Murder City: Detroit, 1974-1975

Nineteen seventy-four was a record year for Detroit. With 715 killings, the city led the nation in homicides, earning it the designation of Murder Capitol of the U.S. Nineteen seventy-four was the year that I graduated with a degree in psychology from Cleveland State University, and it was the year that Marcia and I, a jobless couple with no immediate prospect of employment, decided to move from the Cleveland area to Detroit.

Why? Friendship. When you’re in your twenties, as we were, friendship plays a special role in your life. It is your credo. You have pulled away from the gravitational pull of your family and have not yet had children of your own to form your own little planetary system revolving around your own offspring.

I had failed to get into any of the graduate programs that I had applied to, and Marcia had no idea what she wanted to do career-wise. Meanwhile, our friends, Mary Clare and Randy were finishing their second year in the Motor City and had one more year remaining for Randy to complete law school. They were miserable living in Detroit. Their second year there they had moved to a city apartment along a service drive. The neighborhood was crime-ridden and scary. The apartment was at an intersection where the street went from three lanes to two plus the service drive with a grassy barrier in between, a barrier on which apartment residents put out their garbage cans. Invariably, in the dead of night, drunk drivers would cross the intersection, not see the lane reduction, and go plowing into the garbage cans, startling sleepers from their slumbers.

I remember that place because we helped them move in. Part of the credo of youthful friendship is that you have to help friends move. It seemed back then that every relocating friend had a heavy sofa bed and was moving onto the third floor in a building without elevators. That was the case with Mary Clare and Randy and that second-year apartment. Randy had a law school friend named Bo, and the three of us strained and grunted and panted, struggling with that damn sofa, at one point seemingly getting it hopelessly wedged in a corner of the stairwell. Finally, getting on to the third floor and into their apartment, we sat on the floor amidst moving boxes and ate a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken with the women folk. Memories. Bo was such a trooper. He had offered to help on so little acquaintance with Randy that Randy discovered to his embarrassment, as we ate the greasy chicken, that he had been calling Bo by the wrong name.

At that place, if you subscribed to magazines, they were placed on table in the lobby because they wouldn’t fit in the mailboxes. Randy subscribed to Esquire, and I remember him complaining that when he picked up one issue and brought it back the apartment, he discovered that someone had masturbated inside it over some sexy photo pic. It was that sort of place.

They were ready for a better living arrangement, but money was a problem. We figured that by combining the financial assets of two couples we could afford a nicer place outside the inner city. And we did find one. A roomy two-story house with a fenced yard in a good neighborhood. We put down a deposit, and Clare and Randy moved some of their stuff in.

Meanwhile, I was offered an admission to grad school at a university where I had been placed on waiting list. But we had made the commitment to moving to Detroit. Then I was offered a job administering psychological tests for a study that a psyche prof was running. Again, though, we were committed to the move. Roads not taken.

The guy renting to us was a tall bodybuilder with bulging biceps and long flowing blonde hair. There was something about him that screamed asshole, which turned out to be the case. When Randy and I arrived at the rental, we found the locks had been changed, and he informed us over the phone that he had sold the house out from under us. I was more than little unhappy. I walked around to the side of the house, kicked in a basement window, climbed through, and opened the front door, and Randy got his stuff out. Now we had the greater problem that Marcia and I had our household items in a U Haul, Randy and Clare had terminated their lease, and we had no place to live.

We turned our sights back to the city but looked for a place in an area of residential houses rather than apartments. Lafayette is a main east-west street through Detroit, and, like all the major Rust Belt cities, it contains large old homes that have been divided into smaller rental units. We found one such house that seemed to meet our needs. It had been divided into two units, a second-floor rental and a first-floor rental, the first floor having access to a basement and a fenced in backyard. The latter was available and appeared to meet our needs. Marcia and I had two dogs, and Mary Clare and Randy had three. A young black man was the new owner, and he had been fixing the place up.

Detroit was a depressing city back then. In a survey of its residents, an overwhelming majority, black and white, said they wanted to move out. Yet in the midst of feelings of fear, gloom, and despair, there were people who nurtured hope. In November of 1974, Detroit elected its first black mayor, Coleman Young. He was part of a wave of reformist sentiment and aspiration. Our landlord was part of this new wave, and it was clear from talking to him that purchasing this investment property was his act of faith in the future of Detroit.

Still, Detroit was Detroit, a place where post offices and take-out pizza joints operated behind thick panes of bullet proof Plexiglas, where there were still burnt-out buildings left standing from the 1967 riots, where if your car broke down and you left it briefly unattended, you would return to find it stripped of anything of value, where the city led the nation not just in the highest murder rate but also in the highest unemployment rate. Early in my stay in Detroit, Randy’s friend Bo gave me a ride which proved a tour of Murder City. Almost every place that we passed, Bo casually mentioned a murder that was connected to it. That movie theatre? That’s the spilled popcorn murder. One guy bumped another guy and spilled his popcorn so that second guy shoots the first guy. That bar? That’s the stinky foot murder. Two guys at the bar. One takes off his shoes. Another guy is offended by his stinky feet and shoots him.

The noon news was the crime report. I remember one segment that began with the reporter and cameraman approaching the door of a car repair shop. The reporter said something like “We’re visiting the repair shop of Bill Smith.” He knocks and Bill Smith (or whatever his name was) slides open a corrugated metal door with one hand and looks out from behind the door, holding a shotgun in the other hand. The reporter explains, “Bill Smith has a gun, and he sleeps here at night because it’s the only way he figures that he can keep from being robbed!” Bill then recounts his experiences being robbed and repeatedly losing all his tools despite using alarms and guard dogs (the thieves killed the two Doberman Pinschers). I remember the city coroner being interviewed one day. The reporter says something like “The city says it is reducing the number of gangland murders.” The coroner says, “I don’t know what the city is talking about. But just this weekend I examined three people who had had their hands tied behind their backs and were shot in the back of the head. I would call that a gangland execution.” Our house wasn’t too far from Belle Isle, an island park in the Detroit River. I used to drive there and jog. One day, I get home and turn on the TV and learn that the police had arrived shortly after my run and discovered a cut up body in a series of garbage bags along my jogging route.

My wife is an optimistic, positive-minded person. If she was aboard the Titanic when it hit an iceberg, she would assure you that the ship wouldn’t sink. When it was sinking, she would assure you there were enough lifeboats. When you were about to go under with the ship, she would observe how well the band was playing. I appreciate that cheerful quality in her. When she looks back on our Detroit experience, she remembers enjoying dining in the city’s Greektown, how nice the main library was and Wayne State University where she worked as a typist. Yes, we had good experiences. You could cross over into Windsor, Canada, and enjoy a city that was a garden paradise compared to Detroit. Or you could drive down to the college town of Ann Arbor and take in a band or shop the newest bookstore phenomenon, Borders, one of the first of the mega bookstores. And we never personally experienced violence.

But you always were aware of the potential, always vigilant and wary. My most vivid memories differ in their tenor from hers. I remember disturbed sleep. An alley ran in the back of our house, and everyone had dogs for security reasons. The slightest noise would set off a chain reaction of barking. My parents were visiting once when the police chased a thief into the space between our house and our neighbor’s. The guy ran until his way was blocked by fencing. He jumped to the right and faced the neighbor’s mule-eared German Shepherd mix. Then he jumped to the left and met our five dogs. I think he backtracked and was caught. My parents were not impressed by our new home.

While Marcia remembers a comfortable lifestyle, I remember struggling to stay on a budget. Marcia was working, but I couldn't find employment. We shared food expenses with our friends and bought what was cheapest. Mackerel was cheaper than tuna and tasted it. I would buy a few cans, mix it up with some extender, roll out some dough, and create a giant mackerel loaf that we ate on all week. It got so that Randy couldn’t stomach it. He would claim that he wasn’t hungry and then sneak a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Trying to find work in a nationwide recession, in a city that was hardest hit by it, I found that my college degree was an albatross around my neck. There was no work in my field, and no one wanted to hire a college graduate for store clerking, warehouse work, or such, figuring that you wouldn’t stay. (I hadn’t yet mastered the art of lying about my resume.) Marcia said that I should use the opportunity to write. So every week day, she went to work, and I walked to the nearby main library where I would piss away the time browsing through books and getting nothing written.

I did find temporary gigs, the most memorable being working with Marcia checking for cheating at the big, old movie houses on the downtown square during evening showings. It worked like this. One person buys a ticket and goes in. The second person waits outside with mechanical clicker and counts every patron entering the theatre. Then the second person buys a ticket and enters. You compare the difference between the two ticket numbers with the number of patrons counted outside to see if an employee is letting friends in a free. I didn’t want Marcia standing by herself on the downtown street in the evening, so I was always the one who waited outside for twenty minutes after start time before entering the theatre and sitting down next to Marcia. You would be seeing the same film night after night. I can’t remember how many times I came in on Towering Inferno with the skyscraper already ablaze.

Despite the crime, violence, and the racial strife of the time, I never felt ill at ease as a white person in a predominantly black inner city, until our one particular movie check assignment. It was a film called The Black Gestapo, one of the so-called Blaxploitation flicks. After the white villain has done a number of horrendous things to black people, the Black Gestapo catches up to him in his bathtub and castrates him to the loud cheers of the moviegoers. We did feel a little self-conscious then as the only white people in the otherwise all black audience. I don’t think we stayed to the end of that film.

The summer of 1975, together with our friends Mary Clare and Randy, we moved from Detroit to the Seattle area, leaving behind those who still nurtured civic hope and those who just couldn’t escape. It seemed a fitting ending to our stay in Murder City that ’75 was the summer that mobbed up former Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa disappeared, after being released from prison and seeking to regain his old power. He had gotten his start as an organizer with Teamster Local 299 in Detroit. When he disappeared, no one thought that he had just gone on vacation and just forgotten to send a postcard.

THE END