Читать книгу Criminal of Poverty - Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia - Страница 18

Whitsett Boulevard was smack dab in the middle of the brown-gray L.A. suburb called the San Fernando Valley. Just north of Hollywood, it had originally been designed as a bedroom community for the stars, but they had all gone many years ago, leaving it like a forlorn one-night stand.

Our apartment complex was a study in soiled pastel stucco. Like a giant slice of birthday cake that had sat for too long in a bakery window, its soft greens, pinks and yellows were covered with dust and soot and its long-ago landscaped hedges were filled with weeds, used paper cups and dried snail tracks. The view from the slatted windows was distorted by mineral deposits and grease.

Our neighborhood bordered a wealthier part of the valley filled with mid-sized, tree-lined homes with nary a sidewalk in sight. In L.A. they measure the wealth of a neighborhood by the existence of sidewalks, and for some reason the richer the area the more sparse the sidewalks will be. Obviously, it has something to do with cars, garages and lawns. Suffice to say, every area we lived in had plenty of sidewalks, no lawns, hardly any trees and a lot of alleys. But we did have delis and little restaurants featuring the cuisines of all cultures, styles and communities: Vietnamese, Salvadoran, Cambodian, Mexican, Greek, Italian and some of the best Jewish delis anywhere.

For me that year was all about After School. Eight years old, I had just started the third grade and I was the original latchkey kid. At 3:00 P.M. on the nose every day I would run home with my two best friends after making a short stop at the nearby Jewish bakery, filled with fresh baked hamentaschen and cheese danishes to die for, still crisp, still warm.

I ran home with my luscious danish, filled with plans for the strange urban games I invented each day to play with my new urban friends. All of my friends were nerdy smart kids, the sons and daughters of poor immigrants, and they all had big plans to go to college and lift their families out of poverty. We understood each other that way, since as far back as I could remember my dream had been to make my mother happy—and in the American capitalist sense that meant to buy her a house and a car, one that worked and was preferably new and shiny, like none she’d ever had—and perhaps most importantly, my amorphous plan was “to take care of her.” This had begun with my mom and Annie’s half-joking, half-real request, “Hon, are you gonna take care of us when we’re old and crotchety?” My answer was always an adamant yes, with the idea in my head even then that it shouldn’t be any other way.

One of the games we played was called Steps, and it entailed walking slowly up the side of the forbidden Safeway delivery ramp and then running down the other side. Of course, in this and all the games there were the requisite paroxysms of laughter, common to silly 8- and 9-year-olds. The other games were all about me, my cat, the radio and our empty apartment. I loved afternoon talk radio because it meant the apartment wasn’t quiet—I was terrified of silence. My games were elaborate tableaus involving my cat, the houseplants, all the inanimate household objects that were around and my mom wouldn’t miss, and a variation on a concept involving me as the Head Administrator of a large agency or advocate for many people in need.

That one short year in that extremely unattractive apartment complex was one of the best years of my life. My mother was in a horrible abusive relationship with Rudy, and we were barely surviving on the child support from my dad and what she could get from Rudy once in awhile. Her position as a marginalized, unsupported single mother was now fully locked in place, culminating in the humiliation she experienced when she had to apply for welfare and was put through all kinds of drama which made her feel worthless and “undeserving” of any public assistance. And yet I was happy; she loved me, provided food for us, paid the rent (I guessed), and to me it seemed as though all was well.

At the end of the year we left the Valley and Czatar Rudolph in a flurry of possibilities. My mom had gotten a job, and now everything was going to be great. My mother wouldn’t have to worry anymore, or more importantly, she wouldn’t have to take all that crap from the welfare worker anymore. We were on our way to better things, and since my mom was excited, so was I. Of course, I was sad to leave my friends, especially my rich Jewish friends who had decided by the end of that year that I was the only poor white shiksa who was fun enough to invite to all the coolest parties, catered by Baskin Robbins and other tasty corporate logos. Their faux friendships, filled with the promise of future Bat Mitzvah invitations—and more importantly, more free food—had inspired me to start lying about what part of Hollywood I was actually moving to (“You know, the rich part,” I would say). By this time I had learned most of what I needed to know about L.A. party skills: fake laugh, superfluous conversations that held little content, and of course the compliments that meant little and were spoken as fast as a mouth could humanly move. Without really intending to, I was preparing myself for life as a superficial L.A. pre-adolescent, but more interestingly, I was unwittingly participating in a family tradition of identity “trading up.”

We moved to Los Angeles, Hollywood to be exact, and my mom began work at what was to be the job of her life. She’d been hired as a case manager/social worker at Catholic group home for troubled girls, and this would be her very first professional experience. It was a huge challenge, one that the skills she’d learned in grad school had only partially prepared her for.

At first she had to adjust to simply working with other people. Having had no real working experience until then, she wasn’t very versed in organizational diplomacy, and early on she was deemed “unsuperviseable.” This just meant that she had some very strong beliefs and innovative ideas that didn’t always meet with the approval of the nuns and the Catholic hierarchy that managed the home, but with the help of a therapist she was seeing at the time she managed to pull herself out of that dangerous label and incorporate some teamwork practices into her work. She became one of the most-loved social workers there, and though it was mostly the youth and families who truly appreciated her efforts, some of the younger, more conscious nuns also appreciated my mother’s innovations and dedication to her work.

For the first summer at her job she was truly terrified. For someone already suffering from severe anxiety, a big move to a new apartment, a new neighborhood and a new job was a huge challenge to face on one’s own. This is no doubt why at this point I began to be integrated into her everyday activities. It began with me accompanying her to her job each day and hanging out in the convent’s yard area, something I actually loved. This wasn’t really new, since I’d gone with her to several of her grad school classes because she couldn’t afford child care in Fresno. But this was a little different. I began to take on the role of her personal manager, making sure she had all her things together the night before, helping her avoid the dreaded lateness write-up that she was prone to getting due to the chaos in her mind and in our lives.

That job lasted two and a half years, and those were some of the most hopeful times of our lives. When the funding was cut for her position, the lay-off came down on us like a six-ton hammer, leaving everything shattered in its wake. My mom showed me the flimsy slip of pink paper that had flattened our hopes and killed her budding self-confidence.

Her newfound coworker friends advised her to try to get another job immediately, and she blindly sent out resumes. She acquired all the proper reference letters and scoured the want ads. She went to interview after interview, and six grueling months later she got a call back. Someone finally wanted to hire her, but by then it was too late. By this time she was well into a complete breakdown, psychologically, physically and financially. Joblessness, isolation and the fear of impending homelessness had left her paralyzed, crippled by the fear of too many unknowns, her worsening asthma and deep depression.