You Don't Have to Live Like This Read Online Free PDF Page A

There was some kind of trailer park across the road, some weird metal canisters, a strip of snowy dirt for cars to turn around in. I mean, real fucking nowhere. Two high school girls were finishing lunch at the next table, dropouts maybe or seniors on a lunch break. A fat one and a pretty one, both eating fries; their chicken wrappings were smeared with ketchup. The thin paper kept moving under their fingers as they pushed the fries around. One of them, the pretty girl (she had a small cute acned face, and a nose ring, and straight dyed-black hair), had to lick her knuckles clean.
    The fat one said, “Good to the last drop.”
    For some reason I felt jealous. They weren’t talking much but seemed comfortable together. I missed the friendship of girls, not just in a sexual way, though that, too.
    Robert had told me I could stay with him for a few weeks. Longer if necessary. He was renting a mansion in Indian Village, which he planned to use as a base of operations. They had a full house but could always put a mattress somewhere. We spoke on the phone the night before I set off.
    “It’s good times,” he said.
    This is part of what I liked about him. In his company, I felt close to the center of the action, whereas personality-wise, I’m a periphery guy. My mother sometimes warned me, You live too much in your head . But where else are you supposed to live when you’re in the car.
    A HALF HOUR LATER, I stopped by the side of the road to pick up a hitchhiker. This girl, who looked about twenty years old, wasstanding by the access ramp, holding up a piece of cardboard box with detroit scribbled across it in fat felt-tip. She had messy blond hair and a white face and looked cold. Her nose was reddening in the wind, and she wore cowboy boots and a faded denim jacket.
    As soon as I pulled onto the hard shoulder, her boyfriend came out of the trees and joined her with the bags. They were both German, hitching their way from New York, Astrid and Ernst—or Ernest , she said, in her jokey-sounding English-and-American accent. She had the slightly scornful look of pretty girls but turned out to be light-headed and much too chatty for a three-hour drive. I was annoyed with her from the beginning, because of the boy. Ernst sat in the back with his earphones on the whole way. Probably he was grateful for the break. Astrid needed a lot of responding to.
    She sat in the passenger seat, peeling an orange and sometimes offering me a piece. The scent of the orange soon filled the car. When she was finished with that, she took a ball of yarn from her backpack and began to knit.
    All the artists she knew were moving to Detroit—it was the new Berlin, she said. Hip and cheap. New York was dead already, expensive and dead. The only interesting thing you can see in New York is what money does to cities. And so on.
    She asked me why I was going to Detroit and I tried to explain myself. That a friend of mine from college, who had made a lot of money, was buying up run-down neighborhoods and renting out the houses to people who had the skills or energy to bring the neighborhoods back to life.
    “Artists?” she said at once.
    “Not just artists.”
    But she took out a pen and wrote my email address on the back of her hand. For an hour she fell asleep, but when she woke again, on the outskirts of the city, she fished out a camera from her bag.
    “Do you mind if I roll down the window?” she asked and leaned out of it, against the wind.
    “Where are the cars?” I said. “Where is everybody?”
    “Slow down. I want to take pictures.”
    There’s a kind of momentum to driving on the freeway. After a while, it’s hard to come off, everything passes too quickly—the grassy verge, the trees growing up from the streets below, the exit signs and apartment blocks and office blocks and stadiums. But roads are mostly what we saw, around and below and above. I kept driving over the shadows of bridges and said out loud, the way you do for