IN MEDIUS RES....
Juan got a traffic ticket for $250 because he didn’t wait
for five seconds at a stoplight before moving on. The judge said he could pay $100 and then $50
a month.
“It’s a good deal.” Juan says
and I say
“Yeah, except you don’t deserve it.” (and except he didn’t ask for community
service which he could have worked off
with me but now that he started paying, it’s too late.)
He grinned. And I loaned him the money for the down payment,
and I never worry about him working off a loan, but it still feels sore
because, like Juan, I’m under the gun from two city inspections, (equally petty
and stupid according to me) and from a
potential lawsuit from another laborer, and the threat of extinction from
...well it just goes on and on, no good deed goes unpunished....like that.
Later Juan comes over to the desk I set up in the outdoor
kitchen/command headquarters and says he needs to leave early to take his daughter to the hospital because she has
a....he stumbles over a word...
“Goiter?” I guess, and he says yes. And I think about the way he has to work day
labor to support his family and how his kids are always sickly, probably
because he can’t afford better food, and how the city just contributes to that
social damage by trying to balance its budget on the backs of the poor, but
it’s too late to say anything on any account.
I come home late that night, tired from job after job just
beating my head on the wall, methodically and congratulating myself on
completing each baby step, but still wearied from the constant beatings from
deadbeats and mechanic work that won’t get done because of the inherent
perversity of inanimate objects....”Demons” I call it for short. I notice Juan has left the radio on to the
Mexican station he always listens to but ignore it, start to write and can’t,
swing the hammock out from one pole of the shade construction to another and
lie there watching the flicker of my home made tiki torches loaded with citronella
oil for the mosquitoes, fall asleep and wake up at three a.m., go over to the
radio that has finally toned down the commercial shouting and mechanized commercial
music to some acoustic original corrido.
At last, at least, the crying is real but I can’t sleep with it going on
and on, even faintly, in the background.
All my Colorado Salt Bushes are gone, they grew up in the
most adverse of possessions, out of dirt that is 90% clay and silt left here by
a tributary of the Santa Cruz when it used to run year round before agriculture
and the city sucked all the water out of the aquifer. And now all those nutrients sucked out of
hard, unforgiving ground and not chipped and shredded and put back as compost,
have to be taken to the dump to become part of useless pollution and poison instead,
because the city thinking it knows what absolute beauty is and is not, demanded
immediate removal so a 6 ft.fence could be built to hide what was already
hidden.
