Chuck E. Cheese often propel them toward violence. But for me, it was a reminder that there were really no safe zones left in the Flint area. Weird shit could happen just about anywhere.
These depressing posts often prompted heartfelt laments from readers. “I moved from Flint five years ago to Seattle, Washington,” read one comment, echoing the theme of many others. “I did that because I saw my beloved hometown dying. At Christmas time I visited family and friends. I took what you might call the ‘Grand Tour’ of Flint. What I saw just made me want to cry. I can’t believe that Flint has gotten that bad. My family told me it was bad, but, wow, I didn’t think it could degenerate to the point it has. I truly am sickened by what has happened to Flint. Needless to say I felt like I was escaping when I got on my flight at Bishop Airport. I hope it turns around soon. I hope that city someday returns to its former glory.”
Many comments were deeply personal, and they often came from unexpected sources. Howard Bragman is a public relations guru in Los Angeles who has advised everyone from Stevie Wonder to Paula Abdul, as well as making appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Larry King Live, and Good Morning America. He emailed me an excerpt for the blog from a book he had written describing his less than ideal years growing up in Flint. “I know what it’s like to be an outsider—I grew up a fat, Jewish, gay guy in Flint,” he wrote. “In Hollywood, those are the first three rungs up the ladder of success, but in a town like Flint, it’s three strikes and you’re out. It’s a little like that Twilight Zone episode with a whole planet full of deformed people and they make fun of the normal guy.”
My mom, pushing eighty and living in Florida, became a frequent contributor. Born in Flint in 1930, she grew up on Illinois Avenue, just around the corner from the house that would later become Gypsy Jack’s cowboy corral. She had the same love-hate relationship with the city that I detected in many other readers. She clearly related to the working-class mentality of the place and didn’t deny that she was a hell-raiser growing up, causing her parents no end of grief as she took full advantage of the bar culture Flint had to offer. She had no shortage of affectionate stories about her early life in the Vehicle City. Yet she didn’t hesitate to leave when she got the chance, heading to Wayne State University in Detroit before dropping out and moving to New York City to become a department store model in the fifties. She hung out with the jazz crowd at Birdland and Minton’s Playhouse. She drove with Charlie Parker to a gig in Philadelphia once. She fell in love with a saxophonist from Detroit. Then it was on to Miami, where she became a stewardess—she’s still opposed to the term “flight attendant”—for National Airlines, flying regularly to Havana and New Orleans. It was the scattered trajectory of a beautiful young woman searching for something in life that she couldn’t quite identify. After a short-lived marriage to a navy pilot—make that two short-lived marriages to two navy pilots—she returned to Flint, a divorced single mother with four kids. She threw herself into more mundane work in the admitting office at McLaren Hospital, supporting her family, paying for Catholic schools and expensive private colleges. Despite returning under tough circumstances, she never turned on Flint, even while acknowledging her ever-present desire to escape.
“I grew up on the East Side and recall the unexplained pride I felt when the 3:30 Buick factory whistle blew and the roughly dressed workers poured out of the General Motors labyrinth swinging their lunch pails. Some were headed for home and some for the corner bar, but all with the determined step of an army after a battle won. I somehow felt as if I were a part of this giant assembly line and the city it fed,” she wrote in one post. “Nostalgia, I’m sure, is the opiate of old age. Memories over ten years old automatically become the ‘good ol’ days.’ We remember only the happy things and leave the shaded areas behind. And yet, faintly sifting through the sands of time, I seem to recall saying, ‘The day I’m eighteen, I’m leaving this town.’”
As a newspaper and magazine writer wary of online journalism, I had to admit that the blog had succeeded in ways I never could have imagined. Before long, it racked up two hundred thousand unique visitors and six hundred thousand page views. Tiny numbers compared to big blogs, but who would have imagined that many people cared about Flint? More importantly, I felt more in tune with the city than I had in years, despite going back only a handful of times over the past three decades. I reconnected with old friends and made new ones. Flint was a part of my life again. When the Flint Journal called to write a story about Flint Expatriates, even though I frequently mocked the local rag, I blurted out “I love Flint” in the interview, which of course became the headline for the piece. Where had that come from?
Ben Hamper, my literary hero and author of Rivethead, wrote to tell me he enjoyed the blog and inadvertently gave me the answer. He lives in northern Michigan now but made frequent visits back to Flint. He managed to capture my simultaneous repulsion and affection for our hometown in a single line near the end of his email: “It’s a dismal cascade of drek, but it’s still home.”
Like a lot of people who hit midlife in an adopted city, I began to think of my hometown as a center of authenticity—my authenticity. It took a couple of years of blogging for me to realize it was a place where I knew every street, building, and landmark. A place where I still had a deep-rooted connection to people, even after all these years. No matter how long I live in San Francisco, I sense I’ll never know it like I know Flint.
My family had no direct connection to the auto industry. My mom logged one day at AC Spark Plug and called it quits. My distant father was a navy carrier pilot who had degrees from Annapolis and the Naval Postgraduate School. He drove a Mercedes he couldn’t afford, not a Buick. I’ve never changed the oil in my car by myself. But there’s no denying I’m a product of Flint culture, both high and low. There are things I still hate about it, but my identity is wrapped up in the place that Hamper called “the callus on the palm of the state shaped like a welder’s mitt.”
Even the smells that trigger my strongest emotional response snap me instantly back to Flint. One is the dry, papery odor of books, which reminds me of the long summer days I spent reading in the air-conditioned splendor of Flint’s well-stocked public libraries. The other is that pleasantly repulsive mixture of spilled beer and stale cigarette smoke, spiced with a delicate hint of Pine Sol and urinal cake, that you find in a certain kind of bar. It conjures memories of eating fish dinners as a kid in places like Jack Gilbert’s Wayside Inn, and the mysterious darkened interiors of taverns you could peer inside on hot days when the door was propped open, not to mention the various Flint bars my friends and I frequented in high school and college. It didn’t matter that I had lived in California longer than I lived in Flint. Flint was part of me, and I was part of Flint.
5
Bad Reputation
Thanks to a spellbinding high school European history teacher who looked like a taller, dark-haired version of Albert Einstein and delivered his lectures engulfed in a cloud of pipe smoke, I knew more about the Austro-Hungarian Empire than I did about Flint when I left for college. He threw parties at his house, where teenagers from across the city drank wine coolers, smoked pot, and had break-dancing competitions in his low-ceilinged basement, proving that odd things passed for normal in Flint in the eighties and that a Catholic education wasn’t just choir practice and all-school Masses.
Now, as the publisher of what was apparently the only blog dedicated to the glories of Flint, I felt compelled to augment my meager knowledge of the city’s history, which, if it were a pithy advertising slogan, might be condensed to “Flint: A lot of bars and even more cars.” I soon discovered that Flint’s bad reputation wasn’t exactly a new development. It has recently been labeled “Murdertown, U.S.A.” and “the toughest city in America” while charting on a list of the most depressing places in the country, but the area that would become Flint had image problems from the start, at least among potential white settlers. It was seen as a swampy, dangerous backwater with brutal winters, impenetrable forests, and swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitoes, long considered the unofficial state bird. In
