chapter 2
refugee crisis
I eventually found some time to do some private/anonymized search-engine digging, and I learned two deeply disturbing facts: First, I had enough gold to buy one of those new houses they were building in San Juan Capistrano. Second, not turning in Gramps’s guns promptly could land me in prison for ten years. Worse, it wasn’t clear whether the “promptly” mark had already blown past, and the best way to find out would be to ask the cops, but if I did, and it had, well …
These two facts intruded on my thoughts regularly for weeks as I did my Jobs Guarantee gigs—playing cards in a seniors’ home, playing frisbee in Verdugo Park with an after-school club from Roosevelt Elementary, helping to excavate an old Lockheed fuel dump that had rendered the soil in some poor old lady’s backyard toxic.
The inability to concentrate was really getting to me, and it was compounded by the fact that all anyone wanted to talk about was the refugee caravan headed our way. From the caravan’s videos, they were ex–fruit pickers from the San Joaquin Valley, where all the farms had dried up and blown away after a solid decade of drought.
Refugee caravans had been leaving the San Joaquin Valley for as long as I could remember, but they’d never come this far downstate—and the caravans out of Mojave and San Bernardino had all headed either south of us, or inland to Nevada. Burbank was about to be the first town in the San Fernando Valley—hell, in the LA area!—to get a caravan.
My affinity group—which I’d been invited into by Milena and Wilmar—had downloaded all kinds of docs on getting emergency fed funding to build temporary shelters and looked up state rules on how to trigger an acceleration of the city’s infill plans so we could start work on permanent high-density, high-rise housing for these folks.
We all were half drunk on the idea—seven-hundred-plus new Burbankers, hard workers with brave hearts, who’d come and live with us and help us make a better city!
But of course, the Maga Clubs were wetting the bed at the thought. So much straight-up racist stuff about rapists and gangs and human traffickers. The message boards were brutal and the meme warfare was so ugly, full of faked images of “carnage” in other cities that had “accepted” refugees. It was the usual “flood the zone with bullshit” business. No sooner would we get through explaining that federal law didn’t even allow the city to avoid “reasonable accommodation” for internally displaced people so there was no reason to be having this debate, than we’d get sucked into a debate about their fake-ass images and the fake-ass stories from other cities.
The Maga Clubs were really feeling their oats. With Bennett in the White House, they were convinced their long nightmare was ending and with it, the obligation to look after one another and acknowledge that the world is a shared space full of living, breathing humans who deserved the same happiness and comfort that you did. They just hated that idea, as I well understood from endless nonconsensual conversations with Gramps and his pals.
I’d left my affinity group after high school when everyone did the post-grad drift-apart, but Wilmar and Milena’s group had welcomed me in, and I loved it when we met at Gramps’s house, like we were exorcising all the BS he and his buddies had sprayed into the air and sunk into the paintwork.
Two nights after the caravan announced that it was coming to Burbank, we met in my living room. There were a couple dozen members of the group, but it was rare for more than ten to show up for any event. That night there were more than twenty, and I’d brought in folding chairs from the backyard shed and cushions from my bed. After experimenting with various arrangements of fans and swamp coolers, I gave up and closed all the windows and cranked up the AC and lugged out the big beverage cooler and filled it with ice water, balancing it on the sole coffee table I left in the room.
Kiara had called the meeting, and once we were all settled in, they held up their hands for silence. “How many of you ever heard of the People’s Airbnb?” People started to chuckle, then laugh, then applaud. Someone hollered.
Milena put her hand up. “Kiara, I think I know what you’re talking about, but maybe not everyone does?” I loved that about Milena, she was always thinking of people (like me) who might be shy or worried about seeming stupid.
“Thanks, Milena,” Kiara said. They were a decade older than me but their little sister Laila had gone to school with me from elementary to high school and like all the kids with a cool older sister, Laila had always known about the best music and clothes months before us singletons got clued in. Even though I knew it was silly, I was a little starstruck by Kiara, and not just because they looked totally amazing in a shirt they’d cropped and engineered into a kind of box that was both sexy and amazing-looking, offering glimpses of their strong tummy and their outie belly button.
“Back when Burbank kicked out Airbnb, they passed an ordinance that made it illegal to offer short-term rentals, or to rent to more than two people per bedroom. But under the Federal Internal Displaced Persons Act, laws like those are suspended for anyone who uses their private homes to shelter refugees awaiting permanent housing, provided the fire marshal doesn’t think there’s a safety hazard. The refugees you put up get FEMA housing vouchers and if they give ’em to you, you can redeem these for cash.
“The reason I called this meeting is so that we can start planning on using this to crack the density debate at City Hall. For too many years, we’ve heard every excuse to keep Burbank from growing up, making it viable for public transit and walking: First they say it’ll make social distancing impossible. Then they say it’ll make parking impossible—”
“That’s the point!” someone yelled from the floor. We chuckled.
“Hell yes it’s the point. You know that tired NIMBY song. Thing is, with the caravan on the way, we can crank the density way up and there’s nothing the council can do about it.”
“And we get to do a solid for our refugee friends.” Same guy. I didn’t know his name, but this was his regular deal, doing the call and response, and it had bugged me at first, but Milena told me that he just got so excited that he couldn’t help himself and everyone was okay with it.
Kiara didn’t seem to mind, anyway. “Yes, Samuel, that’s right. We get to house people who need it, and fix a structural problem with our city, all at the same time, and the best part is, the city can’t say shit about it.
“We’re gonna need a lot of rooms though—housing seven hundred people for a couple weeks while we get temporary shelters built, and maybe some of them for a couple years while we start up permanent housing. That’s a lot of extra rooms and living-room sofas and backyard sheds. We’re gonna need to convince a lot of our neighbors to take those vouchers.”
“Food Truck Friday!” Samuel yelled, and now I understood why everyone was okay with him shouting out from the floor. That was a great idea.
“That is a great idea,” Kiara said.
* * *
On the last Friday of every month, the cream of Greater Los Angeles’s food trucks line a two-mile-long stretch of Magnolia Boulevard, while the Magnolia Park shopkeepers change their windows to display their best wares, and everyone from the Scouts to the Democratic Socialists to the high-school cheerleading squads sets up little tables and tents and performs and pushes literature and sells baked goods, while Burbankers and people from all over LA and the Valley stroll up and down, eating shaved ice and tacos, throwing money into the musicians’ guitar cases. Every Christmas, Ume Credit Union brings in an ice machine and creates a mushy tobogganing hill in its parking lot (that struck me mute, the first time I saw that after moving from Canada).
The Burbank Democratic Socialists had a couple of people who made sure that there were always permits available for affinity groups to use when there was a project on, and so, less than a week later, I found myself using a power driver to assemble a model Ikea bedroom that we’d bought at America’s Largest Ikea (the city’s greatest claim to fame, even if it had been subdivided into a trio of Baby Ikeas) under a People’s Airbnb banner, working feverishly with a couple of others to assemble it and make it look pretty in time for rope-drop and the opening of the festivities. We were going to show Burbank how easy it was to convert a spare room to temporary refugee housing.
The furniture off-gassed as I assembled it, a sweet smell from the fixative we applied to the layers of honeycombed cardboard after we had them bolted together. The furniture was cheap, and it would only last for a month at most—less if you had little kids jumping on it—but the fixative that stiffened it and made it waterproof dissolved easily with vinegar, and the cardboard would break down back into the material stream easily.
As I worked, other members of my affinity group were staging the model bedroom with bedspreads, a throw rug, some books, and a clothing rail that we hung with road clothes, a neat line of worn-down shoes beneath it.
“I’d live here,” I said, accepting a shaved ice from Samuel, who’d shown up with a tray of them for the crew.
“Me too, man, me too!” He was such an upbeat guy, practically vibrating in place. I loved his energy. Just standing next to him made me feel reinvigorated. And the shaved ice was amazing.
“Is that cardamom?”
“Uh-huh. Cardamom, cinnamon, buncha stuff. Taste of India’s doing a popup with Mahalo’s. Masala ice. Isn’t it amazing?”
I couldn’t answer because my mouth was full of shaved ice. He laughed at me and moved on to distribute more of his bounty.
* * *
Judging from the crowds and the number of people who took our handouts and scanned our QR, Burbank loved the idea. People were weirdly romantic about Airbnb, the real one, the one that got kicked out of most cities, so the word “Airbnb” brought a lot of foot traffic. They came for the nostalgia, but they stayed for the excitement of having a sleepover party with people who had the grit it took to cross the state on foot in search of a better city. Burbankers were proud of their city, and there were plenty of people who were excited at showing some strangers hospitality.
Then Wilmar showed up with a giant banker’s box of cardboard sheets.
“What is that?” I asked, as he set it down with a thump that made the cardboard night table shift and creak. I’d stood on that table while I was stringing up the banner, so whatever was in that box was heavy.
He grinned. Wilmar was handsome, dark, and always stubbled, with long eyelashes and hair he center-parted like an old-fashioned barbershop-quartet singer. He had something tattooed in Armenian on his collarbone, and he was wearing a V-neck shirt that showed it.
“I had an idea,” he said, and lifted the lid off the box. It was full of stiff sheets of cardboard, not the corrugated kind, laser-cut, with laser-engraved instructions. I lifted one up. It was very familiar, though it took a second for me to get it. It was a replica of the bed I’d assembled, dollhouse-sized, ready to be punched out and stuck together.
I laughed. “What the hell?”
“The designs were all online! I just downscaled ’em and went down to the makerspace and cut a couple hundred sheets. It was easy!”
I punched out and assembled a miniature replica of the room I’d spent the afternoon building, which took minutes, rather than hours. It looked great. Ten minutes later, we were mobbed by kids and their parents, demanding the cardboard handouts, which Wilmar had thoughtfully engraved with the QR code for our People’s Airbnb pitch, and it worked so well that some of them actually circled back to ask questions later in the evening, their kids clutching the detailed miniature cardboard furnishings.
We ran out of cardboard cutouts by about 9 p.m., just as the crowds were starting to thin. I wandered away and bought a cultured “lobster” roll from one of the trucks, biting into the soft potato roll, and wiping the sauce off the corners of my mouth when I spotted the city manager’s information booth, which was half packed up. The woman staffing it was an older white lady, with a kind face and short hair and really cool earrings that could not possibly have been made out of stone because they’d have torn her ears off, but they sure looked like it.
“Hey, sorry to bug you, but do you have time for one quick question?”
She gave me a tight smile that made it clear she wasn’t happy about it, but said, “Sure.”
“Sorry, sorry—I was working over at the People’s Airbnb booth all night and I only just got free. The thing is, I inherited my gramps’s house when he died, just last month, and I want to turn the land and the house over to the city for infill. I figured with all the refugees coming in, the city’s gotta be trying to figure out where to put some high-density buildings, and we’ve got two acres on a corner lot at Fairview and Oak, and, well, I just wanted to make sure the city knew it was there for the asking.”
She gave me a considering look. “Mr.—”
“Palazzo,” I said.
“Mr. Palazzo, if you want to sell your house, you need a realtor, not the City of Burbank.”
“Oh hey, no. I’m not looking to sell it—I mean, I guess the city will be paying for houses for any infill, but that’s not what I’m asking about. I just … I know that when you go and try to do, what’s it called, eminent domain, it’s expensive. People get angry and fight, you have to go to court, all of that. Well, I not only don’t want or need my house, but I also want to help the city do right by the refugees when they get here. I just thought, maybe you folks have a list or something?”
I saw her get it, slowing down from the restless packing up her hands had been doing while we talked, coming into the present moment and looking at me. I nervously wiped my mouth again, convinced I had lobster-mayo on it.
“Oh, I see.” She thought for a moment. “I have to be honest, I don’t think there’s any such list, though you’re right that eminent domain is not fun for any of the parties involved.” She got a faraway look.
“What?”
She smiled, and she was transformed from a tired city employee at the end of a double shift to someone dreaming a beautiful dream. “I was just imagining what it would be like if we could get all the land we needed for the refugees without having to go to war with Burbankers.” She looked up and down at the thinning crowds on Magnolia, the crews breaking down their booths, the food trucks folding down their awnings. “I mean, just between you and me, there’s talk of doing away with the football fields at the high schools to build high-rises there.”
“No way,” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know if they’ll do it, but it’s certainly a measure of how desperate everyone’s feeling about this. After that business with the man on the roof of the high school, the whole city feels like a powder keg. Don’t get me wrong, I love those old-timers, but they haven’t really kept up with the world, and”—she dropped her voice—“a lot of them hung on to their g-u-n-s.”
It was her spelling it out like that that got to me. I just loved her, loved the whole city. It was a fucked-up and sick world, but Burbank was full of this kind of person, lifers in the city government with dope earrings who didn’t want to say the g-word.
“I know it,” I said. I did! “But things are changing. You shoulda seen the folks who came to the People’s Airbnb booth. This town wants to welcome in the strangers. I may have been the first one to volunteer his house, but I bet I’m not the last one.”
She passed me her card, which was, you know, delightful. Cards!
Carole Burke, Senior Administrator,
City Manager’s Office, City of Burbank,
City Hall, 275 E Olive Ave, Burbank, CA 91502.
“You get to work in the old building. How cool!”
She grinned. “It’s a creaker, and the air-conditioning’s never quite right, but it’s a beautiful building, all right. If you’re serious about the house, you give me a call on Monday and I’ll talk to the manager and see where we get to.”
“I will!”
We touched elbows and I left her.
I had to pick up my bag from the People’s Airbnb before I went home. I was almost there when I heard the shouting: an angry man’s voice, shouting “FUCK YOU!” over and over again. I stepped out from between a Korean taco truck and a barbecue cuy van and saw him: a tall and burly man, iron-gray hair under a red Maga hat, jeans and a tight shirt with tessellated lenticular Punisher logos that animated as he stalked from one member of my affinity group to the next, barking “FUCK YOU!” at them.
Wilmar was mirroring him, almost chest-to-chest, keeping him from getting too close to the smaller members of the group, mostly women, and then Samuel joined him and then Kiara, all four foot eleven of them, also started the dance, like a guard on a basketball court. The shouting man loomed over all of them, even Samuel.
“You want to literally fill my city with rapists and thieves? You want to fill my city with illegals? Fuck you! That’s what I say, fuck you!” I was right on them now, joining the guard wall, unsuccessfully stopping him from tearing down our banner and then ripping it with a resounding RRRRRRIP sound. That was the thing about using appropriate materials: the banner was only supposed to last for a month or two and then be compostable. If we’d printed on immortal, colorfast Tyvek he’d have needed a knife or he’d have been standing there straining to start the rip.
Of course, plenty of people were recording all this, hands held high, and now the rage man—his neck corded and the color of a hot dog—started to grab for their screens, wrestling with one person, knocking another’s screen skittering across the ground. I almost grabbed for his wrist but thought better of it. That’s what this guy wanted, a ten-on-one fight where it was young, mostly brown-skinned greenies beating up an old white guy.
Kiara had the answer. “NOT! GONNA! FIGHT! YOU!” they shouted, and we got the idea, joining in: “NOT! GONNA! FIGHT! YOU!” We roared it and I heard more people converging, drowning out the guy’s hoarse cries of “FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU!”
As the cops finally led him away, he yanked one arm free and pointed a finger at Kiara: “Fuck you, bitch!”
They smiled sweetly. “Not with her dick and him pushing,” they said, pointing at me and then Milena, adding some gender-bending to the sick burn. It was cathartic and we whooped with laughter and hugged them. Even the cops grinned.
* * *
The cross burning started at midnight out front of City Hall. Whoever built it knew how to make quick-assemble, freestanding structures. Lot of that expertise in Burbank, studio carpenters and the like.
They were so quick that the cops didn’t catch them. That was the official story: pickup truck arrives, three dudes in ghillie suits jump out, assemble the cross, light it up, speed off. The fact that the police HQ was across the street made this story hard to swallow, but however you gamed out your conspiracy theory, it was ugly: the cops let them get away with it; the cops were so bad at their jobs they couldn’t catch them; the cops were in on it. Those were three bad choices.
The refugees were only two days away now, and the forums had gotten really mean, but even so, none of us were prepared for this. I got woken up by pings from my screen, it having decided they were important enough to play through my bedtime hours, and then I sat with my screen for a long moment, not knowing what to do. Then I knew what to do. I had to go there and bear witness.
We’d had Wilmar’s cowboy beans for dinner and sleep had transformed the delicious residue of garlic and smoke to a vile taste in my mouth, so I grabbed my toothbrush and brushed while I pulled clothes out of drawers. Sleepy and multitasking, I klutzed the little “telephone table” in Gramps’s hallway and knocked over the bowl where we collected keys and pens and masks and other lying-around stuff. The racket was terrible and Wilmar and Milena came out of their rooms in PJs and so I had to explain what was going on and show them the streams from City Hall and then I had to wait while they got dressed and brushed their teeth.
But it was worth the wait to have the company on the ride to downtown. The streets were empty and dark at first, our blinkers bouncing off the houses on Verdugo as we cranked our pedals, no sound but the shush of our wheels and our breath.
We turned onto Olive and stopped: we could see straight down the road, all the way to the rise of the overpass over I-5, and behind that hill, roiling clouds of smoke shot through with blue-red fire-truck lights.
“Well, shit,” Milena said, with feeling.
The thing about cross burnings is that they’re historic. I hadn’t ever seen a cross burning before. I don’t think anyone I knew had ever seen one, or even met someone who’d seen one. I knew they’d been popping off across America again, both in the run-up to Bennett’s election and then any time some culture-war shit kicked off with a Maga Club somewhere like East Bumblefuck, Texas.
But here was a cross, burning outside of City Hall, in Burbank, California.
“Why haven’t they put it out?” I said, pointing to the firefighters holding their dry hose, doing nothing with it.
“Magnesium,” someone said, another person about my age, vaguely familiar, like maybe they were the sibling of someone I’d gone to school with. Burbank was full of those kinds of familiar faces for me. “They load up the crosses with ’em, that’s why it’s so bright. You hit it with the hose, it’ll go boom.”
“Jesus.”
The person shrugged. “It’s effective, give ’em that.”
“Yeesh.” I moved away. I hadn’t liked being near that thing to begin with, and now that I knew that it could explode and shower me with burning magnesium fragments, well …
Cross burnings are old, but they’re not obsolete. Even though I’m white, even though I was born in the twenty-first century, even though I was in California and not the Deep South, that cross was fucking spooky. Magic, and not the good kind. No wonder they burned them. Cross on fire goes straight into your brainstem and down your spine and tells you Get away from this bad place.