and other harrowing events—were far less likely to believe that people in their community could come together to improve their lives.9 This lack of faith had less to do with their neighborhood’s actual poverty and crime rates than with the level of concentrated suffering they perceived around them. A community that saw so clearly its own pain had a difficult time also sensing its potential.
Every so often, Tobin’s tenants would air a passing remark about their landlord’s profits or call him a greedy Jew. “That Cadillac got some shiny rims. I know that didn’t cost no ten dollars.” “He just wants to butter his pockets.” But for the most part, tenants had a high tolerance for inequality. They spent little time questioning the wide gulf separating their poverty from Tobin’s wealth or asking why rent for a worn-out aluminum-wrapped trailer took such a large chunk of their income. Their focus was on smaller, more tangible problems. When Witkowski reported Tobin’s annual income to be close to $1 million, a man who lived on the same side of the park as Scott said, “I’d give two shits….As long as he keeps things the way he’s supposed to here, and I don’t have to worry about the freaking ceiling caving in, I don’t care.”
Most renters in Milwaukee thought highly of their landlord.10 Who had time to protest inequality when you were trying to get the rotten spot in your floorboard patched before your daughter put her foot through it again? Who cared what the landlord was making as long as he was willing to work with you until you got back on your feet? There was always something worse than the trailer park, always room to drop lower. Residents were reminded of this when the whole park was threatened with eviction, and they felt it again when men from Bieck Management began collecting rents.11
—
It had been a bad week. First Scott lost his keys and decided to break into his apartment by putting a fist through the front window. Then his electricity went out. Then Mira fired him. Nothing personal: she had found a crew of hypes willing to work for $25 a day. In NA, Scott had learned that addiction tightened its grip when you were hungry, angry, lonely, or tired—“HALT”—and Scott was all four. After Mira fired him, he used part of his last paycheck to get drunk and high at a friend’s house. That’s when he called his mom, a hospital housekeeper in rural Iowa. On the phone, Scott told his mother about his drinking (but not the heroin) and about losing his nursing license after getting hooked on painkillers. She knew none of it. Scott hadn’t spoken to his mother in over a year.
“Mom,” Scott was crying. “I’m sorry. I’m a mess. I’m a fucking mess.”
Before Scott could finish, his mother cut him off, failing to realize that it took everything he had in him (and a twelve-pack) to dial all ten numbers and not hang up when he got to the seventh or ninth, like he usually did. She explained that she was in a van full of relatives and unable to talk at the moment. They were all going to Branson, Missouri, for the weekend. “But, Scott,” she said, “you know that you can always come home.”
Scott thought about her offer. How could he get to Iowa with no car and no money for a train ticket? And how could he find heroin there? After a day, the sick would start working its way through his body. Then there was the part about being an object of pity. Scott thought about this as he walked through Pick ’n Save the day after the call. He had offered to buy Heroin Susie lunch with his food stamps if she’d give him a hit. “I mean, I could go back home, but, damn, I’m forty fucking years old…I’d have to go back and tell them, you know, that I fucked my whole fucking life up.” Scott had never reached out to his family for help. He considered their lawns and jobs and children and normal problems and concluded, “They wouldn’t know what to do….How much help could they possibly be?” Middle-class relatives could be useless that way.
Scott joined the checkout line and noticed the man in front of him was buying Robitussin.
“You got a cold?” Scott asked.
“Yeah,” the man said. “Can’t seem to shake it.” He coughed as if to prove his point.
“Here,” Scott said. He took out
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