Why can't we be friends....

While working with one of our illegals last night, I asked him why he wasn't going to any of the Midnight Man-ness screenings with Joe and Kris. Seems he wasn't invited.... again. He also suggested that he “wasn't asked last year either”. It made me feel sad. It's got to be hard being a new immigrant in a strange land, a fair-weather Juan to your fancy friends, good enough to mop the floor but not to sit beside in the dark holding hands watching sexually-charged horror films and alternately jumping into one another's lap like frightened school-girls every few scenes. They're called climaxes for a reason I guess.

No, it's funny how we think we're all tolerant, inclusive and multicultural-minded, but how quickly we pass over the new arrivals when it comes to socializing. Sure they wear strange-coloured shoes and you can't understand a word they're saying but only a generation or two ago, Kadas's family were picking bananas in the Colombian jungle, spanked out on low grade heroin and dreaming of a better life in Guatemala picking coffee beans, blissed out on a better grade of dope. How quickly we all forget.

After he got done mopping and we closed up, Juan-Tom rode off on his brakeless bicycle and was swallowed up by the lonely night – likely heading off to another menial job he's too proud to tell us about so he can afford to send a little extra money back to his legless sister in the old country – I felt a tinge of melancholy and guilt. Here's a guy an ocean away from what he knows trying to make his way in a place where he doesn't speak the language or understand even the simplest things about our culture and yet he's here. I think that deserves more than $3.50 a shift so I'm bumping Juan-Tom, or whatever the fuck his name is to $3.75. That should be enough to get one of those little skateboard things for his sister to get around with.

Damn, I'm welling up. It just gets me right here.

Sporgey