Jori sniffed and tried to stop himself from crying. Arleen told him to start his homework, and he sulked back to their bedroom.
Grabbing the newspaper, Arleen left to look for apartments, leaving her boys with Crystal. She headed to Teutonia Avenue, a main thoroughfare that cuts diagonally through Milwaukee’s North Side, and considered the snow. Arleen didn’t remember seeing this much snow since she was a child. On Teutonia, she began calling on rent signs. Some landlords didn’t answer; others wanted more rent than she could give.
Arleen found herself in the neighborhood where her brother Martin lived. She spotted rent signs but decided to move on. “Martin think he can eat off us any dang minute,” she thought. Earlier, Arleen had looked in an area where Ger-Ger’s father lived. She avoided that area too. “Those are just too close to him.”10
Arleen was able to call on nine units before she answered her phone and heard Crystal screaming. “You gotta get the fuck out of my house tonight. Tonight! Get your shit and go to-night!”
Arleen stayed on the phone a few more seconds, then hung up. “This is too ridiculous,” she said to herself. Crystal had said something about Jori being disrespectful, but Arleen sensed Crystal really was saying, I’m hungry. There was no food in the house, and Crystal had been complaining. Buying food was never part of the bargain, but Crystal was broke and her food stamps cut off.11 “As long as we have food, she fine,” Arleen thought. “But when we don’t, it’s like this.”
Arleen stopped at a nearby corner store and ordered a $99 meat deal, an inner-city staple consisting of forty-five pounds of chicken wings and legs, pork chops, neck bones, salt pork, pig feet, turkey wings, bacon, and other cuts. The man behind the counter speaking in Arabic on the phone threw in two sacks of potatoes for free. Checking out, Arleen added soda and potato chips, paying in food stamps. (She received $298 in stamps each month.) She paid for a pack of Newport 100s with cash.
When Arleen stepped back into the apartment, Jori immediately tried to explain his side of the story. “She talking about putting Jafaris out with no coat on, no shoes, no nothing!”
“Jafaris went outside on his own,” Crystal snapped back. “But Jori like, ‘Bitch, I’m gonna punch you in your shit! Bitch, I’m gonna do this. Bitch, I’m gonna do that.’ ”
Arleen listened silently as a mother does when she comes upon fighting children. Jori was saying that he tried to stick up for Jafaris after Crystal threatened to put him outside. Crystal was saying that Jori exploded after she playfully locked them out of the house.
“Okay,” Arleen said when she had heard enough. “You ain’t gonna do nothing to her,” she told Jori. Then she turned to Crystal. “And you’re not gonna do anything to my child.” When Jori tried to speak, Arleen snapped, “And you can shut your mouth.”
“She not telling you the whole story!” Jori pleaded.
“Why would you call her bitches, Jori?” Arleen asked.
“She was callin’ me out my name!”12
“You know what?” Crystal yelled. “Yeah, I’m a bitch. But remember I’m that same bitch that opened up my door and let you stay here even though I didn’t know you from Adam and Eve. I was that same bitch that let you in! The landlord didn’t care. She don’t have to care.”
“I don’t know why you saying all this ’cause I know that,” Arleen responded, her voice assertive and clear. She sent Jori out for the groceries.
Crystal waved her phone in the air. “Whatever my mom says I should do, I’m gonna do, because that’s too much disrespect. Too much!” Crystal was putting Arleen’s fate in the hands of her “spiritual mom,” an older woman she met at a group home. She dialed the number, pressed the phone to her ear, and kept talking to Arleen. “If he’d just called me one bitch, that would’ve been fine. I’d have just chopped it off. But to be called a bitch for an hour straight?”
No one picked up. Crystal redialed.
Arleen walked to her room and began venting to the ceiling. “She always complaining there ain’t no food. But it ain’t my responsibility to feed nobody but my kids. Nobody!”
“I didn’t ask you to buy shit for me,” Crystal yelled back. “Because please believe it, ple-ase. ’Cause I’m gonna have whatever I need. Whatever. Whether I have to sell some ass, Crystal Sherella Sherrod Mayberry is gonna get whatever she needs! What-ev-er!”
Arleen looked at her boys. “I’m sick of y’all!” she yelled. “If I knew I’d be having to go through this, I would have left. What am I doing? I clean up. I just went and bought food for this house. What am I doing so wrong?”
Crystal dialed again, still no answer. Now it was her turn to talk to the ceiling. She began praying out loud. “God, I need an answer right now. God, please. I need to hear something from my momma, my bishop. God, I prooooomise you, I wish you wouldn’t have let me learn to love the way I love….I wish I would’ve been bitter for all the terrible things that happened in my life. Whoa, Lord!”
Crystal began singing a hymn. She walked around the apartment, humming and breathing in through her nose. Occasionally, she would pause and close her eyes. She was calming herself down.
Arleen looked at Jori. “You disrespecting, and she tell us, ‘You gotta go!’ Where is we going?”
“She—” Jori started.
“I said, where is we going?”
Jori went quiet and began to cry. Arleen had spent down her check and didn’t know where she would take her boys if Crystal tossed them out. She looked at Jafaris, who during the fight had distracted himself by drawing in a notebook: two monsters in hats and shoes; one big, the other small.
“You know what,” Crystal finally said. Her eyes were brimming with tears, and she was not yelling but purring in a new voice, hushed and soothing. “Let me say something. Eww, God, I wish you’d have never gave me the spirit of love….My feelings are hurt from both of y’all. But, I can’t, I can’t put y’all out….’Cause, like I told you, I am filled with the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Ghost telling me not to make y’all leave.”
“Filled with the Holy Ghost but does more cussing than a little bit,” Arleen mumbled under her breath. To Arleen, it wasn’t the Holy Ghost but the meat cuts and potato chips and love seat that had delivered the message. In the heat of the fight, she had made sure to tell Crystal, “I’m not leaving without taking my stuff out of here.”
Jori sat on his mattress in the bedroom. He felt dejected, and Arleen knew it. Later on, after things were resolved, Arleen sat down next to Jori and tried to explain herself. “What kind of parent am I to just listen to her and not listen to you?” she said, softly. “But this is what comes when you lose your house. This is what comes.”
13.
E-24
When Beaker found out that Larraine had moved into his trailer, he cussed from his hospital bed. Angry but helpless, he fingered the scar from his triple bypass, a nine-inch pink worm that puffed up from the middle of his chest. Larraine was breathing heavily when he got her on the phone. “Beaker,” she said, “we’re starting out fresh! I’m throwing everything out.” She had spent the morning cleaning the kitchen, tossing the left-out black applesauce and fly-covered ribs before deciding that everything had to go, even the cans of food because bugs were crawling on them. Beaker suggested Larraine take the back bedroom, but she refused because it was filthy. She took out her steamer and worked it over the couch. She would sleep on its cushions, next to the mound of things she had rescued from her trailer.
When Beaker came home from the hospital, he planted himself at the kitchen table and dashed his cigarettes into a disposable plastic bowl, the kind you fill with olives at the deli. Beaker’s real name was Robert, but everyone called him by his childhood nickname. A brooding and taciturn man, with slicked-back black-and-gray hair, Beaker had retired from driving a city bus a few years back, when his health began to deteriorate.
Beaker asked Larraine to split the rent, but Larraine said she couldn’t because she had to make steady payments to Eagle Moving. They fought, and B
eaker settled for Larraine covering the cable and phone bills. Then they fought over what to watch on television. Beaker preferred shows like Ice Road Truckers; Larraine demanded So You Think You Can Dance. Then they fought over Beaker’s refusal to share his dinners from Meals on Wheels because he was still miffed that Larraine threw out his canned food. Larraine’s food stamps had been cut off—in the turmoil of her eviction she had forgotten about a meeting at the welfare office—so she began asking neighbors for spare plates and visiting church pantries.
During her first visit to Eagle, Larraine gave her name to a black man behind the counter who was wearing a backwards cap and gold crucifix.
“And when I pay, can I go look at my stuff?” Larraine asked.
“No. This is a bonded storage, ma’am. I can’t let you back there.” Riffling through your things and pulling out, say, winter clothing was not allowed.
“All right.”
“You got the in fee, the out fee, and the first month’s storage,” the man said. “That adds up to three seventy-five. Then each month after that, it goes up another hundred and twenty-five.” The man suggested Larraine try to get her things out soon so she wouldn’t have to pay on another month. But having just given him what amounted to over half her SSI check, Larraine knew this was impossible. It would take her several months to save for a new apartment while still paying Beaker and Eagle.
—
In the trailer park, Larraine tried to lie low and avoid Lenny and Office Susie. She knew that if they found out where she was staying, they would tell Tobin, who might throw her out, and Beaker along with her.
Lenny and Office Susie were crucial to Tobin—and to his tenants. They could get you evicted just as easily as they could get your toilet working again. Susie pushed for Pam and Scott to be kicked out, but she would also run down the Cadillac and yell at Tobin if she thought he was overcharging someone or moving too slow fixing a porch railing. Most important, Lenny and Susie were cultural brokers, bridging the gap between Tobin and his tenants and smoothing things over when he crossed the line: like the time he approached a tenant’s kids, telling them their father owed rent. On numerous occasions, Lenny literally placed himself between Tobin and an enraged tenant. This was a common practice—outsider landlords hiring people from the community, usually their tenants, to manage property.1
The kids Tobin had approached about the rent belonged to Donny, a portly and unshaven man in his mid-thirties who was liked by almost everyone in the trailer park. Donny was already refusing to pay Tobin, not because he didn’t have the money, but because he felt disrespected. He put his rent in escrow, citing his leaking roof and the black mold under the sink. Said Donny to his neighbor, Robbie, “You know what he tells me? ‘You rented it as-is.’ Tobin is just too ignorant to know that there are people in here that don’t live off Social Security.”
“Damn right!” Robbie spat. “He asked me if I had a job. I said, ‘Motherfucker, I work for the union!’ ” Robbie was a deep-tunnel miner and a member of Local 113. “You gonna treat me like shit, I sure as hell ain’t going to pay you. I don’t care who you are. You’re not gonna sit there and discriminate me. You know what I mean?”
“ ’Cause I’m a redneck.”
“ ’Cause you live in a trailer court, period. You’re still a fuckin’ human.”
Lenny was a redneck too, and understood where the men were coming from. He agreed that the old man was “losing it.” But he also pushed back. “A lot of people say, ‘Tobin, he’s an asshole.’ But why is he the asshole? You’re the one who owes him.” What Donny, Robbie, and the rest of the trailer park didn’t know was that Lenny had a financial stake in them paying. Each month, he received a $100 bonus if he collected $50,000. He’d receive an additional $100 for every $2,000 collected after that.
—
Some days would find Lenny walking alongside Roger from the Department of Neighborhood Services, finishing his sentences. Roger the Inspector glanced down at his clipboard, reviewing notes from his last visit. “Let’s see, W-45 was—”
“The shed,” Lenny cut in. “We got it out of here.”
“Ah.”
“Hey, Roger,” a tenant called out from his porch. “See anything?”
“Do I see anything?”
Most park residents knew Roger, had his business card tucked away in a kitchen drawer. When they got fed up with some housing problem, they would not threaten to call DNS but Roger, specifically. A balding white man with a well-trimmed beard, Roger wore a white DNS polo shirt and 33/30 Levi’s.
“Any violations?” the tenant clarified, trying to be helpful.
“Well, it’s not country living, but if it’s habitable inside, it looks good to me.”
“So, there aren’t any violations?”
Roger shrugged and kept walking. Of course there were. He had noticed the pile of trash behind the tenant’s trailer and a plywood slab where a window should have been. There were trailers with several cracked windows, large steel barrels used for nighttime fires, and trash floating in standing puddles and overflowing from the two giant Dumpsters on either end of the park. Tobin had refused to pay for individual trash cans, but the Dumpsters would fill up days before they were emptied, attracting raccoons and possums. One resident had stabbed a possum dead a few nights before Roger’s visit. Lenny had shot one once. When the garbage collectors came, residents whose trailers faced the Dumpsters would try to convince the truck driver to move them to another spot. They would point to a trailer, saying, sometimes truthfully, “That one’s empty!”
Roger sighed. “Man, you gotta keep me from writing up so much shit.”
“Well, don’t let that hand go, then,” Lenny replied, telling Roger not to record violations.
“Best of intentions, Lenny, best of intentions. Every time I walk through here, there’s always something.” And that was only from the outside. Roger’s inspections usually did not take him inside trailers, where he would have seen sunken bathtubs propped up with car jacks or water heaters disconnected from ventilating pipes.
Roger stopped in front of a trailer. “These windows look like they’re shot.”
“Well,” Lenny replied, “they don’t have the money to buy new windows. So what do you want me to do? I don’t want to buy ’em for ’em.” The trailer was owner-occupied, meaning its residents were responsible for upkeep.
“I don’t want you to have to either.”
“So are we okay?”
“I’m okay with that.”
Back in the office, Roger sighed and lowered his head into his palms.
Tobin hung up the phone. “Okay. What’s the matter? What do we got?”
“Look,” Roger began, “if you’re going to let trailers that look this bad into your trailer park, you have to make it habitable.” Roger began listing off some of the bigger problems: garbage, open storage sheds, broken windows.
Lenny cut in. “It’s been a tough winter.”
“I’m not going to write you up on that,” Roger replied, speaking of the cracked windows. He knew cataloguing every code violation was neither feasible nor, he suspected, in the tenants’ best interest.
Rufus the junk collector stepped into the office. “Are we safe?” he asked Roger. Although the city had renewed Tobin’s license, many tenants still feared removal.
“Yes,” Roger answered.
“Good. Now I don’t have to move my giant cat house.” When Rufus’s mother died, she owned seventy-two cats. Rufus was down to three.
—
Not long after taking over the trailer park, Bieck Management fired Lenny and Susie. After reading his termination letter, Lenny began removing his things from the office in which he had worked for the past twelve years. He gathered his tools and unscrewed his deer antlers from the wall.
The door swung open and a man with sunglasses asked, “Can I get an extension?”
Lenny paused. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I’m outta here.”
&nbs
p; What in the past had become routine was now far from certain. A worried look worked over the man’s face. He left and told the first person he saw. As news spread, a tremor of fear whipped through the park. Would the new management company honor the deals struck over a handshake? Would rents go up? Would evictions? Some tenants hated Lenny and Office Susie, but at least they were known. “Ain’t gonna get no leeway with this setup,” Dawn said. “People that were working at the office worked with people because we’re just making poverty over here.” When the news reached Dawn’s neighbor, Tam, a seven-months-pregnant drug addict, she walked into the office and gave Lenny a long hug.
On their last day, Office Susie erased her greeting from the voicemail system, and Lenny laid his heavy ring of keys on the desk.
Bieck Management replaced Lenny with a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. At twenty-three, young enough to be Lenny’s son, the replacement was clueless and patronizing, but he stuck it out. The new maintenance man quit after a week, saying, “I mean, ninety-nine percent of the houses in here are just too far gone….I’ve been working on mobile houses for seven years, and I’ve never worked in a park like this.”
With Lenny and Susie gone, Tobin had to take care of some matters himself. It didn’t bother him; he had always been a hands-on landlord. In his twelve years at College Mobile Home Park, Tobin had learned to pull profit out of 131 dilapidated trailers. Most impressive was his ability to transform an utterly trashed trailer into a rent-generating machine in a matter of days—and for next to nothing.
After evicting a tenant named Theo and his girlfriend from E-24, Tobin needed to have the trailer cleaned out. Theo was known in the park as a “never sweat,” a lazy slob who didn’t work. His trailer was a disaster.
Tobin hired Mrs. Mytes to clean it out. Unlike some of the other older residents who seemed to be waiting to die, swallowing prescription pills and nodding off in front of the television, Mrs. Mytes still had plenty of fight left. She and her adult daughter, Meredith, would get into foulmouthed shouting matches first thing in the morning. While driving to or from their jobs, trailer park residents would sometimes spot Mrs. Mytes several miles away from home, pushing a shopping cart brimming over with aluminum cans. She was strong and knew how to work.
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