Elepent

The Leland City Club is the first club I ever went to, and quickly went on to become the nighttime place that I unashamedly call home.  City Club’s not like any place else, for better or worse.

The club is ancient (it’s been open since the 1980s), and single-purpose.  It exists at the whim of the Leland Hotel’s owner, which means both that it does not particularly need to make money, and that it can be only one thing.  City Club is only open Fridays and Saturdays (and occasional holidays), and only as a goth-industrial club, unlike most other nightclubs which rotate through different-themed nights during the week.  As a result, the place has a comfortably shitty, lived-in feel to it.  There’s a good chance that it’s haunted, and the condition of the building mirrors the decay of Detroit in spite of recent minor renovations.  And in a way, that’s part of its charm.  If the speakers didn’t occasionally short out, if the heat worked on twenty-degree December days, it somehow wouldn’t be quite the same place.  More than one regular calls it “Shitty Club,” but they still keep showing up, generation after generation of punk, goth, rivethead, cyber, electro, lolita and emo kids.  Gay, straight and anywhere in between are present and welcome.

City Club’s big.  Here’s the nickel tour:  you enter through an unmarked door in the back of the building, climb a set of dilapidated stairs (note that there are no railings on them any more, something that you’ll want to keep cognizant of if you plan to be leaving intoxicated) and push your way through a set of carwash-style plastic flaps.

At the door, you’re frisked, mostly for drugs and weapons.  It’s Detroit, after all, and there are crazy people out there.  It may seem a little bit invasive (you won’t be allowed to bring in a camera, a weapon or wear dangerous-looking spikes) but the result is that the club is safe on the inside, and that’s what counts.  Immediately in front of you is a frequently-changing open area that’s one of City Club’s four primary socialization spaces.  On our last visit, it had been set up with a pair of opposed couches on one side, and an L-shaped homemade chaise lounge/futon that I call the “pillow ship” on the other.  Furniture at City Club has a relatively short shelf life, leading to frequent replacements and redecoration.  To the left as you come in are the vending machines (cigarettes and candy) and coat check.

Proceed forward and you’re between the bar and the bathrooms.   This narrow space is, much to the frustration of the security staff, the second major socialization area.  The wall across from the bar has a mural on it, and it’s perfect for leaning up against and chatting.  Anita and Marvin, the current bartenders extraordinaire, are on hand behind the glass-block counter to take drink orders.  Décor in this section of the club is also mutable; most recently there are plastic skeletons and military camouflage netting hanging from the ceiling, which lacks a drop ceiling so the HVAC ducts and wiring are all visible.  At the far end of the bar, you’ll often see local scene fixtures like the Latex Twins or luminaries from the Detroit Gothic Network (DGN) hanging out.  In the summer, this is partly because there’s a small air conditioner at that end of the bar, or at least that’s where it used to be.  In the winter, City Club is cold inside, and that’s just how it is.  Recent repairs have improved the heating situation, but it’s still going to be cold.

City Club’s bathrooms are just like most club bathrooms, except with a tendency to malfunction.  At least once every two months the water stops working in one restroom or the other, or in both.  At least once a year, some angry drunk will rip out one of the sinks, toilets or bathroom stalls in the men’s room (the urinals have never been molested; apparently they’re tougher than the other fixtures).

Continuing past the bar, you’re in the third socialization area, consisting of tables and benches on both sides.  It’s dimly lit, with the only illumination usually provided by candles on the tables and a ceiling-mounted television that is as likely to be playing a bootlegged new release as it is hentai, and it’s just quiet enough to hold a conversation if you raise your voice.  City Club’s not overtly spooky, but the building’s general mien of decay and the abundance of dark corners create an atmosphere that suits the mood of the average spooky kid quite nicely.

Did I mention that this space will be choked with smoke in a variety of flavors?  Detroit’s goth scene is populated heavily with chain smokers.  Guests with tender lungs should be aware; in spite of its size, City Club’s a secondhand smoke farm.

By this time you’ll be able to hear the dance floor, which is around a couple of corners yet.  The dance floor is straight ahead, but the entryways are staggered so you have to turn left and then right.  The small hallway that this layout creates is where the DJ booth is (you’ll approach it from the back side) and is the club’s fourth socialization space.  It’s loud, but folks hold shouted conversations here nonetheless.  Many of the long-time regulars hang out in this area, as it’s one of the brightest spaces of the club, and the high traffic makes for good people-watching.  City Club’s elite will be able to tell you where Coffey’s Corner and Chad’s Chair are, and where Mark often puts his incense.

Finally, you reach the dance floor, the fifth and final circle of City Club.  Housed in what was once a ballroom popular with Detroit mobsters, City Club’s dance floor is cavernous compared to that of the average club.  The murals on the walls change about once a year, on average.  The most recent repaint hasn’t been particularly popular, though the blacklights and bench seating along the walls are much appreciated.  Massive speakers mounted at each corner of the room are far from cutting-edge, but what they lack in quality sound they make up for in quantity.  The dance floor itself is tile, and the regulars know how infrequently and indifferently it gets cleaned, which is why we wince when an enthusiastic break-dancer puts his hands or head on it.  At the far end of the dance floor, a raised stage provides another seating area.  Sometimes it’s used as a VIP area for special events, but most nights anyone can hang out up there.  It provides a decent view of the dance floor, as well as yet another dark corner, but if you try to have sex up there they’ll kick you out.

It’s hard to describe what’s special about City Club’s dance floor, because it’s not exactly tangible.  Objectively, the club is a shithole.  But from an emotional standpoint, once you swim past the human drama that’s smeared all over any club, City Club’s got a feeling of being more than just a place.  It’s the difference between a building being a house and being a home, and whatever that X-factor is, City Club has it.  Regulars, newbies and tourists alike seem to recognize this once they hit the dance floor.  The masterful thing about this club is that nobody cares.  City Club’s just not that judgmental, as a whole.  You can be gothed to the nines, or just wearing a polo shirt and jeans, and once you get out to the dance floor it’s clear that whatever your thing is (unless you want to slam-dance), you can just go for it.  Can’t dance?   Doesn’t matter.  Nobody’s watching anyway; they’re paying attention to whoever’s in the mood to show off.

City Club’s playlist consists of a steady diet of industrial, synthpop and danceable goth, with a sprinkling of powernoise and electro.  To put that in plain English, this means that you can expect to hear VNV Nation, Assemblage 23, Combichrist, Rotersand, Switchblade Symphony, Snake River Conspiracy, Apoptygma Berzerk, NIN, Stromkern, Covenant and KMFDM almost nightly.  The local juggalos keep trying to get the Insane Clown Posse into the mix, but are unlikely to succeed, and this is a good thing.

Our route from Montgomery westward to Dallas took us straight through Vicksburg, MS, so we decided to stop in and visit H, one of my oldest Internet friends.  There was never a finer picture of Southern hospitality, as we arrived late to find a fantastic dinner of catfish and chicken and a puffy homemade “dutch baby” dessert waiting for us.  We spent the night in the parking lot of the Ameristar casino (casinos are also handy places for free one-night overnight parking, when they’re available) and then the next day we got lunch and a quick tour of the coolest parts of Vicksburg from H.  Lunch was had at the family-owned Main Street Market Café, which specializes in amazing sandwiches.

Vicksburg is a smallish town, and not a big tourist destination in spite of its historical significance.  Still, it’s worth a day’s stop.  There’s a pleasant historical drive, and this town is a big fan of statues, as busts of Civil War luminaries line the route.  H showed us Vicksburg’s downtown, a handsome historic-district sort of place.  You thought I was going to call it “quaint,” didn’t you?  No, Vicksburg is too big to be quaint, though it’s also too small to make it into the average tourist brochure.  Even the Lonely Planet guide’s intro was reasonably short, and omitted the 140-plus year-old Thomas Furniture Building, which collapsed into the street in 2006 and then sat there for two years, bricks spilling across the sidewalk, because the city and the owner got into a pissing match over the historic building’s fate and who should pay for its reconstruction and restoration.  The mess has been cleaned up off of the sidewalk, but the historic building’s fate is still in limbo.  Downtown’s also got a historical mural that stretches for two or three blocks along the riverfront, illustrating the history of the town, and of course the Ameristar riverboat casino, which was used in the Coen brothers’ remake of The Ladykillers.

Thanks to the unseasonably warm weather in V’burg (a warm front that was apparently blowing ahead of an ice storm from the west!), we were able to take a quick (properly chaperoned) drive through the grounds of the US Army COE Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC).  If you know where to look and have someone who’s got the clearance to take you, the ERDC has a display of prototype and unique military vehicles that, while not particularly well-tended, does show off the amazing variety of interpretations of “all-terrain vehicle.”  From screw-drive swamp buggies to trinary-drive wheels and, of course, a tank (which was amusingly labeled thusly:  “TANK.” Unfortunately, the pictures of the tank didn’t come out, so you get a self-propelled gun), this little parking lot is a gearhead’s playground…if you can find it.  The poor dears are weather-beaten and sinking into the ground; a few of them have trees growing through ‘em.  Cool, but kind of sad-making.

We would’ve liked to stay in Vicksburg a bit longer, but appointments in Dallas called; a round of upgrades to the moho needed to be done, and parts were waiting at the shop.  So, we bid Mississippi a regretful farewell, but we plan to return.

We never needed a standard dinette table in our RV.  When we do “sit-down” meals, the slide-in dinette casts a Denny’s sort of ambience that seems to ruin the whole affair.  The Incorrigible’s dinette-free layout offers an alternative for sit-down meals in the form of a fancy transforming coffee table.  Most of the time, it’s a handy low table in front of the couch, perfect for holding fruit bowls, candles and books with arty photographs of silver-age movie monsters.  Give it a tug, however, and it raises up to dinner-table height.  Fold out the leaves, and it’s a full-size dinner table, perfect for a meal for two on the Incorrigible’s L-shaped couch.  If we ever have to entertain, we can bring a couple of folding chairs inside and voila!  Instant family dinner.

Unfortunately, cool transforming coffee tables don’t work so well for work purposes.  We needed a place to park our laptops, printer and other office supplies when we’re stationary.  The space between the front seats, over the engine hump, made perfect sense, and we searched for a table that would fit between them.

Of course, that space presents a number of problems:  first, it’s narrow enough that even the average card table won’t fit.  Second, the floor isn’t level.  And third, any furniture that goes there must be easily removed and stored for travel.   This ruled out finding a cheap table and simply cutting the legs to fit, because I had no interest in wrestling with a table once a month or more.

We found the solution in the garbage.  Literally; one day as we drove through the neighborhood, we spotted a round dinner table top on someone’s trash pile.  It looked promising, and upon investigation, was found to have removable leaves.  When we took it home, removed the leaves (creating a lozenge-shaped table with flat side and rounded ends) and found that it was almost exactly the right width and length, we knew we’d found the Incorrigible’s desk.  Scrap wood was measured and cut into legs; short ones for the front, that stand on top of the engine hump, and a single, wider and longer foot that reaches the coach floor at the other end.  All of the legs are hinged as well, so that they can fold flat against the bottom of the table for stowage.  This means that our computer “desk” can lay on the sofa or even be slid into the under-storage when we’re in motion.  When it’s set up, the driver and navigator’s chairs rotate to face each other and we’ve got a  perfect mutual workspace.  Attaching a magazine file to the wide leg provides space to capture some of the important bits of paper that are constantly floating around any office, and there’s ample room for both computers, an IN box, and the ubiquitous mug full of pens and pencils. Because really, it’s just not an office without a mug full of pens and pencils.

Lexie got seriously clever once the table was done, too.  She took the leaves and attached them to each other (the result is a small, elliptical shelf that looks like a pair of cartoon lips) with a felted bottom that sits on the Incorrigible’s peaked dash, and is perfectly sized to hold our printer.  Our multi-tiered office transforms the wasted (when not on the road) space of the RV’s driving compartment and turns it into the place where much of our business gets done.  Both table and shelf were painted black, and then we brushed the folding coffee table to match as well.