“It’s a good thing I have something to back up on,” Robert Paille said to me, “because I had operated machinery before. Construction equipment and that. And after this happened there, I went to the union, and I told them my previous experience, in that if I didn’t have the experience I wouldn’t never have got on, and I got a job, you know, as an equipment operator. I been working on cranes. I have been working at River Rouge here, where this other crane operator just went in. Most of the time I’ve been oiling, but I have operated machinery and that. It’s the only thing I hadn’t handled before was cranes, so the best way to get in as an operator is to oil; you see, you learn all the functions of the machinery and all, because it’s too much responsibility, you know, you can kill somebody very easy with something like that. Getting much better pay than as a policeman, but I do like police work better. When I was working this other job here, this one at River Rouge there, I wasn’t taking home anything less than $172 a week; I was getting only about $112 a week take-home as a police officer. I’m right between jobs now. I just got laid off this last Thursday, I was working over at the GM Tech Center.
“I was on one of the jobs over there, and this one fellow didn’t recognize me, a white man, and right away he comes out of nowhere, and he says to me, he says, ‘Remember that Algiers Motel last summer?’ I says, ‘Yeah, what about it?’ He says, ‘You know those policemen involved in that?’ I says, ‘Yeah.’ He says, ‘You know what they should do with them?’ ‘What?’ He says, ‘Hang them.’ I says, ‘Why?’ He says, ‘You and I both know what happened over there. These white policemen broke into the building over there, saw these white girls with these colored guys there and killed them.’ I says, I says, ‘You’re all wet in that.’ I says, ‘How do you—’ He says, ‘What do you mean?’ I says, ‘First of all, the police is conditioned to that type of environment there. He’s in contact with these whores all the time. You know, in fact, these colored guys are in bad company, as far as I’m concerned. And why should he put his life, his job, everything he has on the line just for one little single incident? There’s no sense in it.’ And I says, ‘Were you there?’ He says, ‘No.’ So I says, ‘Well, don’t make any hasty decisions about that.’ ”
“I am working now as a plant guard, security guard,” Ronald August told me in midwinter. “I’m on midnights, which there’s no sidearm or—all you do is make your fire patrols, it’s strictly, instead of being a peace officer or police officer with the idea of law enforcement, you’re strictly just like a fire patrol.
“I sleep practically most of the day—she says. I don’t feel like it; seems like I get in there four hours, but my wife says it’s all day. But we have a babysitter come in till two, and that way I can catch some sleep. She likes her nursing, she says she’ll never quit. I believe I’d like to see her keep it up, but not so much, not so many days in a week. She’s working now about four days a week. I’d like her to go back to three days. I guess she makes about eighty dollars, seventy-five dollars a week, depending on how many hours she puts in. When she was working full-time, she was making more than I was, when she worked down at Children’s.
“I’m doing better. Before, I took home $122, after deductions, and now I’m taking home about $140 after deductions, weekly. Average, so to speak. If I work a Sunday, I make time and a half, where down there, you don’t. Down there, you’ll spend as much as three to five dollars a week on cleaning your clothes and buying shoe polish or something, but where I’m at now, you got your shoe kit and you shine your shoes; your clothes are dirty, you take them off and throw them in the basket and you get a lockerful of clean ones at their expense. So I mean this counts up a lot.”
“When it got cold,” David Senak told me, “I had a job with a friend’s father for a while, scraping, bumping and scraping of machines. Worst work I ever did in my life.
“Well, for about a good three months there I think there were maybe four places I went to—here, two friends’ houses, and driving around. Didn’t go to a show, didn’t go anywhere but those four places. Didn’t see too many people because I was embarrassed that I got the Police Department into trouble. My close friends, like the police officer that was my partner for a year and a half, and him and his wife, you know, know me, and I know that they have confidence in me, but the general public and the Police Department, to them I let the Police Department down because I got them in trouble. I had a bad feeling about seeing people. I didn’t want people to say, ‘Aw, we know that you’re all right,’ you know, ‘we know that you did good, and they won’t do anything to you because you’re innocent.’ A lot of people just say it to say something, to be able to say something, and I don’t particularly like it. You’d rather have them not say anything than to just compromise me, so I stayed away from people for a while.
“Then I got another job with a buddy in the Air National Guard helping him with delivering refrigerators, and fell off the outside of a house, about thirty or forty feet. Broke my ankle.
“This was before Christmas. I was helping him move refrigerators. This time we were installing air conditioners in Lansing, and their basements in Lansing are the type that are three quarters above the level, they’re on a sloping hill; I fell from the second floor to the sublevel.
“What happened was that I was boosting this air conditioner up the stairs; the stairs were wooden, they were outside—and came to the last step on the second floor and lifted it up, and there was no guard rail in back of me, and the weight of the air conditioner pushed me back, and for a second there I was standing in midair for a long enough time for me to look down, see the concrete below me, and know that if I hit it I’d be in trouble. So as I was falling down I was facing the building, and I turned my body around so that I hit the grass, or all of me hit the grass but my ankle. My ankle caught the end of the concrete steps. The air conditioner stayed up, luckily; had it gone down there might have been a little more trouble.
“As I was falling, as I looked down, the first thing I thought of was the Road Runner cartoons. Did you ever see those? We go to a bar and they have Road Runner cartoons on Saturday, so we watch them, and you know how the Road Runner always out-maneuvers the fox, and the fox goes over the cliff, and for a couple of seconds he stands up there and runs in midair? That’s the first thing I thought of, and I looked down and saw the concrete, so I spun around.
“They took me to the hospital in Lansing, fixed my leg up. I was there for a couple of days. They put it in a cast. I got out of the cast January 11.
“After that a friend of mine introduced me to the superintendent of the riggers’ union, and I put my application in there. Took the physical and tests, passed those, and went into their apprentice program, and now I’m just waiting; it’s a slack time of year, so I’m waiting for a job to open. All I can do is just sit around the union hall waiting.
“At the beginning I wasn’t too logical about the thing, I figured there was no way of them firing me for what I did, but now you see all this bad publicity and stuff, and the Police Department can fire you for just about anything. So I’m looking toward the future. I was planning to get my education in police administration, even before the riots, but now it would be sort of ridiculous for me to go into police administration at this moment, because if I’m fired from the Police Department, obviously I can’t go into that field.
“So what I’m doing is going into education. Liberal-arts education major. And plan on, if they fire me from the Department, go into teaching. I figure it will take me four years, four and a half years to get my bachelor’s degree starting now, and it will take me two years to get my journeyman’s card, so at the end of two years I’m going to go into gunsmithing, and this is a two-year course, nights. Hopefully I’ll have my bachelor’s degree and my journeyman’s card as a rigger and a gunsmithing guild—this is more or less a hobby that I can do at night—so I’ll teach nine months out of the year, and summer is the most productive time for a rigger, so I can go into rigging during the summer months, and have a well-rounded life there. I can still have the satisfaction of teaching and not be cramped by teacher’s pay, because I’ll have—riggers make $5.50 and $6 an hour.”