isn’t meant to be alone,” Robert told me, tapping the code into the front gate.
That afternoon he flew to Boston, and from there he went on to Geneva and then Hong Kong. A few weeks later I got a peek at his Detroit diary, which Beatrice was in charge of. Flipping through the pages I caught sight of my name. “Take a walk with Marny after breakfast,” it said, under the date.
But even at the time I felt stage-managed. I had opened up to him, in confidence, and he had taken advantage of my confession to give me his opinion. So now I was stuck with it. You don’t often get a sense of what people think of you. And the worst thing about sexual loneliness is that you have no practical and tedious duties and arguments to occupy the hamster wheels in your brain. So this kind of thing goes around and around.
TONY LIKED TO SNARK ABOUT Clay and Robert James and the rest, the whole setup. He showed me around Detroit, starting with the big art deco towers downtown—arched halls, mosaics on the walls and floors, gold leaf. It was like walking around the pyramids, they were monuments, not offices, half dead, except for the tourists, and even the ugly new buildings surrounding them had space for rent signs hanging from the thirtieth-floor windows. You could park downtown, there was plenty of room, and every time a People Mover, one of those funny sky trains, passed overhead, Tony pointed and shouted and tried to see if there was anyone in it.
“This was a fucking great city,” he said, “when LA was just a small town. And the only thing left is four lousy ball clubs.”
We broke into Michigan Central Station together, which reminded me of Sterling Library at Yale. Gravestone architecture, a tall narrow gray slab. Except instead of books it was full of brokenglass, wires, loose stones, graffiti, cigarette butts and beer bottles. Like most abandoned places it showed funny intimate signs of habitation: underpants, a can of shaving foam. I cut my hand on the chain-link fence surrounding it and for weeks afterwards had to resist scratching the scab. We went round the ballparks and the fine arts museum and wandered through the asbestos-lined hallways of an old factory, where the radiators seethed and dripped. Artists had taken over the place and filled it with bad watercolors and large lumpy ceramics. We ate Polish food in Hamtramck.
The house itself was full of journalists, politicians, lawyers, academics and other hangers-on. A documentary crew filmed many of our meetings and sometimes followed us around the city in several cars, recording. Clay Greene was going to present. You couldn’t tell how old he was, that was part of his appeal. Clay was one of these smooth-skinned good-looking guys who might be prematurely gray or well preserved. This was his first venture into TV, which accounted for some of his personal vanity. The mirrors around him were multiplying, and when he opened his mouth the tape recorder clicked on.
Sometimes, after dinner, we watched the outtakes in Robert’s home cinema. There was Clay on the wall, spread out on a flat white roll of screen, and Clay sitting beside me, and both of them were talking, explaining.
Detroit seemed to him a textbook case of the need for private-public partnerships. Most people assumed that the failure of state and market forces meant that Detroit itself was doomed. Urban studies theorists like Richard Florida suggested abandoning the Rust Belt altogether. But Clay believed that a highly directed combination of the two could solve many of its problems. He was very interested in China. The Chinese had been trying to combine free market capitalism with democratic centralism for several years, andhad managed to regenerate a number of cities in much worse shape than Detroit. Of course, the government
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