The Idler

Gary, Indiana

04 August 2005

The only reason you go to Gary is if you’re a crime writer, a drug dealer, or suicidal. Even then, you don’t stop for long.

At first, from miles away, when you pick up Gary, Indiana on the horizon, it looks like the gathering of a biblical storm. The town is permenantly enveloped in a threatening rusty metallic smog.

The sun is completely blocked out. The only light comes from factory gas jet fires. The air tastes of battery acid. Feeding the smog, there are thousands upon thousands of steel factories, churning out vast quantities of toxic pollution (but these days no steel) that makes Doncaster look like Tunbridge Wells
circa 1423.

Amazingly people live in Gary, or rather they die there. Crime is the number one pursuit in a city where unemployment is a way of life. Gary tops the US charts for gun death, stabbings, rape, armed robbery and school shootings. Crack cocaine is the drug of choice, but Gary is the centre for distribution of most other drugs to the Midwest. This profile says it all:
www.whitehousedrugpolicy/gary

The local press is full of “Chicken Man’s Dungeon uncovered”, “Bible teacher gets death,” or “Kids watch as classmates slain.” State executions are de rigour. Those on death row can cheer themselves with the quaint fact that the electric chair at the Indiana State Prison is believed to have been constructed from the old hangman’s scaffold, with the back and legs of the chair formed from braces and uprights. It has now been updated for lethal injections.

On the plus side, Gary has some of the cheapest housing
in the US. And on top of all that, it’s the hometown of Michael Jackson.

El Turk