Before Scott could finish, his mother cut him off, failing to realize that it took everything he had in him (and a twelve-pack) to dial all ten numbers and not hang up when he got to the seventh or ninth, like he usually did. She explained that she was in a van full of relatives and unable to talk at the moment. They were all going to Branson, Missouri, for the weekend. “But, Scott,” she said, “you know that you can always come home.”
Scott thought about her offer. How could he get to Iowa with no car and no money for a train ticket? And how could he find heroin there? After a day, the sick would start working its way through his body. Then there was the part about being an object of pity. Scott thought about this as he walked through Pick ’n Save the day after the call. He had offered to buy Heroin Susie lunch with his food stamps if she’d give him a hit. “I mean, I could go back home, but, damn, I’m forty fucking years old…I’d have to go back and tell them, you know, that I fucked my whole fucking life up.” Scott had never reached out to his family for help. He considered their lawns and jobs and children and normal problems and concluded, “They wouldn’t know what to do….How much help could they possibly be?” Middle-class relatives could be useless that way.
Scott joined the checkout line and noticed the man in front of him was buying Robitussin.
“You got a cold?” Scott asked.
“Yeah,” the man said. “Can’t seem to shake it.” He coughed as if to prove his point.
“Here,” Scott said. He took out a pen and scrap of paper and wrote, “Vitamin C, Zinc, and Echinacea.” “That’s what I would recommend,” he said.
Scott didn’t go back to Iowa. Instead, he decided to go to rehab. On the morning he planned to check himself in, Scott woke up while it was still dark, trimmed his beard, and tucked in his T-shirt. He wanted to climb back out. He felt nervous but ready.
When Scott stepped out of the elevator at seven a.m., an hour before the clinic’s doors opened, he saw that he was late. Fifteen people were already in line. There were older black men who had dressed up for the occasion; a foulmouthed white woman, fifty perhaps, in cowboy boots; a pair of young Mexican men sitting on their feet and whispering in Spanish; a twenty-something black man whose pants were falling down; a brooding, white teenager who had pulled her bangs over her eyes and her sleeves over her hands. Scott slumped against the wall at the end of the line.
After a few minutes, the elevator opened again and an older Mexican woman stepped out. Her hair was long and black except for a streak of gray down the middle. She wore a walking cast and looked over her large glasses with eyes the color of floodwater. She resigned herself to a spot on the floor next to Scott.
The woman told Scott she had been there the day before, but they only took four people. When social workers began appearing at desks behind the glass, she observed, “They are calling the county to see how many spots are available.”
“For what?” Scott asked sardonically.
“For you. You’re here to get treatment, right?”
Scott looked up at the ceiling’s fluorescent lights and inhaled slowly, purposefully. He was trying to endure. “Yes.”
“Look at that girl,” the woman motioned to the white teenager. “She looks suicidal. I’ll bet they take her in. You have to camp out to get a spot.”
Scott began to tap his foot.
At 8:10 a.m., a woman wearing gold earrings and a silk blouse opened the door and announced that they could take five people today. A man emerged with a clipboard. “Number 1. Number 2,” he began counting. The line stood and tightened. Scott stepped toward the elevator and pushed the Down button. He could have tried again the next day, but he went on a three-day bender instead.
15.
A NUISANCE
The day after Crystal and Arleen’s argument, Trisha came downstairs from her apartment after Chris had gone to work with Quentin. Trisha liked Crystal. She was much more youthful and silly than Arleen. That morning, the two women passed the time fooling around and playing pattycake. Their palms slapped together as they sang:
Shame, shame, shame.
I don’t wanna go to Mexico
No more, more, more.
There’s a big fat policeman
At my door, door, door.
He grab me by my collar.
He made me pay a dime.
I don’t want to go to Mexico
No more, more, more.
Arleen watched unamused. She was reviewing apartment listings and making notes on a notepad with HOUSE written in block letters at the top. She regretted not going to a shelter after eviction court. But she hated shelters; mostly she hated the other residents. Collecting her papers, Arleen nodded at Crystal and left to find a new place to live.
Arleen was able to call on two dozen places before heading back to Thirteenth Street. She had no leads but was undefeated. “If I keep being persistent, I’ll find me a house,” she told herself. She also believed that Sherrena had dismissed her eviction. She had not.
When Arleen came back, the apartment was quiet, and Crystal looked troubled. After Chris had gotten home from work and Trisha went back upstairs, Crystal had heard him yelling at her for smoking his cigarettes and drinking his beer. She had heard other noises too.
“The lady upstairs getting beat,” Crystal told Arleen.
“Who cares? I don’t,” Arleen answered. She had painful menstrual cramps and just wanted to lie down. “I kind of figured that was going to happen when he got here.” Arleen didn’t feel she had enough space in her head or her heart to consider Trisha’s problems. Her own problems were enough.1
After night fell, more sounds came through the ceiling. There were blunt and muffled thuds, interspersed with loud pounds when Trisha slammed into the floor. Arleen covered her head with a pillow, but Crystal stewed. “I ain’t fixing to see no woman getting beat up by no man,” she said. She wanted to help Trisha, but she also couldn’t help feeling repulsed by her weakness. She pitied Trisha and found her pathetic. “If a man hits you like that and you let him back in, you like it,” Crystal mused. At one point, she had had enough. Crystal climbed the steps to the upper unit and yelled through the locked door, “I’m gonna dot your eyes, you scary ho! And I want Chris to hear me too, ’cause I dare him to put his hands on me!”2 Arleen had to pull Crystal back downstairs.
Crystal called Sherrena, who didn’t answer. Then she called 911 three separate times. The police finally showed up and took Chris away. When they left, Arleen looked at Crystal. “You must want to lose your house,” she said.
The next day, the police called Sherrena. The officer, a woman, sounded stern, but Sherrena had been through this before. Last year, she had received a letter from the Milwaukee Police Department regarding the same apartment on Thirteenth Street. “Pursuant to Section 80-10 Milwaukee Code of Ordinances (MCO),” the letter began, “I am informing you that the Milwaukee Police Department has responded to nuisance activity at your property…on at least three occasions within a thirty-day period.” It then listed the nuisance activities, which included a fight and a woman being sliced with a razor blade. The letter went on to inform Sherrena that she would be “subject to a special charge for any future enforcement costs for any of the listed violations” that occurred at her property. The city had itemized all police services, down to $4 per 911 call. Sherrena was to respond in writing with a plan to “abate the nuisance activities” occurring at her property. Should those activities continue, the letter concluded, she could be subject to a fine between $1,000 and $5,000 or thrown in jail.
Sherrena wrote back to the Milwaukee PD, explaining that the 911 calls that had generated the letter were attributed to a domestic-violence situation. “If these problems continue,” she wrote, “I will ask her to vacate the premises.” When the district captain read Sherrena’s reply, he underlined the word “ask” and drew a question mark in the margin. “Not accepted,” he scribbled on her reply.