Clearly he’s thought the politics of the thing all the way through. Plus, he’s never dirtied his hands by actually voting. He’s pure!
The guy on the left put a wrinkle into the narrative for about five minutes, bringing psychic relief and patriotic gratitude to the nation. Then he re-emerged in the morning to issue a POW video, er, correction…denouncing himself for embarrassing his teammates, who hid in the locker room while paying fans stood for the anthem.
Sports was our last redoubt. The de-militarized zone in 0ur increasingly militarized culture war beyond the grasping, poopy fingers of politics, the one place where everyone could put the feuding to the side for a couple hours.
At least the kneeling is for a good cause. Nothing bad happens after you torch the cop cars in your town.
Pay no attention to these faces. Really. These are people who know nobody and nobody knows. Besides, they’re not pretty like the Pied Piper.
Bailey decided to marry Owen when she was 14 years old. He was working in a pet store. That boy is so cute, she announced. He’s going to be my husband.
Owen’s life then was in the uncertain quiet which follows chaos. His mother was a heroin addict. His father was in prison. He was shuttling between relatives, mostly living on his own. When the doom cloud was swirling the drain, his parents pulled him out of high school to help them do break-ins.
Two years after Bailey first met him he was working at the store again, putting his life back on keel, when her mother came in to purchase a sacrificial mouse for her snake. Owen tried flirting with her.
“I’m married”, she told him, “but I have a daughter…..”
Incarceration, court-mandated drug tests turned his parents life around. His mother became a big wheel in Narcotics Anonymous. His father regained his contracting business. Owen eventually began working for him as an electrician. They prospered.
I tried to get him to move out to LA, make a go of it as a musician, but Bailey had other plans for him.
All the hippie ladies from the California side of the family came out to see them hitched.
Perhaps there’s a lesson here for husband selection. Pick’em early and wait em out. They still do that in America.
Latinos and Trump voters at the dinner table. No discomfort. The three tribes of the wedding: New Mexico ranchers, Mendocino County hippies and Latino tradesmen made everyone on cable TV look ridiculous.
When they’re finished with the Confederacy and the Catholic missionaries, how soon before the statue topplers come for her? I can think of three reasons she would qualify.
There is so much construction and renovation going on in Los Angeles right now a 50 square foot granite job in Van Nuys qualifies as a nuisance, even if you’re waving cash like a drunken bachelor at a strip club. The normal laws of business are in abeyance when it comes to stone work.
The first contractor to visit told us he was in the middle of a 25 slab bathroom renovation in Pasadena, “but he would squeeze us in”. Our kitchen was less than a single slab.
Of course we never heard from him again. We went through a series of estimates ranging from $1100 to $3900, which meant fabricators were making up numbers and hoping suckers would bite. Mostly, though, people didn’t call us back.
After some gentle and persistent nagging we manage to prevail upon someone to pick up our slab at the yard. Then we waited for work to begin. And waited.
We were doing dishes in the bathtub. Our leverage over the stoneworkers, even as paying customers, was effectively zero.
After six weeks the call came. The countertops were arriving in the morning. The Luises, Juan Luis and Jose Luis, were standing on the porch at 8am. Our finished pieces were in the back of their truck.
Complications ensued, as they say in comedy. The biggest of the pieces, the crucial L shaped one, had an overhang 3/4 of an inch too long. The cabinet drawers couldn’t open. Phone calls were made to the shop. It was suggested I make the countertop 3/4 of an inch higher to accommodate their screw up. I nixed the idea on principle, while dreading the idea of the countertop leaving the house, to return to a nuisance pile to be dealt with by the fabricator at a future date, unknown.
After much negotiation in Spanish it was decided Luis (Jose Luis) would resolve the matter on site.
They set up a table in the driveway, and he went to work, recutting and polishing the overhang in 106 degree heat. It took four hours in the full sun. I brought him water and chatted him up while he took breaks. Turns out we were neighbors.
He lives with his wife and daughter in an apartment on Sherman Way. He came from El Salvador 14 years ago, and started out sweeping floors at the granite yard. He swept for three years before they let him use the tools.
Now he cuts and installs stone perpetually. He doesn’t mind the dust. He pays $2000 a month in rent and has a 14-year old who has to have the “good shoes”. He told me it hurts him when she speaks English when she comes home from school. He doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, doesn’t partake of drugs. To save money he drives a 2002 Mitsubishi. Too many Latinos blow their money on cars, and partying on the weekends. “Good for the economy, but bad for us.” Yet for all his el norte striving, he demands she speak Spanish in the house.
Sometimes other Latinos call him beaner. “Why can’t you speak English?”
In Central America he was picking cucumbers. In Los Angeles he has a trade which puts folding money in his pocket, and a daughter with a phone, surrounded by danger. “Ai, peligro! Peligro everywhere”. Spanish is his only hold on her.
Sons of Stone Cutters
Luis finished the edge detail by mid-afternoon. After a moment of suspense, our fancy new Ikea drawers opened with a perfect 1/8 inch of clearance, and with that, our upper-middle class pretentions for our working class stucco box were marginally closer to fruition, courtesy of El Salvador.
After he left I thought of the movie Breaking Away and wondered what would become of his English speaking, shoe-loving daughter.
