The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (20 page)

I
N
F
EBRUARY
1997, the mayor was up for reelection, and with the first rustle of campaign money sounding in Williamsburg, the expediter
for 26 Heyward Street headed out of the computer room and went down the hall into Joseph Trivisonno’s office. Trivisonno remembers the expediter telling him to get a zoning change that would take care of the missing eight feet. Trivisonno said his department did not get zoning changes or grab land out of thin air. Trivisonno says the expediter said to him, “You get approval for us.”

Trivisonno remembers saying that he could not.

“We’ll get you.”

“The next thing was somebody saying I was anti-Semitic,” Trivisonno said.

Kenny Fisher, a city councilman from an old, well-known Brooklyn political family, suppressed that quickly.

Afterward Trivisonno felt the first fatigue. “If I had to ask for all this help for nothing, then how am I going to last through something that actually happens?” he said to a friend.

M
AYOR
G
IULIANI ANNOUNCED
a policy of closing X-rated movie houses and bookstores because they hurt children. He ordered seventy-five building inspectors out to do the work. Forty percent of a store had to be legitimate books and videos. The rest of it could be for adults. As the history of censorship could serve as wallpaper for a psychiatric ward, sex shop owners began to stock shelves with biographies of Daniel Boone. Once these hit the required 40 percent, here came all those adult books.

This brought the former Carmella Lauretano, who is the wife of a building inspector on detached duty in sex shops, to see Trivisonno. As Trivisonno recalls it, she said to him, “Make my husband get off that job. My husband is a building inspector. You have him in whorehouses. My husband is a family man. You got to stop this.”

F
IRE
C
HIEF
B
LAICH
called a meeting of technical people from the Buildings Department, engineers and experts in construction. They
stood on the street in front of the Lorimer Street buildings, and each time Blaich pointed out a dangerous flaw, they all concurred. “Ostreicher should be stopped from doing any building,” Blaich said. “We’ll put it in writing. We’ll all sign it and that should put it over.” Suddenly the group with him began to shrink. “You better do that yourself,” one of them said. Blaich said, “Why only me?” The guy said, “Because you’re civil service.”

Blaich wrote the letter and sent it in.

The answer came on August 26, 1998, when the first of eleven certificates of occupancy was signed by Joseph Trivisonno and issued to the owner of the Lorimer Street buildings. A certificate of occupancy means you can move into, rent, or sell the building, which has been certified as legal by the City of New York.

Trivisonno said that the building defects had been cured and that in all other cases such as this the building was allowed to be completed and certificates issued.

Blaich shrugged. He had gone further than anybody had before. He had made charges on paper and signed it. The cave-in this time was Trivisonno. Of course it wasn’t enough. Nothing helped Trivisonno, either. In City Hall, they still complained that Trivisonno was obstructing commerce in Brooklyn. Commissioner Gaston Silva wanted him to take a leave. “Teitelbaum is the one who wants to get you,” Silva said, “but we hear he may be going. He’ll head Giuliani’s campaign when he runs for the Senate. When he goes, you can come right back.”

Next, Silva asked about the problem with 26 Heyward Street. Trivisonno said the owner had claimed faculty housing that in fact wouldn’t be there, and that there was an eight-foot overlap problem. Silva hung up. Trivisonno now heard from a secretary: “They want you out.” Trivisonno called the commissioner and asked who wanted him out. Trivisonno resigned in March. He was replaced by Tarek Zeid, whose wife is an expediter. Zeid departed and soon, Commissioner Silva was gone.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

T
hat day, Eduardo got home by 4:30 and called Silvia, and this time he got her before she left for work. She had spent most of the hours after finishing her morning job at the mall on the other side of Highway 6. She had bought pants and blouses for her sisters back home and Winnie the Pooh toys for her nieces. Her sister Emilia was with her now; she had been stopped twice at the border and frightened several times in the desert, but there was no thought of giving up. Silvia got her jobs at both the barbecue restaurant and the Olive Garden. Between them they were sending home $2,500 a month. They now had a one-bedroom apartment, near where Silvia had first lived. That one had been filled with enough relatives to form the trunk of a family tree.

When Eduardo called Silvia this time, he talked about his job. “He told me he had to climb up on the building,” Silvia remembers. “He told me that the work was very hard. Then he said again that he had to climb up on the building. He said the sun was cruel. He had to climb up. He said he didn’t like that. It seemed shaky to him. I knew he had never been that high up. I asked him if it was dangerous,
and he said it was. I didn’t know what else to say. He was there. I was here. What could we do?”

For Eduardo the days had changed only because he was not staying home in the room so much. Now he came to the room in Brighton Beach right after work, took a shower, and went out. He was the youngest of the group by five years, and the age difference with the roommates had become wearing. On Friday night, the others started out at the round table in the kitchen, and Alejandro drank one beer with great gulps, then another and a third, after which he reached for the bottle of tequila. The rest tried to keep up with him. Originally when they did this, Eduardo would sit on the kitchen floor and make fun of them, or he’d go into their room and fall asleep. But over the months he saw that drinking was a morose celebration and that conversation consisted of short bursts of despair. When they needed more alcohol, somebody went down to the store on Neptune Avenue. Later, Eduardo noticed that one of them would leave and wouldn’t return for some time, after which a couple of others would leave. After a few months, he figured out they were going with prostitutes in doorways and cars. Once, in one long drunk that went on for a day and a half, Alejandro drank thirty bottles of Corona beer and a bottle of tequila. There were no classic drinking stories told of this episode. Only the number of bottles was cited. Alejandro had a fierce hangover, but neither he nor the others could speak about it with any humor. One sad night of drink in the kitchen became another the next week, and the weeks became months and the months would become years.

Not only did late-night homesickness torture them, but the loneliness became more searing in the sunlight. They sat in the room and told themselves—and then their wives and children on the phone—that they would be home soon. They did not learn English because they were sure of leaving for home forever. They drank at sunrise on weekends and spoke only in Spanish, thus robbing themselves of any chance for better work.

Many times, Eduardo went to watch television in his friend Lucino’s room two flights over Kings Highway, a subway stop up from Brighton. Lucino lived with his cousin Julisa and her husband and two children. He was a short, stocky, handsome thirty-two-year-old with a prominent nose. Working in Mexico City as an accountant, he saw there was no future and left. He came unannounced to Julisa’s apartment. Why wouldn’t he? He was a relative. After a couple of days, it was plain. Why would he ever leave? He lived there.

Following this, one night Lucino’s brother Pedro called. “I’m here,” he said.

“Where?” Julisa said.

“At the airport. I’m coming over.”

Pedro came in, sat down, weary from travel, and went to sleep. Next, a cousin, José, called from the airport. He, too, was coming over. He, too, could not be moved if you put dynamite under his feet. Soon another of Lucino’s brothers called from the airport. Julisa couldn’t remember his name, but knew he could eat. Lucino mentioned vaguely that Aunt Matilda might be coming in from Mexico. Julisa thought that this would be sometime in the distant future, and in the meantime Aunt Matilda could get arrested at the border. Two nights later, the phone rang. “I’m here!” Aunt Matilda cried.

First they put the men in one room and the women and baby in the other. Finally, Julisa’s husband told her that her cousin had to clear the place. Lucino did. He told all the others to leave, and he took over a room for himself. Lucino was out looking for work from the start. He knew one here and another there and he wound up catching on with a construction job that was starting on Middleton Street. He worked there with Eduardo. Lucino had a treasure: a room to himself. Soon Eduardo was walking into the apartment with his head hanging like a penitent’s and he’d slip into Lucino’s room without talking. They usually drank and watched pro basketball. When he went in there on one night, Julisa heard something
slapping a board and one of them laughing. They were playing some board game, soccer football probably.

J
ULISA WAS NINETEEN
and in the second year of medical school in Mexico City when she and a couple of students came for a holiday to her hometown of San José edo de Tlaxcala, which is near Puebla. She had a twin sister, Lourdes, and seven brothers.

Julisa and her classmates arrived on the one day of the year that the fair came to town. Her glance took in children’s rides and the booths for games and stopped when she saw the handsome young guy in the booth with soccer games on the counter. The guy was putting prizes on a shelf. Of course the woman is not supposed to be so forward as to walk up alone to a booth with a man behind it.

No such thing could happen. The young man in the booth, José J. Eduardo, had his entire attention captured by Julisa, whose long hair and large beautiful eyes filled with gladness caused her dignity to evaporate. His mother, who sold lottery tickets a few booths away, thought she noticed something. He came out from behind the counter and promptly stumbled. He then ran up to Julisa and the others and asked if they wanted to play the soccer game on the table outside the booth. Julisa answered for everybody. She said yes and she went up to that strange game and played it as best she could, and played it for most of the night, her smile so expressive, her shoulders moving with her words, and all of it for this young man who was handsome and so attentive.

He could not wait to graze her.

She decided to marry him.

Professors at the medical school in Mexico City said dolefully that she wouldn’t be able to finish school if she was married.

“When you fall in love, whatever you say, I still get married,” she says. But she stayed in school, although she was studying with one emotion and dying to get married with another.

Two years later, she came to her town to get married in church. The reception was in her home.

She was pregnant in five minutes and was angry with herself and her husband. The couple didn’t have enough money, and their families couldn’t help. She took a bookkeeping job in a Mexico City bakery. The new husband studied chemical engineering but still had to travel with his family to these one-day fairs. With her last year in school and three years of residency in front of her, Julisa had a miscarriage. She couldn’t even pay for books. She dropped out. I’ll try next year, she told herself.

Her twin sister, Lourdes, and her husband went with another couple to Tijuana, and Lourdes called to report that they were going across the border on Saturday night. The hospital in Tijuana called on Sunday to say that Lourdes and two others were dead as a result of beatings that were apparently handed out by marauding thieves in the scrub. Julisa had been raised in the same womb and bed with her sister, but she shucked off as much misery as possible and tried to help raise the money to bring Lourdes back for a funeral.

Two years later, she and her husband were living in defeat in Mexico City. She wasn’t a day closer to returning to school, and he couldn’t get a job in engineering. They saved and borrowed $1,800 for a coyote to cross them at Tijuana. We will make it all up in America, and I’ll come back for school, she told herself. Then she and the husband left for Tijuana.

Fear owned her as she walked and ran over the same soil where her sister had died. The coyote had them hide in a garbage dump. Then they were among a group of five who stuffed themselves into the back of a van going to Los Angeles.

The woman who rented them the first room in Brooklyn instructed Julisa and her husband never to go outside except to go to work and back, because the police would arrest them, and the police were everywhere.

Julisa brought two babies home to these rooms but learned only snatches of English. “We were afraid to go to school at night for English,” she remembers. They moved into the rooms on Kings Highway, and her brother Valentine came to live with them, which gave them an extra hand with baby-sitting and the rent. Mostly, the husband watched the babies while she went out and cleaned houses. When she came home, he left to sweep out a beauty parlor. She paid out the toughest thousand dollars for a booklet, “Fast Practical English,” put out by the UCEDA English Institute, which counted her thousand in English. She picked up a couple of new words and not much more after listening to the CD sent by the institute. Supposedly, there were classes she could attend in a hall someplace, but she was never able to get there.

While a social worker was complaining about the UCEDA English Institute to Joel Magallan, SJ, the director of the Asociación Tepeyac de New York, he waved a hand.

“The Mexicans already know a second language,” he said. “The ones from Puebla were raised on Aztec Indian—we call it Nahuatl. Then in school they had to learn mainstream Spanish. The other Indian language they learn as babies is Tarahumara. That is spoken in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Otomi is the first language of those in Baja. Mayan is spoken first in Chiapas.”

One day, Julisa’s brother left on his bicycle for his job at a refrigerator manufacturer on Atlantic Avenue, a wide, extremely busy street. A while later, a policeman came to the door to tell Julisa that her brother was dead. There had been a two-car accident, and he couldn’t get out of the way and was killed.