Evicted (9 page)

Doreen and Patrice didn't think this was a legitimate concern. “He's not dependable,” Doreen said. But Malik had been acting extra-dependable since learning he was going to be a dad, pulling double shifts, saving money, bringing Natasha food, and looking for an apartment for the three of them. The truth was that Doreen and Patrice didn't expect much from Malik, not because of anything he had done, but because of their own experiences with men. Patrice's and Natasha's fathers had left Doreen; Ruby and C.J.'s daddy was in prison. The fathers of Patrice's children played a negligible role in their lives, and her current boyfriend had recently put her through the dining-room table.
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Doreen and Patrice did not see why a man needed to be involved in family decisions about where to raise a child, let alone what to name it. Said Doreen to Natasha, “There was no one around to rub my stomach when you were kicking me.” Said Patrice, “We didn't have a daddy. My kids don't have no daddy. And your kids don't need no daddy.”

Someone from the doctor's office called. “I gotta come back in for another ultrasound,” Natasha told Doreen, getting off the phone. “They said they found somethin' hidin'.”

“What do you mean they found somethin' hidin'?”

“Hidin'. Hidin', like behind the other baby.”

Doreen gasped. “Natasha, are you going to have
twins
?”

“But I don't want no babies!” Natasha stomped her foot.

“Too late to say that now!” Doreen laughed.

“That's too much.” Natasha slunk down on the couch and Coco jumped on her lap. “Coco, come here. Momma's havin' a bad day.”

Doreen tried to cheer her up. “I'm gonna make sure you get a very big room when we move,” she said. “Down the hall from me. Maybe downstairs. Yeah, I hope we get a house like we had on Thirty-Second.”

“That would be a blessing,” Natasha said, stroking Coco.

“Yes, it would.” Doreen turned to Ruby, who had been sitting quietly on the floor, holding her knees to her chest. “What you think, Ruby girl, wanna move?”

“Of course,” Ruby said. “I hate this house.”

Scott worked for cash here and there, but his main job was taking care of Teddy. He did the cooking, cleaning, and shopping. In the morning, he helped Teddy out of bed and the shower. Scott felt he had a calling for that sort of thing. It was why he had become a nurse. Thirty-eight and bald, with a ruddy complexion, dimples, and eyes that matched the blue flames of a gas-stove burner, Scott had a gentle, broken spirit. As for Teddy, he was a small man, bone thin, with scabbed-over arms displaying shriveled tattoos. He could hardly walk. Scott made him anyway, and Teddy would shuffle slowly around the trailer park, dragging his left leg behind him and looking much older than fifty-two.

Pam and Ned had left to go stay in a cheap motel for a few days, but Tobin was still moving forward with Teddy and Scott's eviction. They had fallen behind two months ago, when a neck X-ray and brain scan set Teddy back $507. Teddy's health problems began a year earlier, when he woke up in the hospital after tumbling down some steps around the Sixteenth Street Viaduct. The space beneath the viaduct was one of his favorite drinking spots, the cars zooming overhead and the valley floor below. He had gone there with a bottle and some men from the rescue mission. In the hospital, Teddy was told that he was partially paralyzed on his left side, that the doctors had had to fuse his neck back together, and that all the pins and screws were there to hold everything in place.

Scott put the eviction notice on their cluttered table, next to bills, beer cans, an old Polaroid camera, and a large ashtray. It was late morning, and the two men sat drinking cans of Milwaukee's Best. Teddy poked the eviction notice. “I suppose he wants to get a little more in his pot. His pot is a lot bigger than my pot.”

Teddy had looked straight ahead when he said it, his back perfectly flat against the chair. Sometimes Scott would walk in and find Teddy sitting on the couch, motionless, arms limp at his sides, not watching television or flipping through a magazine, just sitting. The first couple times this happened, Scott leaned in to make sure Teddy wasn't dead.

“Maybe,” Scott answered. “But what did Tobin do wrong?”

“He is purely an asshole. If you like him, that's your business….If I was in the shape I used to be, I'd already have gone up there and punched him in the nose.”

“That's effective,” Scott said sarcastically.

“I'm a hillbilly. You can take the boy outta the country but you can't take the country outta the boy.”

Teddy went on—he could talk when he wanted to—and Scott sat quietly listening. He didn't interrupt the old man when he launched into one of his monologues, drawn out long and syrupy, like his Tennessee accent. Scott stared into the living room. There was nothing on the wood-paneled walls except a large painting left behind by the previous tenants: Jesus and the two thieves hung on crosses, all reds and purples. A year ago, the men had moved in with little and had acquired little since. Teddy's prized possessions were his fishing rods and tackle. Scott's was a large plastic container filled with photographs, certifications, and mementos from his old life.

When Teddy had finished, Scott looked up from his beer and out the window. Across the way, he saw Ned and Pam's trailer, now abandoned, and Dawn's, where he sometimes bought morphine or, if he was in a pinch, Vicodin. Randy Shit-Pants, who thought his dead father was living in his trailer's heating vents, was filthy on his porch, smoking a clove cigarette and mumbling to himself. An airplane roared in low.

“I,” Scott started. “I don't want to live here.” He picked up the eviction notice. “You know what this is? The kick in the ass to get me out.”

Scott had grown up on an Iowa dairy farm that later went to pigs. He once got a horse for Christmas. Scott never met his biological father, who, during a date, had forced himself on his mother. To save the family some embarrassment, Scott's mother, Joan, was made to marry the rapist. She was sixteen. But Scott's father soon made a clean break, never to be heard from again. The next husband was a mean cuss, a hitter; before they divorced, Joan had one child by him: a daughter, Clarissa. Then Scott's mother found Cam, a cowboy, and they had three more children. One of Scott's brothers became a firefighter; another delivered water for Culligan; and his youngest sister was a nurse. Clarissa was an alcoholic who lived in the worst apartment complex in Scott's hometown. Locals called it the Beehive because tenants buzzed in and out of it.

Scott never got on with Cowboy Cam. He was too sensitive a kid to please the grizzled ranch hand. Scott took the ACT, got into Winona State University, and left home for college at seventeen. He soon outgrew Winona, Minnesota, just as he had outgrown the soybean fields and water towers of rural Iowa. Scott had known he was gay from a young age. “I needed to find others like me,” he remembered thinking before moving to Milwaukee. He finished at Milwaukee Area Technical College and later, at age thirty-one, received his nursing license.

Scott began his career in a nursing home. He checked vital signs, dispensed medication, monitored blood glucose levels, gave insulin injections, administered IV infusions, fed people through tubes, and cared for tracheotomies and wounds. He learned to make his hands light and quick, how not to puke, how to find the vein. Scott felt needed, and he was.

He rented nice apartments in up-and-coming neighborhoods: Bay View, the East Side. One year, his best, Scott took home $88,000. He sent money home to his mom.

After five years of hoisting limp women and men out of beds and bathtubs, Scott slipped a disk in his back. A doctor prescribed Percocet for the pain.
1
Around that time, two of Scott's best friends died of AIDS. “I fell off. I didn't cope well.” The Percocet helped with that pain too.

Scott thought his pain would in time run its course, like any other illness. But when his doctor announced retirement, Scott found himself panicking. The doctor had become a treasure to Scott, like a bartender who pours to the rim; another might not be so forthcoming with the opioids. But there were other options. Scott began buying pills from fellow nurses and stealing them from work. His nursing-home patients too became regular suppliers, selling Vicodin pills at $3 a pop. Then they became regular suppliers without knowing it.

Several months after Scott started taking Percocet, he discovered fentanyl. That was when he fell in love. Fentanyl penetrated the central nervous system 100 times more effectively than morphine.
2
It offered Scott pure, calm happiness; it pulled him toward the sublime. “It was the best feeling of pleasure and contentment I have ever felt,” he said.

In the nursing home, Scott would take a syringe and siphon fentanyl out of the Duragesic patches used for patients with chronic pain. He'd then swallow or inject the drug and reapply the empty patch, as his patients moaned softly in bed. “In your own heart, you convince yourself that you need it more than they do,” Scott remembered. “ ‘If I do this, I'll be able to take care of thirty of you.' ”

Like any other romance, Scott's relationship with fentanyl changed from something thrilling and magical into something deeper and more consuming. Soon, he was no longer chasing a high but running from withdrawal. “The sick,” he called it. When he went without, he would shake and sweat, get diarrhea, and ache all over. “When you stop, it feels like you'd rather be dead.” By this point, Scott needed opioids just to function. When he felt the sick right behind him, he did things he never thought he was capable of doing.

One day in August 2007, some of Scott's coworkers found him standing with his eyes closed, rocking back and forth. They sent him home and checked the patches, finding them drained. Scott's supervisor asked him to submit to a drug test, which came back positive for fentanyl. The same string of events repeated itself in November, but Scott was still allowed to keep his job because his supervisor, who had a drug history, gave him another chance. Then around Christmastime that year, patients complained that a male nurse had removed their patches. Scott was put in a cab and sent to a clinic for a third drug test. He shut the taxi's door and stood outside in the cold.

Behind the clinic's doors was a waiting room full of other junkies slumped in plastic chairs and gloved nurses with flat expressions, giving off neither pity nor disgust. Scott knew that Christmas music would be playing. He turned his back on the clinic and walked away.

Scared, Scott joined Narcotics Anonymous and tried to stop using. But it didn't take. “My life didn't get any better,” he remembered. Four months later, Scott wore his best shirt to his disciplinary hearing in front of the Wisconsin Board of Nursing. The board ruled: “The license of [Scott W. Bunker], L.P.N., to practice as a nurse in the State of Wisconsin is suspended for an indefinite period.”
3
That was the moment Scott decided to settle into a spot on the bottom and become a full-blown junkie. “I really cared about my nursing license,” he remembered. “When they took it away, I was like, ‘Fuck it.' ”

After Scott had lost his job and his upscale apartment, he sold most of his possessions and checked himself into the Lodge. At the shelter he met Teddy, who had recently been released from the hospital. He was drawn to Teddy for the obvious reason: Teddy was frail and sick and needed someone to help him climb steps and carry his food tray. Scott was still a nurse in heart and habit, even if he had lost his license.

Unlike Scott, homelessness was nothing new to Teddy. He had lived in shelters and under bridges since hitchhiking from Dayton, Tennessee, three years earlier. Teddy had grown up in a family with little money and fourteen kids. His father was an alcoholic who died young after slamming his truck into the back of an eighteen-wheeler. “Now, that's an experiment,” Teddy liked to say when telling the story.

They made an unlikely pair: one a straight Southern man, who had lived for years on the street; the other younger, gay, and a new arrival at the bottom. But they became friends, and then decided to leave the homeless shelter together, as roommates.

Teddy's monthly income, from SSI, was $632, and Scott was only receiving food stamps. They needed a cheap apartment, but they also needed a landlord who wouldn't ask too many questions. College Mobile Home Park had a reputation for letting just about anyone in. When the two men visited the park, Office Susie showed them a small trailer without a stove. It was in a sorry state, but Tobin gave it to them and only charged $420 in lot rent. They moved in that week.

After leaving the nursing home, getting drugs had been a hassle. Scott would go to Woody's, the Harbor Room, or other gay bars and hope to run into someone. But in the trailer park, Scott met several neighbors with methadone prescriptions and others who sold drugs. Getting drugs was as easy as asking for a cup of sugar.

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.