Scott never got on with Cowboy Cam. He was too sensitive a kid to please the grizzled ranch hand. Scott took the ACT, got into Winona State University, and left home for college at seventeen. He soon outgrew Winona, Minnesota, just as he had outgrown the soybean fields and water towers of rural Iowa. Scott had known he was gay from a young age. “I needed to find others like me,” he remembered thinking before moving to Milwaukee. He finished at Milwaukee Area Technical College and later, at age thirty-one, received his nursing license.
Scott began his career in a nursing home. He checked vital signs, dispensed medication, monitored blood glucose levels, gave insulin injections, administered IV infusions, fed people through tubes, and cared for tracheotomies and wounds. He learned to make his hands light and quick, how not to puke, how to find the vein. Scott felt needed, and he was.
He rented nice apartments in up-and-coming neighborhoods: Bay View, the East Side. One year, his best, Scott took home $88,000. He sent money home to his mom.
After five years of hoisting limp women and men out of beds and bathtubs, Scott slipped a disk in his back. A doctor prescribed Percocet for the pain.1 Around that time, two of Scott’s best friends died of AIDS. “I fell off. I didn’t cope well.” The Percocet helped with that pain too.
Scott thought his pain would in time run its course, like any other illness. But when his doctor announced retirement, Scott found himself panicking. The doctor had become a treasure to Scott, like a bartender who pours to the rim; another might not be so forthcoming with the opioids. But there were other options. Scott began buying pills from fellow nurses and stealing them from work. His nursing-home patients too became regular suppliers, selling Vicodin pills at $3 a pop. Then they became regular suppliers without knowing it.
Several months after Scott started taking Percocet, he discovered fentanyl. That was when he fell in love. Fentanyl penetrated the central nervous system 100 times more effectively than morphine.2 It offered Scott pure, calm happiness; it pulled him toward the sublime. “It was the best feeling of pleasure and contentment I have ever felt,” he said.
In the nursing home, Scott would take a syringe and siphon fentanyl out of the Duragesic patches used for patients with chronic pain. He’d then swallow or inject the drug and reapply the empty patch, as his patients moaned softly in bed. “In your own heart, you convince yourself that you need it more than they do,” Scott remembered. “ ‘If I do this, I’ll be able to take care of thirty of you.’ ”
Like any other romance, Scott’s relationship with fentanyl changed from something thrilling and magical into something deeper and more consuming. Soon, he was no longer chasing a high but running from withdrawal. “The sick,” he called it. When he went without, he would shake and sweat, get diarrhea, and ache all over. “When you stop, it feels like you’d rather be dead.” By this point, Scott needed opioids just to function. When he felt the sick right behind him, he did things he never thought he was capable of doing.
One day in August 2007, some of Scott’s coworkers found him standing with his eyes closed, rocking back and forth. They sent him home and checked the patches, finding them drained. Scott’s supervisor asked him to submit to a drug test, which came back positive for fentanyl. The same string of events repeated itself in November, but Scott was still allowed to keep his job because his supervisor, who had a drug history, gave him another chance. Then around Christmastime that year, patients complained that a male nurse had removed their patches. Scott was put in a cab and sent to a clinic for a third drug test. He shut the taxi’s door and stood outside in the cold.
Behind the clinic’s doors was a waiting room full of other junkies slumped in plastic chairs and gloved nurses with flat expressions, giving off neither pity nor disgust. Scott knew that Christmas music would be playing. He turned his back on the clinic and walked away.
Scared, Scott joined Narcotics Anonymous and tried to stop using. But it didn’t take. “My life didn’t get any better,” he remembered. Four months later, Scott wore his best shirt to his disciplinary hearing in front of the Wisconsin Board of Nursing. The board ruled: “The license of [Scott W. Bunker], L.P.N., to practice as a nurse in the State of Wisconsin is suspended for an indefinite period.”3 That was the moment Scott decided to settle into a spot on the bottom and become a full-blown junkie. “I really cared about my nursing license,” he remembered. “When they took it away, I was like, ‘Fuck it.’ ”
—
After Scott had lost his job and his upscale apartment, he sold most of his possessions and checked himself into the Lodge. At the shelter he met Teddy, who had recently been released from the hospital. He was drawn to Teddy for the obvious reason: Teddy was frail and sick and needed someone to help him climb steps and carry his food tray. Scott was still a nurse in heart and habit, even if he had lost his license.
Unlike Scott, homelessness was nothing new to Teddy. He had lived in shelters and under bridges since hitchhiking from Dayton, Tennessee, three years earlier. Teddy had grown up in a family with little money and fourteen kids. His father was an alcoholic who died young after slamming his truck into the back of an eighteen-wheeler. “Now, that’s an experiment,” Teddy liked to say when telling the story.
They made an unlikely pair: one a straight Southern man, who had lived for years on the street; the other younger, gay, and a new arrival at the bottom. But they became friends, and then decided to leave the homeless shelter together, as roommates.
Teddy’s monthly income, from SSI, was $632, and Scott was only receiving food stamps. They needed a cheap apartment, but they also needed a landlord who wouldn’t ask too many questions. College Mobile Home Park had a reputation for letting just about anyone in. When the two men visited the park, Office Susie showed them a small trailer without a stove. It was in a sorry state, but Tobin gave it to them and only charged $420 in lot rent. They moved in that week.
After leaving the nursing home, getting drugs had been a hassle. Scott would go to Woody’s, the Harbor Room, or other gay bars and hope to run into someone. But in the trailer park, Scott met several neighbors with methadone prescriptions and others who sold drugs. Getting drugs was as easy as asking for a cup of sugar.
One morning Scott woke up and felt the sick coming. His pill suppliers had run dry. Scott asked Dawn for morphine, but she was out too. He downed several of Teddy’s beers, but they didn’t help. In the evening, Scott sat alone in his bedroom, shaking. He put on his baseball cap and, hands in pockets, began doing laps around the trailer park.
From a lawn chair outside her patio, Heroin Susie watched Scott pass by. She ashed her cigarette and went inside to tell Billy, her longtime boyfriend. When Scott walked by again, they called him over.
Susie and Billy had a small dog, a terrier mix, and a clean trailer stocked with newer furniture. Susie was middle-aged with long dirty-blond hair and dark rings underneath her eyes. Her mannerisms were silky, relaxed. She told people she had the gift of healing. Billy was a wiry man in a cutoff shirt who seemed to blink half as much as the average person. He had a gruff voice and faded prison tattoos. Susie and Billy had been together for years but still liked to hold hands.
Susie asked Scott if he was fiending. Yes, he nodded. She looked at Billy, who retrieved a small leather case. Inside was a package of new needles, alcohol swabs, sterilized water, tiny cotton balls, and black-tar heroin.
Never shoot it. It was the deal Scott had made with himself when opioids began taking over his life. He had promised he would never inject heroin, not after seeing what AIDS had done to his friends.
Billy held a spoon over a stove burner to cook the tar with water. Humming softly, he then soaked up the heroin into a cotton ball and pulled it into a syringe. It was dark, coffee-colored. Scott learned later that this meant it was strong. Scott took the needle behind his right knee. He closed his eyes, waited, and then came relief, weightlessness. He was a child floating back to the surface, the diving board bouncing.
They bec
ame friends, Scott, Susie, and Billy. Scott learned that Susie wrote poetry, liked telling stories of the days she dealt bricks of marijuana in the ’70s, and had shot heroin for the last thirty-five years. Billy shot in his arms, and Susie in her legs, which were so scarred and discolored they made even Scott squeamish. It sometimes took Susie hours to find an opening. When she grew frustrated, Billy took the needle and forced it into her neck’s jugular artery.
Billy and Scott sometimes scrapped metal or collected cans to raise dope money. (Black-tar heroin was cheap. A balloon holding about a tenth of a gram went for $15 or $20.) Other times, all three worked a hustle outside the mall. Billy would steal something of value from a department store, usually jewelry. Susie would then return the item, acting like a dissatisfied customer who had misplaced her receipt. Because Susie had no receipt, the store manager would give her a gift certificate in exchange for the item. Susie would then hand the gift certificate to Scott, who would hawk it in the parking lot, selling it below value. He might sell an $80 gift certificate for $40, taking the $40 straight to Chicago, where Susie’s favorite supplier lived.
Lenny had approved Susie and Billy’s application to live in the trailer park, just as he had approved Scott and Teddy’s. Lenny did all of Tobin’s screening. He never did credit checks, because there was a fee, and he didn’t call previous landlords because he figured most applicants just listed their mothers or friends. Lenny’s screening consisted mainly of typing names into CCAP.
CCAP stood for Consolidated Court Automation Programs. Like many other states, Wisconsin believed its citizens were entitled to view the affairs of its criminal and civil courts.4 So, free of charge, it provided a website that catalogued all speeding tickets, child support disputes, divorces, evictions, felonies, and other legal business. Eviction records and misdemeanors were displayed for twenty years; felonies were displayed for at least fifty. CCAP also reported dismissed evictions and criminal charges. If someone was arrested but never convicted, CCAP displayed the violation with the disclaimer: “These charges were not proven and have no legal effect. [Name] is presumed innocent.” Employers and landlords could come to their own conclusions. Among CCAP’s “frequently asked questions” was this one: “I don’t want my private information on Wisconsin Circuit Court Access. How can I get it removed?” An answer was provided: “You probably can’t.” Ask Lenny if he ever found incriminating records when reviewing applications, and he would grin at the question and say, “Most of the time I find stuff.” And if you asked him what kinds of records prevented someone from being approved, he would tell you that he turned down everyone with a drug charge or domestic-violence offense. But both Susie and Billy had drug charges, and they weren’t the only ones.
—
Lenny got up early one Saturday morning. Office Susie met up with him, and Tobin picked them both up in the Cadillac. They were spending the day in Milwaukee’s Landlord Training Program. None of them wanted to go, but they didn’t have a choice. Attending the training was part of Tobin’s agreement with Alderman Witkowski. Funded by the Department of Justice, the Landlord Training Program began in the 1990s with the goal of “keeping illegal and destructive activity out of rental property.”5
Tobin, Lenny, and Office Susie joined sixty or so other landlords in a large classroom in the Milwaukee Safety Academy on Teutonia Avenue. At nine a.m. sharp, a tall woman with broad shoulders and a dark suit stood up and announced, “We start on time, and we end on time.” Karen Long, the program coordinator, began talking at a fast clip, hands clasped behind her back. “What’s the number one rule in real estate? Location, location, location,” Karen said. “What’s the number one rule for being a landlord? Screening, screening, screening….You have to do a number of things to find out who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.”
Karen told the room to collect an applicant’s date of birth (to check his or her criminal record) and Social Security number (to check his or her credit) and to require two pieces of identification. “You need to require sufficient and verifiable income. If they say they are self-employed, well, drug dealers are self-employed.” Karen brought up CCAP. The landlords also received an advertisement for ScreeningWorks, which promised to provide “the most comprehensive background information about your rental applicants.” For $29.95, landlords could obtain a report listing an applicant’s eviction and criminal record, credit evaluation, previous addresses, and other information. “ScreeningWorks is a service of RentGrow,” the advertisement read. “RentGrow has 10+ years experience in multifamily resident screening, and serves over half a million rental units a year.”6
“Look,” Karen said, “if they have a recent court-ordered eviction or delinquency, you’re not going to rent to them. If they have an eviction, what makes you think they’re going to pay you?”7 Herself a landlord, Karen paid attention to how someone looked at her unit. This point was repeated in the thick training manual landlords received at registration: “Do they check out each room?…Do they mentally visualize where the furniture will go, which room the children will sleep in, or how they’ll make best use of the kitchen layout? Or do they barely walk in the front door before asking to rent, showing a surprising lack of interest in the details? People who make an honest living care about their home and often show it in the way they look at the unit. Some who rent for illegal operations forget to pretend they have the same interest.”8
The small act of screening could have big consequences. From thousands of yes/no decisions emerged a geography of advantage and disadvantage that characterized the modern American city: good schools and failing ones, safe streets and dangerous ones.9 Landlords were major players in distributing the spoils. They decided who got to live where. And their screening practices (or lack thereof) revealed why crime and gang activity or an area’s civic engagement and its spirit of neighborliness could vary drastically from one block to the next. They also helped explain why on the same block in the same low-income neighborhood, one apartment complex but not another became familiar to the police.10
Screening practices that banned criminality and poverty in the same stroke drew poor families shoulder to shoulder with drug dealers, sex offenders, and other lawbreakers in places with lenient requirements. Neighborhoods marred by high poverty and crime were that way not only because poverty could incite crime, and crime could invite poverty, but also because the techniques landlords used to “keep illegal and destructive activity out of rental property” kept poverty out as well. This also meant that violence, drug activity, deep poverty, and other social problems coalesced at a much smaller, more acute level than the neighborhood. They gathered at the same address.
For people familiar with hunger and scarcity, addiction and prison, that often meant being isolated from job networks and exposed to vice and violence. But it also meant people could air problems; swap food, clothes, and information; and finish one another’s sentences about lousy jobs or social workers or prison (“They put gravy—”…“On everything!”). It meant that, should they be in the early stages of opiate withdrawal, they could take a walk around their trailer park to calm the shakes and run into a fellow junkie who could give them what they needed.
Some landlords neglected to screen tenants for the same reason payday lenders offered unsecured, high-interest loans to families with unpaid debt or lousy credit; for the same reason that the subprime industry gave mortgages to people who could not afford them; for the same reason Rent-A-Center allowed you to take home a new Hisense air conditioner or Klaussner “Lazarus” reclining sofa without running a credit check. There was a business model at the bottom of every market.11
“Questions?” Karen’s eyes panned the room.
“Should I do a short-term or long-term lease?”
“First, do a lease. Please. Put it in writing. Between sixty and seventy percent of rental agreements in this state are verbal.”
A man in a camouflage hat raised his hand with a question about evictions: “Do you have to leave th
em there for three months or some foolish thing?”
“No. Nothing protects you from not paying the rent.”
“Is there a maximum charge for a late fee?”
The room laughed nervously, and Karen frowned at the question.
“Can you go in any of the common areas, the hallways, the open basement, without any notice?”
Karen paused for effect. She smiled at the woman who had asked the question. She was a black woman, probably in her fifties, who had sat in the front row and taken notes throughout the day.
“What is the answer?” Karen asked the room.
“Yes,” came the reply from several fellow landlords.
Karen nodded and looked back at the woman. “Okay, say this with me: This is my property.”
“This is my property,” the woman responded.
“This is my property.” Karen said it louder and raised her hands, inviting the room to echo.
“This is my property,” the landlords answered.
“This is myyy property!” Karen boomed, her finger pointing to the land below.
The voices in the room went up in unison, a proud and powerful chorus: “This is my property! Myyyyy property!”
—
After receiving the eviction notice, it took Teddy a couple days to decide it was time to go home to Tennessee. He called one of his sisters, who told him that she’d be sending her husband up with the van. Teddy sent her a $500 money order. “I don’t want to go to them broke,” he told Scott, which also told him his money was gone.
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