A $500 House in Detroit

by Drew Philp

  When Paul was ripped away from the Catherine Ferguson Academy, one of the first things he did was plow up another couple of lots on Forestdale and plant another orchard, just under a hundred fruit trees. Free of work requirements, he spent most of his time running around helping anyone he could, installing electricity, giving advice, using his Bobcat to cut a day’s work down to an hour. He helped me with a plumbing project and refused any payment.

  Will was all set up in his new house in the neighborhood, but plenty of people still couldn’t understand that even though he had been paid to leave his paradise, that money wasn’t what he’d wanted in the first place, and money can never buy what’s important in life. He had a whole new set of problems now, a perennially flooding basement and a leaky roof being just two. The Dequindre Cut, where we once walked the dogs amid the grandeur of nature in the heart of the city, had now been turned into a jogging track. The animals and the dense foliage were gone. Who knows where the Oracle went or any of the other people living down there.

  My friends from the YES FARM started going their own ways, yet we all remained part of the same community. Each of the three founding members had purchased houses in the neighborhood themselves. Jake got married, and Eric moved into his formerly abandoned house on the west side. Molly found a new chef’s job and the Hillbilly Yacht Club appeared every summer. Monte, the artist who had given me the tattoo of the Great Lakes, had, with his wife, purchased their own house. Their son was now in middle school.

  After the YES FARM, the apothecary building was turned into a bicycle repair and teaching shop by some neighbors and one of Paul’s sons. They held clinics teaching the neighborhood kids how to repair their bikes, lending out tools and knowledge and expertise. Another young couple, straight-up urban farmers making their living growing things in Detroit dirt, was able to purchase the house next to Jake’s, formerly the crack house. They moved in with their son, and another was born inside.

  There were so many babies born on Forestdale! There was going to be a whole generation of kids who grew up in Detroit. More people were figuring out ways to make it in the city with children.

  The Kemps continued to raise theirs, adding to their house and garden and love for one another. The first of their daughters was off to college, the University of Michigan, my alma mater. Andy would stop by my place on his bike after work and drop off seeds for the garden, or I’d stop by theirs and they’d feed me homemade burritos, kimchi, and more ground cherries.

  Matt, the guy who had taught Gratiot to swim, died of a heroin overdose. His wake was in the true Detroit style, at one of his favorite bars in the Cass Corridor, packed with teary, drinking mourners.

  I attended Grace Lee Boggs’s hundredth birthday party, and just a few weeks later she died peacefully in her sleep. She had taught us to make the world we wanted to see in Detroit and had left us with a nice round century of knowledge to build upon.

  They found a corpse in a house I can see from my back porch.

  I can’t remember the last time I heard gunshots in the night or saw a wild pack of dogs. Since that dark night my shotgun has remained on its shelf.

  A young couple moved into the house kitty-corner from me and were making it their own. The young man proposed to his partner in an abandoned house nearby. He said that when his fiancé looked at the dump he wanted her to see not abandoned, dangerous garbage, but the spot in which he proposed, where they made their love forever. She said yes.

  Another couple bought the abandoned house on the block just north of me, and homes were being snatched up like they were going out of style, which they were. Due to fire and occupation, there were almost no abandoned houses in the neighborhood and the days of the $500 house were coming to a close.

  I would run into Zeno every now and again, and he seemed to be doing better than ever. I tried to track down the old hooker with the hole in her neck, but she was nowhere to be found. The art gallery that had given me the boards for my house and had taken the Banksy mural from the Packard plant sold the painting after promising not to, angering everyone.

  Gratiot was still a brilliant fuzzy mess and alive, thank God, despite his bravery.

  My dad retired from the school district with thirty-six years in public service. He built the first LEED Platinum certified primary school building in Michigan, which makes the district money—they farm enough electricity to sell it back to the power company, while teaching students about sustainable energy. My friend who helped me install the electricity quit his corporate job and opened a set of bars.

  As for me, I wrote an article about the neighborhood, and my house, trying to attempt to explain some of the tensions in the city. I told a few of the stories that are included in this book. It was published by BuzzFeed, and as it happened, a lot of people read that story, almost two million. It seemed to touch a nerve, and the outpouring of support and connection from around the world was almost too much to bear. I spent happy weeks answering e-mails and questions, grateful that so many people had come to care about little old Poletown.

  But my favorite letter involved Forestdale. I had mentioned that Paul was attempting to find a way to groom the ice rink in the Back 40, and I had found him one day with his clothing iron plugged into an extension cord, trying to iron the ice flat. That, of course, didn’t work. People as far away as France and Canada sent me plans for homemade ice-grooming machines.

  But someone called Paul with an offer of an honest-to-god Zamboni, the kind they use at professional hockey rinks. It was municipally owned and unused, and the price was about one-fiftieth of what it would have cost new, $500, the same as my house.

  Paul thought about it for a while, and went back and forth on whether to pay it. Finally he decided against it, that the money could be better spent elsewhere. One of the new neighbors, Amos Kennedy, a famous printmaker, stepped in with a $500 check.

  “It’s for the community,” he said.

  Paul picked up the thousand-pound ice groomer with his tractor, and like the hay bales before, drove the Zamboni through the streets of Detroit to shocked and pleased looks.

  I used to want to keep Detroit a secret, to not have it handled by too many for fear it might break. My thinking has changed. The city will transform whether we like it or not. The only question left is how. Understandably, those who have been at this a long time are worried about the new influx of money and attention to the city, in part because we’re worried Detroit will lose some of its radical neighborliness, that people will be gentrified from their homes, the city will become an unaffordable dystopia ruled by numbers instead of beating hearts. It’s as if Detroiters have been on strike—a strike for community, fair living conditions, and self-sufficiency—and the worry is new residents like me will act as strikebreakers.

  We have to remember the fight isn’t against our fellow workers. We’re all products of the same society, and in our pursuit of justice we cannot forget compassion. The fight is against the corruption of the bosses, the politicians, the moneymen, those who perpetuate inequality, racism, and antidemocracy for their own gain. Those who are making the city into the image of a dollar sign, not the spirit of Detroit backed by Joe Louis’s fist. We need a new measure of progress.

  Scabs are only scabs if they cross the picket line. Many of the young people moving into Detroit and places like it are aching, desperate to join the union, a brotherhood and sisterhood of meaningful lives lived simply and in chorus with others. These skills are not innate and must be learned, as I had myself, building my house. When used effectively, privilege can work as leverage.

  I wake up in the mornings in a room that once had holes in the wall, an empty space where a window should have been, and feces on the floor. While I once slept on my workbench, my bed is now soft (without being too soft), the walls smooth and white, and morning light pours in from the window I installed myself. The floor is clean enough now to rest my bare feet and look at the first thing I see every morning, a framed poster reading, “Whenever you
feel like you’re nearing the end of your rope, don’t slide off. Tie a knot. Keep hanging. And remember, ain’t nobody bad like you,” the nightly refrain from Detroit’s most beloved disc jockey, The Electrifying Mojo.

  When I walk to my second bathroom and look at myself in the mirror, I can remember it’s here I once tied a climbing rope to escape on Devil’s Night in case the house burned. The bathroom is now finished in brilliant white on white. In the mirror I see hair graying before its time, my tired eyes sitting atop shoulders and a chest muscled with work. My hands carry calluses and scars, the knuckles swollen, badges from a life fully lived.

  As I walk down the unfinished stairs I walk by holes in the plaster from when the house was originally scrapped out. I’ve passed these imperfections a thousand times, but now I can see they contain new plumbing and electrical wires, both of which I earned little by little working crushing jobs and installed with my own hands. Each time I walk by I think about fixing them, sometime. I know anything can be fixed.

  On my way to the kitchen I run my fingers against the new door I’d installed after someone tried to kick in the old one, the one I’d put in when I’d boarded up the house, the door at which I aimed a shotgun to kill someone.

  I make breakfast on my stove that I supplied the gas to, next to countertops pulled from a soda factory, underneath a beam I stole from down the street and a dozen of my friends helped install. I listen to the radio while cooking my breakfast, and light from all the windows I bought for a couple bucks at a salvage place warms my bones. During the day I will tinker with this or repair that, sometimes doing my old work over again, better this time, following years of experience.

  And when I sit on my porch in the evening, as the sun goes down casting a red ribbon dance over the city I love, my body aching from the day’s work, I am happy to be alive and I am unafraid of what may come.

  Even if it’s simply sitting on the porch, watching the sunset and listening to the birds as the dog sniffs the waning summer air, I know that this is a victory. At least for myself I’ve built my own little world, and all the money on our decaying planet can’t buy that. I live with decency, relative security and self-respect. But I can’t truly have any of it until my neighbors do, too.

  * * *

  I had just finished what was likely to be the final mowing of my lawn before the winter came. Woods was sitting in his truck and called me over when the mower went quiet. He was in the driver’s seat smoking.

  “What’s up?”

  “Climb in here a second.”

  I sat on the passenger side and lit my own.

  “Did you check the auction for that house next to you this year?” Woods asked.

  “Yeah. It wasn’t on there.” Whoever owned the LLC had paid the taxes, or something more nefarious was going on, always a possibility in Detroit but it wasn’t listed.

  “Did you notice anything else?”

  “No, not really.”

  “The Terrys’ house is going to be up for auction.”

  “What, how?”

  “I don’t think the missus knows. The house is registered in the old man’s name, and he hasn’t been all there for a while.” He tapped his temple. “The dementia. I doubt she has any idea they’re behind.”

  “So did you tell them?”

  “No, not yet. You know she doesn’t have any money and you know she ain’t no good at the Internet.”

  “When are you going to tell her?”

  “I wanted to talk to you first. I have an idea. You have any money?”

  “Some.”

  “I’ll talk to her, but we might need to buy that house back. They’ve been great neighbors, and I would hate to lose them. I think we’ll be able to get it back for five hundred, but we have to put a two-thousand-dollar deposit down to make any bids at all. I don’t think anyone would bid on that house. We can split it fifty-fifty, and we can put it in her name, so she gets the bills.”

  I thought of all the barbecues I had been to at her place, all the times she’d offered encouragement, watched over me while I was working, and the first day I’d met her, when she’d given me, a stranger, a drink on a hot day.

  “Oh, Jeezus,” I sighed. “Yeah, I guess I would be able to do that. Just two hundred and fifty?” I lit another cigarette. “All right, sure. I can probably come up with that. You talk to her, though, and see what she has to say.”

  Me and a new foundation

  CHAPTER 12

  * * *

  Someone Else’s Home

  Detroit has become home

  Someone had placed a $500 bid on the house. I’d been watching the auction in the weeks leading up to the final countdown and couldn’t believe it. I sat there looking at the computer for a moment. This was going to be much more complicated, and maybe way more expensive than I had hoped. I placed a bid of $600. I thought about that soldier at the auction where I bought my place, bidding for his family against the Greek with deep pockets. I wondered what had happened to him, if he had found a home after all.

  I called Woods to let him know, and we decided not to tell Mrs. Terry. I made some calls to see if there was any way I could find out who the opposing bidder was, and explain to them the situation. There was nothing. Whereas before you could see, in real time, who was bidding on properties, just that year the county had stopped it. I guess some speculators were a bit nervous about all the attention they made buying up homes, including those of people who live in them and had owned them for more than thirty years.

  I e-mailed everyone I knew and splashed social media with a plea that if anyone was, or knew who was, bidding on this particular house to contact me so I could explain.

  No one knew. I did receive a huge outpouring of support from the Internet, though. People who I barely knew or didn’t know at all offered to donate money. Volunteers from different states, and even different countries, offered to help in any way they could. The first Latina city council member in Detroit called me asking if she could help. Friends whom I hadn’t spoken to in years phoned me, asking to donate or pitch in somehow. One gentleman in London, a graphic designer, made a flyer from what I had written and tailored it to Twitter. I’d never heard of him before and haven’t since. He just sent it to me and asked for nothing. Unfortunately I didn’t have any infrastructure to take donations and the bidding price hadn’t moved. I was still the top bidder, and I was hoping it would hold out.

  One of my former coworkers at the French restaurant had opened his own coffeehouse, and I went there to use the Internet and watch the end of the auction. I told Woods to be on standby near the phone while he was at work, in case something happened. There were thirty minutes left to closing, and if the price stayed the same, the Terrys’ house would be safe. At fifteen minutes I thought we were home free. Surely whoever had placed the first bid recognized the house was occupied and the better angels of their nature had prevailed.

  Ten minutes.

  Five minutes.

  A bid.

  * * *

  The war for our humanity is upon us. It is personified by our politicians, our interactions on the Internet, in tens of thousands of people losing their homes in places like this, in the violence wracking our country, the gun deaths once tolerated only in Detroit broadening to suburban enclaves all over America. It’s on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

  But it is not lost. Not yet. As spring approaches I have more wood to cut for the fire, a garden to put to plant, and more friends to help fix up their own homes. The water from an overtaxed sewer system floods my basement and again I pump it out. The city installs more streetlights and old habits die hard. Spring’s cyclical rebirth is upon us and the inevitable change of the season is at hand.

  As before a summer thunderstorm, the air is heavy with the coming transformation, the rain, the lightning, the release. Things cannot stay this way for long. The souls of the people are angry, they are hungry, uncertain of the future. The people are becoming desperate, yearning fo
r some kind of hope, any kind, a way out, a way through. They know it in their bones, in the hunger in their stomachs, the crumbling of the roofs over their heads. The fire is lit and the pot will boil.

  It is your sacred duty to find hope somewhere, anywhere, and keep trying to make that world in which you wish to live. I don’t succeed at it every day. But I try, and know I must keep trying. The thing is, there are a lot of people who feel just like you. You’re not alone.

  I find hope within the sanctuary of the walls of this house, nailed into each and every board I placed myself, screwed into every light switch, flowing out of each faucet. But it is bigger than that, and does not reside only there. It’s located in the hard muscles I’ve gleaned from the lifting, in the keenness I’ve gained from the figuring, in the confidence I’ve earned from the struggle, in the bonds I’ve made with my neighbors through work and hard times and celebration. What I’ve gained, nobody can take away from me and money cannot buy. No fire or billionaire can crush it into the ground.

  I haven’t yet been able to build the world I want to live in outside the walls of my own house. But I’ve seen it. And I’m not alone. My neighborhood, this city, this country is filled with people who haven’t been beaten. As you read this, Paul Weertz might be driving his tractor. Will might be playing his banjo in a circle of friends, singing and laughing and making merry in the face of destruction. The neighbors might be firing up the barbecue or the Kemps growing food in their garden, feeding some young searcher ground cherries and courage.

  And I’m still here. I’m still fighting. I haven’t given up, succumbed to cynicism, ironic detachment, or absurdism. The one thing I’m proud of is I haven’t been beaten. Not yet. I’ve tried to stand up for what I believe and what I thought was right, and this city and this world have not broken my spirit.