This Is Our Neighborhood, and We Refuse to Give Up by Megan Crane

This is our neighborhood, and we refuse to give up.

We live on a quiet little street in south Flint. Our small bungalow is nestled into the shadow of the now-defunct McKinley Academy. The neighbors are working-class and quiet, the lawns are well-kept, and most of the houses have at least a few perfunctory tiger lilies gracing the front steps. There are only two rental houses on our block, and we reside in one of them, my fiancé and I. The other house is on the opposite side of my next-door neighbor’s place.

Until last week, the only neighbors we were acquainted with were the guy across the street, Jeff, and our neighborhood watch guy, Joe, who lives on the corner of our street and Camden Avenue. We pay Joe’s son to mow our lawn – in fact, most of our block does the same – and my fiancé Zach has been known to stand in the driveway talking to Joe for a couple hours. We’re from Up North, after all, and we believe in community. For the most part, however, the people on our block mostly kept to themselves, and we did the same.

It’s strange the way an isolated incident can change things, is it not?

At 7:30 one night last week, I was sitting in my living room. My feet were up on the coffee table, my fat old diva of a Norwegian Forest Cat was embedded in her usual spot on my lap, and I was sipping a coffee and studying for my abnormal psych final the next day. It was a balmy, warm afternoon, and I had the windows open. Zach’s cat, a tuxedo-print Maine Coon, likes to lie in the windows and survey the neighborhood. When I heard a tearing sound coming from our bathroom, I assumed it was Leonard sharpening his claws on something and paid no mind.

A few minutes later, a series of random rapid thumps started coming from the bathroom. My first thought was that the cat had somehow gotten stuck in the bathtub, despite the fact that he can leap into the windows with ease. I stood up, placed my cat on the chair, and went to investigate. Leonard was nowhere to be seen.

I’m only five feet tall, and the bathroom window is level with my forehead. The thumps sounded as though they were coming from directly outside the window, so naturally, I stood on the edge of the bathtub and peeped out to see what was up. I looked to the right first; my next-door neighbor’s screen over her kitchen window was torn and flapping. I looked to the left. Her air conditioner usually rests in her living room window. However, it was gone. It had been replaced by broken glass and a pair of men’s legs sticking out the window.

Maybe Ashley locked her keys in the house and this is one of her friends trying to help her out, I thought. Wait, if he’s a friend, why would he shove her air conditioner through the window? Wouldn’t he have gone through the back? And when did that screen get ripped? My mind immediately answered itself.

“Hey, can I help you?” I called through the window.

The man immediately began wiggling back through the window. His feet made contact with Ashley’s trash cans, crushing them. He maneuvered his way back to the ground, and turned to grin at me, dead teeth leering in his mouth like rotten fenceposts. “Hey, I live here,” he responded.

I recognized this guy as the creepy guy on our block – and every block in Flint seems to have one these days. This particular creeper lived in the other rental house, the Section 8 property on the other side of Ashley’s.

“No, you don’t live there!” I yelled, making my voice as loud and aggressive as I could.

“I live here,” he repeated, still grinning at me, and stepping toward my fence and my face in the bathroom window.

This guy had been acting strange since he moved in. I didn’t know Ashley, except to nod at her, but I was fairly certain she hadn’t given this guy permission to be in her house, and if she had, well then, fuck it, I’d apologize later.

“You don't fucking live there!” I screamed, full-force. I darted back through my house, checking to make sure my ¾” steel pipe, about the length of a Louisville Slugger, was in its place by the front door, then flew out the front.

By now, two other guys I recognized as living down the block had heard me and come running. They had the guy cornered, and as I ran up to them, Joe the neighborhood watch guy came jogging across the street, yelling to us that he’d called the cops already. The intruder started mumbling that he’d thought Ashley had stolen his air conditioner, so he was going into her house to get it back. One of the neighbors, an older gentleman named Paul, immediately “called bullshit” and told the guy his air conditioner was still in his window and he needed to get gone now. Joe repeated that he’d called the police, and told the guy we didn’t want that shit in our neighborhood. The guy staggered off.

Now, under normal circumstances, I could understand if the man was drunk and somehow got his house confused with Ashley’s. They’re the same color, with similar trim. Both places have tiger lilies at the front, and the man had only been living on our street for two months. However, as Paul and Joe and I stood there talking, it came out that only that morning, Paul’s son Eric had caught the same guy in their back yard trying to boost the air compressor over the fence. Eric had had to threaten the guy with physical force, and when that didn’t work, he’d had to use that CCW permit of his and draw down on the guy to get him to quit advancing on him.

Jeff across the street came outside to see what was going on. Joe filled him in, then called Ashley at work. She came flying home, and since we were still waiting for the police to show up, we all ended up hanging out in Ashley’s front yard. We remained there, getting more bits and pieces of the story from each other. The same guy had tried to get into Jeff’s and Joe’s houses the same day. I can only assume he ignored my house due to the ugly purple Saturn with the ungodly-loud motor that I take to school every day. What’s more, he’d knocked on Ashley’s door the previous night, in the midst of a horrific storm, to “borrow” her phone, then pushed his way inside the house and looked around. He tried coming back again later, but that time, she refused to let him in, since it was well past one in the morning.

So after four more calls to 911, Flint’s finest finally sent an officer to take a report. He arrived around 1:30 am, five hours after the break-in, took our statements, told Ashley that the most they could charge him with was unlawful entry, and left.

The next day, we assumed it was back to normal. The car was extremely low on gas, so Zach caught a ride to his cooking job down in Fenton, and I shouldered my backpack and caught the bus over by Kings’ Lane Apartments. I went to school, sat for my exam (96%), and caught the bus back home. It was another gorgeous day, so I got off a few stops early, up by Fenton and Atherton roads, and walked home. I cut across Fenton, walked a block down Campbell, and turned onto Brunswick. My earbuds were in, I was listening to my favorite song by Buffalo Springfield, and I had nothing more in my head than going home and putting the final touches on my Creative Writing class portfolio.

As I got to the street just north of my own, Ashley and her boyfriend Ken came driving up and flagged me down. They informed me that they’d found the guy’s wallet in their backyard, with all of his personal information and a few other people’s names and driver’s license numbers as well. They dropped it off to the police, but we have yet to hear back.

I tell this story not in search of praise, but to comment on the aftermath. Since the break-in, I’ve taken to sitting on my front steps every day. I have severe general anxiety disorder, and the woman who lives behind me is a screamer. I can’t sit in my back yard; she gives me panic attacks. So I sit in the front. I write, or I work on my little craft projects, or I tend to my flower and herb garden. And without fail, Jeff across the street will come out to his front steps. He places his hands on his hips and surveys the neighborhood like a contented monarch looking over his kingdom, then will wave or yell, “Hey, baby girl, how you doin’?” Larry from the end of the block will walk by with his little pug dog, wave, and ask me what I’m working on today. Paul will wander over and talk for a few minutes, or Joe will come across the street to see if I want some cuttings from his wife’s flower bed. Ashley or Ken will lean over the fence that separates my yard from their driveway, and we’ll swap stories about life in the restaurant industry or plants we’re growing or whatever.

Our neighborhood was serene before this incident, and it has gone back to its status quo. We watch each other’s houses, we know each other’s routines. Things have gone back to normal on the surface. The difference is now, we’re invested in our neighborhood. Those roots have sunk a little deeper into Flint soil, and our street feels to me like any of the hundred different small-town streets I lived on before I moved to Genesee County. The police response time might be terrible, but our neighbors have our backs, and we have theirs. The people on my block are good people, hard-working, quiet homeowners who are just as invested in keeping our neighborhood safe as we are. We live in a small oasis of tranquility in the midst of one of the rowdier south-side neighborhoods, and we’re okay with that.

This is our neighborhood, and we refuse to give up.

— Megan Crane

An Absence of Unicorns by Megan Crane

When I tell people that I voluntarily chose to move to Flint, I am usually greeted with looks ranging from confused to appalled. Flint, Michigan, a rough-shod blue-collar town gracelessly eroding at its seams, crumbling into its eponymous river as more and more people flee. The town has been described by author Ben Hamper as “greaseball Mecca” and by noted journalist Gordon Young as a “city that continually challenged the national media to come up with new and creative ways to describe just how horrible things were.” Flint has a well-deserved reputation for toughness, and Michael Moore’s documentary Roger & Me depicted the gritty reality of post-GM Flint accurately, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek. It is one of the most violent and crime-ridden towns in the United States. It is also roughly two hundred miles south of my hometown. However, despite growing up in rural northern Michigan, Flint has been a part of my life for as far back as my memory reaches. In an indirect manner, it has helped to shape my adult personality, and that leaves me owing it a spiritual debt, as we all owe the things that create us.

My father was part of the Flint diaspora of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. He left the city with the hopes that he could find peace and a quiet life up north, and that his offspring would be spared the dangers of a childhood like his, shielding us from the crime, pollution, and general decline of his hometown. Interestingly, Flint still remained nearly a day-to-day topic of conversation in our home. Lee Iacocca and Roger Smith were names I recognized and could identify by face by age five. Michael Moore was someone to be mocked as being “not-from-Flint,” a fact which irritated my father for some unknown reason, as was Moore’s removal from my great-aunt’s bookstore at the hands of my grandfather, who did not approve of the filmmaker’s use of profanity in the presence of ladies.

We made frequent trips south to visit my grandparents and uncle, who remained residents of Genesee County. I would compare Cross Village, Michigan, population 200, where I spent my childhood, to Flint, with rather unfavorable results. Flint had large libraries, museums, a mall, a planetarium, and so many, many things to do. Cross Village, on the other hand, boasted a post office, a tiny general store/gas station, a bar that we were strictly forbidden to enter, and a one-room schoolhouse that educated children in kindergarten through sixth grade until it closed shortly after I entered third grade in 1990. Sturgeon Bay, one of the upper reaches of Lake Michigan, was directly across the street from our front yard, but I had little appreciation of this fact as a child, focusing more on the injustice of the lack of pizza delivery and door-to-door mail service. I felt cheated by the lack of other children to play with and would plead with my parents to move south. My father would attempt to deflect my efforts with what were meant to be cautionary stories of narrow escapes from shadowy-faced hooligans or tragedies that would have never occurred in a suburban setting. However, I was a precocious child, an early reader with a sense of adventure who preferred the reality of Unsolved Mysteries and Reader’s Digest to the Bobbsey Twins and the Hardy Boys, and I developed the ghost of resentment against my parents for depriving me of what I saw as my birthright to eat at Halo Burger and shop at the Genesee Valley Mall.

As I slouched my way through my teen years and into my early twenties, I developed into something of a gypsy, managing to live in several of the small scattered towns north of the forty-fifth parallel without staying more than three or four months in each. Eventually, I settled in Petoskey for a few years, continuing to work as a cook as I had done throughout high school, and always dreaming of escape from what I viewed as a restricted small-town existence. After all, small towns limit opportunities, and the tradition of going off to the city to make a name for one’s self is time-honored for a reason. I still harbored thoughts of Flint in the back of my head, often getting on realtor.com to look at housing costs, searching Flint’s craigslist for cooking jobs, and reading a wonderful blog for former Flint residents, FlintExpats.com. However, while most of the blog’s followers read it for its trips down memory lane and to keep abreast with new developments in their old hometown, I used it rather more as one would use a Spanish dictionary while vacationing in Mexico. Finally, I began to piece together a bigger and more accurate view of Flint than the one garnered from family stories and childhood visits, seeing the city without the rose-colored glasses of childhood fantasy. Flint was dangerous. Flint was dirty. However, it still had colleges and museums, still had history oozing through every pockmark left by an abandoned house, seeping through the wizened and blackened stumps of the burnouts. It invaded my life — most of my friends in Petoskey were either originally from Flint or had ties through their parents to the benighted city. Flint still called to me.

In 2011, I moved 1,800 miles south of Flint to Austin, Texas, searching for year-round employment as a chef. I found a job easily and climbed the ladder rather quickly, ascending from lower-rung prep cook to sous chef, or second-in-charge of the kitchen, in less than two months. Things were going rather well throughout 2012, and I had just been offered the chance to run my own restaurant, an offer I was getting ready to formally accept when my mother suffered a massive heart attack. Six weeks later, I had sold everything I owned that did not fit into two messenger bags and a carry-on suitcase and was on the Amtrak from Austin to Chicago. Two days after leaving Austin, I installed myself at the Super 8 Motel on Miller Road and began looking for a job and a place to live in Flint. I have been living in Genesee County ever since.

My gypsy ways had left me familiar with the adjustment period following every move. Transitioning to a new city means new slang, new eateries, new traditions and routines and habits. My prior familiarity with Flint did not make the transition easier, though. Rather, I felt as though my dad was always walking a couple steps behind me. At the public library, I could almost see the shape of my father, age fifteen, slouched over a notebook and scribbling away. As time passed, I began to see certain traits inherent in my father’s personality explained by the daily reality of living in a factory town like Flint. I began to notice the way that hometowns shape people’s personalities. I am a small-town girl in my heart. I believe in helping the neighbors out and in always trying to believe that people operate with the best of intentions. My sister and I refer to this as “keeping our unicorns,” a sort of stretched metaphor meant to represent the naiveté necessary to believe that the crushed syringe on the ground at the bus stop was dropped by a frazzled diabetic, or that the elderly couple missing for a week simply ran off to Vegas to renew their vows. I like my unicorn; I have grown quite fond of it and have managed to hold onto it for over thirty-two years. Many of my friends “back home” still have theirs too: when your neighbors were once your parents’ neighbors, when your mailman is the fourth cousin of your first grade teacher, and when the cashier greets you by name not because you are a regular, but because you were friends with his older sister in middle school, it is fairly effortless to maintain some level of faith in humankind.

My unicorn, however, has always kept close company with a healthy dose of cynicism. This might sound contradictory, however, my native intelligence led to some rather ferocious bullying when I was a child, which then led to the anxiety issues I still suffer from. After moving to Flint, I began to notice a profound absence of unicorns. People were cynical. People were harsh. So many people felt trapped by the city and dreamed of escape. Meanwhile, Flint kept suffering. The people who fled were the people with education, with fighting spirit and a desire for change, the people still capable of dreaming of better things. It seemed to me that this was one of the roots of Flint’s troubles — all of the people who could help turn the city around and make it better had left or were preparing to do so.

Did I have a right to feel this way? I, too, had fled my hometown, even going so far as to relocate across the country. My travels had shown me, clearly, that where one grows up shapes the person one becomes. In much the way a parent shapes their child’s character, for better or worse, the place where childhood shades into adulthood also dictates several basic parts of personality, such as cynicism, political leanings, slang and its delivery, and often, even choice of career. Had I not grown up in Emmet County, it is impossible to say what I would be like today. My rural upbringing left me with a healthy concern for the environment that focuses more on conservation rather than repair, a love of tree climbing and kayaking and swimming, and a love of animals, especially strays. Since my overall “up North” vibe was one of the things that initially attracted my fiancé to me (he is also an up north boy), I cannot say with any certainty that my marriage in July 2015 would be taking place.

I was starting to feel somewhat guilty for leaving Petoskey and Cross Village until it struck me: those towns were not dying. Cross Village was not the town of my youth. Real estate developers had discovered it in the mid-1990’s and proceeded to blanket it with soulless mansions that saw their inhabitants for three weeks per year. Cross Village, as far as I was concerned, had reincarnated. Petoskey is and has almost always been a resort town, dependent on tourists for the bulk of its economy. It holds a location nearly in the center of the three surrounding ski resorts and has a wildly popular casino and a small but quaint downtown. The residents are well-accustomed to the sudden influx of people in the summer months, and for the first month of “ski season,” and many working-class families augment their household income in the off-season by hunting, fishing, raking leaves and shoveling snow, and other odd jobs. Petoskey would survive without me and others of my kind, dreamers with a passion for a good fight and the smarts to recognize that the road ahead would not be easy.

My curiosity satisfied on that account, I turned to Flint. I had chosen to move here from Austin, rather than back to Petoskey, where my parents now live. On the surface, I rationalized my decision by claiming that it was far easier for me to find a job and affordable housing in Flint, rather than go back to the layoffs and crazy in-season insanity of the tourist towns up north. After all, it was better to be only four hours south rather than a seven hour flight plus a two hour drive away. Now, however, I removed myself from that equation and realized that, in fact, my primary motivation underneath my adult-sounding claims of economic stability was a five-year-old girl in pigtails looking up from her Encyclopedia Britannica and saying “We can finally move to Flint?”

Did I owe Flint a debt, being one generation removed from the right to call it my hometown? Had it truly exerted enough influence over me from two hundred miles away that I could claim any part of it? People who left Flint for greener pastures were referred to as Flint expatriates; what would the term be for someone like me, a gypsy returning to settle in the land of her father? Had Flint born any responsibility for shaping me as a person?

As I stated earlier, I carry a healthy dose of cynicism nestled next to my unicorn. Some blame for that can be laid for the ferocious bullying I endured for four years, which led to a sort of nervous breakdown and a school transfer the next fall. However, a large portion of it I picked up attempting to emulate my father, and his was learned naturally on the streets of south Flint. I felt that my father’s toughness — and to me as a child, my father was the toughest man in the universe — would make me stronger than my tormentors, and indeed, I was disciplined a few times for losing my temper and fighting.

I believe that attempting to model myself after my father lent far more “Flint” to my personality than what I would have naturally inherited, based on examination of the differences between my siblings and myself, and taking our differing basic personalities into account. There are some common threads that mark us as having a somewhat-different upbringing than many of our schoolmates, such as our dark and slightly warped sense of humor, and our political leanings, which are far too liberal for ultra-conservative Emmet County.

All of this intense self-examination had tired me out. I stood and brushed the seat of my Goodwill jeans off and decided to make a run to Angelo’s for a couple coney dogs. It hit me, then: maybe the bits of Flint in me were enough to count. I grew up craving coneys and Halo Burger as equally as I did Mackinaw Island fudge and fry bread. Flint and Petoskey and Cross Village had struck an even balance in me, my hometowns and the home of my father and my father’s family. Both had come together to shape me into the woman I am now. I am fairly fond of myself as a person, for the most part, a geek bearing battle scars from intensive physical labor, the girl who will fight a person for hurting an animal while crying for the animal the entire time. This dichotomy showed me, finally, that yes, I did owe Flint in the same way I owed the towns of my youth. It had already been established that Cross Village was beyond recognition and that Petoskey had never needed me. That left Flint.

I needed my homemade mythos of Flint as a child. It represented all the large dreams of a city that my child’s brain could create. It gave me a focus point while I struggled through the long days of school, watching over my back for my tormentors, getting in fights on the playground, that there was a place out there where I would be able to get through one day unnoticed, with no one calling me a freak. As I grew older and started to make my way in the world as a chef, my vision of Flint shifted to that of a place that would not scorn my working-class upbringing, where the economy was troubled but there were still opportunities available, where everyone got a chance if they were just willing to work for it. 

Sitting on my sofa, tonight, in the living room of my little house in Atherton Park, I see that my vision remains largely unchanged, merely more concrete.
Flint helped shape me as a person on a number of different levels. Most importantly, it gave me a touchpoint. This crumbling town was a beacon of hope for me as a teenager, and it is difficult to let go of the illusions cherished at that age. As an adult, Flint represented myself to me, in a way. Battered and torn down by the establishment, it struggles and has been struggling for years to come back from the ashes of the burnouts and the devastation left in GM’s wake, finally attempting to recreate itself as a college town. I spent years struggling to overcome crippling low self-esteem and horrible attacks of free-floating anxiety after being ostracized and hurt, finally recreating myself as a loud, brash, cocky chef. It has only been over the last eighteen months that I have been able to let my original geeky book-obsessed self out of hiding. Flint has a reputation for being hard, dirty, crime-ridden and poverty-stricken, yet underneath that reputation lies good people, amazing cultural sites, and a wealth of experiences and history one would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. People who grow up in Flint are resilient. They are survivors, able to roll with whatever life throws at them, for the most part. They share a sense of community and nostalgia that keeps them coming back for visits, keeps them busy on their computers googling “Safetyville” and “Hamady sack” and “coney dog Flint-style” when they get homesick. In towns with a large population of Flint expatriates, they tend to find each other almost as though drawn to one another. They share almost a unique love-hate relationship with the city of their birth. None of these characteristics would be present in these people to this degree had they not grown up here. Flint has shaped them — and to a lesser extent, me — in ways no other city could manage.

We — each of us who walk and breathe and eat — owe our parents a spiritual debt for spawning us, raising us, teaching us who we should — or should not — be. In much the same way, where we come from shapes who we are. I am a second-generation Flintoid, a northern Michigan girl raised by an expatriate with the Flint worldview, a Flint repatriate. I came home because of my mother, because I owe it to her to be close while she recovers. I choose to live in Flint for the same reason, because I owe it to aid it in its resurrection. As I was able to rebuild myself into a stronger, better person, albeit one with visible scars from my past, so too can my adopted home rise again, rebuild, secure in its new status as a college town and wiser for its years of struggle. It just needs our help.

Pilgrimage to The Torch

When Flint Expatriates return for a visit, they often end up at The Torch. Here's Jeremy Gatica, who was born at St. Joe's and worked at the Capitol Theater, and his girlfriend, Megan Crane, who isn't technically from Flint, but might as well be since her dad and grandfather are both Flintoids. They call Petosky home now, where Jeremy owns his own business — Graphics Unloaded.