- January 24, 2020
MTC Living History Project
A Life Under Construction
When he immigrated to the United States in 1995, Luis Gonzalez came to strike it rich in his version of the American Dream: wearing expensive outfits and hosting lavish parties. Gazing at his reflection in the mirror of his apartment now, Gonzalez finds himself doing just that: dressing up for a party. After dousing his face with splashes of water, he hurls his tool belt across the room into a motley lump of laundry on the floor of his apartment. His oversized trousers cover up the white paint marks strewn all across his tattered jeans in variegated patches. He caresses the cuts and bruises across his rough palms before nestling them in thick, white felt mittens. He then exchanges the steel-riveted surface of the tool belt for a cool touch of the metal buckle of his black leather belt. After donning his animated mask, he is no longer Luis Gonzalez. “Mickey!” kids screech as Gonzalez enters through the front door of the Sterling Spanish Church adjacent to the William Watters Assisted Living Home in Sterling, Virginia.
After the party is over and the mask comes off , Gonzalez comes face-to-face with the man in the mirror, the “handyman” for William Watters. Brilliant amber hues start to tint the horizon as the shrill beep of his 5:30 a.m. alarm beckons Gonzalez to his work for the day. The door to Apartment #102 flings open, revealing the cramped living quarters allotted to Gonzalez in the basement of the assisted living home. Pushed against the wall, the sofa is covered in a gaudy, chintz floral print and doubles as a bed for Gonzalez. An avocado-green phone with its large dialing disk and curled cable, dangling from the receiver, perches on a wooden side table covered with a doily. A few toys are scattered across the dreary, pink wall-to-wall carpet. A stray fly buzzes around a dated glass light fixture attached to the ceiling, complete with a pull-chain. Before leaving his apartment, Gonzalez takes a quick sip of hot coffee from his favorite electric-blue mug with an engraved “your right hand, handyman” catchphrase. He then embarks on his job to maintain the tenants’ apartment units and the associated community spaces such as the laundry facilities and the activity room. Gonzalez starts by taking the elevator to the utility closet on the third floor and vacuuming the carpeted floors in each hallway from top to bottom. Entering the activity room on the ground floor, he sorts the puzzle pieces dispersed across the table into their respective boxes and wipes the piano with swift sweeps of his dust rag. The dusty, broken keys of the piano resemble chipped teeth, disabling the piano from intoning its once melodious tune. “I really wish I could fix the piano, but now it just makes this sound of... despair,” Gonzalez laments. “She used to sing real nice, but now she’s beyond repair.” Gonzalez gives the piano one last compassionate wipe and trudges towards the managerial office to retrieve a sticky-note that George Whitaker posted for him on his front door. George, the lead caretaker, organizes resident gatherings and coordinates routine health checkups. After a long day of work at William Watters, George would frequent the local McDonald’s for a cup of freshly brewed coffee. George actually met Gonzalez there at his first job at McDonald’s. “Small world. Things come full-circle sometimes,” Gonzalez cheerfully recalls as he opens the sticky-note. Scrawled across the crumpled note are the daily work-orders from the residents.
Gonzalez plods towards the utility closet for his rusty, old tin supply box. As he enters the apartment, he crosses his heart and heads over to the bathroom sink. Gonzalez shuts off the water supply to the sink and sprawls near the cabinet area underneath. He quickly inspects the plumbing under the sink and smells a musty odor, a sign of a leak in the pipe. With a few quick flicks of a carpenter’s pencil, Gonzalez eyeballs a perfect square outline onto the drywall. He grins as he brandishes a hacksaw from his toolbox and gently strokes its cool, metal frame. Gonzalez scores the edges of the square outline with an exacto knife before letting the fine teeth of the hacksaw carve into the wall. When he can hear the rustling of the drywall paper underneath, Gonzalez pulls back. The wall then exposes the copper pipes leading to the sink and some stray, colorless liquid leakage hisses its way out of the pipe.
“There’s our culprit!” he chuckles. Gonzalez grabs his “favorite” Home Depot bucket, featuring a recursive image of the bucket in the corner, to catch the errant liquid from the sink. Without looking back, Gonzalez precisely grabs his special cordless, butane-powered soldering iron from his toolbox. He lowers the safety goggles situated on his forehead to eye level just before a brilliant spark emanates from the copper pipes after they make contact with the soldering iron. Gonzalez glides the soldering iron across the curved cross section of the pipe with brief, serpentine twists of his wrist. He smears golden, honey-like flux on the area of the faulty pipe. “Think of it like a glue for metals. We just gotta heat it up and it’ll do the rest for us.” Gonzalez heats the flux with the soldering iron and the flux seeps into the crevices of the leak. He glances over at his analog wristwatch and waits for a few minutes for the flux to solidify and adhere to the pipe. With the leak fixed, he re-inserts the square piece of the drywall he cut out and smears putty onto the wall patch. “Looks like vanilla frosting, huh? Probably tastes like it too. Wanna try?” Gonzalez teases. “It might look a bit ugly, but it’s good to go. Just pray that nobody doesn’t go looking down there,” he proclaims to an otherwise vacant room.
A gaunt, barely five-foot tall man with a stalky build, Gonzalez shuffles through his curly, unkempt hair and his hazel eyes briefly scrutinizes his hands. Inked on his wrist is an image resembling three keys. “Health, wealth, fortune. In America, hard work unlocks all of that for you,” Gonzalez declares. After wiping beads of sweat from his forehead, he finds that his fingernails are highlighted by streaks of clay-like putty. Luis washes his hands over the faucet in the bathroom before heading out of the apartment. “Sometimes, I feel like a superhero fixing everything. Onto the next job!” Despite bursting out of the apartment with excitement, Gonzalez hesitates before crossing his heart and whispering “Descanza en paz” under his breath. He plucks the name-plate from its place on the late Mr. Hardling’s door. Fiddling with his bunch of spare keys, Gonzalez stumbles on the bouquets outside before he finds the right key to lock the door. “He was a good man. Life goes on and we gotta fix things up for the next occupant. This door won’t be locked for too long.”
Gonzalez then trudges towards Ms. D’Souza’s apartment on the first floor. He knocks loudly three times before Ms. D’Souza finally opens the door.
“‘Ello! Here to fix your window.” Gonzalez says with a radiant smile. Ms. D’Souza returns a slight nod before letting him in. Gonzalez spots the shattered window at the back of the room and confirms the work-order on the wrinkled note stuffed in his pocket. “Those cute little grandchildren of yours really wrecked this place, huh?” he laughs, before reaching through the window. Ms. D’Souza gives a meek smile before scuttling away from his sight.
“At least the storm windowpane is intact. I can fix it. All in a day’s work,” he grumbles.
Gonzalez retreats to the utility closet a few doors away from the apartment and comes back with his mini-vacuum cleaner. Mummified in gradually unfurling bundles of duct tape, the vacuum moans as it crunches on each of the jagged pieces of glass, thinking that each piece could be its last. Occasionally, a stray piece falls out of the cleaner and Gonzalez croaks, “Come on! Don’t be like this!” While Gonzalez continues to vacuum across the plush berber carpet, Ms. D’Souza re-emerges from her bedroom and ambles towards the kitchen.
“So, yeah, I’ll get on that replacement window in the ‘shop. Thank you!” Luis says. Ms. D’Souza barely nods in acknowledgement. Gonzalez waits a while, expecting some reply, before he cackles. “Did you also need a wall repair? You know I was trying to find the wall stud in your room. It’s easy to find: it’s right here,” he jokes, pointing at himself. No response. Gonzalez bobbles his head in silence as he leaves Ms. D’Souza’s apartment to return to his own.
“It can be a thankless job sometimes. But, I know being old and living alone can’t be easy,” he concedes. Gonzalez’s shoulders sag and his eyes droop down to the floor. “I just wish I could connect with them more.”
After immigrating to the States, Gonzalez has always looked for this connection, even at his first job at the McDonald’s in Sterling, Virginia. He received a janitorial job, which entailed mopping the floors and cleaning the tables and kitchen surfaces during a night shift. “Not really my dream job,” he snickers, “but it paid the bills and put the food on the table.” One night on the job, a rowdy bunch of teenagers in the midst of an argument started throwing punches and one agitated teen hurled a large cup of Pepsi across the table. The soda splashed all over the place and onto Gonzalez’s brand-new and only pair of shoes that he had saved up for in the past few months. Gonzalez grimaced at the waste of his only paycheck so far, but calmly stroked the linoleum floor with his mop as he cleaned up the mess. As the teens continued the altercation, he placed a reassuring hand around one kid’s shoulder and asked, “Estas bien?” The group turned their attention to Gonzalez and the kid flung Gonzalez’s hand off his back. “Mind your own business, idiot!” he yelled. Gonzalez continued to try to console him in Spanish. “Learn English or go back to Mexico!” the kid snapped back as he stomped out of the store. From that time onwards, Gonzalez signed up for nightly English classes at the Sterling Spanish Church. “I wanted to learn and communicate in English. But, I’ll use it to help others, not yell at them.”
After the incident, Gonzalez focused on his English classes and started to spend his time working at apprenticeships for learning fundamental carpentry and plumbing techniques. In his free time, he spent hours on weekends watching TV serials like Full House and especially The Home Improvement. Gonzalez tried to emulate how the characters pronounced different words to improve his own communication skills. “Making eye contact with my elders was considered disrespectful in my country. Here, I learned it’s a necessity.”
Even with his endeavors in honing his English, Gonzalez initially struggled with fully understanding the various English instructions he received at his plumbing apprenticeships.“When we were kids in Peru, I made this small birdhouse with my hermano. But repairing those pipes, the methods were so complex and my English wasn’t that good yet.” Eventually adapting to the job and garnering additional skills in electrical work along the way, Gonzalez received his first “well-paying” job opportunity at Cardinal Plumbing in Sterling. Specializing in leak detection and burst pipe repair, he ventured door to door in his yellow-and-blue caravan within his appointed radius of sixty miles. “I knew that I had to check in with the boss at the end of the day. But, riding in that van, helping people, fixing things, that, made me feel so independent. I was living up to my promise.” On his way to a client, Gonzalez fondly recalls swaying in the driver’s seat to a cassette of Enrique Iglesias’s pop songs.
However, at his job in Cardinal Plumbing, Gonzalez endured prejudice from his co-workers on a daily basis. “They always gave me a hard time for my bad English, but I wished we could bond over our shared job.” The clientele further complained about Gonzalez’s broken English resulting in communication barriers for work-orders and requested Cardinal Plumbing to not send Gonzalez in the future. “ ‘Don’t send the Mexican next time! Just send someone who can actually talk to us!’ they would always tell my manager.” Even though he was belittled for his accent, Gonzalez was referred by his co-workers to the Northern Virginia Federal Union on account of his dexterity and competence on the job. Unions were especially on the decline in the ‘90s and his co-workers prized their rare opportunity for a fairer paycheck. “Ever since Reagan fired those air traffic managers, I think lots of unions just closed operations. But, the guys, that made them more stubborn to carry on.” Competition in managing with international and domestic demand just became too cumbersome for most unions in the ‘90s, but the Northern Virginia Labor Federation would not be defied; they continued to try to recruit workers including Gonzalez. However, the union dues Gonzalez was asked to pay placed a hefty stress on his financial life. More critically, joining the union would result in a full divulgence of all his immigration documents. “The fairer pay sounded like a good deal, but I needed to think about my family. They deserve a good life, a good education, and success. I didn’t want my kids to be thrown out just because of my status at the time.”
Alienated from his peers at Cardinal Plumbing after declining to join the union, Gonzalez landed a full-time job at William Watters Assisted Living, where he further realized his need for some extra money for his growing family after the birth of his son. During one of his Sunday prayers at the Sterling Spanish Church, Gonzalez came across a flyer advertising an opening for a paid job to entertain young audiences at parties and gatherings organized by the church. Now, on many occasions during a month, Gonzalez takes a detour from his usual handyman routine and slips into his alias as Mickey Mouse for a party in the church at around 6 p.m. Dressed in his Mickey costume, he enters through a backdoor and stands ready with his hand gradually torquing the door knob. “The trick to the job is not to say anything,” he murmurs to himself before entering and being greeted by shrieking children. With a radiant smile of Mickey Mouse concealing his expression, the costume shrouds Gonzalez’s emotions from the rest of the world. “I always thought wearing a Disney character costume was illegal without the company’s consent. I guess the church had no qualms with letting the Peruvian take the hit. Anyways, with how I entered the country, I’ve taken bigger gambles.” Regardless of his mood, he gently waddles to each kid to give them a snug embrace or a firm fist-bump. He shuffles across the hardwood floor and sways to the music of Disney classics. Gonzalez also juggles three colorful, plastic spindles as the children gape in awe. “I used to only juggle balls because those damn things would keep spinning too fast for me to catch. I got the hang of it eventually though.” Parents eagerly line up at one end of the room and wait for their turn to click a selfie with Mickey. At one such gathering, Gonzalez accidentally bellowed, “Hello kids!” in a Peruvian accent. The birthday boy sobbed and yelled back, “Mickey doesn’t talk like that!” “Gotta zip it whenever I go back in there!” Gonzalez reminisces, clearly enunciating each of his words to suppress his Peruvian accent.
“I’ll make a better life in the U.S.!” Gonzalez sternly vowed to his family before running away from Peru to the United States. Gonzalez extolled the value of the American dream back then and firmly believed that he could make more money in the States than he could ever in Peru. Back in the city of Tumbes, Peru, his family lived in abject conditions with barely enough resources to make ends meet for the family of eight. After sixth grade, he never saw the face of school again as his family’s financial circumstances needed him to accompany his father on “odd-jobs” such as painting and construction tasks. Gonzalez eventually accepted the labor entailed in his menial job as his profession, but he missed going to school even more. He would often commit minor blunders on the job or grumble to his father if he could go back to school, but his father would glare at him before shoving him into a wall and thrashing him with his belt once they came home. Gonzalez’s grandmother was the only member of his family to truly sympathize with Gonzalez’s lack of choice in the matter and would bake him a fresh batch of alfajores every day after work. “It’s like one of your regular Oreo cookies. Sandwiched in between dark and white chocolate cookies, you have this smooth, gooey cream that just melts in your mouth.” Gonzalez’s grandmother would also try to cheer up Gonzalez by demonstrating her juggling tricks. “I learned it all from her. Toss one ball, wait for it to reach the top of its arc, toss the next, make the catch, and again and again. It really does calm and balance the mind, as Gramma always said.”
But, Gonzalez’s family situation started to deteriorate due to the military skirmishes surrounding the ongoing conflict with Ecuador and he firmly believed that his family had to leave the country to survive. “The Alto Cenepa War,” Gonzalez solemnly mentions, “was a brutal war. The previous war with Ecuador already costed the lives of both my grandfathers. We should have all gotten out.” Back in 1941, Peru became embroiled in major border disputes with Ecuador regarding territorial acquisitions along the Amazon River, including Tumbes. This tension resurged as the prior treaty was questioned by the warhawk administrations of Peru and Ecuador that rose to power during the Cenepa War. The battles came increasingly close to Tumbes and Gonzalez found an excuse to escape his strife. “I wanted to fix my life,” Gonzalez claims, “My father never gave me a say in quitting my education. I was just another mouth he had to feed. I had no place there anymore.” With his grandma’s blessing, Gonzalez fled Tumbes to settle himself in the nation responsible for brokering the treaty in 1941, the nation his school venerated as a role model for democracy, the nation where his friends would say all “dreams were realized” : America. “I might have had only fifty U.S. dollars in my pocket when I came to the States, but at least I had the chance to build a life here.”
Gonzalez’s wife Gloria was the backbone of his venture to build a new life in the United States ever since they first met at the Sterling Spanish Church. Gloria Gonzalez, a naturalized American citizen, is a seamstress and also helps around at William Watters with the Wheels on Meals program. “Luis and I haven’t found our dream jobs here,” Gloria says, “But, I think we’re doing the best we can for our family and for others with what we have.” After Gonzalez’s recent masquerade with the Mickey Mouse costume, he comes back home to find Gloria in the kitchen cleaning the countertops as if to scrub the world away, not even once looking up to see who entered the house. The lemon scent of the bleach permeates the air and the room is silent while the kids are asleep, except for the occasional, noisy hum of the refrigerator. “I would have given anything for this, this quiet, back in Peru,” Gonzalez tears up, “It’s not perfect here either: I used to also fear the day they would ask for my papers and take me away. Even if I don’t feel that anymore, I’ll always be the Mexican handyman, the second-class human being to the residents. I just want to help and make them all smile for once.” Gloria suddenly lunges towards Gonzalez and tugs at his shoulder to point out a crack above the main door, where the wall meets the ceiling. In the past few days, according to Gloria, the crack has widened at an alarming rate. The concrete in the crack appears to be chipping and flaking while gritty, sand-like mortar trickles out of it. With his mouth scrunched and eyebrows arched, Gonzalez snatches a screwdriver from his toolbox and jabs the crack. A burst of the gritty substance spurts out and Gonzalez scowls and mutters, “This is bad news. It may be that the water-saturated soil froze and expanded, pushing in and breaking our… foundation. It’s a structural problem, so the foundation guys will have to take a look at it.” Gonzalez slumps against the couch and resigns, “I can’t fix this.”
Even if his life has been damaged at its very foundation, Gonzalez scampers into the activity room the next morning to aid with the Christmas day festivities at 4 a.m. Before pumping air into the red helium balloons, he uses one of his trade secrets. Gonzalez pours a bead of Elmer’s glue into the deflated balloon and rolls the balloon in between his palms before inflating it. “Believe it or not, the glue is going to make them last much longer.” After adorning the activity room with strings of multicolored Christmas lights, Gonzalez takes it upon himself to hearten the residents in the festive mood. Before the residents start gathering, Gonzalez steps into the walk-in utility closet and reappears fully clad in his Mickey Mouse costume. Shuffling through the activity room, he sways to the beat of background music and waltzes with each of the residents, some willingly and some unwillingly at first. A grumpy, plump senior gentleman initially sits aloof in one corner of the activity room. However, when Mickey reaches out to him and beckons him to the festivities, the man obliges as a grin cracks out of his stern stare. As the party wraps up, Mickey takes a bow and Gonzalez takes off his mask in front of the crowd. “Plumber, carpenter, janitor, friend, family,” George declares. “Gonzalez is everything we could ever want. He can truly do anything.” Ms. D’Souza and the rest of the senior residents raucously applaud as Gonzalez, speechless, shrugs his shoulders with a smile kindled on his face. “Our lives are always under construction. I dedicate mine to helping build cherishable memories with others, even if my own life will take more time to repair.”