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Here I am. That's some way to start a journal. But it's true, I'm here. "Here" is a pseudo-European
sidewalk cafe in Royal Oak, Michigan, an up and coming suburb of Detroit with all the money and none
of the soul of the city. The cafe opened a couple of years ago at the tail end of the coffee shop mania.
A Fabio-like Balkan man and his pretty young wife run it. They don't make much money off the place, rents
are too high to make a small coffee shop profitable anymore, but they have a large crowd of refugee regulars
to keep them afloat and inspired. They work side jobs to meet the bills at home. The trains roll by every
30 minutes or so, making your ears and teeth rattle. The cafe is located 100 feet from the train tracks
that I've lived next to all my life. I walked those tracks every day as a child. Sometimes I walked for
miles and sometimes I just crossed over. I used to dream of jumping on a passing train and seeing where
it went, but I know better now. I'm here and no matter where I go that's where I'll be. I have to have
a better reason for leaving than wanting to get away from myself.
I think that's the first foolish idea we come to on the road to adulthood, the dream of escape.
This false notion is most apparent in suburbia where people are slowly driven crazy by ennui and years
of victimization by petty comforts. They leave in droves and arrive in droves. Refugees in their own
hometowns, because all suburbs are the same. Some run to urban drama, the romance of a Soho loft, and
wonder how they got there later. Some run to the wilderness, but can't fill their empty souls on beauty
they never developed a taste for. They long for what passes for nightlife in the suburbs, mostly drinking,
and eventually return.
That's why I like this place. The Balkan flood poured into Detroit. Some were poor, but most seem
advantaged compared to what we classically refer to as refugees. These are the ones that could afford
the journey, the dregs of the privileged classes in the Balkans, here to regroup, form societies and
friendships, and avoid talking about home. They're apprehensive if you speak to them, afraid to reveal
their origins lest they be drawn into an ill-informed geopolitical discussion. I'm friends with some,
the rest I befriend by respecting their privacy.
Miljana is one I know well. She's not a regular here, but she knows the owners. I've been her confidant
in work and relationships for three years now and for two of those years I've been helping her with her
studies at school. She's older than I am, but the older we get, the less that age difference seems to
matter. Her father was a doctor, a respected man in her village community in Serbia. Her early years
were spent in Africa, then at a relatively spacious home in her village with monthly shopping forays
across the Adriatic to Italy. She was a young revolutionary under the communists following the reign
of Tito and when the wars started in the early 90s, her parents sent her to Florida out of fear for her
life. She worked at a Dairy Queen on the beach, two worthless degrees in medicine from Serbian universities
in her pocket and speaking five languages. English wasn't one of them. She married another refugee, divorcing
him after a few years when it came out he was seeing another woman. By that point they had moved to Michigan
to live with her aunt, who had managed to abscond from the old country with some of her fortune, had
divorced her own husband, and now lived in an upper middle class community in Troy, another suburb of
Detroit. Her mother died of natural causes during her absence, a fictional transgression for which Miljana
is unable to forgive herself, and her divorce engendered in her a hysterical mistrust of any fertile
male that comes her way and any romantic compulsions that still stubbornly lurk in her damaged heart.
So what am I doing here? Plain and simple. I can smoke. And I don't mean smoke like you do at the
counter at Denny's. I mean you have to wade through the smoke to find your seat. Here, the non-smokers
are the politically incorrect. Here smoking is an art. When you inhale, you have to drag deep and hold
it, then let the smoke curl out of your nostrils in a sensual, delicate tail. People here know how to
live badly. They're loud and when they burst out in laughter, the smoke bursts above them. They eat fattening
foods, but stay thin. They specialize in drinks that would keep the average man up for days, but they
sleep like logs and wake up before they start to dream. They should be dead, but there's more life in
this room than there is in the whole rest of this burned out railroad town.
I don't claim to be one of them, but I like to be near them. I think about the stories in this room,
weighing them against my own. It keeps me going on my worst days and inspires me on my best. Mostly,
it's the stories themselves I enjoy, even the ones I don't understand. You can hear Serbian, Macedonian,
Albanian, and Croatian all at the same table and if you can sort out which is which, you're a better
man than I. It's their spirit that attracts me. These are the ones that rose above the factional and
ethnic strife of the wars. They're happy to be here where they don't have to think about it, the lively
opposites of the majority of the city's population, who are unhappy to be here and think about it all
the time. Here it's Thanksgiving every day.
I admire them, but I don’t envy them. I’ve learned to be careful what I wish for. Their joy springs
from the same source as life itself: chaos and tumult. This is their gospel music and their expression
of joy is mitigated by an equal knowledge of pain. I’ve learned to love beauty without coveting it and
I walk through life as though it were a museum, enjoying the works I find there without needing to possess
them.
What we desire and what makes us happy are seldom one and the same. My temperance granted me access
to many different social groups when I was young, but I never truly belonged in any of them. I was everyone’s
mascot, a receptacle for their tribulations, hopes, and opinions and I could be trusted to keep their
secrets. Seeing what they considered to be a sensitive soul, the women I knew adopted me into their circle
of confidence. As the beneficiary of such adoptions, I was excluded from personally fulfilling relationships
within these groups, romantic or otherwise. Although I seemed to have all the attributes they claimed
they wanted in a mate, I was always the exception, precisely because of those attributes. As I said,
what we want and what makes us happy…etc. Due to this hypocritical dichotomy, I saw no difference between
women and men, no matter how vociferously the women I knew tried to convince me that men were slime.
I agree that men do tend to suffer from a common neurosis, which a recent girlfriend lovingly termed
“The Madonna Whore Complex,” but women suffer from a corresponding malady. We all want a mate that’s
intelligent, loving, responsible, and who will raise our young with wisdom, but we also want that mate
to be wild and sexy, passionate, impetuous and even raunchy. We want a real life romantic comedy, but
fictional characters, no matter how real we try to make them, always seem immune to the inevitable breakdowns
that occur with the overflow of real life melodrama.
The people in this café may not be immune to life’s melodrama, but they’ve been through it and they
know what it means to have, to want, to ask for, and to receive. I believe that we all get what we ask
for in one way or another; the things that really matter, anyway. We all feel slighted by reality at
one time or another and our perception of justice as an ideal is correspondingly skewed. As much as I
enjoy the search for wisdom, the ultimate question to me is, “When is it wise to stop looking?” When
have we fought enough battles to feel like we’ve won? I still fight the good fights, but I’ve realized
that victories and defeats have equally acid aftertastes. Does life reside in the struggle itself? Maybe,
but peace lies somewhere else.
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