Lieutenant Leo Cowling was suave, good-looking in a street-thug-hip-hop way. He was well-rehearsed and calculating when it came to knowing who in the local media was most beneficial to the DPD. And to his career. Other than that, he was a waste of a badge. “To Serve Myself and Protect What I Got.”
Cowling reported to a man who was his exact opposite. Captain Ray Danbury promoted Cowling shortly after the air surrounding my lawsuit against the department had cleared—as much as such air can clear. Danbury was smart and politically astute. He knew Cowling didn’t deserve the promotion; Cowling was at least a pinky knuckle deep in the dirty police inner circle under the former mayor. Petty cash bribes, soft extortion and corralling high-end hookers for a few politicos and business elite for private parties at Manoogian Mansion, the mayor’s residence. For my investigation into the mayor’s office, I was demoted, then unceremoniously fired. Things got nastier and that’s when I filed a wrongful dismissal suit. Didn’t want to, but like my father used to say, “The only ground a man ever really owns is the two-square-feet he’s standin’ on—and God help him if he gets pushed off that.”
My lawsuit got the attention of the DA and the State Attorney General—both of whom were implicated at least on the periphery as beneficiaries of Cowling’s “ho-wrangling” skills. After I won my lawsuit and collected twelve million dollars, Danbury figured the department and the mayor’s office had suffered enough. Adding Cowling to the lengthy list of cops and administration officials given the boot or serving time would only have prolonged the city’s suffering and threatened a complete and catastrophic collapse of the department. Nobody wanted the State cops to take over. Even fewer still wanted the FBI’s regional office to continue doggedly digging through the city’s years-deep garbage.
Better the little demons you can control than the big devils you can’t.
Danbury promoted Cowling in an effort to shorten the choke-chain on him.
The walk down Washington Boulevard reawakened an old passion for a freshly made turkey Reuben on toasted rye. I decided to happily pursue the subject on foot.
Schmear’s Deli had struggled, barely survived and thrived for over fifty years on Woodward Avenue near the One Campus Martius traffic roundabout. Once the old Kern’s department store had been razed and replaced by the modern gleaming glass and steel jewel of One Campus Martius, businesses along the Woodward corridor experienced a revitalization few had ever imagined for Detroit and fewer still thought possible.
Sure, you can still find those who fondly reminisce about Kern’s larger next door competitor, Hudson’s, and their massive display windows, or the way the thirty-two floors were brightly lit at Christmastime. Or the store restaurant’s Maurice salad and garlic mashed potatoes with meatloaf.
Frankly, the young professionals who now command the streets of downtown Detroit mostly either don’t remember Hudson’s (now a cavernous underground parking garage) or don’t give a shit about Maurice salads and garlic mashed potatoes with meatloaf. They just want some buffalo wings or extra spicy Pad Thai while scrutinizing The Wall Street Journal and Advertising Age, or clicking the Facebook “Like” icon on their iPhones.
The rise of One Campus Martius made it all right for white suburbanites to return to the heart of a city long written off as a hovel of black poverty, simmering racial animosity and perpetual urban decay. The iron-gated wig shops, roach-infested malt liquor bodegas and abandoned office buildings that once made the piously pitying national news reports had suddenly been replaced by international accounting firms, mortgage companies, software start-ups, ad agencies, tony “goat cheese and free-range egg” breakfast cafes and the ubiquitous Starbucks.
Schmear’s Deli, a staple through good times and bad, was now surrounded by trendy restaurants and upscale boutiques. In order to compete in the new Detroit business core, Schmear’s changed from the small, cigar-scented restaurant with a prominent display of beef tongues to something more appealing to the Monday-through-Friday invasion of tech-savvy iPad-slinging professionals.
The posters of Che Guevara, Angela Davis, Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and David Ben Gurion that had once yellowed on the nicotine-stained walls of Schmear’s were gone. So were the waiters who had chewed the wet stubs of cheap cigars, retired mostly by virtue of age and throat cancer. The scarred, uneven wooden chairs and tables I used to sit at with my mom and dad had been replaced with gleaming stainless steel, and shimmering seafoam green Pewabic Pottery tiles. In place of the yellowed posters were inoffensive acrylic paintings and smiling photographs of Detroit’s ethnically varied residents. One of the photos was of me when I was five flanked by my mom, dad and the current owner’s barrel-chested, gap-toothed father.
When I arrived, the young professionals were happily finishing their lunches and paying their tabs. Time to get back to whatever people in Michael Kors and Jones New York suits do.
A seat at the counter opened up and no sooner had I saddled up than I heard, “The prodigal son returns!”
Ben Breitler, second-generation owner of Schmear’s, was now in his mid-sixties. With each passing year he looked more like Albert Einstein on a methamphetamine bender.
Ben was wearing a rainbow-colored tie-dye T-shirt with the bold words “Light One Up!”
We embraced and I said, “Hate what you’ve done with the place, Ben.”
“Yeah, well, I hate it, too,” Ben said with a dismissive shrug. “But you gotta give the gentrifying class what they want. Adapt or die. So you’re back now? For good or just slumming?”
“For a while,” I said. “I started renovating my folks’ old house in Mexicantown before I left. I’ll finish that and then decide what I want to do when I grow up.”
“Good!” Ben said with a grin that revealed a couple-grand’s worth of West Bloomfield cosmetic dentistry. “Live by example and be an example to live by. Mexicantown’s a great area! And it’s only gonna get better. You mark my words. And as to deciding what you wanna be when you grow up, don’t look at me for advice, kiddo. I still don’t know what I wanna be when I grow up—but somehow I don’t think it’s gonna be a Jewish deli owner tearing his hair out over the cost of good lox and fucking green tea.”
Ben turned and frantically waved for one of his waitresses—a young, spike-haired redhead with imposing, dark eye shadow, koi fish tattoos swimming up her left arm and a silver nostril ring. Emo wasn’t normally a look I was attracted to. That being said, Lucy “Tank Girl” Tarapousian had always been the exception to this relatively loose rule.
“Look who’s back!” Ben yelled over the departing crowd.
Tank Girl saw me and admonished her new customers to “Talk amongst yourselves.” As she walked toward me, she said, “Oh-la, me amigo! Que pasa bangy-bangy?”
“Your Spanish is still god-awful,” I said. “But the look is workin’.”
Tank Girl gave me a rib-bruising hug and—much to my surprise and delight—a full kiss. Yet another reason why I enjoyed the ambience of Schmear’s. She tasted like good sex or fresh lox. I often confused the two.
Ben, Tank Girl and I talked for a while. Mostly about my year-long adventure in international drinking and a bit about how the city tried to screw me. After a while, Tank Girl wrote down her phone number, address, email, bra size and locations of her latest piercings on a napkin and stuffed it in my inside jacket pocket.
“Text me,” she said. “I’m sick of my boyfriend.”
“You’re back with boys?”
She grinned, shrugged and got back to her famished customers.
“Don’t you have a policy about staff flirting with customers?” I said to Ben.
“Hey, boychik, if I did, I’d never get laid.”
Ben wrangled a menu for me: six laminated, colorful pages bound in imitation burgundy leather. It included a list of their bottled waters—domestic and imported, flat and effervescent—and “healthy” smoothies and teas.
“Jesus, Ben,” I said perusing the menu. “You really have gone over to the dark side.”
“What can I say?” Ben said with a dismissive shrug. “The dark side pays better.”
The mayor, city council and at least a third of the DPD had thought the same thing a year ago . . .