A twelve-year-old tender mercy

He's about 4'10" with brown hair and dark skin. He's a clear petite Filipino build with Camille's face and a nice big set of front teeth that I assume he will grow into. His voice is cracking even though it will probably not drop lower than it currently is. He gets his hair cut about every two weeks and likes to play video games and baseball. He's a catcher.

When he was about four years old I was packing for girls camp. I took a length of chain--the kind you wear dog tags on--and wrapped it around his wrist. I told him that if he took it off I would never come back. When I got back a week later, my mother scolded me and he presented his wrist, with the chain in the same condition as I had left it. I unwound it and never second guessed his love for me again.

When he was eleven he asked for a sketchbook for Christmas.

"I didn't know you liked to draw," I said.

"I do" he answered. And he isn't that good at it...yet. But he likes to do it and somehow I'm content with that.

Then on Sunday night he told me something odd. "What have you been up to?" I asked him. The usual answer to this question is 'nothing' or 'just hanging out.'

"I picked out my books for summer reading."

"Oh! What books?"

"Antony and Cleopatra and Much Ado About Nothing." The answer took me back. He was going into eighth grade. Did they actually assign those books? Are they nuts? "They gave me a list of books I couldn't read, so I chose these" he offhandedly answered. No, they weren't nuts, my brother was.

"Do you want help?" I asked him.

"Yes" he answered simply. So I volunteered to call him every night around midnight and we would read together. He used to like hearing the stories of the books I read. We would lay in his room late at night while the rest of the house was sleeping and I would tell him of my travels through literature while we both waited out our insomnia.

It still surprised me when he agreed. It surprised me more when I suggested we start then and his eagerness to read the entire first scene by himself.

He was never a good reader. In fifth grade we made fun of him for being stupid. He couldn't read well, and most of the time he didn't know what he had read. I was a freshman in college then, and it bothered me. Why didn't he read more? I wondered. When my mom pulled him out to do home school that year, I volunteered to teach him English. I looked back on the books I had to read as a fifth grader and assigned them to him, then I wrote comprehension questions for him and vocabulary lists. It took him a month to get them back to me because he had to do it through email and he is really bad about doing homework. I suppose the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and I think it has something to with my Dad.

Since then, we would discuss the books he read. But Shakespeare at 12? That was pretty hefty. And it did prove to be a challenge for him. He stumbled through most of it, but then he would take a deep breath and keep plowing through it. Then he would stop and reread it silently to make sure he understood it, and ask if there was something he didn't understand, even with the footnotes on the bottom of the page. It surprised me a lot.

What surprised me the most was when he asked if I was still going to call again the next day.

"Do you still want me to?"

"Yes"

"Yeah, I'll call."

"Ok. I'll see you tomorrow. Well, I'll talk to you tomorrow."

"Ok."

"I love you" he said simply.

"I love you too" I answered before he said goodbye and hung up. I don't think I had thought about him loving me since he was four, but it felt good to hear it. And then I realized how to him, I wasn't his parent, or his teacher, I was his sister. His favorite sister. The one who baked cookies with him in the middle of the night and told him stories. The one who he could talk to when there was no one else willing to listen. The one who told him secrets, the one who asked what he had spent his day doing. The only one he openly loved. The only one he missed.

I am convinced that he is my brother for me.

Mike and me

Suzanne had called me a month ago to extend the promotion to me. I accepted of course. I may as well, since the only real option was to go up. I knew it was coming for some time now, and really it wasn't a big deal.

Training for Stadium of Fire was my first training as a supervisor. East gates, in case anyone was wondering. That means I had taken Brian's spot. He was a weird kid. I never really knew what to think of him. He is one of those people who you feel like is nice because they want something from you. That is what happens when you work at the Marriott Center--everyone starts to want things from you. Then they get insanely angry when you can't accommodate them because they aren't really deaf or don't use a wheelchair, or were simply too late for those Hannah Montana tickets. Too bad, better luck next time. But how do you express all that at training? You don't. That's just one of those life lessons that you have to learn on your own.

It wasn't until after training that I heard about Mike.

"He had a brain aneurism and he really likes Brooks and Dunn. I originally had him in the south end, but I'm afraid he's one of those people who really isn't going to do anything. I shouldn't have hired him, but I'm not going to fire him the day before, so I'm putting him with you as security, and just try to...I don't know, keep him out of the way."

Sure, Suzanne. Piece of cake, right?

She scheduled him for security all right, but not at gate 6 like I expected. She stuck him between 6 and 7 to make sure people aren't passing things through the fence.

Mike was about 40, but had the mentality of an 8 or 9 year old. He smoked and was overweight, and was growing a mustache like Brooks...or Dunn. He had big blue eyes that seemed to take in everything and yet missed it at the same time. I bet that if I had given him a holographic sticker he would have been entertained for more than half of the 6 hour shift.

When he got to his spot, he knew he was being put out of the way. I faced him and his clear disappointment, suddenly regretting having accepted the responsibility. In a sudden move to salvage my own humanity, I moved him to gate 7, telling him that he was to periodically move between gates 7 through 10 and help out the security already stationed there.

Boy was he a whiner. He needed a cigarette break, he was hot, he was tired, he wanted to watch the show, but he never told me any of that unless I asked. But I had to ask because I had already asked everyone else. "How are you?" I asked them all.

"Tired." "Fine." "Hot--by the way, Corbin Bleu asked for extra security detail so he wouldn't get mobbed when he left."

"When is he leaving?"

"I don't know, but can we do it?"

"No, but I'll pass your request on to Suzanne." Easy. Easy easy. But when Mike came up to me to ask for his third break, what could I say other than "sure"?

Suzanne checked on me, pointing out that Mike wasn't where he was supposed to be. I told her he was, and that he never went anywhere without letting me know first in the form of a question. "Send him home when you cut your first round of security" she advised. I nodded. It was protocol. It happens every game. Besides, he was hot and tired. He should have wanted to go home.

But when I asked him to, he almost cried.

"Mike, did you not want to go home?"

He looked at me, fear and despair reeking in his posture and expression. "All my family is here watching the show."

"You can go watch it with them."

"I....I don't know where they are!" The tears were coming. It was like waiting for a dam to break. The pressure of being sent home was almost overwhelming for him. No, I told myself. Suzanne said to send him home. Send him home.

"The ticket office can tell you. Go ask Suzanne and she can help you."

"Okay" he agreed, turning to go. His shoulders were slumped and his head hung. He stopped after three steps and turned, timidly, almost like he was afraid. He kept his head down, looking at me in stolen glances. "Did I do something wrong?"

"No, you did everything I asked you to do" I answered. I tried to smile but I don't think it came out right. He was unconvinced, I knew. I could see it. "We have more people than we need. We do this every game, all the time. We just don't need you here anymore." The words made me bleed. I almost winced at the sound of them, hoping he took them as gently as he could. Whether he did or not, I don't really know. He straightened a little and I told him where he could find Suzanne, and he walked away with the elation of being free from his taskless bondage easing everything that told me he was upset.

I hoped he found his family. I hoped the rest of the shift, then the walk home. His despair at the notion of failing so entirely at his one day $9 per hour job pushed against me as I lay in bed. I finally picked up my phone and went to sit on my front porch, which was loaded with furniture that my roommates hadn't wanted in the living room. I sat down and called home.

"Hello" a deep, playful voice answered on the second ring, almost singing. Pink Floyd played in the background, and I detachedly wondered how my dad was getting away with his music so loud at 3 in the morning.

"Daddy!" I cried as I let everything go, my story and tears flowing freely from me.

My dad's usual thinking look...and civilian shirt...and sunglasses.

Over Burnham Park

It was 3 in the morning. Someone's crew was walking down the street below; I could see them from the balcony of the rented apartment my dad had found. It was right across the street from the park my dad grew up playing in.

"This place has changed so much" I remembered him saying. "Dirtier, poorer." He had planned the trip for two and a half weeks, and was ready to go in four days. It just wasn't the same. He tagged along on our adventures anyway though.

For some reason, Camille really wanted her hair straightened while we were there. She spent a week trying to figure out who would do it for under $60, which was a couple thousand pesos. Not much, considering we were American. My dad asked if I wanted mine done too.

"Sure" I said, wondering if he was serious. He was though, because the day came and we followed him through and around Burnham Park, through a shopping center. There was a big sign for a recording studio just over the overhang bridge that was just about as busy as a metro station platform during rush hour. Filipinos like to sing. I could even hear someone performing just at the end of the bridge for the money I didn't really want to give them.

We wound through the run down shops and into an alley, then came out in front of a condemned building, which we cut through in the back stairway. At the top, we were approached by a security guard who spoke a few words in Tagalog to my dad that I didn't understand. He nodded and let us by and we found ourselves in what could have been the second story of a mall, except for the windows that were boarded up with cardboard.

They weren't all like that. There was a store that carried shoes, one carried bags, another carried fake Gap clothes. There were three salons, spaced between them, and my dad went straight to the one in the middle.

The receptionist was a very skinny, tall, feminine guy with bleached orange hair. That's what happens when a person with black hair bleaches it. It turns orange and looks damaged. He also was a shampoo boy I later realized. There was a man in a red t-shirt with the sleeves cut off who's English was better than the others. He did Camille's hair mostly, though he rinsed mine once. A girl did my hair. She had a low voice and when she spoke to me it was in broken English. She was tall, which is one of those things that makes people over there stand out. Filipinos are small naturally.

My hair isn't as thick as Camille's so I got to leave earlier. What I found was the main floor of the building was a market. There were tiny stalls set up with homemade goods, from shoes to rugs to some kind of battle ax my dad thought was cool and brought back to my mom as her present, claiming them as decorations to the customs official when we got back to the States.

Clarissa was particularly good at getting good prices on everything. That means she's a good liar...by Filipino standards anyway. Or it means that they were willing to play the game and pretend so she would come back more often and they could sell more things.

Camille showed up three hours after the rest of us had finished and gone back to the apartment. We were watching some Disney channel rerun when she walked in.

"When did you finish?" she asked me. She had fallen asleep while waiting for the chemicals in her hair to set the during the second cycle.

"A couple hours ago"

"Did you remember to give that guy a tip?"

"Dad tipped him, and I had a girl"

"No, it was a guy" she said, a smile creeping over her lips.

"No, it was a girl" I said. She shook her head and insisted that it was a guy. My dad chimed in an agreement.

"Lalakway" he laughed before heading up to take a nap. Transvestite, I translated in my head.

I wondered, as those boys passed on the street below me, if that had been one of those things that had changed too. There was one lone street light in the area. A taxi drove by, it's motor loud in the still summer air. I went inside and turned on the t.v.. I wouldn't fall asleep for another hour or so, I knew.

Burnham Park, Baguio, Philippines, 2006 in the daytime from the apartment balcony.