toys into different colors and have the supervisor reshuffle them so they could be sorted again the next day. It meant that non-compliers could have their food stamps slashed. It meant that 22,000 Milwaukee families would be cut from the welfare rolls. Five months after Milwaukee established the first real work program in the history of welfare, Clinton signed welfare reform into federal law.3
When W-2 fully replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1997, it provided two types of monthly stipends: $673 for beneficiaries who worked and $628 for those who didn’t or couldn’t, usually because of a disability. Because Lamar didn’t work, he received the lesser amount, known as W-2 T. After paying $550 in rent, Lamar had $78 for the rest of the month. That amounted to $2.19 a day.
When Lamar’s welfare benefits started, right after he moved into Sherrena’s apartment, he had mistakenly received two checks. In its Rights and Responsibilities guide, the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families informed clients who have been overpaid: “You may have to repay benefits you receive by mistake regardless of whether it is your fault or the agency’s fault.”4 Tell that to a single father trying to raise two teenage boys on a welfare check. Lamar cashed both checks and bought Luke and Eddy shoes, clothes, and school supplies, along with curtains and furniture for their new apartment. “Of course I spent it. Got my name on it,” he had said when a caseworker contacted him after discovering the error. The caseworker deducted the overpayment from Lamar’s next check, causing him to fall a month behind on rent.
Lamar thought the basement job he had done for Sherrena and Quentin was worth $250. The basement was covered with mildewed clothes, trash, and dog shit, reminding him of a recurring dream he had where he would crawl into a strange, shadowed basement to buy dope. He refused to ask any of the boys for help, thinking the work beneath them. He cleaned the basement alone, working until his stubs grew too sore. It took him a week. Sherrena credited him $50 for it. He still owed her $260.
It would have been impossible to get caught up in time by making extra payments. What Lamar had after the rent was paid went to household necessities (soap, toilet paper) and the phone bill. So Lamar sold $150 of food stamps for $75 cash, the going rate in Milwaukee. The refrigerator and pantry would be empty by the end of the month, but Luke and Eddy could ask their grandma for a plate. The other boys already knew to leave Lamar’s food alone.
It still wasn’t enough. If Lamar wanted to keep his home, he needed another hustle. He spotted one when Patrice moved out. Patrice didn’t put up much of a fight after Sherrena delivered her eviction notice. She had moved upstairs from the lower unit, a two-bedroom, where she and her three small children had been living with her mother, Doreen, and Patrice’s younger siblings. When Patrice was served the pink papers, she and her children simply moved back downstairs.
When Lamar found out, he figured Sherrena would need to repaint the unit. He asked her to let him do it. Sherrena agreed, saying she would have Quentin drop off the supplies. “Tell him to bring extra, baby. I’m putting together a crew.”
Buck and DeMarcus showed up, along with Luke, Eddy, and a half dozen other neighborhood boys who had come to see Lamar’s home as their own. They spread out in the spacious two-bedroom apartment, dipped roller and brush into a five-gallon bucket, and started slathering the walls. They worked earnestly and with a quiet seriousness. After a while, some tossed their hoodies and shirts on the floor, painting bare-chested.5
Lamar paused to take in the scene. Just the previous winter, he had climbed into an abandoned house, high on crack. When the high wore off, he found he couldn’t climb out; his feet had frozen. Lamar kept partying after returning home from the navy. In the mid-1980s, crack hit the streets of Milwaukee, and Lamar started smoking it. He got hooked. His coworkers at Athea knew it because he wouldn’t have cigarette money a couple days after payday. Lamar remembered losing his job and apartment. After that, he took Luke and Eddy to shelters and abandoned houses, tearing up the carpet so they could have a blanket at night. Luke and Eddy’s mother was around back then, but her addiction eventually consumed her,
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