It was Hole in the Wall where Emerson got his first job in
San Francisco; a low-pressure position behind a counter selling hot dogs and
ice cream cones. Perhaps he wouldn’t be so busy that he couldn’t study a little
Chinese along the way.
An endless stream of tourists waited in a queue, shuffling
slowly passed the hot dog stand, inching closer to the turntable near Market
Street, to catch the famous cable car as it was turned on Powell Street back up
and over the hill to Fisherman’s Wharf.
The Hole in the Wall was frequented mostly by white tourist
families , but occasionally a Chinese man would go in, not for ice cream, but to
ask Emerson strange questions like “How is business?” or “What day is today?”. They
wanted him to tell Bruce Gao that they were there. Emerson called Mama Gao who
was across the street somewhere in an office in the Woolworth Building. Emerson
started wondering exactly what his store was a hole in the wall for. He soon
found out.
Bruce Gao was a Chinese-American who hired Emerson. The
short, thin, mustached entrepreneur in dark sunglasses would stop into the
store every morning all summer and then rush out to the street to the cable car
turntable a few yards down near the Market Street terminus where willing
volunteers helped push the antique cars around; an endearing photo opportunity
for visitors. Bruce was there with a Polaroid camera to snap them up for five
dollars a shot. His Caucasian wife stood nearby wearing an advertising sandwich
around her shoulders. She collected the fees Bruce handed her.
Fingers plucked a
pre-tuned guitar, holding the pick with the only two fingers he had, playing
Musslewhite slide-guitar with the aluminum top of a mixed-drink shaker wedged
over the stump where his left hand had been. He played it so well. Slide guitar
was as natural to him as a split fingered- slider was to Mordecai Peter Centennial "Three
Finger" Brown, the famous handicapped
pitcher. Like Fingers, he didn’t know how he played so well because he had
never played any other way. Fingers played the Delta blues, with the red-felt
lined guitar case in front of him, on the street. The endless line of summer tourists
waited behind the ropes slung along the cable car line on Powell Street down to
the BART Station promenade on Market Street.
“Look at that,”
Fingers said to Emerson standing at the popcorn machine on the sidewalk, “That
cheapskate just threw in a friggin’ dime.”
“Are you with the
cable car company?” Emerson asked naively.
“Am I with what? Say
what?” Fingers grimaced. “You’re surely joking, right?”
“No, I’m serious;
they should pay you for entertaining the crowd,” Emerson replied
enthusiastically.
“Yeah right; I scare
the hell out of those buggers.” He gestured to the stumps at the end of his
arms. “That’s what you get for being stoned drunk and falling asleep across a
railroad track.”
Fingers had a captive audience for “Born under a Bad Sign,”
which he most certainly was, and “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” which he most
certainly wasn’t. Occasionally, some kid’s father would acknowledge Fingers by
sending a daughter with a quarter to put in Finger’s guitar case; you could see
him point her towards Finger’s cash case saying, “Go on; don’t be afraid.” But
the child’s fear of approaching a fat, hand-less, Samoan with a guitar on the
street was enough to make him think twice. Fingers had such a sweet smile
though. But most tourists tried their best not to look at or hear Fingers, at
all.
The line got shorter each cute cable car filled after being
pushed around the turntable by the happy call for “volunteers” by the brakemen,
to return up Powell Street to Fisherman’s Wharf. To be stuck in front of
Fingers, listening to another rendition of “Summertime,” in the heat of a San
Francisco summer, was more painful to some shy tourists than being stuck
upside-down on an amusement park ride.
Occasionally, when things got slow, Fingers berated the crowd
for being cheapskates. Minutes passed between songs without donations. He’d go
into another rendition of “I’d Rather Go Blind than to See You with Another
Man.” Parents cringed as their kiddies tugged at their pants and asked why the
fat in singer in the Tom Sawyer could play the guitar but had no hands. “Could
he really go blind that way? Did he see her touch another man?”
Bruce Gao’s mother showed up at The Hole in the Wall
regularly; she was all business. Even shorter than her five-foot tall son. When
she came, Emerson had to pretend he didn’t know Fingers. Unlike her son, she’d
breeze passed Emerson at the popcorn machine without a “hello,” scurry down the
narrow space in front of the counter, and expect him to follow behind. There,
she rang up the cash register, opened the till, and counted the money witnessed.
The income had to match the number of hot dogs and spiced sausages floating in
the aluminum tub of hot oil-dotted water.
“How many hot dog you sell?” just to test him; she knew how
many there should be justified.
“Fourteen.”
“Then why fifteen missing?”
“I had one for a snack.”
“It not lunch time yet.”
“I was hungry.”
“No eat behind counter; okay? Not professional,” she strongly
said, took the extra cash, added five more dogs from the refrigerator, and left
the store with Emerson almost at attention.
Emerson learned she had an office in the Woolworth building
across the street. She processed photographs there, he later learned, for fake
passports and visas. How did he learn?
Emerson went home on
the Market Street streetcar. When it made the turn onto Church Street, he was
just a few blocks away from home. Bob was there to greet him. Bob was the man
who lived downstairs in the small Victorian house. He seemed nice enough,
introducing his wife, Cathy and his two little daughters; a lovely woman and two
lovely little girls.
The chaos started a
few nights later at nine o’clock. The cool evening air was unstable. One blanket
cloud, in high wind, marched east in the sky from off the Pacific Ocean to
engulf San Francisco. The streets became urgent, sounds muffled.
First Emerson
could hear angry voices through the air duct in the wall behind the
refrigerator; high-pitched tortured squeals dying with deep articulations like
growls. Through the window now he heard them, boomeranging of the shocking pink
plastic siding off the house across the alley.
How do you get false papers to be
smuggled to America? Every day that the sun shined during the summer, Bruce Gao
was out by the cable car roundhouse taking Polaroid photos of kids with their
parents. It was a front. The real business took place upstairs in the Woolworth
building where Bruce’s mother was getting phone calls and making arrangements
with snakeheads in Canton. The stolen passports were the job of Bruce Gao’s
wife. While Bruce was taking photos of dads with their kids, his Caucasian wife
was charmingly sneaking up behind them and lifting the passport from pop’s
pocket. The handoff was made and brought to Mama Gao in the print shop where
all the mechanisms were available for changing photos and names on passports
using the original sensitive paper, changing the code, and
sending it on its way to the recipient across the Pacific in China. Emerson knew
something was going on when single middle-aged Chinese men entered the Hole in
The Wall looking for Bruce or Mama Gao. They had no interest in a bag of
popcorn or having their souvenir photo taken. Theirs were bigger fish to
fry.
Emerson
didn’t find out how it was done until years later when he was teaching at
Norman Thomas High School. That’s when he met Ting Wang, a thirteen year old
when his parents paid smugglers $25,000 to take him from his village in China
to the United States. He had enrolled himself there, thanks to his immigration
attorney who had searched for a legal solution and had gotten him a visa meant
for victims of human trafficking – usually meant for people who were brought to
America against their will, like women forced to work as prostitutes.
It
starts when the parents of a Chinese youth contracts a “snakehead,” a local
mafia loan shark who promises to take the youth where he can have a better life
and earn $1000 a month instead of $100 working at a restaurant in San
Francisco. When he arrived, in a phone conversation with his mom, he learned
that he had to send money home or their lives would be in danger. When the debt
is paid off, the family is free. Immigration authorities detain thousands of
unaccompanied youth trying to enter the U.S. Ting Wang was one that made it
through.
One
snakehead’s connection was Bruce Gao and family. Mama Gao knew people from the
youth’s village and did them a service. The doctored passports and visas were
contracted for and picked up by an agent, a U.S. citizen who brought it to back
to China and accompanied the youth on the return, pretending to be a relative.
The whole transaction was done in cash. The agent was then supposed to set up
employment for the youth and guide him on his way, but it often didn’t happen
like that.
Once
Ting Wang was brought to America, he was on his own. His mother told him to
look around for employment agencies in Chinatown and he did, but he was told he
was too young and turned away again and again spending the first five nights
sleeping on a bench in the Embarcadero, until by chance he met a man from his
village who offered him a job in his garment factory.
Emerson
didn’t know about any of that when he hawked hot dogs at the Hole in the Wall;
only that there was some funny business going on. To the Gao family, Emerson
was a Trojan Horse. In an attempt to get them to lay him off so he could
collect unemployment insurance, he threatened them not realizing how close he
got to getting himself killed.
“I
know what you’re up to,” he said
“What?
What am I up to?” Bruce questioned cautiously when he stopped by to see what mess
Emerson had caused; Emerson took to tossing a hot dog through the fan they had
placed at the end of the counter and watching as it splattered all over the
tiny store. Then, he would slowly clean it up, until Bruce got the picture, but
Mama Gao wouldn’t suffer the contribution she would have to make to let him go,
so she kept him on. However, they couldn’t jeopardize their smuggling racket
and finally relented, but not before sending Emerson a warning.
It
happened one day that a check his aunt had sent from New York had gotten lost
in the mail. Emerson knew it was a month late because his aunt kept checking on
it for him. Then, one day, Bruce Gao handed Emerson the envelope that contained
the check at work and said that he had found it on the street near his home;
what a coincidence. It was a warning. Emerson got laid off but knew he had better
not look back once he was gone.
“I lost my
job today,” said Emerson when he saw Bob in his usual five o’clock spot; on the
steps outside the house, beer can in hand.
“Oh, so sorry.
That’s tough.”
“No, it’s
okay; I wanted to get laid off. Now I can collect unemployment insurance and
get food stamps,” explained Emerson.
