Teardown. Gordon Young
an ass-kicking. (The Copa still had its share of shoot-outs and brawls, but none appeared to be caused by musical or sexual preference.)
Kain was an outspoken critic of the harebrained schemes to revitalize Flint with auto-themed amusement parks and high-end shopping projects, but the fact that he had a thriving business didn’t give him much pull at city hall. When Kain died in 1991, he was dismissed with a tiny, four-paragraph obit in the Flint Journal. The paper managed to spell his name wrong.
By writing about bars, I found my people. The number of hits jumped, and readers began sharing their thoughts on Flint. Only a few dozen had to be edited for excessive profanity. Some were heartfelt odes to venerable local institutions like Halo Burger, home of the deluxe with olives and the Vernor’s cream ale. Others celebrated local characters like Gypsy Jack, an East Sider who turned his house into a Wild West museum, complete with a jail and saloon in the basement. He sometimes dressed like a cowboy, strolling the cluttered grounds of his small corner house in chaps, boots, and cowboy hat. Sometimes, when he’d had a few, he’d dispense with clothing altogether and ride naked through the darkened streets on his motorcycle.
But amid the drinking stories and reminiscences, I posted constant reminders of present-day Flint’s condition. In Flint, autoworkers are often referred to as shop rats—sometimes affectionately, sometimes not—so it’s fitting that a chain restaurant symbolized by a big, bucktoothed animatronic rat named Chuck E. Cheese served as one of the most high-profile examples of Flint’s decline.
On a cold Saturday night in January 2008, a grandmother named Margie was attending a birthday party for her five-year-old granddaughter at the pizza joint/video arcade where “a kid can be a kid” and adults can struggle to maintain their sanity amid the sensory overload. It’s located just outside the city limits in Flint Township on a road filled with big box stores, strip malls, and fast-food joints leading to the mall that helped kill downtown Flint in the seventies. Margie noticed more than a dozen teenage girls roaming the restaurant, probably bored with playing skeeball and crab grab and looking for trouble. A friend of Margie’s took offense when one of the girls bumped into her. Words were exchanged, followed by punches. Margie’s friend was quickly outnumbered. “There had to be twelve to fifteen girls on one girl,” she told the local press.
The family fun was just getting started. As many as eighty people were brawling when officers from seven different police departments converged on the restaurant. “The biggest thing we did was just try to control the crowd,” one cop said. “Once pepper has been sprayed, it’s floating in the air so we called in for medical help in clearing it. If people aren’t used to pepper spray, they get pretty scared and angry.” Those just might be the two most common emotions in Flint these days, but it’s not exactly what a grandmother has in mind when she plans a birthday party. “It was almost like a nightmare,” Margie said. “Kids were screaming. It was almost like we were in a stampede.” Police finally cleared the restaurant and shut it down for the night.
The next day, a local news crew arrived to film a segment about the brawl when another fight broke out in the parking lot. This one was minor by comparison—just ten people, all from the same family.
After initially downplaying the incident as a simple argument among friends, the Chuck E. Cheese corporate office responded by banning alcohol sales at the restaurant, along with profanity and gang colors. Less than a year later, the new policies appeared to be working, at least by local standards. The Flint Journal ran a feel-good story proclaiming that the restaurant was clearly a “more peaceful place” because cops had responded to only a dozen calls since the brawl, mainly for purse snatching and parking lot vandalism. “Nothing major,” the Flint Township police chief said. “No fights.”
I suppose the brawl was hardly the worst thing that ever happened in Flint. Nobody died, after all. Friends with kids have jokingly told me that visits to Chuck E. Cheese often propel them toward violence. But for me, it was a reminder that there were really no safe zones left in the Flint area. Weird shit could happen just about anywhere.
These depressing posts often prompted heartfelt laments from readers. “I moved from Flint five years ago to Seattle, Washington,” read one comment, echoing the theme of many others. “I did that because I saw my beloved hometown dying. At Christmas time I visited family and friends. I took what you might call the ‘Grand Tour’ of Flint. What I saw just made me want to cry. I can’t believe that Flint has gotten that bad. My family told me it was bad, but, wow, I didn’t think it could degenerate to the point it has. I truly am sickened by what has happened to Flint. Needless to say I felt like I was escaping when I got on my flight at Bishop Airport. I hope it turns around soon. I hope that city someday returns to its former glory.”
Many comments were deeply personal, and they often came from unexpected sources. Howard Bragman is a public relations guru in Los Angeles who has advised everyone from Stevie Wonder to Paula Abdul, as well as making appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Larry King Live, and Good Morning America. He emailed me an excerpt for the blog from a book he had written describing his less than ideal years growing up in Flint. “I know what it’s like to be an outsider—I grew up a fat, Jewish, gay guy in Flint,” he wrote. “In Hollywood, those are the first three rungs up the ladder of success, but in a town like Flint, it’s three strikes and you’re out. It’s a little like that Twilight Zone episode with a whole planet full of deformed people and they make fun of the normal guy.”
My mom, pushing eighty and living in Florida, became a frequent contributor. Born in Flint in 1930, she grew up on Illinois Avenue, just around the corner from the house that would later become Gypsy Jack’s cowboy corral. She had the same love-hate relationship with the city that I detected in many other readers. She clearly related to the working-class mentality of the place and didn’t deny that she was a hell-raiser growing up, causing her parents no end of grief as she took full advantage of the bar culture Flint had to offer. She had no shortage of affectionate stories about her early life in the Vehicle City. Yet she didn’t hesitate to leave when she got the chance, heading to Wayne State University in Detroit before dropping out and moving to New York City to become a department store model in the fifties. She hung out with the jazz crowd at Birdland and Minton’s Playhouse. She drove with Charlie Parker to a gig in Philadelphia once. She fell in love with a saxophonist from Detroit. Then it was on to Miami, where she became a stewardess—she’s still opposed to the term “flight attendant”—for National Airlines, flying regularly to Havana and New Orleans. It was the scattered trajectory of a beautiful young woman searching for something in life that she couldn’t quite identify. After a short-lived marriage to a navy pilot—make that two short-lived marriages to two navy pilots—she returned to Flint, a divorced single mother with four kids. She threw herself into more mundane work in the admitting office at McLaren Hospital, supporting her family, paying for Catholic schools and expensive private colleges. Despite returning under tough circumstances, she never turned on Flint, even while acknowledging her ever-present desire to escape.
“I grew up on the East Side and recall the unexplained pride I felt when the 3:30 Buick factory whistle blew and the roughly dressed workers poured out of the General Motors labyrinth swinging their lunch pails. Some were headed for home and some for the corner bar, but all with the determined step of an army after a battle won. I somehow felt as if I were a part of this giant assembly line and the city it fed,” she wrote in one post. “Nostalgia, I’m sure, is the opiate of old age. Memories over ten years old automatically become the ‘good ol’ days.’ We remember only the happy things and leave the shaded areas behind. And yet, faintly sifting through the sands of time, I seem to recall saying, ‘The day I’m eighteen, I’m leaving this town.’”
As a newspaper and magazine writer wary of online journalism, I had to admit that the blog had succeeded in ways I never could have imagined. Before long, it racked up two hundred thousand unique visitors and six hundred thousand page views. Tiny numbers compared to big blogs, but who would have imagined that many people cared about Flint? More importantly, I felt more in tune with the city than I had in years, despite going back only a handful of times over the past three decades. I reconnected with old friends and made new ones. Flint was a part of my life again. When the Flint Journal called to write a