Detroit: An American Autopsy

by Charlie Leduff

  He was holding a plastic gas can.

  “Arson,” he said. “In this town, arson is off the hook. Thousands of them a year, bro. In Detroit, it’s so fucking poor that fire is cheaper than a movie. A can of gas is three-fifty and a movie is eight bucks, and there aren’t any movie theaters left in Detroit, so fuck it. They burn the empty house next door and they sit on the fucking porch with a forty, and they’re barbecuing and laughing ’cause it’s fucking entertainment. It’s unbelievable. And the old lady living next door, she don’t have insurance, and her house goes up in flames and she’s homeless and another fucking block dies.”

  I wrote it all down. I knew there was a story here.

  A few days later, I came back to the firehouse to embed myself, like a correspondent tailing a squad of marines in an Afghanistan backwater. We loaded up on a rig and went for a tour. Also on the truck were Jimmy Montgomery, a short, excitable white man; Montgomery’s best friend, Walt Harris, a burly, soft-spoken black man who moonlighted as a Baptist minister; and Jeff Hamm, who had a second career as a nurse.

  It was raining lightly and near dusk. The evening had an oily quality about it. Nevin looked out the window with a vacant ten-mile stare.

  “Why did I even come to work?” he said to me from the front passenger’s side as we idled at a stoplight, watching a guy in a parka smoke a joint. “You know what it’s like working this job in this city? It’s like those old black-and-white movie reels of Vietnam. Like those soldiers waving at the camera, like, ‘Hey, Ma, everything’s cool. Everything’s all right.’ You know? And there’s a pile of corpses behind him and he’s smoking a joint and playing cards. ‘Hey, Ma, love ya. See ya in eight months.’ I mean, it’s whacked. Somebody here’s gonna eat it. Somebody in this truck is going to get seriously hurt, sooner rather than later. This city’s burning all day and all night long and we got shit equipment—I mean, look at these boots. And nobody gives a shit.”

  He put a finger through a hole in the shank.

  “It’s just a matter of time until somebody goes down. You know? Just a matter of time, because it can’t keep up like this.”

  At the wheel, Harris, the minister, chuckled, then turned on a side street and was delayed by a drug deal through a car window.

  “Look at this shit,” Nevin continued, watching a faded crack head walk away. “Look at that guy. He’s a forgotten person who’s forgotten himself. It’s sad. What else has he got? They talk about New Orleans and Katrina. But there’s no airdrop here. There’s no relocation plan or rebuilding money. They left people like him here to survive and what else has he got?”

  Nevin sprang from this neighborhood. His grandfather, a Lithuanian immigrant, slapped bumpers on cars at the Packard plant. His father was born a few blocks from the firehouse and retired after serving nearly thirty years in the department. And now Nevin was working here too, trying like all the brothers in the firehouse to keep the remnants and its people from burning to the ground. “I love this place, this neighborhood, these people,” he said. “I’m angry with the people in power who are supposed to lead and don’t.”

  We turned by a Lutheran cemetery on the way back to the firehouse. An earthmover was there, but instead of placing a casket into the ground, it was taking one out.

  “What’s going on there?” I asked.

  “They’re removing the dead,” Harris said without irony. “Taking him to the suburbs.”

  “No, that can’t be true,” I said. Firemen hazing the gullible reporter?

  “Suit yourself,” Harris said.

  I wrote a note to myself on the back of the notebook to check it out later. White flight. Black flight. Now dead flight.

  Harris himself had moved to the suburbs of Sterling Heights—the city north of Warren and the Eight Mile border—finding it too difficult to raise his children in the city among the people he loved. And the people in his new neighborhood—his white neighborhood—had problems with a black man moving in.

  “It is too hard raising kids in the city anymore. And then when I moved up there it was sort of a ‘there goes the neighborhood’ feeling at first,” Harris said of being the only black man on his block. “But it got better once they got to know me.”

  Harris turned the rig left onto East Grand Boulevard, past Kirby Street. The firehouse is located on the city’s east side, near the hulking wreck of the Packard automobile plant that closed in 1956 but which nobody ever bothered to tear down. A square mile of industrial decay, scavengers had descended upon it, ushering in a marathon game of cat and mouse. The scavengers, looking for metal to sell at the scrap yard, light a section of the building on fire. After the firemen dutifully extinguish the blaze, the scavengers return to help themselves to the neatly exposed girders and I-beams that form the skeleton of the structure. From the rig, you can see the missing roofs and walls and forty-foot holes in the ground and the trees growing inside, and the whole thing looks like a gigantic, cancerous atrium.

  “It’s like we work for the fucking scrappers,” Nevin said.

  A walkway that arches over Grand Boulevard, connecting the south portion of the plant to the north, holds a marquee with missing letters, spelling out an appropriate epitaph: MO OR CITY IN U TR L PARK.

  A block away is the firehouse. Inside is a perpetual pot of coffee, which the men stand around while waiting for the next run, and they don’t get to the bottom of their cups before the next run comes.

  The radio box bleated incessantly like a colicky sheep across a city constantly in flames.

  “Ladder 16, please respond.”

  The response:

  “Ladder 16, out of service.”

  Jimmy Montgomery laughed. He laughed every time he heard something like that. We went out and stood on the street corner. Everything seemed broken here: the toilet seat in his firehouse, the city government that pays his check. He stared at the house across the street on East Grand Boulevard, the one with a blue tarpaulin for a roof. He looked at the weeds. The abandoned car. The empty little factories and workingman bars and the bakery where he used to get his bread when he started on the job seventeen years ago.

  Even the alarm in the firehouse was broken. And since no one from headquarters had bothered to come out to fix it, one of the boys here jerry-rigged it into some Rube Goldberg mousetrap contraption.

  When a call comes to the station, a fax paper rolls out of the printer containing the directions to the fire. So someone had it rigged where the fax paper pushed over a door hinge with a screw mounted on it. The screw touched an electrified metal plate that was wired to the alarm, which completed an electrical circuit. The bell rang. Then the box bleated.

  In came a call: A man has tapped into the gas main with a garden hose because he is too poor to warm his children. The hose leaks. The block explodes. They arrive at the neighborhood three minutes later. The place looks like a painting from the hand of Hieronymus Bosch, a landscape of fire and human failing. The firefighters pull the children from the flames and peel a guy’s guts from the jagged window frame where he lies like an old cloth doll. One fireman gets in the ambulance with a kid, holding one hand over her eyes, the other over her shattered femur.

  There is a crater where the house used to be.

  “Is it ever gonna stop?” Nevin asked no one in particular an hour later through his cheap cigar, nonchalantly, as though the carnage were an everyday occurrence. “Children are dying in this city because they’re too fucking poor to keep warm. Put that in your fucking notebook.”

  I put it in my fucking notebook.

  Eight men returned to the firehouse with faces of mud, dirty and tired, and before they knew it, the box was bleating again. This time, it was a run-of-the-mill house fire in a city with 62,000 vacant homes. They jumped into the rigs and were off in seconds, barreling down Mt. Elliott Avenue. Motorists didn’t even bother to move to the side
. The siren had become a nuisance here.

  And when the firefighters arrived at the abandoned place, what they saw was a table that had been set for supper, eyeglasses left on top of a book. The cupboard was filled with cans and cereals. It was as though the owner went out for a walk with the dog two decades ago and never came home.

  It was then I began to realize who the Detroit firefighter is. He is the man holding Nero’s fiddle.

  It seemed to me that by virtue of the job, Nevin and Harris and their firefighting brethren were uniquely situated to witness the backward march of a great city and the fight to keep its living people from the ash bin of history.

  * * *

  The depth of Detroit’s problems was burned into the national consciousness decades ago in the early eighties when, inexplicably, the city would burst into flames each year in a pre-Halloween Mardi Gras of arson and destruction known as Devil’s Night.

  There were 810 arsons reported in 1984, as Detroit became a porch light to every fire bug across the country, a tourist destination for lunatics and thrill seekers. And only now that I was home did I realize my family was a victim of them too.

  My mother’s flower shop was located on East Jefferson Avenue, the main thoroughfare that runs eastward from downtown Detroit out to the exclusive Grosse Pointe hamlets.

  The shop sat on the lip of a black ghetto that used to be inhabited by working-class whites. The plate-glass windows of the flower shop had bars over them, and the view from the street was blocked by plants so that stickup men might not see that my mother was working alone, which she often was. She’d been held up at gunpoint several times. She stayed in that stinking spot for many years, sticking it out, making it work, struggling to feed five kids between marriages. She was one of those people who were irrationally connected to the city, until one autumn evening just before Halloween, a crazy man lit the place on fire.

  He must have torched the shop for the thrill of it, because he took nothing. The senselessness of it left my mother stunned. Why destroy for no purpose? Why burn down a building, a neighborhood, a city? She boarded up the back and stayed awhile longer until someone threw a brick through the window. She replaced it. A week later someone threw another brick through the window. Unable to get her mind around it, unwilling to try anymore, my mother turned her back on Detroit and moved her shop to the quaint, manicured and well-policed streets of Grosse Pointe Park.

  I went back to the flower shop not too long ago. It was gone. Nothing but a heap of bricks and plaster. Kicking through the rubble, I found a few billing invoices with Ma’s handwriting. When I gave them to her, she stared at them numbly. And then she wept.

  * * *

  A few days later, I was back at the firehouse, back on the back of the truck. Nevin wanted to make a point clear to me: “The people in Detroit are poor, but most of them are good. There are things going on here beyond an ordinary person’s control. These people are hungry and they have no job. No possibility of a job. They’re stuck here. And the assholes in charge, from Bush in the White House to Kilpatrick in the Manoogian, they’re incompetent, and it’s like a national sickness.”

  He told me about the rationing of firefighters, the fact that 20 percent of the fire companies are closed down at any one time due to the lack of money in the city coffers. The fact that they must purchase their own toilet paper and cleaning supplies. The fact that they are forced to wear aging bunker gear coated in carbon. The city even removed the firehouse’s brass poles some time ago and sold them to the highest bidder.

  When you ask him to think on a grand scale, he says the problem is much bigger than city hall.

  “I guess when you get down to it, it’s simple,” Nevin says. “The man took his factory away, but he didn’t take the people with him.”

  Dinner was served, and Harris, the minister, led the men in prayer as he always did. Then they regaled me with stories, including one about an unlucky man they removed from an electric power line, dangling there like a human piñata. He’d tried to cut down the live wire and sell it for its copper.

  Even the firehouses themselves were not untouched by thieves. Recently the men here cooked a supper of steak and potatoes, but a call came over the box before they could eat it. When they returned, they found that their dinner had been stolen, right down to the green beans. The canned beans and coffee creamer were gone from the larder, and so was a pickup truck belonging to one of the men.

  A few days earlier I watched as a deranged woman set fire to an abandoned house. As the firefighters worked to put out the blaze, the woman crawled into the fire truck and tried to drive away. The firefighters radioed police dispatch.

  The response came: “No cruiser available.”

  They covered her in a coat and sat on her until two arson investigators came and took care of her.

  We hadn’t finished our supper when the Rube Goldberg alarm sounded again. And again, the men jumped into their bunker gear and into the rigs.

  The fire was a few blocks away. The house was empty and unoccupied, the last one left on the block. There was a tractor in the vacant lot across the street. One of the firefighters explained to me that a farmer had turned the tumbledown neighborhood into a hay field. There were large cut piles of it everywhere among the tall grass.

  As the firefighters were unrolling their hose, a group of four men arrived in a minivan with video and still cameras. They had gotten to the fire before some of the engine trucks and they wore jackets with patches from fire departments all across the country, which led me to believe they were from headquarters or the union hall. One guy was eating a candy bar.

  “You firemen?” I asked with my notebook out.

  “Something like that,” one guy answered creepily.

  I asked Walt Harris, the minister, who they were.

  Harris looked over at the tall hay on the next block, at the older black people standing on their porches in their bathrobes. Harris looked at the white men wannabes and their fire patches.

  “They probably set the fire since they got here before us,” he said. “They come, they take a motel and they drive around with a scanner waiting for a fire to go off,” Harris explained to me. “It breaks your heart. What’s happening here, it breaks your heart. Every one of these guys here will tell you that he’ll give you everything he’s got to help the people of this city. He’ll give his life if he has to. It breaks your heart.”

  I looked at the douche bags with their cameras and their New Jersey fire department patches. They needed their asses beat down. Where were the police? Where was anybody?

  MONGO

  THE WAY I saw it, I had mailed Kilpatrick a great big valentine with the dead stripper Strawberry story. With daily revelations about women and pay-to-play schemes within his administration, it was the closest thing to good press the man was going to get.

  Now it was time for payback. Kilpatrick owed me lunch and an interview at the very least, and I called his people to say so.

  But he was hiding in his badger hole and he wasn’t about to come out, I was informed.

  “What’s in it for him?” asked his spokesman, James Canning, over coffee in the eastern wing of City Hall. We were sitting in a window across the street from the Renaissance Center, the world headquarters of General Motors. It was a workday morning, but the buildings and the streets below were empty. My eyes went from a panhandler and settled on Canning, a young white man who had the unenviable task of standing before the news cameras and lying that it was business as usual for Mayor Kilpatrick who was hard at work saving the city.

  “What’s in it for him?” I echoed back, summoning my best big-city big-shot-reporter indignation that I’d honed for a decade at the Times. “I’ll tell you what’s in it for him. If he doesn’t give me an interview, I’ll kick his ass every day up and down Woodward. That’s what’s in it for him.”

 
Canning looked sour, like I’d just pissed in his coffee cup.

  “Where’d you come from?” he asked. “New York, right?”

  “Yeah. New York.”

  He nodded, then scribbled a name and number on a busi-ness card. “Here, call the reverend. He can speak on the mayor’s behalf.”

  I looked at the card: Rev. Horace Sheffield. I put the card in my pocket.

  “And lunch?”

  “I’ll ask.”

  “Tell him I’ll pay.”

  * * *

  Reverend Sheffield had a community center on the far west side of town, walled off from the ghetto he served by a pike fence and an electronic gate. The son of a UAW icon, Sheffield operated in part on public contracts and grants from city hall. Since the feds were crawling up Kilpatrick’s ass, that spigot of money had dried up. When I later called him, he complained to me that his cell phone had been shut off and he was in danger of missing his mortgage payment.

  His center was drab and ill lighted and as I walked in toward the reception desk, I stopped and looked at the classroom where a half dozen kids were slouched in chairs, doodling or groping one another. According to the signage, this was the life skills program for at-risk youth, ostensibly where that money from city hall went.

  I signed in at the desk.

  “The reverend is on a telephone conference,” the attendant told me, and I took a long, cold seat.

  I studied the civil rights photographs on the wall—the well-dressed black men at the union rallies and dinner banquets—and I realized how little I knew about the history of Detroit, its race and labor record, the rough-and-tumble machinations of Detroit black—and for that matter, white—power. I was wearing a tie, but I had neglected to shave and I noticed a small hole in the knee of my blue jeans.

  I really had no specific questions for Sheffield, because I knew nothing insightful to ask. I simply wanted to stare big-city politics in the face, study the knickknacks and doodles on its desk.