Detroit: An American Autopsy

by Charlie Leduff

  “He was right behind me,” said Hamm, pointing to the spot. “He was right next to me. I don’t know why I’m here.”

  It took a few minutes to find Harris because his homing alarm failed to sound. It failed because it was defective. Because that passes for normal here. Defective equipment for emergency responders.

  Harris died not because he was burned or because the timber broke his bones. He died of suffocation, unable to breathe from the weight of the roof. If the alarm had only worked.

  Harris was pronounced dead before the sun had risen.

  “Goddamn,” Nevin spewed, standing in the damp exposed attic.

  I remembered the prophecy Walt Harris had given me six months earlier at a house fire: “Every one of these guys here will tell you that he’ll give you everything he’s got to help the people of this city. He’ll give his life if he has to. It breaks your heart.”

  The men fell silent. There was only the sound of the rain.

  Then I heard a mechanical click.

  I spun around on my heels. It was the photographer from the Free Press stealing a little photograph of the scene.

  The next morning, on the cover of the Free Press was a photograph of Verlin Williams, the would-be cowboy, reenacting his death-defying escape from the caved-in roof.

  * * *

  I took my daughter to the funeral. Firefighters came from all over—Chicago, Toledo, Canada, the Detroit suburbs. What struck me was the shitty condition of the Detroit equipment, the shining suburban stuff next to the banged-up, dented Detroit rigs.

  Nice speeches were made. “He was a hero,” said fill-in mayor Ken Cockrel Jr. “It was his brand of heroism that will never be forgotten.”

  It was bullshit, and everybody knew it. Criminals ruled the streets. Christ, Cockrel himself had the gutters stolen off his house for scrap metal.

  Firefighter Wes Rawls had his car stolen at the memorial service the evening before. It was the third time he’d had his car stolen. One of those times, Rawls was attending an anger-management class.

  Walt was put in the ground, and as quick as that, the hero went forgotten by the city.

  * * *

  I got a call from one of the men in the firehouse the following weekend.

  “We’re gonna burn it.”

  “Burn what?”

  “The house.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “The house where Walt died. It’s still standing.”

  “It’s still standing?” I said, incredulous. In New York, a firefighter dies in a house, the thing gets torn down in hours. But I had to keep reminding myself, this place wasn’t normal.

  “Nobody gives a fuck,” the firefighter said. “It’s becoming a shrine, like at one of those places where kids die. There’s stuffed teddy bears and bullshit stapled to the house. We don’t want that shit. This ain’t Disneyland. We want it down. We want it fucking gone. That’s what they would do in New York.”

  The pain in his voice frightened me. He was violently rational.

  “We’ve got it prepped. The holes are cut in it. We just pour some gas on it and watch it go.”

  “Don’t do it,” I told him. “Don’t. Don’t become one of them.”

  The prospect of a firefighter dedicated to saving a city ravaged by arsonists crossing the line into criminality, even if it was for the right reason, horrified me.

  “We don’t give a fuck anymore,” he said. “Eventually, we all become one of them. We’re gonna burn it.”

  “I’ll be back to work on Monday,” I told him. “Just wait. Please, just wait. I’ll make some calls. I’ll try to get them to tear it down. If they don’t, you can torch it then.”

  “Would you do that?”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that. Just don’t do anything stupid.”

  “All right, we’ll wait.”

  I went straight to the firehouse that Monday. The black bunting commemorating Walt’s death had been ripped loose by the wind and hung over the bay doors like a hangman’s noose. No one was there. Out on another call.

  I drove over to Kirby Street. Not only was the house still standing, but just like I’d been told, it was decorated with T-shirts and wilted flowers and a teddy bear, like at those street corners where a teenager has been gunned down. There was a sign that read: PERSON WHO SET THIS FIRE IS A MURDERER AND COWARD.

  The fire had indeed been ruled an arson, making Walt’s death a murder. And yet the thing still stood.

  I knocked on a neighbor’s door.

  “This is the second time they set it on fire,” a woman told me in her kitchen doorway. There were three children playing behind her. “They lit it on fire a couple years ago, and the city never did nothing about it the first time, and if they had, then maybe . . .”

  I was scribbling in my notebook.

  “Who you, the po-lice?”

  “Reporter.”

  “You gonna get that house torn down?” asked her husband, who had joined her in the doorway.

  “It’ll get taken down one way or another.”

  “I would much appreciate that. It’s a hell of a place to raise your babies.”

  “I bet,” I said.

  “Sir, you’d win that bet.”

  I drove back to the office and started working the phone. The building authority, the mayor’s office, the demolition department. Hell, I even called FEMA. Nobody returned my calls.

  There was no one in charge of the city anymore.

  I eventually reached Councilwoman Sheila Cockrel, the stepmother of the interim mayor, who was more knowledgeable about the inner workings of the city than anyone I had met since I had come home to Michigan.

  The process of tearing down a building is a long and tedious one, filled with red tape and greasy palms. In fact, Cockrel told me, the city of Detroit had recently been awarded a $23 million federal grant to demolish abandoned houses like the one Harris had died in. And yet the city council voted to spend just $14 million on demolition while funneling the other $9 million to politically connected ministers for their “block programs.”

  I told her the firemen were threatening to burn the house down.

  “Tell them the house will be down by eleven A.M. tomorrow,” she said. I didn’t know how she was going to do it. And frankly, I didn’t care. “You just made a thousand friends, ma’am,” I told her.

  * * *

  It was a cold, sunny morning, a Thursday. My car wouldn’t start, so my wife dropped me off at the house where Harris died. Matt Labash, the writer for the Weekly Standard, was in town writing his own elegy for the city and we had made plans to link up there.

  The neighborhood was inaccessible, with the fire engines and news trucks and the motorcycles of the Axe Men, a crew Walt rode with, clogging the streets. Only in Detroit would the demolition of a house, a single straw in a haystack, draw such attention. It felt decent.

  Sheila Cockrel was there. The battalion chiefs. Neighbors. Even Adolph Mongo was there at my invitation. He looked ill at ease, as though someone might recognize him and run him off the block with a shotgun. He had worked for Kilpatrick, after all. And it was safe to say there were no fans of Kilpatrick here.

  “I hate this shit,” Mongo said as we shook hands. “Look at it, this city is a motherfucking wreck. It just hurts me to look at it. I’m gonna get the fuck out of here.”

  “Stay,” I said to him. “It’s your city too.”

  I watched the newspeople interview Cockrel, the firefighters, even Mongo. I watched a local reporter parade around as if she were in charge of the morning’s itinerary. Where had she been for the last decade? Something went badly and she swooped in on it like a vulture, feigning outrage and calling the community to action. It was all so pathetically obvious to me because she was behavin
g exactly like me and every other reporter I knew.

  So I made no more paper notes. I just wanted to see the thing come down. Soak it in. Victories are few here. But it felt good. It’s a feeling I’d rarely had as a newspaperman. A feeling that the work can actually be of some benefit to somebody.

  When the bulldozer began to tear at the roof, people cried. And when the last wall came down, they applauded. I shook hands with the men of Engine 23, gave Montgomery and Kirschner and Nevin and Williams a hug and started back to Labash’s rental car.

  As I walked, the man and woman who lived across the street waved to me from their porch.

  “Merry Christmas,” I hollered. “I told you we’d get that house knocked down.”

  The man came off the porch and walked toward me, stopping at the fence. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”

  He swept his hands across the calamity of his neighborhood and the half dozen or so other rotting houses.

  “But what about the rest of it?”

  * * *

  I went back to the paper and I sat in my cubicle among the empty pods of cubicles.

  Detroit was beginning to wear my ass out. I didn’t have the usual reportorial detachment anymore. This was home. This was where I lived. This was where I was raising my kid, and my sister’s kid dies in some dark basement not six weeks after I arrive. And this morning I’m watching grown men cheer the demolition of a shit box as though it were the Berlin Wall coming down.

  I looked out the window realizing that Detroit was doing something to me that a story’s never done to me before. It was hurting.

  Ordinarily, a throb of emotion is good for a writer because it feeds his story, it feeds his writing, but then the throb goes away after it’s written. But this time it wasn’t going away except when I drowned it in wine and then it would return when the wine went away. I felt physically small and cold.

  The emotional throb was not informing me so much as eating me. I was tired. And I was beginning to understand now what The Hole really looks like. Before, when I was in the rough places of desperation, I had a plane ticket out. Now I was living in it, a captive, a native son.

  TWO

  ICE

  ICE MAN

  INSIDE THE SHELTER, in the rear, near the toilets, two men sat in chairs, shooting dice between their feet. The news played on the wide-screen television set. The TV talk was about money nobody seemed to have anymore. Outside, the arctic wind howled.

  The homeless shelter sits in the guts of a skid row ghetto in the city’s downtown Cass Corridor. It was packed to the corners, divided with men in one room and women in the other. It smelled like tired bodies.

  About one in thirty-five people at any given time in Detroit is without a place to sleep. The problem is so bad and the beds so few that shelters like this one offer only a chair to sit in. The chair is yours as long as you stay in it. Step out for a cigarette and it’s a free-for-all. This passes for normal in Detroit. I spent an hour watching the dice game from under a knit hat, occupying a chair that should have gone to someone else who was probably shivering in some crumbling shack that used to function as a home.

  I was writing a weather story for the News.

  The men in front of me were gambling for cigarettes. A die caromed off a chair leg, and the gambler in the parka protested the other man’s sloppy dice handling.

  “I didn’t see the number,” he snarled. “You picking up the fucking dice too quick.”

  “Six!” barked the gambler in the knit pullover, snatching up the cigarette anyhow. A shouting match erupted. Chairs went scattering. Both men were put out in the stinging cold and two men lurking against the wall quickly took their seats.

  My cell phone buzzed. It was my brother Frankie calling. He said a friend of his had found a dead body in the elevator shaft of an abandoned building on the south side of the city.

  “He’s encased in ice, except his legs, which are sticking out like Popsicle sticks,” Frankie said.

  My brother’s friend was one of a strange fraternity in Detroit who call themselves urban explorers. They are a group of grown men who get their thrills traipsing around the ghost buildings, snapping photographs and collecting bits of this and that for odd pieces of art. In other cities, they have tourists.

  The explorers had been playing hockey on the frozen waters that had collected in the basement of an abandoned warehouse, my brother explained.

  “Why didn’t he call the cops?” I asked.

  “He said he was trespassing and didn’t want to get in trouble.”

  “Didn’t want to get in trouble for trespassing? Really?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  Man frozen in ice. Good detail, the reporter in me thought. I arranged to meet my brother to make sure the dead man was true. You never know. It was probably a mannequin. As I was leaving the shelter, I turned for a last look. A man had taken my chair, his feet wrapped in plastic shopping bags.

  I got into the raggedy pool car—a Chevy Neon—belonging to the News’ city desk. I turned the motor over and let the car warm.

  Whirr. Whirr. Whirr, the motor whinnied, like a washing machine with bad pulleys.

  The dice player in the parka knocked on the window. I rolled it down.

  “You a cop?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Then gimme a dollar.”

  “That’s how you’re gonna ask me?”

  “Please, gimme a dollar?” he said through a cloud of steam.

  I gave him fifty cents, preserving us both some dignity.

  * * *

  I stopped at the News office and picked up my partner, Max Ortiz, a photographer. If the dead man was real, then we were going to need a snapshot. We are reporters, after all. We trade in the hard and the obscure. The public is right to despise us, but I knew they couldn’t resist the detail of a frozen man either. George Hunter, the Detroit cop reporter with a talent for one-liners, put it this way: “People hate used car salesmen too. But people still buy used cars.”

  And so Ortiz and I drove to the warehouse in search of an oddball dead man.

  Whirr. Whirr. Whirr.

  The building was known as the Roosevelt Warehouse and once belonged to the Detroit Public Schools as a book and supply repository. The structure burned years before and caused a scandal, since it was filled with thousands of books and balls and crayons and paper and scissors and such—supplies left to rot, despite the fact that Detroit schoolchildren are among the poorest in the country.

  This very morning, in fact, a public plea had gone out to the city’s parents asking them to send toilet paper with their children to school.

  My brother was already at the warehouse with the urban explorer who had, apparently, skated across the body. I was not expecting to see him, since he was worried about those trespassing tickets. He said little to me except that the dead guy was a “fucking trip.” He also said, rather unconvincingly, that he had had trouble sleeping since finding the feet a few days earlier and that he wanted me to call the police.

  He pointed down at the body. In the middle of the loading dock, there was a gaping elevator shaft. At the bottom of the shaft, you could clearly see a pair of shoes, nothing more. All it appeared I had here was an overimaginative explorer and a pair of discarded discount sneakers. We went down the crumbling steps of the warehouse to get a closer look.

  So much rainwater had collected in the basement over the years that we had to stoop down to clear the top of the threshold of the emergency exit, which normally would be eight feet high. We tiptoed across the ice, past a makeshift hockey rink, visible by the light from the barred basement windows, which were now waist-high.

  The basement was dark and made more eerie by the light diffracting through the support columns of the southern wall. I worried that if we fell through
the ice, no one would find us. Preoccupied, I caught my neck on a string of dangling wire and tripped.

  “You all right?” my brother asked.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Over here,” said the explorer.

  I picked myself up and walked over. There in the cascading light in the central elevator shaft were the shoes, but from this angle there were also shins attached to them. I poked at the shoes with the eraser side of my pencil. I always make notes with pencils in the wintertime. Ball-point pens tend to freeze—same with dogs and people if you leave them outside long enough.

  This was no mannequin. This was indeed a man frozen in the ice. His shins had hair. His socks were oddly white, the laces fresh and the sole of the left shoe worn out at the heel. Strangely, the feet were propped up on a pillow that had pooled into the elevator shaft along with other detritus. The hem of a beige jacket could be made out under the ice, as could the contour of his back. The rest of the body looked as though it had vanished.

  “Jesus,” Ortiz said.

  “Yeah,” said my brother. “I can’t believe he’s still got his shoes.”

  Frankie had brought along his own camera, a digital number with a gigantic lens. Since he had graduated from art school with a degree in photography, my brother was struggling to find a career making pictures. Social documentary, he liked to say.

  He snapped a few photographs of the frozen man until he saw Ortiz go to work. Frankie frowned, backed away and deleted his pictures. “Not my shot,” he told me later, after the publication of the frozen man story caused an international sensation. “What was I going to do with his picture?” Frankie explained. “Hang it on my wall? Please.”

  * * *

  I called a couple homicide cops I know, leaving them messages about the body. I didn’t call 911. It didn’t seem like it was an emergency. There was no blood. The man wasn’t going anywhere. He would wait. We headed back to the office.

  Whirr. Whirr. Whirr.

  My cell phone buzzed a few minutes after we arrived at the office. It was one of the cops. “Aw, just give 911 a call,” he said. He sounded tired, unconcerned. “We’ll be called eventually.”