Janesville

by Amy Goldstein

  This month already, she has completed six of forty-five assignments in Marine Science. She is on pace to complete the course on time, though she is hoping to get ahead. For one of the assignments, she has made a PowerPoint presentation for the lesson “What is a stream?” She went down to the Rock River to make her January observations—birds and animals, slope of embankment, texture of the shore. No green algae, she noted. No geese present. And she made her set of predictions for her next observation, at the same time of day, to be faithful to scientific principles by holding constant as many variables as she can.

  Her PowerPoint so far ends with an image of the river in winter and the words that Alyssa has typed: “What is to come?”

  On Monday, February 4, Jerad starts a new job. It is one that he applied for after Tammy’s boss heard that he was having a hard time finding work and put in a good word with a cousin who runs a local branch of a company that delivers reconditioned auto parts to repair shops.

  Jerad’s route is more than two hundred miles a day. He needs to punch in at 6:30 a.m., drive a truck filled with parts to body shops in Chicago’s western exurbs, drive the truck back to Janesville, and, if all goes smoothly, clock out ten and a half hours later. It does not take more than a month before the Interstate traffic in Illinois, heading toward Chicago, begins to stoke Jerad’s anxiety. Not as bad as the claustrophobia and panic attacks back at the County Jail, but bad enough that he sometimes calls Tammy at her job to vent about the bad drivers on the road, about the body shop owners who don’t always find the parts acceptable, about the GPS telling him for miles in advance to turn right when he knows he needs to turn right.

  Tammy recognizes that these calls help Jerad with his stress, even if they increase hers. And she wonders how they ended up like this. She never was someone with big plans for their lives. Just wanted them to be comfortable. These days, she tells Alyssa and Kayzia—and even Noah, though he is younger—that they are ahead in the game of life. They already know how to live without enough money.

  Jerad’s newest job comes with a trade-off. It pays $12 an hour—not enough to live on, but enough, with what Tammy and the girls earn, so that their FoodShare goes away. But it is a job, Jerad figures, and it almost pays the bills.

   51

  Night Drive

  “Come on, get the hell out of here!” a guy shouts as he bursts out the door and speed-walks across the terra-cotta-tiled lobby, barely slowing to slide his ID card through the punch clock. Friday night at the Fort Wayne Assembly Plant. The end of the workweek. The end of second shift—a nine-hour shift today, with a lucky hour’s overtime, so that it is 11:45 p.m. as this guy is shouting, one guy among 1,100 GM’ers pouring off the factory floor to start their weekend.

  Amid this horde, Matt Wopat reaches the lobby at 11:47 p.m., wearing a knit cap, a backpack slung over one shoulder. He is not running, but he, too, is walking very, very fast. A Friday night ritual. He reaches the chilly night air, and a co-worker wishes him a safe drive tonight. He stops for an instant at the ’97 Saturn, which he parks in the same part of the vast lot every Friday—in a middle row under a street lamp—so that he won’t have to think about where he’s left his car when he returns on Monday. He pulls his duffel from the trunk and continues walking very, very fast over to a nearby 2003 Pontiac Grand Prix, already idling. In the driver’s seat is Chris Aldrich. In the backseat, his coat scrunched up between him and the door, is Paul Sheridan. Janesville GM gypsies, both. Chris pops the trunk for Matt to toss his duffel inside and slam the trunk shut before he gets in on the passenger side. Matt’s door is barely closed when Chris guns the engine and roars off.

  Two hundred eighty miles to go. Four hours and thirty-five minutes, speeding just a little where they are pretty sure they will not get caught. Matt pulls out his phone, calls Darcy to tell her they are leaving. Same as he does every week.

  When Chris guns the engine, it is 11:54 p.m. in Fort Wayne, except that Matt is not the only one who stays on Janesville time, so the dashboard clock on the Grand Prix says 10:54. Chris started working at Fort Wayne on August 17, 2009, seven months before Matt. Chris will never forget that day. His wife and kids along to help him move, except that he doesn’t like to say he has “moved,” so he says that he “stays” in Fort Wayne. Anyhow, his family left on Monday morning when he went to the plant for orientation, which was during first shift, so he was back in this new apartment by 3:30 that afternoon, and he sat on a chair from a cheap dinette set they’d just gotten, staring at a wall. Alone. His wife and kids already back in Janesville. One of the worst feelings of his life.

  That was three and a half years ago. The Grand Prix had 47,000 miles on it. Now it has 134,407.

  On this night, they are not yet ten minutes from the plant, about to turn onto Route 114, when Matt says in his quiet way, “This is my three-year anniversary.”

  Chris doesn’t miss a beat. “We aren’t going to celebrate that,” he shoots back.

  Matt already texted Darcy before going to work: “Happy anniversary to me. 3 years.”

  And the reply came back: “Has it been 3 years? Seems a lot longer.” Darcy had added a sad-face emoticon.

  Three years, even with GM vacations factored in, is a lot of Fridays, hurtling through the night to get home. This week, it snowed ten inches in Fort Wayne, but then it thawed, and today was sunny. Tonight is clear, so the stars are bright on the drive through the Indiana farmland, so much flatter than Wisconsin’s.

  “Think we’ll get lucky and get a double raccoon tonight?” Chris asks. Last summer on this stretch of Route 114, with exquisite timing, one raccoon ran into the road from the left and another from the right, and the Grand Prix struck them both, one with a front tire and one with a rear.

  You don’t get that every week.

  But they do get the house alongside the road whose occupants have a flair for decorating. Tonight, it’s lit up like Christmas but in green and gold with shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day coming up.

  And now the bend north for a few miles and then west onto U.S. 30, four lanes divided, which Chris and Paul and Matt agree is a better way to go than the Indiana Toll Road further north that some of the other Janesville gypsies take on Friday nights.

  U.S. 30 gives them the chance in the summer to try to guess what’s playing at the drive-in movie theater just off the road—not Chris or whoever’s turn it is to drive, but the passengers craning their necks to get a quick peek at the screen at an angle. And one time, they drove through a giant thunderstorm, with lightning bolts that, along this flat land of long views, they could see shooting straight down into the fields.

  No matter the season, there is always the Bourbon Bible Church, with its weird, larger-than-life David and Goliath diorama that you can see as you drive by.

  Matt’s phone rings. It’s Bria, his youngest, calling past her bedtime. “In Indiana,” he says. “About three hours probably. Okay, sweetie. I’ll let you go. I love you, too.”

  And now they are in Valparaiso, where they stop, as always, at the truck stop called the Pilot Travel Center. Some of the Janesville gypsies wait until the next fast food stop, the last one before the Illinois line, but Chris and Paul and Matt like this one for its good snacks and multiple bathrooms. They are back in the car soon with their snacks—teriyaki beef jerky for Chris, regular jerky for Paul, and Smartfood popcorn for Matt along with a bag of chewy Sour Patch Kids that he is saving for Bria and Brooke.

  Then it is north onto Highway 49 and west onto the Toll Road.

  “You are going under the speed limit,” says Paul, who has mostly been sleeping, curled up against his coat.

  “Fuck you,” Chris says. “You want the tire to wobble off?”

  “You know how to change a tire,” Paul says.

  Matt jumps in. “You are doing a good job, Chris.”

  “Thanks,” Chris says. “You are very supportive.”

  And now they are whizzing past Gary, with what remains of its steel mills on the right. Li
ghts sparkling. Gray smoke plumes dissolving into the sky. A flicker of flames. Gary was known as “Magic City,” when U.S. Steel arrived in 1906 to build the mills on Lake Michigan’s southern shore. Now its population of 78,000 is less than half of what it was in its heyday of 1960, nearly one fourth less than even in 2000. Four in ten of the people left are living in poverty. Gary is a perfect specimen of what the Rust Belt looks like and what Janesville is striving not to become. Chris drives on.

  It is almost 1:30 a.m. Janesville time when the Grand Prix glides through a tollbooth with an EZPass and enters Illinois—the Skyway and then the Dan Ryan Expressway, which gets clogged even with its fourteen lanes. The Dan Ryan is easy to cruise along tonight because, with the extra hour at the plant, the overtime, they are later than usual, and most of the city of big shoulders, as Carl Sandburg christened it for the toil of piling job on job, is asleep.

  The downtown skyline comes into view.

  Just north of Chicago, a red car passes with four guys inside. “Tom is driving,” Chris notes. “Almost looks like O’Leary in back.”

  More Janesville gypsies.

  Matt dozes off for a few minutes, joining Paul in his slumber. Chris doesn’t like the silence. “You are supposed to be doing color commentaries,” he teases Matt when he wakes up.

  Good thing Matt is awake when, a little after 2 a.m., a text arrives on his phone. It’s from yet another car filled with Janesville gypsies, up ahead. “Mile marker 28 or so, cop in the median.” Chris slows. Nine minutes later, Matt spots the cop. “No likey tickets,” Chris says. “Can’t afford to.”

  The one time Matt got pulled over, the summer before last, he told the officer the truth: that he works in Fort Wayne during the week and was driving home, and he guessed he was just a little bit excited to get there and see his family. The cop said he could understand and let Matt off.

  They pass the Belvidere Chrysler plant, the one that wasn’t hiring when the assembly plant shut down. When they get to Rockford, Chris says, “The home stretch. We’ll have Paul in his driveway in twenty minutes.”

  “Holy shit, we are nearly home,” Matt says.

  Paul continues his gentle snores.

  And at this hour—2:41 a.m. Janesville time—Chris gets philosophical about spending his workweeks in Fort Wayne. “Funny how we count time,” he says. “I count how many Christmases I have to spend there. Three more Christmases.”

  He’s coming up on twenty-seven years since he became a GM’er on August 17, 1986, part of a big hiring wave that came right after Janesville survived one of its near-death experiences. When the last day really came—December 23, 2008—Chris was down at the plant, shooting video with a digital camera. His anniversary date means that Chris has three years and seven months until he can retire. Matt has twelve years and seven months.

  “When I retire,” Chris says, “I don’t want to leave you guys there. I want everyone home. Maybe that’ll be my business after I retire. I’ll be a shuttle guy and bring you guys home.”

  Paul wakes up as the Grand Prix pulls off the Interstate at exit 177. “Cool your jets,” Chris says to Paul. “I’ll have you home in a heartbeat.”

  It is just after 3 a.m., Janesville time because this is Janesville, when Chris pulls into Paul’s driveway. After dropping him off, Chris drives up Center Avenue, crossing the Rock River near where the assembly plant still stands vacant, up Centerway Street and then up Milton Avenue to Matt’s nice house on the north edge of town that he and Darcy have managed to keep because he is a gypsy. It is a straight shot up through town. But sometimes they go through town different ways, just because it’s nice to be home, nice to see Janesville’s streets.

  At 3:20 a.m., Chris pulls into the driveway of the beige house with its dark red front door. Darcy hasn’t remembered to turn on the outside light, but she has left the light on in the laundry room—just inside the garage door where she and the girls once cried as Matt was leaving for Fort Wayne the first time—to welcome him home.

  Matt hands Chris a $20 bill for gas and oil changes, when the Grand Prix needs them. “What time you going to be here Monday morning?” Matt asks just before pulling his duffel out of the trunk.

  “Probably 8:10, 8:15,” Chris says. “The usual.”

   52

  The Ebb and Flow of Work

  Union or not union, no job is forever. No guarantees. Nearly two years since he began to work in the human resources department of Seneca Foods, Mike Vaughn understands this in a way he did not back when it had seemed that being a UAW representative, his family legacy, was his life. Sure, serving as shop chairman for the union brothers and sisters of Lear Seating had shaped who he was. Yet it wasn’t, it turns out, his only opportunity.

  Mike notices the ebb and flow of work, in particular, because of the burst of seasonal hiring each year for the production months at Seneca. The 1.1-million-square-foot processing plant has about four hundred full-time workers, adding two to three hundred more during peak processing times. There is a rhythm to the crops that ripen, most of them on Wisconsin farm fields, and come through the plant: peas from June until late July, corn until early fall with potatoes running alongside, then mixed vegetables and a time of potatoes again. Mike puts people through orientation, enters them into the personnel system, knowing that they will be gone once the last potatoes have been processed by Christmastime.

  Though he is a year-round employee and not a seasonal one, these crop rhythms affect Mike’s work. Off-season, his shift is 3:30 p.m. to midnight. During the canning season, he works overnight. And during this production season, there is opportunity for overtime. Mike volunteers to be available for overtime seven days a week. Sometimes, he gets six days. Sometimes, all seven.

  Mike grabs this overtime because there is extra personnel work to be done, and overtime is a way of making sure that he does not fall behind. Plus, working overnight makes days off complicated for his body clock, so he might as well be working, instead of at home, awake during the dead of night. His biggest reason for grabbing as much overtime as he can is financial. Mike has gotten raises since he started at Seneca, but his wages still aren’t what they were at Lear. Adding in all the production season overtime, though, he does pretty well. He and Barb have developed a money rhythm: they put aside some of what Mike earns in the summer and fall, and they spend down some of it during the lean, cold months—like a larder. This is how they have propped up their standard of living close to what it was before they lost their Lear jobs.

  He and Barb always have tried to save, but he is aware that putting money aside seems more crucial than in the past. Having lost a job once, it’s always in the back of his head; he can’t rule out its happening again.

  And if it happens a second time, Mike has a faith in himself and in the nature of opportunity that he did not have before. If he puts his mind to it, he can turn a negative event into a positive outcome. This was, he realizes, the very advice that he gave out when he met with small groups of union brothers and sisters on the Lear factory floor: that they needed to make the best of the situation and formulate a new plan.

  When he was dispensing that advice, over and over again, he knew that it was true. But it was in his head—abstract. He did not see what seizing opportunity looked like, really see it up close, until he watched Barb rush back to school, watched her study as she had never studied in her life. He followed her lead.

  Barb is moving along in her new work. Last June, Creative Community Living Services promoted her from residential coordinator/community protection to a position called program manager/supervisor. The pay is just a little more, climbing toward $13 an hour. But she is now dividing her time between administrative work and the work she loves most—the direct help to clients.

  To her surprise, Barb believes that Lear’s closing was the best thing that could have happened. Its closing taught her that she is a survivor. It taught her that work exists that is worth doing, not for the wages, but because you feel good doing it. Working wit
h developmentally disabled adults, who depend on her and call her day and night, often does not even seem like a job. It is a way of life. Barb has promised herself that, after the injuries to her shoulder and wrist on the Lear assembly line, after her brief and depressing stint at the County Jail, she will never again stay working anywhere that she is not happy. She does not look back at Lear. She looks forward to how her clients are growing and, with her help, becoming as independent as they can be.

   53

  Project 16:49

  The premiere of Sixteen Forty-Nine seems to Ann Forbeck a long time ago. Nearly two and a half years have gone by since that first showing. She and Robin Stuht, the Beloit school social worker who is her partner in the project, now laugh at their naïveté to have ever thought that they could open a shelter for girls and one for boys within twelve months.

  Still, fundraising for Project 16:49 is coming along. In a community once shocked by the very idea of homeless kids in its midst, the project is being embraced. On June 1, a thirty-six-year-old Janesville insurance agent, who had a homeless spell himself as a boy, will begin to ride his bicycle around town every day for thirty days, with the goal of riding 1,649 miles as a magnet for donations. He will complete those miles and, in the process, collect $16,000.

  Since last spring, when the YWCA made its painful decision to sever ties with the project, Ann and Robin have learned more than they ever dreamed they could about the incorporation of nonprofits. Project 16:49 is now a 501(c)(3), with its own board of directors, the directors including a pair of homeless kids. The board is about to begin a search for an executive director.

  Project 16:49 has been leading Ann places that she never imagined a school social worker would go. Today, she arrives at another new place: Room 411 South, a gold-painted committee room, three floors above Governor Walker’s office, in the Wisconsin State Capitol. It is mid-March, six months since Ann was riding in a carriage down Main Street with two of her crop of homeless teens in the Labor Fest parade. It is early afternoon, and she is here to testify at Wisconsin’s first Homeless Youth Symposium. Deb Kolste, three months into her first term as Janesville’s Assembly member and no longer a volunteer on Wednesdays at HealthNet, is sitting at the perimeter of desks surrounding the oak witness table at which Ann and Robin are taking their seats. Of all the professionals in Wisconsin who cross paths with homeless students, Ann and Robin have been chosen as two of the symposium’s four “voices from the community.”