It didn’t take long. Larraine was cleaned out in less than an hour. She watched the truck lurch away. Her things were headed to Eagle’s storage warehouse, a dimly lit expanse with clear lightbulbs strung from a ceiling supported by large wood pillars. Inside, there were hundreds upon hundreds of piles, each representing an eviction or foreclosure. The piles were stacked to eye level and individually encircled in shrink-wrap like so many silken-wound insects on a spider’s web. Up close, the contents were visible through the taut clear wrapping: scratched-up furniture, lamps, bathroom scales, and everywhere children’s things—rocking horses, strollers, baby swings, bouncy seats. The Brittain brothers thought of the warehouse as a “giant stomach,” digesting the city. They charged $25 per pallet per month. The average evicted family’s possessions took up four pallets, or 400 cubic feet.
Larraine would have to find a way to pay her storage bill. If she fell ninety days behind, Eagle would get rid of her pile to make room for a new one. This was the fate of roughly 70 percent of lots confiscated in evictions or foreclosures. Years before, the Brittain brothers had approached Goodwill but were rebuffed; there was simply no way Goodwill could handle that kind of volume. The brothers searched elsewhere. They reached out to metal scrappers. They found someone who would buy the clothing by the bale, turning it into rags. They partnered with people who would rummage through the piles, looking for things to sell. They organized public sales twice a month, each involving ten to forty lots. But most of the stuff ended up in the dump.15
With the sheriff out of sight, Larraine ignored the orange sign and broke back into her trailer. The big items were gone, but the movers had left behind clothes, blankets, and miscellaneous smaller things. Larraine reached down and picked up her steamer.
There was only one option, Larraine thought: take what was left to Beaker’s trailer. He was in the hospital. He couldn’t say no. Larraine recruited a pair of boys to help, and the three of them made several trips between the two trailers, piling whatever they could carry in Beaker’s living room.
When the work was done, Larraine gave each boy $5 and sat alone in Beaker’s trailer, swatting away fruit flies. She swallowed pain pills, including 200 milligrams of Lyrica. In silence, she let the painkillers work. Once they had, she looked around at the clutter, the foulness, and the pile of things the movers had considered junk. Larraine let out a muffled scream and began punching the couch over and over and over again.
10.
HYPES FOR HIRE
Wright Street was covered in snow. An early December storm had arrived and was predicted to drop ten inches. It was that wet, slushy snow—the heavy kind you shovel in small doses so as to avoid throwing out your back. Lamar looked out the window as the snow continued to fall, drinking instant coffee and putting off the job he had to do.
Once he and the boys had finished painting Patrice’s old unit, Lamar called Sherrena, who came straight over to inspect the work. After a swift march through the unit, she shook her head and offered an evaluation: “I tried to work with you, and you disrespecting me with this motherfucking shitty-ass job!”
“What I did is worth way more than two sixty,” Lamar had yelled back. “I’m crawling around on my knees painting for you! And you gonna do me like this?”
Sherrena stormed off. A few hours later, Lamar dialed Sherrena’s number. He begged her to let him finish the job, to cover the spots the boys had missed. “Please,” he said, “I don’t like being in nobody’s pocket.” Sherrena decided to give him another chance. It was his best hope of keeping his home.
Lamar finished his coffee and strapped on his legs. Grabbing his cane, he opened the door and stepped onto the porch, grimacing at the snow and clutching the stair rail to keep from falling. Patrice’s son, Mikey, was outside, trying to shovel the sidewalk. He paused when he saw Lamar struggle on the porch steps, unsure of whether to offer his hand. He didn’t, and Lamar managed fine. He even gave Mikey’s shovel a few pushes. When Lamar said he was heading upstairs, Mikey asked if he could help.
“Come on, son,” Lamar replied.
Inside, Mikey looked around the apartment he and his family had been evicted from.
“Why y’all didn’t make it to school today?” Lamar asked. It was a Tuesday.
“I guess I fell asleep,” Mikey answered. He was in the fourth grade.
“Ah, boy, Michael. You don’t get no education like that, son.”
Mikey put his head down. “We had art today,” he said.
“Don’t you know you can get rich off of art? Don’t you know that you can have a—a career being an artis? An architecter?”
Mikey smiled a broad smile, and Lamar began sweeping a paintbrush through the pantry. To reach the lower sections, he unclipped his prosthetic legs and crawled on the floor. Mikey helped in any way he could. He passed Lamar rags and rollers with such quick eagerness you would think he was competing for the job. When Lamar got stuck on the floor, Mikey would fetch his cane.
“Where’s your momma and them at, man?” Lamar asked.
“My momma? She went to get her QUEST Card from Dace,” Mikey started, speaking of Patrice’s food stamps and boyfriend. “And he took her cards, and she ain’t have nothin’ to eat. So. And her cards—”
“Michael, okay,” Lamar interrupted, gently. “You could have just said she was gone. Don’t tell nobody your momma’s business, man. You know I’m a friend, but, but I didn’t really want to know.”
Mikey nodded slowly, pretending to understand.
Lamar scooted along the floor and, quietly resolved, lifted his brush. As the morning wore on, he began sweating and breathing heavily. He grunted and prayed for strength, “Jesus, get me through the day.”
“It’s ridiculous, Lamar,” Mikey said, trying to console.
“No, it’s people get outta you what they can get outta you. That’s what it is, Michael.”
When the job was complete, Lamar reaffixed his legs and headed back to his apartment. From there, he called Sherrena to tell her he had finished painting. Promising nothing, she said that she would come by later to have a look. Then she asked Lamar to mop the floor too.
Buck stopped by later in the afternoon. Noticing the paint on Lamar’s skin and clothes, he asked, “I thought we was done up there, man?”
“Man, she made me go up there and take care of the pantry. People just don’t be satisfied.”
“That’s money, pops!” Buck smiled, glad that Lamar and his boys would be able to stay.
Lamar sighed and massaged below his knees the way someone rubs an old, familiar injury. “They ain’t gonna pay, man,” he said.
“They gotta pay!”
“Man, they can get some hypes to do it for way less than that.”
Lamar’s labor was cheap, but he knew there were better deals to be had. When the plumbing broke, the roof leaked, or rooms needed painting, savvy inner-city landlords did not phone plumbers, roofers, or painters. They relied on two desperate and on-hand labor pools: tenants themselves and jobless men. New landlords would speak of “knowing a good plumber.” Experienced landlords would say they “had a guy.” Lamar knew that Sherrena “had people” and doubted that she would let him stay. He did the painting anyway, having no better option.
Buck frowned and stared at the snow. “Nah, pops,” he said, disbelieving.
“Hypes!” Lamar shouted. “Hypes done messed up everything. It’s hard to even sell a bus pass at the right price….I had to argue with her to get that job for two sixty. She got guys that’ll do it for a hundred. The whoooole thing. Drywall and all.”
—
The next Tuesday, Lamar woke up to a warm house. He had kept his stove burners on overnight to fend off winter’s chill, a common trick used by those who inhabited the North Side’s drafty duplexes with old furnaces. A week had passed without any word from Sherrena.
Most days, he had instant coffee and a cigarette for breakfast. But he had allowed Luke and Eddy to stay home from school; so he began frying eggs and boiling grits. The smell of bacon pulled the boys out of bed, and soon Buck stopped by, as if he had smelled Lamar’s cooking from his house down the street.
A soft tap was heard at the back door, and one of the boys opened it. It was Kamala, the new upstairs neighbor—the third in five months. If you spotted her a block away, you might think she was in seventh or eighth grade. Kamala was petite with skin “blacker than purple,” as the saying went. A white tank top clung to her thin frame. She wore no makeup or nail polish. Her only flourish was a locket that hung from a thin gold chain. Her eyes were heavy. Her whole spirit was heavy. She asked Lamar for a cigarette.