Читать книгу Criminal of Poverty - Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia - Страница 12

“I can’t breathe here …”

These were the largest sidewalk squares I had ever seen. My mother and I were stranded on one, holding onto each other for dear life. I was eleven years old. We were in downtown Los Angeles—the Rampart district, on the edge of the Crenshaw area, famous for graffiti, police helicopter chases and opaque landscapes filled with ancient alabaster apartment buildings, immense streets and sidewalks.

“I can’t take that job … I can’t breathe here … I’ve got to get out of here,” her words came out in tense clumps.

I couldn’t stop myself from focusing on the size of each cement square. As she spoke, they seemed to grow larger, and the thick foundation of the apartment building in front of us seemed to stretch and bend, threatening to curl over us. I only heard parts of her words, and after several minutes it was just the consonants jumping up and down in the atmosphere.

“But couldn’t you just try it for one week?” I begged, trying to appear nonchalant, my desperation dangling in the silent, white-brown afternoon air. I looked up, hoping for some sky, some hint of blue or a tip of cloud, but I found only the usual omnipresent glare, a sky color specific to Los Angeles, generated by the reflections off of windshields, chrome bumpers, sunglasses, apartment windows, billboards and the bottoms of airplanes.

I tried again,“You need this job, it might be the last one you get.” While she pondered this momentarily, the parts of my stomach that were drowning in an admixture of adrenaline and acid came up for air. “We’re not going to make it without that job. We have no savings, what about the rent?” Despite my efforts to keep it from happening, fear was seeping into my voice.

“But you know I can’t breathe in this smog. I just don’t know …”

My whole body searched for something else to say, knowing so well, so perfectly clearly that if she did not take this job, if she did not get out of the house now, get back to normal immediately, then life would change for good, not partially or just for a while, but completely, irreversibly and forever.

“Lisa, I don’t know what to do. Maybe I can get a job in Santa Monica. The air will be better there. I know jobs are competitive in West L.A., but …”

As she spoke, we both continued to shrink, hovering together on the sidewalk while an exhaust-filled breeze began to circle and expand above us, swaying the fronds of the dusty palm trees. That day was the end of things previously lived: innocence, goofiness, dumb ideas, eleven-year-oldness. That day was the end of life as I had known it. And like all endings, it was actually a beginning: the beginning of crisis, terror, impossibility, extreme poverty and vicious cycles. Yet, as is often the case, beginnings are never very clear and endings are even fuzzier, so we went home to initiate what became an odd sort of schedule, a schedule to change things, an impotent form of desperate networking with no network.

Even when my mom was working things hadn’t been “normal,” from a conventional American perspective, i.e., two parents, a stable home, steady income, etcetera. My father had divorced my mother when I was four years old, threatening her with a custody battle if she ever demanded child support, and so we were always poor. My mother struggled constantly with the isolation and desperation of being a very low-income single parent. Still, I thought she was an excellent mom, one who protected me, taught me and mentored me. I was always included in the complex discussions and strategies necessary to keep both of us alive, which I loved. We were completely entwined co-conspirators.

One of our most hopeful times had been when my mother got the job she had just recently lost. She had been a social worker/case manager in a Catholic group home for emotionally disturbed adolescent girls, a position that was created with a government grant. The nuns took a chance on my mom, a newly minted social worker with no work experience, and after one year my mother had become highly respected for her innovative techniques. Implementing an approach that is now referred to as “family restoration,” she attempted to keep each family she worked with intact, using a team approach that included extensive advocacy and support. By her second and last year there, she had become a team leader of teachers, therapists and house managers. Her position was terminated when the funding ran out, and now, a few months after she’d been laid off, she was physically ill and emotionally distraught, caught in a complex web of phobia, conflict and poverty.

We lived in a dilapidated apartment building located on the edge of Hollywood, barely touching the border of Hancock Park, a remnant of old money and faded glamour. As you stepped onto Rossmore Street—what Vine became once you crossed Melrose—you entered a lush, green, tree-lined, non-Los Angeles peace that filled your nostrils and chilled your eyelids. If you didn’t look back, you could imagine that you were walking in some wealthy gated community, but if you turned around, you faced the corner of Melrose and Vine, nexus of Hollywood hopes, broken dreams and desperation.

I straddled these disparate worlds with a daily visit to Winchell’s Donuts, at the corner of Melrose and Vine. Back when my life had made sense, I would stop in at Winchell’s on my way to school, taking a quick detour to acquire a plain old-fashioned, enjoying the hustle and excitement of being a kid in a city too large and tense to notice you. After my mother got laid off and I no longer went to school, my visits to Winchell’s became one of a series of patterns that I established in my attempt to hold on to some semblance of order. I wasn’t familiar yet with the notion of reading newspapers or drinking coffee, but I was able to go there and buy something, to get out of the house and partake in some sort of normalcy.

Our apartment was art-deco-huge with incredibly high ceilings, wall-to-wall carpeting and floor-to-ceiling cream-colored drapes. Our landlord, who also owned the Rossmore Hotel that had housed none other than Mae West herself, explained to us that Errol Flynn had had our apartment built for his girlfriend, and so we were really quite lucky to get it at only $390 per month. I didn’t know who Errol Flynn was, but I hoped it would rival my friend Cindy McCoy’s status of living in the building where the Hillside Strangler used to rent an apartment.

One day while my mother was still working, we bought a small orange cat at the local pet store that catered to the wealthy people in Hancock Park. My mom, orange cat and I lived happily ever after until my mother lost her job, at which point a lethal admixture of cat dander, wool carpeting and smog began to slowly suffocate her, causing her anxiety to be compounded with the onset of severe asthmatic symptoms.

“A blossom fell and very soon I saw you kissing someone beneath the moon …”

Ever since my mother bought the Nat King Cole tape, she played it eight hours a day. His buttery voice coated the yelling that emanated from our apartment.

“Lisa, you have to help me get out of here!” That’s how it would begin, and then she’d hand me enlarged handwriting thrown across a lined piece of paper,“Call them.”

Sometimes I’d sneak out onto the fake balcony/fire escape that extended delicately by peeling wrought-iron tendrils over the five-lane intersection. I watched people going to and from things, things that seemed to have a beginning and an end, 9:00 to 3:00, 8:00 to 5:00.

“But what about going to school today?” I would sometimes ask.

“You can’t go today. You can’t leave me alone. You’ve got to help me get out of here!”

“Here” was an amorphous concept, depending upon her level of depression that day or week. Sometimes it meant the actual apartment—it had been ten months since she’d lost her job and three months since she’d been out of the house. But more often “here” meant the whole city of Los Angeles, or even the entire continent.

In the first few weeks after she was laid off, my mother called my school to get permission for me to come in late or be absent for a few days at a time when she needed my help and absolutely couldn’t be alone. But the school system didn’t allow for anything outside of the accepted norm, and family health crises, homelessness or the need for a child to work weren’t on their list of valid reasons for a child to miss school. Eventually they began to threaten my mother about my truancy and so she just stopped calling them; I was quickly forgotten, just one more child with a “difficult” life in the massive L.A. Unified School District. A few years later when we were in the throes of homelessness my mother tried to re-enroll me, but the location of our parked car was not their idea of a proper home address. My mom gave up completely after that, though according to her it was not the end of school, it was just the end of “their” school.

I was now enrolled in the school of hard knocks, learning to take over tasks that my mom’s depression made her incapable of handling; basic adult things like balancing a check book and paying bills, making medical appointments and taking care of the car registration became my responsibility. I had to teach myself most of this, and as our poverty increased the tasks got harder, including eviction preparations, bankruptcy and creditor evasion, not to mention launching a microbusiness at the ripe old age of 13.

“If I could just get out of this place, maybe I could get a job, maybe I could breathe. Lisa, you’ve got to find me a therapist. What if we move to Mexico, will there be medical care there?”

And then there was the most challenging and labor-intensive job of all, one that began in that apartment and continued for the rest of my mother’s life: I became her care-giver/advocate. In the beginning, and often in later years, this entailed an endless number of phone calls to seek help or some kind of advice or information. Different calls were always on the list depending upon her focus that day—to get employed again, maybe volunteer, to try school, to become less isolated—but almost consistently the quest for a therapist would be part of the plan. We had no money except her meager unemployment that would run out very soon, and there was no free therapy available that we could find, so this, the most important of needs, was left unmet.

The Reverend Jim Bond of the Peace and Freedom Church would appear on the list at least twice a week. He had shaken our hands once at a seminar called Becoming One With Your Political Correctness.

“Hi, I’m Jim Bond. Welcome. Here’s our program.”

My mother believed that if someone acted helpful you should take him or her seriously, take them up on their implied hospitality.

11:22 A.M. Tuesday:

“Hi Reverend Bond, it’s Lisa. Just calling to check if you know of any low-cost therapy resources in the area?”

“Therapists?” an audible gulp.

“Yeah, for my mother.”

“Oh.”

11:40 A.M. Thursday:

“Hi Reverend Bond, it’s Lisa. Just calling to check if you know of any graduate schools in the Seattle area? My mother wants to go back to school.”

11:37 A.M. Monday:

“I thought you loved me, you said you loved me … we planned together … to dream forever …” Nat was whispering in the background.

“Hi Reverend Bond, it’s Lisa. Do you know of any good volunteer resources in the Canada area?”

“The dream has ended, for true love died …”

“Also, are there any free therapists in that area?”

“Lisa, can I ask you a question?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“How old are you?”

“Eleven.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school right now?”

“Oh nooo, school’s already over for me. You see my school starts at 6:00 A.M. and it’s over by 11:00.”

“That night a blossom fell and touched two lips that lied …”