Another curious feature was the political mix. You’d expect a lot of left-wing hippies, counterculturists, and we got them, too. But there was also a libertarian streak, and a number of Tea Party types.
Opposite the Rosens lived a childless married couple called the Adlers, Tina and Don. Don was a professional grumbler who worked in insurance and was forced into early retirement a couple of years ago. First they moved to Phoenix (from Kansas City), which was too expensive he said, and not his scene. So he said to Tina, for once in our lives let’s do something with our lives. He used to have political ambitions but the system was hopeless and corrupt. The trouble with any system is that it’s designed to perpetuate itself. There’s no point in getting into government if you want to get rid of government. That’s not how it works. And so on.
He used to walk over the road when he picked up his newspaper and talk to me. He was kind of friendly-miserable. When he heard about this Detroit business, he thought, this is what I’ve been talking about my whole life. The idea of America is a small-town idea, Jamestown, Plymouth, it’s a city-state idea. In his opinion the trouble started with the Constitution. There was nothing wrong with the Articles of Confederation — a confederation is what we should have stuck with. He read history books and liked to explain why he disagreed with them. He also watched a lot of TV and sometimes told me in the morning what he planned to watch later in the day.
Tina was one of these nice women who puts up with unreasonable men. Her whole personality was a defense against male-pattern craziness and also at the same time a kind of supporting act. She was small and made herself up heavily. Her hair was supposed to look blond but looked faded; it couldn’t quite take on the artificial coloring, it had got too thin. In her own way, she was just as crazy as him. But they must have had guts, too, to move to Detroit in their sixties, when they didn’t know anybody. She said to me privately that Don was much happier these days. There were days in Phoenix he wouldn’t leave the house.
“I know he talks too much,” she said. “You’re a good listener. Don’t think I don’t thank you in my heart when I see you together. But he’s one of those men, when he isn’t talking too much it’s worse.”
But Don did more than talk. He started getting involved in the politics of the place. Robert and the rest of us hoped that something like a town hall mentality would develop, but there wasn’t anything in the charter about local government. He thought it should spring up on its own.
In fact, what happened was this. The first community organization of any kind was the Neighborhood Watch, set up by Kurt Stangel and Eddie Blyleven and a few other early arrivers. (It’s funny, but there was already a slight difference in status between the people who came in that first wave, in late February and early March, and the ones who showed up later, during the summer and after. Walter and I were considered second-wavers.) Eventually the Neighborhood Watch started concerning itself with more than just the roster for patrols. In August, there was a string of burglaries along the streets running off East Lafayette, more violent ones, involving guns. A kid, a nine-year-old boy, was briefly held hostage — forced at gunpoint into a car and then pushed out several blocks later, from where he had to make his way home in the dark. I think they just wanted to scare him, they wanted to say fuck you or watch out. He wasn’t hurt but another time somebody did get shot, a Michigan grad student named Shreedhar Patel, who was fixing up a place for his family to move into. Maybe it was the same guys who took the kid, but Shreedhar had a gun, a Beretta 92 that his father had given him when he moved to Detroit, and which he didn’t know how to work. Somebody saw it and shot him in the leg; then they took off. Eddie suggested establishing a couple of checkpoints at night, by the corners of St. Paul and Grand and Jefferson and Van Dyke, and closing off some of the smaller cross streets altogether. Part of the western border was the cemetery wall, and to the north and east the neighborhood opened out into the other new settlements.
For the first time, the meeting was widely attended. People crowded into Eddie’s front room, and since the night was fine eventually moved out into the garden. There were strong feelings and real disagreements. The mother of that nine-year-old boy stood up to say something, one of these tightly put-together, anxious hippie moms, who bike their kids to school and go shopping in big cars. “These people,” she started to say, “what you have to understand about these people,” before someone shouted over her. What do you mean, these people, why don’t you just say it, etc. You could hear us several blocks away.
Then Jayson stood up. He was short and chubby and even on his feet had to shout a little to get noticed, but when people saw his black face they let him talk. “Wait a minute, wait a minute here,” he said. “This isn’t a race thing. This is a class thing. You’ve got to understand the mentality. It’s about you just moved here and what do you know. Let’s get that straight.”
The boy’s mother said, “I will not be shamed out of saying what I want to say. If it was your boy— What you have to realize is that the first person I blame is myself.”
This went on too long in my opinion, the righteousness and upset and self-explanation, on all sides. But we got through it in the end, and afterwards there was a kind of elevated mood, like, this is politics, this is how you talk things through.
The first thing we decided is that the Neighborhood Watch Committee needed to be democratically elected, which didn’t make much immediate difference, since Kurt and Eddie got voted in by a show of hands. But Jayson also put himself forward and won a seat on the panel. So did Don Adler. And the motion was passed. We closed off St. Paul, Kercheval, Baldwin, Seminole, etc., after nine p.m., using old cars, and set up checkpoints along the rest.
ROBERT JAMES WASN’T TOO HAPPY about any of this. “You haven’t got the right,” he said, “and if something goes wrong there’ll be big trouble. And something will go wrong.”
He used to pick me up in the car on the corner of Johanna and drive us over the bridge to Belle Isle for a jog. Sometimes afterwards we came back to his place for breakfast, then I’d walk home.
“What do you want me to do,” I said. “You need to increase the police presence.”
“That’s not a solution. They have enough to do.”
“Then hire a security firm.”
“For five square miles? This has to work because it works, because people want you there.”
“I don’t think they want us there.”
We ran on silently for a few minutes, or almost silently — puffing a little and pounding our feet in the grass. “It doesn’t matter what anybody wants,” Robert said eventually. “No checkpoints.”
“Well, tell that to Eddie Blyleven.”
“I will.”
“He’ll tell you what I’ve been telling you, that you have to do something. So what are you going to do?”
“There are things we can try with the police we already have. I’ll talk to the commissioner about stop-and-frisk.”
“That’s another way of pissing people off,” I said.
When we got back to the house Robert had an email waiting for him that put him in a good mood. He checked his phone as soon as we walked through the door, and after that the atmosphere lightened a little.
“What is it?” I said.
“Nothing yet. I’ll let you know.”
His mother was staying with him — she came in at this point and we all sat down to breakfast in the kitchen. The last time I’d seen her she was wearing a boot cast. This time she had on a pair of house slippers and skinny jeans and a plain collared shirt, open-necked. She was one of those mothers who expresses affection for her son by flirting with his friends. But she hung on Robert’s neck, too; she touched him a lot. Maybe she had changed a little, maybe she was needier, and wanted to talk more.