One morning Scott woke up and felt the sick coming. His pill suppliers had run dry. Scott asked Dawn for morphine, but she was out too. He downed several of Teddy’s beers, but they didn’t help. In the evening, Scott sat alone in his bedroom, shaking. He put on his baseball cap and, hands in pockets, began doing laps around the trailer park.
From a lawn chair outside her patio, Heroin Susie watched Scott pass by. She ashed her cigarette and went inside to tell Billy, her longtime boyfriend. When Scott walked by again, they called him over.
Susie and Billy had a small dog, a terrier mix, and a clean trailer stocked with newer furniture. Susie was middle-aged with long dirty-blond hair and dark rings underneath her eyes. Her mannerisms were silky, relaxed. She told people she had the gift of healing. Billy was a wiry man in a cutoff shirt who seemed to blink half as much as the average person. He had a gruff voice and faded prison tattoos. Susie and Billy had been together for years but still liked to hold hands.
Susie asked Scott if he was fiending. Yes, he nodded. She looked at Billy, who retrieved a small leather case. Inside was a package of new needles, alcohol swabs, sterilized water, tiny cotton balls, and black-tar heroin.
Never shoot it. It was the deal Scott had made with himself when opioids began taking over his life. He had promised he would never inject heroin, not after seeing what AIDS had done to his friends.
Billy held a spoon over a stove burner to cook the tar with water. Humming softly, he then soaked up the heroin into a cotton ball and pulled it into a syringe. It was dark, coffee-colored. Scott learned later that this meant it was strong. Scott took the needle behind his right knee. He closed his eyes, waited, and then came relief, weightlessness. He was a child floating back to the surface, the diving board bouncing.
They became friends, Scott, Susie, and Billy. Scott learned that Susie wrote poetry, liked telling stories of the days she dealt bricks of marijuana in the ’70s, and had shot heroin for the last thirty-five years. Billy shot in his arms, and Susie in her legs, which were so scarred and discolored they made even Scott squeamish. It sometimes took Susie hours to find an opening. When she grew frustrated, Billy took the needle and forced it into her neck’s jugular artery.
Billy and Scott sometimes scrapped metal or collected cans to raise dope money. (Black-tar heroin was cheap. A balloon holding about a tenth of a gram went for $15 or $20.) Other times, all three worked a hustle outside the mall. Billy would steal something of value from a department store, usually jewelry. Susie would then return the item, acting like a dissatisfied customer who had misplaced her receipt. Because Susie had no receipt, the store manager would give her a gift certificate in exchange for the item. Susie would then hand the gift certificate to Scott, who would hawk it in the parking lot, selling it below value. He might sell an $80 gift certificate for $40, taking the $40 straight to Chicago, where Susie’s favorite supplier lived.
Lenny had approved Susie and Billy’s application to live in the trailer park, just as he had approved Scott and Teddy’s. Lenny did all of Tobin’s screening. He never did credit checks, because there was a fee, and he didn’t call previous landlords because he figured most applicants just listed their mothers or friends. Lenny’s screening consisted mainly of typing names into CCAP.
CCAP stood for Consolidated Court Automation Programs. Like many other states, Wisconsin believed its citizens were entitled to view the affairs of its criminal and civil courts.4 So, free of charge, it provided a website that catalogued all speeding tickets, child support disputes, divorces, evictions, felonies, and other legal business. Eviction records and misdemeanors were displayed for twenty years; felonies were displayed for at least fifty. CCAP also reported dismissed evictions and criminal charges. If someone was arrested but never convicted, CCAP displayed the violation with the disclaimer: “These charges were not proven and have no legal effect. [Name] is presumed innocent.” Employers and landlords could come to their own conclusions. Among CCAP’s “frequently asked questions” was this one: “I don’t want my private information on Wisconsin Circuit Court Access. How can I get it removed?” An answer was provided: “You probably can’t.” Ask Lenny if he ever found incriminating records when reviewing applications, and he would grin at the question and say, “Most of the time I find stuff.” And if you asked him what kinds of records prevented someone from being approved, he would tell you that he turned down everyone with a drug charge or domestic-violence offense. But both Susie and Billy had drug charges, and they weren’t the only ones.
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Lenny got up early one Saturday morning. Office Susie met up with him, and Tobin picked them both up in the Cadillac. They were spending the day in Milwaukee’s Landlord Training Program. None of them wanted to go, but they didn’t have a choice. Attending the training was part of Tobin’s agreement with Alderman Witkowski. Funded by the Department of Justice, the Landlord Training Program began in the 1990s with the goal of “keeping illegal and destructive activity out of rental property.”5
Tobin, Lenny, and Office Susie joined sixty or so other landlords in a large classroom in the Milwaukee Safety Academy on Teutonia Avenue. At nine a.m. sharp, a tall woman with broad shoulders and a dark suit stood up and announced, “We start on time, and we end on time.” Karen Long, the program coordinator, began talking at a fast clip, hands clasped behind her back. “What’s the number one rule in real estate? Location, location, location,” Karen said. “What’s the number one rule for being a landlord? Screening, screening, screening….You have to do a number of things to find out who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.”
Karen told the room to collect an applicant’s date of birth (to check his or her criminal record) and Social Security number (to check his or her credit) and to require two pieces of identification. “You need to require sufficient and verifiable income. If they say they are self-employed, well, drug dealers are self-employed.” Karen brought up CCAP. The landlords also received an advertisement for ScreeningWorks, which promised to provide “the most comprehensive background information about your rental applicants.” For $29.95, landlords could obtain a report listing an applicant’s eviction and criminal record, credit evaluation, previous addresses, and other information. “ScreeningWorks is a service of RentGrow,” the advertisement read. “RentGrow has 10+ years experience in multifamily resident screening, and serves over half a million rental units a year.”6
“Look,” Karen said, “if they have a recent court-ordered eviction or delinquency, you’re not going to rent to them. If they have an eviction, what makes you think they’re going to pay you?”7 Herself a landlord, Karen paid attention to how someone looked at her unit. This point was repeated in the thick training manual landlords received at registration: “Do they check out each room?…Do they mentally visualize where the furniture will go, which room the children will sleep in, or how they’ll make best use of the kitchen layout? Or do they barely walk in the front door before asking to rent, showing a surprising lack of interest in the details? People who make an honest living care about their home and often show it in the way they look at the unit. Some who rent for illegal operations forget to pretend they have the same interest.”8