Without a Net

by Michelle Tea

  By the time I am nine and translating my report card for my father, I know he is not going with me.

  IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, I HEAR THAT AMERICANS ARE TRYING TO keep up with a family named Joneses. The Joneses are a mystery of the English language. My mother says she’s never heard of “la família Yoneses” and I should quit worrying about what everybody else is doing.

  In our part of the world, no one is keeping up. We belong to a community based on the fact that we are all doing bad. When someone does a little better, there is an unspoken betrayal. You smile at them and when they leave, you talk about how they are lying to get welfare checks, working por la izquierda, putting on airs. When you are the one doing better, you sit at your kitchen table and say, “It’s incredible but true. Any little good thing you got, somebody else wants.” You talk about how celoso, jealous, people can be. It is easier to say that people are jealous than admit they have a right to want something better.

  It takes years for me to understand that the Joneses happen only in English, in houses where people cook in one room and eat in another. The Joneses don’t happen where people are called “white trash” and “spics,” “welfare queens” and “illegals.” And no one ever asks the Joneses if they are collecting.

  WHEN SOMEONE ASKS MY FATHER HOW HE IS DOING, HE LOOKS at his hands, studies the scattering of black scars and the dryness of the skin. His answer is always the same, “Ahí, caballero, en la mísma lucha.”

  When I ask him what it means to say you are in the same lucha, my father says it means you are doing the same old thing. Years later in community activism, that’s all I hear, that we’re in this lucha together. Lucha means struggle, someone tells me. The same old thing, la lucha. I sit at a lesbian collective meeting, my hand clasping my pen tightly. It’s hard to explain how in one moment, someone can translate a word and your understanding of your family and your history can be turned around.

  In the mid-nineties, the lucha changed. Neighbors began talking about working as home attendants. The closed factories began outnumbering the ones that stayed open, and the new jobs were in cleaning floors and baby diapers and serving food. Men from Central America arrived, renting the first floor of our home, eight men, two bedrooms. The whites who could moved out. People came from all parts: Mexico, Pakistan, Brazil, India. The men waited at the street corner for construction work that barreled down the street in blue pickup trucks. In our basement, the Spanish newspaper was marked in red ink with circles and X’s.

  My father survived the onset of NAFTA because of the Cuban revolution. A political refugee, he was entitled to citizenship and the unemployment benefits that carried us between his jobs. The newer immigrants and those who came from other countries didn’t have his privileges.

  At the unemployment agency, he sat alongside African Americans, Pakistanis, Dominicans, and Nigerians, and they learned the English words for the work they did, and how to spell them. “Embroidery.” “Seamstress.” “Machine operator.”

  Factories closed for a week, a month, forever, and we waited for the phone to ring. The calls came randomly. At first the voices were Pure American English, a language that rarely falters. It begins with a “hey, your dad home?” and ends with a “thanks.”

  I was never to say that my father was out looking for another job or that he’d found one, part-time. I was never to reveal anything over the phone. Just take the message.

  Sometimes the factory had not closed but “tell your dad to come at eight, not five, tonight.” Or, “Tell him we need him tonight.” “Tell him to call us next week.” “Tell him he can file for unemployment.”

  As the years passed, the factories changed hands and the callers changed. The American voices disappeared and were replaced by an English that stumbled all over itself. “Halo, Ignacio?” No, he’s not home. “Eh, tell him, no work, eh, come ehere efriday.”

  Even the unemployment agency changed to a new dial-in system to collect unemployment benefits. The brochure came in Spanish and English.

  My mother studied it carefully. My father made the money and my mother handled it. She wrote the checks, paid the bills, and completed the forms for unemployment with me. My father’s hands could do many things, but handling money was not one of them. Making phone calls was not one of them, either. His hands would wake me up with a gentle shake. He’d still be sober. “Your mother called unemployment and couldn’t get through. Come on, get up, call them.”

  The dial-in system was fabulously efficient. Much more so than the factories that closed.

  If your social security number ends on an odd number, call on Tuesday. If it ends on an even number, call on Thursday. Enter the weeks for which you’re claiming.

  The dial-in system was clever. They said it was to help us, to avoid waiting at the agency for a long time. I suspect it was the best way to handle a possible riot as the economy switched from the manufacturing to the service sector. Not making a trip to the agency meant you wouldn’t have to see in one room how many other people were going through the same thing. When you did show up (because the phone system didn’t work), there were fewer people, even though back on your street you knew it was more people than that. You began to doubt yourself. Maybe it wasn’t so bad.

  Not going to the agency meant you could avoid seeing the pain of other people. You didn’t need to know English to understand the agency man telling someone on the line that “no, sir, according to this you have nothing left to collect.” You didn’t need a translation for the immigrant man’s English words, “But I no find job.” And then came that dreaded English word—“welfare.” “Sir, I’m gonna need for you to get off this line because we can’t help you here. Get on the line at window four and you can talk to someone there about welfare.”

  Calling in, you could avoid that man’s eyes, the way his brown body, sheltered under five layers of clothes against the winter storm, turned away and left. You could avoid looking at his empty hands. You could avoid thinking about what would happen one day when none of us could collect.

  The only thing I feared more than my father not being able to collect was time spent collecting. At least when there was work he wasn’t around drinking and yelling at me as much. The world was cruel to him, yes, but it was hard for me to be angry and afraid of an abstract idea like “world.” It was easier to be afraid of my father’s hands. Easier to be angry when the blistered and swaying drunk hands slapped me on the back of my head. And there were other emotions that came more easily than anger: fear and guilt. Fear that life would always be like this—at the mercy of a factory closing, a paycheck arriving. Guilt because I—with my English words and schooling—would one day lead a different life than his. I just had to get there.

  For about a year, I worked at McDonald’s. I worked the register and got free meals. My job meant that if I set my mind to it and flirted with the right managers, I could become a manager too, with paid vacation, paid sick time, and a steady paycheck. So I watched my classmates play softball, run for student council, and drive their new Nissans. I’d get home and change from my Catholic uniform to my McD’s one. If I worked enough hours, I made as much as my mother did at the factory.

  On Saturdays, the manager created competitions to make us work faster. “The register that makes the most money before noon gets two tickets to Loews movie theater!” It was the first time anyone had ever referred to me as a machine. But I just smiled politely. I was proud of learning the register, its grid of prices. Big Macs, Large Fries, Apple Pies. But the manager was right. In a matter of months, I had become a machine. You had to shut down some part of yourself to the sexist jokes, to your hours cut when a new manager took over the schedules and didn’t like you. The job was like walking on a tightrope without a net. You are up in the air alone. Interacting with other people is an act of acrobatics. You never know who will start talking shit about you. You never know what will piss off your boss. You never know why they sent you home but not the others. A wrong word could mean your hours the
next week were reduced from forty to thirty-two.

  It’s hard to write this part of the story. It’s the part of the story I never talk about with my New York friends, writer friends, community activist friends, with anyone. We act the same—like we never worked with our hands. Sometimes we mention in conversation that we worked menial jobs, we stripped, we waited tables, we worked fast-food jobs, we cleaned diapers. We use those middle-class words to describe experiences that are not middle-class. But we don’t know how else to talk about them.

  It’s hard to write about how quickly I moved that Saturday, how jealous and ashamed I was when I came in a close second for those tickets. It’s hard to write about burning my fingers at the fry machine, how the grease of the place sticks to your skin, how you take the money you earn to the nail salon and get long acrylic tips and for a moment forget you are at a job that slowly turns your hands to cardboard. And it’s harder still to know that a good number of people don’t work and live like this. Harder still to know those people are your teachers, your friends who live in towns where McDonald’s aren’t even allowed to open.

  In college and after, there are other jobs, the ones you really talk about over dinner with friends. The job at the library, the newspaper, the publishing house. But after years of numbing myself to working-class life, an alcoholic father, a fast-food job, it isn’t easy to make myself feel something. I am too used to a world where trips to museums are something you do on class trips in high school. Our passions weren’t work, but what we saw on the Spanish news, our romantic lives, losing weight, getting pregnant, waiting to love, wanting to be loved, the specials on Bergenline, the freebies at the Macy’s Clinique counter with a purchase of $19.95. We talked about dreams, where we’d go if we had all the money in the world, who we would marry if we could pick anyone.

  Those office jobs after college meant walking into a place where people didn’t dream like that. They had jobs they liked, money-market accounts, paid vacation time. Dreams were something that actually happened. No one talked about buying a Lotto ticket.

  More than anything now I am trying to feel something rather than numbing myself to the gap between my father and me, between the past and the present. I get a paycheck for writing newspaper articles about unemployment, while he works part-time as a janitor. Friends tell me to feel accomplished, that my résumé is a reflection of him, his sacrifices and triumphs. That’s probably true, but it doesn’t resonate.

  The only things that do make me feel something are art, writing about him, loving him, taking pictures of his hands, listening to him tell me I should photograph this one scar on his index finger. He can’t remember how he got it.

  WHAT’S THE QUESTION AGAIN?

  AYA DE LEON

  MY MOM WAS AN EXOTIC DANCER. A PHOTO OF HER HUNG ON THE WALL OF our living room, a black-and-white photograph from her early twenties, sitting in profile with bare feet tucked under her. In the picture, she’s wearing thick black eyeliner and a sandy brown pixie haircut. A light-skinned Latina, her face looks like Jane Fonda circa 1960, but her leopard-print bikini looks more like Wilma Flintstone. The most noticeable feature in the photo, however, is the boa constrictor snake wrapped around her arm and neck.

  My mom grew up in the projects in L.A. Her European-American father was an alcoholic, and her mother was a Puerto Rican immigrant with a thick accent who couldn’t get work other than cleaning houses, even though she had a college degree. My mother grew up smart but poor. When she left home she worked many shitty jobs, including as a telephone operator for “working girls” and a retail clerk at Frederick’s of Hollywood. Being an exotic dancer wasn’t by any means the worst job she ever had. She’d tell me stories, laughing about how the snake helped keep creepy guys from messing with her.

  I would often wonder if I could make more money with my body. I always knew I could, and that I would, if I needed to.

  My mother walked around naked in our house when I was a kid, whether she was thinner or thicker. She never seemed self-conscious about her body, and I grew up feeling the same way. So when I was in college and tired of working for minimum wage, I would often wonder if I could make more money with my body. If I took my clothes off for pay. I didn’t do it. But I always knew I could, and that I would, if I needed to.

  I WENT TO A PRIVATE UNIVERSITY WHERE MY FINANCIAL AID covered room and board as well as books, so I was never hungry or in danger of homelessness. But there wasn’t a lot. I was raised by my single mom, and around junior high, my father stopped paying his court-mandated child support.

  My dad visited me at school during my freshman year of college. I was not yet eighteen and he was still responsible for me. We sat at an outdoor cafe where I ordered a croissant, then anxiously peeled off the layers and put the little half-moons of pastry into my mouth while my dad drank coffee. Between sips, he told me that he was going to start paying me the child support directly instead of to my mom. Then he gave me $300, his monthly payment, in cash.

  I had never had that much money in my hands at one time. We left the cafe, and he went with me to open a checking account. When I deposited the bills, I felt like a millionaire. I thought, maybe I can focus on school, and maybe I won’t need to get a second job.

  The next month, I waited for another check. It didn’t come, and it didn’t come the month after, or the month after that. The balance dwindled. Finally, I closed the account. I felt so humiliated. How had I let myself be such a sucker? I knew my dad didn’t keep his promises. Why did I let myself believe this would be different?

  When I graduated, I asked him not to come to the ceremony. “Graduating college is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” I told him. “I want to celebrate with the people who helped me do it.”

  I REMEMBER AROUND THAT TIME, A BUNCH OF FRIENDS WERE sitting around and one of them asked us all the following question: “If there was no danger involved, would you have sex with an average-looking stranger for $10,000?” I didn’t understand the question. Of course I would. I was already having sex with average-looking near-strangers for nothing.

  And the sex itself was by no means its own reward. I was looking for that attention I couldn’t get from my dad. Of course the sex didn’t satisfy me, because I wanted a deeper connection, even as I was scared to be vulnerable. But I was captivated by the intensity of the attention I got from men by dangling the prospect of sex. I know you want me felt infinitely more safe and powerful than I need you to care about me. So I developed a sexy girl persona who had a bunch of casual sex and didn’t get much out of it.

  For $10,000? What’s the question again?

  I HAD WORKED A NUMBER OF DIFFERENT JOBS THROUGHOUT college, many of them work/study jobs that were part of the financial aid package. One year, some friends and I stayed on campus during spring break and cleaned bathrooms in the dorms for extra cash. It paid much better than the work/study jobs, which were never hard, but they were mindless, isolating, and boring. I’d sit at a desk in a windowless basement and check out films to students in the semidarkness.

  It was in that basement where I decided there must be something more interesting and lucrative I could do, and I seriously considered the idea of taking my clothes off for pay. I proceeded to call all the art schools in the area to ask if they needed models. Sure enough, Boston University needed models for art classes. Easy money! And I didn’t even have to pose nude—it turned out that you could be paid the same amount for modeling with your clothes on, so I did that. Only once, though. I found the inability to move to be somewhat torturous. How ironic that stillness, not nudity, was intolerable.

  MY FIRST JOB OUT OF COLLEGE WAS AS A COCKTAIL WAITRESS. I learned to multiply by $2.75 because that’s what most of the cheap beers cost at the club where I worked. That place paid subminimum wage plus tips. I never bothered to pick up my last check because they calculated our taxes based on wages plus estimated tips, and then took the full tax amount out of our paychecks. The checks were for around $2, as much as the subway fare would
cost me to go to the restaurant and pick it up.

  Raised by a mother who had grown up poor, I’d been schooled in the mythology that getting a degree would open doors for me, and on the other side of those doors was the good life. I didn’t realize that it was also necessary to have access to people with resources and influence who could help you move your life forward. I didn’t realize that college wasn’t only about studying; it was also about networking. But as a Black/Latina woman, I found college hostile. I focused on surviving and getting out. It wasn’t until afterward that I really gave a thought to what was next, and by then it seemed like it was too late. So there I was, waiting tables with my Ivy League honors degree.

  Like so many folks raised working class, I’ve had to figure out how to navigate my way through the world of work without much mentorship. My life has generally felt economically precarious, in part because I chose to be an artist, but also in part because I carry inherited anxiety about survival from my mom. Only now, decades after I graduated college, do I have a life that is beginning to look somewhat middle class. I’m married, have a kid, and my partner and I both have steady, white-collar jobs. I even drive a boring, reliable family car.

  Recently, I’ve landed my dream career, writing novels. Really, it’s a dream side-hustle, because I can’t afford to quit my day job. In my novels, I have found myself often writing about women who do sex work. At first, I had no idea I was writing about my family. It wasn’t until years later that I realized my writing about sex work was part of my family inheritance. Curvaceous young black and Latina bodies learn quickly that the society is ready to monetize our tits and asses. Working-class females learn that our bodies and our sexual labor are considered our biggest financial assets.