American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  Then she did. Opal’s caseworker at the Opportunities Industrialization Center was Darlene Haines, the same woman Opal had dazzled in class with her spoof of the job interview. Haines was a blustery, gold-toothed woman with a hard-luck past, quick to boast of her savvy. “I don’t play when it comes to gettin’ people jobs,” she said. Some of her clients called her a “hood rat,” a ghetto woman putting on airs. But Opal liked her. Haines kept the cover of The New York Times Magazine on her wall—she was in the picture, too—and the sight of Opal posed with the governor made other clients gripe. “She’s out there doing drugs,” one said. With a few calls, Haines discovered that Opal’s problems included a warrant for her arrest. Soon after, Opal showed up at OIC with an agitated look and a notice saying her benefits were slated to end. Haines took her into a private room. “They’re goin’ round saying you’re using,” she said. “They who?” Opal answered. Then she began to cry and admitted that she had been smoking cocaine.

  This, in W-2 theory, was the perfect exchange. Among Jason Turner’s complaints about the old welfare system was that it let recipients hide their real problems. He had talked of “thrusting them into the public square,” where their needs could be addressed. With her tearful confession, Opal was accordingly thrust. But from there, theory and practice diverged in the hands of Darlene Haines. W-2 pictured addicts like Opal combining a community-service job with a drug-treatment program. Instead, Haines did the one thing the program expressly forbid: she simply sent Opal a check. She said she feared that if she cut Opal off, the kids would suffer. (“Women she likes, she gives them money,” one of her coworkers complained.) A few months later, Haines herself was gone from OIC. She went on to jobs at rival agencies, Goodwill and Maximus, until her conviction for check forgery; she had a temp job at a bank where she altered a check and tried to cash it as though it was made out to her. Then Haines moved to the other side of the desk, as a W-2 client herself.

  I saw Opal a few days after her encounter with Haines. Family life was in a fragile state. She was drinking beer and chain-smoking Newports, and she said she had been reading the Bible to ward off the urge to get high. With Opal spending her money on drugs, Kenny had pawned his jewelry to pay the rent, and the power company had shut off the lights. Despite her binges and depression, Opal had found a job in a factory that made diaper wipes—something she hadn’t told Haines—and along with welfare she had an unemployment check: she was triple-dipping. “Drug addicts are some of the smartest people in the world,” she said, more in sadness more than in pride. “ ’Cause we’re able—I’m not gonna say me—to manipulate, to get whatever they want.”

  Two months later, when I saw her in January 1998, Opal was a different person. “I’m in better spirits—can you tell?” she said. She said she had stopped getting high. Kenny had given her a special Christmas present, a green Tommy Hilfiger coat, and she wore it with schoolgirl pride. Sierra, Kierra, and Tierra seemed better, too. Unprompted by Opal, they sat down to dinner and launched into a prayer. To make it to the factory, Opal had to get up at 5:00 a.m. and catch two buses across town. But she talked about packaging diaper wipes as though she’d found her calling. By now she had reported the job, so her W-2 benefits were about to end: her next check would be her last. She had just gone to H&R Block, and with a big check for tax credits coming, she had plans to refurnish the apartment. Opal, the unlikely poster child for welfare reform, was sounding like one. “Now I have to work,” she said. “I’m better off.”

  Opal quit two weeks later, on her thirty-first birthday. With $4,000 of tax money in hand, a sunrise bus to an assembly line plant no longer held its allure. She decorated the apartment just as she had planned, with a green-striped sofa, matching love seats, and a new dining room set. It all wound up in the drug dealers’ hands, with everything she owned. The most remarkable thing about Opal’s collapse was its sheer velocity. It took about thirty days.

  The first thing Kenny noticed was the air freshener. Then Opal started to chain-smoke again. They were supposed to be living in a drug-free building—the manager could demand a urine test—but there were people getting high on every floor. A neighbor had a drug-dealing son, so Opal no longer had to catch the bus to see Andrea, the crack-house proprietor she had met in jail. She could buy drugs down the hall. Kenny realized Opal had stopped wearing the Tommy Hilfiger coat. She told him she had lent it to Jewell, but he saw it on the drug dealer’s back. “I was gonna kill him, not just shoot him,” he said. “Not over the coat, over the fact that he was killing her and wouldn’t care.” A few weeks after Opal quit her job, Kenny went to Chicago for a sobriety convention and came home a few hours early. He found Opal as he’d never seen her, on the bed unable to speak. She had sold a television and a VCR and had another wrapped up to go. “She was looking crazy—it was like the devil,” he said. Opal was so high, she later said, she felt like she was having an out-of-body experience, like she was watching a stranger’s dream. She could hear Kenny storming around, demanding to know where she had sold their stuff. High as she was, she knew better than to say. Someone could get killed.

  Though Kenny had five sober years behind him, no one’s recovery is secure; if The Program had taught him anything, it should have taught him that. Having once put women on the street, he now found himself babysitting for a woman on the lam. He lost his job, which was nothing new. But blaming Opal was a more alarming sign, since it violated the ethic of personal responsibility at The Program’s core. Out of work, out of money, and low on self-respect, Kenny walked into a liquor store and bought a miniature Courvoisier. It was his signature drink in his days as a pimp, and just staring at it made him stir. He - could smell it. And taste it. He could feel its glow. The liquor store was next to a music shop, and Kenny used the rest of his money to buy a Gospel tape. He put the bottle on his dash and sat in the lot, letting the music play. Should I? he asked.

  Most addicts who buy a bottle find a way to say yes. Kenny’s first effort at sobriety had ended that way: six months clean, one sneaked drink, and he was back on the streets. In subsequent years, his counselors had urged him to answer temptation with a mental image. See the big picture beyond the small bottle, “Get something up under your feet.” In the big picture, he wasn’t homeless anymore. He wasn’t stealing to get high. In the big picture, young guys trying to get sober looked up to him. Kenny stared down the bottle and delivered his verdict aloud: “I got a lot of people who depend on me, and I love myself today. So this is not the way out.” When he went home shaken and told Opal what had happened, she drank the Courvoisier.

  Kenny moved out a few weeks later, in the middle of March. “I looked at the Opal I met in the program, and she wasn’t that Opal anymore,” he said. “She chose drugs over me.” With Kenny gone, Opal had no brakes at all. “Now I can just get high whenever I want,” she figured. She wanted to every day. The next month passed in a blur. She got three bags of dope for the microwave and four for the end tables. She sold her jewelry, her clothes, her food stamps. With nothing to eat, she bummed milk from the neighbors for the girls. One day, she failed to pick them up from the day-care center that kept them after school. “I didn’t forget—I was just high,” she said. The center gave them to Kenny’s mother, and Opal stayed gone two days. The girls started wetting their beds, and a social worker took them aside and asked if their mother used drugs. Sierra, at eight, knew enough to lie. But Kierra, six, felt trapped. “I don’t think I want to tell you that,” she said.

  By the spring of 1998, as Opal hit the skids, the state’s rolls had fallen about 85 percent. Whatever its shortcomings, the system had proved skilled at one thing: diverting people who were basically able into entry-level jobs. Opal, crazed with cocaine, posed a challenge of a different order. Everyone had known such cases existed, and W-2 had ambitiously promised them an individualized plan, one that combined a workfare job with services like drug treatment. Enthusiasts thought the rigor of work would itself have therapeutic value. Others feared the ino
rdinate demands would drive the hardest cases away. What happened with Opal was a scenario neither side envisioned. First, W-2 ignored Opal’s collapse. Then it abetted it.

  As Opal started coming unglued, she called OIC to get back on the rolls. Darlene Haines was gone, and a new caseworker, Opal’s third in a year, knew nothing of her addiction—though she would have had she looked in the computer. She told Opal not to bother coming in: just go look for a job. Instead, Opal spent the next few weeks selling off her possessions, until she grew so desperate she called back and confessed she was using drugs. On paper, what happened next went according to plan. The agency gave Opal an assignment that combined treatment with a community service job. But then it just forgot her. Special cases were supposed to be monitored by specialized workers; Opal’s case wasn’t monitored by anyone. It was assigned to a worker in a different department, Sonya Gordon, who waited two months just to schedule their first meeting. Opal fell into a bureaucratic black hole.

  Looking to do just enough to reclaim her check, Opal showed up at the treatment program. But she mostly skipped the job, with a nonprofit agency that put people with disabilities to work at light assembly tasks. Treatment was a low-budget affair without urine tests, and she continued to get high every day. With no one at OIC handling her case, no one sent her a check. The treatment program ended. Out of food and facing eviction, Opal started calling OIC three times a day. But she couldn’t even leave a message; her caseworker’s voice mail was full. She couldn’t reach a supervisor, either. OIC had a $57 million contract and about half the cases it had budgeted for. You’d think someone could answer the phones. (I once called an OIC worker and got a voice mail that advised, “Try to call only once a week.”) Finally Opal just walked in, asking to talk to someone. Had a caseworker ever gone to her home, she could have seen all she needed to see: no food, no furniture, three frightened kids. Had the receptionist even looked in the file, she would have known that the thin, disheveled woman seeking help was a mother on drugs. Instead, she said the office didn’t see walk-ins. She told her to make an appointment.

  Sunday was Mother’s Day. Opal and Jewell usually spent it together, but this year Opal didn’t show. Jewell stopped by on Monday after work, and when Opal wouldn’t answer the door, she waited outside, figuring Opal would come out soon to get the girls from day care. Opal emerged looking wild-eyed and wasted, and Jewell walked her to the day-care center. The girls looked terrible, too: hair uncombed, clothes askew. Back at the apartment, Jewell was shocked to discover that all the furniture was gone. She knew that Opal had been smoking Primos, but she had no idea things had gotten so bad. Jewell was furious: “How could you do this to the kids?”

  “Fuck you, bitch!” Opal screamed.

  “Fuck you, bitch,” Jewell said.

  Just then, Kenny pulled up. Though he had moved out two months earlier, he still came by every week or so to drop off cigarettes or milk. He hadn’t gone back in the building, so he, too, didn’t know she had sold everything. He arrived just in time to hear Opal telling Jewell that their days as cousins were through. Jewell went home, called Opal’s mother, and told her to come get her grandchildren right away. Kenny gave Opal the news. “It’s over,” he said. “You don’t have nothing left to sell but your body, if you haven’t already started doing it.” Opal put up a fight, but she knew she’d been beaten. She couldn’t face her mother like that. She hated Kenny. She hated Jewell. “I should kill myself,” she said. Kenny didn’t take her seriously, but he - didn’t take any chances. He bought her a beer, made her drink half, and doused her with the rest. Once she smelled sufficiently drunk, he drove her to detox, one place he trusted to keep her safe. Her mother rushed up from Chicago for the kids, and Opal cried herself to sleep, a ward in a ward.

  Detox was just an overnight solution; Opal had no place to go after that. The shelters were full, Medicaid wouldn’t cover another residential program, and at forty, Kenny still lived with his mother; he - couldn’t take her there. He picked her up, cast in his conflicting roles—ex-lover, accuser, counselor, best friend—and they drove around so broke he had to stop by a friend’s to bum gas money. They wound up at a sobriety meeting, Opal’s first in a year, and a Program friend gave them a place to spend the night. In its bittersweet way, it felt like a date; they stayed up listening to recovery tapes and talking of better times. The next day Kenny pulled a rabbit from a hat. One of his old counselors ran a halfway house called Project HALT. Opal met none of the conditions to get in: she wasn’t working, she couldn’t pay the rent, and she hadn’t stopped using drugs. But Kenny didn’t see any other options. On top of all else, Opal was two months pregnant, with a child she claimed was his.

  I caught up with her a few days after she arrived. She was fiddling with the blinds in a sad little room, trying to capture fading light through a dirty window. Opal recounted her collapse in matter-of-fact tones: the yearning for drugs, the good-bye to the girls, the thoughts of suicide. She was a woman in suspended animation, a detached observer of a shattered past and a future she felt powerless to change. The moment she sprang back to life was when she spit out her scorn for Jewell. “I ain’t never gonna talk to her again!” she said. Yet Jewell may have kept her from losing the kids. A few days after she left her apartment, Opal returned to gather a few things. While she was there, an investigator arrived, saying someone had filed a child-welfare complaint. If Opal’s mother hadn’t gotten the girls, the state of Wisconsin might have had them.

  From her dingy room in the halfway house, Opal started calling OIC again, pleading for a welfare check. Sonya Gordon, her caseworker, finally returned her call. If she was curious what Opal was doing in a place called Project HALT—“Hungry, Addicted, Lonely, and Tired”—she didn’t say. She did say that nearly two months after inheriting the case she hadn’t looked at it. She’d have to talk to a supervisor and call back. When she did, she compounded the errors: she agreed to send Opal $700 as back pay. There were any number of reasons Opal didn’t qualify for a W-2 check. She hadn’t worked for it, of course. Even more basic than that, she didn’t have custody of her kids. But OIC didn’t know.

  Opal cashed the check and headed for Andrea’s, telling herself she’d be back for dinner. She stayed for six months, making the crack house her home. Sonya Gordon transferred the case to yet another caseworker, Opal’s fifth in a year, and the checks continued to flow. Pregnant addicts were a big concern in Wisconsin that year. Just as Opal moved in with Andrea, Tommy Thompson signed a “Cocaine Mom” law, authorizing courts to force pregnant women into treatment programs. “The unborn child is going to be preserved and protected and . . . healthy when born,” he said. Meanwhile Opal was pregnant and living in a crack house—and Thompson’s celebrated welfare program was buying the crack.

  FOURTEEN

  Golf Balls and Corporate Dreams: Milwaukee, 1997-1999

  The Company’s services are designed to make government operations more efficient and cost effective while improving the quality of the services provided to program beneficiaries.

  —MAXIMUS, INC.

  In theory, the people sending drug money to Opal had a motive to clean up their act: fear of the competition. After twenty-eight months, their contracts expired. If the Opportunities Industrialization Center wouldn’t answer its phones, if it sent checks to pregnant women in crack houses, then it risked being replaced by its rivals. In practice, the agencies acted less like competitors than like members of a welfare cartel. With Milwaukee split into six exclusive regions, the contracting produced a kind of ethnic and ideological partition. One contract went to the black grassroots group (OIC). One went to its Hispanic counterpart (United Migrant Opportunities Services). Two blue chips of the public service world were dealt in (the YWCA and Goodwill Industries, which ran two regions). With a common consultant and common agenda—keeping state regulators at bay—the agencies showed more interest in sticking together than in raiding each other’s turf. Think OPEC, not the Cola Wars.

 
The exception was the fifth agency, Maximus, Inc., which did want to take over the city. As a national, profit-seeking corporation, Maximus wasn’t just the new face in town but the ultimate symbol of privatization: a welfare agency that traded on the New York Stock Exchange! The state saw a paragon of market-based virtues—efficiency, discipline, accountability—and considered letting Maximus run the whole Milwaukee program before bowing to the political imperative to include local groups. Critics saw a cold, distant corporation, looking to profit off the poor (and some just seized on any opportunity to attack W-2). When Opal moved to Andrea’s, she didn’t just land in a new service region. She landed in an ideological battle zone.

  As a business, Maximus arrived in Milwaukee on a wave of spectacular success. In 1975, its founder, David Mastran, left a job at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to start a consulting firm in his basement. Two decades later he was master of an empire based in Reston, Virginia, with contracts in nearly every state. Along with consulting, Maximus ran programs itself; it collected child support in Tennessee, helped enroll Texans in Medicaid, and processed Connecticut’s child-care payments. By allowing states to privatize their programs, the 1996 federal law set off a gold rush for similar contracts; one Wall Street analysis saw more than $2 billion a year coming up for grabs. Formidable rivals, like EDS and Lockheed Martin, the aerospace giant, were fighting for the business, but with its long record and tighter focus Maximus was thought to have an edge. The W-2 contract was a coup. No welfare experiment was followed more closely, and Maximus hoped to leverage the publicity and prestige into market share nationwide. The company went public on the eve of W-2’s launch, and the share price rose by two-thirds over the next nine months. Mastran’s stake was worth more than $100 million.