The Best American Essays 2011 Part 6

While she and I were "together" I'd thought of myself like an astronaut going on one of those s.p.a.cewalks outside the s.p.a.ce shuttle. Below me I could see Earth, the glorious terrain. The place where true couples dwelled. And while I wasn't there, I could still view it. I knew what it looked like. And in time I'd make my way back into the shuttle; I'd hit the thrusters on my s.p.a.ceship and return to that good soil.

But when Margie and I stopped talking it was as if the craft had blown to bits. I had plenty of oxygen in my suit, but I was no longer tethered to anything.

And the shock waves of the blast didn't send me hurtling down to Earth.

Instead, they blew me backward.

Deeper into s.p.a.ce.

It's funny to have to relate all this first. Because I really want to tell you about my life after I lost weight. What s.e.x was like once I'd exercised and dieted myself down to 195 pounds. That's from the lifetime high of somewhere just north of 350. How did I manage the miracle? I bought a refurbished StairMaster and used it four days a week. And I joined Jenny Craig, the weight-loss system that used out-of-work celebrities in their ads. Ridiculous as it sounds, it worked.

To belabor the astronaut metaphor just a minute longer: I'd found my way back to Earth after having drifted through the lifeless void for two years. Victory parades were thrown in my honor. The president offered me heartfelt congratulations. (By which I mean my mother was incredibly proud of my change.) Here's our man, finally height and weight proportionate! Once again a member of the human race.

But in the time I'd been away-when I'd been inhuman, I guess-I'd journeyed well past phone s.e.x of any kind. Leapfrogged over message boards and heated Internet exchanges. I'd found another phone line where each side really did want to meet and make things happen.

I had s.e.x-lots of it-with women who were, essentially, just like me. By which I mean more than 350 pounds and crippled by self-loathing. We made our introductions on the phone line, essentially negotiating the details of our affections in advance. I want this and you want that; I won't do any of those things, but I will try these. As a result I'd show up at some woman's apartment for the first time and we'd be naked in about ten minutes. Engaging in the kind of s.e.xual fantasies that usually require six months of dating before anyone will even broach the subject. And then they probably still wait another six months before they trust each other enough actually to try it. We covered all that ground in a single night.

And I'll tell you what I learned during those two years: fat people are perverts.

By which I mean to say, loneliness perverts you.

I'm not talking about the s.e.x. Or not exclusively, anyway. My first date as a trimmer man scared me more than my very first fistfight. Part of the reason was that I didn't even realize we were on a date.

We met each other at a party in a bar. We shook hands and exchanged a few words and then mingled among other friends. Once or twice we sat in the same frame for some of those group photos people take as a party wears on. When she sat next to me at a table and smiled before I'd said anything, I had the notion that she might be flirting with me, but the phenomenon had been so rare these last few years that I didn't trust my lying eyes. I figured my intuition had probably shriveled up and died long ago. She wasn't flirting, she was just being friendly.

But then, a few hours into the party, she came up and asked if I liked her blouse. Her friend stood nearby, at the bar, a gla.s.s of beer in front of her mouth to try and hide the way she giggled at her friend's boldness. I was seated and she stood over me. She asked again if I liked her blouse, and this time she flipped the bottom of it up and showed me her stomach.

Now that was flirting. Impossible to ignore. Plus, I didn't want to ignore it. This woman was beautiful by any measure. When she flipped her shirt up I saw her skin and I realized how long it had been since I'd seen a belly without stretch marks. Five years? Ten? I'm including my own in that count.

Before I left I asked if she'd go to dinner with me, and when she said yes she actually went up on her tiptoes, like a kid.

I took her to a sushi restaurant and sat across from her, but after a few minutes it was clear her face showed none of the same enthusiasm as at the bar. I asked her questions about her job as a magazine editor, but she hardly answered in full sentences. I made jokes, each one worse than the last. Maybe it was just that she'd been drunk at the party. I couldn't think of an explanation for why she was acting so d.a.m.n uninterested now.

Then, during another moment of silence, I looked away from her and out of the window. There were no couples between us and the store's large front windows. I saw her reflection. She was as lovely as the other night, maybe more so. She wore a sheer sweater and a skirt that flattered her long legs.

And me?

I was still wearing my coat.

Not a jacket. My winter coat. We'd been inside for half an hour and I hadn't taken it off. No wonder she seemed distant, even dismayed; it looked like I couldn't wait to get away.

And it wasn't just the coat. I had so many layers on. A sweater and a b.u.t.ton-down shirt. And a T-shirt under them. It wouldn't have surprised me if I had thermal underwear layered down there as well. In other words, I was dressed like a fat person. We make the mistake of thinking those layers of clothing are serving to hide us.

A kind of protection. Instead they only serve to make us look even bigger. Or, in this case, to make me seem like an a.s.shole.

I wanted to explain everything to her. I'm going through a big transition. But I couldn't bring myself to tell her. No matter how I phrased it in my head, it always sounded like a bad pun, a sad joke. Finally, I slid my coat off, but the gesture must've seemed like pity. I popped mine off and she pulled on hers. We ate the rest of our meal quickly. I took her home on the F train, but when we reached her station she said I didn't have to walk her home.

All this changed after I dated the woman with the violent boyfriend. We became friends first. We worked in the same s.p.a.ce and at lunchtime we sometimes ate together and talked. We were attracted to each other, but did nothing about it for months. She continued to date the aforementioned bruiser and I was busy trying to live like a normal-sized man, meaning I stayed off the phone lines, I ate sensible meals, I exercised regularly, and I told no one that I'd ever been fat. The last seemed particularly important. If enough other people believed it, I hoped that I'd come to believe it too. If they treated me like a guy who'd never knocked out a dozen Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnuts in one sitting, then I'd forget I ever had. I needed the outside world to convince me because I still couldn't quite believe the transformation had been real.

So all of the fall of 1998, I'm flirting with this woman but keeping a respectful distance. Getting closer and then pulling away. And she was doing the same. This slow build felt exciting and frustrating. But each time I saw her again my feelings seemed even stronger. And that was a shock too. Feelings. Not to be too self-pitying (or self-aggrandizing), but I hadn't really cared about a woman outside my family since Margie and I hung up our phones in 1995.

Christmas 1998. A little bit of partying. A lot of alcohol. I remember the first time she put her arms around me, outside a bar. I held my breath as she clasped her hands around my waist; then she rested her head against my chest.

And finally the two of us are stumbling back to her building. We climb the stairs to her apartment. Open the front door, listen for her roommate, and when it seems we're alone we fall across her living room couch. I'm on my back and she's on top of me. She undoes my jeans and slides them down and lifts her skirt. She climbs back on top of me.

And as much as I'm enjoying myself, as I antic.i.p.ate the next step with three years' worth of pent-up glee, I'm also not really there. As soon as my pants slide down to my knees and my shirt rides up above my belly I feel myself wince, as if preparing for an explosion. And I realize I've been thinking of my clothes as if they were the casing around a live bomb.

Have you ever had out-of-body s.e.x? It's not the same as that tantric business. As soon as my skin touched open air my mind drifted away. I watched myself and this woman having some wonderfully energetic s.e.x. I even felt proud of the guy down there because he seemed so free. He was laughing and gripping her hips, but I was floating up by the ceiling. That body and the person inside it weren't connected to each other. While the body worked up a sweat, I remained cool on the outside, keeping watch; I felt sure that if this woman saw me at the wrong angle, or in the wrong light, her l.u.s.t would suddenly fold up and be packed away.

Then she reached down and touched my stomach; I'd lost a lot of weight but the skin there was a little loose, and there were faint stretch marks along the bottom that looked like dried-out riverbeds. She put her hand on my stomach and I sucked my belly in. Understand, I didn't even have that belly anymore, but that didn't make the belly any less real to me.

Her hand stayed there on my stomach and I waited to hear her say, "Stop." Or, "Get off me." Or a groan of disgust.

But instead she did the most perfect thing. For which I remain grateful.

She lifted her hand and then brought it back down hard. She smacked me.

But not out of revulsion; not to punish me.

She looked down at me and gritted her teeth.

"Harder." is the only thing she said.

Later that night the violent boyfriend showed up. We were in her bedroom by now, zonked out from s.e.x and bourbon, when the sound of the building's buzzer woke us up. In my tired mind it was the sound of a wasp, a swarm of wasps, and I woke up swatting at the air. Finally I realized someone was downstairs, in the lobby, trying to get in.

"It's him," she said quietly.

"How do you know it's not your roommate?"

"My roommate doesn't ring the bell. My roommate has the keys."

Now we both sat up and listened as the buzzing continued. I'd met the boyfriend before, when he'd visited her at work. Not intimidating. The guy reminded me of Jean-Paul Sartre, actually, owlish like that. After he'd left she'd told me about how violent he could get and I thought she was making a confession about her own abuse. But it wasn't like that. He'd never swung on her. Or even used a cross word. But she swore she'd watched him chop down guys the size of redwood trees. You can't always guess that kind of thing, just from looking.

I slid out of bed and said, "I'll go talk to him."

But she frowned. "You really don't want to do that."

I thought of her stories about him. I was much smaller than a redwood now.

I slid back next to her and we lay there as he continued zapping the buzzer. We wondered if her roommate would show up and let him in. Caught sleeping in bed with another man's woman: that's a sure-fire way to get your a.s.s snuffed. She fell asleep long before I did. I spent hours lying there, alert.

By dawn I still hadn't gone to sleep, but I had stopped worrying over the violent boyfriend long ago. I lifted my hand until it was bathed in the morning light coming through the thin curtains. I still couldn't believe what I saw. My new hand, slim enough to show the wrist bones; the knuckles no longer lost in flesh. But this hand hadn't replaced the old one; instead it was like this hand had grown around the fatter one somehow. Both were there, but only one could be seen.

What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?.

Charlie LeDuff.

FROM Mother Jones.

IT WAS JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT on the morning of May 16 and the neighbors say the streetlights were out on Lillibridge Street. It is like that all over Detroit, where whole blocks regularly go dark with no warning or any apparent pattern. Inside the lower unit of a duplex halfway down the gloomy street, Charles Jones, twenty-five, was pacing, unable to sleep.

His seven-year-old daughter, Aiyana Mo'nay Stanley-Jones, slept on the couch as her grandmother watched television. Outside, Television was watching them. A half-dozen masked officers of the Special Response Team-Detroit's version of SWAT-were at the door, guns drawn. In tow was an A&E crew filming an episode of The First 48, its true-crime program. The conceit of the show is that homicide detectives have forty-eight hours to crack a murder case before the trail goes cold. Thirty-four hours earlier, Je'Rean Blake n.o.bles, seventeen, had been shot outside a liquor store on nearby Mack Avenue; an informant had ID'ed a man named Chauncey Owens as the shooter and provided this address.

The SWAT team tried the steel door to the building. It was unlocked. They threw a flash-bang grenade through the window of the lower unit and kicked open its wooden door, which was also unlocked. The grenade landed so close to Aiyana that it burned her blanket. Officer Joseph Weekley, the lead commando-who'd been featured before on another A&E show, Detroit SWAT-burst into the house. His weapon fired a single shot, the bullet striking Aiyana in the head and exiting her neck. It all happened in a matter of seconds.

"They had time," a Detroit police detective told me. "You don't go into a home around midnight. People are drinking. People are awake. Me? I would have waited until the morning when the guy went to the liquor store to buy a quart of milk. That's how it's supposed to be done."

But the SWAT team didn't wait. Maybe because the cameras were rolling, maybe because a Detroit police officer had been murdered two weeks earlier while trying to apprehend a suspect. This was the first raid on a house since his death.

Police first floated the story that Aiyana's grandmother had grabbed Weekley's gun. Then, realizing that sounded implausible, they said she'd brushed the gun as she ran past the door. But the grandmother says she was lying on the far side of the couch, away from the door.

Compounding the tragedy is the fact that the police threw the grenade into the wrong apartment. The suspect fingered for Blake's murder, Chauncey Owens, lived in the upstairs flat, with Charles Jones's sister.

Plus, grenades are rarely used when rounding up suspects, even murder suspects. But it was dark. And TV may have needed some pyrotechnics.

"I'm worried they went Hollywood," said a high-ranking Detroit police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the investigation and simmering resentment in the streets. "It is not protocol. And I've got to say in all my years in the department, I've never used a flash-bang in a case like this."

The official went on to say that the SWAT team was not briefed about the presence of children in the house, although the neighborhood informant who led homicide detectives to the Lillibridge address told them that children lived there. There were even toys on the lawn.

"It was a total f.u.c.k-up," the official said. "A total, unfortunate f.u.c.k-up."

Owens, a habitual criminal, was arrested upstairs minutes after Aiyana's shooting and charged for the slaying of Je'Rean. His motive, authorities say, was that the teen failed to pay him the proper respect. Jones too later became a person of interest in Je'Rean's murder-he allegedly went along for the ride-but Jones denies it, and he's lawyered up and moved to the suburbs.

As Officer Weekley wept on the sidewalk, Aiyana was rushed to the trauma table, where she was p.r.o.nounced dead. Her body was transferred to the Wayne County morgue.

Dr. Carl Schmidt is the chief medical examiner there. There are at least fifty corpses on hold in his morgue cooler, some unidentified, others whose next of kin are too poor to bury them. So Dr. Schmidt keeps them on layaway, zipped up in body bags as family members wait for a ship to come in that never seems to arrive.

The day I visited, a Hollywood starlet was tailing the doctor, studying for her role as the medical examiner in ABC's new Detroit-based murder drama Detroit 1-8-7. The t.i.tle is derived from the California penal code for murder: 187. In Michigan, the designation for homicide is actually 750.316, but that's just a mouthful of detail.

"You might say that the homicide of Aiyana is the natural conclusion to the disease from which she suffered," Schmidt told me.

"What disease was that?" I asked.

"The psychopathology of growing up in Detroit," he said. "Some people are doomed from birth because their environment is so toxic."

Was it so simple? Was it inevitable, as the doctor said, that abject poverty would lead to Aiyana's death and so many others? Was it death by TV? By police incompetence? By parental neglect? By civic malfeasance? About 350 people are murdered each year in Detroit. There are some 10,000 unsolved homicides dating back to 1960. Many are as f.u.c.ked up and sad as Aiyana's. But I felt unraveling this one death could help diagnose what has gone wrong in this city, so I decided to retrace the events leading up to that pitiable moment on the porch on Lillibridge Street.

People my mother's age like to tell me about Detroit's good old days of soda fountains and shopping markets and lazy Sat.u.r.day night drives. But the fact is Detroit and its suburbs were dying forty years ago. The whole country knew it, and the whole country laughed. A bunch of lazy, uneducated blue-collar incompetents. The Rust Belt. Forget about it.

When I was a teenager, my mother owned a struggling little flower shop on the East Side, not far from where Aiyana was killed. On a hot afternoon around one Mother's Day, I was working in the back greenhouse. It was a sweatbox, and I went across the street to the liquor store for a soda pop. A small crowd of agitated black people was gathered on the sidewalk. The store bell jingled its little requiem as I pulled the door open.

Inside, splayed on the floor underneath the rack of snack cakes near the register, was a black man in a pool of blood. The blood was congealing into a pancake on the dirty linoleum. His eyes and mouth were open and held that milky expression of a drunk who has fallen asleep with his eyes open. The red halo around his skull gave the scene a feeling of serenity.

An Arab family owned the store, and one of the men-the one with the pocked face and loud voice-was talking on the telephone, but I remember no sounds. His brother stood over the dead man, a pistol in his hand, keeping an eye on the door in case someone walked in wanting to settle things.

"You should go," he said to me, shattering the silence with a wave of his hand. "Forget what you saw, little man. Go." He wore a gold bracelet as thick as a gymnasium rope. I lingered a moment, backing out while taking it in: the bracelet, the liquor, the blood, the gun, the Ho Hos, the cheapness of it all.

The flower shop is just a pile of bricks now, but despite what the Arab told me, I did not forget what I saw. Whenever I see a person who died of violence or misadventure, I think about the dead man with the open eyes on the dirty floor of the liquor store. I've seen him in the faces of soldiers when I was covering the Iraq war. I saw him in the face of my sister, who died a violent death in a filthy section of Detroit a decade ago. I saw him in the face of my sister's daughter, who died from a heroin overdose in a suburban bas.e.m.e.nt near the interstate, weeks after I moved back to Michigan with my wife to raise our daughter and take a job with the Detroit News.

No one cared much about Detroit or its industrial suburbs until the Dow collapsed, the chief executives of the Big Three went to Washington to grovel, and General Motors declared bankruptcy-one hundred years after its founding. Suddenly Detroit was historic, symbolic-hip, even. I began to get calls from reporters around the world wondering what Detroit was like, what was happening here. They were wondering if the Rust Belt cancer had metastasized and was creeping to Los Angeles and London and Barcelona. Was Detroit an outlier or an epicenter?

Je'rean Blake n.o.bles was one of the rare black males in Detroit who made it through high school. A good kid with average grades, Je'Rean went to Southeastern High, which is situated in an industrial belt of moldering Chrysler a.s.sembly plants. Completed in 1917, the school, attended by white students at the time, was considered so far out in the wilds that its athletic teams took the nickname Jungaleers.

With large swaths of the city rewilding-empty lots are returning to prairie and woodland as the city depopulates-Southeastern was slated to absorb students from nearby Kettering High this year as part of a ma.s.sive school-consolidation effort. That is, until someone realized that the schools are controlled by rival gangs. So bad is the rivalry that when the schools face off to play football or basketball, spectators from the visiting team are banned.

Southeastern's motto is Age Quod Agis: "Attend to Your Business." And Je'Rean did. By wit and will, he managed to make it through. A member of JROTC, he was on his way to the military recruitment office after senior prom and commencement. But Je'Rean never went to prom, much less the Afghanistan theater, because he couldn't clear the killing fields of Detroit. He became a horrifying statistic-one of 103 kids and teens murdered between January 2009 and July 2010.

Je'Rean's crime? He looked at Chauncey Owens the wrong way, detectives say.

It was 2:40 in the afternoon on May 14 when Je'Rean went to the Motor City liquor store and ice cream stand to get himself an orange juice to wash down his McDonald's. About forty kids were milling around in front of the soft-serve window. That's when Owens, thirty-four, pulled up on a moped.

Je'Rean might have thought it was funny to see a grown man driving a moped. He might have smirked. But according to a witness, he said nothing.

"Why you looking at me?" said Owens, getting off the moped. "Do you got a problem or something? What the f.u.c.k you looking at?"

A slender, pimply-faced kid, Je'Rean was not an intimidating figure. One witness had him pegged for thirteen years old.

Je'Rean balled up his tiny fist. "What?" he croaked.

"Oh, stay your a.s.s right here," Owens growled. "I got something for you."

Owens sped two blocks back to Lillibridge and gathered up a posse, according to his statement to the police. The posse allegedly included Aiyana's father, Charles "C.J." Jones.

"It's some lil n.i.g.g.as at the store talking s.h.i.t-let's go whip they a.s.s," Detective Theopolis Williams later testified that Owens told him during his interrogation.

Owens switched his moped for a Chevy Blazer. Jones and two other men, known as Lil' James and Dirt, rode along for Je'Rean's a.s.s-whipping. Lil' James brought along a .357 Magnum-at the behest of Jones, Detective Williams testified, because Jones was afraid someone would try to steal his "diamond Cartier gla.s.ses."

Je'Rean knew badness was on its way and called his mother to come pick him up. She arrived too late. Owens got there first and shot Je'Rean clear through the chest with Lil' James's gun. Clutching his juice in one hand and two dollars in the other, Je'Rean staggered across Mack Avenue and collapsed in the street. A minute later, a friend took the two dollars as a keepsake. A few minutes after that, Je'Rean's mother, Lyvonne Cargill, arrived and got behind the wheel of the car that friends had dragged him into.

Why would anyone move a gunshot victim, much less toss him in a car? It is a matter of conditioning, Cargill later told me. In Detroit, the official response time of an ambulance to a 911 call is twelve minutes. Paramedics say it is routinely much longer. Sometimes they come in a Crown Victoria with only a defibrillator and a blanket, because there are no other units available. The hospital was six miles away. Je'Rean's mother drove as he gurgled in the backseat.

"My baby, my baby, my baby. G.o.d, don't take my baby."

They made it to the trauma ward, where Je'Rean was p.r.o.nounced dead. His body was transferred to Dr. Schmidt and the Wayne County morgue.

The raid on the Lillibridge house that took little Aiyana's life came two weeks and at least a dozen homicides after the last time police stormed into a Detroit home. That house too is on the city's East Side, a nondescript brick duplex with a crumbling garage whose driveway funnels into busy Schoenherr Road.

Responding to a breaking-and-entering and shots-fired call at 3:30 A.M., Officer Brian Huff, a twelve-year veteran, walked into that dark house. Behind him stood two rookies. His partner took the rear entrance. Huff and his partner were not actually called to the scene; they'd taken it upon themselves to a.s.sist the younger cops, according to the police version of events. Another cruiser with two officers responded as well.

Huff entered with his gun still holstered. Behind the door was Jason Gibson, twenty-five, a violent man with a hist ory of gun crimes, a.s.saults on police, and repeated failures to honor probationary sentences.

Gibson is a tall, thick-necked man who, like the character Omar from The Wire, made his living robbing dope houses. Which is what he was doing at this house, authorities contend, when he put three bullets in Officer Huff's face.