A $500 House in Detroit

by Drew Philp

  Cecilia didn’t say anything, and paced the floor, thinking. I smoked a cigarette, unsure of what to say or what I wanted to say, pugilistic sentences running jumbled through my mind all wanting to come out at the same time, but like the Three Stooges getting stuck in the doorway that was my stupid mouth. The late-evening sun was pouring into the west-facing windows I had framed out, the ones I had been working on at the moment I had decided I’d ask her on the first date. This house, once one of possibility, now seemed like a cell.

  Cecilia grabbed my hand and kissed me there, in the sun. She led me back outside to the porch and we sat in the dying light. She had brought something, her computer, and pulled it from her bag.

  “I will show you now, my house.”

  What followed next was heartbreaking. In the mountains and overlooking the ocean, the house was built from some of the finest materials in the world, exotic wood, glass, steel. She had designed it from the ground up, and her father, a wealthy man who owned a construction company, had built it for her. The house had just won a European architecture prize worth tens of thousands of euros. It was clean, new, well built, and sleek, everything mine wasn’t. As we looked out over my vista, a jungled backyard filled with trash, empty lots, and two abandoned houses, one that was now being squatted by some junkies, I felt jealous. One of the photos showed her fiancé sitting in a room in Cecilia’s house, and I wanted to be angry, I felt I should hate him, but I felt nothing.

  Instead I felt ashamed of this house and this life I had chosen. I felt ashamed of the dirty plans I had made with my grandfather, and I felt ashamed of being ashamed of that. Where had my fighting spirit gone? Where was the “fuck you I don’t care I live in Detroit, motherfucker, and I don’t care what the rest of the world thinks, I’m badder and cooler than anyone else”? Her house seemed so nice and so exotic, and here I was in Detroit, a place everyone but me thought exotic.

  What had I done? Why did I have to be the one to care about this place above all else? Why the fuck did I have to be the martyr? And now why did I have to be so self-pitying? Why did I have to be so poor, and why did I have to be left feeling sorry for myself while some other asshole fucked this woman I thought I was in love with? I didn’t believe in God, so there wasn’t some reward in the afterlife, just a dream that I might go up against the system and win, that by holding fast and not letting go I could make the world a bit better for others and live a comfortable life in the process. Well, right now I didn’t feel like I was winning. Not by a long shot.

  What could I do? If I’d left I would have been a coward. I would have called myself a coward. So there wasn’t anything to do but pick up my plow and go back to work and attempt again to forge some meaning out of my meaningless existence, to convince myself that this struggle somehow mattered, that I wasn’t some idiot speck of stardust floating in the cosmos. And if I could find that meaning, well, I could prove something to myself and others, that not only was a better world possible, a better world was happening, and we were making it ourselves out of the cinders of racism and consumerism and escape. If I failed—

  Cecilia, already, was in the past. I was hoping I would find more in attempting to live a virtuous life than a pride in personal integrity, that one life, lived well, and with a little bit of luck, could be meaningful to others as well, could bend the direction of the great freight train of history toward justice and compassion and equality. I felt that if I just held on, to this place, to this city, to this vision of myself, that if I kept my grip firm the dream would always live, that it could be extinguished only if I gave up, if I left the city like so many others before me. When I first kissed Cecilia I had turned away not only from Detroit but from my history and my blood, for something I thought more interesting and sexy, a brand-new way of selling out. Even with the bonds of friends and relations and a home tying me here, there was really only one thing keeping me in this place, and that was my will. If my will was broken, so was the dream.

  Cecilia had chosen the other guy, the other house, the other life, and I was going to have to find some other choice myself. Maybe by building this house I could make Detroit love me back. Work would be our vows. Cecilia snapped the computer shut.

  “What do you think?”

  “Well, obviously, it’s beautiful.”

  “Are you jealous?”

  “Yes. I am jealous.”

  My grandparents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary was the very next day, June 24, 2010. I attended it instead of the rest of the social forum and the march with the sunflower pickets.

  * * *

  I made Cecilia her first peanut butter and jelly sandwich and drove her to the airport. She had finished her projects and it was time to go back to her Italian boyfriend, and her spectacular home. Wherever she was going it was likely to be clean and warm and not life-threatening.

  On the day she was to leave, she asked first to see the famous Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts, our world-class art museum built with auto money. We rode our bikes slowly through the early July heat, up to the imposing white marble building. The museum seemed a bit quiet, and when I tried the door, it was locked. I had forgotten the institute was closed that day of the week.

  “Well, okay,” Cecilia said. “It will have to wait until next time I am in Detroit.”

  I knew she was lying again. She’d never be back. I wouldn’t get to see the murals that day, and her, likely never. But—

  Jane, one of the founding members of the art gallery that had given me the wood to board up my house, was walking up the street. She wore a badge that said she worked at the museum.

  I waved. I shouted, “Hey, Jane!” She stopped. “I didn’t know you worked here.”

  “It’s brand-new, and I love it.”

  I explained my predicament. She opened the door.

  “Come on inside.”

  We would get a private tour. She led us through security and up the marble steps into the great hall, the floor decorated in mosaic, suits of armor, swords, and ornate muskets lining the vast corridor. Up ahead was Rivera Court, where the master himself had spent a summer convincing the world of the beauty of the working man along the walls of one of America’s greatest museums. He worked just blocks from where mass manufacturing was born, when the middle class had been brought to life on five dollars a day, and where the struggle of building objects with one’s hands became honorable and noble. He painted the workers larger than the king.

  We stepped inside. Completed in 1933, the frescoes depict life inside Ford’s auto factories and the endless nobility of man.

  The twenty-seven panels portray advancements in science and technology, the fruits of the earth, the feminine and life-giving in relation to the masculine, hope, cooperation, and the totality of the human spirit, the interconnectedness of humankind, industry, and the soul.

  Nowhere is the community spirit of Detroit, and everywhere like it, better portrayed than in what is likely the finest example of Mexican mural art in the United States. This is where generations of artists have come to dip into the well of inspiration, the church of creativity, the warm embrace of the imagination clasping hands with reality. I explain all this to Cecilia as we hold hands together alone in the empty museum.

  I tell her: It took an outsider, a Mexican Communist, to show our heroism to ourselves. He showed us that what is inside us here is inside all of us, everywhere, man’s legacy to the world. The figures are huge and all work together, different colors of men working and struggling and pushing toward one goal. Sand, rubber, and iron went in one end—and only but through the hands of man—a car came out the other.

  This is Detroit’s history, the heroism of the forge and crucible on display, a reminder of who we are as men and women and citizens of this planet. A gift to the city of Detroit, the fresco offers a choice: panels depicting poison gas and bombing planes mirror panels depicting vaccinations and aircraft of exploration.

  They are not just offering us a choice of good or evil,
forward or backward. They offer the choice between creativity and destruction. Rivera begs us to choose to create, to bring new life into this world, to make not just products but a brand-new heroic world of brother- and sisterhood, of nobility and honor. It could have been my grandfather or my father or anyone in my family depicted up there, and maybe yours.

  He’s asking all of us to do this. You. Create something every day. Despite what they may tell you, you artists, you mothers, you misfits of creativity, the world depends on what you can dream up. The ice caps aren’t getting bigger. The bombs are still being produced. The cities never stopped being torn apart with inequality and suffering.

  Practice. Practice creating that new world. Our very survival depends on what you can create. You. Not someone else.

  You.

  I took Cecilia to the airport that day and I would never see her again.

  When I got home to Forestdale, Jake was loading protest junk into his truck from the YES FARM. The protesters from California had left all their stuff and split. In a bout of staggering irony we had no option but to put it in the incinerator. While they were off gallivanting to their next good deed far away from their mess, that shit went up into the air and into our lungs.

  I was too tired to help right then, so I went inside my house, passing by the half-finished door I’d stolen still sitting on the sawhorses where I’d left it, and sat down in the shower and cried.

  I called my father that evening to tell him I was sorry I hadn’t talked to him in weeks. I told him something I’d never told him before, that I had been in love with someone, and I had just taken her to the airport, never to be seen again. I spilled my guts in one long, rambling sentence, telling him everything.

  He was in transition, too. After twenty-one years of teaching farm kids to make auto parts and tools from steel and aluminum, he had been tapped to become the vice principal of the school where he’d spent his adult life. Where once he wore a blue shopcoat, now he was wearing suits. A tradesman since a teenager, he was making his way to management, climbing the ladder of the American Dream. When I stopped talking there was a pause.

  He said he was sorry to hear it. My family spoke in the language of work and striving and hardness, and cute rich girls from Europe didn’t exactly fit into that. He had worked hard for my family his entire life, and love and duty had always embraced each other as long as I’d known him.

  The next question he asked was about the weather. Some things you just have to face alone.

  But Will knew what was going down that day, and he called and told me to come over to his house. He had bought me some beer and a little bottle of whiskey. I lay flat on my back on the cool concrete outside his uncertain home as we talked and drank. I told him how stupid I felt, how young I felt. I was way behind on my house, and I’d wasted so much time. The social forum was done, everyone had left, and all there was to do was go back to work.

  “For the people that come in and don’t last, everybody’s everything else is more important than what we have to do for ourselves,” Will said. “People want to escape their reality for a while and snack on yours, but they don’t want to buy the meal. Everyone needs help with their projects. Everyone wants to be shepherded around, and I bet a bunch of new people are going to move here because of that social forum. It’s like church camp. People come on fire for God or whatever, then they’re back fornicating the next week with their boyfriend. You lost this time, Drew, pretty hard. I know how it feels. You have a little bit of growing up to do.”

  I felt a bit like a whole city must feel losing half its population.

  “People come to Detroit and places like it all the time.” He snapped his fingers. “And then they leave. Once they get what they came for, Drew, poof. It’s happened in the past, and it’s going to happen in the future. You have to recognize that. You have to protect yourself. But . . . ” He paused, and I turned my head to look at him. A cigarette burned between his fingers and he took a drag. “But you cannot harden your heart. You cannot close yourself off, you cannot shrivel the little ounce of good that brought you here, and has kept you here in the first place. And most of all, you cannot be the one who repeats it, who does it himself.

  “We’re all in this dirty old bathroom and the sink is clogged,” Will said. “The faucet’s running and the water’s spilling out all over the floor. There’s going to be lots of people running at you, trying to hand you a mop. Some of them will even be talking about love and lots will be talking about money. You got to remember to stick with what you were trying to do in the first place, which was fix the plumbing.”

  CHAPTER 6

  * * *

  Load-Bearing Walls

  Carrying the beam that holds up my house

  I smashed the beam with the sledgehammer and it didn’t budge. I tried again, nothing.

  Andy Kemp was yelling at me to get the jack. It was Labor Day and eight of my friends, my father, and a French Canadian film crew were inside my house as we were lifting the beam in place to hold up the roof. I had removed that load-bearing wall separating the kitchen and dining room, and had framed the opening for the new beam just a bit tight. Always a bit tight.

  The beam was stuck as a dozen men held it above their heads. I scurried to get the jack from my truck to lift the ceiling so we could move the lumber into place.

  I had found the beam a month earlier in a glass-recycling factory that had caved in a block away from my house. The building, which looked like it had been in the bombing of Dresden, was really just a pile of rubble—cinder blocks, bricks, trash. At one point it had been at least two stories high, yet now the only room that still stood above ground level was the bathroom, the white porcelain toilet broken and half gone.

  What I was after were the laminated supports that once held the roof up. They were made from old-growth hard pine stacked atop one another and bolted through with steel rods. They measured more than twenty feet long and were thicker than a man’s forearm. Each had a gentle curve, and I thought one would be a nice solution to an exposed-header problem—the beam would sit proud of the drywall on the ceiling and provide a nice focal point for the room, as well as a good story and a small piece of Detroit’s history. I needed fourteen feet, cut out sixteen, and loaded it into my truck crossways with the springs creaking to drive back to my yard, the crew walking next to it like it was a precious treasure.

  On the day we put it in, I rallied the troops on Forestdale, needing every hand I could get. Andy was hosting the film crew and agreed to come if they would be able to tag along as well. They were in town filming an art movie called The End of Time, and I said sure, as long as they agreed to help. I felt uncomfortable about this, but I needed the hands and Andy was invaluable. I found out later that one of the men holding the beam aloft was Peter Mettler, the director, fairly famous in some circles.

  His crew was rolling as we lifted the beam and when it got stuck. As the men strained under the great weight of the beam the size of a tree trunk, I retrieved a jack and a 2x4 to push up the ceiling enough to slide the timber home.

  “I can’t hold out much longer.”

  When I got the jack in place the two-by was too long. The crew groaned. I found a circular saw and nipped off the end.

  “We’re going to lose it here, Drew.”

  Close enough. I cranked on the jack.

  “I’m slipping here, my man.”

  The floor began to creak and I could see the ceiling rise by fractions of an inch.

  “Drew. We can’t hold this much longer.”

  “All right, there. Try it. Try it!”

  I mounted the ladder with the sledge and hit the end as hard as I could.

  “Yeah!” “Wooh!” “You got it!”

  The beam moved a fraction of an inch. I hit it again. More cheers, it was moving. It was moving!

  I hit the end again and finally it was set in place. My dad swung his hammer ferociously, pounding nails as long as his fingers to keep the beam tied in. It now ho
lds up the entire house.

  The Queen Anne was still a shell, its bones exposed, but it was starting to feel like mine. Built in 1903, its builder used horses to move the materials and lift the rafters, not cars and internal combustion. That I could simply drive to the hardware store in a matter of minutes, pick out whatever part I needed—almost certainly exactly the same as any other I could buy anywhere in America—was something of a miracle. When the house was built, boards were hewn with steam or water power and left rough, rafters were lifted with block and tackle by animals that ate and breathed. The builders very well may have had to clear the land of trees and stumps to build the foundation of bricks that had likely been made in a factory right in Detroit. I tried to imagine the men who had built it, working in white shirtsleeves and leather vests.

  The house itself was once a living thing, too. The trees that made its skeleton and skin were once living organisms, growing and eating and reproducing in the forest. When the house falls back into the ground it will nurture the earth and will go back to being alive, too. In the grand scheme of things it appears nothing seems to ever really die.

  Now more than ever, the house had become a constant presence in my life. I had screwed around too much that summer, but there would be nothing else but THE HOUSE for the next years of my budding adulthood. The first question people invariably asked was, “How’s the house coming?” All of my money went into the house. All of my time not working to make that money would go into my house. All my thinking went into the house. All my energy went into the house. They say your possessions own you at some point, and if that’s true, the house owned me, mind, body, and spirit.