Why Are We Delivering Free Labor?

October a
Basam was asking me where I've been. I don't tell him I've been getting into the culture of working through lunch up there. So many skipped writing days. I barely remember who I am. The trick is to always figure out how to come back to the paper and the pen. Oppression's always going to pull me away. I've been waking up terrified. This morning I almost threw up. I couldn't tell where I was. Was I still in Ventura too afraid to face the school day.? But then I remember about Jacobo. There's always been a force field between my home and the outside world. Some days I couldn't cross it. I only crossed it because I had to, there was no way my Mother let me stay home even if I was burning with fever, choking in phlegm, or oozing pus. I always let Machi stay home if he has to. Before I could cross the force field I had to throw up. I want to go home. But when I'm home I'm afraid. Home is my own mind the way it was before I went to sleep, before the nightmares and the morning terror. So much has happened. It's been weeks since I've gotten myself to the park, to my mind home. Already the place, the job,is sucking me in. Stockholm syndrome. Abducted by burocracy, wage slavery. Pseudo reality is the biggest cult.

The boat outing was weird. I don't know how I survived it. By the time I got home I had a throbbing migraine in my right eye from keeping my face on and looking so hard. I looked so hard and what did I see? The river up close was like those onyx stones my father brought back from his trips. B's friend Rich's boat was a sailboat it turned out but we had to use the motor anyway. Even without wind and waves I got seasick. Rich is the son of the 'Bs friend from when she was a City volunteer on the Island right after college. Was he the one whose mother jumped from a window of an Island luxury hotel after the father left? (How do some lives go so wrong? What is there not to be scared of?) We made it to the Immigration Museum on the offshore island where the first European immigrants were penned. At the museum B was the only one among us who thinks she found her relatives on one of the boat lists in their computer exhibit. The blown up photographs showed clusters of sorted out small white people. The groups they'd been sorted into were marked on their clothes with chalk. An x marked the ones who did not read. This was the place where the boats came in when the hoards of criminal European immigrants came, long before the Islanders or the Venturan exiles arrived (one of each of whom was me). There were stacks of their trunks with clothes and toys and photographs.

On the way back on the boat we had our potluck picnic. Lucha got Teresa talking about Amina. “I wish it was true she was still dating Ed. But he almost got her into a car accident, driving her home like a maniac, when she refused him sex.” Everybody laughed and I joined in. “Or that''s the story she tells.” They laughed harder. “Thank god. Maybe he'll stop calling me at home.”Now they were bending over. I was confused. Ed was another of the Bb's touted hires. I'll have to catch Lucha by herself sometime when I'm not trying to keep myself from vomiting. I couldn't eat because I was seasick and I could barely watch them eating. I brought Basam's falafels and persimmons I grabbed on my way to the revolving door where we were all going to meet. Teresa brought arroz con gandules and potato salad. Solly brought three kinds of cheese and pears and crackers. Lucha brought two six packs of beer. She had more than her share of it and when B tried to give Rich the two left over when we docked Lucha bristled and said she'd take them home. Lucha was so edgy even with the beer that Solly got her off to the side for privacy but I could hear them talking about Lucha's daughter Jody. Solly was telling Lucha she had to send her away, away from the neighborhood someplace where she could get treatment. I picture Jody looking like Machi's girlfriend. God help our teenage kids.

At my first site visit as a staff developer the teachers were prickly. I knew some of them from my before bureaucrat self but that didn't seem to make a difference. Or made it worse. They hated me because now I am a bureaucrat. One guy who used to be my friend and chat me up when we were both participants in Solly's workshops, just wanted to see me squirm. “Why are we delivering free labor?” What answer could I give. “Reinaldo, why don't you get off your ass and make the revolution and then we won't have to?” I said Freire didn't come up with popular education for the places where it would be easy to do but for the places where it would be difficult, and where could it be more difficult than in the belly of the beast? I wouldn't say those things if the b, or the bb, or maybe even Lucha were with me.

I overheard Teresa and Amina by the xerox talking about Ed. He's stopped calling Teresa at home after she put her husband on the phone and her husband sent him to hell. Lucha told me he's the worst serial sexual harasser she's ever seen in all her years as a burocrat and (her words) before that a poverty pimp.The bb called us all in last week to look at a video about sexual harassment. Lucha said she's finally caught on and wants to help him (by making the rest of us watch the tape). All departments in the agency are required to watch it. The lifers and the grant fundeds sat on different sides of the room. This also breaks down by race; most of the lifers are black and the grantfundeds are latinos and jews and ethnic whites. There was lots of tittering when the video showed a black guy hovering by a white woman's cubicle making double entendre jokes. Ed didn't show a thing on his long shiny black face.

I could barely concentrate that day. All I could think about was when I smashed a beer bottle on one of those big glacier rocks by the park concert hall after Jacobo told me he's going back to his wife. He'd gone back to her already. He told me after the fact. Part of my mind always has known he never left her at all, he was only getting even for her lover, having some fun of his own while he waited for her lover to lose interest in her. Why Jacobo doesn't is a mystery, even though he must know it's only a matter of time before one of her lovers takes. She's a borderline, narcissist, psycho bitch. I don't know how many times we've met but she never remembers me. I remember her. When I think I won't be with him again I get dizzy. Dizzy and ashamed. Dizzy with shame. I left my home for him, I wake up with that thought and feel as if I'm careening through air on my sawn off tree limb.