Thinking it over ...He just wanted a job By Félix Alfonso Peña Watching the man smirk and laugh about the prospect of keeping a legal battle going on for years, I feel resentment poking at my insides. But it’s not I, the 58-year-old reporter, who resents the white-haired man who is fighting the quarry expansion. The resentment is reborn from the teenager grinding sun-baked stones beneath his shoes as he walks down the dirt street that passes in front of his home to the downtown business district. It’s the mid-1960s, and the prospect of nicer clothes, a little spending money and being able to eke out a little more independence and help out with the bills pushes him through the hot afternoon toward the air-conditioned shops that crowd against the sidewalks in the business district. A nicely pressed white shirt, a tie, crisp dress pants, black socks and brilliantly polished shoes, all topped by freshly-washed hair frozen in a graceful pompadour courtesy of the green goo in the medicine cabinet — this kid can’t help but get hired. He’s polite, fluent in English and Spanish, a quick learner, good at arithmetic, scrupulously honest. How long can it take him to get a job? Longer than one day, it turns out. Shop owners’ admiring looks when I walk in turn into tight smiles meant to cushion any disappointment after I ask politely about a job in their store. Anything. Cleaning up. Helping customers. Stocking shelves. I just want to work somewhere in this bustling downtown where people from Mexico come in droves to stock up on American-made goods. Usually I get a nod as they hear my request, then a shake of the head and a few words, perhaps a polite jotting down of my name and telephone number. “Are you related to … ?” they ask. And sometimes we connect, find somebody in common, which is not an extraordinary thing in a town with some 60,000 people. And then I move on, methodically, to the next shop, the next open door. After a few days I’ve met a few who tell me that, honestly, jobs are scarce with so many men looking for work. And when they have a job, they prefer to give it to men with families to support. I don’t blame them. I know from what I was taught in school that I live in the poorest town of its size in the USA, with an unemployment rate in the teens for much of the year, so quite a few men stand between me and that job, and they would be grateful to get it, even if it only pays minimum wage. Times are hard and need is great in my home town. At school, I swallow my envy at the boys in school who work at their parents’ or other relatives’ businesses, or at the firms owned by their parents’ friends. Connections are good. I simply don’t have them, or a job, crisp slacks, nice pompadour and good manners notwithstanding. Years later, when he sees a man laughing about keeping the cement company from expanding the quarry that they own, that teenager doesn’t lose his good manners, but he glares through his frustration. The white-haired man and his neighbors, most younger than him but all with families, don’t want the heavy traffic rumbling past the homes that they purchased near the quarry. They don’t want the blasting that comes with it and the possibility, however slight, of damage to their homes, even though they would be compensated for it. Their lawyer questions a witness about how far stones can fly after a blast. And yes, a man in a neighboring county was killed by such a stone some ten years ago. People remember that because it was a freak occurrence, but the lawyer doesn’t mention that, of course. And yes, the expert remembers that a home was damaged once by the vibrations the blast he had set off sent through the earth — once in 36 years of blasting. The lawyer parses legal language, spreads doubt and mongers fear, I think, all part of his strategy. But the teenager doesn’t think. He just feels. Jobs. Good jobs. The dignity of hard work and the security of a paycheck. Normality the way it should be: coming home from work to rest, eat and spend time with your family, fuss over fixing up the house or the garden — not to worry about how to pay for next weeks’ meals or a cheap pair of shoes like those men waiting for the jobs in the home town of my youth. The man and the boy know the quarry was there when the people bought their homes. It was as unavoidable as the nearby hills that thrust their brawny backs against the horizon. The people up in arms against the cement company knew the quarry was there and what it’s business was all about. But they don’t know about looking for a job and not finding one. The white-haired man is retired. He has his house and his security. He might have to tighten his belt to pay for a new heating system or a new roof, but he won’t have to tighten in because he’s hungry most of the time. Like him, the others have theirs, and they think they have security. Driving back to the office, I see the sign for a new shopping center. Malls and shopping centers pass for economic development these days in the USA. They’re touted as progress. But they’re little more than pipelines for our money to go overseas. The places where we make things to sell, where we fabricate, mill, build, assemble, are vanishing. In their place, we have poor people, grimy industrial buildings with boarded-up windows, and shops to buy what people make elsewhere. Sure, there will be jobs at the new shopping center: jobs that send our money elsewhere, not jobs that go to keeping our own economy healthy. I remember the communist axiom that when it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will sell you the rope. I recall the latest outrageous figures about our balance of trade and how much of our debt is held by foreigners. It seems we’re willing to go into debt to buy the rope ourselves. And in the case of the quarry, people don’t want to be inconvenienced by letting companies do what they have all the legal right to do with their property: develop it. The reporter will sit at his desk and type in a brief version of the legal wrangling over the struggle. The teenager lives in a dynamic hologram constructed of memory and wanting, dreams and retrospection, and he shakes his head at the people who laugh about cutting off the lifeblood of an industry in their backyard. They don’t know, he says. And he feels for the young ones who will some day walk out the door full of hope and come back to sit on their bed, choking back tears. They just wanted a job. |