A $500 House in Detroit Read online

  I imagined my father spent the same evening having a drink with my mother, hoping they wouldn’t be burying their son and that I’d figure out what I could do with the general studies degree I was about to be awarded, along with a steaming pile of student loan debt, about equal to the national average. Although they loved me fiercely and had given me every advantage they could afford, they couldn’t understand what I was doing in Detroit.

  * * *

  I spent most of those early days sitting on the stoop watching the neighborhood pass by, hoping to find a job. It seemed like everyone who could, and wanted to, had left. I wasn’t eager to begin the meaningless corporate work to pay off the tens of thousands in debt I’d accumulated, on the student loans I’d signed at seventeen before I could buy a pack of cigarettes or drink in a bar, so I stayed. At the time, moving to Detroit meant “dropping out,” in the Timothy Leary sense, to remove myself as one bolt in the proverbial machine—not as a sabot to throw in the cogs—but to get out of America by going into its deepest regions.

  A few days after I’d arrived, one of the few other white kids in the building asked me to help move a television to the Dumpster. I walked into his apartment as he was shooting up.

  “You want some? I have clean needles.”

  I declined, but asked him if I could watch.

  “Sure.”

  He had just begun to tie off around his biceps, and the shot was in a syringe that he held between his teeth. I watched as he put the tip of the needle slowly into his vein at an oblique angle, his knuckles resting on his forearm. He pulled back the plunger, his blood clouding the heroin like a drop of red food coloring in a vial of vinegar. He pushed the shot into his circulatory system, like the colored acid kissing the baking soda in a science fair volcano. A great bubbling calm washed over him as he lit a cigarette. This, apparently, was going to be my new life. I rolled one myself and we smoked in silence, until he broke it.

  “So you want to move that TV?”

  In a scene that would repeat itself as I got deeper into the city, those kids soon left, too. In this case, they hopped trains to California and the marijuana harvest. I was the only white face left in the building.

  I would get offered drugs or sex, on the street, almost daily. Buying drugs was then almost the only reason a white kid would be in the city. With nothing to do I wandered the neighborhood in boredom and was mistaken for a customer.

  “No thanks, ma’am, I stick with the amateurs.”

  “I’m all right, I just quit.”

  “Nah, man, crack isn’t my style.”

  Drinking, however, was. On Mondays the bar behind me would brew beer and the whole neighborhood would smell like baking bread. I’d never been to a bar or even a film alone, but started going there to drink by myself all night, occasionally chatting with the bartenders or the barflies, semigenius immigrants from Africa, artists working in strange materials such as pigskin, labor historians and Communists, Mexican poets, Iranian gear heads, Korean illustrators, an entire drunk UN. It made me realize there might just be more to Detroit than the death and poverty that was all I saw on the news.

  The staff would often take pity on me, too, serving me free drinks or letting me stay after they switched off the neon OPEN sign. One friendly bartender drove me to the grocery store in nearby Dearborn to show me where to buy food. Until the Whole Foods showed up in 2013 there wasn’t a single grocery store chain in the city.

  * * *

  On my stoop I met a man named Zeno who was a crack dealer. We had little in common, but became friends out of habit and proximity, our floating schedules aligned. He had a difficult time understanding what I was doing in a place like that. So did I. But I’d learned something by facilitating poetry workshops in prisons over the previous couple of years: when you have little in common with someone and you are forced to interact, you talk about what you do have, big stuff, God and Man and War and Love. Things get deep pretty quickly and it often creates bonds not easily broken.

  “Are you a cop?” Zeno said.

  “What?”

  “Are you a cop? Are you wearing a wire, motherfucker?” He grabbed the front of my shirt in his fist and pressed his face close to mine.

  We’d been drinking pretty heavy one night and had gone into his apartment to roll a joint. He had repainted his three rooms himself, and paid the super extra to add carpet to the living room. The floors were spotless and the furniture made of dark wood. A saltwater fish tank had a pleasant blue glow and sat at the end of the small hallway, and he’d installed a chandelier over the glass kitchen table. He had created a little oasis inside the tenement. He had once told me, “Your home is your refuge. When the world outside is so fucked up, you have to have somewhere nice to come back to. Your own castle.”

  “A wire? What are you talking about?”

  He stared silently at me, his brow hard and aggressive.

  “Take off your shirt.” He flicked the front of my T-shirt with his thumb. “If you aren’t wearing a wire take that shit off.”

  “Dude, how long have you known me? What the fuck.”

  I reached to get a cigarette from a pack on the table. He got to it first. He picked the pack up slightly and dropped them, his eyes never breaking contact with mine.

  “Not long enough. Take it off.”

  I wasn’t sure what to do next. So I took off my shirt. If there is a cool way to put your shirt back on after having been ordered to take it off by your only friend in a new town, I haven’t found it.

  After that he made it his business to show me around. He took me on crack deals and to his sister’s house for dinner, introduced me to the projects, and when I said I didn’t know what Belle Isle was—our version of Central Park on an island in the Detroit River—he made me get in his car and go, right then.

  As we drank forties out of plastic cups sitting on his hood, watching the sun set over the skyscrapers downtown, he told me about his life. Kicked out of school at fourteen, mother an addict, father nonexistent. To him, selling dope was more honorable than the food line. There was little to no honest work for a high school dropout, and what he’d tried—the docks, for example, were controlled by the Mob, racial hierarchy, and bored animosity—never seemed to make ends meet. So he did his work, and was good at it. He sold just enough to eat and keep a roof over his head. He never touched anything harder than marijuana and had never been in any serious trouble. He was a unicorn in his line of work.

  After months of looking I managed to find a job in the most unlikely of places: the classified section of a newspaper. I met my new boss for the first time in a bar with Formica tables and moody waitresses because I was too wary to bring him to my apartment. He was a large man with an enormous voice and a black SUV just as big. He had grown up in the city, but had since moved to the suburbs to raise his kids.

  He explained his company was an “all-black construction company” and he needed a “clean-cut white boy” to sell his jobs in the suburbs—people wouldn’t hire him when his address read Detroit and the first person they saw was black. I grew up in a small rural town far outside Detroit’s suburban sprawl, and knew little about the animosity between the city and the ring of municipalities that surrounded it. I didn’t know that Detroit is the most racially segregated metropolitan area in the nation.

  The semester before, nearly all my classes had concerned race and were mostly filled with white people. Our discussions would tiptoe around the subject, students performing incredible verbal yoga, twisting themselves into absurdity to avoid mentioning anything that might offend anyone. I was happy to be my boss’s white face. At work we talked frankly about race. When a call would come in, we would discuss whether she sounded white or black. If she sounded white, I would bid the job. If she sounded black, my boss would.

  I would also work alongside everyone else sanding floors for $8.50 an hour, plus commission if I sold a job. When I came home and blew my nose the snot would be black from sawdust and polyurethane. I worked
out the summer there, hunched over a thirty-pound disk sander, a long way from the university.

  In August we had a job for one of my boss’s relatives, also kin to my coworker Jimmy, a kind man with whom I worked closest and who taught me everything I know about hardwood floors. The relative’s flat was on the second story, so we had to carry the machines upstairs and the sawdust down. The homeowner had worked thirty years on the line at Ford and had lived in what he called the ghetto for most of his life, but he was proud and comfortable, in his finances and with who he was. After shaking hands and looking me over suspiciously, he showed me each gun he had hidden around his home.

  “Whoa! There’s another one,” he said as he pulled something long from under the couch.

  “Bam!” He mimed shooting an invisible intruder, then winked at me.

  I got the sense everyone respected him, but he didn’t trust me because I was white. While we sanded and scrubbed, he apparently felt the need to work as well, and stood outside with a chain saw, cutting down tiny invasive trees that had grown into his yard, none thicker than his wrist. His adult son followed him, admonishing him to take it easy.

  “Boy, I take shits bigger than you. You’re slowing me down.” He reared the saw in his son’s direction. “Now get on the other side of that tree there and look out.”

  At midday, he offered to buy us lunch.

  “Do you guys eat chicken?”

  The crew, all black aside from me, sat bone-tired on his back steps, shrugging at the question and pulling at bottles of Gatorade. I could have passed an anatomy test on the muscles in my back.

  “Now, I said I’m going to buy you lunch. Do you guys eat fried chicken?”

  Jimmy answered, “Of course we eat chicken, we’re black.”

  The record stopped with a scratch. Everyone looked at me. I was a vegetarian, something I had picked up at the university, as a challenge to myself. I hadn’t had any flesh of any kind in more than two years, but I hadn’t told any of my coworkers for fear of ridicule.

  “I, um . . . ” I was a little too stunned to come up with what to say. I’d be breaking a pact I had made with myself. Then again, maybe I’d be exchanging it for a new one.

  “He lives right around the corner. He’s black,” Jimmy said, saving me.

  “I, um . . . ”

  “Well, do you eat chicken?”

  They all looked back at me.

  “I eat chicken.”

  * * *

  Sanding floors showed me many areas of the city outside my bubble in Midtown and got me thinking. Maybe I could make a go of it here. Maybe I could buy a house, live in it while I was fixing it, and flip it or rent it when I moved elsewhere. They were practically giving them away. The problem was I had no idea how to buy a house, let alone fix one up. It was just a vague idea. I thought I might start with something in the vast and relatively dense residential ghettos of the city where crime ruled second only to abandonment. Or maybe in a nice historic district where proud people still raised families and mostly kept to themselves.

  But first, I had to finish school, at my parents’ behest. I wouldn’t leave Detroit, not yet. I blocked my classes on two days a week so I could still work at the floor place, but $8.50 an hour doesn’t buy much gas when it’s four dollars a gallon, as it was then, so I would often hitchhike between the two cities. One time a professional gambler picked me up, going to one of the new casinos in Detroit. The houses of gambling were the latest in a long line of economic silver bullets that never seemed to make the city any less broke.

  The gambler had holes in his jeans and hollow eyes. I asked him what game to play in a casino if I wanted to win. What were my best odds? He, too, looked me dead in the eye. He said, “Don’t ever walk into a casino.”

  Commuting between the desperate poverty of Detroit and the cosmic wealth of the university had made me sick, gave me economic jet lag of the conscience. The explosive inequality was eating me from the inside. Detroit was among the poorest cities in the United States and located only forty-five minutes away from Ann Arbor, one of the richest. The University of Michigan, a public school, costs more to attend for an out-of-state student than the average American makes in a year. I’d begun to think of them as different worlds, and having a foot in each was taxing on my view of the country that placed them so close together, and disrupting for my love of the university that had seemed to insulate itself from the desperation just down the street.

  I’d known, too, just a little bit about what it feels like to be hungry and watch someone eat. I was dangerously broke and in Detroit unsupported by the orbit of wealth at the university, where I could casually walk into a dining hall past the bored attendant for a free, stolen meal or rely on my wealthier friends to pick up the tab at the bar. I began to question if I could go back at all, sanctimony about my new home working as an antidote to my sickness of dissonance. Living in Detroit wasn’t exactly easy, but it seemed more noble somehow, and honest.

  Amid the glass chandeliers and ivy of the university I had been selected to teach a class concerning race to other undergraduates, overseen by a kindly older professor named Charles. As I was getting a firsthand look at scratching out a living working near-minimum-wage jobs and the drug trade, other student teachers in the class were taking internships at places like Goldman Sachs and questionably capitalistic nonprofits in India. I thought this was bullshit and told them so. I told my teachers, including Charles, I thought academia was bullshit, too, sequestered from the real conflict. It didn’t win me many new friends. I drifted farther away from the place that four years earlier had sent me an acceptance letter that had made my father cry in front of me for the first time in either of our lives.

  But Charles would often insist on taking me out to lunch. He would listen patiently to my complaints and fury as I told him of my gestating plans to buy a house. I had formulated a vague notion I would start some kind of folk school, buy a big place or a duplex and use half for instruction, half for my home. Charles, knowingly and gracefully, nodded and smiled as I laid out my dreams for changing the world. Maybe, I thought, it would start with a house. That naïve dream came one step closer when I dressed as an organ grinder for Halloween.

  Just down the street from my apartment in Detroit sat a contemporary art museum that threw wild dance parties. I had concealed some cheap liquor inside the organ and set it down in the corner to dance more freely. When I took a break to retrieve an illicit swig of Old Grand-Dad, by chance, sitting next to the liquor-cabinet-cum-music-box was a white guy dressed as an organ grinder’s monkey. Something seemed meant to be.

  He said he was a carpenter and his name was Will and he hated crowds, and people in general. He had just moved back to Detroit after ten years or so of traveling the States by freight train and thumb, typical methods of crusty-punk locomotion. Now he had become something different. We were both, somewhat desperately, looking for friends, both cynical about finding them.

  “I kind of want to buy a house,” I told him outside the party, smoking. The crowd spilled out into the street and ignored us.

  “I just did,” he said. “It’s probably burning down right now. With my dog in it.”

  * * *

  I called him the next week, nervous and wretched, like asking for a platonic date. He invited me over.

  His house stood in a neighborhood on the near east side called Poletown. It looked like the apocalypse had descended, that the world and this life was but an afternoon performance that had reached its uneasy conclusion, the players having washed their hands and left for home, the crowd disappointed. This didn’t look like a city at all. In my tiny car I crossed a set of disused train tracks and the houses all but disappeared. Poletown seemed prairie land, a huge open expanse of gently waving grass, the sightlines broken only by what appeared as crippled and abandoned houses twisting in on themselves. Aside from the grid of roads scarring the expanse, it must have looked close to how the land had appeared when it had been stolen from the Native Ame
ricans. One of the biblical meanings of apocalypse is “New World.”

  What structures remained looked like cardboard boxes left in the rain. Ominous two-story monstrosities with wide-open shells and melted porches lurched in bondage like tortured Greek gods of the underworld. Forgotten rosebushes ran over palsied fences, and the houses seemed to watch with yellowed eyes, like two-story Goya paintings, naked and ragged and proud. Trash seeped from the orifices where windows used to be. Abandoned dreams, abandoned lives, facades contorted into abandoned smiles.

  Most of the houses had been deserted while still functioning. They had died by the elements, harvested clean of valuables by scrappers working as scavengers. Slow-moving nature had done the rest, reclaiming what it had lost a century ago. One of the original areas of white flight, Poletown had also been abandoned by all levels of government, the people who stayed left to fend for themselves. The average police response time was about an hour, if they came at all. Aside from some brave and stubborn holdouts and their solitary immaculate homes, the neighborhood was dead. Or so I thought.

  Will’s house stood on the edge of all this, just across the tracks. His street, named for the saint of the abandoned cathedral four blocks down, was pimpled with manhole covers spewing great columns of steam from the trash incinerator looming on the horizon. In the evening the exhaling bowels of the city created an opaque curtain of fog. The only other house on the block was a hideous cinder-block project house built by an architecture student from Cranbrook, the same private college Mitt Romney attended as a teenager. Whoever built the structure apparently didn’t want to live in it either, and it, too, was abandoned, the water pipes burst from freezing long ago.

  As I drove into the alley where Will parked his truck, I noticed behind his place lay a paradise of forest land abutting the Dequindre Cut, a long-abandoned railroad trench. Any homes and buildings had been torn or fallen down, and nature reigned once again. Thirty-year-old trees grew up between dumped boats and hot tubs and railroad ties and piles of rubble. A sextuple of abandoned grain silos presided over the blooming expanse of forgotten land. Scrappers would burn the jackets off copper wires at the bottom, as they were doing the first night I visited.