by Drew Philp
Something caught my eye out the window. Two of my neighbors were inside their house, sitting at the kitchen table with their chairs turned toward mine. They had cups of coffee and smiled and waved when I noticed them. They’d been watching my shave like a television show. It would be in the 50s that day, sunshine and blue skies, and I had a lot of work to do.
The first and most dangerous project was to attempt to seal my roof using an enormous blue tarp. I had done something similar to my Forestdale house with Norman, where we rigged some climbing rope around the chimney, so it was familiar, but my roof was much more challenging. The pitch on the Forestdale roof was standard, with standard valleys. Mine was a gambrel roof, completely unwalkable. The bump halfway up is called the hip, the tippy top the ridge. It looks like this:
I enlisted Will because he was crazy enough to help on a roof project. We would have to float a ladder over the hip, throw the tarp over without getting it tangled, and nail it to both sides with strips of wood at the edge so it didn’t rip. I borrowed a ladder and we went to work.
The side with the empty lots was no big deal. Will drove his truck next to the house and we placed the ladder in the bed. Will and I got up on the roof, he nimbly and I slowly, and got the tarp positioned.
Will unfurled a rope he kept in his truck and we tied one end to the tarp and another to a wrench, which we took turns attempting to throw over the ridge, laughing, and running when it would inevitably come crashing down on the wrong side. Finally, Will threw it over with a Herculean toss and we pulled the tarp behind it. He nailed the edge of the tarp in, frowning at me because I had convinced him, against his better judgment, to do it for me. I hate heights. I can deal with power tools, and snakes, and spiders, and small spaces, and clowns, and oceans, and loneliness, but I hate heights. You never know which phobia you’re going to get. Now to nail the other side.
There was a slender alley between the abandoned house next door and mine, littered with the usual Detroit treasures, broken glass, rusting metal of indeterminate origin, filthy plastic, soggy lumber. Will and I tried placing the ladder in different ways, struggling with it, but it wouldn’t fit. The angle was too steep, and the alley too narrow. By this time Will was doing his usual cursing.
“Sketchy handyman Will, always gotta help with the roof projects.”
He heaved the ladder again, lost it, and it came crashing to the ground.
“God damn it!” he said, walking away muttering curses. “We can try to put it through the window next door.”
“All right,” I said skeptically. Obviously it was the only choice, but I certainly didn’t want to get caught in that house with tools. I walked through the hole where the back door would have been. I heard water running downstairs and found the supply line had been cut behind the meter. Thousands of gallons a day were shooting onto the floor, creating a tiny lake, but the water seemed to be draining well. This was costing Detroit taxpayers hundreds of dollars a month, and it certainly wasn’t the only abandoned house in which it was happening. I discovered years later the house kitty-corner to mine also had the water running in the same manner, and it had been on for more than a decade.
Upstairs, bullet holes pocked the walls. The inside was a bit like mine, with less trash, but broken plaster plagued the floor, and the running water made for a bright smell. The corpse of the house was pretty well stripped out, aside from some nice doorknobs, which I would go back and get later.
This used to be someone’s home.
There was some glass still in the window we needed to get through, so I broke it with a hammer. Will lifted the ladder up to me in the house, over his head, and onto the roof. But the floor was vinyl tile and the ladder kept slipping. I asked Will what to do.
“Nail it to the floor.”
He found some boards in the house, and after violently adjusting the ladder, he nailed a two-by-four to the floor as a backstop. He nailed another on top so the ladder wouldn’t move up and slip. He looked at me. He held out a hammer.
“I’m not doing this one. It’s your house.”
I took a deep breath. “All right.”
There’s no courage without fear.
I put the hammer in my belt and grabbed some strips of wood, put some nails in my mouth. Will spotted the ladder as I climbed.
I ducked through the window and out over the alley, hoping the ladder wouldn’t snap in half. I looked back at Will and wished I had broken out all of the glass in the frame. Some shards remained, looking like dinosaur teeth, and if I were to slip I would slide right through them, shredding my groin. If I fell, the nails in my mouth would likely get smashed through my throat. My leg might get caught between rungs as I tumbled, my body weight cracking it in half, likely never to walk again. Will had wandered away from the ladder, looking at something, and I yelled for him to get back to his post.
“You’ll be fine. Just keep going. I’m hungry.”
I made it over the hip, still carrying everything. I dismounted the ladder and stepped around it, leaning on the roof. I would have to wedge my foot between the ladder and the shingles, and extend myself completely to reach the tarp. I looked down in the alley. I wished I’d cleaned that, too. The shards of glass from the window gleamed like razors, along with some jagged and threatening pieces of wood, pipes sticking from the concrete, a board with nails in it like some caveman weapon. I began to hammer.
One. Two. Three. More nails. I worked my way across. Four. My fingernails tore at the shingles to stay aloft. The tar began to heat up, and I felt its dirty warmth on my cheek and through my jeans at the hip. I almost got comfortable and looked around a bit: four abandoned houses, two occupied. I saw a fence at the abandoned place two doors down, and what looked like a decent gate. I made a note of it for later. Across the street on the next block stood a large building, once a settlement house, now vacant. Vacant, vacant, vacant. Behind me, a building that looked occupied, but I wasn’t sure, a squatted house and some more abandoned ones, and two abandoned schools, one a sprawling former high school named after Frederick Douglass, its towering windows gone, its floors filled with waste, the yard overgrown. I could see a piece of black theater curtain fluttering within one broken window.
A fear of heights isn’t the fear of falling. It’s the fear of jumping.
Solid ground.
Back in the kitchen. No puncture wounds, no broken bones. I started moving the ladder down and shook off the adrenaline. “That’s enough for today,” I said.
Will had picked up what looked like a page torn from a magazine and was looking at it upside down. He peered at me over the top.
“You owe me.”
“I’ll buy you lunch.”
* * *
The next project was to brick up the holes in the basement. Scrappers had stolen most of the ducts, and had left large holes where the main trunks had passed through the foundation into the crawl space. A friend from college, an itinerant musician and activist, was in town that day and he helped me mix the mortar as I laid the brick. I’d never done any bricklaying, but thought it couldn’t be that hard. This wall didn’t need to hold any weight or be super straight, and it turned out decent. After, I helped my buddy design a multiple-person dragon costume for a protest he was getting ready for. We drew the plans right on the wall in my front hallway.
I had brightened the house up, too. The Kemps suggested two solutions from when they were doing their place. The first was to cut the top third off each board covering the windows. This piece could be hung and removed with just two screws, giving me some light without having to wrestle with the entire piece of ply. The other was to cut a hole about a foot square from the center of each board and seal the opening with Plexiglas, in effect a window in a window. These would let in enough light to work by, but wouldn’t be breakable and would provide the same measure of security as the boards themselves, which wasn’t a whole lot.
I needed to start thinking about the backyard, and yardwork was one of the things I felt I co
uld get from the multitudes of acquaintances who’d said “If you ever need any help . . . ” but had few real skills and liked the idea of helping more than the actual dirty work. It was the most labor-intensive of all the jobs. I figured most people had grown up mowing the lawn and understood the intrinsic pleasure of working outside.
Wild grapevine had taken over the yard, and had been creeping across everything, probably since I’d had my first kiss. It snaked its way up trees, killing them and tangling their branches, and down into the ground, anchoring itself along dozens of points in the trash-meshed soil. It hung from the telephone lines strung across the rear of my property, sagging them and creating an impassable curtain of vegetation. At its largest it was the thickness of a baseball bat, green and springy and living and tough.
Also populating the backyard were dozens of Ailanthus trees, or “ghetto palms” as we called them, the tree of heaven that Betty Smith so effectively used as a metaphor for tenacity in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. They had become the bane of my existence. They’re useless as trees, and ugly. They grow at an incredible rate, snaking into foundations and waste pipes, crumbling them, and are nearly impossible to kill. I did my best to clean the yard of them with my new chain saw, but they came back every year.
From years of falling leaves and dumping trash, the soil had turned to near compost. What was decomposable had decomposed, but the plastic and glass remained, threading itself throughout. It would all need to be dug and raked out, and sometimes the easiest thing was to just throw away the soil with it. Aside from heavy machinery, which I couldn’t afford, there was really no good way to go about cleaning the yard, as each intertwisted layer required a different tactic and a different tool. Nine years later I am still digging other people’s trash out of my backyard.
“I found the mother brain!” my buddy Nate said. He was working with me that day and seemed to have found the source of the grapevine, a gnarly stump buried in the ground. He was an unlikely candidate to live in Detroit at the time, from farm country in Michigan’s thumb, and had grown up working on a milk ranch. He was likely one of only a handful of people living in the city who had voted for George Bush, but he truly was a great guy, six foot three, 275 pounds, and cheerful. He was studying historical preservation at the local university.
He chuckled as he pulled the strands from the tree, bending the branches with it. It didn’t want to let go. “Come look at this!” he said.
I set the chain saw down still running and trotted over to where he was standing. He had picked up a clear glass bottle with a cork still in the top. He brushed the dirt off to reveal the name of a brand of whiskey I’d never heard of, and the word “medicine.” He had a little pile of trinkets going, dirty action figures and tin boxes and beetle-looking pieces of auto parts.
“Sweet. You found it, you can have it.”
“It might be from Prohibition, and worth some money.” He gave the bottle a longing look. “Aw, I wouldn’t take this from you. It came from your house. Where can I set it?”
“You sure?”
“It’s all yours.”
I placed it carefully in the truck and went back to the hot chain saw, still growling on the ground. It was the Cadillac of saws, a Swedish model, likely one of the safest on the market. Nevertheless, it was amazingly powerful, with a razor-sharp chain. It could cut through a waist-thick oak log in seconds, and I could only imagine what it could do to a person. The chain saw rivals only the table saw as the most dangerous of tools in the workshop.
I resumed cutting away at the brush in little spurts, clearing the fallen whips with my foot as I went. Something sounded wrong, a clinking. I backed off to listen, then revved the engine to clear the obstruction. I listened for a moment and revved again. The bar broke free from the saw body, throwing the chain and wrapping it around my leg. I felt the talons grip my jeans. It was over in a second, the air quiet with the stopped saw, me standing there hoping I still had a leg.
Nate called, “You okay?”
This time I was lucky. The chain break had stopped the rotation in a fraction of a second, slowing it enough to only kiss me. If it hadn’t gone off, a trip to the ER would have been the least of my worries. It left a little half-ring of nicks in my jeans where the teeth had bitten in just enough to pull back the cotton in a testicle-crumpling warning. My first near injury, and I was going to wear that one like a badge of honor.
I hadn’t tightened the bolts correctly when readjusting the tension on the chain, so the whole thing was my fault. I had forgotten the special adjustment tool at Forestdale and had stupidly tried to use a pocketknife and a pair of pliers to do the job of a wrench and a screwdriver. If I wasn’t more careful the odds were I was going to seriously injure myself over the course of building this house.
“Are you okay?” Nate said again, rushing over.
I showed him the nicks in my pants. “Hey, cool,” he said.
“I should probably stop for the day, and remember to bring the right tool.”
“Well then, do you want to grab that door?”
I had told him earlier I’d been eyeing the front door on the abandoned house across the street. It was oak and had some nice dentil molding surrounding a window about the size of a pizza box, which was of course gone. The door had been painted in layers and layers of hideous colors, the latest being the purple of a cartoon dinosaur. I’d been avoiding it because I still didn’t know what the neighbors would think. Sneaking into the house next to me to take some old doorknobs at dusk was one thing, taking the front door off a house in broad daylight was another.
Many neighbors had known the people who had lived in these houses, and still held on to an idea of what the neighborhood once was. I might not just be stealing the door off an abandoned house, I might be stealing the door off what was once Mr. Jackson’s, where the baseball went through the picture window and, as a child, one of the neighbors had to mow the lawn all summer to replace it.
“I dunno, man.”
“Ahh, it’s fine. It’s going to go to waste if you don’t. They’re going to tear that house down. Or it’ll be taken by someone else. You’re really protecting it,” Nate said earnestly.
His argument seemed like the same one used to take mummies from the pyramids and justify them sitting in the British Museum alongside other antiquities removed for “protection” during colonialism. But this wasn’t Egypt, this was Detroit, and this wasn’t a pyramid, it was an abandoned house. What I was going to do would technically be stealing, but from whom? A memory? The people who had abandoned it, the governments that allowed it to fester? It wasn’t going to Britain, just across the street, and was going to be used to eliminate abandonment at my place, not make more of it. If whoever lived there before cared enough about its memory, they could have burned it like photographs of an unfaithful lover. I was stealing a memory to make a new one.
I looked around and it didn’t seem as though anyone was on the street, so Nate and I headed over and ripped the door from its hinges.
* * *
European season had come with the high summer. The artistic kids across the Atlantic had realized Detroit was cool before most Americans, and the city had long been a stop on the Euro art circuit. The Dutch in particular love Detroit. The fascination has something to do with the fall of European empires mirrored visually and rhetorically in the fall of American manufacturing hegemony, coupled with a distinct lust for urban planning. The logic goes that if the fall of empire can happen in America—Detroit was the proof—then it follows it might happen to America as well.
That year we had a group of four young German artists by way of Holland staying on the block, another small group of Dutch men, and a pretty architect from Italy.
The whole neighborhood was tearing the back off Jake’s house as I walked over after my shift at work. More than a dozen neighbors smeared in black demolition dirt were holding tools or putting dark wood in garbage cans and little piles.
The Italian architect was sitti
ng on Jake’s lawn, too. She had dark, shaggy hair, a thin nose, and angular cheeks. When she spoke, her sentences were soft and sweet, like yogurt. She laughed easily, and was presently seated next to Will, teaching him to curse in Italian. I introduced myself, and she said her name was Cecilia. Damn, I’d forgotten to wear my chain-saw pants.
The only other house on Jake’s side of the block was right next to his, and owned by a concrete mason named Ian who had been in the neighborhood a long time. He was a nice-enough guy, but had a drug problem. He had recently been hanging out with some crack dealers, a couple of scabby-looking white guys. The neighbors all told him, “Hey, Ian, if you keep letting them stay at your house, they’re going to kick you out of your own spot and you’re never going to be able to live there again.”
That’s exactly what happened. When they threatened Jake one day brandishing a gun, he told them to go fuck themselves in the nicest way possible and went to the cops. Jake instinctually mistrusted the cops like most of the rest of us, but he was at a loss for what to do in this instance. The deals were happening at nearly fifteen-minute intervals, and he had been taking pictures of license plates and recording times, etc., all the things cops would need to shut the house down, but the direct threat to his life was the last straw. The cops told him, verbatim, “There’s nothing we can do. Get a shotgun.”
The neighbors figured they were going to have to do something before the virus spread. Jake asked one of the elders in the neighborhood to find out if the dealers were connected to any of the big gangs. We thought we might be able to come to some kind of peace, but they were just lone wolves. This meant higher-level discussions were out of the question, but it also meant we wouldn’t be starting some kind of larger war by throwing them out. Some folks talked about burning the house down, but it was too close to Jake’s for safety. There was also the notion of cutting down the giant tree in the front yard and dropping it onto the house, but that wouldn’t crush it completely enough to make it unlivable. So we decided that making life uncomfortable for their customers would be the best option.
