The Genealogies: Chapter 4, Part Two

Leisure time

A short précis of Marcelo’s unemployment will suffice. He did not find a job right away. He did not find a job for 8 months. At first, it was because he wasn’t trying. After having worked for 5 years with little time off, he discovered that he liked the reality of waking up late every day, puttering around the house, watching awful daytime television. He had savings, Jessie was working, and his unemployment insurance kept him financially afloat. He took it as a long overdue and much deserved vacation.

He started every day at nine or ten. He would wake up, go out to the driveway and get the newspaper, make coffee and breakfast, sit down on the couch and read while eating. He would listen to the radio, usually NPR, and spend an hour like that. The shock of being laid-off—fired, in his more brutal moments—wore off after a week or so of sleeping in. It was a warm summer, and he took advantage of it by laying out in the yard, or going to the beach. He visited a friend in San Francisco. He would take Jessie lunch at work. He cleaned the house, did the dishes, washed the clothes, and made dinner. He kept himself occupied with simple, everyday tasks, and tried not to think of the chore of finding another job. That task lay in the future. It would become necessary soon enough. In the meantime, he enjoyed his freedom, the first freedom he had had since college. He even enjoyed being awoken by the gardeners hired by his landlord who mowed the lawn and pulled the weeds every other week. It was a sound he never would have heard normally.

The one thing he assiduously avoided doing was writing. This was merely a continuation of long-held practice. He certainly had the time to write, but he preferred to fill his long days with more commonplace pursuits. Of course, at that moment in his life, he was in great doubt as to both his vocation for writing and his talent. He would stare blankly at a blank page, or a blank computer monitor, and will words to spring forth. Nothing was as easy for him as it had been in college. Back then the words flowed out unbidden; he had felt possessed during those more fruitful days. It was as if all he had to do was sit down, flick on his computer, and not even try all that hard. The words just irrupted like some barbarian invasion, black letters uncoiling out onto the page in inexorable succession. Writing then was a release, an endless wellspring of pleasure. He never submitted any of his work for publication, but he had been convinced that would come in due time. All he had to be was patient, and keep working at his craft. Everything would fall into place.

That things didn’t fall into place would have been a great disappointment to Marcelo, were it not for the fact that he refused to think about it, and refused to do so with a great discipline. He shrugged off what he considered his greatest failure with the same casualness he applied to other unpleasant realities. He didn’t view his inability to produce writing of any quality—or any writing of any quantity, for that matter—as something of great concern. At first it had affected him, the nights that went by without working, the weeks that passed without a single word committed to paper or word-processor. He had always defined himself as a writer; it was his vocation, his creed, his raison d’etre, when he allowed himself to wax so epically. He had spent many a boozy and marijuana-hazed night in college discoursing on the purpose of poetry and the role of the writer in an image-obsessed world, and in the center of that image-obsessed world, Los Angeles. At parties, when asked the obligatory “What do you do” question, he invariably responded, “I’m a writer.” He would then normally add a caveat, such as, “I’m still unpublished”; however, adults of a certain young age are more easily swayed by an interlocutor’s self-image than by more objective criteria, such as, “I’m a writer, but I’m working as an office temp in a shipping company out in City of Industry.” The mind latches on to the first, more soulful clause of the sentence, excising the subsequent, all-too-pedestrian reality.

The thought of writing was a chore. The act of it itself was a task beyond endurance. At some point, for whatever reason, his muse had abandoned him. Rather than court her with the rededication and abnegation which she demanded, Marcelo merely, bit by bit, surrendered that dream, gave up on that vision of his life. He would still claim to be a writer, but less frequently, and never to new acquaintances. To old friends he would keep up the pretense of writing, since that was how they saw him, and he hated to disappoint them, even though he felt like a fraud when he still professed to write. It was as if he were to run into his old parish priest from New York at the Spearmint Rhino, and, out of shame, claim to still be attending services regularly and following all the precepts of the Church, even though it was patently obvious he was breaking nearly all the teachings, and doing so quite openly and brazenly. (That that priest was himself in contravention of his vow would have had little bearing on the scenario.) He couldn’t bring himself to admit that writing was a religion in which he no longer believed.

He therefore passed the days in front of the television, or the occasional movie. Sundays would pass, and he would swear to look in the Sunday paper’s employment section, but he wouldn’t. The money was holding out, and he had no urge to look for work. Or rather, he did have an urge, but a greater fear of trying and not finding anything. Week followed uneventful week, the heat of summer mellowing into California’s subtle autumn, and he was frozen, still holding onto the memory of his previous job, and not quite able to push himself into looking for a new one. He began to resent his situation, growing bitter and a bit despairing, especially after he finally began sending out résumés, first in a trickle, then a flood, and received no response, or worse, negative responses. The few interviews on which he went he instinctively felt that he blew, an assumption verified by the lack of calls following them. Jessie could barely stand being around him as he grew moodier and more quick-tempered, his anger alternating with bouts of deep sadness.

One day while cooking dinner he upended a bowl that contained marinating chicken breasts, thus wasting an entire day’s preparation. Jessie was in the living room, sitting on the couch, watching the local news.

“What happened?” she asked. “Everything all right?”

Marcelo didn’t respond. He just stared down at the floor, looking at the splattered meat, the marinade pooling outwards. The smell of the meat and the juice reached him, and all he could think about was how they would now have to go out to dinner, a dinner Jessie would have to pay for. He grabbed the edge of the kitchen counter, steadying himself, but it was of no help. Slowly, hesitantly, his lower lip began to quiver, and his eyes filled with tears. He tried to remain quiet, and to hide from Jessie’s field of vision.

Jessie asked again, “Is everything all right in there?”

By then he was silently crying, his body shaking with sobs. He kept thinking how he had ruined dinner, and how now it would cost ten times as much to eat out as if he hadn’t been so clumsy. He was filled with an overweening wave of uselessness, and he allowed it to consume his body. He opened his mouth and let out a muffled cry, and followed it with another, louder one, until in short order he was weeping in a way he hadn’t wept in years, not since his father’s death, and perhaps not even then.

Jessie entered the kitchen, saw the meat spilled on the floor, saw Marcelo crying, and stopped for a moment, unsure of what to do. Marcelo crying was something she had never witnessed, had no well-practiced response for. At last, she did the only thing she could do: she went to him, taking him in her arms, and let him release it all on her, the futility, the sense of failure, the apparent hopelessness of his situation.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re going to have to eat out, and I can’t pay.”

She shushed him. “It’s okay. Let’s just clean this up. It’ll be okay.”

Eventually, within a few weeks of that incident, Marcelo found a job. Things slowly returned to normal as he got back into the routine of waking up at six-thirty, shaving every day, dressing in something other than shorts and t-shirts. But he was marked. It had been the first time as an adult that he had felt completely insecure, unsure of what lay ahead, of how he would survive. He knew that he could depend on his family, in theory. There was always a room for him at Mamá’s house, if things came to such a drastic pass. However, he didn’t like how close he had come to such a decision, even if he had come to the brink only in his mind and not in actuality. It was too close for his taste, and the roiling depression that visited him had also been something unaccustomed and unwelcome. He was growing weary of depending on someone else for his livelihood, and had an intimation that something else had to be in the offing.

***

Before he and Jessie moved up into the Fairfax district, Marcelo had found himself on a bus riding into downtown L.A., Monday through Friday. Due to the high price of parking downtown, his company had subsidized his monthly bus pass. In the beginning he had taken the train into work. This involved catching the Green Line at the Aviation station, taking it the six stops to the Rosa Parks/Wilmington station, and transferring to the Blue Line, which had a terminus at 7th Street beneath the surface of the Financial District.

At first, Marcelo had enjoyed taking the train into downtown. It stirred memories of his subway explorations in New York, when the train was a conduit to destinations far beyond the small confines of his neighborhood. Others might be content to swelter in the environs of St. Nicholas and Fort Washington Avenues; Marcelo always possessed a bit of the explorer’s streak, even if he often tamped it down. Taking the train into work afforded him the chance to get out from behind the wheel, from the white-knuckle stress of navigating clogged freeways, inching along, cutting into other lanes, looking for any advantage in order to get ahead, to make it in on time. On the train he could relax: read, sleep, people-watch. In addition, he surmised that the train in L.A. was an expensive trifle, a toy for suburban, downtown-bound commuters from the South Bay and Long Beach, a way for lawyers and accountants to make it into the city center without having to drive, and thus not used by many people. He was mistaken in this assumption, however. The Green Line did arrive almost empty at his embarkation station. But, by the time he got off at the Blue Line transfer point, the cars were packed to the gills, every seat occupied, people strap-hanging in the aisles; or not quite in the aisles, as train commuters in Los Angeles all seemed to have the unfortunate habit of congregating in a tight knot around the sliding doors when no seats were in the offing. Marcelo shook his head at this, seeing twenty people bunched around each train door, while the aisles stood as bare as elm trees in December in Maine. The view which offered itself from the Green Line was innocuous if bland, as it rode down the middle of the Century Freeway. And the people taking the train weren’t the lawyers and professional sorts he was expecting. There were maids, airport workers, security guards, retail clerks, students, dry-wallers, all the lower rungs of the Los Angeles economy. There were a few professionals and technical people like himself interspersed among the crowd, and if they had been the only riders he would have been more content. But the press of humanity was more than he expected, and soon proved to be more than he could handle. Driving had spoiled him. He was no longer used to commuting with hundreds of other people in the same space. Even on a bumper-to-bumper freeway, each driver had his own zone of exclusion, his own private domain of steel and glass and rubber. L.A., more than any other city, made sacred this private space. The years had turned Marcelo irrevocably into an Angelino; that fact hammered home into him as he commuted on the train.

One of the facets of living in Los Angeles is the ability, if one wishes, to live in a willful, blissful ignorance of the less savory parts of the city. Five lanes wend in one direction, and five in the opposite, massive rivers of asphalt and concrete cutting swathes through the county, usually enclosed by high retaining walls so that drivers couldn’t even see the neighborhoods they were bypassing if they so had a yen. And the freeways do cut through the tougher parts of the county: South Central, Compton, Inglewood, the less Brady Bunch-like areas of the Valley. The freeways impose a reality upon the city; as much as they tie the city together, they also separate the place, setting boundaries, demarcating territories. During the ’92 riots, the gentle burghers of the Westside were stricken by fear from a rumor—reported repeatedly on the local news—that the Bloods and Crips would effect a truce to their warring and, joined together, roar north of the 10 and west of the 405 to wreak havoc on Santa Monica, Brentwood, Westwood from the windows of suped-up El Caminos. For the residents of the wealthier sections of the city, the freeways during those noisome three days promised to bring them destruction. In fact, they may have served as a sort of barrier, because the Crips and Bloods managed to unite only in ravaging their own neighborhoods. No armada rolled out of Watts on the Harbor Freeway like a Vandal army on a latter-day Via Flaminia.

Riding the train, though, Marcelo was brought face to face with the other Los Angeles. He grew to not much like it quite quickly. The Green Line was crowded, slow, and oftentimes late, but at least it had the advantage of gliding along the middle of the 105, offering no scintillating view, but likewise not depressing commuters as they looked out of the windows. It was the Denny’s of mass transportation. The Blue Line, conversely, ran for most of its length—or at least for most of the length on which Marcelo rode—through some of the most blasted landscape L.A. had to offer. Marcelo felt himself deflate every time he boarded the Blue Line for the ride into downtown. Part of it, he was sure, had to do with the job. But much of it was simply due to the utterly ruinous vistas that greeted his eyes every day. He rode through dilapidated residential areas, where derelict houses sat on brown, desiccated lots; through commercial strips whose businesses seemed to consist solely of rubber tire recyclers and wooden pallet depositories. There were two points in the ride which served as oases, when the train rolled past large, tree-covered parks. But even these parks bespoke of decay, one with a pool that remained empty winter and summer, and another with brown dust where grass should have been. Yet on the ride home he always saw these parks crowded with children playing soccer or tossing footballs or shooting baskets, for they were probably the only parks within any distance for the residents of those neighborhoods. This wasn’t like New York, where even his immigrant, lower-class neighborhood had a surfeit of green, rolling parks. Marcelo, of course, always had the option of driving up to the Santa Monica mountains, or to the beach. But what choice did these people have?

Much to his dismay, Marcelo found that he didn’t enjoy sharing the train with the other commuters. There were too many of them, and some didn’t wash well, and someone always sat down next to him when all he wanted was the row to himself so as to enjoy whatever book he happened to be reading. He fell back into his New York habit of not taking notice of what happened around him, keeping his eyes focused down on his book or out the window, ignoring the loud teenagers, the wailing babies, the arguing lovers, the panhandlers. Adding to the chore of taking the train, the floors were often sticky with the residue of spilled drinks that weren’t supposed to be onboard, leaving the soles of his shoes gummy. His romance with rail in Los Angeles died a quick death. But he was stuck. His work paid more than the pass was worth, but less than a month’s parking would be, and they made it clear that he wouldn’t be receiving a larger stipend. That was when he discovered the bus.

When arriving at his train station and parking (and he found that so L.A., that one had to drive to catch the train), he often saw a group of people queued up on Imperial Highway. He had always assumed they were waiting for a bus, but what struck him was what kind of people they were. They were all well-dressed, with briefcases, newspapers, laptops. They didn’t seem the sort to be waiting for a Metro bus, which was even more decrepit than the train. Yet there they were, day after day, waiting in a polite queue. One day, Marcelo decided to wait in his car and watch what happened to the line. After a few minutes, a large white bus with the words “Commuter Express” arrived at the stop, and the waiting file dutifully trooped onto it. On the destination scroll he saw the words “Downtown Los Angeles.” He thought he saw his possible salvation. He trudged off to the train, dreading the ride into work, but hopeful that he would soon have a solution to his problems. After some research on the Internet he tracked down all the particulars about the bus—its route, the fare, its schedule. A monthly pass was only a few more dollars than what he paid presently, and it couldn’t be any worse than taking the train. The following week he started taking the bus, and in it he soon felt safe, secure, at ease, senses which eluded him on the train. He still felt noble for taking public transportation, for not adding the pollutants from his car into the soup overhanging L.A., but it didn’t feel like quite as much of a sacrifice as it had been on the train. That’s what Marcelo liked the most about the arrangement: it provided for an easy righteousness. Once he and Jessie moved away from the airport, however, even that easy righteousness proved to be impossible, and Marcelo, once again, drove the long thoroughfares into Downtown.