And he found that person, Caroline, in college, at a stupid house party in their senior year. She was cute and gawky — her glasses made her look like a cute owl — and he approached her in a perplexing mixture of confidence and hesitation: he’d been confident that he wanted to introduce himself and talk to her, but hesitant because of his fear of weirding her out or coming on too strong, or being unable to suppress his just-below-the-surface desire to be feted over and loved. But fortunately, she recognized his essential goodness and sweetness and was receptive to him. That he wore glasses and was well-spoken and just the right height for her — about six foot — was a social lubricant, too. Living next door to each other didn’t hurt, either.
So, as part of his mutual love and respect, he played the kabuki theater role of going to wash his hands (“remember to wrap your hand in your shirt when you open the door!” was another bit of her hygienic advice he followed from time to time, i.e., when she was around to witness it). He made his way through the restaurant, keen to avoid colliding with the donned-in-black waiters and waitresses running to and fro, drinks sloshing perilously on their trays.
Holy shit.
What’s that noise used on television shows where there’s that overdramatic rewind? That shriek-y record scratching from the 1980s, that abrupt cartoon piercing rewind (skuuuuurrrrrrrrEECH). Alex practically walked backward, as if retracing his steps to move time backward to make sure that he indeed saw what he thought he saw.
Gloria.
Not just Gloria, but a resplendent Gloria — well, her version of resplendence — a fur coat wrapped around her chair, a put-together outfit with a bright, dignified necklace against her heart. She sat across from a middle-aged brown-skinned man in a fitted cap. The only other detail Alex could make out was the man’s smile. Suffice to say, the man smiled like a man not used to — or not comfortable with — smiling; maybe because he had a major front tooth missing.
Fuckin’ Gloria.
He could spy on them from the bathroom entrance. If only his timing had been sublime and he’d been able to spy on them at the end of their meal … he was dying to know whether she’d be paying the bill. If her clothing was any indication — and wasn’t clothing so wrapped up with identity precisely because it indicated? — then she certainly wouldn’t be counting on her companion to pony up dough for the yellowtail taquitos and ginger margaritas. He didn’t know much about fashion but he knew enough to know her get-up looked pretty expensive, and the fuzzy jacket was definitely the same sleeve stump that reminded him of a Pomeranian back at her apartment.
He kept them in vision, hawk-like, as he circled en route to his table. Fortunately, as “that guy” — white guy, early 30s, undistinguished brown hair, somewhat average if slightly overweight build, nondescript glasses — his superpower was going unnoticed.
Caroline waved at him animatedly. Two yellowtail taquitos were waiting for him. She directed him to them like a neon blinking arrow. “Oh yeah here we go!” He waited a respectful beat — she fucking loved this place — before going in with the more important news:
“Get this, I just saw one of my clients in here.”
Keeping with the jubilant mood, she oohed: “Cool! Did you say hello?”
Eating at Sushi Samba was apparently such a joyous occasion that the thrust of his cynicism was bound to be misperceived. Being a caseworker was such a charitable profession that everyone just assumed his role was to be an empathetic partner to his clients and serve no disciplinary function whatsoever. It was hard to pivot away from the cheery front he maintained when he was with her. Well, it wasn’t a front, per se, as he did enjoy being with her and she did make him happy. But there was a bit of theater involved with his enforced cheeriness, and maintaining it all the time chafed a bit.
“She has no income, supposedly, yet here she is, paying for her and her friend,” he proffered, filling in facts not in evidence to obviate her likely objections and make his case stronger.
“Well,” she offered, no doubt hoping to end the matter, “maybe it’s her birthday! Or maybe she just got a great job!”
He doubted she was so guileless — her job involved a lot of “brass tacks” business tactics and salesmanship — but something about their pairing brought out her cutesy side, perhaps because she loved his nurturing nature and did what she could to bring it out. He decided to let it rest — Sushi Samba, after all — and the cutesy way she exclaimed “her birthday!” tipped him off that it was at best futile and at worst selfish and destructive to push this any further. Maybe it was for the best, because avoiding the conversation let him stay convinced that something shady was going on here.
To Alex, Gloria’s complete nonchalance regarding her abortion was evidence of … something? Perhaps he was naive, but wasn’t abortion supposed to be … difficult? Weren’t there supposed to be some kind of emotional consequences? Not that there should be … just, wasn’t it just part of the package? Asking the very question felt patriarchal and provincial. But surely, drained of its political implications, there had to be something unseemly or at least discomforting about a joyous, expensive celebratory meal less than a couple weeks after your third abortion? Right? Right?
Alex and Caroline — two liberal-minded, empathetic, sensitive people — both had deep reservations about casting aspersions on others’ moral decisions, especially if those others were disenfranchised or disadvantaged in some obvious way. But surely, she’d have to agree that something didn’t sit well with this, right? But he could think of no sensitive way to bring that point up, which effectively disqualified exploring the issue with her.
>< >< ><
After their meal, they held hands on the way to the subway, got seats together, held hands on the way to the Long Island Rail Road, got seats together, again, and held hands on the ride home. Caroline snuggled against him, reading a dollar paperback of collected Edgar Allen Poe stories. Alex stared thoughtlessly and dreamily out of the train window, up at the deep inky purple blackness, sundry lights of cars, houses and street lights casting their illuminations, and then, gone.
Caroline went into the apartment and he stayed outside to call his friend Brian. Fucking AT&T, he had to call while he was outside if he wanted to get a signal; you’d think he was in Alaska instead of a borough of almost 2.5 million people, in the largest urban conglomeration in the United States of America. He half-wondered whether it was bad form to disrupt the merriment with Caroline to call Brian, but before he could think about it too much, Brian had picked up:
“Hey Brian, it’s Alex. How’s it going out in San Diego?”
“Nothing, really. Same shit.”
“Oh, ok. How’s the job?”
“Sucks.”
Alex knew he’d say that. Still, he asked. It was an unexamined but glaring condition of his life that practically all the friends he still kept in regular contact with were more disgruntled or lower on the social totem pole than he. It certainly hadn’t been planned that way; maybe he just felt a kinship to Beautiful Losers, a group to which he sometimes felt he belonged. It seemed that people his age were all burgeoning yuppie professionals, struggling hipsters, or the insufferable blend of the two, the trust fund hipsters. In New York, it seemed you were either ballin’ or bust (or a student, whereby student loans allowed the illusion of ballin’ until graduation, and then, bust).
And out in Bayside, Queens? Forget it, young people didn’t live out there.
All this was to say he wasn’t making friends too easily, which only exacerbated his natural tendency to stay in touch with anyone he could consider a true friend, including Brian. He and Brian had gone to Hunter College together, but Brian had dropped out sometime in their junior year for some combination of psychological, personal and financial reasons that he’d never fully articulated. After struggling for a couple months in retail hell in New York, he decamped to his mother’s apartment in San Diego, where she’d l
ong since relocated from Brian’s childhood home of Pelham, New York.
Alex’s friendship with Brian had been stuck in a rut for quite a while; hell, Brian hadn’t even been back to the East Coast since junior year, hadn’t ever met Caroline, even. The fact that Alex had an identifiable career precluded him from bitching to Brian, so he had to act out of character and dole out optimistic aphorisms, ostensibly for Brian’s sake.
“How’s school?”
“Stupid. Same bullshit classes, same indifferent students. The kids are stupid, the teachers don’t care.” Ever since Brian moved out west, he’d been a perma-student at San Diego Community College, taking film classes for some quixotic reason which may have seemed cool three or four years ago but was now properly understood as fucking pointless and depressing. Worse, because Brian left New York owing money to Hunter College — in an amount he wouldn’t reveal — Hunter academically cock-blocked him by preventing the release of his transcripts and transfer credits.
“See any movies or anything recently?”
“No, not really.”
There was no way that could be true, given the nature of Brian’s coursework, but whatever.
As depressing and predictable as it was to talk to Brian, Alex kept calling out of some potent mixture of genuine concern and friendship, civic duty, and perhaps an acknowledged iota of, well, not exactly schadenfreude, but perhaps a reminder to be grateful for what he had. After talking to Brian, he’d be a little more affectionate with Caroline, make sure he got a good night’s sleep, and try to put in a little more effort the next day at work.
>< >< ><
He pored over Gloria’s file the next day at work. Nothing jumped out at him, just the usual smattering of dated forms and NYCHA and HRA appointments. Her rent was subsidized at $362 a month. She made $288 a month in EBT and $200, biweekly, in HRA cash allowances. She might have had some money saved up from her retail job and almost certainly got some off-the-books help from family and friends. That’s all fine and dandy, and to be expected.
Investigating the finances of an impoverished woman was not inspiring. He felt he was doing a good job, yes, but he wished he could be doing something more ennobling. He wished Keith Ortega would call him and set up an appointment, they could go through his situation together, and Alex could put him on the right path to get all the benefits that were legally allowable. Maybe Keith would mention an elderly mother or something, and Alex could suggest SCRIE — Senior Citizen Rent Increase Exemption — and Keith would light up and pledge to look into it.
Then, months later, Keith’s mother would get approved, Keith would call up Alex and thank him profusely.
Then, months later still, maybe they’d run into each other at the Cloisters … eh, that wasn’t realistic … maybe just the area around Fort Tryon, and Keith would recognize him and wave him over. Keith would tell all his friends how great Alex had been, how Alex had hooked him up, and Keith’s friends would look impressed and see him not as a typical bland white boy but a cool, worthwhile guy.
The story expanded with a life of its own as he killed time on Google. It took him a second to realize he’d Googled the Washington Heights clinic where Gloria had her abortion, imaginatively called the Washington Heights Clinic.
He picked up the phone to call Gloria. The fervor of excitement created by his everyday superhero fantasy turned into butterflies of excitement while the phone rang, and then popped into nervous regret when she picked up.
He wasn’t being a superhero to her, not at all.
“Hello, Gloria? It’s Alex, your case worker.”
“Oh hi Alex, I know who you are. I got your number recognized, silly.”
“How are you doing?”
“Good. I’m doing good. Thanks for checking up on me.”
If he didn’t say something soon, there’d go the conversation. “Look, Gloria, I’m sorry, but I’m calling just because there’s, there’s a discrepancy here. I had to look over your files — my boss, Kaye, remember her? She is making us all prepare and present her an audit of all of our case files, and when I went over yours, I just remembered, I’m going to need a … I remember you said that you had received money from your friends and family. Was that money put in your bank account? You can’t have a certain amount above your bank account to remain eligible for services ….”
She saved him from rambling further.
“I don’t got any money. I told you already. I didn’t pay for the abortion.”
He needed to check his notes, he thought she’d said at one point that family members had helped her pay for it.
“I used all the money I made to pay off my credit cards. I don’t got money, I can print you out my bank information. I got like, less than $500 in there until I get my next payment from you guys.”
“Wait, what money? You said you used ‘the money you made’ to pay off your credit cards? What money are we talking about again? Did you get a new job? You need to report that income immediately, if you did.”
“Nah, what? I meant the money I got, like, I mean, I made it by getting it, getting it from my mother.”
‘Making’ money and ‘getting’ money were two vastly different things, and not interchangeable or easily confused, at all.
“Are you sure you didn’t make any money, like, earned income, over the last couple of months?”
“Nah. Hold on a second.” He held on the phone and heard rustling, emphatic Spanish directed toward her son, heard “Go” and “living room” in English, and then she was back:
“Sorry, just my son acting up. Look, I think actually, yeah I got something like only 50, 100, dollars, something like that, for a clinical test I had done, at that clinic I told you about. While I was going there being seen I signed up for this trial, they just asked me a bunch of questions, it took less than an hour. They gave me a form and I got like 100 dollars, I think. I threw the form out though.”
“Okay, well. Thanks for telling me. A hundred dollars is below the reportable amount.”
Now he was the one rushing her off. Shit, he had to leave for his own intake clinic in about ten minutes.
Now his head was buzzing.
>< >< ><
His intake clinic ended up being run of the mill. An old Italian women who lived in East Harlem her whole life was in court with her landlord because her dogs were supposedly too noisy (Alex referred her to Legal Aid); a young Puerto Rican male wanted his landlord to assign him his mother’s apartment, which he’d lived in all his life (Alex printed out a form explaining the right to succession in rent-controlled apartments and told the guy to find his mother’s lease and fax him a copy); a young family wanted help applying for EBT (Alex led them through the process); a skinny, honey-voiced Somali was upset that his landlord refused to renew his lease, even though he’d been a good tenant and paid all his rent (Alex introduced him to the Division of Housing and Community Renewal and went through the forms the man would have to fill out). Alex made sure to give everyone more-than-enough time and apologized to the secretary afterward for making her stay late.
His emotional state, when he thought about it, was warmly perturbed. Something felt awry, there was something unresolved with how things had transpired with Gloria, more questions than answers. He had made a commendable effort to help all the people who came in today, no one left less than satisfied — well, except the Italian woman: who wasn’t annoyed when they were referred elsewhere? — but still, he felt bothered, disquieted. Neither his effort at the intake clinic, nor Caroline’s company, nor the movie they watched together that night — a giddy French action movie called District 13 — nor the home-cooked meal Caroline made, nor the soothing bourgeoisie book he read before bedtime titled the Power of Habit … none of these did anything to take his mind off those uncertainties that nagged at him throughout the night.
>< >< ><
His expectations were fi
ltered through a gray, drained Great Depression he never experienced. He was not sure where it came from, really; maybe a corollary of studying Sociology is an inculcated expectation that, wherever there are poor people interfacing with bureaucracy, the situation will be bleak, the atmosphere Hobbesian. Visiting a pawn shop or a payday loan center (not to say Atlantic City, New Jersey, or a Yonkers casino) certainly wouldn’t disabuse you of those expectations.
But Washington Heights Clinic didn’t seem so bad.
He expected a cattle herd of pregnant women, huddled, pleading. Instead, he found a respectable but not overwhelming number of pregnant young women — almost all minorities, true — most alone, but none looking abject or miserable. Rather than the expected single harried receptionist chewing gum and offering all greeters with a “whaddya want?” he found a sizable staff of nurses and receptionists greeting patients and fetching them water, or bringing Spanish-language magazines to the reclining clientele.
Alex didn’t speak Spanish fluently, but the medical professional’s pronunciation of the next patient’s name sounded passable to his ears; if the client objected, her warm smile and gracious nods didn’t convey it. The doctor coaxed his arm snugly around his patient’s back and assisted the obviously-pregnant woman into the back of the facility and out of view.
Alex approached the receptionist.
“Hi, I’m Alex, I’m here to see Dr. Rampole about Ms. Hernandez. Gloria Hernandez.”
“Yes, please go through the doors and make your second right.”
He’d done something responsible and called ahead. A bureaucracy is the closest thing to immortality to be found on Earth, and, in his experience, bureaucracies responded to formal requests with all the rapidity that could be expected from an institution that had no understanding or concern for time. When he’d called, he’d been referred to someone in the records office — what he expected to be the first in an endless loop of referrals — but was mildly impressed when, a couple of minutes later, he was greeted with “Records, how may I help you?” The pleasant-sounding lady on the phone told him what he’d expected: that he needed a HIPAA release to review Gloria’s medical records.
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