Detroit Noir

"Detroit is an old and wounded city, broken into wildly diverse splinters, but it is not dead, for it is possessed of a unique vitality rooted in its complex history and its hardy people. Detroit is noir, shadowed and striving, grim and powerful. It is impossible not to know the city and not respect it."

-E.J. Olsen and John C. Hocking, Detroit Noir

Where I grew up, Detroit was the place your people ran away from. Most of the people I was raised with likely couldn't find downtown Detroit, unless perhaps they came for a baseball game in a church group bus. After dark, they couldn't imagine being caught on Detroit's streets, not beyond the white-trash-paradise of the Casinos anyway. I, on the other hand, ran to Detroit. I took refuge in it. I found an unknowable beauty in it, and a whole new realm of possibilities. From the beginning, I picked up the scent of the place on my finger tips, threw my hand up in the air and declared, "This is the place for me." Having dug my roots into Detroit soil, I have declared the city as my home, and here I will stay until they throw the dirt over my head.

Detroit's downtown has returned to a semblance of life you might find in any city, with "luxury-condominium-lofts" for the newly arrived yuppie set, complete with Starbuck's, Border's Books, and a Hard Rock Café. The tourists, such as they are, will content themselves to make the circuit on the Detroit People Mover, an elevated railway that makes a never-ending loop of the central city. I, on the other hand, spend all of my time in the working heart of the city between the Fisher Freeway and Eight Mile Road, where the real Detroit can be found.

I rarely ride that Detroit People Mover, or go downtown for that matter. I prefer the rest of the city, the real city. Saturdays will invariably find me at the Eastern Market, a great urban farmers market of the type once found in every Victorian city. Then I may venture off by bus in any direction, along one of the great spoke thoroughfares; Michigan Avenue to the West, Gratiot Avenue to the East, or Woodward Avenue that bisects West and East sides of Detroit. I ride the busses to explore, or to find another great urban adventure, wherever they might arise along the streets that thrust out into the flesh of the city.

Last Saturday I wound up in the back of an old storefront that sold alligator shoes. The proprietor was well dressed enough, though in a style way too bright, and way too tailored that fell out of fashion sometime around the time of the great 1967 riot. I soaked up some of his local history, tales of events gone by, and then I wound up going down on him in the back room of his shop where the shoes are stored.

Afterword, after a few awkward moments of trying to figure out where to dispose of his ejaculated jizz, I did the right thing and just swallowed it.

No longer in throws of physical pleasure, the man seemed torn and troubled between gratitude for having been celebrated in that way by a female more than half his age, and the mortal fear of an older man that he'd just been given some kind of mercy sex. It was the sort of thing men his age are always reflecting on after the sex act. Where a younger man might have just been thinking more along the lines of taking his traditional post orgasmic nap, this one needed to be reassured; reassured that I enjoyed him in that way that I wanted to.

I assured him that he still had that "It" thing going on that turns me on. And I wasn't lying to him, he did. The man still had that "it." Then we parted ways.

Detroit's mean streets are not always so dark, or bruised, or painful as they sometimes seem. In Detroit there is always enough time for everything, even a time to touch, and often with a little smuggled sex included into the mix to pass the day.