479 West Willis, Detroit

It was a cheap hotel that rented out rooms to a hodgepodge of people. They ranged from long-term residents on social security to short-timers to graduate students, like me, attending Wayne State University.

The address was 479 West Willis. I lived there for two years, beginning in 1968.

My apartment on the second floor. It was plain and uninspiring. It had a small living room with, at one end, an open kitchen. There was a little table against the wall in the room and a desk situated near a 1950’s orange vinyl couch. There was a cheap easy chair. The bedroom was adjacent to the living room. I furnished the apartment sparsely, and, as was my usual way, without charm.

There were windows on one side that faced the Detroit street, West Willis, below. In the bedroom, I had a bed and not much else. The bedroom curtains were those flimsy, colorless cheap things that feel grainy to the touch and always slightly dirty. They were there when I rented the place, and out of sheer laziness, I kept them.

It was the first time, save for one summer in New York, that I’d ever lived in a large city. I knew very little about Detroit when I moved there. I’d only been there with my mother to buy clothes at Hudson’s Department Store when I was a boy. I’d graduated from the University of Michigan in 1967, floundered a bit afterwards, then enrolled at Wayne State’s graduate school in English.

So here I was in what turned out to be a typical urban neighborhood where life is played out on the streets and from open apartment windows. I could walk to Wayne State from where I lived. As I said, I wasn’t the only student who lived in that building. There were three or four actors who attended Wayne State’s celebrated theater school who lived there, too.

It was new and exciting to live in that neighborhood and in a building where the people were unlike any I had ever met. Ann Arbor was pastoral, insulated. Detroit was open, gritty. As I got used to the difference, to the newness of urban life, I grew to like it — was inspired by it. Detroit was its own graduate school. Nothing, I would discover, educates like a city.

I was twenty-three when I moved in, still very unformed and often struggling with depression and enthusiasm at the same time, not so unusual for someone my age. For the most part, though, it was a vibrant time. It was a time of enlightenment. I was encountering new worlds.

When it got warm, I threw open the windows to let in the outside air. They opened to West Willis. That’s when I would hear her.

She was an older woman who would lean out of her window from a building across the street. She would rest one arm on the sill and use the free hand to hold a cigarette. When she finished with one cigarette, she immediately lit another. Her teeth were missing. I could even see that from my window. She would rant for hours, gesturing like a conductor with her cigarette and going on and on about various injustices inflicted upon her that made no sense. She spoke in the poetry of the incoherent, of the slightly mad.

She would talk for hours and hours, never seeming to tire, emphasizing flamboyantly with her free hand. Everyone on the block saw her and heard her. Eventually, in late afternoon, she would stop and withdraw. She would return the following morning, cigarette in hand, indefatigable. Her stamina and commitment were something to behold. She became part of the cityscape.

Who was she? I learned that she had a husband. He would be on the street from time to time, talking with his cronies. He would talk as his wife would soliloquize insanely three stories above him. I know he was her husband because his pals would tease him about her, and he would get a look of discomfort and embarrassment on his face.

I always wondered what things were like between the two of them. Was she different when he was with her? Or did she rant all the time? But what impressed me was that he stayed with her. He didn’t leave. Every day after he talked to his friends, he went back to her. They were a couple.

Two blocks east of my building was Woodward Avenue, one of the main arteries of Detroit. It began dead center in Detroit and ran all the way to Pontiac, about thirty miles northwest from its source. Along the way, it changed personalities several times, passing through Royal Oak, Birmingham and, just before Pontiac, to Bloomfield Hills, the leafy community where many auto executives lived. Bloomfield Hills was also where Cranbrook was located, a boarding school I had attended unhappily some years before.

I would walk from West Willis, cross Cass Avenue, to Woodward Avenue, where I would turn left and walk to Wayne State, a fifteen-minute walk.

I loved the teachers I had there. Though I can’t remember all of their names, I can see all their faces and hear their voices. Wayne State gave me many lessons, not the least of which is that colleges with sterling names do not necessarily a better education give.

I met an older man who lived in the building. He introduced himself to me while I was sitting on the steps outside the building. He had a craggy voice, raspy. He was a retired merchant marine sailor. He had a small smile. We’d sit on the steps in the Detroit evening and talk. He’d been all around the world many times in the merchant marines. He told me about Singapore, Yokohama, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Liverpool — all the ports he’d been to — and about the seamy sexual side to those places.

“Yeah, kid, you can get anything in those places. If you have the money.”

As we got to know one another, he told me about the dubious parts of Detroit where he went to gratify himself.

“Come along, kid” he said. “It’s interesting.”

He was like someone you might meet in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, perhaps a trickster, someone who might mean you well, or ill, or both. In the end, I think he just wanted company. He had lived his life, had adventures, probably had a little money, not much — why else would he be living in this hotel? I always liked seeing him there, sitting on the steps, smoking a cigarette and then saying, “Hiya, kid. Good to see you.”

There were women. There are always women when you were young and in college, especially when it was the 1960s. This woman was different. I don’t recall her name, and I wish I did, because she deserves to be remembered by her name. I have never forgotten her, though. I said my bedroom was stark. It certainly was, and I did very little to change that. When I took this woman to bed, she began to shiver at a memory. It was summer, the windows were open, and the breeze blew the cheap grainy curtains over us.

“These curtains are just like the ones they had at the home,” she said. Her body tightened.

“What home?”

“Where I went to have my baby,” she said.

“You had a baby?”

“Yes. I gave it up.”

“What was this home?”

“A place for unwed mothers. It was so depressing. And they had these kinds of curtains.” She was summoning unhappy memories, devastating memories. “Why don’t you do something about this? Why don’t you get some decent curtains?”

“I’m sorry.”

She was right. They were ugly. They were depressing. What was wrong with me?

“That place was so bleak, so unloving. I had my baby, and there was no one I knew, not a single person, there.”

She began to cry.

What did I know of the world? Nothing. I had been raised privileged, had gone to a private school and then to the bucolic University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I did not understand so much about the lives of people. My room had torn open scars in this woman’s heart. To be a mother and give up your baby. I was ashamed to have caused her so much anguish.

At the corner of West Willis and Cass, I think, there was a plain, uninviting bar with, I think, the word “Moon” in its name. Whether or not it was on West Willis and Cass or whether or not it had “Moon” in its name, there was a bar I wandered into one evening near where I lived.

It was dark with beer-lacquered tables and a few customers spotted here and there. There was a jukebox that played country music with lyrics about home and missing home and wanting to go back home. Inevitably, someone would play “Detroit City” while I was there with its mournful refrain, “I wanna go home, I wanna go home. Oh, how I wanna go home.”

The bar wasn’t simply sad. It was bleak. The people were from Appalachia and rural Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia there. They had come north to work in the automobile factories to make money that they couldn’t make where they lived. The money was good working on the assembly lines. This was a bar built on longing.

Nobody here wanted to be in Detroit. They wanted to be back home in the holler or on the farm. People came to drink with others like them who were living in Detroit, a hard city with Northern speech and food, while everything they knew that made them understood was a thousand miles away. When I left the bar, the loss of home stayed with me. I couldn’t shake it, like a bad dream.

Fred Coffin would come to visit my apartment. He was an actor, enrolled in the celebrated Wayne State Theater Program. I’d met Fred at the University of Michigan. He was large, larger than life, wonderfully, comically theatrical. I’d never met anyone who loved acting as much as Fred did. Acting was his god and his religion, and his determination was something to behold. It seemed as if he couldn’t live without acting. In fact, I don’t think he could.

In Fred, I encountered for the first time in my life, someone who wanted to do something with an urgency, a conviction, a relentlessness that I had never seen before. And it was in the arts! I had never met anyone who wanted to be a lawyer with a burning passion, for example, or a businessman. For Fred, being an actor was a matter of life and death. This startled me, amazed me, excited me.

When I saw this nearly fanatical desire, I was skeptical. Really? Acting? Yes, acting. It was like being in the presence of a fast-moving train. It wasn’t going to be stopped. Fred was going to get where he needed to go. Nothing, especially a lack of money, was going to stop him. The sincerity and genuineness of his passion stoked my desire to be a writer. Could I put my life’s energies and desires into writing, beyond money and security? Fred’s passion said, yes, you could. Yes, you should.

April 4, 1968. I woke up from a nap. It was dark outside. I had left the radio on. Music was playing, It was Verdi’s Requiem. The station normally played rock music. What was this? Maybe I had the wrong station. Then the Requiem finished, and the announcer came on.

“We dedicate this music to the memory of Martin Luther King.”

To the memory of Martin Luther King? It didn’t take me long to find out that Martin Luther King had been killed at 6:01pm in Memphis. I slumped in my chair.

Then the riots began. Detroit had had a major riot the year before in which great parts of the city were aflame. I wasn’t living there at the time. The riots that came after Martin Luther King was assassinated lasted two days. I remember walking after dark that next day. There was a curfew. Governor Romney had activated the National Guard.

I went out anyway. I walked over to Cass Avenue, skirting Guardsmen in uniform carrying rifles. I saw tanks moving down the street. Tanks! There is something astonishing about seeing a tank move down a city street. It is gigantic. It is completely out of place. To see a monstrous machine like that rolling down a city street in its massive slowness is to see the world turned upside down. And it’s scary.

Two months later, Bobby Kennedy was killed.

My first published piece was for the student newspaper, The South End. It was a radical paper, whose masthead featured a black panther and whose politics were to the left of Lenin. I covered a rally for George Wallace in Cobo Hall. Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, was running for president. I wrote a very long piece. They published every single word. When I got the issue, I felt the pride only a young writer can feel seeing his words in print.

I attempted suicide at 479 West Willis. That I was in despair goes without saying. I was still seeing my psychiatrist in Ann Arbor. One weekend, it all just seemed so bleak to me. I swallowed a bottle of aspirin. Can you even kill yourself by swallowing a bottle of aspirin? I still don’t know. I guess I thought you could.

I wrote a novella at 479 West Willis, my first attempt at fiction. It was titled “Danny,” and I worked hard on it every single day for weeks. I’d written some short stories before, but they were heavily autobiographical. This novella was based on a person I knew, a woman I had dated at the University of Michigan, but a great part of it was made up, imaginary. I had to create “real toads in imaginary gardens” as Marianne Moore put it.

Every day I went to my desk and labored. It was hard work; my brain hurt sometimes. I struggled. I floundered. But there were few satisfactions as great as creating a world completely out of thin air. A scene, a character, that seemed real but that came simply from my imagination. It was, I hoped, a real person I had made up. Every day when I stopped, I was exhausted from that effort. It was an honest exhaustion. An earned exhaustion. An inspiring exhaustion. It was the first time I thought: I might be a writer for real.

Often on Sundays I would leave the apartment early and walk over to Woodward Avenue. I would walk for miles. I walked Woodward, because I’d never seen a street like this. This was Detroit. The true Detroit.

I walked a territory that was unfamiliar to me. I was the stranger. I was the interloper. A city is at it most raw on an early Sunday morning. What’s left are sins and the now-feeble echoes of Saturday night’s dramas. In their place is emptiness and quiet and a few people making their way home. I drank all the sourness in, all the exhaustion and forlornness of a Sunday morning.

Unless you grow up in a big American city, you don’t know what a city means. Then one day, you encounter your first big city. That city, no matter how distinguished or undistinguished, will stay with you. Detroit was mine. It’s never left me.

I walked home, dazed and hungry, to my apartment at 479 West Willis.

I made some breakfast. I sat down on my couch and picked up a book. I had the whole day ahead of me. What could be better?

Then it was time to leave 479 West Willis. I finished my thesis. I received my degree. There was no reason to continue living in that apartment. I decided to move out.

I got a job in an advertising agency. I found an apartment in a much better neighborhood in Detroit. So, I said my goodbyes — to the people in the building I knew, to the sailor, and to the actors and to anyone else I’d met and spent time with. I said goodbye to the apartment itself, to the building, to the street, West Willis, to the world I knew for two years.

The thing is, though, like so many times when we experience a place or a time, I didn’t understand its full impact and significance at that moment. I left 479 West Willis, but it never left me. I had a growth spurt there, profound changes and enlightenments. I feel something, still, fifty years later, about that apartment, that building, that street, that city — gratitude.