Detroit
1808hrs
Detroit is a disaster; both our stay here, and the city itself. We've still not managed to contact Colin's friend, and have pretty much given up hope of doing so.
Nearly everything here is closed down, and looks like it has been for years. Everything else is decrepit, overgrown, doesn't work (in the case of most of the phones), or is completely insane (in the case of most of the people).
We've met more weirdoes in Detroit than anywhere else in America, which is quite a feat. I couldn't possibly mention them all here, but I'll tell you about a few.
A woman yesterday gave us a leaflet about the Bible's views on the end of the world (Christian, I ask you!), and a couple of other people tried to give us something about 'Watching the Elderly', or, to put it another way, 'Spying on Old People'.
A couple of other people have been mad in less interesting ways, like walking past and mumbling at you, and then there was a bloke today who accosted us in the street and started asking who we were and where we were from, which was pretty odd for a start. Then he said to Colin: "You're quite good looking, did you know that?" Colin didn't reply (it wasn't really a question, he tells me. Maybe I phrased it wrong). Then he said: "I bet you're a good kisser as well, aren't you?"
"I don't kiss blokes," said Colin, which wasn't very friendly, but there you are.
"You don't kiss black people?" said the man (he was black).
"No, I don't kiss blokes."
He seemed to take the hint at this point, and said goodbye.
He didn't say anything to me. As an isolated incident, I wouldn't have read anything into this, but there's no ignoring the fact that it is the latest in a long line of similar incidents.
Just last year, on holiday in Amsterdam with my friend Jon, we were wandering late at night around the red light district, not completely lost, but not, on the other hand, entirely sure where we were, when a number of men gave him looks as if to suggest, he reckons, that they hoped to solicit his services as a prostitute. How many similar looks did I receive? Not a one.
And just a few years earlier, I had a P.E. teacher who was later alleged to have had a habit at the time of sexually assaulting male students. I never heard the result of the trial, so I suppose he may have been innocent all along, but he never so much as looked at me.
A pattern, then, begins to emerge, and we have to ask ourselves why it is that I do so little to turn on perverts and madmen. Is there something wrong with me? Am I that hideous? Is it so much to ask that one weirdo molests me, assaults me, or tries to get me to kiss him? Very offensive, I call it.
But moving on. What else did we do today? We spent a lot of it on the people mover - we did a whole lap just for the sake of it. We also spent at least an hour trying to buy a phone card - one bloke was sold out, another misheard and directed us to the rack of phone cords, and most just didn't sell them. But we got one in the end.
As it became increasingly obvious that we weren't going to see Colin's friend, and our time in the most depressing place on earth (not Detroit's official slogan, but it ought to be) had been for no good reason at all, I came up with a plan to leave early. The idea had been (and still is since my brainwave didn't come to anything) to get a train tomorrow morning to Chicago, where we'll have a couple of hours before we catch another train to Flagstaff, where we arrive late on Saturday evening. Looking at the train timetable, I saw that there was a train to Chicago this evening, which would get there at nine o'clock. I thought, then, that we could get that, stay in the Chicago youth hostel overnight, and have ages to look around tomorrow.
So we rang Amtrak and cancelled our tickets to Chicago tomorrow, and got ones for tonight instead. That done, we rang the Chicago youth hostel, which was full. So we rang Amtrak again, and changed back to the train we'd been going to catch originally.
A couple of good things have come out of our stay in Detroit. I finally got my washing done today, which was well overdue - this is at least the third time I've worn this tee-shirt, and the fourth these jeans. Actually I only bought the one pair of jeans (shorts take up so much less room in your rucksack), so if we have more cold days I'll be forced to wear these again, still unwashed. But after tomorrow we'll be way out west, where, for reasons which my limited understanding of geography goes no way toward explaining, it's lovely and sunny and never rains. Well, a lot less than in the east, and it's hardly rained yet. Once for about two minutes in New York, and once when we were on a train. There was also a constant shower of very fine water in the air in Niagara Falls, but that wasn't actual rain from clouds, just droplets in the air being blown about. I should think it's always like that there, which must get a bit annoying.
If I can clean out the sludge in the bottom, I'll also have a bath tonight, so that's another of the few useful things in this place. The bathroom door doesn't lock, of course, being too stiff to quite shut, but you can't have everything.
I'd like to end by mentioning that I saw a dead cat in a skip earlier, which sums up Detroit perfectly. It should be their logo.
Same day
Detroit
2120hrs
Lots of interesting things happen when you're bored. I've recently taken to saying 'Well, yeh' a lot, and a while ago Colin bet me I couldn't last until LA without saying it. Five minutes later I owed him a dollar.
There's a door in the wall behind one of the beds here, and I wondered what was behind it. Knock knock knock, I went, and to my surprise I got a knock knock knock back. Knock knock, I went. Knock knock, came my reply. Knock, I went. Knock, replied the mystery knocker. A bit later the bloke from next door who'd done the knocking came round and introduced himself, smoking something suspicious-looking. He's called DJ, and from Marilyn.
There are a couple of bunk beds in the room, which I've passed a fair while clambering around. Yesterday, having put myself in an impossible position, and failing to recover from it, I fell to the floor and hurt my knee, which I have twice since hurt again walking into things. It's very sore.
I suppose Detroit hasn't been that bad, now that we're about to leave and I am in a position to edit and dramatise the memory. It gave us a chance to recuperate from a week of late nights, early mornings, and little sleep in between, and gave us a couple of days of calm in the middle of three weeks of running around doing things all the time.
Colin bought a book by Einstein about the theory of relativity a few days ago, which we've been reading together and failing to understand, or, rather, to see why it's not a load of gibberish. He just asked me whether I think that we just don't get it, or we've spotted a flaw in the reasoning - or, to rephrase the question, are we idiots or was Einstein? I can't be sure, but I think I know the answer.
I'm not going to have a bath. It's full of gunk.
