The Great American Reach Around - The Midwest & France

Gary, Indiana

I am going to go ahead and get this out of the way at the very beginning: Gary has the highest percentage of black people of any city in the United States. Over 84% of the population of around 100,000 is African American. Someone who knows this statistic and hears people saying how terrible Gary is might be under the mistaken impression that hatred of Gary is racially motivated. It is emphatically not. It isn't the people in Gary that are horrible, it's the city itself. It's so decrepit and such a stinking industrial wasteland that you actually feel endangered by the buildings.

According to Wikipedia there were about 103,000 people living in Gary in the year 2000 and by 2005 that number had fallen to just 99,000. I'm sure Wikipedia gives all sorts of lame reasons why that happened, like white flight and unemployment rates, but the truth is simple: Gary killed those people. The motto of Gary is "City in Motion", but apparently about 4,000 of its residents just couldn't move fast enough.

Maybe they were walking at night to get a pack of cigarettes and a miasma of purple gas came out of a vent and then they were just gone. Maybe they stumbled and rolled down into a ditch and landed in a seep of bubbling liquid that stripped them down to skeletons in seconds. Maybe they were on their way to work one morning and there was a hiss and a burst of superheated gas and the asphalt just opened up and swallowed them.

The first thing you will notice about Gary is that it stinks. This is the rotten stench of dead steel mills, the sulfurous stink of paper mills and the ammonia tang of some sort of industrial piss works. A genocide investigator from Bosnia used to unearthing mass graves will cover his nose with his shirt when he gets near Gary. This is the decaying stink of an industrial city in its last throes. Residents of Flint, Michigan might know the aroma.

If you want an anecdote of how cosmically fucked up Gary is then you need look no further than any given week's newspaper. There is always a story of something strange and unnatural happening there. This week it's the latest in a string of alligator sightings in trailer parks in Gary. The latest gator was a four-footer caught live and scampering around the trailer park, the last gator was not so lucky. It was spotted in winter and by the time it was located by animal control it was frozen solid.

You could theorize about some crazed herpetologist releasing gators into trailer parks in Gary every few months, but it's so much more likely that there are simply alligators emerging from derelict factories there.

If you've ever been to suburban America you know that it's a glossy string of fast food chain restaurants and strip mall shopping. Gary has a few forlorn burger joints, but most of the city is more likely to have a cigarette store where you feed dollar bills through a slot in bulletproof glass and the guy behind the counter hands you a pack of Camels using an armored Lazy Susan. The last time I stopped at a convenience store in Gary there was an elderly guy with no shirt on laughing and picking scabs off his face in the parking lot. This was at night in January.

Gary's only claim to fame is that it's the only city in America with a casket store and nail salon combo. You want to get a nice casket in Gary, because if you've lived there for more than a few years it's going to be a closed casket. That's if you're lucky and the city left enough of your loved one to actually bury.

Get out while you still can!