A $500 House in Detroit

by Drew Philp

  “The fire department will show up soon,” Will said contemplatively as I got out of my car. He sipped a can of beer and his eyes never left the silos until I walked through the fence gate made from a pallet. His yard was filled with things he’d found on walks through his neighborhood, shingles, scraps of wood, pieces of sheet metal, halves of garden tools, sad lawn ornaments. Will appeared part of the cast-off junk as well, the tired leader of a lonely circus. I got a good look at him in the light, without his monkey costume, and he was a dead ringer for Hank Williams, the same goofy resting grin, the slim ghostly figure. Had he not been moving the cigarette between his mouth and ashing on the scrubby ground, he would have looked like a mannequin, frozen in time with the forgotten things he’d collected and given a home to.

  He noticed me side-eyeing at some blue 55-gallon barrels.

  “Oh, I’m going to make a rain barrel system with those,” he said. He moved the pouch of tobacco from his lap. “I’ll catch the rain coming from the roof and use it to water the garden. The water bills here are outrageous.” In fact, they were. In spitting distance of the planet’s largest source of fresh water, the Great Lakes, the water bills were almost twice the national average.

  Will had dragged the barrels from the market across the tracks, which was still full of working slaughterhouses. He’d squirreled them away one by one when they would appear next to Dumpsters and scrubbed some out with bleach.

  “I’ll let the rain clean the others,” he said, and stood, opening his back door. The security gate was padlocked near the bottom and a cinder block served as the step up to the threshold.

  “This is like a tree house, you can do whatever you want,” I said, stepping into his home.

  Will demurred.

  “This is great.”

  “It’s not bad,” he said, his hands in his pockets.

  “This is freedom,” I said.

  He didn’t look so sure.

  He gave me the short tour: an entryway where he kept his garden tools, to a room that held the furnace and the kitchen sink that was not the kitchen, into his kitchen piled with houseplants and mail and knickknacks. The living room was a cacophony of found objects, art he’d made by himself or presents from friends, a piano covered in trinkets and records, a rack of mixtapes he had saved over the years. His house was as full as the outside was empty.

  He wound an ancient child’s toy on the piano. A tin horse and carriage ran in a circle around a saloon. The tinkly music glistened, but one of the bars was broken, rendering a sour note with each revolution.

  “I found that last week out back,” he said. “This is my tool room.”

  He walked across the hardwood floors and opened a creaking door. A table saw stood in the center on a platform made from logs with the bark still attached. The rest of the room was filled with dusty tools and half-finished birdhouses.

  “These are cool,” I said, picking up one with an irregular shape and a tin roof. “What’s this?” I thumbed the perch, a fat nail with the number “66” stamped into the oversized head.

  “It’s a date nail. You find them walking along the train tracks. It tells the year they were put in.” He took the birdhouse from my hands. “This one’s from ’66. That was a good year.”

  The half dozen birdhouses in various stages of completion had all been made from junk—lath, pieces of half-burned pine, tiny sheets of metal picked from the dirt, forgotten pipe. He was making delicate houses for the free birds of the air at the same time he was building his own, nearly out of the same materials.

  “I just do that for fun,” he said, shutting the door to the shop. Years later the mayor’s wife would buy one priced in the hundreds of dollars.

  The house was as much Will as he was it. Walking inside was like hiking through his cluttered and brilliant mind. I would come to call this aesthetic “junk punk,” common in Detroit and rusting cities like it where the predominant vernacular was of objects cast off then repurposed and reloved by people who had been cast off themselves. The old was new again, and you needed a good eye to recognize value among chintz.

  “I moved to Detroit right after high school,” Will said as I sat in a sagging armchair in the living room. He had graduated about a decade earlier than I had. “I lived downtown in a building across the hall from Kid Rock before he was famous, but never really talked to him. I moved out a couple years later to travel the country, riding the trains and hitchhiking, lived in a few cities. But I would always come home and drive the streets.”

  He stroked his pit bull named Meatballs as he talked. “It was Armageddon, man! It was crazy!” His voice became excited for the first time in the evening, his sinewy frame inching closer to the edge of the seat. “I’d drive around for hours and I always noticed this house surrounded by nothing. I looked it up and it was for sale for three thousand dollars but for years, nobody had purchased it. I’d always drive by here to see if anyone had bought it. One time I drove past after I’d just broken up with my girlfriend in North Carolina and I told my roommate at the time, ‘Man, if I had three thousand dollars I would buy that house right now.’ ”

  His roommate happened to have received a windfall while he was gone and lent him the money that day. He purchased the house, in cash, from a Detroit police officer, the son of the former owner, and had spent the better part of the summer camping there, without much electricity or any plumbing. He bought bottled water and mopped with rainwater, planted a garden, and attempted to learn all the trades he needed to get normalcy to the house. At the beginning he didn’t even have a door, just a sheet of plywood, and would let himself into and out of his own home with a screwgun.

  I pulled open a yellow window shutter behind the chair and watched: one lonely house, a lonely empty street, a lonely stoplight doing its duty for no one but us.

  “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” I told him.

  * * *

  “Can you go with me to the hospital today?” With no warning, Zeno had called when I was in my socks making eggs.

  “Of course. What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Do you need an ambulance?”

  “I’m fine. I’ll tell you on the way.”

  He picked me up in his blue Ford Escort, with his girlfriend, Amy, sitting shotgun. She was about half the size of Zeno, and looked shrunken that day. The hospital was only a block from my house, and we could have walked, but he picked me up and stopped in the parking garage. There was something about the formality of it all.

  The three of us signed in at the desk and received “visitor” name tags to stick on our chests. We walked a short distance to a small one-room chapel in the center of the building, a dark chamber with two rows of pews and a stained-glass window behind an altar that was backlit with electric light. I sat a few rows behind and in the other aisle from Zeno in the front, who put his arm around Amy. I wasn’t exactly sure what was about to happen.

  After a few moments, a fat white preacher wheeled in a small plastic gurney and parked it before the stained-glass window. I scratched at the oak grain in the pew. I wasn’t sure what I was doing here.

  On the gurney lay a tiny bundle, swaddled from head to toe in a blue blanket. The child Amy had been carrying, Zeno’s unborn son, was dead, stillborn.

  Zeno and I had discussed the child months ago. He told me he had gotten Amy pregnant, and although neither of the parents had the type of lifestyle that might be considered best to raise a child, they wanted to keep it. Zeno explained that living such a dangerous life, in such a dangerous place, he wanted the chance for his lineage to carry on. He might not have another opportunity for his seed to be planted, even if the soil wasn’t as fertile as to be hoped. Why wait for better days when you don’t believe there will be better days, and you don’t think you’ll live to see them anyway?

  The preacher folded his hands and opened his sermon with one of the Psalms. He spoke about God and Man and Love and read from other religious books and holy works, background noise to the tiny speck of life, e
xtinguished, lying before the altar. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I remember Amy crying softly, and Zeno holding her, silent tears streaming down his face. Eventually Amy asked the preacher to stop.

  “I want to see him.”

  Oh my God.

  “All right,” the preacher answered. “We usually advise against—”

  “I want to see him.”

  The preacher, with trembling and careful hands, removed the blue blanket from the child. Inside, wrapped in a white shroud and no bigger than half a baguette, was their son. From the back of the small chapel I could make out his tiny head and little arms and legs inside the blanket, the clear shape of a body. A dead little Moses in a plastic basket.

  “I want to see his face.”

  The preacher hesitated.

  “I want to see him for the last time.”

  I’d only been in Detroit for a few months, and this was what it was going to be like?

  The preacher removed the final blanket.

  The child had a stomach and delicate fingers, chubby legs. He was still and stiff and I cannot remember if he had hair, but I remember his eyes. Tiny, black, and open.

  I tried to leave, meditate, anything. I imagined myself far away, outside the hospital, beyond that the city for miles and then the suburbs, the nice places and the places of peace and silences and waves and amniotic rocking and quiet. This world is a sphere, and if you go straight long enough you’ll end up right back where you were. Try as I might, I couldn’t escape those black eyes pulling me back into a reality I wanted to ignore.

  The preacher covered the child.

  As long as I live I will never forget the image of those black eyes.

  Afterward, on the ride home, some stereo or other piece of equipment had to be sold to pay the rent. Zeno drove us to the place, and when he went inside I sat in the back of the car smoking while Amy wept softly, her head resting against the passenger-side window.

  I think Zeno was trying to show me something, to warn me. Maybe it was because I didn’t know what to say, that with all my education I didn’t know how to fix it. That I couldn’t bring the baby back was a given. That I couldn’t make things feel any better, for Zeno or myself or everybody in this city and places like it, was a heartbreak. Maybe I’m projecting. Maybe I’m not supposed to say anything at all. Maybe all the tragedy of this place represented by one dead child isn’t for me, a white kid, to try to explain, that I should bow out gracefully, that this world isn’t for me and I should admit that my mistake was coming in the first place and never come back. Maybe I should have never come at all.

  But I was there. I saw it. And I cannot unsee it, and I don’t know what it means, if anything. Now it’s yours, too. Welcome to Detroit.

  * * *

  A couple of weeks later I went alone to an art show held in a repurposed factory. I was still trying to shake off those few moments in the hospital chapel, and school was only making it worse. I knew I couldn’t go back, but now I was unsure if I could stay here either. I tried to keep busy while I decided what to do.

  Past stalls filled with BDSM art and Day-Glo paintings of dead rock stars, I stopped at a booth containing dozens of bales of hay. A couple of people who seemed to shine as if they had been scrubbed with a brush for the first time in a long time chatted with pedestrians or made roses from painter’s tape.

  I introduced myself to a white guy, naked under his overalls, who said his name was Garrett and the hay in their booth had been grown in Detroit. After some pleasantries, he invited me to an art show that just happened to be in Poletown, half a mile or so from Will’s. Everyone in the booth lived on a strange and special block tended by a wild and virtuous farmer who had been in the neighborhood for decades. Farm animals roamed freely and the farmer had figured out how to make hundreds of bales of hay each year in a neighborhood fifteen minutes by bicycle from downtown. The street was named Forestdale. The building holding the art show, which they were rehabbing, was named the YES FARM.

  He handed me a hand-typed business card:

  I thanked him and asked if I could bring a friend.

  On the day of the show Will and I pulled up to the block in his little white truck. It was located within the shadow of the Packard plant, an Albert Kahn–designed factory that had come to a comfortable end as a toxic trash heap. At one time steel, sand, and rubber went in one end, and a car came out the other. Now trees grew out of the roof. It was often on fire, and people talked about it like the weather. Aside from the abandoned train station, it was the best ruin porn in the city. People hadn’t started to take high-fashion pictures of nude models in it yet, though, and there was still a notable piece of graffiti placed in the windows of the plant’s bridge, spanning Grand Boulevard.

  It read, “Arbeit macht frei.”

  On this block, though, all the houses seemed to be standing and well maintained, an incredible feat for a neighborhood with enough space to grow hay. Even without the fires and demolitions, gravity was inescapable. Someone had taken care of this place for a long time.

  A community garden with neat little rows and a brightly painted sign sat across the street. On the corner was the YES FARM, brick, brightly painted and unmistakable. A former apothecary, the front had been painted in stencils and sunshine and brilliant waves of blue. Plywood cutouts of exotic animals had been screwed into the crumbling brick. A hole was blown into the back of the second story, which I later found out was made when a house across the street exploded, its gas line illegally hooked up with a garden hose. A wire, with what looked like an extension cord zip-tied to it, was strung between the YES FARM and a window in the house next door.

  As I got out of Will’s truck, a fat brown-and-white dog sniffed at me and wagged his tail. He had a collar and nobody seemed concerned that he was just wandering around, so I shooed him away and he went to sniff in the garden. I knocked on the side door to the YES FARM, which appeared to be made from two-by-fours stacked on top of one another, old and new. I could hear music from inside and voices. I pounded again and still no answer. Will shrugged and pushed the door open.

  The room was filled with construction materials and tools. The extension cord leading from the house next door was powering a few caged work lights strung across the room like blue-collar Chinese lanterns. Someone had just finished painting the room with a city scene, black buildings on a red background, primitive style. There were doors lying around and stacked against the wall, but none of them hung in the doorways. It appeared there was no heat, but there was energy. People were working on the place and it seemed this show was part of its renovation.

  I stepped over a ladder and some boxes containing papers and bolts into a room filled with televisions. The first piece in the show comprised a diorama of them that had been shot with a gun, Elvis-style. The title card explained that each set was carefully selected from a mass inventory of TVs found dumped around the city and pistol-shot in the basement of the building. Another project was signed “Molly Motor” and consisted of a television that held a live rooster with straw and food, a TV terrarium. Inside was also a set of what looked to be hairy cigars, tied in a bouquet.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Those are my dreadlocks. I just cut them off,” said an enormous voice from behind me. It definitely wasn’t Will.

  I turned to see a woman wearing rubber boots and a Carhartt, on which someone had spray-painted a spider stencil. She reminded me of Ma Joad from Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, a woman you would never want to fuck with and who might throttle you if backed into a corner, but with a fierce love and mothering instinct to match. She introduced herself warmly as Molly and said she lived across the street. She mentioned I could use her toilet if I needed to, and walked through the anteroom, parting a curtain into a whole new world, common in many cultures, but new to me, that of the dissatisfied and creative, the artists whose medium was society itself, those attempting, however naïvely, to make the world anew, and better this time.
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br />   I followed her in. The room was warm and neighborhood children were performing a puppet show called Patrick’s Weird Beard inside a huge cardboard television that had been constructed onstage. A half dozen kids in homemade costumes were giggling and stumbling through the show of their own creation. The small room was packed and the lights had been dimmed. The fire in the wood-burning stove was raging and you could hear its roar in the silences. I found Garrett in the crowd and slid in silently next to him. He whispered that earlier in the night they had hosted a City Council candidate who gave a speech inside the TV. He was a dark horse, and had just gotten out of prison, but seemed to make a big impression. Garrett also mentioned I could use his toilet if I needed, because the one in here had frozen.

  After the play the lights were turned up and everyone milled around in conversation. There were about thirty people in the room, most of them in different states of dirty, but none of them filthy—it was like the healthy glow and smell you get after taking a run, not the kind of funk when you’re lazy and haven’t showered in a week. This dirt was from work.

  The children scurried among all manner of art made from TVs, grabbing food off the tables, continuing their puppet show offstage, laughing. Garrett pointed out the farmer, Paul, in a pair of coveralls, who had grown the hay. He was skinny with a neatly trimmed gray beard, and was drinking a can of beer, talking with a red-headed black boy. He had a wiry, electrical energy, and scurried away before I could introduce myself. He seemed important, revered even, someone with an entire spinning globe of knowledge inside his hyperactive head, a leader of a leaderless tribe. Who was this man with a tractor and hay and a block of diverse people in East Detroit?