“As far as I’m concerned, he still owes the two sixty. Excuse me, now it’s two ninety.”
The old friends laughed. It was just what Sherrena needed.
3.
HOT WATER
Lenny Lawson stepped out of his trailer park office to burn a Pall Mall. Smoke drifted up past his mustache and light-blue eyes and disappeared above a baseball cap. He looked out over the rows of mobile homes bunched together on a skinny strip of asphalt. Almost all the trailers were lined up in the same direction and set a couple steps apart. The airport was close, and even longtime residents looked up when planes came in low, exposing their underbellies and rattling the windows. Lenny had spent his entire life in this place, all forty-three years of it, and for the past dozen years he had worked as its manager.
Lenny knew the druggies lived mostly on the north side of the trailer park, and the people working double shifts at restaurants or nursing homes lived mostly on the south side. The metal scrappers and can collectors lived near the entrance, and the people with the best jobs—sandblasters, mechanics—congregated on the park’s snobby side, behind the office, in mobile homes with freshly swept porches and flowerpots. Those on SSI were sprinkled throughout, as were the older folks who “went to bed with the chickens and woke up with the chickens,” as some park residents liked to say. Lenny tried to house the sex offenders near the druggies, but it didn’t always work out. He had had to place one near the double shifters. Thankfully, the man never left his trailer or even opened the blinds. Someone delivered food and other necessities to him every week.
College Mobile Home Park sat on the far South Side of the city, on Sixth Street, off College Avenue.1 It was bordered on one side by overgrown trees, shrubs, and sandpits and, on the other, by a large truck distribution center. It was a fifteen-minute walk to the nearest gas station or fast-food restaurant. There were other trailer parks nearby, surrounded by streets with modest tawny brick homes and sharply pitched roofs. This was the part of Milwaukee where poor white folks lived.
The Menominee River Valley cuts through the middle of the city and functions like its Mason-Dixon Line, dividing the predominantly black North Side from the predominantly white South Side. Milwaukeeans used to joke that the Sixteenth Street Viaduct, which stretches over the valley, was the longest bridge in the world because it connected Africa to Poland. The biggest effort to change that came in 1967, when two hundred demonstrators, almost all of them black, gathered at the north end of the viaduct and began walking to Poland to protest housing discrimination. As the marchers approached the south side of the bridge, they heard the crowd before they saw it. Chants of “Kill! Kill!” and “We want slaves!” rose up above the rock-and-roll music blasted from loudspeakers. Then the crowd appeared, a deep swell of white faces, upwards of 13,000 by some counts. Onlookers hurled bottles, rocks, piss, and spit down on the marchers. The black demonstrators marched; the white mob pulsed and seethed—and then something released, some invisible barrier fell, and the white onlookers lurched forward, crashing down on the marchers. That’s when the police fired the tear gas.
The marchers returned the next night, and the night after that. They walked the Sixteenth Street Viaduct for two hundred consecutive nights. The city, then the nation, then the world took notice. Little changed. A 1967 New York Times editorial declared Milwaukee “America’s most segregated city.” A supermajority in both houses had helped President Johnson pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but legislators backed by real estate lobbies refused to get behind his open housing law, which would have criminalized housing discrimination. It took Martin Luther King Jr. being murdered on a Memphis balcony, and the riots that ensued, for Congress to include a real open housing measure later that year in the 1968 Civil Rights Act, commonly called the Fair Housing Act.2
The white, working-class South Side had, since the 1930s, made room for a small number of Hispanic families, whose men had been recruited to work in the tanneries. In the 1970s, the Hispanic population began to grow. Instead of putting up another fight, whites began moving out, pushing farther south and west. Poland became Mexico, a small enclave on the near South Side of the city. The North Side remained black. The East and West Sides of the city, as well as the far South, where Lenny’s trailer park sat, belonged to the whites. Open housing law or not, Milwaukee would remain one of the most racially divided cities in the nation.3
Lenny stamped out his cigarette and ducked back into the office, which was situated in the middle of the trailer park, near its only entrance and exit. It was a cramped and windowless space, paper-cluttered and lit by a naked bulb screwed into the ceiling. The old fax machine, calculator, and computer were covered with grease smudges. In the summer, a wet spot grew on the thin maroon carpet under the leaky air-conditioning unit. In the winter, a space heater buzzed softly on a plastic bucket. Over the years, Lenny had added some flourishes: stag antlers, a Pabst Blue Ribbon plaque, a poster of a flushed pheasant.
“Hey,” Lenny greeted Susie as he took a seat behind his desk.
Susie Dunn was on her feet, as usual, sorting mail into the mailboxes that made up one side of the office. She was not placing letters in their boxes as much as punching them in there, fast and hard. It was her way. When Susie smoked, she sucked the cigarette down, keeping her hand close to her mouth. She couldn’t talk without also sweeping or scrubbing or rearranging patio furniture. It was as if she’d fall over, like a toy top, if she stopped spinning. Susie’s husband liked to call her the Queen of the Trailer Park. Other people settled for Office Susie, so as not to confuse her with Heroin Susie.
“Here’s your unemployment check,” Susie said to a letter. “Now, why don’t you pay some rent?…If she don’t pay her rent, she ain’t gonna be living here much longer. She can move back to the South Side or live in the ghetto.”
The office door opened and in walked Mrs. Mytes, barefoot. At seventy-one, she was a taut and un-frail woman with a shock of cotton-white hair, a face crisscrossed with wrinkles, and no teeth.
“Hey, granny,” Lenny said with a smile. He, like everyone else in the park, thought Mrs. Mytes was crazy.
“Guess what I did today? I threw a bill in the garbage can!” Mrs. Mytes looked at him sidelong with her bunched-up face. She had almost yelled the words.
“Hmm. Is that right?” Lenny answered, looking at her.
“I’m no dummy!”
“Hmm, well, I’ve got some bills for you. You can pay mine.”
“Ha!” Mrs. Mytes said, walking out to start her day pushing a grocery cart and collecting cans. Mrs. Mytes paid the bills with her SSI check. She cashed in the cans to give her mentally challenged adult daughter snack money or, after a nice haul, a trip to Chuck E. Cheese’s.
Lenny grinned and went back to his paperwork until the door swung open again. People who got half an ear everywhere else got a full one from Lenny. It was up to him to keep track of rents and maintenance requests, to screen tenants and deliver eviction notices. But it was also up to him to listen to the trailer park, to know it—know who was current and who was behind, who was pregnant, who was mixing their methadone with Xanax, whose boyfriend had just been released. “Sometimes I’m a shrink,” he liked to say. “Sometimes I’m the village asshole.”