Once the trailer was cleared out, Tobin placed an advertisement in the paper. Soon, couples were coming to look, and Tobin offered them the Handyman Special. He apologized for the condition of the trailer—it still smelled of cat urine and smoke, some windows were broken, and the black grime on the toilet was still there—but as consolation he threw in a couple months’ free rent. A few weeks after Theo left, Tobin had a new pair of tenants in E-24. The couple began to use the money they were saving on rent to fix up their new home. Two months later, they began paying Tobin $500 a month in lot rent.
Office Susie thought Tobin had shortchanged Mrs. Mytes, but she didn’t say anything. She called Tobin’s other workers, who cut the grass or picked up trash for beer money, “regular trailer park tramps.” Tobin fired the tramps after Alderman Witkowski stipulated he hire outside maintenance help, but some kept on working out of boredom or the hope that Tobin would still pay them something. Troy, a bony, out-of-work motorcycle mechanic, was one of them. He had even helped mop up the sewage spill that had made the news. For that, he got nothing but an earful from his common-law wife, Samantha.
“What are we supposed to do!” Samantha had yelled in her uniform from George Webb, a Wisconsin-based chain restaurant that served breakfast all day long. They were behind in rent and were hoping that Tobin would credit them something for Troy’s eight hours of puke work, even if Tobin had not hired him for the job. “You cleaned up shit! Human shit!”
“I’ll tell you,” Troy said. “I’ve cleaned up horse shit, when I was shoveling stables. I’ve cleaned up chicken shit. But I ain’t never had to clean up human shit. It was terrible.”
“I know, ’cause you smelled bad!” Samantha took a breath. “I’m a bitch,” she continued. “I’m a bitch. And, Troy, you don’t got no bitch in you.”
Troy dropped his head in quiet agreement, taking a sip of a milk shake that Samantha had brought home from work. “Tobin wants to whine and cry all the time,” he said. “The guy’s filthy rich, and he still wants money. He makes more than a million dollars on this park.” He gestured toward the line of trailers. “Add it up.”
Alderman Witkowski had quoted a similar number, estimating that Tobin’s trailer park netted more than $900,000 a year. Both Troy and Witkowski arrived at that figure by multiplying Tobin’s 131 trailers by the average monthly rent ($550). It was a sloppy calculation that assumed Tobin didn’t have any expenses or vacancies—and that his tenants always paid their rent in full.
Tobin didn’t have a mortgage: he had bought the trailer park for $2.1 million in 1995 and paid it off nine years later.2 But he did have to pay property taxes, water bills, regular maintenance costs, Lenny’s and Office Susie’s annual salaries and rent reductions, advertising fees, and eviction costs. After accounting for these expenses, vacancies, and missing payments, Tobin took home roughly $447,000 each year, half of what the alderman had reported.3 Still, Tobin belonged to the top 1 percent of income earners. Most of his tenants belonged to the bottom 10 percent.
Troy finished the milk shake. “Did that hit the spot, baby?” Samantha asked, rubbing his shoulder.
14.
HIGH TOLERANCE
Scott had no intention of fighting his eviction. He skipped his court date and never talked to Tobin about it. Instead, he focused his efforts on finding another place to live. After several calls, Pito from Narcotics Anonymous came through. Pito worked with landlords, repairing and filling their properties, and vouched for Scott to one he knew. The two-bedroom upper was on the near South Side. It was small and bare with a treacherous balcony and no shower. But the landlord was only asking $420 a month and didn’t bother with a background check.
The apartment also came with Pito’s nephew, who went by D.P. A baby-faced nineteen-year-old with several tattoos and earrings, D.P. had recently been released from prison, where he was serving time for weapons possession and tampering with a firearm. He had sawed off the barrel of a shotgun. D.P. ran with the Cobras and wanted a gun in case things heated up with the Kings. In prison, he got his GED and another tattoo that read BEGINNING.
One day, Pito learned from another landlord that an old man had died in a nearby trailer park and no one had come to claim his things. So he arranged for Scott and D.P. to clean out the trailer in exchange for them keeping whatever they wanted. In the dead man’s closet, Scott had found a pressed suit in a zipped garment bag and a silk-lined suitcase. In the bathroom, he had learned the man’s name from mailing stickers on American Legion magazines. But Scott found the cigarette burns next to the bed most revealing. They led him to speculate that the man was on morphine. In Scott’s mind, drugs explained a lot about the world: why this man had died alone, why Pam and Ned got tossed from the trailer park, and why he was in a stranger’s home, collecting shabby furniture for his apartment.
The new roommates loaded a dresser and sofa onto the oily bed of a Ford F-150. When the truck was full, D.P. started the engine and turned on loud rap music. Scott would have preferred something else—his favorite song was “Solsbury Hill” by Peter Gabriel—but he didn’t say anything.
Scott was still on Mira’s crew, but work had slowed. Mira had run through her jobs too quickly by working her men twelve hours a day, lugging washers and dryers, mattresses, sleeper sofas. When workers said they were exhausted or sore, Mira sold them painkillers. But Scott thought she charged too much. When he needed relief, he would ask Heroin Susie to meet him somewhere.
“I want to do what Pito’s doing,” D.P. said. “I want to come home clean and leave the house clean. I can’t see myself at thirty doing this bullshit.”
Scott couldn’t either, years ago, when he was D.P.’s age.
After unloading the furniture, D.P. and Scott shared a beer on their front steps. The apartment was on Ward Street, on the west side of Kinnickinnic Avenue, which the locals shortened to “KK.” It faced an undeveloped plot of land surrounding railroad tracks and was not far from an apartment Scott used to rent years ago, when he was still a nurse and living in Bay View, a thriving neighborhood that attracted young professionals, artists, and hipsters. From their stoop, Scott and D.P. could see the crowning dome of the Basilica of St. Josaphat. One hundred years ago, Polish parishioners had emptied their savings accounts to fund the massive building project, “a scaled-down version of St. Peter’s in Rome.”1 As Scott drank his beer, he joked about “taking his own vow of poverty….All I’m going to do is buy some food and clothes and some drugs now and again.”
D.P. said nothing.
“Damn,” Scott said after the moment had passed. “My neck and back are killing me.” His shifts with Mira were beginning to take a toll.
“Why don’t you go to the doctor?” D.P. asked.
“Because I don’t think there’s anything they can do.” Scott paused. “They could give me Percocet! Too bad I’d eat them all in one day.”
—
Scott still bought his Vicodin at the trailer park. He thought Mrs. Mytes was the only adult there who didn’t do drugs or have a history with them. Scott loved drugs. Being high was a “mini vacation” from his shame of a life. He took the trip whenever he could afford it.
Scott had gotten high with Pam and Ned shortly before they received their eviction notice and had moved in a hurry, leaving behind a couch, beds, dressers, and other large items. Scott figured Ned and Pam got what was coming to them. In his old life, before the fall, he might have been more sympathetic. But he had come to view sympathy as a kind of na?veté, a sentiment voiced from a certain distance by the callow middle classes. “They can be compassionate because it’s not their only option,” he said of liberals who didn’t live in trailer parks. As for Ned and Pam, Scott thought their eviction came down to their crack habit, plain and simple. Heroin Susie agreed with him. “There’s a common denominator for all evictions,” she said. “I almost got evicted once. Used the money for other things.”