The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez

by Jimmy Breslin

  First they put the men in one room and the women and baby in the other. Finally, Julisa’s husband told her that her cousin had to clear the place. Lucino did. He told all the others to leave, and he took over a room for himself. Lucino was out looking for work from the start. He knew one here and another there and he wound up catching on with a construction job that was starting on Middleton Street. He worked there with Eduardo. Lucino had a treasure: a room to himself. Soon Eduardo was walking into the apartment with his head hanging like a penitent’s and he’d slip into Lucino’s room without talking. They usually drank and watched pro basketball. When he went in there on one night, Julisa heard something slapping a board and one of them laughing. They were playing some board game, soccer football probably.

  JULISA WAS NINETEEN and in the second year of medical school in Mexico City when she and a couple of students came for a holiday to her hometown of San José edo de Tlaxcala, which is near Puebla. She had a twin sister, Lourdes, and seven brothers.

  Julisa and her classmates arrived on the one day of the year that the fair came to town. Her glance took in children’s rides and the booths for games and stopped when she saw the handsome young guy in the booth with soccer games on the counter. The guy was putting prizes on a shelf. Of course the woman is not supposed to be so forward as to walk up alone to a booth with a man behind it.

  No such thing could happen. The young man in the booth, José J. Eduardo, had his entire attention captured by Julisa, whose long hair and large beautiful eyes filled with gladness caused her dignity to evaporate. His mother, who sold lottery tickets a few booths away, thought she noticed something. He came out from behind the counter and promptly stumbled. He then ran up to Julisa and the others and asked if they wanted to play the soccer game on the table outside the booth. Julisa answered for everybody. She said yes and she went up to that strange game and played it as best she could, and played it for most of the night, her smile so expressive, her shoulders moving with her words, and all of it for this young man who was handsome and so attentive.

  He could not wait to graze her.

  She decided to marry him.

  Professors at the medical school in Mexico City said dolefully that she wouldn’t be able to finish school if she was married.

  “When you fall in love, whatever you say, I still get married,” she says. But she stayed in school, although she was studying with one emotion and dying to get married with another.

  Two years later, she came to her town to get married in church. The reception was in her home.

  She was pregnant in five minutes and was angry with herself and her husband. The couple didn’t have enough money, and their families couldn’t help. She took a bookkeeping job in a Mexico City bakery. The new husband studied chemical engineering but still had to travel with his family to these one-day fairs. With her last year in school and three years of residency in front of her, Julisa had a miscarriage. She couldn’t even pay for books. She dropped out. I’ll try next year, she told herself.

  Her twin sister, Lourdes, and her husband went with another couple to Tijuana, and Lourdes called to report that they were going across the border on Saturday night. The hospital in Tijuana called on Sunday to say that Lourdes and two others were dead as a result of beatings that were apparently handed out by marauding thieves in the scrub. Julisa had been raised in the same womb and bed with her sister, but she shucked off as much misery as possible and tried to help raise the money to bring Lourdes back for a funeral.

  Two years later, she and her husband were living in defeat in Mexico City. She wasn’t a day closer to returning to school, and he couldn’t get a job in engineering. They saved and borrowed $1,800 for a coyote to cross them at Tijuana. We will make it all up in America, and I’ll come back for school, she told herself. Then she and the husband left for Tijuana.

  Fear owned her as she walked and ran over the same soil where her sister had died. The coyote had them hide in a garbage dump. Then they were among a group of five who stuffed themselves into the back of a van going to Los Angeles.

  The woman who rented them the first room in Brooklyn instructed Julisa and her husband never to go outside except to go to work and back, because the police would arrest them, and the police were everywhere.

  Julisa brought two babies home to these rooms but learned only snatches of English. “We were afraid to go to school at night for English,” she remembers. They moved into the rooms on Kings Highway, and her brother Valentine came to live with them, which gave them an extra hand with baby-sitting and the rent. Mostly, the husband watched the babies while she went out and cleaned houses. When she came home, he left to sweep out a beauty parlor. She paid out the toughest thousand dollars for a booklet, “Fast Practical English,” put out by the UCEDA English Institute, which counted her thousand in English. She picked up a couple of new words and not much more after listening to the CD sent by the institute. Supposedly, there were classes she could attend in a hall someplace, but she was never able to get there.

  While a social worker was complaining about the UCEDA English Institute to Joel Magallan, SJ, the director of the Asociación Tepeyac de New York, he waved a hand.

  “The Mexicans already know a second language,” he said. “The ones from Puebla were raised on Aztec Indian—we call it Nahuatl. Then in school they had to learn mainstream Spanish. The other Indian language they learn as babies is Tarahumara. That is spoken in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Otomi is the first language of those in Baja. Mayan is spoken first in Chiapas.”

  One day, Julisa’s brother left on his bicycle for his job at a refrigerator manufacturer on Atlantic Avenue, a wide, extremely busy street. A while later, a policeman came to the door to tell Julisa that her brother was dead. There had been a two-car accident, and he couldn’t get out of the way and was killed.

  Once more, she had to grope through her grief to come up with money for a dead body.

  Now here she is, five years after leaving medical school, standing in her room, a baby sleeping on her bed that is covered with a big brilliant red Mexican blanket. Still, energy and enthusiasm fill her eyes and brighten her face and she says that soon, yes, soon, she will be able to leave this place and go back to medical school in Mexico. It is still the reason she does not try to find time to go to school for English. Why should she? She just told you that soon she would be going back.

  Never once does she pause to realize that she has no money for any school, and that she is a cleaning woman when she should be a doctor, and that her husband is sweeping up in a beauty parlor when he should be an engineer. And that all around them the lives of the Mexicans are the same. Here in her house right now, Lucino is an accountant, and he was the cheapest of labor. Visiting for the basketball games was Alejandro, an upholsterer who works for perhaps a dollar over minimum wage. Simultaneously you’d look at each week’s pay with Mexican peasant eyes—it was rich man’s money—and then add their weekly bills in Brooklyn and realize they live at the bottom.

  At those moments when Julisa suddenly saw the walls of her room for what they were, a life sentence, she said to herself right away, soon I will go back to school. She says that through each year.

  Does she still love the husband she met at the fair?

  “For my children I love him.”

  And Eduardo worked at bricklaying, which he knew, for the lowest money in all of construction. He didn’t have the slightest idea that a white in New York gets $23 an hour for the same work. How could he know such a thing? Nobody could speak English, and the only people they knew had jobs as bad or worse. Sometimes Julisa felt sad for Eduardo when he walked past her as if afraid to talk.

  When Eduardo went out at other times, he hung out in front of the Mexican store on Neptune Avenue with a kid named El Viejo, which means “the old man.” He was twenty. They went to the boardwalk at Coney Island and played video games and talked with others who were their age. Frequently, they now rode the el up to Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, where o
ne night in a Mexican restaurant the waitress looked at Eduardo and when he put his chin down, she put her hand under it and lifted it. “I like you the best,” she told him. His chin went right back down.

  When they left the place, everybody was laughing at Eduardo because of his shyness. It was one thing for the older guys back in the room to make fun of him, but these were kids his own age. He told them that he would show them all. He would go back to the restaurant and take the waitress out of there for all to see how much she loved him. A week later, he walked ahead of the others into the restaurant; he didn’t know exactly what he was going to do, but for sure they were not going to laugh at him anymore because he was going to talk to that waitress and make her like him and go out with him. Nobody would laugh. He walked in and found another waitress working. He asked for the one he wanted. “She quit,” the owner said.

  ON MARCH 11, 1999, an application for a $2 million general liability insurance policy on Ostreicher property under the name of Faye Industries Corp., 527 Bedford Avenue, was forwarded by a broker to Greg Portnoy, a broker in the Westchester suburb of White Plains who places accounts with the First Financial Insurance Company, which has an Illinois license but conducts business all over, much of it in the state of North Carolina.

  The application called for the policy to be in effect on March 17, 1999. It was a simple three-page questionnaire of yes-or-no answers in boxes. There were two questions about background, the first of which appears to be there only to please the religious beliefs of Carolina:

  7. Any past losses or claims relating to sexual abuse or molestation allegations, discrimination or negligent hiring?

  Let no hands commit a sin of the flesh in a lumberyard. (The discrimination and hiring can be considered a throw-in.)

  Answer: no.

  The next question was at the center of the insurance business:

  8. During the past ten years has any applicant been convicted of any degree of the crime of arson? The question must be answered by any applicant. Failure to disclose the substance of an arson conviction is a misdemeanor punishable by a sentence of up to one year of imprisonment.

  Answer: no.

  There is not even a thought of punishment, save loss of this particular policy, for some grubby child molester. Strike one match without admitting it and, according to the piece of paper, leg irons can be clamped on.

  As collateral, Faye Industries listed ten vacant lots and two buildings. The lots happened to have buildings on them. Industrial Enterprises listed five vacant lots and one building. Ramon, Inc., listed four empty lots and a building. Both Ostreichers said they had three empty lots. A cousin, Samuel Newman, was down for three vacant lots. Middleton Street, where everybody worked, had seven addresses that were listed as vacant lots. This could disorient an experienced postman. Later, a lawyer for First Financial thought that the number of addresses for Middleton Street were there to dizzify those looking at the application.

  Then on the third page of the application there were three questions, short and easily answered.

  12. Any structural alterations contemplated?

  Answer: no.

  13. Any demolition exposure contemplated?

  Answer: no.

  14. Has applicant been active in or is currently active in joint ventures?

  Answer: no.

  One possible explanation for all of Ostreicher’s answers was that it was cheaper to insure an empty lot than a building full of workers. Anyway, who was going to check? If there was no catastrophe, the policy would sleep in a file. Who would be dumb enough to list all the work being done and pay those higher premiums?

  On the last blank on the application, Ostreicher came up with his personal safety net:

  APPLICANT’S SIGNATURE:_______________

  The space was blank.

  Two brokers and an insurance company collected premiums. Therefore, the policy was good. What does it matter if the guy forgot to sign his name? Just an oversight. We’ll get it when we get it.

  They could not envision Ostreicher sitting at a legal proceeding and saying, in substance, “It is not my policy. I never signed it. This policy is full of mistakes made by some clerk in the insurance company. I have never seen such an application full of errors. You can see I never signed it. Where is my signature?”

  8/10/99 BF 25 FIRE OPERATION REPORT

  58 Middleton Street. On arrival found cause for alarm to be a partial collapse of a building under construction with workers trapped. Engine 269 stretched hand lines, stood fast assisted with first aid and victim transport. Three non-life-threatening injuries to workers, all taken to Bellevue. A two story building 20 feet by 40 feet. A phone alarm at 11:17 units here four minutes later 11:21 all hands at 11:23 three engines and two trucks and special units rescue two squad one. Under control 12:42. Three civilian victims. Chief Corcoran from 11th division pd 90. Buildings Mr. Maniscalco on site. Supervisor Leon Schwimmer Industrial, 527 Bedford. Block Foreman Colin Torney.

  Since the accident had happened at the far end of the construction site, none of the Mexicans knew about it. Only that something had happened.

  The three workers battered in the collapse of a floor went out through the building’s rear and were taken over the bridge to Bellevue Hospital on First Avenue in Manhattan, which is the Yankee Stadium of emergency rooms. Their names on police aided cards were Herb Lubin, Brian Dubois, and Robert Jackson. All the Mexican workers were at the other end of the construction site. They let these three work together because they spoke no Spanish. The injuries were minor: a sprain, a bruise. They had no medical coverage from the job. They walked out of Bellevue and went into the perpetual night of itinerant workers.

  Only Eduardo and his brother José knew about this collapse. A few days later, the boss, Leo Schwimmer, sent them up to the building. (Leon Schwimmer, known as Leo, is the father-in-law of Faye Schwimmer, who is the daughter of Eugene Ostreicher. Faye and her husband, Ed, who live in Ostreicher’s house at 527 Bedford, are part owners of the sites on Lorimer and Middleton Streets. Including the founding father, Eugene, there are eight Ostreicher relatives on the building company’s payroll.) José says now, “The building wasn’t level. It didn’t have a lot of beams. We wanted to know who was working there but we couldn’t ask or we’d be fired.”

  The cause of the collapse was cinder blocks heaved onto the third level before cement poured on the C-joists as support had hardened. The cinder blocks were put there because the man in charge of the job, Eugene Ostreicher, had ordered them to be.

  The day after the accident, Blaich was on the block when Ostreicher drove up.

  “The fools!” Ostreicher said of the people working for the lowest money. “I told them not to put anything heavy on the floor. They’re fools!”

  Someone at the Building Department put in papers for violations and went home. His job was done, and he knew the paper would be in a file or on a computer forever because anything to do with Ostreicher, or any other Hasidic builder, was fixed by City Hall in advance.

  Blaich, who admits to having had more faith, was at least surprised when the job, which had been closed for three days, suddenly reopened with Ostreicher and his engineers, Hertzberg and Sanchez, standing with one foot on the Mexican workers as usual. The Buildings Department sent no inspectors to see if they were making anything any safer. The Buildings Department issued a statement saying that, under the law, they do not have to inspect such a building until it is completed.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  His thirty-second birthday was on the twelfth of September, 1999, a Sunday, which is why Nelson Negrón is sure of most of the things that happened. The day before, Saturday, he had been out on the curb in front of the bodega on Bedford, and at eight o’clock a van pulled up and the guy called out for three people who wanted to work. Nelson and his friend Miguel got in the van, which took them to a factory in Long Island City where they spent the day moving sewing machines. To push a machine was a two-man job. Even so, by the middle
of the afternoon their arms were made of lead. The guy gave Nelson and Miguel $60 and drove them back to the bodega. Nelson walked home. His roommate, Tony, had rice and beans ready. After that, Nelson watched television and fell asleep.

  “My birthday,” he said when he woke up at 7 A.M.

  “Happy birthday,” Tony said. “What are you going to do?”

  “To work. I have no choice.”

  He got dressed and walked to the bodega, the DR, on Bedford Avenue. He had a pastrami sandwich and coffee and stood outside on Bedford, eating and hoping for the great job, a birthday present, a trailer truck from the south coming up and paying a hundred for the day to unload it. Instead, Leo Schwimmer pulled up in a green van and asked Negrón if he wanted to make $50. Put the $50 together with the $60 from the day before and I got $110 to begin the week, Nelson told himself. Beauty! If I ever put together five days, including the weekend, on top of this, then I got the best week I ever had working.

  Negrón enthusiastically went over to the van, which he remembers had a sliding door. Leo knew from past jobs that Negrón could speak the language and was a good strong worker. Nelson had worked on beams, support beams, and taping for Leo. When Leo got to the Middleton Street site, a full crew was working. That it was Sunday meant nothing to Leo, and was not vital to the Mexicans, who believed that work is prayer. Leo told Nelson to get fifty-pound sacks of cement up to the third level of the new buildings. The building fronts were wide open. Framing would come later. They were working on a series of four-story brick houses that started at the corner bodega and ran up the street, taking in numbers 40–50 on Middleton Street. Across from the houses was a dreary brick grammar school.