Evicted (6 page)

Then her car gave out at the worst time—winter—when money was tightest. Ned had been working with a construction crew, which all but shut down in the colder months. They didn't have enough money to repair the car, and Pam lost her job. That's when they fell behind with Tobin. Emergency Assistance got them through one month. A couple months later, in February, Pam gave Tobin $1,000 that she received from her tax refund. But they were still in the red. Pam could have given Tobin more, but she wanted to get back to Quad, which meant she needed a car. She bought one for $400, but a week later Ned heard a clicking sound and told Pam to offload it before the engine threw a rod.

And a lot of money went to dope. There were mornings when Pam would come home from working the third shift to find Ned at Heroin Susie's or wide-awake in the living room, on the tail end of an all-night bender, with women passed out on the couch. There were evenings when Pam got so high she couldn't walk.

The computer and television sold, the rest of their things shoved into garbage bags, Pam walked across the row and asked Scott if she and her family could stay with him until they got back on their feet. Or at least until the baby came. Scott was a heroin user approaching forty. He lived with Teddy, an older man he had met when both were staying at the Lodge. Pam trusted them around the girls, even if Scott did pass out in front of them once. Scott and Teddy said yes and didn't even ask for money.

Tobin huffed when Office Susie told him that Pam and Ned were staying with Scott and Teddy. He had agreed to rent Scott and Teddy's trailer to Scott and Teddy, nobody else. Tobin gave Scott and Teddy an eviction notice, tacking on Pam and Ned's rental debt to Scott and Teddy's bill. Eviction could be contagious that way.

Arleen didn't mind Thirteenth Street. There was a bodega owned by Arabs on one end of her block and a bar for old men on the other. She could walk Jafaris to school. Arleen could have done without the hypes—crack addicts—who'd recently moved into the abandoned house next door, but a few more houses down a girl was learning to play the violin.

Her new apartment was coming along too. There was a time when the house was a stately thing. Built in Greek Revival style, it was two stories of sandstone block with twin columns supporting an awning over the front door. A pair of picture-frame windows, adorned with peaked pediments, faced the street, as did a larger second-story window whose pane opened on hinges. But over the years the house had deteriorated. One column base was settling, causing the overhead awning to slope sideways. The columns, porch, and window pediments had been painted ash-gray, and an imposing iron-barred outer door had been installed. Arleen didn't like walking up the front steps, with their flaking paint and mismatched stair rails on either side, so she always used the side entrance.

Arleen had thrown herself into making the apartment a home. The previous tenants had left behind a large armoire, a bedroom dresser, a bed, and a refrigerator. There was even more in the basement: dishes, clothes, an upholstered chair. Arleen put it all to use, rearranging the furniture and stacking the dishes next to her nice porcelain plates, the ones she had been given years ago by a domestic-violence shelter. She claimed the front bedroom and gave the boys the one in the back, placing their twin mattresses on the ground and organizing clothes in dresser drawers. She unpacked a stereo and listened to old-school hip-hop tracks on burned CDs, her favorite being 2Pac's “Keep Ya Head Up.” In the kitchen, she hung a humble drawing of black farmers hoeing a row. Over the bathroom door, she affixed a sign that she had found at a drugstore:
TODAY WORRIED YOU YESTERDAY AND ALL IS WELL
.

In the basement Arleen had also come across rollers, brushes, and a five-gallon bucket of white paint. She lugged everything upstairs, tied a wrap around her head, and gave the walls a fresh coat. She went ahead and painted the stairwell leading to the upstairs unit too. The job complete, she lit a stick of incense to mask the paint smell and looked around. She felt pleased with herself, content.

The days passed, and Arleen and her boys settled into their new home. After school, Jori sometimes challenged other neighborhood boys to a game of cans, Jafaris looking on. Using a basketball, Jori and his competitor tried to hit soda cans flattened on the sidewalk, earning more points for farther shots. He was a lanky boy, whose arms and fingers seemed to be growing faster than the rest of him, a condition he tried to conceal under oversized sweatshirts and coats. He wore his hair natural and had a relaxed, agreeable way about him. But Jori was fiercely loyal to his momma. If Arleen needed to smile, Jori would steal for her. If she was disrespected, he would fight for her. Some kids born into poverty set their sights on doing whatever it takes to get out. Jori wasn't going anywhere, sensing he was put on this Earth to look after Arleen and Jafaris. He was, all fourteen years of him, the man of the house.

Jafaris was a big kid, the biggest in his kindergarten class. While Jori was all knees and elbows, Jafaris had a round chest and defined shoulders, with high cheekbones and cornrows that always needed redoing. When Jafaris grew bored, he would scavenge the basement or back alley for anything he could find—mop handles, rusted tools, dog leashes, pieces of plywood—and pretend they were tanks and helicopters locked in battle. After dinner, Arleen would watch reruns with the volume turned low, or read through Jafaris's Individualized Education Program (IEP) evaluations, or flip through her prayer book. Some nights, she climbed the stairs and opened the upper unit's unlocked door to give herself a little privacy. Arleen liked that the upstairs unit was vacant. She preferred things quiet.

One day, a friend gave Arleen a cat: a half-black, half-white thing. After Sherrena said they could keep it, Jori named him Little and began feeding him table scraps. Jori laughed when Little would spring at a loose shoelace or gulp down a ramen noodle. Jafaris would pick him up and press his nose against his ear. Both boys especially loved it when Little caught a mouse. He would drag the thing to the middle of the room and smack it around. The mouse would take different routes, trying to figure out what Little wanted.
Bat! Bat!
The mouse would tumble and roll with every swat. At some point, the pathetic creature would burrow under Little's arm, hiding. Little would let the mouse rest and warm itself. Then he might reach down and grab the creature with his mouth and throw it into the air and, enjoying the effect, do it again and again. Eventually the mouse would just lie there motionless, and Little would look at it with cool disgust, wondering why the creature didn't get back up.

Jori opened the door and called out, “He havin' an asthma attack.” Jori had walked Jafaris home from school. Arleen stayed on the love seat waiting to see how bad it was. When it was a small attack, Jafaris's mouth opened and closed like a caught fish. When it was a medium attack, he made an
O
with his mouth. When it was bad, his lips curled back, and he breathed through his nubby teeth.

Jafaris walked through the door making the
O
face. He shrugged off his backpack and leaned on the love seat like an old man after climbing a flight of stairs.

“Jafaris, go get me my bag,” Arleen said.

The boy nodded and went to the bedroom. When he came back, Arleen pulled out the albuterol and shook it. Jafaris put his mouth to the inhaler and breathed in. But their timing was off. “Blow it out! Don't be playing with me,” Arleen snapped.

Jafaris missed the next try too, but the third filled his lungs. He held his breath, puffing out his cheeks the way children do before jumping into a pool. His mother counted: “One…two…three…” At ten, Jafaris exhaled, took a breath in, and smiled. Arleen smiled back.

She gave Jafaris albuterol every morning and every evening. Before bed, he got prednisone, a steroid, through a PARI Proneb Ultra nebulizer with plastic tubing and an airplane-cabin mask. Arleen called it “the breathing machine.” Jafaris's asthma had been improving. Arleen remembered when she used to rush Jafaris to the hospital every week.

Jafaris's father had given him his name, and lately Arleen had been worried he might have given him other things too. His father had “learning disabilities and anger issues,” and Jafaris was beginning to exhibit similar characteristics at school. He excelled at reading but struggled with other subjects, and he pushed his classmates around. He had been evaluated but didn't qualify for additional help. Some teachers had suggested medications, which made Arleen bristle: “I don't like medicine. I'm totally against Ritalin. I think he needs more one-on-one attention….I don't want to medicate him until he's seen a counselor and done gone through that.”

Arleen had met Jafaris's father at the movie theater at the Mayfair Mall, when she was working the concession stand. “It just kind of happened,” Arleen recalled. “We weren't in no real relationship.” They tried for one, but Arleen discovered he could be a violent man. He went to prison soon after she left him. He gave Jafaris little else beyond life.

It had been the same way with Arleen's father. He had left after impregnating her mother, who was only sixteen when she had Arleen. Arleen's grandmother served food in the cafeteria at Columbia St. Mary's Hospital, but her mother rarely worked outside the home. She received assistance and later married a man who held down a job. That man became a minister, which was the reason Arleen tried never to set foot in a church.

When Arleen moved out at seventeen, she threw away the hand-me-down clothes her mother had made her wear to school. “
Ding-dong,
” her classmates would taunt when she walked past in recycled bell-bottoms. Arleen put rubber bands on the bottom of her jeans, but that only made the kids laugh harder. When she dropped out before finishing high school, her mother said nothing. “She didn't care.”

Arleen moved in with a family that paid her to babysit their children. During that time, she met the man who would become the father of her eldest child, Gerald, whom she took to calling Ger-Ger. After Arleen discovered she was pregnant with Ger-Ger, her man got entangled with the law. “I didn't know nothing about having a boyfriend in and out of jail all the time. So when I met somebody else,” during one of the times Ger-Ger's father was locked up, “I just left him alone.”

That someone else was Larry. He was a lean man with calm eyes and a wide brow. Larry had taught himself how to be a mechanic and earned money fixing cars in a back alley. On paydays, he would take Arleen out for Chinese food, her favorite. She would read the long menu but order the same thing every time: sesame chicken. They were poor and in love, and soon Arleen was pregnant with another son. They named him after Larry but called him Boosie. Larry and Arleen had three more children after that, a daughter and two more sons, letting Arleen's mother name their youngest. “Jori.” They liked it.

“Will you marry me?” Larry asked one day.

Arleen laughed. She thought he was joking and said no. “He wasn't talking about no big marriage, wasn't even talking about at the courthouse,” Arleen remembered. But he was not joking. When she realized this, Arleen dropped her smile and said she would have to think about it. What gave her pause was not Larry but his mother and sister. “They always thought they knew more…I was never good enough in they eyes.”

After that, Larry started running around. It crushed Arleen, but when he came back, she always held the door open. Until one day he didn't come back. They had been together for seven years. This time, the other woman was someone Arleen considered a friend.

That happened years ago. Sometimes, Larry parked outside of where Arleen was staying. She'd climb in his van, and they'd drive around and talk, mostly about Jori. From time to time, Larry took Jori to church or let him spend the night or swelled his lip for getting in trouble at school. When Jori spotted Larry driving by in the neighborhood, he'd holler, “There go my daddy!” and run after him.

When Larry walked out on her and the kids, Arleen was working at the Mainstay Suites, by the airport. In despair, she quit and began relying on welfare. Sometime later she found work cleaning the Third Street Pier restaurant, but then her mother died suddenly. The grief overwhelmed her, and she left that job too. She later regretted going back on welfare, but it was a dark time.

When she moved onto Thirteenth Street, Arleen was receiving W-2 T, owing mainly to her chronic depression. She received the same stipend in 2008 that she would have when welfare was reformed over a decade earlier: $20.65 a day, $7,536 a year. Since 1997, welfare stipends in Milwaukee and almost everywhere else have not budged, even as housing costs have soared. For years, politicians have known that families could not survive on welfare alone.
1
This was the case before rent and utility costs climbed throughout the 2000s, and it was even more true afterward.

Arleen had given up hoping for housing assistance long ago. If she had a housing voucher or a key to a public housing unit, she would spend only 30 percent of her income on rent. It would mean the difference between stable poverty and grinding poverty, the difference between planting roots in a community and being batted from one place to another. It would mean she could give most of her check to her children instead of her landlord.

Years ago, when she was nineteen, Arleen rented a subsidized apartment for $137 a month. She had just had Ger-Ger and was grateful to be out of her mother's house. She could make her own decisions. So when a friend asked Arleen to give up her place and move in with her, Arleen decided to say yes. She walked away from a subsidized apartment and into the private rental market, where she would stay for the next twenty years. “I thought it was okay to move somewhere else,” she remembered. “And I regret it, right now to this day. Young!” She shook her head at her nineteen-year-old self. “If I would've been in my right mind, I could have
still
been there.”

One day on a whim, Arleen stopped by the Housing Authority and asked about the List. A woman behind the glass told her, “The List is frozen.” On it were over 3,500 families who had applied for rent assistance four years earlier. Arleen nodded and left with hands in her pockets.
2
It could have been worse. In larger cities like Washington, DC, the wait for public housing was counted in decades. In those cities, a mother of a young child who put her name on the List might be a grandmother by the time her application was reviewed.
3

Most poor people in America were like Arleen: they did not live in public housing or apartments subsidized by vouchers. Three in four families who qualified for assistance received nothing.
4

If Arleen wanted public housing, she would have to save a month's worth of income to repay the Housing Authority for leaving her subsidized apartment without giving notice; then wait two to three years until the List unfroze; then wait another two to five years until her application made it to the top of the pile; then pray to Jesus that the person with the stale coffee and heavy stamp reviewing her file would somehow overlook the eviction record she'd collected while trying to make ends meet in the private housing market on a welfare check.

The upstairs unit on Thirteenth Street didn't sit vacant for long. Sherrena moved a young woman into the apartment soon after the paint had dried on Arleen's walls. Trisha was her name.

Arleen and Trisha began talking and sharing meals. Arleen could be quiet and cautious around new people, guarded, but Trisha was an open book. She told Arleen that this was her first real home in eight years. Her last real home belonged to her sister, who had asked her to leave after Trisha told her what their father had done to her. Trisha then started sleeping in shelters and abandoned houses, but mostly she went home with men. At sixteen, she learned to use her skinny frame, her flush of wavy black hair, her copper skin, a mix of black, Mexican, and white blood. The year before, when she was twenty-three, Trisha had had a baby but signed him over to her sister because she was using. Crack, mostly. After the baby came, Trisha found Repairers of the Breach, a local homeless outreach that helped her get on SSI.