Doing the Best I Can. Kathryn Edin
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Annot’s Steam Power—later Standard Rug—between Coral and Amber, the Weisbrod and Hess Brewery on the corner of Amber Street, and many more.8 Several are abandoned, though some have been converted into smaller manufacturing concerns or affordable live and work spaces for struggling artists. Built in the late 1800s, these are Dickensian four-to-six-story red brick affairs—some embellished with arched window openings and other fancy brickwork and topped with tall chimneys. Some area mills are still crowned by rusted iron water receptacles proudly bearing a defunct company’s name. Neighborhood lore has it that in the turn- of-the-century golden era, one could walk down any one of Kensington’s industrial streets like East Hagert and find a job in fifteen minutes. But more than fifty years of deindustrialization have taken a severe toll.
Any old-timer in John’s neighborhood will tell you that as the jobs have fled, so has much semblance of social order. Middle-school kids sell drugs openly in broad daylight on major thoroughfares; John’s street bears the mark of the addictions the trade spawns. At the base of Hagert Street, on the corner of Kensington Avenue, is the Saint Francis Inn, a soup kitchen well known for serving meals to the area’s neediest, including the worst of the addicts. And just across the street, Inner City Missions offers drug referral and substance abuse counseling. The mean price of the neighborhood’s homes sits at just under thirty-five thousand dollars, and given the low value and the very poor condition of so many of the narrow brick dwellings, lifelong residents have been known to simply abandon their houses to squatters or leave them to children or other relatives as cheap starter homes.9 There are still enough stalwart white working-class residents in the neighborhood to keep its primary parish, the impeccably maintained century-and-a-half old Saint Anne, pulsing with parishioners—six hundred to seven hundred on a typical Sunday.10 This fortresslike Romanesque Goliath and its parish house, graveyard, and school commandeer a wide swath of the beleaguered Lehigh Avenue, another of the neighborhood’s old industrial streets and its northern boundary.
Tim was raised in a very different area of Greater Kensington, just south of Norris Street on the 800 block of East Thompson, in the more respectable Fishtown section, once the center of the shad fishing industry. Fishtown now houses families a bit too proud to live in Kensington proper: police officers and firefighters, along with nurses and other health care employees and craftsmen of various kinds—electricians, stone masons, plumbers, sheet-metal workers, teamsters, and skilled construction workers. It also claims an increasing share of young college-educated professionals with a taste for “authentic” urban living. The housing stock is the same aggressively plain red brick monotony of two- and three-story row homes that bleed into Kensington. So, eager to claim a separate identity from their Kensington neighbors to the northwest, residents carefully demarcate the area with potted plants and flower boxes, the occasional crisp metal awning, glossy new aluminum screen doors, manicured side lawns, decorative garden benches, and other flourishes that complement a streetscape neat as a pin. These outdoor environs host impromptu gatherings of residents who while away summer nights on lawn chairs chatting idly with one another.
Back in Kensington proper, we have our first conversation with John late on a weekday morning on his day off. The five hundred fifty dollar a month apartment he shares with a roommate—a female stripper—is simply furnished; the front room, where we settle on a couch and a chair, is dominated by an oversized television but is devoid of other decor. Coming up hard, John says he came to despise both of his parents. John’s mother worked as a cop until recently, when she was suspended without pay pending investigation of a charge of police brutality. While she waits for the official adjudication of the charge, John’s mom, whom he characterizes as a “bum,” has been collecting welfare—illegally, it turns out, as she’s also working full-time as a security guard. His father is a diesel mechanic who lives in central “PA,” but John hasn’t seen him in more than ten years.
John joined more than seven in ten of his classmates when he dropped out of Kensington High, one of the worst performing schools in the city.11 This white youth was lured away from the tedium of school and into the work world at sixteen by a minimum-wage job at McCrory’s, the now-defunct dollar-store chain that was all that remained of the local five-and-dime giant by the late 1990s. After that John worked one “chicken shit” job after another until landing his current position tinting everything from car windows to plate glass, which he got through a friend of his uncle. The summer he turned eighteen he was still working the chicken-shit jobs but had another source of income as well. He and a friend had turned a casual street-corner drug business into a modest empire, setting up shop in a cheap rental apartment where they and their “partners” could deal undetected day and night. John claims he was making money hand over fist and “blowing it” by buying drinks and weed for anyone who would party with him. While the business lasted only a couple of months—things with the police quickly got too “hot” to continue—he remembers it as a glorious time.
In the midst of that Mid-Atlantic summer haze, John met his baby’s mother, seventeen-year-old Rayann, through a friend he hung out and partied with in the neighborhood; she was his friend’s “girl.” When she started hinting that she wanted him and not his friend, John claims he steered clear out of loyalty. “I didn’t want to have nothing to do with it,” he insists. The neighborhood rumor mill claimed otherwise, though. Soon, John’s friend “heard some shit and started talking shit saying he would kick my ass.” Furious at his friend’s assumption of betrayal, John resolved, “Then I will be with your girl!” John concludes his story in this way: “Eventually, I just got stuck with her for a little while.”
Six years later John’s language reveals that even in the early days of courtship, he didn’t feel that he had found the ideal match. Instead, in headlong pursuit of revenge, he “got stuck” with Rayann through pregnancy; just twelve months after they met, she gave birth to their daughter at the Cape May Regional Medical Center on the South Jersey Shore, where she had moved five months into her pregnancy—to get away from John. Little language of love or even attraction (except her initial attraction to him) enters into John’s narrative, although there may well have been attraction involved. Though John says he badly wanted to “be in love” during this period in his life, things with Rayann just didn’t click. Nor does his use of the phrase “a little while” indicate much commitment.
The conception that made John a father—occurring just three months into the relationship—was actually Rayann’s second with John, following immediately after an early miscarriage. John suspects that in reality, Rayann’s mother forced her to get an abortion. “Yeah, and then we’re making another baby,” John says. How did these conceptions come about so quickly? “You know, like she was always cheating on me. So whenever I would catch her cheating on me the first thing she would do is she would turn to sex because she was a nympho. It made me forget about the other guy,” John recalls. In the afterglow of these postfight reunions, “She would start talking that she knows she wants to have a baby.”
Despite these “discussions” John would hardly characterize the pregnancy that culminated in the birth of his daughter Naomi as planned. Indeed, John claimed surprise and even disbelief and insisted they make a trip to Planned Parenthood to confirm Rayann’s news. When he told his mother, she called him “an asshole and stupid.” Rayann’s mother, the alleged impetus of the earlier forced abortion, hated John so badly that to preserve family peace, Rayann decided to name another man—the on-and-off boyfriend she had been secretly seeing on the side and that her mother liked better—as the father. John is proud to say that he finally put this false claim to rest with a paternity test he paid for himself when his daughter turned two.
In spite of these strong negative parental reactions, John claims that neither he nor Rayann even considered ending this pregnancy, perhaps because a surprise pregnancy after only a few weeks or months “together” is not unusual in the neighborhoods young men like John inhabit.12 Here, families are often formed through a pregnancy brought to term in a relationship that is neither entirely casual nor serious. John’s story hints at a common truth, that children can often ensue from relationships that have a haphazard, almost random quality. The women who bear these men’s children seem to be indistinguishable from others that they “get with” but don’t happen to become pregnant.
Tim, down in Fishtown,