View all notes
The rebels were the state, and overnight. A transition that was not unlike a man waking up to discover he’d somehow married his mistress. A gesture that would surely kill the allure of romance, of luminous desire, in the very fact of its guarantee. Like killing the allure of a new government, a new power structure, in the very fact of its installment. He gazed at the watery horizon, indulging in a childlike wonder at the simple fact that there were unseen worlds beyond the blue. “The sea! The sea!” the soldiers cried out. He felt an old familiar hunger beginning to announce itself, the desire to dissolve back into civilian life and witness the rest of this thing, the completion of revolution’s arc, from a cozily anonymous vantage.
Feelings run high. Just sit at the Teresita for one lunch rush and you’ll get the drift. People who feel that everything was stolen from them, and just because it’s been almost fifty years now doesn’t mean they have forgotten. They haven’t. Nor have the companies. A company is like a person in that it has a memory, its own institutional memory. A company can wait and anticipate with more patience than a person. There are pending claims against the Cuban government that the Cubans ignore. Mining concerns like the old Nicaro Nickel Company keep meticulous account of what they lost. United Fruit became United Brands became Chiquita. CEOs came and went. The claim lives on, in a black binder somewhere at the Justice Department—$350 million at this point, with inflation. After every last person who worked for United Fruit is long dead and gone, still, the company will fight to get its assets back.
Del once said that Mother’s sympathy for people, without any sympathy for what caused their circumstances, was not real sympathy but sentimentality.
Perhaps it’s true. The fact is we went down there and we took. But I don’t think it was Mother’s responsibility to change that fact, or anything else. I don’t think her sentimentality was any kind of crime.
not a crime, but insipid all the same
think he enjoyed that I stole the shopping bag. He wanted to see me regularly after that. He was looking for the girlfriend experience and a lot of women I knew considered that the gold standard: these men would pay a year’s worth of rent, up front; all you needed was one of them and you were set. I’d gone on the date because my old friend Eva had convinced me to. Sometimes what other people want is wantable, briefly, before dissolving in the face of your own wants. That night, while this square from Silicon Valley pretended we had a complicity like lovers, which meant treating me like trash, telling me I was pretty in a “common” sort of way, using his money to try to have power over me socially, like this was a relationship but since he was paying for it we would interact on his terms, and he could tell me what to say, how to walk, what to order, which fork to use, what to fake like I enjoyed—I realized that the girlfriend experience was not my thing. I would stick to hustling my income as a lap dancer at the Mars Room on Market Street. I didn’t care what was honest work, only what wasn’t repulsive to me. I knew from lap dancing that grinding was easier than talking. [...]
I sometimes think San Francisco is cursed. I mostly think it’s a sad suckville of a place. People say it’s beautiful, but the beauty is only visible to newcomers, and invisible to those who had to grow up there. Like the glimpses of blue bay through the breezeways along the street that wraps around the back of Buena Vista Park. Later, from prison, I could see that view like I was ghost-walking around the city. House by house, I looked at all there was to see, pressed my face to the breezeway gates of the Victorians along the eastern ridge of Buena Vista Park, the blue of the water softened by the faintest residue of fog, a kiss of moisture, a glow. I did not admire those views when I was free. Growing up, that park was a place where we drank. Where older men cruised, and snuck off to mattresses hidden under bushes. Where boys I knew beat up those men who cruised, and threw one off a cliff after he’d bought them a case of beer.
Even despite his obsession with this girl, he sometimes wanted out of the prison job, but change was such an elusive thing. A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.
[...] She wanted to brag, but she wanted to seem like she was being discreet. She kept talking about what good money she made as a waitress on Pier 39. She said, as if she somehow knew what I did for a living, “I make my money respectably.” Pier 39 is garbage.
[...] Backstage at the Mars Room women would critique other women for not having fancy costumes, or a choreographed and skillful floor show. Who cares—the job is about making money, not wasting it on costumes—and yet there were women in the dressing room who wanted there to be a set of rules to stripping. They believed you had to put on a good show and buy expensive costumes because it was more dignified and professional, respectful of some standard they wanted to uphold. But most of us worked in that environment because we were the kind of people who did not believe in standards and would never try to uphold any. You don’t have to believe in anything to work at the Mars Room. The Russian women, when they started dancing at the Mars Room, brought a new post-Soviet ruthlessness, a bracing lack of regard for costuming and glamour, for anything that wasn’t directly tied to profit. Most did hand jobs in the audience, which cut the rest of our business way back.
We three hovered in our turkey cages while Jones bullied the other prisoners into sitting down for the rest of their orientation. Everyone was agitated. People were crying. Jones told them to shut up and reminded them that they had made choices, that Sanchez, as she called the girl who’d had the baby, had made really poor choices, and should have thought about her baby’s future before she broke the law.
Betty heard us laughing and that was what did it. She was no longer the center of attention and agreed to flush up the photo.
After we got the thirty layers of plastic wrap unpeeled, Sammy unfolded a newspaper article that featured the incriminating image. I had pictured a classic nude with a bikini of hundred-dollar bills, the long tan legs insured for millions.
The image was of a woman lying on a bed stony as a corpse, with an enormous landslide of money crushing her, only her head emerging from the pile. She looked as if a gravel truck had backed up to the bed and slid its multi-ton load over her, entombing her in money.
We didn’t either of us say a word. Sammy folded up the image, rewrapped it, and sent it down the pipes.