Tales of Two Americas

by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)

  Gabby came with her some evenings to visit Diem. Some days she went alone, or Gabby sent Ricardo. Between the three of them, they did not miss a single day. At first, Iris’s younger sons set an alarm and walked slowly and on time to school, but eventually only Ozzie kept trying. He wanted to be able to say that his brother did not have to worry about him anymore. One day, when Diem was allowed to come home. One day.

  Gabriella

  Your son walks into the house where you work and you say nothing. How could you not have known that somehow this whole thing couldn’t work the way it was supposed to? You had done all the right things. You had not gone back after dropping him at the house, you never called him, you waited for him to call you, and when he visited you did not send him back with the kinds of gifts that you wanted to because you knew he had to cultivate different tastes now and you didn’t want to remind him of the things he loved and missed with all his might. You had praised Ricardo each time he came home and said he’d seen Luis and had managed to turn away from your son, giving nothing away. Instead, you had held him close, and pretended that it was not longing for Luis but desire for you that was weighing his body down, and you told him again and again that it was best, it was only four years and then you would both have your son back for good.

  But then you come back from picking up the girls at the bus stop and you see him sitting at the dining table with Ari’s son, and you hear him talking in a way you don’t recognize but can’t help but admire, and it is not your mouth but your hands that betray you. You cannot help it. You reach out and you stroke his head, and Theo laughs.

  And you wouldn’t have minded the laugh, you even smiled at the sound of it, withdrawing your hand, folding the memory of that silken hair into your palm as stealthy as a card shark, but then Luis turns and sees you and he swears. He swears at you in language you will never repeat to Ricardo because you cannot break Ricardo’s fierce, strong heart that has loved you so well for so long, right from the beginning, words that rise before your eyes and blur as you see them written in letters as big as the sign outside the Faith Emanuel Baptist Church that you go to each Sunday, the one with the glassed-in sign that says in elegant font that Jesus Loves You and that It Is Not Too Late To Repent. And how is it that instead of lifting your hand and striking your son so he can never speak to you again, his shame would be so great, his remorse so bottomless, how is it that you remember to cover Ephie’s ears? How is it that you can even think about the fact that Ephie speaks Spanish almost as fluently as your own daughter, not because she has been born with your language ringing in her ears but because she listens to language tapes that come in shrink-wrapped yellow boxes, and spends her summers at camps where they only speak to her in Spanish? How is it that you forget that Theo, too, whose accomplishments were chosen and paid for by the same father, must once have attended those same camps?

  You take the girls into the kitchen and you only half listen because what more is there to listen to?

  —I can’t believe she touched you! My father is fucking crazy to have her around. C’mon man, let’s go over to my mom’s house.

  And you think about that, about this business of having two houses and two sets of parents and two lives and you wonder if that is what makes people like Mira and Ari happy, the way they can separate what should be inseparable so easily and so neatly, like yolks from whites, and you wonder if Ephie and Athena ever think about that, about how their father once loved someone other than their mother, and whether that bothers them at all. You think about Theo and if he even thinks of Mira as a mother at all. You think about all kinds of things, but you don’t think about what Luis has said, or the way the brush of his hair has stained your palm with a feeling you cannot rub out, a feeling you neither want to remember nor forget.

  ■ ■

  At the library Iris picks up two sets of whatever brochures have been set out; for night classes, technical training, online colleges, language instruction, book groups, and summer programs for teenagers that combine sports, reading, and mathematics. She shares them with Gabby.

  Iris keeps her set beside her bed and never opens them; they are a decoration.

  Gabby flips through her brochures each night, and each night in rotation she pictures a new life that she might make, a life where nothing that should be together is ever pulled apart.

  Across the line that divides the city, before turning out the lights for bed, Mira flips through catalogs for described clothing and other frivolities, dog-earing the pages that catch her eye.

  Each woman dreams of purchases none of them will ever make. In their various beds, some hard, some soft, differently lonely, their children dream too.

  WE SHARE THE RAIN, AND NOT MUCH ELSE

  Timothy Egan

  FOR A TIME, I worked as a longshoreman in Seattle, during the twilight of an era when union workers could afford second homes on Puget Sound and no one ever asked you where you went to school. Pre–Microsoft boom, late Boeing bust. The hometown company—the Lazy B, it was called—had laid off more than sixty thousand workers in the early 1970s, almost two thirds of its peak payroll, prompting a billboard plea: “Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights?” But here’s the thing: not that many people left. The place was just too damn beautiful, surrounded by water and forests; on a clear day you could see three national parks from the top deck of the Space Needle. People “reinvented” themselves, though that term was not in vogue. It didn’t take much to cover your nut, working part-time-this or helping-out-with-that, and the views, of course, were free. As always, being out on the far western edge, caressed by sea breezes born in some mid-Pacific tempest, was a recipe for possibility.

  I wasn’t a real blue-collar worker. I knew the gig was temporary. I had plans, vague and half shaped, but I knew I would not be using my back as a wrench or my hands as claws. I was studying Irish history at the University of Washington, and on select days my buddy and I would skip our classes and go down to the hiring hall at dawn, a block from the waterfront. We had used a connection to get on the union extra board, no small thing. If our names got called, we would work a shift offloading crap from Asia, and a week later get a paycheck for that single day that was enough to cover a month’s rent, and put a dent into quarterly tuition, which was even less. Hooboy—I always felt rich.

  The scruff is gone from Elliott Bay, as is the union hall where we waited in folding chairs on a peeling linoleum floor. On a clear day, if you squint, you can still see a longshoreman or -woman, laboring in the shadow of a giant Ferris wheel, not far from the new offices of Expedia. When people talk about a city’s soul, I think of those jobs, even though offloading container cargo is no more noble than steering people online to a chain hotel with free breakfast. Nor should we believe that a “working waterfront,” to be authentic, must involve grease and sweat and people who didn’t learn how to swear by watching movies about Wall Street. Whether we’re in the market for cars from Japan or window seats on airplanes, somebody has to move the levers.

  What was important about those jobs—what’s lost in the new Seattle and all the other gilded brain capitals prospering in their lovely settings—is that they used to give longshore workers equal footing with citizens laboring in offices overlooking the sound. Today—forget about buying a getaway cabin with earnings from the dock, even at almost $80,000 a year in base pay. That kind of salary will not get you into one of the starter homes being bid up by people fleeing the $1 million tag for a leaky shack in the Bay Area.

  Walk up the hill from the waterfront, past a place that used to have a six a.m. happy hour and another address that was a refuge for sailors called the Catholic Seamen’s Club, and you find a town with barely a trace of its odiferous past. Looming among the other new buildings that snag the clouds is one that tourists take selfies in front of—the home for the fictional Master of the Universe in Fifty Shades of Grey. Our main pop cultural reference used to be Slee
pless in Seattle, starring a houseboat community that was built, years earlier, by beats, banjo pluckers, and barroom socialists. Bohemians, I think they were called—another lost word.

  For most of Seattle’s history, when politicians came to town they held huge open rallies—Teddy Roosevelt on the waterfront, Bill Clinton at the Pike Place Market, a very young Barack Obama at Garfield High School, whose former students included Quincy Jones and Jimi Hendrix. Now the politicians zoom through the city in a security cocoon to a rich person’s home, Seattle as an ATM. The public, regular folks, are not engaged.

  To lament the past is a perilous thing. Revisionism is only half right, at best. The easy mistake is to think it was always better back then, the past that brushes out racial segregation, closeted sexual lives, no cure for polio. Life was harder, surely, when women washed clothes on scruffy boards. And life is easier, surely, when most people have all the world’s knowledge in the palm of their hand, at the swipe of a screen. But the past in Seattle—which is really nothing in the scheme of things, considering that the city is not even two centuries old—had a golden postwar period when people without college degrees, or GIs returning home after defeating Hitler, could live well, in the same neighborhoods as the swells. That past cannot be restored.

  So when I walk the streets of the town where I was born, wading through the Amazon.com jungle that has replaced body shops and antique stores and affordable brick apartments, I try to restrain the nostalgic impulse. Those Amazon jobs pay well, though not enough to make a brogrammer feel as princely as the longshoreman once did. Better to have something new century than the ghosts that haunt Detroit. The way I try to make peace with the new era, knowing that the gulf between the rich and everybody else grows by the day, is to see some of Seattle’s egalitarian essence in the new.

  The city was one of the first to pass a law phasing in a fifteen-dollar minimum wage. Several years in, the sky did not fall, jobs did not flee, though you might pay an extra twenty-five cents for a fast-food burger. Not far from Amazon is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a hive of people working start-up hours to bring clean water to African villages and an end to diseases that no longer kill people in the developed world. We burned with envy—some of us, at least—when Microsoft was turning out millionaires by the boatload. But now, look! There are those same tech titans, late middle-aged and soft around the middle, trying to figure out how to give away more money than any private entity has ever attempted to do. A bit of the old socialist DNA, which manifested itself when Seattle became the only American city to stage a general strike in 1919, was alive among the billionaire class.

  The things that give people a sense of belonging to their city, free for the asking, are still here. Those three national parks, visible as before from the Space Needle, are surrounded by public land that is the birthright of any citizen. You want to experience true wealth? Walk in a forest of five-hundred-year-old cedars, your land, a few miles from the city’s edge. The public schools work, off and on, and there are ongoing crusades to make sure they remain at least a peripheral concern of the same people who attend those fund-raisers for liberal Democrats.

  On the downside, the University of Washington is no longer cheap; no secondary school in America is. If college is still the best elevator to the middle class, crippling debt is the price of the ride upward. Once, well before my time, the UW was free. Why not go back to that future? Didn’t somebody from Vermont run for president on that idea? I doubt if there are many people who dip their toes in the two worlds, the docks and the gothic towers of the university. Too bad. I learned as much from the people at one place as I did at the other. And they paid me for the education.

  BLOOD BROTHER

  Sarah Smarsh

  YOUR BROTHER HAS A HOLE on the inside of each arm that never quite closes. A blood tap, really, like an oil well for drilling. He is a tall, strong man in his early thirties—an ideal source for plasma.

  A woman calls his name. She takes his temperature and blood pressure. He gets to skip the full-blown health screening since he’s been coming here twice a week for almost ten years. She pricks his finger to make sure his blood is okay today.

  Some of the other regulars take iron pills for fear they’ll get anemic and be turned away. There’s a weight minimum of 110 pounds, so the smallest, frailest women, sometimes elderly or underfed or both, put on extra clothes or wear ankle weights to pass.

  A technician wearing a white lab coat, a name tag, and a clear plastic shield over her face puts a needle in one of your brother’s inner-arm holes. He’s in a “donating bed,” a high-tech recliner of sorts that elevates the legs and leans him way back.

  Rows of these chairs on the donor floor hold people whose faces he sometimes recognizes. They look at cell phones, magazines, or televisions hanging from the ceiling while maroon fluid drains from their veins. Some of them are homeless. Some of them are like your brother: college graduates with beat-up cars, insurmountable credit-card debt, federal and private student loans. The state university where he worked and borrowed his way through undergraduate degrees is just four blocks away. Plasma centers like to set up shop near universities, where the blood is young and the wallets are light.

  When your brother finally graduated, the economy was in the tank. As a first-generation college student he had no connections in the professional world, and no one to tell him that communications and history degrees were bad bets to begin with. A good job never turned up. For years he has worked at call centers, leasing agencies, shipping companies. Those paychecks don’t cover basic living costs, though. Thus, his face has aged a decade going in and out of this place by necessity.

  The plasma center, though, like hundreds like it across the country, always looks the same: The fluorescent lights. The rows of quiet people lying back with one arm hooked to a whirring machine. The white lab coats and the clear plastic face shields. The signs about what to eat the day before, the day of, and the day after giving plasma in order to keep your strength up.

  Your brother’s blood follows a tube to a centrifuge that separates out what they want: liquid plasma the color of Mountain Dew.

  The materials around the place tout the life-saving service he’s providing others; the plasma stripped from his blood will be turned into pharmaceuticals. Very expensive pharmaceuticals, ones he could never afford were he diagnosed with hemophilia or an immune disorder. He doesn’t have health insurance and could use a trip to the doctor himself. The promotional pamphlets and websites call what he’s doing a donation, but it’s really a sale.

  The buyers are corporations with names like BioLife, Biotest, Octapharma. Plasma brings thirty, fifty bucks a pop depending on how often you go and how much you weigh. Your brother is in the highest weight class, which means he gets twenty dollars for the first donation of the week, forty-five dollars for the second. Sometimes there are bonuses: prize drawings, scratch-off tickets. The place your brother frequents is running a recruitment special: UP TO $400 THIS MONTH. Applicable for eligible, qualified new donors. Fees vary by location. Check with your preferred CSL Plasma donation center to see if they are participating in any other special promotions.

  Regulars like your brother are already on the donor loyalty program called Z Rewards. The more plasma given, the more points and the higher status they attain—bronze, silver, gold. If you’re away too long, they want you back. “Lapsed donors,” who haven’t given plasma in six months or more, get fifty bucks each for their first five return visits.

  Plasma is big business, a monopolized industry comprised mostly of five international corporations. After the 2008 economic crisis, when Americans lost their jobs and homes during the Great Recession, the plasma industry suddenly had a swelling source of eager plasma sellers. New centers popped up across the country, and total donations—transactions, really—nearly doubled in five years, rising from 12.5 million in 2006 to more than 23 million in 2011. In 2008, plasma was
a $4 billion industry. In 2015: $20 billion.*, *

  The sort of drugs made with your brother’s plasma came onto the market during the 1950s and have a grim history. During the sixties and seventies, private plasma companies siphoned their product from the veins of American prison inmates, paying them five or ten dollars a hit. From the late seventies to the mid-eighties, about half of all diagnosed hemophiliacs reportedly contracted HIV from infected drugs derived from the plasma of such a high-risk population.* The resulting class-action lawsuits revealed that one company knew it was flooding the market with dangerous supplies.

  During the nineties, China turned poor, rural areas in Henan Province and elsewhere into springs of plasma. Chinese farmers’ blood, it turned out, was worth more than their labor in the fields. In the process, dirty needles, other bad practices, and the resulting tainted plasma supply infected thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Chinese people with HIV and hepatitis C. Every plasma station in the country would be shut down, but in the last few years they’ve blossomed again across the country. In 2012, a doctor who discovered the 1990s contamination published a letter warning of the dangers involved when “plasma collection once again becomes a profit-seeking route for some unscrupulous health officials and medical professionals on local levels, thus having devastating consequences for some of China’s most vulnerable people.”*

  What if your brother came across this information in a magazine while hooked up to the plasma machine? Would he feel a kinship with the U.S. prisoners and the Chinese farmers? As it happens, your brother’s grandpa went to prison a time or two; on the other side of his family he is the first man in generations not to be a farmer. He worked hard to go to college instead of to prison or the fields, but here he is, selling out his veins. If he knew the history of plasma as a product, would he feel afraid for his health, cheated by an economy?