A $500 House in Detroit
Page 27
Right at this moment I might be banging on this old house, cursing and sweating and bandaged, hoping I can make my corner of this earth a little kinder, a little warmer, and a little bit more cheery. I have no idea if I’ve made any difference at all. Maybe I’ve made things worse. But I tried. If it all blows up in my face and my house burns down, or I get kicked out, or I make a fool of myself in a myriad other ways, I know that I did the best I could with what I had. Our only failure can be trying nothing new. I haven’t given up yet, and the game ain’t over. I live free. I’m still here.
* * *
The sneaky bidder was trying to wait just until the end in hopes I wasn’t watching and snake the Terrys’ house out from us. I made a bid of $700 and called Woods. For each bid recorded in the last five minutes the clock would start over. He bid again. As did I.
“Hello.”
“Hey, Woods, someone else is bidding on the property.”
“No.”
“Yep. We have to decide how much we’re going to be able to spend.”
“Who the hell would be bidding on an occupied house, I mean—”
“Woods, there’s no time. He just placed another bid. It’s at one thousand dollars right now. Should I bid again?”
“Yeah.”
I clicked.
“We have to make a decision here, buddy. We going to go up to fifteen hundred, two thousand?”
“I don’t know, fifteen hundred, I guess.”
“It’s climbing again.”
We bid.
“It’s at fifteen hundred right now, Woods, what should we do?”
“Go ahead and do it.”
Seventeen hundred.
Eighteen hundred.
“I can go as high as two thousand, Drew, I don’t think I can afford any more.”
It’s a funny thing, deciding, in U.S. dollars, how much good neighbors are worth. To put a price, a dollar amount, on how much someone’s security, the only home in the world they have, costs. Do unto others, right? Love your neighbor, right?
Right?
Well, in dollars, how much do you love your neighbor?
“It’s at two thousand, Woods. What do we do?”
“Do it.”
“This is so fucking stressful, this is so fucked up.” I clicked the button.
“He bid again. It’s at nineteen hundred. Do we go up to twenty-five?”
“I don’t know, Drew, I don’t know where this money is going to come from. Go ahead and do it, I’ll figure something out.”
$2,000.
$2,100.
$2,200.
I never got the chance to find out for myself how much my neighbors were worth. As a great man once wrote, only those who fall over the edge truly know where to find it. Woods and I purchased the house for $2,300.
I ran back to the Terrys to tell them we had got it. Woods had told the missus we would be bidding on the house that day, and she was home waiting. The inside of her home, the one I momentarily owned, was cool and dark. Mrs. Terry played with a grandbaby in a diaper, her boys at work, but her brother was sitting with her, reading the family Bible. When I told her, she cried. She said she would find a way to pay me back, somehow. Later, I’d receive it, too, fifty, a hundred dollars at a time.
I ran back and forth to get all the paperwork right, and decided to put the house back in the Terrys’ names. Everyone I had talked to beforehand told me to put my name on the deed until I got paid back, but I didn’t want to hold someone else’s house hostage. I had a thought, just a glimmer, to fill in my name on the deed. I could have, I would have been well within the law to do it. I had paid for it. But I put the house in Mrs. Terry’s name, along with one of her sons. It was theirs. I owned it for about an hour.
Afterward someone remarked, “That’s very George Bailey of you,” referring to the film It’s a Wonderful Life. That movie had a happy ending, right?
Right?
I was lucky. This was the first time in my life I had any savings and could have done something even remotely like that. Their house and security was paid from the advance for this book you hold in your hands.
Loaning them the money was a small act, just one house, and one family, and frankly it’s not enough. The problem is systemic, not personal. I realize ending the book in this manner plays right into the white-savior narrative. But the struggle is not over, this isn’t the end. Detroit is out there, places like this all over the world are out there. I have no tidy endings or easy solutions to offer you. We have to do what we can, and when you dedicate a life to attempting to expand the possible, anything can happen. I may have saved one house, and my neighbors and Detroit might have saved me, too. I know that’s cliché, but it’s true. What matters is we did it together, that we pull one another up out of the mud of fear and mistrust of our fellow man, together. If we work with one another we can win.
* * *
That very evening I was relaxing on my couch. My shoulders were sore from hunching over the computer all day, and the tension of the sale. A fire was going in the woodstove. Someone from Forestdale said he had been able to buy an abandoned house just up the street from me in the same auction. I was going to have a new neighbor. I heard a car horn once, then a couple of times.
Someone was really laying on it now. It was continuous, a good two minutes of horn. I considered getting up and telling whoever was doing it to cram it, but I figured it was just a kid and said forget it, I’ll wait it out.
Woods called.
“What’s on fire?”
“What?”
“Something’s on fire. I just stepped outside and something’s on fire, by you.”
I put on my shoes and ran outside with Gratiot. I thought maybe a spark from my chimney had lit the abandoned house next door. I smelled smoke, and considered going back in for the extinguisher but decided against it.
I couldn’t see any fire next door. I went into the alley. I could see black smoke, and thought it might be my neighbor Andi’s place.
“What’s up, Woods?” I could see him in the alley just ahead of me. We turned into the lot between Andi’s and the abandoned house. The fire was on the northeast corner. A car was in flames. I heard it pop. Then a small explosion. I put my arm up to shield my face. The car was really going, the flames two stories high. If the fire department didn’t get here fast it was going to take the house and maybe the one across the street with it.
I turned back to get the dog, who had followed me, into the yard. Two young men walked down the street and said something to me I couldn’t hear. Gratiot jumped the fence again and I put him in the house, but for some reason I stopped and got the mail as the fire raged behind me. I called the fire department on my way inside and they told me they were en route. I laid the mail on the counter and looked at who it was from, strangely calm. Andi called and I told her I’d be over.
She was in her bathrobe as we watched from her porch. The neighbor from across the street, now Sawtooth Betty, was on hers, and she crossed the road to stand next to us. King came down, too, and gave me a cigarette. A crowd of teenagers watched it from the street, and one of them kept saying, “I just got out of jail.” The fire department arrived and put it out. An arson investigator did not stop by.
When it was all over Andi returned inside and King went home. Sawtooth Betty asked me to give her a boost through her window because she’d forgotten her keys.
As she stood on a plastic chair, I laced my hands and gave her a leg up, and I held the window as she wiggled through. I put the chair back on the porch and went home. I decided it was a good night to check my smoke detectors.
When I woke up the next day the house still smelled like burned rubber. I pulled on my jeans and boots and got ready to hang the Sheetrock in my office. As I opened my windows to let in some fresh air, I heard a reassuring sound. Children were playing in the new playground of the Boggs School, their tiny golden voices echoing throughout the neighborhood like bells. I listened to them for a moment be
fore I headed to work upstairs, something to behold and kept as a gift until it moved again, the great wandering of hope on the American frontier.
Can you hear it?
“I feel sorry for people who are not living in Detroit. Detroit gives a sense of epochs of civilization in a way that you don’t get in a city like New York. It’s obvious by looking at [Detroit] that what was doesn’t work. People are always striving for size, to be a giant. And this is the symbol of how giants fall.”
“People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values.”
“These are the times to grow our souls. Each of us is called upon to embrace the conviction that despite the powers and principalities bent on commodifying all our human relationships, we have the power within us to create the world anew.”
“We are the leaders we’ve been looking for.”
—Grace Lee Boggs, 1915–2015
Acknowledgments
This book would be nowhere near its final form without the kind, even, and often brilliant guidance of my editor, Colin Harrison. I thank him dearly for pushing me so hard. I also wish to thank my agent, Shaun Dolan, for his tireless work, enthusiasm, and encouragement. My most sincere gratitude to both for believing in a blue-collar kid from Michigan.
This book would not have been possible without Sandra Allen, both for taking a chance on this story in its infancy as a feature for BuzzFeed, and for profound edits along with Steve Kandell.
I would like to thank the many people who supplied art for this book, including, Kehben Grier, Kinga Kemp, Garrett MacLean, Amy Philp, and Mike Williams. Thank you to Dan Cuddy, Sarah Goldberg, Kyle Kabel, Elisa Rivlin, and Paul Whitlatch at Scribner for making this happen.
Joel Peterson and Rebecca Mazzei have long been great patrons of the arts in Detroit and have generously extended that support to me in many ways. A very special thank-you is due them, my Detroit community, and everyone between these pages. I would particularly like to thank the Weertz family, especially Paul, and everyone else on Forestdale for feeding me, helping with the house, and caring for me as if I were family.
I would also like to thank everyone who has helped me along on this journey—book, house, and otherwise—Pat Ahrens, Andy and Sara Bailey, Mark Binelli, Ben Bunk, Eric Froh, Siobhan Gregory, Sarah Hayosh, Nate Izydorek, Duryea Johnson, Chris Jones, Jerry Klein, Sam James Levine, Andrew Marok, Monté and Erin Martinez, Molly Motor, Steve Neavling, Chris Powers, Dave Roberts, Matt Temkin, Elaine Thompson, Mary Lee Thompson-Goldsmith, G. Richard Thompson, Char-Lene Wilkins, Mike Williams, James Woods, the 555, the Adrian Center for the Arts and Luke Barnett, Kevin Miller and Atlas Plumbing, the Thomas Philp family, the Terrys, Zach Massad and Randy Voss and the Motor City Brewing Works, and everyone else who got dirty or bought drinks on my behalf. It takes a village. Rest in peace, Matt Davis.
As this is my first, I would like to thank the teachers and mentors who grew me from nothing into a person who could even consider writing a book: Buzz Alexander, Charles Behling, Diane Cook, John Lowe, Oyamo, Jeffery T. Schultz, John Cox, and Chris George and everyone at the Bakersfield Californian. I very much appreciate your guidance and support when I was just beginning to think about writing professionally.
Readers of early drafts included Heidi Kaloustian, the Kemp family, Meg Lemieur, Karen Lewis, Mike Medow, Diana Nucera, Dave Torrone, and Mary Kate Varneau.
This story also drew on the work of scholars, activists, and storytellers including Grace Lee Boggs, Mark Binelli, Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Bill Wylie-Kellermann, Monica Lewis Patrick, and Thomas J. Sugrue. The Boggs quotes at the end of this book first appeared, respectively, in American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, documentary, 2013; as approved by Boggs in 2006 to Robert Shetterly for his painting series Americans Who Tell the Truth; from an article entitled “Seeds of Change” that Boggs wrote for Bill Moyers Journal, 2007; as told to the author and nearly everyone else Grace came in contact with.
Not least, I want to thank my lovely partner, Kehben Grier, who read early drafts of this book and helped in ways too numerous to name.
And finally I would like to give immeasurable thanks to my family, without whom neither my house nor this book or anything good in my life would be possible. A very special thank-you to my parents, Amy and James, in particular, and to my grandparents, at whose kitchen table much of this book was written. I love you all.
About the Author
© GARRET T MACLEAN
Drew Philp’s work has been published both nationally and internationally and has appeared in publications including BuzzFeed, the Guardian, and the Detroit Free Press. He lives in Detroit with his dog, Gratiot.
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Photo Credits
Photos courtesy of the author, except:
Pages 1, 9, 67, 175, and 275 courtesy of Mike Williams
Pages 95 and 123 courtesy of Garrett MacLean
Page 147 courtesy of Amy Philp
Page 273 courtesy of Kehben Grier
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Copyright © 2017 by Drew Philp
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Philp, Drew, author.
Title: A $500 house in Detroit : rebuilding an abandoned home and an American city / by Drew Philp.
Other titles: Five hundred dollar house in Detroit | Rebuilding an abandoned home and an American city
Description: New York : Scribner, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016046283| ISBN 9781476797984 | ISBN 9781476797991
Subjects: LCSH: Philp, Drew—Homes and haunts—Michigan—Detroit. | Detroit (Mich.)—Biography. | Dwellings—Remodeling—Michigan—Detroit. | Urban renewal—Michigan—Detroit—Citizen participation. | Subculture—Michigan—Detroit. | Community development—Michigan—Detroit. | Working class whites—Michigan—Detroit—Biography. | African Americans—Michigan—Detroit—Social conditions—21st century. | Detroit (Mich.)—Race relations. | Generation Y—Biography.
Classification: LCC F574.D453 P55 20
17 | DDC 307.3/4160977434—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046283
ISBN 978-1-4767-9798-4
ISBN 978-1-4767-9801-1 (ebook)
Portions of this book originally appeared in slightly different form on BuzzFeed.com.