Whenever he described his job as a social worker to strangers, that’s the first thing they asked about: the horror stories. But he had yet to personally come across anything so black-and-white, so objectively evil. Instead, he encountered slighter moral deviations — a fair amount of substance abuse, sub-optimal work ethics, sexual promiscuity — in the context of three-dimensional people bounded by personal weaknesses, exacerbating the hardships of already shitty circumstances.
“When are you going to get the abortion?”
“Soon. Next week.”
“Where?”
Her eyebrows creased hard and she made a disgusted face. The mark of an uncultured person, Alex had learned throughout the course of his job, was the inability to suppress sudden displays of emotion. To be cultured, he’d learned, was to perfect the facade of equanimity. It had been a vestigial remnant of his middle-class upbringing that kept him from looking taken aback after finding out about her upcoming family-planning hat trick. He still had those middle-class values, even if his social worker salary now appended the dreaded ‘lower’ to ‘lower-middle-class.’
“Washington Heights Clinic. Why? It’s none of your business.”
“I’m just curious. Just interested.” He almost forgot that, typically, welfare cases were sycophantically nice to social workers during their monthly status updates. Gloria had integrity for telling him off, that’s for sure.
“Do you have anyone to go with you?”
“That’s not any of your business.”
“Sorry. I was just wondering if you needed anyone to accompany you.”
“That in your job description?” she asked, more taken aback than angry.
“I’m sorry … I don’t know why I asked. I was just wondering.” It said something about the disenchantment he was feeling that he didn’t even know whether that was part of his job description or whether he’d just violated some ethical rules.
“Is social services paying for the abortion?” He adjusted himself in his chair to make himself appear more authoritative, to give the illusion of an interrogative question rather than the embarrassing reality: he didn’t even know the answer. He was asking himself the question in his mind and his mouth unwittingly articulated it. Did social services pay for abortions? He was pretty sure it didn’t, but he should know stuff like this.
“No.”
“No? Who is paying for it? Is the father paying for it?” For a split-second he imagined himself a take-no-prisoners journalist, speaking truth-to-power, busting someone bilking the government. Dateline-type shit.
“No.”
The circumstances surrounding this ostensibly free abortion were still hanging in the air, but Alex’s drive to root out this inconsistency dampened when he remembered he was haranguing a fucking welfare recipient about how she was going to pay for her third abortion. On some days, he could convince himself that his agency was actually designed just to keep tabs on the morals and goings-on of brown-and-black poor families.
Javier, Gloria’s six-year old son, tottered into the living room, a big red Yankees cap matching his big red shorts and big red-and-white shoes. The kid’s fitted Yankees cap, Alex noted, was the type he was always too cheap to buy. A cynical person would recognize this child as the anchor baby. Despite what people may think, welfare doesn’t really exist for the childless. But a child is the gateway into The System, and once you get into The System — as long as you play along and make your meetings and feign patience with the inevitable administrative fuck-ups — you’re in The System to stay. And there were many administrators who had a vested interested in making sure The System was good at keeping people within its confines.
“Come here, Papi.” She lifted Javier up into her lap, bouncing him on her knees, and maybe even off her little baby bump. Alex was always a little surprised that his Hispanic clientele actually did say “Papi”: he always thought that’d been lazy stereotyping, like whites loving mayonnaise and tuna fish.
“And how is everything else going?”
Alex attempted more natural conversation — talk of family, holidays, usual shit — until these subjects just petered out and the conversation came to its natural end. Gloria provided him an updated resume and some library records to show that she’d applied for home aide and retail jobs. A couple months ago, she’d worked at a Payless shoe store down in Harlem (her rent had gone up, accordingly, per New York City Housing Authority rules), but she didn’t like the job and quit (her rent then dropping back down, accordingly). Despite her inability to handle the job at Payless, and despite submitting several dozen applications to apparently effective silence, she claimed to be optimistic about her chances of securing and retaining some entry-level employment, somewhere.
Alex remembered reading Gawker horror stories of despair about college grads sending 400 applications into the Great Unemployment Black Hole. It always surprised him — if surprised was the right word — to find that most of his indigent clients had admirable levels of self-esteem. They were depressed, certainly, but their depression was always blamed on their external circumstances, and rarely based on perceived personal or inherent defects. Maybe this was how it was supposed to be. But he knew his friends and kinda-sorta friends across various social networks griped endlessly about their failures and hardships (real or imagined), intoned daily about their Worst Days Ever, and turned one ambiguous look from a company superior into a prophecy of doom and failure, yet the struggling lower-rung of humanity he dealt with day-in, day-out managed a respectable level of stoicism and perspective.
He felt ashamed of himself for arbitrarily harassing Gloria for unnecessary details. After he’d left her apartment, he even considered going back upstairs and apologizing to her, but he knew that would just be a fumbling, awkward mess. He made the argument to himself that he’d only acted out of genuine concern for Gloria — he wasn’t sure if he was convinced, but it was enough to picture Caroline’s ruddy smile of approval. Caroline was his girlfriend, but in his mental life she was practically his spirit animal: he thought of her beaming, winning face looking upon him proudly whenever he did something right, and providing him encouragement whenever he felt down on himself.
He thought of her shiny face and took the “A” train back downtown to the Family Services Call Center.
>< >< ><
He should really listen to that jazz standard “Take the ‘A’ Train.” It was indefensible that he had both a growing curiosity about jazz and actually took the “A” train often to commute to work and to his clients’ houses, yet couldn’t find the time to listen to the track on YouTube or something.
He invented a fake beat and a fake tune and hummed it to himself — “Take-in’ the A train, T-T-T-Take-in’ the ‘A’ train —” all the way back to the Family Services Call Center at 132 West 125th Street. Back in the office, he found his coworker Kevin Tharani ensnaring a soon-to-be intern by the stairs.
Ethn-aring? No, he concluded firmly, that play on Kevin’s last name was too lame to be vocalized.
“So, guess,” Kevin began to his fresh prey. “What do you think I am?”
“Umm, hmmm,” she looked at Kevin, smiling toothsomely. She went through the options in her head. She was smart enough not to articulate her process of sorting out what ethnic group Kevin may belong to, in case anyone around her got offended. She was such an overachiever that, despite her smile, she’d kick herself if she got this guess wrong.
“I’d go with … Pers …” — she drew out the ‘z’ sound, to see if he’d bite and confirm her guess — “Persian?”
“Man,” Kevin exalted, slapping his hands together. “That’s awesome, everyone says Persian. That’s everyone’s number one guess. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Persian person, but everyone thinks I’m Persian. I must have been adopted. The best guess I ever got was Puerto Rican. Someone once said half Puerto Rican, half Jewish.”
“Well, then, what are you?” she asked with a zeal fueled largely by her status as a lowly prospective intern, and Kevin’s status as her potential superior.
“Let me guess,” Alex interjected. “If I had to guess, I’d say … let’s see, I’d say you are a light-skinned North Indian from Gutenberg, New Jersey who has practically no understanding of his background.”
“Dude, you ruined it, man!”
“That was going to be her next guess, I’m sure.”
“I know enough about being Indian. Meaning, I know what holidays I can take off.”
Alex turned to the future intern. She’d gotten the gig but wouldn’t intern until her next semester, and Kevin was just showing her around the place while she picked up her offer letter. “Hey, I’m Alex. I’m the ‘other Kevin.’ We were the same year in college, have the same job title. We used to be roommayyy – officemates.”
She smiled. “I’m Erin.”
“Nice to meet you.”
They all made small-talk, Alex pleased with himself that he was able to fit in his usual joke whenever the Kevin “Ethnicity Game” came up: “I’d just have guessed he’s whatever Ray Romano was, just the darker-skinned version,” and she laughed and everyone would agree he looked just like Ray Romano, except darker.
After some more small talk, she made her exit, spry and happy and bubbly, back to the comforting cocoon of college classes.
Kevin turned to Alex right after she left. “Dude, I’m impressed. She’s cute as shit.”
“Yeah, she seems cool. Cute as shit, high praise, indeed. I don’t know man, you should see my shit, when I put lipstick on it and crimp its eyelashes. It’s pretty cute.”
Kevin was undeterred. “She’s cute enough that even talking about your shit, she’s still cute. Even if I realize I compared her to shit, she’s still cute.”
Kevin refused to take a shit at work, so that was high praise indeed.
“So, how was Gloria? Glorious?”
“Always. She’s on abortion number three.”
“Damn dude. Well, at least whenever she’s pregnant you get to leave the office.” When a client was pregnant or otherwise immobile, they got to travel to them and pick up whatever documents they needed.
“Kevin, Medicaid doesn’t pay for abortions, right? That’s the Hyde Amendment? I wonder how she’s paying for it.”
Kevin shrugged. “Yeah, sure, I think. Maybe the community volunteered money to keep her from having another child.”
“Make-A-Wish Foundation. The community’s wish: not dealing with any of her children.”
“Word.”
Gloria stayed on his mind for the rest of the day. He thought about how he acted differently around Caroline and wondered how she’d interpret his harmless joking with Kevin. He wondered what it must feel like to be pregnant, and how envious he was that Gloria seemed to be completely secure in herself, despite being abjectly poor with one dependent and another abortion-in-tow.
>< >< ><
Alex liked his job, for the most part. It was rewarding (or as rewarding as routine could be), he had minimal supervision, and the pay, while nothing great …well, that was the sticking point. Being the only child of an industrious father, the inevitable low pay had been the issue hovering over his head throughout college and grad school. The joke throughout college was that a Sociology major concentrating on Poverty Studies was redundant, as a Sociology degree was a lifetime guarantee of a, shall we say, hands-on experience with the subject.
As such, the field attracted a few archetypical practitioners. There were the extremely wealthy children of privilege who didn’t have to worry about money, who had an abstract, almost alien relationship to the normal need to earn an income. Then, the most common group, were those, usually women, who were unusually passionate about social justice and practically fierce in their display of empathy and compassion and understanding, and saw this field as their natural calling. Finally, there were the others: the bitter ones, the ones who held an interest in social work but harbored doubts about whether they should commit to this modest field, but lacked the nerve to stray off course and now resented their more successful friends. It says a lot about the nature of his profession that, while so much ink was spilled about the supposed plight of teachers in New York, spend a private minute with a social worker and the resentment toward teachers comes gushing out. (One unarticulated secret kept from the public about social workers was their quiet, dignified struggle with teachers: they presented a united front in their common cause as city workers in constant threat of budget cuts, but a social worker would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to realize that, when it came to benefits, pay, and job security, they had gotten the short end of the stick.)
Alex had been a social worker long enough to know how to play the politics game with both the true believers and the burn-outs, and adopted some vacillating middle position that tilted a bit toward the latter.
At the advice of Caroline, whom he lived with, he tried to take stock during the day and think about what he should be happy about. To a ten-years-younger Alex, that sounded like something he’d agree to and then never bring up again, but he tried in good faith to stick with it. In that spirit, he told himself (taking stock, as Caroline would put it), that he was thankful for his exchange today with Gloria, and was proud of the way he handled himself. So much of this job was passive and reactive; there, he’d been probing and proactive.
All day, he felt he was reacting, putting up appearances with clients that strained the limits of his tenderness and sympathies while his girlfriend, his love, was doing business work: deal-making, conquering, doing. Caroline loved him for his sweetness, his understanding, but she spent all day hustling, riding the wave, hunting down commissions. She’d come home and be invigorated — made a commission, got a new deal — and throw her jacket down and announce that they were going out to dinner — her treat — and again he’d be reactive and smile and be appreciative, but made no secret of how he wished he could be the one sweeping her off her feet after some kind of actual success. That he’d spent the afternoon participating in the process, having at it with Gloria, was something … something good, he supposed. It was a lot more than he could say about how a lot of his co-workers handled matters. At least he’d reacted.
Later that night, when he went home back to Bayside, Queens, he was the one who felt invigorated. Be positive, he repeated to himself while riding the Long Island Rail Road. Be positive. You did good, and things are looking up.
“Hey baby,” he said when he came through the door. Not ‘baby’ in the coquettish way he usually did — spreading the word out like a warm blanket for her to be swaddled up in — no, more like a come-on.
“Hey,” she responded, a dulcet tone in her voice, maybe in recognition of his good mood. “How are ya!”
“Good, baby,” and he walked over to the couch and kissed her forcefully, and she returned the kiss.
“Why, hello there!”
“Hi!” And he mock-waved in the cutesy way he sometimes did.
They didn’t talk much about their day — when you live with someone you’ve been with for over five years, there wasn’t much of a need to provide daily status reports, and, to be honest, unless work was acting as a cause for joy or grief, they were both mutually inclined to avoid talking about the subject.
And sure, despite his moxie, the night transpired in PG-fashion, which he was fine with tonight. He clutched her while they surfed Netflix and ate leftovers on the couch — quite literally clutching her, he held her in a cute bear grip and kissed her left cheek while she stuffed her right cheek with leftover Tikka Masala. She responded appreciatively, both to the kissing and the grub.
He spent the rest of the night with her in such fashion, again putting off calling his friend Brian in San Diego.
“Aww baby you so good to me,” she told him after he cleaned up the
dishes.
“Nope, just good enough.”
“Oh, pshaw.”
When going to bed, she kissed him on the lips, sweetly. He’d kiss her back, but he didn’t know where to kiss her, as she had retinol on her face and always forewarned him not to kiss her when she was wearing retinol, and he always (or usually) obliged.
“Good night, Gobstopper,” she said.
“Good night, Lollipop.”
“Ooh, you should be the lollipop.” She tugged him teasingly on his hip.
“Ooh la la.”
They fell asleep holding each other, her first (because she always fell asleep first), him a couple hours later, as always.
>< >< ><
His natural inclination was to call Gloria the next day and apologize. All that bluster the day before about being proactive somehow frittered away, some gentle alteration of perspective, and now he just felt queasily guilty. But the gears of his mind were already whirring with the rote details of his day: client intake and SCRIE and DRIE forms, oh boy, and the weight of responsibility served its purpose in smothering any rash decision. Better to just let it rest.
Kevin walking toward Alex’s office stopped him from doing anything stupid. Kevin stopped by almost every day, usually around lunch. If Alex was in the mood to list things he was thankful for, working with one of his best friends was certainly something to put near the top of the list. Uncouth as Kevin could sometimes be — and seemingly indifferent and callous to issues he didn’t care about — he was a good friend to Alex and the only person at the office Alex spoke to on any serious level. Plus, Kevin was something of a cineaste with pretty impressive and wide-ranging tastes, which people didn’t expect because of his aforementioned uncouthness, his obsession with sports trivia, and his, shall we say, populist diet (case in point: Kevin had counted down the days until Taco Bell delivered to their office). With those attributes, you wouldn’t exactly expect him to be able to sing the praises of My Neighbor Totoro and Bicycle Thieves in between bites of his Gordita Supreme, but people had a way of surprising you. And even better, Kevin managed to maintain the eating habits of a college freshman and the workout regimen of a lame horse while still keeping a trim waistline, so he was doing something right.
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