American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  She got a job. She lost the job. She fell into a pit of depression. A doctor warned the depression stemmed from her fears of leaving Mercedes, but she wouldn’t go to counseling. There are “perverts out there” in day-care centers, she told Michael. Since Mercedes can’t talk, if someone tried to hurt her, Hansen wouldn’t even know. Months passed until she felt ready to work again. When she did, the day-care center wouldn’t let Mercedes return. Hansen owed $40 in late fees and “Ebenezer Day Care,” as Michael dubbed it, wouldn’t budge. Neither would W-2, which paid child-care bills but not late fees. Michael brokered a repayment plan: Hansen would pay $10 - every other week. She missed the first payment. She was stuck at home, as paralyzed as Mercedes, when SuperFep leaped into the breach; he skipped lunch and drove across town to make the payment himself.

  The effort went about as smoothly as his trips to the thrift store. Again, he had to borrow the money. Then the center wouldn’t take cash. A money order alone wasn’t good enough, either; the center demanded a signed agreement, pledging the balance. “She’s really in a bad way,” Michael pleaded. Rules are rules; blah-diddy-blah; your lack of planning isn’t our emergency. He forged her signature and faxed the agreement. His supervisor warned him he was in too deep. Someone discovering that he gave Hansen money might imply he was expecting something in return. But Michael trusted her, and his trust was repaid. When I met her six months later, she described Michael as a “brother.” Sometimes Michael felt good about that. Sometimes he reminded himself that she still didn’t have a job.

  Michael had just donned his SuperFep cape when Opal finally walked in, a few weeks after having Brierra. W-2 hadn’t yet caught her attention. But with his gym-rat build and Marlon Brando eyes, Michael did. “He was fine!” she said. “Fine, fine, fine, fine-looking white man! I was flirting with him the whole time.” Michael didn’t notice. As a mother of a newborn, Opal was, for a rare moment, a caseworker’s dream: he put her on maternity leave, and they were done for three months. When the leave expired and Michael insisted she do something for her check, he no longer looked so fine. “Michael Stein-some-shit,” she would call him.

  For now, he had another challenge: the Woman Without a Coat. She reappeared just after his meeting with Opal—loud, raspy, and coatless still. He tried to act indignant about her claim that he hadn’t helped her. But his resolve melted in a hail of denials and her loud, sing-songy Mi-ikes. “I never said that, Mi-ike! I never told a lie about you!” She popped up in his office, talking gibberish: God is money, the Devil is deaf, beware the millennium bug. But in between her story trickled out. She was thirty-nine, with a grown daughter and a ten-year-old son. She was raised in the ghetto, but not on the streets; her mother was a church woman and her father kept a job. She played high school basketball, got her diploma, and landed a clerical job. Then a decade ago she went to a party where people were smoking a new drug. She figured it couldn’t hurt to try it once. She stole, she whored, she slept in the gutter. Treatment programs couldn’t keep her off of crack. Only her mother’s death, two years ago, gave her the resolve to get clean. Her mother had been “about taking care of business,” she would say, and now she was taking care of business, too. “I lost my soul on crack, Mi-ike. I’m about business now, Mi-ike, I’m about business.”

  At first Michael wasn’t sure if he cared. But her stories had a morbid pull, and there was something obligating about her trust. Michael was particularly impressed with the impeccable manners of her son. Sit up straight, she would fuss. Look at the man when you speak. Oddly, he started feeling half pleased when the receptionist announced, with a sarcastic aside, that his train wreck of a client had arrived. While Michael didn’t say so, she wasn’t the only member of the tandem who often felt desperate about getting through the day. At one point, she brought him a crinkled sheet of greeting-card verse: “Obstacles are only what you see when you take your eye off the goal.” He tacked it to his wall.

  Bonding was one thing. Binding her to the scaffold of W-2 was another. In January, Michael assigned her a community service job, sorting clothes at the St. Vincent dePaul Society. She never showed up. In February, she called from a pay phone and announced she was going to be a nursing assistant. “Mi-ike, I’m in a training now!” Michael snapped at her: That’s not how it works! You can’t assign your own activities! “Why not, Mi-ike, if it’ll help me get a job?” She didn’t get her certificate, but Michael let her keep half her check. “I just didn’t have the heart to cut her off,” he said. In March, she got an eviction notice after falling four months behind on the rent. Michael grew newly concerned. Most landlords wouldn’t carry her that long, and hers was no philanthropist. Michael asked if she had been having “rent dates,” swapping sex for shelter, and her denials left him unconvinced. Maximus had a unit to deal with evictions; unfortunately, it was the same one that dealt with coats. She was still looking for a new place when the landlord removed her front door.

  It took him weeks, but Michael found a solution. A nonprofit group, Community Advocates, would pay her security deposit. In exchange, it would become her “protective payee,” cashing her W-2 check, paying the landlord, and giving her whatever remained. Most recipients balked at losing control of their money, but Michael’s client quickly followed through, even putting down $10 for a key. All she had to do was to pick an apartment. SuperFep had gotten it done! But she didn’t pick an apartment. She moved to a shelter. And the next thing Michael knew, she was sitting in his boss’s office, complaining that no one would help her. He got her to a private room and lost his considerable temper. What was she doing in a homeless shelter? How could she do that to her son?

  Her answers didn’t make sense. All the vacant houses were on the south side, she said. She grew up on the north side. “I can’t live on the south side, Mi-ike.” Jesus, she was acting goofy; it was almost enough to make him think she was back on drugs. He was so pissed he started to taunt her: what, are your connections on the north side? She flared up and taunted him back: I walk by my connections all day! It took Michael a moment to grasp what she was saying. He hadn’t been serious. She wasn’t still using. She wasn’t still smoking crack? “Yeah, I’m smoking crack!” When was the last time she smoked? Three days ago. She told him she had been clean two years. “I told you what you wanted to hear.”

  Michael felt the room spin. He felt like a total chump. He had poured some subconscious drive for redemption into a crackhead who had scammed him. “A small part of me knew it the whole time,” he said. “I felt really stupid and really useless as somebody who was supposed to be helping her. And I felt very sad for her son.” More shouting followed when Michael urged her to return to treatment. No way, she said; treatment programs tell you it’s your fault. To some extent, Michael said, it is your fault. Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I hate myself every day? It more or less ended there, the conversation and the latest disillusioning chapter in the life of SuperFep. No hard feelings, he said with a parting embrace. But he needed to refer her to a more specialized caseworker. “Do what you got to do, Mi-ike. I always do.”

  A few weeks later, Michael was sitting at his desk, staring at the Excuse Woman. She never did anything, this one. The bus was late. The dog was sick. She lost the address. She forgot to call. Doing his best not to look like a man having a breakdown, he excused himself and crossed the hall to his supervisor’s office. Question: who could he see about the company’s counseling program? He was having a little problem with—how to put this?—managing his anger. He was having a problem with the idea that “financial and employment planners” were going to help “job seekers” scale the “work ladder” to achieve “self-sufficiency.” In fact, he found the whole notion ridiculous, and he - didn’t want to be held responsible for the next calamity. He returned with a pamphlet for Employee Assistance and flashed the Excuse Woman a look of contempt. “What kind of fantasy world are you living in?” he asked.

  He went home that night and told his girlfriend, Jai,
he was looking for another job. They lie and cheat and lie some more. They bear out the cynic’s adage: no good deed among Feps ever goes unpunished. He got no argument from Jai. Her own mother had spent years on welfare and left her for relatives to raise. “I’d tell them their sorry ass was always gonna be in the gutter,” she said. “He calls them ‘job seekers, ’ I call them ‘money seekers.’ I’d cuss ’em out and lose that job!” Michael was going back to hanging drywall. You nail it and it stays in place.

  Who was he kidding with his calculator routine? Even his successes were emptying bedpans and swabbing hotel rooms. There’s no such thing as a bad first job! Your kids are going to be proud! He’d been to a conference where Tommy Thompson had given that speech, and it had made him cringe. “I’m the guy the politicians hire to tell themselves they’re doing something about the underbelly of society: ‘Oh, we’ve got W-2! Isn’t it a great program!’ It’s a farce. It’s sickly comic. There’s some delusion that we’re going to take these - people to the next level—that’s not going to happen.” Michael’s midnight resolve faded with morning light. He couldn’t quit; he had to pay the rent.

  To boost his spirits, he hung up a MaxAcademy “Certificate of Completion” that belonged to a woman he hardly knew. Angiwetta Hills had walked in at closing hour, looking as ragged as her tale. She had lost her job, moved to a shelter, and gotten dropped from the rolls when Employment Solutions, the Goodwill subsidiary, failed to properly transfer the case. Here we go again, Michael thought, bracing for a tirade. Instead, she apologized for the way she looked; she had left her clean clothes at a relative’s house and hadn’t been able to change. Michael spent hours restoring her benefits. Then she surprised him with perfect attendance in Motivation Class. It wasn’t exactly a new life. Or even a new job. But the surprise ran in both directions: she hadn’t expected a caseworker to work so hard to straighten out her case or offer such reassurance. “He said, ‘Everything’s going to be all right, Angiwetta. You put in your half and I’ll put in mine,’ ” she said.

  His expectations of Dinah Doty ran just as low. At twenty-three, she was a high school dropout, pregnant with her fourth child, and about to be evicted. He rushed to get her a special grant, but she got evicted, anyway. She was pleasant enough, but very street, and Michael had her pegged as a lifer. Once her maternity leave expired, he gave her the calculator spiel: $3.91 an hour, can you beat it? The next week, she announced she had a job as a clerk at a homeless shelter for nearly $8 an hour. And she seemed so—Michael felt embarrassed to say it—proud. “Michael gave me that motivation to get up and basically open my eyes,” she told me. “I have children to take care of. We conversate about it all the time. Michael understands where I’m coming from.”

  On that, she may have been more right than she knew. He had lost his business, wrecked his marriage, and wasted his shot at a college degree. There were days when he felt so disgusted with himself he - couldn’t look in a mirror. And he told that to some of his clients. “I say, ‘I know what it’s like to be down and out. I know what it’s like to not even be able to get out of bed because you’re drunk from the day before and you’re too depressed.’ ” While Michael thought he had nothing to learn about the tragedy of ghetto life, he learned something, anyway. “They don’t want to be perceived as vulnerable,” he said of his clients. “But when you cut away the exterior, they’re sad—sad for themselves, sad for their children, sad that they haven’t done more with their lives. And they’re just aching for you to listen. Not necessarily to solve their problem, just to listen. I’m not sure if I knew that before and chose to forget it or if I’m learning it for the first time.”

  The case he saw as his biggest success can be seen as a tribute to either his ample gifts or his slender expectations. In his first stack of dusty cases sat the file of Shelley Block, who had collected $6,000 the previous year without doing a thing. Michael sent letters. Michael made calls. Michael took away her check. That made his telephone ring. “What—you don’t give out checks?” she said. He told her to come see him in the morning. “I don’t do mornings,” she said. Finally, she darkened his door. Literally. She weighed more than three hundred pounds. She had a pierced tongue and a tattooed neck, and she was as cynical in person as she was on the phone. Michael found her enchanting. “Everything she said made me laugh,” he said. When she talked, vaguely, about becoming a nursing aide, Michael told her the truth: she was too fat to stand up all day. “I respected him for that,” she told me. He lured her to MaxAcademy just to get her out of the house. Then he arranged a work assignment at Maximus, to keep her in sight. They talked—about her boyfriend, her boyfriend’s crack problem, her days in a street gang. “He made me feel like he actually cared,” she said.

  One day, she arrived in his office especially depressed. She had dumped the crackhead boyfriend, who then broke in the house and beat her up. Michael responded with the best you-are-somebody lecture she had heard. “I see you as an authority figure,” he said. “I can see you sitting behind a desk, making sound money. Don’t ever let anybody put you down.” When she got back to the car, her mother asked why she was crying. “Michael just makes me feel real good about myself,” she said. Not long after, when Michael fell captive to one of his depressions and told her he wanted to leave, she turned the lecture around. “I told him, ‘Don’t quit! You’re too good at what you do.’ ”

  After a year on Michael’s caseload, Shelley Block got a job. It was nothing that either one of them would mistake for a social triumph: a part-time job at an after-school program, driving a bus. It paid $7.25 an hour. It might lead to something better. But probably not. “Fep of the year,” he said to himself. “A part-time bus driver. Big deal.” Not long after, one of Michael’s coworkers was down in the dumps, griping about the caseworker’s lot. The clients don’t listen. The system’s a mess. The whole thing’s a big con. Michael stunned himself with his response. “We do God’s work here,” he said. For a moment, he believed it.

  SIXTEEN

  Boyfriends: Milwaukee, Spring 1999

  Angie did her share of God’s work, too. She had been doing it now for three years: lifting, washing, dressing, and feeding the infirm. She did it before sunrise and after midnight. She did it when her feet were sore and her back had shooting pains. She did it in an old Polish neighborhood that once rioted to keep black people away. She did it without complaint. Stepping off a bus eight years earlier, looking for a welfare check, Angie was someone society carried. Now she carried those who couldn’t carry themselves. “Angie has a sparkle,” said her supervisor, Wendy Woolcott-Steele. “I think she’s ace.”

  Angie’s story had a special luster, but it conveyed a common theme: whatever the frustrations of SuperFeps or the failures of the bureaucracy, poor single mothers, defying predictions, went to work at unprecedented rates. Although they didn’t all sparkle, about three-quarters of the women leaving the rolls in the late 1990s worked in the subsequent year. Six in ten worked at any given time, and those with jobs worked nearly full time, about thirty-five hours a week. No doubt the surging economy offered ideal conditions. Yet previous booms had largely left welfare families behind, and the gains were greatest among the most disadvantaged, which discounts the notion that a rising tide simply lifted all boats. The employment rates of never-married women rose nearly 50 percent, while those least affected by welfare policy (married, college educated, or childless) scarcely changed. In its curious mix of hassles (“They gave me a lot of yada, yada, yada. I said, ‘Screw ’em’ and found me a job”) and help (child care and tax credits), the drive to end welfare created a singular employment machine. “It succeeded beyond, I think, what anybody could have rationally predicted,” Clinton told me. And on one level he was right.

  But the advocates of the law had talked on other levels, too—not just of putting poor people to work but of the rewards that work would bring. “Work organizes life,” Clinton had said. “It gives meaning and self-esteem to people who are parents. It g
ives a role model to children.” The celebrations of the law were celebrations of its social bequests—of meaning and role models and transformed kids. Of parables like that of Lillie Harden and her son. About the time Angie let Opal move in, Tommy Thompson invited another welfare-to-work success to tell her story during his State of the State Address. Michelle Crawford had gone from two decades of depression and drugs on welfare to a job at a plastics factory. Facing the legislature beside the man she nervously called “Government Thompson,” she stole the show. “Today, I’m working as a machine operator, providing for my family,” she said. Then, with flawless timing, she pointed toward the gallery where three of her children were watching. “Now, I tell my kids that this is what you get when you do your homework!”

  The author Mickey Kaus went so far as to argue that the rising work rates presaged “The Ending of the Black Underclass.”

  [B]y definition and in practice, working-poor mothers aren’t in the “underclass.” A maid changing sheets in a Marriott is no longer cut off from the world of work. . . . She can’t afford to develop an attitude that sets itself in opposition to the mainstream culture. Her children will grow up knowing the discipline of a working home, and they will have at least one working “role model. . . .” If women know they . . . are going to have to work, they are apt to ask that men contribute by going to work. Young women will be less likely to have children out of wedlock.