The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (53 page)

Working against the Hartzells as they set out in life was their nearly complete lack
of education or money or family or support of any kind, plus more than their share
of health problems: Danny’s deafness and tooth decay, Ronale’s tooth decay, obesity,
and diabetes, Brent’s ADHD and growth hormone problem, Danielle’s hearing disability
and anxiety. Working in their favor: Danny had a trade, the parents didn’t drink or
do drugs, the kids were respectful, the family would stay together no matter what,
they all loved one another. By conventional morality, the plus side should have kept
them afloat, and at another time, in another place, maybe it would have.

The first disaster came in 2004. It was the usual downward spiral of circumstances
and mistakes. First, the welding shop moved up the coast to New Port Richey, and Danny
couldn’t afford to move with it, so he lost his job. The Hartzells were renting a
trailer in St. Pete, Danny doing odd jobs for the owner with the idea that they’d
buy it as soon as they got their Earned Income Tax Credit. But the owner never paid
Danny, and then he told the Hartzells to leave, claiming Danny owed him back rent.
One night, Danny’s father and brother Doug got drunk and decided to trash the trailer
on his behalf. When the police were called, they arrested Danny at the motel where
the Hartzells had checked in, and Danny spent the worst night of his life on a concrete
slab in a jail cell with a hundred other guys. The next day the judge took a look
at his spotless record and released him on his own recognizance, but now the family
had nowhere to live.

They roamed around St. Pete for a month, sleeping in the car. Ronale stocked up on
meal boxes at the food pantry, and when the kids got sunburned she rubbed them down
with vinegar to speed up the healing. Brent was bored without his video games, and
Danielle was afraid of night noises. Later, she remembered sitting in the car one
night by the beach beneath the Gandy Bridge. “There were a bunch of food boxes in
front of me, and I would look at the food boxes and then I would look out at the trail
of sand up to the ocean.” In the mornings, Danny and Ronale put the kids on the school
bus as if nothing had happened.

They managed to move back to Tampa, found the apartment on South Dale Mabry Highway
for $725 a month, and Danny was hired at Master Packaging. For the next four years
things stabilized. Danny’s younger brother Dennis slept on their living room sofa
and chipped in his pay from a part-time job retrieving shopping carts at Wal-Mart.
With Danny’s wages, Danielle’s SSI, and food stamps, it was enough to keep their heads
above water. Then the pink slip came, and one thing led to another.

In the spring of 2009, Danielle was diagnosed with osteosarcoma—bone cancer in her
left leg. For the next year and a half, the Hartzells’ lives were absorbed in hospitals
and tests and surgeries and chemotherapy. Almost all the care was charitable. With
a cash gift from a complete stranger they bought a 2003 Chevy Cavalier to drive to
appointments. Danny stopped the job hunt to give his daughter his complete attention,
and Ronale, who was always complaining about wrongs done by teachers, employers, landlords,
and neighbors, loved Danielle’s doctors and joined cancer parent groups, the first
time in her life she felt part of a community. The apartment filled with framed inspirations:

WHAT CANCER CANNOT DO

It cannot cripple love

It cannot shatter hope

It cannot quench the spirit

It cannot destroy confidence

It cannot shut out memories

A prosthesis that would require regular four-millimeter adjustments as she grew was
sewn inside the length of Danielle’s skinny little leg. She went a whole year cancer
free. They thanked God. Otherwise, nothing changed for the Hartzells.

*   *   *

In the late spring of 2011, Danny Hartzell had a dream: he would move the family to
Georgia.

He’d lived in Tampa ever since he was twelve and now he felt trapped. The walls of
the apartment were getting smaller and smaller, especially after the couple next door
was arrested for neglecting their two small children, leaving their apartment filthy,
with fast-food containers sitting around, and the roaches migrated through the wall
to the Hartzells’ place. They were the small, infesting kind—they left a black trail
of larvae where the living room wall met the ceiling, they scurried over the vinyl
furniture, got into the bathroom sink and the kitchen Tupperware, the air-conditioning
ducts blowing the horrible smell of their poo throughout the apartment. Because of
the roaches, Ronale stopped making pasta and instead bought frozen foods at Wal-Mart,
pizzas, Velveeta Cheesy Skillets, six Salisbury steaks for $2.28, which was cheaper
than cooking anyway—it cost less to buy a cake than make one from scratch—or else
she boiled ramen noodles, which Danny called one of man’s greatest inventions. There
was nothing they could do about the roaches short of having the place bombed, which
would mean paying for three nights at a motel. The roaches embarrassed Danny and Ronale,
who prided themselves on keeping the place clean. Meanwhile, the new family that moved
in next door liked to scream and play loud music at one in the morning. One day, the
upstairs neighbors flushed their toilet and opened a hole in the plaster ceiling over
the Hartzells’ toilet while Ronale was in the bathroom. The super never fixed it.

For a while Danny had a part-time job at Target, unloading and shelving stock in the
late-night hours before the store opened, making $8.50 an hour. At first he got thirty
or forty hours a week, just enough to get by, but after the holidays the store cut
back on his hours, and by spring he was averaging ten hours a week, for a paycheck
of $140 every two weeks after taxes, while Target hired three new people in his department
at lower pay. He couldn’t help thinking he’d make more if he got laid off and started
collecting unemployment, not to mention seeing their food stamps double. One day Danny
overheard his managers talking about the store’s sales figures from the day before,
which were down to $52,000. He did a quick calculation. “Almost four hundred grand
a week, and they can’t afford to pay me? It’s just greed.”

When Target first hired Danny, they showed him a video on the evils of unions and
told him that if anyone approached him about joining one, he should report it to management.
Danny had never thought much about unions, but he wondered what was so wrong with
them. One night he and Ronale watched a show on the History Channel that talked about
the Battle of Blair Mountain, a coal strike back in the 1920s. What got Danny was
the fact that miners from the rest of West Virginia went down to help the ones in
the southern part of the state who were trying to join the union, and a lot of them
got killed by hired thugs of the coal company. That kind of thing didn’t happen anymore.
People were too scared to join a union, and the corporations had too much money, they’d
just threaten to sue. These days it was hard to get people to agree to do anything
together. He knew that it wasn’t any better for poor people back in the day. He could
even remember being a boy in Pennsylvania and huddling around the kitchen stove for
heat, eating government beans and peanut butter out of black-and-white cans. But what
had changed since then was people. In the world today it was dog eat dog, every man
for himself.

On the morning that Target told Danny to come in when Danielle had a doctor’s appointment,
he was a no-call no-show, something he’d never done before, which pretty much invited
them to fire him, and they did. He applied for unemployment benefits. He was right
back where he started.

The Hartzells were sick of Florida. Five out of ten people were jerks, Ronale said.
Neither Danny nor Ronale had voted in the last election, but they hated the new governor,
Rick Scott, who was cutting everything poor people needed, including schools. The
Hartzells wondered why Americans like them were sinking while new immigrants, like
the Indians right across Dale Mabry, were able to buy convenience stores. Danny had
heard that their first five years in America were tax-free. He wasn’t a racist, but
if that was true, it was unfair.

When Danielle was sick, Ronale had gotten on Facebook, and through her page Danny
had reconnected with a childhood friend from Tampa. The friend was operating a forklift
up in Georgia, in a small town called Pendergrass. The Hartzells drove up to spend
one July 4 weekend with him and his daughter, and they loved the trees, the fishing,
being able to walk outside the friend’s door and not see another house. The schools
up there sounded good, and housing cost less, and Ronale decided that only two out
of ten people were jerks. There was supposed to be plenty of jobs. Even Wal-Mart was
nicer in Georgia—Ronale heard they let people off over July 4 weekend. If the Hartzells
ever wanted to move to Georgia, the friend invited them to stay with him until they
found their feet.

And suddenly, at the beginning of June, they decided to do it. They wanted a fresh
start. Their lease was up at the end of the month, but moving to another apartment
in Tampa that didn’t have roaches would only change their place, not their situation.
“It’s kind of like I’ve fallen in that non-climbable-out-of rut,” Danny said. “Maybe
it’s partly me—maybe I stopped trying. I was struggling for so long I got tired and
threw my hands up in the air. Maybe some people are better climbers. My whole thought
process is, if you can’t climb out, why not move?”

Danny’s dream was exciting and scary. The Hartzells clung to it like a ladder at the
bottom of a well. Danny didn’t know if he was doing the right thing for his family,
but not doing it seemed worse. Ronale was tired of reaching the end of the month with
twenty-nine dollars and having to wait for Danielle’s next SSI check to arrive so
she could buy Diet Pepsi or Dr. Pepper. “Some people are afraid, but sometimes you’ve
got to make that big leap,” she said. “Keep your faith and say your prayers.” She
wouldn’t miss a thing in Florida other than Disney World and Danielle’s doctors. Danny
didn’t have a job lined up, but Wal-Mart promised a spot at a local store in Georgia
for Dennis, who was coming with them, and the kids were happy about going somewhere
new. There was hardly anyone to say goodbye to.

On the last day of June, the day before their move, Danny and Ronale got new teeth.
They drove with the kids to a walk-in dental clinic next door to a crack house in
a bad neighborhood of East Tampa. Each of them had had infected gums and residual
teeth that needed pulling, which took weeks, so that by the time they were ready to
be fitted with new sets, they were completely toothless. “It’s going to be strange,”
Danny said in the waiting room. “Daddy’s going to eat a Dorito tomorrow. I haven’t
ate a Dorito in about eight years.” He went into the dentist’s office and emerged
after half an hour flashing a smile of brilliantly white, perfectly even teeth, mostly
paid for by Medicaid. The teeth made him look younger and less poor. Danielle sat
in his lap and coached her father: “Say ‘them.’ ‘Zebra.’ ‘Tycoon.’ ‘Dolphin.’ ‘Wal-Mart.’”
Danny began to like the feel of his dentures. “I could get a girlfriend with these,”
he said, twitching his eyebrows suggestively.

Ronale’s teeth took an hour to be fitted. Voices were raised in the office, and she
came out furious. “The upper one hurts my gum!” she cried.

The dentist, a Hispanic woman, patiently explained that Ronale’s mouth was still sore
from the extractions. For a few days she should take the dentures out every fifteen
minutes and rinse them in warm salt water. “If you could come back next week I would
be very happy to make an adjustment.”

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Ronale said. “This is pain. I’m sorry if your other customers
don’t mind pain, I’m not perfect. It’s like a toothpick going into my gum.”

“But it was too loose,” the dentist said. “It was going to fall out.”

“I want to go. I’m tired of being treated like I’m stupid.”

On the drive home Ronale went on about the pain and the way the dentures pushed her
lips out so that she looked like a gorilla. Danny’s fit him better. “Lucky you,” she
said, “yours don’t hurt. With mine it hurts to talk.”

“Then leave ’em in,” Danny cracked.

“You jerk.”

Soon the kids were playing the word game with their mother, getting her to pronounce
“zebra” and “Wal-Mart.” By the time they got back to the apartment, the car was full
of laughter, Ronale joining the rest of the family between complaints. At home she
took her teeth out and never wore them again. Out of sympathy or inertia, Danny did
the same.

The next morning, July 1, Danny rented a sixteen-foot Budget truck with all the money
he could scrape together and backed it up to the apartment door. He and Dennis spent
the day loading their stuff. The TV, computer, and sofa. Boxes of dried food. The
kids’ bikes. Danielle’s Hannah Montana school supplies. Danny and Brent’s large video
game collection (Ronale was sick of seeing the back of her husband’s head when he
disappeared into World of Warcraft for ten hours at a stretch). They tried to get
rid of everything that was infested, including the black vinyl armchair, but Danny
was resigned to some roaches making the trip to Georgia with them.

In the middle of the day, an official letter came from Tallahassee: the unemployment
compensation board’s appeals referee determined that Danny had been terminated by
Target for cause, and his benefits claim was rejected. “I guess it’s just all water
under the bridge at this point anyway,” he said, putting aside the letter. “Being
that we’re going up there to stake a new claim. Right, Brent? I really think things
will be better up there. Everything will be fresh and new. I think this is the right
thing to do. Things aren’t going to get any better for us here.”