by Drew Philp
I asked about the TVs. Garrett said this show was called the TV Show, and the irony of it was that almost no one in the room owned a working one. He said everyone from the block had been pitching in to get the building functioning just enough for the evening.
He pointed out a new mural that had just been painted, a mother-earth green figure growing too big for the wall and onto the ceiling with doleful eyes and huge feet. The artist who had painted it sat beneath the picture on a reclaimed church pew with his wife. She was intensely pregnant.
“That’s his unborn son he painted,” Garrett said. “He’s about ready to burst from Erin’s stomach. He’ll get raised in Detroit, right here on the block.”
I realized the room and this block were the incarnate vision of a philosopher I had read in college, then living just a few blocks away and more than ninety years old. Grace Lee Boggs was Detroit’s patron saint of transformation, the spiritual center of almost anything truly innovative in the city. Although difficult to pinpoint exactly, her fingerprints touched many communities like this, striving for a new image of possibility. I had found an idea made manifest.
Busy introducing me to everyone, Garrett forgot to tell me about himself. When I asked, he said he had moved around some, but had come from an art colony in San Francisco that had just been gentrified out of the Mission. Originally from Boston, he was trying to decide if he was going to make a go of it in Detroit or just keep wandering the polluted and harried cities of America’s urban wasteland. Not liking to talk about himself, he quickly introduced me to more people whose names I immediately forgot, but stopped at a slight woman who had painted a picture of two hands stretching a tape measure that hung over the doorway. Garrett introduced us and we shook hands. Her daughters had been two of the children performing the play.
“Hi! I’m Kinga!”
We were interrupted by a ghoulish guitar chord from the stage. A tall and tattooed man sat behind the drums, and a redhead I recognized from the last art show manned the guitar. It appeared the final order of business was a jam involving anyone who wanted to play.
“That’s Andy, Kinga’s husband, behind the drums,” Garrett shouted into my ear.
“Do you play?” Kinga yelled to me on her way to the piano.
“Sure.”
I grabbed a guitar, and much of the neighborhood was onstage, more than a dozen people, adding their little sounds, working on one more thing as a community before the night was through. The rest sat in the audience, clapping and hollering and drinking. Andy sang into a microphone:
Nobody can unplug my drums
That’s why I’m beatin’ ’em
And no one can unplug the sun . . .
* * *
I sold my car and bought a truck for $1,000, a rusted F-150 built when I was still in elementary school. That birthday, my twenty-second, I asked my parents for a power tool set that included a reciprocating saw, circular saw, drill, and flashlight. I thought leaving would be turning my back on everything that dead baby boy represented, and I needed something to keep me in Detroit, keep me from running away. I was going to try to buy a house and I was hoping Forestdale could show me how to build it into a home.
My father was excited that I wanted to do something befitting a man. While he and the rest of my family had been building things, I had been writing poetry. This was something he could understand. Wisely, he had bought me a single tool each Christmas since I was a toddler, so I already had many of the basics, screwdrivers, wrenches, and such. He was happy to oblige with more of the same.
Will said I could live for free at his house that summer, but no longer. He was a private man.
Aside from a single paper, all that was left of school was to graduate. The essay was for Charles, the kind professor who would take me to lunch. It concerned that dead baby. I was angry and hurt, both at myself and my peers, who I thought were leaving their posts at the most crucial point. The paper was dramatic and not particularly self-aware. I was slashing with a knife of self-righteousness at anything near me, including potential allies. Maybe I needed to do it to leave both behind, Zeno’s raw world of the drug trade and tenements, and Charles stifling, pretentious world of circular and hopeless discussions at the university. I was looking for something far more meaningful than either, something closer to the American heart. In lieu of a grade for my paper, Charles gave me this response:
My guess, based again on my own struggle (projection?), is that you feel empathy and horror for the pain you see in Detroit, and that you feel revulsion at the comfort you see in Ann Arbor. That you may also feel drawn to Detroit as a way not only to support the people there, but also to work out your own personal anger. That your anger sometimes frightens you, because you do not want to lose the love and acceptance of the people you are angry with. That you feel panic sometimes because, despite your good intentions, you feel helpless to do anything about the social conditions that you see . . . That you deeply, desperately want to create change, and that you do not really know how to take effective action. That “dropping out” seems the only alternative, but an ineffective one. That you feel deep confusion about who you are and what your identity is in all this mess. That you feel excited by possibility, and deeply sad and lonely. That what you really want in an ally is someone who can see not only your courage and ideals but also your fear, loneliness, and shame.
CHAPTER 2
* * *
Clapboard Siding
The YES FARM door
Two statues, located downtown and mere steps from each other, represent the dual nature of the city. The first and perhaps most famous is called The Spirit of Detroit. Located in front of City Hall, it’s twenty-six feet tall and in patinated bronze depicts a cross-legged man with his arms spread apart, his breast open to the city. In his hand he holds a gilt sphere like the sun, representing God, and in the other he holds a golden family representing the people of Detroit. It was commissioned in 1955 at the height of Detroit’s worldwide economic dominance, when everyone had two cars in the garage. It cost more than half a million dollars in today’s money. The inscription reads, “NOW THE LORD IS THAT SPIRIT / AND WHERE THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD IS, THERE IS LIBERTY,” from the second book of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians.
Steps away, and within sight, is a twenty-four-foot-long black fist suspended from a pyramid. It represents the forearm of Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, champion boxer from Detroit. It was dedicated in 1986, the year of my birth, and one of the toughest times in Detroit’s history. It represents both Louis’s strength in the ring as a prizefighter, and outside it as a combatant against segregation. It’s a huge Black Power fist set at Detroit’s most prominent intersection.
Two statues for two Detroits, one white and the other black; two statues for two Americas. Both were painted on the red steel door I stood before, the threshold to a house calmly sitting at the end of Forestdale. The depictions had been modified, though, by the artists inside. Like a Hindi god, The Spirit of Detroit had arms emanating from its back, each resembling Louis’s fist. Each hand held a shovel. I was hoping this door would open up to a path to my own house, and hopefully the strength and generosity built of hard work represented by the painting. I knocked.
“Hey, Drew, come on inside.”
Andy Kemp, the singing poet from the show at the YES FARM, opened the door and turned back toward what he was cooking. Garlic hung upside down in the hallway, swaying as we walked by, and trays made of window screen built into the walls dried herbs from the vast garden outside. I took a peek out the rear window and saw the garden built in a circle, cobbled-together woodsheds, a greenhouse, and a little pond so quaint it struck me immediately and crushingly as sad, like an unexpected and forgotten children’s doll found by chance in an attic.
The kitchen was tiled with broken pieces of porcelain and a wood-burning stove sat in the middle, radiating tender heat. The cabinets and trim were reclaimed and mismatched, but the room hung together somehow, like a calico cat. I could
see into a pantry that now contained musical instruments, and a porch swing dangled in the parlor. Their home, on the whole, gave the feeling of being inside a cabin at a friendly sleepaway camp on a rainy day. A cat sat on a bar stool and swished its tail like a gambler.
“Here, sit down,” Andy said.
He put a plate of homemade tortilla chips and guacamole in front of me, and I ate.
“Try these, too.”
He set down a bowl of what looked like marbles wrapped in a husk.
“What are they?”
“Ground cherries, you eat them like this.” He popped the fruit out of the rind and into his mouth all in one motion.
His house was once a squatted crack house. With his wife, Kinga, also from the show at the YES FARM, they entirely rebuilt it, down to the studs. I aspired to their artistry, and thought I might accomplish something similar myself in a couple of years’ time. Andy and Kinga had been working on theirs, together, for more than a decade. It was the second they’d accomplished; the other, on the west side of town, was rented to a young cellist and activist. I wanted not only for my future home to look like theirs someday, but for my life to resemble theirs as well. The answer they were about to give me would help determine that.
Andy threw the natural wrapper of the ground cherry into a pullout compost bucket built into his countertop. He was six foot two and built like a bicycle racer. His legs were covered in tattoos that he did himself, and his wedding ring was tattooed on his fourth finger. He had used a needle and a bottle of India ink. It must have hurt something awful, all that shading with a sewing needle, probably sterilized with a lighter.
I popped a ground cherry into my mouth.
“That’s like candy,” I said. “Did you grow these?”
“You know it.” He turned back from the pot to look at me. “So what’s up, man?”
“I was hearing from Garrett that you might need someone to stay in your brother’s house over the winter.” The house was on the opposite end of the block and vacant. Andy’s brother had purchased it from an old Polish couple most of the neighborhood called “Betty and Sweaty,” although some people found the nickname unkind.
“Well, yeah. Are you looking for a place to stay?”
“I’m thinking about buying a house in the neighborhood and Garrett said you might be willing to trade work for rent.”
“We could be. It’s pretty hit in there, though.”
“I have a place to stay for the summer,” I said. “But I need to be out by fall. I figured I’d have enough time to get your brother’s place ready before the winter, while I’m looking for a permanent one.”
“Have you found a house yet?” Andy asked.
“Not yet, but I’m looking. I need to be sure I have somewhere to live while I’m working on it before I really jump in.”
“Nice. All right. I’ll have to talk to Kinga, but it sounds like that might work out, we can help you get your start. There’s probably enough time to get it ready,” he said. “Hey, Kinga!”
Andy stirred what he was cooking on his Detroit Jewel stove, made in the 1930s. Before Detroit was the Motor City and manufactured automobiles, it was the heart of stove making in the United States. That had moved elsewhere, too.
“We already have the house demoed, all the plaster and lath is sitting in the yard,” Andy said, attending to a cast-iron pan. “We’ll need to finish the electricity and get it insulated. Trying to get you in might light a fire under us to get going over there.”
“Hey, Drew,” Kinga said as she walked into the kitchen. “Mmm. That smells good.”
She wrapped her arms around her husband and kissed him on the back of the neck.
“Here, try this.” He put the wooden spoon in her mouth.
“That’s wonderful,” she said.
He dipped the spoon back into the pot and brought it my way, blowing on it as he held his free hand underneath to catch drips.
It was a fantastic curry.
“So Drew here wants to live in Bunk’s house for the winter,” Andy said, looking at his wife.
“I thought Jesse had already claimed that one.”
“I think he found somewhere else.”
“You know there’s not going to be any heat,” Kinga said, looking at me.
“I can take it.”
I popped another ground cherry into my mouth. At least for a little while I’d be a resident of this magical place. I hoped I could take it.
* * *
Will and I rode our bikes around Poletown, ducking into wide-open shells, not even plywood covering the doors, stepping over broken glass and broken tile and broken dreams. Occasionally neighbors would peer from behind steel-barred security doors, and sometimes they would ask what we were doing. I would explain that I wasn’t a scrapper or a speculator, but I was going to fix one of these up and live in it. They would laugh, or appear skeptical. To the best of my knowledge no one ever called the cops.
“What about that one over there?” Will said, riding his bike with no hands and pointing to a duplex that looked smushed in like a pug dog’s face.
I had three goals: I wanted a big kitchen, a chimney for a wood-burning stove like the Kemps, and a large front porch. Having some land around the house for a garden and to insulate myself from any trouble would also be essential. Will hated vinyl siding and what it represented, and his view had rubbed off on me. We would pass by any of those. Condition didn’t matter. The duplex Will had pointed to didn’t have a porch or space for one.
Next.
I imagined life in my yet-unfound house to be pastoral and wonderful, a life in which I could make most of what I needed, grow a bunch of my own food, and live in a manner I thought responsible. I’d spend my free time woodworking and inventing little contraptions to make life easier. One of my goals was to have nothing plastic in the house, nothing cheap and disposable and made by the hands of children in Asia, nothing with built-in obsolescence. I’d be self-contained, and warm and content. I’d read books by soft desk-light and go to work and come home honest and tired. I’d eat a lot of peaches, ones that I grew myself.
There was one house we looked at a couple of times. A piece of plywood barely covered the door, and Will peeled it back as I stepped inside. It had a sloped gambrel roof and robin’s-egg-blue paint over clapboard. It was dirty and broken, but seemed friendly, like a cheery home-bum contented with a mellow drunk in the sun.
Although this house was just a simple wood-frame, like most of the other places in the neighborhood it was well built. It was also in fair condition for an abandoned house, but each time we would return more and more of it would have been stolen. First it was the wiring, then it was the plumbing in the bathroom—the tile was pink and hideous, but the pipes and fixtures were still intact, a rarity in the neighborhood. The tile had been smashed out battering-ram-style, and the copper pipes and brass fixtures taken. It could have been workable, but was directly next to an occupied house, the only other on the block.
“What do you think?” I asked Will.
“It’s your house,” he said, picking up a shard of tile from the ground. He spat on it and wiped it clean with his thumb like an urban geologist. “Seems like you could do better. Makes me nervous, someone keeps picking it clean. You might have trouble.”
There were more abandoned options to explore. Next.
I didn’t think I wanted to buy a house right on Forestdale, although I’d been spending more time there. What was going on was special but, I thought, insulated. I wanted to see what life was like for the vast majority of Detroiters who didn’t live downtown or anyplace special, who lived in the sprawling wilderness of the city. There were other places like Forestdale, and I thought I might be able to start something similar, fix up other abandoned houses and spread the idea. Or join something just as tight, if not as colorful and easy to spot.
“It’s kind of like living in a fishbowl,” Will said. “Everyone knows your business. On the other hand, it’s safe and fun.
You gotta decide what’s more important.”
I also looked into some move-in-ready foreclosures, pert brick homes in Detroit’s stable and well-populated areas. I could have purchased many of these for less than $3,000. I just couldn’t bring myself to profit from someone else’s misery. All I could think of were the families once living in these homes and the day the banks and sheriff put them on the street. Just between 2005 and 2007, 67,000 houses went into foreclosure in Detroit. Not only did the forced sales leave many homeless, they further decimated Detroit’s tax base, one of the crucial factors in a municipal bankruptcy that people had begun to whisper about but no one thought could actually happen.
I decided I wanted a house nobody wanted, a house that was impossible. The city was filled with these structures. It would be only one house out of thousands, but I wanted to prove it could be done, that this American vision of torment could be built back into a home. Fixing it would be a protest of sorts.
Will and I laid our bikes in the grass outside a tiny yellow house. It only had a half dozen rooms total and was so small the city had no record of it, the property classified as an empty lot. Likely it had been a mother-in-law house, a kind of satellite behind a larger one. It gave me the creeps, for no reason in particular. Some of the houses we went into had an eerie feeling, more than the normal unease of stepping into an abandoned home in Detroit, as if some past crime marred the vigor of the place and hadn’t yet been washed away by rain and carried into the atmosphere by wind. I felt that way with this one.
“This is what I’m talking about,” Will said. “It’s so itty-bitty. If you don’t buy it I might get it myself. You could have this fixed up in two years.”