BEN HALLMAN
COLLATERAL
DAMAGE
over the back seat of his pickup
truck. He had come to check up
on the boys’ two pet rats, kept
in a cage on the floorboard. But
he forgot to leave the windows
down, and the cab of the truck is
explosively hot.
One of the rats is dead. The
other is extremely sluggish. He
pours water over its whiskered
nose, but it has no effect.
“I think she died in my hand
just now,” he says.
He carefully places the rat back
in the cage. Then he covers his eyes
with his hands and begins to cry.
“It’s my job to prevent this from
happening, and I’m failing at it,”
he says.
In his past life, he was at his
best under stress, he says. Now he
has trouble managing his feelings.
He cries a lot more, he says.
Genel is less demonstrative, at
least in front of a reporter. But she
is also struggling.
“I don’t even know what to do,”
she says.
The contrast between her
work and home life is profound.
By day, she is a purchasing manager at Belco, a Spanish-owned
power company in nearby Chino,
Calif. On a recent company outing, she flew inside a World War
HUFFINGTON
09.22.13
[Mogelberg] covers
his eyes with his hands
and begins to cry. “It’s
my job to prevent this
from happening, and
I’m failing at it.”
II-era B-17 bomber. She earns
about $900 per week.
At night, she returns to a life she
finds increasingly hard to manage.
A new apartment seems out of
reach. They had bad credit even before the lockout, and most landlords
screen prospective tenants. They
Mogelberg
and Genel
with their
possessions
at the Hilton
hotel in
Anaheim,
Calif.