The Set-up (Hooking pt 2)

Your average Latino day laborer lives packed into a small apartment with several others like him. Early in the morning, he walks to the gas station on Buford Highway or Chamblee-Tucker Road and waits. The white men come by in pickup trucks, and he clamors with the others to be picked for work that day.


His family lives back in Mexico or Honduras or El Salvador, or maybe even Texas, where they settled before the work dried up. He's a hard worker when the work is available, which seems to happen less and less these days.


At some point, noon approaching, if he has not been picked, he heads home to spend the day alone or with his roommates.


He keeps his cash in a freezer or mattress or a hole in the wall, since the banks will not work with him.


He hears a knock on the door, and he opens it. A young woman or man smiles at him and offers to sell him jewelry or flowers or chocolates for his girlfriend or wife.


Our laborer, lonely, bored, and unemployed, tells the vendor that he has no girlfriend or wife, which is true in the moment, if not in a larger sense. This is the answer the vendor is looking for.


"We have something to take care of that," says the vendor, changing tone, confiding, offering a helping hand, suddenly playing the pimp or prostitute. And, for a small amount of his buried cash, our laborer can buy a little company to pass the time.


The women the laborer can afford are generally washed-up, often eastern European, missing teeth, dressed in secondhand clothes. They come into the neighborhood when ordered, and do their work day and night, according to the demand.


This is the set-up, anyway. The real story, the arc, the shame, the outside lives, remain obscure for those not in the trade. Ruthie and I are not in the trade, so we only know what we are told, and we have no strong feelings about it until our neighbor, lonely and a bit drunk, misunderstands our purpose in the neighborhood and invites us in.