Price Check (Hooking pt 3)

Years have passed since we moved here. The work we have done in this neighborhood has all but wiped out unkind sentiments. Now my neighbors tend to look at me with a confused sense of gratitude.

That is why the look from the drunk man catches me off guard. I can't describe it as hostile, but there's something unkind about it that I don't understand until he speaks.

Our apartment stands at the corner of the parking lot by the office. Karina and Vanessa's sits kitty-corner to ours.

Ruthie and I knock on their door on Sunday mornings to pick up Karina for church. But it is Saturday night, and we are speaking at another church tomorrow, so we are knocking to tell Karina that Jarrett will pick her up instead.

The man, stout, Latino, mustached, and obviously a bit drunk, sways slightly on the sidewalk as we pass him. We mount the steps to the kids' apartment, and he and his friend follow at a distance. We knock on the door and he hovers about ten feet from us in the hallway.

Vanessa answers. We tell her about the ride situation and she talks with us, but glances over our shoulders at him.

He gives me a wierd feeling. I look at him, making eye contact, not macho or aggressive so much as curious what he's doing. He chins the air in my direction. I turn and say goodbye to Vanessa abruptly, and she gets the cue, and says, OK, and closes the door.

-Hey, he says to me.

I turn to face him and respond, Yeah?

-How much?

Later, after it all plays out, it will seem strange to me how it takes a moment to interpret the question. But Ruthie has never been mistaken for a prostitute before, nor I a pimp. And beyond that, we have a great deal of love for these neighbors, which makes my mind spin a bit to find a better understanding than the obvious one, which is that this guy wants to pay me to have sex with my wife.

-No way, I tell him, She's my wife, I tell him.

I run a check to see if we did anything wrong aside from being here when we don't really naturally belong. Ruthie wears slacks and a modest, long-sleeved t-shirt. I wear jeans and a button-down cowboy shirt.Avoid the appearance of evil, the Bible says, but sometimes good things are so strange that evil gets assumed.

Several understandings roll through my head at once. The first is that I am not angry. Then, in the dream-time that thoughts travel, in the moment of contact between my eyes and his, I feel that a good thing has occurred, that a mystery has been offered between us and this man. That the strangeness of our presence here tells a story.

Here's a truth about our neighborhood that dawns on me as I turn from him and follow Ruthie out to our car: That we are in America, but that when a white person enters this neighborhood, it is usually to exploit or arrest or pimp out low-class hookers to these people.

But here is the final fact, and the reason I feel glad as Ruthie and I laugh together at what has just taken place: We are changing a dynamic. We are breaking an evil norm. The fact of the norm is dark, tragic, and unsettling. It is a division defined by fear and greed. But we are defying it in the name and Love of Jesus.

So the pimps will continue to move through the neighborhood. The police will have their roadblocks and arrest those who would risk all to feed and offer a hopeful future to their families. Churches and politicians with their pamphlets will canvas the neighborhood then leave.

Our own love is shallow. Our sacrifice is small. But God has taken our decision to live in his love seriously, and he uses it to speak to our neighborhood.

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.

Another What? (Hooking pt 1)

They are not our problem when we roll through in a car or see them through a window, but when we weave ourselves into the narrative fabric of the neighborhood, every subplot matters:

Jarret and I see her as we turn onto Plaster Road from Buford Highway. White, worn-looking. Her age is in question because her profession tends to exaggerate the years. A few absent teeth, streaks of white amid otherwise blonde hair.

- I don't know why they're here all of a sudden. I don't remember any hookers when we first moved here, I tell him.

- Or when I moved in, Jarrett replies.

She walks in the flash of our headlights, looks over her shoulder as if she knows she is being discussed, and keeps moving.

- I don't get the appeal, I say.

Jarret nods.

- Desperate times, I suppose.

We get to Jarrett's place, an apartment in our same complex, and he grabs a change of clothes before we head back out. Back in the parking lot, he says to me, There goes another one.

I look around to see what he's talking about and meet the eyes of a brown-haired, heavyset fortysomething white woman in loose-fitting jeans and a pullover rushing by.

- ANOTHER WHAT? she growls, and keeps walking.

It seems like there are more of them here every day, moving out across the neighborhood, looking cheap and tired, catering to probably the last market available to them in Atlanta.

They are not the ones we came here to reach, nor are they friendly to our purposes here, but here they are nonetheless, right in plain sight for management and the police and every lonely Latino laborer to see.

We have chosen for the story of the neighborhood to be our story as well. So when they move in and peddle their wares, they become players in a redemptive arc that has already been told somewhere, but remains obscure to us here, now. We are characters ourselves in this tale, and are neccessarily blind until the curtain closes.