Flash

by Jim Miller

  “I don’t know, man. Religion has actually started more wars than it’s stopped,” I replied.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Cheno said, “I don’t believe in anything, man. I just think people need something to keep them in line so they don’t go totally loco.” I laughed, grabbed a Coke from the dirty little fridge by his desk and walked outside for some air. Right next to the records warehouse was a porn warehouse. They threw away damaged product in a big dumpster that they kept locked up like Fort Knox. Once in a while, a page would come loose and we’d find a random beaver shot lying on the ground. Cheno collected these and had lined the wall above his desk with them, creating a perverse collage.

  Next to the porn mill was another building that was always sealed up tight. I could hear the drone of loud machinery, but I never saw a soul, until that day when I was standing by the porn dumpster with my Coke and somebody rolled up the big metal door to reveal rows of sewing machines, each one the host to a woman, hunched over with head down, hands and fingers moving fast and furious over a garment. They all looked Indian. It was a hot summer day in the nineties and I was surprised to see that the huge sweatshop was only cooled by a single large fan. The women, both young and old, looked exhausted, with faces like marathon runners nearing the finish line. It was only two o’clock. The man who’d rolled up the door glared at me and said, “Mind your own business if you know what’s good for you.” He pulled the door down and it slammed against the concrete like a prison cell.

  When I went back inside to tell Cheno, he shook his head and said, “They’re slaves, Jack.”

  “What?” I said incredulously.

  “Serious, man, they don’t have no papers. They come up to get work and those fuckers grab them and tell them they have to work fourteen hours a day, and if they quit or tell the cops they’ll be deported away from their children. What do you call that but slavery, man?”

  “Shit,” I said, unable to muster anything more profound.

  “No kidding, Jack,” Cheno said. “No kidding.”

  Early the next morning a man from the main office came, took a walk around with a clipboard, and left without speaking to us. Pilar, who drove the morning truck, told us she had heard they were getting ready to close us down. Then she slipped me her phone number. That night, we went out for beers, Pilar and me. We met at a little dive in Sylmar and played pool. She had big brown eyes and a sexy, crooked smile. She always wore her hair in pigtails under her hat at work. Without the hat and uniform, she was striking in a plain white blouse and tight jeans. She took me home and we made love all night. She had beautiful, long black hair, which she took down for the first time before we got into bed. It transformed her miraculously from a tomboy to a goddess. When I left in the rosy dawn I asked when I could see her again. “Never,” she said as she kissed me goodbye and patted my cheek. “My boyfriend would kill you.”

  I missed Pilar and Cheno, but losing that job allowed me to focus a bit more on the last two weeks of my summer courses in English and Journalism. It turned out that, according to my professors, I was a good writer. Still, at this rate, I wondered if I’d ever be able to finish before I hit thirty. I got two A’s and signed up for another journalism class that Fall. In the meantime, I went to a temp agency and they found me a job at an office for once. It was mind numbing. My task was to cross-check thousands of names, addresses, and phone numbers on the company computer with the same names, addresses, and phone numbers in an endless series of big plastic binders. This was supposed to last for two weeks. I got fired in half a day when the supervisor caught me putting my feet up on the desk during a break. “It sends the wrong message,” he said. I told him to go fuck himself, and he called for security to have me escorted from of the building. As soon as we were out of earshot, the guard said, “Good job in there, kid.” I laughed and we shook hands before parting ways.

  The temp agency told me on the phone that I wasn’t the caliber of employee they were accustomed to working with. I hung up on the woman and found a job in the want ads at The Royal Ribbon Company, a computer printer ribbon factory over the hill downtown. My shift started at 5:00 AM, so the drive from the valley was relatively painless. The job, on the other hand, was grueling. I started at a station that received a constant flow of boxes of newly inked ribbons (these were the days of big old printers) and I had to unload the box, ribbon by ribbon, and wipe off the excess ink with a rag that I dipped in a toxic-smelling cleaning solution. I wore big rubber gloves, but, by the end of the day, my hands were still dyed black and blue from the ink. It took me half an hour of scrubbing every day to get clean. Homero, the fellow next to me at this station, had worked there for five years and his hands stayed dyed, even after he scrubbed down. That can’t be healthy, I thought, but I needed the money.

  If the ink-stained hands weren’t bad enough, the lifting did the trick. The boxes were all around fifty pounds, easy enough to lift and stack, but by the end of the day, my back was sore as hell. But I stuck with it, working like a robot on the line. Homero was a stoic, nearly silent man who only grunted when I tried to speak with him—in English at first, and later in Spanish. I was the only Anglo in the whole factory it turned out. Everyone else was Mexican, or from Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, or some other country in Central America. There was a crew of workers from Pakistan too. And one black guy, George, whom I had lunch with every day.

  “What brings you to the neighborhood, white boy?” was the first thing out of his mouth. He grinned and laughed at me before I had a chance to answer.

  “I’m on a field trip,” I said. George had just got out of high school and was trying to save enough money to move back to Alabama where his extended family lived. His parents had worked at the shipyards in Long Beach and at an auto factory in Southeast LA, but those jobs were drying up or long gone. And his neighborhood was getting pretty rough too.

  “All these illegals are fucking things up,” he said.

  “Don’t you think it’s bigger than them?” I responded, remembering the sweatshop in Pacoima.

  “Maybe,” he said, “But when you only got a small pie, you don’t invite the neighbors over for dessert.” I laughed and let the matter rest. We were sitting on the loading dock, watching our fellow workers as they huddled by their cars listening to a soccer match on their radios. It was the Cupa de los Americas, and Mexico was playing Guatemala. Mexico scored and a wave of cheers went up just as the horn sounded signifying the end of our leisure. Back inside, the noise was deafening. I looked over at the station where the boss had put the group from Pakistan. A big guy saw me and gave me a hostile stare. I ignored him and put on my rubber gloves. Across the floor I could see the prettiest woman in the factory, Rosa, whispering to another woman, who then whispered something to another woman. She saw me looking over and smiled at me. I smiled back and started going about my work.

  At the end of our shift she walked over to me and said, “The girls think your blue eyes are pretty.”

  “And you?” I asked, surprised and intrigued.

  “I don’t trust them,” she said smiling as she walked away. That night I got a call from Shane who was at UCLA. He had a friend who worked at a local weekly called Word on the Street. They were looking for student interns. It didn’t pay, but it would give me some experience. I took down the information and told Shane I’d call the next day after work.

  At Royal Ribbon, the flirtation stopped but the whispering continued. At the break, George and I watched Rosa walk over to the big Pakistani who had glared at me. Their talk didn’t last long and Rosa left looking frustrated.

  “What’s going on?” I asked George.

  “She trying to organize, Jack.”

  “Organize what?” I asked stupidly.

  “A union, white boy. She talked to me the other day and I told her I don’t need the trouble.”

  “She told me she didn’t trust my eyes,” I said with a smirk.

  “She don’t trust you because she don’t think you’
re gonna stay long. Are you?”

  “No,” I acknowledged. “No fucking way.” The rest of the day dragged on horribly. My eyes had started to dry out from the fumes and my back was mighty sore. I felt bad that Rosa didn’t trust me enough to let me in on the secret. Did she think I was a spy or something? That was a little paranoid, I thought. Was it because I was white? Depressing. That afternoon, I called the Word on the Street and they asked me to come in for an interview. I was excited at the possibility of learning how to write for a paper. I’d been driving forklifts and lifting boxes for over a year and it was getting old.

  Back at Royal Ribbon, I kept my head down for a few more weeks until, one day, the boss came over, pulled Rosa off the line, and took her into his office. She came out in tears with a security guard at each arm, escorting her out of the building. Then, I was surprised to see a whole bunch of other guards show up and take up positions at practically every station in the factory. Suddenly, the line stopped, and a phalanx of managers came out of the front office, splitting into pairs to hit each station. They were carrying batches of checks. When two of the little toads made their way over to Homero and me, we were told that, unfortunately, the factory was going to cease production. He handed me a check. I suddenly felt stupid and ashamed. Rosa had been right to be cautious of a stranger. They were firing the whole fucking plant, shutting it down to kill Rosa’s organizing drive in utero. Most of the workers had no papers, so what could they do? It was unbelievable. The next day I checked the Times on a hunch and there it was: “Wanted, factory workers. Will Train. Contact Royal Ribbon Company.”

  I got the internship with Word on the Street, so I started doing a little bit of everything for them—reviews, reporting, editing. It was great. To pay the bills, I got a job at a home repair company, that consisted of Dan, the owner, and whoever happened to be working with him that week. We painted houses on the cheap, put in tile floors, replaced windows, etc. Dan was a great old guy, about sixty with a scruffy gray beard that made him look like a disheveled Heming way with a beer gut. He could fix anything. His mornings were always productive and we’d be on pace to get done early, but then he’d grab a sixer at lunch and things slowed down considerably. He listened to AM radio news all day and would say things like, “The world’s going to hell, drink up.” His wife had died a few years before and his son was in the army, stationed in Germany. Once he had gotten a little drunk, he’d always put down his paintbrush or saw or spackle knife, slap me on the back and say, “You’re a good worker, kid. Your Dad should be proud of you.” He was a sweet, lonely old man so I never had the heart to tell him the truth.

  4

  I met the Marine, Mark Sawyer, at a Mexican restaurant in a strip mall next to an auto parts store in Oceanside. We sat down over enchiladas and talked about his buddy, Jake Sullivan. Mark was polite and very articulate, but you could see the weight he carried in his eyes. His clean-cut appearance and studied dignity covered over a deeper hurt. I got the sense that he was holding onto a certain formality as a way of overcoming his knowledge that chaos was somewhere just around the corner. He told me about his two tours in Iraq with Sullivan, a decorated war hero who became infuriated about human rights abuses by private contractors in Al Anbar province and complained to the higher ups only to be warned to mind his own business. Sadly, it was a familiar story by now. What bothered Mark, however, was his belief that everyone had turned the page on Iraq, even before it was over. As he put it, “It’s as if our series got cancelled because of bad ratings. Everyone just changed the channel.”

  But for Jake, it wasn’t that easy. He kept at it and got the information to some journalists who covered the story and it caused a stir. Jake got transferred to another unit and, when he came home after his second tour, his father, a career Marine, let him know he did not approve of his whistle blowing. That led Jake into a long depression that was exacerbated by his emerging posttraumatic stress, which the VA took its time to diagnose and treat. Jake went down hill, drank too much, and got into trouble—bar fights and a couple of DUI arrests. His girlfriend left him, and then he got a letter telling him that he was being called back up due to a shortage of manpower.

  About that time, Mark told me, he and Jake went on a long camping trip out in the desert. They spent a week hiking brutal, obscure trails in the mountains around Anza Borrego, and exploring the badlands. Things had been going fairly well until the night that Jake wanted to do the mushrooms he’d scored from some hippies on the boardwalk in Ocean Beach and Mark refused, sticking instead with a bottle of whiskey and The Doors on a boom box by the campfire. Jake got mad, told him to fuck off, and ate them anyway, wandering off by himself into the night without a flashlight or anything else. Mark let him go, waited for hours, but then started getting worried. It was probably three o’clock in the morning and he could hear a pack of coyotes howling in the near distance. Mark started searching the ravines near their camp, and he came up empty, but continued for hours into the dawn.

  Mark kept looking for Jake, systematically mapping the land, quadrant by quadrant. Finally, he found Jake’s clothes in a pile by some large rocks. He climbed up a steep hill in the morning light for what must have been several miles, then suddenly, from out of nowhere, he heard the sound of weeping above him and scurried faster until he came upon a small cave under several large boulders. It was then that the weeping turned to a moan and then a howl from what seemed like the bowels of the earth itself. Mark screamed out Jake’s name and got no answer, so he climbed down into the cave, following the sound, until he found Jake lying on his back in the dark, his face and upper torso scratched bloody by his own hands.

  He cradled Jake there for a long time saying only “It’s alright” over and over in the calmest voice he could muster. Finally, Jake said “I’m sorry” and that was the first and last that they ever spoke about it. Mark led him out of the cave, back down to his clothing, and they returned to camp, cleaned up as best they could, and drove home in silence.

  In the days that followed, Jake retold the story of their trip to several mutual friends editing out the nightmare hike. Mark thought he should have told Jake to get some help, but he seemed more normal for a while. When the subject of returning to Iraq came up, Jake began to welcome it; he said he wanted to go back. It would get him straight. Then, without a word, the day before he was supposed to leave, he shot himself. And nobody covered it.

  Mark’s lips tightened as he told the story. “How can a Purple Heart make the news, but not his death?” I shook my head and told him I’d do my best to tell the story, tie it in to the unexpected rise in suicides amongst service men. He shook my hand and thanked me, quite formally, and we walked out to the parking lot together and parted ways.

  As I hit the 5 south and drove back to the office, I thought back to my early days in San Diego when I used to hang out in the old downtown with all the dives full of jarheads and sailors playing pool. At first, I have to admit, I had some politically correct, punk disdain for them, but, after a few conversations, I dropped my attitude and got to know some of them. They were kids mostly, looking for adventure or a way to pay for college or stay out of jail. I even had some great conversations with guys who were reading Noam Chomsky or some other radical stuff, while they did their time in the belly of the beast. It complicated things for me. Not that I’m any less anti-war, I just put the blame where it belongs: at the top. Actually meeting guys in the service moved my opposition to war from an abstraction to a visceral anger at the waste of life.

  I had come down to San Diego to write for the SD Scene, an offshoot of the LA Scene, in the early nineties. After Trisha left, I’d stayed in Los Angeles for a while but it felt purgatorial, even when I moved back to Venice to escape the Valley. A change of venue was in order. The owners of the LA Scene had sent my friend and fellow reporter, Gary, down to San Diego in the late eighties to start up a new paper. I’d gone down to visit Gary a number of times before I transferred to San Diego, and we’d spent a few los
t weekends hitting the handful of rock clubs in the Gaslamp and following them up with a delirious trail of dives: the Hong Kong , the Naha, the Orient, Suzy Wong’s, the Li Po, Molly’s, the Lobby, etc. If the bars closed too early, we’d hitch a ride to TJ and drink in the Zona Norte until they shut down at 6:00 AM, staggering into the early dawn to buy cheap cigarettes and tacos on the street before figuring out how to get home. I remember waking up on Gary’s couch with a surreal thread of memories of pool tables next to fish tanks; odd conversations with aging Korean barmaids who longed for the old days; sailors fighting with fists and pool sticks; Patsy Cline and Asian disco on the jukebox; tequila shots in Mexican dance halls filled with campesinos, tough prostitutes, and taxi cab dealers; bodies sleeping on the benches in the billiards hall; Norteño and filterless Delicato cigarettes; storefront evangelical churches preaching all night; and the rush and bustle of the 4:00 AM street on Friday.

  I came to love all the old dives downtown and got to know some of the bartenders and doormen. The old timers had years of stories to tell and the gritty Gaslamp would have made Bukowski proud, with its bittersweet rooming house poetry, its tragic drunks, and comic absurdity. Soon, it became clear to me that Gary was powering his endless bender with crystal as I’d get calls from him at all hours and the quality of his work began to slip badly. Still the SD Scene limped along for much of the nineties until Gary totally lost it and alienated all of our advertisers. I’d stopped partying with him when the nights began ending in the parking lot of the all night bowling alley with an angry crank dealer or at some crack den up on Cortez Hill. It was dire and, given my family history, I’d always been a bit leery of the hard stuff. The last time I saw Gary, he’d moved into an apartment in City Heights that he shared with a couple of tweekers who worked for UPS. He hadn’t slept in two days and he’d lost twenty pounds. They were all sitting on a big couch in the living room with the blinds drawn at midday, the room lit only by the eerie glow of a muted TV recycling through cable news.