PARAPHILIA TRASUMANAR

were keeping people away from Detroit. Plus, something new was on the horizon: the suburban shopping mall. Why travel beyond your neighborhood community when all could be found locally?

One would think that the release of White Panther leaders John Sinclair and Pun Plamondon would have sparked more energy in the air in terms of a revolutionary earnestness. However, there was something destroying the inner city culture that all the radical politics and bohemian artists in the world were unable to prevent. An inner city struggle for a greater share of a shrinking pool of decreasing financial resources was inevitable. False hope was held by the ever-dwindling diehards. Some said that Detroit would make a comeback: a phoenix rising, the Renaissance Center, and all that jazz. But it didn’t.

The toll was staggering. Motown left the city. Eventually, the music icon whose very band was representative of the power and glory when Detroit had exploded musically and creatively, Rob Tyner of the MC5, would himself depart Detroit for Birmingham, a suburb on the outskirts of the city.

It was in these years that the mighty bands of the Motor-City and the surrounding areas began a downward tumble. I thought of the phrase that I had heard manically repeated during one of my past trips: It is time for you to read the signs. Yes, it was true, the signs were apparent, and I knew others must have seen them as well. As the symptoms of the decline became impossible to ignore, two questions came to mind. Why would a city become a perpetrator of its own implosion? And why would a nation’s power elite allow one of their top ten cities to collapse?

It was the circumstances of this era that my thoughts kept returning to, and I became obsessed with the idea of somehow altering history. Was it possible that the events of the past could be changed? And if so, how?

I knew that I could effectively travel back to the past, and was getting pretty good at arriving at my targeted destinations in time. But as I looked through my hotel window at the surrounding wasteland that encircled downtown Detroit, my mind again became enraptured with the thought: Could there be an alternative reality to what I was seeing?

In this mindset I pondered, and into this time frame my thoughts latched unto.

Although many years had passed and much had transpired since the time of Detroit’s glory days, the thought of Michigan’s very own Palace being just a rotting curtain on a stage in the parking lot of a vacant city was more than I could bear. This was the image that became the catalyst in my premeditated attempt to alter history.

For most of the Palace acts I had attended in my youth, I had been accompanied by Julie.

However, for some reason or another, I could not remember why, I had originally attended The Stooges’ concert solo. This fact just made my decision easier. I could not tolerate any distractions. There were to be no encumbrances to influence my moves in my quest to alter events, and to that end my re-attendance of this concert was to be the ultimate test in my most righteous plan.

My first appearance at this concert had been cut short due to the violence of the crowd. But I had never really understood why a local crowd would vent in such a terrible manner to a local 24