DIARY
In the muggy cover of July ’99, friends and I breached the cargo doors of that abandoned hospital and found that a maze of underground tunnels linked all the buildings together. We found murals, stacks of computers and magazines, dirty and clean linen. In the basements, everything had the stale, dry smell of decay, and upstairs, the whole world was quiet. We’d crawl about the ‘L-shaped’ outer buildings and up the core of the cross-shaped main hospital. On the roof, we had one of the most spectacular views of the city… Longway shivered in the distance through the head, aquamarine cool, and wet reflecting the glow of the nearby fountain, and a mile away, the Towers, the Mott building, the weather ball, and Hurley and frowned back at us. The sun set. On our last trip, we held hands and called out and the silence that gripped us afterward brought about the most terrifying moment of my whole life. This final trip happened in early September, when I was staying with the Crawfords, and many of that summer’s illusions had simply given up.
In the chilly spring of ’96, friends and I acted in Flint Youth Theatre’s original production the 7th Dream. Kids that spit on the stage and swore at us became suddenly silent when one of the actors was shot and died and stood up to be shot and killed again. This repeated six times. To the audience, the rest of the show was a farce. They were all 9th graders from Northwestern High School. At the time I was dating a girl, and we went to an afterschool luncheon at Donovon Mayotte. It was pouring outside. And it was warm. The ground was so green and the sky to gray, and everything so wet that my feet semed almost to bleed brown and green. Two months later, the 7th Dream had wrapped up and I’d broken up with that girl, and the weather had finally turned around. I went for a 4 AM walk with my best friend, again in the rain, and from that moment on I was a convert.
During the summer of ’98, the same friend and I spent a week together. We slept on the porch of a friend’s house… it was hot out, but dry, and comfortable, and there were crickets chirping, and the sound of bass thudding two blocks out. Within a few days we’d seen the Smashing Pumpkins live (for the second time) at the State Theater in Detroit. Within a few days, we went for awalk down to Ballenger and rode the swings in the dark at the Unitarian Church. I was always convinced that if the creatures from the White Wolf games were real, that would be where they lived.