Erik Mortenson and Christopher Kramer, Kick Out The Bottom: A Shared Account of a Detroit Mystic, Stevens Point, Wisconsin: Cornerstone Press, 2023.
Motor City. Motown. Where else but Detroit? French-named in the eighteenth-century, America’s most populous African American city in the twenty-first, it gives its presence to this wholly intriguing shared memoir by Mortenson and Kramer. At hand is an alternating two-for-one shelf of life-writing, the young manhood and existential querying of paired friends, their life inside the craters and challenges of Michigan’s best-known “black” metropolis, and above all, their relationship with the figure of Ryan, the “Detroit mystic” so designated in the subtitle. The upshot is a species of mirror-writing, dense cityscape and rites of self-passage, for Mortenson the pending academic and Kramer the pending visual and documentary artist.
Dedicated to “all the seekers of the self” Kick Out the Bottom might best be thought a kind of urban Walden (not hard to be mindful that Thoreau said he went to the pond “to front only the essential facts of life”). You are on the one hand among books, artwork, Wayne State University, and in and out of the bordering suburbs. Centrally, however, you are enclosed in the city itself, once Montmartre finesse and architecture but in the 1990s a lock of racial fault-line, subsistence making-do, heroin and street drugs, and hermetic violence and rackety tenant housing.
Threat hovers. Decay and poverty thread relentlessly. Even so, and at the same time, the Supremes can syncopate and Marvin Gaye lilt under Berry Gordy’s record label. Eminem can dispense underclass white rap. Night and day the city can echo like some often frantic rock and roll boom-box. Amid which the two authors, then graduate student age, find succour, inspiration, in the guru-existentialist Ryan (“one of the strongest people I ever met” writes Mortenson). Aleister Crowley-inspired, Thelemite, he serves them as a kind of local Supreme Leader in the ways of authenticity, for lives — however outsider white and so privileged – chosen to be lived right at the edge:
Kick Out the Bottom, as the name suggests, portrays our struggles with and against the city of Detroit to better understand who we were and to fashion a new sense of self.
Ryan, referred to only by his last name throughout, assumes presiding status, a model of giving his all to committed identity (“By turn mystic, guru, scholar, punk, anarchist, shaman, magician, lover, and fool, he was always there for us, and always an inspiration”). The volume’s colloquy, thereby, becomes an ode to “how to live,” or rather, how to find right pathways into best working selfhood.
Well-turned passages map thoroughfares and bus routes, bars and clubs, ethnic enclaves whether Bangladeshi, Polish or Latino/a/x, wrecked houses and panhandling. Detroit hands will quickly recognize 8 Mile Road, Hamtramck, The Guardian Building, the Joe Louis Arena, Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, and drug sites like Fourth Street. But via Ryan, there is also plentiful allusion to celebrity custodians of angst or daring. Crowley’s tarot and occult leanings in, say, his Book of Thoth and his dictum “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”provide a touchstone. Discussion fires among Ryan and his two acolytes, the allusions wide and frequent: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Jung, McLuhan, the Bhagavad-Gita, Confucius, Zen, the Qabalah, and not the least Burroughs. Hallucinogens enter the reckoning, records of LSD as another kind of proposed illumination, as does invocation of Native Sweat Lodge and Masonic temple.
These feed into Ryan’s critique of corporate capitalism, of word virus be it TV, newspaper, mainstream political decree, or the relentless and hugely subliminal codes of advertising. In his heavy-mileage black sedan, his refusal of institutional study, his vast thesaurus of people – to include a shifting cast of lovers, Ryan beckons both authors as mentor. Which is not to say they toe every line or believe every word. Rather he assumes the role of lamp-lighter for the span of years they spend in Detroit, their putative un-fathomer of the self’s mystery.
In this respect the writing takes its further autobiographical turn, relationships and marriage, Mortenson’s career into academia, Kramer’s into canvas and art gallery. No one pre-emptive stance or philosophy prevails for either. An energetic eclecticism holds, assuredly stirred from Ryan, but also forged by individual resolve and seizing of direction. Kick Out The Bottom, nicely pitched between discursive essay and first-hand story and at the same time twice-over voice, does duty as a Book of Pathways. Indeed two books in one, a handily sized Detroit memoir of self-awakenings and departures, engaging to a fault.
A. Robert Lee