Detroit City Is the Place to Be by Mark Binelli Page B

salutation “They call me Satan. But my name is Joe.” You wouldn’t hear Satan’s thoughts on the Bing rightsizing plan (“I think it’s a bunch of bullshit. Let people do what they want to do, live where they want to live”), nor would you learn that Satan, who just turned sixty and has massive arms and long silver hair and a light, almost South Asian complexion, used to work as an underwater welder on oil derricks in the Gulf, doing commercial deep diving—he was certified at two hundred feet—and that he’d also been a cop, briefly, in Louisville, though he didn’t like it, and now he mostly builds and fixes Harleys, having lost one of his legs after being hit by a drunk driver in 2001 while riding his motorcycle and left for dead. You also wouldn’t get to ask a stupid question like So how did losing your leg affect your riding? nor would you receive a response combining a good-natured slap of the prosthetic with a cry of It didn’t make it easier!
    A female blues singer whose name I didn’t catch had told the crowd to “put some cotton in the children’s ears” before launching into a song called “I’m a Dirty Old Woman with a Dirty Mind.” You wouldn’t have heard that, Lafayette Park, nor would you have caught that cherry red ’66 GTO driving down Forest or have had the following exchange with the guy standing next to you in the leather vest and dark glasses:
    G UY IN L EATHER V EST: Man, I used to have that exact car!
    M E: What happened?
    G UY IN L EATHER V EST: They stole it! Don’t mean no disrespect, but white boys stole it.
    M Y FRIEND B ILL: Some of us are dicks.
    M E: Ever find it?
    G UY IN L EATHER V EST: In Detroit? Shit .
    Later, Harmonica Shaw took the stage with a sort of gunslinger’s belt strapped around his middle, only the belt had different harmonicas. It would have been a shame to miss that.

 

    Neighborhood watch leader James “Jack Rabbit” Jackson, a retired Detroit police officer living on the city’s east side. [John Carlisle]

 
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    NOT FOR US THE TAME ENJOYMENT
    I F YOU WERE TO make the five-minute walk east from Mark Covington’s Georgia Street Community Garden to Gratiot Avenue, then turn north and stroll a single block, you would reach the Slumberland Child Development Center. In a city of haunted ruins, it takes special élan to stand out as an unusually haunted ruin. For the Slumberland Child Development Center, the crude mural featuring Mickey Mouse and the Tasmanian Devil provides that extra boost, especially if you live in the neighborhood and happen to know the recent history of the place—how, in 2009 and again in 2010, the former day care center was used to hide the cadavers of murder victims. Including the two Slumberland corpses, the bodies of eight women were discovered in the immediate vicinity over the same time period. Two years on, there had been no arrests in connection with the killings. In one of the local articles on the case, a resident wondered if the neighborhood was becoming a “mecca for dumping bodies.”
    Though his community garden earns most of the attention, Covington also serves as vice president of a group called the City Airport Renaissance Association. As the body count piled up, the members of CARA, dedicated to stabilizing what remained of their neighborhood—called “City Airport” because of its proximity to the barely used Coleman A. Young Municipal Airport, 1 which for years has handled only cargo and the occasional private commercial traffic—began knocking on doors and distributing flyers warning residents of the killings.
    If you ask a Detroiter about saving the city, it’s unlikely that she will mention tech start-ups or urban farming. The first thing most Detroiters want to talk about is crime.
    *   *   *
    I was robbed at gunpoint when I was twenty, just a short walk from Service Street. A group of us had decided to drive from Ann Arbor, where I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, to