The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez

by Jimmy Breslin

  Blaich married Mary DiBiase, who was the photographer for the New York Daily News who climbed a fire escape to get the famous picture of mobster Carmine Galante dead with a cigar in his mouth in the backyard of a restaurant in Ridgewood, Queens. “Don’t you look up my dress!” she said to the photographers following her up the ladder. Her photo went all over the world. Now she raises two kids in Staten Island and once in a while gets a call from the New York Times and from some Catholic publications. She goes out with her cameras and tells herself, “queen for a day.” She bought $6,500 worth of cameras for sports events, and she takes pictures of night baseball games at Yankee Stadium while whatever her family does for dinner, they do it alone.

  Around the side of the building is Truck Eight of Police Emergency Services. Upstairs, always on the ready, is Billy Pieszak, out of Our Lady of Czestochowa school, on Thirty-second Street in the Sunset Park neighborhood. During his school days Polish was the first language. His home bar is Snooky’s, which everybody in his Brooklyn knows. His best souvenir is a New York City detective badge used to open the show NYPD Blue. It was given to him by Bill Clark, who once was a detective in the Ninetieth Precinct and went on to become the producer of NYPD Blue.

  There was an afternoon when Bill Clark and a television crew were shooting a scene in front of the precinct. A car with police lights and windshield parking placards pulled up, and a heavy guy with a beard and yarmulke got out.

  “Bill Clark, NYPD Blue? I’m the NYPD Jew,” he said.

  He introduced himself as Richie Ostreicher. Clark thought he was a Police Department chaplain. If there is one thing that makes an Irish detective back off, it is a Jewish chaplain. Clark, even though retired, did what every Catholic cop ever did, and that was to virtually genuflect. This came from the nights and days of the Satmar’s famous Rabbi Wolfe, who was introduced as an untouchable by the Brooklyn commander and who then walked into the squad rooms of the Sixty-sixth and Seventy-first and Ninetieth Precincts and without so much as a grunt of hello went into the confidential files. Detectives typed up notes without looking at him.

  Rabbi Wolfe’s main need was all accident reports involving Satmars. If, on rare occasions, a Satmar had a criminal matter pending, Rabbi Wolfe studied the complaint, then asked for a match.

  After the day’s filming, Clark went for dinner at the Old Stand, on Third Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan. Richie followed in his car. As he observed kosher rules, he ate no food. Instead, he had soda and talked incessantly about the police. He said it was “the job,” which is how police give their occupation: “I’m on the job.” He identified precincts in cop language. It was the “nine-oh,” not the Ninetieth. He was engaging and excited about cops. Clark recalls, “He did not have a gun. If he had one, he would have made sure that I was aware of it, that he was carrying. He talked like the construction business was his. But I assumed his father was the show and that Richie just did things for him.”

  When Clark got back to the Regency Hotel, where he was staying, there were flowers in the room for his wife, Karen, from Richie Ostreicher.

  Richie Ostreicher was married on November 25, 1998, and had the reception at the Le Marquis at 815 Kings Highway. The guest list showed Police Commissioner Safir at table fifty-four, Inspector John Scanlon at fifty-five, First Deputy Commissioner Patrick Kelleher at thirty-one, Inspector Vincent Kennedy at thirty-two, Deputy Chief of Patrol William Casey and Chief Tom Fahey at thirty-six, in addition to the mayor’s special assistant, Bruce Teitelbaum.

  The father had just bought nine lots from the city at an uncontested sale for $345,000. The lots ran the length of a long Williamsburg block, Middleton Street. He intended to build three- and four-story apartment houses.

  AT THE SAME TIME the construction work of Eugene Ostreicher was stopped temporarily by the Fire Department, Eduardo Gutiérrez was in and out of stores asking for work. A Korean who had a fruit store on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn hired him without saying a word. Eduardo knew that the job was seven days a week of twelve-hour days at pay of $250 a week.

  Eduardo became another Mexican sitting on a box in front of the flowers and fruit bins outside a market, the immigrant learning that America is a word that also means drudgery.

  The United States Department of Labor showed in a survey that a Korean immigrant starting work in New York received $500 a week and a Mexican only $270, which is an unrealistically high figure. Down to the bottom, the lightest skin color does best.

  One Korean store owner hired a Korean for $500 and two Mexicans for $230 and $270 a week. When his business slowed, he fired the Korean and one Mexican and hired a second Mexican for $170 a week.

  The study showed that the usual Mexican earned $170 a week for a seventy-hour week, the equivalent of 1,700 pesos; there was no such salary in dream or reality anywhere in San Matías.

  The Mexican population in the United States has reached six million. They wire home $6 billion a year. This amount is counted on by Mexico’s banks. Mexico’s credit line with American banks is based on the expected national income from Mexicans without papers in America.

  They are in the dark dawn doorways of coffee shops and restaurants, the bread delivery next to them, waiting for the place to open for the start of their twelve hours as dishwashers and porters for $170 for a six-day week.

  “Why don’t you go to school?” Angelo, the owner, asked José, fourteen, when he presented himself for a job in the Elite Coffee Shop on Columbus Avenue. José asked, “Is the school going to pay me?” Angelo shrugged and he motioned the kid to the kitchen, where he would still be ten years later.

  They all put their bodies up.

  My friend Maurice Pinzon was on an East Side subway when three Mexicans got on at the stop underneath Bellevue Hospital. One held up a hand that had a white hill of bandages. He cursed the job that caused this. He had lost a finger and the doctors in Bellevue couldn’t help. “They throw away my finger like garbage,” he said. One of his friends said, “Now you cannot work.”

  “Why not?” the injured one said.

  “How can you drive at work?” one of his friends said.

  The guy shrugged. “I drive with one hand.”

  In Brooklyn, the A train on the old dreary el tracks outside drowned out the crying of the women in the second-floor rooms. The body of Iván Martínez, 17, a brother and cousin to the thirteen people in the apartment, had just been taken off the street and carted to the medical examiner. He was here from Puebla, delivering pizza for $150 a week, when three hoodlums from the neighborhood shot him in the head, took $36, and went for chicken wings from a Chinese takeout.

  And Brother Joel Magallan sits in the offices of the Asociación Tepeyac de New York on West Fourteenth Street and talks about the trouble of trying to make it better. “They hired census organizers a year before. They hired Mexicans one month before. We had no chance. The new president of Mexico wants to have a guest worker program. You sign up in Mexico. That means none of the people coming here as guest workers can join a union.”

  He held out his hands. In the far suburbs of Suffolk County, two Mexicans who stood in front of a 7-Eleven store in the town of Farmingville were picked up by two whites who said they wanted them for day work but instead took them to an isolated place and gave them a beating. Some politicians in Suffolk thought that a central hiring hall would stop violence, but the county executive turned down the idea. He said it would be illegal to put a roof over their heads.

  In the room next to Magallan’s offices, one of his staff was interviewing a young guy who had been working at a store selling accessories in the Bronx. He worked one hundred hours a week for $200. The boss had tables set up outside the store and wanted the Mexican to work them. “I had a bad cold,” the Mexican told Magallan’s worker. “He fired me.” They had the Mexican get a witness and made out papers for $8,800 in back pay. Maybe there would be this one victory. Maybe not. It is so hard to be on the bottom in New York.

  Eduardo Gutiérrez bec
ame another of the black and brown who stand in the cold darkness of Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg and wait for someone to pick them up for a day’s work. It is his first morning here. He had come to Brooklyn for a construction job, but it was shut down for a while, and the Korean market was a bust, so he was on the street to look for work.

  There is no street with the past and present of Bedford Avenue, which starts miles away at hamburger stands and bars around Brooklyn College and crosses Nostrand Avenue to form a space where old men, with cheers still in their ears, tell of the day John F. Kennedy drew a crowd of far over a million in his campaign in 1960.

  After the college neighborhood, Bedford Avenue runs into streets almost entirely of color. It is here, a few yards up from the corner of Empire Boulevard, that it goes past high gloomy brick public housing known as Ebbets Field Houses, which stand where the old ball field had the Dodgers as a home team. So few know that it is the place where the most profound social change in the country took place. That was on a raw March afternoon in 1947 when Branch Rickey, the owner of the Dodgers, sent a typewritten note to the press box at Ebbets Field during a preseason exhibition game. “The Brooklyn Dodgers today purchased the contract of infielder Jack Roosevelt Robinson from Montreal. He reports immediately.” Thus changing baseball, and the nation, whether it realized it or not. Robinson was the first of color ever to play in the majors. This happened while Martin Luther King Jr. was a sophomore in an Atlanta high school, it was before Brown vs. Board of Education, before Harry Truman integrated the armed forces, before Little Rock school desegregation, before the lunch counter sit-ins of the South. Before anything here was Jackie Robinson on first base at Ebbets Field as the first black in baseball. Long years later, during a lecture at the New York Historical Society, Frank Slocum, who had been in the Dodgers office in Robinson’s time, was asked how something of such magnitude and complications could have been done with only two sentences, when any decent law firm would compile a foot-high stack of briefs.

  “Yeah, but we were really doing it,” Slocum said.

  Today, the Ebbets Field Houses and the school across the street from it, Intermediate School 232, the Jackie Robinson School, are dreadful proof that one magnificent act becomes just that, one act, when placed against the grinding, melancholy despair of life every day. Cling to the great act that can inspire and give hope. But you can’t brush away the effects of the disease of slavery and suddenly make softer the life of thousands of children who come out of the housing project with keys around the neck, latchkey kids, for no one is at home when they return from school. The school has a narrow fenced-in cement yard unworthy of a state prison, a yard with flowers at one end for the young boy who was shot dead while playing basketball. The school is one of the five worst in the city.

  Past the housing project, the avenue goes down a long slope, and the color suddenly changes to white and the avenue becomes one of Hasidic Jews, the men with black hats, beards, and long curls, the women with heads covered with kerchiefs.

  The four-story brick corner house at number 527 has claws coming out of the foundation. It is the home of builder Eugene and son Richie Ostreicher. On the side is a new addition, a garage for their construction company.

  The street goes around a curve and comes up to a park and bodega where Eduardo stands outside, looking for work.

  He was in T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, with his black cap on backward. And he was, like the others standing alongside him, a person of towering dignity. He had put up his young life to come to this curb and look for work to build a house for his future, and to buy book bags for his sisters in San Matías.

  He became one of the blacks and Mexicans who waited for people to pull up and beckon to them and take them away for day labor, cleaning lots, emptying trucks, rearranging warehouses. They stand here in their rough clothes and dark skin, mostly unable to speak English, coming from rooms without bathrooms, without kitchens, and if they must walk far to a subway, then they walk far to a subway. In the dimness they may seem like unkempt shadows, but as you watch them, they grow and the features are defined and the heads are raised. They are the aristocrats, descendants of the pure royalty of 1947 of their street. Yes, it happened long ago. And now there still is so far to go. But once you were too far down even to dream. Now, back where Bedford crosses Empire Boulevard, Jackie Robinson hits a single and right away takes a couple of steps off first base and the crowd shouts in anticipation. He is going for second! He is the only player who can cause a commotion just by taking a couple of steps off first. And take the step he does, and take second he does, and when he stands and brushes off the dirt, he becomes the hope for those millions and millions who had gone out each day, as did the generations before them, feeling only the deadliness of despair, believing there was nothing better. He stood for the dawn people on Bedford Avenue who take a step off the curb and peer at the headlights to see if anybody is slowing down to stop and give them work. Bedford Avenue whispers in their ear. Sure, so much is hideous. But the dream has been handed down to them. They take any insult, suffer any degradation, face every unfairness and injustice, yet never leave, because they are here for others, for wives and children at home, and nothing can make them quit.

  Here on Bedford, each time a car or van suddenly pulls up and the driver calls “One” or “Two,” the number of workers he needs, the street standers rush blindly to the car and go diving into the backseat. They go off without knowing where they are going or how much they are going to be paid. The word job throbs through their bodies unconditionally. Those waiting on the curb can be there for the full day. One or two, or at the most three at a time, jump off the fence and run to get a job without questioning. The jostling on the sidewalk is continual and causes despair among those left at day’s end.

  For all the valor spent chasing work, the Mexicans also are irresistible temptations, the nearest occasion of mortal sin: cheap labor.

  It is blood in the mouth of nearly everybody who hires.

  That left Eduardo with only one thing to do. He was on the curb at Bedford Avenue by 6 A.M., one of a pack of people trying to feed a family. One or two remember being there with him. One was Rafi Macias, who had had a job for $7.50 an hour at a luggage factory in Long Island City. One Monday when he climbed the factory steps to his floor, the foreman was in the doorway and told him that there was no work. The place had moved. He remembers that his first thought was of his son on a tricycle on the street in front of the housing project in Coney Island. He came right to the curb at Bedford. He remembers that he caught a job that day, cleaning a yard in Hackensack, New Jersey. The guy gave him $60 and that was all right. He didn’t return from the curb empty.

  Somebody told Miguel Aquino that Italians paid $10 an hour for construction workers, and so he went to Eighteenth Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street in Bensonhurst only to find so many waiting that he was shut out. After that, he remembers trying Utica and Fulton, where Italians in vans were hiring, but when Miguel started for one van, a Puerto Rican punched him on the side of the head, and Miguel lost his balance and the job.

  He, too, did not go home. He came straight to Bedford, though it was too late the first day. But he says he stayed because he couldn’t face his wife and children at home knowing that he had quit when he should have kept trying.

  On that first day on the street, Eduardo missed out on every chance and went home disgusted. He reminded himself that he had to get the jump on them. He was quicker the next day and was out front for a plumbing truck, and spent the day moving pipes. He came home with $45.

  Farther along, the street for work, Bedford Avenue, now becomes Puerto Rican. Flags, loud music, Spanish calling through the air. Then the sidewalks turn old Polish and new Eastern European, a street of people smoking furiously in coffee shops with leather jackets tossed over their shoulders. But so many Polish stand under the Williamsburg Bridge and look for work each morning. At North Eighth Street is a subway that is only one stop to Manhattan’s East Side, an
d it is a thousand miles away.

  Eduardo took the room’s cell phone into a corner of the kitchen and called Silvia in College Station for the first time. She remembers being surprised to hear from him, for she knew that he hadn’t asked her mother or father for her phone number. He told her that he got the number from a brother-in-law of her cousin in the Bronx.

  “How is work?” she asked him.

  He mumbled. She thought later that he didn’t want to admit that he had traveled this far to get hit-or-miss work.

  She told him that she worked at the barbecue stand in the morning and the Olive Garden at night.

  “I make minestrone soup for four hundred and fifty people,” she said. She was aware that he didn’t know what minestrone soup was, so she told him about cutting up the vegetables for it.

  She asked how many people were in his room. He told her six. She thinks that he didn’t want to tell her the exact number, eight, because he knew that she didn’t like a crowded bedroom.

  He asked her how many were in her house in College Station. She told him five, but it was only a two-bedroom apartment and she was used to her own room. Things would be better soon. Finally, he volunteered something. He had done his own laundry. He had taken all his shirts and underwear to a coin laundry and washed and dried them.

  “Make sure you tell that to your mother,” she said. “She won’t have to do your wash anymore. I won’t either.”

  That got him flustered and the call was over. He said he would call again, and he did. But he made the call when he came home after work and she was just leaving for the night job at the Olive Garden. She could say only a few words. On the next couple of calls, the time difference caused him to miss her. Silvia remembers trying him once on the cell phone and getting no answer.