I Figure I’ll Stop Scrappin’: My Three Thanksgivings
by Matthew Loflin Davis
Before scrap metal prices went through the roof in the mid 00s and every scrapper was considered scum, I had a truck and made my way cutting steel out of burned out and unsalvageable buildings.
Five years ago Thanksgiving, I was trying to come up with some copper to turn into the scrap yard the next day for my fix. The building behind mine was falling down and hadn’t had anyone in it as long as I could remember so I climbed to the roof and down through the hole that the weather over the years had provided me.
Once inside, the copper was everywhere. I started cutting it out when I realized that some of it was still live. I carefully unhooked the three connectors to the 440 coming into the building when POP, a loud fucking explosion of light and power filled the room. The wrench I was using had touched another metal plate. My rubber boots and gloves saved my ass. It no doubt would have killed me. Shaken badly, I had gotten the power off so I continued to pull the copper. Part of me knew this was wrong but when your heroin fix is the one true love in your life you can sometimes rationalize things.
Looking back, I knew I was wrong taking that copper but I’m not here to apologize. Putting the big pieces aside, I went to the basement and started cutting smaller wires when I heard a door open upstairs.
“POLICE!”
I hid behind some machinery thinking Detroit cops wouldn’t want to go through the entire building. I was probably right but it wasn’t the police, just the owners with Glocks and handcuffs. It was my first and only felony; it haunted me for years and I was jailed several times for breaking probation due to dirty urine.
About 364 days later, a day before Thanksgiving, I was again scrapping an abandoned building in the Eastern Market. I had my torches and was cutting heavy I-beams. Things were going great. The sun was out and it lit up the third floor very nicely for me and my buddy to work in. I went to check out the room next door and walked down the hall into a shaded area. My eyes couldn’t adjust fast enough before I realized I was falling. The next thing I remember thinking was “Damn, I’m falling a long way.” I hit the ground about two floors down. I gasped for breath as the wind went out of me. After the fear settled, I felt that I couldn’t move my leg and it hurt like hell. My face hurt and my wrist hurt, too. I spent the next three months in a wheelchair. I had broken my femur, wrist and jaw. A titanium rod was inserted into my femur, pins in my wrist and my jaw was wired. To top things off, I lived in a house with only a wood burner. I was chopping wood from my wheelchair all winter.
One December day that year, I was out of work and I had my habit and I was sick. I could feel the bile in my stomach churning and my legs wouldn’t hold still. My nose and eyes were running and I was sneezing eight times in a row. I wheeled myself down the street on that frigid December day while carrying my aluminum extension ladder resting on the arm of my chair. I headed down to a spot I knew where the man would sometimes trade tools for dope. I sat outside and waited for him, but when he showed up he didn’t want the ladder. I was at wits’ end, sitting on wheels on McDougall Street in the blowing cold praying for my father to send me something from above. My eyes were running so bad I couldn’t see and my body arched with my sneezes as I looked in the street to see a bill tumbling with the wind right toward me. I franticly pushed myself toward vector with the tumbling green blur and caught it under my wheel. Reaching down, I pulled up a twenty dollar bill so I looked up and thanked my Pop. I blew it all on one fat blow and worried about my next need when it came. Somehow it always works out.
Flash forward one more year to the next Thanksgiving. (You can look up my medical and police records if you don’t believe me) I’m again scrapping the Grand Trunk Building on the seventh floor. It’s a refrigerated building with no lights, no windows. I’m trying to unbolt a brass valve. After taking the bolts out I tried to wiggle it out by hand, no luck. Grabbing my hammer, I gave it a good whack and an explosion of pure ammonia blasted me in the face. The room filled with the gas and I stumbled upstairs where fresh air was coming in through the roof. My eyes were burning. Luckily it was raining and I was able to flush them out. About 75% blind, I managed to make my way down through the pitch-black seven floors and out to the parking lot. From there I somehow made it home. Before I went to the hospital I stopped at the dope house and spent my last $10.
I was blind for about three months in both eyes until my right eye healed fairly well. My left eye didn’t do so well and I am still blind in that one today three years later.
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When he wrote this story, Matthew Loflin Davis was an artist and recovering heroin addict in Detroit.
In 2015, he died of a heroin overdose. His blogposts remain at WWW.JUNKYSAYS.BLOGSPOT.COM, from which this story was culled.