The Aorta

Falling in love with Detroit, the beginning

When I met kids my own age in Detroit— and I met hundreds, selling The Red Tide in front of every public high school in the unified school district— I’d tell them, “I just dropped out of school and moved out here from California.”

Their mouths dropped. “You’ve got it all backwards!” they’d say. “Are you crazy?”

I had their attention. “You have something here,” I said, “you will never find in Los Angeles if you looked for a million years. LA is a celluloid company town; everything is illusion.”

But who made the lasagna? Left to right, that’s Tony, Lisa, Michael, Hoppy; and on the bottom: me, Wendy and Tonya.

Detroit was the opposite of Los Angeles, however bruised the city was in 1975. It was still based on making things that made America run. If Chicago had big shoulders, Detroit had steel quads. You pushed the pedal to the metal. You meant what you said and you said what you meant.

My first morning in Detroit, I walked into the I.S. national offices on Woodward Avenue, across the street…