The World Doesn't Work That Way, but It Could

by Yxta Maya Murray

  Our two years at Zillow and our expensive educational degrees make us wonder if perhaps the situation in Boyle Heights is not, indeed, a zero-sum game and if the scary situation currently forming between BHAAAD and PSSST could be replaced with cooperative behaviors. Boyle Heights does not have to go the way of Soho or of Wynwood, does it? A variety of progressive economic experiments spring to mind: PSSST could allocate a certain percentage of its gross to a fund that would help pay for residential rent and food, for example; or PSSST could let Boyle Heights homeless people sleep at the gallery at night.

  But even as we at Zillow begin to imagine such utopian urban possibilities, we grow shocked at ourselves. We wonder if we have somehow been lobotomized by the Bernie Sanders cult or castrated by the unstoppable Clinton brigade, despite the fact that we still plan on hopelessly voting for Donald Trump, who is the only jackass around who seems to even minimally care about the kinds of marginal males who spend their time quietly sobbing into their keyboards while they should be writing zingy copy for Zillow.

  All of this is to say that the valiant investor who wants to take over the property from The Investors Who Would Like To Remain Anonymous should roll around the floor giggling with excitement at all of the Pinkwashing and Artwashing that is going on in Boyle Heights. The fruit is hanging so low that it has already been plucked and scrubbed and is waiting on a golden platter for your fangs. In no time at all, the PSSST gallery will be outpriced from 1329 East Third Street, and its queer and Latino artists will be staggering around Riverside stapling their art to utility poles. Intelligentsia Coffee, Anthropologie, and Medispas will occupy the ever-increasing rents, and condos will rise like ginormous Godzillas where creaky, single-story, circa-1960s bungalows now squat. And you, our dear, faithful Zillow reader, will be driving your convertible Merc down East Third Street with the top down and a twinkle in your eyes, eyes that will be looking beyond the Boyle Heights horizon toward the dingy but promising shires that are LA’s high-crime but still fiscally underrated Compton, Leimert Park, and Chesterfield Square.

  Features

  • Fireplace

  • Parking

  • View: City

  • Neighborhood: Desperate*

  “They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort,” he continued. “10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.”

  BRANDON CARTER, “Trump Slams Puerto Rico: ‘They Want Everything to Be Done for Them,’” The Hill, September 30, 2017

  In our survey, interruption of medical care was the primary cause of sustained high mortality rates in the months after the hurricane, a finding consistent with the widely reported disruption of health systems.

  NISHANT KISHORE, DOMINGO MARQUÉS, AYESHA MAHMUD, MATHEW V. KIANG, IRMARY RODRIGUEZ, ARLAN FULLER, PEGGY EBNER, CECILIA SORENSEN, FABIO RACY, JAY LEMERY, LESLIE MAAS, JENNIFER LEANING, “Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria,”

  New England Journal of Medicine, May 29, 2018

  After Maria

  I WAS EXCITED TO HELP. The response here, officially, was bad. A lot of us knew we needed to react to that somehow. We wanted the victims to know that not everybody here felt like he did. But also, yeah, that’s the word for it, exciting.

  I applied to go through my union. I’m a nurse in San Bernardino Memorial’s critical care unit. My union had asked for names of people who were willing to go there and do first aid, public health, whatever was needed. Our representative didn’t say anything outright political, but a lot of us didn’t like the president’s tone. He’d said, “They want everything done for them.” We knew that you can’t talk like that about patients, victims. I signed up right away.

  My husband looked bashful with pride when he saw me packing my bags. He told everybody at his work that I had been chosen to do triage in a crisis zone. He said he’d get his mom to help with our daughter and that everybody at home would be okay without me for a little while.

  “You’re an amazing woman,” he said. That made me feel good.

  Two days later I left.

  We landed in Luis Muñoz Airport in San Juan. A bunch of girls and guys from all over California, not just San Bernardino, were on the flight. We were very geared up on the trip over. Nobody drank anything, and we discussed how serious the situation was. But there was also a lightness about it, people glowing and speaking loudly and quickly, like they were on a date.

  At the airport, you could see the beginnings of the real damage. The lights were out. Hundreds of people lived in the hangars. Families sleeping there, eating there. We did first aid on many children. It was not clean. It was wet, there was a smell. We hiked up our bags onto our shoulders and ran out into the crowds. One mother cried as I cleaned up her daughter’s foot, which had been cut by falling branches. Another old woman came up to me and asked in English for penicillin. I had a few small bottles on me, and I gave her two, which I later knew had been a stupid mistake. At the airport, it was a populated area, and those people had some care: there were doctors and nurses. The older woman was really grateful, though, you know. I told people at home about it later. I said her reaction was the real story of the people there and gave a picture that folks in the States, I mean, in our parts of the US, weren’t getting over the news. Anyway, she was thankful. She kissed my hand.

  The government sent us cars to take us to the city, the capital. It’s a little over seven miles to get there on the 26 Expressway from the airport. The sky by that time had turned blue again, but power lines and tree branches still scattered on the freeways. We weaved back and forth on the road. Our driver had seen some bad things already. He was tall and nervous, sort of zany. He acted serious when the advisers assigned him to our group and told him where to take us. But once he got on the road, he zipped back and forth through the power lines, smiling at us through the rearview so that we could see his spaced-apart teeth.

  “The fast and furious!” he yelled, I guess like the movie. He kept laughing.

  We’d been in good moods on the plane, but we smiled at him with closed lips like we were being empathetic but didn’t think it was funny.

  San Juan. At first I thought, Oh my God, this is terrible. Some of the buildings were crushed, and people milled around, asking for food and supplies. That’s when I first saw the huge lines. FEMA set up shop in the middle of the city, and victims lined up to get applications for hurricane relief, if that’s what you call it.

  The nurses gathered into groups of ten or so. The FEMA officer in charge of our quadrant assigned my group an attaché, Brian, from Kansas City. I’d peg him at forty years old, and he wore a Bluetooth that he talked on constantly. He wore glasses, and he had to clean them with his shirt every five minutes because of the humidity. He wore the blue FEMA slicker. He gave us rubber pants and boots and our own FEMA ponchos for the rain, even though we weren’t government employees. He was getting pulled in every direction but would click his Bluetooth off to listen to our questions.

  “Where’s the deepest impact?” one of our group asked.

  “Have you segmented by pathology?” another inquired.

  “Is there a geriatric unit around here?” is what I wanted to know, as I’d had some experience with the elderly.

  “Well, we’ll see what kinds of trouble we can get into,” Brian joshed. He brought us to the Coliseum. There, we did a little triage again like before at the airport. The hundreds of victims made the space dirty, hot, and steamy, but guards and nurses and doctors had stationed there. From what I could tell, the Coliseum wasn’t like the Superdome in Katrina, where people did die.

  After a couple of days, Brian took us to the historical district, with the romantic pink and blue colonial buildings. We saw more flooding. Trees and a couple of cats floated in one of the streets. The police kept people clear. We passed by the Capitol, a white building with marble or concrete steps that had been covered in sludge. Three men washed the steps clean with huge hoses. Brian then brought us to a clinic at the San
Jorge Women and Children’s Hospital, where we showed a mother how to breastfeed and treated four children for dehydration. The power had all switched over to auxiliary. We walked around the plaza and saw other groups from our union walking around too and waved at them. We saw Mayor Yulín Cruz running across Avenida Juan Ponce de León. She had this blue sweater on her shoulders that dropped on the street, and she just left it there, racing to wherever. She had this totally fierce look on her face, just furious.

  The people had no power, no reliable power. The grid had gone out the first day the storm hit, on September 20. In the capital, people used generators. You had to come to the main city, mostly, to get help. FEMA didn’t really go to you. A lot of people had traveled. I don’t know how the folks from the mountain towns got to San Juan without any juice up there. Maybe the Army? And they’d traveled all that way just to stand in line. They stood in long rows, and I saw a lot of people falling asleep, just like that, on their feet.

  The most FEMA investigators I saw were in the capital. I didn’t see them anywhere else. In San Juan, they sat at tables and gave out the applications in one section and the water and beef jerky and cookies in another. Everybody spoke English. FEMA made their announcements on Twitter, though bilingually. At first I didn’t question it, because I use social media constantly. But then, later, I wondered.

  “What the hell are we doing?” Craig asked after a week of this. He was one of the nurses in our group, a big, tall guy with a red beard from Chicago. He’d just put a Band-Aid on a man with no mobility issues.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I’m in,” Latisha said. She’s a girl we met from Oklahoma, an emergency RN.

  Another girl, Ranee, wanted to tag along too. She came from New York.

  “I didn’t come here to be a tourist,” Ranee said.

  So we looked around and scrounged for the food, medicine, water, batteries, and a satphone that we thought we’d need. Finally, we also got a hold of a Rambler. We split.

  We went to the mountain areas. We had the rubber gear, rubber boots and pants and gloves, and our FEMA slickers. We ate power bars. We cursed and swore when we looked out the Rambler’s windows and saw the smushed cars and ripped trees. Meanwhile, we also talked some about the political scene, but then Ranee wound up saying she liked the president fine, and so I kind of kept all that to myself.

  The thing is, these people are Americans. They are United States citizens. That’s what a lot of people didn’t understand back home at the time.

  I felt better once we left. I had that feeling again on the road, that this was new and I was doing something important and big. Like it was war. I mean, it looked like warfare out there, past the city. The roads were just destroyed, often unpassable on account of live electrical cables, cracked surfaces, and huge palms that had been pulled from their roots. Boulders toppled from cliffs or mudslides and landed in the highways. Utility poles had tipped over. The mud ran thick and filled with rocks, and our car skidded out of control over the slick parts. Trash spread out everywhere in huge piles—plastic, torn furniture, hazardous materials like asbestos and electronics, chemicals, batteries, televisions. Aluminum hung on the standing utility poles and dragged down the cables, which shot sparks. About ten miles out we had to physically pick up the cables to make the car squeeze in beside the piles of trash, a big mound made up of what looked like a broken sofa and plastic bags and gas cans that spilled everywhere.

  The worst part was the flooding. We saw dead animals, dogs and cows. The water stood sometimes two feet up on the road, three feet, as we splashed through.

  About twenty or thirty miles out of town we saw a man walking through a passable part of the current with his little girl on his back. We stopped and yelled at him to get out of the water. When we got them into the car, we freaked because he had a cut on his arm and the girl had one on her stomach. We stuffed them with Cipro and cleaned the wounds as best we could and then drove them to shelter in higher ground.

  “Don’t walk in the water,” I told him, in English. I swear to Christ none of us spoke Spanish. It was stupid. A lot of nurses have some medical Spanish, but none of us did. We’d tried to get a hold of a translator in San Juan, but they were all doing administrative tasks and didn’t want to go to the mountains. I told the man, “There’s sewage, chemicals, viruses, mold. Don’t touch the water. Don’t let your daughter touch the water. If you need to drink water, clean what you get from a tap with bleach or chlorine tablets. Don’t get near it otherwise.”

  “Thank you,” he said. He had streaked dirt all over his face from where he’d rubbed it with a cloth.

  “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “Thank you, thank you,” he said.

  “Thank you,” his daughter said. She was like six, with light-brown hair and wrapped up in my sweatshirt. My daughter at home is four years old, so it was like, you know.

  “Yeah, you’re welcome,” I said.

  But at least we saved them.

  After we dropped them off, we zoomed through the flooding, and the water splashed into the Rambler from a crack I’d idiotically left open in a back window.

  What was he doing at this point? This was, like, October 3. I think he was throwing paper towels to rich people in Guaynabo. But the people in the mountains didn’t know about that. They didn’t know where anybody was or what was happening.

  I don’t know why the people in the mountains stayed so long. I’m talking about the ones that the Army for some reason didn’t get out. Mostly, it might have been because they just couldn’t walk or drive out on their own steam. But I think other people got confused by how smooth things went down in Houston, earlier—when, oh, Hurricane Harvey happened those last weeks of August 2017.

  I think the people in the mountains thought that if they stayed put, they’d get the same kind of help that folks in Texas got.

  We saw a woman standing on top of her house in Camarillo. She was a large, heavy lady, really broad, wearing a mud-covered dress and waving her hands. She was crying. The flooding had come up halfway to her house, and when she saw us, she started screaming about her dogs. Latisha in our group knew the word for dogs, perro, and when I thought about it, I knew the word too.

  “Here we go,” Craig said.

  “She’s in trouble,” I said.

  We ran out to save her. We pulled on our rubber pants and wandered through the water, trying to figure out how to get her down. Latisha found a ladder sticking through a smashed window, and we pulled that up and propped it up to the roof of her house. I climbed up first.

  The woman’s eyes looked strange, but I’m a nurse and so I’d seen that before. A real spaced-out look, like an animal. Maybe I shouldn’t say that. It’s just a human thing, though. You get animal when you get that scared. We all do.

  She fucking grips onto my legs yelling about her dogs, and I thought she was going to pull me down.

  “Wait, wait!” I yelled at her. Craig came climbing up, and he’s got a way with the ladies, I guess. He knew how to use his voice to calm her. She clambered up on his back and kept slipping down, so I held her up by her bottom, like to support her. We lugged her down the ladder somehow. Then we carried her over the water, the whole team did. She kept crying. She yelled at us about her dogs. We finally hauled her to higher ground, and she sat down in the mud, exhausted and talking excitedly in Spanish.

  I ran back to the house. Climbed up through the smashed window where Latisha found the ladder. The house smelled awful. Black mold. Gets in the lungs. The woman had been stranded for a week maybe, but I think more. The ceiling curdled or buckled or something. The walls had cracked with water damage. I tried not to breathe. I went wading through the kitchen, the water up to my stomach, pushing past floating plastic forks and spoons and cups, until I got to the bedroom.

  Two of those little itty-bitty types of dogs looked straight at me. Soaked and trembling. They stood up on a bureau, just above high water.
Those pop-eyed dogs. Chihuahuas. They started howling with their poor little mouths. I chugged through the water and grabbed them and hauled ass out of there before the ceiling came crashing down.

  I don’t know how I got through the window with a dog under each armpit. One of them started biting me. I was, like, laughing, I guess from fear. I gave the dogs to Ranee, and she ran over to the woman and gave them to her.

  The woman stuck her face into the dogs and just cried and cried. We all started crying.

  We looked at her feet and asked her, “Are you diabetic?” The word, thank God, is almost the same in Spanish. She said yes. She didn’t have her medicine. Later I learned that a lot of people didn’t know that it could go unrefrigerated, and they threw it away.

  We cleaned her wounds and bandaged them. We gave her insulin and Cipro and water and some food. We treated the dogs too, even the bitey one. They had sores.

  After a while some girls from higher ground showed up, and all of them starting talking really fast in Spanish. The girls spoke English and said that the woman was very thankful. The girls said that they knew the lady, and she could come stay with them because their house was undamaged.

  We dropped everybody at the girls’ house. The parents came out and wrapped up the woman in a blanket.

  I felt like a hero.

  Toa Baja sits on the northern coast, about twenty-five kilometers from San Juan. It’s a smallish city, maybe eighty thousand people. It looked deserted. It got really ripped up. A lot of the little houses there didn’t have roofs. It’s a tourist place because it’s by the water, which wasn’t perfect when the storm came. Later I learned that the Army had come and evacuated a lot of people. But they didn’t get everybody.