Detroit: An American Autopsy (12 page)

Moroun—Detroit’s biggest owner of dilapidated buildings—was giving out the free hats in a public relations move—a sort of “Matty Cares” campaign.

The idea was cooked up by Adolph Mongo, whom Moroun had hired as his Detroit strategist. The free hats and the dead man were pure coincidence, Mongo told me.

I later asked Moroun why he didn’t just tear the old book repository down. A gesture like that would do more to soften his image in the newspapers as Detroit’s billionaire slumlord than distributing a trailerful of hats. To which he replied: “I’m in the catbird seat here.”

Moroun was so rich and the town so broken, no one was going to make him fix shit as long as he had money for lawyers. And he knew it.

The timing of Moroun’s hat giveaway stunt was as unfortunate as the selection of hats themselves. They were not your run-of-the-mill knitwear; they were, in fact, ski masks. The type gunmen use to stick up liquor stores.

* * *

The picture of the frozen man made its way around the world by way of the Internet, with commentators wondering what in the world was happening in Detroit.

Bailouts, credit-default swaps, international trade blocs. These things were too amorphous, too complex to get your mind around. But a human being left in a crumbling elevator shaft. Everyone could understand that. Had it reached the point of anarchy? a reporter from Barcelona asked me by telephone.

Funny things happen when you run out of money, I told her.

Police officials spent the day trying to explain why it took two days and five phone calls to extricate the man. Some black people complained on the radio talk shows that the
News
—and by extension, I—was racist because it never would have published the picture of a dead white girl from a posh white suburb.

The small, white “art community” in Detroit complained that I was focusing on the negative in a city with so much good. What about all the galleries and museums and music? they complained in a flurry of e-mails and blogs. What about the good things?

It was a fair point. There are plenty of good people in Detroit. Tens of thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands. There are lawyers and doctors and auto executives with nice homes and good jobs and community elders trying to make things better, teachers who spend their own money on the classroom, people who mow lawns out of respect for the dead neighbor, parents who raise their children, ministers who help with funeral expenses.

But these things are not supposed to be news. These things are supposed to be normal. And when normal things become the news, the abnormal becomes the norm. And when that happens, you might as well put a fork in it.

What galleries and museums have to do with a dead man is beyond me. Writing about shit like that in the city we were living in seemed equal to writing about the surf conditions while reporting in the Gaza Strip.

The town turned on me. As if I had committed the outrage of throwing the man down the shaft. The
Free Press
asked why I didn’t wait around for the police myself that first night, intimating that I was a sensationalist; that I twisted the facts and sat on a body for a good story.

I got an anonymous phone message from someone claiming to be one of the hockey players. He offered to beat my ass. He said the Showtime network wanted to film the hockey players and their basement scene until I had ruined it with the dead man story. The caller didn’t leave a name with his message. A spokesman from Showtime told me he had never heard of urban explorers.

Most odd, I received an e-mail from a man who had also been at the hockey game and claimed he was the first to see the body that morning. He wrote that he took exception to my characterization that his was a cold heart because he stepped around a dead man.

“This discovery presented a moral dilemma to me,” he wrote. “Yes, this was a dead human being. However, he had clearly been there for at least 3 months, knowing that the basement had frozen by November. And, as you stated, this building houses many homeless men through the winter. While others may say who-gives-a-shit about the homeless people finding shelter in this warehouse, I wondered if the police would essentially kick all of them out. Maybe one of them would freeze to death?”

He was half right about the homeless people. They were evicted once the police were notified. But no homeless man froze to death as a consequence. They simply moved over to the next abandoned building, an old hotel.

F
IRE
W
OMAN

T
HE WHOLE FROZEN-MAN
episode was dredging up memories I’d tried to bury for a decade. The death of somebody else society considered worthless: my sister.

Nicole died after a night of partying in a bar frequented by prostitutes and heavies called the Flame, located in Brightmoor, on Detroit’s west side.

My sister, among her many endeavors in life, was a streetwalker. I wish I could say it wasn’t true—but it is. So there you go.

According to the police report, she had climbed into a van with a strange man. He was loaded on liquor and Lord knows what. He was doing eighty miles per hour down a residential street. The street dead-ended at a vacant lot, and beyond the lot was a garage.

My sister was a wild one. And if I remember her right, she probably decided that if she was going to die it wasn’t going to be sitting passively in a van while it smashed into a brick wall. She jumped out, straight into a tree.

The van came to a stop, entering the garage through the back. The man inside survived.

At her funeral, the Outlaws motorcycle gang sat in the back of the church, red-eyed, snuffling into their leathers. They had purchased a big horseshoe of roses, the same kind they place around the neck of the winner of the Kentucky Derby. Her name, spelled out in gold lettering, was pinned to it.

NICOLE.

The wake was held in my mother’s yard. It was ridiculous. There were bikers and women with the ten-mile stare and proper Catholics and three grown men who wept as they confided to me separately how much they loved my sister and how they were planning to marry her.

I introduced the triplets to one another and watched as they hugged and cried over their shared loss. No hard feelings.

God, I loved my sister. What a hellcat. A fire woman who lived red hot until the flame burned out. Three paramours. A biker gang. A rap sheet and a whole clan weeping over her. I’m proud to have been her brother.

NICOLE.

My mother, predictably, was shattered with guilt and loss. A few weeks after the funeral she asked Frankie and me to take her to Brightmoor so she could lay some flowers at the spot where Nicky died. Then maybe go to the Flame Bar, retrace Nicky’s last steps, as though they might offer some sort of explanation as to where it all went wrong.

So we went to the tree in the vacant lot. My mother put her palm upon it and wept. She collected a dry leaf and put it in the pocket of her raccoon coat. Then we went to the Flame.

The place was typical Detroit: cinder block, cheap paneling, a jukebox and a handful of wretches with faces of mud. We sat at the end of the bar, near the door. The mud faces looked at us hard. Lynyrd Skynyrd was playing.

I got a whiskey, my brother got a Southern Comfort and my mother ordered an Amaretto and coffee, except they didn’t have coffee here. Or Amaretto. She adjusted her raccoon coat with dignity and smiled.

“Jack Daniel’s then. Do you have that? Okay, Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. Thank you.”

A working girl, gauging by the makeup and cheap spaghetti-strap dress she was wearing in the fangs of winter, approached my mother.

“Do I know you?” barked the hooker, standing with her legs wide apart, her hands on her hips, like there was going to be a fight. My brother stiffened and looked at me with a stony eye. I kept an eye on the leathernecks at the far end of the bar.

My mother looked at the woman with a warm sadness.

“I don’t believe so, no.”

“Are you lost?”

“No, sweetheart. My daughter used to come here. I wanted to see what it was like.”

“Who’s your daughter?”

“Her name was Nicole.”

“Oh,” the girl said, lowering her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you,” my mother said and sipped her whiskey. “Did you know her?”

“Yes,” the girl said, and then went back to the corner and whispered conspiratorially to her people.

We didn’t pay for the drinks.

* * *

I’ve been most everywhere on the planet: war zones, deserts, the Arctic Circle, campaign buses, opium dens, even Albuquerque, but I’ve never returned to that section of Detroit called Brightmoor. I was afraid of it and would drive miles to avoid it. The memories are too hard.

My mother dealt with the pain a different way. Despite her staunch Catholic beliefs, my mother had my sister cremated. Unable to let Nicky go, not knowing what to do, not wanting to scatter her to the wind, my mother kept her ashes in an urn in her closet, waiting for inspiration. And then the inspiration came.

As I pulled up to the old house on Joy Road, I found my youngest brother, Billy, sitting on a rock in the front yard, crying. He steadied his head in the fold of his elbow, which rested on the stump of an old maple. The tree had died a long time ago from disease.

Traffic out front was unusually light for a workday. When I was a kid, there was always a traffic jam in the late afternoon, around quitting time. But what did I know? I hadn’t been home in years.

My brother Frankie told me the Ford plant up the street was down to a single shift.

“Ain’t shit left here,” he said, frowning at Billy through a menthol.

Billy shuddered, caught a big breath and whimpered again. He was always tender as a boy. When a hatchling fell out of the fir tree near the front door, Billy brought the thing into the house to nurse it. The bird died overnight, and early the next morning I watched from the upstairs window as he gave the thing a private funeral, replete with tears and a cross.

Now he was carrying on like an old Greek widow. I wanted to kick him in the ribs and tell him to shut the fuck up. He was upsetting the children. Instead, I took the cheap bottle of liquor lying at his knees and poured it in the bushes.

“Stop it,” I told him. “She’s dead.”

My mother sat on the porch, pale and thin, a cigarette burning between her knuckles. Her husband was pacing back and forth shouting, “Goddamn it!”

My stepfather—my
second
stepfather—was old enough to be my grandfather, and he came late in his life to our family. He was from a different time, from that mythological generation of people who worked hard and fought a good war and paid their debts and had respect for the rules. His was a generation that knew nothing about drugs or divorce or moral dissolution. At least that’s what he said. He never had any children of his own, but then he married into six—if you count my niece, Ashley, Nicole’s daughter, whom he raised since the time she was practically an infant.

And now Ashley was lying in a casket in the funeral parlor next door to our house on Joy Road, dead of a heroin overdose. She died in her other grandparents’ basement near the interstate while her father slept nearby.

I looked at the ravaged face of my stepfather and thought to myself that he had finally been baptized in the fires of pain. He was suffering the ultimate feeling of belonging to a family—at least our family.

Stupid kid, she would have grown out of it. Ugly me. Why did I not open my home for her? Had I been away from Joy Road so long that I’d forgotten who I was? The rules and expectations of family? If a brother lies, the other brothers lie to protect him. If a niece calls, her uncle takes her in.

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.”

J
OHNNIE $

T
HE 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 kitchen 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
.