Robert started paying me three hundred bucks a week to run a newsletter, which was mostly online and ran advertisements for neighborhood businesses: a dating service, a goods exchange, that kind of thing. Every Friday I printed out a heap of copies and stacked them at Joe’s and a few other places around town. There was a Your Stories section, in which I interviewed people and asked them why they moved to Detroit, and what they hoped their new life would be like, and so on. Robert wanted me to write a history of the whole business eventually, and this gave me an excuse to keep records and start nosing around. Each week I sat down with somebody new and it’s wonderful what people will tell you if you ask them.
There was a couple from Grand Rapids who planned to start a school, Bert and Ingrid Wendelman. Their relationship had an interesting backstory—it was Bert’s second marriage, and she was about fifteen years younger than him, one of these blond red-faced Dutch midwesterners, not particularly sexy, but healthy-looking, friendly and kind of ageless. I sometimes find it hard to tell how smart these northern European types are, since I usually measure intelligence by degrees of sarcasm, and Ingrid played everything straight. But I think she was a tough cookie, capable and not to be crossed.
Bert taught English and drama at a Catholic school in Forest Hills. Ingrid was the third grade homeroom teacher of his son, Jeremy, by his first marriage. This was how they got to know each other, and when Bert and his first wife decided on a divorce, they sat down with Jeremy very reasonably and asked him who he wanted to live with. He picked Bert and Ingrid—he really liked his homeroom teacher.
Of course, that’s not the whole story, and Bert also said that Jeremy’s mother was a resident oncologist who worked unpredictable hours, so he often gave the boy his supper and put him to bed. The divorce settlement made it difficult for him to keep the house and give his ex-wife a fair shake, so they sold it. Both Ingrid and he needed a new start—their affair had soured a lot of their daily relationships. People took sides and most people sided against them. One of the things they both realized, Bert said, meaning him and Ingrid, is how little it cost them to give up the friendships, both at work and among their neighbors, that they had built up over the years. He was determined this time around to arrange his life differently.
I liked Bert a lot. He was a good-looking guy, a little over six feet tall, with a mustache and a faintly thinning head of brown hair. Back at the school in Forest Hills he ran the kayaking club, and still tried to “get out on the water” at least once a weekend. He seemed in good shape. He was also about to turn forty-five, and you could just see a little stiffness in him when he walked, not stiffness exactly, but a kind of brittleness or carefulness, if he had to run a few steps, for example, or stand up from a low sofa.
The school he planned to set up with Ingrid was going to be a homestead-type school in a single house, with only a couple of classrooms. One for kids up to the age of eleven, which Ingrid was in charge of, and the other to see them all the way through high school. I asked him if he needed a history teacher.
“Have you done any teaching?” he said.
“I spent about five years lecturing on colonial America at the University of Aberystwyth.”
“Some of these kids will be twelve years old,” he said. “I tell you what. Why don’t you get a little experience, even if it’s only substitute experience, at some local school. If you can teach at a Detroit public high school you can teach anywhere.”
So I called Gloria. I wanted to call her anyway, but I used Bert’s idea about substitute teaching as an excuse, which I half regretted, because the way she sounded on the phone received a slight adjustment when my interest turned out to be practical. She remembered who I was.
“You ask a lot of questions,” she said. “And you get drunk like skinny people, kind of high energy. I thought you must have forgot my number.”
“I wrote it down.”
“Well,” she said, “you took your sweet time calling it.”
I told her I was thinking of becoming a teacher and eventually she invited me to lunch at her school—after the holidays. It was still mid-July, which gave me no excuse to see her for a couple of months. But we kept talking. For some reason neither one of us wanted to hang up, though I can’t say I enjoyed the conversation much. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. When I met her the first time I was too drunk to care, but over the telephone I noticed a couple of times that I changed what I was saying because she’s black. For example, she asked me what my neighbors were like, if everybody was excited by what we were doing, if we all got along. I told her about going out one night with a few of them in the car to patrol the streets. Somebody took a gun, I said.
“You took a gun?”
“Mostly we just drove around talking. About two a.m. we went to one guy’s house and made some coffee and carried it back into the car. It was an intense way to get to know each other.”
“I bet,” she said.
It was a relief to get off the phone. Apart from anything else I wanted to look forward to seeing her again without anything getting in the way, like having to think of things to say. Gloria is a well-organized person and put a date in the diary for me to come by the school, a few weeks into September, but by that point Astrid and I were already sleeping together.
SUSIE WAS ONE OF THE reasons I went out more. By August she had started spending a lot of time at the house, and since Walter and I used to have dinner together every night, I tried to give them some space. This left a big hole in my life. Also, I was sexually lonely, and seeing Walter and Susie brought that home. For example, there were parts of my personality, like tenderness, that I didn’t get to use at all, and which I saw Walter and Susie using every day.
I ran into Astrid at Slows—a barbecue restaurant by the old train station, where I sometimes went to eat by myself at the bar. She was there with a couple of girlfriends, German girls from home who were visiting her, and they were going on to a party at one of those half-abandoned warehouses in east Detroit and invited me along. Artists had turned the building, which had all kinds of problems with it, including faulty electrics and asbestos plastering, into studios. The party was partly a chance to show off their work, but they’d also rigged up an elaborate sound system and themed different studio spaces according to types of drink and music. But the walls weren’t thick enough to separate the sounds, and the clash of noise fronts was really pretty powerful and unpleasant and hard to escape.
Astrid and I eventually took our drinks out into the parking lot. It was a hot August night, and I could hear the call of a Tigers doubleheader coming from one of the cars. There were several people, younger than me, sitting inside it, drinking and smoking pot. I could smell the sweet smoke drifting over towards us, towards the crumbly cinder block wall at the edge of the lot where Astrid and I sat down. She told me the story she hadn’t wanted to talk about before, which explained why Ernst had left her. I later saw another version of this story, which she had written down. It also appeared in a different form in a film she was working on, and after that night, after we started seeing each other, I heard her talk about it several times.
A few weeks after I dropped them off, she was raped coming out of a nightclub on Woodward Avenue. She had gone to this club with Ernst to hear a new DJ, who mixed a lot of Motown in with other things, techno and more contemporary music. At one point she went outside by herself for a smoke. This was a couple of weeks before the Michigan ban, and the dance floor was full of smokers, but she wanted a breath of fresh air along with the cigarette. My guess is she had also had a fight with Ernst, though she didn’t mention it. It was very late and the street was deserted; the bouncer had gone inside. While she was standing there, a young man came out of the glare of a street lamp and asked her for a smoke. He was dressed in clean new jeans and unlaced work boots; he had recently had a haircut. He was black. She took out her packet and reached it towards him and he grabbed her hand and started pulling her along.
“I was drunk, too,” she said. “Not sick-drunk but enough to be confused. Also, it was still very cold, there was still snow on the ground, not much, and I was wearing only a small dress. At first when I went outside I thought how nice and cool it was, after the hot club, but when he gave me a shock, I felt suddenly very cold and shaky.”
Woodward runs through a small park and he dragged her towards it. Even though it was two or three in the morning there were still a few people coming out of the restaurants and clubs. But nobody helped her and for some reason she wasn’t screaming. She thought he might have a gun. She tried to explain to him that she didn’t have any money, her boyfriend had her wallet and he was back at the club. “He’ll give you whatever you want,” she said. When they got to the park, he pushed her down behind a tree next to some bushes; the ground was very hard and also a little wet. When he lay down on top of her (he felt very strong and heavy), he said, “Fuck, it’s too cold for this shit,” and pulled her back up.
There’s not much around there except tall commercial buildings, with shop fronts on the ground floor and offices above, but a few blocks from the park he found a row of parked cars and broke into one of them. They had to cross several large streets, almost as wide as highways, to get there, and even though it was very early, there was still some traffic. By this point she had started screaming. He held her around the waist with his arm and had also grabbed her other hand as if she were drunk and needed support. He had large hands with long fingers and smelled strongly of cigarettes and aftershave or alcohol. But everybody was in cars and no one heard her; at least, no one stopped.
Inside the car, he spent about a minute getting it to start. When she tried to open the passenger-side door, he struck her very hard on the mouth, breaking a tooth so that her mouth filled with blood, which she spat onto the floor. This is one of the ways they eventually identified the stolen car. Then they drove for about ten minutes, she has no idea in what direction, until they came to a dark street with several vacant lots on it, a few run-down houses and a medium-size apartment block. They went into the apartment block and he pulled her up a flight of stairs—she had stopped using her legs, and the next day, apart from everything else, she found her shins and knees covered in dark bruises.
He said, “Let’s just hope my sister ain’t here,” as he beat on one of the apartment doors and then kicked it in. She doesn’t remember much about the apartment. All the lights were off and he took her through a couple of dark rooms and then pushed her onto a bed, where he raped her, pinning her arms against the mattress with his elbows. She didn’t resist him. When she woke up or came to she heard a woman saying, “What you have to break down the door for.”
“You wasn’t here.”
“How’d you get here.”
“Some car.”
“What you doing now?”
“I’m a drive it away.”
“Don’t leave your ho with me.”
“She ain’t no ho.”
“I ain’t cleaning up after your white hos.”
“She ain’t no ho.”
“What you doing now?”
“I told you. Taking the car.”
And then he left. Eventually the woman came into the room Astrid was lying in.
“Well,” she said. “What do you expect me to do with you?”
“I want to go home.”
“You should a thought of that before.”
“Please,” Astrid said. “I don’t have anything.” She had left her purse in the stolen car.
His sister hadn’t switched on any lights, but the curtains were open, and light came into the room from a street lamp outside. She had a mannish face, with very short hair; she looked yellower than her brother, who was very dark. Older, too. “Fuck this,” she said. “Where you live?”
“I’m staying with friends in Royal Oak.”
“No way I’m driving you out there.”
Astrid said, “I’m very scared. You’re a woman, too. I don’t know what to do.”
“Don’t mess around with no niggers,” the woman said. But she drove Astrid to the Greyhound bus station downtown. “Come on, get out,” she said, with the motor running. “I don’t expect you wanna see any of us again.”
At least the station had a waiting room, with lights on, and a few people sitting around. But for the first few minutes Astrid sat on the bench outside, in spite of the cold. She wasn’t yet ready to say anything to anybody. The station is about a block from the Lodge Freeway, which runs under Howard Street. By this point it was almost five in the morning, and the early commuter traffic made a continuous roar, which echoed off the bridge and surrounded her with noise. Dawn was about an hour away.
There was a bathroom inside, though it was very dirty. Astrid went inside to clean herself up before calling 911. The dispatcher sent an ambulance and a squad car—they took her first to the hospital and then to her friends in Royal Oak.
At the hospital a policewoman photographed the bruising on her legs and around her thighs. A doctor took several samples, including blood samples, and put her on a complicated course of medication. In the afternoon, she had another visit from the police. She wanted to see the photographs, but they weren’t ready yet. Already the bruises on her legs had begun to change color, and after the policewoman left, she asked Ernst if he would take new photographs of her injuries. He didn’t want to so she took the pictures herself. At first, she was just very anxious, because it seemed to her that her bruises were the only evidence she had, apart from the photographs, that something terrible had been done to her; and she knew that the bruises would go away. But later, as she did in fact begin to heal, and her skin turned yellow and then paler again, she started taking pictures as a way of recording the process, which seemed to her almost beautiful and even moving.
She soon realized, she said, that these photographs were the only actually “artistic” photographs she had ever taken, the only ones with any artistic value. It shouldn’t have surprised me that Astrid was still the pretentious woman who had annoyed me in the car, but even as I sat on the wall outside the party, listening and saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I felt annoyed. I also thought, you tough bitch. But I did feel sorry for her and wanted to kiss her, too, though we didn’t kiss till later, after a few more drinks, when we went back into the party.
Later she asked me to look over the version of the story she had written down. She especially wanted my opinion about the dialogue, if she had gotten right the way black people talk, if it was offensive. I told her I didn’t know any better than she did. Also, I wasn’t there. “But you know what it’s like,” she said. “You remember only what you hear, and you hear only what you expect to hear, which is what prejudice is.”
I shook my head at her. “I don’t know.”
Ernst left her, she said, for no other reason than that everything about them had become too unhappy. I’m not unhappy, she told him. Something terrible has happened to me but I’m dealing with it. (I liked it when she used American slang.) He said to her, Come with me, let’s go home, I’ve had enough of this country, but she felt that America was just becoming interesting. She was becoming interested in herself—she was discovering new things. Also, they argued about sex. Already a few weeks after the rape she wanted to prove to herself, and Ernst, that she could be normal and okay about sex, but in fact, she admits now, she was a little crazy in this respect, and Ernst understood very well that she didn’t want to be touched. But this is how she interpreted it, that he didn’t want to touch her, and she accused him of stupid things, she said he didn’t want to put himself where a black man had been, that she was stained and dirty and ruined, a ruined woman, that this was how he saw her. All of which upset Ernst very much, he was in tears, and somewhat pathetically tried to stroke her. But it wasn’t just pathetic, he couldn’t help himself, it was all too deliberate and unnatural, a little forced, and again she felt this childish feeling, that he was stronger than her, and when she pulled away in reaction, she had never seen him so angry before.
Why do you make that face, she asked me.
“I’m beginning to feel a little sorry for Ernst.”
“I feel sorry for him, too. When you saw me that night”—she meant at Bill Russo’s place in the country—“I was still a little crazy with everything that had happened. But you were smart. You ran away from me.”
“I didn’t run away. There were people I needed to talk to.”
“No, I know when a boy runs away from me.”
“Did they find the man who—raped you?”
“They found the car, and there were his fingerprints in the car, and they know who he is, but they haven’t found him.”
“But they found his sister?”
“Yes. I saw her again.”
“What did you say to her?”
“I can show you one day. I filmed it.”
For some reason, she hadn’t brought her video camera to the party. But often, when I saw her afterwards, she had it along: a small black Kodak, which she wore around her neck like sunglasses. It took some getting used to. I found myself talking and acting unnaturally and hated watching the results. My voice sounded funny to me, which is what everybody says, more southern than it sounds in my head, and kind of complaining or sarcastic or gay. In the beginning, I often stared into the camera, which Astrid told me not to do, but I couldn’t help myself.
Not that night but later I agreed to let myself be filmed having sex with her, which I came to regret. It started bouncing around the Internet at a bad moment, before the trial, when there was already a lot of media interest in my name. I learned firsthand the way private acts become distorted if they are shown in public. Because in fact it was a very tender scene. This was the first time Astrid had had sex since being raped, which is why she wanted to record it. We were extremely gentle with each other, and it wasn’t so much about pleasure as about getting through it, though of course there was pleasure, too, especially on my side. She cried much of the time but also held on to me and in her own way seemed pretty insistent. But it didn’t look good, and the sound quality was poor, which made it difficult to hear what she was saying. We filmed it at my bedroom in Johanna Street, and the way people took it was, this is the kind of thing they got up to there. But it didn’t really have any bearing on the case.