Detroit City Is the Place to Be (27 page)

A dirty secret of union towns like Detroit was how the historic battle for fair overtime pay, combined with the shrinking of benefits and real wages, had resulted in the strange phenomenon whereby, in the midst of deliriously high unemployment, the lucky people who’d somehow managed to hang on to their jobs might actually wind up overemployed, either via copious overtime—this worked out well for management, as overtime remained cheaper than covering the benefits of an entirely new hire—or, as in Marvin’s case, snagging second, lower-paying jobs, simply to maintain something approaching the middle-class lifestyle to which they’d grown accustomed.

Marvin led me around back, through the wide-open bay doors. The Highland Park Fire Department, it turned out, was being housed—stored?—inside a warehouse. Marvin explained that the department’s poorly maintained former headquarters had been declared an environmental hazard by OSHA, so they’d come to occupy this temporary location. That was six years ago. Past a row of aged fire trucks, a white McDonald Modular Solutions trailer had been set up as an office. In front of it, an old stuffed couch and a pair of recliners, all scavenged from various curbs by the firefighters, had been arranged around a television set. A rack of oxygen tanks lined one of the walls like bottles of wine. Next to the trucks, the rest of the uniforms stood at the ready: boots on the ground, with thick, flame-retardant pants and suspenders already attached, so the firefighters could step right into their pant legs and yank up their suspenders with a single motion. The prepared uniforms drooped down over the boots like melted fireman candles.

Firefighters milled in the dim light, chatting and eating. The ceiling of the warehouse rose nearly two floors above us. In a distant corner, I could make out a gym consisting of free weights and benches people had brought from home or picked up at garage sales. It had been a quiet night so far. Nearby, a blue plastic barrel with a handwritten sign taped to it read

POP

CAN$

Beverage cans in Michigan were returnable for deposits.

The firefighters had actually been evicted from their old firehouse while Highland Park’s finances were being controlled by the state of Michigan, under the auspices of an emergency manager. Rather than bring the old firehouse up to code or build a new one, the city had been paying several thousand dollars per month to heat the cavernous space each subsequent winter. Thanks to a proposal written by one of the department’s junior firefighters—on his own time and initiative, with no grant-writing training
3
—Highland Park received a $2.6 million federal FEMA grant for a new building. But after two years, the grant money still hadn’t been spent. Officials blamed the historic designation of the old firehouse, which made it difficult to tear down, though sources inside the department ascribed the delay to political infighting and shadier efforts to funnel the grant money to other city projects. Questions have also been raised about the way in which the architectural firm that contracted to design the new firehouse won its bid.

In the meantime, the firefighters had made do. “We call this the Village,” Marvin said, leading me to the back of the warehouse. “One guy came up with this idea, because the trailer doesn’t hold us all.” In a dark corner, the firefighters had nailed together planks of raw plywood, constructing a multilevel warren of individual cells, a cross between a children’s box fort and the sort of slapdash partition undergraduate roommates might throw up in a dorm. They’d built twenty-six rooms in all; a Jolly Roger flag hung from the roof. Two of the firefighters, apparently preferring al fresco accommodations, slept in tents. Marvin pushed open the door to his room.

“It’s small, but everyone’s got their own humble abode,” he said. The space was about the size of a large walk-in closet, with barely enough room for a twin bed and a television set. A framed photograph of a fierce-looking house fire hung next to the TV.

“Were you there?” I asked.

Marvin nodded and said, “It’s the fire devil holding on to the house—see it?” He stabbed the flames jutting from the roof with a thick finger. Sure enough, they resembled a cartoonish demon’s head, and you could even flesh out the pair of fiery arms reaching down to hug either wall of the place. “It’s not cropped or anything,” Marvin said.

Marvin had started out as a firefighter in Pontiac. “Before that, I was a junior engineer,” he said. “Sucked! I tried nursing. Sucked! I said, ‘I need something exciting.’” Eventually, a friend told him, “You want to see some real fires? Come down to Highland Park.” At the time, Republican governor John Engler had just modified the residency rules in Michigan, allowing city workers to live outside the community employing them, so Marvin was able to transfer to Highland Park without moving there. None of the Highland Park firefighters I met actually lived in the city, except when they slept at the warehouse.

An average night found eight firefighters on duty. Normally, this level of staffing would be more than adequate for a city of Highland Park’s size. But considering the firehouse often saw multiple structure blazes over the course of a single evening, the place eked out its defensive duties with an absurdly skeletal crew. One of Marvin’s lieutenants, Eric Hollowell, told me about a time when eleven houses burned in one night. Hollowell’s entire seven-person unit—one of the eight firefighters on duty must always remain behind to answer incoming calls—had been in the midst of combating the first three fires, a trio of neighboring houses, when they got word of several more fires breaking out at the opposite end of the block, forcing Hollowell to split up his already overstretched crew. (Normal procedure would call for three trucks—about fifteen people—when responding to a single residential fire.) Not long after that, a resident approached Hollowell at the scene and informed him of another abandoned house that had caught fire, on the next block over. Hollowell had to let that one free-burn for an hour. He couldn’t spare any more guys.

One of the fire trucks came from Texas, used; another, also used, from Arizona or Georgia, no one could remember which. All were ancient by fire engine standards, twenty years old, leaky. One had a five-hundred-gallon tank that, by the end of an average night, would lose three-fifths of its water; another’s ladder, so rickety, had everyone afraid to climb it.

“You know how we communicate at fire scenes?” Hollowell asked me.

A part-timer named Chuck, sitting nearby, glanced up and muttered, “You telling him everything?”

Hollowell continued, “We only have three radios. We communicate by voice. Once people are inside a building, I have no way to know if they’re okay. Chuck is driving our main truck and he doesn’t have a radio. If people are called to another scene, he can’t communicate.”

Chuck, nodding glumly, admitted, “It’s like in baseball: all hand signals.”

Then he did an imitation of a catcher flashing dispatches to the mound.

*   *   *

Angel’s Night had been slow, so Marvin invited me to come back to the station on another occasion. Even by Highland Park standards, the week of my return had been a rough one. A two-hundred-unit apartment complex had burned several days earlier, one of the residents dying after leaping from a second-story window. “Definitely arson,” a firefighter who wished to remain anonymous told me. “Either an insurance job or some kind of retaliation.”

When I showed up, several of the men had arranged their folding chairs in the mouth of the bay doors, facing the train tracks. They all looked crispy and adrenaline-deprived. Even Marvin, outwardly jovial as ever, had exhausted, vacant eyes. The night before, there had been only two fires, but afterwards, Marvin hadn’t been able to fall back asleep. “Every time gas prices drop, we see an increase in fires,” he noted. A Bluetooth device blinked from one of his ears. He delivered the line matter-of-factly, like an observational comic doing a bit about airplane food.

Hollowell sat nearby, chain-smoking and drinking coffee from a thermos. A trim black man with a cleanly shaved head and a wispy mustache, he wore a blue Highland Park Fire Department polo shirt tucked into dark slacks. Hollowell was thirty-seven. He’d grown up in Highland Park, just a few blocks from the warehouse; so few houses remained on Hollowell’s old street, one of his coworkers told me, “I call that block We Lost It.” Hollowell’s mother had been a teacher at Highland Park High. His father died when Hollowell was only ten years old. An electrician, he’d been doing work in a friend’s basement as a favor and stepped into a puddle of water, not realizing someone had cut the power back on.

Hollowell had always thought being a cop would be a cool job, that or the military, and began working as a cadet-in-training at the police department when he was fifteen. By the time he turned twenty-one, he’d already seen close to thirty homicides. The job started to get to him. He’d been fired upon by people openly selling drugs from their porches, and he took to strapping on his gun before going out to cut the lawn.

“Actually, if I was outside at all,” he emended. “I could be sitting on my porch and I’d have a gun on the table next to me with a rag over it. The city was riddled with dope.”

Hollowell related all of the above in a muted deadpan. I’d be tempted to describe his affect as hard-boiled if not for his habit of coaxing reactions from his listener by pulling some manner of exaggerated face.

A train flew by. Hollowell lifted his hand and waved at the conductor. He told me he’d transferred to the engine house as soon as word of an opening came down.

Hollowell’s colleague Sergeant Nate Irwin wandered outside and planted himself in another chair, bringing his cigarette and coffee mug. Hollowell told Irwin about my book.

Irwin gave me an appraising look. “You going fiction or nonfiction?” he asked.

Non, I said.

He snorted. “No one’s gonna believe it.”

Hollowell and Irwin could be characters in an eighties Hollywood buddy movie about firemen. Irwin, a thirty-two-year-old white guy, had grown up in Royal Oak, which, back when I was a kid, had been the “hip” suburb (record stores, vintage shops, a bondage outfitter). His head, shaved cleaner than a brush cut, retained a sandpapery stubble, and Irwin clearly derived therapeutic pleasure from pensively rubbing it while discussing the particular hardships of his career path. Having worked in Highland Park for over ten years, he’d armored himself with a jaded air similar to Hollowell’s.

“How did I end up here?” he asked. “Well, you watch the news.” He meant that, like Marvin, he’d been drawn by the action. “And then,” he said, lighting another cigarette, “after a few years, you can’t leave, for multiple reasons: (a) you don’t want to, and (b) no one will take you.” The reason for (b), oddly enough, had to do with the amount of field action one quickly accumulated in a place like Highland Park: a captain at a suburban department, who might see a handful of fires each year, wouldn’t necessarily be eager to hire a young guy with so much more experience.

Highland Park and Detroit get so many fires, of such spectacular variety, that firefighters from around the country—Boston, Compton, Washington, D.C.—make pilgrimages here. Some monitor the police scanners and just turn up at the scene, snapping photos and shooting video. A decent enough photograph might make the pages of one of the trade (
Fire Chief
or
Firehouse
), where a cover shot could fetch a thousand bucks. “We’re YouTube legends now,” Irwin noted wryly. One firefighter from the Bronx visited twice every year. He’d told the Highland Park guys the Bronx had become boring. Most of their buildings were occupied now, and it just wasn’t popping like in the old days.

The sky had turned a mauve color. On the service road of the industrial park, a stream of cars began to depart; a late shift at one of the parts shops must have ended. From inside the warehouse, we could hear the echo of a television commercial for Liberty Mutual Insurance.
What’s your policy?
the announcer asked. A slight, pleasant breeze stirred up.

“It’s probably something free-burning somewhere, sucking up all the oxygen,” Hollowell said.

A firefighter named Chaplain sat nearby, occasionally answering a phone and taking notes on a pad. I hadn’t paid much attention to him until I realized he was talking to someone who seemed to be requesting an ambulance. Hollowell noticed the curious look on my face and said, “This is our 911.” He meant that Chaplain—a lone guy sitting in a folding chair answering a phone—was the 911 operator for the entire city of Highland Park. When the call was completed, Hollowell said, “Chaplain, who have you got tonight waiting for the EMS?” Chaplain looked at his pad and said, “Two strokes, a heart attack, a guy who fell and cracked his head open.” He said the first call had come at 5:56 p.m. and none had received EMS attention yet. I looked at my watch. It was after eight.

The city of Highland Park did not own an ambulance and had only one EMS truck. Many of the calls Chaplain had been fielding were repeat calls from people asking when the medics would arrive.

With the exception of Hollowell and Irwin, the other firefighters sitting out there—the diminutive, shaved-headed white guy who talked about his impoverished childhood, how when his mom got remarried, the family finally had enough money to buy Kool-Aid; the ripped Iraq vet, with tattoos of a machine gun and Arabic script running up and down his arms, who used to live in Detroit, but had moved across 8 Mile, to suburban Ferndale, “just to get city services,” he said, adding, “I mean, my fiancée is pretty tough. She can handle herself. But if you get someone on your front lawn acting crazy and you have to shoot ’em, that’s no good”—all of these guys were being paid ten dollars an hour. Cops in Highland Park started at eight. Irwin and Hollowell both liked to use this fact to wind up their right-leaning chief, especially when it came to conservative demagoguing on the supposed overcompensation of the public workforce.
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“Unions, I mean, what’s left?” Irwin asked. “The trades? None of those guys even have
jobs
. The only unions left are the ones they can’t break: public safety, UAW, Teamsters, teachers.”