There were so many residents scrambling to escape in the eighties that renting a U-Haul was almost as tough as finding gainful employment. Moving trucks beelined to places with better weather and more jobs. Florida. Georgia. Texas. California. Assembly lines had never encouraged creative thinking, and there seemed to be a bunker mentality among those lucky enough to have a job in Flint. They were hunkering down, hoping to avoid the layoffs as long as possible, maybe even make it all the way to retirement. Life in Flint was risky, but it was no longer a place for risk takers. The future was somewhere else.
My family joined the flood of Flint refugees. I headed off to college in Washington, D.C. My brother found a full-time job teaching and coaching at a small Catholic grade school in Jacksonville, Florida. My two sisters, happy to escape the Michigan winters, followed him there and soon landed work. They all lived in the same apartment complex. Jacksonville was not an unfamiliar locale. The family had briefly lived there before I was born. It was the navy town where my parents had met and fallen in love. So when McLaren Hospital offered my mom a buyout with lifetime healthcare and a small pension in 1986, she took it and moved to Jacksonville. She wasn’t eager to leave Flint, but she missed her kids and didn’t like living in our old house all alone. Everyone except my grandmother had said their goodbyes to the Vehicle City.
As an undergraduate studying political science, I wasn’t exactly proud of my Flint heritage. I would sometimes lie and say I was from Ann Arbor to avoid the disdain that often followed if I told the truth. After all, even people from Detroit looked down on Flint. I was attempting to pass myself off as some sort of sophisticated anglophile, fond of Romantic poetry and obscure British bands, and I didn’t think the Vehicle City fit the image I was trying to construct. The Smiths, my favorite band at the time, regularly sang about postindustrial Manchester, a rough English equivalent of Flint minus the gun violence and the muscle cars, but I failed to make the connection at the time. Abstract English deindustrialization was so much cooler to me than the homegrown variety. I had no regrets about being the last make and model of my family to roll off the assembly line in Flint.
After college, I became an active member of the Flint diaspora, finding work as a reporter in Little Rock, Arkansas. Compared to my hometown, it was strange and exotic. I marveled at how few bars there were, only to discover that many counties in Arkansas had none at all. They were against the law! Unions were equally scarce, although technically still legal. I regularly got to interview the state’s charismatic governor, some guy I had never heard of before named Bill Clinton. It was such an insular city that I interviewed Bill and Hillary once when they were in line behind me at a Little Rock movie theater. We were waiting to see The Doors. Bill did all the talking. Hillary looked distracted. I was also in the crowd, notebook in hand, when Clinton announced in 1991 on the steps of the historic Old State House near downtown that he was running for president.
Just when the novelty of living in the South was wearing off, I managed to land a cushy fellowship in Great Britain. I had few responsibilities other than studying Victorian literature at the University of Nottingham and delivering speeches to drunken British businessmen about life in America. It never crossed my mind to include Flint in my presentations.
When my funding ran out, I conducted a frantic transatlantic job search and landed as an editor and writer at a mediocre alternative newsweekly in San Jose. A few years later, I migrated north to a much better paper in San Francisco. In contrast to Flint, there was an irrational sense of optimism floating around in the dry Northern California air. The weather was so mild that people whined about a little fog just so they’d have something to complain about once in a while. Everyone came off as friendly and happy and physically fit. They were brimming with big ideas. Even after the dot-com bubble burst, it was a hopeful place compared to Flint.
So why, after more than a decade in this paradise of positive thinking, did I suddenly miss the Vehicle City so much? Why was I getting teary-eyed just thinking about the city I couldn’t wait to leave? Therapy was clearly in order, but getting in touch with your emotions is expensive in San Francisco, like everything else. So I did what any logical Californian would do when confronted with a profound psychological quandary that required extensive rumination. I started a blog.
4
Virtual Vehicle City
I launched Flint Expatriates in the fall of 2007. It lacked just about every attribute that guarantees a large audience in the blogosphere. It wasn’t devoted to strident political views, tawdry celebrity gossip, the latest life-changing technology, or hardcore porn, unless you are turned on by graphic photos of abandoned houses, stripped bare of their aluminum siding and totally exposed to the elements. Aside from demolition crews, pawn shops, and moving companies, it had no obvious advertising tie-ins.
I wasn’t expecting a blog about a troubled Rust Belt city to be wildly popular. I was hoping it would help me come to terms with my conflicted feelings about Flint without being mean spirited, depressing, or sappy. I wanted it to be funny without making too much fun of Flint. Improbably, I hoped to cover the past, present, and future of the city from my remote publishing headquarters in the cramped living room of my house in San Francisco. If I failed, it was no big deal. I figured no one would read it anyway.
The result was a jumbled collection of posts based on my mood and what I could dig up after classes at the university or during downtime between freelance assignments. A story theorizing that Flint might rebound when water shortages forced residents of the southwest United States to move north might be followed by an item about a pair of AC spark plugs, once proudly manufactured in Flint, that had been fashioned into earrings for sale on eBay. A YouTube video that used satellite imagery to compare Flint, with its acres of demolished factories, to Ground Zero after 9/11 ran the same day as a piece on urban gardens springing up on vacant lots in some of the city’s worst neighborhoods. It was an odd mixture of hope and despair, wonky urban-planning material and kitschy cultural ephemera. Memories of the old days mingling with semi-informed conjecture about what might lie ahead. The blog was my way of thinking out loud about Flint.
As expected, the public response was underwhelming. A few comments trickled in, but I sensed that many of the three dozen hits the blog generated each day were mistakes—collectors tracking down info on flintlock rifles or cartoon fans searching for trivia on Fred and Wilma Flintstone. Then I realized that I had neglected to address a topic that would surely resonate with my elusive target audience. I didn’t have any posts about the ultimate leisure activity in Flint—getting drunk. I remedied the situation by asking Flintoids, as we sometimes called ourselves, to name every local bar, smoke-filled tavern, and dimly lit lounge they could remember. This was apparently the supreme challenge for the current and former residents of a factory town that once felt like it had a drinking establishment on every corner. The post generated more than a hundred comments, and the list of booze emporiums climbed to well over three hundred. There was everything from strip clubs like the infamous Titty City near the Chevy plant to posh joints like the University Club in the penthouse of the now-abandoned Genesee Towers, Flint’s tallest building. The names alone made you want a drink: the Argonaut, the Ad-Lib, the Beaver Trap, Thrift City, Aloha Lounge, Auggie’s Garden Glo, the Treasure Chest, the Rusty Nail, the Torch, the Teddy Bear, the White Horse, the Whisper. The sheer number was impressive, although most were now closed. A clever economist could surely track Flint’s decline by charting the year-over-year drop in bars open for business.
One of the dearly departed to make the list was the Copa, an improbably named oddity that stood out in a city where bars tended to have rustic names like the Wooden Keg, and references to Barry Manilow songs were frowned upon. Bill Kain opened the Copa in 1980 in the heart of downtown on Saginaw Street. Though Flint lived and died with the auto industry, Kain embraced diversification and catered to just about everyone, including high school kids with bad fake IDs. The Copa was primarily a gay bar, but Thursday was officially straight night, and the crowd was mixed on many evenings. In a largely segregated town, it was racially mixed, playing funk and hip-hop in a market that made Foreigner, Styx, and Billy Joel rich. There were house music nights, live rap acts, and male strip shows—attended