I should have gone to Chicago this weekend. One of my best friends invited me down for home-cooked Mexican food. Instead, I went to Windsor, and it redoubled the conviction I've formed that the problems of this city are intractable and unfixable.
I had been encouraging my friend Ryan, my roommate's boyfriend, to come to Canada with me for some time. Canada, I had been telling him, is awesome. I don't know how much of that is true, before this weekend I had visited Windsor three times. Once for the GRE, once for Pho with my roommate and my girlfriend, and once for an intimate evening of Korean food with my girlfriend. This weekend, I had a craving for Ethiopian food.
You might notice a (small sample size) pattern there. It's real. None of those foods exist (at least, none of them exist at a reasonable price point or distance from our homes) in Detroit. I'm happy to drive to Dearborn to eat Levantine food, to Hamtramck to eat Yemeni or Polish food, to Seven Mile and burnt-out Westside churches to eat Jamaican food. But I have to go to another country for those other cuisines.
Maybe I'm spoiled. Maybe it's just that I've lived in Chicago and LA and there's a great and readily accessible diversity of cuisines in those places, and so I expect it everywhere. Maybe I'm lazy. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, didn't scour enough forum posts to find Korean that's not fucking sushi fusion on this side of the river. Maybe my expectations are too high. Maybe driving almost all the way to the U-Pick apple orchard and cider mill is a reasonable distance to taste Ethiopia. After all, it's way closer than actual Ethiopia.
Maybe this is just an accident of circumstances. Maybe having the best restaurants in your area be a random Thai place and a Tim Hortons is normal. (Yes, Timmy's real name has no apostrophe. Official Bilingualism, motherfuckaz.)
Anyway, we crossed to Canada, Ryan and I, and my roommate Mitch. Ryan's roommate Jorge is skeptical of Canadians ("They're planning something, can't you see?") and decided not to come with us.
After crossing the border at the tunnel with only minor hassle from the Canadian migra, we found the restaurant. We then parked on the street, at a working meter. None of the three of us felt any fear from parking on the street, none of us imagined that the police would fail to respond to someone breaking in, I don't think any of us even realistically considered that a break-in was a possibility, despite the fact that I my car was broken into and burglarized not five miles away, less than a week ago. Though we Americans tend to stereotype Canadians as a polite people, I don't think it was this that made us think my car was safe.
We ate a delicious meal, which we were able to pay for with American dollars. We then decided, as we were walking along the street back to the car, to go to a bar. I drank (one and a half over the course of nearly three hours, I promise I wasn't driving drunk) delicious Canadian microbrews and we walked, in complete security, back to my car.
It was only when we were at my car already that I realized that all the street lights had been functional. Every single one.
In a normal city, that's unremarkable. I remember being slightly disappointed with the city of Los Angeles for finally fixing (when I was 17) the burned-out bulb across the street from my house because it made it harder to see the stars, but I also remember that being the only streetlight I ever noticed being out.
Here, it's a rare streetlight I notice being functional. It is a genuine surprise to notice a street lighted at night by more than my headlights, except in parts of Downtown.
As we drove back toward the tunnel, I noticed that none of the roads had major potholes. On our side of the border, people who drive in the lanes in the spring are chuckled at, because so much swerving is required to preserve the shocks, struts, and undercarriage of the car that you would imagine that the city was a test track for the new Olympic sport of Automobile Slalom.
Every time I commute to work through the potholes and the days-old unplowed snow, and hear Katya, the cheery CBC weatherperson, announce that the roads in Windsor-Essex are "between bare and dry and bare and wet" I cry a little in my soul.
Back in reality, I went to Eastern market. This is one of the few nice things about the city of Detroit. I picked up some vegetables, some apple cider donuts, and some clams. The fishmonger I went to was the only place in the city selling fresh clams. I would learn later when I went to cook them that they were not particularly fresh, nor were they still alive. I am not sure if I should blame this on Detroit, I will simply point out that I could find (actually fresh, on ice, not vacuum packed) clams in several places on the South Side of Chicago. But I was desperate.
I met up with a whole mess of other desperate Detroiters at the Job Fair I went to at Cobo Hall an hour later. I was interested in the position of Urban Planner, which was advertised on the website of the city as one of the positions that they would be offering at the fair. They even had TWO positions! And only wanted coursework at the BA level! And I have a mess of experience from the neighborhood council. I thought my suit and bright orange tie would make me memorable, and hopefully get me out for an interview.
The job fair was not especially crowded, I got called in the first group. I got inside.
There was no table for people hiring urban planners. Nobody could tell me why it was on the internet, nobody could tell me why they weren't there.
I left Cobo Hall, resolved that it was simply not to be.
As I left, there was a consultant hustling for business. He tried to hustle me. I thought about the shirts, the ones that say "Detroit Hustles Harder." There's no bigger lie in the world. Fucking Toledo is a realer-looking city, a safer place, a place where more people seem to care about the future, individual and collective, than Detroit. Windsor, which must be a third-rate Canadian city at best (No NHL team of its own, despite the potential for a built-in rivalry with the Wings) is a realer city. Indianapolis is realer. Cleveland is realer.
In a city where the school district has an achievement gap to make up before it even begins to make up the achievement gap (I shit you not, they compare their data only to "African-American students across the state because African-Americans are DPS' largest subgroup" to make it appear they're closing the achievement gap overall when it reality it's widening, and then trumpet that as if it was some success) where charter schools blatantly violate students' first amendment rights by promoting religion in the classroom every day (looking at you, Marvin Winans) where the State's school district (the EAA) juices its nearly impossibly bad numbers by churning special ed students back to DPS, nobody is really hustling.
The secret about Detroit is that even though everybody has a hustle, nobody is hustling anyone but themselves. The burbs are hustling Detroit, the State is hustling Detroit, L Brooks Patterson is hustling Detroit, Dan Gilbert is hustling Detroit, the Feds are hustling Detroit, the Car Companies are hustling Detroit, the Hipsters are hustling Detroit, Chicago is hustling Detroit, Mike Illitch is hustling Detroit in the worst way (The Joe is great, asshole), car insurance companies are hustling Detroit, Kevyn Orr is hustling Detroit, even fucking Windsor is hustling Detroit.
Detroit is getting hustled up, down, and around the corner, six ways to Sunday. The shirt they print should really say "Everyone Else Hustles Harder."
