Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [47]
Shortly after Celikoski purchased GT’s, a group of two hundred or so day laborers were evicted from the spot where they had been congregating each morning at a nearby bus turnaround. There they had constructed a makeshift plywood hut to give them shelter from the rain. They soon found their way over to GT’s, where, because of the mall’s parking lot, there was room for employers to drive in and pick up workers for the day. Moreover, the day laborers needed a place to take shelter from the elements as well as a bathroom. GT’s offered both. On any given morning in the winter, fifty to sixty men, most of them Hispanic—though a few Mongolians and Cambodians as well—gather in the parking lot, just outside GT’s, waiting for potential employers to drive up, usually in their SUVs, which the laborers swarm to like moths to a lightbulb. Since it’s January, work is hard to come by, which is why these two men were still lingering at the diner at midday. One of them who looked to be in his twenties approached Celikoski and asked for a cigarette. Celikoski gave him one of his Marlboros. “Wake up your friend, please,” Celikoski told the young man, who was wearing a GAP baseball cap. The other man, who looked to be in his forties, his hair disheveled, his down jacket ripped, had rested his head on the table. “I wake him up three times,” the younger man said. Celikoski calmly walked over to the dozing laborer and gently shook him. “Amigo, wake up. Please, you go home and sleep. Respect me.” The man lifted his head, revealing a fresh wound on his forehead. He looked disoriented, as if he’d been drinking. Celikoski walked away, shaking his head. A few days earlier, he told me, feeling sorry for this man, Celikoski had given him a container of chicken noodle soup which he took out on the sidewalk to eat. The man consumed half of it before passing out, falling headfirst into the soup.
Celikoski grumbles incessantly about the day laborers. He says that on occasion they’ll leave without paying for their coffee. Do you go after them? I ask. “For seventy-nine cents I say ‘forget about it,’ ” he tells me. He says he’s lost customers, especially women and children, who are intimidated by the loitering men. He says they’ll gamble on the sidewalk outside, that they’ll occasionally get into fights. And he contends they can’t find work because they’re too greedy. “They ask for too much money,” he says. “They ask for one hundred fifty dollars for eight hours. It’s no good.” But the thing about it is if you spend time at GT’s with Celikoski, listening to him try out his newly learned Spanish and offering the recently purchased hot pepper mix, one gets the distinct impression that he rather enjoys their company.
I arrive one morning, shortly after seven a.m. It’s thirteen degrees out, and so GT’s is packed with the day laborers seeking refuge from the cold. One man, who tells me his name is George and that he arrived from Guatemala fifteen years ago, is sitting at the counter, eating a breakfast of three scrambled eggs, potatoes, toast, and coffee. He’s one of the few who actually buys a meal, this one for $3.39, usually when he’s just finished a job and is flush with cash. He spent the past two days cleaning an abandoned factory for nine dollars an hour; it was his first hire in twelve days. (Many of the day laborers tell me that they do indeed ask for a lot of money but that it’s because they need room to negotiate; otherwise, they say, they run the risk of getting paid near or even below minimum wage.) George is thirty-six and has soft features and an open face. He’s wearing a black skullcap that he’s shaped into the form of a Robin