Grand Rapids

Michigan, fate, and an all-time great unintentional restaurant.

Chris Molnar is the co-founder of Archway Editions, as well as the Writer’s Block, the first independent bookstore in Las Vegas. His novel, Heaven's Oblivion, is forthcoming.

In April the extra work stopped at the Christian publisher’s warehouse; all the seasonal gifts had been returned and we’d taken the stickers off all the Bibles. My next job was at a Styrofoam factory, a huge nondescript warehouse full of massive white blocks like fake marble thirty feet tall, which we’d saw down to size with hot wires. The smell of burning foam filled the air and my brain, and the entire vast well-lit warehouse was covered in little pellets of Styrofoam which would follow you home in your pockets and shoes, almost indistinguishable from snow.

It was 2006 and I’d gotten kicked out of my first year at Calvin College, the local Christian university I’d sleepwalked into after growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan with no religious urge. I was still sleepwalking; by the first week at any temp factory job I’d accumulate a few middle-aged men missing teeth, hitting me up for a ride. They’d throw me a few bucks and I couldn’t say no without it getting chilly. It was like life was a trap I’d walked into, and no one was telling me another direction. After a long day inhaling fumes, I’d go back to the places I’d been in high school, trying to stay out of my parents’ house and avoid anybody I knew. Build up enough unsettled and unhappy feeling to make myself leave was the goal, easy enough when the only job I could get was non-union factory work. Paul Schrader once said “When you leave Grand Rapids, if you don't have a lot of energy, you're gonna get as far as Kalamazoo. They're gonna bring you back.” He went to Calvin, too. In his day the whole place was industrious Dutch Reformed celery farmers and furniture makers, with more mid-century coherence, but it was the same grey-skied flatness hours away from Detroit or Chicago. My Chinese-American mother would drive us to Windsor in Canada for dim sum.

People would move to Chicago and then inevitably slink back. No exit to the trap. The namesake of Calvin College, John Calvin, has a signature theological theme, and that is predestination, the idea that everyone is saved or damned at birth. This might have influenced the city a little bit. I’d be giving rides to factories forever.

Downtown (there are richer suburbs, but I never had any reason to go) I drove on a circuit southeast of where Grand River intersected the highway. No direction in any sense, just pent-up frustration, the feeling of waiting for something you don’t know. Abandoned apartment buildings downtown, intermittently squatted by crusties, where you could easily break in and climb to the roof with a full view of all the little tree lined neighborhoods and towards Lake Michigan, about forty minutes straight out, and near Vertigo Music, the legendary record store. Nearby was Morningstar75 and Morningstar76, both dark, twenty-four-hour smoke-filled coffeeshops; the latter next to Yesterdog with their handheld, crumpling, perfect chili dogs, both in Eastown, a historically bohemian enclave of houses with wraparound porches surrounded by Black, Latino, and remnants of older Dutch neighborhoods. Further north was Little Africa, a no-frills Ethiopian restaurant, on Fulton on a little block catering to all these demographics and more.

Little Africa Cuisine

West Michigan felt like fate had dealt you the wrong hand. There wasn’t anything to aspire to other than fatalism, it was the center of nothing, I wanted to write and that culture did not exist here; real life, then, existed thousands of miles away. I only went places that felt like they didn’t belong, because they were the only ones claiming the space for themselves. Someone like Lou Negash, the owner of Little Africa, was an incomprehensible monument, this intensely easygoing man with no previous experience making food, who immigrated at nineteen from Ethiopia to Grand Rapids during the civil war in the ‘80s, when the whole country was in a turmoil beyond understanding. He’d gone to Grand Valley State—the other school in town—for manufacturing, but already things were drying up as he started working in plastics, and so in 1998 he opened an artifact shop, selling imported sculptures, drawings, and other regional goods. Little Africa, incredibly, turned into a restaurant by popular demand, serving the best food I’ve still ever had, with a laconic confidence and graciousness towards the inability of old white people to understand the mechanics of a finger bowl. That gratefulness and easy mastery was the antithesis of youth and my conception of this place. The opposite of the students at Calvin who all seemed there unwillingly due to fear or parents or inertia. Relaxed, in the pocket, every dream realized, with thankfulness. “You can’t plan anything on this earth, only God’s plan.” Negash says when I call him at the restaurant. “You can think about something, not finish it. God finishes it.” I agree, effusively. The older I get the more I see it. Safety, community, the ability to save money to open a little store, change it up, keep it real. No longer becoming, or searching for a center, you’ve become, you are the center, and when it hits you realize how much of life—outside of a few crucial choices—is dealing with the heaviness thrown at you with however much grace or ability you’ve got, that choice is an illusion.

The author and his mother at Little Africa.

It was the one time I think I really understood Grand Rapids, with nothing else to do, unable to begin or take stock of life. Feeling implicated that a place I felt trapped by could be freedom for someone else. But feelings are your reality. Banned from campus (it had been disciplinary, breaking and entering into classrooms after hours just to hang out), on the weekend I would drive to Lake Michigan and just sit at Rosy Mound, feeling self-ordered. An empty cold beach as the snow is melting, the lake coming back to life, appealing with no pretension toward extreme beauty. Loitering in order to be set free from time and predestination. Even if it’s your hometown, you can still arrive. Dinner then at Little Africa, where I’d have really the only option, an extreme, seasoned Jasmine tea along with colorful, strongly spiced vegan dishes on injera, lentils, beans, potatoes, finely mixed in sauces simple yet with enough flavor to make me believe that meat and dairy were worthless. And every platter sized and priced to you. If Lou can find a way out of Ethiopia’s most fucked-up moment of modern existence, getting out of Michigan is nothing, even if it’s an opposite trajectory. It’s not the place but the distance between where you’re from and where you’ve gone, the act of making one big choice. I remember sitting by myself, looking at the old ‘40s Dutch pastry shop across the street, sky grey as always, Lou on the phone in the back, stirring a huge boiling pot, the feeling that this was his home and as invited in it became mine, or anyone’s. That what made a place, someone carving out a place for themselves, and the more unassuming the more profound.

So unless you’ve got some heavy plan to change where you’re from, you have to leave if you want to really live. I went back to school, community college, and after started working at a different factory south of the city that refurbished brake shoes for semis full time, with different old men immediately caging a ride. My hair full of grease even after multiple showers as I took the old brakes and scraped off the pads and threw the massive metal pieces covered in grease into machines that pelted them with metal until they were clean and could be repainted and reshoed, doing this for months and months in a Zen state of consciousness until I had enough money to buy a Greyhound bus ticket to New York City. I’d never been there before or knew anything about it, but then whatever I’d do would be for real.