There’s no Paul Newman challenging the man. You put your trash in shitty plastic bags and when you fill one you tie it off and leave it on the side of the road and move on. You don’t get to stand around. If you stand around, officer Kyle comes over to you and reprimands you verbally. If you talk back it’s simple — you go straight to jail. But you also develop … strategies for moving as slowly as possible. Why hurry? There’s only more trash. There’s never-ending trash. And you are part of the trash — you are a trash advertisement.
Except for dishonorably discharged Rick, who had the kind of eyes that said I WILL BEAT THE FUCK OUT OF ANYONE WHO TALKS TO ME, me and my homeboys slowly but surely got along. You’d think not, right? Some middle aged bouge blonde woman with sagging tits getting along with a bunch of SoCal thugs? Au contraire.
People who have been to jail more than once can smell it on each other.
Men in groups operate through a series of male codes. Movements in the hands and eyes. Stances. Verbal exchanges with triple entendres. Little challenges and invisible battles and hierarchies worked out. So I rarely spoke and I never wore make-up and I wore baggy assed pants and I made goddamn sure my labor was not that of a woman. Luckily, I have the shoulders and strength of a swimmer.
The second week I lifted a big chunka railroad tie by myself. I hoisted it up onto my shoulder, and even though I knew my spine was crumpling up a vertebrae at a time like little wads of paper, I looked bad ass enough to be … what’s the word. A trusted body.
I’ve never been treated less like a woman in my life. I remember telling a colleague of mine — one of the only people who knew that by day I was out there with my posse while at night I had a fancy visiting writer job teaching budding young MFAs how to make their words more wonderful and she said: “Do they say lewd things to you? Do they do anything … you know, weird around you or to you? Aren’t you scared to be around those people?” I just stared at her. I tried to picture what she pictured. A bunch of male mostly minority small time criminals — those people — and a blonde woman who … who what? Who did she believe I was? She taught World Lit. and drove a Beamer.
Who I was. I was the convict with the best English. The day Jimarcus asked me what I did for a living, and I told him I taught English at SDSU, he laughed.
“Hey mahn, check it out. We got a Professor with us,” he broadcasted one day when we were scraping crap off of the walls of the county elections office.
A slow laugh made its way through the chests of the other men. And smiles. They’d smile like nothing you’ve ever seen before. All that dark skin opening. They slapped my back or put a hand on my shoulder and shook their heads, laughing, laughing. They laughed in a way that somehow felt good. “But you with us now, sistah?” Jimarcus would say, shaking his headful of dreads. After that they all started calling me “Doctor.” You know what they wanted? They wanted me to teach them how to talk more like everyone else. They wanted more English.
On road crew my hands blistered so badly from hacking down sea grass with giant dull-bladed loppers near Sea World I couldn’t hold a cup of coffee.
On road crew if there was heavy lifting my scoliosis spastic back hurt so bad when I got home every night I’d go straight to a bath and lay in it and cry.
On road crew we spray washed graffiti and painted it over with mindless gray paint. We laid tar. We carried concrete and wood and glass away from condemned buildings. Once Rick cut his arm and punched a hole in a wall. He got extra days for that. I surmised Rick was also in anger management classes.
Our assignments were mostly cleaning up the world so people can pretend it’s not dirty, chaotic, out of control, a giant world-sized compost heap.
Once we cleaned toilets in day use area parks. You haven’t lived until you have to pull tampons and needles and condoms and cigarette butts out of a john. Yellow plastic gloves just don’t seem to quite make you feel better.
I got the closest with Ernesto. Ernesto played classical guitar. I never heard him or saw him play but I watched him air guitar it when he described it. I’d ask him about it on breaks and at lunch and he’d Spanglish it out to me — what I didn’t need language for was how beautiful he looked talking about music. Or his hands. After awhile he began to ask me to translate things. A word at a time. “Dr. Lidia. What is English meterse en líos? What is English un llamamiento a la compassion?” To get into trouble. To call for compassion.
All those weeks we labored. We sweat. It is a “we” I have not been able to use as a word the same way since. There isn’t a proper translation.
The eighth week of road crew we’d split up in teams under an overpass near Balboa park. The trees and bushes were thick and lush so we had the mercy of shade. Things smelled like water was near, but it was probably the highly advanced sprinkler system that helps keep Balboa park green and sparkly and fit for tourists.
Me, Jimarcus, Sonny the chubby Italian and Ernesto were shuffling trash with our sticks. Jimarcus yelled out hey mahn and pointed to a little path in the shrubs. So we followed him. After we were dumped off in a parking lot by officer Kyle, Jimarcus shared cigarettes when we finished each day that made you feel pretty good. To this day I’ve no idea what was in them. That’s why we followed him. Because at the end of the day he’d ease us.
So we’re walking down this little brush lined path and suddenly Jimarcus stops so Ernesto stops so I stop and chubby Sonny, who is last, kinda bumps into me. There in front of us, peaceful as can be, is a sleeping bum.
I think that’s what some people call him, right?
I’m not sure what a good translation is. But I’m guessing some people would go with “bum” because of how he looked. And smelled. Our bum had an enormous Grizzly Adams beard. His hair shot out untamed and ratted — probably there were bugs in it, possibly worse. And his skin was red and pockmarked and puffy with drink. His nose landscape looked lunar. And he smelled like week-old sweet burned apple piss. Enough to sting your nasal passages and make your eyes water. I’d say he was about 5’8” and weighed maybe 210. His belly a smelly mound.
But what was most striking about our bum, and what made Sonny nearly puke on the spot, is that his pants were down around his ankles, and his exposed genitals were swollen. I mean like huge. I mean elephant man huge. His balls were the size of purpley croquet balls. His dick looked a little like a reptile had gotten loose. And the pièce de résistance? There was a giant pile of human shit about a foot and a half away from him. He smiled in his sleep. He snored. Sonny gagged.
Jimarcus said fuck mahn and Ernesto laughed and Sonny bent over how you do when you are going to vomit and I said “Shhhhhhhh! You’ll wake his ass up!” So we backed up like kids who’ve seen something they weren’t supposed to. The bum? He just slept the sound sleep of babies and puppies.
When we got back to the group none of us said a fucking thing about our bum. Rick would have popped a spring in that geared up little skull of his and beat the shit out of our bum. And look, there was no way we were going to tell the clean-shaven officer Kyle. He would have arrested our bum. We already knew what it felt like to be arrested. Multiple times. We already knew what it felt like to fuck up. To be passed out drunk. To stink. To not want to be alive. To wake up with your face on the pavement. To use words but find your sentences doubling back and betraying you. To stay in a hotel for a week when you hear on TV the police are doing a sweep. To have no one who understands. To be passing — leading a double life. Maybe we didn’t yet know what it was like to have swollen genitals the size of Texas, but metaphorically — some body part out of control — some piece of you gone freakish — kind of we did.