I wake up on a paint-spattered mattress on the floor, nose to nose with an inquisitive cat. The light through the windows shows the cool charcoal of almost dawn. The windows have no screens. The house is a mess. A real work-in-progress. Freshly demo'd, freshly painted, freshly reborning. Detroit.

The cat sneezes. I sit up and look around. The house's owner is still asleep on the sagging mattress. Her back rises and falls with her breath.

Paint cans and haphazard lumber lurk in every corner. Overturned buckets trap ideas from scurrying away. Tangles of chicken wire litter the floor like some rooster's nightmare. This is the revival. Attended by naked studs and vague plans sketched in pencil.

Over that way somewhere the RenCen rises glittering with the sun. If its flanks are a bit battered and its facade a little scarred—that's just testament to what it can withstand. I know this because Detroit is in my bones. There's a street named for my fur trapper ancestors. Beaubien.

I grew up digesting Detroit with my vitamins. Pontiac and Lafayette, Cadillac, Ford, Berry Gordy. From Joe Louis to Kwame Kilpatrick. I grew up here but I know the cold truth is I'm an outsider looking in. A refugee in my own homeland. A nomad, permanent observer. Could I fit in here? I shudder. What if I fit in nowhere?

The night floods back in woozy snippets. Bulleit bourbon and tallboy cans of PBR. Metal shop sounds and freak appeal. This is Detroit. A land of outcasts and runaways. Machinery music and industrial beats. War cries and cries for help. All blasting forth from Moog synthesizers and modulated guitars tuned intentionally awry.

Colored lights and Nag Champa choked the air, swirling on ear-bending feedback loops that would've made Kesey proud. Detroit 20teens. Sweaty bandanas and too-big glasses sliding down greasy noses. Floors dirtied by dollar store boots and thrift shop smiles. Soaked through with bottles and blunts and blotters.

At one point I stumbled up the roughhewn stairs needing a breather, overcome by secondhand tattoo and mustache. She followed me up on the wings of some warbling EDM beat and we kissed on the balcony. Her balcony. Her house.

I found her online as people do these days and we met for a beer or three and wandered around Hamtramck where she pointed out empty houses and friends' houses and houses she'd bookmarked for her next DIY venture. She loved rebuilding, she said. Gave her a sense of purpose.

She reminded me of an Afghan hound. Her nose was long and angular, her hair straight and lank where it fell around her ears. Her eyes were deep and searching. The color of an abandoned well reflecting the sky.

I'm up next, she said. She looked around at her upper rooms stripped to their 2x4 bones and electrical ligaments. A plywood board lay spread-eagled across two sawhorses, scattered with illegible drawings and unintelligible post-it notes.

Can't wait, I said, passing her the joint.

She smiled and I told her the old chestnut that goes, what do you think a hippie's favorite word is? And she thought for a second and said, peace? And I grinned and told her, Nope it was ear, and she asked, ear? And I said, sure, and I hit the joint and held in the smoke as I passed it to her, croaking—'ere!

She laughed. She ran a hand up and down her leg to smooth the fabric of her stockings. The floor thumped with bass where we sat against the wall and we moved out to the rickety balcony overlooking her stretch of sidewalk, a clean-shaven strip amid the overgrown block.

Her rangy fingers trembled as she stubbed out the roach.

Nervous?

She nodded through her bangs. She shook her head. Ran a palm back along her shorn temple to her neck. Shrugged. Nodded again. I stood and helped her to her feet. She pressed close and we kissed again.

Back downstairs after one more bracing pull at the Bulleit bottle she ascended the makeshift stage and began warbling a dirge that spoke of loneliness and frustration and of promise and despair. She fingered her guitar strings like garrote wire on Valentine's Day. A rhythmic pulse looped through, hissing and bopping like a bicycle pump working to inflate a shattered heart.

Or maybe that's just what my own heart heard.

I sit up at the edge of the mattress on the floor. I find my shirt on the stepladder leaning against the freshly purple-washed wall. In its shadow sits a dinted toolbox full of her grandpa's old tools and a scattering of nails and screws in paper bowls. She lies on her stomach with her arms pinned beneath her. A colorless tattoo crawls up her thin shoulder blade and along her neck. It's a scar, she told me and left it at that.

We danced to the caterwaul of analog sound production, revolving and flashing like the disco balls slung here and there as we gyrated to the lonely, searching music. When her set was done we clung to each other and felt the desolation melting away in the warm spaces under clothes. With a shy little smile she led me upstairs and we stumbled, undressed, and she shut the door in a wall only half plastered.

This is a city built on wayward kids flooding in from all corners, attracted to the warm glow of creative promises and arty Zen. Self-styled pioneers working up a frenzied clangor in hopes of drowning out the echoes of riots and racial savagery. Stanching the wound. This is what it's all about. This and the cheap housing.

Houses go for a thousand bucks in the foreclosure auctions. People notice from all around, like, hey, I can afford that! I can move there and own something.

This is Detroit, early 21st century. Add your feather to the phoenix flight.

We meet online. We rip sparks through tinder. We smile and nod and talk and it's all exciting. It's all new and interesting and scary and intense. We come in droves, driven by a lysergic dissonance and a spirit that lived and breathed and sang in San Francisco circa 1960s. Transported now through cyber veins.

This is a young generation of rainbow travelers in bare feet and leather boots, in moccasins and tattered Converse. Pioneering against the established Way Of Things. Against tidy corners and matching furniture. Away from the tyranny of pop music and fashion districts. Toward our own particular pots of gold. Building dreams through sweat equity and neighborhoodism. Pitch in. Mow the whole block's lawns. Plant gardens in abandoned lots. Volunteer to clean DPS playgrounds of all the ragged needles and 7.62mm brass. This is what we do.

This is gentrification, too. And even the hardest-nosed social justice warrior might be persuaded to say it's a good thing. At least in this case. At least for now…

There are people you've heard about. There's that polyamorous couple that runs the Airbnb/bike shop/urban farm while they scrape together revenue for renovations. There's the dude whatshisname with long scraggly hair who builds and sells these analogue synths that everyone's drooling for. Along with the pot and the LSD and molly to make them sound good. There's the fifth-grade teacher just graduated who calls himself a certified master hoodrat dressed in browline glasses and big ideas and a hi-top fade. There's the kid who's just dropped everything but his old typewriter and fled the cranky East Coast. Testing the waters with a toe and realizing that the only way in is in.

She mumbles something and turns her head on the pillow. I lean over and gather her straw-colored hair in a loose fist and wish I'd been able to fuck her last night. I press my nostrils to knuckles scented briny with primordial desire and grimace with frustration, cursing the goddamn whiskey.

But the whiskey had nothing to do with it. It was the heartbreak. The first step is admitting it. It had left me a slobbering ninny, curled up on the floor of my own reckless romanticism.

I pull on my pants and check the pockets. Wallet, knife, keys. Pen. Notebook is there, scrawled with gibberish turned to watercolor by spilled bourbon. It's all part of my own phoenix flight.

This is Detroit. There's a rhythm in the air. A melody of optimism over the tune of saws and the rhythm of hammers as boarded-up ghost neighborhoods are stripped of boards, aired out and swept of dust and slapped with fresh coats of temporary paint to beautify things while the real work begins.

Detroit circa 20teens. There's something happening here. No one really knows what or why or where it's going. But it's here and it's happening. Ask around. Who hasn't heard?

You think about Detroit and it used to be a bone yard. A place buried in history under the lava of its own eruption. It was talked about like a site of ancient ruins, pillaged by bands of gorilla warriors. But now you hear about Detroit and it's a scene. It's getting arty again. It's being written about and photo blogged—and not just for disaster porn any more.

Detroit is rebuilding. The whispers have changed. It's no longer about how many murders a day or do you feel safe. Now it's about where you're gonna leave your mark and how you can help guide this revival. It's about where's the music, where's the current, where's the beat.

I shuffle away from the mattress and let myself downstairs and out into the cool morning air. A robin chirps about its business. A battered Pontiac rolls past heading downtown for work.

Indigo gives way to green in the west and I kick a few crushed beer cans from the lawn. Someone snores on the porch wrapped in a canvas poncho and curled up with his head on a faded military backpack. Allen or something like that. Home from Afghanistan.

When San Francisco felt like this Detroit was in flames.

That week of chaos in '67 raged like a bush fire, rolling fast and hot through streets dried up of patience and fueled with war angst. For decades afterward the city smoldered, abandoned to cinders. From the green roof of the Fisher Building to the musty basement halls of Tiger Stadium. Everyone who could fled the ashes of history and the city lay like a gilded skeleton under a shroud of fear and loathing.

Now The Spirit of Detroit is kneeling close and blowing gently, adding splinters and shreds of newspaper stories. Patiently gathering fragments and dreams and fanning the flicker with a big mural contract here, a new startup charter there. Beckoning to all who can imagine the eventual bonfire. To all who care to dance around the renewed blaze and watch Detroit rise from its own ashes. Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus.

The sun breaks free of the tree line and ignites the sky. If you squint just right you can see it glinting off the buildings downtown and see it filling the streets with light and warmth as the neighborhoods stir all around.

I head off into the morning driving fast through ghost hoods and what look like archaeological digs, ignoring stop signs and racing toward downtown Detroit circa 20teens. If I can't find the American Dream there, it's not anywhere to find.