“No, you were just a baby. Now, Bliss, she was. She got so used to it. She always saw blood just pour out of me.”
Pam found a way to leave him. She began working as a certified nursing assistant, emptying bedpans, mopping up puke, and rotating the invalids to prevent bedsores. She learned how to cook pots of spaghetti and macaroni salad. Her mother had died in a car accident when Pam was in high school and had never got around to teaching her. Her father hadn’t either; he spent a lot of time in prison on drug and drunk-driving charges. Pam’s brother was doing better too. He was taking methadone and said he didn’t miss heroin.
It was a time of promise and rebirth, a time of putting one foot steadily in front of the other. Then the ground shifted beneath. One day Pam answered the phone. A voice was saying that her brother was dead. Pam asked how. The voice said overdose. He was twenty-nine. Pam screamed into the phone. Then she hung up and dialed another number to ask for something to keep her from drowning.
The words to describe the drug—“crack,” “rock”—gave off the impression that it was a gnarled, craggy thing. But when you held it in your hand, it could be smooth and elegant. It could look like a piece of Chiclets gum, the kind that slides into a child’s cupped hand out of the quarter-turn machine. All those years with the drug dealer, Pam had stayed away from it. She saw how it turned people, saw what they would do for it. But she also saw the way it helped people forget. “There was not a day that went by that I wasn’t fucked up on something,” Pam remembered. “And sometimes I’d be like, ‘Wow. I haven’t even cried for him yet.’ But I didn’t. Before I would, I’d go and get high.”
That’s when she met Ned.
That first year, crack was the force that held them together. They lived for it and by it, raising the girls along the way. Soon they began selling it. A year after meeting, they were caught and convicted. Ned, who had a previous drug charge, did prison time. It was Pam’s first felony. She was sentenced to four years’ probation and made to sit for ten months in a jail cell, where, finally, she cried.
When Pam got out, she tried to stay sober. She moved in with the straightest friend she knew in Green Bay, but while Pam was in jail, the friend had developed a habit. “Everybody, everybody I know in fucking Green Bay is fucking on dope,” Pam vented. She asked her father to wire her $500 so she could move and, to her surprise, he did. But Green Bay was a small town, and Pam soon crossed paths with one of her former dealers. “He got me hooked right back on.”
Pam and Ned reconnected after he was released, and Pam soon discovered she was pregnant. Ned demanded a paternity test, which confirmed the baby was his. They settled on a name: Kristen. Soon, Ned’s daughter from another woman came to live with them. Laura had a small nose and freckles, and was one year older than Bliss. A few months after Laura moved in, Ned left her, Pam, and the other girls with a woman they had just met in the drug scene. Pam and the girls spent the night at the woman’s house, then the next night, and the night after that. Pam eventually walked Laura to her mother’s house and knocked on the door. She remembered standing at the door and telling Laura’s mother: “I’m about to have this baby. I’m homeless right now. Your old man left me. I have no money, no food, no nothing for your kid. I’m scared….Can you please take your daughter?”6
Laura’s mother stayed on the phone, gave them a bag of canned food, and shut the door. Pam and the girls stayed at the woman’s house. Ned came back a month later.
—
When Tobin told Pam and Ned he was keeping their rebate check and still evicting them, he brought along a security detail. But nobody caused a scene, even though Tobin only gave them twenty-four hours to leave before he called the sheriff. Ned might have raised hell if he didn’t have an outstanding warrant for his arrest, stemming from another drug charge. Pam and Ned blamed each other for the eviction.
“You cracked it up,” Ned snapped at Pam.
“You cracked it up,” Pam shot back. “Talking about me. I handed you all the money….You got us evicted.”
“Move, bitch.”
“It’s you, Ned.”
“You can move.”
“I can’t. It’s you.” Pam stopped. “I don’t know. Is it really me? Is it me who has the problem? I don’t know. Maybe it is. Am I the one that fucked up?”
They sold their only possessions worth anything—the television and the computer, Pam’s Christmas gift. They would need the extra cash. Each month Pam worked thirty hours a week for her welfare check of $673 and received $390 in food stamps. On a good day Ned brought in $50 cash for customizing and repairing motorcycles. Pam’s money was Pam’s money and Ned’s was Ned’s. They kept separate bank accounts and split the bills down the middle.
After jail, Pam had had a difficult time finding work with her recent drug conviction. She finally was hired by Quad Graphics, a commercial printing plant. Quad had a reputation for hiring people with records and without high school diplomas, provided they were willing to work the third shift. Pam was. She ran the warm, humming machines from seven p.m. to seven a.m.
Quad Graphics was in Sussex, a forty-minute drive from the trailer park. Pam relished the commute. It was her time, time away from Ned and the kids.
Then her car gave out at the worst time—winter—when money was tightest. Ned had been working with a construction crew, which all but shut down in the colder months. They didn’t have enough money to repair the car, and Pam lost her job. That’s when they fell behind with Tobin. Emergency Assistance got them through one month. A couple months later, in February, Pam gave Tobin $1,000 that she received from her tax refund. But they were still in the red. Pam could have given Tobin more, but she wanted to get back to Quad, which meant she needed a car. She bought one for $400, but a week later Ned heard a clicking sound and told Pam to offload it before the engine threw a rod.
And a lot of money went to dope. There were mornings when Pam would come home from working the third shift to find Ned at Heroin Susie’s or wide-awake in the living room, on the tail end of an all-night bender, with women passed out on the couch. There were evenings when Pam got so high she couldn’t walk.
The computer and television sold, the rest of their things shoved into garbage bags, Pam walked across the row and asked Scott if she and her family could stay with him until they got back on their feet. Or at least until the baby came. Scott was a heroin user approaching forty. He lived with Teddy, an older man he had met when both were staying at the Lodge. Pam trusted them around the girls, even if Scott did pass out in front of them once. Scott and Teddy said yes and didn’t even ask for money.
Tobin huffed when Office Susie told him that Pam and Ned were staying with Scott and Teddy. He had agreed to rent Scott and Teddy’s trailer to Scott and Teddy, nobody else. Tobin gave Scott and Teddy an eviction notice, tacking on Pam and Ned’s rental debt to Scott and Teddy’s bill. Eviction could be contagious that way.
5.
THIRTEENTH STREET