"Constructive Summer" (notebook, 2014)

In which I visit Detroit and contemplate the direction of my life

I’ve always had a hard time tossing old notebooks. You could be throwing away the seeds of a great idea, one that, for whatever reason, your younger self wasn’t ready to commit to. You could be throwing away the details of a fun episode in your life, like the trip I took to Detroit, in the summer of 2014, with my friend Matt. Though old notebooks can be minefields, too, especially if, like me, you use them for a bit of everything: writing, work, random to-do lists and life goals. They can remind you of how much time you frittered away on things—writing projects, relationships, career anxieties—that never really came to anything.

I don’t usually give my notebooks titles, so the fact I called this one “Constructive Summer”—a nod, presumably, to the Hold Steady song—makes me a bit nervous to leaf back through it. On the first page is a list of summer goals we might charitably describe as “ambitious:”

• Finish story collection (send a couple pieces to bigger places)

• Novel: start over, with reconceived plot/character

• Essays: first draft of 4-5 pieces

• Update CV, research job possibilities

• Go to more shows (music, art)

• Re-activate dating profile?

There’s a desperate, careening quality that I can (mostly) laugh about now. I’m not sure which bullet point is funniest, actually: that I thought I could reasonably write 4-5 essay drafts in three months, or the idea that a story collection might be the thing to save me. Or maybe it’s that novel, which was apparently on the verge of being great, if only I could iron out a couple small details, like the plot and the main character (the setting, one assumes, was bang-on).

In Detroit, Matt and I stayed at a hostel about a mile from downtown, in a neighborhood where roughly eighty percent of the houses had been razed. Some of the lots were being farmed. Others had become what all the think pieces about the city’s uncertain future were calling “urban prairie.” The manager of the hostel was a 40-something white guy named Jeff, who had one of those long goatees I associate with the band Anthrax. Matt and I saw a lot of those goatees in Detroit. On our first day, Jeff instructed us to say hello to people we passed on the street. Tourists were sometimes wary of the neighborhood, he said, but the locals were friendly, and often eager to chat. He told us media reports had greatly exaggerated the city’s stray dog problem, but he also told us a pretty harrowing story about being chased for several blocks by a pack of stray dogs. “The main thing is, don’t make direct eye contact,” he said. “With the dogs, I mean. Eye contact with people is good.”

On one page of the notebook is a packing list for the trip (comfortable shoes, nicotine gum) and a list of Detroit musicians to put on the playlist I was making for the car. Martha and the Vandellas. The MC5. Bob Seger. Aretha. On the next page, the beginnings of a letter I never sent to a woman I’d been seeing in an on-again, off-again way (First line: “I’m sorry if this letter is embarrassingly earnest.”).

In Detroit, Matt and I did our best not to be disaster tourists. At the hostel we heard about chartered buses of people from New York and Chicago who seemed a bit too excited about how cheap it would be to buy an old house, or even an entire city block. As we walked around the city, I tried to limit how many photos I took of the city’s crumbling architecture, though there was something starkly beautiful about the city’s crumbling architecture, like one of those Discovery Channel shows that uses CGI to imagine the world’s great cities after humans have gone extinct. Here, though, the people hadn’t gone extinct, they’d just lost their jobs and their homes. Near the Heidelberg Project, we saw the remnants of two houses that had recently burned down—you could still smell the ash—and another that had been taken over by stray dogs. Two of the dogs sat on the front porch like an old married couple, and another snarled at us from an upstairs window. I tried to avoid eye contact.

That summer I was reading How to Practice by the Dalai Lama, dipping my toes into a little light Buddhism at the urging of a therapist. In the notebook, I outlined the book’s chapters and copied down key passages, like the dutiful college student I’d once been. Under “1st Noble Truth: Suffering,” I wrote: “The goal is contentment, which is peaceful, accepting, instead of the poverty of always wanting more.” In the unsent letter to that woman who kept drifting in and out of my life, I wrote: “It makes me feel like an idiot to admit this, but the truth is you wouldn’t even have to do that much to keep me around.”

Walking around Detroit, I reminded myself to say hello to people, many of whom were, in fact, eager to chat. At the art museum, a guard told us a funny story about a guy who asked her, on his way out, how many of the paintings he just saw were originals, rather than copies. “All of them?” she said. His eyes went wide, like a cartoon character. “Oh my god, I went too fast!” he told her. “Is it ok if I go back through?”

On Belle Isle, Matt and I took pictures of the river, and I thought about the Philip Levine poem:

We stripped in the first warm spring night
and ran down into the Detroit River
to baptize ourselves in the brine
of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,
melted snow.

Back at the hostel, a generational divide emerged. The people our age and older tended to sit around the common area, drinking beers and shooting the shit, while the younger travelers—teenagers, college students—kept to their laptops and phones. At first I thought I was overgeneralizing, or being a curmudgeon, but Matt noticed the same thing, which only became more pronounced over time. At a bar called Nancy Whiskey, the bartender asked us about our trip and explained that newcomers get shots of Tullamore Dew on the house. There was a story behind this, possibly having to do with Prohibition, though the only detail I remember is a line she attributed to the bar’s original owner: “It tastes like an angel taking a piss on your tongue.”

A passage from How to Practice that I jotted down in the notebook and surrounded with stars: “You are only a single person measured against an infinite number of sentient beings.”

While Matt and I walked around, dipping in and out of shops and bars, we talked about our lives. We had similar jobs in academia, full-time but without the possibility of tenure, and we’d both been contemplating a change. We talked about how tired we were of dating, with all its exhausting uncertainties. We talked about some of the places we’d lived, and places we’d like to live, and what our lives might look like if we moved them to Detroit, which despite its well-publicized struggles was turning out to be a pretty cool, welcoming place. Matt’s dad had been sick, terminally so, and I’m sure that colored our conversation, too, even if his illness had progressed to a stage where there wasn’t much you could say about it.

In the notebook I wrote: “In order to get rid of suffering, we need to eliminate the cause and condition of suffering, and in order to achieve happiness, we need to acquire the causes and conditions of happiness.”

Easy!

On our last day in Detroit, Matt and I drove out to Grosse Pointe, where we gawked at the mansions on Lakeshore Drive and I made jokes about taking us on a guided tour of filming locations for the 1997 John Cusack/Minnie Driver movie Grosse Pointe Blank. Though aside from an establishing aerial shot and a few exteriors of Pointes High School, most of the movie, it turned out, had been filmed in Los Angeles. At a little cafe we ordered white wine and complicated salads and made jokes about being “ladies who lunch,” but the food was so boring, indifferent, that it made both of us irrationally angry. Back in the car, Matt said we should knock on the doors of rich people and yell at them for a while. “Like, do they even know there’s a city on fire just down the road? Do they even care?”

Instead we went back to the hostel, where we drank a couple beers and then went out for barbecue with two older guys who described themselves as survivors of the ‘60s. They asked us questions about the literary journal Matt and I edited, and about the writing we did. They’d known each other since college, and they tried to take a trip together once a year, even if it was only a long weekend. I thought about how nice that sounded, the regularity of it, a little through-line in the long, disjointed narrative of a life.