"Oh you don't think so, do you?"
"Can I quote the sperm donor on that?" Can I quote the sperm donor's threat to have narco thugs come up to the United States to kill his biological issue?"
"You can quote me on this. My son has a rich fantasy life, but my spoiled little son is vulnerable. He likes the financial support the sperm donor sends, doesn't he?"
"Is the sperm donor threatening the biological issue with economic blackmail?" "The sperm donor is a reasonable man. You can continue to write for your newspaper. I will even admit that you're not without talent. But write under a nom de plume and dragging your family through the mud. How about John Felton? But I suppose your mother never used that one either."
"I have no family, and if you insult my mother one more time I'll fly down and kill you myself."
"You have three half-sisters. Do you think they deserve to be dragged through the mud?"
"I have written nothing about my three half-sisters."
"I'm confused then as to why you would want to use the name Avellanos, the name of the family you despise? How old are you now?"
"The issue is 21 years of age. He finds it strange that the sperm donor is unfamiliar with the age of the product of his loins."
"If you write under a nom de plume. I will continue to support you. If you continue attempting to dirty up the name I want to hand down unsullied to my three daughters, I will assume you want to fend for yourself."
"So you are threatening me?"
"I'm trying to school you in the realities of life. You've never experienced xenophobia unprotected by your family's money."
"Perhaps I should?"
"When your student visa expires, and you have to deal with the United States immigration system, you will discover that you are nothing more than another illegal immigrant."
"No human being is illegal."
"You said in your communist newspaper that Oscar Avellanos is a sanctimonious thug, a man who claims to be a Christian but who was part of the class that sold out the poor of Mexico to the Bush Administration for 30 pieces of silver."
"The poor people of the global south are history's current incarnation of the crucified Christ. They starve. They get sick. They have no medical care. They work for slave wages to provide Americans and Western Europeans with cheap consumer goods. The rich people of the global north are history's current incarnation of Judas. You sir, are Judas."
"Your blasphemous misuse of the Bible notwithstanding, I'm still willing to help smooth your way through the American immigration system. If only you would write under a nom de plume. Are you afraid to let your work stand on its own?"
"I will stand on my own."
"Are you sure about that? You think it's easy to navigate the United States immigration system after 9/11?"
"No, I do not, so why should it be easy for me? Why should I not stand with the poor people you, Clinton, and George Bush have nailed to a cross?"
"Are you sure about that?"
"I renounce all financial support. I renounce all claims to your political influence. I will continue to use my real name."
He stomped his foot on the floor.
"And you can also be certain that on the day the poor people of Mexico drag you and your class to the guillotine, I will applaud when your head falls into the basket."
But the elder man had not heard the last part, having already hung up the phone.
When the editor at Guillotine came to John Avellanos with the idea that, upon his return to Mexico, he should write a series of articles on the drug war, it had the quality, not of a suggestion, but of inevitability. Until he confronted the world that killed his mother, he would always be that little boy who locked himself in the basement. The month after his college graduation, therefore, he was ensconced in a tiny apartment in the middle of a notoriously violent border city across the river from Texas.
The next month, Guillotine's readers noticed that John Avellanos, after having spent the past year attacking Oscar Avellanos had disappeared and that a certain John F. El Guero, whose style was remarkably similar, had begun a series of articles called "Drug War on the People," an ambitious project dedicated to proving that the "so called drug war" was actually a "counterinsurgency campaign against the Mexican poor, executed by the Mexican government, and orchestrated by Washington." That he managed to last over a year and file 26 articles for Guillotine was proof of his courage and his tenacity. Nevertheless, even though the first 24 articles were quite good as far as "man on the street reporting" went, they fell ludicrously short of proving the case that the drug war was a counterinsurgency organized in Washington, and were considered little more than dangerous travel writing by a spoiled American dilettante. By the time Avellanos got around to writing the 25th and 26th articles, he was discouraged, and, more importantly, broke.
At about his lowest point, he was sitting in a bar waiting for a pitcher of beer when two young men in their late teens joined him at his table. One of them, who spoke broken English, and who had overheard him talking on his cell phone, asked him how familiar he was with the United States. They made an offer. If he helped them smuggle a trunk load of marijuana across the border to El Paso, they would split the money three ways, a very good deal, they assured him, since he was getting a third of the profits and none of the risks, being unknown to their suppliers, who were notorious for killing smugglers who lost product. Whether it was the idea that the expedition would make a good 25th article for Guillotine, desperation for money, the notion that, if he got picked up by the US Border Patrol, his father would be forced to get him out of jail in order to avoid embarrassment to himself, or simply a youthful urge to flout bourgeois morality, he accepted. It was a success. A week later, he was sitting in the same bar, flush with cash, writing a taut little adventure story that included all the details save one.
He kept the money.
It was the 26th article, however, more specifically, the photo attached to the 26th article that got him into trouble. Having gotten into the habit of exploring the surrounding towns on a beat up old motorcycle he had purchased with the proceeds of the 25th article, he managed to get lucky, or, depending on your point of view, very, very unlucky. Taking a roundabout path into a small town a little over 50 miles northwest of the city, smack up against the border of the United States, he managed to avoid all of the road blocks that had been carefully thrown up around the perimeter. The first thing he noticed was an overpowering presence of exhaust fumes. His heart started to pound when he noticed men in uniform and then a troop convoy. When he heard English being spoken with a distinctly American accent, he realized Texas was all of three football fields away, and that some of the men looked entirely too tall and too blond to be Mexicans. He began to feel something of the same excitement a Stone Age hunter gatherer would have felt when he noticed that the Woolly Mammoth was running straight for the pit they had dug the previous night. So he hid his motorcycle behind a tree and walked the rest of the way into town.
Halfway there, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He was about to run, but a friendly voice greeted him as "hey buddy," and, when the owner of that friendly voice heard an idiomatic American accent answer him with "oh hi, how are you," invited him to lunch. Avellanos could hardly believe his luck. The man, who worked for a large security contractor in the United States sat across from him and two other men for over an hour, describing, in detail, his company's involvement with the Mexican government. There was nothing particularly earth shaking about that in and of itself, but, then, almost as if he were a chess master watching the possibility of a checkmate come into view, he saw three men stroll into the cafe, the very well-known American head of the American mercenary company, a notorious Mexican drug lord who had shown up, the previous month, in Time Magazine, and a high level official of the Mexican government. Avellanos, who came close to wetting his pants and crying for his late mother, somehow not only managed to keep his composure, but to get pictures of the three men, the troop transports, and
a burly man with an American flag patch on his khaki jacket with a small point and shoot camera he always carried in the breast pocket of his jacket.
Once back home, a few hours browsing through the Congressional Record on line revealed that the security contractor had recently gotten a large contract for "guarding diplomatic personnel in Latin America." A search of the Mexican governing party brought up a photo of the man he had recognized in the cafe, and a night of feverish writing yielded a convincing argument, which, along with the photos, that did indeed prove that there was some sort of collusion between one of the top Mexican drug lords, the American and Mexican governments, and a notorious American security contractor. Suddenly, John F. El Guero and Guillotine had their 15 minutes of fame. Avellanos' article was republished all over the Internet. A well-known left wing congressman read the article into the congressional record. The offices of Guillotine in Boston were vandalized, and his editor got to go toe to toe with one cable news bully after another.
"Sorry, but I'm not going to tell you the real identity of John F. El Guero," she would say. "If you want to discuss Drug War on the People, or kill the person who wrote the articles, that person is me."
Soon, fliers began appearing in Avellanos's neighborhood assuring him that he was not long for this world. The most frightening, frightening because the photos of his mother's corpse had never been released to the public, not even to his immediate family, came in the form of a macabre diptych. On the left side was a bullet riddled Laura Felton, covered in gore, but still recognizable because of her tall stature and graying black hair. On the other was Avellanos's high school yearbook photo. "Like mother like son," the caption read. Avellanos realized that, while he could hide in his apartment for a few days, that only made it easier for them when they got sick of waiting, and it was only a matter of time before he ended up being "killed by a lone nut" or "overdosing on drugs" or ending up in all of the national gossip magazines as "that rich kid who hooked up with the wrong prostitute and got his throat slashed." So he decided to slip over the border back into the United States. A week later, after giving the considerable sum of money he had left over from the drug deal to two different members of the Border Patrol, he was waiting in a Greyhound Bus terminal in Texas with a ticket back to Boston, and composing, in his mind, another article, about how easy it was to cross the border from Mexico to the United States that, as a joke, he wrote up in the form of a chain email.
"Please pass this along to all patriotic Americans who care about the security of our borders and our liberties," he wrote with a smirk on his face.
There was one disappointment. Avellanos had meant to give the Border Patrol agents only half of the money, but they searched him, quite literally "shaking him down," and found all but a few thousand. That meant constant temptation to access the remainder of the money he had left in the bank back in Mexico. Before crossing the border, Avellanos had decided to forgo taking out what was left of the trust fund from the sale of his mother's paintings from the bank, so that, as long as the money was in the bank, anybody who had access to the information would assume he had not left the city. To avoid the temptation, he took out all of his papers at the first rest stop, held them over a trashcan and burned them.
A day after that, on a four-hour layover in Chicago, he found out that he was dead.
He had fallen asleep in the Chicago Greyhound terminal in between two homeless men, one muttering about damned Mexicans, the other about damned white motherfuckers, when he heard his name on the Spanish language TV station someone had playing in a news stand 20 yards away. He closed his eyes and went back to sleep, thinking he was dreaming. A few minutes later, he woke up, certain he had not been dreaming. He went over to another seat closer to the newsstand and waited for the story to rotate back through the programming of the 24-hour cable news channel. It came back on.
"Son of Mexican oil executive and three other people killed in massacre," the ticker read underneath the footage of the small house where he had rented his apartment.
As John Avellanos watched the story, he realized that the teenage boys who had been sent to make sure he didn't escape had probably panicked so badly when they realized he had slipped out of the neighborhood that they went into the house and shot everybody there, including his landlord and an elderly neighbor. Then they torched the house to make sure no one could tell the bodies apart. His father came on next and gave a short, petulant interview where he, first, protested that the media was invading his privacy then spent a few minutes talking about his dear, sweet, studious, highly promising son who was cut down before his time by drug dealing thugs. He vowed to prosecute the people responsible then sharply cut off the interview.
"I'm free," Avellanos thought. "I'm dead but I'm free."
Avellanos got back on the bus, happy, looking forward to living underground in Boston as a romantic, outlaw intellectual. He would be protected, and supported, by the staff at the Our Investigation Our Right to Speak, a once obscure newspaper he had almost single handedly thrust into the limelight. When he reached New York, however he learned that the story he had written for Guillotine had been discredited, that it was now labeled as "a half coherent rant for a radical left wing extremist newspaper written by a drug smuggler." Had the two men sold the story to a tabloid after they thought he was dead, he wondered? Or had they set him up from the very beginning? He bought a phone card at a Somali deli, and called his editor.
"Thanks for ruining my career asshole."
"Career? This was about your career?"
"You're dead to me."
"Is it really that bad?"
"Ever hear of an IRS audit?"
Avellanos threw his bus ticket into the trash and walked out onto 8th Ave. It was stupid to have kept the money. If he had only pleaded poverty and asked for a salary. Then it would have become obvious how much he needed money. He needed it still. More importantly, he still needed somewhere to hide until he could either risk coming back to the surface or find a way to get political asylum in Europe.
Making a living turned out to be easier than he thought. The 5000 dollars lasted all of six weeks, but he was tall, good-looking, and could affect a laid back personality, all of which made it easy to find work as a waiter or a bartender. Nobody asked for his ID when he found an illegal sublet in Jackson Heights. He was paid in cash, and he didn't have enough money left over at the end of the week after paying his bills to worry about needing a bank account. He could have stayed in New York as long as he wanted.
Without the threat of being killed lurking around every street corner, however, John Avellanos forgot the reason he was living underground, and his life felt just like what it was, a dull, hopeless, proletarian existence with little or no future. Even the idea of writing a book on illegal immigration lost its appeal since he did not even see very many illegal immigrants. Most of his coworkers were United States citizens working under the table to get out of paying taxes, a surprisingly vibrant part of the economy, as he quickly learned. His last job in New York was waiting tables at The Eastwood Cafe.
The Eastwood Cafe, now closed due to legal issues involving the estate of Clint Eastwood, was an unauthorized theme restaurant a few blocks east of 42nd Street run by two Palestinian immigrants with connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. All of the waiters were tall, good looking young men in their 20s who were required to come to work with no less than one, but no more than three days’ worth of stubble on their faces. Most were in the country illegally. There was an Irish Eastwood, a French Eastwood, an Egyptian Eastwood, a Japanese Eastwood, a Norwegian Eastwood, an Italian Eastwood, a Chilean Eastwood, a Greek Eastwood, and Avellanos, the "American Eastwood," as most of his fellow waiters referred to him.
There were other rules. You were expected to steer customers to the most expensive choices on the menu. A blackboard was kept in the back room with the week's totals. Old woman were to be flirted with. Young woman were not to be flirted with under the threat of immediate dismissal, even if
they flirted with you. Gay Eastwoods were to be reported. Failure to report a gay Eastwood was grounds for immediate dismissal. As Mr. Said, the majority owner, would say. "Nobody but nobody likes a swishy Eastwood." Customers were to be waited on within 5 minutes of sitting down. When you approached them, you were to flip open your order pad, stand up straight, and say the following words: "go ahead, make my day." Failure to open a transaction with a customer with the words "go ahead, make my day" meant that the customer's meal was free, and came out of the waiter's paycheck. Three failures to open a transaction with "go ahead, make my day" was grounds for immediate dismissal.
Avellanos, the "American Eastwood," was often much better at his job than his fellow Eastwoods. He had never seen any of Eastwood's movies, or any spaghetti western, but in his childhood he had often heard one of his neighbors, a short mestizo man who spoke almost no English, do a magnificently spot on imitation of Inspector Harry Callahan, and he found that by imitating him, he did a better imitation of Eastwood than most of the other Eastwoods who had actually seen Eastwood's movies. He had no trouble flirting with old ladies or ignoring young women who flirted with him. He was, in fact, so good at flirting with older women that a 74 year old man from Thorpe Wisconsin once grabbed him by the shirt and threatened to take him outside. His wife was so pleased with her husband's behavior that she left a 20-dollar tip for Avellanos over and above the 15% she left for the meal. Avellanos was masterful at making people run up bills. Even the cheapest tourist from the Midwest found himself, under Avellanos' tutelage, ordering rare Argentinean prime rib washed down with a 40-dollar bottle of red wine. He did fail to report a gay Eastwood who was working at the cafe while living deeply in the closet, but his bosses overlooked the transgression since they considered him their best waiter. He got the best shifts, the most overtime, and the best tables.
NOT AN AMERICAN Page 18
