In The 313

I was born and lived my early years in Detroit. Not the suburbs. Not Royal Oak. Not Southfield. Certainly not Grosse Pointe. No I was a real Detroiter and spent the first years of my life between Seven Mile Road and Eight Mile Road on a street called Fairfield on the block between Curtis and Thatcher.

I remember all this because back then it was important to remember that stuff. I was only allowed to walk to the end of the block when I was a little kid. But when it was time for me to go to school, it wasn't long until I was walking to Hampton Elementary School on my own. At least that's how I recall it. My brother was supposed to walk me home and did for awhile, but one day he forgot about me. It was a real windy fall day and I stayed at that school along holding tightly to the fence waiting for someone to come. I can't remember if my mom came and got me or I figured out how to get home on my own. In my mind I think it was the latter, but in reality it was probably the former. Regardless, it wasn't long after that I figured the best way to get myself to and from school was to get myself to and from school.

Being a Detroit public school, it was majority black. My parents were the last of the great white liberals at that time, or they were lazy. Either way, we stayed in the city a lot longer than most whites. Our particular neighborhood was relatively safe, but the number of break-ins was growing and my mom recently reminded me of the big spotlight we had in the backyard that was kept on all night long.

I had a good time in elementary school. I had long hair for a little kid. The black girls used to love to play with my hair in class. My best friends were black. In fact, pretty much my only friends were black. The teachers were black, the principal, etc. There were not any racial problems. I got into fights, but they were fights alongside the black kids against other black kids. At that age, we're too young to notice things like skin color.

This was a few years after much of Detroit burned in the riots. My Dad covered the riots then. My brother recalls a picture of him interviewing a group of young, angry black men down on 12th while police were holding back other crowds. I was only two when the riots happened, so I don't have any memory of it at all. In 1968, when King was killed, there were riots in lots of cities, but Detroit kept its cool. I have a memory that is probably false of being in a car with my father when news of the assassination came over the radio and him then racing home to drop me off and go back out to report.

I have another distinct memory that I don't believe is false. Down the street from us was this one house that was occupied by a group of black men with the big afros, the whole works. There was always a Mustang 302 parked in front. That house scared the shit out of me. Those were some serious looking mother fuckers (shut your mouth). They would hang on their front porch smoking and looking angry. One day when I was walking home from school and they were hanging there one of them pointed his hand at me like a gun. I took off for the front door. I'm sure it gave them a good laugh.

We moved out of Detroit in 1973. I was only in second grade. My older brothers have much richer memories of our life there. They remember my Dad taking them to the 1968 series. They remember Lions games at Tiger Stadium. I remember trips to my grandmother's apartment in a much tougher neighborhood than ours. Grandma would not leave the neighborhood even though all the other Jews and whites had long cleared out. One time she was walking home with groceries and some kids grabbed them from her. But a couple of older kids in the neighborhood made the punks give the groceries back. She stayed on Dexter Avenue until the early 1980s when she was finally persuaded to go into assisted living.

I was happy in Detroit, at least living there. Our family was fucked up, but it would've been fucked up anywhere. If we hadn't moved to Jersey, sooner or later we would've moved to the suburbs of Detroit and I'm glad that didn't happen. When we moved to Montclair, I immediately became friends with all the black kids. When my mom went to a parent-teacher conference, the teacher told her, "all the black kids love your son, he talks just like they do."

A little time in Montclair took care of that and ironically when my parents split up a few years later and I found myself living in that town's black neighborhood (yes Montclair had a black neighborhood), I really was an outsider.