This Land

by Dan Barry

A veteran reporter at The Providence Journal, Bill has long been an authority on Rhode Island’s expansive underbelly, with sources on both sides of the law and an expertise in gangs, guns, organized crime and municipal corruption. Last year, the New England Society of Newspaper Editors named him a “master reporter.”

  But the intense curiosity that drove his professional success has waned. He has little interest now in a state once described to me as a reporter’s theme park. Of the few subjects he cares about, baseball sits at the very top.

  “Why?” I ask as Bill drives below the speed limit in the interstate’s middle lane, oblivious to the red-faced truck driver passing on the right, shouting epithets.

  “It’s just where I grew up,” he answers.

  He means, in part, that he grew up in southeastern Connecticut, at a time when everyone knew Walt Dropo, the Moose from Moosup, who once played for the beloved Red Sox, and big John Ellis, from New London, who once played for the dreaded Yankees. Bill was a batboy for Ellis’s American Legion team; played winter basketball with Bill Dawley, a future All-Star pitcher; occasionally ran across Roger LaFrancois, whose major league career, one year as a backup Red Sox catcher, would end with a .400 batting average. (4 for 10!)

  Bill’s baseball devotion developed on the streets, not at home. His mother was always working the night shift as a hospital nurse, and his father was always reliving World War II.

  Active in the Polish resistance, Mieczyslaw Malinowski spent more than four years in Nazi prisons and labor camps, had his teeth knocked out with a rifle butt and was once ordered to dig his own grave. Battling tuberculosis when he immigrated, he was sent to a sanitarium in Norwich, where he later found work as a porter.

  No war movies allowed on the television, no “Hogan’s Heroes” canned laughter. The inadvertent slam of a door echoed like gunfire in his father’s ears, enraging him, leaving his wife and three children to tiptoe about their modest house in Norwich. The war-scarred immigrant never spoke of the past and rarely spoke in the present—but made it clear that he considered most American pastimes to be frivolous, including baseball. What is this baseball?

  Bill wound up excelling at another frivolous endeavor—basketball—and was good enough to play at Connecticut College. But the Red Sox remained his true passion: Tony Conigliaro and Rico Petrocelli and big George Scott; Fred Lynn and Dwight Evans and Jim Rice; and the constant, Yaz.

  By the time I met Bill, in 1987, he had mostly recovered from the 1986 World Series, in which his Sox lost to the Mets for reasons that go well beyond a ball rolling through Bill Buckner’s bandy legs. We were both reporters at The Providence Journal, and our friendship developed over shared interests in wiseguys, wisecracks and baseball.

  Over the years, we shared many family vacations, including a few in the Adirondacks, where Bill continued to maintain and strengthen his body: 6 feet 3 and 225 lean pounds, with massive shoulders. Every morning he took a six- to 10-mile run, and every afternoon he swam a mile—often with me beside him, lazily kayaking, as he sliced the lake water with rhythmic precision.

  Last fall, the runs became harder, the easy breathing a labored wheeze. He was covering the murder trial of a former New England Patriots football player, Aaron Hernandez, a fairly routine court assignment that by day’s end left him spent.

  “I reached a point where I couldn’t run, I couldn’t swim, I couldn’t bike outside,” he says, eyes trained on the road ahead. He became one of about 6,400 people in the United States who will be found this year to have A.L.S.

  He says he cannot help wondering about the whys and hows of it all. Given the research into a possible link between A.L.S. and concussions, how could he not focus on that horrific collision on the basketball court at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?

  Playing for Connecticut College, Bill and an M.I.T. player collided head-on while chasing a loose ball and bam—lights out for several minutes. “A violent hit,” he says, so bad that his dazed opponent air-balled the free throw. And Bill stayed in the game.

  Was that it? A concussion nearly 40 years ago? All he knows is that some people at Massachusetts General told him they see A.L.S. among former soccer players. More soccer than football, in fact.

  We keep driving, Bill, me and this, as K. T. Tunstall sings “Feel It All” on the radio. “It does make you wonder,” he says after a while. “How does this happen?”

  Bill is losing weight—13 pounds since June—because it is harder to swallow now, and A.L.S. tends to affect taste. He has also stopped taking the prescribed medication, Riluzole, because the constant nausea did not seem worth the minimal benefits. Sustenance comes instead in a book-and-movie project he’s working on about the Rhode Island underworld, which has attracted the interest of some big names.

  And, of course, there is still exercise: every morning to the local Y.M.C.A., riding a stationary bike and lifting weights, then recording the workout in his journal. This is his way of fighting back, mile by mile, pound by pound.

  “Trying to push past it,” he says.

  We ease into downtown Boston. Bill notes how much gas prices have fallen. Says his leg brace is bugging him. Notes that the song on the radio, “Shut Up and Dance,” is by Walk the Moon, a band that played during the All-Star festivities this year.

  Baseball.

  That beacon of Fenway, the Citgo sign, rises into view like a red-white-and-blue moon. We find a garage beside the park and pay the outrageous $40, figuring the closer the better. Still, Bill needs to balance himself against parked cars as he walks. Crowds of people, thin and overweight, young and old, rush past him to the Yawkey Way finish line.

  Our excellent seats are beside the Red Sox dugout, compliments of a friend with an indirect connection to Pete Frates, a former Boston College baseball player with A.L.S. who began last year’s charity rave, the ice bucket challenge. Johns Hopkins—where Bill has an appointment this month—has credited the charity with helping to underwrite a recent study that provides a deeper understanding of the protein clumps associated with A.L.S.

  Tonight’s game means nothing. Both the visitors, the Tampa Bay Rays, and the Red Sox are more than a dozen games out of first place. Still, Bill is looking forward to it, almost as much as he is to rooting hard against the Yankees in the playoffs.

  He disappears for a few minutes, then comes back down the concrete steps, carefully, with a massive vanilla ice cream cone in his hands. Lots of calories and easy to swallow.

  It will be a long night. We will not return to Bill’s house until after midnight, and he will be wiped out. Then, in the early morning, he will rise before I do, drive to the Y and lift more weights to forestall what seems inevitable.

  For now, though, there is baseball. Meaningless, late-season baseball, the innings blending one into the next in a game without a clock. The Red Sox are losing, and the scoreboard in left says the Yankees are winning.

  That’s all right. Bill finds hope in the young Red Sox ballplayers out there. Brock Holt, Mookie Betts, Blake Swihart. And this kid, Jackie Bradley Jr., who just hit a meaningless single in the bottom of the eighth.

  The hell with the Yankees. Next year, he says. Next year.

  A Force of Labor and of Politics in Las Vegas Hotels

  LAS VEGAS, NEV.—NOVEMBER 6, 2016

  She begins her day in black, the natural black before dawn and the requisite black of her uniform: the T-shirt, the pants, the socks, the shoes with slip-resistant treads, all black. The outfit announces deference.

  She crams fresh vegetables into a blender and holds a plate over its mouth as the machine whips up her green liquid breakfast. Its whine sounds the alarm for her four school-age grandchildren who, one by one, emerge sleepwalking from corners of their crammed rented house.

  Time to go. Before shepherding the children into her silver Jeep Patriot, the woman straps on a fabric back brace and covers it with the last piece of her uniform, a gray and black tunic. Then, above her left breast, she pins two small union buttons besid
e her silver name tag. The combined effect says:

  This is Celia. Underestimate her at your risk.

  Celia Vargas, 57, with dark wavy hair restrained by a clasp, works at one of the hotels in perpetual gleam along and around the Strip. She is a “guest room attendant” and a member of the Culinary Union, one of more than 14,000 who clean hotel rooms while guests donate money to the casino of their choice.

  Ms. Vargas, who is from El Salvador, and her Latina union colleagues are a growing force in the politics and culture of Nevada, vocal in their beliefs and expectations. Their 57,000-member Culinary Union, a powerful supporter of Nevada Democrats, is now 56 percent Latino—a jump from 35 percent just 20 years ago.

  “The power and courage of guest room attendants are the foundation and a big source of strength of the Culinary Union,” Bethany Khan, the union’s communications director, says. These workers, she adds, “are the majority of the middle class in Nevada.”

  Most of the hotels on and around the Strip are union shops, but the one that employs Ms. Vargas has yet to sign a contract. Even though its workers voted to unionize last December, and even though it is violating the law by not coming to the bargaining table—a point reinforced in a decision and order issued on Thursday by the National Labor Relations Board.

  So Ms. Vargas wears her back brace, hidden, but also her buttons, prominent.

  A wooden rosary draped over the rearview mirror sways as her Jeep wends through a working-class stretch of Las Vegas; this is not where Donny and Marie live. She drops her grandchildren at their school, then goes to the house of a friend from the Dominican Republic. She is standing outside, dressed in the same black and gray.

  The Jeep drives deeper into the Vegas peculiarity, past the 7-Elevens and massage parlors, the smoke shops and strip clubs. Soon the casino and hotel giants of the Strip are framing the view, including one that sticks out like a gold tooth in a wicked grin.

  This is where Ms. Vargas will clock in at 8:30, and where she is expected to clean a checked-out room in less than 30 minutes and a stay-over in less than 15. Every room seems to reveal something about the human condition.

  “Sometimes I open the door, and I say ‘Oh my God,’” Ms. Vargas says. “And then I close the door.”

  Despite their name tags, guest room attendants are anonymous. They go unnoticed by many as they push their 300-pound carts to the next room, and the next.

  A glimpse of what is expected of these attendants can be found at the Culinary Academy of Las Vegas, a joint venture between the culinary and bartenders unions and many properties along the Strip. Here, people are trained as cooks or baker’s helpers, bus persons or bar apprentices—or guest room attendants.

  A corner of the academy’s building features a series of mock guest rooms, each one representing a specific hotel’s style: a Bellagio suite, an MGM Grand, a Caesars Palace. Students learn how to lift mattresses without injuring their backs; how to wear gloves while reaching with care into wastebaskets; and how to maintain quality while moving quickly, because there’s always another room.

  “Get in and get out,” says Shirley Smith, a former guest room attendant who now trains others.

  Consider all the items on that cart. Linens, magazines, water bottles, coffee, toiletries, tissues, glass cleaners, disinfectants, bathrobes, dusters, a vacuum, and assorted brushes, including one for the toilet and one for the crevices around the tub and shower.

  Now consider the job itself.

  “We make the beds, dust, vacuum, mop, fill the coffee, the creamer, the sugar,” Ms. Vargas says. “We wash the toilet, the bathtub, the shower, the Jacuzzi. Worst, sometimes, is the kitchen. We clean the kitchen.”

  All in a half-hour. Nine, 10, 11 times a day.

  And when her shift ends in the early evening, Ms. Vargas has often sweated through her back brace and black T-shirt. Aching here there and everywhere, she drives home and tells her family that Grandma needs to lie down for a little bit.

  Grandma’s full name is Celia Menendez Vargas. She grew up in the city of Santa Ana, the daughter of a soldier and a nurse. As civil war engulfed El Salvador in the early 1980s, her husband was killed in a bus bombing, and various family members fled to asylum in Canada and Australia. She entrusted her two children to an aunt and sold her belongings to pay for illicit transport to the United States. She was smuggled in a wooden container on a truck bound for Los Angeles.

  “Illegal,” she says. “Like a lot of people.”

  She worked for four years as a live-in housekeeper, applied for residency and saved up the money to arrange for her two sons to join her legally. She remarried, gave birth to a girl in 1986, divorced and kept working. Newspaper deliverer. Garment factory worker.

  Babysitter. School custodian. Food-truck cook, making pupusas, those Salvadoran corn tortillas filled with cheese or meat or beans.

  In 1996, Ms. Vargas became an American citizen. Her reasoning is familiar, yet fresh: “For me this was very important. I always think this country was the best for the future of my kids.”

  Friends were urging her to come to the soccer fields some Sunday and meet a man who was also from Santa Ana, but her heavy work schedule precluded romance. “Always working,” she says. “Working, work, work.”

  They met, finally, she and Jorge Alberto Vargas, and were married in 2003. A few years later they moved to Las Vegas, on word that jobs were plentiful in the neon oasis.

  Mr. Vargas, who had a work permit based on political asylum, became a chef at a casino on the Strip, and things were fine until they weren’t. Three years ago, he was detained after being arrested a second time for driving under the influence, although the family maintains his second arrest was a medical episode related to diabetes. He spent more than two years being shipped to various federal detention centers—Nevada, California, Texas, Louisiana—before being deported back to El Salvador in July.

  Ms. Vargas saw him last a year ago, for 30 minutes; she cries at the memory. She keeps his clothes boxed in the garage, and files document after document with the government, working toward that day when they might be reunited.

  This and other travails consume Ms. Vargas. But she has returned to the work force, finding a job as a guest room attendant in this glittering gold nonunion hotel. It paid a little more than $14 an hour—about $3 less than what unionized housekeepers were making, and with nowhere near the complement of benefits.

  Some of her colleagues began to agitate for a union vote. Union pamphlets and cards were surreptitiously exchanged in the parking lot, in the bathrooms, under tables in the employees’ dining room. Ms. Vargas joined in, motivated in part by the $17,000 in debt she had accumulated by undergoing surgery for breast cancer; she wanted better health care benefits.

  At one point she and a few other workers were suspended for wearing union buttons, but this concerted union activity is federally protected. After the Culinary Union filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board, she was quickly reinstated with back pay, her buttons intact.

  It has not been easy. Downsizing after her husband’s deportation, selling her bedroom set, moving in with her daughter and her family. Publicly agitating for the union—and for the Democratic nominee for president—and then fretting that there might be retaliation at her nonunion, pro-Republican workplace. And working, constantly working.

  “I tell my children, we have to work,” Ms. Vargas says. “It’s not for government to support me. We work work work.”

  She pulls into the employee parking lot of the gold hotel, set aglow now by the unsparing morning sun. Searching for a parking spot, she passes other women, many of them also in black and gray tunics, hurrying toward the service entrance.

  Soon she is heading for the same door, one more guest room attendant who wears a back brace while cleaning rooms for a presidential candidate whose name is on the bathrobes she stocks, on the empty wine bottles she collects, on her name tag.

  He will receive her labor, but not her vot
e.

  A Refugee Home, Furnished in Joy

  LANCASTER, PA.—DECEMBER 25, 2016

  A dull gray house on a hillside has to become a home. Another Syrian family of refugees will be arriving soon, and this empty, echoing old place needs to be readied in welcome.

  The word has trickled down from the State Department’s refugee resettlement program. A mother, a father, his brother and four children, the youngest just 10. Muslims, traveling from Turkey. Flying into New York in the next few days.

  Their imminent arrival explains all the commotion inside this slate-colored house in the small city of Lancaster, in south-central Pennsylvania. The state may have gone to Donald J. Trump, who likened the Syrian resettlement program to a “a great Trojan horse” for terrorists. But he isn’t president yet.

  That is why volunteers and staff members from the Church World Service, a nationwide nonprofit that helps the government take in refugees fleeing violence and persecution, are cleaning cabinets, carting furniture and doing their best to make things homey. Just not too homey.

  “Doing too much can make a family feel like it’s someone else’s home,” says Josh Digrugilliers, 26, the group’s local housing specialist, whose crowded key chain jangles in reminder of all the refugees in need.

  He scours a government checklist of housing requirements for a resettlement, mindful that whatever he spends is deducted from a refugee’s one-time government grant of no more than $1,125. A family’s combined grants must cover its rent and other expenses until the nonprofit has helped the adults acquire Social Security numbers and jobs.

  The used furniture being trundled in reflects the emphasis on economy. Some comes from the donations hoarded in a cluttered garage, where a “Welcome Home” sign in Arabic is on display. Other items were acquired cheap—chairs for $5, tables for $20—at Root’s Old Mill Flea Market.

  New paint and flooring give the house the smell of a fresh start, thanks to the landlord, John Liang, who came to Lancaster as a child, one of the “boat people” who fled Vietnam on dangerously overcrowded vessels after the war. He spent a year in a notoriously hellish refugee camp before coming to Lancaster, where he and his family delivered newspapers, shoveled snow, did sewing and assembly-line work. Anything.