predicted ninety-eight tomorrow.
More and more cars were displaying the special commemorative license plate observing the first hundred years of the automobile, an uninspiring rectangle with the background and characters reversed, blue on white. You had to get right up on the rear bumper to see the washed-out lines of a spindly horseless carriage stamped in the center. Henry Ford would have smelted down the entire run to make another Model T.
I fought homebound traffic all the way north to Birmingham. The ozone was blue with monoxide. I rolled up my window. Another century of that and we’ll all have snorkels growing out of the top of our heads.
Cassandra Photo operated out of the second floor of a yellow brick building with a formal-wear emporium at street level and wrought-iron curlicues to draw the admiring eye away from the bars on the windows. A hairstyling salon called Le Cut shared the strip on one side, with a gift shop selling fourteen-karat pencil cups and Waterford bedpans on the other. Grosse Pointe is old auto money, stacked and stored in ten-thousand-dollar bricks in climate-controlled vaults with the furs. Birmingham is platinum cards carried in quick-draw holsters. The credit came from downtown Detroit banks the cardholders hadn’t visited since Nixon.
I parked between a silver BMW and a red Corvette that came up to my knees and went in through an air-locked compartment containing the stairs to the second floor. The chill air inside reminded me I’d left my jacket in the car, but I merely rolled down my cuffs and buttoned them on the way up. Formality is the first casualty of summer.
You can tell a lot about a building by its stairs. There are stairs between green-painted plaster walls fretted with graffiti and paved with rubber speckled with cigarette burns like suppurating sores, lighted (when they are lighted at all) by dusty fifteen-watt bulbs that illuminate only themselves and the shrunken pupils of the human animals that live in their shadows; glossy black-painted iron stairs cast in lacy patterns, rising like smoke through the middle of clean bright rooms full of new merchandise around brass firemen’s poles with polished handrails; broad gilded sweeping stairs for the customers of expensively renovated theaters as opposed to narrow cramped Skoal-smelling stairs in the back for the help; creaky stairs layered six inches deep with the odors of meals cooked and consumed and forgotten by people who have passed beyond need of food; quiet cushioned stairs for discreet upholstered people who read the stock market and shipping reports and count their cholesterol; clean, pine-smelling stairs in new buildings full of their future; dirty shuddery garbage-stinking stairs in old buildings emptied by their past; stairs that serve as bathrooms; stairs that serve no purpose at all; cold echoing penitentiary stairs painted gray; crowded chattering schoolhouse stairs too trafficked to paint; stairs to go up but not down, stairs to go down but not up, stairs on the inside to take you to something, stairs on the outside to take you away from something else. They are the ferries of civilization on the cusp of the millennium, and more than any other part of the structures they inhabit they reflect the attitudes and life histories of the people who use them. Any reliable detectives’ handbook should include a chapter on stairs.
The one I was climbing was carpeted in maroon plush with an Oriental design and had a smooth oak handrail attached to a wall wainscoted in the old manner, although the building wasn’t fifteen years old; unlike their counterparts in Detroit, the Birmingham city fathers become nervous whenever a piece of construction approaches the age of consent. Every time I go there I see a building that wasn’t there the last time, although I never see one going up or its predecessor coming down. They do it at night with infrared glasses and pneumatic hammers wrapped in chinchilla to avoid disturbing
More and more cars were displaying the special commemorative license plate observing the first hundred years of the automobile, an uninspiring rectangle with the background and characters reversed, blue on white. You had to get right up on the rear bumper to see the washed-out lines of a spindly horseless carriage stamped in the center. Henry Ford would have smelted down the entire run to make another Model T.
I fought homebound traffic all the way north to Birmingham. The ozone was blue with monoxide. I rolled up my window. Another century of that and we’ll all have snorkels growing out of the top of our heads.
Cassandra Photo operated out of the second floor of a yellow brick building with a formal-wear emporium at street level and wrought-iron curlicues to draw the admiring eye away from the bars on the windows. A hairstyling salon called Le Cut shared the strip on one side, with a gift shop selling fourteen-karat pencil cups and Waterford bedpans on the other. Grosse Pointe is old auto money, stacked and stored in ten-thousand-dollar bricks in climate-controlled vaults with the furs. Birmingham is platinum cards carried in quick-draw holsters. The credit came from downtown Detroit banks the cardholders hadn’t visited since Nixon.
I parked between a silver BMW and a red Corvette that came up to my knees and went in through an air-locked compartment containing the stairs to the second floor. The chill air inside reminded me I’d left my jacket in the car, but I merely rolled down my cuffs and buttoned them on the way up. Formality is the first casualty of summer.
You can tell a lot about a building by its stairs. There are stairs between green-painted plaster walls fretted with graffiti and paved with rubber speckled with cigarette burns like suppurating sores, lighted (when they are lighted at all) by dusty fifteen-watt bulbs that illuminate only themselves and the shrunken pupils of the human animals that live in their shadows; glossy black-painted iron stairs cast in lacy patterns, rising like smoke through the middle of clean bright rooms full of new merchandise around brass firemen’s poles with polished handrails; broad gilded sweeping stairs for the customers of expensively renovated theaters as opposed to narrow cramped Skoal-smelling stairs in the back for the help; creaky stairs layered six inches deep with the odors of meals cooked and consumed and forgotten by people who have passed beyond need of food; quiet cushioned stairs for discreet upholstered people who read the stock market and shipping reports and count their cholesterol; clean, pine-smelling stairs in new buildings full of their future; dirty shuddery garbage-stinking stairs in old buildings emptied by their past; stairs that serve as bathrooms; stairs that serve no purpose at all; cold echoing penitentiary stairs painted gray; crowded chattering schoolhouse stairs too trafficked to paint; stairs to go up but not down, stairs to go down but not up, stairs on the inside to take you to something, stairs on the outside to take you away from something else. They are the ferries of civilization on the cusp of the millennium, and more than any other part of the structures they inhabit they reflect the attitudes and life histories of the people who use them. Any reliable detectives’ handbook should include a chapter on stairs.
The one I was climbing was carpeted in maroon plush with an Oriental design and had a smooth oak handrail attached to a wall wainscoted in the old manner, although the building wasn’t fifteen years old; unlike their counterparts in Detroit, the Birmingham city fathers become nervous whenever a piece of construction approaches the age of consent. Every time I go there I see a building that wasn’t there the last time, although I never see one going up or its predecessor coming down. They do it at night with infrared glasses and pneumatic hammers wrapped in chinchilla to avoid disturbing
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