by Drew Philp
“We made it through Devil’s Night!”
“Roll up your victory sleeping bag so you can buy me victory breakfast,” he said.
He crowed and strutted around a bit more, gathering his things, happily talking to himself. “And these are my victory shoes, and now I’ll roll up my victory sleeping bag . . . ”
“Hold on, wait, what? I just. Why don’t you have a shirt on? It’s freezing.”
“You better hurry up because we need to stop at my house first so I can take a victory shit.”
* * *
I had an impossible number of things to do to get ready to live in this bad boy.
I was going to have to accomplish all this mostly on my own with whatever help I could rustle up from friends and family. The first thing to do was to clean the trash out, which I did with a pitchfork and a snow shovel. I’m talking small mountains of clothing, yard waste, empty tin cans, toys, diapers, those white foam trays that raw meat comes in, used auto parts, construction debris, liquor store plastic bags and bottles, rolls of old carpeting, broken furniture and glass, literal piles of human shit, uncapped needles.
I found the better part of a Dodge Caravan inside, cut into chunks with a reciprocating saw. From what folks who grew up in Detroit told me, it was an “insurance job.” Someone had needed the money, so they reported the van stolen and paid a couple of guys to cut it apart and deposit it around the city. Most of it made it into my house. The amount of garbage that had found its way inside was amazing. The initial cleanout took three months. Including plaster, I removed more than ten thousand pounds of trash, five tons, from my house.
I would back my truck up to the porch and push everything into the bed. I carried what I could from upstairs in trash cans I had found in the neighborhood, slipping, lifting, falling down the stairs, spilling the contents of the cans on myself. It was a filthy job, and I was scared of being pricked with a needle, of which I found many. I shoveled the feces, picked out the metal to scrap, and attempted to save anything else useful or possessing artistic merit for souvenirs.
I removed the existing trim carefully. It was truly beautiful, not something that would be stocked in any big box home-improvement store anywhere, ever. Made from old-growth oak, the baseboards were almost a foot tall, door casings six inches wide with intricate bevels. Header casings over windows were oak nearly an inch thick, eight inches tall with mitered corners and painstaking flowing ornate detail. For a reason I can’t understand, it had all been painted. Likely the slumlord before me had been in a rush and covered up the natural beauty to save a few pennies.
They don’t make material like that anymore. It was in thousands of houses around the city, houses the politicians were calling blight. That old-growth oak, pine, maple would be pushed into the ground with the backhoe like everything else, gone forever. It could have been harvested, WPA-style, and provided quite a few jobs. But you needed imagination to see the wealth amid the danger. For now it was simply destroyed in what amounted to a stunning waste of resources.
All the plaster in my main three rooms needed to go. It was a shame, because plaster is better-looking and blocks sound better than cheap drywall, but this was too far gone to save. It had crumbled in many places, and I wanted to get utilities like wiring and ducts in quickly anyway. I’d be able to use roll insulation instead of having to blow it in, too. I wanted to start, at least in these first rooms, with a clean slate.
The plaster was original to the house, and made with real horsehair. A lost art, it consisted of a layer of lath, thin rough strips of wood nailed with quarter-inch gaps horizontally across the studs. This would hold a rough cement layer, reinforced with horsehair and smeared on quickly to flatten the wall and create a base. This rough undercoat would support a final smooth top layer of plaster that could be painted. I learned to smash it out in reverse. Beat out the layers of plaster without disturbing the lath and it could be scooped up with a snow shovel and dumped into buckets. The lath could then be removed on its own and stacked for future use, kindling, decorative wall cover, spacers.
Wearing a respirator, I worked one room at a time, miniature sledge in one hand, crowbar in the other. It was like Mordor in there. Because there was no electricity I worked by the light of a battery-powered fluorescent and whatever I could get from the windows. The dust swirled with each shovelful, the plastic of the respirator sticking to my face with sweat, swing after swing. The rooms would become filled with plaster smoke and get darker as I worked, the open windows like a bright hole in ice viewed from underwater. When I couldn’t take any more I’d head outside and tear the mask from my face, drinking the clean air. I’d let the dust settle for a moment, then head back inside.
I would come home with black soot covering any exposed part of my body. When I rinsed off in the shower the water would pool darkly about my feet. Jeans and T-shirts used for demolition had to be washed all by themselves. It was repellent, but I’d come home to Forestdale closer to my goal by one day.
I removed the wall between the dining and living rooms. It was non-load-bearing and came out pretty easily. The wall running east and west separating the kitchen from this space was going to be a bit more tricky. It held the weight of the house and would have to be replaced with a giant header. The studs on each end needed to be reinforced underneath, and temporary walls had to be built on either side to hold the house up while this was happening. A chimney had once run along this wall and had been removed, leaving a dangerous hole in the floor and sagging main beams in the basement that appeared to have once rested on corbels in the chimney. The beam now sagged, lacking support. The whole house would need to be jacked up. I patched the hole in the floor and left the rest for later.
In the wall separating my main three rooms from the parlors hung a pocket door, five feet wide, two inches solid, made of oak. It was likely worth more than I’d bought the house for. There had been others in the parlor, but they had been stolen. This one had jammed unmovable in the wall, saved because it wasn’t functioning. When I broke out the plaster, I was able to pry the door up and onto its track. I greased the bearings and the slab slid in and out like magic, closing off my three little rooms from the rest of the house. Good as new, aside from the hideous lime-green-and-silver paint job the landlord had done. The door would need to be stripped eventually, but for now sliding it into place was good enough.
I saved all the materials I could for future use. I also saved pictures I found, including one of a woman with an enormous rear in lacy panties posing suggestively. I found a half dozen doors in the pile, saved those, some errant trim, saved that, too. The rest went to the incinerator. I must have looked strange as hell to the neighbors, pulling this horrid shit from this house that no one wanted, struggling by myself to get it in my truck and come back for more.
At the incinerator, located down the street, they would take only one load a day, maximum one thousand pounds. Occasionally I would recruit Will or someone on Forestdale to come with me for the second go-round, use their ID so I could make two trips before the sun went down. The guy at the entrance was the same each time, a white guy with a walrus mustache who could be friendly on the right day. He’d take your address at a little kiosk as the garbage trucks whizzed past. If I was overweight he would let me go back and pick up some of what I’d left instead of paying the forty-dollar fee.
“I remember you,” he said one slow afternoon. “You’re the only white guy that comes here.”
Past the gate, an enormous shed, as long as a football field and just as deep, held a trash pile almost three stories tall. You’d dump your garbage on the ground in front and a bulldozer would scrape it onto Trash Mountain, the dozer climbing the pile itself, listing backward like a caterpillar on a heap of horseshit. Seagulls fought in the yard and the smell was gut-wrenching, sour and poignant. You could taste it.
The “world’s largest municipal incinerator” was heavily subsidized. Detroit has an asthma hospitalization rate three times the national aver
age, and the highest rate of asthma in children among large cities in the United States. Nearly one in six residents suffers from the disease. The incinerator releases almost five tons of toxins—about what I removed from my trash-packed house—into the air each day. It’s inconceivable they would place something like that in a neighborhood that wasn’t poor and black.
Because of hideous deal after hideous deal the city worked out with various businesses (including at one time Philip Morris the tobacco giant, in some kind of perverse joke about air quality), suburban communities pay less to burn their trash in the incinerator than Detroit does. Some cities in the suburbs not only bring their trash to be burned in my neighborhood, for me and my neighbors to breathe, they pay less to do so than we do.
In 2010 the incinerator contract, despite one of the largest community outcries in Detroit’s history, was renewed until 2021. In an amazing bit of Orwellian language the new owners are now calling the literal garbage fire “green energy,” because of some steam heat and electricity it generates for downtown. More suspect tax credits for the incinerator were passed that year, with two city council members switching their votes at the last minute without explanation.
If you would like an inside look at Detroit’s continuing third-world level of corruption, a good place to start is the incinerator.
“The only difference between Detroit and third world nations—where corruption is concerned—is goats in the streets.”
Sam Riddle said that, and he would know. In 2010 he was convicted of corruption, extortion, bribery, fraud, etc., along with Monica Conyers, then president pro tem of the city council and wife of the storied U.S. representative John Conyers. Riddle and Monica Conyers both spent time in prison, Conyers while her husband was seated in the House.
You can safely say there is a culture of corruption in your city when the top two politicians, including a former mayor, have been, or are currently, in prison for corruption, racketeering, and the like. One former city councilwoman allegedly requested a bribe including seventeen pounds of sausages. The former police chief was indicted for theft totaling $2.6 million. The former school board president resigned from office only after masturbating in front of the female superintendent. Former Detroit city council president Charles Pugh just pled guilty to having sex with a fourteen-year-old boy and received five and a half to fifteen years in prison. The former city treasurer was just locked up. One Detroit high school principal used to drive a Maserati, purchased with crooked dollars.
The list of corruption, just over the last few decades, is too exhaustive to publish here. It could be its own book. And these are just the ones that got caught, just in Detroit. In its latest national study, the Center for Public Integrity listed Michigan dead last in laws and safeguards for ethics and transparency.
Soon after I bought my house the incinerator was sold again, and the private company started charging forty dollars a half ton to bring debris. Not only did I have to breathe its air, I couldn’t take my junk—which was really someone else’s—there anymore either.
The danger of sorting through someone else’s trash, breathing someone else’s trash, is that it can make you misanthropic. You can begin to hate the petty little modern conveniences such as plastic bags that never disappear, and with it begin to loathe not only the people that dropped them there, but the society that allowed them to. When the wind is right I smell not just the vomitus stench of a pile of burning trash, but years of corruption and neglect, not just in Detroit but of a society itself that refuses to come to terms with the waste of our rabid consumption.
But who am I to talk? I smoke cigarettes and sometimes throw the butts on the ground. I give part of the money I earn to a giant corporation whose profits are built solely upon addicting people and keeping them hooked until they die. What can I say, they got me early. As much as I hate it, I plunk my seven dollars on the counter for a pouch of tobacco and I roll it up and I smoke it. It might make me a hypocrite, but does it make me less worthy of clean air in general? The kids on Forestdale? Does what I do as an individual prevent me from criticizing a moneymaking entity from poisoning a city? Do I have to be perfect, beyond reproach, to criticize anything? Is the truth less the truth from the mouth of a sinner?
Just this year the owners of the incinerator notified some Poletown residents, including many on Forestdale, of a class-action lawsuit settlement they can take advantage of. They’re offering about $7,000 in exchange for waiving all rights to take future legal action against the owners of the plant spewing the smog that’s killing them.
* * *
There wasn’t much more I could get done at my place before the winter snowed everything in. I’d gotten most of the trash out, but had accomplished little else, not that I’d planned to. It was getting too cold. Shivering without heat at my house on Forestdale didn’t exactly provide the energy for dirty construction work. At least on Forestdale I could sit by the fire. The winter was for planning, and getting through it. I took as many shifts at the bar as I could to build up some money for the spring, not that there was much money anyway. Working just above minimum wage doesn’t allow one to get ahead. Any money I did gather was spent immediately on storing materials for the spring so I didn’t spend it on something stupid in the meantime.
The first weekend in November had come, and so time for the Harvest Party, Forestdale’s annual celebration of the bounty of the summer. The farmer’s carnival includes hayrides, bonfires, and homemade apple cider and cherry wine, pressed from fruit grown right on the block. On unlucky years it’ll snow. It marks both a relief from the work of the summer and a push through the frigid and lonely winter, a promise spring will return.
Paul drives the tractor, a blue Ford diesel from the ’40s, good-looking in the sinewy-horse sort of way of mechanical vehicles built just after World War II. He reserves a couple of dozen bales of hay each year to fill the wagon to give the children hayrides. The adults love them, too. They get faster and wilder as Paul becomes increasingly drunk. He’s hit parked cars in the past.
The ride begins by snaking first through what we call the Back 40: All but two of the houses on the block behind Forestdale are gone. Instead of letting the space slowly fill up with trash and despair, Paul planted an orchard. In the summer peaches and pears and apples and plums grow on the trees. Vegetables of every make and model grow in the soil. Neighbors care for bees and collect honey in autumn. At one time it was used to exercise the horses that were stabled on the block—remember, this is in walking distance from downtown Detroit.
In the winter Paul floods the center of the horse track to make an ice rink. The growing area is situated in a great oval, about an acre, with space in the middle for the rink and a track running around the outside. The fruit trees ring the exterior of that, like an elongated bull’s-eye. Paul’s not sure how many of the actual lots he owns, but two at the far end are untouched save for a small path meandering through. Paul left these just as they were to show the contrast between what he had done and the wilderness it would have become. Some of the neighborhood kids erected a teepee back there and play their version of cops and robbers, standing on the enormous compost hill or flitting in and out among the farm implements Paul has collected, cabin-size combines, seeders, thrashing and harvesting machines, the hay baler.
Before the Harvest Party, Paul hides pumpkins he grows amid the foliage and each hayride pauses momentarily so the children can jump out and hunt for a pumpkin to take home with them. When they’ve each found one the ride continues through the community garden, which Molly cares for, and then past the house I was staying in.
The tractor snakes its way down the block and through backyards and alleys, passing the houses of ordinary people doing extraordinary yet simple things. These were folks who looked for community and an honest life and found it in Detroit: Adam the chef and his two children; Tim the Stanford graduate working in landscaping; Betty the generous and testy bartender and her on-again off-again boyfriend who shoots heroin
but everyone likes anyway; Minnehaha, who grew up in the Belizean jungle with a white beauty queen mother and a Black Power father; Monk, a quiet lifelong resident and often the block’s conscience; Paul’s two grown sons and their growing families; Dan and Anne, a Polish couple who never left.
These aren’t characters, remember, but real people. And maybe not the kind you think of when you think of Detroit, maybe not the kind you see on the news. Mothers who care for their children, people who work hard and only want their fair due, folks who care for one another in very real ways. Detroiters who aren’t desperate or corrupt or criminals. Why don’t we ever see these people representing Detroit?
It’s a good question.
Children run the length of the block playing tag, riding skateboards, and the adults laugh, shout a greeting to an old friend, or eat venison stew or rabbit chili. The hay in the hay wagon is pokey and Paul has had a half dozen beers. I’m holding one, too, sitting next to Will, who has an unlit cigarette. The kids in the hay wagon are chanting, “Paul’s too slow! Paul’s too slow! Paul’s too slow!” He revs the engine and the kids scream, knowing what’s coming: the walls of the hay wagon bulge and I hold on to the railings as Will starts to holler his enjoyment.
Paul revs the engine again, this time for real, and we’re off, careening around corners and jerking the wagon back and forth as the kids scream their joy and my beer slops out of the cup onto Will. We’re thrust against one another in the packed wagon and everyone laughs and is happy, if only momentarily; the hay that Paul grew to feed the animals and my friends and neighbors feels powerful beneath my seat, my community helping one another and expressing joy in this place they said no one could love, a joy that cannot be bought. After another year of shit-kicking work in a community without consumers, I know I am home.
