Not everyone who works or studies at Columbia lives close by, but the reaction of the administration has also mimicked Alma Mater’s stone-faced shruggery. In a series of e-mail messages, the administration made clear that end-of-semester finals will go on and staff, faculty and students should make it to campus as usual. Morning exams could start an hour late, but none would be rescheduled. Absent staff members would have their absence counted against their vacation days.

In order to facilitate this we-will-not-be-affected approach, Columbia set up a system of shuttle vans to and from various locations. How all this is going, however, has been swallowed up by rumor and confusion. Reports are spreading of Columbians, nervous about failed exams and lost vacation days, shivering on the streets for hours, waiting for vans languishing elsewhere in traffic. Yet legends of perseverance are spreading as well. I heard tell of a staff member in computer support who biked all the way from Park Slope – “but he forgot his long johns” and suffered frostbite in the process.

Despite the pressure at the margins, the dome of intellectual lassitude and care-free youthful exuberance that insulates Columbia remains intact. People are obsessing over finals, but always with school spirit – late Tuesday afternoon, I saw a harried undergrad rushing around a computer lab wearing ribbons in her hair, blue and white, the colors of Columbia. Another undergrad stood on Amsterdam Avenue, laughing and talking with a friend while she waited for the charter bus procured by Columbia to ferry departing students to the airport. I asked her, an Oregon native, whether the transit strike had changed the way she thinks about New York City. She shrugged and said, “No, not really.”

I nodded and shrugged in solidarity, one student to another. Unlike Alma Mater, at least we get to leave Columbia on holidays.

___________________________________________________

Patrick Gallagher is a graduate student at Columbia University and managing editor of mrbellersneighborhood.com.

A streetlight pole beside the kiosk caught my eye as I bent down and rummaged. One of the flyers on the pole made me nervous. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I had the distinct feeling that it was not supposed to be there.

The flyer said, “FOUND: TYRANNOSAURUS REX.” There was a picture, clip art, of a Tyrannosaurus Rex with its fearsome maw open toward the street. The paper had an appropriately fossilized look, wrinkled up and gray with hardened rain and obviously much older than all of the other flyers. I wondered why no one had ever ripped it down or flyered it over when the streetlight served such a busy intersection.

Most alarmingly of all the entire bottom third of the flyer was torn away. The information that stated whatever purpose the flyer was supposed to serve was gone. That the Tyrannosaurus had consumed a portion of its own flyer was both as unprovable and as likely as any other explanation.

Minutes later I sat two blocks down in Coronet chomping on my plain Jumbo Slice. No disrespect, but there is something gummy about the crust at Coronet which makes it a pizza that has to be chomped, not chewed, and especially not lamely suckled and swallowed whole like the pizza across the street at Famiglia. Try as they might, Famiglia will never drive Coronet out of business because Coronet hones the act of sitting on a stool and consuming a piece of pizza to its barest essentials. That is the only way to approach Coronet. The slices are too big to take on the street, besides which there is something unsightly about seeing seen with such a vast, unwieldy portion of food covered in such sweaty-looking grease. You eat with your face down even if you aren’t alone because Coronet is lit like the places you don’t want to be. A hospital waiting room, a high school math class, the post office. The harsh overhead lights cast every nook and cranny of your physical being in the least flattering possible relief. Finally, Coronet’s gummy crust sucks the herbivore straight of your teeth so that Coronet fills up with the sounds of lips smacking and furious, open-mouthed chomping.

I read Matt Taibbi’s political column in a giggly mien while I chomped. Taibbi wrote, “Rove is not a genius at all. He is a pig, and the only thing that distinguishes him is the degree of his brazenness and cruelty.” I thought to myself, Tee hee. I was in the best possible mood until a voice from down the counter disturbed me.

“Hey, the way you eat that pizza . . . That’s an interesting method you’ve got there,” it said.

I looked up. It was a young man with a moustache and a goatee that looked scraggly, but still a little bit too full for his Johnson & Johnson complexion. His thick head of dark hair looked electrocuted in a vaguely Einstein-esque fashion, but at the same time pampered. If you looked closely enough, you could tell each fine, delicate strand apart from all of its neighbors. His round glasses filled out his weird pseudo-European aura, on top of which he wore a Hawaiian-style shirt that depicted images of the Manhattan skyline against a voluptuous tropical sunset. Over and over again, the shirt said, “New York,” in a hazy yellow font that seemed nostalgic for itself.

He tilted back his head and looked down his nose at me like a professor demanding that certain essential facts be repeated.

He asked, “Could you tell me if that is the way that you always eat pizza, or are you deliberately trying to do something different?”

The gentleman was referring to the fact that I tend to eat the crust first. It’s the eat-your-vegetables principle applied to pizza—get the crust over with and save the tastiest portion for last. I said, “I don’t know.” Then I returned to my article.

Taibbi wrote, “Karl Rove is a character of a type that reappears from time to time throughout history—an unscrupulous power-chaser of the highest order, who rises to the top by demonizing and defaming innocent people.” I tried to get back into the groove.

“I’m just asking because, I think that’s very interesting what you’re doing there.”

I kept reading.

“Do you think I should start eating pizza like this?”

I looked up and saw him turning his own piece of pizza counter-clockwise in his hands, opening and closing his mouth to simulate chomping.

It was late at night. He was sitting only one stool away from me in a restaurant that I now realized was otherwise empty.

“Or, do you just want to get back to what you’re reading?”

“Yes,” I said. “I would like to get back to what I’m reading.” I turned away from him accordingly. But then I turned back and added: “If you’re really thinking about trying to eat pizza counterclockwise, that would be cool.” I mimicked the way he had turned his pizza, but without picking up my own slice, and continued, “Like, eating the pizza in a spiral, instead of in rows? That would be cool if that’s what you’re contemplating.”

“No,” he said, sounding serious. “That’s not what I was talking about.”

I said, “OK.” I went back to my article and at some point he left.

When there was nothing on my plate but a smear of grease I stood up from my stool without lingering. I felt cool, I guess the low-key excitement that had struck me upon my return was persisting. When I stood at the trash, the single gesture with which the contents of my tray slid down into the open mouth of the receptacle felt masculine and decisive. I needed to walk downtown five blocks to return some DVD’s that had been due before I had left on my trip. The thought that the fees incurred could be the final, single straw that cleared out my bank account and doomed me to constant, desperate foraging for crumbs throbbed away in the back of my mind, but the throbbing was quiet. To survive as a small business owner you had to have real teeth, but despite that I truly believed that the owner of this rental outlet had the soul of a herbivore. Tonight, things just felt OK.

I had a spring in my step. I ambled under a corridor of scaffolding between Coronet and 110th singing “Cold Blooded” in my head. Uniform shadows loomed under the scaffolding that concealed pedestrians’ faces, but not their iPods. I thought, Is it not the loss of the inner iPod that is the true tragedy of the iPod? I started trying to make up new lyrics for “Cold Blooded.”

“Hey man. Do you want a cookie?”

I shuddered—he was back. He walked beside me, under the scaffolding all but invisible but for the silhouette of his absurd intellectual hair. I saw that he was a full head taller than me.

I heard the squeaky sound of the cookie pouch tearing open.

“I got ‘em at Duane Reade’s,” he said.

I said, “No,” as though he were homeless and I had never seen him before, sped up, and then crossed Broadway at 110th. From across Broadway I watched him ambling in front of the huge well-lit Gristedes, cookie pouch in hand. I knew that everything about his laid-back, surfer-Trotsky style was so over-the-top that it could only be explained as cover for a violent, irrationally aggressive personality, whether he knew it or not. Just after Gristedes he disappeared from view . . . Either he was on an excursion, determined to buy at least one item from every single store on Broadway, or he was hiding. Or both? In any case I knew the video store was on the East side of Broadway and that I would have to cross back over to his turf sooner or later.

My apartment was further uptown, on Riverside, and there were times when I would walk between there and the Columbia campus late at night and have to remind myself that it was not all one, single, continuous campus. The elegant stone facades of Grant’s Tomb, Riverside Church, the Manhattan School of Music, and the many vast faculty housing projects almost lent themselves to the fantasy, but at night an eerie silenced reigned in Morningside Heights that compelled dread. On the very few occasions when I had experienced urban violence, the quality about it that stood out was its suddenness. One minute you’re ambling, the next there’s a knife in your face and whatever you had expected in the previous second now means nothing.

How do you make it clear to a stranger that you don’t want to know them? That is, How do you let someone know that you won’t feel comfortable with them at least until they tell you their name? The fact that this idiot would offer me a cookie without even telling me his name was the ultimate proof that he was out of his mind. Crossing Broadway I envisioned him coming up behind me with a knife, a hammer, or just his elbow, a potentially life-changing act of retribution that I would lack even the privilege of being able to witness.

*

I slipped in and out of the movie store unnoticed. There had been no collection agency flunkies lying in wait as I had feared. A group of drunk men of all different ages swayed from Broadway into a nearby bar. I hopped off the curb and into the street to get by as fast as possible. In this area, you know people are safe if you see them in groups. Elsewhere, the opposite may be true, but the point is that at moments like this, in which I was being stalked by a lunatic who was capable of literally anything, made me grateful that the language of social signs could at times be so precise. On this score, I began my trek through the gauntlet back uptown regretting my earlier opprobrium for the iPod. Walking around carrying an iPod was a way of relinquishing any claim on society and embracing total atomization, right or wrong. The dead look in the iPod zombie’s eyes said as much; it was impossible to imagine being robbed by such a mute, passive savant.

That was why the iPods looked the way they did, I decided. It was a white flag, a sign of peace in the urban war of all against all.

The streets grew emptier as one business after another locked its doors. Lights went out and I watched people get into cabs blocks ahead of me, only to have disappeared without a trace when I would catch up to their point of takeoff. I walked backwards crossing 109th because it was a wide-open area, but there were a lot of trees below where he could have been hiding.

When suddenly I heard the squeak of the wrapper again I started, almost screaming until I looked around, found no one, and then realized that the sound had come from a cookie wrapper abandoned on the sidewalk that I had stepped on myself.

Could it have been the same cookie wrapper? I didn’t have time to find out.

I didn’t feel safe until I reached 113th, where I was in clear view of Columbia Public Safety. I found the flyer again and I studied it, “FOUND: TYRANNOSAURUS REX,” and asked myself again what I thought it might mean. Irony—it was a joke of belonging. Anyone who understood it could breathe a sigh of knowing relief. The Tyrannosaurus Rex was the monster loose everywhere, the ever-present threat of violence that haunted the metropolis at even the best of times. It can never be lost because it is at home everywhere, and at the same time it can never be found . . . Because it finds you. Like the counter-clockwise pizza-eating buffoon of my acquaintance, the monster wears New York like a Hawaiian shirt.

I took off into Columbia, behind its comforting black iron bars, to check my email at the 24-hour computer lab. There I would be safe until daybreak . . .

—Lowell Boileau

Part collage, part museum, part mausoleum, and all constructed around a series of intricately conceived online “tours,” detroityes.com depicts Detroit’s past and present in a library containing thousands of vivid photographic images.

For many, the centerpiece of the website is “The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit,” an online photo album which takes visitors on a tour of the city’s many remarkable abandoned buildings. Including police station houses, misbegotten franchises from the likes of Holiday Inn and Sears, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architectural gems in a variety of famous styles, ornate hotels that loom forbiddingly over the skyline, and, most of all, historic auto plants, “The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit” is both a lament and a celebration for these buildings and their various states of lonely disrepair. Since the website was founded by Lowell Boileau in 1998, new e-tours of landmarks from the history of soul music (soulfuldetroit.com) and key locations in the city’s once-thriving Jewish community (shtetlhood.com)have also been added.

In 2003, the Detroit Metro Times, the Detroit Free Press, and Hour magazine lauded detroityes.com as the best Detroit website of the year. Recently I talked to Mr. Boileau, erstwhile visual artist and Detroit area native, as well as the founder of detroityes.com, and he was good enough to share his views on the neglect and loss of America’s historic auto plants, recent improvements in Detroit’s economic condition, and the artistic possibilities of the Internet.

Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood: So, I was wondering if you could tell us about the website, and how you started it, and how it has gotten to be so big, what with over 1,000 images and all.

Lowell Boileau: It gets over 2 million visitors a year now and in the range of 30 million page hits . . . The original site ["The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit"] is, well, first, of all, my background is I’m a fine art painter. When the web came along, I started trying to sell my paintings on the web, and I realized it’s an art medium. And so I created what I call “for-art websites” like Detroityes and Soulfuldetroit. And so this was, being an urban landscape painter, Detroityes was in some ways an attempt to paint a giant portrait of Detroit. You see? The web is my new paint and canvas. And then to take it beyond that, then I involve the audience by making them into the question of what went wrong, and how does it go right, essentially.

It also started out a little tongue and cheek—Rome has got ruins, Athens has got ruins. Ours our bigger, but there’s no guidebook to them. And so it was to . . . tell that, and was kind of a different approach, I guess. That’s it in a nutshell.

MBN: The difference between our ruins and their ruins might be that ours seem so much more fragile. If there were an official occasion for this interview, it would be that the Studebaker factory, one of Detroit’s most historic factories, just burned down [on June 21, 2005]. One of the most important sites in industrial history is gone forever. Can you tell us a little bit about why there are not more serious efforts to preserve these sites?

LB: The National Auto Heritage Organization is doing some things with them. The original Model T plant, the preservation group is taking care of that and protecting it. The most important one, in my opinion, that is, the most important factory in history, the Highland Park Model T plant, nothing is being done with that, unfortunately. I mean, this is the one where the moving assembly line construction starts. Everything—the whole birth of the modern car is there, essentially. That’s unfortunate. Detroit’s got pressing problems, they need to redevelop, and it’s complicated—let me put it that way. With Detroit’s poverty.

MBN: I recently picked up Time magazine, and I was dismayed to learn that they had named current Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick the worst mayor in the country [in the April 17, 2005 issue of Time].

LB: Well, one of the three. They didn’t name him the worst, but they said, “These three are the worst.” [The other two worst were, according to Time, Dick Murphy of San Diego and John Street of Philadelphia.]

MBN: Do you think that the economic situation is so advanced that no political efforts to turn it around can possibly succeed? There appeared to have been a lot of enthusiasm around Dennis Archer’s tenure as mayor in the 1990’s, but not very much seems to have come out of that, either.

LB: I disagree with that completely. First of all, I think that Detroit has turned around. It turned around in 1995. It turned around under Archer in 1995, and if you compare downtown Detroit in 1995 and now, it’s day and night. I mean, you could have shot a cannon down most streets in Detroit on a weekend night and not hit anyone. And when you consider the area from the Fox [Theatre, restored in the early 1990's] down to the Renaissance [Center], what’s going on there with the stadiums, the casinos–for better or worse–the residential, the housing that’s going on there, hundreds and hundreds of units of loft conversion, Campus Martius Park, the whole Winter Garden extension to the Renaissance Center, the new Park Hilton, it goes on and on. It’s really quite remarkable. The West side, downtown, is still lagging. And they have lots of others in the greater city itself, but . . . there have also been thousands of residential permits, especially if you compare it to the Coleman Young [Detroit mayor from 1974-1994] low point of zero residential permits.

It’s a got a long way to come up, and the appearance may not be perceptible, but here’s an old timer here—it’s amazing. And it’s continued under Kwame, but somewhat out of . . . but there’s economic reasons, too. The economy, the auto economy, is not doing well right now.

You know, I don’t know if you read the forum on the website, but this is where I get all of my information, basically [Both Detroityes.com and Soulfuldetroit.com have online forums, with over 3,000 registered users between the two of them]. And there’s quite a good article today on how difficult a job it is being mayor, they quoted an article from the Free Press by Bill McGraw [Detroit Free Press columnist], and a discussion’s taken off on it. The big problem with Detroit is that the city of Detroit has to take care of all the poor people, the homeless, the felons, the single parent families, the poor people who can’t pay taxes, while the rest of the communities and the families of Detroit take a walk.

They don’t have to go out and face panhandlers when they go to the store where I live here in Farmington, let’s say, or in other places. Added to that they get high insurance rates and the declining place to live in experience. End of sermon.

MBN: One of the things that I especially like about the site is its lack of sentimentality. In addition to the fact that the neglect of these buildings represents a loss of and lack of respect for history, the truth is that they are also, as the site says, simply “Fabulous.” They have their own kind of grandeur and even beauty.

LB: Absolutely. They’re like the ancient ruins. They have that visual aspect to them and that was what drew them to me in the first place.

MBN: What surprises me about your city paintings is that they have this pristine quality to them. And, at the same time, nature insinuates itself into the cities through puddles, trees in incongruous locations, and so forth. And in your paintings of natural landscapes, by contrast, technology does the same thing—insinuate itself just slightly into the image, as in a single road curving through a vast hillside. Nature and technology seem to have a yin and yang kind of relationship in your paintings.

LB: Well, you know, you picked up on that. These American painters in the mid-nineteenth century, the Hudson River School, all of their work was very similar in certain ways, in the ways that they saw pristine nature being encroached on by civilization, cleared lands, and at the same time they were also very taken by the dramatic aspects of landscape, and sky and light. And this is sort of the other end of it, where nature’s coming back. This is also sort of a theme in a lot of Dutch Renaissance-style paintings, and things like that, and I’m not saying I’m particularly trying to copy those or anything, but I think that I feel moved in a similar way.

MBN: The way that you paint cars reminds me of Futurism.

LB: Maybe it was on a subtle level. A lot of that deals with an excuse for the more abstract issues that I was trying to deal with, in a representational framework, and also to deal with the micropoint painting technique that I use, that only uses the three primary colors, where you use white as a hole in the paint, basically. It’s complex, let me put it that way.

MBN: Would you feel like telling us about any new stuff that’s going on?

LB: I just did a painting and photographic show in January, the first hard-copy painting I’ve done in a while. If you go to detroityes.com/360 you’ll see the presentation of that show. But my art medium and my art effort is mainly digital right now, the for-art websites, and I just did a major revision of shtetlhood.com, the “Lost Synagogues of Detroit”. It’s basically a presentation and a tracing of them and of the African-American congregations that have largely taken them over since then. It’s a completely audience-authored artwork in that I solicit the comments and the memories from the audience, and that becomes the text and the description for the site. And, so that was—I just added about twenty new sites I found to that, and I also improved the ability for people to leave their memories, share their memories, and that has been my main thing lately.

MBN: One of the things that I think is neat about web design is the way it incorporates changes over time, so that a portrait on the Internet can be more fluid and dynamic than a conventional portrait. This especially comes through, I think, in the “Urban Prairies” section of detroityes.com, where the visitor can click between aerial photographs of the same city neighborhood taken in the 1940′s, when rows and rows of houses had been there, and in recent years, after virtually all of them had been demolished.

LB: Well, that’s true. The tremendous thing is the interaction part. That’s what sets this art medium apart totally from painting. Painting as interaction: You hang some work at a show, people come and then they talk about it briefly there, then some rich guy buys it. End of conversation. With them [the websites], there’s, like, an ongoing art opening. Not only between the artist and the audience, but also within the audience itself. And that takes off, they come in, and now the audience becomes a participant in it by contributing to the discussions. And if you look in the discussions at all, you’ll discover numerous pictures that people post in there, you know, so something happens in a certain place, and somebody’s got a picture of it. It goes outside of itself, in terms of artwork, outside of the artist’s control, in a lot of ways. To me, that’s why I’m so sucked into it. I can’t hardly paint anymore.

MBN: Wow, well, thanks a lot. You’ve told us some really neat stuff. First I have to type up this interview, then you’ll be able to look at it on the website if you want.

LB: I will. I checked it [Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood] out, and I see where you’re going with it.

MBN: Great.

LB: OK. Shoot me an email when you’ve got it up, OK?

MBN: I will.

LB: OK. Have a good day.

Of course, the problem was that I wasn’t driving, was another way you could look at it.

I stood next to my friend’s car, the Packard Plant looming up around me. I patted down my pockets for my cigarettes, just to cope with the awe. The identical brick buildings went on forever like a dead city. The cloud-bedecked mid-October Michigan sky, fluorescent orange, exaggerated the shadows dripping off of the towering walls.

It gave a general impression that it could house activity of infinite loudness, but the only sounds were the rustling of my feet in the gravel and the scattered voices lingering around the other cars. The superhuman scale of the edifice, the grid frames around the crushed windows, arthritic with rust, the cables and emaciated catwalks stretched between one end of the canyon and the other, the corners in every direction giving way to the promise of endless vistas, spoke to an oldness beyond my comprehension. It felt older than Rome or Athens. I lost myself completely in the feeling of having stepped backward in time and into a deactivated corner of a retroactively canceled past. I had the feeling that I had seen this before, not the Plant itself, but its world, and that every rustle I made in the loose gravel parking lot between me and the entrance to the party brought me closer to reunion with a forgotten past life.

The vibe that I was getting was one of the strongest that I had ever experienced, for any reason, so I tried to ignore what signs of my own present time gradually began to assert themselves . . . the outfits, the wispy adolescent goatee on the shiny face of the teenager at the door who wanted my $25, and my friend, who had immediately begun to make the scene in that insufferably obnoxious way that, in his defense, only I, as his friend, seemed to notice.

It was 1997, the high time of the candy ravers. My friend and I had just started college, he in our native Ann Arbor and I at a more expensive and, therefore, incomparably more prestigious institution in the Northeast. To be honest, I think that this disparity had always made him slightly insecure. Whenever we were together with former high school compatriots, teachers, parents of friends, or whatever, he always made a point of saying that going to school in Ann Arbor was “a different Ann Arbor” than the teenager Ann Arbor, the truth of which I never once doubted, but which he seemed to need to express using the bitterest possible tone of voice.

As though to prove that this were so, in any case, in just his first few months of school my friend’s social life became increasingly focused on Ann Arbor’s famous neighbor to the East, Detroit. And he was not alone: For whatever reason, an underground techno scene that had flourished for years was attracting more attention than ever from Detroit’s inordinately wealthy suburbs, a development which the naked eye could see in the proliferation of vast bell-bottom style jeans, Adidas logos, backpacks shaped like stuffed animals, and grown men and women nibbling on pacifiers not just in the clubs and bars of the city, but up and down the leafy, freshly-paved, occasionally gated streets of Farmington, Bloomfield Hills, Pontiac, Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, and, eventually, Ann Arbor. You saw the scene at the dentist’s office, shopping for school supplies, and even in corporate record stores. I remember sitting in Ann Arbor, sipping coffee with a girl who at the time attended a college in the Northeast, a college not unlike my own. I wore a navy blue polo shirt borrowed from my Dad and she a faded T-shirt from the Lilith Fair, but we concluded that we would rather be ravers than neo-hippies if we had to make the choice under duress. The scene was ascendant; it had the thumbs up from the mainstream.

It captured my friend’s imagination and he was a quick study—I was back just seven weeks into the semester, on my first break, and he already seemed to know where every party was happening and when. He told me about it and I wanted to see something new, so we got on I-94 and drove out there. We rolled down the windows and smoked Newports.

The autonomous fashion sense, in addition to the famous ubiquity of drugs, made it inevitable that it would also cobble together its own highly mystical ideology. That night, it was around the time we passed the Uniroyal tire, Detroit’s kitschy equivalent of the Colossus of Rhodes, that my friend first began to lecture me about sensation, perception, and the existence of a universal mind. Before the night was out, I would learn a thing or two about UFO’s. Androgyny was also a major theme: variation among clothing styles between men and women was minimal because of the premium on the essential identity of every human soul. The whole thing was a futuristic Romantic throwback, and the ecstatic music became a soundtrack to the erasure of all differences, the union of all opposites in peace. The sun rising in the middle of the night. Gods returning from Olympus on purple, blacklit, unidentified flying chariots. It was all Greek to me, but I knew where it was coming from. Everyone felt it and it was an unmistakable component of its popularity. I developed my own version of it, which, rather than permanent global utopia, focused on the fall and rise of Detroit itself in the aftermath of its postindustrial economic apocalypse.

This was the way that I dealt with it, the way that I tried to be as outgoing, personable, and sporty as my friend as the time went on. I had been told more than once that I was spoiling the vibe when I had found myself in a massage chain and I remember a number of occasions in which girls, appropriately dressed for the night, would see me wandering around, get right up in my face with their ankles rhythmically bobbing, tell me, “Smile!” and then bob away. Without intending to, I was putting a damper on the scene just by being myself. It seemed I was constitutionally incapable of not putting a damper on this joyous scene, which I regretted . . . I basically agreed that it was joyous.

There was one night when I remember sitting in a brightly lit corner. Elsewhere people were dancing between walls obscured either by darkness or fluorescent purple, but here a Mole People vibe emanated from the high concrete walls as exposed to the harsh white light of a tall lamp. There was a guy and a girl splayed on top of each other. The guy leaned his head back against the wall and stretched out his arm, handing me a white plastic cone, which in its aerodynamic bullet nose and the concentric circles in its depressible cylinder base reminded me of the space shuttle. The guy withdrew it and performed a brief demonstration of how to blast off, then handed it to me again . . . “Maybe this is a way to save Detroit,” I said. I had resorted to turning the whole thing into a seminar in Urban Studies just so I could tread water. “The fact that these parties are attracting this much tourism from the suburbs could lead to a lot more. If any city could rebuild a healthy economy purely on leisure, then surely it’s Detroit . . .” The disintegration of Detroit in the wake of the factory closings and riots may well have been a subtext to the rave scene, but I pushed it right up front and center. Before I could finish the sentence, though, my forehead became unbelievably heavy and I returned the cone to the guy. The girl sat behind the guy with her arms wrapped around his chest like a Harvard sweater. She laughed as I trailed off, bent down and kissed him on the neck. Her long, blond hair fell back from behind her ear, concealing her face. I lay down and watched the music warp the ceiling, like melting glass, unable to move but sinking slowly into paranoia about particles accrued over the generations to the bare floor. I think that the track might have been “Want a Life.”

In an effort to blend in, I would dispense with the navy blue polo shirts and put on vaguely ironic T-shirts that I had attained from a big outlet in Ypsilanti called ValuWorld, but it wasn’t enough. I went up to girls and said, “Hey. Do you come to a lot of these things?” Every time I knew it was stupid to refer to a sacred utopian gathering as a “thing,” but I did it anyway. They would say, “Yeah” and I would say, “I think these things are great!” I would go hours without seeing my friend once and he would come up to me, extract a deflated balloon from between his front teeth, and ask, “Whassup? Are you partyin’, kid?” And then I would say, “Yeah, man.”

Hidden somewhere in the way that I would say that was an insult, his face would fall, go completely empty, and then it would be hours before we would reconvene again. People operated at an instinctive level which I could only understand at my most exhausted or least coherent. I would stand next to the DJ impersonating some kind of techno connoisseur. It was only after I had lost the energy to do otherwise, after hours of constant standing, nodding my head to the same beat, that I would notice the pacifier-sporting androgyne next to me silently offering me a drag off of their Newport. I would take it, and nod, and we would both know that something had happened.

It was always well into the morning when we finally took off. The rides back were silent, if not hostile, my friend setting his jaw grimly against the unfolding road. We were sick of being awake and the look of the city in broad daylight was different. It was no longer possible to use your imagination in the way that you did with the shadow-drenched empty doorways and towering vacant buildings. Rather than skeletal structures under an elegant cloak of darkness, you saw the loneliness of the empty homes, standing alone on whole city blocks covered in grass, dirt, and scattered trash.

The cloud-domed Michigan sky went from fluorescent orange to newsprint gray. But the music still rang in my ears and the fusion of those sounds with Detroit’s images still produced something magical. The music was like the city’s ghost, pumping away doggedly through the night in senses both literal and figurative. The feeling was so powerful that I kept going, the “things” still enticed me, even though the truth was that I found raves boring and I had only engaged the people on the shallowest terms. I never developed more than the most rudimentary understanding of their language, and it never had the opportunity to explain itself to me—if only because, as almost anyone would have boasted, there was really nothing to explain. The impact that it had on me was that it provided a soundtrack to learning that certain parts of the map aren’t so blank after all and that some moments in history were never really forgotten. What remains of my days as a wannabe raver is the memory of getting to know a city that my parents, along with seemingly every other adult in Ann Arbor, had written off forever, and a music whose boundless, frenzied optimism embodies the tantalizing possibilities of the future.