Where It All Goes Down
Smyrna, Detroit, and San Francisco from the early 1900s to Present
Global Fondue
Unlike America, Smyrna seems to be an actual melting pot, in which you can savor all the different cultures. Cal paints the picture like this: "Everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and Dutch. […] Did I mention how the reek of the fig women mixed with pleasanter smells of almond trees, mimosa, laurel, and peach?" (1.3.117).
This is so different from homogenized Detroit, where the only thing melting out of people is their identity. Lefty is expected to act as American (whatever that means) as possible, even receiving instruction from his employer on the American way to brush his teeth. The irony underlying all the pressure to conform is that Detroit is super segregated. Desdemona notices this when she enters the Black Bottom Ghetto: "There was no roadblock, no fence. The streetcar didn't so much as pause as it crossed the invisible barrier, but at the same time in the length of a block the world was different" (2.3.107). And here Detroit was starting to sound like a pretty nice place to live…
Both Smyrna and Detroit burn to the ground, but Cal draws significance from Detroit's motto: "Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus. We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes" (2.1.7). Kind of sounds like our main character when you think about it, doesn't it?
Golden Gates
We don't get much of a feel for San Francisco in this book. Cal's welcome to the city is brutal (he gets kicked in the head and peed on), and his life there is only possible because he's part of an underwater sex show run by Bob Presto.
Eugenides does cast San Francisco as a gay mecca of sorts: "Many of these sailors had picked up amatory habits that were frowned upon back on dry land. So these sailors stayed in San Francisco […] until the city became the gay capital, the homosexual Haupstadt" (4.4.103). For Cal, it's yet another miraculous case of right place, right time.