American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  It happened to Opal. Finding her file in his dusty stack in November 1998, Michael Steinborn quickly sent her an appointment letter. As usual, she didn’t show. One reason he needed to see her was to update her employability plan, since without one her case would fail to meet state standards. When she didn’t appear, he simply went into CARES, wrote a plan, and stuck it in the mail. It showed her aspiring to become a teacher’s assistant. And to get her started, he gave her the assignment he gave everyone. “Opal Caples?” he said to himself. “It’s MaxAcademy for you!” He didn’t know she was addicted to crack. He didn’t know she was pregnant. He didn’t know she was living in a drug house while her mother raised her kids. He had never met her. But with that, his casework was up to standards: Opal’s case was now passing. “CARES is a fantasyland,” he said.

  The state took its computerized snapshot of the caseload on January 29, 1999. A few weeks later, Maximus, like all the Milwaukee agencies, learned that it had passed. Its “national exhibit” was safe. State officials were just as relieved. In scoring the agencies’ performance, they were also scoring their own, and the last thing they wanted was any hint of failure. Thompson was mulling a run for president and pushing W-2 for a prestigious Innovations in American Government Award, which is cosponsored by the Ford Foundation and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He won. In bestowing the $100,000 prize, award administrators called W-2 “one of the nation’s best examples of government performance.” One of the qualities they singled out was its financial efficiency. The other was the quality of its casework.

  For Maximus, there was more good news. By the end of the year, with George Leutermann leading the charge, the company won a prized $100 million contract in New York City, where Jason Turner had gone on to serve as welfare commissioner; just as planned, W-2 proved a springboard to greater things. Six months later, the legislative auditors’ report would appear, and the talk would shift to Melba Moore and clowns. But for a fleeting moment, more fleeting than he knew, Leutermann was on top of the world. “The company hired me because of the quality issue,” he told a local business paper. “There is nothing worse than a pitch man not having substance to back him up.”

  Opal never read her employability plan. She had been missing for six months when Kenny ran into Angie and Jewell and told them where she was. A week later, the two of them knocked on her door. Opal came out, and they sat in the car, where the three women fell into the irreverent banter that marked them as family. Opal didn’t say a word to Jewell about turning her in to her mother. Jewell didn’t say anything to Opal about smoking cocaine. She just listened to Opal’s spirited drug-house stories. “Girl,” Opal said, “you see some tripped-out shit over there.” More visits followed. Then Angie urged Opal to move in, and a few weeks before the baby was due, she finally did. With that, Angie achieved what W-2 had not; she got Opal out of the crack house.

  Opal was miserable. She missed Andrea’s, not just the drugs, but the rush of late-night excitement. There was nothing to do at Angie’s but lie around, and lying around left her depressed. Angie and Marcus argued all the time, and Opal had never much liked Angie’s kids, who didn’t want her around. (“Opal’s a drug addict,” whispered Darrell, Angie’s five-year-old. “I don’t talk to Opal.”) The house smelled like the pit bulls that Marcus was raising, and the dogs had chewed up the top floor, forcing everyone into uncomfortably close quarters. Opal shared a bed with Kesha, who at fourteen felt an excitement about the baby that Opal didn’t share. Kenny resisted Opal’s claims that the baby was his, and he soon stopped coming by. Back in touch with her mother, Opal called one day and said she wanted to give the baby away. Her mother told her she was talking crazy; babies aren’t something you give away. It was another thing to fight about.

  As Angie came in one morning, Opal told her it was time. “Stop playin’,” Angie said. Then Opal dropped her pants to show that her water had burst. “We fittin’ to have a baby!” Angie screamed, jumping up and down. Angie went with Opal to the hospital, and Jewell joined them after work. Bo, Opal’s new man, did not, seeing no reason, he said, to come out and “hear you holler.” It was nearly midnight by the time Brierra Caples arrived, surrounded by her exhausted mother and two crying aunts. “What y’all crying for?” Opal fussed, pretending to be annoyed. But once the swaddled infant was laid on her chest, all that she could think about was what a beautiful daughter she had. The talk of adoption ceased. She told herself what she was soon telling others, it was time to start doing things right. “You ain’t going nowhere, girl,” Opal said in the delivery room. “You stayin’ right here with me.”

  FIFTEEN

  Caseworker XMI28W: Milwaukee, 1998-2000

  Opal’s return from the streets didn’t register on Michael Steinborn, who had mailed off her employability plan a few weeks earlier but still hadn’t met her. With his roster of “job seekers” fifty-something names long, Michael had other problems. One was now standing before him on the coldest day of the year, a candidate for hypothermia.

  “Mi-ike!” she rasped. She stood so close it was all he could do to keep from backing away. She talked with such a loud lisp he thought she might be retarded. She had lost half her teeth, and her skin looked almost plastic. If she weren’t so big in the butt, he would have guessed she was smoking crack. That’s the thing he had noticed about addicts: their butts were the first thing to go. As her sandpaper voice silenced the room, the receptionists stopped to stare. “I need a coat, Mi-ike! You’re my caseworker now, Mi-ike!” Michael felt his loathing for his job surge to new highs. “She’s a mile a minute with the ‘Mikes,’ ” he thought. “My new best friend.”

  Since inheriting her case months earlier, he had known her only as a computer code. She hadn’t answered his appointment letters. (Typical.) She hadn’t complained when he docked her check. (Not typical.) Now here she was in shirtsleeves with the wind-chill factor 24 below. Coats weren’t part of Michael’s job. That’s what all those high-priced “community outreach” specialists were for. But given days to produce, the outreach team produced only excuses. Bunch of nail-filing bitches, he thought. The waste around this place. “They haven’t gotten you a coat?” he said. “Look at me Mi-ike—does it look like I have a coat?” There was a thrift shop down the street. Michael promised her a coat.

  Sometimes when Michael hatched a plan, his body moved faster than his brain. He was halfway out the door when he remembered he only had $4. He climbed back up the stairs, bummed a loan from a coworker, and ran four blocks through the snow. The drifts swallowed his office-worker shoes and buried his toes in ice. The thrift store was out of coats. There was another thrift store two blocks away, and after another frigid sprint Michael was surrounded by coats. There were blue coats and black coats, long coats and short coats; there were so many coats that he was losing his way when a voice came into his head. It was the familiar voice of self-reproach, his You Idiot! voice, and it reminded him that he wasn’t there to make a fashion statement: just pick one, you idiot! He chose a blue ski jacket with a pink collar, nicer than anything he had expected to find. It cost $11. He had $9. His You Idiot! voice returned: Maximus has a $58 million contract, and you—idiot—can’t afford a used coat. He humbled himself before the store clerk, who indulged herself in a show of disdain but let the difference slide.

  It wasn’t exactly a landmark in the annals of social work. But climbing the Maximus stairs, Michael allowed himself a frisson of satisfaction. The nail filers had sat around all week; Michael Steinborn, can-do guy, had gotten something done. She lifted her arms over her head and made a sour face. “Mi-ike! It’s a little snug when I do this, Mi-ike!” The slapstick line came to mind: “Then don’t do this!” But the coat had another problem. The zipper didn’t work.

  Back he went, six blocks through the snow. Back to the sign that warned: “No Exchanges. All Sales Final.” What was he supposed to say? Special exceptions for guys like him, dumb-ass social workers with ice in their shoes? The clerk fo
und him too pathetic to bother with; Michael walked out with a lined denim jacket and a zipper that zipped.

  “Mi-ike!” she said. “The other one was better looking than this!”

  Mi-ike wasn’t going back in the cold. Mi-ike wasn’t wearing a coat himself. He left his at home because his clients’ kids kept wiping their Cheeto hands on it. Mi-ike said he was done talking about coats. “Okay, Mi-ike!” she said. How about a bus pass? Four days later, in shirtsleeves again, she told Michael’s supervisor that no one had been willing to find her a coat.

  A social worker! He couldn’t believe he was a social worker! Six months earlier he was an unemployed jack of the building trades, drunk by noon and wondering how he and his pregnant girlfriend were going to get by. Now he was a “Financial and Employment Planner,” dispensing career advice. He hated the grip of starched collars on his throat. He hated the new-carpet office smell. He hated the officious, self-satisfied talk of some of the senior staff. Above all, he hated feeling responsible for any part of ghetto life, just as he had as a kid collecting his father’s rents. “Son, take it from me,” his father had warned, after another tenant had trashed an apartment and skipped out owing a big debt. “They’ll take and take, and then they’ll spit you out.” (When he wasn’t griping about his tenants, Ted Steinborn was running them on errands and bringing them bags of used clothes.) Growing up in the family business, Michael took pride in never backing down from a fight and had his nose broken three times. The last thing he brought to his profession was a sentimental view of the poor. “I never wanted to be a sucker for a sob story,” he said.

  Yet as a caseworker Michael was surrounded by sob stories, and just like his father he believed some of them. He could carry on, and did, about his clients’ bad-faith betrayals: their games, their evasions, their weak alibis. “You’re lied to on a constant basis,” he said. But sometimes he felt he was lying, too, talking up the promise in all these dead-end jobs. “People will call and say, ‘I got a job!’ I feel like saying, ‘You’re going to have a really fucked-up time living on $6.41 an hour.’ But my job is to bullshit them, to say, ‘Hey, that’s great, it’s a first step.’ ” Clients liked Michael. (“My guardian angel,” one said.) Clients trusted Michael. (“Like a brother,” said another.) Clients had crushes on Michael. To an extent rare among the city’s 150 caseworkers, Michael’s career served as a tutorial on what conscientious casework can (and can’t) achieve.

  Shortly after the coat debacle, Michael’s supervisor caught him with an application for a job cutting plate glass. “Are you leaving us?” she asked. He was, sooner than he knew. The next day, when he got to work he just kept driving—nowhere, somewhere, anywhere but here. Resigning with his gas pedal, he spent thirty minutes feeling freed, and then he felt like a loser. He didn’t get the plate glass job, and a no-call, no-show was a firing offense, the kind of stunt his clients would pull. Michael assumed he had burned his bridges until his buddy Jose, the manager, called and promised to smooth things over. Give it a second chance, he said. You owe yourself. What he didn’t say was that, being shorthanded, Maximus couldn’t afford to lose a caseworker, even one as disenchanted as XMI28W. “You fucker,” Michael said. “You just want my XMI on the caseload.” The next morning, he was back. “I had a new son,” he said. “I had to feed him.”

  The promise of individualized casework—made lavishly in W-2, and echoed in many other programs—is more extraordinary than it sounds. Personalized attention, if it ever existed, was chased from the system two generations ago. Welfare-rights groups called it paternalistic and discriminatory: aid was a right, not a privilege. And budget offices deemed it frightfully expensive, especially as the rolls surged. By the late 1960s, the average caseworker was the equivalent of a postal clerk, a low-paid, rules-oriented cog. In his original proposal for W-2, Jason Turner wrote: “More of the success of Wisconsin Works will ride on the talents . . . [of the] ‘financial planners,’ than any other collective feature of the new design.” He listed some of their ideal attributes: “Creative, intuitive, optimistic, a people person . . . a paradigm shifter, and a problem solver rather than an enabler.” But having recruited heavily from the old system, W-2, like most programs, still mostly had postal clerks.

  It wasn’t as if most clients were eager for a stranger’s help, especially when the stranger controlled her check. To Opal (or for that matter, Angie and Jewell), “personalized casework” was a euphemism for someone dipping in her business. Hoping to strengthen ties to their clients, officials in Oswego County, New York, tried an especially client-friendly program called Pathways. The only thing clients had to do to keep their checks was appear at a single monthly group meeting. Still more than a third either couldn’t or wouldn’t attend. “I was shocked,” said Toby Herr, the Chicago social worker who designed the program. “They would give up their whole check rather than come. They wanted no part of it.” In Milwaukee, the challenge was compounded by the balkanized private system, which ignored the fact that poor people constantly move. One in five clients changed regions each year, starting over with a new caseworker who knew nothing about them. Add the turnover within agencies, and you get what Opal got in her first year on W-2: six caseworkers at two agencies, of whom one was a fellow addict and another would be convicted of check forgery. And Wisconsin’s bureaucracy was typically celebrated as among the country’s best.

  Yet shortly after Michael went AWOL, something strange occurred. He decided he might be good at the job and that the job might do some good. Casework requires a balance between inspiration and caution, hope and reality; balance wasn’t Michael’s forte. He skipped lunch to drive clients to job interviews. He brought them his son’s used clothes. He stayed up past midnight to rewrite one woman’s résumé. (She didn’t show up the next day.) He offered to babysit while another enrolled in a training program. (She still didn’t go.) When a client showed up desperate for diapers, he blew off his plan for an end-of-the-week beer and gave her his last $10; he knew he’d never get a voucher out of the bureaucracy on a Friday afternoon. Michael had a calculator routine. Follow along, he would say. W-2 pays $673 a month. There are 4.3 weeks in a month and forty hours in a week. Pivoting the calculator, he would show what welfare paid: $3.91 an hour. “Do you think you can do better?” He was waiting, as he put it, to see “the lightbulb go on inside someone’s head.”

  Michael thought he had seen it all, but some things hit him afresh. One seemingly demure twenty-one-year-old always had new hair-styles and clothes. He wondered how she was getting by, especially since he’d been reducing her check. One day, she burst into tears and told him; an old man was paying to kiss her between the legs. He - wasn’t surprised at what she was doing, only at how much it upset him. Michael was stunned to discover that another client had a terminal liver disease. He had pegged her as a malingerer until the doctor warned she had five months to live. What’s more, the county was threatening to drop her from Medicaid. The sick woman wanted to fax in her forms; the county worker told her to “fax your ass over here.” Michael stood over the county supervisor’s desk, ranting so wildly she started to call the security guard. “They just screw people left and right!” he said, sounding more like a welfare advocate than an agent of welfare repeal. In retrospect, Michael began to think of this period as a crazy jaunt, his SuperFep stage. “I came into this job because I needed money,” he said. “Then, I started thinking, ‘Maybe I - COULD make a difference.’ ”

  One afternoon, a nervous client named Kimberly Hansen told him she was ready to get out of the house. At twenty-five, she had been home for six years, caring for a daughter with cerebral palsy. But child care was going to be a problem: the girl needed a day-care center with transportation, wheelchair access, and someone who could feed her through a gastrointestinal tube. Previous caseworkers, following the book, had fobbed her off on an ineffective child-care referral service. Michael spent three hours calling around town and got her appointments to inspect two places. The next thing he knew
, she filed a complaint with Legal Aid. The group dragged him to a refereed appeal. Absurdly, there was nothing to appeal. He hadn’t reduced Hansen’s check; he had pledged to keep sending it in full until she found child care. But the Legal Aid lawyer bore in. You don’t understand what you’re dealing with here! This child has special needs! Even Hansen was taken aback. “Michael really did try to help me,” she protested. She had called the lawyers with a panic attack, not with a concrete complaint.

  A few weeks later, she returned to his office, this time with her daughter, Mercedes. Any grudge Michael felt disappeared. Mercedes was in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the neck down. She had difficulty lifting her head or controlling her saliva flow. Still, she was immaculate, and Hansen hovered over her to keep her that way. Michael turned his head, fighting the impulse to cry. She was obviously a mother of unusual devotion; the last thing she needed was him giving her grief. “I didn’t pity her as much as I respected her,” he said. He went back to working the phone and helped her find the child care.