A deranged man short on his medications was threatening to kill himself in the middle of downtown Detroit. He stripped his belt from his trouser loops, wrapped it around his neck, and attempted to hang himself by his arms.

This, he eventually realized, defies the laws of physics. So the man rushed into midday traffic, attempting to commit suicide by squad car. This hope, too, proved useless. The cops simply drove around him. The man screamed at the patrolmen to shoot him dead before he shot everyone else. But not many police are available in Detroit, and the irritable officers offered him a tip of their caps as they kept motoring down the boulevard.

I don’t have to go into the city to find stories anymore. The city comes to me.

The deranged man was eventually pacified with a bag of warm hot dogs, french fries, and a tasty slice of cheesecake provided by a local restaurant owner. The lunatic was then sent on his way—whether to camp in the trees, a nearby abandoned building, or the bus terminal.

The restaurant, called American Coney Island, boasts the motto “100 Years of Awesome.” It is the cultural and geographical centerpiece of the city—and I am the maintenance man there.

I am also a reporter, and as a reporter, my handyman side gig may be the best career choice I’ve ever made. I don’t have to go into the city to find stories anymore. The city comes to me.

   Illustrations by Gabriel Gigliotti

Detroit, I have learned, is best appreciated from your knees while mixing a bucket of mortar. What’s the insane homeless guy telling me? That he’s off his medications with no place to go and no one to help. So that might mean that someone with City Hall contracts is siphoning off federal money sent to help him.

What does the cops’ disinterest tell me? That the rosy crime stats pumped out every January from City Hall are bullshit.

I carry a small pencil and pad in the bib of my overalls. I make a note, look into it, and write it up.

– Millions of federal dollars unaccounted for in the city’s “battle to eradicate” homelessness.

– Police brass made 300 corpses disappear from their homicide tally over last 10 years.

After I publish, I might make an appearance on a local media outlet. But traditional media is less appealing than a soiled prophylactic floating down the Rouge River. I get more traffic on my podcast The No Bullshit Newshour. Yep, everybody’s got a podcast these days. Even the handyman.

There isn’t much that I miss working this corner. The federal courthouse is nearby, so I know when a grand jury has been convened for public corruption. The judges, the G-men, the ambassador all stop in for lunch. We talk.

The police headquarters is three long city blocks from the restaurant. A few years back, I ran down a mugger who had snatched the boss’s cellphone. We struggled in the noon-time traffic along Michigan Avenue. It took 20 minutes for the cops to make the three long blocks. As I wrestled with the mugger, an FBI agent came upon the scene, pulled some shoe laces from his suit pocket, and tied the guy’s wrists together. To this day. I wonder where Johnny Fed got those shoelaces. He was wearing loafers. To this day, Johnny Fed wonders what takes cops so long to respond to crime calls.

A road worker recognizes me from my TV news days. “Hey, Charlieee!!!!” he shouts in a thick Latino accent. “Where’d you learn to work like that, bro?”

“Shit!” I shout to my new compadre. “Who do you think did this shit before you guys came here?” He had a big laugh at that one.

The next day, he brought one of my books for me to sign.

In this age of populism, I’ve found that people like to see their reporters actually laboring. They want to see dirt under their nails rather than a clear polish on top of them. This makes people believe the reporter actually knows what he’s talking about when he reports on their troubles and dreams.

   Illustrations by Gabriel Gigliotti

I used to be known around the country a little bit. I worked on both the East Coast and the “Left Coast.” I rode motorcycles with Schwarzenegger, climbed to the top of the Empire State Building with the chief technician, and covered Ground Zero, Mexico, and Iraq—even the Arctic Circle.

I was a national correspondent at the New York Times for a decade where I won the Pulitzer Prize before tiring of the backstabbery and pretension. I quit and circled home to Detroit so my daughter might know her grandmother.

I worked for the local paper for a couple years before joining the local Fox affiliate. From there, I was a national correspondent for the Fox Television Group—and then I walked again.

Why? Hunter S. Thompson put it best:

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

I didn’t want to die for no good reason, stuffed into a rubber girdle wandering the empty halls of “Broadcast Barbieland.” If I was going to die, then I was going to die on the streets doing my job instead of doing my makeup. (Factoid: the foundational element inside men’s makeup is girls’ makeup.)

The thing is, I forgot to arrange health care before I quit Barbieland. I never thought about it. As a lifetime cog in the corporate media machine, I never had to worry about insurance. It was always just there. Suddenly, I was worried. Private insurance was out of reach. Obamacare was a disaster. After a couple of decades in the news business, you’d think a reporter would have known that.

So I asked Grace Keros, the third-generation owner of American Coney Island, if the restaurant could use a guy who could patch a roof, snake a drain, and repair tiles and bricks. American Coney offers health insurance. I got the job, and it’s become my favorite day of the work week.

The “Coney Island” is a proprietary hot dog topped with chili, mustard, onions (always in that order) on top of a tasty steamer bun. It was invented by Keros’ grandfather, Constantine, a Greek peasant who landed in New York in 1906 with $25 and a single pair of shoes. Before boarding the train to Detroit, however, Keros visited Coney Island, Brooklyn, where he set his dark eyes upon the electrified glory and tasted the frankfurters sold at Feltman’s emporium.

In 1917, the enterprising Keros converted the basement of his Detroit shoeshine shop into a speakeasy and gambling parlor after Michigan became the first state in the nation to ban alcohol. In order to keep his patrons drinking and gambling, Keros concocted his Coney Island hot dog, making him Detroit’s version of the Earl of Sandwich.

For more than a century, the joint has never moved and never closed—not for the Great Depression, two world wars, two race riots, or the flames following the ‘84 Tigers championship.

It never shut down—until COVID.

Business has slowly but steadily recovered at American Coney.

Not so much for Lafayette Coney Island, which is located directly next door. The rivalry between the two Coney Islands has become an international spectacle. Lafayette got shut down for rats in January—again—the second time in two years. So Keros convened a press conference to let the world know her establishment, while sharing a wall with Lafayette, does not share spit.

The news pinged across the internet, and I found myself standing in the cellar of it. Because, you see, I am the HANDY man.

When the health department shut down Lafayette, naturally inspectors scurried into American. I’m pleased to report there were no problems there. Coolers at 40 degrees. Garbage in the bins. Any holes in the 150-year-old brick foundation had been sealed with hydraulic cement.

I wish the men at Lafayette luck. I really do. I consider them my friends. You never want to see a business, a family, or a tradition flounder and sink. That’s how I think of my city. We’re all in this together. And things are tough around here.

All during the Biden administration, the media kept reporting how terrific the economy was. But working on the restaurant’s foundation, I could see from my knees that this was a fantasy peddled by the “Cable Kens” of prime time news that nobody’s watching.

From my knees, I could see that every cigarette butt littering the sidewalk had been smoked to its end. When times are good, people discard half-smoked cigarettes. Just look at the sidewalk in front of the New York Stock Exchange. The butts there are long because the times there are always good. Not so much in Detroit. I’m here to help fix that, with a pad, a pencil, and a cement trowel.

Whenever I meet up with the old journalism gang for a drink and they ask me, “What happened?” I don’t mind them. I just drink their liquor. Because I’m home. My daughter knows her grandma, and we’ve got healthcare.

Charlie LeDuff is the author of the New York Times bestseller Detroit: an American Autopsy and a winner of the Pulitzer prize.