Off she goes, triumphant. You only get twenty-four or so seconds. The rest of the girls make their entrances, the big redhead smiling with the bad dentures, the ash-blonde with the blue robot eyes sent from the future to kill you, the actually not bad Asian-American who took the place of the blond one that I’d been representing but who quit to make the speech on Vox and Canal 5. Who cares about any of them? Me and the mother are still crying. The mom looks over at me and says, “Maybe my bitch of a daughter will now give me some rest.”
“Jajajajajajaja!” I’m laughing. “Don’t bet on it!”
What happens of course after swimsuit is that it’s time for the next cuts, down to ten. So we had to wait. The hosts came on and said a bunch of nothing, and then we had to get through an intermission with a song by Travis Garland, “Want to Want Me.” The mom and I yelled along to the lyrics. We hollered so loud people are saying to shut up.
And then I got the call from my girl’s cell.
“Tito,” she said. “Come back to the dressing room now, please, and bring my family.”
“We’re not allowed back there,” I said. “Calm down! You did great! Focus on the next cuts!”
“I already know I made the cut.”
“Wait, they told you? You made the next phase?” Sometimes, with some pageants, they do tell you beforehand about the results. I’m not saying Miss USA, but it’s not unknown.
“Yeah, but that’s not why I’m calling,” she said. I didn’t like her voice. “Just come.” She hung up.
I told my team members to wait. I grabbed the mother and the boys. We ran to the dressing room. I thought she maybe had a fever or was throwing up. But when we got there, we saw like four producers, a body guard, and some assistants. And it’s not good.
My girl didn’t look at me. She didn’t even look at her mother. She looked at her little brother, the two-year-old one. She bent over and picked him up. She started kissing him all over the face.
“Hey, baby,” she said. “Hey, my baby.”
“What’s going on?” I said, to her and to the producers.
“She has a child,” a producer said. The producer was a new white woman I didn’t know. She wore a gray suit and had a Bluetooth in her ear and held three phones in her armpits. This producer woman had a look on her face like she’d been murdered from the inside already and this wasn’t the worst of it. “She’s disqualified.”
Now the mom went quiet and very still and looked at her feet. The older brother started playing with some of the makeup and talking to the other contestants, who had bright, shiny faces like they just won Christmas, which they did.
“We got a call from——” the producer said. The producer named the wife of my girl’s sponsor, the oil guy, worth billions. “Mrs. So-and-So emailed us the papers proving paternity, and then the girl confessed.”
“Yeah,” my girl said, still kissing the boy on his fat cheek so his grumbly face softened.
“Your client hid her child from the director at the state level, and so now we have to clean it up,” the producer’s droning on. “Which is just great.”
“Okay,” the mom said, behind me. “Oh, well. You did good, honey, very beautiful.”
I just stood there sweating buckets and didn’t say anything.
“Let’s pack up and get out of here,” the mom said, starting to bustle around. “But Tito spent a lot of money on this stuff, and we need to get it to the car safe, so she gets her money back.”
“My money back,” I repeated, and I felt so much fire in my head. I started thinking about the cash I laid out for the Botox and filler and lightening, the airplane tickets, the Hilton, and the loaner fees on the Herrera and Posen. I thought of my precious track record. I thought about my franchises. I thought about how she’s not going to be a brand ambassador and there will be no housewares. I think about how I crawled my way from Jalisco to Florida to become the number one or maybe three coach in the nation, and now my reputation is ruined. And how she lied to me. And how this and how that. “I ain’t never going to get my money back,” I said.
“You’re not leaving,” the producer said, to my girl. “We’ve had enough scandal. We’re going to replace you in the cuts, but you’re going to walk the evening and the finale. You’re finishing out the show.”
“Tito,” she said to me.
I had very strong anger about the money and my brand. Why didn’t I think about my sister, who did like the same thing? Stupid. The money made me say these evil, wicked things to my girl.
“You are a goddam user and you are a nobody,” I yelled. “You are from the sticks and you belong there. I don’t know what I ever saw in you. You are a thief. You don’t have the character or the elegance to be Miss USA. You are trash.” On and on, I go. I don’t know what I was doing.
“Get out,” the producer said to me.
“Tito,” my girl says. “I’m sorry.” She started crying.
“Never talk to me after this day,” I said. “You betrayed me.”
“Tito,” my girl cries.
“Madam, get the fuck out,” the producer said, to me.
I got out.
I flew back to Florida. I ate myself up with bad feelings for two days, and then got over the “catastrophe.” After that, I missed her like crazy and knew I had done something terrible to her. Yes, she had a kid. Women have children. My poor sister had my nephew Fernando. It’s natural, it’s good. Why do they penalize? My girl only did what girls do. I didn’t care about the lies or the pageant.
In the middle of the night, she and her mother left all my stuff on the front stoop of my office, all wrapped up in butcher paper and plastic in case any rains came. Not a speck on it, not a stain. But my girl didn’t leave a note. And she never answered any of my texts or my calls. I don’t know where she lives, if you can believe it. I don’t have her physical address. Sarah found one mention of maybe her on a city college website, out of West Texas, but when I contacted the school, they said they couldn’t help me except to forward the message. And then, nothing.
I saw her do the last evening-gown walk on the Reelz streaming, about a month later. I watched it in my bedroom, drinking. I was still bananas to find her then. We’d put her in a gold Zac Posen with a sequined train and a slit on the right leg and just a tiny bit of frill on the bodice. She wore five-inch gold platforms with crystals glued on the sides, and she had a matching crystal pedicure that I’d given her myself the day before. They didn’t shoot her face when the cuts were made, and then in the finale she was just a blur.
I already knew something was up, so why did I say all of those evil things? I knew already—I thought maybe she’s pregnant, she’s got a man, she’s got a felony. Maybe the brother. Yeah, I smelled it. But when the success came—after she placed in the top fifteen and then did the second swimsuit immaculate—I lost my mind. I just started thinking about the damn franchises and skin-care lines. I don’t know why. I can’t say why, when I already knew she’d screwed it up.
And that’s the thing that I want you to know if you want to train with me and my team, is that it’s easy to get confused. There’s so much nastiness. What you tell yourself is that evil in this business all belongs to other people but that doesn’t make you one of their whores. You play ball and survive, but you can keep your soul pure. Except that maybe the blond contestant with the fake Park Avenue la-di-da who made the speech on Vox and Canal 5 was right all along. I don’t know, I think actually she just wanted to get famous in a different way. But maybe she figured out what I know now, which is that you shouldn’t let wickedness touch you because it gets inside. I’d thought, well, my life has been hard and there’s been suffering for me, and so I do what I have to do. And I did. I won five USAs and three Universes and two Worlds and six Miss Americas. I’ve been profiled in People and Business Insider. I have two houses and a corporation that takes me all over the planet. And I’m an old queer who has been hated by cruel people every day of his life. So I thought that I knew what is
evil and what is good and how to scoot around the bad to get to the other side.
But it turns out that I didn’t know anything at all. And so I lost her.*
The latest flashpoint is PSSST, a 5,000-square-foot nonprofit arts space located in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights. . . . Despite its seemingly progressive mission, PSSST has recently received strong opposition from activists both within and outside the Boyle Heights community, some calling for increased dialogue with community groups, while others simply want the space gone.
MATT STROMBERG, “In LA, Fear of Gentrification Greets New Nonprofit Art Space,” Hyperallergic, June 3, 2016
The Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement is a coalition born from the complex specificities of Los Angeles. We are new and old friends who find ourselves at the intersection of multiple overlapping struggles. We have come together to confront the current crisis of evictions and abusive real estate practices in L.A., to question the role of culture in gentrification and the narrative of “inevitability,” and to push to stop displacement in its tracks.
Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement, http://alianzacontraartwashing.org/en/bhaaad/
The ongoing controversy surrounding art and gentrification in Boyle Heights caused PSSST to become so contested that we are unable to ethically and financially proceed with our mission. Our young nonprofit struggled to survive through constant attacks. Our staff and artists were routinely trolled online and harassed in-person. This persistent targeting, which was often highly personal in nature, was made all the more intolerable because the artists we engaged are queer, women, and/or people of color. We could no longer continue to put already vulnerable communities at further risk.
BARNETT COHEN, Pilar Gallego, and Jules Gimbrone, “Dear Friends,” posted on Defend Boyle Heights Facebook page on February 21, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/defendboyleheights/posts/one-of-the-new-galleries-here-in-boyle-heights-just-announced-they-are-closing-t/1200300376753621/
But voters who agreed with the statement “people like me don’t have any say about what the government does” were 86.5 percent more likely to prefer Trump.
DEREK THOMPSON, “Who Are Donald Trump’s Supporters,” The Atlantic, March 1, 2016
The Prisoner’s Dilemma
ZILLOW LISTING of 1329 East Third Street, Los Angeles, CA 90033
Heavy Industrial Property 4,716 sqft
For Sale $800,000, was $1,160,000
Zestimate®: $836,850
Est. Mortgage $2,169/mo. Get pre-approved. Listed by: Remax.
Facts:
1329 East Third Street is a heavy industrial property in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. It has an estimated value of $836,850, which is 94 percent higher than the $432,354 average for similar parcels in the 90033 zip code. However, the owners have reduced the price to only $800,000. They want out of Boyle Heights as soon as possible and so this is a perfect opportunity for a buyer with ready cash and an unapologetic disposition.
This property was purchased in 2014 for $975,000 by Investors Who Would Like to Remain Anonymous and who used it to host the incipiently defunct PSSST Art Gallery. These Anonymous Investors first sank money into Boyle Heights in 2009, which is when the city’s Metro Rail System built its light rail Gold Line subway station at First Street and Boyle Avenue and initiated the still-advancing Boyle Heights Boom. It’s too bad that the Anonymous Investors don’t have the stomach to wait out the current political controversy, because since they bought in, intrepid developers have brought many exciting projects to the neighborhood. These include a growing number of art galleries, which, unlike the minority- and queer-friendly PSSST, enjoy expanding revenue and so qualify as harbingers of the gentrification that makes Boyle Heights so attractive to pioneer stakeholders.
It cannot be said that PSSST failed as an art gallery per se because of its location. It just ran into some bad locational luck that will evaporate when the full and terrible force of the invisible hand soon arrives in Boyle Heights to bat it away. In the meantime, 1329 East Third Street’s values are depressed, and for reasons that we here at Zillow have never witnessed before. Since the dawn of creative capital, art galleries have been viewed by local communities and media outlets alike as the veritable Mother Teresas of the real estate world. Look at what happened in Soho, New York. Soho was a ditch full of minorities and sweatshops called “Hell’s Hundred Acres,” and then in the 1970s came along gallery owners like Paula Cooper. Now the New York Observer hails Cooper as a Lower Manhattan visionary and a two-bedroom on Prince Street costs a baffling $13 million. And take a look at Wynwood, Miami: in 1990, the New York Times reported on the Puerto Rican neighborhood’s problems with extreme poverty, drug dealing, and riots. Then in 1998, the “bleeding edge” Locust Projects Art Gallery exsanguinated all over NW Twenty-Third Street. And today, an old factory on N. Miami Drive is on sale for $6.9 million.
The same thing will surely happen in Boyle Heights. East LA gentrification is as inevitable as the seasons and as death. The only reason why Boyle Heights presents such delicious low-hanging fruit for people richer than on-sufferance Zillow copywriters who earn $27,432 a year and cannot afford even its depressed rentals is because of certain disruptive elements in the neighborhood. These elements are known by the amazing alias of Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement (BHAAAD). These anti-real-estate rabble-rousers want to expunge all art galleries from Boyle Heights, because they fear that these galleries’ presence foretells the priapic escalation of Boyle Heights real estate prices that is probably at this point unstoppable. BHAAAD are poor minority people who for obvious reasons do not want to see rising real estate and thus rental values. BHAAAD people, in fact, want (according to their website) “all new art galleries [to] immediately leave Boyle Heights.” Some of these BHAAAD no-art people also go so far as to quote Mao Zedong for ideological support, which is incredible. They have additionally run around the new local galleries threatening the art people with maybe violence. This forms another reason why the real estate values in Boyle Heights are temporarily underperforming but will skyrocket as soon as this nonsense is dealt with by local police.
Mao Zedong! He was a really good urban planner. We here at Zillow are joking when we say that. What we are actually insinuating is that BHAAAD people do not understand the market. The market is an implacable force for Progress, we at Zillow still pretty much think even after working in the web real estate business for two years since graduating from Connecticut College with $180,000 of debt.
The market is a form of Free Choice, unrestricted by governmental controls. People vote with their dollars and create the world that they desire through market elections as opposed to governmental interventions, which restrain liberty. We here at Zillow learned of the market’s awesomeness in high school, way before we hit undergrad and got an expensive East Coast business degree. When we were at also-expensive Choate and still believed that the world was our own personal steaming hot bowl of delicious clam chowder, we read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith taught us the basic lesson that the market allows for conscious evolution, a crowd-sourced path to progress. Which is to say, the social advancement created by the market is a good thing, or usually a good thing. It is typically a really good thing for people who got into Brown and who are not now collapsing beneath the Northwest’s gig economy but are rich. Such rich people who will be able to give you an even better pep talk about capitalism would be our Seattle-based Zillow founders, such as former Microsoft exec Rich Barton, who is worth $400 million.
Not that we here at Zillow are about to quote Mao Zedong! Zillow does not hire fanatics, even at the lowly copywriter levels. Zillow believes in algorithms, accurate Zestimates, cobranding, and company cohesion. But the BHAAAD people do not believe in these forms of rationality. For example, BHAAAD looks like it is made up of mostly Hispanics, who might actually prefer to be called “Latino,” though we’re not sure. Yet note that some of the
art people whom the BHAAAD people are attacking are also minorities. It is true that the two art directors of PSSST, Barnett Cohen and Jules Gimbrone, are either white or mixed Asian and white and went to Vassar and Smith, respectively. But Cohen designed PSSST as a “queer space,” and Gimbrone is transgender. Gay and trans people are still, as far as we here at Zillow can tell, minorities.
The BHAAAD people do not care about this and say that their lives are being destroyed by art-gallery-driven gentrification that is really a brand of propaganda known as Artwashing and Pinkwashing. Artwashing means sweetening the bitter gruel of gentrification with sparkly frosting made of art galleries and ceramics studios. Sprinkling studios and galleries among rapidly transforming warehouses/lofts and panicked scattering homeless people makes ubercapitalist urban upcycling look attractively progressive because artists are usually talented, socially conscious, and starving. Pinkwashing designates official supports of gay-friendly spectacles in order to divert public attention from authoritarian acts like dropping bombs on stateless people or cleansing cities of undesirables via urban renewal.
Working at Zillow is interesting. In the two years that we here at Zillow have been writing real estate ad copy, we have had occasion to draw on the theories expounded on by our unaffordable college teachers. In our junior year’s Organizational Behavior class, we learned about the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma describes how competitors who want limited resources (the chance at escaping prison, say) have a choice of either working together or defecting from their cooperative agreements in order to obtain such goods. In an imperfect world, full of misery, poverty, paranoia, distrust, and misinformation, prisoners usually fall into the false-consciousness trap of zero-sum-gamism. As a result, they “defect,” that is, betray one another in order to grab hold of the tasty crumbs that might fall from whatever mighty hand is controlling them. This usually results in their greater degradation and ultimate doom.
The World Doesn't Work That Way, but It Could Page 3