Evicted_ Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond Page 0,85

too, found Arleen a lock and let her slide on the insurance. She thanked him before shuffling through the cold concrete lot to close the orange aluminum door to C-33. At least her stuff had a home.

—

They spent the night, then the weekend, back at Thirteenth Street with Crystal, sleeping on the floor.

Arleen called the Lodge and other shelters, but they were full as usual. On Monday morning, she tried domestic-violence shelters and secured a room at one she had stayed at years ago, when fleeing Jafaris’s father. When Arleen called Carol to tell her the name of the shelter for Red Cross money purposes, she learned that Carol had rented the apartment to someone else. Arleen didn’t ask why, but she figured Carol had found a better tenant, someone with more income or no kids. Arleen let out a long, emptied-out sigh and balled herself up in a chair. “I’m back to square one,” she said.

Soured, Arleen gathered their last remaining things in the apartment. She took down her curtains and remembered some dirty clothes that were in Crystal’s closet. She and Jafaris brought Little upstairs to Trisha.

“Take care of kitten,” Jafaris asked.

“I am, baby, I promise,” Trisha answered.

He thought and said, “Give him some food.”

Arleen planned on leaving behind her love seat, which had collapsed since Crystal began sleeping on it. Besides that and a scattering of clothes, blankets, and broken lamps, the place was barren. Then Arleen remembered that she had bought a $5 adapter that connected the stove to the gas line. She told Jori to remove the part, which would have rendered the stove useless.

Seeing this, Crystal screamed, “Get out of my house!” She began picking up Arleen’s things and throwing them out the front door. “I don’t need none of your shit!…Got me fucked up!”

“Stankin’ ass bitch!” Arleen yelled, getting in Crystal’s face.

“You call me stankin’, but whose clothes you got on? Mines. My shirt!…Three days in a row, you nasty bitch!”

“I’ll hit you in yo’ mouth!” Jori yelled at Crystal, running up. He put his nose inches away from Crystal’s face and cocked his fist back. “I’m fittin’ to scrap you!” he yelled. “I don’t give a fuck about no fucking police!”

Suddenly, Quentin was in the room. He had been showing prospective tenants the rear apartment when he overheard the commotion. Quentin walked in the open door and grabbed Jori by the shirt collar. “Hey! Hey!” he barked.

Jori lunged at Crystal. “Come on!” he yelled, his fists flailing. Quentin tugged him back. Crystal only stepped closer. “Look, boy,” she said, chuckling. “You are not hard as you think.”

“No! No!” Jafaris cried. Trying to be helpful, he had found a broken shower rod and was hitting Crystal with it. Arleen grabbed Jafaris and pulled him out the door. At Quentin’s prodding, Jori moved in that direction, stopping to kick in Crystal’s floor-model television.

As the family left, Crystal stepped onto the front porch and continued throwing their things everywhere. The front lawn was soon littered with random stuff: schoolbooks, a Precious Moments doll, a bottle of cologne. “Y’all ain’t untouchable,” Crystal was screaming. “This is America! This is America!”

If Arleen hadn’t been under so much pressure, she might have realized that removing the adapter was throwing Crystal’s desperation in her face. Maybe she would have been able to defuse the situation. Under better circumstances, they could have been friends. They got on when there was food in their bellies and some certainty about the next day. But Arleen was in the press of the city, depleted. So when Crystal exploded, Arleen exploded right alongside her.2

Crystal could quickly turn violent. The year before she met Arleen, Crystal had been examined by a clinical psychologist who diagnosed her with Bipolar Disorder, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Reactive Attachment Disorder, Borderline Intellectual Functioning, Neglect of a Child, Sexual Abuse of a Child as Victim, and Emerging Personality Disorder Dynamics with Borderline Features. Her childhood had left a mark. “Crystal is highly sensitive to anticipated rejection, abandonment, and harm in her relationships,” the psychologist wrote in his report. “She has immense underlying rage at significant others for their perceived unwillingness and/or inability to respond to her needs for nurturance, security, and esteem….She has limited ability to tolerate much in the way of frustration or anxiety and a proneness to act out her tensions without much…forethought or deliberation….She is still seen as being fragilely integrated.” The report surmised that Crystal had an IQ of about 70 and anticipated that she would need