by Drew Philp
* * *
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
I sat bolt upright out of bed from a deep sleep, gasping for air, my heart pounding. The gunshots sounded like a 9 mm from less than a block away. You always wonder when a stray one is going to rip through the house. The delight of the Harvest Party was through, and winter had set in.
There were gunshots almost daily near Forestdale at that time, and with police response at almost an hour, why call the cops? If you called them for every gunshot, you’d be calling them every day. The rounds would ring out like reminders to never forget that I could be seriously injured at any moment, that I could never get too comfortable. Fitfully I tried to get back to sleep.
A pleasant temperature inside the Forestdale house that winter, with the fire roaring, would be just under 50 degrees Fahrenheit. January in Michigan averages in the teens. I couldn’t ever get the fire to burn overnight, and even during the day I could see my breath. My uniform that year was a Carhartt, wool hat, and insulated overalls, which I swore I would never wear because I find them hideous. The cold got the best of me. I would sleep in my coat and hat as well, and my father was worried I would asphyxiate under so many blankets.
One morning I woke up and the temperature in the house was especially savage. I could see my breath, and had to count down from ten to get out of bed. When I sat on my toilet, I saw an icicle the size of a carrot hanging from the sink faucet. I generally tried to keep the faucets dripping at night, as it’s more difficult for running water to freeze, but it was getting too cold even for that and the pipes had frozen shut. I was showering down the street at Molly’s and work on my new house had come to a halt on account of the cold.
I struggled to do anything, just to get out of bed. The stony cold, the hunger—the whole world fucking sucks, and you are just so small, only one person. And what the hell are you going to do, all by yourself and cold and hungry? You can’t even take care of you. Now you’re trying to get ahead a little bit, build a house? You can’t even feed yourself properly.
But you get out of bed anyway. What else is there to do? You get up because you want to tell that motherfucker on TV he is a liar and a leech, along with anyone else who said you’re crazy, who laughed at you and anyone like you. The anger can keep you going, but you have to suppress some of it and channel it into building something. Destroying things doesn’t work anymore.
The cold created a frantic animal insanity. It’s like being deep underwater, the pressure everywhere. Warming up wasn’t as easy as jumping in a cold pool in the summer to cool down. Thawing out took a good hour and a half. And then you would become sleepy. Drinking helped a little, but was dangerous and expensive. The cold worms its way through your mind as if it were an apple. My pens would freeze. I would have to warm them up in a pot of water on the stove, careful to not let the tips slip under the surface and create an inky mess. It became a nightly ritual I called the “unthawing of the pens.” My aunt came to visit that winter, and the dishes in my sink had frozen, plates and forks sticking out this way and that. She almost fainted.
On some of the coldest nights, my firewood running out, desperate, I attempted to burn some of the books I had collected during previous years for donating to prisons. Burning them never really worked (they create too much ash). I don’t know if it’s a sin to burn books to keep yourself warm when you’re cold and hungry and out of firewood. I do know I had definitely thought it was, before I had to make that choice myself.
The more I was hungry and cold, the more I was aware there were hungry and cold people in the world. And it made me want to work harder. I thought it was important to experience what a large part of my new community was experiencing. I decided it would not defeat me, and I would use the cold, hunger, and physical pain to harden my body and will. I couldn’t have done anything about it anyway, because I had nowhere to go and no money to get there.
I wasn’t the only person without heat. Just on the block, Jake and Monk didn’t have it either. I met dozens of people who have gone without: preachers, artists, the elderly. Heat is the biggest winter living expense, and it’s the first thing to go. I’ve met more longtime Detroiters who have gone without heat for at least one winter than haven’t. The most common question I hear about a living situation is “Do you have heat in there?”
The local power and gas utility, DTE, is universally loathed. It’s a for-profit company, and its rates keep going up. They do lots of “charity” in an attempt for people to say, “Well, look at all the good they do for the community.” People don’t need some ratty donated coats. They need fair prices on their heating bills.
The winter wasn’t all bad, though. One Tuesday evening, about eight o’clock, I came home and thought a bottle of wine might take the edge off the chill. I’ve bought maybe three bottles of wine in my life, almost always sticking to the blue-collar staples of beer and whiskey. After buying it at a supermarket, I realized I didn’t have a corkscrew, so I walked down the block, looking for someone outside, who I wouldn’t disturb at dinner or family time or art making. Molly was stringing blue Christmas lights on her bushes, and offered to pop the cork.
Her house was always warm and full of animals. Between her and her roommate, Jennie, there were seven cats, two dogs, a couple of rabbits who lived in the garage, and chickens. The previous summer she had found two baby pheasants whose mother had been killed. They were too young to survive on their own, so Molly made an entire room in her house into a habitat for them, complete with sticks and grass and enough space to run freely until they were old enough for the wild. It was Molly’s nature to care for things.
She was so fastidious, though, that her house never smelled of animals. The walls were painted vibrant orange or green, and were filled with art she had purchased in Detroit over the past twenty-five years: paintings of chickens, skulls, silver-painted guns, a 400-pound printing press someone had found in an abandoned school and given her, accidental Detroit ephemera that is daily growing in value. She had gone to art school, and as it turned out her skill was in curation. She was the best hostess on the block, supremely generous, and an excellent carpenter.
In the center of her living room sat a wood-burning stove, and she had made a sitting cove behind it with a bench and lambswool pelt. As we chatted and I opened the bottle, she loaded the stove with wood. She would let me shower at her house, and left the front door open and unlocked so I could do so at my leisure. This is in East Detroit, remember. Most people have bars on their doors and windows.
The bathroom was tiled in colorful mosaic, work she had done herself. Usually she had candles lit, and a cat was most often curled up in the sink. Jennie had drawn faces on the toilet paper rolls over the toilet, and as I would shower she would sometimes sing and practice her guitar in the living room. I longed to ask her to play in the kitchen so I could hear her better, but was always too scared. I would take my time getting ready just to listen to her for a bit longer. Molly had insisted I use one of her towels, which she would launder for me, and it hung on a peg by the door next to hers and Jennie’s.
When I got the wine open I offered her a glass. She asked me about work at the new French restaurant where she had just hired me, and at which she was the executive chef. She had been on vacation and was wondering how I was getting along.
Seven hours later I was dancing to ABBA in her living room with Jennie, who had returned from work to wine and whiskey bottles rolling about the floor. Four in the morning and Molly was splay legged on the rug, bouncing her head, looking at a record cover, schooling me on the ’80s music I’d missed. That was the beauty of living on Forestdale. It was almost impossible to be lonely. No matter how hungry I was or how broke I was, someone would always feed me, invite me in, have a dance party on a Tuesday in the winter. It had snowed half a foot during our private party, pure white soft snow, the good thick kind, and all three of us decided to take a walk with the dogs on account of the beauty and wonder.
Outside was still a
nd foggy. While we drank, the neighborhood kids had made what seemed like hundreds of tiny snowmen and placed them upon everything, on the hoods of cars, in front lawns, up in trees resting on branches. There were hundreds of all different sizes, perfect little three-ball snowmen with rocks for eyes and twigs for arms, none standing more than a couple of feet tall, the smallest the size of a tin can. Someone had built one on top of my mailbox, and when I opened it there was another inside. Each snowman smiled and glistened white in the silver darkness of a fresh Michigan snow and a full moon.
That winter I was the most broke, hungry, and cold I’d ever been, but no one on that block ever let me go without. They never let me forget I was part of something larger than myself, an organism made of many people, and that I would have the chance to pay it forward someday.
* * *
I thought we’d be left alone forever. It had been decades since anyone outside of Poletown cared for what happened inside it. I thought I might be able to live out the next couple in the stasis of the cyclical change of the seasons. Although I was cold now, it was to ensure I’d be warm in the future. Each year I’d be in a bit better position to live in comfort. Will had suspicions otherwise, and what he would tell me next was just the beginning of what was to come.
I stopped by his house late that winter to shiver by his fire for a change—he’d installed a woodstove in the kitchen. His furnace was working, but barely, and he didn’t have the money to keep it much higher than 50. A new charter school had opened up just down the street, and they had been eyeing his house for expansion. They’d been sniffing around and making friendly with Will, but had so far not made any offers.
“So are you going to sell it if they ask?”
“Not if I don’t have to.”
“Dude, you could make so much money.”
“That ain’t what it’s about. I could make money in a lot of ways,” he said. “This is my paradise, this has been my dream for years. I don’t want to move anywhere else, I don’t want a—” he used air quotes—“nicer house. I like it right here.”
“They’ll eminent domain you out if you don’t. You know what happened with the Poletown plant.”
In the early ’80s, the entire north half of the neighborhood was demolished to make way for a 362-acre auto plant, heavily subsidized by the city, state, and federal governments. More than 4,000 residents were deprived of their property by eminent domain. Fourteen hundred homes, several churches, and 140 businesses were razed to make way for the promise of three shifts of work a day. A Jewish cemetery is located inside the plant’s grounds, as it was illegal to move it. If relatives wish to visit their ancestors, they can do so on two days a year.
Approximately 6,500 jobs were promised at the Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant, as it’s officially known, in exchange for demolishing half the neighborhood. At its peak employment, roughly 3,500 people worked there, less than the number of people kicked out of their homes to build it. It was the death rattle of American manufacturing, the last attempt at making cars in Detroit for anything more than lip service or sentiment.
Before that, in the ’60s, Interstate 75 cut through the neighborhood. It was run straight through two of the most economically and culturally important black neighborhoods in the United States, Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, both of which bled into Poletown. What was left was replaced with a model community, and the rest of the people moved to towering projects or the suburbs.
But even before that, the downfall of the neighborhood began in earnest. Poletown was bisected, north and south, by Interstate 94 in the ’50s. This was the first inkling of what was to be called “urban renewal,” a broad set of policies where large tracts of cities would be transformed by enormous public and private works projects. By 1962, more than 43,000 people had been displaced by urban renewal just in Detroit, 70 percent of them black.
Although these developments were genuinely thought at the time to be benevolent, there were, of course, winners and losers. The city, for example, was a giant loser. Those freeways allowed people to escape to the suburbs, pulling their economic might and taxes with them. Governments flush with postwar tax money were happy to build the infrastructure to accommodate them, while letting cities decay. It would start a long history of policy decisions that prioritized the suburbs over the city and ensured Michigan would have some of the wealthiest ’burbs in the nation surrounding one of its poorest cities. It was the start to building the most segregated metropolitan area in the United States, and would also have immeasurable consequences for individuals.
My grandparents were able to get some of the reclaimed lumber from a demolished house along the I-94 corridor when the government ran it through Detroit. They used the lumber to build their own home on virgin land along Lake Huron. As I write these very words, I’m sitting at my grandparents’ kitchen table surrounded by a house originally framed with lumber from Detroit, perhaps Poletown.
My grandparents were both children of the Depression and worked hard. My grandfather built this house with his own hands. But this is how the past bleeds into the future. This is how, sixty years later, my family, myself, and people like us everywhere benefit from decisions made long before we were born. This house, this beautiful house that protects me from the elements as I write, warms me, keeps me safe, was made from the bones of someone else’s misfortune. I’ll never know exactly whose house this lumber came from or where their descendants are now. I hope they’re doing all right and I hope they got a fair price for their home when the government came knocking and ordered them out.
I tried to prod Will some more about what he was thinking. He reloaded the stove and the teakettle on top began to whistle slowly. He refilled both of our glasses, each with cooling nettle tea, supposedly good for the liver. Was this just the beginning of some great change, or had it been happening for longer than I’d been alive, maybe forever?
“I don’t want to think about it right now,” he said.
The winter was coming to a close.
CHAPTER 4
* * *
Windows and Doors and Airplanes
Gratiot
I’d just shaved my beard off. It took me the length of side one of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. The beard had grown thick over the winter and I didn’t have any clippers, only a razor. There was no mirror in the bathroom, so I did it standing at my dresser with water in a bread pan. I looked five years younger, but I liked it. When I woke up I couldn’t see my breath and couldn’t remember how long it was since that had happened.
I looked at myself shirtless in the mirror. I hadn’t really seen myself naked in the longest time. Because of the cold, I would transition between the bath and clothes as fast as I could, never stopping to look. My body had become hard from the physical work and the chill. There was very little fat. I could see the strands in my muscles and pick out each one in my back. My face had become thin without the hair, and the shadows atop my cheekbones were dark. I needed a haircut. My stomach was smooth and hard. I could see purple veins running through my forearms, and the tops of my hands were spidered with them. I looked like a buck deer that had made it through the winter. And I had.
I needed a dog—something to protect me while I was in the house and the house when I wasn’t. I didn’t really want one, though. Owning a living creature would change the rhythms of my life, and tie me down. No more working all day then heading to the bar all night. I’d have to care for a being other than myself for the first time, and this worried me. I was barely caring for myself. But a dog was essential. I don’t know anyone who has redone an abandoned house without a dog.
I went to the pound. I was looking for a puppy, something I could raise up to my lifestyle. My mother and I walked past cages of barking and miserable adult dogs to the puppy bin. There was only one left and he was stomping around in the middle of the room, playing with a splay-legged woman on the ground. He was black and tan with a white chest and had a little puppy snarl on his face, ripping up a fr
og toy. He puffed his chest and trotted over when he noticed us, the cutest little bastard mutt I’d ever seen, nine pounds of fuzz and teeth and tongue. His paws were way too big for him and he was clumsy but fearless. He was perfect.
“Hi, little buddy.” I bent down to rub him, and he peed on my foot. The yellow stream became a puddle and I hollered for something to clean it up with. This obviously meant he was the one. I sighed.
I cleaned the spill and he rolled onto his back. His stomach was spotted black and white in patches like a milk cow.
“Oh, you have a fuzzy little cow belly,” I said to him in baby talk. He bit my finger.
On the ride home, the little monster bit everything: my shirt, the car door, the seats, my chin, the seat belt; he squirmed and tried to grab the steering wheel. I settled on Gratiot (rhymes with “hatchet”) for a name, from a main avenue running through the east side, just a couple of blocks from my house.
“Your name’s going to be Gratiot and you’re going to grow up big and strong and we’re going to be best friends and play every day and I’ll feed you crunchies and buy you toys and it might be cold for a little bit and I love you.” I held his face and we looked into each other’s eyes. He barfed on my shirt.
“Ugh! Gratiot. NO.”
He burped happily.
That’s when I realized the sentence I would be saying more than any other for the next two years was “Gratiot, NO.”
He wriggled upside down on the floor in the Forestdale house as I inspected my beardless face in the mirror. He had the stuffing almost all chewed out of a Santa Claus toy he’d found in the pile outside.
“Gratiot, relax,” I said, bringing the pan of water I’d used to shave back to the sink to dump it. The dog looked at me for a moment and went right back to what he was doing.
