Search Results for: The Awl

El Padre de Los Migrantes

El Padre Javier, director del albergue en Juárez durante los últimos siete años, sentado en su oficina entre pilas de libros. Fotos de Itzel Aguilera.

Alice Driver | Longreads | Junio ​​2017 | 22 minutos (5,698 palabras)

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“¿Qué tan buena es una frontera si no hay gente dispuesta a abrirla de par en par?”
— Hanif Willis Abdurraqib *cita del relato en vivo en el “California Sunday Popup” en Austin, Texas, 4 de marzo de 2017

* * *

A la orilla de la tierra prometida se levantan tormentas de polvo provenientes del desierto obscureciéndolo todo, incluso los migrantes tienen que esperar frente a un complejo rodeado por una valla metálica coronada por alambre de púas. Pero el Padre Javier Calvillo Salazar es oriundo de Ciudad Juárez, México, y está acostumbrado a todo esto, así como a todos aquellos que llegan después de una jornada en la que bien pudieron haber transcurrido miles de kilómetros y cientos de días, casi todos llegan cubiertos de cicatrices, con huesos rotos o sin alguno de sus miembros, con heridas que dejan en evidencia la falta de humanidad que se encuentra a lo largo del camino. Son personas que llegan llorando, con rostros endurecidos, con embarazos, con enfermedades venéreas y hasta con historias que remiten a las de Gabriel García Márquez, en las que cuentan haber visto con sus propios ojos a un cocodrilo devorar a un recién nacido de una sola y tajante mordida.

Nicole fue entregada en los brazos de su madre, Ana Lizbeth Bonía de 28 años, en un hospital de la frontera norte de México. Después de una travesía de 9 meses, que inició en Comayagua, Honduras, Ana Lizbeth llegó al albergue de migrantes Casa del Migrante Diócesis de Juárez con su esposo Luis Orlando de 23 años, y su desnutrido hijo José Luis de 2 años, que tenía unos ojos redondos como platos que brillaban con emoción. Ana nunca terminó la primaria, y pasó su niñez en las calles, vendiendo verduras desde los 4 años.

El albergue para migrantes en Juárez está tan cerca de El Paso, Texas, que los migrantes sienten el agridulce llamado de una tierra que pueden ver pero en la que difícilmente pueden vivir de manera legal. El albergue cuenta con 120 camas para hombres, 60 para mujeres, 20 para familias, así como con un área aparte en donde los migrantes transgénero pueden quedarse si así lo desean. La mayoría de los migrantes que llegan son hombres solteros, y durante las entrevistas realizadas ellos mencionaron que la amenaza del presidente Trump de separar a los niños de sus madres ha provocado una caída en la migración de estos grupos. Inicialmente, cada migrante tiene permitida una estancia no mayor a tres días, pero pueden quedarse más tiempo dependiendo de su condición, como es el caso de Ana, que necesitaba tiempo para descansar y recuperarse después de haber dado a luz a Nicole. Read more…

Between Life and Death, There’s San Francisco: A Reading List

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

They came in the tens of thousands, pushing baby carriages and packing roller skates. All in all, an estimated 200,000 pedestrians crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on May 27, 1937, its first day in business. The bridge was already a San Francisco landmark—a flaming, burnt-orange beacon conceived a decade earlier by Leon Moisseiff, who had engineered the Manhattan Bridge. It was a graceful design, but suspension bridges still weren’t entirely safe—the engineer’s Tacoma Narrows Bridge would fail spectacularly only a few months after it opened in 1940.

The Golden Gate also has a dark side. To afford a view of the city, the bridge has a low barrier that is easy to scale. (In “Jumpers,” the New Yorker’s Tad Friend meditates on the bridge’s reputation for death—for the families and friends of those who succeed in their jumps, it’s an indelible monument to their loved ones’ pain.) This month, city workers will finally begin the installation of a new barrier, a grey netting that will blend into the water without obscuring the view. Officials hope it will finally reduce suicide rates on the deadly bridge.

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Learning to Swim in a Sea of Uncertainty

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Katie Prout | Longreads | May 2017 | 12 minutes (2,916 words)

 

This semester, I’ve been learning to swim. When I told her I didn’t know how, Stephanie laughed at me.

“John can’t swim either,” she said. “The people in your family don’t have enough body fat, you muscle-y freaks.”

Stephanie is John’s wife, my sister-in-law, and Stephanie can swim; she grew up in Michigan’s thumb, a remote place called Port Austin where freighters from Ontario still pull in. We grew up farther south in the state but still, my dad used to take us to watch them, longer than football fields; bigger, he said, than the Titanic. Further in along the boardwalk we’d go, skin sticky against the piping of the metal fence, and my dad would jump into the water my mom forbade us to enter, and come up clean.

When he was born, I hated John’s guts. Eventually, there were six of us kids, but for all of my memory it had just been me and my brother Steve, two years younger, and that was how I liked it. I was three years and 363 days old when my parents brought John home, and from his first adorable cry, the hot hate of cruel little animals coursed through my body, directing my actions toward him for the next two years.
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The Teenage Dreamland of ‘Twin Peaks’

A.N. Devers | Longreads | May 2017| 9 minutes (2,206words)

When the first episode of Twin Peaks aired, I didn’t see it. It was the spring of 1990 and I was in shock. My grandfather and grandmother had just died unexpectedly of different causes less than twenty-four hours apart, on April 1st and 2nd, respectively. I was 12 years old and felt as if I was in a fever dream. Their deaths were ghastly and remarkable and strange and heart wrenching and I felt like for two weeks my body had left the earth, a pre-teen balloon, floating above their home of Ft. Worth, Texas watching streams of mourners as they arrived with potato salad and Ricky’s BBQ and chocolate cake.
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My Electric Bike is Not ‘Cheating.’ And It Could Replace Cars for Millions of People

Boy learning to ride a bicycle
Learning to Ride a Bike via Wikimedia

“Hey, no fair! You’re cheating!”

The guy was wrapped head to toe in black Lycra. He had clip-in cleats and a racing helmet. I was wearing a skirt and blue suede shoes. He was annoyed because I’d passed him. He was riding hard, I could see his effort and as I pulled out on the left, I could hear him breathing.

This stretch of road doesn’t look like much, but it’s an uphill grade. When I’m heading into town, I hit it from a right turn or a full stop, both of which kill my momentum. It’s nowhere near the gut emptying climb before you reach my house, but it’s not a coast, either. Road bike guy had probably come from the park at sea level; he’d likely been climbing for a mile already. Read more…

The Circle of Las Vegas Life Is One Never-Ending Buffet

Las Vegas is a twinkling, cream-filled temple of excess where millions of pounds of food go to waste each year. At Eater, John Semley profiles the multi-generational family business that turns casino food waste into the slop that puts fattened pigs back on Vegas buffet plates. R.C. Farms is high-tech, smelly and growing. And that smoked pork shoulder sure is good.

Most importantly, the new facility’s located on landfill property 30 miles north of the city, far away from the prying eyes of tourists and hypersensitive noses of neighbors populating new suburb developments. The Combs boys seemed baffled — and slightly annoyed — by the effect that exurban sprawl had on their dad’s farm. “As the city developed, and encroachment came all around them,” Hank told me, “we would go down to city council meetings and just tell ’em: ‘We’re not moving.’ They’d go ahead and approve the developments anyhow. Right next to him. They have three schools right near there, within a mile.” (The proximity to the farm earned one of these schools the unfortunate nickname “Pigsty High.”) It’s a problem they hope to avoid with their new facility, located on landfill property, surrounded by industrial parks. “That’s the reason we’re here,” Hank noted. “You don’t see a lot of people.”

Hank estimates that the family company currently handles about 15 percent of buffet food waste in Las Vegas. The actual amount is tricky to tabulate, as the total tonnage of food that isn’t diverted to the farms isn’t calculated. “We really don’t know the true number,” Hank said. “Some of these hotels are throwing out eight tons of food a day!”

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Between Mom and Stepmom

Illustration by Giselle Potter

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | May 2017 | 15 minutes (3,743 words)

 

Meg first appeared to me as a nimbus of curly red hair, looming above my top bunk late at night. The hair, backlit and aglow, was so remarkable that I reached up and patted it as though it were a rare creature. Meg offered the nervous, extra-buoyant “hi” of the girlfriend meeting the boyfriend’s kid for the first time. In reply, I stroked the hair.

I was five; she was 25. Just a few weeks before, she had met my dad at an art opening. He was up-front about the fact that he was 37, divorced, with a 15-year-old and a five-year-old. She was working the second shift at a hospital, reading dense Buddhist texts, hanging out with a band of artists whose blue velvet berets and psychedelic hand-stenciled trunks would later color our house. They met in February and married in October. The ceremony was in the backyard of our old brick house near downtown Cincinnati. There was carrot cake, a smoldering fall sunset, an exchange of vows inspired by a California guru. Meg walked down the aisle to the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place.” In November of the following year, my brother Jackson was born.
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Wrestling With the Truth

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich | The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir | Flatiron Books | May 2017 | 22 minutes (6,102 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from the first four chapters of The Fact of a Body, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s gripping hybrid memoir of a murder case and family secrets. Blending crime reportage with first-person narrative of her own struggles, the braided story wrestles with trauma, violence, and the ways we try to understand the past, especially when those we trust betray us. Our thanks to Marzano-Lesnevich and Flatiron for sharing it with the Longreads community.

Note: This work is not authorized or approved by the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center or its clients, and the views expressed by the author do not reflect the views or positions of anyone other than the author. The author’s description of any legal proceedings, including her description of the positions of the parties and the circumstances and events of the crimes charged, are drawn solely from the court record, other publicly available information, and her own research.

One

Louisiana, 1992

The boy wears sweatpants the color of a Louisiana lake. Later, the police report will note them as blue, though in every description his mother gives thereafter she will always insist on calling them aqua or teal. On his feet are the muddy hiking boots every boy wears in this part of the state, perfect for playing in the woods. In one small fist, he grips a BB gun half as tall as he is. The BB gun is the Daisy brand, with a long, brown plastic barrel the boy keeps as shiny as if it were real metal. The only child of a single mother, Jeremy Guillory is used to moving often, sleeping in bedrooms that aren’t his. His mother’s friends all rent houses along the same dead-end street the landlord calls Watson Road whenever he wants to charge higher rent, though it doesn’t really have a name and even the town police department will need directions to find it. Settlers from Iowa named the town after their home state but, wanting a fresh start, pronounced the name Io-way, even as they kept the spelling. The town has always been a place people come for new starts, always been a place they can’t quite leave the past behind. There, the boy and his mother stay with whoever can pay the electricity bill one month, whoever can keep the gas on the next. Wherever the boy lands, he takes his BB gun with him. It is his most prized possession.

Now it is the first week in February. The leaves are green and lush on the trees, but the temperature dips at night. Lorilei, Jeremy’s mother, isn’t working. She rented a home just for the two of them—their first—but the electricity’s been turned off. Her brother Richard lives in a sprawling house up on the hill, but she isn’t staying with Richard. Instead, Lorilei and Jeremy are staying with Lorilei’s friend Melissa, Melissa’s boyfriend, Michael, and their baby. The baby is two years old, old enough that he wants to play with the boy and screams when he doesn’t get his way.

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The Doctor Dolittle of the Upper West Side

(AP Photo / Alexander F. Yuan)

At the New York Times, Andy Newman covers a day in the life of Dr. Anthony Pilny, veterinarian at the Center for Avian and Exotic Medicine in Manhattan. Dr. Pilny’s practice routinely involves bowel-obstructed bunnies, lame ducks, and feisty, festering iguanas, just to name a few of his pint-sized patients.

The center, on Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is the city’s only exclusively exotic animal hospital. “Exotic” in the veterinary trade simply means all pets except cats and dogs. The center treats anything else that comes in the door and weighs under 50 pounds. Most of the patients are rabbits, rodents, lizards or birds, but they can get pretty exotic: kinkajous, alligators, flower horn fish and prairie dogs. So can their problems.

The duck was out cold on the table in a basement operating room, a breathing tube stuck down her bill. Dr. Pilny sliced open her abdominal cavity and rooted around.

Dino has other health issues. Her egg problems led to calcium deficiency, weak bones and a fractured leg. She could no longer walk.

“She can crawl around on towels, but otherwise we have to carry her everywhere,” said her owner, E. J. Orbe, a ballroom dance instructor from Paterson, N.J.

Some people might hesitate to invest $1,200 in gynecological surgery on a lame duck. But Dino has a job: She’s a seeing-eye duck for another of Mr. Orbe’s ducks, Penguin, who is blind. “She finds food and water and makes noises, and Penguin would come over and start eating,” Mr. Orbe said.

Inside Dino, Dr. Pilny was hacking his way through a sea of yolky blobs. “It’s just a very extensive, severe amount of schmutz in here,” he said to the veterinary technician, Kristine Castillo. A clamp on Dino’s webbed foot fed her vital signs to a monitor. Her heartbeat pounded through the cheap speaker like a tom-tom drum: thwap-thwap, thwap-thwap.

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A Life Measured in Swipe-Rights

Graffiti on the sidewalk reading "i saw you on tinder"
Image by liborious (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Andrew Kay found himself on the dating market and the academic job market simultaneously, and spoiler alert: they’re deeply analogous, and it turns out that living both the personal and professional parts of your life as one massive interview is not easy, or pleasant. He takes us through the whole stressful, performative, soul-deadening process in The Point magazine — the piece is long, but the candor makes it compelling.

You craft a digital avatar of yourself and send it out into the virtual world, then spend the ensuing months and years honing and revising it; you rehearse behind closed doors again and again, giving yourself forcible makeovers until your behavior, your tics—I almost said your inner being, though this last remains up in the air, a thing you gradually learn not to think about—correspond with the simulacrum. On OkCupid and Tinder, I was “a chill, big-hearted guy,” family-centered, mild-mannered, humorously self-deprecating. In my cover letter I was a young scholar and teacher of luminous promise—bold, theoretically omnivorous, a winner of fellowships and awards, an author of multiple articles with a first book in the pipeline and a second germinating. The process is exhausting: neither in bathroom nor bedroom are you free from it, devouring dating profiles on the toilet, reaching for your cell phone when you accidentally wake at 3 a.m., checking the jobs Wiki from the parking lot outside the gym. At last you crawl, parched and ragged, to the reservoirs of intimate encounter, thinking here at last you can abandon the pretension and performance, here forget and enjoy yourself—only to learn that the performance and assessment have merely begun.

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