A $500 House in Detroit

by Drew Philp

  On top of the breaker box is a switch used to turn the system on and off, like Frankenstein awakening his monster. There’s easily enough energy flowing through there—220 volts—to kill a buffalo. Electricity is silent and invisible, the one thing in your house that will slay you instantly. It also causes fires. The greatest risk comes not from the gas in your furnace or stove but from the electricity in your walls, wires heating up and igniting the timber locked behind drywall, sparks igniting dust clots, loose connections bringing ruin. Instant death and fire were only two of the scenarios that I faced on the day I was to finally get on the grid with the rest of the country. The power company just hooked up the wires. They wouldn’t be flipping that Frankenstein switch, I would have to do that.

  A gruff suburban electrician who looked like he drank cheap six-packs in an aluminum lawn chair in the backyard hooked the wire from the pole in the alley to the peckerhead attached to my house. He had a mustache like a walrus and snickered at my home as he bolted the live wires to the service cable.

  “You’re either brave as hell,” he said, looking down at me from the ladder and holding a wire that could potentially kill him, “or crazy as a loon.”

  At this point I didn’t know either. The power in those wires he was bolting into my house had likely come from a mix of coal and nuclear, the latter from a plant just south of Detroit near Monroe, Michigan. It had once nearly blown up, serving as the narrative to the famous jazz song “We Almost Lost Detroit.” I was hoping the house wouldn’t go the same way. One of the nine Hopi prophecies of the end-times is that the country will become crisscrossed with a spiderweb. Maybe that was their way of describing the power grid.

  When the electrician left, I put on rubber gloves, thinking they might offer some protection against the current, and told my roommate to follow me downstairs. We stood in front of the box as if to dismantle a bomb. He held a flashlight and looked serious.

  “All right, man,” I told him. “If something happens, you’re going to have to tackle me off of here because I’ll get stuck by the current, but I’ll probably be dead before you can get to me. It might blow up and kill us both.”

  He held the light and solemnly hunched himself to strike. I took a deep breath, blowing it out slowly through pursed lips.

  “You ready?”

  He nodded once.

  I touched the switch quickly with my fingertip like I was testing a skillet.

  Safe.

  I put my index finger on the switch. I looked over at my roommate. He nodded.

  Click.

  It flipped.

  Nothing.

  I looked down at my chest and at my hands, then over at my buddy. He straightened up and took a deep breath. Everyone still alive. I didn’t smell fire. Cautiously we walked upstairs.

  “It’s your house, you do the honors.”

  Watching the bulb on the ceiling, I flipped a switch.

  Light.

  We didn’t say anything for a moment, looking at the shining bulb. Then my roommate burst into laughter. We ran around the house turning lights on and off in jubilation, one little victory against the darkness. He leaned back and stretched out his arms, pumping his legs in a happy dance, and I shuffled around the room twirling my hips to the silent music of success. It was the first time I’d really felt I was bringing something back to life, like performing CPR on a corpse that just took its first greedy gasp of air.

  “VICTORY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” I shouted. “VICTORY!”

  I strutted around like a cock, danced some more, sang with my friend. Now I could charge the batteries on my cordless power tools and use the corded ones. I could use a space heater if I was flush. I could take a leak without having to use a flashlight and I could work all night if I wanted to. But first, that night, that first glorious night, I slept with every light in the house on.

  * * *

  I took my roommate to the airport soon after and turned the heater on in the truck driving back. It was getting cold, pipe-freezing cold. It would be harder to keep the fire going around the clock. I would have to go back to work soon as well. There was no money. The gas gauge on my truck was broken, but I knew it was running on fumes. I walked back in the door to my house, my friend already in the air, and shut it behind me. It was when I heard the bolt click I knew I was truly alone.

  The next morning I searched the newspaper at the liquor store kiosk, the bored attendant not caring if I was buying. There had been another shooting right up the street from my house. The gunmen tried to kill a pizza deliveryman for his cash and car. They shot him three times. Everyone on my block had been broken into but me. A friend had been abducted from a bar I frequented and sexually assaulted. Two more people who lived on Forestdale were robbed at gunpoint, one a brazen holdup as a half dozen people sat around a bonfire. A coworker was murdered in his home during a robbery.

  I even had a collection of bullets I’d found, casings, the lead tips, entire unfired projectiles packed with gunpowder. Detroit is the kind of place where you just find bullets. In the sidewalk, embedded in roofs, lying in the street like they’re no more than a twig from a tree.

  The new police chief, James Craig, said that the good citizens of the city should arm themselves. He said he was scared to get gas at night in Detroit. He was nearly carjacked himself. When the police chief is scared, what are the rest of us supposed to do?

  A crackhead stopped by and asked if I would take him to the scrap yard. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was a setup. My neighbor to the north, Andi, said as much. She’s a good woman whose house had just been broken into, the back door pried open while she was at work. She was an attendant at a supermarket meat counter six days a week, sometimes seven, a hard, honest job. I don’t think she’d missed a day in about ten years. She didn’t deserve to be stolen from.

  The abandoned house next door was becoming more peering creature than clapboard structure. It seemed to watch me, silent and unmoving aside from the flicking of a tail, less feline than forked. That was now also my responsibility. When painful noises came moaning from the tortured structure, the dog and I, a framing hammer in hand, would be the ones to investigate. My heart would pound and breath quicken. Animal, man, the decay of neglect and time—most often I never found out what the noises were exactly, and the worry and wonder would follow me like a shadow.

  Winter was miserable. The rain ruined everything. It was relatively warm, but the downside was the rain would not end. I could watch it plink, plink, plink into the jars and glasses, but there were never enough. When I would get one situated juuuuust right, the drip would travel slightly and I’d have to move the bucket again, and again, and again. New leaks would sprout. Gratiot seemed unperturbed about the whole thing and was in the corner fighting one small stream, trying to catch it against the floor with his paws, splashing. A drop hit him on the butt as he was trying to bite another, and he turned around with a little snarl, trying to find it. I was too tired to try to stop him from getting wet.

  As I ran around trying to catch the leaks I sang to myself a Beatles song in an attempt to keep my spirits up.

  “Fixing a hole where the rain gets in, to keep my mind from wanderingggggg.”

  I was singing more out of lonely desperation than joy. I had no idea where I was going to get the money for the roof. It was going to be cheaper to hire it done than try to do it myself. I had torn off and replaced plenty, the last on my former house on Forestdale, but with the gambrel, this one was senseless. It had taken us two weeks to get the roof on Forestdale, and that was relatively easy. A professional crew could have gotten it done in just two days. My roof was the only thing I wouldn’t do with my own hands, and I justified it because the roof was the only thing that would cost more by doing it myself.

  I’d just gotten bids, though, and the lowest was just under $7,000. That’s more money than I’d ever seen at one time.

  Now almost Christmas, the rain turned to snow. The pipes froze, both the shower trap in the crawl space a
nd the sink supplies running against the outside wall. Out of necessity this would be the project for the day, and I called into work sick. If I didn’t take care of this now the pipes would burst. I couldn’t weld them back together in the cold, and if I couldn’t fix this I’d be out of a shower till the spring and consequently out of a job. I built a fire and set it to roaring, and began warming a pot of water on my new kitchen stove, which my father and I had just run a gas pipe to.

  Earlier that winter I had managed to install a water heater, purchased on credit. I paid Matt, the junkie from Forestdale, a couple of bucks to grab some lengths of black pipe from an abandoned house the next time he was looking for treasures. He delivered a tight little bundle wrapped in extension cord. I didn’t have time to think about the ethics of outsourcing the stealing of abandoned materials. Too tired. Gotta keep going.

  Soon after my dad had brought up a bucket of loose fittings, and we set to work connecting them to service the new water heater, the stove, and what would one day be the furnace.

  “You can’t keep living like this, Andrew Man. You’re going to get sick,” my father said, adding dope to the thread of a long piece of black pipe. The physical work was a respite from his new suit-and-tie job and the squabbles of small-time politics in small-town America that went with it. That work was never finished and everyone was never happy all at once. With the pipes they would join and seal or not. The never-ending politics, mirroring those going on in America at large, were chewing him up, even though he would never admit it, proud tradesman in a suit that he was.

  “I know, I know,” I said. “But what do you want me to do about it? There’s just no money. This was the world you left to me.”

  “Get off that high horse. You did this to yourself.”

  Because of the thermal mass of the earth, it was warmer in the basement than upstairs, but still miserable. While my father and I worked on the plumbing, my mother cleaned the kitchen in her winter coat. They had bought me braces for this? People with less fortitude and grace would have abandoned me.

  When I went upstairs for a coupling my mother repeated what my father had said, “You can’t live like this anymore, Andrew.”

  She scrubbed at the new stove, a white Detroit Jewel from the ’30s. My former roommate had left a bike I didn’t need, and I traded it to someone on Forestdale for the gleaming white piece of cast iron. It was beautiful, without question the best-looking thing in my house. It had a small oven on the right-hand side, drawers on the other, a flat white-steel workspace on top. None of it was plastic. It was made before “planned obsolescence”—coincidentally invented right here in Detroit—and built to last. When my father and I had finished the gas lines and the utility had turned the main on, it was the first thing I lit, the glowing blue flame a point of hope on the lowest, coldest rung of hell.

  I was thinking of what my parents had said a month before as the stove boiled the pot. I couldn’t live like this anymore. I poured the roiling water into the shower but it didn’t break the clog. There were already two inches of liquid in the pan from the shower I’d taken that morning, discovering the obstruction in the process. I’d only made things worse. If this water froze, too, it might crack the pan and I’d have a real problem.

  I tried table salt. I poured all I had into the drain and poked at the clog with a straightened coat hanger. This didn’t seem to be doing any good either. I called Will, who generously lent me his orange hair dryer, and I abandoned the shower trap to work on the sink pipes. Maybe the salt just needs some time. I have to keep going. Gotta keep going.

  The hot air coming from the dryer felt good. I was wearing my insulated overalls in the house, outside the house, everywhere. The city didn’t plow the streets in Poletown, and cars without four-wheel drive had gotten stuck, like in quicksand. I’d helped dig out at least four in front of my place over the last two days, but it snowed again and a handful were simply abandoned in the middle of the streets, their owners waiting for a thaw or a cousin with a truck that could pull them out.

  After I worked the supply lines over with the hair dryer the ice finally broke. First slowly then all at once. Yes. One down. It didn’t seem to do any damage.

  From my bathroom window I could see a neighbor behind the Terrys’ shoveling snow in front of the light-industrial building he lived in. I walked over to introduce myself and asked if I could borrow some rock salt. He was a white guy, about fifty, a tree climber and excavator. His business card said, “Down in a hole or up in a tree, I’m there when you need me.” After some rummaging in his building he came back with a half-full bag. I barely knew him but he gave me the salt for free, and wished me luck.

  I poured the salt down the drain and poked it again with the clothes hanger. I waited awhile, heated up more water on the stove, poured it down, too. Still not working.

  I put on all the warm clothing I had and crawled headfirst into the crawl space. A rat scurried out. I almost threw up. I yelled at Gratiot to get it but he ran in the opposite direction.

  I worked the exposed pipe with the hair dryer, staying under until I couldn’t handle the filthy, cramped space any longer, and pulled myself out, gasping for air. I checked on the water on the stove. It was boiling. I poured it in the basin, scalding myself, and stirred the water around, attempting to raise the temperature. I poured in more salt. I repeated the process.

  I repeated the process.

  I repeated the process.

  I repeated the process.

  I was about to give up. One more time in the crawl space with the hair dryer.

  Magically, the clog came loose, with a sound like chunk. The water drained. I grabbed some loose scraps of insulation and wrapped them around the trap, hoping this would hold out until spring.

  I crawled on top of my workbench and tried to take a depression nap. It was too cold to really rest. I wasn’t even particularly tired, but I didn’t know what else to do. The anxiety, hunger, cold, and fear were endless.

  I couldn’t sleep. I had to get up every once in a while to make sure the fire didn’t go out and freeze the pipes again.

  For the first time in my life I got down on my knees and prayed.

  I didn’t believe in God and had no faith. At one point I was a stone-cold atheist. But I could no longer go on without any belief in something larger and smarter than me. This may make me a coward in some people’s eyes. But I didn’t have any other place to turn. The atheists weren’t offering any alternatives for hope when I was cold and tired and alone. From the vantage of my dreadful, freezing house it seemed like modern atheism was born of excess rather than principle. They say there aren’t any atheists in foxholes, and there aren’t many who are hungry and scared and begging for release trying to make it alone through the first winter in an abandoned house in Detroit.

  Maybe, I thought, if we were going to rebuild this broken city, we could build a new faith, too, a new religion out of the old ones. This house was showing me that anything could be repaired. We didn’t need to throw everything out, just keep the good parts and toss the bad ones, retain the bits about loving your brothers and sisters and banish the rubbish about unclean women and hating gays, the parts that seemed to condone slavery and the genocide of the American Indians. Even Thomas Jefferson had cut apart his Bible, and some pope a thousand years ago had decided what was to be included anyway. Why not do it again? Like everything else, it, too, needed to be repaired, rebuilt, and reimagined.

  On my knees, on the floor of that filthy, disheveled house, I was no longer too proud to ask for help, even if it was from a god I wasn’t sure existed. But I had to believe in something.

  * * *

  My father called soon after. The only thing keeping me from spiraling into complete misery and suicide was that I still had so much work to do. There was always something to distract my idle time, always a way to wear myself out so I slept through the night dreamlessly tired.

  “I talked with your grandmother and we’re going to buy you a furn
ace for Christmas.”

  “Pardon me?”

  My initial reaction was to protest—it seemed like cheating. I thought accepting something like that might constitute some kind of unfair use of my advantages over others. Not everyone has a kind and generous family, and the furnace cost about $850, not including ducts and accoutrements. My father had anticipated my reluctance.

  “We already bought it. We won’t let you live like this any longer.”

  Truthfully, I was relieved. The cold seeping into my bones and between my joints was more painful than bruised pride. I accepted the offer.

  My dad came up between Christmas and New Year with my brother-in-law and we put the furnace in the basement, running the silver ducts from the plenum to four registers cut in the floor of my kitchen and bathroom, with two in the living area. The furnace was a forced-air high-efficiency model, sized for my house, and looked businesslike. I had wanted to use radiators, as heated air would dry out the house, as well as blow dirt around. But I wasn’t in a spot to be choosy.

  Turning the furnace on for the first time was nothing like the night-and-day elation of flipping the switch on the electricity or seeing the beam go up. I could only afford to keep the house at 50 degrees, which wasn’t much better than I was living anyway, just enough to keep me from having to unfreeze the pipes. Warming my house any higher was throwing out money that I didn’t have.

  But my gloom was also born of the furnace having been purchased for me. I hadn’t worked for the money to buy it like the sink or windows, hadn’t studied for months how to do it myself like the electricity, hadn’t stretched my cunning or bravery like taking the beam from the collapsed building. It was just a furnace, not a metaphor or connection to a larger ideal. I was thankful for my family, certainly, but the furnace was more of a product of defeat than a success. It was just a blue heater sitting in the basement and not a revelation.