The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit

The World of Things

46 In space things touch. In time things part. E. M. Forster my house is filled with objects taken from my parents’ house and other parents’ houses, perhaps yours. I have a particular taste for the items of the early sixties, that era when my parents were in their prime: good white middle-class folks living in a good white middle-class Detroit neighborhood. The objects they possessed are what obsess me now—things Danish Modern and Limed Oak, things Lucite and mosaic , things flecked and swirled with ovoid Jet Age patterns, things ludicrously self-serious with their commitment to the well-living of the American dream. Of course, the American dream changed in Detroit after the ’67 riots. Lots of those good white middle-class folks headed north of 8 Mile Road afterward and just kept on going into the suburbs and beyond. Mine didn’t. Yet I’m not that different from the other riot babies born that year, a bit daffier perhaps, a bit more forward in my obsession. We are the ones who still watch the old television shows on cable, that crave our“comfort foods,”that buy the resurrected Mustangs, Chargers, and GTOs that the Big Three is currently retrofitting for us. Yet those same folks come over to my house and smile bethe world of things 47 The World of Things musedly at my “collection.” But I don’t collect these things, I simply like them. I read somewhere that we are all secretly enamored of the decade in which we are born. That is certainly the case with me. In the late eighties, I picked up a few items at a thrift shop to fill my bachelor ’s apartment: boomerang Formica kitchen table, tubular chrome kitchen chairs, a cowboy couch with wagon-wheel arms and six-guns embroidered into the cushions. I can’t say what attracted me to them. After that, I happened upon a few other items—mosaic cityscapes, blond end tables, a streamlined Toastmaster. Before long I was scouring garage sales, thrift stores, and estate sales (not to mention mom and dad’s living room) for the detritus of my elders’ glory days—bilevel coffee tables, tiki mugs, Russel Wright dinnerware, letter holders that looked like dachshunds, wild geometric-patterned drapes, hi-fi albums with music that percolated between speakers, coat racks that resembled atomic molecules. I wanted to live in a “Rumpus Room.” I got a job in advertising as an art director and in the Creative Department , discovered other people who shared my tastes. Each grateful for the other’s peculiarity, we huddled in offices sharing information about estate sales, devouring books of fifties and sixties design as if it were samizdat. We loved it all—automobiles, diners, lamps, matchbook covers, furniture, corporate logos. We laughed knowingly at the amoeba fabrics, Harley Earl’s bosomy automotive appendages, the super-saturated color photographs of aproned suburban Dads in their backyards wielding freshly grilled wieners. Yet I also believe there was a genuine affection for what we saw, even while recognizing our own twisted longings for some romanticized, sanitized America that never existed, and that we would have hated had we been forced to live there as adults. Still, I decided that I never wanted to live in a home furnished with regular things—beige plaid couches, entertainment centers, wall-to-wall carpeting, and such. I had friends from my college years who 48 The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit lived in those kinds of Scotchgarded, childproof, generic homes. Over time, I lost touch with all of them. I met Grazyna at one of the agencies I worked at, and though her interest in old things never matched mine, being near someone like me intensified her appreciation. We married and as soon as we could, we bought a house and I filled it with these foolish things, the things our parents embraced, then outgrew, then expunged. But not my mother, who continued to live in that good middle-class neighborhood even after it became a neighborhood of crack houses—main streets lined with the faded exoskeletons of burned-out mom-and-pop stores and boarded-up car dealerships with weeds growing between the concrete slabs where bright Chryslers once stood. This is where she and my father lived for thirty-seven years, where my mother lived the last eight years of her life before she died two weeks...