All Gringos Look the Same

“But, how can I possibly know? All gringos look the same to me.”

He tried to remember, but they were all sort of a blur. A common face with very specific differences. Not specific enough for him to recognize them.

He was just working, asking people for their orders, when all of a sudden this guy pulls to the window and points a mean looking gun to his face. “Give me all you got in the till, or I call the federales.” The guy chuckled nervously. Jose’s face grew red and hot. He was shaken by the violence of it all. It took him a little while to understand what the guy wanted, to confirm what his first suspicions were: I’m being robbed. Yup, that fits. He wants money. This box is called a till, he wants everything in it. But what the heck is that stuff about federales?

He wanted to run for it, hide behind the fryer. If he shot, he would be alright. But he was worried about the other people, those who didn’t know that there was some kind of madman with a gun at the window. “I don’t know how to open this box” he muttered. He tried to push every button he could think of, but the think kept answering with a beep that denounced abuse. “Don’t touch me like that,” the box seemed to say. “The money. I’m not kidding. Don’t try to be smart!” He heard a shot. Apparently the robbers tried to scare him shooting in the air, but realized their mistake: the noise would attract the police, and quick. There’s a cop mobile every other block in this neighborhood: gotta keep those beaners in line, you know? So they sped up and out.

Just as the guy with those shinny blue eyed, pointy goateed, flannel shirted guy had feared, the cops arrived in less than five minutes. “What happened,” Jose heard them ask the supervisor. “I don’t know, sir. I heard a shot outside. Jose must know. He was working the window at the moment.”

Jose was paralyzed with fear. “Calm down,” he told himself, “you didn’t do anything bad. Just relax.” But it was hard. He could remember when, a month ago, he drove his car for the first time. An ‘88 Chevy Caprice. It was beautiful. The guy sold it to him for a thousand dollars. “You can give me two hundred every month,” he told him. “I know your parents. They are cool people.” It was the most beautiful thing he ever possessed. It was light blue, with shinny bumpers (not too shinny though, but at least they weren’t rusty), and a couple of bumps here and there, but nothing bad. This car was tough as nails. Inside of it he felt that he was driving a space ship to Mars. It was spacious, and even though the AC only spitted hot air and the stereo only played cassettes, he felt he was inside some state of the art miracle. After he gave the guy the first two hundred dollars he took his brother and his friend Frankie to a dance. He’d been to the club before, but he’d been driven there each time. Now he felt important. He could have taken four more people in it. The car was that big. But five blocks away from his house, he saw the spinning lights of a cop mobile’s siren. He freaked out. He didn’t know what to do, and he wasn’t sure he heard right when the police officer yelled “get out of the car.” He tried to open the door, but it didn’t budge. “Don’t!” His brother said. “What are you doing? You are supposed to wait for them to come to the car. You shouldn’t get out. You’ll get in trouble.” “But I think that they want me to come out,” said Jose. “Come out of the car.” The voice said again. “See? I think they are asking me to come out.” He kept jiggling the handle until the door gave in. “Put your hands in the air,” the officer said. Jose did. “Walk towards the car slowly. Why didn’t you get out of the car when we asked you to?” They asked. “I wasn’t sure that’s what you wanted.” Jose was shaking, he wanted to kneel and tell them that he didn’t do anything wrong. He wanted to tell them that this was his first time driving, that he was sorry for being out here. He wished he knew more about the uses in these lands when things like this happened. What are you supposed to tell to a cop in a moment like this? He wondered. He had no idea. He felt he was flunking a test for which he hadn’t prepared at all. He wished he had spent more nights at home studying. But, where do you get a book that teaches you this kind of stuff anyway? “Have you been drinking?” The cop asked. “No! No sir. You can see the car. I have no drinks.” He pointed towards it, thinking he might have been better off buying a crappy Ford Escort, or something like that, which wouldn’t profile him so badly. The cop smiled. “Have you had many experiences here in the States?” “Experiences? No. This if the first.” I’m sorry, he felt like saying. I’m sorry I’m here. If you don’t want me here, I’ll go back. I don’t want to cause any trouble! But he just stood there, shaking. “We need to see your ID” “Sure, but it is in my pocket,” he said with the typical jumpy accept of his people, and pointing to his pocket with his raised hand. “Ok, you can show it to me. I just wanted to tell you that your tail light is out. Here in this state is mandatory that your lights are all working properly when you drive at night.” He gave him back his ID. He punched his tail light. It flickered and it went on. He would have to remember to punch this stupid light every night.

“Federales!” he said to himself. “He meant la migra!” The INS, or the USCIS as they now call it. The whole Department of Homeland Security was after his case now. He was an illegal immigrant, and green trucks seemed to peer to him from everywhere. At least that’s what they told him that the tracks of la migra looked like. Green. Grin. Gringos. They weren’t so nice to him as his friend had promised him that they would be. “Just come, man. This place is awesome. If you come and stay for five years, they give you papers.” He ignorantly lied, “You’ll love it here.” And he did. He came and he loved it. It was true that those girls who ran into his bike when, trying to do a right turn, they were too busy checking if someone came from the left to notice that he was coming from the right. They offered to take him to work, to call his boss and to explain everything. They even gave him their number. He would have called if he knew what to say. Phones scared him. He hated phones when he was back in his country in South America, and he hated them now when he didn’t even understand the words that came out of it. “Whatever you do, don’t way ‘yes’ to anything that those guys ask you. As soon as you say yes, you agreed to purchase whatever they are offering you. I know like five cases. These guys now have telephone features that they can’t even afford, just because they said ‘yes’ and they didn’t even know what they were agreeing to.” So he just said “Sorry, I no speak English good,” which was the best he could produce under the pressure of the telemarketers. Some of them sounded as if they were being dragged to make these calls. “I really don’t want to do this, but if I don’t, I’ll get an F in my math class.” That’s how it sounded. Sometimes they were so nice he could picture them smiling, their voices sounding like white polo shirts and brand new Sketchers’ shoes. Those girls were nice, he told himself. So many people were nice to him since he arrived here. But he just couldn’t figure out what people were so impatient and rude to him at work. There weren’t many white kids in his job that he could compare the way they both were treated, and even if there were, he was so busy and focused on his job that he didn’t have time for such comparisons anyway. He gave a hundred percent of his mental efforts to understanding what these people were telling them. “No pickles on that. And easy on the ice.” Easy on the ice, what in the world did that mean? Did they want him to put the ice in the cup slowly, so they wouldn’t break? What was all that about? “Just don’t put so much ice,” Nano told him one day. “They don’t want so much ice, that’s what it means.” “Then why don’t they say so,” refuted Jose. There were so many things he needed to learn. He still struggled with how to say “when I get out of my job.” He tried to talk to a girl once, tell her when he was out for the day, but he didn’t know how. When I exit my work? When I finish my job? How was it! It was such a simple thing that not being able to say it gave him headaches and real doubts about his future fluency in the language. “I don’t know what kind of language you speak, but I speak English,” an angry customer told him once. He tried, and yet these people treated him as if he didn’t care at all. If only they knew how much I care, he repeated to himself.

And now these two officers were questioning him. “What kind of car did he drive? What did he look like? What else did he say?” What kind of car? He had no idea. It was brown. At least that’s what the few parts that still had paint looked like. But he had no idea how to say that. Make? You mean the brand? He didn’t know much of these cars. He was used to European cars: Fiats, Peugeots, Renaults. He had never even seen all these car logos before. The cops weren’t happy. He knew about Fords and Chevrolets. This one wasn’t one of them. What did they look like? Like every typical American he’d seen in the movies: skinny, very blond, blue eyes. How can I know? All gringos look the same to me, he felt like saying, but decided that it wasn’t appropriate. So he told them: skinny, very blond, blue eyes. Again, the cops weren’t happy. “He told me to give him the money.” The “H” in the word “him” was very strong, raspy, hoarse. He wasn’t used to that subtle “H” sound yet. It didn’t exist in his own language, so his brain didn’t seem to perceive it like that yet. Like so many other things which were different and he hadn’t noticed yet. Not the cops though. They were the same as the ones in his city. Cops seem to be the one thing that every society shared. But he wouldn’t say that either. He said as much as he dared, wincing as he waited for the question about his legal status, shaking, rubbing his sweaty hands under the table.

“Well, thanks anyway,” said one of the cops, and they walked away without even saying goodbye. Jose’s relief was instantaneous. Two encounters with the police and he was still there, unharmed, wiser. They are not that bad. They are just doing their job. He told himself, grinning as he tried to calm himself enough to stop shaking. This place is not that bad. Justice happens. They were looking after me. They cared.

“Jose, that window won’t attend itself,” yelled the supervisor, a mustachioed 19 year old who felt immensely superior to him just because he came to America when he was five, and therefore knew more about the rules than Jose ever expected to understand. “Sure,” he said, afraid of angering him now. He needed this job. He was getting used to the window. He almost memorized every ingredient in every item in the menu. Life was definitively getting better.

He smiled, put his head set on, and walked towards the window.