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Modern-day Invisible Man
I am an invisible man. No, I
am not a
spook like those who haunted
Edgar
Allan Poe; nor am I one of
your
Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.
I am a man
of substance, of flesh and
bone, fiber and
liquids –and I might even be
said to possess
a mind. I am invisible,
understand,
simply because people refuse
to see me.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible
Man
I came to America six years ago, but it could’ve
been sixteen or sixty. I believe the airport computer registered me when I
arrived. By now it’s a blip of information completely unrelated to me, to me as
a person, as an individual.
I’m 29 years old,
but I could be 19, 39 or say 49. At first I was a tourist, an optimistic,
herd-driven bus seat occupier on the double-decker taking me around New York
City along with other spaced-out souls on a beautiful autumn day.
Some months later,
when I ran out of status, money and illusions, I applied to the community of my
compatriots for help, and was told to go back where I came from, namely to our
motherland. “It's every man for himself here. We are not a government-- we
can’t issue papers for you. Neither can we fix you up with a job, because it’s
illegal, so scurry along.”
I wasn’t
discouraged -- in the early days I was optimistic, stoic. I approached my
community’s mobsters for a job. They were eager to assist me for a reasonable
kickback. They sent me to clean floors in some corporate superstores in
Michigan. Even in those days I had serious problems with my kidneys and the
copious amounts of chemicals on this job promised to completely annihilate my
health. I’m not much of a blue-collar worker anyway, so I resolved to wriggle
out of my predicament.
I did some
independent analysis and contacted the Boss in New York. “I figured out the
corporate system, and saw your part in it, and I believe I can use my command
of English, and my brains to make you more money.”
I was proven to be
right. My boss sent me a Greyhound ticket back to New York and gave me a job
stealing from the Gap and Banana Republic stores.
I have an
ambivalent relationship with corporations –like in marriage –I love them, I
hate them. They use me; I use them.
I can’t relate the
details of our scam, because it’s my bread and butter, and besides my mobster
Boss would kill me if I told you. I'll just give you a general outline. It has
to do with buying merchandise and when the stuff goes on sale, you go back with
pre-sale receipts and exchange it repeatedly. Zero productivity, useless work
for the employees, a means of survival for illegal aliens like me.
A nice corporate
job with flexible hours, no chemicals. There is just one problem. Corporate
management knows about the scam, although they don’t police it, because it
would complicate and encumber their whole system of sale and exchange, so they
figure it’s better to lose a few million a year, than to have to revamp their
entire system.
But the damn
managers always make my life hard. I should mention that almost all of the Gap
Inc. managers in the five boroughs know my face. And naturally the moment they
see it in their store they try to get rid of me, disrupting my business.
Consequently I have to travel further and further from New York City to New
Jersey, Long Island, Connecticut and Upstate where the managers don't know me.
>I don't make a whole lot of money, in fact,
barely enough to rent half a room in a Brooklyn apartment, or a compartment in
the basement. I change my place of habitation every other month; I must keep
moving. I fear that if I stop, if I begin to live in a certain slum for a
longer stretch of time, I will wind up staying there forever. Being constantly
on the move creates an illusion that this state of life is temporary, that a
day will come, and I believe that that day will come soon, when I start leading
a decent life.
I share my rental
with droves of illegal immigrants from my country. I don't see much of them --
they work swing and graveyard.
Women. That is a
serious problem. No woman wants to associate with me. I have no legal status
and no normal work -- a combination that robs me of my manhood. Yet again, a
corporation – Microsoft, saves me. The Internet and its anonymous dating sites
provide me with a forum to create a marketable self. I tried city women, but
soon realized that they were of a higher class and would never condescend to
spend time with me.
White trash land,
trailer parks. Women from welfare families, underprivileged, don't care about
my status, don't expect expensive dinners, gifts etc. They are simple, without
that city smart-ass demeanor, open and easy. Of course until it comes to a
serious relationship, then they become skeptical like city women.
And so my
Greyhound odyssey begins. I skip a day or two of work, buy a bus ticket and
ride up to Utica, New York or down to Ephrata, Pennsylvania to fuck overweight
white trash. Somehow, it turns into another version of the Gap; I have to go
further and further from New York in search of trashier and trashier women to
find any that are willing to consort with me.
Sometimes I want
to flee New York altogether, but of course it is impossible. I have no driver’s
license and neither can I get one after 9-11. And furthermore, there are no
jobs for me out there. I don't have any desire to return to scrubbing corporate
floors.
So, here I remain,
in Manhattan, the dream island. I walk and no one notices me. Minus me the
crowd is intact; with me, it makes no difference. Often I have out of body
experiences. It’s like my body is walking, performing all the tasks it is
supposed to perform, but my mind is somewhere else, well, nowhere else. Gone.
Evaporated. As for my identity, I lost it long time ago. After two years in
America, all I want is not to turn into a beast. Taking one day at a time is
the only alternative.
Talk about
empathy. For instance, when I tell this story in my accented (but not heavily)
English, people shrug and say, “We've heard it a million times before”; when I
write it all down and submit it for publication, they say, “It’s corny.” You
see my stance is not original; in fact it’s mundane. So, they, one of whom is
probably you, tell me, “Go back where you came from. We have television if we
need entertainment.”
I don’t need
television. I need human contact. I must have it. It’s necessity, like the
craving to eat or have sex, when you are long denied it. Every morning I buy
coffee at McDonald’s, which is my favorite restaurant. I usually start
complaining right away. You see, the associates treat people like customers,
like important nonentities, which is no good to me, because I have a human
contact deficiency. I need human contact. I need to talk. I need to be treated
as an individual. So I use the opportunity to the maximum. I complain about the
coffee, and the girl apologizes, but I’m adamant, I keep pushing, claiming my
rights of a customer. And she first freezes, all nerves, but I sort of melt
her, talk to her, make her talk to me. And she does. Little by little. We have
a conversation.
But then those
bastards, those customers behind me
in line begin to complain too. I jump on that opportunity and so we all shout
and scream at one another. And I feel much better. Here, there is human
contact, even if not entirely positive.
Recharged with
communicative energy I proceed to my job. Not much communication here though.
The moment I walk through the door, the manager already spots me -- the thief.
Which doesn’t mean that I am someone, that I have substance, that I am a
person, with identity and personality and character. No, I’m a violator, a
nuisance, a pain in the butt. Because the moment I walk into Gap or Banana
Republic they start trying to get rid of me. There’s this passive aggressive
energy directed my way, in quantity enough to make five serial killers out of me.
Everyone, managers and associates, radiates it; bathe me in it. You lousy thief. But you see they can’t call the police, they can’t
tell me explicitly to get out. Because technically I am a customer, and the
customer is always right, right?
So I “shop”
alongside frenzied women and busy men, who all look dead serious, as if
shopping is no fun anymore, but rather an obligation, a mandatory social
activity. And perhaps it is, after all shopping keeps the economy humming. I’m
a “counter-shopper,” so what?
I run from store
to store in the Tri-state area until late in the evening and then I’m in Times
Square. They have that Internet Café, the largest in the world, Easy
Everything, it’s called, where there are eight hundred computers and about that
amount of space monkeys punching away at the keys, looking for human contact.
We are all looking for it. First mass media took it away from us, and then sold
us back all these high-tech, super-duper gadgets like cell phones and Internet
connections, making us pay monthly service fees, turning a nice profit out of
it. Made us pay for our need for human contact, which they had single-handedly
stripped from us.
Marriage. I met my
wife in the Easy Everything Internet Café on Times Square. Her name (I think it
won’t hurt if I say her real name here, perhaps it will help to bring her back,
who knows) is Dama. When I got acquainted with her from Times Square she lived
in Maine with her parents in a trailer park. Now I don’t know where she lives.
Could be anywhere.
Two days later I
was riding a Greyhound to Maine with a Gap present, a nice sweater. A big
surprise awaited me. Dama wasn’t overweight-- in fact she was beautiful. Like
some teenage fool I fell in love with her on the spot. Perhaps I had been alone
for too long. Or perhaps she was really special, in some way.
And because I had
all those feelings, all those condensed emotions targeted at one particular
girl, at Dama, I didn’t tell her about my lack of status and job opportunities.
You see I didn’t want to lose her. I lost every woman I had ever been with upon
telling them about my status and my job. Real deal breakers. So this time I
kept my mouth shut.
Catch-22. American
women don’t want to deal with me, don’t want to consider marrying me, because I
have neither legal status nor job. Marriage to an American citizen is the only
way I can achieve this status, and thus any means of supporting a family.
Dama was a
teenager, literally, nineteen years of age. And from the way I was dressed and
the way I behaved myself, as a gentleman -- I believe that’s the word -- she
thought I was the one who could take her away from her white trash village on
the Canadian border.
Dama decided on
the spot to run away with me, so I ordered a taxi. The taxi arrived and her
parents made a scene. Somehow Dama and I managed to get into the backseat while
Dama’s father ran back to the trailer to get his rifle. I guess the driver
figured it out because he sped away as if he was in some Hollywood action
movie.
We went to New
York and got married. And then soon she saw what my reality was like. She got
pregnant and ran away again. Hooked up with some gang, didn’t know any better.
I looked for her. I found her. Brought her back to my half room in the Brooklyn
basement. She called her parents. Her parents came and picked her up in the
fourth month of her pregnancy. She left me. I called her. She said, “Get lost,
loser.”
Then she gave
birth and let me come visit our daughter Betsy -- a DNA test proved me to be
her father. Dama let me visit her once a month. But then something happened.
Dama moved away and her parents refused to communicate with me and tell me her
new address.
I hired a lawyer
and he said not to even think about trying to locate my wife. In fact, I was
supposed to be grateful that she didn’t call the INS to have me deported.
Because I didn’t have rights, any rights, let alone the right to visit my
child. According to the law she wasn’t even my child, she was Dana’s child. Which is a chauvinistic
law. Men are stripped of all responsibilities to care for the children they
sire, except for paying alimony. Men pay for the privilege of not being with
their family. So men pay and women take care of the children. And that was what
my lawyer said to me, “Don’t even think about locating your child and your
wife.”
I’m in New York
again, my fourth year in America. I’m a hunchback these days. And my kidneys
are failing me. I can’t visit a doctor. I don’t have money to pay him under the
table. And I have problems with my digestive system from all that crap I eat at
McDonald’s. Still no friends and no lovers. Quiet desperation, dull depression.
I speak to my boss
and he tells me, “Just keep your head above water. It took me nine years to buy
a fake Green Card.”
As I said before,
the loss of my identity doesn’t bother me that much. But it is the first link
in the chain reaction of my downfall. What bothers me in my sixth illegal year
in America is the incremental loss of my humanity. You can’t see it in my
appearance. I am nicely dressed and nicely sprayed with nice perfume. The loss
is all within. I am turning into an animal. Instincts are all that remain of
me. I stop talking -- with whom anyway? Sometimes I utter just a few sentences
in the entire day, while surrounded by millions of people. Animal instincts,
that’s all I am preoccupied with. They enhance and augment me, until they are
all I care about, until they consume my whole being, gnawing away my humanity
in its entirety.
A shy man by
nature, all of a sudden I begin to have many lovers. Never much of a violent
person, I initiate physical fights with my roommates. And I eat food using no
utensils: I re-conceptualize the joys of McDonald’s where I can eat in a
pre-civilization, pre-fork sort of a way, operating with my bare hands.
I think I had the delusion that if I started
behaving differently, people would recognize my presence, would start
communicating with me but apparently not in New York. If before my
transformation, people walked through me, now they walked around me. I managed
to create a square foot no-man’s land around my body. I manage to completely
erase myself from the space-and-time continuum.
McDonald’s
associates stop arguing with me. They just ignore me. When I make too much of a
scene they let me have my coffee for free: and that -- in front of all the
other envious customers. First Banana Republic’s managers, and then Gap’s,
begin to throw me out of their stores. Literally. They don't bother about any
customer-is-always-right crap or store ethics. They want the beast out. Pronto.
So I go to my
boss. And ask him to help me. And he says, “Everyone is on his own in this
country. You gotta help yourself, buddy.”
I am outside now.
It’s cold. It’s windy. And it’s lonely. This is an uninhabited island,
Manhattan is. Everyone for himself and herself on this island. I learned my
lesson well. I am a modern-day invisible man. But there is a euphemism for it
that has a nice ring to it, “illegal alien.”
I walk through the
streets of New York and no one sees me. I try to talk to the people, but they
scurry away. I am completely alone.
Misha Firer is a 25-year-old writer from Ulyanovsk, Russia
who now resides in Oakland, California. After serving in the Israeli
Defense Forces and slacking in Amsterdam he incidentally wound up
in the USA, where he started writing in English. His short stories can be
found in BIG News, Laundry Pen, Nuvein, Paumanok Review, Pink Chameleon, Rose & Thorn,
Scarlet Letters, Slow Trains, Taint, Vestal Review and Word Riot.
Misha Firer
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