Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [43]
Boyle is now practicing law out of his home, except on Saturday mornings, when he runs a legal clinic at the town’s Democratic offices, a storefront along one of the town’s commercial boulevards. It’s a bare room, narrow but deep; Boyle meets with his clients in a cubicle in the rear. He invited me to join him one Saturday morning. His clientele, he told me, are a mix of old immigrants and new, a cascade of outsiders. They come to Boyle when they have nowhere else to turn, and while Boyle tries to keep an arm’s distance, he inevitably gets swallowed up by some of the stories he hears. He is, after all, an angry man, and so he can and does get angry on behalf of the people he represents.
Boyle’s first client is a forty-year-old political refugee from Lithuania. Valdos (he asked that I not use his last name) is dressed in a fire-engine-red shirt, black shorts, white socks, and loafers. He has a pink earring in his left ear. He looks like a working-class version of Liberace. He’s been in this country for thirteen years, and he buys and sells jewelry, which explains the magnifying glass hanging from his neck. Valdos wanted to purchase a two-flat, and one of his tenants, a white gentleman, hasn’t paid rent for six months; Valdos wants to know how easy it would be to evict him. Cicero, Boyle tells me, has a big problem with deadbeat tenants, usually white, who know that landlords will initially favor them over Hispanics. Urban nomads, they move from one apartment to the next, often getting six months of free rent. Boyle tells Valdos that for a hundred dollars plus the filing fees he’d help file an eviction notice.
Enriquez, who’s twenty-six years old and has been laid off as a delivery man for Miller beer, arrives with his father, Tony, who was the first Mexican-American precinct captain in the town. Enriquez tells Boyle his story. Six weeks ago, he says, he called the police because a gaggle of gang members loitering on his block pulled out guns. Three times that night, the police came, but each time the gang members had disappeared into the alleys and walkways. Enriquez admits he got a bit heated, and he said to one of the officers, “Why don’t you do your job, man?” Well, the other night, Enriquez goes on, he had dropped off a friend in an unfamiliar part of town, and to get home he drove down an alley, where he got stopped by that same officer. Enriquez didn’t have his insurance card, and so his car, a 1995 Buick LeSabre, was towed. Boyle asks for the officer’s name. Enriquez tells him. “Oh, shit,” says Boyle. “He ain’t never seen an Hispanic who he doesn’t think is a criminal. He’s a prick.” Boyle instructs Enriquez not to pay the seven-hundred-fifty-dollar towing fee since if he does he has to waive his rights to contest the claim. Boyle tells him that for a hundred dollars he can help him beat the charge. “You got the balls to do this?” Boyle asks. Enriquez hesitates. His wife works as a bank teller, and she needs the car to get to work. His father tells him he’ll lend his car to Enriquez. Boyle claps his hands. “Then we’re done. It’s the only way the shit stops.”
A twenty-seven-year-old Hispanic woman, Gabriella, who works for the Department of Public Aid, arrives with her seven-year-old daughter and her mother. She’s concerned that her father’s death from a blood clot could have been avoided if he hadn’t initially been wrongly diagnosed at a local hospital. Boyle tells her he doesn’t handle personal injury lawsuits. While they’re talking, they realize that Gabriella was taught by Boyle’s sister in seventh grade. And then Gabriella lays out her other problems. A black tenant hasn’t paid his rent for three