expensive in San Francisco, like everything else. So I did what any logical Californian would do when confronted with a profound psychological quandary that required extensive rumination. I started a blog.
4
Virtual Vehicle City
I launched Flint Expatriates in the fall of 2007. It lacked just about every attribute that guarantees a large audience in the blogosphere. It wasn’t devoted to strident political views, tawdry celebrity gossip, the latest life-changing technology, or hardcore porn, unless you are turned on by graphic photos of abandoned houses, stripped bare of their aluminum siding and totally exposed to the elements. Aside from demolition crews, pawn shops, and moving companies, it had no obvious advertising tie-ins.
I wasn’t expecting a blog about a troubled Rust Belt city to be wildly popular. I was hoping it would help me come to terms with my conflicted feelings about Flint without being mean spirited, depressing, or sappy. I wanted it to be funny without making too much fun of Flint. Improbably, I hoped to cover the past, present, and future of the city from my remote publishing headquarters in the cramped living room of my house in San Francisco. If I failed, it was no big deal. I figured no one would read it anyway.
The result was a jumbled collection of posts based on my mood and what I could dig up after classes at the university or during downtime between freelance assignments. A story theorizing that Flint might rebound when water shortages forced residents of the southwest United States to move north might be followed by an item about a pair of AC spark plugs, once proudly manufactured in Flint, that had been fashioned into earrings for sale on eBay. A YouTube video that used satellite imagery to compare Flint, with its acres of demolished factories, to Ground Zero after 9/11 ran the same day as a piece on urban gardens springing up on vacant lots in some of the city’s worst neighborhoods. It was an odd mixture of hope and despair, wonky urban-planning material and kitschy cultural ephemera. Memories of the old days mingling with semi-informed conjecture about what might lie ahead. The blog was my way of thinking out loud about Flint.
As expected, the public response was underwhelming. A few comments trickled in, but I sensed that many of the three dozen hits the blog generated each day were mistakes—collectors tracking down info on flintlock rifles or cartoon fans searching for trivia on Fred and Wilma Flintstone. Then I realized that I had neglected to address a topic that would surely resonate with my elusive target audience. I didn’t have any posts about the ultimate leisure activity in Flint—getting drunk. I remedied the situation by asking Flintoids, as we sometimes called ourselves, to name every local bar, smoke-filled tavern, and dimly lit lounge they could remember. This was apparently the supreme challenge for the current and former residents of a factory town that once felt like it had a drinking establishment on every corner. The post generated more than a hundred comments, and the list of booze emporiums climbed to well over three hundred. There was everything from strip clubs like the infamous Titty City near the Chevy plant to posh joints like the University Club in the penthouse of the now-abandoned Genesee Towers, Flint’s tallest building. The names alone made you want a drink: the Argonaut, the Ad-Lib, the Beaver Trap, Thrift City, Aloha Lounge, Auggie’s Garden Glo, the Treasure Chest, the Rusty Nail, the Torch, the Teddy Bear, the White Horse, the Whisper. The sheer number was impressive, although most were now closed. A clever economist could surely track Flint’s decline by charting the year-over-year drop in bars open for business.
One of the dearly departed to make the list was the Copa, an improbably named oddity that stood out in a city where bars tended to have rustic names like the Wooden Keg, and references to Barry Manilow songs were frowned upon. Bill Kain opened the Copa in 1980 in the heart of downtown on Saginaw Street. Though Flint lived and died with the auto industry, Kain embraced diversification and catered to just about everyone, including high school kids with bad fake IDs. The Copa was primarily a gay bar, but Thursday was officially straight night, and the crowd was mixed on many evenings. In a largely segregated town, it was racially mixed, playing funk and hip-hop in a market that made Foreigner, Styx, and Billy Joel rich. There were house music nights, live rap acts, and male strip shows—attended primarily by straight women. New Wave music was a staple, and it was the only bar in town where dancing to the Tom Tom Club or New Order wouldn’t warrant an ass-kicking. (The Copa still had its share of shoot-outs and brawls, but none appeared to be caused by musical or sexual preference.)
Kain was an outspoken critic of the harebrained schemes to revitalize Flint with auto-themed amusement parks and high-end shopping projects, but the fact that he had a thriving business didn’t give him much pull at city hall. When Kain died in 1991, he was dismissed with a tiny, four-paragraph obit in the Flint Journal. The paper managed to spell his name wrong.
By writing about bars, I found my people. The number of hits jumped, and readers began sharing their thoughts on Flint. Only a few dozen had to be edited for excessive profanity. Some were heartfelt odes to venerable local institutions like Halo Burger, home of the deluxe with olives and the Vernor’s cream ale. Others celebrated local characters like Gypsy Jack, an East Sider who turned his house into a Wild West museum, complete with a jail and saloon in the basement. He sometimes dressed like a cowboy, strolling the cluttered grounds of his small corner house in chaps, boots, and cowboy hat. Sometimes, when he’d had a few, he’d dispense with clothing altogether and ride naked through the darkened streets on his motorcycle.
But amid the drinking stories and reminiscences, I posted constant reminders of present-day Flint’s condition. In Flint, autoworkers are often referred to as shop rats—sometimes affectionately, sometimes not—so it’s fitting that a chain restaurant symbolized by a big, bucktoothed animatronic rat named Chuck E. Cheese served as one of the most high-profile examples of Flint’s decline.
On a cold Saturday night in January 2008, a grandmother named Margie was attending a birthday party for her five-year-old granddaughter at the pizza joint/video arcade where “a kid can be a kid” and adults can struggle to maintain their sanity amid the sensory overload. It’s located just outside the city limits in Flint Township on a road filled with big box stores, strip malls, and fast-food joints leading to the mall that helped kill downtown Flint in the seventies. Margie noticed more than a dozen teenage girls roaming the restaurant, probably bored with playing skeeball and crab grab and looking for trouble. A friend of Margie’s took offense when one of the girls bumped into her. Words were exchanged, followed by punches. Margie’s friend was quickly outnumbered. “There had to be twelve to fifteen girls on one girl,” she told the local press.
The family fun was just getting started. As many as eighty people were brawling when officers from seven different police departments converged on the restaurant. “The biggest thing we did was just try to control the crowd,” one cop said. “Once pepper has been sprayed, it’s floating in the air so we called in for medical help in clearing it. If people aren’t used to pepper spray, they get pretty scared and angry.” Those just might be the two most common emotions in Flint these days, but it’s not exactly what a grandmother has in mind when she plans a birthday party. “It was almost like a nightmare,” Margie said. “Kids were screaming. It was almost like we were in a stampede.” Police finally cleared the restaurant and shut it down for the night.
The next day, a local news crew arrived to film a segment about the brawl when another fight broke out in the parking lot. This one was minor by comparison—just ten people, all from the same family.
After initially downplaying the incident as a simple argument among friends, the Chuck E. Cheese corporate office responded by banning alcohol sales at the restaurant, along with profanity and gang colors. Less than a year later, the new policies appeared to be working, at least by local standards. The Flint Journal ran a feel-good story proclaiming that the restaurant was clearly a “more peaceful place” because cops had responded to only a dozen calls since the brawl, mainly for purse snatching and parking lot vandalism. “Nothing major,” the Flint Township police chief said. “No fights.”
I suppose the brawl
