In recent updates, I’ve talked about Hungry Rats through the lens of the lumber era, teen noir, and fairy tales. That leaves just two important contexts: serial killers and Flint, Michigan.
Today I’ll tackle Flint.
From Hungry Rats:
By the time the lumberjacks arrived, Flint, Michigan was already decades old. It grew from a trading post near some old Indian battlegrounds. The warriors left their ghosts when they died. The fur traders came and left their ghosts, and so did the lumberjacks. Carriage makers and auto barons. Then, a great wave came from Germany, Ireland, England, Hungary, New York, Missouri, Tennessee and Kentucky. They built cars through the second World War, tore down buildings and threw up huge chunks of concrete. Sheet metal and train tracks stretched from one end of town to the other and the factories went out in every direction. Then, half of the people left. They left their ghosts behind too.
You can’t really throw a famous book without hitting the author who wrote it from “exile”: James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov… they all wrote about places “they were but weren’t any more.” Ernest Hemingway was perhaps the most prolific diasporic writer, living seemingly everywhere, moving along, and then later writing about it.
In my case, I haven’t lived in Flint in years, and being one of the more picked-upon communities in this country, it’s awkward writing about the city from a genre that, by definition, digs up the dregs of our social existence. In fact, Hungry Rats surprised me by being the most publication-friendly of all my writings.
That said, I don’t think anyone would question my commitment to Flint. I lived in the pleasant, stable East Village neighborhood for most of my childhood, and later rented out a couple apartments on the rough and messy Eastside. I went to high school in the nearby suburb of Flushing, which might be described as an improved Eisenhower-era enclave, and have since divided most of my adult life between Chicago and New York.
Why write about Flint and what does it have to do with Hungry Rats?
Part of the argument merits objectivity.
Flint boasts a plot arc worthy of Hamlet or King Lear: it tells a powerful, compelling, and (yes) tragic story. The city was once a small town based around a profitable trading post. Through the lumber era and the establishment of the auto industry, Flint rose to become one of the most dynamic and wealthy of America’s industrial cities, and a palpable symbol of American power as Sherman Tanks rolled off the GM lines in Grand Blanc a few miles to the south. The presence of a strident union couched prosperity in pragmatic, real-world terms, and local institutions seemed to deliver on their promises. The height of Flint’s prestige was the height of American prestige, period.
But proseperity was fleeting. In a few decades, Flint suffered from ugliness both social (white flight) and economic (deindustrialization). Today, just 150 years into the story, much of the city is scarred and blighted, and much of it has burned down. Most tellingly, much of the city has been abandoned, and side streets can be very quiet at times. Whenever I bring a visitor there, they are struck by the severity of these images. And yet, once that first impression has settled a little, they are surprised by the richness of life there, the responding sharpness and energy and innovation: in street fairs, underground concerts, back porch art, late night cruises. Really: the city is half-empty and bankrupt, but also packed to the neck with astonishing art, music, theater, and the most poetic roads you’ve ever driven.
Quite simply, Flint, Michigan is one hell of a story, and I’m one of a small number of humans qualified to tell it.
Part of the argument demands subjectivity.
Hungry Rats is my strongest novel to date, and Hungry Rats couldn’t have happened without Flint.
In 2003, I was a starving artist, emphasis on the word “starving,” and I decided to move back to Flint for the summer to get some more writing done. The plan was to work part-time and to live off a bit of money I’d saved up while temping in Chicago. The cost of living is a lot less in Flint, so I got a job as a dishwasher (night-shift on weekends) at the famous Angelo’s Coney Island, and I took out a lease on Maryland Ave. near Iowa. The Eastside is a rapidly changing neighborhood with a few landlords leasing apartments to dozens, or hundreds, of families. Things change year-by-year and block-by-block, and this particular block was just then taking a turn for the worse.
At the same time, I heard about a writing project called National Novel Writing Month, in which one creates a 50,000-word novel draft between November 1st and November 30th. I started planning, and quickly decided that I wanted to write a noirish mystery. I thought it would be fun to write in second person, and I dimly imagined activating some menace from an long, unburied past nosing its way into the present. But what do do and where to begin?
One night — it might have been July, or it might have been August — my girlfriend and I went out for a pleasant drive. We left the city long after dark and grabbed a late meal at a coney island up near the reservoir. We drove back into Flint, the long way around, checking out the old mansions and willow-heavy parks on the southwest side; Woodcroft where the most famous engineers and executives from the world’s largest corporation used to live. Then, I drove back home around Kearsley Park, a beautiful old space modeled on Olmstead and Vaux’s New York spaces. This put me on a notorious thoroughfare with a lot of abandoned shacks and vacant lots, so I wasn’t too surprised when I saw a sack of garbarge lying in the middle of the road. “Oh, that’s nice,” I thought, when I realized that the sack was open, spilling trash into the street. And then I suddenly saw that the trash wasn’t trash, but a human being.
We sped home and called 911 at once.
The newspaper typically reports homicides with clocklike reliability, and nothing was posted in subsequent days, so I assume that the person we saw wasn’t dead; perhaps she had gotten drunk and passed out. I probably won’t ever know for sure. Certainly, I wish and hope that nothing serious happened there.
Later, I recalled another story a friend had told me; probably made up, probably to frighten me. We were camping on Lake Michigan (in those days, you really could camp out on the Warren Dunes parking lot for five dollars), and on one particularly foggy night he told me that he had seen three people in black robes, wading into the lake, lifting their arms to the sky for God knows what reason.
I’ve really been blessed in life; I’m luckier than most people I know, so much so that I often don’t know what to do about it. It is both bizarre and a little unsettling that this novel, soon to be published, is so firmly rooted in my own experiences, which are themselves, isolated and non-representational.
That said, I can own this:
If you read Chapter One here, I lived in Meredith’s house. I’ve seen things that she has seen and I’ve heard things that she has heard, and they all combined in 2003, and in five minutes there I knew the plot of the novel I’ve been developing for the last seven years. Funny, huh?
But no, there is no Hungry Rats without Flint.
There is absolutely no story whatsoever.