Detroit: An American Autopsy (11 page)

I told her the firemen were threatening to burn the house down.

“Tell them the house will be down by eleven
A.M
. tomorrow,” she said. I didn’t know how she was going to do it. And frankly, I didn’t care. “You just made a thousand friends, ma’am,” I told her.

* * *

It was a cold, sunny morning, a Thursday. My car wouldn’t start, so my wife dropped me off at the house where Harris died. Matt Labash, the writer for the
Weekly Standard
, was in town writing his own elegy for the city and we had made plans to link up there.

The neighborhood was inaccessible, with the fire engines and news trucks and the motorcycles of the Axe Men, a crew Walt rode with, clogging the streets. Only in Detroit would the demolition of a house, a single straw in a haystack, draw such attention. It felt decent.

Sheila Cockrel was there. The battalion chiefs. Neighbors. Even Adolph Mongo was there at my invitation. He looked ill at ease, as though someone might recognize him and run him off the block with a shotgun. He had worked for Kilpatrick, after all. And it was safe to say there were no fans of Kilpatrick here.

“I hate this shit,” Mongo said as we shook hands. “Look at it, this city is a motherfucking wreck. It just hurts me to look at it. I’m gonna get the fuck out of here.”

“Stay,” I said to him. “It’s your city too.”

I watched the newspeople interview Cockrel, the firefighters, even Mongo. I watched a local reporter parade around as if she were in charge of the morning’s itinerary. Where had she been for the last decade? Something went badly and she swooped in on it like a vulture, feigning outrage and calling the community to action. It was all so pathetically obvious to me because she was behaving exactly like me and every other reporter I knew.

So I made no more paper notes. I just wanted to see the thing come down. Soak it in. Victories are few here. But it felt good. It’s a feeling I’d rarely had as a newspaperman. A feeling that the work can actually be of some benefit to somebody.

When the bulldozer began to tear at the roof, people cried. And when the last wall came down, they applauded. I shook hands with the men of Engine 23, gave Montgomery and Kirschner and Nevin and Williams a hug and started back to Labash’s rental car.

As I walked, the man and woman who lived across the street waved to me from their porch.

“Merry Christmas,” I hollered. “I told you we’d get that house knocked down.”

The man came off the porch and walked toward me, stopping at the fence. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”

He swept his hands across the calamity of his neighborhood and the half dozen or so other rotting houses.

“But what about the rest of it?”

* * *

I went back to the paper and I sat in my cubicle among the empty pods of cubicles.

Detroit was beginning to wear my ass out. I didn’t have the usual reportorial detachment anymore. This was home. This was where I lived. This was where I was raising my kid, and my sister’s kid dies in some dark basement not six weeks after I arrive. And this morning I’m watching grown men cheer the demolition of a shit box as though it were the Berlin Wall coming down.

I looked out the window realizing that Detroit was doing something to me that a story’s never done to me before. It was hurting.

Ordinarily, a throb of emotion is good for a writer because it feeds his story, it feeds his writing, but then the throb goes away after it’s written. But this time it wasn’t going away except when I drowned it in wine and then it would return when the wine went away. I felt physically small and cold.

The emotional throb was not informing me so much as eating me. I was tired. And I was beginning to understand now what The Hole really looks like. Before, when I was in the rough places of desperation, I had a plane ticket out. Now I was living in it, a captive, a native son.

TWO

ICE

I
CE
M
AN

I
NSIDE THE SHELTER
,
in the rear, near the toilets, two men sat in chairs, shooting dice between their feet. The news played on the wide-screen television set. The TV talk was about money nobody seemed to have anymore. Outside, the arctic wind howled.

The homeless shelter sits in the guts of a skid row ghetto in the city’s downtown Cass Corridor. It was packed to the corners, divided with men in one room and women in the other. It smelled like tired bodies.

About one in thirty-five people at any given time in Detroit is without a place to sleep. The problem is so bad and the beds so few that shelters like this one offer only a chair to sit in. The chair is yours as long as you stay in it. Step out for a cigarette and it’s a free-for-all. This passes for normal in Detroit. I spent an hour watching the dice game from under a knit hat, occupying a chair that should have gone to someone else who was probably shivering in some crumbling shack that used to function as a home.

I was writing a weather story for the
News
.

The men in front of me were gambling for cigarettes. A die caromed off a chair leg, and the gambler in the parka protested the other man’s sloppy dice handling.

“I didn’t see the number,” he snarled. “You picking up the fucking dice too quick.”

“Six!” barked the gambler in the knit pullover, snatching up the cigarette anyhow. A shouting match erupted. Chairs went scattering. Both men were put out in the stinging cold and two men lurking against the wall quickly took their seats.

My cell phone buzzed. It was my brother Frankie calling. He said a friend of his had found a dead body in the elevator shaft of an abandoned building on the south side of the city.

“He’s encased in ice, except his legs, which are sticking out like Popsicle sticks,” Frankie said.

My brother’s friend was one of a strange fraternity in Detroit who call themselves urban explorers. They are a group of grown men who get their thrills traipsing around the ghost buildings, snapping photographs and collecting bits of this and that for odd pieces of art. In other cities, they have tourists.

The explorers had been playing hockey on the frozen waters that had collected in the basement of an abandoned warehouse, my brother explained.

“Why didn’t he call the cops?” I asked.

“He said he was trespassing and didn’t want to get in trouble.”

“Didn’t want to get in trouble for trespassing? Really?”

“That’s what he says.”

Man frozen in ice. Good detail, the reporter in me thought. I arranged to meet my brother to make sure the dead man was true. You never know. It was probably a mannequin. As I was leaving the shelter, I turned for a last look. A man had taken my chair, his feet wrapped in plastic shopping bags.

I got into the raggedy pool car—a Chevy Neon—belonging to the
News’
city desk. I turned the motor over and let the car warm.

Whirr. Whirr. Whirr,
the motor whinnied, like a washing machine with bad pulleys.

The dice player in the parka knocked on the window. I rolled it down.

“You a cop?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then gimme a dollar.”

“That’s how you’re gonna ask me?”

“Please, gimme a dollar?” he said through a cloud of steam.

I gave him fifty cents, preserving us both some dignity.

* * *

I stopped at the
News
office and picked up my partner, Max Ortiz, a photographer. If the dead man was real, then we were going to need a snapshot. We are reporters, after all. We trade in the hard and the obscure. The public is right to despise us, but I knew they couldn’t resist the detail of a frozen man either. George Hunter, the Detroit cop reporter with a talent for one-liners, put it this way: “People hate used car salesmen too. But people still buy used cars.”

And so Ortiz and I drove to the warehouse in search of an oddball dead man.

Whirr. Whirr. Whirr.

The building was known as the Roosevelt Warehouse and once belonged to the Detroit Public Schools as a book and supply repository. The structure burned years before and caused a scandal, since it was filled with thousands of books and balls and crayons and paper and scissors and such—supplies left to rot, despite the fact that Detroit schoolchildren are among the poorest in the country.

This very morning, in fact, a public plea had gone out to the city’s parents asking them to send toilet paper with their children to school.

My brother was already at the warehouse with the urban explorer who had, apparently, skated across the body. I was not expecting to see him, since he was worried about those trespassing tickets. He said little to me except that the dead guy was a “fucking trip.” He also said, rather unconvincingly, that he had had trouble sleeping since finding the feet a few days earlier and that he wanted me to call the police.

He pointed down at the body. In the middle of the loading dock, there was a gaping elevator shaft. At the bottom of the shaft, you could clearly see a pair of shoes, nothing more. All it appeared I had here was an overimaginative explorer and a pair of discarded discount sneakers. We went down the crumbling steps of the warehouse to get a closer look.

So much rainwater had collected in the basement over the years that we had to stoop down to clear the top of the threshold of the emergency exit, which normally would be eight feet high. We tiptoed across the ice, past a makeshift hockey rink, visible by the light from the barred basement windows, which were now waist-high.

The basement was dark and made more eerie by the light diffracting through the support columns of the southern wall. I worried that if we fell through the ice, no one would find us. Preoccupied, I caught my neck on a string of dangling wire and tripped.

“You all right?” my brother asked.

“Shit,” I said.

“Over here,” said the explorer.

I picked myself up and walked over. There in the cascading light in the central elevator shaft were the shoes, but from this angle there were also shins attached to them. I poked at the shoes with the eraser side of my pencil. I always make notes with pencils in the wintertime. Ball-point pens tend to freeze—same with dogs and people if you leave them outside long enough.

This was no mannequin. This was indeed a man frozen in the ice. His shins had hair. His socks were oddly white, the laces fresh and the sole of the left shoe worn out at the heel. Strangely, the feet were propped up on a pillow that had pooled into the elevator shaft along with other detritus. The hem of a beige jacket could be made out under the ice, as could the contour of his back. The rest of the body looked as though it had vanished.

“Jesus,” Ortiz said.

“Yeah,” said my brother. “I can’t believe he’s still got his shoes.”

Frankie had brought along his own camera, a digital number with a gigantic lens. Since he had graduated from art school with a degree in photography, my brother was struggling to find a career making pictures. Social documentary, he liked to say.

He snapped a few photographs of the frozen man until he saw Ortiz go to work. Frankie frowned, backed away and deleted his pictures. “Not my shot,” he told me later, after the publication of the frozen man story caused an international sensation. “What was I going to do with his picture?” Frankie explained. “Hang it on my wall? Please.”

* * *

I called a couple homicide cops I know, leaving them messages about the body. I didn’t call 911. It didn’t seem like it was an emergency. There was no blood. The man wasn’t going anywhere. He would wait. We headed back to the office.

Whirr. Whirr. Whirr.

My cell phone buzzed a few minutes after we arrived at the office. It was one of the cops. “Aw, just give 911 a call,” he said. He sounded tired, unconcerned. “We’ll be called eventually.”

I called 911. A woman answered. I explained it slowly to her.

“Where is this building?” she asked. I pulled up an online map on the photo editor’s computer. A crowd of
News
reporters and photographers was gathering around the photo of the frozen man’s feet.

“You think it’s a story by itself?” I asked one of the paper’s more imaginative editors.

“Yes, I do,” she said. “It’s an important story.”

Twenty minutes passed, then 911 called the newsroom. This time it was a man. “Where’s this building?”

I explained it again.

He said he’d send a crew out.

Gary Miles, the deputy managing editor of the
News
, told me to hold off writing a story until the body was extricated by the authorities. Maybe we would learn his cause of death and such. So Ortiz and I drove back to the warehouse and waited until sundown. We saw no squad car, no fire truck. We drove home and had a warm supper.

Ortiz and I went back to the warehouse the next morning to check on the frozen man and collect details for the story we would write. Incredibly, he was still there. Now the man became his own story. Two feet in ice, and nobody cared.

A colony of homeless men frequently used the warehouse to keep warm until the nearby shelter along Michigan Avenue opened for the evening and gave out sleeping spaces on the floor by lottery. One of the men, a bundle of bones and whiskers, was lying under filthy blankets not twenty feet from the shaft.

“You know that guy in the shaft?” I asked him.

“I don’t recognize him for his shoes,” he said.

“Did you call the cops?”

“No, I figured someone else did,” he said. “There’s lots of people coming through here with cameras and cell phones.”

“He’s been down there since last month at least,” said his shack-mate, who had walked up with some scrap wood to feed the fire in an oil drum.

“I thought it was a dummy myself.”

Besides, he said, he’d rather live next to a corpse than play the musical chairs game back at the shelter.

Then he asked: “You got a couple bucks?”

* * *

Ortiz took some more photos, this time lighting the scene with a strobe. We drove back to the office and called 911 twice more. Once they hung up. The second time, they answered and took directions. And then they called me back again. This time, I offered to show them where the dead man was.

Ortiz and I drove back out. The firefighters were standing at the wrong building, across the vacant lot. We pointed them toward the elevator shaft across the street.

After a few minutes, one of them emerged. “My God, every time I say I think I’ve seen it all, I see something like this,” said the captain. The firefighters began to extract him with chainsaws.

A police sergeant arrived and called me to his car to make some notes. His city-owned Chevy was smashed on the right front quarter panel. The odometer read 100,000 miles. The floorboards were rotting away, and the sergeant’s thin shoes were sitting in a pool of cold water where the gas pedal was. We made small talk. I asked him how business was. “I’ve got job security, let’s put it that way,” he said, deadpan.

“Nobody says shit,” the sergeant said about murder witnesses. “Now we got to be nice to them. Yeah, like that works. It’s a culture of silence and death in this city.”

He explained to me how he was trying to get one of his homicide cases reclassified as a suicide, since it may have been possible that a bedridden invalid had plugged himself in the face with a shotgun. “If you look at the blood splatter just right, it is possible,” he said hopefully.

“That’s one way to close a case,” I said, wishing him luck.

The television trucks began to show up, having heard the goings-on over the police scanner. A tall British cameraman could only laugh at the attention the frozen man was now getting. “The people actually alive in this city can’t get an ambulance to show up and Mr. Freeze down there has half the fire department helping him. That’s the power of the press, mate.”

True. The average response time in Detroit for an emergency call to the police is a half hour, give or take; it’s little better with ambulances.

* * *

It was nearing midnight when the frozen man was finally extracted. He was set on the loading dock to await the meat wagon, the coroner’s van.

When it arrived, who should get out but my old pal Mike Thomas, the rapping body collector. I had profiled Thomas a few years earlier for the
Times
—one of those “losers” I wrote about—and he was fired under orders from city hall, since he made the city look bad.

I wrote that he was one of the few people in Detroit who was working. Thomas earned $14 a human corpse and claimed on his tax forms that he had made $14,000—not including the $9 he got paid to collect dead animals that had been mistaken for human beings, which happened more often than one would think.

The difference between a dead dog and a dead man is $5, exactly the amount Henry Ford used to pay for a day’s work.

“Hey, Mike!” I yelled. “I thought I got you fired.”

“You can’t get rid of me, son. I’m like a cock-a-roach.”

He appeared to be doing well. He said he had recently moved out of the ghetto, married the mother of his child and cut some new songs. He invited me to his upcoming show, then drove away with the corpse.

* * *

The story of the frozen man hit the streets the next morning, the photograph of his feet above the fold and stretching five columns wide. The headline read:
FROZEN IN INDIFFERENCE
. It was a bold decision by Jon Wolman, the editor and publisher. A dead man with your cornflakes is not the journalistic standard.

The lede read: “This city has not always been a gentle place, but a series of events over the past few, frigid days causes one to wonder how cold the collective heart has grown.”

The story was not the only thing that hit the streets that morning. A middle-level manager who had been laid off from General Motors dove out of his downtown high-rise apartment just as a bailiff knocked at the door to evict him.

Also that morning, four thousand winter caps were distributed to the poor by Matty Moroun, the billionaire trucking magnate who owned the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit to Canada. As it happened, Moroun also owned the rotting warehouse in which the frozen man was found.