Ground wire

By Edgar Larrea

Hate me, for pity's sake, I beg you; hate me without limit or mercy

I’d rather hate than be indifferent… because resentment hurts less than being forgotten.

Julio Jaramillo, “Hate Me”

My first semester at a graduate school in this country quickly taught me that I was going to need much more time and (above all) money than I had available. By the end of those first 14 weeks, I was completely exhausted, both physically and mentally. 

I missed my old life and the friends I had left behind in North Carolina. As a Spanish teacher at a public high school in a small rural town in the northeastern part of the state, I had made few but close friends during my five years living there. With almost no Hispanic people in town and no family in this country, the few Americans I had met during that time had become my only circle of friends. Now, seven hours south, in a new city, in a new state, and with a new job and studies, I had to start all over again. 

Hard work didn’t scare me (the San Fernando School of Medicine in Lima had prepared me for anything), but the idea of having to live very frugally for the next four or five years did (that’s why I left Peru, for crying out loud). The stipend I received as a doctoral student was, to put it mildly, suffocating. After years of receiving a full-time annual salary, going back to living on Ramen noodles and frozen pizzas— Le Baron wasn’t encouraging at all. Even though the university deposited my meager stipend every other Friday without fail, after paying my share of the rent and basic bills, it was clear that I still had many days left in the month to stretch that small paycheck. Especially in the summer, when I didn’t get paid for three months and had to figure out how to survive. 

But that week had been different. I’d earned a whopping fifty dollars for a relatively easy translation job. So I decided to treat myself and splurge on a decent pizza with all the toppings from the city’s trendiest pizzeria, and buy a bottle of wine just for myself. I’d even set aside $5 for the tip I’d give the delivery guy. I didn’t want him to see me as a poor, inconsiderate Latino student.

Twenty minutes after placing the order over the phone, I heard that sound for the first time. At first, I thought someone was opening an old door. It was a metallic, raspy screech, like a nail scraping against a wall. 

“Ding dong,” went the doorbell on the first floor.

“Pizza for Gustavo!”

I ran barefoot down the stairs, opened the door, and greeted the delivery guy in English. He was a very pale, blond guy, about my age, but very thin and much taller than me (despite my 6-foot-1 height). I couldn’t help but notice that he had something taped—with pieces of electrical tape—to the outside of his left leg, over his yellow and red uniform. It looked like a ruler or something like that.

“It’s my ground wire,” he said when he noticed that he had tilted his head to get a better look at the strange metal bar, and let out a loud“ha, ha, ha” that made the small panes of glass in the door rattle.

I was wearing an old T-shirt that said “I Love Peru”—one of those that Chorri Palacios made popular in Peru back in the ’90s. 

“Peruvian? Oh my god, you’re kidding me??? Me toooo!!!!” the delivery guy said to me with a thick Southern accent, just like Colonel Sanders’. 

“Oh, what a small world,” I said. He must have sensed my lack of enthusiasm, because he immediately replied in Spanish: “I know, I look like a gringo, don’t I? Ha, ha, ha.” That glass-shaking laugh rang out again. “I’m Peruvian, man! Myparents were working in Peru when I was born; we were there for five years, and then I came back to South Carolina to study. My parents are from here in Columbia,” he said in almost accent-free Spanish. I was more interested in the metal bar attached to his leg.

Bert Lane was born in Peru by chance. His parents were doctors with Doctors Without Borders. They loved Latin America and its people, and for many years they traveled the region from one end to the other, helping wherever they were needed most. They would have preferred Bert to be born in the U.S., but at seven months pregnant (just before she was due to return for the birth), his mother was diagnosed with placenta previa due to overwork: “No stress, and certainly no flying until after the birth,” the doctor said. Fate had decided that Bert would be born in Peru. 

Bert would get a little electric shock every time he touched a metal surface (a minor annoyance that some people experience). In his case, as a pizza delivery guy, this little problem had already caused him to drop a couple of orders while ringing the doorbell—with a huge anchovy pizza and a cheese pizza in his hands.“With all the toppings, man.” Disasters he had to pay for out of his own pocket.

Someone had told him that, to avoid electric shocks, he first had to touch surfaces with something metal. It occurred to him to tie a small metal rod to his leg so he could keep his hands free at all times and forget about the whole thing (and never send another pizza flying through the air again). “How interesting,” I said, trying to sound interested. “Well, here you go.” I handed him my carefully saved $5 bill. He was very pleased, and from the seat of his truck, smiling, he shouted to me as he drove away: “Goodbye, friend, long live Peru!” 

“Crazy gringo,” I thought. I couldn’t help but ask myself the snobbish question of how, at that age, the son of American doctors was making a living delivering pizzas.

He didn't. Bert worked full-time repairing cell phones at the giant American phone company with the three-letter name. He delivered pizzas and drove for Uber to make extra money so he could pay his mother's medical bills. 

        His parents had separated when he was ten years old. His father left his mother for a jungle nurse he had met in Iquitos. Devastated, she returned to the U.S. with little Bert. For some reason, she began to have problems with her speech and memory. Shortly thereafter, she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, something like what Michael J. Fox had, as I later found out. She was only 41 years old. 

It had been more than 10 years since then. Bert couldn’t go to college; he had to pursue a technical degree at a community college, find a job, and take care of his mother, who had to stop working because of her illness. His parents, who were doctors and had spent twenty years volunteering around the world, hadn’t amassed any fortune.

       For about a year now, Bert had been unable to care for his mother and had had to place her in a nursing home. For the past few months, she hadn’t recognized him. She mistook him for his father and blamed him for abandoning her and Bert for that voluptuous woman. 

    The attacks became not only more frequent, but also physical. Bert’s mother had started hitting him with whatever she could get her hands on. Twice, the nurses had to pull her off him because she wouldn’t stop hitting him. The doctors forbade him from visiting her for his own good, at least until they could control his mother’s outbursts of rage when she saw him. This had devastated him. Because of her illness, his own mother (whom he loved so much) hated him, because she thought he was his father. A tremendous irony.

Bert told me this one day when I ran into him at The Whig, that dive bar in Columbia where we USC grad students would go religiously on weekends to commiserate, looking for some human connection outside the classroom. Bert told me the story with tears in his eyes after I asked him about the black eye and the scratch on his cheek. I thought a dissatisfied customer had done it to him.

“I’ve gotta go—it’s Mom’s birthday today,”he told me, downing his beer the last time I saw him at that bar. He had bought a cake and some flowers to take to his mother at the nursing home. She would most likely throw them in his face and attack him again, seeing in him the traitorous father. “She may no longer know who I am, she may no longer remember me, but I will always know that, in the mind of that person who hates me today, my beloved mother once lived.” 

I watched Bert open the bar door, which closed behind him, and wondered if, sometimes, where love still remains, hatred can hurt less than being forgotten.