by Peter Plate
“Point taken.”
“And my aim is to be consistent.”
“What kind of shit is that?”
“I just do my job as a professional.”
Let him figure it out. The Pinkerton ruffled my feathers and made me feel truculent. I didn’t care if my clients were Mayan, or if they spoke Urdu. The Mission had everybody. There were Salvadoreños residing on San Carlos Street, Croats on Lexington and third generation Irish on Lapidge Street. And while I hadn’t been feeling like Joan of Arc lately, or even Jean Seberg, I was glad to get them food stamps.
four
The vast and bumpy expanse of the waiting room’s floor had been polished and buffed with wax over the weekend. The receptionist’s area had been repainted a lively hue of baby blue. Rows of red and yellow plastic chairs filled the whitewashed windowless space and the clients, some cheery, some not, had taken every seat.
This post-surplus arena was the center of my universe. If it weren’t for the herd of welfare recipients who populated it, sitting in there to get some applications processed with the whole place smelling like baby shit half the time, my college education would have been in vain and I’d have never gotten a job.
“Charlene! C’mere!”
Eldon Paskins was approaching me from twelve o’clock high. He was the DSS janitor, a fiftysomething white man, compact, powerfully built, the graduate of a vocational training program sponsored by the San Francisco County Sheriff’s Department.
“What do you need?”
“You got a smoke I can bum from you?”
“Can you handle a Marlboro?”
“Sure thing. I love them.”
I gave him two Marlboros, one for now and another for later. Without knowing the details, I saw the skidmarks of a devastating weekend on the custodial engineer’s face. He’d been recently and uneasily divorced from his wife of twenty years. And I knew that he’d been arrested last week for public intoxication, having been found naked on Mission Street in front of the Albert Hotel. Which was a shame because two months ago Eldon had told me a secret.
“I got back with my old lady. Her brother called me up and said she wanted to meet with me. We went out the next night, going over to the Deaf Club, because you know she can’t hear, yeah? That’s where we made up. And then we got some tamales from a lady selling them at the BART station. After that, we went back to my room and like, fucked our brains out.”
Eldon took the smokes and made tracks toward the janitor’s closet. I heard someone coming and I recognized the footfall. I peeked over my shoulder and sure enough, there was Lavoris. She was wearing a black double-breasted pants suit and she was carrying a sheaf of caseloads, which she would try in her customary fashion to pawn off on me, pleading fatigue, carpal tunnel pains, menstrual cramps.
After a weekend of devoting herself to strictly cosmetic needs, Lavoris was repaired and fortified. She was a high-yellow woman of forty-nine, older than me and better preserved. I was fourteen years younger than her and I didn’t know how she could wear high heels day after day. My own feet were flatter than spatulas.
“Wait up, Charlene.”
She caught up with me just as I was about to enter the women’s bathroom, taking me in with her violet eyes and flaring her nostrils; she was always complaining about sinusitis.
“I’ve got to check this with you, Hassler.”
She accented the first syllable of my surname, making it hiss on her tongue. I glanced at her mouth and saw nothing affectionate there, just business.
“What is it, Lavoris?”
“We have a situation. You mind? It’ll only take a minute.”
She didn’t hand me her paperwork or ask me to take it. I paused, wary, saying, “So, hit me.”
“Are you ready to hear this?”
“Depends on what it is.”
“Try and keep an open mind.”
“Okay.”
“You sure?”
“Sure, I’m sure.”
“I’m having a problem with your performance. The food stamps, that bit. Are you following the guidelines? We don’t want to see no illegal distribution around here.”
She waited for me to respond, wanted me to do something. A challenge like this, I didn’t need. Since there wasn’t any value in telling her my angle, I gave her a polite brush-off.
“Lav, what I do is legit. Let me get blunt with you. You got a bug up your snatch about it? File a complaint.”
“That’s all you can say?”
“What do you want? A confession for something I haven’t done? How many fucking years have I been here? Nobody’s ever given me any shit about this until now.”
“You’re more obtuse than I thought. Is it deliberate or congenital?”
“Don’t try to provoke me. It’s futile.”
“I’m not trying to do that.”
“You’re not? Then what is this? An impromptu quiz show?”
“I just want to get to the bottom of this. I want to know what you’re doing.”
“You want to know something? I’ve got it. I think you’re trying to set me up. Can you tell me why?”
“Clean the wax from your ears. If you’re breaking the law, it gets reflected on all of us.”
“Shit, you know this isn’t the best time to discuss slander.”
“Then when is? Should we make an appointment?”
“Later, okay? I’ve got some clients waiting for me.”
“What if I said this can’t wait. That if you don’t do something, it’s going to boomerang in your face.”
“Is this a warning?”
Lavoris gave me a smile that was insincere, varnished, and ruthless. “No, Charlene,” she said, walking away. “It’s not a threat. It’s a consultation.”
Hard as it was to remember, not so long ago, Lavoris and I had been allies. Seeing that the welfare recipient was going the route of the carrier pigeon; that vast herds of them would be slaughtered. That mounds of butchered dole children would be photographed and archived in the pages of regional history books: as childless women, I cannot tell you how much it pissed us off.
I was still feeling antsy about Lavoris and what she’d said when someone tapped me on the elbow, making me jump like a jack-in-the-box.
“There you are. When you get through with your interviews, some time this week come upstairs and see me. I want to have a word with you.”
It was Gerald Petard, the Commissioner of Social Services in San Francisco.
Before I hazarded a reply, a counterpoint to his request, he’d pushed through the mob in the corridor. Petard had gone so quickly, I didn’t even see what he looked like, other than getting a glimpse of his blue serge suit and his silky red hair. His salary: a tantalizing combination of bonuses, wages and perks, superior to anything I could imagine for myself. His job: seventy hours a week in a supervisory role with vile responsibilities that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies.
What did he want from me? I wasn’t in any hurry to find out. Gerald’s office was a glass-walled room decorated with wicker furniture from a close-out sale at the Emporium. His roost overlooked the crosstown freeway, and I’m sure he’d seen lots of smash-ups from there. The traffic on the highway was just like him: cars racing without any logic with me pathetically tagging after his shadow.
I shouted, “Petard!”
He didn’t hear me. In the morning, the noise of the waiting room was overwhelming.
five
My name was coming over the intercom in the corridor, guttural and obscene. It was a name that sounded like it didn’t belong to me, as if it referred to other people and other places, things I knew little about. I went over to the nearest wall telephone, took the receiver and depressed the volume button. “This is Charlene on line three. Who am I speaking to?”
“Is that you, Mrs. Hassler?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“This is Frances Dominguez.”
“Yeah?”
“You said you were coming
by sometime today?”
I had completely forgotten about this appointment, not a wise move on my part. Tough as my schedule was, I didn’t have an excuse for neglecting a client. But then it dawned on me that Mrs. Dominguez was toying with me.
“No, I said I’d be over on Tuesday.” I glanced at the clock. “I’ll be over to your place tomorrow afternoon.”
Being tardy was just something that happened once in a while whether you liked it or not. I had ninety-seven clients on my caseload—what could you expect? But the Dominguez woman was trying to pull a number on me.
I hung up the phone and while I was deciding my next move, Simmons came over to where I was standing. I could feel his inquisitive gaze wandering over my legs, my boobs, and the lack of makeup on my face. He would’ve liked a fling with me; he was enamored with short women. I’d discovered a long time ago that it was impossible to resist the contagious nature of his alienation.
“You look constipated, Charlene.”
“Ah, I got a home visit to make tomorrow. Not my favorite cup of tea.”
“New case?”
“Yup. But you know her, too.”
“Who’s that?”
“Frances Dominguez.”
“That bird?” Simmons said. “You’ll have fun with her. She by herself?”
“Beats me.”
“Where does Frances live these days?”
“By the market on Twenty-third Street. She’s on Shotwell.”
“That so? She used to camp out on Treat Street until she got evicted.”
A social worker like Simmons wasn’t just a public servant; he was also something that I’d seen in myself, the clients, in my two ex-husbands and in all the other people dwelling in the city.
What I saw was the mark of a snitch on Simmons. In him, there was the innate aptitude for ratting on other men and women. If he had to, he’d turn someone out to save the only things that mattered: his career, the money it brought him and his own precious ass. I watched a tic in his left eye spin out of control when he asked me, “You going on a vacation soon, Charlene?”
“In March. I’m going down to Los Angeles. How about you?”
“Not this year. Got to pay off my credit card.”
A snitch was being born every minute. I felt the urge inside myself, something alive in my uterus coiling around my guts, slithering across my liver and entrails, making its way upwards to the lungs, making me feel: God, I wanted to hurt someone.
I had seen that look in my mother’s slate-gray eyes whenever she leaned over the crib’s railing to find that I’d shat on myself. Later, I began to see it in my friends. The boyfriends that turned into backstabbing creeps, and the girlfriends who sidewinded away like snakes when things got rough.
“How’s your husband these days?”
“Frank? He’s okay. Doing his welding classes at the community college.”
“You guys getting on good?”
I thought of Frank in the morning and said, “Yeah, we’re doing well.”
Simmons rued. “If I could’ve gotten Connie to say that, just once.”
Four years ago, his wife left him after he got caught with a handgun that didn’t have any serial numbers on it. They’d been filed off, God knows why. A disreputable Taurus revolver from Brazil. He’d been driving on Grant Street in Chinatown when a cop pulled him over for a faulty taillight and found the piece under the front seat.
Federal agents had pulled him in for an interrogation, but after working at the DSS, Simmons could lay down a barrage of doubletalk that was flawless. He stonewalled their questions and denied everything. I found him a hot-shot Jewish lawyer and he beat the charge, which was possession of an unlicensed and illegal weapon. He got away with only a year of unsupervised probation. He then contested the divorce proceedings. Simmons spent a ton of money and lost; he hadn’t been with a woman since then.
“Hey, I got to get moving.”
“See you later, Simmons.”
The long sweep of cubicles, my office among them, extended out from one side of the waiting room to the other. Seeing their particle board walls made me wonder what the Germans felt when they saw the Berlin Wall during the Cold War, or what the U.S. Marines experienced when they patrolled the perimeter fences at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
There was a map pinned to a corkboard on the wall next to the desk in my office. It was a map of the Mission district, bordered to the west by Dolores Park and to the east by the slopes of Potrero Hill. On the map, held there by a thumbtack, was the latest report from the Department of Health, which said everyone in the neighborhood was suffering from Toxic Stress Syndrome.
six
A job motivation seminar was about to get going and I was five minutes late. Navigating myself into the auditorium, I fell into the closest seat with a thud and looked around, but I didn’t see any of my clients. Was I failing to do my homework?
Irked, I sank back in the chair, noting how comfortable it was. When I saw Petard wasn’t in the room, I breathed a sigh of undisguised relief. Thank Christ, the prick hadn’t shown up.
Eldon was there: everywhere I went, he was around. I knew he was having a problem with me. I didn’t get the particulars, but I could feel the vibe because the devil himself knew the janitor did not admire caseworkers.
The speaker was a black man in a nifty sharkskin suit who kept moving his hands while he talked. His eyes fairly smoldered with caffeine fueled intensity as he tried to woo a litter of AFDC mothers, their unenthused kids and a troop of lone, hardened men on GA scattered across the almost empty hall.
“Work is a horrible word. I know it is, and you know it, too. But general assistance welfare? That’s a red flag word. It’s a bad word. Because when you’re looking for work, you’ve got to be creative. You need a good color word that says you’re working, you’re getting somewhere, going places, doing the job you like. And when that happens, work isn’t such a horrible word.”
He clasped his hands together, shaking them slightly for extra effect and then he opened his mouth, getting ready to show us his tongue.
“At first you might have to crawl to prove yourself before you get your perfect job, or any job at all. Everybody hates the word work. But if you got an aim to do something you like, you can tolerate it.
“The only person who can stop you from getting the kind of job you want is the person you see in the mirror. That person may also be your best friend and ally, someone you can count on. It all depends on your attitude. I like the reflection I see in the mirror. Because nobody is gonna hire you if you don’t like yourself. And you’ve got to act like the word work sounds good. The benefits of having a job outweigh the consequences of not having one. Besides, to be honest, I like the money. Who doesn’t? Am I right? Let’s see the hands of the people who are looking to get some money.”
I was the first to raise my hand, thrusting my arm into the air, approximating the nazi salute. The speaker saw me and grinned.
“You,” he said. “You seem like a wholesome, earnest female. What are you on. GA? SSI? Have you finally reached the place where you’re telling yourself, it’s time for a transition?”
“I’m Charlene Hassler. I’m a social worker.”
The silence which ensued would have humiliated a lesser woman. But that, I am not. The speaker, as if he hadn’t heard me, continued his sermon.
“Money makes the word work sound a little better. And when you look at it like sex, good sex, everything is all right. One of the ways I can be an inspirational speaker like I am in front of a crowd is to look at everyone as if they were naked. When I first started the hunt for some work, I hated the word interview. It takes some marketing, some creativity, but nothing’s impossible. But if you’re going to hate something, you aren’t going to do anything. You’re going to stay in bed. So, tell me, what are the benefits of work?”
“Knowledge,” Eldon said.
I piped up. “Money.”
“A woman always knows what’s best,” the sp
eaker smiled.
Eldon turned around in his seat and gave me the evil eye, hating me for chumping him in front of the crowd.
“We have to create a positive image of the word work, putting it on the same level as sex. Like when I was a heroin addict.” The speaker didn’t even pause to let that fact sink into the ears of his listeners, before pushing on.
“I went through one job after another, because I looked at that word in a bad light. But nowadays, I’ve friends on the job, and the salary. I would go to McDonald’s to look for work if I had to, because there’s room to grow. Opportunity is unlimited. Who doesn’t want to own their own McDonald’s franchise? You make a percentage, the corporation makes a percentage. You can become a millionaire, starting out by flipping burgers. It’s all the way you look at things. You have to be a good detective. Why don’t people want to work at McDonald’s? I look at McDonald’s as a golden opportunity, and let me tell you, the acquisition of work is better than sex. You might as well get used to doing it, because once you’re in the world of employment, you’re gonna be there until the day you die. Okay, who wants to work?”
Nobody raised their hands, but that didn’t faze our speaker, not him.
“Are work and sex the same? They can be. For some of us, they should be on the same shelf in our lives. Don’t tell your prospective interviewer you are on GA, just tell them you’ve been self-employed. Because some words have a negative connotation.”
A lady in the front row asked, unsettled, nickering, “You mean we got to lie?”
“You do what you gotta do,” the speaker told her.
After the lecture was over, I fled the auditorium to smoke a cigarette in the courtyard under the quote by Margaret Mead. A fag would taste heavenly and our dead Margaret would give me something to think about.
Before I could find my lighter, a fracas erupted near the front gate. Rocky and a score of restless Pinkertons were accosting a young man as he was about to leave the complex. It was one of those things. The security chief was pontificating, “You fuckin’ mojado, what did you think you were doing in there, cutting in line in front of everyone?” And the other Pinkertons were pinning the culprit’s arms, holding him while Rocky got in several kicks.
