When Target first hired Danny, they showed him a video on the evils of unions and told him that if anyone approached him about joining one, he should report it to management. Danny had never thought much about unions, but he wondered what was so wrong with them. One night he and Ronale watched a show on the History Channel that talked about the Battle of Blair Mountain, a coal strike back in the 1920s. What got Danny was the fact that miners from the rest of West Virginia went down to help the ones in the southern part of the state who were trying to join the union, and a lot of them got killed by hired thugs of the coal company. That kind of thing didn’t happen anymore. People were too scared to join a union, and the corporations had too much money, they’d just threaten to sue. These days it was hard to get people to agree to do anything together. He knew that it wasn’t any better for poor people back in the day. He could even remember being a boy in Pennsylvania and huddling around the kitchen stove for heat, eating government beans and peanut butter out of black-and-white cans. But what had changed since then was people. In the world today it was dog eat dog, every man for himself.
On the morning that Target told Danny to come in when Danielle had a doctor’s appointment, he was a no-call no-show, something he’d never done before, which pretty much invited them to fire him, and they did. He applied for unemployment benefits. He was right back where he started.
The Hartzells were sick of Florida. Five out of ten people were jerks, Ronale said. Neither Danny nor Ronale had voted in the last election, but they hated the new governor, Rick Scott, who was cutting everything poor people needed, including schools. The Hartzells wondered why Americans like them were sinking while new immigrants, like the Indians right across Dale Mabry, were able to buy convenience stores. Danny had heard that their first five years in America were tax-free. He wasn’t a racist, but if that was true, it was unfair.
When Danielle was sick, Ronale had gotten on Facebook, and through her page Danny had reconnected with a childhood friend from Tampa. The friend was operating a forklift up in Georgia, in a small town called Pendergrass. The Hartzells drove up to spend one July 4 weekend with him and his daughter, and they loved the trees, the fishing, being able to walk outside the friend’s door and not see another house. The schools up there sounded good, and housing cost less, and Ronale decided that only two out of ten people were jerks. There was supposed to be plenty of jobs. Even Wal-Mart was nicer in Georgia—Ronale heard they let people off over July 4 weekend. If the Hartzells ever wanted to move to Georgia, the friend invited them to stay with him until they found their feet.
And suddenly, at the beginning of June, they decided to do it. They wanted a fresh start. Their lease was up at the end of the month, but moving to another apartment in Tampa that didn’t have roaches would only change their place, not their situation. “It’s kind of like I’ve fallen in that non-climbable-out-of rut,” Danny said. “Maybe it’s partly me—maybe I stopped trying. I was struggling for so long I got tired and threw my hands up in the air. Maybe some people are better climbers. My whole thought process is, if you can’t climb out, why not move?”
Danny’s dream was exciting and scary. The Hartzells clung to it like a ladder at the bottom of a well. Danny didn’t know if he was doing the right thing for his family, but not doing it seemed worse. Ronale was tired of reaching the end of the month with twenty-nine dollars and having to wait for Danielle’s next SSI check to arrive so she could buy Diet Pepsi or Dr. Pepper. “Some people are afraid, but sometimes you’ve got to make that big leap,” she said. “Keep your faith and say your prayers.” She wouldn’t miss a thing in Florida other than Disney World and Danielle’s doctors. Danny didn’t have a job lined up, but Wal-Mart promised a spot at a local store in Georgia for Dennis, who was coming with them, and the kids were happy about going somewhere new. There was hardly anyone to say goodbye to.
On the last day of June, the day before their move, Danny and Ronale got new teeth. They drove with the kids to a walk-in dental clinic next door to a crack house in a bad neighborhood of East Tampa. Each of them had had infected gums and residual teeth that needed pulling, which took weeks, so that by the time they were ready to be fitted with new sets, they were completely toothless. “It’s going to be strange,” Danny said in the waiting room. “Daddy’s going to eat a Dorito tomorrow. I haven’t ate a Dorito in about eight years.” He went into the dentist’s office and emerged after half an hour flashing a smile of brilliantly white, perfectly even teeth, mostly paid for by Medicaid. The teeth made him look younger and less poor. Danielle sat in his lap and coached her father: “Say ‘them.’ ‘Zebra.’ ‘Tycoon.’ ‘Dolphin.’ ‘Wal-Mart.’” Danny began to like the feel of his dentures. “I could get a girlfriend with these,” he said, twitching his eyebrows suggestively.
Ronale’s teeth took an hour to be fitted. Voices were raised in the office, and she came out furious. “The upper one hurts my gum!” she cried.
The dentist, a Hispanic woman, patiently explained that Ronale’s mouth was still sore from the extractions. For a few days she should take the dentures out every fifteen minutes and rinse them in warm salt water. “If you could come back next week I would be very happy to make an adjustment.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Ronale said. “This is pain. I’m sorry if your other customers don’t mind pain, I’m not perfect. It’s like a toothpick going into my gum.”
“But it was too loose,” the dentist said. “It was going to fall out.”
“I want to go. I’m tired of being treated like I’m stupid.”
On the drive home Ronale went on about the pain and the way the dentures pushed her lips out so that she looked like a gorilla. Danny’s fit him better. “Lucky you,” she said, “yours don’t hurt. With mine it hurts to talk.”
“Then leave ’em in,” Danny cracked.
“You jerk.”
Soon the kids were playing the word game with their mother, getting her to pronounce “zebra” and “Wal-Mart.” By the time they got back to the apartment, the car was full of laughter, Ronale joining the rest of the family between complaints. At home she took her teeth out and never wore them again. Out of sympathy or inertia, Danny did the same.
The next morning, July 1, Danny rented a sixteen-foot Budget truck with all the money he could scrape together and backed it up to the apartment door. He and Dennis spent the day loading their stuff. The TV, computer, and sofa. Boxes of dried food. The kids’ bikes. Danielle’s Hannah Montana school supplies. Danny and Brent’s large video game collection (Ronale was sick of seeing the back of her husband’s head when he disappeared into World of Warcraft for ten hours at a stretch). They tried to get rid of everything that was infested, including the black vinyl armchair, but Danny was resigned to some roaches making the trip to Georgia with them.
In the middle of the day, an official letter came from Tallahassee: the unemployment compensation board’s appeals referee determined that Danny had been terminated by Target for cause, and his benefits claim was rejected. “I guess it’s just all water under the bridge at this point anyway,” he said, putting aside the letter. “Being that we’re going up there to stake a new claim. Right, Brent? I really think things will be better up there. Everything will be fresh and new. I think this is the right thing to do. Things aren’t going to get any better for us here.”
To escape traffic and heat, they waited most of the day to leave: Danny, Brent, and one cat in the rental truck, Dennis, Ronale, Danielle, and the other three cats in the Cavalier. By sunset the Hartzells had left Tampa behind.
* * *
They lasted a little over a month in Georgia.
Danny’s friend had a new girlfriend, and she didn’t want the Hartzells around. He was a surly host, demanding reimbursement for movie tickets, dropping broad hints that they should move out as fast as possible, treating them as inferiors, even making fun of Ronale’s weight, which greatly offended Danny. One day, the kids went for a walk in the woods and Brent came back with tic
ks. The next day, Dennis disturbed a hornet’s nest in the yard and was stung half a dozen times. They moved into the first trailer they could find, off a busy highway. The A/C didn’t work, but the kids were afraid of the stinging velvet ants, so they stayed inside the stifling trailer day and night. The good news was that Danny found a welding job, working on tractor trailers with a crew of Mexicans for $12.50 an hour, but on his first day he caught a falling piece of steel and aggravated an old back injury. The next day he could hardly get out of bed. After years of unemployment and retail he wasn’t in shape for heavy work. Brent was doing fine—he could be anywhere as long as he had his family and video games—but Danielle missed her friends, and her parents belatedly realized that the regular eight-hour trips back to the hospital in Tampa for adjustments to her prosthesis were going to be arduous and expensive. In rural Georgia every drive was long—Dennis’s new Wal-Mart was miles from the trailer, the milk began to spoil before Ronale could get it back from the store, and they were eating up all their money in gas. Worst of all was the isolation. They were no longer speaking to Danny’s friend. In Tampa at least they had the doctors, the support group. Here they had no one.
By early August they were done. Returning to Tampa was less a decision than a collapse. A benefactor from the hospital found them a trailer park near Brandon called River Run. Ronale looked at the pictures online and put down a two-week deposit of four hundred dollars. They rented another truck and left Georgia just before midnight on a Friday. When they reached River Run the next morning and saw the holes in their trailer’s walls, the jalousie windows that didn’t open, the door without a lock, the lack of any appliances, they wanted to fall on their knees and cry. There was no way the children could live there. They drove into Tampa and dropped Dennis off at Wal-Mart to plead for his old $7.60-an-hour job back. Then they started looking for a motel. Some homing instinct led the Hartzells back to the area around MacDill, where they took a forty-five-dollar-a-night room at the Crosstown Inn off South Dale Mabry Highway, a few blocks north of their old apartment. There was a toaster oven, and they ate toasted hot dogs one night, little pizzas made out of buns, tomato sauce, and sliced cheese the next. All their stuff was in the rental truck, already a day late on the return, which meant half the deposit. They’d lost the deposit on the trailer in River Run. They had enough money for about a week at the motel. After that, there was a woman they knew from the hospital who might be able to take in Brent and Danielle while Danny, Ronale, and Dennis slept in the car.
Danny was at the end of his rope. He tried to put on a brave face, but he kept berating himself—he hadn’t thought the whole thing through, all the consequences, and now the simplest decision left him paralyzed. One day, Danny and his daughter were sitting in their car in the Wal-Mart parking lot getting ready to go in and buy sandwich meats, bread, and potato salad for dinner at the motel, and Danielle started crying. She was afraid that if they became homeless again the cats would die. Danny always tried to be a strong father in front of his kids, but as he put his arms around Danielle he couldn’t keep from crying with her.
In the middle of the crisis, Danny experienced a painful clarity. He knew two things: everything had to be about Danielle’s health, and everything depended on his finding a job. Shaking off a numbness that had settled over him, he began driving all over Tampa, dropping off applications everywhere that was hiring, fast food or anything, it didn’t matter. After Dennis’s supervisor at Wal-Mart put in a good word for Danny, he was hired to unload and stock produce for eight dollars an hour. With his and Dennis’s jobs at Wal-Mart, he was able to secure a $745-a-month apartment in public housing on South Lois Avenue. It had one more bedroom than their old place on Dale Mabry, which was only a mile away, bringing them full circle, as if God had meant for them to forget about going somewhere else to start over, and instead try to make things work here where they had their feet planted.
PRAIRIE POPULIST: ELIZABETH WARREN
She had two stories to tell. One was about herself, the other was about America.
Elizabeth Herring was a good girl from Oklahoma. Her folks were Dust Bowl survivors who never headed out to the coast, conservative Methodists clinging to respectability. They had three much older sons. By the time Elizabeth arrived in 1949, a business partner had run off with the money that her father had saved up for a car dealership. Mr. Herring had to work as a janitor in an Oklahoma City apartment building to pay his debts and feed his family.
The parents used good English and taught the children not to say ain’t, and Liz made them proud with her grades. Despite her father’s job, she was so convinced the family was securely middle class that it shocked her to learn that her mother hadn’t been married in a nice wedding dress.
When Liz was twelve, her father had a heart attack. He was demoted at work, and between that and the medical bills, the Herrings couldn’t make payments on their air-conditioned bronze Oldsmobile and lost it. In order to hold on to the house, which they had bought in Oklahoma City’s best school district, Mrs. Herring had to take a job answering phones in the mail order department of Sears. On the first day of work, Liz watched as her mother, crying, squeezed herself into an old girdle and black dress.
“Is this dress too tight?” her mother asked.
Liz lied that she looked great.
Her mother railed at having to go back to work, hammered on her husband for failing the family. He withdrew into his humiliation. Liz stayed out of the way—throughout her life she had a habit of refusing to look a debacle in the face—and kept up appearances. She babysat and waitressed, sewed her own clothes, had her father drop her off a block away from Northwest Classen High School so that her classmates wouldn’t notice the condition of their old off-white Studebaker. She joined the Pep Club and won the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow award.
It was the midsixties, but none of the upheavals reached the Herrings. Oklahoma City was still segregated. Liz’s brother Don was fighting in Vietnam and of course they supported him and the war. Liz recited the daily prayer at the start of school. She knew that a girl’s two choices were nursing or teaching, and that she would choose the second.
She made the debate team and turned out to be very good at it. She subscribed to Time and Newsweek, spent a year researching nuclear disarmament and Medicare, and won the statewide competition. Other than a visit to her elementary school by one of its former students, the TV star James Garner, when she was eight, debate was Liz’s first intimation that there could be a life for her in the wider world. At sixteen she won a full-ride scholarship to George Washington University. By then, the Herrings had regained their foothold in the lower middle class.
Within a few years, by the early seventies, she was Elizabeth Warren, married to her high school boyfriend, a NASA engineer; she had a degree in speech pathology from the University of Houston and a baby daughter. A few years after that, following her husband from job to job, she got a law degree at Rutgers and had a son. Her husband wanted her to stay home and raise the kids, but she was restless. In 1978 she got divorced and began teaching law at the University of Houston. She was a registered Republican because the party supported free markets, which she thought were under too much pressure from government.
That same year, 1978, Congress defeated a bill to set up a new consumer protection agency, but it passed another law making it easier to declare bankruptcy. Elizabeth Warren decided to pursue scholarly research on this obscure subject. She wanted to find out why Americans ended up in bankruptcy court. She took the attitude of her unforgiving mother. “I set out to prove they were all a bunch of cheaters,” she would later say. “I was going to expose these people who were taking advantage of the rest of us.”
With two colleagues, Warren spent the 1980s doing her research. And that was when the first story she told, her own story, ran across the second, which went like this:
Starting in 1792 with George Washington, there were financial crises every ten or fifteen years. Panics, bank r
uns, credit freezes, crashes, depressions. People lost their farms, families were wiped out. This went on for more than a hundred years, until the Great Depression, when Oklahoma turned to dust. “We can do better than this,” Americans said. “We don’t need to go back to the boom-and-bust cycle.” The Great Depression produced three regulations:
The FDIC—your bank deposits were safe.
Glass-Steagall—banks couldn’t go crazy with your money.
The SEC—stock markets would be tightly controlled.
For fifty years, these rules kept America from having another financial crisis. Not one panic or meltdown or freeze. They gave Americans security and prosperity. Banking was dull. The country produced the greatest middle class the world had ever seen.
Warren’s life began in those years, and although she had seen her share of rough times as a girl, her parents and brothers were doing all right, and she managed to reach the age of thirty in good financial shape.
Then came the late 1970s, early 1980s. “Regulation? Ahh, it’s a pain, it’s expensive, we don’t need it.” So government started unraveling the regulatory fabric. What happened next? The S&L crisis.
In the late eighties, seven hundred financial institutions went under just as Warren and her colleagues were getting ready to publish their research on bankruptcies. What they had found was just the opposite of what Warren expected, and it upended what she had believed about markets and government. Most Americans in bankruptcy weren’t deadbeats gaming the system. They were middle class, or wanted to be, and had done everything they could to avoid ending up in court. They were working hard to keep up, to afford a house (like Warren’s parents) in a district that still had decent schools so that their children could stay in the middle class or reach it, but the loss of a job, a divorce, an illness had taken their savings. They lived more and more on credit and finally sought refuge in bankruptcy to avoid spending the rest of their lives deep in debt. Most people in bankruptcy weren’t irresponsible—they were too responsible.
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