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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.”
    —
    The owner of the trailer park was named Tobin Charney. He lived seventy miles away, in Skokie, Illinois, but visited the trailer park every day except Sunday. He paid Office Susie $5 an hour and reduced her rent to $440. Tobin waived Lenny’s rent and paid him a salary of $36,000 a year, in cash. Tobin had a reputation for being flexible and understanding. But no one thought him a pushover. A hard man with squinting eyes and an unsmiling face, he had a gruff, hurried way about him. He was seventy-one, the same age as Mrs. Mytes, and worked out regularly, keeping a gym bag in the trunk of his Cadillac. He was not chummy with his tenants or amused by them; he did not pause to ruffle their children’s hair. He did not pretend he was anything he was not. His father had been a landlord and at one point owned almost 600 units. All Tobin desired was one address and 131 trailers.
    But in the final week of May 2008, he found himself on the verge of losing them. All five members of Milwaukee’s Licenses Committee had refused to renew Tobin’s license to operate the trailer park. Alderman Terry Witkowski, a longtime South Sider with a pinkish face and silver hair, was leading the charge. Witkowski pointed to the 70 code violations that Neighborhood Services had documented in the past two years. He brought up the 260 police calls made from the trailer park in the previous year alone. He said the park was a haven for drugs, prostitution, and violence. He observed that an unconnected plumbing system had recently caused raw sewage to bubble up and spread under ten mobile homes. The Licenses Committee now considered the trailer park “an environmental biohazard.”
    On June 10, the city council, called the “Common Council” in Milwaukee, would vote. If the Licenses Committee’s decision stood, Tobin would be out of a job and his tenants would be out of a home. That’s when the newspeople showed up with gelled hair and shoulder-mounted cameras that looked like weapons. They interviewed residents, including some outspoken critics of Tobin.
    “The media paints us as ignorant half-breeds,” Mary was saying to Tina outside her trailer.
    “They said this was the ‘shame of the South Side,’ ” Tina replied.
    Both women had been in the park for years, and both had strong, windblown faces. “My son hasn’t slept because of this,” Mary went on. “Neither have I or my husband….You know, I work two jobs. I work hard. I mean, I can’t afford to go anywhere else.”
    Mrs. Mytes walked up and put her face right up next to Tina’s. Tina took a step back. “That son of a bitch!” Mrs. Mytes began. “I’m gonna call the alderman, and I’m gonna give