Snitch Factory: A Novel (3 page)

“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.

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 speaker 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.

The guards’ antics were drawing a crowd: clients, caseworkers, and the carpenters rebuilding a stairwell out back. Additional security men dashed into the courtyard, frightening a band of finches that’d been sitting on the nude branches of a potted tree, sending them into flight. Eldon skirted the brawl and came over to me, wearing a slight fleer on his lips.

“Great seminar, huh, Hassler?”

His disaffection for me was vivacious, intuitive and a poignant story. Middle-aged heterosexual caucasians like Eldon were the lowest rung on the social ladder in San Francisco. Everyone picked on his ilk. Nobody was more disrespected than the uneducated, ignorant white men who resided in the Mission and Tenderloin. But Eldon brought out a maternal streak in me, though he was my senior by many years.

“Yeah, I thought it was highly informative.”

“You think so?”

“Anything helps in this game.”

“What did you learn, Charlene?”

“That a good disposition will make you rich.”

The janitor mocked me. “It’s all about your mood, huh?”

His lack of worldliness was tragic, monumental, a continent of its own, set apart from the rest of us.

“Absolutely,” I replied. “What else is there? You heard what the speaker said. Money is the incentive and the goal. Don’t you want to get a leg up?”

If they could’ve, his poached, vehement eyes would have slain me. The malaise of Eldon’s spirit was physical, heady, a surrogate Oedipal miasma reaching its first bloom. Like pollen does, it was capable of spreading onto me. I told myself to watch out for the pessimistic janitor.

 

I walked back to my office and started to interview another client, a young lady. It was going fair enough when someone knocked on my door. I looked up; it was Matt Vukovich from SSI. He saw that I was busy and so he nodded, no problem. I didn’t know what he meant by that, but when he went outside the door and torched a cigarette, I knew he’d be around for at least another five minutes.

Meanwhile, I instructed my client to go down to the Department of Motor Vehicles on Oak Street in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park to have a state identification card made with her picture on it. She seemed to be an intelligent woman. Renee Bamberger, age twenty-six, born in Santa Cruz. She had two likable tykes in tow, named Imhoff and Nathan. They were in the waiting room with their paternal grandmother, a woman called Selma who resided with them on Lucky Alley.

B
runo’s was a Mission Street restaurant that had undergone a miracle. Unlike many of the other institutions which dotted the broad palm tree-lined avenue, Bruno’s had been given a facelift. It was a jewel of gentrification, having been repainted, re-floored and furbished with personalized dining booths upholstered in red leather.

Even with the street up for grabs in a teenage gang war, the restaurant became an overnight sensation; the city’s socialites and bigwigs flocked to the establishment. People who yearned to have an adventure and wanted to be seen; this was the place they could do it.

For a weeknight, the joint was overflowing; every booth was taken. I had meandered out of the women’s lounge after washing my hands and from where I was standing, I could see the entire room.

The lighting in the place was sultry; the tables were crowded with men in suits and ties. Important men with lovely women at their side, drinking wine, picking at lobster and steak dinners, smoking cigars, and laughing at well-timed
bon mots.

The new mayor of the city was holding court in a booth, surrounded by his associates and cronies. Criminal lawyers in cowboy boots, HUD officials, newspaper gossip columnists. His bald pate was shimmering in the candle-light, and the woman he was dining with smiled at every word that came out of his mouth.