Detroit: An American Autopsy

by Charlie Leduff

  Had I forgotten about the beauty of continuity? My grandmother died in the room where I grew up and my child was now sleeping in that very same room. Had I become that East Coast pretender?

  I looked at my wife, who said nothing, except to ask the old people if they needed coffee.

  * * *

  The funeral was held the day before Mother’s Day. The cemetery was near a baseball diamond. Children in yellow uniforms were shouting. My mother finally had a place to lay her daughter. In the casket next to her granddaughter. Ashley and Nicole were laid to rest under a red maple.

  My brothers and I buried them by shovel. It is a gesture meant for the living, not the dead. It is a promise that we will see each other through until a person’s time is no more. It is the last thing we can do for one another. Except pray.

  I handed the shovel to my brother Jimmy and looked up at the old people around the grave and considered the great turmoil of human history that they represented. My mother, her ties to the Native people of the Great Lakes and the drifting, whiskered French settlers. My stepfather, whose people emigrated from the port of Danzig, the long-disputed city claimed by both the Germans and Poles, which ignited World War II. My niece’s other grandparents, hill folk who hailed from Appalachia and traced their heritage back to the Lowlands of Scotland and the warrior William Wallace.

  People from all corners of the earth who came to Detroit to work in its factories and make it one of the most significant cities of history.

  I looked up over the grave and surveyed the heaving sobs of my nieces and the strained faces of my brothers. Jimmy looking for work. Frankie on the verge of losing his house. Billy in the screw factory. Somehow, the city of promise had become a scrap yard of dreams. But fighters do what they do best when they’ve been staggered. They get off their knees and they fight some more.

  “How you doing?” I asked Billy over a beer afterward.

  “Squeaking by,” he answered.

  “Sorry I poured your liquor out.”

  “You owe me four bucks.”

  JOHNNIE $

  THE FROZEN MAN in the elevator shaft was identified a week after being found by the wallet in his back pocket. His name was Johnnie Lewis Redding. DOB 09-29-1952. The medical examiner ruled out murder or drowning since there were no broken bones, no wounds and no water in his lungs.

  Most probably, Redding died of a cocaine overdose and was tossed down the elevator shaft by a panicky friend.

  It happens all the time with drug addicts. The year before, a man overdosed and his friends stuffed him in a suitcase, threw the suitcase in an SUV, then lit the SUV on fire.

  “The way that members of a society die is a reflection of the way society lives,” Dr. Carl Schmidt, the Wayne County medical examiner, told me in his office, decorated with Mexican death art. “The point is, there are people like that. And one of the things that separates the human species from all other animals is that we bury our dead. So when we walk away from a dead human being, what does that tell you about the state of things?”

  The doctor was right. Like my sister, Johnnie was a human being, worthy of some consideration. I decided to track down his life.

  * * *

  To begin at the end, Johnnie Redding’s body had not even been put in its grave before another man moved into his house.

  It was a little A-frame wigwam, made of felt and perched on top of an abandoned garage. The wigwam had a framed window and a chimney. It had a river view and a garden. Johnnie had built it with his own hands.

  One of Johnnie’s street friends whom I had met at the liquor store near the book repository brought me along.

  He was beating on the wigwam door, threatening to evict the interloper by force. Even the people of the rough and raw streets have their law.

  “You’s probably the one who killed Johnnie,” Johnnie’s friend barked at the plank-board door, alcohol vapors tumbling from his mouth. “You killed Johnnie, and now you sleeping in his bed! You be gone by sundown!”

  * * *

  Johnnie was a second cousin to Otis Redding, the soul singer. His street name was Johnnie Dollar. He was described by people who knew him on the boulevards as a consummate hustler, a pool shark, a block captain who liked a little liquor and a little cocaine. He took handouts and mission food, but he didn’t walk around with his hat in his hand, and he didn’t get Social Security.

  Johnnie, who was fifty-six when he died, painted houses. He hustled pool tables from Ann Arbor to southwest Detroit. When he was low on money, he would sort clothing at the Most Holy Trinity rectory for $10. Sometimes, the church would give him charity bus tickets that he would turn around and sell.

  “He didn’t have to be out on the streets, but the street life is an adrenaline rush,” said the church’s homeless director, who had called me after seeing Johnnie’s name in my column. “If this was the 1800s, Johnnie would have been a mountain man.”

  Johnnie came to Most Holy Trinity the first time asking for money to help pay for his pain medication after having all his teeth removed. Johnnie came to Most Holy Trinity the last time asking for money again.

  “He wanted bus fare to get out of town,” the director remembered. “I wouldn’t give it to him. I regret it now.”

  Johnnie moved around. When he grew weary of the street life, when his body began to shut down, he would go home to relatives to dry out—to get himself right, he liked to say. He stayed with his brother in River Rouge. He had stayed with his sister in Atlanta for six months, then he came back to Detroit and got lost again.

  Like a moth to the light, Johnnie gravitated to the corner near the Happy Liquor Store on Fort Street, hanging around with his friends, who called themselves the Bus Stop Boys. Wearing a trench coat and with his pockets bulging, Johnnie passed out $10 bills he’d brought from Georgia and told his friends to buy themselves beer.

  “That’s why we called him Johnnie Dollar,” one of the Bus Stop Boys told me. “He was one of the good ones.”

  Johnnie Dollar did not have to be on the streets: “It’s the only place he could be hisself.”

  I went to visit Johnnie’s brother Homer in River Rouge, a depressed little town downriver from Detroit where young men used to make steel and now make trouble. Homer’s house is a neat little Cape Cod left to him by his mother, where both he and Johnnie were raised. According to Homer, his brother was a softhearted man who fell into the street life. Johnnie was one of those men who bounced from odd job to couch to the streets and back. He showed me a picture of his brother from the seventies. Johnnie was lean and dark and wore a wide-brim hat, dark glasses and a white suit with fluted bell-bottoms. He looked like a character from the blaxploitation films of Gordon Parks Jr.—Super Fly out on a Friday night, flush with cash from his job at the mill. But the steel mill eventually closed, and Johnnie began partying hard. He ended up on the streets.

  “At some point in his life, he didn’t want to work anymore,” said Homer, a thin, rickety, bald-shaven man. “He got laid off from the steel plant about fifteen years ago, and that was it. But he wasn’t homeless. Too many people loved him.”

  What homelessness is is a matter of opinion. The government has all kinds of ways of counting, and like the unemployed, the government never seems to count them all.

  Another of the Bus Stop Boys put it like this: “Homeless means nobody wants you no more. So you can’t consider Johnnie homeless.”

  * * *

  Except that Johnnie did consider himself homeless. Several months earlier, he had been given a free meal by an outreach group. In exchange for the meal, he had to sign his name, age and address in a manifest. On line no. 7, in shaky block lettering, he wrote: Johnnie Redding, 56, Homless [sic]

  That didn’t mean Johnnie was trash who should have been left at the bottom of an elevator shaft, said Homer as he fought back tears at his k
itchen table, rubbing its linoleum as though inspecting it for quality. “I don’t know why he said that,” Homer croaked. “He was a person. He was a person. He was a person.”

  Of course he was. Of course Nicky was. And Ashley. And all the other no-name “losers” out there. They all were loved by somebody.

  The funeral for Johnnie Redding was held on a windswept Saturday, and nearly three hundred people attended, including some of the Bus Stop Boys. Afterward, as I had a cigarette in the parking lot, an old lady pulled up and asked me if I was the reporter who found Johnnie. Yes, I told her.

  “People are fake,” she said, referring to the hundreds of Johnnie’s Johnnie-come-lately well-wishers. “Put that in your newspaper. People are fake.”

  Johnnie’s funeral was paid for by an insurance policy left on his life by his mother. She suspected something like this might happen. She did not want her children drifting around the earth in death. “She seen too much in life,” Homer said.

  Johnnie would be buried in the suburb of Westland in a box that was more expensive than anything he owned in life.

  The crowd whittled down to about forty people at the cemetery, not including the clergyman. After the prayers and tears, everybody left. Johnnie Redding lay alone and abandoned in his casket. No one stayed to watch him be buried except me and Ortiz and his camera. The soil at the gravesite was rain-soaked, and the sides of the earth collapsed as the gravediggers tried to stuff Johnnie in the hole. It would have to be redug, prolonging the burial by a few hours. My feet were cold; wet and cold.

  “You got what you need?” I asked Ortiz.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s get the hell out of here then. I’m freezing.”

  We walked off. And Johnnie Redding was left to his lonesome once again.

  * * *

  I went back to the wigwam a couple days later, wanting to tell the new tenant that he was safe now, nobody was coming to take his house. He seemed relieved and invited me to sit down. He bummed a smoke and grew philosophical.

  “Nothing’s permanent,” he said. “We all end up in a box. What do you think this is?”

  Then he asked for two dollars for something to eat.

  Johnnie, it turned out, had not lived in the wigwam for some time. The new man had claimed it while Johnnie was away in Atlanta. Finders Keepers—that too is an unassailable law of the street.

  Understanding this law, Johnnie did not grow belligerent, the man said. Johnnie simply built himself another house of wood and tarpaulin in the culvert below.

  His stuff was still in it. A bed. A razor. A pair of reading glasses. A can opener. Near his pillow were two silk neckties and a book: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

  MAMA’S BOY

  WITH GENERAL MOTORS stock trading at levels not seen since the Great Depression, Kwame Kilpatrick walked out of jail shortly after midnight on February 2, 2009.

  Kilpatrick had done ninety-nine days.

  By the look of things, incarceration had been good to him. Although his fingernails were in need of their customary manicure, he was twenty-five pounds lighter, and the Afro and shaggy beard he had grown in the Wayne County Hilton made his head and ears appear larger—and so his padded shoulders less ridiculous.

  As he emerged through the revolving doors of the concrete jailhouse, he was swallowed in a weird scrum of television cameras and thick-necked Nation of Islam bodyguards who threatened to pulp any reporter who got too close. The police only smirked at the complaining reporters, who did not get too close. I stood far on the fringe.

  It was as sad as it was appalling: a black city in which the most prominent leader plundered, pillaged and lied, all the while presenting himself as its guardian angel against the White Devil.

  Kilpatrick, who walked into that jailhouse as a quivering-lipped pretender, walked out as the creature he always claimed to be, the preening Hip Hop Mayor. Kilpatrick ducked into an SUV and was chauffeured to the house of his mother, Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, where she reportedly made him eggs for breakfast.

  He probably would have benefited from a few hours spent working in a factory. Factory work tends to give you perspective on the importance of things. Of course in the hip-hop world, work was for suckers.

  Not that the automobile executives were much better at running things. Turns out our masters of the universe couldn’t manage a grocery store.

  Steve Rattner, the Obama car czar, walked into the Renaissance Center, the world headquarters of General Motors located on the Detroit River, and made this assessment:

  “Everyone knew Detroit’s reputation for insular, slow-moving cultures. Even by that low standard, I was shocked by the stunningly poor management that we found, particularly at GM, where we encountered, among other things, perhaps the weakest finance operation any of us had ever seen in a major company.”

  The weakest finance operation any of us had ever seen.

  Christ, it didn’t seem to matter. Black or White. Liberal or Conservative. White collar or Blue. Nobody could run shit. And it wasn’t just Detroit. Sacramento, Washington, D.C., Wall Street. The entire country was being run into the ground by a generation infected with incompetence and greed.

  Consider that Rattner himself was being sued by the attorney general of New York and investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for his involvement in a kickback scheme involving the state’s pension fund and his investment firm.

  Corruption and ineptitude was a national sickness and it was killing us. But Detroit, it cannot be denied, had a certain flair.

  PAIN NEVER FEELS GOOD

  AFTER A FULL morning of having his balls busted at the screw factory for eight stinking bucks an hour, Billy walked out. Bruce Springsteen–style, with his fist in the air. The guys who once hated him shouted, “Much respect, man!”

  It was the best day of work he ever put in there.

  * * *

  My brothers and I and our cousin Johnny got together in Billy’s basement to do some drinking. He was renting a small two-bedroom Cape Cod about a quarter mile down the road from the house the sheriff locked him out of, the one he wrote the mortgage note on, the one not too far from the interstate.

  We drank well into the morning. Our brother Jimmy passed out with his head on the table and Frankie snored like a tractor on a threadbare couch. Johnny asked Billy if he wanted to come to his factory, where Johnny worked as a foreman. Johnny told Billy he could probably get him $10.50 an hour plus overtime. And if Billy showed up and did the job with no absenteeism, then after ninety days he could probably get Billy on full-time with higher wage and bennies.

  My brother jutted his square, inebriated chin into the air. He pointed a finger. He moved to say something. And when he opened his mouth, the dental bridge fell out and bounced into the ashtray. Billy looked down quizzically, then plucked it from the ashes, blew on it and popped it back into place.

  Billy got around to answering my cousin’s offer with this: “No way.”

  “Suit yourself,” Johnny said with a shrug. “Jobs are awful hard things to sneeze at.”

  Billy just shrugged.

  “What the fuck?” I shouted. “It’s a better chance. Look at your fucking teeth!”

  “I still got dreams,” Billy said after some drunken silence. “If I take that job I’m just admitting that I gave up.”

  “Gave up? You’ve got a family.”

  “I’ve got dreams, Char,” he croaked. “And a factory just isn’t part of it. I’ve got more in me.”

  * * *

  When the bank began moving in on Frankie’s house, Frankie didn’t want to make a deal. He wanted out. The place was worthless, what with the hookers and rats flooding into the neighborhood. What was the sense of trying to dig your way out of a hole by putting the dirt in your pockets? Fran
kie went looking for boxes to pack up his home.

  Boxes are expensive—about four and a half bucks for the big ones. But Frankie found a guy selling them cheap up on 20 Mile Road. A buck apiece. When Frankie got there, he saw the stamp on the side: MADE IN CHINA.

  “Motherfucker, don’t we make anything anymore?”

  “Not so’s you could afford it,” the guy said.

  Frankie bought two loads of the Chinese boxes and we went to pack his house. We loaded the moving truck in the rain. I took the metal gates as a memento.

  Frankie and his family moved to a nice three-bedroom house in a working-class suburb a few miles down the road. The place had a main street and ice cream parlors and children actually played in their front yards. It was the first time in his adult life that my brother did not own his home.

  “Maybe it was for the best,” I said, drinking a bottle of beer and scanning the quiet street. “This is a really nice neighborhood. It’s got to feel good.”

  Frankie looked at me with a crooked eye. “Char. Despite what they say in the poetry books, pain never feels good.”

  SCREEN DOORS

  I RECEIVED A letter. It was typewritten with no return address and unsigned. It was from an anonymous neighbor complaining about a teacup-size wind chime I had hung on my porch. The anonymous neighbor wrote that now that the weather was warm and people had their windows open, the little bell was distracting and my cooperation in removing it would be greatly appreciated.

  It would have been a funny little note had it not been so outrageous. For one, a freeway runs directly behind my house. Before I made an ass of myself and started banging on doors demanding that the anonymous note writer step forward, I decided to take a cool-down drive.