North to River Rouge

NOSTALGIA North to River Rouge G.C. Compton IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES. LBJ was battling poverty in Appalachia, and Detroit, Michigan, was in the middle of one of the biggest strikes in automotive history. The economy had gotten so bad in the Motor City that the wino population onJeffersonAvenue had tripled. January, 1965, was not a good time for anybody to be in northern Michigan, let alone an eighteen-year-old boy from Pike County, Kentucky. A winter storm was blowing in from Canada when I got off the Greyhound bus in River Rouge, carrying everything I owned in a Piggly Wiggly bag. Between two clean shirts and my other pair of pants was my rite of passage into a new world—and manhood: a brand new high school diploma and an unabridged copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Boarding with relatives who talked funny and hardly knew me, it was the middle of February before I landed my first job, loading magnesium on a Great Lakes freighter with a band of knife-wielding pirates from Jamaica. But I was grateful, for the job paid a dollar and a quarter an hour! That same day I moved into a two-room apartment over Mom's Bar on Henry Street, a street that never slept—or allowed anyone else to sleep—a street that throbbed with the continuous uproar of Mom's Bar and its neon sign flashing in my bedroom window, a street where the city wrecking bar had already cut a wide swath. I shared these quarters, reluctantly, with a family of rats who, like Mom's Bar, could be relied on for round-the-clock company. They were not your ordinary cheese eaters, but great, lumbering, thieving beasts, with tusks like boars giving them perpetual Edgar G. Robinson grins. They traveled in herds, fifteen and twenty abreast, and nothing seemed to set off a stampede like the sound of one's snoring. It was not long before I began to miss things: a can of pork and beans, a tablespoon, a can opener. I found half a plug of tobacco that had been tried and discarded, perhaps because of the inferior brand. I tolerated the society of these outlaws until I awoke one morning to discover that my copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover had been purloined. I later found the book, with some of the juiciest passages gnawed away and savored, and so lost no time in rounding up six of the 44 meanest, non-pedigreed Detroit alley cats I could lay hands on. In less than a week, I was down to one cat, and damn lucky to have him. I showed up for work one snowy morning only to discover that my ship and her rowdy crew had set sail for a foreign port during the night, leaving me without ajob and minus a week's pay. Back at the apartment, I stood by the window clutching my Piggly Wiggly bag, solemnly watching the snow pile up on Jefferson Avenue while the wrecking bar swung inexorably just three houses down the street. I was torn between petitioning my relatives for a night's lodging and stowing away in a Greyhound bus when a loud pounding on the door changed my plans. "Open up in the name of the Lord!" "Fred Daugherty!" I would have known that voice anywhere! It was Fred all right, my dear cousin Fred G. Daugherty from LaGrange, and a buddy he had picked up on the road by the name of St. Louis. There were the usual back-slaps, fake punches and go-to-hell introductions. I had not laid eyes on Fred since his first incarceration, which had something to do with a train wreck at Broad Bottom when he was fourteen. We had missed out on many a good time together, having taken divergent career paths. For three years we had been separated by the conflicting schedules of grade school and reform school. I had been promoted to ninth grade at about the same time he was advanced to Trustee status at the Pike County Jail. While I was laboring over English and science in high school...

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