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Maybe it’s a couple of weeks. Abra’s got a job with Mrs. D., waking up at four a.m., leaving at five, starting work at six, making it over to the Mission, some sweatshop with all Filipino ladies making jewelry stands out of felt and Styrofoam. Making dollar and fifty an hour. Probably talking unionizing in between. Comes home by three p.m. smelling like glue, just in time to pick up the twins at school and start organizing to save the I-Hotel. Organizing every day until midnight. Sleep four hours, then start again. Something’s got to give.
I see Abra. I ask, “When’s it happening? “
“What?”
“The revolution.”
She’s gotta show optimism, so she says, “Soon, Felix. Soon.”
How many years Joe’s running the I-Hotel? Maybe not forever, and nobody knows how he starts. Gets the manager’s room with his private bath and all the keys, decides if there’s room for you at the inn, collects your money. For some, there’s always a room. For others, don’t bother. For Joe, it’s about loyalty and protection. You in his brotherhood, you stay there. Sometimes I think, who else could do this job but Joe? Think about the tramps and lowlifes coming through. Pimps and hustlers. Addicts and ex-cons. Joe might give you a slim chance, but he wants it respectable and quiet. He’s keeping the rooms for his brothers. Nobody breaks Joe’s rules. How many times I see Joe arriving at somebody’s door with his baseball bat. Guy might be naked. He’s got to run out the hotel or take his medicine. How many rules Joe’s got to break to keep this kind of peace?
Over the years, Joe’s rubbing shoulders with the guys who rise to the top. In case you forget, city’s a port. Tough guys rise from the dock to do the work of the people. Longshoremen with connections up and down the coast, up to organizing us Alaskeros. An injury to one is an injury to all. And just in case, he coaches boxing to every new generation. So when the I-Hotel gets threatened, he gets the ear of the mayor himself, old family friend. Probably taught this kid his jabs and hooks. Don’t let the mayor forget where he comes from.
Macario and I take public transportation back to the hotel. I think out loud to Macario. “Bus is like the hotel. For the people.”
Macario nods. “Sorry about the car, Felix.”
I shrug. “Forget it.” I continue my thinking. “You know this eminent domain? Got sides to it.”
“Yeah,” Macario agrees.
“City can use the power to take away anything for the public good, but who can say what is the public good? More like political good.”
“Public good in our case would be to house the poor and elderly after working all their lives.”
“Makes sense to me.”
“The city has to be made responsible for public housing.” Macario’s pounding on his knee, practicing his speech. “They can use eminent domain to obtain our property, but they’ve got to use it for low-cost housing for the people. That’s what we’re trying to argue.”
Finally I say, “Joe might be thinking like this. Eminent domain, buy-back, realistically, it can never happen. Something gets proposed, goes to court, court agrees, knocks it down, you get an appeal, goes back to the city, win, lose, buying time—not buy back, just buying time.”
“You mean, we’re just using stalling tactics.”
“You never know. We could win.”
“What kind of line is stalling tactics?”
“Line?”
“It’s like this, Felix, a line is . . .” Macario is looking for words.
I cut in, “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? I don’t know what your line is? How’s your party line gonna help me? You get a party, but what do I get?”
Abra and Macario poking around the bones on their plates.
“Felix is right,” Abra says. “Every group is using the hotel to test their line.”
I know the problem. How many old tenants we got left? Used to be fifty. Now, maybe thirty. Every support group attached to one or two tenants, hauling him around from rally to rally like the real thing. I don’t say nothing because what’s an old guy got besides this kind of family, this kind of attention? What does he know about party lines? But he is not stupid. Didn’t survive all these years without learning something.
“Looks like the whole city coming to save the hotel.”
“I hope so.”
The chanting never stops. It’s coming out of loudspeakers everywhere. The whole place is wired for sound.
THE PEOPLE UNITED CAN NEVER BE DEFEATED.
THE PEOPLE UNITED CAN NEVER BE DEFEATED.
STOP THE EVICTION! WE WON’T MOVE!
STOP THE EVICTION! WE WON’T MOVE!
WE WON’T MOVE!
WE WON’T MOVE!
WE WON’T MOVE!
I’m feeling the excitement. They’re telephoning and radioing the whole city. People pouring in to Manilatown. Put their bodies up against the I-Hotel.
Outside my door, I know the corridor is filled with the second contingent. Wet towel’s tucked under the door to stop the teargas. My mattress is outside, blocking the landing. Folks packed in like sitting sardines, arms locked and waiting. Police’s got to drag them out one by one. Then finally, there’s us. The last thirty tenants, each one sitting in our rooms, waiting. That’s the plan.
What am I thinking? That they never get this far. That this time, like the other times, they give up and go away. Drive their cars with lights and guns and clubs away. Trot their horses back to Golden Gate Park. Go home to their families and children. Go home to TV and dinner. Let me stay here and live the few more years I got to live.
"The last tenant is being escorted from the hotel. He wants to make a statement."
I am crippled, and I am deaf, and I am very old. I am alone here, and they put me in the street. I want freedom, the principle of American democracy in the richest country in the world. Do you think our mayor has a place for me? No. No. Because I was happy here.
"Although the mayor promised to provide housing for the tenants after their eviction, there is no one here offering housing to anyone. There are no promised buses or housing assistance."
"A contingent of tenants can be seen walking away down Kearny. They have no place to go. Where will these suddenly homeless people go?"
"It is eight a.m., and the Sheriff has handed over the I-Hotel to the Enchanted Seas Investment Corporation."
After we had worked together for our beliefs in twenty-four-hour days without rest, bonded ourselves to each other through the inner struggles of self-criticism within our groups, confessed our social sins to our brother- and sisterhoods and lost our individual selves to our collective purpose, we finally could only be with each other. And we found ourselves fighting if we should collude with the so-called system and its elected liberal officials, if our struggle should be defined as working with the working class or our oppressed Asian communities, if this or that hotel tenant was an advanced worker, if gay lib protestors were bourgeois degenerates, if our loyalties were with the PRC or the USSR, if any of us were reformists, revisionists, or sellouts, if our art and writing must always have political purpose, and we were very sure that depending on our correct analysis of these definitions, we could then make decisions to act that would be ultimately unbeatable. But however we may have accounted for our thinking and our actions in these years, this was how we fought and spent our youth.
In February 1998, a small Pasadena company named GoTo started auctioning placement in search results they bought from other providers. Six months later, they claimed to have more than a thousand paying customers. According to GoTo, you didn't need fancy algorithms to determine relevance, just the invisible hand of the free market. Any company bidding for placement at the top of the results must be a good match for the term being searched. At Google, we found that concept ridiculous. Bidding-based ranking was clearly inferior to results based on an algorithm. Bidding was driven by imprecise humans. Humans bad. Math good. We knew about GoTo, but we discounted their "non-technological" approach. That proved to be unwise. We gave them a head start, and for the next four years we would fight them for supremacy in the online advertising market.
foreshadowing lol
Jeff couldn't wait to engage the challenges at Google. He showed up weeks before his official start date, before he'd even left the other company, and wrote code without being on the payroll because he "wanted to hit the ground running."
on jeff dean. classic. it's not just a job! it's beyond regular distinctions of work and non-work! (at least if you join early enough)