Chapter Two

The Beginning

(Detroit, 1979)

Benny moved cautiously down the dark and dreary hallway looking for room 666 on the 6^th floor of an old dark and dreary downtown hotel. The worn-wood flooring creaked and groaned beneath his every careful step… sounds from behind locked doors… naked electric light bulbs dangling from the ceiling at the end of cobweb-coated cords like glowing spiders showing the way down a dark and dreary tunnel.

Detroit.

1979.

By 1979, Detroit was becoming a dark and dreary place. When a mist blew in off Lake St. Clair, in some neighborhoods that had not long before been neat industrial rows of brick middle class housing with kids playing in the streets, the feeling could be ghostly, like the emptiness after a nuclear war.

Detroit was not turning out the way everybody thought it should. It was supposed to be the shining light of a nation’s progress and prosperity; harnessing Nature through science and technology; planning and organization. It’s where Rosie the Riveter had worked to defeat fascism, at the River Rouge plant. America churning it out. The east coast had its international bankers and the west coast had its oriental trade and orchards, but America had Detroit, churning it out.

There had long been a saying: “When General Motors (meaning Detroit) sneezes, the country catches cold.” Detroit had been the technological mecca of the world, Motor City, where Mustangs and GTOs were born. Detroit was at the hub of a great productive region created to facilitate motion… motion, ceaseless motion going in a direction. It built machines to transform hydrocarbons into the mechanical motion of pistons turning gears. It transformed the mystery of “energy” into a kind of “civilization” with Main Streets and parks and movie theatres on a planet in a mystery called “space.”

Detroit was an idea, and the idea spread. It was at the center of economic circles of lives lived by regular people from coal miners in West Virginia, southern Illinois and Kentucky to the mining towns of the iron-rich Mesabi Range along the southern shores of Lake Superior; the lives of regular people clustered around industrial plants -- not just the massive Willow Run and Rouge plants of Detroit, but countless Midwest towns and neighborhoods congregated around local factories where parts of the whole were made… piston rings, brake shoes… and the truckers on the highways and the seamen on the Great Lakes moving all the stuff around from mines to showrooms in circles within circles like a living organism adapted perfectly to its environment of navigable waters, forests for shelter and fields for fruit and corn.

But by 1979 Detroit was becoming a dark and dreary place. As far as factory workers waiting in long lines for unemployment checks were concerned, the city’s lifeline -- oil, its oxygen -- was being squeezed tight by dark-skinned Arabs with a mysterious religion. And sneaky, yellow-skinned Japs (with another mysterious religion), whom Detroit’s steel machines had not long before defeated in open warfare, were taking advantage of the situation to fuck the city over for a dirty buck.

But by 1979 Detroit was becoming a dark and dreary place. As far as factory workers waiting in long lines for unemployment checks were concerned, the city’s lifeline -- oil, its oxygen -- was being squeezed tight by dark-skinned Arabs with a mysterious religion. And sneaky, yellow-skinned Japs (with another mysterious religion) whom Detroit’s steel machines had not long before defeated in open warfare, were taking advantage of the situation to fuck the city over for a dirty buck.

The 70s would be remembered as the decade of the Arab “Oil Embargoes.” Before then, regular people didn’t worry too much about gas at the pump. Little more than pocket change could get you around town for a week in a big Pontiac Bonneville. It was like breathing air, until the Arabs applied their choke hold. Blocks-long lines formed at neighborhood gas stations. Prices shot up. Like survivors of a shipwreck on a life raft in the ocean, regular people were told to eat less. Political elites imposed a nationwide 55 M.P.H. speed limit. A rock song hit the charts – “I Can’t Drive 55!” Tempers flared. A cabinet level post of “National Energy Czar” was created to promote the new ethic. Volker and the new directors at the legal tender factory choked off the supply of money to force a pause in the nation’s forward motion. People started buying cheaper, smaller, fuel-efficient Japanese cars… not because they were more comfortable, or safer, or cooler to drive, but to conserve, to do with less. Sales of America’s gas-guzzling big cars plummeted. Manufacturing plants started closing; production lines mothballed. All across the Industrial Heartland small towns and neighborhoods huddled around a local factory were boarding up. Steel mills struggled. Detroit was becoming a dark and dreary place.

In 1979, Benjamin T. Profante, known as Benny, was a newspaper reporter in Detroit. It was his job to know what was going on and he wanted to do a good job. It seemed to him like the natural thing to do. Do a good job. He’d been raised in the 50s on the Idea of Progress -- the almost universal idea back then that if you tried to do a good job you had a right to expect things to work out for the best and that if they didn’t you had a legal right to complain.

Benny was considered an up-and-comer. He was a young guy, just 31 in a business dominated by older guys with holes in their socks and dog-eared notebooks crammed with contact numbers collected over the decades. But Benny liked to hang out in unusual places and was good at coming up with unusual slants to breaking stories. In the business, it was called “instinct,” or a “nose for news.”

Benny hadn’t started out wanting to become a newspaper reporter. The small northern Michigan college he’d attended didn’t even have a journalism department. Actually, he’d started out wanting to become a writer -- a famous one. That’s why he’d taken off in the first place -- to become a writer. From what he’d learned from his college professors, it seemed to him like that’s what writers did, before they became famous -- they took off, in one way or another. Getting into the newspaper business was just something that happened to him along the way because writing didn’t pay until you were famous and had made it onto the Johnny Carson Show. Newspaper reporters, at least, got a regular paycheck, not much, but at least enough for a young, single guy to get by in an old car with enough left over for beer and shots of cheap whiskey at the local workers’ bar.

The idea of becoming a famous writer first lodged itself in Benny’s mind during his senior year in high school. He’d just been kicked off the football team for an M.I.P. (Minor in Possession). He’d been the star halfback. The whole town would gather on Saturday afternoons to watch him race down the field, eluding tacklers, raising his arms, holding the ball high in the air declaring victory with the winning score. His whole world cheered! He was at the center of his universe. Scouts from small northern colleges had been keeping an eye on him. Who could say? Maybe if he bulked up, maybe someday he’d get a tryout with the Packers. He was that fast. And quick.

Then that night getting busted drinking Stroh’s with his buddies at the hunting camp, miles out in the middle of nowhere over two-path roads into Pine Creek country. A total collapse. A night in the county jail until his dad sent an uncle to bail him out in the morning. Kicked off the team. Front page in the sports section of the local Daily News. Maria, the Italian princess cheerleader who’d worn his athletic ring since their sophomore year, secretly thought that maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. It was foolish to encircle your future life of family around dreams of becoming a Green Bay Packer. There were good jobs with futures at the power company. Her uncle ran the local Laborer’s Union. Or maybe college… she thought Benny might like being a high school teacher and maybe a part-time coach.

For weeks Benny stumbled around the high school halls in a daze, an outcaste from the world he knew. No football practice after school. He started spending more time at Mario’s pool hall. He lied about going to church. He couldn’t figure out what now, now that he’d accepted the end of a dream. What now?

Then that night when the answer came to him parked out on the peninsula in the backseat of the ol’ man’s Chevy, where Maria tried to teach him how to swim without breathing.

That was the night Benny first heard the Beatle’s “Paperback Writer,” on the local AM station on the dashboard radio.

He bolted upright. “I could become a famous writer!” he said.

Maria didn’t want to talk about it.

“It’ll be ok,” he said, looking past her to the moon-lit cedar forest beyond. “I’ll work hard.”

They tried to talk it over, but a war got in the way.

So that’s what he did. He decided to go off to college to learn how to become a famous writer and one of the English Department profs -- Professor Jon Heikkinen, known as “The Professor” -- kind up took him under his wing and was the one who first suggested that he might consider becoming a newspaper reporter after graduating.

“I want to be a writer,” Benny insisted.

“Lots of famous writers were newspaper reporters early in their careers,” the professor returned. “You can learn lots about writing working as a newspaper reporter, mainly how to do it, even when you’re hung over and don’t feel like it.”

Benny started out at small town dailies and kept moving up because he tried to do a good job. He won awards because he knew where to look for things. He’d grown up in the wide ranging concentric circles of extended family in a small town way up north at the edge of the woods; he knew who in town knew what, and how they knew it. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything. It’s what the adults talked about at night sitting around the kitchen table, the kids listening from a corner of the room..

So, right from his rookie year Benny started breaking stories that other reporters, too busy going to press conferences, weren’t even looking for. He broke a story, for instance, that the county probate judge had vodka in the water decanter on his trial bench. He found that out by drinking beer after work with the courthouse janitor. He got to know the waitresses and groundskeepers at the local country club. He was doing a good job, finding out what was going on and having a good time.

He began to think of himself as an investigative reporter.

The 70s were a good time to be an investigative reporter after Woodward and Bernstein, played by Dustin Hoffman and what’s-his-name, made it look glamorous.

He began to think of himself as a hot shot.

Just not yet a famous writer.

Not long before he’d gotten to the “big time” in Detroit, Jimmy Hoffa was disappeared. Because it happened in Detroit it was a “local” story with Pulitzer Prize written all over it. Benny was put on a special team of reporters assigned to crack the case. For a year or more every new lead got front page play, but after the leads eventually petered out he was put on the next big thing -- the energy crisis and its effect on the life of the city.

It was a hard story for a hot shot investigative reporter to get his head around. There was no smoking gun at the end of a trail of clues. No Perry Mason moment. No Pulitzer Prize. No puppet master. There was nobody to blame but ourselves – us, we, it was our nature to foul our nest, to eat next year’s seed. Now we were running out, starting with energy and everybody would have to make do with less or we’d all die. The End of the World.

The phone on Benny’s desk rang. It hurt his head. It was a Monday, his day to do the morning police beat. He was hung over bad, but he’d had a good time.

He looked at the phone through scratchy eyes.

It rang again.

He picked it up… he recognized the voice right off, sunny and birdlike, quick with a heavy New York Jewish accent…

“Benny? Is that you?”

“Dr. Rebecca?”

“Oy! Yes, it’s me. Such a week it’s been. How are you? I read recently in the Alumni News that you were in Detroit now, the big city. Sounds like you’re making a success of yourself in your newspaper career.”

“Just not yet a famous writer,” he said and imagined he could hear her smile and would have bet a hundred bucks that she would say what she said next… “Thoughts have Mass,” she said. She was famous around campus for saying things like that. Then she added, “Some thoughts take longer to ferment than others.”

Benny had always liked being around Dr. Rebecca during his college years. There was something about the way she thought and the peculiar things she said that drew him into a perspective where things are not the way they appear to be. Like Alice’s wonderland. He spent the entirety of his first LSD trip thinking about another one of her favorite things to say – that there’s no such thing as empty space. Drifting through the purple microdot windowpane, he kept thinking that if the emptiness of the Void he was looking into was not empty, then what was it, or was it even an it? Then rocks along the shore of Lake Superior bust into psychedelic colors and began to mate. At the beginning of every chemistry and biology class he’d ever taken since high school the teachers all started out with the most basically obvious idea on which everything else rested – that, ultimately, it all comes down to tiniest particles separated by empty space. It made perfect sense. It was the way things looked – things and no things, this and that with nothing in between. But Dr. Rebecca dismissed colleagues and teachers who believed “that stuff” with a breezy wave of her delicate hand, calling them, to their face, “oh, so, 16^th century.”

She also liked to say that what makes a person crazy is not so much what they think as not knowing why they think the way they do. Benny often thought about that, too, when he was just getting started in his newspaper career. His first city editor, an ancient character who’d known Capone, wanted to teach him what he would need to know to survive in the enclosed environment of newsrooms and mass messaging. He hounded Benny about confining his stories to the “5 W’s” – the who, what, when, where and why. But then Benny would remember what Dr. Rebecca had said and wondered if there wasn’t something more.

And she also liked to say “you’ll never get the plot looking at a movie one frame at a time.”

And lots of other thought provoking things.

Like she said mathematics was how she expressed her mental world. She played the violin and said that was how she expressed her mental world as well.

Benny had gotten to know Dr. Rebecca because she was married to Dr. Heikkinen, “the Professor,” the one who’d taken Benny under his wing and who first suggested to him the idea of becoming a newspaper reporter.

Dr. Rebecca – Doctor Rebecca Mendelssohn-Heikkinen, PhD. – insisted that everybody call her Rebecca. She was a professor at the college too. She taught mathematics – advanced – so Benny never took any of her classes. He got to know her at the weekend parties they threw at their home on a hill looking to the north out over Lake Superior. Under the Professor’s wing, Benny got to be a regular at the parties. There were always lots of other professors there and Benny initially felt intimidated. Professors were his new heroes, like Stan Musial and the astronauts had been in the 50s, growing up. But right from the start he felt comfortable in Rebecca’s presence. He’d help her in the kitchen and listen to what she had to say.

They’d kept in touch by phone over the years since Benny graduated… Benny, Rebecca and the Professor.

The newsroom was a madhouse, typical of every Monday morning. Deadline for the first edition was approaching fast and Benny had a couple of police beat stories to write.

“I’m kind of busy,” Benny said, typing with his fingers, holding the telephone receiver between his shoulder and chin. He looked up at the clock.

“I understand,” Rebecca said. “You can call me back. There’s somebody in Detroit that I want you to meet.”

Later that same day Benny was walking down the hallway on the 6^th floor of a dark and dreary downtown hotel. It felt like the hallway’s dingy plastered walls were closing in on him. He was going down a tunnel. His heart raced, looking for Room 666. He turned a corner and there at the end of the hall were the armed security guards he’d been told would be there. They’d been trained, he’d been told, at Mitch Werbell’s paramilitary camp in the swamps of southern Louisiana where Central American revolutionaries went to learn techniques of irregular warfare.

They nodded to Benny as he approached. “He’s expecting you,” one of them said, motioning towards the door.

Two hours later Benny was gunning his beat ol’ Pontiac down John R to Telegraph to the newspaper office. He pulled into the building’s private parking garage and raced upstairs to the newsroom and across that right past the city’s editor’s desk to the managing editor’s office and barged in without knocking.

Benny made a big show of collapsing into the overstuffed leather chair looking at the head newsroom boss facing him from the other side of his desk.

“This better be good,” the boss said, looking up at the clock on the wall and its minute hand counting down to afternoon deadline.

“If what I just heard is true,” Benny said in between labored breaths, “it’s the biggest fucking story in the whole fucking world! Pulitzer written all over it.”

The boss looked back up at the clock on the wall. A beginning.

“Then get to work,” he said.