Category: Travel

Minneapolis and Northfield

 

Headed to Northfield in the afternoon to pick up Carroll and bring her back to Minneapolis. This was the first time we’d seen each other in seven or eight years, but (as usual) we were able to pick up as if no time at all had passed. You can do this with your best friends and not even be surpised by it. This is a good thing.

Back in the city, Carroll checked into the Marriott and did some shopping while I napped on her bed. And then drinking ensued…good old-fashioned hotel room drinking, with eight years worth of collected conversation and an incredible view. Afterward, we fought our way through the strange collection of corridors connecting the hotel, the skyway mall, and the parking garage (oops…I mean parking RAMP).

 

Dinner at The King and I, a surprisingly good Thai place. Afterward, a little Mastercard-financed Telnetting at the hotel kiosk (Carroll and I having become major nerds since last encounter) and home to bed.

 

Minneapolis

 

On my morning jaunt to the bank, I was a little alarmed that I couldn’t withdraw money from my checking account even though I should have had plenty of money (OK…”plenty” is too strong a word…) Fortunately, the situation rectified itself by evening. Not being able to get money when you’re almost 2000 miles from home is a bit disconcerting.

Good thing White castle is really cheap…

I managed to nap most of the day after not sleeping too well the night before. I was starting to get reacquainted with that Minnesota allergy thing. Jeez it was nasty. I was stuffy enough to begin with, but the mess increased exponentially every time I got near someone who’d been in contact with a cat in the past, say, three months or so. Of course any first-hand contact wth an actual cat might have proven catastrophic.

 

Got in touch with Carroll (one of my best friends since 1982) and Bil (an ex-boyfriend, sort of, and friend since 1994). Bil and I drove around a bit, and Carroll and I made plans for Friday.

Erik and I ventured out for a bit of drinking, first at a nice enough neighborhood bar in Loring Park, and then at the Minneapolis Eagle. Interesting place, the Eagle. It’s definitely the “nicest” leather bar I’ve ever seen, that in the sense that it looks like a yuppie sports bar: wood panelling, plush carpet, booths, etc. I couldn’t imagine anything nasty happening (or even being arranged) in this place.

Afterward, there was food at the late-night rock and roll Mexican place. Cute rivethead boy. Free Tootsie Rolls. Not bad…

Madison WI to Minneapolis MN

Odometer: 87313

Woke up. Visited a couple of thrift stores. Got gas at station near the freeway and wondered at the fact that (other than California and North Carolina), this part of Wisconsin has the odd distinction of being the only place I’ve spent time in each of the past three years.

Finally, I headed west through Eau Claire (more thrift stores) toward Minneapolis and Erik. Of course, I arrived right at rush hour. Minneapolis at rush hour is an ugly thing. Inadequate and badly designed freeways full of incompetent drivers produce really nasty headaches. And Minnesotans, despite being some of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet, are as a group the worst drivers I’ve ever encountered. Anywhere…

Finally, though I arrived at Erik’s office. It was good to see him for the first time since Vegas. He took me home, where I was immediately accosted by a psycho neighbor who wondered if I knew who’d smashed her jack-o-lanterns. Mind you she was not at all concerned that a perfect stranger was walking into the apartment unescorted, but she was pissed about her pumpkins.

Soon we were off to First Avenue to see Meat Beat Manifesto. I was very happy to find an escape in the form of the “annex” next door where the beer was cheaper and the music was better.

Afterward, it was off to the Saloon, and home. There was sex. There was sleep. Boy did I need sleep.

Milwaukee WI to Madison WI

Odometer: 87217

  

A mildly hungover moring in Milwaukee, cured by a big lunch at a great old-school Italian restaurant. This place was really incredible, with the kind of Italian food I grew up eating (in other words, none of your foofy “light trendy pasta of the month” bullshit…). The host was a classic “mama” of the sort who pinches your cheeks at the table and asks why you didn’t finish everything. Great.

 

In addition to a tour of the city, I met the neighbor kid, a very out 14-year-old queer who was about to give a class presentation on Truman Capote. I saw the “Laverne and Shirley” building. I saw what used to be the Schlitz brewery. We drove by some Milwaukee resident’s own personal version of the Cadillac Ranch. Pretty interesting place. Milwaukee. I should have given it more time.

It was almost 4:00 by the time I left. I was worn out from too little sleep and too much lasagne. It was starting to rain. I was offered crash space for the night, but I was determined to make it to Minneapolis, so I hit the road.

I got as far as Madison. That big indention in my butt was the result of kicking myself (hard) for being so stupid.

I didn’t even go out in Madison. I checked into the Motel 6 from hell (this place was REALLY bad), got dinner from the sub shop across the street and settled in for some strange voodoo incest movie on HBO, followed by a PBS documentary on the history of the ACLU. All in all, I guess it was a pretty good low-impact rest break. All in all, that’s a pretty good descrition of Madison in general.

Detroit MI to Milwaukee WI

Odometer: 86376

I made it out pretty early. Would have been even earlier, but there was cruising to be done at the motel. Seems the “high school/homecoming kid” we’d noticed earlier was (a) a couple of years older than originally pegged, and (b) cruising me really hard. Unfortunately, we never completely connected and we didn’t get to fuck to a background of Judge Judy. Pity…

 

Southern Michigan is not the most exciting place in the world. There’s Ann Arbor, the cute college town, Battle Creek, the depressed cereal town, and Kalamazoo, the town where I couldn’t stop singing that song about “I got a gal…”

I made it through pretty fast, ate somewhere, and all of a sudden I was in Indiana again. There was cheap gas. There were cheap cigarettes. And I made my way through Gary, the dowdy gateway to Chicagoland just a little too close to rush hour for comfort.

Logistics (OK…money…) kept me from spending any time at all in Chicago. I didn’t even drive through the city since I arrived so late in the afternoon. I flew through the far western suburbs on I-294 and didn’t stop ’til I was in Wisconsin.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I was running a day early, and I was hoping this wouldn’t screw up my chance to meet up with Dave in Milwaukee. Fortunately, it didn’t. We met up at the bookstore where he works part time and were soon joined by boyfriend Doug and roomie Davee. At this point, there were far too many Davids in one room. We survived.

 

I’m told Milwaukee has more queer bars per capita than any other city in the country. This is a pretty reasonable notion since Milwaukee is traditionally “Beer City USA”. Strange thing is, all of the bars we hit were tiny sleazy little corner bars. Of course, I liked this aspect of the place. There was This Is It, with the big booth an the strange man who wanted to escort me to the bathroom. At C’est La Vie, Dave and Doug won a lovely porn video playing pob-ball. At the Ballgame, there was wood panelling, strange statuary, and a security camera. And there was also this straight bar which I really loved. Cheap beer all around. I really loved that too…

 

And (again) it was really cool to meet people and instantly feel like old friends. We hung out. We drank beer. We watched demolition video. I was in awe of all the techno toys in the house. I was in awe of all the HOUSE in the house. After Detroit (where I lurked in a house being purchased for an obscenely low price) and Milwaukee, was becoming increasigly impatient with the walk-in closet I call home.

Detroit Still

 

Seems the Detroiters I was lurking with are not at all sentimental about the place but are still fiercely loyal to it in a certain way. San Franciscans seem to have no discernible sense of humor about themselves, perhaps due to absolute terror that someone might get offended and deem them “unworthy” of living here. On the other hand, it is quite acceptable for residents to make wry and sarcastic comments about Detroit without being branded traitors. A refreshing quality indeed…

 

A few idiosyncracies I noted:

  • Major intersections do not have left turn lanes. They have built-in U-turn zones at mid-block. An interesting experiment which really doesn’t work.
  • It’s hard to see much of Detroit’s decay from the freeways. This must be very comforting to the commuting suburban residents who rea most responsible for this decay.
  • Grosse Point is very aptly named.
  • Hamtramck, described by the Utne Reader as one of the ten coolest urban neighbrhoods in America, vaguely resembles an urban version of a trailer park. Apparently, many of the residents are not totally out of place in this environment, given the large racist skinhead presence, etc.

 

Scott and I spent Sunday afternoon driving around the city taking pictures and discussing what had happened. We toured Grand River Avenue, a once fashionable area of large houses, which now features neat and well-kept homes interspersed with bombed-out shells and vacant lots. Near Woodward Avenue, the headquarters of General Motors, one of the world’s largest corporations, fittingly presides over the decay. The irony is apparently not lost on GM; they’re in the process of moving to the Rennaissance Center.

 

We visited a large pile of rubble which had once been the Cadillac factory which employed Scott’s father and the adjacent neighborod which went to hell when the factory closed. We visited the west side and some suburbs where a midde class still exists. We played “White Castle or White Tower”, where the object is to guess which chain an abandoned white porcelain building used to belong to.

 

 

It’s a strangely emotional thing for me to drive through Detroit, a place which dramatically illustrates the end result of of racism and corpoarate greed. I realized that the Hudson’s building was in some ways a metaphor for the entire city: abandoned, neglected, and a little too big and cumbersome for real adaptive re-use. The massive and majestic train station pictured above is perhaps an even more striking metaphor. It’s a beautiful building which sits on the outskirts of downtown, completely abandoned and gutted, almost begging to be put out of its misery because it will never be restored.

 

I don’t mean to suggest that Detroit is begging to be destroyed. There’s still life here, despite popular opinion. Scott summed up the city very well with one single statement he kept repeating: there’s absolutely no place else like Detroit. And I’m still drawn to the place. Every minute I spend in Detroit makes me crave ten more.

From Windsor ON, downtown looks completely different. The view from the hideous new casino reveals no trace of the dark side of the faded jewel across the river. What it does reveal is just how bad the Detroit waterfront could look in a few years when the casinos open there. Casinos are a really misguided plan for revitalizing a city, methinks. Look what they did for Atlantic City, after all. Thy’re insulated environments which feed of the city and give nothing back.

Sort of like the Renaissance Center. And sort of like General Motors, its new tenant.

 

Time to move on. Scott had to start a new job on Monday and I had to be on my way after another morning drive through a downtown which ones had chain and people and now had one less abandoned department store across the street from the boarded-up Lerner Shop.

Building Fall Down Go Boom

Have you ever sat through the Saturday morning teenybopper shows on NBC? All of them seem like warmed-over “Saved by the Bell” wannabes, each with exactly one stylishly-attired member of each major ethnic group (although some have two or three stylishly-attired white kids…audience demographics, y’know…). I can’t imagine watching this crap even when I was a kid. However, I did sit through it on Saturday morning in Detroit.

I should have been visiting the boy in the room next door: the one Scott and I had (mistakenly, it seems) pegged as a straight high school kid throwing a homecoming party or something. More about him later.

Instead, I waited for the abortion protest to end and tried to get in touch with Mike, another email correspondent who was planning to show me around a little. Unfortunately, we never could connect (a problem exacerbated by the fact that the message light on my phone wasn’t working).

 

Soon enough I was off with Scott to downtown Detroit for the demolition of what used to be Hudson’s Department Store, second largest building of its kind in the United States. This is the event around which my entire trip was oriented, and frankly I was pretty amazed that there wasn’t a bigger crowd assembled to see it. All the same, I’m told, there were more people downtown on a Saturday afternoon this day than there had been in years. Specifically, there were more WHITE people. Maybe they felt safer knowing their suburban counterparts were there to protect them.

There was definitely a crowd at Jacoby’s, a cool bar nearby, with a tasty bartender and a good beer selection.

Demolitions of old buildings are always disturbing to me, and since I’m just barely old enough to remember when big downtown departent stores were the rule rather than the exception, I could identify with the old-timers who were sad to see it go. On the other hand, this building could never really have been re-used and its vacant shell was a big slap in the face to residents forced to see it everyday…a constant reminder of what Detroit used to be and would probably never be again. So I could also understand that many people were glad to see it go.

  

After a few delays, we heard the first blasts. Nothing happened. I wasn’t worried, having watched the Hotel Charlotte in North Carolina demolished in similar fashion about ten years before. Eventually, wings started collapsing, the crowd started cheering, and the whole thing was over in a few more seconds.

  

And then came this horrendous dust cloud. I was prepared for this as well, having been caught in it at my last implosion. We even brought masks and offered the extras to a few kids so they could propagate the species. Once the building came down, I grabbed Scott and we ducked into a corner bar (which locked its doors against the dust a few minutes later). When the dust settled, it looked like a gray blizzard had hit.

 

After drinking a toast to Hudson’s, there was time to roam around downtown Detroit (which was now relatively dust-free) for a while. This was a good excuse for food at Lafayette Coney Island, which came highly recommended by my friend Rae. Coney islands (hot dogs) seem to be a pretty high art form in Detroit. This place was incredible. Thanks Rae.

 

I took lots of pictures. Downtown Detroit is such an amazing place, with blocks and blocks of early 20th century commercial buildings and skyscrapers, many of them alarmingly vacant and abandoned, standing like testosterone-deficient phallic symbols (did I really write that?). There is life downtown. You just have to look for it.

 

There was another beer or two later, of course, at Steve’s, this very strange old bar run by the same marginally bitter couple for about 50 years or so. Huge place. Nothing on the walls. Bathroom from the 30’s. Cheap beer. I love hanging out with locals. Afterwards, we retired to the Motel 6 for what was supposed to be a nap (no…I’m not offering any details thank you…) and then off to more Detroit nightlife.

 

We hit a leather bar called the R&R (I think), which allegedly has some backroom action some nights (but not this night) and then a beautiful, huge, new club on Michigan Avenue. This place was your basic top-notch dance club. At 1AM on Saturday night, we were the only customers. I don’t understand…

Indianapolis IN to Detroit MI

Odometer: 86283

A few productive thrift store moments in the morning after saying goodbye to Bob, and I was off through northeastern Indiana and southern Ohio. This was the shortest drive of the trip so far, which was a good thing since I got such a late start. The drive was not particularly exciting. The only big amusement was the sign in a rest area outside Fort Wayne:

“We have urinals for men, not stool seats.”

Thing is, if “stool seats” is supposed to mean “commodes”, the sign was wrong. There were three. All the same, I opted for a urinal, feeling a bit skittish about doing my busness in something which might not really be there. Could be messy, after all…

 

I hit Detroit about 7. At least I think it was 7. Coming into or out of Indiana is always a confusing thing, since Daylight Savings Time is not spoken there. I checked into my trusty Motel 6 and set about getting in touch with Scott, my tourguide for the weekend. Scott had offered me lodgings with his friends Don and Kristen, but I felt bad about impacting to many lives at once, so I figured I’d opt for the room and see what happened.

Anyhow, I headed over to the house after a while. It’s always an odd thing to walk into a house ful of people you don’t really know. It’s always a great thing whe they make you feel like a long-lost friend and you actually believe you ARE a long-lost friend after about five minutes. This was one of those nights. I was happy.

I felt like I was really missing the point last year when I hit Detroit, because I had no one to show me around, no one to tell me where I should or should not drive, etc. All the same, I was obsessed with the place then and I’m obsessed with it still. If ever there was a polar opposite to the theme park known as San Francisco, this is it. Detroit is not pretty, at least not in ways that most people recognize. Gentrification is not an issue. Detroit is starkly real.

And it’s hard to write about it without sounding really pompous, so I’ll save the deep analysis for another time.

Friday night’s entertainment consisted of White Castle (what a great icebreaker!) and a trip to a very strange goth club in the grand ballroom of what seemed to be a soon-to-be-abandoned Ramada Inn downtown. This was the sort of place where you realize the decay in the club is probably not just a “pretty goths dressed in black” affectation. It was pretty cool, actually.

Then it was off to bed, as I prepared for Saturday’s demolition downtown and the kids got ready to confront the God Squad at an abortion protest the next morning.

Indianapolis IN and Cincinatti OH

 

Indianapolis was something of a homecoming. It was the first stop where I’d spent any significant time previously. It’s also the home of my friend Bob, on whose shoulders I place the blame for these annual mega-trips. Thus, I had some perspective (and lots of pictures from last year) so I could actually look at things with my eyes rather than with the camera.

I miss fall. It was always my favorite time of year when I used to live in places with discernible seasons. So it was pretty cool to see (a) trees and (b) trees with multi-colored leaves. It takes so little to make me happy. Sometimes.

After a couple of thrift stores (including Bull Winkle’s where I managed to find the missing link in my set of Flintstones mugs from McDonald’s) and a pretty decent used bookstore, we did the southeastern Indiana tour along US52…

 

…which led ultimately to Cincinatti. I’d never been to Cincinatti. It brings to mind images of a really repressive social climate and of scrappy little AM radio stations. Actually, it seemed a fairly interesting place with a sort of seedy urban aesthetic I really liked. Reminded me a little of Pittsburgh. Definitely worth a longer look next year.

 

The evening brought a quick trip to a bar or too. At the 501 Tavern, I had a brief conversation with a crowd of lightweights who thought I was completely nuts for dribing around the country when I could have spetmy vacation flying to really “fabulous” places. They were pretty much irredeeemable and I moved on to this strangely endearing sort of mega-club (whose name I forget) where I spent a few minutes chasing a boy who looked completely out of his mind. I didn’t catch him. In retrospect, I think I’m glad…