The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (17 page)

The large woman in plaid snarls, “The engineer has to write a letter. That’s work you should have done. Who are you? What are you doing with such a mess?”

After all, their business is to rectify dangers in a building by means of pieces of paper. All this noise from people on the phone, from the world’s only noisy computers, from old printers makes it impossible for a person to think of somebody dying in a building. If somebody dies in a fire in a stairwell or falls off the building, that is a tragedy. But these things do not happen every day, and therefore what is of concern is getting the proper certificate so the builder can build.

One expediter prints out complaint number 4069852, filed on September 8, 1997: “Multiple dwelling fire escape in danger of collapse—all rear.” The clerks handling the complaint listed it with priority C, which placed the complaint on a level with a missing shingle. That had to please the expediter. Some 339 days later, the Fire Department inspected the premises. Their report said the fire escape was “in danger of collapse and was a health hazard to both the building’s occupants and members of the Fire Department.” The owner was ordered to fix the fire escape immediately. But if the clerk in the Buildings Department had listed the complaint as priority A, where it belonged, it would have been targeted for inspection in a day and a half.

That a potentially hazardous condition was placed in the wrong priority category was found in twelve complaints out of a batch of seventeen. The response time in inspecting and ordering repairs for these defects—which ran from a corroded I-beam to an unsafe
structure—went from the day and a half of a priority A to the weeks and months of other priority classes.

This could be the result of a department with so few inspectors that it is impossible to inspect even the urgent. The priority category is dropped to protect the department workers, with everyone hoping that the conditions won’t worsen and people won’t get hurt. The change of categories is also a smashing tactic for expediters. Turn the B into a C and tell the owner he can go on vacation.

The first street on Ostreicher’s violations list, Lorimer Street, was empty and sullen when Ostreicher first arrived to build. Old closed factories sat on the edges of empty lots. Up ahead was the old yellow el trestle passing by the red brick Woodhull Hospital. Once, when John Lindsay was mayor and the people running the city were young and full of hope, Woodhull was built as a public hospital with all private rooms. It was Lindsay’s belief that if people could have a private room in Lenox Hill Hospital because they had the money to pay for it, then the poor should have a private room because they didn’t have the money to pay for it.

Lorimer Street backs onto Middleton, where Ostreicher also planned to build.

His streets of brick condominiums—look-alike, in trouble alike—stood for the worst, and they looked up the street at the best.

J
OSÉ
D
ANIEL, SEVENTEEN,
Eduardo’s younger brother, talked to Eduardo several times on the phone about his coming to New York. In March 1999, Eduardo told José that he could get him a construction job. José immediately left San Matías. The coyote price was $1,600. The entire family in San Matías dug hard and came up with airfare to Tijuana, but that was it. José, following the path of his brother, and the others who had gone before him, went to a small hotel in Tijuana called the Azul, where he met the same coyote who had taken his brother across. José arranged to come to New York as a “collect immigrant.” His brother would somehow have the money
waiting. But as José had not even made a partial payment, he was considered a risk to flee once he was in America. Therefore, he was treated as a suspect through the entire trip. The coyote would have a man take him to New York, where Eduardo would meet them with the money in his hand. Please be there.

José was one of a crowd of twenty young men who followed the coyote for long hours through a desert of bushes and sand. The coyote pulled away bushes that covered the entrance to a tunnel that had dirt walls and ceiling. There were only a couple of wood supports visible. The tunnel was pitch black and airless. The coyote used a flashlight. The ones with him used their fear. José remembers people calling out that they felt a snake. Some tried to turn and go back, but they were going through the tunnel in a chain, and so this could not be done. One raised his voice to a scream. This stopped nothing. When they emerged from the tunnel, José remembers, they walked in the scrub parallel to a highway for a long time. Two vans then picked them up and drove them to a house in Phoenix. He does not remember how long he stayed there. The immigrants with him were leaving one at a time with a coyote. In the late afternoon, a Mexican who had nothing to say grunted and indicated the door. He was burly with uncut hair and wore a black rain jacket. José and three others went with him. A van took them to the Phoenix airport, where they went through the metal detector while the silent coyote walked around it. A Hispanic working at the metal detector nodded. They got on a flight to New York. When the coyote sat, his rain jacket was open and a shirt showed something beneath, gun or knife. The coyote jammed the ticket receipts into his pocket. He spoke for the first time. He told José in short harsh words that his brother Eduardo had better be right on time for their meeting and have the money. He said no more. He was unconcerned about the other three. When the plane stopped at Chicago, they got off without goodbyes.

The flight to New York brought José and the coyote into chilly
darkness at LaGuardia Airport. The coyote, who knew the city, took José on a bus. Then they took a subway for some time. José was excited by the noise and lights and speed. He asked where he was. The coyote told him the Bronx. The train then became an el. José stood up and walked to the opposite side of the car in order to see what was behind a bank of bright lights on the ground below. The coyote immediately stood next to him. When José went back to his seat, the coyote was with him. The train stopped and the doors opened, and suddenly the coyote held an arm in front of José. He acted as if he was stopping José from getting off at the wrong stop. He had not come this far to lose a cash customer. As the train was going to the next stop, the coyote showed some tension. He put a hand on José’s arm. At the next stop, he guided José out to a platform that was empty. The coyote had a hand close to whatever he had inside his jacket and under his shirt.

There was a call from the middle of the platform. Eduardo was coming off a staircase and walking excitedly through one station light and into the darkness toward them. The coyote pretended to smile, but José remembered that he kept his shoulder in front of him. Eduardo walked up and put his hand into his pocket to get the money. This caused the coyote to stiffen, and his hand dug into his jacket pocket. Then he saw the cash. It now was a straight exchange, immigrant for cash. Suddenly Eduardo and José were afraid that the coyote would take the money and for some reason kill them. They had never thought of such a thing before, but now it was obvious in the night air on the empty platform. The coyote’s right hand held the weapon, showing that he was afraid that the two brothers would kill him and keep their money. There had been a series of dead bodies in the Bronx to validate all their fears. Eduardo counted the money out as fast as he could. He then handed it the coyote. This was the instant where murder might take place. The coyote snatched the money with his left hand and walked off in one motion, closing his jacket.

There was no construction work because of the weather. José went to the curb on Bedford Avenue and then was told by Lucino in the room in Brighton Beach about a job at a grocery store on Avenue U, which was within walking distance of the Brighton house. He got the job and worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and was paid $240. At the end of each day he sat in gloom. Had he known that he would make such little money, had he known that if he kept a job like this it would take him almost a year to repay the $1,600 to his brother, he would have stayed in San Matías.

Then the weather broke and there was excitement in the room at Brighton Beach. They were going to work, and they were sure they could get José on the job. They did.

Suddenly, he was making $340 a week and he could repay the loan and still send money home. He worked three floors up at the back of the site. Lucino was his partner. Eduardo was on the street side. The brothers rarely talked during work. Afterward they went to the corner bodega and sat in the back and had pizza or chicken or tacos. Then they took the train home. Sometimes they went to a store and bought Mexican vegetables and steak and cooked that at home. Otherwise, nothing changed except the date on the calendar. This drudgery each long day consumed their lives just as would an illness.

Everybody working regarded the structure as unsafe. Eduardo and José talked about this during what both felt was their one best day in New York. They took the subway over to Battery Park and stood looking at the Statue of Liberty.

Eduardo posed while his brother took his picture, and then he took pictures of his brother, and after that they asked tourists to take pictures of both of them. They were proud to show their best shoes, dark construction boots with yellow tops.

They wondered if their youngest brother, Miguel Angel, was carrying more than one slate at a time. He must be up to two or even three, they agreed. He was eleven by now and loved the work.
When Eduardo had left San Matías, the addition to the house had only the cement work done. There were no walls. The father said he would buy steel beams with the money Eduardo would be sending home. He needed people to help him with it. They had to be friends, as he had no money to pay for help now.

Eduardo mentioned that they should go home to help. It was a nice thought, except it didn’t include directions on how to get money for the construction if nobody was working.

José remembers that they looked at the statue and wondered how the workers had been able to get up to the arm and put on the torch.

“They couldn’t do it on our job,” the brother remembers Eduardo saying.

“Doesn’t anybody look at our job to make sure it is safe?” José asked.

“They say they do, but I never see nobody,” Eduardo said. “The floor shakes.”

José thought this was because no Mexicans worked on the Statue of Liberty. The ride home on the subway reinforced this idea. Anybody sitting near them left room so they wouldn’t be rubbing up against these Mexicans.

Still, the thrill of seeing the statue made Eduardo call Silvia and tell her about it excitedly. She said she would have to come sometime. Eduardo and his brother sent the pictures to her and everybody in San Matías.

A
LL VACANT LAND
in New York, from marshes in Staten Island to abandoned junkyards in the Bronx, all these empty lots everywhere, covered with old tires, filthy refrigerators, and stained mattresses bloated by rain, is like a jewelry store window to a builder. Yet his is a slow dream. Possession of unoccupied land is not ruled by time of day or month of year. But when you get it, only a lottery is better. The city has a series of rules that are designed to make the
public feel it is being protected, and at times it actually is. Simultaneously, a land grab can appear honest and sometimes even be honest, while at all times it protects the politicians’ right to accept bribes and the builders’ right to bribe and cheat and steal while smiling for the public.

The system is the result of ages of politicians who proved that they were not nearly as stupid as they acted. They put together a system where many are paid and few are apprehended. It takes seven months to get permission to build anything in the city.

In Brooklyn, a number of empty lots on Middleton Street were in rem, which means the city and state have taken them over for nonpayment of taxes. An in rem procedure begins in the City Council, where a member lobbies for the return of the property to the one who lost it and has now paid the taxes. In Albany a member of the State Assembly proposes that with taxes paid, the property can be returned to the owner, who in this case received the tax money from Richie and then sold him the property.

The moment a person not in need of a lobotomy hears this antiquated, complicated, and thoroughly suspicious method being evoked, he must go on guard duty. As usual with in rem cases, the facts do not show, and therefore City Councilman Stanley Michels of the Washington Heights section of Manhattan grunted when he saw listed on the voting agenda of this day, “By Council Member Ward: SLR 471. Res. 3245. Assemblyman Genovesi. Reconveyance of block 2242 to Louis Ortiz.”

“When this comes up, you abstain,” he told two people sitting near him on the floor, new council members. “It’s the things you don’t vote for that save your life.”

Michels had started doing this when he had two children in fine colleges and he preferred not to lose the means of keeping them there.

“What’s the matter with it?” he was asked.

“The matter with it is I don’t know what it is about. I don’t
know what any of these things are about. Neither do you. Let’s keep investigations far away. Abstain.”

At the end of the meeting they had the day’s business, all resolutions and bills, together in one package on which the members started to vote.

“You vote yes on all except SLR 471, Resolution 3245,” Michels said. “On that you abstain.”

“And then?”

“And then you’re all right. If it’s got to do with buildings, then you’re safe to abstain all the time.”

S
OMETIMES WHAT APPEARS
to be a direct approach by a wounded citizen is made in the land business. The wounded citizen writes as one poor lone person, but when you parse the sentences you find lawyers, lobbyists, and references to phone call after phone call to city officials.

September 12, 1995
The Honorable Rudolph Giuliani
Mayor of the City of New York
New York, New York

Dear Mayor: