I woke up feeling tired and greasy. It was early and a few street lights were still lit, the east growing pink with dawn. I washed myself from a garden hose and returned to the church to break into what looked like a kitchen. Paper cups, plastic spoons, a coffee pot littered on a table. I found a box of Nabisco crackers which I ate until I was full.
At work I spent the morning at the buffer, but was then told to help Iggy, an old Mexican, who was responsible for choosing tires that could be recapped without the risk of exploding at high speeds. Every morning a truck would deliver used tires, and after I unloaded them Iggy would step among the tires to inspect them for punctures and rips on the side walls.
With a yellow chalk he marked circles and Xs to indicate damage and called out “junk.” For those tires that could be recapped, he said “goody” and I placed them on my hand truck. When I had a stack of eight I kicked the truck at an angle and balanced them to another work area where Iggy again inspected the tires, scratching Xs and calling out “junk.”
Iggy worked only until three in the afternoon, at which time he went to the locker room to wash and shave and to dress in a two-piece suit. When he came out he glowed with a bracelet, watch, rings, and a shiny fountain pen in his breast pocket. His shoes sounded against the asphalt. He was the image of a banker stepping into sunlight with millions on his mind. He said a few low words to workers with whom he was friendly and none to people like me.
I was seventeen, stupid because I couldn’t figure out the difference between an F 78 14 and 750 14 at sight. Iggy shook his head when I brought him the wrong tires, especially since I had expressed interest in being his understudy. “Mexican, how can you be so stupid?” he would yell at me, slapping a tire from my hands. But within weeks I learned a lot about tires, from sizes and makes to how they are molded in iron forms to how Valley stole from other companies. Now and then we received a truckload of tires, most of them new or nearly new, and they were taken to our warehouse in the back where the serial numbers were ground off with a sander. On those days the foreman handed out Cokes and joked with us as we worked to get the numbers off.
Most of the workers were Mexican or black, though a few redneck whites worked there. The base pay was a dollar sixty-five, but the average was three dollars. Of the black workers, I knew Sugar Daddy the best. His body carried two hundred and fifty pounds, armfuls of scars, and a long knife that made me jump when he brought it out from his boot without warning. At one time he had been a singer, and had cut a record in 1967 called Love’s Chance, which broke into the R and B charts. But nothing came of it. No big contract, no club dates, no tours. He made very little from the sales, only enough for an operation to pull a steering wheel from his gut when, drunk and mad at a lady friend, he slammed his Mustang into a row of parked cars.
“Touch it,” he smiled at me one afternoon as he raised his shirt, his black belly kinked with hair. Scared, I traced the scar that ran from his chest to the left of his belly button, and I was repelled but hid my disgust.
Among the Mexicans I had few friends because I was different, a pocho who spoke bad Spanish. At lunch they sat in tires and laughed over burritos, looking up at me to laugh even harder. I also sat in tires while nursing a Coke and felt dirty and sticky because I was still living on the street and had not had a real bath in over a week. Nevertheless, when the border patrol came to round up the nationals, I ran with them as they scrambled for the fence or hid among the tires behind the warehouse. The foreman, who thought I was an undocumented worker, yelled at me to run, to get away. I did just that. At the time it seemed fun because there was no risk, only a goodhearted feeling of hide-and-seek, and besides it meant an hour away from work on company time. When the police left we came back and some of the nationals made up stories of how they were almost caught—how they out-raced the police. Some of the stories were so convoluted and unconvincing that everyone laughed mentiras, especially when one described how he overpowered a policeman, took his gun away, and sold the patrol car. We laughed and he laughed, happy to be there to make up a story.
If work was difficult, so were the nights. I still had not gathered enough money to rent a room, so I spent the nights sleeping in parked cars or in the balcony of a church. After a week I found a newspaper ad for room for rent, phoned, and was given directions. Finished with work, I walked the five miles down Mission Road looking back into the traffic with my thumb out. No rides. After eight hours of handling tires I was frightening, I suppose, to drivers since they seldom looked at me; if they did, it was a quick glance. For the next six weeks I would try to hitchhike, but the only person to stop was a Mexican woman who gave me two dollars to take the bus. I told her it was too much and that no bus ran from Mission Road to where I lived, but she insisted that I keep the money and trotted back to her idling car. It must have hurt her to see me day after day walking in the heat and looking very much the dirty Mexican to the many minds that didn’t know what it meant to work at hard labor. That woman knew. Her eyes met mine as she opened the car door, and there was a tenderness that was surprisingly true—one for which you wait for years but when it comes it doesn’t help. Nothing changes. You continue on in rags, with the sun still above you.
I rented a room from a middle-aged couple whose lives were a mess. She was a school teacher and he was a fireman. A perfect set up, I thought. But during my stay there they would argue with one another for hours in their bedroom.
When I rang at the front door both Mr. and Mrs. Van Deusen answered and didn’t bother to disguise their shock at how awful I looked. But they let me in all the same. Mrs. Van Deusen showed me around the house, from the kitchen and bathroom to the living room with its grand piano. On her fingers she counted out the house rules as she walked me to my room. It was a girl’s room with lace curtains, scenic wallpaper of a Victorian couple enjoying a stroll, canopied bed, and stuffed animals in a corner. Leaving, she turned and asked if she could do laundry for me and, feeling shy and hurt, I told her no; perhaps the next day. She left and I undressed to take a bath, exhausted as I sat on the edge of the bed probing my aches and my bruised places. With a towel around my waist I hurried down the hallway to the bathroom where Mrs. Van Deusen had set out an additional towel with a tube of shampoo. I ran the water in the tub and sat on the toilet, lid down, watching the steam curl toward the ceiling. When I lowered myself into the tub I felt my body sting. I soaped a wash cloth and scrubbed my arms until they lightened, even glowed pink, but still I looked unwashed around my neck and face no matter how hard I rubbed. Back in the room I sat in bed reading a magazine, happy and thinking of no better luxury than a girl’s sheets, especially after nearly two weeks of sleeping on cardboard at the church.
I was too tired to sleep, so I sat at the window watching the neighbors move about in pajamas, and, curious about the room, looked through the bureau drawers to search out personal things—snapshots, a messy diary, and a high school yearbook. I looked up the Van Deusen’s daughter, Barbara, and studied her face as if I recognized her from my own school—a face that said “promise,” “college,” “nice clothes in the closet.” She was a skater and a member of the German Club; her greatest ambition was to sing at the Hollywood Bowl.
After awhile I got into bed and as I drifted toward sleep I thought about her. In my mind I played a love scene again and again and altered it slightly each time. She comes home from college and at first is indifferent to my presence in her home, but finally I overwhelm her with deep pity when I come home hurt from work, with blood on my shirt. Then there was another version: Home from college she is immediately taken with me, in spite of my work-darkened face, and invites me into the family car for a milkshake across town. Later, back at the house, we sit in the living room talking about school until we’re so close I’m holding her hand. The truth of the matter was that Barbara did come home for a week, but was bitter toward her parents for taking in boarders (two others besides me). During that time she spoke to me only twice: Once, while searching the r
efrigerator, she asked if we had any mustard; the other time she asked if I had seen her car keys.
But it was a place to stay. Work had become more and more difficult. I not only worked with Iggy, but also with the assistant foreman who was in charge of unloading trucks. After they backed in I hopped on top to pass the tires down by bouncing them on the tailgate to give them an extra spring so they would be less difficult to handle on the other end. Each truck was weighed down with more than two hundred tires, each averaging twenty pounds, so that by the time the truck was emptied and swept clean I glistened with sweat and my T-shirt stuck to my body. I blew snot threaded with tire dust onto the asphalt, indifferent to the customers who watched from the waiting room.
The days were dull. I did what there was to do from morning until the bell sounded at five; I tugged, pulled, and cussed at tires until I was listless and my mind drifted and caught on small things, from cold sodas to shoes to stupid talk about what we would do with a million dollars. I remember unloading a truck with Hamp, a black man.
“What’s better than a sharp lady?” he asked me as I stood sweaty on a pile of junked tires. “Water. With ice,” I said.
He laughed with his mouth open wide. With his fingers he pinched the sweat from his chin and flicked at me. “You be too young, boy. A woman can make you a god.”
As a kid I had chopped cotton and picked grapes, so I knew work. I knew the fatigue and the boredom and the feeling that there was a good possibility you might have to do such work for years, if not for a lifetime. In fact, as a kid I imagined a dark fate: To marry Mexican poor, work Mexican hours, and in the end die a Mexican death, broke and in despair.
But this job at Valley Tire Company confirmed that there was something worse than field work, and I was doing it. We were all doing it, from foreman to the newcomers like me, and what I felt heaving tires for eight hours a day was felt by everyone—black, Mexican, redneck. We all despised those hours but didn’t know what else to do. The workers were unskilled, some undocumented and fearful of deportation, and all struck with an uncertainty at what to do with their lives. Although everyone bitched about work, no one left. Some had worked there for as long as twelve years; some had sons working there. Few quit; no one was ever fired. It amazed me that no one gave up when the border patrol jumped from their vans, baton in hand, because I couldn’t imagine any work that could be worse—or any life. What was out there, in the world, that made men run for the fence in fear?
Iggy was the only worker who seemed sure of himself. After five hours of “junking,” he brushed himself off, cleaned up in the washroom, and came out gleaming with an elegance that humbled the rest of us. Few would look him straight in the eye or talk to him in our usual stupid way because he was so much better. He carried himself as a man should—with that old world “dignity”—while the rest of us muffed our jobs and talked dully about dull things as we worked. From where he worked in his open shed he would now and then watch us with his hands on his hips. He would shake his head and click his tongue in disgust.
The rest of us lived dismally. I often wondered what the others’ homes were like; I couldn’t imagine that they were much better than our work place. No one indicated that his outside life was interesting or intriguing. We all looked defeated and contemptible in our filth at the day’s end. I imagined the average welcome at home: Rafael, a Mexican national who had worked at Valley for five years, returned to a beaten house of kids who were dressed in mismatched clothes and playing kick-the-can. As for Sugar Daddy, he returned home to a stuffy room where he would read and reread old magazines. He ate potato chips, drank beer, and watched TV. There was no grace in dipping socks into a wash basin where later he would wash his cup and plate.
There was no grace at work. It was all ridicule. The assistant foreman drank Cokes in front of the newcomers as they laced tires in the afternoon sun. Knowing that I had a long walk home, Rudy, the college student, passed me waving and yelling “Hello,” as I started down Mission Road on the way home to eat out of cans. Even our plump secretary got into the act by wearing short skirts and flaunting her milky legs. If there was love, it was ugly. I’m thinking of Tully and an older man whose name I can no longer recall fondling one another in the washroom. I had come in cradling a smashed finger to find them pressed together in the shower, their pants undone and partly pulled down. When they saw me they smiled their pink mouths but didn’t bother to push away.
How we arrived at such a place is a mystery to me. Why anyone would stay for years is even a deeper concern. You showed up, but from where? What broken life? What ugly past? The foreman showed you the Coke machine, the washroom, and the yard where you’d work. When you picked up a tire, you were amazed at the black it could give off.
Being Stupid
What evilness had risen from my hand? Once, when I and a neighbor friend, Rinehart, a true Okie and lover of gravy on cantaloupe, were on the front porch, a very drunk man in a brown overcoat staggered down our street in the middle of the afternoon. He reeled like those drunks in the afternoon movies—side to side, forward and then backward, all the while slurring words at himself and things that got in his way.
Rinehart and I watched him pass, thinking it was funny that he should have to lean against a car and hold on. Then the brilliant idea: Why not sell him a beer bottle filled with water? We beamed at each other and rushed off to find a bottle before the drunk escaped our scheme. Pulling one from the garbage, we filled it with water from the garden hose and then ran after the drunk who had not wandered too far. Rinehart was standing behind me, somewhat scared, when I yelled: “Mister, you wanna buy a beer? Look at this.” I held up the bottle like a chalice and pointed at it. He turned slowly to show us his watery eyes. His stare drifted, and out came: “Whaaaat?” It was an ugly sound that scared both of us. Still, when the drunk took a dollar from his pocket, I snatched it from him and then set the bottle at his feet. He tried to lunge at me, but I sidestepped him and he fell to the ground, tipping over the bottle. He looked at the bottle, then back at me, and whined from some terrible cavity of the heart: “You’ll get yours, sonny.” The words scared me. I was Catholic. I knew right from wrong and what he meant.
The drunk rose to his feet with difficulty and then bent down to pick up the beer bottle and raise it to his mouth. As he continued down the street, we watched in silence as he crossed the street into the next block. I turned to Rinehart and tried to be funny by crossing my eyes but his face had gone slack from bad feelings. I suggested that we cash the dollar, but he didn’t want anything to do with it. He left me and went inside. What could I do? What was done was done. With the dollar I bought a Coke, potato chips, and a lemon pie, and rode my bike up and down the block, now and then staring at Rinehart’s house and feeling bad.
I marched through life in evilness, and perhaps a low point that will surely send me tumbling into hell was when Scott, my best friend and still another lover of cantaloupe and gravy, begged me to break into his sister’s house with him. She was on vacation in Yosemite, so it was a perfect time to undo a window screen, slither through, and come out smiling with the stereo, the color TV, the alarm clock, the antique silver, or whatever our hearts desired.
“Come on, Gar, no way are we gonna get caught,” he beat over my head all night. “We could put the stereo in the closet, and sell the rest of the stuff. Fifty-fifty.”
At first I was surprised at Scott. My mouth hung open, and when I closed it it fell open again. His own sister’s house? His recently married sister? I would never have thought of stealing from family or, for that matter, stealing period. I was Catholic. I believed in evilness.
But then, Scott’s arguments sort of made sense. Didn’t we in fact need a stereo and wasn’t it true that we were stealing from the rich? Surely no harm would result. His sister worked for the government and his brother-in-law was employed as a surveyor. He made a killing, we thought, and there were benefits to boot.
“Gar, we could do it. No one will know,”
he argued for hours before I finally came around to agree with him. We planned our break-in for the following night, and then sat back in our beds bragging about what we would buy: Vienna sausages, cheeses, and assorted packages of Lipton soup, our favorite. Our imaginations narrowed to Cokes, Cheez-Its, and puffed bags of Chee•tos. Okie Heaven, we laughed.
Our circumstances were laughable. Mad at my parents, I had said “shit” under my breath and had joined Scott in renting a small room in a boarding house. We each had a bed, a chair, and one wobbly table where we fixed our meals. We lived like monks with bad eating habits: For breakfast there were Froot Loops and Sonny Boy orange juice; for lunch we slurped up a bowl of Lipton soup, along with a thin sandwich of peanut butter and jelly; for dinner, which I ate alone because Scott worked the night shift at a box factory, I often opened a can of Campbell’s Manhandler. Great stuff, I thought at the time—a time when I was trying to become a poet. I had taped my poems (all three of them) to the wall near the window where I ate, re-reading them as I weighed each steaming spoonful of my Manhandler. When a breeze came in the poems fluttered and hung on the verge of pulling off the wall and coming alive. Good stuff, I thought, but the professor I would show them to that fall would think different. The poems died in his class, or limped like old dogs in the hallway, and when I tried to tape them back to the wall they slipped behind the bed where I left them, depressed.
Scott worked hard hours while I lived on social security. Ninety dollars every month. Thirty dollars for rent, twenty for food, and fifteen for gas. There were other expenses that might have amounted to five dollars, but I managed to save the rest for a rainy day.