And I really do try not to read the Weekly Standard. But every so often, Labash gives a reminder as to why, politics aside, he's a great magazine writer. Case in point is his massive cover story on Detroit from a couple weeks back. The overture is a crisp summary of how the clouds gathered over Detroit, after which Labash makes a valient effort to find some silver linings, mostly through the prism of his bromantic journocrush, Charlie LeDuff. Whereas the opening is a sort Grand Guignol about the death of a city, a death so spectacular and bizarre in the details that ou can't help but find it amusing at times, the vignettes that follow -- about the tragic death of a firefighter, visiting the Motown musuem with Martha Reeves, and a homeless man named Wayne Williams who actually came to Detroit to find work (!) -- turn that story into something heartfelt and personal. There is no larger picture, no Whither Detroit? But maybe that wasnt the point. Or maybe that's what Labash hoped to find, and realized it was impossible to say. Although perhaps something concrete could have been said about the auto industry, which made a tantalizing appearance as a structural pole around which to turn the piece. For whatever's lacking there, it's compensated for by the extra props Labash gets for giving a homeless man a lift and spending the afternoon with him:
His name is Wayne Williams, and he has a gentle spirit. We get to talking, and I quickly lose interest in the goats. He says he moved to Detroit two years ago. He was a gravedigger back in Alabama, and he came here to get a better job.
"You came to Detroit to get a better job?" I ask.
"Yeah," he says, smiling. "I know better now."
He says he's tried to get a job in over 100 places, everywhere from construction to fast food to gravedigging again, but hasn't managed. The box he is carrying is full of clothes that he got out of a dumpster. He walks the empty streets waiting for passersby, seeing if they want to buy any. His own clothes are all from charity, which might explain why he wears snowboots that look like they belong to a 10-year-old boy.
I ask him where he lives, and he shows me. He lives beneath a Rosa Parks Boulevard underpass, in the shadow of Tiger Stadium, which has been mostly torn down, though the preservationists are trying to save the last of it. The Tigers now play at Comerica Park, though the company the park's named for has fled to Dallas.
He shows me his lean-to boxes and blankets, and a Bible sitting on a bridge girder as though it were his bookshelf. I ask how he could sleep, it's so incredibly noisy. He's used to it, he says, and he wants the traffic. That's why he's there. He figures there's less chance of getting killed if he sleeps where motorists can see him. A few months ago, he was robbed and thrown off an overpass. He shows me his still-swollen thumb and the scars on his head and back. "I feel safe under the bridge," Wayne says.
We go back to my truck. He asks me for nothing. But I tell him I'll give him a lift to wherever he's going since he's been a good guide, and also slide him twenty bucks. He offers me a breast-cancer awareness pin. He found a bunch of them in a dumpster and is going to try to sell them, but thinks I should have one for free.
We talk local politics a little. With time on his hands, he reads all the newspapers he finds. He's disappointed in Kwame: "Great leaders take care of their people." He says he would make a good one because "I love the human race." He prays for them, as well as for Detroit, he says, which he worries about. I ask him if he gets lonely out here. He says yes, he does, but a red-tailed fox sometimes comes to visit him, though it's too scared to approach, so he'll roll food down the overpass embankment to it. Plus, he talks to God a lot. He calls him "my partner."
"All I want to do is live to be an old man," Wayne says. "That's what I ask my partner for."
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