Wednesday, January, 13, 2016 // The Statement
6B

Personal Statement: On a Couch in Detroit

by Adam DePollo, Daily Arts Writer

A 

few weeks ago I was at a show in Detroit, sitting next 
to my friend David on a white leather couch in the de 
facto VIP section of a club/art gallery in Midtown. We 

were surrounded by about 30 artfully dressed rappers, paint-
ers, producers and filmmakers who were all passing around 
blunts and talking about their work. Someone was actively 
selling weed and possibly cocaine on the other couch about 
three feet away from us. There was 
a girl twerking in the corner while 
she waited in line for the bathroom. 
Everything in the room was illumi-
nated by a set of blue neon lights, and 
it felt like we were in either an arcade 
or the movie “Spring Breakers” — but 
the drug deal going on right next to us 
made it feel a lot more like the latter.

The image of James Franco fellat-

ing a pistol popped into my head, and 
I started laughing. Then I looked over 
at David, who I’ve known since my 
sophomore year at Detroit Country 
Day School — a very expensive pri-
vate school in Beverly Hills, Michigan 
that we both attended on scholarship. 
I thought about how we used to play 
“Super Smash Bros.” and talk about 
“Top Gear” in our homeroom dur-
ing lunch hour, between meetings 
with college prep advisors. I let loose 
a stupefied “bruh.” We both looked 
over at the drug deal for a moment, 
and then I asked the question that’s 
almost always gnawing at the back of 
my head when I find myself in a room 
full of musicians in Detroit: “What 
the fuck are we doing here?”

David, I found out, was asking 

himself the same question for many of 
the same reasons. When you’re grow-
ing up in a middle-class household in 
Southeast Michigan like we both did, 
you’re given a sort of default narrative 
arc for your life that, frankly, doesn’t 
include an episode with you sitting 
on a couch in Detroit across from 
a rapper named Ka$h ThA KuSh-
MaN. It goes more like: work hard 
in high school, do your extracurricu-
lars, get into a good college, figure 
out what you’re doing with your life, 
get a respectable job making more than your parents, marry, 
kids, retire, rinse and repeat for the next 15 generations. If you 
play the game right, you end up in a nice city like New York 
or Chicago with a comfortable apartment, good clothes and a 
well-fed 401k. If you had interrupted us mid-“Smash” back in 
high school and asked where we thought we’d be in six years, 
our answers probably would have been “Episode 3: Foot in the 
Door at Business Corp.”

But there we are, and there’s Ka$h. He’s not evaporating 

— in fact, he’s talking about the time he took 25 tabs of acid 
at once — which means one of two things: Either we really 
fucked up, or we found a way out of the Matrix.

On the one hand, like, shit, we’re on the damn VIP couch! 

I’m a journalist — I interviewed the guy that just said he took 
25 tabs of acid at once. David is a DJ — he has done shows on 
the same stage as the guy that just said he took 25 tabs of acid 

at once. There’s a concert going on in the next room over, and 
we both know the guy who’s performing — personally! This is 
the most well-dressed roomful of people I have ever seen and, 
for all I know, anybody in this room could conceivably become 
a world-famous artist one day. We’re also in this room. We’re 
cool goddammit!

On the other hand, what the fuck are we doing here?!? We 

should have jobs with benefits! We should have places to be at 
8 a.m. tomorrow! That guy just said he took 25 tabs of acid at 
once, is he insane?!? There’s a drug deal going on in this room, 
shouldn’t I be calling the cops?!? Weed is legal here?!? Don’t 
they know weed is a gateway drug? Does anyone in this build-
ing know CPR?

We sat there on the couch for a while longer, going back and 

forth about how absurd and incredible and confusing and just 
plain lucky it was for us to be where we were — this VIP couch 
that our parents probably never would have had the chance to 
sit on when they were our age, a couch that wasn’t even in this 
room until someone decided it was a good idea to open a club 
and art gallery in Detroit a few months before we sat on it, a 
couch right in the beating heart of an astonishingly vibrant 
underground art scene that’s still in its infancy.

The music was still thumping in the other room, but it got 

quiet where we were sitting as I stopped talking and started 
thinking about the realer side of “what the fuck are we doing 
here?” Maybe it’s OK to go bump around Detroit, sitting bewil-
dered on strange couches for a while in my twenties with no 
particular goal in mind.

At the same time, just sitting on a couch feels like a waste of 

space — I’d like to do something more to help the city and its 

culture, but do I have any right to think 
that I could or should help? I grew up 
in the suburbs fed on a steady diet of 
horror stories about urban blight and 
corrupt mayors and general post-apoc-
alyptic decay in Detroit. Before friends 
like David started inviting me to shows 
and really introducing me to the city, 
Detroit’s culture, for me, was limited 
to the Detroit Institute of Art, Eastern 
Market, Greektown, Tigers games and 
the occasional concert at Orchestra 
Hall — everything else in the city was 
just a foreboding network of wrecked 
houses and dark streets I was told to 
avoid driving around in at all costs. I’ve 
since learned that there are a whole lot 
of incredible artists living along those 
streets, and they’re immensely gener-
ous, community-minded, industrious 
and unbelievably talented. Things have 
been tough in Detroit for a long time, 
but the artists living and working there 
have built up a thriving culture through 
the struggle — they were doing fine 
before I started coming downtown to 
take new profile pictures, use up space 
on the couches and write articles about 
wondering what the fuck I’m doing 
there. Detroit was never my home, but 
maybe it will be one day. Yet would my 
presence there be adding something 
positive to the city and its culture, or 
just taking it out of the hands of the 
people who were there from the start?

Later that night David and I got off 

the couch and walked into the other 
room. My friend Martez was DJing 
a footwork set, dancing on a make-
shift stage in the middle of the room 
between song transitions. About half-
way through his set, a 40-something 
salt-and-pepper-haired 
white 
dude 

wearing three winter coats stepped up onto the stage and 
started waving his arms around as though he were doing tai 
chi. He alternated between undulating and rolling around on 
the ground for the next half hour, and nobody seemed to know 
what the fuck was going on (the way his eyes were bugging out 
of his head, I’m not sure he knew either). Nobody stopped him, 
but it kind of felt to me like I was watching the hostile takeover 
of a creative space. Martez kept DJing, and the guy kept doing 
his thing. Maybe it was performance art — just another weird 
art happening in Detroit, another addition to the surreal post-
modernist dreamscape that is the city’s arts scene.

Eventually a few people got on stage and started dancing 

with him. I looked around the room, wondering what every-
one else was thinking. I looked back toward the couch. My 
palms were sweating, and I didn’t know what to do with my 
hands.

ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM DEPOLLO

