The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (16 page)

“Yeah, but we were really doing it,” Slocum said.

Today, the Ebbets Field Houses and the school across the street from it, Intermediate School 232, the Jackie Robinson School, are dreadful proof that one magnificent act becomes just that, one act, when placed against the grinding, melancholy despair of life every day. Cling to the great act that can inspire and give hope. But you can’t brush away the effects of the disease of slavery and suddenly make softer the life of thousands of children who come out of the housing project with keys around the neck, latchkey kids, for no one is at home when they return from school. The school has a narrow fenced-in cement yard unworthy of a state prison, a yard with flowers at one end for the young boy who was shot dead while playing basketball. The school is one of the five worst in the city.

Past the housing project, the avenue goes down a long slope, and the color suddenly changes to white and the avenue becomes one of Hasidic Jews, the men with black hats, beards, and long curls, the women with heads covered with kerchiefs.

The four-story brick corner house at number 527 has claws coming out of the foundation. It is the home of builder Eugene and son Richie Ostreicher. On the side is a new addition, a garage for their construction company.

The street goes around a curve and comes up to a park and bodega where Eduardo stands outside, looking for work.

He was in T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, with his black cap on backward. And he was, like the others standing alongside him, a person of towering dignity. He had put up his young life to come to
this curb and look for work to build a house for his future, and to buy book bags for his sisters in San Matías.

He became one of the blacks and Mexicans who waited for people to pull up and beckon to them and take them away for day labor, cleaning lots, emptying trucks, rearranging warehouses. They stand here in their rough clothes and dark skin, mostly unable to speak English, coming from rooms without bathrooms, without kitchens, and if they must walk far to a subway, then they walk far to a subway. In the dimness they may seem like unkempt shadows, but as you watch them, they grow and the features are defined and the heads are raised. They are the aristocrats, descendants of the pure royalty of 1947 of their street. Yes, it happened long ago. And now there still is so far to go. But once you were too far down even to dream. Now, back where Bedford crosses Empire Boulevard, Jackie Robinson hits a single and right away takes a couple of steps off first base and the crowd shouts in anticipation. He is going for second! He is the only player who can cause a commotion just by taking a couple of steps off first. And take the step he does, and take second he does, and when he stands and brushes off the dirt, he becomes the hope for those millions and millions who had gone out each day, as did the generations before them, feeling only the deadliness of despair, believing there was nothing better. He stood for the dawn people on Bedford Avenue who take a step off the curb and peer at the headlights to see if anybody is slowing down to stop and give them work. Bedford Avenue whispers in their ear. Sure, so much is hideous. But the dream has been handed down to them. They take any insult, suffer any degradation, face every unfairness and injustice, yet never leave, because they are here for others, for wives and children at home, and nothing can make them quit.

Here on Bedford, each time a car or van suddenly pulls up and the driver calls “One” or “Two,” the number of workers he needs, the street standers rush blindly to the car and go diving into the backseat. They go off without knowing where they are going or how
much they are going to be paid. The word
job
throbs through their bodies unconditionally. Those waiting on the curb can be there for the full day. One or two, or at the most three at a time, jump off the fence and run to get a job without questioning. The jostling on the sidewalk is continual and causes despair among those left at day’s end.

For all the valor spent chasing work, the Mexicans also are irresistible temptations, the nearest occasion of mortal sin: cheap labor.

It is blood in the mouth of nearly everybody who hires.

That left Eduardo with only one thing to do. He was on the curb at Bedford Avenue by 6
A.M
.,
one of a pack of people trying to feed a family. One or two remember being there with him. One was Rafi Macias, who had had a job for $7.50 an hour at a luggage factory in Long Island City. One Monday when he climbed the factory steps to his floor, the foreman was in the doorway and told him that there was no work. The place had moved. He remembers that his first thought was of his son on a tricycle on the street in front of the housing project in Coney Island. He came right to the curb at Bedford. He remembers that he caught a job that day, cleaning a yard in Hackensack, New Jersey. The guy gave him $60 and that was all right. He didn’t return from the curb empty.

Somebody told Miguel Aquino that Italians paid $10 an hour for construction workers, and so he went to Eighteenth Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street in Bensonhurst only to find so many waiting that he was shut out. After that, he remembers trying Utica and Fulton, where Italians in vans were hiring, but when Miguel started for one van, a Puerto Rican punched him on the side of the head, and Miguel lost his balance and the job.

He, too, did not go home. He came straight to Bedford, though it was too late the first day. But he says he stayed because he couldn’t face his wife and children at home knowing that he had quit when he should have kept trying.

On that first day on the street, Eduardo missed out on every
chance and went home disgusted. He reminded himself that he had to get the jump on them. He was quicker the next day and was out front for a plumbing truck, and spent the day moving pipes. He came home with $45.

Farther along, the street for work, Bedford Avenue, now becomes Puerto Rican. Flags, loud music, Spanish calling through the air. Then the sidewalks turn old Polish and new Eastern European, a street of people smoking furiously in coffee shops with leather jackets tossed over their shoulders. But so many Polish stand under the Williamsburg Bridge and look for work each morning. At North Eighth Street is a subway that is only one stop to Manhattan’s East Side, and it is a thousand miles away.

Eduardo took the room’s cell phone into a corner of the kitchen and called Silvia in College Station for the first time. She remembers being surprised to hear from him, for she knew that he hadn’t asked her mother or father for her phone number. He told her that he got the number from a brother-in-law of her cousin in the Bronx.

“How is work?” she asked him.

He mumbled. She thought later that he didn’t want to admit that he had traveled this far to get hit-or-miss work.

She told him that she worked at the barbecue stand in the morning and the Olive Garden at night.

“I make minestrone soup for four hundred and fifty people,” she said. She was aware that he didn’t know what minestrone soup was, so she told him about cutting up the vegetables for it.

She asked how many people were in his room. He told her six. She thinks that he didn’t want to tell her the exact number, eight, because he knew that she didn’t like a crowded bedroom.

He asked her how many were in her house in College Station. She told him five, but it was only a two-bedroom apartment and she was used to her own room. Things would be better soon. Finally, he volunteered something. He had done his own laundry.
He had taken all his shirts and underwear to a coin laundry and washed and dried them.

“Make sure you tell that to your mother,” she said. “She won’t have to do your wash anymore. I won’t either.”

That got him flustered and the call was over. He said he would call again, and he did. But he made the call when he came home after work and she was just leaving for the night job at the Olive Garden. She could say only a few words. On the next couple of calls, the time difference caused him to miss her. Silvia remembers trying him once on the cell phone and getting no answer.

The next time he called, he said he was working on a construction job. He didn’t say much more. He was still strangled by shyness, even when shielded by a phone. By now, everybody in the room at Brighton knew this, and when they all got off the train at Flushing Avenue and walked down the streets to the job at Middleton, they started in on him, did it because he was so easy, just walking there with them.

“Look at the pretty girl, Eduardo,” Alejandro remembers saying to him when a woman passed by going to work. “Go up and tell her how pretty she is. Tell her you will die for her.”

Eduardo never stopped to think that the others never would do this. They were afraid that the woman would call for the police and get them deported. All he did was look at the sidewalk as he passed the woman. Early on in his days on the job, Eduardo showed that he could not break out of his shyness; nor could he handle the others taunting him about this. One morning he came off the el steps running. He went all the way to the job. He liked the run. It kept them out of his ears. From then on, he ran from the el each morning. Finally, they said that they would stop fooling with him. He did not believe them. Still he ran.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T
he building business in Brooklyn lives on the eighth floor of the seedy old Municipal Building, upstairs from the Court Street stop of the number 2 train. You come off the elevator on the eighth floor only to be blocked by the back of a large woman in a plaid coat who is on one of the three pay phones on the wall.

“Listen, he thinks that because I work around the corner, I can come in here as a favor for noth—” She listened for half a breath. Then she roared, “Exactly! They think I can do this when I go out for coffee. I’m here an hour alread—”

This time she suffered the other voice for a moment, then snaps, “No. Give me Alex. I’ll tell him that I want to get paid for this.”

A small man in a leather cap is jammed into the wall by the woman. He talks in a low voice on another pay phone.

Inside a cubicle a step away from the phones, three people sit at old computers that rattle. A sign on the wall says each person is allowed ten minutes. Another says, If You Offer a Bible, It Is Considered a Gift.

Next to each computer, a printout machine that could have
carried the news of Truman’s victory rattles and grinds as it sends out long pages of building violations. They are printed too faintly for all human eyes except for those of the expediter. Without the expediter, builders couldn’t build a doghouse in Brooklyn. These are hallway people who know computer codes, all Buildings Department regulations, and also the offices and members of the Buildings Department. The commissioner for Brooklyn, Tarek Zeid, has a wife who is an expediter. His office was a few yards down the eighth-floor hallway until he took a leave under some fire.

Expediters gather all the paper a builder needs and do it in a tenth of the time he could and then move in and out of hallways and offices and fix anything that has to be fixed. The builder wouldn’t know where to begin.

A rabbi spins around and asks, “What do I do?”

“You got to take a number,” he is told. “Take a number like it’s the butcher’s.”

Three people sitting on chairs ignore the rabbi. Four others are standing against the wall. Now one person at a computer stands up, clutching his printouts. Two tumble from the wall and try to get there first. But a man gets out of his chair and beats them to it. He starts commanding the computer to find his specific violations. The woman in the plaid coat from the hallway bursts forward. She yells to everybody, “You didn’t take a number!” She pushes hard. The man leaving with printouts has to burrow through the people.

One person at the computer, a young law student named Maurice, whose long pointed chin looks as if it could punch a hole in the keyboard, turns around and says, “This doesn’t work.”

A man with a face of cigarette smoke and wearing a candy store sweater, an old maroon cardigan with pockets for change, jumps off the wall.

“Go back. Punch A. Did you hit A? All right. Hit PUB, then PRM. That’s—”

“I already did.”

“Then you’re in. You’re logged on.”

“I’m still not.”

“Did you hit three?”

“Three?”

“You want Brooklyn, you press three to get into Brooklyn. Every borough got a different code. Three is for Brooklyn. You want Brooklyn, you just press three and you got Brooklyn.”

Maurice nods and presses the key. With Brooklyn up, he taps out the name he was doing research on, Ostreicher. His chin comes closer to the keyboard.

His tutor has gone back to leaning against the wall. The young guy is learning the trade of expediter, which is as essential to the building of a building as the roof.

The printer alongside the young guy now begins to grind out page after page of violations for Ostreicher.

34232893K VIOL ACTIVE

43 LORIMER STREET

RESPONDENT INFO: OSTREICHER, CHAIM 527 BEDFORD AVENUE, DESCRIPTION OF VIOLATION:

STAIR ENCLOSURE DOES NOT COMPLY WITH THE REQUIRED FIRE RESISTANCE RATING; IN THAT BUILDING IS BUILT AS A FOUR-STORY OCCUPANCY GROUP—WHICH REQUIRES A TWO-HOUR FIRE-RATED ENCLOSURE AS PER SECTION PFI.

B 5027

STRUCTURAL DEFECTS VIOLATE REFERENCE STANDARD RS 10–5B IN THAT 1.—NO STRAP BRACING FOR FOR “C” JOISTS II ANCHORAGE BETWEEN JOIST AND BEARING OR NON-BEARING WALL WAS NOT PROVIDED.

B5C 27

EXISTING APARTMENT DOORS OPEN DIRECTLY INTO STAIR ENCLOSURE CONTRARY TO D 27 373. REMEDY: FILE PLANS TO LEGALIZE IF FEASIBLE AND CONFORM TO CODE.

Every ten minutes the person at the machine is supposed to give it up and let the next person look up all his violations. But when Maurice’s ten minutes are up, unseen hands push him back down. As the old violations come out of the printer, one of the expediters is offended by Maurice’s inefficiency. “How could you let this go on?” he says. “You are supposed to get certificates of correction.”