Rachel and Her Children (14 page)

There is another reason for believing this is possible: Mr. Tuccelli, I am told, would like to see himself as a humanitarian and to be so regarded by others. Kim’s relatively generous perception of her landlord is, admittedly, voiced by few others in the building. Most residents are in too much turmoil to attempt to see the human side of
someone who holds so much power over them. But at least one other woman has described some kindly things that he has done: small favors or a thoughtful word to somebody in trouble. Even if the Martinique, however, should someday be utterly transformed, there will still be more than sixty other buildings in New York that offer an equivalent regime of degradation. The real question is why the city, any city, will allow itself to do this.

“Government policy,” according to the New York City Council, holds that if homelessness is made “too comfortable,” the homeless “will want to remain homeless.” The mayor believes that the hotels have acted as a magnet. His concern is that a family doubled up or living in substandard housing sees hotels as the first step to better housing. “New buildings,” he says, “are like highways—they attract occupants.” For this reason, he explains, “we are going to, whenever possible, put people into congregate housing [which] is not something people might rush into….”

“The mayor’s words are very hard on people living here,” says Kim. “I don’t know what’s in his heart. But his sarcasm hurts a lot of people.”

She tells me of a child in the Martinique who has had an opportunity to testify in Washington. In his testimony before Congress, he reported he was often hungry when he went to school. He said that he had trouble concentrating and sometimes he had to rest his head against his desk because, he said, “it hurts to be hungry.” The mayor replied that the child’s family (six persons) received a budget of over $20,000, not including the hotel bill. Thousands of city employees, he observed, earn less than that. “And,” he said, “they all work for a living. I wonder why they bother.”

Kim: “What he seems to mean is that the people here are lazy. I don’t believe the mayor is being fair. When he added up that budget, he included the allowance for apartment
rent. People in a hotel don’t receive it. He added Medicaid. Right there, those two items add about $8,000. Subtract $8,000 and the budget comes to something like $6 for each child for one day. Is that enough to feed your child in New York?”

A reporter later asked a similar question to the mayor. “You bet it is,” he said.

The mayor’s views have changed somewhat in recent months. His present position, summarized in the final pages of this book, has been described by homeless advocates as less severe. Whatever one may think of this, it may be worthwhile to recall Kim’s words about Mr. Tuccelli. Individuals did not create these prisons. Systemic inequities are the real issue. City officials throughout the nation, faced with the results of such inequities, resort to words and measures that seem punitive.

Why do they do it? “They have to do it,” George Orwell wrote in 1931. “If they made these places too pleasant you’d have all the scum of the country flocking into them.” That is apparently what cities fear.

“As to conditions at the hotels,” the HRA reports, “the city … has a stringent Family Hotel Inspection Program. Violations of building and health codes are identified through regular inspections…. Corrective action plans are both required and enforced….”

It is true that there is an inspection program. Inspections in the Martinique, however, are announced ahead of time. Families are told to hide their hot plates or their toasters in a drawer. Residents tell me garbage bags are handed out by the hotel to hide a hot plate too large for a bureau drawer. The ritual has the effect of leaving residents responsible for fires or for any injuries to children that result from cooking in a crowded room. The hotel is protected by the
notice that prohibits cooking, given to people on arrival. The city is protected by the pretense of inspection. The residents are unprotected.

“When I came here first,” says Kim, “I found I’d lost the right to vote. A group of people had to sue the city to regain the franchise. Even with the vote we’re disenfranchised. We’re like cripples in this city. But I thought that the denial of our right to vote was pretty raw.

“Other rights go by the board. You’re not supposed to talk to a reporter. There’s no written rule, but it’s well understood you run the risk of being thrown out of your room if you say something that gets into print. You can publish a newsletter but it’s censored. There was one newsletter issued by the nurse. They did an item about legal rights, the way to fight eviction. Very brief—they simply gave a number to reach Legal Aid. The hotel confiscated the entire issue. How do TV stations get into the building? They hide their cameras. One reporter hid the camera in a baby carriage.”

She shows me a copy of the banned newsletter that she salvaged from the trash. The item about Legal Aid is followed by this admonition: “Please do not leave your children unattended. If you absolutely cannot take them with you, get a responsible baby-sitter. Otherwise, fires could result…. Your children [could be] taken away by the police. Things could get worse….”

She laughs. “That’s true. They could. You could be in a hotel that doesn’t have refrigerators. We had to fight for those. Food for children couldn’t be refrigerated. You couldn’t open a can of infant formula and save it overnight. If you didn’t use it all you’d have to throw it out.

“I’d been through one summer here with no refrigerator. Living in this building in the summer—it was steaming in these rooms. A woman upstairs agreed to talk to a reporter. A man who saw the story offered to provide her
a refrigerator. He asked: ‘Does anybody else there need refrigerators?’ She said: ‘Every mother in the building does.’ So he told her: ‘Get a list together.’ I worked on it with her. We found diabetics in the building keeping insulin under the water tap. There were children who were ill and needed daily medication. Some needed injections. We made the list. On the day they came, Mr. Tuccelli wouldn’t let us bring them in. The truck was there. TV reporters came. Once he saw them he agreed. If you confront him, he’ll back down.”

The hotel added a dollar to the rent each night for the refrigerators. “Later he supplied them to all residents. They’re half-size refrigerators. I believe they cost less than $200.” She does not regard this policy as sinister but simply part of a predictable routine. “Why not? Hey! For him, it isn’t a bad deal.”

She tells me what happens when the rent is overdue: “First you lose your right to visitors, clean linens … Mr. Tuccelli comes to your door at 6:00 a.m. He bangs on the door. You open up. There he is in the hallway with his gun. ‘Where’s your rent?’”

I ask her why a parent doesn’t go and get the rent a day or two before it’s due.

“That would make sense,” she says. “But that’s the problem. It is not permitted. You cannot get your rent check even
one
day early. You have to go and pick it up the day it’s due. Even then, they don’t begin to type the checks until four in the afternoon. If someone’s sick, a crisis, anything like that, you’re overdue. If the rent is three days overdue, they’ll send up a guard at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. He bangs at the door. ‘Your rent is due.’ It wakes the children. Then you can’t get back to sleep. Six a.m. He bangs again. Mr. Tuccelli. ‘Where’s your rent?’” She shakes her head. “There’s got to be a better way to do this …”

Kim is a lively woman with an angry and investigative
zeal. But none of her anger is turned in upon herself. It is turned out; and in that turning out, that venting of a well-defined and well-supported rage, she finds a fair degree of energy and health.

Political anger isn’t high on any list I’ve seen as a solution to the ravages of homelessness; but it is notable that those who seem to hold up best under the pressures and who seem the best defended against alcohol or drugs are almost always those who have some kind of overview—a “lever” or an “edge.” The rise in drug use in poor neighborhoods of inner cities, those at least with which I am familiar, parallels the sharp decline in organized political activity that makes it possible to galvanize a neighborhood to fight for its collective good. Those who celebrate the passing of the urban protests of the 1960s, but deplore the heightened fratricidal violence and use of drugs among the very poor, may not be persuaded that the loss of one fosters proliferation of the other. I believe they are connected and that Kim’s defiant sanity is an example of the energy that finds its nutriment in focused indignation. The consequence is not a better room or an exemption from continual assault by sometimes hostile overseers; but it does protect her from self-laceration and it also seems to have protected her from the despair that leads so many people in this building to collude in their own ruin.

It’s also interesting to me that Kim is one of the few people here who doesn’t demonize her landlord. Her evenhanded comments on Mr. Tuccelli, salted with a bit of irony and humor, demonstrate some capability for balance. Political awareness seems to rescue her from hate and self-hate both. She voices anger at injustice, not contempt for individuals.

Self-hate is common among many women here. If a woman feels she is despised, and has no recognition of the forces that demean her, perhaps it is inevitable that she
will feel despicable. If nothing can affirm her dignity (if she is, like Terry, forced to beg and sweat and tremble in the hallway of the Martinique, hiding her children in a tiny room for fear of being cast out on the street) it seems understandable that she may see herself as worthy of contempt. Drug use in the Martinique strikes me repeatedly as a routinely exercised attempt at self-annihilation. If we are persuaded that society would dearly wish that we did not exist, might we not assist society in our undoing? These tendencies are not particular, unique, but shared by many. Epidemiology may be of more help to us than classical psychiatry in understanding why so many people whom we dare not touch regard themselves as toxic and unclean.

Kim: “Why don’t people in this place complain? Because they’re so damn scared. If the city will do this, they think, it might do something even worse … There’s a woman on the seventh floor. She’s like a broken stick. You ought to meet her. She’s so timid and afraid. She thinks that all of this is something she deserves. Some kind of punishment from God. She asks for something and it’s never done. She loses her benefits. She gets cut off—this happens all the time—because she cannot read. She’s quiet. They ignore her. Why do you think nobody intervenes? They’ll intervene after she kills herself. She takes her children to the hospital. They don’t explain things. They throw papers at her. She can’t understand. Nobody says: ‘Wait a minute. Something here is wrong.’ They leave her there to rot. Why don’t they teach her how to read? I
know
her. This is something that she
wants
. If they had a decent day care setup in this building, I’d go down and teach her. There’s no day care, nothing you can count on. No literacy—there are volunteers but nothing energized enough to do the job. No library. No quiet place to meet and talk. Not even a pleasant place to sit and read a book.

“Why don’t people in the city ever look around this
building? Why don’t they figure out who’s here, who’s got some skills, who could help someone else? They look at us to see what isn’t there, and not what
is
. They see us like a lot of empty bottles that they don’t intend to fill. Listen! There are gifted people in this building. Why don’t they wake up? Do they think that they won’t have to pay for this?”

It seems astonishing, with all the arbitrary cruelties or illegalities we have observed, that Kim must be interrogated by psychologists in order to decode her poverty and ascertain the secret failing in her soul—behind the broken furnace.

“Imagine,” says Kim, “with all these children, all these people concentrated here within one building, all the useful things that you could do. I mean, you
have
these people here. You don’t have to beat the streets to find them! The mayor is supposed to have a literacy program. Lots of press. You must know about it. ‘Where can we locate those in need? Why don’t they come forward?’ Here they are! What happened to the mayor?

“You could do some good things in those empty rooms. Lectures. Movies. Every night you could have education going on. Doctors could come and talk, explain things women need to learn. Imagine all the decent things that you could do with just a little common sense if you were not thinking of this situation as a penalty for failure.”

K
ai Erikson describes a feeling, voiced by dislocated families he has met, that they have lost “a certain natural immunity” to misfortune. He speaks of a growing conviction that the world is no longer “a safe place to be.” One of the “bargains men make with one another,” he observes, “in order to maintain their sanity is to share an illusion that they are safe even when the physical evidence in the world around them does not seem to warrant that conclusion.” Without this bargain he wonders whether life would be endurable.

There are only a few people in the Martinique Hotel of whom it would be accurate to say that life has ceased to be endurable. Kim spoke of one such person. She described her as “a broken stick.” When I return a few nights later she has arranged for us to meet.

The woman—I will call her Laura—is so fragile that I
find it hard to start a conversation. Before I do, she asks if I will read to her a letter from the hospital. Her oldest son has been ill for several weeks. He was tested in November for lead poisoning. The letter tells her that the child has a dangerous lead level. She’s told to bring him back for treatment. She received the letter some weeks ago. It’s been buried in a pile of other documents she cannot understand.

Although she cannot read, she knows enough to understand the darker implications of this information. The crumbling plaster in the Martinique Hotel is covered with sweet-tasting chips of paint that children eat or chew as it flakes off the walls. Infants may be paralyzed or undergo convulsions. Some grow blind. The consequences may be temporary or long lasting. They may appear at once or not for several years. This final point is what instills so much uneasiness; even months of observation cannot still a parent’s fear.