Labor Story 2011 3rd place

 Rosemary Jasmine Rivera

“Bullet Through the Brain”

“Those leaves sure look bright today” I thought to myself as I finished collecting my garden tools. The way the image reflected on the metal handle of the rake seemed dream like. I couldn’t remember the last time I paid attention to something like that, but I did. Soon after my shift ended I went up to the owner of the house and asked for my daily payment. It was off books, always, since I didn’t have a green card. “There you go Paco, ten dollars.” the brown haired, 6 foot 2 inch bastard with a bald spot in the middle of his forehead said as he paid me 10 dollars for 5 hours. (That means 2 dollars per 1 hour. Yeah I know my math.) And to make things worse, “My name is not Paco, it’s Roberto Ponce Gonzalez.” I said under my breath. To make things even more worse, if that’s even correct English, I kept coming back for those 10 dollars for 5 hours for about 60 days. Why? Because I had to.

Every day at 3am I woke up, drank my 4 Coronas and went to the bodega around the corner to buy some more. I knew it wasn’t good for me, but that’s how I was able to get through the day without putting a bullet through my brain. Ha, it was only yesterday I went with my wife and kid through the desert to cross the border. To think I thought America was a way to get out of the hell I went through in Mexico. I lost my job in Cancun as a bartender in one of the American owned resorts. My family was barely getting by with the money I earned there. but at least I was in an environment that was familiar to me, even if the rich, white people kept getting drunk, passing out in front of me. I can’t count how many times I had to wipe the floor clean after some dumb college student threw up. The one mess I’ll never forget is the 18 year old Harvard university student who lost her top and threw up some sort of neon paste that resembled cereal and glow stick juice. Didn’t want to know what she ate to get that going. After a couple of years of that, and a child from my wife, who I only married a year before my job, I got fired from that resort. Turns out there were a lot of bartenders that could replace me, and all I had to do was spill a drink on a customer’s lap to get fired. I didn’t get any benefits, any unemployment, all I got was a goodbye and that’s what led me to here.

And I can remember, I can remember the night we decided to travel to the border. My wife was struggling to keep our daughter quiet while the border patrol drove around with their flashlights trying to pin down any of us scared mice. It was horrible. After a week of being thirsty, so thirsty we could drink seawater from a dirty glass, we made it to the guide who took us straight through the path that led to America, and my 2 dollar an hour job. Boy was he fast that guide. But he wasn’t fast enough when they spotted him in the darkness and shot him point blank in the head. The spilled brain goo made my daughter soil herself when it landed close to her right leg. We couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t scream, we couldn’t breathe. We just lay there in that bush and waited until they left. And when they did go, we ran. I picked up my child and we ran. Until that night I didn’t really think much of life, still don’t, but it kept me going. It kept me going to the spot behind Home Depot where the other day laborers stood to wait for jobs. It kept me going to somehow scrounge up enough money to pay for my little girl’s graduation dress for 5th grade, a pretty Robin's egg blue color. “And now it’ll help me with the long day I have ahead, along with my Coronas of course.” I said taking a sip of my first beer of the day.

I used to not always be a drinker. When we first got to American soil, the first thing we did was get in contact with one of the guides from the other side. He gave us some starting money and we bought ourselves some hamburgers and sodas in one of the fast food chains nearby. It was funny because even though I hate fast food, that burger tasted like heaven knowing earlier I had survived on crackers that had dirt encrusted on top.

“Roberto we have to get out of Texas. We can’t raise our child here. They’ll deport us if they catch us.” said my wife when we had been in Austin for 2 months. “I know, but we need enough money to move.” I don’t really know how we managed to save, but we made enough, both my wife and I; me by working 120 hrs a week and her by cooking and cleaning for the blancos nearby. It took us a year to save up $4,000, but we did it. I know it wasn’t much, but it was enough to buy a bus ticket to NYC and pay for a couple of months rent. “Why move?” my daughter asked me before we left. She was only seven at the time. I told her because mommy and daddy are always scared we’ll be sent back. “But why can’t we go back?” she would ask. “Because daddy has nothing there. I want you to have a chance at a better life, even if that means moving.”

It was scary. It was scary all the time. Anytime we saw a cop car we turned off the lights to the rented, run down house we lived in. If we were outside and we saw a police officer, we would walk the other way. “But that was then,and this is now. It’s better right?” I thought to myself. I picked up my six pack and heading to the door. As I heard the bells above move and jingle, a robber came in and tried to hold the store up. He had on a black ski mask but I could tell he was white. He pushed me to the ground and told me “Get the fuck down you fucking beaner, get the fuck down now.” I said softly, “I don’t want any trouble, please I have a family.” and laid down on the floor. The man hurried the store clerk to empty the cash into his plastic bag. His glasses and straight black hair had beads of sweat dripping down. I tilted my head up to see if the robber was going to leave when the store clerk took out a rifle to shoot the robber. “Bang!” was all I heard as the robber shot the clerk in the head and ran away with the money. All I could think was: “Thank God that wasn’t me.” The funny thing was that when the robbery was shown in the news, they described the assailant as black. Were they just describing his ski mask?

After that day things seemed to go down hill from there. Jobs kept getting scarcer and the few jobs I did have were demeaning. A 10 year old, not much younger than my daughter paid me 5 dollars to pick up some dog poop in the backyard of her parents brownstone in Brooklyn. I did it. Whay did I do it for? I did it for my little girl, the one thing in my life that I loved the most. She was the reason I took those god awful jobs. She was the one I lived for.

When my little girl, Gabrielle turned 11, she asked me to take her ice skating in Manhattan. I knew we couldn’t afford it, but I just couldn’t bare to make her sad. So I took her and when we got there she was the happiest little girl. She skated for hours, sometimes falling, sometimes flying. I was so happy, I didn’t think anything of it when she started coughing and sniffling. “It's just a simple cold.” I said to myself. “She'll be fine. But it ended with her getting pneumonia. We don’t have any health care so I tried to work extra jobs to pay for her medicine. “Just 2 more hours, just 2 more days, just 2 more jobs, just 2 hundred more dollars” is what I thought each time some faceless man handed me a 10 dollar bill or 20 if I got lucky. But just 2 weeks later my girl didn’t make it. And 2 minutes later I realized what all my hard work had amounted to.

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror. My wife’s cries deafened my own in the bedroom. I grabbed a gun I managed to get off some kid behind a liquor store near my block for 30 dollars and emptied it into my head, 1 shot. And for 1 second I saw my daughter, the beach, my family, even the dog I had when I was little. For the briefest moment, I was happy, and then the bullet went through my brain.