The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez

by Jimmy Breslin

  Nelson got a sack on his shoulder and stepped up to the bottom level of the scaffold. That was one. Now he went up another level. Heaving and sweating already, up the scaffold he went, looking up at Eduardo’s face and a roof held up by false hope.

  “Too heavy!” Eduardo said. By this time, September 1999, he had gone from the curb at Bedford to construction sites all over Brooklyn, one job leading to another. Finally he was part of the crew on this group of buildings being built by Ostreicher. This was the job he had first heard about in Mexico.

  “Nothing is too heavy for me,” Negrón remembers saying. He weighs 220 and can handle weight.

  He threw the sack onto the floor. The wood went up and down. Not a lot, but just enough to give him the idea that the floor where they were working was no good.

  Negrón stayed on the scaffold and looked in. There were little cracks in the few beams he could see holding up this top floor. There were only three beams across.

  Seeing that Negrón, too, had noticed the floor support, Eduardo asked, “Where’s the rest of the beams?”

  When Negrón complained, Eduardo’s friend, Lucino, knew Negrón was saying the truth, but he didn’t know what to do about it.

  “We could get hurt,” Negrón remembers Eduardo saying.

  “You could get more than that,” Negrón said.

  He remembers that Alejandro then came over and said, “Could we get killed?”

  “That’s right,” Negrón said.

  “What are we supposed to do?” Alejandro said.

  “I don’t know,” Negrón said.

  “If we say it, the boss fires us,” Alejandro said.

  “This is how he wants it,” Negrón said.

  “It’s wrong, but he told me to do it this way,” Eduardo said.

  “Around here,” Negrón said, “around Bedford, the guy with the money runs your life.”

  Leo came back and told Nelson to take beams from a stack of shining aluminum and lug them to the top level. First, Negrón went to the corner bodega to get a bottle of water. They had learned that soft drinks don’t do you much good.

  Eduardo took Negrón’s place with the cement sacks. Eduardo was sopping wet in the hot September afternoon as he made his way up the scaffolding with the fifty-pound sack on his shoulder. Eduardo struggled with the sack and was about to throw it on the third level when he slapped the wood with his hand. He felt it give.

  “I could knock this thing down,” Alejandro remembers Eduardo saying.

  And he remembers saying to Eduardo, “You think so?”

  “Sure.”

  Just inside on the third level, Eduardo had a circle of sand and a water hose and mixed the cement mushy, between dry and wet.

  On the sidewalk, Leo looked around, made a phone call on his cell phone, and left.

  Nelson Negrón threaded a rope through one of the utility holes in the beam and ran it up to a pulley fastened to the third level. He and a guy called Miguel then pulled the beam up. Miguel clambered up the scaffolding and got on the top level. Nelson came up behind him. Standing on the scaffolding, Nelson began to shove the beam onto the third level. He heard a sound, a screw dropping out of the scaffold. He went to put his right foot firm on the scaffolding, but there was nothing there. He was in the air, going over backward, and fell three stories to the dirt and debris.

  He has no idea of how long he was there.

  The first thing he saw was a man with no teeth bending over him and lifting him up by the arm. The man had on a long black sweater and good sneakers. Somebody said that the guy’s name was Louis. Whoever he was, he had just appeared, and as soon as he got Negrón onto the sidewalk and propped against the base of the building, he went away.

  At the same time, Negrón remembers that Leo showed up. When somebody said to call 911, Leo shouted, “No!” They had just finished three collapses around the corner and one on this block. He wanted no record of this one. He slid the door open while a couple of workers carried Nelson Negrón into the van.

  When Leo delivered him in front of his apartment house, Nelson couldn’t get out. He couldn’t move one leg. His back was filled with barbed wire. Somebody from the sidewalk in front of his house had to come out and help him.

  Negrón remembers Leo handing him $30.

  “You didn’t work the whole day.”

  He made a U-turn and drove off without looking at Nelson.

  That was the last time for a while that Negrón saw anybody. Soon he had a cane and long empty days in his apartment.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  That November of 1999, Eduardo’s brother José admitted that he no longer could live away from his mother and father. He also missed a girl in San Matías named Teresa. “Besides,” he told Eduardo, “I can help building the house.” He sent all his savings, a thousand dollars, home to his father for the building. He went to Delgado Travel under the el and bought a ticket to Puebla. He spent most of his time packing his clothes. There were shirts and caps and jackets with insignias on them. The others in the room wouldn’t have minded if he left some of them, but you cannot come back from America in such defeat that you don’t even have a big thick Buffalo Sabres zipper jacket.

  The little tricks of living with almost nothing were now brought into play. The day before he was to leave, José had to pick up his ticket. The woman in the agency said two identifications were required to get on the plane, and also to get back into Mexico. The Mexicans were copying the United States by having gatekeepers. The woman told José that his birth certificate alone was not enough; he could be sent back from Mexico and arrested upon his arrival in New York. In a Russian gift shop across the street a man in the back took his picture and for $10 quickly made a plastic identification card that said, “Bearer has top security clearance for this company.” A handwritten signature was at the bottom. The back of the card contained a brief lecture on the bearer’s importance to the company.

  His plane was at 4:30 on Saturday afternoon. Two and a half hours early, José and Eduardo carried one huge duffel bag to the travel agency; in his free hand Eduardo struggled with a much smaller but still heavy duffel bag. They threw it into the trunk of the Odessa Car Service livery car that he had ordered. Now on the sidewalk, a tiny woman with an old Indian face peered over the top of an immense box covered with black cloth. She had two young men helping her push it. The Mexicans call it a muchila, a knapsack, which she said held a stereo for her family in Cholula, but it was big enough to hold a bandstand. The woman’s wrinkled hand held out a clump of bills. The woman wanted José to include her muchila as part of his baggage. She put $60 in his hand. She swore that the overweight charge would be thirty dollars, and the rest was his. He took the money, and the woman and the two with her pushed the box to the curb. They pointed to the trunk. The Russian cab driver stared at the cigarette in his hand. They pushed and tugged the black box into the back of the cab. Eduardo and José barely fit in.

  At the airport, the line for the Mexican flight was about a block and a half long. Eduardo stayed with the luggage while José went for soda. Then Eduardo wandered over to the waiting room windows that looked out at the great plane with the AeroMexico markings that sat in hope and splendor in the sun. He told his brother that he could see his mother standing in the doorway of the courtyard as he walked toward her, with the dogs jumping onto him in joy. He wanted to get on this plane right now. So what if he couldn’t do it? He’d go to the travel agent and get the next one.

  The woman at the AeroMexico counter grimaced as she and another agent pulled José’s two bags off the scale and threw them onto the conveyor. She told Jose that the overweight charge was $68. He had to put $8 of his own to the overweight bill. José muttered. He would still have to pay several dollars more or nobody at the Puebla airport would help with his luggage.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  He woke up slowly. Instead of coming off the floor with a rush to get into the bathroom, Eduardo propped his chin on his fist and watched a pair of feet
go by. He was thinking of something, because he didn’t move, and another pair of feet whisked by. Ten minutes for each miss. When he heard the door opening, he pulled himself up and started for the bathroom, but someone else went right by him. He waited for the ten minutes and decided to add his banging to the day’s confusion. Alejandro came out. “The last,” he said to Eduardo. “Your timing is off.”

  They walked to the el on Brighton Beach Avenue.

  Two short blocks over, on Fifth Street, Angel Tlapaltotoli came out of the dungeon of a rear basement apartment in the frame house where he lived with his wife and child. He walked up the alley to the street and turned for the el, which was only a few doors down. Lucino Hernández Robles was up at six o’clock in his room two flights up over Kings Highway and the subway. His cousin, Julisa, was busy with her baby. They said good morning to each other, and Lucino was gone to his job. Blocks away, in an unfurnished first-floor apartment, a block off the el, Juan Sánchez and his brother, Angel, each 5 feet 3 inches, threw on their clothes and left for the job. Juan had been here for seven years, and his younger brother only a few months. All the family was in New York working. The last to arrive, the father, was asleep in a back room. He worked in a restaurant. Juan was often anxious about the entire family barely making it; an uncle who earned $500 a week in a fish market was the greatest wage earner. Still, he knew it was better than the small farm in Mexico where he worked “morning to the sun, even to midnight” and for virtually no money. There also was a brother-in-law far over on Dean Street who was in the subway going to work at this hour.

  The ones leaving the house in Brighton Beach rode the train to Smith/Ninth Street. They sat together and as usual had huaza talk about the young women on the train. They changed and took the local to Flushing Avenue and came down the stairs onto Middleton Street. In the morning dust ahead was the Job and the bodega next to the last building, 50 Middleton Street.

  Eduardo had a container of coffee and one piece of toast in Lupita Bodega. He sat with four others at a small table covered with linoleum and wedged between shelves of jalapeño peppers, sugar, onions, Mr. Clean, Tampax, Pampers, Ziploc bags, and racks of pornographic books. It was a chill day and they wore heavy clothes. Summer people in winter clothes.

  Hurshed, one of the Russians, had a can of soda that he held out for Eduardo. The others said Hurshed was taking the place of Eduardo’s father.

  The large red Speedy Pumping Concrete truck pulled up outside on Middleton Street. Its barrel revolved as the insides of rocks and cement were being mixed. There was a hose running from the truck up the front of the building to the third floor, where a heavy metal stand held up a spout for throwing off concrete. Eduardo held the handle of a machine that looked like a large electric floor waxer.

  Somebody called up, and with a roar the concrete truck’s engine became loud and the cement came pouring from the spout. Eduardo, on the third floor, pushed with his big spreader; the others working had wood trowels. The noise filled all ears.

  Over in a corner in the rear of the floor there were these fingers of light coming through cracks where the right wall of the structure should have been fastened to the rest of the place, including the roof.

  Juan Sánchez looked up and was surprised to see the light coming through cracks. He became frightened when he saw the bars of light growing larger. Already, after working four months on this building, he noticed that rainwater was in the bottom part of the building but not up on the third level. He didn’t know what that meant. He knew he didn’t like that the building shook when they poured concrete.

  He says that this time he called out, “No bueno.” But the noise from the concrete pump on the third level and the spreading machine Eduardo was pushing were too loud.

  There was no swaying or quivering. No time even for a warning gasp from somebody. One second to the other, Alejandro says. An instant, a shrug of concrete and metal, and the floor under Eduardo went.

  Down Eduardo went, so quickly that he made no sound.

  Down went Alejandro and Lucino and Gustavo and two Angels and Juan.

  Down they went so quickly that nobody screamed.

  The third floor fell into the second floor and the second fell into the first and everything fell into the basement. The rear wall blew out, as did a wall that was supposed to be tied to the building. There was a cascade of cinder blocks and metal.

  What were supposed to be metal beams holding up the floors were as strong as aluminum foil.

  Eduardo fell face first into three feet of concrete on the basement floor and drowned.

  There were shrieks in the basement from the dozen who were injured and in the concrete.

  Above, the cement pump still stood on one part of the floor that had not snapped. The pump kept pouring concrete down, the thickest of gray rains. The workers were stuck in it. As it covered the chests of the workers, it started to flatten them and stile their breathing. If one exhaled, the weight of the concrete on his chest prevented him from inhaling again.

  Angel Sánchez fell into concrete, and his brother landed on top of him. Angel was partially buried, and the concrete came down in a gray storm. His brother-in-law pulled him up.

  Alejandro went under the concrete and would have been gone forever except Angel Tlapaltotoli caught sight of him. He is small, this Angel is, and he was hurt and stunned from the fall, but he saw the spot where Alejandro disappeared, and somehow he took one leap out of the concrete and landed in next to Alejandro and stabbed both arms down through it and onto Alejandro. He yanked Alejandro’s head up and was rubbing the concrete from his mouth and nostrils. Alejandro was unconscious. But he was alive in Angel’s hands.

  How many did Gustavo Ramirez grab?

  All anybody remembers is the cries for help and Gustavo grabbing at people. Grabbing for Lucino, who was in shock and unable to move. Or at Hurshed, the big guy, whose head was above the concrete, but when he became catatonic, his head had to be held up.

  The woman in the bodega called 911.

  When Chief Dillon from the Fire Department arrived, he saw the concrete truck on the street oblivious to what was happening. It was still pumping concrete upstairs. Dillon’s aide, Chris Steidinger, ran up to the truck and shouted at the driver to stop it.

  Now Bill Pieszak of Emergency Services, just off the truck, came through an opening into the basement. Another cop, Dave Kayen, went through the first floor window.

  Sticking out of the concrete were arms and legs and the white oval of a mouth. It was strange, Pieszak remembers, but the wet concrete saved a couple of them because they landed on something soft. At the same time, Pieszak and Kayen were in wet concrete up to their thighs and could barely move. They began to try to remove people by first bending forward with their arms stretched out and digging at the wet concrete with their hands.

  Dig it and shove it to make a clearing around the body. As they made this clearing, the concrete came back like a heartless tide. They kept pushing the concrete. Pieszak lifted a body. Lifted it four inches. He took a breath, reached into the concrete again, and tried for another four inches.

  The concrete parted under Kayen’s hands and he saw a prize, a belt with a big buckle. The buckle was covered with concrete, but it had a value greater than any medallion ever struck for royalty. This was a buckle you could grab and pull up, and he raised the body of a mauled human out of the sucking concrete just enough to let him live. With Pieszak tugging at the shoulders and Kayen at the belt, they lifted.

  Four inches. Maybe a little more. Lift again. Four inches. Now again. Four inches. Lifting, lifting, lifting. Now slide a board under the body and up comes a mummy able to breathe. Because of the concrete, the worker weighed twice his normal weight.

  Now there were firemen and cops everywhere, tugging, heaving, and these voices were calling out, “Angel?” “Juan!” One Mexican, battered, dazed, and bleeding, tried to slip away after they pulled him out. Firefighters grabbed him. They were afraid he was hurt and would colla
pse trying to walk home. The guy kept trying to get away. He was more afraid of an immigration agent than of an injury.

  Eduardo’s body was pulled out of the cellar by ropes. He was one hundred pounds heavier with the cement on him. The body was taken to the morgue at Bellevue Hospital.

  In Woodhull Hospital, Lucino was in bed in a haze and with his body hurting. José J. Eduardo, the husband of Lucino’s cousin Julisa, was allowed in. She had medical knowledge and the husband had none, so of course she remained with the children and he saw Lucino in intensive care. José told him in amazement, “Do you know, somebody died.” He told Lucino it was Eduardo. It would be many months before Lucino could say the name without crying. Miguel called Eduardo’s father, Daniel, and said that something had happened. The father went into denial and hung up on him. Then Gustavo’s sister, Teresa Hernández, who had gotten several calls about the accident, called the father from her basement room in Queens Village. She said that Eduardo had died. The father in San Matías shouted, “No!” and hung up. The father called Brighton Beach and got only Mariano Ramirez, a brother of Gustavo and Teresa who’d slept on the floor with Eduardo and who had two brothers hurt in the collapse. Mariano didn’t want to be the one to tell Eduardo’s father. He told Daniel that he would find out and call back. Finally, after many calls, Miguel, the husband of Martha, Mariano’s sister, called Daniel and told him. This time, Daniel believed the bad news. He closed the cell phone and turned around and told his wife that the first child born to her was dead.

  Silvia was surprised that her mother was calling her this late, after she had returned home from the night job at the Olive Garden. It was her mother who called rather than anybody from Brighton Beach, because Eduardo never had informed anybody that she was his girlfriend.

  The mother said she did not know how Eduardo died. Silvia remembered him saying he had to climb up the building. In her mind she saw him dead on the ground, sprawled dramatically. Nobody told her mother or her how he actually died. Her mother asked if she was coming for the funeral, and Silvia said of course she would be there. She hung up and sat through part of the night thinking about it. That they had not seen each other in months was suddenly not important. They could get past that and live their lives. But the death left her blank. She had never experienced anything that had a finality to it. This did. At her age, all the days and months were part of looking ahead.