Drive-by Saviours

by Chris Benjamin

  Lily’s ideas and the concept of unionizing these workers made total sense to me, but I couldn’t get it down on paper or pixel. It felt better to grab at berries and sweat with the men whose labour I hindered more than I helped. At least I made them look that much more productive by comparison, and I lost a few pounds I didn’t need.

  The work was physically more strenuous and rewarding than anything else I’d done. In a way it was also more stimulating, intellectually. All morning long as I picked with them, I learned a whole new mode of communication, the singsong of the work. Its rhythm and cadence seduced me. Sometimes they sang a song, a haunting a cappella work melody. More often they told stories, mostly about sexual conquests, or jokes or teased each other for being slow, fat, lazy—or worse, bourgeois. Whatever filled their voices and my ears at any given time, be it song, story, taunt or laughter, there were never any spaces left between words or compañeros. To leave a space would be to separate, and to separate would be suicide.

  At first my only participation was to listen, as I had always listened so analytically to the world. And I was relieved no one ever asked me for a song or, worse, teased me, even though it was obvious that I was the most deserving of insult, the fattest and most bourgeois. In my own circles, as a non-profit worker in middle-class society, I always felt so radically poor. With the Mexicans I was little more than a tourist worker or an anthropological researcher. I struggled on through my own plots and offered little more than an occasional pained whimper, the sound of a weak back’s betrayal.

  But I listened. I learned.

  I learned that Enrique, who had struck me as so absent-minded and foolish, was also among the kindest and most sensitive, the most likely to notice when someone had had enough of being teased and could offer a subtle saying of wisdom at the right time, to steer the gentle insults his way. He was the most respected and the easiest to make fun of among them, and he could take better than he could give. They called him Neruda.

  I learned that while Juan Ramon left the most prodigious trail of broken hearts, usually among slumming middle-class housewives in town, almost all the men carried on affairs while far away from home, and most carried their guilt home with them in one form or another.

  The three more puritan exceptions were Enrique, Gorge and Fernando Ignacio, who countered teasing for their chastity with teasing of the wrath of God. Among these dozen committed Catholics, invoking the name of God always met with the hardiest laughter of all.

  What I took most to heart were the subtle clues left between jokes and songs that their laughter betrayed pain and longing. I knew from experience of the likeness between laughter and lament.

  And if that weren’t enough, they painted me a clearer picture. When evening descended over our bunkhouse, when they prayed out loud for their families and prayed for forgiveness for their betrayals, begged for some small break, like just enough money for an important operation or school fees, I felt the tears they would not shed. They didn’t want Jesus to think them greedy or materialistic. They knew what awaited the rich in the time of reckoning. It was they, the poor, intrepid ones, for whom paradise was open.

  Honoured as I was to catch these glimpses of their lives, I wondered why I was never teased—if maybe it had more to do with pity or even contempt than with respect for how I helped them, as I thought at first. This worry germinated in my brain, which was equipped with far too much freedom to wander and think while my body worked.

  Despite my best efforts to follow the rapid, unbroken stream of profanity-laced Spanish, sometimes my fatigued frontal lobe simply took a nap and let my imagination run wild with insecure fantasies of betrayal. Sometimes I worried that Bumi was back in Indonesia laughing at my pathetic attempts to counsel him, when all he needed was cold hard cash. Sometimes I worried that Sarah was taking sweet vengeance on my absence in the arms of someone smarter, better looking, more stable and more exciting.

  I never gave voice to my fears, or anything much at all, at first. To speak would have only accentuated my class difference and I knew, from their discussions of their burning class awareness, they hated my class, and were sceptical of allies from within it. Yes they wanted to unionize, but they preferred to do so from within.

  As much as they abhorred wealthier people, they wanted a piece of that world. Quite literally, they lusted for their share in the form of hot women with power and money. Lily, with her Latina roots and socialist tendencies, was of particular interest to the men. During one conversation, Jose Ramon raised the subject of Lily with particular vigour, and to my surprise they all, even the three most chaste, agreed that “having” her would be an experience as close to supreme divinity as possible in the material world. But mixed with that lust was genuine love. They had guilty crushes on her. As Guillermo put it, to great laughter, “Senorita Lily is looking out for us. She’s like a mother I’d like to fuck, only younger.”

  Fernando Ignacio added, “She cares because her parents are true revolutionaries. They know what it’s like.”

  “But she herself only knows second-hand. She is unscarred by the poverty in her true homeland, or the battles we’ve fought,” Guillermo said.

  What, I wondered, did they make of me? I was unscarred by poverty, my parents were unscarred by poverty, centuries of my family had in fact profited from other people’s poverty. Yet I too wanted to help. Did that make me just a strange ally or an impostor?

  To find out I laughed. I took my cues from their own laughter. The first time I laughed too loud, too suddenly, they stared and laughed back at me. Juan Jesus, the quietest man among them, shouted something to the effect of, “Hey look, you made the gringo laugh!”

  They all laughed harder because Juan Jesus was almost as quiet as I had been.

  I smiled at the men, who stood back from their work and stayed silent for once. “Well, it was a good one,” I said.

  “We thought you had no sense of humour,” Juan Ramon said.

  I smiled again. “I have a sense of humour but my Spanish is bad.”

  They erupted with laughter and returned to their toil.

  From there, my participation escalated. Soon I could add the occasional quip. A week later I told a raunchy story about how I lost my virginity in high school. It brought the field down. My self-deprecating remarks about my poor picking skills were invariably popular, as were stories I told about self-important bureaucrats who thought they were saving the world from inside their cubicles. In the evenings, when tearjerkers were the norm, I talked of my friend Bumi, shamelessly whoring his plight so they could see that I understood.

  And they saw what I wanted them to see. They opened up to me in ways they never had before. Julio told me of how he, desperate to save his children from his own fate of poverty, had smuggled cheap merchandise, and later heroin, into Texas. He had convinced his wife to sell her body to tourists in the cheaper motels in Mexico City, and even in backpacker hostels. She agreed and made a steady stream of tortuous revenue until she was caught by Julio’s brother, who enjoyed the same services from other desperate women whenever his wife was pregnant.

  Julio could only show outrage toward his wife when his brother told him the news, as if he’d been unaware. He beat her publicly, divorced her and left the next year to spend his first of many summers in Ontario. His ex-wife raised their children in the slums of Mexico City. He sent them money every month via Western Union, minus thirty percent for administration, but he hadn’t spoken with woman or children for many years.

  Edwin told me that he did much the same labour in Mexico that he did in Canada, but in Mexico they used pesticides that were banned by the United Nations. “My first two years, as the new guy, I had to spray them,” he told me. “And six months after I stopped, my son was born a jelly baby. He was missing a whole bunch of important bones and he can’t walk or move around on his own. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to buy him the kind
of wheelchair he needs—the kind you control with your breath.”

  He came to Canada thinking that pesticides were part of his past and that he’d make enough here to support his son’s high needs. “I ended up the new guy again, using legal pesticides but without any protection from them—hope I don’t get cancer. Anyway the money here is better at least. But of course still not enough for Joaquin’s wheelchair.”

  Ricardo told me about several months he spent in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. He worked for next to nothing in sweatshop factories while the owners drove around in BMWs and SUVs. He was appalled that one of his managers had a brother in England who had either died from or survived cancer in the eighties—no one on the American side of the family had bothered to check. Ricardo had hoped for better from Canada, but the conditions and people were much the same to him. At least he didn’t have to run from border officials. “Still,” he said, “I hope my kids come to Canada and learn English—but not the goddamned culture.”

  All the men agreed on this point: small town Ontario would love them if they had money, but if they had money they wouldn’t be there.

  I had noticed the stares when we’d made our field trips to the bank. The men made quite a spectacle. Their efforts to look richer did them in. Their sharp shiny suits and layers of cologne emphasized the true source of the town’s resentment: their Mexicanness.

  Alone or by the dozen the locals stared at their brown skin, even though we were just a few hundred kilometres from Toronto’s supreme multiculturalism. The Mexicans in Cauldron were tolerated too, in the way that carnies and freaks are tolerated, because they provide a little entertainment to break the monotony. As long as they don’t become too numerous, boisterous, entrenched or in any way threaten the safety of the homogenous people. That safety was paid for with excitement and freedom.

  It was in these men’s stories that I found my thread. What strung together Mexico’s poverty; Canada’s abundance; inequality itself; the sketchy history and murky future of the union movement; my bleeding heart; and Lily’s vision were these men and their families. The men left the families behind in desperate need, a need just like Bumi’s, one I’ve never known or fully understood, but one that I could describe, with Lily’s help, in these men’s own words.

  My name is Jose Pablo. Bandits killed my father when I was six years old. My family was evicted from the farm where he worked. My mother had no choice but to sell her body to keep us all fed, but even then we went many days without a meal.

  For a few years I had to beg on the streets, until I got big enough to work on a farm like my father had. I became friends with the men there and they told me about a man in town who was recruiting labourers to go to Canada. By this time I had three children of my own and it was hard to support them all with clothes and food. I went to meet with this recruiter in town and he said I could make enough in Canada to take care of my family, maybe even send my children to school. So, like everybody else I knew, I signed up for the program to go to Canada to work for a better wage. I would like to say that I am grateful to the Canadian government and to Ferris Farms for giving me this opportunity.

  Unfortunately, life in Canada has been no easier for me than my last years in Mexico. The wage I was offered of eight dollars an hour sounded like a lot from Mexico, especially with a free room. But Canada is very expensive, and just to eat and keep clothes on my back can be very difficult. From this wage also come the deductions for Canadian social programs that I can never use as a foreign worker. And in fact, I was not given a room but a shack to share with eleven other men: There is no running water there, just buckets to fetch water from the tap on the outside of the house, and a leaky latrine. Sometimes I think people here value their livestock more highly than they value us. In fact we are not treated like men at all. We are given strict curfews and forbidden from fornication.

  But, we are men, even though it is hard for us to act so here. We have had no translators until this volunteer came, no one to help us fill out English forms to get our health cards so we can get proper care when we are injured or sick. Last year, a labourer on our farm fell and broke his leg. He had to borrow from home to get treatment because he didn’t have his papers. He has been stuck here ever since, unable to work or afford to go home. He wasn’t even able to work long enough to pay back the money for his ticket to Canada. In another month he will become illegal here, but he has no way home.

  And so we live in complete isolation. No one in town will talk to us except a few other Latinos, and the townspeople eye us suspiciously if we enter their shops.

  Our farmer claims to sympathize with us, but he will not change his ways until every other farmer does too, until they are forced to. I requested a transfer at the end of last season, because the conditions here are so bad, and this farmer does not care about work-place safety. But I’m a good planter and picker, and my farmer refused to approve my transfer to another farm.

  So, here I am back again working fifteen-hour days with no breaks, but being paid only for seven hours a day. This year I was also chosen to apply pesticides. I spent two weeks spraying. The farm in Mexico never needed pesticides so I have no training or knowledge of such things, yet I was made to apply this one. My farmer acted as though it should be an honour for me even though I was paid the same as always and given no safety equipment or training. I understand that this is common and that the Ontario Health & Safety Regulations and Employment Standards Act do not apply to migrant farm-workers.

  It is for these reasons and these hardships that I ask you to fund this proposal to assist us in gaining the right to unionize. It is because we are men and not livestock that I request the right to organize and thus act as men in our struggle to be treated as men.

  Yours in Solidarity,

  Jose Pablo Cruz Lopez

  I RETURNED ONCE AGAIN TO THE TORONTO PEOPLE-TRAP ON A Greyhound filled with dread. Not only might our proposal be rejected, I could be convicted of fraud and professionally humiliated. Jose Pablo Cruz Lopez, the star of my story, was a fictitious composite of many men’s true stories. His testimonial was truer than non-fiction, truer still than statistics, and so I hadn’t bothered to clarify that I made him up, filling in the details from other people’s experiences.

  Somehow, though, my visions of medium-security prison were far more pleasant than the thought of living with Sarah again. It wasn’t that I preferred the company of men, and I certainly didn’t prefer the conditions of life on the farm. The hard labour had had pleasant effects on my figure, but it was still hard. Bearing witness to those men’s lives made me feel privileged. It was not a good feeling because I felt unable to share that privilege. It angered and shamed me. Yet, I loved it on a gut level, loved having something to struggle for.

  Maybe that’s why Sarah loved picking fights with me, to create struggle and drama in a relative life of ease. Some make origami, some argue with their partners. But I wasn’t meant to be some tool for Sarah to blow steam at between gigs.

  As the bus reached the northern outskirts of Toronto we drove through a business district and I saw the suited drones in their five-o’clock shuffles to the subway crush. I too had my diversions: sports teams, the newsletter, Bumi. I used Bumi just as Sarah had used me, as something to fix between shifts.

  I alighted from the bus knowing I would see her, that she would run to me and hug me. She would claim to have come around to see it my way. She would want all the details of my four months in Cauldron, during which time I barely kept in touch with her.

  I didn’t send any letters, just short, to the point, weekly emails when we could get to the library during off-work hours. I called her a few times but never had much to say, could never get any words out. Mostly I just listened to her talk.

  She told me about her business, how she had a website up and had met with several bankers, and was applying for a loan from one. How she was planning
a trip to Mexico to see some manufacturing facilities that were supposed to be ethical. She wanted me to come along and translate.

  I told her I missed her.

  I thought about it for a good chunk of the four-hour bus ride and I still couldn’t think past that first embrace. Maybe if I could have imagined a little further, and heard what I was going to say, I would have chickened out, reasoned my doubts away. Instead, when she ran to me, threw her thin arms around me and whispered how much she had missed me, and loved me, I answered, “We need to talk.”

  SARAH ALWAYS CAME AROUND TO MY WAY OF THINKING AFTER A disagreement, even though she was the smart one. It was the same way with the break-up. At first she resisted, cried, yelled, stormed out and came back to yell some more.

  Then she slept on it, visited a friend, came home and agreed that a break-up was the right thing, that our relationship really had run its course, that she was tired of trying to save it if my heart wasn’t in it anymore, and that frankly I was becoming a dead weight. She didn’t make the experience easy for me, and I didn’t make it easy for her. She had forgiven me for the last time.

  The upside of our mutual unemployment was that it made financial decisions easy. We kept what was our own and sold what was co-owned, including the house. Our final months together were marginally worse than the preceding year. We slept in separate rooms and took less and less interest in each other, but the air in our once-happy little home was stressed and clung to us tightly. It tried to force us back together against our will.

  I refused to seek long-term employment in case the grant came through and I could work with Lily, who as a boss was Sherry’s dreamy opposite. Sherry’s world was complete accountability, full tracking of all activity and outcomes. “It’s a pain,” she’d say, “but without accountability you are out of business.” Lily was more of a loose cannon. She cared less about accountability to higher powers than she did about what was moral. My crush on Lily had transformed into an overwhelming desire to work for whatever she felt was moral.