—
When Larraine spent money or food stamps on nonessentials, it baffled and frustrated people around her, including her niece, Sammy, Susan and Lane’s daughter.5 “My aunt Larraine is one of those people who will see some two-hundred-dollar beauty cream that removes her wrinkles and will go and buy it instead of paying the rent,” said Sammy, a hairstylist with her own shop in Cudahy. “I don’t know why she just doesn’t stick to a budget.” Pastor Daryl felt the same way, saying that Larraine was careless with her money because she operated under a “poverty mentality.”
To Sammy, Pastor Daryl, and others, Larraine was poor because she threw money away. But the reverse was more true. Larraine threw money away because she was poor.
Before she was evicted, Larraine had $164 left over after paying the rent. She could have put some of that away, shunning cable and Walmart. If Larraine somehow managed to save $50 a month, nearly one-third of her after-rent income, by the end of the year she would have $600 to show for it—enough to cover a single month’s rent. And that would have come at considerable sacrifice, since she would sometimes have had to forgo things like hot water and clothes. Larraine could have at least saved what she spent on cable. But to an older woman who lived in a trailer park isolated from the rest of the city, who had no car, who didn’t know how to use the Internet, who only sometimes had a phone, who no longer worked, and who sometimes was seized with fibromyalgia attacks and cluster migraines—cable was a valued friend.
People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to. Instead, they tried to survive in color, to season the suffering with pleasure. They would get a little high or have a drink or do a bit of gambling or acquire a television. They might buy lobster on food stamps.6
If Larraine spent her money unwisely, it was not because her benefits left her with so much but because they left her with so little. She paid the price for her lobster dinner. She had to eat pantry food the rest of the month. Some days, she simply went hungry. It was worth it. “I’m satisfied with what I had,” she said. “And I’m willing to eat noodles for the rest of the month because of it.”
Larraine learned a long time ago not to apologize for her existence. “People will begrudge you for anything,” she said. She didn’t care that the checkout clerk looked at her funny. She got the same looks when she bought the $14 tart balsamic vinegar or ribs or on-sale steak or chicken. Larraine loved to cook. “I have a right to live, and I have a right to live like I want to live,” she said. “People don’t realize that even poor people get tired of the same old taste. Like, I literally hate hot dogs, but I was brought up on them. So you think, ‘When I get older, I will have steak.’ So now I’m older. And I do.”
—
The next month was August, and Larraine used some of her food stamps to buy instant mashed potatoes, ham, and creamed corn for a hard-luck family that had moved into the trailer next to Beaker’s. The family of six had recently lost many of their things in an eviction and were sleeping on the floor. Once dinner was ready, Larraine led a prayer. “Dear God in Heaven, thank you so much for this food. And thanks for all the people in my life who have blessed me. Thank you for Jayme. And thank you for my brother, Beaker. Even though he makes me so angry sometimes, I still love him, Lord. Please take care of my brother. Amen.”
Two days later, someone knocked on the door. It was a tall white man with a mustache and a tucked-in collared shirt. He was holding a bright-yellow piece of paper.
“Good morning. We are going to have to shut your gas off this morning,” he said.
Larraine took the paper. “Oh, okay,” she said sheepishly.
“There’s payment information on the back there. Have a nice day.” The man went behind the trailer with his toolbox.
“So Uncle Beaker hasn’t been paying the gas?” Jayme asked, working her mascara brush.
“I guess not,” Larraine said, looking down at the yellow paper reporting a debt of $2,748.60.
“When do you finally grow up and start paying your bills? Uncle Beaker needs to grow up and stop living like a child. You too, Mom. You have a real problem with living above your means. You need to really, just, not do that.”
Larraine looked at her daughter. “I don’t know when you got so cute,” she said.
As fall bled into winter, warmth began seeping out of the trailer. The thin walls and countertops and water and silverware in the drawer grew cold. Larraine and Beaker burrowed under blankets, doubled up on sweaters, and plugged in two small space heaters. They both slept more to keep warm. If Larraine fell asleep on the couch, Beaker would put an extra blanket over her. Early morning was the worst. Beaker would put on his heavy coat, but Larraine’s winter clothes were sitting in Eagle Moving’s bonded storage facility. They were not the only tenants in the trailer park who couldn’t afford to reinstate their gas before the first snow fell. As for Tobin, he hated the snow. He traveled to warmer climates during the winter.
—
One fall day, Beaker told Larraine he was moving to a federally subsidized assisted-living facility for the elderly and disabled. The following morning, he did. This caught Larraine by surprise. They had never really learned to talk to each other.
After Beaker left, Larraine knew she had to come out of hiding and make new arrangements, if not with Tobin, then at least with the new management company. She worked up the courage and walked down to the office in sweatpants and a stained black fleece.
“I need to get emergency assistance as soon as possible,” Larraine told the college kid who had replaced Lenny. “I’m so cold….The heat. All I know is I need the heat on.”
“Oh my goodness,” the college kid said without looking up. He was nonplussed. He was learning. The college kid dialed the number to Bieck Management and put Larraine on the phone with Geraldine, the office manager. Geraldine told Larraine that Beaker owed almost $1,000 in back rent. The gas bill was not the only one he hadn’t paid. Larraine sat in the office chair, resting her forehead on her palm. “Please, Geraldine, I need your help. I need your understanding.” After a few more minutes, Larraine hung up the phone. Her best hope of staying, she believed, was to convince Beaker to pay his back rent.
Beaker’s new place was in the Woods Apartments, on College Avenue and Thirty-Fifth Street, across the street from Mud Lake. It was white-wall clean and new-smelling and warm. Larraine asked Beaker to settle his debt with Bieck. He said he could not pay two rents. Larraine said she couldn’t pay last month’s rent because her money had already gone to storage. At this point, Larraine had paid Eagle Moving $1,000.7 Ruben had room to store Larraine’s things, and Lane had a truck. But both said no when Larraine asked them for help.
“Well, I hope you go live with your storage because that’s all—”
Beaker stopped himself. Larraine looked pitiful. She had heavy bags under her eyes, and her hair was a mess. It had been days since she last showered. She refused to ask Lane and Susan to use theirs. Beaker knew his trailer might just as well have been an abandoned shed: the heat, hot water, phone, and cable had been cut off. A helpless, dull silence hung between brother and sister.
Then Beaker said, “Take one of those sweaters.”
—
Larraine had six days to be out of Beaker’s trailer. Beaker had written Bieck Management a letter that read, “I’m moving and will be leaving my trailer to Bieck Management for the money I owe them. I’ll be out…and so will my sister.” Larraine learned about Beaker’s betrayal—that’s what it felt like, anyway—when one of Bieck’s property managers got her on the office phone three days after she had visited her brother in the Woods Apartments. The manager told Larraine to be out by the first of the month. She had pl
eaded, “Please, I have no place to go,” and “I’m not this bad person,” but in the end she just said, “I see. I see. Thank you for your time, and God bless you.” Larraine sat down. “I don’t know what to do or where to go anymore,” she said. “I have no idea.”
Larraine began looking for a new place to live in the streets surrounding her church. It was the centerpiece of her life; it might as well be the centerpiece of her housing search too. She shuffled gingerly along the icy sidewalks, calling landlords. Then she decided to stop by the housing projects in South Milwaukee, where she grew up. The woman in the office told Larraine they were full and not accepting applications, but she gave Larraine the address to HUD’s offices.
The Milwaukee branch of the Department of Housing and Urban Development was located downtown, on a top floor of The Blue, a grand modern tower with a mirrored façade interspersed with rows of candy-blue glass. Larraine’s wet shoes squeaked on the lobby’s terrazzo floors. The HUD receptionist handed Larraine the Multifamily Housing Inventory Report, thirteen legal-size pages listing all federally assisted rental housing in the metropolitan area. “I have no idea where half of these places are,” Larraine muttered at the long list of addresses and phone numbers. It hardly mattered, since most of the properties were reserved for the physically disabled or elderly. In fact, for years Larraine had assumed that most public housing was exclusively for senior citizens. “And even they, a lot of them, couldn’t get low-income housing,” she remembered. “So I thought, if they can’t, neither can I.” It was why Larraine had never before thought to apply for public housing.
Politicians had learned that their constituents hated the idea of senior housing a lot less than public housing for poor families. Grandma and Grandpa made for a much more sympathetic case, and elderly housing provided adult children with an alternative to nursing homes. When public housing construction for low-income households ceased, it continued for the aged; and high-rises originally built for families were converted for elderly use.8
Larraine found two addresses on HUD’s Housing Inventory that accepted applications for people who were neither elderly nor handicapped and that were located on the far South Side of the city. Larraine did not consider the near South Side to be an option, let alone the North Side. The application asked if she had ever been evicted. Larraine circled yes and wrote: “I had some complications with the landlord, and he evicted me.”
—
On the day Larraine had to be out of Beaker’s trailer, ice spread over the city. An early December snow had fallen, melted, and, when the temperature dropped, froze. Larraine stood in her kitchen listening to the sawing sounds of people scraping their car windows and chipping the ice from their doors. There was a pile of trash on the floor, mainly Beaker’s empty Maverick cigarette boxes and chocolate-milk bottles, and dirty dishes were piled in the kitchen sink. The cold had immobilized Larraine under blankets on the couch—the cold and the question of what to do next. Little had been cleaned since winter had arrived. “I don’t care anymore,” she said, swallowing pain relievers and antidepressants.
Larraine had applied to or called on forty apartments. She had had no luck on the private market, and her applications to public housing were still being processed. Larraine didn’t know where she was going to go. She was considering approaching Thomas, a man her age who lived alone in the trailer park, or Ms. Betty, whom Larraine knew only as an “old lady who lives across the road.” Larraine packed up her remaining things. Her plan was to pay Public Storage $50 to keep them.
Late in the day, Larraine knocked on Ms. Betty’s door. She was a small white woman with crystal eyes and silvering blond hair falling past her shoulders in double braids. Ms. Betty looked younger when seated and enjoying a slow cigarette, but she walked like an old woman, hunched with one arm held close. What the women knew of each other came from passing hellos and rumors. But when Larraine asked Betty if she could stay with her, Betty said yes.
“Sure you can stay with me, until after the winter.” Ms. Betty raised an eyebrow. “I know you’re not as big of a problem as they say you are.”
Larraine smiled. “I’ll be able to take a shower and everything,” she said.
Betty’s trailer might have been the most cluttered in the whole park. There was room for Larraine but little else. Ms. Betty had piled her tables with magazines and old mail and canned food and bottles of soy sauce and candy. In the living room, a tree bent toward the window, shedding its leaves on the floor, and keepsakes were clustered together on shelves next to a picture of Jesus. There was an order to the mess. The bathroom drawers bore a resemblance to the nuts-and-bolts aisle at the hardware store, with all the travel-sized tubes of toothpaste and bobby pins and hair ties and nail clippers grouped together in their own respective compartments. In the kitchen, Betty had hung a sign: SELF-CONTROL IS DEFINED AS REFRAINING FROM CHOKING THE SHIT OUT OF SOMEONE WHO IS DESPERATELY DESERVING OF IT. Larraine agreed to pay Betty $100 a month.
A few days after moving in with Ms. Betty, Larraine heard back on her applications to public housing in the form of two rejection letters. Each letter listed a pair of reasons Larraine’s applications were turned away: “Collections from the State of Wisconsin” and “Eviction History.”
Larraine understood “Eviction History,” but not “Collections from the State of Wisconsin.” When she called to find out more, she was told she owed property taxes. “Property!” She laughed after getting off the phone. “I’d love to know how I owe property taxes.”9
Betty thought Larraine should appeal. She looked over the top of her large glasses and said, “You have to fight, Larraine. I had to fight for my Medicaid.”
“I don’t have the energy,” Larraine answered. “And I don’t feel like getting rejected again.”10
Betty nodded. She understood.
A few days later found Larraine in an especially religious mood, her church’s Truth Class fresh in her mind.
“When you look at Jesus, what do you see?” Larraine asked Betty.
“A hottie,” Betty replied without missing a beat. A long, unlit cigarette shot out of her lips like a plank from a ship.
“Oh, Betty!” Larraine giggled.
Betty sauntered over and tapped the Jesus picture. “Hottie,” she repeated. “I’ve always liked men with facial hair.”
“Naughty, Betty,” Larraine cooed.
The new friends talked and laughed into the night. On the couch, they fell asleep at the same time.11
19.
LITTLE
The cheapest motel Pam could find charged $50 a night. They checked in and started calling friends and relatives, hoping someone would take them in. Two days passed without any luck, and Pam began to worry. “Everybody we knew weren’t answering our phone because they knew we needed a place to stay,” she said.
Then Ned lost his part-time construction job. He was fired for the two days of work he missed when helping his family move from the trailer park. Job loss could lead to eviction, but the reverse was also true.1 An eviction not only consumed renters’ time, causing them to miss work, it also weighed heavily on their minds, often triggering mistakes on the job. It overwhelmed workers with stress, leading them to act unprofessionally, and commonly resulted in their relocating farther away from their worksite, increasing their likelihood of being late or missing days.2 Ned’s firing wasn’t out of the ordinary, but that was little consolation for Pam. Their money was running out.
Even so, Ned refused to call his family. Typical, thought Pam. Ned called home to brag but rarely to ask. So Pam worked her phone, calling almost everyone she knew and even churches. Nothing. Finally, a friend agreed to take the girls until Pam and Ned got back on their feet. They dropped off the three oldest girls and kept two-year-old Kristin with them. Then Ned’s phone rang around ten p.m. It was Travis, a buddy they used to party with in the trailer park and who had since moved into a nearby apartment complex. Travis offered his couch. Pam breathed a sigh of relief. At least she w
ouldn’t have to bring her new baby back to a cheap motel.
Travis was their first godsend; Dirky was their second. A muscular, white-haired man with a professional-grade mechanic’s shop in his garage, Dirky gave Ned an off-the-books job customizing motorcycles. Ned had met him through a mechanic buddy.
After a month at Travis’s, Pam and Ned sensed he was about done with them. When Kristin got fussy, Travis would tighten his jaw and shut his bedroom door, and not only because he had to be up at four thirty the next morning for work. The last time Travis let someone stay with him, it was his brother and nephew, and those two drunks got him evicted. Ned would tell Pam to hush her kid, and Pam would tell him that she was his goddamn kid too.
One morning, they drove to Dirky’s garage, Kristin and her Care Bear buckled up in the backseat. Pam was due in nine days; they were no closer to a new home than they were the day Tobin kicked them out of the trailer park; they might have to live on the near South Side, with the Mexicans; Ned was out of cigarettes because Pam was smoking more to offset stress and hunger pains; Kristin was throwing a fit because her lovey teddy got thrown in storage after the eviction; Dirky wanted Ned to do a transmission, which would probably mean working deep into the night; and he hated that his family had to rely on Travis. When he turned toward the booming music and saw a car with two young black men in the lane next to him, he hated them too. “Fucking niggers,” Ned bit.
A few minutes later, Ned spotted a rent sign in white, working-class West Allis and told Pam to write down the phone number. She missed it.
“I told you,” Ned said. “I told you the fucking number, and you just can’t write it down?”
“Not when you say it so fast!”
“I’m not the one with the fucking problem!”
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