The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [71]
My mother loved to swim more than anyone I know.
Swan.
Your Tax Dollars At Work
Ernesto
Alejo
Angel
Manuel
Rick
Ricardo
Sonny
Lebron
Pedro
Jimarcus
Lidia
Notice anything about those names?
Six Mexicans, one Italian, one African-American, one Jamaican, one white dishonorably discharged Navy guy wound tighter than dynamite, and me. Compliments of the State of California.
The posse. All in day-glo orange vests on the side of the freeway picking up your trash with sticks that have “grabbers” on the ends of them. At least that was one of the week’s assignments. The easiest and least humiliating. Who we were on paper:
Breaking and Entering (but not stealing anything. ?)
Possession
Possession
DUI
Domestic Violence
DUI
Possession
Driving without a License or Vehicle Registration
Fleeing a Crime Scene and Failure to Produce Identification
Public Intoxication and Indecent Exposure
And a big blond
D
U
I
Doing time on a road crew in the hot asphalt and suntan lotion world of San Diego makes you feel like you are in much crappier remake of the movie Cool Hand Luke. Everybody who is tanned and glamorous - the paid for whitey pretty smiles and the paid for bleached blonde color weaves and the paid for total laser hair removal jobs and the paid for body parts - drives by you like you are ice plant or oleander. The stuff in the divider between the zipping lanes of freeway life. When cars go by your hair blows up and hot wind brushes your face. The sound of all that driving and social surface life can make you feel nuts.
There’s no Paul Newman challenging the man. You put your trash in shitty plastic bags and when you fill one you tie it off and leave it on the side of the road and move on. You don’t get to stand around. If you stand around, officer Kyle comes over to you and reprimands you verbally. If you talk back it’s simple - you go straight to jail. But you also develop … strategies for moving as slowly as possible. Why hurry? There’s only more trash. There’s never-ending trash. And you are part of the trash - you are a trash advertisement.
Except for dishonorably discharged Rick, who had the kind of eyes that said I WILL BEAT THE FUCK OUT OF ANYONE WHO TALKS TO ME, me and my homeboys slowly but surely got along. You’d think not, right? Some middle aged bouge blonde woman with sagging tits getting along with a bunch of SoCal thugs? Au contraire.
People who have been to jail more than once can smell it on each other.
Men in groups operate through a series of male codes. Movements in the hands and eyes. Stances. Verbal exchanges with triple entendres. Little challenges and invisible battles and hierarchies worked out. So I rarely spoke and I never wore make-up and I wore baggy assed pants and I made goddamn sure my labor was not that of a woman. Luckily, I have the shoulders and strength of a swimmer.
The second week I lifted a big chunka railroad tie by myself. I hoisted it up onto my shoulder, and even though I knew my spine was crumpling up a vertebrae at a time like little wads of paper, I looked bad ass enough to be … what’s the word. A trusted body.
I’ve never been treated less like a woman in my life. I remember telling a colleague of mine - one of the only people who knew that by day I was out there with my posse while at night I had a fancy visiting writer job teaching budding young MFAs how to make their words more wonderful and she said: “Do they say lewd things to you? Do they do anything … you know, weird around you or to you? Aren’t you scared to be around those people?” I just stared at her. I tried to picture what she pictured. A bunch of male mostly minority small time criminals - those people - and a blonde woman who … who what? Who did she believe I was? She taught World Lit. and drove a Beamer.
Who I was. I was the convict with the best English. The