by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)
I’d say I wasn’t as less than average as my grades. I got Bs in a couple of subjects. Like Spanish. Not an A because a grade wasn’t about what you knew only. The teacher wasn’t particularly fond of me, and I don’t blame him, though he was a bloated fart and deserved me and other pains in the class. I might have gotten As in PE and auto shop and even math once or twice. Maybe Bs. Probably, maybe. Grades weren’t about skills. Cs in the rest. Except English, where I got at least three or four or even five Ds. Not just that I never did homework—I never carried a book home—unless it was in-class, and I kept having specific trouble with those teachers. The only time I asked for a meeting with a counselor and vice principal (instead of one being called about me) was because I figured out the teacher planned to flunk me. I wanted a transfer to any other class so I wouldn’t be held back or have to take it again. She agreed to pass me at the meeting.
My senior year my mom married again and I found a full-time graveyard-shift job as a janitor at McDonnell Douglas—had to get military-grade government clearance for that, and it came even though I just turned seventeen, in high school, and lied. I was allowed to go half day to a better neighborhood school, because clearly I was so advanced. I wanted the diploma. I always missed my first morning class to have breakfast and slept in the next. The next two classes weren’t ones really. They gave a group of the special students like me a special “class” that was like two.
And so I graduated. Like most of my friends did too. I was the only one who pushed on and stuck to it at the community college level. And I was pure lucky. When I first got, for example, an F in a freshman English class (I had no belief that could happen, especially when I was trying—I got Ds on papers, and gave up), I soon after received my please come to the induction center letter in those Vietnam draft days, and I went (not a cheerful place). I visited my draft board office right after and asked if I could have a second chance for a student deferment. And they let me. Working full time, I took a night class at a “lesser” junior college, where I suddenly became smarter, and got a B in that freshman comp course. Well intentioned, I wasn’t close to a high-level student then, but, given information, I was someone who could take what I knew I could do and figure out what came next.
Like me, my friends, all of them, did what they did, what they’d learned, harmlessly almost always. We were the mess-ups. We were the ones who didn’t sit in the front of the classroom and join school clubs and organizations and government. Some guys played sports, some girls were on drill team and cheerleaders and a homecoming princess, but none of us got the best grades or worried about them, knew one thing about the best schools or even good ones. There were the ones who bought a car that was too expensive and worked to pay it off, to make it cooler, faster, lower, or were losing it to thieves or collection agencies. Ones that took too many drugs, though mostly only mota, weed. A couple moved on to juvie or prison. They got pregnant. They got married too early and had babies too young. They were in love or they were trying to do right. They stayed together and they didn’t, either full-time occupations. Some jobs were awful, really shitty bosses, or so boring that nobody human, young anyway, could bear it. They tried studying fire science or health care at a junior college and then, oh well. Or business, and no thanks. They worked construction and in department stores or welding and wanted oil pipeline jobs or mining or to go to the wilderness or desert or Mexico and some went kind of hippie or semihippie until it was just a job job. Most stayed within a few miles of high school and worked at the familiar there, or there, and they had rent, lived with someone new and maybe a nice, modest wedding. Or they were drafted or joined. Or just had work that came out of the family, lived near all of them. They just did what they’d been doing, what they learned to do.
Little did they or I realize that by graduation it was all set. By all I mean 99.9 percent so. I mean the big shit. The grand, good whole front and backyard, and briefcase dad, and beautifully painted bedrooms life visualized on TV or movies. I mean, does one exception—which in many ways is me, I’m aware, because, miracle, I became a writer—out of ten thousand (and that’s not generous, because isn’t it more like a state lottery number)—make a braggable trend? You know, how a certain America rah rah likes to have it. Actually it could have been settled even sooner than that. A bet-able wager. Clearly we were traveling on a different American highway than those better behaved than us. And I’m saying there are a lot more of us than those who had a wise father mother grandfather grandmother neighborhood history inheritance and who genetically did everything just right. Better grades, better schools, better family, better manners, better breakfasts, better homework, better birth, better land. Never screwing up. Always hitting it right, with winks and wows coming back at them.
It’s not like at first I didn’t believe myself that anything was possible. I didn’t consider probability, the odds, favorites. I was an elitist to my mind, or at least someone who believed in the better being better, that some can and will do better than others and should. Of course that meant that I could. Maybe I’m too short for an NBA squad, but I could make a major league baseball team! If I’d gone for it. If I’d have thought about it instead of an hourly job I wanted. What I didn’t know and couldn’t were what I didn’t know that I didn’t know. In the wide space of anything is possible, I could name like five side trails and maybe heard of five more. I thought that was a lot—I was doing better than any expectation—and I was off. New York, Paris, Rome, Yale, Harvard? Of course and sure I heard about all of them! What I knew about was, e.g., South Gate and Watts and Imperial Highway and say the campuses of ELA and Harbor and Compton colleges. Sure I was aware of the biggie deals, of the White House and president and cabinet and their offices, and attorneys and doctors and architects—like I knew of India, the Amazon, like I knew of astronomy, like I knew so many movie stars who lived in L.A. where I too lived and grew up.
You know these stories well: At twenty-two he or she accomplished this or that and what a job to land on! Admirable greatness, we are left to believe. And we do accept. But . . . by twenty-seven he runs this, controls that, invented, achieved, defended, wrote, and and and. At twenty-two I was still learning to read better, struggling with vocabulary, which is to say my thinking ability, and at twenty-seven I couldn’t get a job (by then I had a master’s degree in philosophy and religion) but somehow so-and-so didn’t have any of that kind of problem ever of any kind. Ever! Not that I don’t and didn’t believe it, but here’s what really underneath I was being told to take away from this: They are just smarter. More talented. More ambitious. More skilled. More accomplished and able. Work harder. Super trained. Perfect personality, mesh with the world, with the biz. More fluent, articulate, focused. In sum, the best, they earned it. And I say okay. And I do not believe it isn’t true. I am sure it is. Such are the breaks. Así es. Life. Whereas . . .
Here’s where the bad kid in me will be sent to the vice principal’s office yet again, where my attitude has gotten my butt fired from let’s say a number of jobs over the years. Because here comes another list that starts with a Whereas . . .
A step sideways first: I was a construction worker into two decades after I received my master’s degree. Union high-rises generally. A one-crane job would be like thirty to seventy-five men there, depending on what stage of what. There were usually a couple of Chicano carpenters on downtown jobs, a few mexicanos. A few more percentage of black carpenters, especially at the bigger projects, of two or even three cranes. One job I remember, in West L.A., they’d had this one apprentice, black, who didn’t work directly with me but was around and who seemed in every way normal and capable from my distance. Who at break would sit with me and another two Chicanos and one drawling Tejano and a few laborers—except for the dude from outside Houston, we were all Dodger and Laker fans and the apprentice was too. Then one day he was gone. Let go. The foreman said he was tired of him coming in late and being lazy, that he had too many screwups, and
that he didn’t like his mouth. Like I said, I barely knew the guy, and what the foreman said was all possible, and I didn’t give it much more thought. In the trades, jobs came, jobs went. Then there was a layoff. The two Mexicano carpenters and the two big, older black carpenters were given checks. Job slimming down as we got closer to the top seemed like a plausible explanation. Keeping the younger, faster dudes who also could speak English to the boss. Soon enough two new carpenters appeared, both friendly and easy around the foreman. And in a blink a new apprentice too, who seemed connected to the new boys. I had to be around him more, and he wasn’t too pleased about that, and I for one didn’t enjoy him much either. He was a fucken jerk. If I asked him to do something, he’d frown, like it was beneath him. He was a hothead, got outraged at laborers for not doing what in fact should have been his job, wronged if anyone of us (not his buddies) suggested that maybe he forgot this, didn’t do that well enough—normal advice for apprentices—and maybe he should buy his own tools so he didn’t borrow and lose ours. And he missed days and was late often enough and hungover bad on Mondays. What the boss said? He’s young, feeling his oats. His mouth? Fiery, full of spunk. Shitty work? He’s learning, how it goes at first.
And so it is for all the very special people treated most specially from the especially special lands. Yet even that can seem sort of like nature’s way—power picking what suits it. More money, for instance, goes to those who are living around more money places, and people in the wealthier places have more money to have and choose more. Up to a point anyway, and up to the point when, in a bit of less equanimity, when yet again it’s one of them and not one of us, one of me mine, when it’s the layoff check here and not there, when it’s didn’t even get an interview unless it’s like Princeton—you know, I could go on and on—and that’s when I’m fuck you. That is what your only “best” is? Duhhh, gee, every and all the time, huh? You think I don’t know better? Do you think I think it’s okay? That I’m good with it? Do you really? And that’s when the Whereas pops out. Not uttered through the lips, not one word like the following (unless maybe you push, freaking hard, except then you’re at a construction site, you’re not talking about high, sophisticated power that doesn’t have a stupid Trump-like face even thinking it): Whereas you, sir, you are just not our winner kind. Proof? This outburst. We go with winners and winners start as winners. You, sir, are no winner.
Oh god is that true. I grew up in L.A. and when I got out, I went not to New York or San Francisco, but straight to El Paso of all places. I didn’t even know Princeton was in New Jersey until a few years ago. But you do know I’m not really talking about me, right? I’m not. I’m okay. A lot better than I and anyone who knew me when would have ever imagined. What I am talking about is what I love. America? Sure, lots I am grateful for, my birth here instead of there. And of course what I mean by America includes its history of what is below its southern border, and what I mean is what I have imagined was the best of America, the openness, the range and grandness of space real and dreamed. And the honest prospect of opportunity, not just for the privileged clutter at the top, way over there and all about there. I’m an elitist. That is, I believe in the best and that it should be admired and learned from and supported. It’s just that my own view of best isn’t what goes for best in this country of my birth.
A few years ago I was living in Oaxaca, one of the most beautiful cities in Mexico. Every morning I walked down a hill to get a cafecito. At a corner a block up from the café, a lady in a typical Mexican housedress would have set up a table, selling morning chilled frutas all cut into cubes and in plastic containers. They were mango, piña, melón, sandía, and sometimes even coconut. My second visit to her I bought two and she suggested that my girlfriend might prefer some limón and chile on the coco. When I told her I was solito but especially liked mine that way, she laughed—at sorry me or lucky me, I couldn’t tell—and gave me one for free. I went every day and began to sit next to her for an hour to talk and listen and eat a little fruit and hear stories (and learn words and phrases in her native language) and watch people buy her fruit. She always saved me a coco when she brought them. She was Zapotec, from a village not far, but now lived nearby. Every morning she got up by four-thirty and went to the market and picked out the fruit and hurried back to her home where she cut and boxed them so she could be on the street early.
Almost eighty, she’d told me this was what she learned to do, and she had been doing it for decades, though not always in the same spot. That she lived on these pesos, from twenty-five, thirty-five fruit boxes. Of course it occurred to me to ask her how it was that she was this. But I couldn’t. Couldn’t treat her as a subject. She was more friend, a respected elder, and after a month she treated me, for that hour, as part of her life, sharing. I was already as lucky as I could be, able to be there, the large of it, the small of it. And what else but my luck? The big metaphor of that, the small connotation. She was so good, so lively and happy to be living her fate. So quick to talk and to laugh. There could be no better than her, no harder working, ambitious, accomplished. Like pure water. The best. She was just, normally, unseen. A few pesos, a gracias.
In these days, these last decades especially, it’s as if privilege is taken for granted by those who live inside it, who don’t know a world that is not it—that exotic, other world where there are other, poorer, lesser people who . . . just don’t and probably, certainly, didn’t have what it takes, weren’t born better. Lately, these days, in these years, privilege isn’t simply accepted, it’s entrenched and it is assumed it is true, right. Privilege has made the special more so. It’s advancing the special and calling only those therein “the best.” And though it could be so, I’m not buying that fruit.
LA CIUDAD MÁGICA
Patricia Engel
YOU SEE THEM walking along the shaded perimeters of parks, dressed like nurses in pressed white uniforms, pushing strollers, talking to the babies in their care. You see them sitting together on benches near the playground, watching the children on the swings, occasionally calling to them not to climb so high on the jungle gym.
You see them walking along the road, carrying the child’s backpack on the way home from school, while the child walks a few steps ahead, laughing with a friend. You see these women waiting outside of karate and ballet class, sitting in church pews beside the children on Sundays.
You see these women at the supermarket, pushing the cart down the aisle, the child perched atop the seat, legs dangling between the metal rails, while she pulls food from the shelves to buy and prepare for the family. You see these women sitting at the ends of tables in restaurants, keeping the children entertained with coloring books and video games, cutting their food into small pieces, whisper-begging the child to take another bite, so as not to interrupt the parents’ dinner conversation.
You see these women in the morning, as early as sunrise, stepping off the bus from the downtown terminal, walking quickly along the avenue to arrive at the place of their employment in time to wake the children, feed them breakfast, and get them ready for school.
You see these women in the evening, sitting five to a bench beneath the bus stop shelter, shielding themselves from the summer sun or from the winter rain, waiting for the bus to come to take them home.
■ ■
A group of mothers dressed in exercise clothes, adorned with jewelry and painted with makeup, gather for lunch at a café in Coral Gables—where streets lined with ficus and poinciana trees have Spanish names like Valencia, Minorca, and Ponce de León.
You overhear their lunch conversation, comparing nannies by country of origin.
“I prefer the Panamanians and Nicaraguans,” says one woman, picking at her salad, “because they know their place. They don’t try to get too friendly with me. I hate that.”
Another woman jumps in. “Oh, you mean when they address you directly? My God, it’s like, ‘Who gave you permission to open your mo
uth?’”
“Brazilians are just crazy, and you can’t trust Colombians or Ecuadorians. They steal and they’ll flirt with your husband,” offers another woman. “Don’t even bother trying them out. And Guatemalans come with too many problems. They’re always crying about something. Like, hello? I hired a nanny, not a charity!”
The women laugh, then brag to one another how their children are fluent in Spanish, and though it annoys them that now the nannies and their offspring can have private conversations, at least it’s still cheaper than hiring an American babysitter or paying an agency commission for a European au pair.
■ ■
Tuesday morning at a bakery in The Roads.
Two men ahead of you on the counter line catch up after not having seen each other in a while.
One man tells the other he and his family plan on moving away soon.
“We’re tired of feeling like foreigners around here. You can’t go anywhere in this city without hearing Spanish spoken. I don’t want my children growing up around that.”
He says they’re thinking about moving north to Broward or Collier County. “Somewhere spic-free.”
“But they’re everywhere,” his friend says, laughing. “You can’t escape them.”
