An Autobiography of Rust
Edward Weston, “Armco Steel, Ohio, 1922”
What we now call “The Rust Belt” was once called “The Steel Belt”.
The population of Chicago has been declining since 1950. The population of Buffalo has been declining since 1950. The population of Gary, Indiana has been declining since 1960. The population of Flint, Michigan has been declining since 1960. Cities such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit have lost over 40% of their population over the last four decades. In these and many other cities of the rust belt, median income has declined by nearly as much as their populations.
Growing up in the dark, Midwestern-style bars my father inhabited, I saw a generation of men enduring diminishing wages, or who were under- or unemployed, slowly drinking themselves to death. Their culture was one in which they were taught to be desensitized to their pain, both physical and emotional. But they still suffered from it.
The way he drank, I was surprised, actually, by how long it took my father to drink himself to death.
There are over 50,000 empty homes in Chicago, thousands more abandoned buildings, and over 32,000 vacant lots. The vast majority of these lots are privately owned or owned by the municipal government. For comparison, about 17,500 buildings were estimated to be lost in the Great Chicago Fire.
Walking through the Southside of Chicago by the time I was a late teenager was walking among ghosts. Dead factories that took up multiple city blocks. Warehouse districts that had not yet been converted to hipster centers and tourist traps. Abandoned rail lines where people slept. Wrought-iron bridges given over to spiderwebs and rust. And the projects. And the projects.
And the streets still alive on summer days with crowded BBQ joints and Italian beef sandwich shops without any tables or seats to sit down at, designed as they were for working-class people on their lunch breaks or coming home from work; the sounds of hip hop; groups of girls in short-shorts; gifted drummers whose drumsets were sets of plastic five gallon buckets; supermercados selling the cheap cans of beans and bags of rice we lived on; bumping cars announcing the young men driving them; older men playing chess under dead trees.
Because the infrastructure of our country has rarely been updated, and due to its central location, Chicago is still the hub of US rail lines. Chicago also has an elevated train system. So anywhere I lived, I would hear the sounds of trains. My favorite places in the city, though, were the old railway yards. Places you’re not supposed to go. But I have always been an excellent jumper of fences.
At the last place I lived in Chicago, I slept on the kitchen floor. Two of my roommates did crack. We had a friend who was waiting to inherit money from his parents and who worked for the Democratic party in some capacity he could never quite explain that would bike to our place from the Northside with bags of cocaine. There was rarely food in the fridge, but three of my roommates saved for weeks to buy a decent sound system.
Several of our friends were extremely talented musicians who were also heroin addicts. I remember watching a friend shoot up. I remember even more clearly his eyes at it hit him. He looked like he was seeing God. He looked like the carved images of saints I had seen in Catholic churches. He looked like he had surrendered, completely.
I have a few fears: sharks, spiders. And needles. I think it was only my fear of the last that saved me from being a heroin addict. I only ever snorted things, and that was enough.
My last coke binge I was on I didn’t sleep for three days and then informed one of my brothers I never loved him. It’s just the coke, man, he said, his eyes sad. No, I replied. I want you to know, truly, I never loved you. Then I stayed up till dawn playing chess with a man I had just met as we listened to Blonde on Blonde on repeat.
Later that morning after I had determined to end my life, two of my friends came in and sat with me as I alternated between weeping and screaming until I slept for ten hours straight. When I woke up, my friends were gone. But they had gone out and bought me a burrito from my favorite Mexican restaurant, with a note that they loved me.
We lived in what was called the “blue-light district”: the area of the city with the highest crime rate, where the city had suspended massive cameras that were painted in cop-car-colors with flashing blue lights at their base from many of the streetlights and stoplights. So flashing blue lights filled our front windows every night, even through the cheap screens we bought.
Maybe you imagine the paranoia that causes.
The 16-year-old who lived behind us, who used to cut through the tiny plot you might call our yard after he got out of school to the first floor apartment where he lived with his extended family, was shot, one early summer night, six times in the head, at around two in the morning. His body was then dragged down the alleyway where it happened. When it happened, my roommates and I laid on the floor of our apartment for half an hour, until the sirens arrived. Then the flashing blue lights filled our back windows as well as our front windows.
More horrible than the six shots were the sounds of the women in his family, wailing, for hours.
Most of the people who went to his funeral were teenagers. The line to see his coffin—closed, of course—went out the funeral parlor and wrapped around the street.
In the single-room occupancy building I lived in just before that, the largest single-room occupancy building in the city, built by the YMCA in the 1916, and only recently permanently closed, the man who lived three doors down from me was stabbed in the face one afternoon. But. There were many other things that happened there.
The Chicago YMCA “hotel”, 1951.
Different floors of the building were dedicated to people with different “issues”. Two floors for “former” sex workers who sometimes still worked the streets around the building, floors for people attempting to move on from lives as gang members, a few floors for people who had recently been released from prison, etc. I was on the 17th floor, the floor for those with a history of mental health issues.
In a poem I once wrote, the speaker’s roommate sells his blood plasma for grocery money. In my life this was my next-door neighbor at the YMCA—my one real friend on the floor we lived on. I can remember him lying on his bed, exhausted, eyes closed, as the lights of his TV screen illuminated his face. He had already reached the maximum number of donations he could give in a single year, he murmured. What was he going to do for the money?
I’ve never slept with anyone for money. But I have slept with someone so that I would have a place to sleep.
At the time I drank fewer beers in the morning than I had previously. But I still showed up regularly half an hour late to the bookstore I worked at, still stoned and usually having only had a few hours of sleep. After I lost that job I worked briefly as a server, spent six months not working at all and sleeping on my friends back porch so that I might dedicate myself entirely to writing, then, desperate, started working nights as a freight processor: difficult and unreliable work.
Before that I lived with two brothers. One of them was a mechanic and a cocaine addict, the other was a coke-dealer and a cocaine addict. I was half in love with a heroin addict, one of the most beautiful people I have ever met, who was in and out of rehab. I was more than half in love with another woman, who lived half the year in a different city, who only occasionally used, but was married to a heroin addict.
This last woman is one of the few people I have ever known who can walk as long and as far as I can. Across the city, some nights. Until perhaps we found a lot that had reverted to a field we could lay down in and kiss as we listened to birds announce the dawn, instead of the usual increased shouts and the sounds of cars and car horns which usually announced the dawn, which meant we were outside the city, finally.
There was no one else I knew that understood how much a morning could mean like she did.
Finally a few of us in my friend group moved away. I still talk to a couple of those friends. The ones who moved away, I mean. The others I have not heard from since.
Chicago Union Stockyard, 1941.