Evicted (28 page)

What the judge was saying, in essence, was: We all agree that you were poor and scared when you did this violent, hurtful thing, and if you had been allowed to go on working five days a week at Old Country Buffet, refilling soup pots and mopping up frozen yogurt spills, none of us would be here right now. You might have been able to save enough to move to an apartment that was de-leaded and clean in a neighborhood without drug dealers and with safe schools. With time, you may have been able to get Bo-Bo the medical treatment he needs for his seizures, and maybe you could have even started taking night classes to become a nurse, like you always wanted. And, who knows, maybe you could have actually
become
a nurse, a real nurse with a uniform and everything. Then you could really give your kids a childhood that would look nothing like the one Shortcake gave you. If you did that, you would walk around this cold city with your head held high, and maybe you would eventually come to feel that you were worth something and deserving of a man who could support you other than by lending you his pistol for a stickup or at least one who didn't break down your door and beat you in front of your children. Maybe you would meet someone with a steady job and get married in a small church with Kendal standing proudly up front by the groom and Tembi as the poofy-dressed flower girl and Bo-Bo as the grinning, toddling ring bearer, just like you always dreamed it, and from that day on your groom would introduce you as “my
wife
.” But that's not what happened. What happened was that your hours were cut, and your electricity was about to be shut off, and you and your children were about to be thrown out of your home, and you snatched someone's purse as your friend pointed a gun at her face. And if it was poverty that caused this crime, who's to say you won't do it again? Because you were poor then and you are poor now. We all see the underlying cause, we see it every day in this court, but the justice system is no charity, no jobs program, no Housing Authority. If we cannot pull the weed up from the roots, then at least we can cut it low at the stem.

The judge sighed, and a silent moment passed. The court stenographer steadied her hands above the keys and waited. Kendal, asleep on Shortcake's lap, breathed noiselessly. The judge ruled: “This is not…a probationary case. I am going to impose eighty-one months in the state prison system. It's going to break down to fifteen months of initial confinement and sixty-six months of extended supervision.”

The bailiff approached Vanetta and told her to stand to be handcuffed.

“Oh, God,” Shortcake let out. She shook Kendal awake and took him to the glass. “Wave goodbye, son.”

Hands behind her back, Vanetta turned around, tears streaming down her cheeks. Kendal stared back stone-faced, strong, just like his momma had taught him.

After getting into several conflicts with congregants, bishops, and eventually her minister, Crystal left Mt. Calvary and joined Restoration International Ministries, an inner-city church in a bland two-story office building on Forty-First and Burleigh.

One Sunday, Crystal sat in the third pew from the front and began clapping with the music. She wore a black shirt and green pants, unbuttoned and unzipped halfway to fit. The pastor, a black woman with hair falling in arching waves down to her shoulders, wore a white robe with gold accents. She paced with a queen's authority, stopping as the spirit led her. “God says He is the truth and the light,” she said. The young man at the piano fluttered his hands, and the even younger fellow behind the drums began teasing a cymbal. “The truth! And the—
light
! You
hearing
me?”

“Amen,” Crystal said. After being kicked out of her apartment with Vanetta, Crystal was admitted to a homeless shelter. Then through a weary, looping rhythm—make a friend, use a friend, lose a friend—Crystal found, for short bursts, dry and warm places to sleep. When those bridges burned, she dropped back into street homelessness, returning to St. Joseph's or the Amtrak station. Sometimes she would walk the streets all night and sleep on the bus once morning broke. But through it all, she almost never missed church.

“
Sha la la la YABA SHO TA tama ma ma,
” the pastor prayed into a microphone. The language of tongues was spoken in a cadence the shape of a heartbeat: a small entrance, followed by a spike, then a quivering trailing off. “Are you in the press? Are you squeezing yourself up into the crowd to see Jesus? Whoa!” She stumbled back as if bumped by an invisible force.

“All right, pastor!” Crystal hollered. Crystal had always believed that SSI was a more secure income source than a paycheck. You couldn't get fired from SSI; your hours couldn't get cut. “SSI always come,” she said. Until one day it didn't. She had been approved for SSI as a minor, but her adult reevaluation found her ineligible. Now Crystal's only source of income came from food stamps.
4
She tried donating plasma but her veins were too small. She asked her spiritual, foster, and even biological mothers for money, but what they could give her didn't go very far. She didn't ask anything from her church because “it always led to conflict.” Because she didn't know what else to do, Crystal went “on the stroll” and began selling sex. She had never been a morning person but soon learned that it was the best time to turn tricks, catching men on their way to work.

“Is Momma okay?” the pastor asked. She was looking at an older woman being held up by two people.

“No.”

“Then we gonna stop everything and
pray
for her.” The pastor knelt down in front of the woman. A dozen or so churchgoers surrounded her, some standing on chairs, some with their hands on the old woman's head. “Reach out your hands this way and pray!” the pastor commanded, and her congregation obeyed, even the children. “Oh, Jesus!” the pastor yelled into the microphone. “Oh, by the blood, oh you death spirit, you stroke spirit, come out!”

Crystal was bouncing and moving her hands from shoulders to hips, chanting, “By your stripes, Lord, by your stripes.”

“By the blood,” prayed the pastor. “The blood!
ShabbabmaSHOTtala!
I bind you. Come back, Momma. Come back!”

The music simmered low, waiting. The clutch of people surrounding the older woman parted, revealing her limp and blood-drained face. She looked to be asleep or dead. Then the huddle closed in again. After a few minutes, the people encircling the woman grew louder and stepped outward to show the pastor kissing the woman about her face and hands. People began clapping as the woman rose to her feet.

“Praise God!” the pastor said. She let out a triumphant scream into the microphone and collapsed to her knees, praying. The piano and drums kicked up, and the church exploded. People began running up and down the aisle, shouting and singing. Someone found a tambourine and started pounding it. The drummer crashed the cymbals, and the pianist lingered on the high notes. A woman yelled and sprinted in place, sweat streaming down her face. “We ain't trying to have no funeral up in here!” the pastor boasted.

And there was Crystal, hands raised, fingers spread, beaming and dancing. “God got me,” she cried. “God got me!”

Scott had been eight days sober when he went to the Serenity Club, a smoke-filled, wood-paneled AA bar that served stale coffee and root-beer floats. “They're addictive,” one regular with a rap sheet said about the floats. “But I don't do robberies for them.” When it was time for the speakers, a light-skinned Puerto Rican woman in a black bandanna and vinyl jacket took the podium. This was Anna Aldea, an acid-dropping, coke-snorting, cowhide-tough biker lady turned high priestess of AA. A few months shy of her ten-year chip, Anna had helped dozens of addicts through the program. During her speech, she pointed to her newest project.

“I love you, Scott,” she said. “Keep coming back. It works—”

“
If you work it
,” the room finished.

A week prior, Scott had woken up from his three-day bender, broke and hungover. To still his nerves, he dressed and left his apartment. It was early Saturday morning, and Scott walked as the city slept. He made it all the way to Pito's house and got him out of bed. Two years sober himself, Pito knew what to do with a detoxing junkie who wanted to get clean: plenty of water, coffee, vitamins, cigarettes, food, and, above all, constant monitoring. Pito stayed with Scott all day and that evening took him to meet his brother, David (fourteen years sober), and his wife, Anna. Anna lit a fire in their backyard pit and sat up with Scott until the bars closed at two a.m. It was a nauseating, painful, stretched-out day—Scott's first drug-free in years.

Day five was miserable in a different way. Scott passed it sobbing at Pito's house. “I can feel my body getting better,” he said, “but when you have years and years and years of not feeling anything from drinking and dope, then it kind of hits you.”

AA had its own binge for people starting to get sober: ninety meetings in ninety days. The idea was to surround the baby, their slang for newcomer, with a support structure that would replace his junkie network. And to never leave him alone. So Scott began showing up at Pito's before the liquor stores opened at eight a.m. and ending his days around Anna's fire pit after last call.

Scott was almost three weeks sober when his landlord told him to go. D.P.'s newly acquired pit bull had got out and somehow snuck into the downstairs neighbors' apartment. The neighbors called the police, who called the landlord, who, wanting to keep his long-term tenants, gave Scott and D.P. the boot. By that time, Scott was basically living at David and Anna's. They told him he might as well sleep there too.

David and Anna's working-class home was one of those places that seemed to belong to everybody. People would walk through the door without knocking and open the refrigerator without asking. “This is the Aldea Recovery House,” Anna would say. “If somebody's not here, somebody's calling.” She kept large bowls of rice and beans on hand and never locked the door.

Scott began sleeping on the Aldeas' couch and picking up their children from school. Soon, he began working with David, a freelance mason and, in lean weeks, a metal scrapper. Scott liked the work, especially the urban adventure of hunting for aluminum or steel scraps, even if it did involve the occasional Dumpster dive. A barrel-chested Puerto Rican man with pinched eyes and a ready grin, sometimes David paid Scott and sometimes he didn't. Scott didn't complain. How could he, after what David and Anna had done for him?

At first, Scott liked cleaning the Serenity Club. The pay was piddly—$7.15 an hour, which would give him around $100 a week—but because he worked alone, from ten p.m. to one a.m. most nights, it gave him time to think. He thought about finding someone, although he didn't know where to start if not in a gay bar. Craigslist? He thought about his sister's wedding. Maybe he could make it home for that. He prayed, “
Please don't let me use tomorrow
.”

But most of all, he would dream about returning to nursing. He thought that would be a “great way to stay sober because you start thinking about other people and not your poor, pathetic shit.” But the road ahead felt daunting. The nursing board didn't just take Scott's license away. Understandably, it made it extremely difficult for him to earn it back. He would have to submit to “the testing of urine specimens at a frequency of not less than 56 times per year,” which would cost thousands of dollars. He'd have to stay clean for five years and attend biweekly AA meetings.
1
Scott recognized his weaknesses. He didn't know if he would have tried harder to get clean years ago if the nursing board had not put license reinstatement so far out of reach. But giving up did come easier when things seemed impossible.

The “impaired professionals” gathering had left him discouraged too. One nurse said it had taken her over a year to find a job after being sober for about two years and passing all the requirements. And she had a master's degree.

There were stations between having a revoked nursing license and having one with full privileges. But to get a nursing job with a restricted license—one that didn't allow you to handle narcotics, say—was rare. Scott knew people. Over the years, he had stayed in touch with several nursing pals, and some had moved into positions of influence. He even had an aunt who was the dean of nursing at a large state university nearby. But staying in touch with these people had meant hiding his addiction and poverty, so approaching them for help was complicated. The last time Scott spoke with a friend who was the director of a local nursing home, he said he was doing fine. “So now I'd have to go back and say, ‘Oh no, I really wasn't doing well. I was still a junkie. I totally lied to you.'…I guess that's where a lot of my reservations would come in.” Scott didn't feel he could call in any favors.
2

After four months of cleaning the club with only one night off in total, Scott began to grow weary. He was sober and bored. He would empty the ashtrays, scrub the toilets, and, at the end of the night, grade his performance: A–, C+. Then twenty-one hours later, he would do it all again. At least when he was a junkie, his life had purpose: get dope. Now he felt as though he were pacing in a small, dull loop. Anna had asked Scott to pay $200 a month to sleep on the couch and to put his food stamps toward groceries, which made it difficult for him to save much.

It was more than just his work at the club. As the initial high of sobriety wore off, Scott began to sour on AA in general. This post-honeymoon sensation was so common that AA had a phrase for it: “falling off your pink cloud.”

“Ambivalence has turned into animosity,” Scott said. It embarrassed him, spending nights in folding-chair semicircles with washed-up drunks and cokeheads, drinking Folgers out of styrofoam cups and swapping horror stories. Scott grew to hate the rituals, the stranger's hand on his shoulder, the hoary sayings—“But by the Grace of God,” “Let go and let God”—not to mention the Serenity Club crowd's belief that fighting addiction with a prescription—methadone, say—was cheating. Scott was considering going to the county clinic to get something to help with the cravings and depression. But he couldn't tell Anna or David. Scott had puked and shivered and wept to push the poison out of his system only to look around and see that he was still broke and homeless, logging stupid hours at AA and dipping a mop into a bucket at midnight. “Fucking addicts and drunks,” he would yell into an empty room whose folding chairs had not been put back. “This makes me crazy!”

At 7:37 a.m., Scott signed into the Milwaukee County Behavioral Services Division Access Clinic. The clinic served residents with no insurance or only GAMP, Milwaukee County's public insurance. A sign on the wall announced:
YOUR FIRST APPOINTMENT MAY LAST THREE TO FIVE HOURS
. If you didn't have the money, you would pay with your time. Nurses and social workers bustled past patients strolling the hallways, doing nothing while they waited. Scott wouldn't mind working at the clinic, being one of the fast-walkers. But on that day, he was there for drugs. To him, what the AA converts didn't understand, because none of them were heroin users, was that his body was physically in need of something that would give him a boost and kick-start his motivation. His fingers were crossed for Suboxone, which was used to treat opiate addiction. After almost three hours, Scott's name was called. He stood up, relieved to be seen.

The psychiatrist was a skinny Asian man with a flattop and a voice just above a whisper. He led Scott into a drab, rectangular room that resembled an oversized closet. Scott sat on a couch and the psychiatrist bent over an old desk, reading Scott's file. The desk was pushed against the wall so that when Scott looked up from the couch, he saw the psychiatrist in profile.

“How long have you been depressed?” the psychiatrist asked, staring at the file.

“A long time,” Scott answered.

“So, what kind of symptoms are you having?”

“I just really don't have any energy….I'm thinking about looking into Suboxone. I can't tell if I'm in post-withdrawal.”

“How long have you had trouble with the drugs?”

“I'd say about, about seven years.”

“And how long have you been clean?”

“Four months.”

After Scott filled him in about his drug use, the psychiatrist paused before the next question. “Um,” he continued, “it says here that you were sexually abused when you were younger.”

“Correct.” Scott sniffed.

“How old were you?”

“Young. From four to”—Scott thought for a moment—“ten.”

“Who was the perpetrator?”

Scott told him.

“So how did it end? Was someone told?”

“No. I never told anybody about it.”

“Have you ever got any treatment for that?”

“No.”

“You have any interest in that?”

“No.”
3

Scott walked out of the clinic with two bottles of antidepressants. He was to take 100 mgs of Zoloft twice a day and 50 mgs of amitriptyline at bedtime.
4
When Scott had asked, “Do you suggest anything to help with the cravings?” the doctor had mentioned treatment programs instead of Suboxone. Scott had been “a little bummed” at that response. But two out of three wasn't bad. It was cold outside, –1° without the windchill. Under Scott's boots, the snow squeaked.

Three months later, while rooting around for loose change, David and Anna Aldea's twelve-year-old daughter found a syringe in Scott's swimming trunks. Oscar, the Aldeas' eldest son, who had recently moved back home, floated the possibility of it being an old needle, which was entirely plausible. When Scott had first moved in, he would periodically find paraphernalia in the pocket of a sweatshirt or pair of jeans he hadn't worn in a while. He even found a crack pipe once, looking at it and remembering, the way you do when finding a faded ticket stub in the laundry. But David and Anna weren't buying it. That night, after Scott had finished cleaning the Serenity Club, he discovered his things on the Aldeas' porch with a note. He tried the door. Locked. Theirs had been his home for seven months.

Scott didn't plead his case. He shunned confrontation, and David and Anna wouldn't have believed him anyway. “It's much easier for them to think that it was mine than his,” Scott reflected. Besides, this was no time for Oscar to detox, having just become a father. The unselfish thing to do, in Scott's mind, was to allow Oscar to keep using so that he could be there for his girlfriend and baby daughter.

Scott knew the needle was Oscar's because Scott had shot up with him. Scott wouldn't use the term “relapse.” He would say, “It just made me normal.”

Several things had happened all at once. First, Scott learned that all those AA meetings he had sat through and all those group therapy sessions, which he hated even more, didn't count toward his nursing license. The nursing board had its own procedure, and Scott hadn't followed it. The board also had its own lab for urine screening, and since Scott hadn't used it, all those clean drops he'd been racking up didn't count either. “I went and pissed in the cup, and I did that for weeks and weeks and weeks. And finally, I contacted the board to make sure that it was all okay. And they were like, ‘No.' ”

Just days after hearing this defeat, Scott ran into Heroin Susie and Billy at a gas station. They offered, and he accepted, a quiet act of rebellion. That might have been an isolated incident, a small back-slip on his steep climb, but then Oscar moved in with a full-blown habit. The two began getting high on the weekends together. Scott would stop using by Monday so that he could piss clean on Friday. He was still going to counseling and AA meetings. But after a few months, he dropped the routine and started getting high whenever he could.

At two a.m., standing on the porch of the Aldea Recovery House with a sack of clothes and his memory box, Scott took the natural next step and called Susie and Billy. He spent that night in their trailer, right back where he started.

A few days later, as Susie baked an apple pie, Scott called his mom, Joan. He had decided to give methadone a try and needed two things: heroin in his system, which he had, and $150, which he didn't. A month earlier, Scott had returned to his hometown for a two-day visit. He stayed at his mother's small but dignified home, visited his grandmother in the nursing home, played video games with his teenage nieces, and watched his sister model her new wedding dress. It had been two years since Scott had seen his mother. “I would drive up to see you if I could drive in the city,” Joan apologized without apologizing. The visit had been pleasant. Scott was relaxed and calm, not like his last visit, when he seemed to Joan as nervous as a caged rabbit. “His legs would be shaking a mile a minute,” she remembered. Joan had organized a special lunch and a big dinner so that all the relatives could see Scott. He'd traveled back to Milwaukee feeling loved, and that memory helped him pick up the phone.