by Jordi Puntí
* * *
Mike Franquesa went on to tell me that he earned his first wages parking cars in one of the second-class casinos. It turned out that Wilfredo Bonany, the part-Catalan, part-Cuban guy he’d just met, had set up a business giving work to illegal immigrants. In Las Vegas, like everywhere else, there are smaller casinos, parasite businesses living off gambling, getting by behind the front line, in the shadow of the big empires. They’re ideal places to make your way when you’ve just arrived and aren’t aiming high. And no one asks awkward questions. Wilfredo Bonany’s strategy was very simple yet closely studied: he wanted good-looking young folk in their thirties from Latin America and newly arrived in Las Vegas. And better still if their English was basic, as was the case with Mike Franquesa. Wilfredo went to the job interviews, dressed in his own distinctive way, big, bushy beard and all, responding shyly and with a reserved demeanor helped by his apparent difficulties with the language. Then he produced his totally legal documents proving he was a citizen and normally got the job. Basic unskilled labor. On the first day Wilfredo sent along some other bro, as he put it, having instructed him to show up clean-shaven and to be reserved at all times, like he’d been at the interview.
Thanks to this tactic, based on uniforms and, in particular, the inability of human resources managers to distinguish between the faces and accents of Latin Americans, Wilfredo Bonany had a staff of a dozen people who worked for him in his name, and in exchange they gave him thirty percent of their salary. Slippery as an eel, he was a kind of temp-to-hire agency for gardeners, cleaners, food delivery guys, valet parking attendants, and so on. He had a good eye for business and covered all kinds of work. He only had to be careful not to sign more than one contract per company. The ubiquitous discretion of business in Las Vegas did the rest.
In Mike’s case, everything happened as Bonany had planned. Since he was working the night shift, on his first day he arrived at the casino at six in the afternoon. His boss asked about the beard and, following Bonany’s instructions, he said he’d shaved it off to give a good impression, which instantly got him points. He was given a uniform and introduced to the guy who did the same shift, an Armenian of crabbed character and twitchy movements who had to show him how to go about parking cars.
“I worked there for eight months,” Mike Franquesa recalled as we asked for a second beer and he checked out the menu. “It was very boring but a good apprenticeship for understanding the ins and outs of Las Vegas social life, the codes that separated those who work and those who are out for a good time. We parked cars for people who wanted to go to the casino or a complex of restaurants vaguely modeled on New York, with pizzerias, hamburger joints, taco stalls . . . Always in the shadow of a sheepish-looking reproduction of the Statue of Liberty and a papier-mâché arch that was supposed to resemble the ones of Brooklyn Bridge. My job was to open the car doors, politely greet the clients, and then drive their vehicles round the block to an underground parking lot. There, two security guards wrote down the license plate in a register, and when one of the cars was reclaimed, they gave us back the keys so we could return it to its owner. We were running up and down all night without many breaks, and if I say it was a boring job, it’s because most of the cars were hired at the airport and total dullsville; but once in a while a Maserati, say, or a Ferrari or a Lamborghini showed up and the Armenian and I discreetly scrapped over who’d get to drive them. And, man, those five minutes at the wheel! He had more experience, of course, but sometimes I got to drive one of those marvels. More than once, when I’d gotten into a Ferrari, for example, I could have hit the accelerator to give free rein to the thoroughbred, to get the hell out of there, racing through the Las Vegas night, past the boulevard, to lose myself forever. If I didn’t do it, it’s because it would have brought me bigger problems. Where the city ends, the desert begins, and the desert is enormous and terrifying. Then again, there was the question of tips. The better the car and the more spectacular the alpha male’s bevy of beauties, the more disposed he was to impress them by forking out a good tip. And those extra bucks, of course, were very attractive, because they didn’t count in Wilfredo Bonany’s thirty percent.”
At this point Mike Franquesa went quiet for a moment as if trying to summon up the silence of the desert at sundown, as if wondering whether to tell me about some dramatic aspect of his story; so, to prod him a bit, I obligingly asked what other jobs he’d done apart from parking cars.
“Well, now,” he said, “the casino folk gave us one day off a week, but Bonany often used that to relocate us when someone unexpectedly left or was out sick. We were a kind of army of Latino clones at his service. So that’s how I got to work several times as a gondolier at the Venetian, a fabulous aberration of a place. My job was to take the gondolier round the casino’s canals, where water and sky were animation-movie blue. Every ten minutes I had to start singing “O sole mio” and stop at the fake Bridge of Sighs because a couple of hicks from Texas, Ohio, or Nebraska wanted to have a photo taken and a kiss, in that order. Among my other jobs were cleaning the swimming pool at the Las Vegas Country Club, being an Egyptian waiter at the Luxor casino, and picking up cartridges and changing targets at a seedy rifle range. But, anyway, all these occupations were satellites of the parking job, and that ended very badly . . .”
“Oh, yeah? Why?”
“Some Catalans were to blame. How about that? One night I was attending to two middle-aged couples in a car that had been hired at the airport, as I’d done so many times before. One of the women stared at me and, when her husband was giving me the car keys, blurted out, ‘You’re Miquel, aren’t you? Mireia’s cousin?’ I looked up in surprise. I couldn’t restrain myself, so—as Catalans do when they’re out in the big world—I said yes, I was, greeted them, and then we started looking for connections. They were friends of my cousin Mireia. We hardly knew each other, had only run into each other at the odd summer party, but I made the most of the occasion and had a good long chat with them. It was months since I’d spoken Catalan, and I had trouble finding the words. After a while we said goodbye and arranged to meet up for a drink after my shift. I said I’d tell them about something amazing they could do the next day. As soon as they left, the Armenian came over and, with a sneer, said, ‘Michael, huh? No Will, no Wilfredo?’ Somehow the word got out, because half an hour later Wilfredo Bonany himself turned up at the casino, hopping mad and accusing me of endangering his business. My name was Wilfredo. Was that so hard to remember? He was very sorry but I had to leave the job immediately. It turned out that the Armenian was from a similar organization, this time employing illegal immigrants from the Middle East, and his boss shared out the jobs with Bonany. So the Armenian mightn’t have been Armenian but Iranian or Turkish or whatever. My slip had nearly wrecked the whole structure, and the best thing for me to do was to hightail it out of there. Make myself very scarce.”
* * *
As I said, I’ve seen a lot of movies. I imagined Mike’s descent into Sin City’s circles of hell till he touched bottom all over again, but what he told me next was the exact opposite. In order to talk about his amorous adventures, he had to go back some months earlier. During his first week of parking cars, he left the motel and went looking for a room to rent. At the time, the United States was hit by a brutal recession, thanks to the housing bubble: Lehman Brothers, the risk premium, and the whole show. Sometimes, when he was riding a bus in streets on the outskirts of the city, Mike noticed that there were houses left unfinished, their gardens without lawns watched over by spindly palm trees, and frequently advertising rooms for rent. Many middle-class families in the stranglehold of crushing mortgage debts were struggling to earn a little extra cash on the side—money that wouldn’t be directly snatched by the bank. One day Mike stopped at one of these houses and rang the doorbell. The family who lived there, a couple with a teenage son, was renting a furnished room.
“It was pretty basic,” he said, “but it was air-conditioned and had a window l
ooking out on the garden; and the best thing was that it had its own entrance, so I could come and go as I liked. It was at the back of the house and even had an en suite bathroom, although the brick walls had been left untiled. That was fine by me. When I showered, I felt like I was a fugitive half-hidden from the world. The deal also gave me the right to use the kitchen, of course. They kept a special shelf in the fridge for my things, and if I wanted to, I could warm up takeaways in the microwave oven or cook. In this regard, American families are much more open than we are and always willing to share everything. Yet, even so, I found it difficult to mix with them at first. I kept ungodly hours because of my parking shifts, and often when I got home at two in the morning they were asleep. At most, the light was on in the kid’s room, where he was killing time with online video games. If I ran into them during the day, they always seemed frazzled or distant, as if they were ashamed of having a lodger in their house. I knew he was called Glenn and she was Jane and that they were more or less my age, but not much more than that. We agreed that I’d pay in cash every week, on Friday afternoon, and it was only in those few minutes that we exchanged the few platitudes permitted by my terrible English. They asked if I was happy and I sincerely thanked them, smiling and saying, ‘OK, OK!’—which works for almost everything.
“When I’d been with them for three weeks and I had a Sunday off, I ran into Glenn and Jane at breakfast time. They offered me coffee and scrambled eggs and bacon, and that was how we broke the ice. As we ate, they asked about my job, the casino where I was working, and I told them as much as they could know. Then I asked what they did. Jane said she did nothing, that she was unemployed, and then she looked at her husband. ‘I’m a loser,’ Glenn said, rounding off his words with a bitter snigger.”
It turns out that Glenn earned a living doing all kinds of odd jobs, under-the-counter stuff and shifty favors, all good for a few dollars, but what gave the family most financial stability was his job as a sparring partner in a gym where the brightest upcoming stars of Las Vegas boxing went to train. Years earlier, he himself had tried to make it as a welterweight but hadn’t managed to go pro. However, his trainers could see that he was a great sparring partner, well able to take the punches, a decent guy who didn’t take things personally. Some months before, as a result of the economic crisis, the insurance consultancy where he and Jane worked had gone bust, and all of a sudden the only alternative was to get back in the ring. This time he knew he’d always lose and he accepted that as part of the deal.
“I can’t say I was shocked by this information,” Mike Franquesa told me that afternoon, “because anything goes in Las Vegas, but, yes, after that I did see Glenn in a different light. From one day to the next he sprouted bulging muscles straining at his tracksuit. I looked at his knuckles and they gleamed like steel. His standoffishness made me think of someone who’s always on the defensive, always waiting for the final fucking blow, if you pardon the expression. In any case, his presence didn’t get threatening or involuntarily threatening—well, not for some months, at least. Not until Bonany gave me the sack. All at once, I was spending more time in the house, in my rented room, and inevitably Jane and I started fooling around when we were alone. Believe me, there’s nothing easy about getting involved with a boxer’s wife, however much of a loser he is; but love is blind, and there are things even the best intentions can’t control. I’m telling you this as a former gambler.”
I must have been looking incredulous at this twist in the story, or maybe Mike realized he was starting to sound mawkish, because he immediately wanted to clarify things. The morning after he was sacked, he got up feeling anxious and with no desire to talk. Thanks to his homesickness, he’d lost the only income he had in Las Vegas. He had some savings left but resisted working out how long they’d last. He knew from experience that the come-on of gambling, the lure of chips stacked on the table and money changing hands, was always lurking behind such reckonings, so he tried to ignore the temptation. That first morning, then, he automatically went out looking for work, doing the rounds of several casinos, offering himself as a valet parking attendant or anything else. He was willing to clean toilets if it came to that. But everywhere he went, they wanted references and documents, and he couldn’t comply. That evening, seeing that he was at home at an hour when he was usually working, Glenn shyly knocked at his door to ask if he was all right.
“Can you imagine? I open up and there’s this boxer with his nice-guy face asking how I am. The day before that he’d been KO’d at the gym, so he had a black eye and looked even more battered than I was. I told him I’d been kicked out because of a misunderstanding, but it was a temporary problem and I’d soon find something else. He tried to cheer me up, saying that they’d probably be quite happy to take me on at the gym as long as I didn’t mind copping an inoffensive hammering from time to time. He offered to put in a word for me so I could become an apprentice sparring partner. (In other words, and let’s be clear, this meant apprentice loser.) As tactfully as I could I said thanks, but no.”
Mike Franquesa spent a few days feeling really down, even wondering if the time had come for him to return to Barcelona, but his survivor’s instinct always won over frustration. He was fed up with watching television: too many channels, too many game shows that were no use at all for learning English, and this instinct of his told him he’d do better to use his time doing physical exercise and not brooding. One morning, moping round in the garden, he noticed that some tools had been dumped in one of the corners: a rake, a shovel, pruning shears that had started to rust . . . Without asking permission, he grabbed the hoe and got to work. The hot, dry climate didn’t allow too much floral indulgence, but he still enjoyed transforming the wasteland he could see from his window.
“I remember that I’d been busting a gut for about an hour, trying to turn over that gritty ground, when I heard a door opening behind me and footsteps coming closer. I knew it was Jane and assumed she was going to tell me off for the liberty I’d taken. But when I turned, I saw she had a smile on her face and a hose in her hand. And she only wanted to tell me about the local government’s water restrictions and the virtues of cactuses for decorating a desert landscape. That evening Glenn was nice about my prowess as a gardener while making it clear that my efforts wouldn’t go toward paying for my room. ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘It’s just to keep busy. And I’m getting experience along the way.’
“I worked in the garden early in the day, when the heat was bearable, and then went off to roam the city looking for work. Now I was adding to my résumé that I was an expert in gardening, landscaping, and even botany, but the days rolled by and I wasn’t convincing anyone. Meanwhile, every morning Jane brought me a glass of lemonade and stayed for a chat as I worked in the garden. That’s how we learned to look each other in the eye without embarrassment and exchange confidences, which, later on, when Glenn was there, we censored because of a kind of guilty sense of shame. When she went back inside, I imagined her sitting on the sofa, alone and lonely, looking for consolation in some novel by John Irving where, yeah, chance did change people’s lives. In that microclimate, our storytelling gradually got bolder. An excessively hefty cactus made her laugh about Glenn’s physical rigidity; a scrawny wild rhubarb plant reminded her of her nihilist adolescent son. I listened and laughed with a camaraderie that made her—and me, too—feel less alone. One day I asked if she’d let me search online for some botanical information about I forget which plant. She took me into the office and, under some pretext, showed me the whole house, the spaces that I’d had to imagine until then. Another day she asked me if I knew how to fix a tap. There was one in the kitchen that had been dripping for some days, and it was annoying her. She stayed at my side the whole time, watching me, and the kitchen was sparking with emotional electricity. We were both about to take the next step—you could feel it in the air—and if nothing happened then, it’s because the scene was too cliché, like something out of a porn movie. The next day a co
mment about the bad luck dogging us both clinched the matter. Jane asked about my Zodiac sign and we had the same one: Sagittarius! What date was I born on? Incredibly we matched there. Year—no, impossible—but that was the same too. Jackpot! We’re the same age. We came into the world on exactly the same day, and in Las Vegas, coincidences involving numbers are always rewarded. We started our affair without complexes, relieved at last, convinced that destiny had decreed it, and that it would have been unforgivable sacrilege against the god of coincidence if we didn’t.”