The factories where Tammy worked—Plant 8, Hubbard, Thomas Road—were shut down. They soon joined the landscape of broken windows, weedy asphalt, and empty parking lots that stretched across the Mahoning Valley. The restaurants and bars frequented by Tammy and her coworkers lost most of their business.
Delphi was hailed as a model of cost cutting through bankruptcy.
After paying taxes on her buyout money in 2007, Tammy had eighty-two thousand dollars left. She spent part of it helping her mother and kids, and she put part of it into a CD that earned 3 percent. But in 2007 she hadn’t yet been hired by MVOC, and she was thinking again about leaving Youngstown. She wanted to make a little extra on the rest of the money in order to position herself to leave, and to receive regular payments because she was in school. She had a relative by marriage who was a real estate agent in the area, and who had helped Tammy and Barry finance their house on the south side. He admired Tammy, called her a hustler—someone who knew how to survive and didn’t get too down—and he was always asking her to come work for him (he also had a lawn care business, a day care center, and a nonprofit that helped people coming out of prison). Sometimes he even called her “daughter.” He offered to invest her money in real estate. He wrote out a contract promising a 10 percent annual return in monthly payments, and Tammy gave him her last forty-eight thousand dollars from the buyout.
The first year went great. The checks came every month and were enough to cover her house and car payments. When the second year began in mid-2008, with the housing market sinking, he asked her to turn the money over for another year and negotiated the rate down to 8 percent. By that Christmas he was paying her only 5 percent, and the payments were arriving late. In 2009 they stopped coming.
Tammy’s mother’s health was declining, and Tammy wanted to get her out of a nursing home into a decent house. She asked the relative to bid fifteen thousand dollars of her investment on a house that was probably worth twice that. She won the bid, but when he couldn’t come up with the five-thousand-dollar down payment, she knew something was really wrong. When she demanded her money back, he said that he didn’t have it. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m going to get it together. I’m trying not to file bankruptcy, because if I do ain’t nobody going to get paid. I’m going to rebound and then you’ll get your money.”
She knew that he was trying. Without the payments she couldn’t keep up on her house in Liberty and the bank was getting ready to foreclose, and somehow he gave her the twelve hundred dollars she needed to get a loan modification. But he still couldn’t come up with the money that she had invested with him, and she began to think that he had been running a Ponzi scheme, using her money to pay other people, and he’d been caught by the collapse of the market, just like Madoff at the very same time. She began to hear stories about other people, some out in California, who had invested with him and never got their money back, and other stories that he had transferred mortgages to relatives using his broker’s license and refinanced without letting them know. His employees weren’t getting paid. She confronted him and told him that she was thinking of going to the police. The relative, who was a deacon in his church, said, “That is not what Christians do to each other.”
She was trying to be a good Christian and do the right thing. Anyway, what would a police report get her? She didn’t turn him in, and she told few people in the family. Finally, he wrote her a check for part of what he owed her. When she took it to a check cashing place, it bounced. That’s when he stopped taking her calls and disappeared. She never heard from him again, and never saw her money again—money that she had counted on for the lean years after Delphi, then her retirement. She was furious with herself. She should have put the money in a safe CD with a low return, maybe set aside part of it to experiment with the stock market. “You’re so damn stupid,” she railed, “I don’t know why you even did that. Why did you ever trust him?” She was angrier at herself than at him, and in spite of everything she felt a little sorry for him, because he was ruined.
In the midst of this fiasco, Tammy lost her parents. Throughout her life, her father had often been cutting and combative, and ever since her teens she had defied him, but toward the end she saw a buried softness in her father that allowed her to believe that he loved her. In September 2009 he died in his sleep of liver cancer, after leaving the hospital and going home to be with his wife and their children and enjoy a meal of barbecue, watermelon, grapes, and a beer.
But for Vickie it was different. Her health had been bad for years, with the disintegration of her bones, hepatitis C, and the ravaging effects of heroin. She was depressed, fading mentally, and Tammy was trying to figure out a way to bring her home and care for her. Over Thanksgiving, Vickie was hospitalized at St. Elizabeth’s, where Tammy visited her. But Tammy had surgery scheduled for December 2, with a month of recovery afterward. She didn’t feel that she could take time off from organizing the way she had done at Packard if someone covered for her. She spent the days before her operation trying to catch up on work, and though they talked on the phone three times, she wasn’t able to go see her mother again. While Tammy was in the hospital, her mother, without telling her, asked for her own treatment to be stopped. Tammy was released from the hospital on December 4 and went home. Two days later, her mother was taken to the emergency room with congestive heart failure, and she died at the age of sixty-one. “She was alone,” Tammy said. “I couldn’t make it to the hospital in time. I promised her I’d be there with her. My mother needed me and I couldn’t be there for her.” This thought would not leave Tammy alone.
They still had so much living to do. But Vickie had been ready to go for a long time, even though she knew that Tammy wouldn’t let her. And after she was gone, Tammy missed climbing into bed beside her, sitting next to her without saying anything, her hug, her hand stroking Tammy’s hair, a comfort no one could replace, because in spite of everything it was her mother.
For a long time afterward, Tammy questioned herself, and her work, which had kept her from seeing her mother at the end, and God, who had filled her life with so much struggle and taken away so many things that she loved—everything except her children.
TAMPA
At the bottom of Tampa, where the peninsula died into the bay, South Dale Mabry Highway ended at the front gate of MacDill Air Force Base, the home of United States Central Command. World-famous four-star generals—Tommy Franks, John Abizaid, David Petraeus—drew up war plans for Afghanistan and Iraq there, commanded hundreds of thousands of troops in battle, took off in their personal jets to fly around their Area of Responsibility, committed huge strategic errors, and belatedly tried to correct them. They enjoyed the lavish hospitality of Tampa society hostesses while shaping U.S. foreign policy and the fate of nations across the most volatile region of the globe, from Egypt to Pakistan, with all the authority of Roman proconsuls. After the White House and the Pentagon, no parcel of America exercised more power during the War on Terror than MacDill. And four blocks away lived the Hartzells.
The Hartzells were Danny and Ronale, their kids Brent and Danielle, Danny’s younger brother Dennis, and four cats. They lived on South Dale Mabry Highway, across from the MacDill Motel and Bay Check Cashing, in a two-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a complex where the neighbors dealt drugs and got mad if someone looked at them wrong. The Hartzells regularly watched HGTV, which was devoted to real estate, but they were too poor to flip houses, lose them in foreclosure, or end up as clients of Matt Weidner. They didn’t even have a car, which left them at the mercy of Hillsborough Area Regional Transit buses. Danny never made more than twenty thousand a year, and the only time they had spare money was at tax time—one year they spent their Earned Income Tax Credit on a computer, the next on a black vinyl armchair and sofa, then on a cheap flat-screen TV. They were estranged from their surviving relatives, most of whom were heavy drinkers. They had few friends, and no church (though they were Christian) or union (though they were working c
lass) or block association (though they wished the area was safe enough for the kids to go trick-or-treating). They hardly gave a thought to politics. What they had was one another.
In 2008, when the recession hit Tampa, Danny was laid off from his ten-dollar-an-hour job at a small factory near the base called Master Packaging, which made plastic snack food bags. The worst thing about it was that his supervisor, who had gone to high school with Danny, made someone else give him the news. Danny brought the pink slip home and showed it to Ronale, and she said, “What are we going to do now?” That was in March. Danny spent the rest of the year searching for a job. He applied at Home Depot, Sam’s Club, Publix, and sixty other places, taking long bus rides to interviews, but he was always the twenty-fifth applicant for one opening. He was in his late thirties, short, with a pot belly on him, a wispy goatee, and a nearly hairless head under his Steelers cap. He was missing a bunch of teeth and spoke in a loud hoarse voice because of deafness in one ear. He classified himself as a “blue-collar-type guy,” not a “behind-the-counter-take-your-money-can-I-help-you-find-your-dress-size-type guy,” but the only jobs left were in retail, and he lacked the right look and manner.
One evening just after Christmas, the family sat around their cramped living room, a teen game show on TV, the kids holding hands on the gray carpet, which had seen better days. Brent, who was twelve and small for his age, and Danielle, who was nine, still believed in Santa, had no trouble doing so because they didn’t see how their parents could afford presents. In fact, Danny and Ronale had depended on charity for Christmas this year. Danny didn’t like having to do that—other people out there were in worse shape than they were—and he hated not being able to put Danielle in dance class or Brent in soccer. He thanked God every day for Ronale, but, to be honest, he was actually starting to lose heart. “Why do all these people out there view me as such a bad person? They don’t know me, they don’t know my work history, they won’t give me a chance. I start to wonder, what’s wrong with me? You work for what you have, that’s all anyone can do, and then all of a sudden the economy gets so bad and instead of thirty people looking for work there’s three thousand.”
And yet somehow Danny blamed himself. He had dropped out of high school his senior year and now regretted it deeply, and he felt that the world was singling him out for some terrible payback, that this trouble must have been his fault, that the failure was his alone and he had no right to anyone’s help. From the bankers on Wall Street to the homeowners in Weidner’s office, no one else seemed to take this view of themselves.
Danny came from outside Pittsburgh. His father, an alcoholic, had been a maintenance man for the railroad, then the power company, then a local college, before moving the family to Tampa when Danny was around twelve and the steel mills were closing in the early eighties. He drank even harder in Florida. He taught Danny to drive defensively and love the Steelers, but otherwise no one kept after Danny to brush his teeth or do much of anything else.
Ronale had it far worse. She was born in Tampa. Both her parents were drunks, her mother a spiteful woman with an evil look in her eyes. They split up when Ronale was seven, and she was dragged around Florida and North Carolina by her mom (who drank rubbing alcohol if she couldn’t find booze and shacked up with any man who would have her), sometimes living in their car, missing a lot of school, stealing Reese’s cups because her mother was too strung out and selfish to buy her food if Ronale said, “Mommy, I’m hungry.” From an early age the idea stuck in Ronale’s head that she’d never be that type of parent.
When Danny was in tenth grade and Ronale in ninth, they lived next door to each other in South Tampa, near the base. Danny’s older brother, Doug, went after Ronale, and out of sheer jealousy Danny would barge into the room whenever they started to make out. He’d walk past Ronale on the sidewalk, look her in the eye, and say “Bitch,” and she’d answer “You’re such an asshole,” and when they found out that they liked talking to each other it was the beginning of lifelong love. Ronale dropped out of high school earlier than Danny—she was sick of being bullied. “Quite a few people literally wanted to kill me,” Ronale said. “Backed into corners and no one to help me and stuff, and everything.” She went to work in a Laundromat, and he got a job as a grinder at a welding shop in St. Petersburg. When she became pregnant with Brent at twenty-two, in 1995, they moved into a trailer together. In 1999, with Danielle on the way, they married.
Working against the Hartzells as they set out in life was their nearly complete lack of education or money or family or support of any kind, plus more than their share of health problems: Danny’s deafness and tooth decay, Ronale’s tooth decay, obesity, and diabetes, Brent’s ADHD and growth hormone problem, Danielle’s hearing disability and anxiety. Working in their favor: Danny had a trade, the parents didn’t drink or do drugs, the kids were respectful, the family would stay together no matter what, they all loved one another. By conventional morality, the plus side should have kept them afloat, and at another time, in another place, maybe it would have.
The first disaster came in 2004. It was the usual downward spiral of circumstances and mistakes. First, the welding shop moved up the coast to New Port Richey, and Danny couldn’t afford to move with it, so he lost his job. The Hartzells were renting a trailer in St. Pete, Danny doing odd jobs for the owner with the idea that they’d buy it as soon as they got their Earned Income Tax Credit. But the owner never paid Danny, and then he told the Hartzells to leave, claiming Danny owed him back rent. One night, Danny’s father and brother Doug got drunk and decided to trash the trailer on his behalf. When the police were called, they arrested Danny at the motel where the Hartzells had checked in, and Danny spent the worst night of his life on a concrete slab in a jail cell with a hundred other guys. The next day the judge took a look at his spotless record and released him on his own recognizance, but now the family had nowhere to live.
They roamed around St. Pete for a month, sleeping in the car. Ronale stocked up on meal boxes at the food pantry, and when the kids got sunburned she rubbed them down with vinegar to speed up the healing. Brent was bored without his video games, and Danielle was afraid of night noises. Later, she remembered sitting in the car one night by the beach beneath the Gandy Bridge. “There were a bunch of food boxes in front of me, and I would look at the food boxes and then I would look out at the trail of sand up to the ocean.” In the mornings, Danny and Ronale put the kids on the school bus as if nothing had happened.
They managed to move back to Tampa, found the apartment on South Dale Mabry Highway for $725 a month, and Danny was hired at Master Packaging. For the next four years things stabilized. Danny’s younger brother Dennis slept on their living room sofa and chipped in his pay from a part-time job retrieving shopping carts at Wal-Mart. With Danny’s wages, Danielle’s SSI, and food stamps, it was enough to keep their heads above water. Then the pink slip came, and one thing led to another.
In the spring of 2009, Danielle was diagnosed with osteosarcoma—bone cancer in her left leg. For the next year and a half, the Hartzells’ lives were absorbed in hospitals and tests and surgeries and chemotherapy. Almost all the care was charitable. With a cash gift from a complete stranger they bought a 2003 Chevy Cavalier to drive to appointments. Danny stopped the job hunt to give his daughter his complete attention, and Ronale, who was always complaining about wrongs done by teachers, employers, landlords, and neighbors, loved Danielle’s doctors and joined cancer parent groups, the first time in her life she felt part of a community. The apartment filled with framed inspirations:
WHAT CANCER CANNOT DO
It cannot cripple love
It cannot shatter hope
It cannot quench the spirit
It cannot destroy confidence
It cannot shut out memories
A prosthesis that would require regular four-millimeter adjustments as she grew was sewn inside the length of Danielle’s skinny little leg. She went a whole year cancer free. They thanked God.
Otherwise, nothing changed for the Hartzells.
* * *
In the late spring of 2011, Danny Hartzell had a dream: he would move the family to Georgia.
He’d lived in Tampa ever since he was twelve and now he felt trapped. The walls of the apartment were getting smaller and smaller, especially after the couple next door was arrested for neglecting their two small children, leaving their apartment filthy, with fast-food containers sitting around, and the roaches migrated through the wall to the Hartzells’ place. They were the small, infesting kind—they left a black trail of larvae where the living room wall met the ceiling, they scurried over the vinyl furniture, got into the bathroom sink and the kitchen Tupperware, the air-conditioning ducts blowing the horrible smell of their poo throughout the apartment. Because of the roaches, Ronale stopped making pasta and instead bought frozen foods at Wal-Mart, pizzas, Velveeta Cheesy Skillets, six Salisbury steaks for $2.28, which was cheaper than cooking anyway—it cost less to buy a cake than make one from scratch—or else she boiled ramen noodles, which Danny called one of man’s greatest inventions. There was nothing they could do about the roaches short of having the place bombed, which would mean paying for three nights at a motel. The roaches embarrassed Danny and Ronale, who prided themselves on keeping the place clean. Meanwhile, the new family that moved in next door liked to scream and play loud music at one in the morning. One day, the upstairs neighbors flushed their toilet and opened a hole in the plaster ceiling over the Hartzells’ toilet while Ronale was in the bathroom. The super never fixed it.
For a while Danny had a part-time job at Target, unloading and shelving stock in the late-night hours before the store opened, making $8.50 an hour. At first he got thirty or forty hours a week, just enough to get by, but after the holidays the store cut back on his hours, and by spring he was averaging ten hours a week, for a paycheck of $140 every two weeks after taxes, while Target hired three new people in his department at lower pay. He couldn’t help thinking he’d make more if he got laid off and started collecting unemployment, not to mention seeing their food stamps double. One day Danny overheard his managers talking about the store’s sales figures from the day before, which were down to $52,000. He did a quick calculation. “Almost four hundred grand a week, and they can’t afford to pay me? It’s just greed.”
The Unwinding Page 39