IMMIGRATION
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He took up his conversation with the cellular almost as soon as we were in the car.
"I talked to Santana. He says there's nothing he can do. Even if the clown you took up with hasn't been deported, he's being held under special circumstances that are outside the law...
"Don't yell at me, it's not my fault...
"Santana's not a lawyer, he just knows things. Get legal help somewhere...
"I don't know what you're going to do in the meantime... What country is he from?"
"Ask at their embassy. Do they have a section of town like China Town or Little Italy or something similar. In his case it might be called clown city?"
"OK, OK, I am trying to help. I won't be sarcastic.
"I do send you money."
"It's all I have. Can't you get a job? ...
"I'll see what I can do but it's up to you to provide for Angela ...
"Yeh, yeh. I'll do what I can"
He pushed a button to hang up the phone. "God, she's a bitch. You married? Oh, that's right, divorced. You seeing anyone? They got kids?"
I had no intention of discussing my personal life with him. That is, had I a personal life it wouldn't be revealed to him.
The yellow blinking turn signals on the top of the trucks ahead and the red brake lights indicated something was happening on the road before us. As we inched along with the other vehicles surrounding us it soon became apparent that lanes were merging. When we got to the orange cones Eddie couldn't help giving me one of his manifestos, "That's a great job, public works. One hour to drive out to the job site, two hours to lay out the cones, an hour of work mixed in with bullshitting, lunch, a little nap, and it's time to pick up the cones again."
"I think it's a little more than that but working for the state is at least steady."
"There a lot of jobs in Canada?" Eddie asked.
I thought back to my own experience. I had no answer other than a cliche, "If you have a skill. That's what employers want."
"Employers want what they don't have to pay for. They want people who will work for nothing. If they cared so much about training and education why do they keep moving the jobs south of the border. Do you think the Mexicans and the Indonesians are smarter than us? Better educated? What, they understand English better?" This pleased him immensely and he laughed at his joke. The little idiosyncratic laugh of his was beginning to get under my skin and fester.
Still, I had to admit, he knew more than I did at his age. It had taken me quite some time to learn the great truth in the American workplace, that everything considered, everything proposed, everything planned and produced, leads in the direction of money. And money floats upward into a funnel of fewer and fewer hands. The plutocracies of El Salvador and Guatemala don't seem so strange to us anymore. Small wonder those in power in the U.S. identify with right wing fascist dictatorships where business interests and state interests coincide.
"What's this? Not again."
Cars were piling up before us and we could see a uniformed person waving some through and questioning the drivers of others. I immediately thought they were looking for us. APB for old man and kid wanted on dope charges. Old man is in the habit of traveling with known and unknown fugitives. As the uniform became more distinguishable it became apparent we were passing through a fruit and produce inspection center. Nothing to fear, thought I. No outlaw vegetables on the run to Canada here. Then I saw the other officer and the familiar green sedan of the Border Patrol. They were way north and they weren't vacationing so it was hard not to conclude they were finding people to detain. I looked over at Eddie. He was going to get a double take. I wondered how he handled coming back from San Diego when they give every vehicle a real going over. It had never before occurred to me what it must be like going through the checkpoint for an American of Mexican descent. I'm as white as a mime but I start preparing answers several miles before the checkpoint. Babe Ruth played for the Yankees, Trigger was the name of Roy Roger's horse, I have no idea how big a centimeter is. I'm not an illegal from down south, I don't look like an illegal from down south even after a week at the beach, yet I can feel the steering wheel go hot and slippery beneath my grip as the uniforms peer into the passenger compartment.
That's the point. It's not to keep the illegal immigrants in fear. After all, wouldn't someone clue them in to the standing checkpoints? It's to keep us intimidated by the presence of uniforms so we learn how to have proper humility.
We were waved through.
I was hungry and we pulled off the freeway to find a place for pizza. I ordered the pizza and to my surprise Eddie had picked up a pitcher of beer.
"You going to a relative's funeral?"
"No, someone I use to know."
"When you were in Canada?"
"Yeh, when I was in Canada." The beer wasn't going to bust down the door to my natural reticence and drag out loquaciousness. I knew the alcohol was on patrol so I let mellifluous, the honey tongue, hide in the basement.
"You must be pretty good at horticulture," I said.
"Learned it from my father. Kind of. He was the worse gardener who ever picked up a pair of shears." Eddie was high flying, flapping his hands in the air. "He could take the lushest, greenest, thickest set of grass, water it every day and turn it brown. I personally saw him chop down a customer's tree into the next door neighbor's swimming pool." We were both having a good time at his father's expense. "I kid you not. You'll like this: He once thought he'd try a little topiary for one of his clients. That's where they make animals and things like that out of bushes. So he decides that he was going to make the pattern of a snail out of a shrub in the front of his client's house. He planned it out so that he had a neck rising above the round swirly shell. It looked quite good in the picture." Eddie was now having a hard time containing himself and I was enjoying the story right along with him. "By the time my father was done trimming and staking and wiring he had managed to put in this guy's front yard, in the middle of the block for all to see, a gigantic erect cock complete with testicles."
He was howling almost in tears as he was making me visualize the obscene monstrosity rising out of the center of the street.
Our pizza number was called and we settled down into getting our share.
"My first job was working in a pizza place," he said between bites, cheese stringing out of his mouth. "I was 12 or 13 and it was close to home so I could walk to the place. It was owned by this old couple. He was a little man, thin and always hunched over. The only time he straightened was when he threw the dough up in the air. It was cool to watch. His wife was big and round and had sort of a moustache thing going around the corners of her mouth. They had a daughter who was real homely looking. Supposedly she was due to be married to a guy from Italy. It was an arranged thing. He'd come over and work in the place and marry the daughter. So the guy gets off the plane, grabs his bag, manages to get up to the pizza place, takes one look at her and turns around and goes all the way back to Italy. Her personality wasn't any better than the way she looked. I'd worked there most of the summer and I happen to see her and walked up to say hi and she didn't even know who the fuck I was. Really hurt my feelings. Anyway, the husband and wife were always fighting. They'd be yelling at each other and right in the middle of the argument a customer would come in. They don't stop the argument, the wife just turns to the customer in between yelling at her husband and says, "What you want?" and takes the order. "What you want?" and goes back to screaming at her husband. So one time I'm in the back and I'm hearing them screaming half in Italian, half in English. I come around the corner with an armload of dishes just in time to see him toss up a swirling frisbee of dough and then watch her lean forward into its path and it come down right across her head and face. But she hardly pauses. She scoops out two eye holes and turns to the customer who had just come in, 'What you want?' Looks like a giant Casper or KKK grand wizard, 'What you want?'" He pauses to finish his slice and take another.
"But you know they were always real nice to me. If I came in with my friends even after I'd quit, they'd buy us the pizza. And both of them would run out and ask me how I was. Something happened to her and they closed up their little place."
We walked out onto the street and into a parking ticket. "Shit, can't even stop the damn car without paying." That was what the ticket wanted you to know, you had to ante up to play the game. Vagrancy laws had been struck down by the courts so they throw up the parking meters and the laws against sleeping in your car as gatekeepers against the unworthy. Maybe you or your antecendents snuck past the INS but it wasn't over at the border. Each time you stop to catch your breath there's an agent or a parking meter checking your papers.