Flint Books: Phil's Siren Song by Tim Lane

 

Who doesn't love a great Flint novel? Tim Lane's latest book, Phil's Siren Song, is available now. Here's an excerpt:

I drive Stuart home in his father’s beat up Chevy Caprice, taking the desolate route between the Flint River and Buick City plants while Karen follows us in her puny Chevette. The play in the steering wheel of this vehicle is wicked; the brake pedal almost goes completely to the floor.

         “Where are we goin’?” There are duffel bags of oily tools on the floor of the back seat where he has wedged himself. “Take me to Karen’s.”

         “I’m afraid we’re taking you home.”

         “No!” He is shouting under the front passenger seat.

         “Probably for the best.”

         “Let’s get some beer.”

         “It’s past two.”

         “So?”

         “Stores don’t sell past two.”

         “Since when?”

         “Like, since always.”

         “Well, fuck me,” he says, softening. “I knew that.”

         He passes out until the Caprice thunders over the train tracks at Leith and Dort, the car’s rough action jolting him back to life. The white orbs of Karen’s headlights violently bob behind us.

         “Phil, if the blacks live on the North and South End. And the Mexicans live on the East Side. And the whites live wherever the hell they want, East Side, West Side, doesn’t matter—”

         I pop a cassette into the tape deck and turn it up while he struggles to un-wedge himself and repeat his assertions about the blacks, the Mexicans and the whites.

         “Then where do the Ojibwe live? Answer me that. Where do the Indians live?”

         His street is lined with young silver maples and telephone poles mounted with streetlights.

         Karen pulls up to the house and observes my lame attempts to assist m’lord from the safety of her car.

         Signaling desperately with my hands, I plead the obvious. “For God’s sake, help me!”

         When the rusted Caprice’s back door slips from its hinge, the grating of rusted door parts makes me wince.

         “C’mon, man, ya gotta help me here.”

         “I can’t open my eyes.”

         “Oh, fer Christ’s sake.”

         “Come on, goon boy, get your ass out of the car. It’s time to go night night.”

         “Karen, you shut up.”

         His charming little sister meets the three of us at the side door.

         “Hi, I believe this is your brother.” I am trying to seem as nonthreatening as possible in the yellow light leaking into the night from the bulb above the side door. “We’ll just throw him on his bed, if that’s okay.”

         “Uh, I’m not related to that butt wipe.” She is not intimidated. “Why don’t you just throw him in the back yard?”

         Before escorting Stuart home, the deserted view of downtown from the Genesee Merchants Building had been memorable, but had left me a little sad. I had taken the fire escape to the roof out of habit more than anything else, a yearning for the times we had partied up there, when downtown had still felt dangerous.

         The scene below had looked the same as it used to—the empty parking lots and side streets, the vacant store fronts, a few cars crawling north and south on Saginaw—but something had changed, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

         “Karen,” Stuart sputters, tripping on the stairs. “Don’t sleep with him. Show some fuckin’ restraint.”

         Stuart’s sister’s bare feet lightly slap the floor. She is wearing an over-sized John Stamos t-shirt.

         In the poor light, John Stamos’ face looks insane, more like Jack Nicholson’s looming in the splintered bathroom door of The Shining.

         “There!” She is not concerned with waking anybody, and by anybody I mean the entire East Side.

         “Oh, boy, here we go,” Karen mutters.

         A bedroom door swings open and Stu’s husky father teeters into the hallway half asleep, in his underwear, until our stomachs touch. His belly reacts like a waterbed.

         “Ahem, why hello, Mr. Page.” Confidence is everything.

         He pauses to scratch an armpit and adjust his privates as a sleepy, disembodied female voice calls out behind him. “Glenn, what is it? What’s going on?”

         Stuart’s sister explodes. “Dad, go back to bed! Get in there! Mom, never mind!”

         Now, I am smiling to beat all hell. I am actually very well acquainted with Stuart’s dear mother.

         Margot and I are coworkers.

         When I am not going to my creative writing class, selling drugs at El Oasis or helping my housemate, Joe, run punk shows, I’m usually at Windmill Place, managing Ruggero’s, a pizza counter where the two of us eke out lame paychecks. But now is not exactly the time for exchanging pleasantries. I chuckle at the thought of calling out to her, though, as she lies in bed in a negligee sheer from years of washing and tumbling dry.

         Stuart’s family is as working class as it gets, and no one can say that Margot doesn’t work her ass off. I can hear her saying, “I ain’t got the energy to even think about sexy lingerie.”

         It’s a shame.

         Her tired, heavy voice takes shape in the darkness. “Glenn, who’s there? What’s going on?”

         Glenn wakes up: “Goddammit! What the hell’s this?” It is every man for himself, now.

         “Stu’s drunk!”

         “What?”

         “Drunk, Dad. Drunk. He can’t even open his goddamn eyes.”

         “Hey!” he barks. It is clear she is not allowed to swear.

         “Go back to bed, Dad!”

         Glenn retreats. Dresser drawers being ransacked can be heard, the mechanisms of plastic wheels on the metal runners of accordion-style closest doors in need of lubrication, and now I am thinking, “Oh, fuck. Guns.”

         Stuart’s sister loses it. “Throw ‘im on the goddamn bed, Jesus Christ, what’re ya waiting for?”

         It’s a fair question.

         But I can’t help asking, “So, are we about to get shot here?”

Tough Times: The Death of a Student Newspaper in Flint, Michigan by Gordon Young

The former offices of The Michigan Times. (Photo by Santiago Ochoa/The Michigan Times)

The Michigan Times, the student newspaper at UM-Flint, is officially "sunsetting." That's the sort of euphemism a good editor would slash and replace with something more clearcut. It's a nice way of saying the publication that has been covering the downtown campus since 1959 is all but dead.
 
The Times hasn't published a print edition this year. Its website and online archive have disappeared. All of its social media feeds are dormant. Confusingly, another publication calling itself The Michigan Times that covers "all types of local news for the cities of Flint and Detroit" has purchased the paper's domain name and is publishing online, but it's not connected to UM-Flint. It's as if the paper's very identity has been stolen.
 
College papers are not immune to the brutal economic conditions that have killed publications across the country as advertisers and readers disappeared. The United States has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers and 43,000 journalists since 2005, according to a recent report from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. But while there have certainly been budget cuts over the years at the Times, lack of funding isn't the biggest problem. It's lack of interest.
 
"Ever since I took over, I've been bailing water out of a sinking ship that never left the dock," said Eric Hinds, the current and, it appears, last editor-in-chief. "There just didn't seem to be any way to find people to work at the paper."
 
Just a decade ago, more than a dozen staffers and freelancers put out the paper, according to then-editor Alex Benda. But it dwindled to a few students before the Covid shutdown during the 2020-2021 academic year and continued to shrink when in-person classes resumed. Hinds, who lives in Flint's Mott Park neighborhood, is headed to law school in Rhode Island in the fall. His only reporter is transferring next year. Despite intense recruiting efforts, no viable candidates have emerged to replace them, let alone expand the staff.
 
"You have to have a passion for journalism," Hinds said. "In the current climate, you get a lot of hate. It's a difficult job. And if you don't really want to do it, you're going to be bad at it. I guess no one wants to deal with that."
 
The not-so-slow demise of the paper corresponds with the elimination of most journalism courses at UM-Flint. In 2009, the university added an ambitious journalism program, with a major, a minor, and several new classes. "The program was proposed in response to student requests," according to a university press release. "For years, students in the media studies track of the communication degree program have asked for more journalism courses."
 
Tony Dearing, then editor of The Flint Journal, was enthusiastic at the time. "It is important that we cultivate and train the next generation of journalists, and I strongly believe that a journalism program at UM-Flint would help meet that need," he stated in the press release.
 
The timing could not have been worse. UM-Flint was embracing journalism education just as newspaper revenues were falling off a cliff. It wasn't long before nearly the entire curriculum was eliminated, a victim of budget cuts and lack of interest. It's hard to attract students to a dying industry. And without journalism students, it's tough to keep a student paper up and running, especially at a commuter school in an economically depressed city where many students work to pay for school and need a good job after graduation.
 
The paper is still considered a "sponsored student organization," meaning it's eligible for funding from student activity fees, but it will soon lose that status. If students want to relaunch the publication in the future, it will have to be a volunteer-only organization responsible for its own fundraising.
 
"From the university's perspective, providing a robust student life experience is essential to help augment classroom teaching with practical skills," Julie Snyder, associate vice chancellor and dean of students, stated in an email. "The newspaper being sunsetted means that there is one less avenue for students to be actively engaged in our community, an outlet for their budding talents and a practical co-curricular learning opportunity. However, as the students are not currently interested in taking advantage of that avenue, they have used their collective voice."
 
First-year student Grace Walker — the only other staff member besides Hinds — is transferring to Central Michigan University next year. The 19-year-old Flint resident plans to major in journalism and hopes to join CMU's student paper, a scrappy, vibrant outlet that’s been around for more than a century.
 
In the meantime, she's working on a final project for a class that chronicles the demise of local news coverage in the Flint area, a topic she knows all too well. She's not sure where it will be published, if at all. "I've always been interested in journalism and politics," she said, "so it's been really hard and disheartening to get involved with something when it's shutting down, when it’s going away."

A revised version of this story also appear in East Village Magazine.

Shoring Up Our Bankruptcy

 

"I'm just telling you. She says today's problems can't be solved by today's people, we just keep shoring up our bankruptcy with the only tools we know. Making up more and more complicated stories about how we haven't failed."

— Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered

Inescapable Landscapes

 

1515 Illinois Avenue, Flint, Michigan.

"We can’t help ourselves. We are shaped by the landscapes we are born to as inescapably as any other earthly creature born to any other ecosystem."

— Margaret Renkl in the New York Times

Flint Expat Classics: Ode to the Ghetto Palm (Ailanthus Altissima)

Originally published on Friday, June 19, 2009

I mentioned the ghetto palm in my story on house hunting in Flint, and it seems some readers are not familiar with the charms of this invasive species, also known as the Tree-of-Heaven. I'll let the Plant Conservation Alliance, which describes the tree on its "Alien Plant Working Group Least Wanted" list, sing its praises:

"Tree-of-heaven is a prolific seed producer, grows rapidly, and can overrun native vegetation. Once established, it can quickly take over a site and form an impenetrable thicket. Ailanthus trees also produces toxins that prevent the establishment of other plant species. The root system is aggressive enough to cause damage to sewers and foundations."

It also has a nice stank about it and is very difficult to eradicate.

"You have to cut them down and keep cutting them down for three years to get rid of them," exclaimed Tim Monahan, the president of the Carriage Town Historic Neighborhood Association, over coffee yesterday. Needless to say, he's not a big fan.

But I can't be too hard on the much-maligned trees. After all, I've got a ghetto palm forest in my temporary backyard. I'm trying to blend in and not provoke these aggressive predators, especially after learning "each leaflet has one to several glandular teeth near the base."

Goodstock 2023 in Flint

 

Slow Sipper by Mort Maizlish

I was active in the NAACP Youth Council in Flint 1959-61. Flint neighborhoods were still viciously segregated, with the main stem, Saginaw St, through the north side of town as the impregnable line between black and white housing. Most restaurants by then were grudgingly taking anybody’s money, but the Help Wanted signs mysteriously disappeared whenever a person of the “None Have Ever Applied” category asked about a job.

We did a drive-in at a drive-in on N. Saginaw Street that catered to both sides of the street but restricted the hiring of carhops to the melanin deficient. We drove in, two to a car and one car at a time, as spaces opened, until we filled the place. We each ordered a small Coke, placed it on the dashboard, and waited.

After an hour or so, the owner noticed a lack of turnover and the profound silence of the cash register, and came out to look around. He screamed, hollered and threatened, especially when he located the adult leader, Edgar B Holt, but couldn’t do anything until we finished our orders. Mr Holt calmly explained that he had a delicate stomach and had to sip his Coke very slowly, and suggested that they might chat about the hiring policy as an aid to his digestion.

We left after 2 or 3 hours, and made our point. I did feel personally cheated, though. My car was the only one with two lightly complected people in it, and I was one of the first to drive in. The guy harangued everyone in the lot except me and my cohort. He glanced at us once but never could make the connection. Here we were, eager to be part of his problem, and he just ignored us!

Don't Miss Porch Fest in Flint's Carriage Town Neighborhood

 

Charles W. Nash House For Sale

The Charles W. Nash house in Flint.

Ron Fonger of Mlive reports: 

The former Flint home of Charles Nash, co-founder of Buick Motor Co. and former president of General Motors, is for sale, but the historic structure won’t necessarily be sold to the highest bidder.

The Genesee County Land Bank is hosting a showing of the home at 307 Mason St. from 2-6 p.m. on Wednesday, June 28, and attendance is the first requirement for making a proposal to buy, invest in, and preserve the Victorian-style, three-bedroom home that was built in 1890 in the city’s Carriage Town Neighborhood.

Michael Freeman, executive director of the Land Bank, said the Nash house ended up in his agency’s hands after the county foreclosed on it for failure to pay property taxes. The Land Bank is highlighting the home’s availability and accepting proposals from prospective buyers until 4 p.m. July 24.

Readers of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City may remember that this was the house where I stayed when I returned to Flint in the summer of 2009. It was then owned by my friend Rich Bennett, who was instrumental in convincing me to rediscover my hometown. Rich is no longer with us, but his memory and all the things he did for Flint live on. 

Let's hope the new owner of the Nash House treats it well.

My sleeping arrangements at the Nash House in 2009

Laundry day at the Nash House in 2009.

That's My Moon over Court Street: Dispatches from a life in Flint by Jan Worth-Nelson.

The essence of Flint is too often defined by outsiders. Journalists, politicians, and policymakers love to swoop in, make dire pronouncements and tenuous promises, then skip town faster than General Motors. My friend Jan Worth-Nelson is just the opposite. She moved to Vehicle City for a job, put down roots, and made it her home. That doesn't happen too often these days. Her highly nuanced relationship with a place that's hard to love is captured in these pages. She details Flint's struggles with compelling, clear-eyed prose but still manages to pinpoint what makes it unique, admirable and, yes, appealing despite all the heartache attached to this troubled spot on the Michigan map.

Here is the introduction to her new collection of essays, That's My Moon over Court Street, which is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Flint and everything it represents.

When I arrived in Flint at the start of the '80s, I was already 30, never married, a broke social worker and former journalist, desperate for evidence my life wasn't wasting away. 

I never, ever, thought I would still be here 42 years later. But here I still am.

I lived in a walkup on Avon Street, which crosses Court Street, the main east-west
artery through the heart of the city. It was a down-at- the-heel old neighborhood, tucked
between an ugly freeway and artifacts of Flint’s glory days: sprawling brick high school,
library, art museum, planetarium. On the other side of Court, a big green park and a
fancier neighborhood which seemed unreachable.

From my upstairs dormers many nights I used to see a mysterious bearded man on a
bike slink out in the moonlight and disappear.

I eventually found out that figure was Gary Custer, founder and publisher of the little magazine that appeared on my own doorstep every month. East Village Magazine is a
scrappy little black-and-white publication that has been landing on the doorsteps of
homes, shops, and restaurants in Flint, Michigan, since 1976. Some of us rudely called
it the “East Village Idiot.” But as I learned over the years, Custer was anything but.
A Vietnam-era Navy veteran, Gary had graduated in photojournalism from the
University of Missouri. He often cited ideas about the Global Village -- he was crazy
about Marshall McLuhan. For him, that meant a passion for neighborhood preservations
efforts, and, while he sometimes seemed reclusive, he had a commitment to train
volunteers and students in community journalism.

He never married and never had any kids. His untamed long white beard made some
people wonder if he was homeless -- but he wasn’t. His apartment in a big Victorian
house was a short bike ride to the office -- a storefront owned by his brother that bore
no sign, no hours, and was frequently locked.

Sometimes, nursing a pipe, he worked at the office all night, hammering away in the
midst of a firetrap tunnel of piled-up folders, books, old copies, on a succession of hand-
me-down computers, piecing together the eight-page product that was, I think it is pretty
safe to say, his whole life.

East Village Magazine focuses on the kind of journalism that matters to every citizen
who cares about what is happening in their town. Over the years that included news
from City Hall, city council meetings, the school board, zoning issues, blight elimination,
crime, healthcare, local politics, and neighborhood associations. And, because it is in
Flint Michigan, the abandonment of Flint by General Motors, the State-appointed
“emergency manager,” and, of course, the Flint water crisis.

But Gary always included a story that described everyday life in Flint. He showed us
that no matter what was going on at City Hall, people continued to live their lives. He
called it “Village Life” as a nod to McLuhan.

Eventually he found some of my writing here and there and, after another back page
columnist left, he asked me to join in. I said no for several years.

When Gary finally snared me to write the column, I was already well into middle age,
and the inexplicable survival of the little magazine had become almost legendary. By
then I lived in my own house, miraculously in that leafy historic neighborhood on the
south side of Court I had envied decades before. I am still there.

These are not the essays of a young person, though I was often playful. I didn’t feel my
age; I was furiously emerging from a long- failed marriage and launching a new one,
and I was half-pissed all the time at not getting enough respect in my university job.
Writing the column was freeing and cathartic.

Gary was a cantankerous editor, and he and I used to fight about words. He was a
subject-verb-object man. I liked words like lachrymose and duende -- not to be a
showoff, I insisted, but for the pleasures of it. I was teaching my poetry students to write
sestinas and pantoums, for chrissake. He stood for simple sentences and he worried
about the reader. I wanted to take the reader along with me. The job was to write “local,”
and he liked best when I observed my daily life - the kind of sensory detail, beloved or
troubled specifics, that kept us both going through our ups and downs.

In the end, he let me write pretty much whatever I wanted. That was the gift of it. At first
he told me to write 800 words so it would fit on the back page. But when I had more to
say he didn’t fight me much -- he said, “Write until you’re done and then stop.” When I
came in, usually on Sunday afternoons, to proof my column, he poured me Bushmills in
a chipped mug, and we would talk about everything -- repeating gossip and legends of
the city, sometimes with the door wide open to the scent of it -- acrid and redolent with
ghosts. A wild rosebush twisted around the fence outside. I have repeated all this so
many times: I cherished those Sunday afternoons.

I never got paid for it, except for the Bushmills. Once in a while he’d send me an email:
“good work.”

Gary Custer died suddenly in 2015, just weeks after he’d learned he got a five-figure
grant from the C.S. Mott Foundation -- enough to keep the magazine going for least
another year. I’d just retired from teaching writing, and so I was free.

For the next five years, I was the editor. I didn’t really want to do it, but I got roped in,
and hacked away grumpily at the financial and technical thickets. My husband, an LA
transplant, faithfully pitched in. We got renewal grants each year. I wrote far fewer few
Village Life columns from then on, getting other people to join in. We expanded the
magazine to 12, then 16, and now often 20 pages.

In 2020, after a series of personal crises, burned out by the Trump era and smothered in

the worst of the pandemic, I stepped back. Though I’ve contributed several columns
since, as I have stated, I was tired of words. I handed the editorial reins to Tom Travis,
who has been ably guiding East Village Magazine ever since.

For years, my second husband and I also commuted back and forth from an apartment
at the LA Harbor, but always, always, I came back to my home in the old house off
Court Street, where my life, familiar and beloved, proceeds. What I wrote about it, even
when I was perched on the lip of the Pacific, always seemed to turn to Flint. My roots
have gone down deep.

I have a lot of friends here, people as enmeshed in complex life journeys as me, and I
love that so many of them have tolerated appearing in my columns.  If you are looking
for evidence of advocacy or political analyses, this collection is not for you. Throughout,
my inclination was not to "promote" Flint or offer arguments or solutions to its repeated struggles.  What I had to offer, instead, were my eyes and ears and my heart, put together in collages of what I hope are decent sentences and respectful stories -- a palette of dramas, small and large, collected one by one, from my own life in this place. 

In 2018, I got myself my first (and only) tattoo. It’s a semicolon – to me, a powerful
reminder that there is so often so much more to a story – certainly true in my life, and
absolutely true in Flint, Michigan. At about the same time, I inherited a Buddha from the
back yard of my beloved friend, the late poet Grayce Scholt. The Buddha is missing its
right hand. I don’t know the story of how that damage occurred, but I do know that the
broken Buddha, who now sits quietly in my own back yard, still retains a big broad
smile. It has become a cherished symbol, for me, of incongruous joy and of the
community that has become my home.

My adult life in Flint has had some dark times, and I haven’t been spared from hard and
stupid things. These essays describe the improbable happiness I have found so often
here. How could that happen in a town like this, even through some of its toughest
times? These columns, one by one, represent a kind of answer, the vindication of
claiming my life in this complicated city: to look at it, to love it, sometimes to despair
about it, and to write it into the cornucopia of our collective human lives.

— Jan Worth-Nelson