The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez

by Jimmy Breslin

  BACK IN NEW YORK, a social worker, Awilda Cordero, drove Angel and Mariano to the morgue. They went into a conference room, and one of the assistants came in with color pictures of Eduardo’s corpse. The two looked at the picture, said, “Sí,” and the identification was through. It took several more days for the body to be released because immigration people had to be notified that the young man was here without papers. This is poor form for a dead body.

  That Sunday afternoon, with the sky gray and the wide commercial street outside desolate, Eduardo’s body was in a white casket in a closet of grief at the Lopez Funeral Home in Brooklyn. He was in a good white shirt, and the black cap he loved sat atop the casket. Everybody who was not in the hospital came there in rough clothes and sat in silence. Gustavo was angry and kept mopping his forehead, which was still bleeding.

  The cost of getting the body to Mexico was paid by the Red Cross and the New York City Central Labor Trades Council, whose members in the construction trades are mostly white and from New Jersey, and whose officers are in their element at cocktail parties in Manhattan with politicians. The labor leaders paused to pay for the funeral and get in the newspapers.

  The case was in the jurisdiction of the Kings County District Attorney’s office, whose normal tenacity in pursuit of justice slowed to a stroll when faced with the history of the Board of Elections, in whose records are carried no list of winners who attack Hasidim.

  At this moment, into the ominous gloom and wet smell of the collapsed building on Middleton Street came James Vanderberg of the Department of Labor. He was another of these people who exude mildness and can destroy you. He was slim and young. His job was to find out how this poor Mexican got killed. But he had to do it with a lightened step. Under the OSHA rules, a violation of safety rules causing the death of a worker is a misdemeanor. The maximum for the misdemeanor is six months in prison. There is no restitution for the victim. But if a felony could be made out of Ostreicher’s lying to the federal agent, Caterina, then there was a chance that something could be gained out of the sourness and misery of the matter. For the felony would be punishable by from zero to six years in prison. Restitution for the Gutiérrez death could somehow be made a part of any plea agreement, and there certainly would be one; Ostreicher could face no jury. The fine could then be substantial and Eduardo’s family, which had only been hurt until now, could receive some financial help. Eduardo had drowned in concrete during great arguing on Mount Olympus about world commerce and work. Eduardo had no understanding of the names of the technologies that caused fists to wave on the streets of Seattle and Genoa. Nor could he name the diversities of trade, nor the new merchandise that comes off the shelf not by hand but by a tapping key whose message flies to the sky and back to the shelf. Yet Eduardo represented the most invaluable part of the economy of the world. He was cheap labor.

  IN A VACANT CORNER OF THE airport in Mexico City, international trade was represented by the casket of Eduardo, who had died in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, and was in Mexico to be buried. He was put on a van. Mariano, who had brought the body home, cried as he got into the van, which drove down to Eduardo’s house and the funeral.

  In College Station, Silvia sat one last night before deciding that she couldn’t go to the funeral. Getting to San Matías was simple. But then she would have to sneak across the border again, and that could take days and weeks, particularly if she got turned back. Surely she would lose both her jobs. She thought of the railroad tracks in the night with snakes in the brush. That settled it. She would sob for Eduardo and then live for the living.

  The order of grieving in San Matías calls for nine days of prayers before the burial. By the time the body arrived in the yard at Calle Libre, eight days had passed, and the father agreed with the priest that the young man should be buried on the next morning.

  The night before the funeral, Eduardo’s casket was in a room that had been cleared out and was across from his new blue room. There was no upstairs because there was no money to build. Eduardo’s new room shrugs off storms and sun. It is painted blue with white trim. It is a glorious room. The casket was surrounded by candles, and there was wailing and fainting.

  Instead of many prayers and drinks, there were only prayers that night. On the morning of the funeral one of his cousins, a woman with a face of the Aztecs, bit her lip and began hauling a bucket of water out of the well. One hand over the other, arms straining as she pulled the rope. Now the large pail came out with the water sparkling in the sun, and some of this reflected onto the wall of the room Eduardo died for.

  They carried Eduardo’s body through the heat and among the children running with dogs alongside, the large crowd pushing to get closer to the casket of Eduardo Daniel Gutiérrez, who drowned in concrete in Brooklyn at age twenty-one while trying to make money.

  They went to the old yellow church with red trim, with candlelight flickering on the gold wreaths and babies crying and the sound of children’s feet. The people stood outside the doors and threw rice to symbolize the marriage Eduardo never had.

  Then they walked the streets to the cemetery. They were in the middle of the cobblestone walk that went up to the cemetery gates. The walk went past stacked tires and the clotheslines of families living in shacks, and the crowd threw white carnations at the casket.

  Nine young women stepped out of the crowd. One, whose name was Sol, wore a white sweater and a heartbreakingly young face. She went up to the casket and took the place of a young man. She held the casket handles underhand. Eight other young women took the places of the young men who had been carrying it.

  Now there were nine young women, each of whom held the handles underhand.

  A mariachi band at the end of the procession played a song called “Las Flores.” As the trumpets sounded in the hot sunlight, the band leader, wearing a powder blue suit and black gloves, began singing the song.

  On the left side of the casket, Sol swayed back on her right foot. So did the other young women on her side. The young women on the other side swayed forward with the casket.

  Now the young women on the left side stopped going back and swayed forward. All hands gripped the casket handles, and the young faces were determined as they swayed with the heavy box. The young women on the right side stepped back.

  As the left side came forward, all the young women caused the casket to dance a couple of feet closer to the cemetery gate.

  Young women learn this dance just by living here. It is done only with the caskets of women who die unmarried or a young man like Eduardo Daniel Gutiérrez, who drowned in concrete at age twenty-one in Williamsburg in Brooklyn.

  The young women carrying his casket were friends of Eduardo. Their faces were determined. Soon, however, they cried as they made Eduardo’s casket dance. Sway forward on the left leg, sway back on the right foot, sway forward, sway back, sway, sway, sway, dance the young man to his grave.

  In front of the cemetery, as the mariachi singer cried out the last notes of his song about flowers, the young women had their places at the casket taken by older men. The older men now rocked the casket as if it were a rowboat.

  Three young men sat atop the cemetery arch and threw candy down. The kids raced for it.

  Inside the graveyard there was a tangle of small graves covered with dead flowers. The grave had been dug by friends of the father, Eduardo Daniel. The cemetery is staffed only by flies.

  Before the casket was lowered, Eduardo’s mother, Teresa, was at the foot of the casket, and her face, uncovered, held a thousand years of grief. All through her roots, lifetime after lifetime, somebody young had died in every one of the families that came before her. At moments like this, her only emotion was dull acceptance.

  Mariano Ramirez Torres tried to bury his round young face into the top of the casket. In the throng pushing forward to be near the grave was his mother, Angelina. With the two sons hurt in Brooklyn and not working, and the other son here to mourn, she said that there were no money orders from Brookl
yn. She is raising the four children of one of the injured sons, Gustavo.

  At the graveside the grandmother, Angelina, was racked with grief and necessity.

  There were at least half a dozen men standing in the fresh dirt at the lip of the grave. Two men in white polo shirts were in the hole. When they pushed and tugged the casket into place, they got on either side of the casket and began slapping new red bricks, baked in this shack town, atop the casket. They wanted a brick wall to protect the top of the casket when the dirt and sand would be thrown down on it.

  Eduardo Gutiérrez had already drowned once.

  EPILOGUE

  On June 15, 2001, the New York City Central Labor Trades Council ran a media bus tour of South Eighth Street in Williamsburg, where another Mexican immigrant from Puebla, Rogelio Daze Villaneuva, was crushed to death. He lost his life only blocks away from where Eduardo had perished.

  A Hi-Lo forklift caused a ramp to collapse on the demolition job of an old hot dog factory that was uninspected.

  In the doorway of a building next door, a gray-haired man wearing a shirt with the words Kabila’s Knishes on the front pocket said, “No papers.”

  “The contractor?”

  “No, the Mexicans. They have no papers, no green card. No paper, no pay. Cheap pay. Five, six dollar an hour. Nobody looks at the building.”

  Rogelio, an immigrant with no papers of any sort, had been making about a third of union wages. He had four children.

  The union announced that the bus ride was to “shine a bright, public light on violations of basic human rights of workers in New York City.”

  Eduardo’s father, Daniel, arrived in Brooklyn unnoticed at that time. He was here for depositions for lawsuits. The lawyer had sent tickets. He got off the plane with two hundred dollars. Two hundred American, he said to himself. I can stay here for a month.

  He was on Lorimer Street, the one behind the ruined buildings on Middleton Street where his son died. This is not using the name Lorimer Street as geography in a story. Rather, the attempt at justice was made on that dull, treeless block.

  Daniel crouched and pushed through a narrow, ragged opening in a chain-link fence and trudged through this lot filled with debris that was covered with weeds. He came to the rear of the collapsed buildings where Eduardo drowned in concrete.

  The father was forty-six. Suddenly, he seemed so much older. Pain spilled from the dark eyes and ran through the small creases around his eyes and into the ravines and rivulets of his cheeks and mouth. He looked over seventy.

  Then the sunlight splashed the brown face and the lines softened and he was forty-six again. A sadness weighs on his eyes, and he looks down to hide this.

  The construction site is silent. A metal sign says it is in the hands of a demolition company. On the left, the last two units have wood ladders of four steps leading up to the second level. The one next to last has a basement yawning dark and wet. Daniel looks into the open first floor. He shakes his head, then holds his thumb and forefinger far apart. He points at a space between the wall and the floor above.

  At the ruins of the last site, the one that was going to be numbered 50 Middleton, he went up the ladder. For so many nights and days in San Matías he tried to imagine this place. But now there was only a pile of cinder blocks and bricks and twisted metal that has an evil shine.

  The sound of a bus idling comes from Middleton Street.

  Suddenly, and in a quiet voice, Daniel says that he can see Eduardo at work. “He is talking to the other workers,” Daniel says. “He is happy and young.”

  Now he steps up to the vision that has dissolved. He sees the pile of bricks at the place where the floors caved and his son dropped face first into a lake of concrete covering the basement.

  The father’s face does not change. He does not talk. The moment causes tongue and face to be frozen. This is where his first-born son died. Walk up to the place and look at it. Then call the boy’s mother in Mexico and tell her what it looked like. What else is there to do? It is your life as a Mexican.

  Now tears finally run from the corners of his eyes.

  He stays only for a few minutes. Leaving the street, they drive him up a few blocks to Woodhull Hospital, which sits under the el.

  “This is where they took Eduardo,” somebody told Daniel.

  Immediately he twisted to see the building. He took a pencil out of his pocket and tried to write the name down on a scrap of paper. The driver, Awilda Cordero, stopped the car and printed it in large letters.

  “Woodhull,” he said, reading it.

  He put the piece of paper into his breast pocket. “For the mother,” he said. The hospital made him cry.

  He had six days left in Brooklyn before flying back to San Matías. He was staying in a blue frame house on a small crooked street in Brighton Beach with Mariano and three others from San Matías, who had moved a few blocks from the one room where everybody slept on the floor.

  At 11 A.M. on a Thursday, he was watching an animal show on the Discovery Channel. He was fascinated by a large python at work. The el train ran almost directly over the house, and the noise kept filling the room.

  He had no way of knowing that suddenly on this day a year and a half of frustration was coming to an end a few miles away, in downtown Brooklyn, where the clerk in the fourth floor federal courtroom of Judge Leo Glasser called out, “United States of America versus Ostreicher, Criminal Information 01CR717.”

  Eugene Ostreicher, blocky and decisive of step, walked up to the bench. He had on a black yarmulke and a black suit with a white shirt open at the collar. His beard was two large white puffs coming from his cheeks. He had sharp dark eyebrows over pale blue eyes. He stood motionless.

  “Frank Mandel for Eugene Ostreicher,” his lawyer, a thin man, said.

  “Assistant United States Attorney Richard Faughnan for the government.”

  Ostreicher was sworn in. He was here to plead guilty to a criminal information. This is different from a grand jury indictment, which causes a full jury trial. A criminal information gives a defendant the chance to slither out of deepest trouble with a plea.

  The judge said, “Do you realize that you must tell the truth, that it is a crime to tell a lie after you swear to tell the truth?”

  “Yes,” Ostreicher said.

  Glasser then asked him if he was under any medication that would interfere with his ability to understand what he was doing. Then he asked him to read a copy of the charge against him. The judge then said that rather than plead guilty right here he could stand on his constitutional right to a grand jury. He told Ostreicher that a grand jury is made of between sixteen and twenty-three people, and if at least twelve say there is a probable cause that a crime has been committed, there will be an indictment. Did Ostreicher understand?

  He understood too well. For eighteen months he had been twisting and ducking the chances of such a thing, for he understood that the indictment inevitably leads to a trial and the chances for imprisonment would be high.

  Now Glasser read the charge. “On March 14, 1996, in the Eastern District of New York you knowingly made a false statement to an OSHA officer by stating that at buildings number 25–49 Lorimer Street there had been no collapse.”

  Glasser pressed Ostreicher. “You have a right to say not guilty. In that case there will be a public jury trial.”

  Ostreicher showed no anxiety.

  “I do not accept a guilty plea from an innocent man,” Glasser said.

  (The last time I saw Glasser, he took a guilty plea from Sammy Gravano, not quite an innocent.)

  “How do you plead?” Ostreicher was asked.

  “Guilty.”

  After a year and a half of investigations by one agency after another, Ostreicher convicted himself of spitting on the sidewalk.

  Right to the end, most thought that the plea agreement was supposed to be for an OSHA civil case only, and therefore there would be no prison time. However, the Labor Department agent, James Vanderberg,
had never quit pressing for a felony criminal charge and won out in the back rooms of justice. The civil charge was replaced by a criminal felony charge. It included what Vanderberg wanted: a fine of a million dollars so at least the victims could get something. Usually there is nothing for them.

  In court, the judge gave him one part of the sentence. He would never be allowed to build again, which was something the Fire Department’s Blaich had called for at least three years ago. Then a million-dollar fine was to be paid to the victims of Middleton Street. He was not charged with the deadly collapse, but he was fined for it because on a plea, you can put in almost anything—write down “Rome burning.” There was no way anybody was going to let Ostreicher walk away from Eduardo Daniel Gutiérrez’s death with no penalty at all. Glasser said the additional sentencing date would be in October. Ostreicher faced anything from zero to five years, the judge said. The chances were that there would be no prison time. That was to happen.

  When the guilty plea was over, Mandel stood in the aisle and said to somebody, “Where did you get the police badge from?”

  “From the guys he showed it to.”

  “Who showed it?”

  “Richie the Rabbi.”

  “Who? There is no such person.” Mandel playfully punched one of the people with him. “He says there is a Richie the Rabbi in the family.”

  Mandel laughed and the guy laughed. Ostreicher shrugged. He was not going to say anything to anybody, because that was what had gotten him in trouble. Of course there is a Richie the Rabbi, proper name Chaim. Only this time there was no federal guy asking an official question.