The Other America

Earlier this year I was waiting for a bus in Florida, near Miami, on my way to catch a flight to South America. As I sat in the scorching summer heat I was mentally preparing myself for the transition from first world USA to third world Peru. I had been to India the previous year, and it was a confronting experience. Then this white trash guy with short hair and a whitely t-shirt came and sat beside me. ‘I’ve been looking for work,’ he told me. ‘Yeah, what are you looking for?’ I asked.

Apparently, he was recently out of work and after applying for work at a few more places he was going to make a drop of 100 pills, $4 each down from $5 due to slow business. The job he recently lost involved standing outside with temperatures in the high 30’s and humidity even higher shaking a sign to attract passing motorists to a jewelry porn shop for $7 an hour. He used to smuggle bags of pills across boarders in his stomach, he told me, ‘but now they can see it in you. Still gotta pay the bills somehow though.’

‘What do you do for work?’ he asked. ‘I work at a hospital doing pretty menial administrative stuff.’ ‘Wow. An office job. I bet it has air con and everything.’ It did, and I did not have the heart to tell him that it was a part-time job paying $24 an hour that I had while finishing off a Law degree at a good University.

We then steered the conversation to more safe topics for our demographic of young males – drinking beer and sleeping with women. He was doing more of the former, he lamented. Apparently, ‘Florida girls are frigid whores.’

‘What station are you going to?’ he asked. ‘Lake Worth, I think. Why?’ ‘Good,’ he replied, ‘cos the other one – where the blacks are – that place is dangerous. They’ll kill you for $2, which can get them a hit of crack.’ I didn’t know whether to feel relieved that I was not going there or deeply concerned that people were getting killed for a $2 crack hit. Shiiiiiiii. I watch The Wire, but this is pretty heavy.

‘I hate this f%!#*&* place. I gotta get out of this State, away from my family,’ he confided. ‘Just this morning my Mom tried to run me over.’ I asked him which State he would move to if he could go anywhere. After some thought he answered, ‘Orlando’. Orlando is in the same State. The furthest he could envisage himself from his own personal hell was only three exits down the Florida Turnpike, ‘maybe working at a restaurant,’ he added.

When he went to get off the bus to apply for another job involving standing outside in the heat shaking a board for minimum wage, I noticed deep scars up both his wrist. If I were in his shoes, maybe I would have done the job properly, I thought. ‘Good luck,’ I said earnestly. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to give up.’