The America That Is Not For Me: Part 12

I was on official duty manning my post and minding my business during an afternoon shift when a mail carrier, an African-American man with a muscular build and stubs of grey hair carpeting his oblong head, walked into the lobby. While in the lobby, he hurriedly pressed the elevator call button to summon it down. I was a bit busy attending to another visitor and didn’t notice when the mail carrier walked into the lobby. The mail carrier was awash in sweat and, like other mail carries before him that hectic day, he seemed in a hurry to go up and deliver his knapsack of mails.

But the elevators took forever to return to the lobby. The mail carrier and employees returning from their lunch breaks waited impatiently for the elevators. Those employees who could no longer wait for the elevators to come down made a beeline for a flight of stairs situated to the extreme left of the lobby area when one directly faced the elevators, or directly opposite the security desk area.

Remaining employees followed their colleagues up the flight of stairs leaving the mail carrier behind in the lobby.

By this time I had signed the visitor in and released him, after making a phone call to confirm with a couple of tenants whether they were expecting him. When the visitor left my desk and joined the mail carrier in front of the elevator, I turned my attention to the mail carrier. I politely signaled him to the desk and respectfully asked to see his I.D., a ritual that had become second nature to me.

Whether it was my brazing politeness to see his I.D. or frustration from the protracted delay of the elevators to come down―none of which I could exactly pinpoint was the provenience of what followed next―he exploded in a fit of fury, unleashing thunderstorms of saliva and unchained melodies of viscid phlegm into my surprised face.

Slivers of saliva and phlegm slid down my cheeks like Niagara Falls.

This man was not a work in process―evidently. He was rather a seething bomb of unimaginable fury in the calculating suddenness of his questionable behavior. I tried to block my face and eyes in particular from his unrelenting salivary salvoes but my growing efforts proved frustratingly fruitless. The salvoes blinded me temporarily and all that my mind’s eye could see was the raging fury of a human being whose manhood, existence, and humanity had been reduced to a set of deciduous teeth by the competing claims of the legacies of chattel slavery, racial profiling, vampire capitalism, prison-industrial complex, otherism, and racism.

When I regained my sight and composure and sense of place, he was gone, gone with the wind. I wiped the saliva and phlegm off my face with tissues of wet paper. Where did he go? I had no idea. I concluded that he must’ve gone up on the elevator or ran out of the building through the lobby door. About fifteen minutes later he exited the elevator, looked askance at me with vengeful triumphalism and rushed out of the lobby door into the unknown universe beyond the compass of my mind―without offering an apology. I logged the incident and made no fuss over it.

At this post, the same post my colleague had slapped me in the presence of a supervisor, the superintended of the building forced security guards, especially guards who were immigrants from Africa, to shovel snow during winter and spring seasons and to sweep the spacious pavement in front of the building throughout the year, tasks falling outside the scope of duty of the security guard. Those who refused were transferred to dangerous sites as a form of punishment. Some industrious guards in school had to resign on short notice because the re-postings disrupted their class schedules. Re-posting guards in a way that disrupted their class schedules was potentially purposeful. The superintendent did not impose these compulsory chores on Americans.

Owners of the company I worked for made lots of money from their clients. As a result, they did everything within their power to be in their clients’ good books. This meant that my employer wouldn’t tolerate any employee’s behavior that threatened the sources of their wealth. My employer also wanted to protect its contractual obligations to clients as part of its long-term strategy to secure new contractual agreements when existing ones expired, yet another reason for the Main Office to re-assign or find dubious excuses to terminate employees whose questionable behaviors stood in the way of financial gain.

Capitalism at its best.

Thus, employees perceived as potential threats to the status quo became expendable in the game theory of profiteering and corporate sustainability. Such self-serving official calculations and decisions reduced employees to exploited robots in the sweltering innards of corporate greed. “The white man pretends to love black people only because he steps on black people to make his money,” one of my friend’s fathers once told me. This is exactly what corrupt, de-centered black leaders have been doing to their own kind, a central motif in novelist Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons. The white man, on the other hand, steps on anybody including God to get to the soul of the money machine. Man is a slave to mammon and will therefore do anything for money. Mammonism ultimately drives the engine of corporate decision and assigns the element of humanity an extraneous status in the optimization equation of corporate strategies.

I thoroughly weighed these underlying assumptions of corporate greed before asking the Main Office to transfer me to a new facility because shoveling snow and cleaning up the pavement in frigid winter made me sick, tasks for which security guards weren’t compensated. Instead, I was transferred to an open construction site in Brooklyn where I was exposed to the elements. The potential of armed robbery was high and manning this vast construction site as the lone security guard on post during my overnight shifts heightened my sense of insecurity, another troublous provocation I never expected or imagined in the context of my reassignment. The slightest sound on the construction site made me jumpy. In fact there were times when, at the mere sound of anonymous human feet accompanied by the whistle of the wind, I vacated my post and vamoosed to some of the rooms in one of the two unfinished buildings where I hid myself from the rest of the world.

I assumed the overnight shift, as was the case at my previous post. I was back in school again taking prerequisite courses for a health sciences degree. It was therefore expected that my relief, an energetic and vivacious US veteran in his late 20s or early 30s, would take over from me at 7am when his official work schedule for the morning shift began. Yet he was never there at 7. On certain occasions he reported for work 30 to 45 minutes late and never bothered to call in advance to let staff or the Main Office know that he was running late. It didn’t even matter to him that he and I lived in the same community and that I was never late to work. He simply didn’t care.

If I didn’t hear from him, which happened quite often when he was running late, or if I sensed that he wasn’t going to show up for work at all, I quickly placed a call to the Main Office and the Main Office in turn contacted him. The office would then call me back with an outrageous statement to the effect that he was sleeping when a call was placed to him, and that he didn’t know that he had been scheduled to work that day, notwithstanding the fact that every employee who worked on that site had a fixed 40-hour-per-week schedule.

So I ended up going to classes late, one of which began at 8. His habitual lateness caused me other problems as well, one of which was that I missed out on vital information I needed to understand and study for my exams. With time I became a thorn in his side as well as in the side of management because I, too, became a habitual whiner in the hard-of-hearing desert of management, a distasteful nuisance in the sour mouth of the Main Office, and a focused pursuer of equity.

The old dog of institutionalized discrimination was alive and kicking, kicking hard against the ectopic pregnancy of social justice in the viscera of corporate America. Suddenly the habitual whiner was the number one enemy, the habitual latecomer the darling of institutional corruption, and as a result, the habitual latecomer was neither fired nor strongly reprimanded for his unprofessional conduct. Was he dating one of the powerful females in the Main Office, a staff manager whose sister reportedly dated one of my employer’s sons, as a highly placed confidant I privately related to me? I couldn’t prove this circulating rumor so I let go. Why should I become an enemy when I was neither the source of his chronic lateness nor he? Why must I be made to bear the brunt of vicarious punishment? Why wasn’t anyone apologizing to me for his lateness?

It’s disheartening when Americans complain about immigrants like me stealing their jobs, jobs they hate and don’t like to do. It’s apparent that most of those who make these sensational complaints are more likely to be low-income employees, ex-convicts, high school or college dropouts, racists and nativists and xenophobes, and demagogues than members of the upper class. This is not to derogate low-income employees, ex-convicts, drug addicts, high school or college dropouts as there are many exemplars of such persons who have turned their lives around and impacted America and the rest of the world in significant ways.

On the contrary top-notch scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, economists, physicists and chemists, university professors, writers and authors, pharmacologists, historians and historiographers, actuaries, doctors, and nurses aren’t complaining that immigrants are stealing their jobs. “Do you have any information about NASA scientists complaining that immigrants are taking their jobs?” a white classmate reminded me. “It’s usually members of the middle class and working class who make these complaints about immigrants taking their jobs, stealing their jobs.”

I therefore found it particularly absurd when the habitual latecomer said I was among those immigrants taking and stealing their jobs. I was lost for words. Was he for real? He had job yet he had no respect for this job, co-employees, company policies and procedures. He flouted these procedures and policies with impunity. Why he came to work late was a subject of intense speculation.

The habitual tardiness still continued from time to time in spite of the Main Office’s direct knowledge of it. It’s ironic to see him fly into a temper when his relief didn’t show up on time. My bitter complaints about the matter to the Main Office also consistently fell on deaf ears. And then, to my chagrin, some classmates began to think that I was making up convenient excuses to explain away my personal deficiencies―of my corresponding habitual lateness to class―which in fact wasn’t the case. I discussed the matter with those of my professors whose classes were affected, and I was fortunate they understood my predicament, yet I continued to fall behind the rest of the class.

The impasse remained unresolved when another problem emerged. Construction workers fought over parking slots thereby forcing the foreman to come up with a simple solution, a tall list containing a compilation of the workers’ names with a corresponding spot for a maximum of two car plate numbers allowed for each worker. Each employee had a spot for only two cars, that is. A third car wasn’t allowed even if I knew the employee. The foreman then instructed me not to allow any car whose plate number didn’t match those on the list into the parking lot. “You’d be fired on the spot if you violate my clear instructions,” he warned with a straight face. “You shouldn’t have any problems enforcing my instructions because I’ve given copies of the list to all my workers with clear instructions not to make your job difficult. Good luck!” I shook my head in agreement.

He walked briskly away with his head covered in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

A few days later following the foreman’s orders, an Italian-American worker showed up in front of the main gate of the parking lot. I quickly took notice of his plate number and matched it against the list. No match. I reminded him of the foreman’s warnings apropos of the contents of the list, a copy of which I found sitting directly on his dashboard, but he was having none of that. It may have seemed to him that the reminders weren’t ajar with the evidence sitting on his own dashboard. We soon found ourselves on a collision course as my insistent refusal to allow his car into the parking lot deflated his machismo. I stood my ground in the face of his fractious posturing.

Then, without warning, he stepped on the gas catching me off guard in the tiny space between the gate and the hood of his car. I found myself on the hood of his car while he crashed through the gate with my shoes grazing the concrete face of the parking lot. The shoes eventually came off and my feet scarcely began grazing the concrete parking lot. Other construction workers began massing in the parking lot, by which time I had come off the hood in emotional tatters and absolute shock, confused and stupefied and out of breath. I retrieved my shoes and one of my shredded socks, and then reported the incident to the Main Office, rather than to the police. Management promised to look into the incident. I returned to my post with my sore feet.

It wasn’t long before the contract with my employer came to an abrupt end. The Main Office asked us to come in for re-assignment. I was in the Main Office by 9am but for a reason I could never fully explain―even today―I never got to see the staff manager. Whenever I asked to see the staff manager I was told she was busy. I sat in the office past noon only to be told around 3pm that the staff manager had left for the day. Unbeknownst to me, she had used another door to avoid direct contact with me. It also turned out that all my colleagues including the habitual latecomer had been re-assigned―except me. The Main Office didn’t look into the formal complaint either.

I went home and contemplated my next move. Then a call from one of my supervisors solved the puzzle for me. He suggested that I apply for unemployment benefits which I did. Just as I received my first check from the State, suddenly the Main Office had a job for me, but then Kingo recommended his employer and asked that I apply for a job with his employer. And I did.

Another security job!

My education couldn’t even get me a supervisory position in this security company. Perhaps security wasn’t for knowledge workers, after all.