only asking $420 a month and didn’t bother with a background check.
The apartment also came with Pito’s nephew, who went by D.P. A baby-faced nineteen-year-old with several tattoos and earrings, D.P. had recently been released from prison, where he was serving time for weapons possession and tampering with a firearm. He had sawed off the barrel of a shotgun. D.P. ran with the Cobras and wanted a gun in case things heated up with the Kings. In prison, he got his GED and another tattoo that read BEGINNING.
One day, Pito learned from another landlord that an old man had died in a nearby trailer park and no one had come to claim his things. So he arranged for Scott and D.P. to clean out the trailer in exchange for them keeping whatever they wanted. In the dead man’s closet, Scott had found a pressed suit in a zipped garment bag and a silk-lined suitcase. In the bathroom, he had learned the man’s name from mailing stickers on American Legion magazines. But Scott found the cigarette burns next to the bed most revealing. They led him to speculate that the man was on morphine. In Scott’s mind, drugs explained a lot about the world: why this man had died alone, why Pam and Ned got tossed from the trailer park, and why he was in a stranger’s home, collecting shabby furniture for his apartment.
The new roommates loaded a dresser and sofa onto the oily bed of a Ford F-150. When the truck was full, D.P. started the engine and turned on loud rap music. Scott would have preferred something else—his favorite song was “Solsbury Hill” by Peter Gabriel—but he didn’t say anything.
Scott was still on Mira’s crew, but work had slowed. Mira had run through her jobs too quickly by working her men twelve hours a day, lugging washers and dryers, mattresses, sleeper sofas. When workers said they were exhausted or sore, Mira sold them painkillers. But Scott thought she charged too much. When he needed relief, he would ask Heroin Susie to meet him somewhere.
“I want to do what Pito’s doing,” D.P. said. “I want to come home clean and leave the house clean. I can’t see myself at thirty doing this bullshit.”
Scott couldn’t either, years ago, when he was D.P.’s age.
After unloading the furniture, D.P. and Scott shared a beer on their front steps. The apartment was on Ward Street, on the west side of Kinnickinnic Avenue, which the locals shortened to “KK.” It faced an undeveloped plot of land surrounding railroad tracks and was not far from an apartment Scott used to rent years ago, when he was still a nurse and living in Bay View, a thriving neighborhood that attracted young professionals, artists, and hipsters. From their stoop, Scott and D.P. could see the crowning dome of the Basilica of St. Josaphat. One hundred years ago, Polish parishioners had emptied their savings accounts to fund the massive building project, “a scaled-down version of St. Peter’s in Rome.”1 As Scott drank his beer, he joked about “taking his own vow of poverty….All I’m going to do is buy some food and clothes and some drugs now and again.”
D.P. said nothing.
“Damn,” Scott said after the moment had passed. “My neck and back are killing me.” His shifts with Mira were beginning to take a toll.
“Why don’t you go to the doctor?” D.P. asked.
“Because I don’t think there’s anything they can do.” Scott paused. “They could give me Percocet! Too bad I’d eat them all in one day.”
—
Scott still bought his Vicodin at the trailer park. He thought Mrs. Mytes was the only adult there who didn’t do drugs or have a history with them. Scott loved drugs. Being high was a “mini vacation” from his shame of a life. He took the trip whenever he could afford it.
Scott had gotten high with Pam and Ned shortly before they received their eviction notice and had moved in a hurry, leaving behind a couch, beds, dressers, and other large items. Scott figured Ned and Pam got what was coming to them. In his old life, before the fall, he might have been more sympathetic. But he had come to view sympathy as a kind of naïveté, a sentiment voiced from a certain distance by the callow middle classes. “They can be compassionate because it’s not their only option,” he said of liberals who didn’t live in trailer parks. As for Ned and Pam, Scott thought their eviction came down to their
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