American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  Perhaps Angie wasn’t alarmed because she wasn’t around very much. She had finally gotten an assignment as a home health aide. Angie had worried about working in a stranger’s house, and her client, Karen, had worried, too; she was confined to a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis, and her last aide had stolen from her. But the two of them hit it off. After two hours with Karen in the morning, Angie headed to Mercy after lunch, stretching her workday from breakfast to 10:30 at night. But two weeks into the new routine, she got her first paycheck: $178.42. To celebrate, she bought the kids a pizza. No one was in the mood. “You found my mama?” Tierra, the six-year-old, asked everyone. Opal had gotten her welfare check on Wednesday, disappeared on Thursday, and left a message on Bo’s pager Friday afternoon: “I know y’all mad at me, but I still got two hundred dollars, and I ain’t coming back tonight.” Angie raged. “I could think of a million and one things I coulda done with that money—paid on the light bill!” she said. Plaster fell from the gun blast to the ceiling. Newspaper still covered the broken window pane. And there on the table lay the pizza box, perched like a cardboard crown. Angie, God bless her, tried.

  The job with Karen, months in the making, ended within a few weeks. Solving one problem (too little money) aggravated another (too much time away). Angie quit working for Karen and switched to the first shift at Mercy. Angie hated first-shift work. First shift made her alarm clock bleat at 4:30 a.m., it made her whole body rebel. But if she started at 6:00, she could leave at 2:00 p.m. and try to be home more. “I don’t want Opal to be in the mood to take nothing, and I don’t want Marcus in the house,” she said. “I can kill two birds with one stone.” Karen was facing a spinal operation and pleaded with Angie to stay. But Karen mostly needed help in the mornings. While she tried to create some dinner-hour work, Angie felt bad about sitting around and laid herself off. “Don’t you let nobody take your money away like that,” she warned Karen. “You might need that.”

  Shortly after, a friend told Angie there was an easier way to get a car. W-2 would loan her the money. This struck Angie as unlikely news, but it turned out to be true. To help people stay off welfare, the program offered “job access loans” (of up to $1,600) for cars, uniforms, or even rents. This was another example of what states could have done with their welfare windfalls, rather than siphoning them into suburban road projects, and Angie was a perfect candidate. She was also a mark for a used-car salesman, and she nearly got talked into a $7,000 Dodge that would have been destined for repossession. It was bright red. He offered financing. All she had to do was sign. Angie tried to believe the car man when he said she could afford it, then came to her senses just in time. “I’d be signing myself over to the Devil,” she told him, pulling herself away. A few days later, she put a deposit on a rusty old Cutlass that wasn’t half as pretty. But it cost only a quarter as much, and she figured it would run long enough to get her started at the pool.

  Under the logic that ruled Angie’s life, when something went right, something was about to go wrong. Marcus was losing his mind. While Angie and Marcus had always fought, she felt he had crossed a new line. She put him out every night and woke up to find him back: waiting on the porch, lying on the couch, using the shower. She rose before dawn to find him staring in her bedroom window. In the middle of car shopping, she had gotten a restraining order. But it wouldn’t take effect until the police could put it in his hands. Following her to the bus stop a few days later, Marcus warned if she tried to evict him he would burn down the house. Angie had the worse temper of the two. “I think I’m gonna buy me a gun and blow his fucking head off,” she said.

  Angie came home from buying her car and went to bed early. The kids woke her up at 1:00 a.m. Marcus had been drinking; he was standing on the porch and somehow he had gotten a key. “Your door’s open,” he yelled. Angie had had enough. Enough double shifts and enough unpaid bills. Enough wounded male pride. “I’m a very violent person,” she once said. “Not violent toward everybody—I’m violent - toward people trying to hurt me.” She picked up a screwdriver and told him to come in. He taunted her from the porch. She locked the door, and he opened it. Then she heard him drop the key. As he bent to grab it, she flew out the door in her nightgown and knocked him down the stairs. “You trying to hurt me?” Marcus laughed. “Trying to kill you,” she said. Then she stabbed him in the back. Opal was in the middle, trying to pry them apart, and the screwdriver passed through her hand.

  It took three calls to summon the police, but they arrived at 4:00 a.m., served the order, and drove Marcus away. Had he kept his wits about him, it would have ended there. Maybe he didn’t realize how angry Angie was. Maybe he didn’t understand that he was legally barred from the house. Maybe, as he said, he just wanted his clothes. But he was back at dawn, daring Angie to call the cops, and this time they kept him. He wasn’t disturbing the peace anymore; he was violating a court order. And with his record as a chronic offender, he faced up to three years. “Marcus felt I wasn’t going to go to this extreme,” Angie said. “Wrong brother!” She spent the morning in bed, reading a romance novel. In a few days, she could pick up the car. And with the car, she tried to tell herself, there was no telling where she might get.

  EIGHTEEN

  A Shot at the American Dream: Milwaukee, Fall 1999

  “I need a whole new life,” Angie said, and for a moment she thought she had one. She lost a man, found a car, and glimpsed a vision of hourly wages climbing to double digits. She stopped drinking beer. She did her hair. She did jumping jacks in the living room. She got up early and cleaned the basement. With no one rattling her window at night, she let Opal’s daughter Sierra sleep beside her. “I been sleeping heavenly,” Angie said. She sensed a return to an earlier, idealized self: younger, stronger, lighter, free. With a week of vacation coming, she talked about driving to Mississippi. “If I don’t go to Mississippi, I’m a get me a hotel room.” She knew of one with a spa. “I deserve to romance myself.”

  Then the old life rushed back in: Angie was the only one working in a house with eight kids. Von and Kierra fought all day. Kesha’s cats had fleas. Redd’s summer-school teacher said he had an attitude. Kesha dumped Larry, the boy with the condom, and started dating the upstairs neighbor, Jermaine. One day, Opal’s seven-year-old, Kierra, said, “I’m gonna get paid today!” She couldn’t say why—or she wouldn’t get paid—but the secret spilled: she had caught Jermaine in Kesha’s bedroom, and they had tried to buy her silence. “She gonna be pregnant, Angie,” Opal warned.

  The week Angie picked up her car, she got her annual raise: 20 cents. “Cheap bastards!” she said. “I’m a damn good worker. I’m worth more than twenty cents!” A few weeks later, she came home from work to find her lights shut off. Opal had given her some money for the bill, but Angie had bought school clothes instead. The cutoff was her third in as many years. How the power got reconnected is a bit of a mystery. Angie said she got a note from the asthma doctor, reiterating Kesha’s need for a breathing machine; Opal said Angie’s cousin broke the lock and turned it on. When her vacation arrived, Angie got no farther than the neighborhood bar. She spent the night dancing alone.

  One evening after the lights returned, Angie dragged in from a double shift. It was nearly midnight. She had worked sixteen hours. She was due back at dawn. Out of toilet paper, Angie had tried to swipe some from work, but even there she met defeat: the place had been picked clean. Angie usually treats her setbacks with mordant humor; this night she wasn’t laughing. “Ain’t got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of!” she spat.

  “Why you working so hard?” her friend Barbara asked.

  Angie shot her a withering look. “I got bills to pay!”

  Kesha’s face had swollen from the fleas, and Von worried that his would, too. “Mama, you sure there’s no bugs in that blanket?” he said.

  Angie didn’t answer. “Gotta be back at 6:00 a.m.,” she groaned. “I gotta get my ass in bed.”

  Two months after she got her
car, Angie finally did it: she drove five miles west to the edge of town and applied for a nursing-pool job. At Mercy, she had just cleared $8 an hour. Top Techs Temporaries, Inc., paid up to $14 for some weekend shifts. Wendy, her Mercy supervisor, argued she was making a mistake. Lot of aides left for pool work only to return after months of canceled shifts. “They think they’re going to be millionaires, but then they can’t get the hours,” she told me. But Angie wasn’t quitting Mercy; she was just looking for extra pay. She filled out the Top Techs forms, got back in her car, and found it - wouldn’t start. She ate lunch and tried again; all that was driving was the autumn rain. Speeding past on an ugly afternoon, the commuters heading home for dinner had no way to know that the drenched woman trudging down the road was a welfare-to-work marvel trying to work two jobs. Angie had the car towed and caught a bus to a bar. “Three hundred and fifty-nine dollars and eighty-two cents!” she moaned when the bill came in. Still, her good humor was back. Fourteen dollars an hour.

  Angie kept her thoughts about Marcus closer to her chest. Shortly after his arrest, she got a call from a prosecutor, asking if she wanted to press charges. “Look, I don’t want the man to go to jail,” she said. “I just want him to stay away from me.” The prosecutor agreed to drop the case, and then reconsidered; this was a violation of a restraining order, and Marcus had a record. Marcus spent a week trying to make the $500 bail, and as soon as he did he headed to Angie’s, this time with a police escort. Ostensibly there to collect his stuff, he was trying to collect his wits. He was no stalker—he was her man!—and now he could be facing three years. While the police gave them a few private minutes, Angie wouldn’t engage. You chose your own way, she said. The next week, Angie went to a block party near Jewell’s house. She disappeared into the crowd and when she emerged a few hours later Marcus was at her side. Opal and Jewell were stunned, and more surprised still when Angie let him come back to Brown Street for the night. The next weekend, he took her to a bar. When she ran out of hair gel not long after, Angie drove to the grocery store where Marcus had found a job, knowing he would get her a jar. “Oh, is the love coming back?” asked Marcus’s boss. The kids were still applauding his absence when Marcus was back in the house.

  Angie had little to say on the subject, but Opal and Jewell chewed it over good. Jewell stressed economics. “Us women that just got off W-2 can’t make it out here by ourselves,” she said. While Marcus - didn’t directly pay the bills, she noted that Angie had lost her lights just after she kicked him out. “Every little bit helps,” she said. The difference between Marcus and no Marcus might be the difference between gel and no gel, beer and no beer, lights and a night in the dark. Opal, a student of both money and men, didn’t slight fiscal concerns. She’d once heard Angie scream at Marcus, “I don’t love you—if you ain’t got no money, I don’t want you around!” But Opal argued that Angie had feelings at the start. “It only got financial when they started having hard times.” All Angie would say was that the restraining order, which remained in force, gave her a legal leash. “He have to go when I say go,” since a call to the cops at any time would send him back to jail. One day, Marcus tried to bring her a microwave. Angie would have none of it. She didn’t want anything to imply he had squatting rights.

  Angie had no such leverage over Opal. No one did. Not her mother. Not her man. Not her lovely pigtailed daughters. And certainly not W- 2, which had accomplished no more in Opal’s life than the programs it had replaced. At the beginning of the year, Angie and Jewell had thought she could turn things around. She had gone to rehab once before and gotten clean. She was too smart, too strong, too much a survivor to squander her life on cocaine. “She’s trying to get herself together,” Jewell had said. No one would say that now. Opal, the woman who could light up a room, had vanished in a fog of listlessness and gloom. Most days, she didn’t get up until dusk. On her feet, she exploded in fury. “I’ll hit you so hard in the motherfucking mouth I’ll knock your ass on the floor!” she screamed at Redd. They were fighting over a pancake. Opal wasn’t Opal anymore but an imposter in her own skin.

  As summer stretched into fall, the only one blind to Opal’s problems was the woman being paid to address them: her new caseworker, Darcy Cooper. Months after she inherited Opal’s case, I stopped in to see her, only to leave wondering which Opal Caples she claimed to have met. “She was out there looking for a job,” Cooper said. “She did everything she was supposed to do.” Opal had left ten teeth in the dentist’s pliers just before they met. “Opal looked good, appearance-wise,” Cooper said. “It seemed like her home life was intact.” How she felt confident in Opal’s home life wasn’t clear, since Cooper had never visited her home. Opal did report that she had been stabbed, one hint that her home life wasn’t “intact.” In six months, Cooper had met with Opal twice, both times in her cubicle at Employment Solutions, the Goodwill subsidiary. Yet even at that, her cheerful credulousness must have been hard to sustain. Opal had given up. In the past, she had faked or flirted her way to a monthly check; when she had to, she pleaded. Now she had her own safety net—Angie and Bo—and W-2 could do what it pleased. A letter arrived, warning that she was halfway through the five-year federal limit—in welfare theory, a wake-up call. “I don’t be reading that shit,” she said. “I ain’t trip-pin’ about that check, long as I have my food stamps and medical card.”

  Still the checks kept coming. First, Cooper gave her a month to look for child care. Then, the stab wound bought more time. After that, Cooper had Opal fill out Employer Contact Sheets, the same forms she had been forging for years by thumbing through the Yellow Pages. Opal didn’t even finish making up a list. She was literally too tired to fake it. “I told her ‘Miss Cooper, I don’t just be home sleeping’—which I do,” Opal said. While some caseworkers acted callous or cavalier, Cooper just seemed myopically nice. She told me she had heard that clients sometimes fake the job search, but “to me, it seemed like she was actively doing it.” She sent Opal another check. “We all have days when things don’t go our own way,” she said.

  Others showed less understanding. To qualify for W-2, Opal had to identify Brierra’s father, so the state could try to collect child support. Opal repeatedly missed her appointments, and the child-support office told Cooper to close the case. Cooper entered the case-closure codes. But even that didn’t end Opal’s aid. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of families were dropped from the rolls for minor infractions, or no infractions at all. In Opal’s case, the computer seemed to have a gremlin inside: whenever it saw the words “Opal Caples” it churned out a welfare check. She got $673 for October; $673 for November; and $673 for December. By the end of the year, the tally of cash and food stamps topped $11,000. Even Opal was amazed. “I didn’t do nothing,” she said. “They just sent it.”

  Goodwill’s incompetence was hardly unique, but it merits a moment of special attention, given the marker laid down by the program’s aggressive young CEO. William Martin was barely thirty when he took charge of the $112 million contract, with one of his assets being his political ties to the administration that had awarded it; he had helped run Tommy Thompson’s Milwaukee office. At the program’s launch, Martin sounded like a business student on Nō-Dōz. W-2 was about “getting to yes” and finding “win-win opportunities.” It was about “cutting-edge, private-sector, customer-centered growth.” While welfare had left people “wards of the state,” Martin, the descendant of a line of southern black preachers, said he had never met someone he couldn’t put to work. “We start from a moral premise that it’s simply unconscionable to leave somebody on welfare.” Two years later, Opal looked like—well, a ward of the state—and Martin was articulating a new moral premise. “We try to give people the benefit of the doubt, rather than hold to the mechanics of everything,” he said, when I asked about Opal’s case. “If they had the wherewithal to make it on their own, they wouldn’t be in the program.”

  Someone did “get to yes”: William Martin. As Goodwill i
gnored Opal’s downward slide, Martin collected $62,000 in performance bonuses, bringing his year’s pay to more than $172,000. He also gave bonuses averaging nearly $10,000 to more than half his staff. In time, the project attracted the legislative auditors, who found some of what they had seen at Maximus: tens of thousands of welfare dollars spent on staff parties, embossed briefcases, and the like. They also found something that disturbed them more: Martin was using the W-2 contract as a marketing fund, spending money earmarked for client services to seek contracts in other states. This was not a “win-win” situation. State auditors deemed it a violation of the law. While Martin called it a bookkeeping error, among the expenses the auditors disallowed were nineteen first-class plane trips to Arizona, where Goodwill was battling Maximus for the next privatization prize. The day after they requested the agency’s credit card records, Martin came forward to say he had discovered another $160,000 in unallowable costs. At Maximus, the auditors had found reckless extravagance; at Goodwill, they suspected a cover-up, and the headline in the Milwaukee paper soon read, “W-2 agency under FBI investigation.” Martin was forced out of Goodwill, and after repaying a half million dollars, Goodwill was forced out of W-2, with its chief executive, John Miller, pleading “bumbling rather than trickiness.” With that, Goodwill and Maximus, the two leading players in privatization, became the two leading emblems of waste and abuse. And they can scarcely be dismissed as an unrepresentative slice of the W-2 bureaucracy: together, they handled half the state’s cases.