by Drew Philp
Will was just finishing up the door and Jake was nearby, cheering him on. As I went to the truck to get the lock, Jake spray-painted on the door, “Drew’s house, WATCHED,” and “Protected by Smith and Wesson.” I thought this gave the wrong message so I spray-painted over it, the gray door turning blue. I fitted the padlock into the door and for the first time in ten years the house was no longer open to the world.
* * *
After I purchased the house with my orange bidder card, I was shuffled into another room to sign papers concerning the deed. I took photos of everything I signed, knowing the City of Detroit was notoriously bad at the details. When the deed came a month later, they had spelled my name wrong.
When Jake and I returned to Forestdale from the auction, neighbors were waiting for us in Paul’s house. Two other people on the block had purchased houses or lots that day and there was a celebration going on. Paul had killed and cooked one of his chickens, and as I walked into the house Molly threw me a can of beer.
“You got a new Carhartt and an old house!” she said.
Paul gave me a hug and shook my hand. It was the first time he’d done so. “They call it real estate because it’s real,” he said, his eyes twinkling.
That night all of my new friends piled into cars with six-packs and went over to my new house. We smoked a joint on the porch, and I looked upon the dream and the nightmare of the best years of my life.
There was a grumpy quality to the neighborhood, and the city, but it eased open with familiarity. Detroit wasn’t a blank canvas. There were people already making their lives there, and I hadn’t “discovered” anything. As it turned out I would need their help.
Detroit stayed the same. It was I who had changed. I’d lived there less than two years, but I was learning. Detroit ceased to be a black stone monolith and became a garden of variety. It had always been that way, but my ignorance had hidden it from me. The city wasn’t a playground, and I had a responsibility if I was going to do this. I wanted to add my voice, not overwrite what was already happening. There was a community already here, not a grotesque one that needed changing as I had been told, but a powerful and innovative one I wanted to assimilate into.
I would be staying in Detroit no matter what. I was a homeowner, I paid taxes, and in time I would be a true Detroiter. I was twenty-three years old.
CHAPTER 3
* * *
Someone Else’s Trash
A nearby house burns down
The Forestdale house was looking less like a shell and, while not exactly like home, maybe a dusky cottage. I had gotten as far as I could before winter. I had insulated the walls and ceiling, but wouldn’t put drywall or any covering over it. For the kitchen and the bathroom I had made makeshift sink basins from pieces of plywood and scrap lumber. There was an empty stud wall between the two rooms, but nothing facing it. You could see right through. Entertaining was going to be a problem.
Kinga and I had finished all the electricity, so the lights worked, but still the only plumbing I had was cold water. I had a cookstove and arranged my workbench in the kitchen as best I could to make a food prep space. My family had donated some rugs, so they added some cheer to the room, and I did what I could to hang up any art that I had or had been given to me by the block. This is key: cheer, in the form of wall hangings and trinkets of joy, is essential for making it in a formerly abandoned house.
An ex-girlfriend had given me a wood-burning stove, which really wasn’t a stove but a porous and thin fireplace insert, that I hooked into the crumbling chimney and surrounded the best I could with bricks so as to not burn the house down. I placed two chairs in front of it, both plucked from the city dump.
When the house was clean it wasn’t bad. The new place got plenty of light with new windows installed, and I used bedsheets for some makeshift curtains. There was a claw-foot bathtub, but it wasn’t hooked up, and the last item I had was a bookshelf I had found in the trash. I had no idea how cold the winter would get, no idea what brutal, unending cold can do to a person. This was my first stab at building a habitation. Everyone starts somewhere. It was time to start thinking seriously about my own house.
I understood how brave the Detroit firefighters were when I saw a three-story home in my neighborhood on fire, smoke and flames spewing from the windows. As the fire trucks surrounded the blaze and firemen in yellow-and-brown suits rushed around connecting hoses, shouting into radios and spraying water into the void, there was someone on the roof. Straddling the ridgeline was a firefighter. As the house burned he chopped at the roof with an axe. He’s not only sitting on a flaming house, he’s cutting away at the very thing supporting him. Furiously he chopped, finally making a hole that began to gush thick black smoke.
A few weeks later I saw a group of firemen at a local diner and asked them about it. They said they needed to open a hole in the roof to let out the smoke, like a chimney, so they could go inside and make sure nobody was still in there. I tried to buy their lunch but they refused.
Detroit is the most flammable city in America. We even have an image of the city burning on our flag, and a quote in Latin, “We hope for better things. It will rise from the ashes.” There are a dozen “suspicious” fires a day on average, marked thus because the city has only seven arson investigators, total. The fire department itself says it responds to 9,000 structure fires a year, at least 5,000 of them suspicious. That’s one fire for every eighty people in the city. Conservatively. If each of the arson investigators worked every day of the year, seven days a week including holidays, and investigated one fire a day each, they wouldn’t even get to half of them. Realistically, they are able to investigate only one in every five “suspicious” fires a year.
People, I’ve learned in Detroit, burn down houses for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it’s a firebug who does it for the spectacle or because they are mentally ill; some houses are burned down for insurance profit or to get rid of a structure being used as a dope house or brothel; some fires are set for revenge or out of anger; some to make the scrapping of the house easier. People in places like Detroit witness so much change but have little control over it, and burning things down can be their chance to take that control back.
I myself have seen too many fires in my neighborhood to count. We used to chase them, follow the black smoke in our trucks to see what was burning. It was exciting, something fun to do. I don’t do that anymore, having realized how grotesque and morbid that is. With enough time I didn’t even need to go far. In total I have watched two houses and an abandoned store burn to the ground from my back porch. That’s three fires within one block of my house.
One of the first I saw up close was just a block away from Forestdale. I watched it burn, and the closest I could get was thirty yards away. These houses don’t just smolder, they blaze. The houses are old and balloon-framed, and the wood is incredibly dry. They go up spectacularly. You can feel the heat from hundreds of yards away, watch the rising black smoke for miles. Entire two-story houses wrapped in roaring flames. They actually roar.
Some days are worse than others. In 2014 there was a day with thirty-six fires. Some weekends are bad as well. There were a hundred fires over July 4 weekend that same year. But the king of them all is Devil’s Night, the annual orgy of arson and destruction on Halloween weekend. At its peak in 1984, there were eight hundred fires over a three-day period. The words “Devil’s Night” still bring chills to longtime Detroiters and the understaffed and underfunded fire department—sometimes using stacked pop cans and a fax machine for an alarm—their ladders and hoses critically unmaintained for lack of money.
Devil’s Night occurred two weeks after I bought my house. I decided this should be the first time I stayed in it, to make sure it didn’t burn. I gathered my supplies: a fire extinguisher and smoke detector I bought earlier that day; an axe for protection; a climbing rope borrowed from a friend; various lanterns and flashlights; a battery-powered radio for company; and some blankets, beer, a boo
k. I also included the deed in case the cops or firefighters wondered what I was doing in this abandoned house. The last thing I brought was a snow shovel, because I would still need to clean out a bedroom.
None of the entryways into the house had stairs yet, and the rear door was just a piece of plywood screwed to the frame, so I pulled my truck bed against the front porch and hopped up. A family of pheasants flew from the backyard and startled me. I watched their halting glide for a moment, glad for the presence of another living being.
I opened the door for the first time, unlatched the padlock with a click, and threw open the steel: piles of trash, darkness, the stairway leading up. I turned on the flashlight, grabbed my bag, and headed to the second floor. It began to drizzle, and the evening was cold. It was barely still daylight, and I needed to get to work.
I selected a bedroom in the front corner, figuring this would give me the most visibility. The walls had been painted pink by whoever owned it before me, but because of the scrappers ripping out electrical wires and the leaking roof, there were great holes in the ceiling. The lath jutting out was ragged, hanging this way and that, angry, like a poisonous plant. The floors were buckled from the water and littered with piles of plaster. There was a stack of rotting drywall in the corner. Home sweet home.
I took the plywood off the windows to let in what light I still had left, and I set lanterns in each signaling “someone is here.” I tied the rope around a sturdy stud in the bathroom and uncoiled it near the window, so in an emergency I could throw it out and climb down. I set the radio, axe, and fire extinguisher in the cleanest corner and got to work with the shovel on the plaster, piling it in the bathroom.
In one of the piles of garbage downstairs I found a mop with a yellow handle and missing only half its bristles. I captured some rainwater from the roof in a bucket, also found in the house, and mopped the bedroom as best I could to at least wet the plaster dust down. It’s deathly toxic. I brought the blankets from the truck, made a pallet, turned on the radio to the oldies station, and surveyed my home. That’s when it began to drip in the room. I moved my blankets to escape the water. That’s also when the cops showed up.
I first heard them shouting outside, but when I looked out the window I could see only the car, no officers. I fished the purchase documents from my bag and headed downstairs. I opened the door and saw three pistols pointed in my direction.
Reflexively I put my hands up. I explained that I owned the house and was watching over it for the night. I told the lead officer I had the documents in my hand and they put their weapons down. The first officer holstered his and I handed him the papers and he smiled.
“You’re making our job easy tonight.”
I told them how much I’d spent, and they smiled and shook their heads as they left. I was alone in my house for the first night.
I walked through the filthy rooms with a lantern, looking for treasures, planning. It was laid out with a double parlor in the front, and a kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and dining room in the rear. I figured I would have to carve out a small space, just a couple of rooms, to start. Basically I would need to fashion an efficiency apartment within the house. I would only heat this small section and everything else would run wild for the time being, a common practice in rehabbing Detroit homes without using loans.
The backside of the house was the most suited for this outpost. I could remove the walls separating the kitchen, bedroom, and dining room, creating one large space. The cramped bathroom could be enlarged to fit a shower. Getting clean was crucial if I wanted to work and make money. In the winters it would be the warmest fifteen minutes of my day.
The kitchen would have to be totally redone, the plaster demolished, the basement door moved to provide more space for countertops, and a new, bigger window put in to provide light, a back door added, plumbing, sink, stove, gas, everything. In the coming weeks Eric, a kid from New York in for an artist residency, would help me measure the space and draw a crude picture of what I hoped it to be. I would take this picture and measurements to my grandfather, a master draftsman and carpenter, and he would teach me to make a scale drawing using an architect’s scale. He’d never received any formal training as an architect, but he was a damn good one, his teacher being experience building houses. He had tiny cardboard cutouts of toilets, refrigerators, and stoves that I could move around within the drawing and get a sense of where I wanted appliances placed.
For now I was left with the night. Some ratty cabinets lay spilled across the floor along with some bags of leaves and garden clippings. One of the bags had broken open and leaves crunched beneath my feet.
Looking closer in one of the cabinets, I found children’s toys: a pink-and-yellow carousel that appeared to be in ideal shape, some grungy-looking crayons, an action figure missing the head. As I explored further I found more children’s things, a tiny Superman onesie, marbles, squirt guns. On the inside of the closet door in the first-floor bedroom someone had scrawled “Colby’s closet” in childlike lettering. This made me sad.
It was raining hard now, the wind gusting. I was in for a cold night. Through the roof, through the second-floor ceiling, through the second floor and first-floor ceiling into a frank little puddle, the water had begun to drip into the kitchen now as well. The rain crept toward an upside-down photograph, which I picked up. A smiling family, a boy, maybe Colby, his hand in excitement in the air, his teeth straight and white and distinct like Chiclets.
I returned upstairs. Both of my lanterns had been knocked off the windowsill and the rain was whipping inside. The puddles from the dripping ceiling had begun to run. It was going to be a wet night, too. I replaced the lanterns and opened one of the beers and began to read from the complete Shakespeare that I had brought.
I tried my best to creep into the corner, away from the wet, but it was going to be impossible if the rain kept up like this. I should have considered bringing a book that was maybe a little easier, because try as I might, the Shakespeare wasn’t keeping my attention. This wasn’t going to be like a camping trip. It’s hard to have any fun when your jeans are soaked to the knees and the hems of your shirtsleeves play about your wrists with the tickling and stinging cold of wet.
But this was my duty. This wasn’t always going to be fun. This was work, my cross to bear—
Someone outside was yelling, and I figured it was the cops again so I grabbed my deed and headed downstairs. What I saw instead made me happy and interrupted my sanctimony.
Sunny had moved to Detroit at about the same time I had. He had just come from living in a Buddhist monastery and had the soft and jolly countenance of a monk—not the silent kind, the beer-making kind. He had a hearty clucking laugh and was quick with it. People called him Sunny for a reason, and he could instantly change a room with his goodwill and joviality. His real name is Patrick, from Irish stock, and the Buddhist name he received was Sun-Chim. Sunny made more sense.
As I hopped off the porch he was untying a sleeping bag from his bicycle, one of those touring rigs people ride across the country, as he had done the year before. I had told him I would be defending my house from fire this night but must have forgotten, and he had come through at the last minute. I was hoping the sleeping bag meant he was in for the long haul, too. Maybe this journey wasn’t going to be as lonely as I thought.
“Sunny!” I approached him to shake his hand, but he gave me a hug instead. He was soaking wet.
“Thanks for coming by, buddy.” All of my other friends were looking after their own houses.
“I wasn’t going to leave you alone on a night like this. I brought beer, too.” Sunny was studying to be a brewer and once let me make a batch with him. After we bottled it for storage, he found a couple of mice among our additional grain. We called it Two Mouse Porter.
He clapped me on the back one more time after looking me in the eye and headed into the house.
“It’s drippy in here!” he said, laughing. “It’s like a sewer, like the Teenage M
utant Ninja Turtles.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“I get to be Donatello.”
“Wh—”
“You can be Michelangelo. This is a bitchin’ pad. You’re going to have so much fun in here. Where can I put my stuff?”
I showed him the room we were sleeping in and he laughed, rubbing his hands together. “Rustic.” He clapped. “I like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Real manly like.”
He grabbed me on the shoulder and shook me, hard enough to chatter my teeth, smiling. He laughed again. “Well, let’s get down to business.” He opened a beer and sat against his sleeping bag. “So what are you going to do first?”
We chatted into the night, and Sunny told me stories from his past and his travels, his shadow playing against the wall as he stood and gestured, pacing around the room, inhabiting the characters and using different voices. He fiddled with the radio, explored the house, made little dioramas with the trash, wrote his name on the wall—on the inside—so “you can remember who slept with you on Devil’s Night,” and generally made the time pass quickly. Before we went to bed he asked me, “So, you really think you’ll be able to make it here?”
“There’s no other way than to find out.”
“Let me know when you need any help.”
“I will, bud. I’m sure I’ll need a lot.”
“I hope you’re all right here, man. I don’t think I’d be able to do this.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
We slept fitfully in the cold.
I awoke to daylight and Sunny shouting “Victory” to the morning. He was awake before me and was bare chested, looking out the window with his hands at his sides, hooked into his belt. He crowed like a rooster and observed me with a devilish grin. “Victory,” he whispered. “Victory!” He shouted that time.
