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
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
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