Ordinary Lives: A Journey Through America

Ordinary Lives:

A Journey Through America

a Memoir

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Jaime P. Espiritu

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Copyright 2011 Jaime P. Espiritu

All rights reserved

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval, without the express written permission of the publisher, except in the case of reviews, and where permitted by law.

Ordinary Lives, autobiographical novel, Jaime P. Espiritu

Published by Petradome Books at Smashwords

ISBN–13: 978-1-4660-2830-8 eBook

This work is derived from the personal life events of the author. People and places described in this book were as they existed in the time of the events they were a part of. Some of the names of the characters were changed as a measure of the author’s discretion.

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Petradome Books

www.americanfiction.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition, August 2011

Table of Contents

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Introduction

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Virginia ---------- 1980

New Jersey------- 1965 – 1966

Canada ----------- 1966 – 1969

Toronto

Windsor

Toronto

America ---------- 1969 – 1986

Detroit

Los Angeles

Washington, D.C.

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Epilog

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Photo

Other Books

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The Author

1996 2008

Born and raised in the Philippines, Jaime Espiritu moved to the U.S. after college with a B.Sc. in Architecture. After twelve years in the profession and nothing to show for it, he went back to school and trained in the computer field. In it, he developed skills that saw him through a rewarding 26-year civil service career as an IT Specialist with the Federal Government in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, he continued to pursue a life-long desire to write and, to date, has produced a body of work in fiction listed at the end of this book.

Jaime currently lives in a D.C. suburb in Maryland with wife Nancy.

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You’re welcome to visit his home [page] at

www.americanfiction.com

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I am a naturalized U.S. citizen, born in the Philippines eleven months before the Japanese invaded the country December 8, 1941 hours after Pearl Harbor.

I survived the war and lived there till the age of twenty-four. In July 1965, two weeks after college, I ventured on a journey to America with a tourist visa and two hundred dollars in my pocket.

I am now a retired U.S. Federal  employee in the D.C. Capital area and have finally found time to finish this memoir, an autobiographical novel, recounting the first 21-year period of that journey: 1965-1986.

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Ordinary Lives: A Journey Through America, is a newcomer's story of the unveiling of America, an illustration of a discovery, of an imagined world that didn’t quite turn out to be the same as in the Hollywood movies he saw working as a full-time usher in Manila. The veil of innocence lifts slowly as the narrative progresses through the dismantling of the stereotypes of America stuck in his head since the war—from the virtuous images of G.I. Joe, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and the rest of those Hollywood icons; beautiful parks, neat houses behind manicured frontyards, clean streets and big-band parades, to crime in the streets, barred storefronts, race riots, unemployment, family breakup, poverty, prejudice and discrimination.

While he faced these realities of life in America, he went through a process of assimilation that demanded the utmost of human determination to survive and stake out a place in society. The narrative covers flashbacks to the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, the build-up of the Vietnam War in the early sixties, the race conflict in the inner cities, the rise of the drug culture and liberalism in the extreme left of society. These from the point of view of innocent youth at first and later through that of a grown adult after breaking through the barrier of those stereotypes.

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Ordinary Lives :

A Journey Through America

a Memoir

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Jaime P. Espiritu

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Petradome Books

www.americanfiction.com

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INTRODUCTION

People have those ‘years’ that for some reason, good or bad, will be specially remembered till the day they die. Aside from the usual life-cycle happenings as birth, death, marriage, divorce, graduation, usually the reason is an event involving a significant change in one’s life either for the better or for the worse.

For him, one of those years is 1980, the year he will remember for the beginning of a stable work career, steady job and regular paycheck. The year he switched careers for good—from architecture to the computer field—entered the federal government service and ended years of aimless job-hopping, the dread of instant pink slips and no future security.

He had it all planned from the year before. After bouncing for four more years from job to job in the Capital area since arriving from Los Angeles in November 1975—he finally had the mind to think seriously, at thirty-eight years old, that he better get something steady going, something permanent he could build on for the future. The next twenty years. He was pushing forty and he wasn’t much better off than when he first came to America, only weeks out of college, fifteen years ago .

The serious idea began when, early in 1976, he met and became friends with this fellow, Fred Matero, a Chicano from San Antonio, Texas, who had been with the Department of Labor for several years. They went out regularly, night-clubbing weekends. Learning how he’d been job-hopping for years, Fred suggested he look into getting a government job like he did when he came to Washington from San Antonio back in 1972.

Good benefits, he said. Regular vacation and sick leave, health insurance, pension, salary increase every year, no layoffs, and even promotions. This stopped him cold and got him thinking.

Salary increase! Promotions! Health insurance and pension!

The only time he got an increase at any of the jobs he’d had—at least fifteen of them the last decade and a half in America and Canada—was when he changed jobs and upped his hourly rate twenty-five or fifty cents more at the interview. And salary! He’d been so used to being on hourly wage, getting paid only for the time he worked and produced, he didn’t know what being salaried meant.

And promotion! Again, the only way he got promoted was by doing it himself everytime he changed jobs: raising his hourly rate and applying for a higher position. Now health insurance and pension—what a deal! These are totally something else. Because it’s something he never gave a thought of ever since he came to America. Not a moment’s thought while he hopped from job to job from the east coast to the west coast and back.

And, finally, to top it all off—no layoffs! (This wasn’t exactly true for during the Administration of the early ‘90s, the ax fell on the federal bureaucracy with the downsizing that went on for several years. And at the Office of Personnel Management where he would spend twenty years of his civil service career, he had several co-workers fired for incompetence after a period of being ‘written up’.)

It was now the beginning of March 1980. He had just turned thirty-nine four weeks ago. At this time, he had been working for R.T. Coles, Architects, an architectural firm from Buffalo, New York, which had partnered with VVKR, Architects Associates, an Old Town, Alexandria group on a joint venture project—a $30-million ten-story office-building in downtown D.C. where the office of the city mayor was supposed to be relocated. He had accepted a position as a project captain and had been managing a staff of a dozen architectural and structural draftspersons developing the working drawings (construction blueprint) from the design done by a Harvard-graduate Japanese architect named Kuni who barely spoke English.

Three and a half years earlier, coming out of a computer training school in Fairfax Virginia, he worked as a computer programmer for a year and a half with two different companies. First with the National Association of Homebuilders and then with the Army Times Publishing Company, a local-community newspaper publisher. He had switched careers as he had intended, coming to D.C. from L.A. where he had been on unemployment for months. It was a fresh start, but he missed architecture and the entry-level pay in the new line of work was low.

So he tested looking for a job again in architecture and was lured by an offer with a Jewish firm in Silver Spring, Maryland which did a lot of community development—high-priced townhouse projects in Virginia and Maryland, mixed subdivisions—and office and cultural buildings. Work was interesting—while it lasted.

It lasted eight months.

Next it was with a small practitioner in Bethesda who did hi-rise apartments and hotels. The project assignment was a nine-story Holiday Inn hotel expansion at Tyson’s Corner that practically doubled the size of the existing. That lasted six months.

Near the end of that, he had that talk with Fred Matero about getting into government service. Here, things started nagging at him: the thought that he shouldn’t have gone back to architecture and stayed on track instead with the career switch to computers, that he was wasting time that’s now becoming more precious as he got older.

But he was about to be out of work again and when the Buffalo architect offered him the job, he didn’t have a choice. Besides, the money, at nine dollars an hour, was the highest he ever made in his work career. Again, he accepted an architectural job but, this time, one that would be his last full-time in the profession.

After ten months, as with many other jobs in the past, work started thinning out on the $30-million joint-venture project. Everybody prepared for the breakup of the crew as the job wound down. Some who were lucky enough to get lined up for another project in their head office were recalled, while others including him who had no place to go hung on through the last few cleanup jobs on the project, the last few weeks’ paycheck.

The day he bought the Post and read the daily Federal Diary column, he had no idea what a turning point that would be in his life. It couldn’t have happened sooner as he read news of the Navy job openings for several computer programmers. He called the number listed in the column and landed an interview the following week. Two weeks later, he got a follow-up call from the government making him the job offer.

On April 7, 1980, two weeks after he got the follow-up call, he ‘came on board’ as a GS-334/7 (computer programmer grade 7), reporting to personnel of NMPC, at the time known as Navy Op-16 (Naval Military Personnel Command), Department of the Navy, at the Navy Annex building near the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.

He would look back to this over and over again in the years to follow and each time breathe a sigh of relief for having read the paper that day, made the call and landed the job later that paid the annual salary of $7,315. With pension and benefits! And no layoffs!

Twenty six years later, he would retire from the federal government service with the ending annual salary of $100,554.

Following is the story of how he got there. The story of a journey, of one ordinary life in America.

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~ VIRGINIA ~

1980

It took nearly the whole morning getting through personnel and security. Following instructions on the ‘Report for Duty’ sheet he got in the mail the week before, he was at the gate outside the first-wing entrance before eight. There, he was fetched by a prim dress blue skirt E-6 to be deposited first to security for the building pass, parking sticker and facility orientation, which meant stuff to read, copies he can keep, forms to fill out and turn in right there. That took an hour including waiting fifteen minutes with three other newcomers—two white men his age, maybe a couple of years younger, and a young black woman—in the waiting room until a middle-aged woman in civilian clothes with a friendly grin on her face that told them not to worry she’ll take care of them showed up and marched them on to personnel, fourth floor, wing two of the Navy Annex, also known as FOB #2.

More forms to fill out and turn in or take with them and submit later, materials to read or read to them to which nobody had anything to say or do but nod and smile. That took even longer—over an hour. Next was the coming-on-board ceremony which none of them knew was coming. The same smiley woman led them to a room with a platform two steps up from the floor. Across the wall and at the corners were the service colors with the stars and stripes in the middle. Chairs lined up the rest of the walls except at one corner where a table with a coffee maker and supplies were located. On the end wall opposite the platform on the right as they entered hung the picture of Jimmy Carter whose first and only term—already in deep trouble since four months earlier when the Iranians sacked the embassy in Tehran to hold the hostages till his last day in office, while Ronald Reagan was being sworn in—would come to an end nine months later.

There were five other people seated in the room when they arrived. Three white men and two women, one black and one white. All in their late twenties or early thirties. A few minutes later, a line officer—a Commander, followed by a male ensign and the E-6 that fetched him at the gate, came in. They went straight up and took their standing positions on the platform, the enlisted far to the Commander’s left near the wall and the ensign far on his right. The personnel woman stepped up to speak with the Commander in a low voice but everyone heard everything clearly.

Do we have ‘em all here now? asked the Commander.

Yes. All present and accounted for. This is all we’re getting today.

Good. Thanks.

She returned to the back of the room while the Commander faced the group.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, greeted the navy officer. Mid-thirties, he figured, the three gold bands on the sleeves of the spotless dress blue so prominent along with the stars on his epaulets.

All nine of them and the personnel woman as well responded in a chorus, some louder than others: Good morning.

All three in uniform on the platform thought there might have been hell raised had the group been military instead of civil service employees for not saying ‘sir’.

How you all doing this morning?

Again, they spoke in a chorus but this time responding in different ways.

Fine.

Doin’ good, thanks..

Happy to be here, finally!

Great!

Obviously eager to get done with business at hand, Commander Albert Braun first introduced himself and went right into the brief ceremony. It all looked and sounded so routine so that, afterwards, he wondered how many times a week they do this ritual: the Commander steps aside from center and asks them to get close so everybody has a clear view of the flag up against the wall; the two uniforms at the corners turn to salute the flag then the Commander tells the group to raise their hand as he does and says ‘repeat after me’—

I pledge allegiance to the flag

of the United States of America

and to the Republic for which it stands,

one nation under God,

indivisible,

with liberty and justice for all.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Commander said right after, stepping down from the platform and moving to his right end of the line. Welcome to the United States Navy. Or should I say the Department of the United States Navy? He looked in the direction of the personnel woman as if to consult with her.

That’s just as good, Commander, she said with a satisfied smile. Even better.

Thank you, Evelyn, replied the Commander, and to the group: Welcome aboard. Glad to have you all with us, moving up the line to shake everyone’s hand. He then turned their attention to the two uniforms standing behind him and introduced them.

This is Petty Officer Peggy Hardy. And this is Ensign James Daly. They’ll be in charge from here on till they get you to your workstations. He wished them all good luck and left with the personnel woman.

They spent a little time socializing with each other and with the two uniforms over coffee. Another twenty, twenty-five minutes. Then they split, four of them going with Ensign Daly, five including him with Petty Officer Hardy to report to their respective workstations.

She took them on a long walk on the corridor that crossed several wings of the Annex until they reached wing five and made a right turn. It was almost eleven o’clock but she was in no hurry as she would slow down coming to a sign on an office wall and tell them where they were at now, what Command, what Division: Plans and Policy Division, Budget and Procurement Division, Sea Duty Commands Division. Like they were on a guided tour in one of the Smithsonian museums in Washington across the river. The place buzzed with both civilian and military personnel. Everybody wore a plastic laminated picture ID with their name and either FOB 2 or PNT on it in big black letters.

None of the five, apparently, had ever worked for the Navy Department here or anywhere else as all they did was listen and nod, waiting for their guide to stop fully at one point or another to turn somebody over to his or her supervisor at a workstation.

He thought how strange this whole process was coming to report to work the first day, spending this much time checking in, given all this orientation and guided tour. For years, everytime he changed jobs, the most time his new employer spent bringing him in the first day was to show him where the office supply room was; the blueprint machine, the copier room, the toilet and the coffee room, if there was one, before he was deposited to his drafting table or workstation. Within the first hour and a half, he was at work on a project assignment making money for the company at the hourly rate they hired him for. Time is money. They didn’t waste any of it on a new hire, especially when they had no intention of making a permanent asset of him by keeping him after they got what they needed him for on a project.

In that regard, it would dawn on him later on, months later and again and again years later after he decided he would stay with Uncle Sam, that—as if coming out at last at the end of a blind journey through a long dark tunnel—he no longer had to worry about being in a short-term or temporary employment. And as far as pay is concerned, too, he no longer had to play the game with anybody, co-worker or employer, wondering what the next guy who did the same work he did was making or if he undersold himself at the interview; all that on top of the question whether or not they’d keep him permanent through thick or thin or how soon before he saw the last paycheck..

He didn’t have to go through that shit here. Not here in government. If you realized later you’re underpaid or underrated by a grade or two, you had no one to blame but yourself. You should’ve applied for a higher grade. But you could always re-apply for a job opening in the line of work you qualify for according to the position description in the posted job announcement at a higher grade with a higher pay.

You get paid only according to the wage schedule set by the law for your occupation and grade, not by an arbitrary approval of some supervisor or company vice president. Thus, you see a co-worker at the same grade and step you’re at for as long as you’ve been, doing the same job you are, you know how much he makes—not a nickel more than you’re making.

Officially, there’s no place for exploitation here such as what he remembered he at first unknowingly went through in a number of places he worked for outside, in Detroit, Toronto, Los Angeles. In Detroit, back in 1970, a manager in an architectural firm approached him after he had been working there a few months and told him how happy they are that he had come to work for them. Doing a great job, the man told him, meaning—as a co-worker, another architectural drafter who was also a newcomer immigrant like him at the time, told him later—for the cheap wage they’re paying him.

The man went on to ask him openly if he knew anybody else like him (cheap labor) who might be interested to come work in the office. He stayed another two months till he found another job where he asked for and got a seventy-five-cent-an-hour raise from the three-and-a-half-dollar-an-hour he was getting.

They turned into a stairwell, climbed up the second floor and emerged into a hallway in front of a thick-glass double door. A sign on the transom read: Overseas Shore Commands. They went through the door, walked past a couple of workstations and turned right into a waiting room. Here Petty Officer Hardy released two of them to another uniform, a male E-5, behind a counter who checked them out on a clipboard and took them to their supervisor.

Two more got dropped off down the hall near the stairwell at the end of the wing and now he was alone walking alongside the E-6 new-hire dispatcher. At this point, he got curious where she was taking him, how much farther they had to go, what floor, what wing.

Mind giving me a hint where we’re going? he asked as they neared the door to the stairwell.

She half-turned as she went by while he held the door open into the stairs. Earlier at the ceremony and at the gate, he was so preoccupied with this new world he was venturing into, what’s ahead of the day for him, all he did was follow her around and listen to what she was telling him. Now, for the first time, he got a close look at her and did a second take.. Early thirties. Not an ounce on her, at five foot six, she shouldn’t be carrying around so that everything she had on looked custom made. From the white and blue cap covering her head at a slight angle, the ash-blonde hair under it which came partly down her ears and tapered cleanly back to cover her neck, to the long-sleeved service dress blue with knee-length skirt, perfect fit with the high-gloss black pump shoes.

We’re almost there, she said. Third floor coming up, same wing halfway back.

Crisp, northern accent, definitely not redneck as he’d encountered often, living here in Arlington, Virginia for five years now. Educated, with class but friendly. She even surprised him as they stepped onto the third floor a few moments later and asked: Are you Filipino?

Yes, he answered smiling after giving her a curious look. You?

When she tipped her head up and laughed, he did too, feeling appreciated for his sense of humor.

No, she replied, slowing down as they neared a sign over the hallway that read Information Resource Management Division. But I wouldn’t mind that at all. I’ve worked with a few my last sea duty a coupla years back. I had a CPO was a Filipino. Good man.

Glad to hear that.

First time in government? she asked

First time ever.

I bet it’ll be quite a change.

I see it already following you around this whole building. It doesn’t look or feel all that bad.

You’ll find that out soon enough, starting today. The next few hours.

A few more yards and they stopped at a door to a spread of workstations, or cubicles as they were alternately referred to, separated by five-foot high moveable partitions. Up on a column off to the left of the hallway a few yards away was the sign Data Audit and Analysis Branch. Above the doorway they were facing, a sign hanging on chains from the ceiling read Reports Section. Across the hallway was an identical spread of cubicles under a sign that read Data Audit Section.

We’re here, Peggy Hardy announced, leading the way to a cubicle where a lean, grey-haired civilian got up from his desk and stepped up to them.

Well, well, well, the man said, smiling broadly. Thought you’d never get here. I guess there’s no getting around all that front-end run-around.

Nope. Gotta do it everytime, said Peggy Hardy. She moved aside so the men could shake hands when she introduced one to the other.

The men exchanged how-do-you-do’s and while she was saying, Chief Herb Corkland, head of Reports Section of the Data Audit and Analysis Branch—, the man interrupted her to tell him: I usually go by Herb. That’s good enough for me. Welcome aboard to our group. Glad to have you with us.

Thank you. Glad to be here. Finally.

Yeah, finally! I’ll take over from here, Peg. Thanks.

You’re welcome, Peggy Hardy replied, and to the new hire: Have a good first day. See you around.

Thanks, he replied and was delighted to see her go into one of the cubicles. He had been wondering where she worked, if he’d ever see her again after today. Could it be she was on temporary shore duty and would be on a ship shortly, out somewhere in one of the seven seas?

The Section Chief, Herb, draped an arm over his shoulder briefly to steer him towards a cubicle two away from Peggy Hardy’s by the windows overlooking a temporary parking lot three stories below. The casualness he sensed in the office starting with Peggy Hardy and Herb did well to lessen his concerns about the kind of place it might be. Over a number of years now, this was one thing he learned to consider more importantly whenever he changed jobs. Not just the money and the work but the people that make up the place. There were a couple of places in L.A. who made him an offer but after hearing of the reputation of some of the people who work there, he preferred to adjust his lifestyle living on his meager savings a little longer and turned them down.

There were eleven cubicles in the Section altogether, five on each side of the aisle parallel with the hallway and the windows. The Section Chief’s was at the end right by the doorway. Some of the staff present in their cubicles overheard the arrival of the new hire and popped their heads up over the partition, others came out partly at their doorway to have a look. He noticed several of them in uniform, all enlisted.

Herb led him into his cubicle, saying: Here we are. Your new home with the United States Department of the Navy. I hope you find it to your liking.

Using his trained eye at calculating dimensions visually from years in architecture, he figured quickly a ten by ten room, give or take six inches either way. It looked spacious enough for the desk against one partition perpendicular to the window wall, the chair he’d be sitting on, the other two—one at the open end of the desk and another at the corner on the other side of the doorway; the five-foot high filing cabinet against the wall opposite the desk and a worktable next to it with lots of drawers underneath.

This is just fine, Herb. Just fine. I don’t need more than this. Plenty of room here for one person.

Good. Unless you want to throw a party with a coupla dozen people.

The man standing in his office directly across the aisle heard and said: Then you’d have to do it at Henderson Hall.

The man in the next cubicle before Peggy Hardy raised his head over the top of the partition with a big grin on his face saying: Just don’t forget to invite some of us.

Everyone had a quick laugh before Herb said to the staff, Alright guys— and to him: Don’t mind them. They’re just being friendly. I’ll take you around later to meet them. But first, let’s go over the first order of the day—.

There were three manuals waiting for him at his desk, between a half to a full inch thick. Go over them at your own speed, Herb said. No hurry. You’d find it useful to take notes as you go along, mostly of stuff you’re going to have to dig back out of there when we finally get your userid and password to start work on the system. Questions—I’m right here anytime. If I’m not here, grab any of the fellas around. They all went through the same thing. I did too.

That was the order of his first day in U.S. federal government service. Well, it turned out—order of his first few days. By the time he had a realistic idea what kind of work he was expected to perform as a GS-7/Step 1 computer programmer, three days later, he worried about how long it would take him to actually do some work to earn his paycheck. Everything he read in the manuals were new stuff. The computer environment (IBM mainframe system) which he had used two years before in his last programming job in the private industry—with the Army Times Publishing Company—but had to brush up on big time, the (Navy) Standards of Use and Operation, the application of these standards in Navy Personnel data processing which was what one of the manuals was all about, the Enlisted and Officer Master Files which he found out later some old-timers in the Branch made a career of learning and maintaining.

Weeks later, he realized everything he worried and wondered about were nothing at all to lose sleep over. As a matter of fact, at the rate he managed to bring himself up to speed, he learned that he did better than some of the current staff did when they first came on board. They were asking him for answers to questions he expected them to know after a year or two on the job. Three months after he arrived, he was producing work as a GS-7 computer programmer at the same rate and proficiency as some, and higher than others. He turned in completed work, assigned to him by systems analysts, way ahead of target completion dates.

Herb, his boss the Section chief was pleased, the analysts were pleased and so were their bosses higher up. He knew then that he was earning his paycheck. He was aware beforehand that he really didn’t have to worry about this too much, being in the government service now and didn’t have to show anybody exactly what he produced for eighty hours to earn his paycheck for that pay period but, as it goes, only had to be on the job and show that he’s ‘working on it’. Not like in the private industry when he was paid hourly wages, and paid only for the hours he worked, and had to prove he earned his dollar by showing the boss the work he produced on paper.

Thus, he began to relax. Settle in this government job, much like a regular civil service careerist, thinking how he had set himself up to—but now realizing he didn’t really have to—perform the same way he did in the private industry where he worked hard and honest to earn his pay and keep his job. He had to learn to slow down, get used to taking it easy as he saw in everyone’s pace of activity in the office.

After fifteen years in America, he felt he had just arrived and, in a sense, was starting over again. Like a newly landed immigrant who would scrape the bottom of society’s barrel to eke out a living the best way he could. It was hard to get over that feeling that if he didn’t do the best he could, work better and faster than everybody else, he might not last long on the job. For he was the least valued, the most open to exploitation, and the most expendable.

He continued to equate the amount of work he produced with the equivalent hourly wage the government paid him in salary, to the half hour increment, even a quarter hour which some offices he had worked for in private industry actually did. There was a big architect’s office he worked for in Toronto—Page and Steele, St. Clair Avenue and Yonge Street—where a man name of Horst Theis went around between 8:00 and 8:15 in the morning carrying a clipboard checking on who’s late and by how many minutes. At the end of the pay period, the total time a worker came in late was taken out of his time sheet, and pay.

The thought of this persisted through most of the year he spent with this first government job. It never actually left him as it, in effect, had forged a work habit in him that gave a fair measure of himself for what he took, through the next twenty-six years he was to spend in the federal government service.

As a result, everytime he saw a bureaucrat—particularly a high-grade one, up there in the GS-13 through GS-16 level—going about his ways in a relaxed manner either socializing in the hallway, in a co-worker’s office, chatting on the phone or actually appear to be working, going over some papers on his desk, he wondered how much the worker, or the ‘work’ he produced for the past…say, half hour or fifteen minutes, was really worth the money the government paid him.

Through more than the quarter century of a civil service career that lay ahead of him, he would come to believe without a shade of doubt that not one civilian federal worker earned half the government paycheck he took home and afforded him the high-end security and lifestyle he enjoyed living in Washington, D.C. and the suburbs of Northern Virginia and Maryland.

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He knew it was going to be tough financially for a while when he decided to switch careers. He learned it the first time he did it with the programming job the computer school found him with the National Association of Homebuilders in the District in 1976 within a year of arriving from Los Angeles. He’d have to go through some more belt-tightening as he did then. The GS-7 salary paid a couple thousand a year less than the last architectural job. But he didn’t mind. The position he got in—Job Series 334 (Computer Specialist) was posted as a Grade-7/9/11, meaning a two-grade promotion after a year in each grade. Unless he screwed up on the job, did something stupid to hold himself back.

It was an opportune time to get in the Job Series at the time. The government was filling in all the 334 openings they had as fast as they could with what’s out there, from entry level recruits like him to veteran programmers and systems analysts, particularly ex-militarys, retired uniforms, better known as double dippers. Work was all in mainframe computers using mostly IBM, Univac or Honeywell system software; computer languages either COBOL, Fortran, PL/1, RPG, Pascal or Basic. The PC hi-tech revolution was a few years away. The commercial internet a dozen years in the future.

The line of work he was in was in demand. After several pay days, though, he felt the pinch. At the time, he was living in the one-bedroom apartment he had inherited from his sister when she bought a townhouse in nearby Falls Church. It was on the third floor of a high-rise on South Courthouse Road, off Columbia Pike in Arlington close to the Navy Annex—a little more than half a mile which he walked once in a while on a good-weather day. Most of the time he drove, especially when it’s hot, cold or snowing. Besides, he wanted to take advantage of the parking privilege.

He had a ’72 Malibu Chevrolet, going on nine years old at the time. The same car he bought in Detroit a month before he pulled up stakes there, lock stock and barrel, when he got fed up with the weather and after a daylight mugging right in front of his apartment building in the inner city, and drove for six days to Los Angeles. Getting a new car didn’t enter his mind at all. Paying the $295 rent and the other bills was all he was concerned about.

The day after he got the job offer, he scribbled it all down on a piece of paper where he wrote ‘Two-year skimp – back to computers’. And under this header, he detailed his monthly budget for the next two years, counting on getting the two-grade promotion after a year. With a little belt-tightening, mostly in the areas of weekend outing—singles club, dates, eat-out, he figured he was fine. He even came up with a monthly saving of $75 the first year. The second year, with two or three thousand bucks more annual salary as a GS-9, he was off to the races, he anticipated.

Didn’t quite turn out that way the first year. The end of each month, there was no $75 left. In fact, a few times during the year he had to dip into the small savings account he had to cover irregular expenses like car repair, medical or doctor bills not covered by insurance. He found a part time job in an architectural firm in Springfield, Virginia, where he put in fifteen to twenty hours a week. Coming out of the Navy Annex at 4:30 in the afternoon, he’d drive the six miles south on I-95 to the office and push pencil on a drawing board for six dollars an hour till nine or ten o’clock at night. He did this for a few months till he had saved enough to cover all the bills, about the same time he decided he’s fed up with pushing pencil for architects who never paid him what he knew he was worth and was glad to give it up for good this time.

*

With a steady job now, possibly a career job as he planned, he began to acquire a sense of stability, and with this found the calm and clarity of mind to reflect upon the future. With job security, meaning year-round employment, regular annual income, not to mention health benefit, insurance, pension, and paid vacation and sick leave, there was nothing hard at all looking to see what’s ahead. In less than a year, he would turn forty years old. The plan was to put in twenty years, he decided when Fred Matero convinced him about working for the government. It’s that simple. Retire at sixty.

At this writing, he still savored that sense of stability and relief especially when he thought about the dozen years he put in architecture, the aimlessness of his work career during those years, the insecurity. He felt sorry for the people he left behind in that line of work, in Detroit, Los Angeles, and here in the Capital area, some of them with family, struggling in a highly unstable livelihood, not knowing how long their job is going to last. Many of them, like him since six years before when he was unemployed back in L.A., had wanted to get out of the profession. But because of tight personal circumstances, many of them can’t and were stuck in a continuing cycle of job-hopping and periodic unemployment. (He would regret it so much later after he’d been in government service fifteen years, seeing some of his co-workers retiring under sixty years of age, some of them his same age at fifty-five, that he didn’t leave it sooner than he did.)

Now, feeling sure-footed with a fixed direction, he was finally able to consider possibilities he didn’t even dare imagine before. Life possibilities like travel vacations, owning a home, marriage, family. Soon, he thought, once he got settled in his civil service career and began climbing up the grade scale. In a year or two.

Most of that did come to happen, some sooner than others, and others much later in his life. The first was the home, a one-bedroom unit in a condo complex on Skyhill Road near Old Town, Alexandria which he bought in June 1985, with some help from his sister Felicia with the down payment.

The job at the Navy Department was a stepping stone in his civil service career. It could’ve turned out long-term, career-long as what happened, he would learn later, with some bureaucrats who started out with a first job they stayed on till they retired, thirty, thirty-five years later. But it didn’t. Halfway through the year with the Navy job, he knew that wasn’t it for him.

Having no real clue of the culture in federal employment, he had planned on finding out not long after he got in. People moved from one agency to another to find a better position or get a promotion they weren’t getting where they were, or simply to find a better work environment professionally, geographically. They didn’t lose seniority or time in service as far as pension and time-based benefits are concerned as long as they stayed in the [federal] service.

His first six years with Uncle Sam, he worked for five different executive-branch agencies: Navy Department, Army Department, Selective Service System, Air Force Department and Treasury Department. In that time, he learned what government bureaucracy was like more than what he had just heard about it living in the Washington, D.C. capital area. To this day, he is convinced bureaucracy in the military and Defense agencies is worse than in any other, that there’s more ass-kissing, inefficiency, oversight and waste in the uniformed services than in civilian agencies. With such an enormous annual defense budget of three hundred fifty billion dollars by the year 2003—more than the GNP of most countries on the planet—one might expect a level of waste and abuse but to what extent (beyond something like a six-hundred-dollar toilet seat) no one could really tell. Not even Congress, its GAO and watchdog committees.

But that was hardly his concern. As long as bureaucracy didn’t hamper his effort at his individual level to perform the duties and responsibilities written in his position description (PD), management and all the politicians in the office could drag their feet with whatever business they had at hand, he couldn’t care less. He was a white-collar journeyman worker working on assignments he’s being paid to do and that’s all that mattered to him—earning his paycheck and keeping a job year-round.

What concerned him more, next to job security, was the cultural awareness he gained rapidly with his personal experiences at work, with his co-workers and the office customers, both civilian and military. The acculturation he was going through, the process of assimilation and what he would see more in later years—not just in his work life but social and economic life—as his Americanization.

This process actually began several years ago since he became a U.S. citizen in August 1975 in Los Angeles. But it was slow sinking in. He had now become an American citizen, he thought then, but it was all on paper only. He didn’t—couldn’t—have a grasp of his being an American. Only of being an American citizen.

At work, that took a significant turn. It began first when he saw the diversity in the office. White, black, Hispanic, Asian. Not just Asian, but Filipino. He’d seen this before of course, but from a distance—on television, the media, and close at the workplaces in the private industry in Detroit, Toronto, Los Angeles and here in Washington, D.C. But that’s different. Those people of different color and nationality he came in contact and worked with were a mix of Americans (U.S. citizens), and foreigners and aliens some of whom may even have been illegals or on temporary work permits.

In the federal government service, especially in defense agencies, only U.S. citizens were hired. This was one of the first instances that brought him a sense of being distinctly an American not just on paper. Another was when he registered to vote in the upcoming presidential election—and voted.

From those instances, he would learn year after year, that gaining insight into being an American or becoming one beyond having the citizenship paper was a lifetime process. Even now, he still thinks the only real way to become a citizen of America or of any country, is to be born there. What’s mostly responsible for this also was the stereotypes of Americans he carried with him in his head from the Philippines, from years of watching American movies and being the target market of American trade and commerce in that part of the world. The Philippines, especially, a former U.S. possession for nearly fifty years till the end of the Second World War.

The American was white, anglo-saxon, English speaking, tall, beautiful and rich. With this image built solid in his head, he couldn’t possibly imagine himself being an American. Him—a non-white, a Filipino from a poor family of a farm peasant heritage, speaking in hard-accent foreign academic English. It seemed silly to even think anybody including him could conceive of himself as an American.

After a few months working with the office crew, namely—

Chief Petty Officer Arcadio Marquez, a mild-mannered respected Navy enlisted leader, a chicano from San Antonio, Texas with twenty years service,

Vic Kenney, a black E-6 (African-American and the rest of the politically correct hyphenation in later years hadn’t begun in the ’80s) whom everyone in the Report Section consulted for his long experience and ability in data processing,

Bart Caluguran, another CPO, of the Data Audit Section and a Filipino who was likewise a highly regarded leader and technical consultant in the Branch,

Phil Johnson, another E-6, a mainstream white who did his work ably and conducted himself with everyone in the office without regard to race, nationality, accent, appearance or any other personal attribute,

Lee Matthews, another white E-6, a peaceful man who carried a bible often and read it at lunchtime at his desk,

and Peggy Hardy

—that stereotype image of the American person he had carried in his mind as far back as Imus, the boyhood hometown in Cavite province twenty kilometers south of Manila, began to crack like a weakened statue on a broken pedestal.

Suddenly, it dawned on him after he’d been rubbing elbows with his co-workers for a few months—they’re a group. They’re one people working together to support an organization and it didn’t matter what one looked like, how one spoke English, where one came from. They’re all… Americans, working for the U.S. Department of the Navy. And he’s one of them.

It’s different from the way it was with all the other jobs he’d had in America going way back to September 1965 in his first job with… Robert P. Moran and Associates, Architects and Engineers, an A/E firm in West Orange, New Jersey. Especially then when two and a half months after landing in San Francisco with a six-month tourist visa, he found himself on a Monday morning at a drafting board in a room full of ‘Americans’, people who looked precisely like the stereo image he carried in his head—white, big and tall, blonde or redhead, beautiful with their high nose, colorful eyes and simply handsome and pretty caucasian faces. He remembered listening closely to their language, the American English he’d heard most of his life only in movies and television. They sounded exactly like Tyrone Power, Gary Cooper, Kirk Douglas, Glen Ford, Charlton Heston, Rita Hayworth, Susan Hayward, Doris Day, Lana Turner and the rest of those movie icons from the 40s and 50s. He was twenty-four years old, never been out of the country of his birth before. Suddenly, two months out of college, still very impressionable as he had been since childhood, he was here in America. It was as if he was reborn.

And he was, in more ways than he imagined, into a whole new world.

*

That was the only thing he believed an American was. That image, carved from many memories of life in the Philippines as far back as the end of World War II.

In the beginning, the American was a soldier. GI Joe. He was friendly, especially to children. Never threatening and fearsome like the Japanese of whom everybody, his whole family and the entire neighborhood, were afraid. Friendly GI Joe—big and tall with pockets full of chocolate candy and chewing gum; in combat boots and helmet, carrying a big gun. He was also called, in colloquial Tagalog, Kano. Short for Amerikano. Kana, for the female Amerikana.

As a child during and shortly after the big war, in the late 40s and early 50s, he was so fascinated by how beautiful those Kanas were. He rarely saw any of them in real life. He only saw pictures of them in American magazines. The Reader’s Digest, Life, Saturday Post. Then later, in movies. He dreamed of kissing one of them on the cheek but knew how impossible it was to ever happen.

After Douglas MacArthur returned and won the Philippines back from Japan, the country was granted independence on July 4, 1946 by the U.S. But many Americans remained, both military and civilian. In Imus where the house he grew up in was only one away from an army camp complex known in town as the cuartel, an old civil guard headquarters during the colonial Spanish regime, he would see buses come in or out through the gate loaded with Americans. He couldn’t see clearly through the tinted-glass windows but saw enough to make out the figures of the Kanos and Kanas inside the air-conditioned bus, their blond hair, their handsome faces behind sunglasses that shielded them from the brutal heat of the tropical country. Some of them waved at him—a brown-skinned, barefoot little Filipino boy standing on the roadside marveling at them—perhaps wondering, as he himself would many years later, how far apart their worlds are even as they passed each other only a few yards away.

The period following the war came to be known as peacetime when the country started rebuilding, people went back to work, children went back to school, the economy picked up quickly. The peso, the local currency, was re-established. He could remember as far back as the early 50s when it was valued at three to one U.S. dollar. At this writing nearly sixty years later (2004), it was around fifty-six to one.

Everyone, not just the people but the government, the politicians themselves, believed the Americans didn’t really leave the country when they granted the Philippines its independence. For years afterwards, the country was inundated with American culture in trade and commerce. English was the official language, along with Tagalog, in government, business and in schools. American textbooks were used in every level of education. In grade one in 1948, he learned to read with a children’s book about local stories and characters written in English by an American-educated Filipino author.

The colonization of the country continued through the cultural dominance of the Americans by way of commercial propaganda, capitalism and free trade. New Hollywood movies sometimes were released in Manila before they were in the States. The Filipino was totally sold on the American culture, the American way of life. There was nothing better or more desirable.

So, then, the American transformed from GI Joe to a handsome gun-toting cowboy on a horseback, a rich businessman in an expensive suit driving the latest sleek Ford model sedan, or an energetic young man wearing a blue or red jersey displaying in big letters the name or the initials of the college he attended.

Stereotypes. Models. Ideals.

These stayed with him for years after he arrived in America, even after he had become personally acquainted not just with white Americans but with other types of Americans and learned that not all Americans are rich, tall, white and handsome. Even after he discovered that some of them, many of them, didn’t speak English as well as he did or, in fact, didn’t speak English at all; that not all of them went to college or are college-degree holders like he was, that there are many who are even considered illiterate.

But everything he saw in America contrary to his pre-conceived idea of the country and its people he set aside and subconsciously ignored, including the now first-hand knowledge of the fact that Americans were never always just Americans since the world began, that other than the Indians, they weren’t the native peoples of the land, that they all came from Europe and later from other parts of the world, including the Philippines. He couldn’t simply reverse or discard the cultural brainwashing he had been subjected to in a country that had been ruled by America for nearly a half a century when he was born. It would have been like throwing away certain values, fundamental ideas and beliefs you were brought up with, if not exactly doing that.

Over time, however, beginning mostly with his entry into the government service in the Navy Department, he went through a process of reversal, a process that chipped away at those stereotypes, gradually but convincingly, while going through another process at the same time—that of becoming an American himself.

It was a slow process, over a timespan of at least forty years, which saw him through periods of loneliness, nostalgia and struggling with many self-defeating notions of himself and of the world around him.

**********

~ NEW JERSEY ~

1965 - 1966

It started right from the first job in the architect’s office in West Orange, New Jersey. Shortly after he started working, he decided he was just going to save enough money for a plane ticket and go back home. He had been away from home two and a half months and was going through a horrendous battle with nostalgia and a combination of cultural and geographic shock.

The first time he had a real close look at black people, in person, one day when he was walking on a street sidewalk in Newark, he couldn’t believe his eyes. A whole bunch of them—large and heavy like the size of people he never saw before—was coming up the sidewalk. They were not just dark but black, pitch black their skin looked so thick, like tar, as if they fell in an asphalt ditch and just got out. Scared the shit out of him.

For days, he had been running to the bathroom because of the food. After a lifetime diet of rice, fish and vegetables, the switch to burgers, hot dogs, pizzas and TV dinners which he never even heard of in his entire life just didn’t agree with his stomach. The Chinese restaurant at work across the street was a welcome relief at lunchtime when he discovered it his first week in the office.

The cold weather was approaching and already, by late September, he was freezing at the bus stop in the early morning. One of his co-workers, name of Bob Curto who rode the same bus from Newark and was in it before him, noticed as he climbed in one morning. Bob made a comment about starting to wear warmer clothes for the coming season. It dawned on him for the first time (a lot of things that happened in his life for the first time were happening in rapid succession) that he needed cold-weather clothes in this part of America. The east coast where it gets so cold water freezes outdoors. And it snows, although the thought of this gave him a thrill for it was something he had never experienced in his whole life! A month into fall, he became seriously concerned if he could survive the cold weather.

The most he had been away from home was two weeks when he ran away with two friends to the island of Mindoro with twenty pesos he obtained by forging his mother’s signature in a note he took to the rich good neighbor across the street in Imus to borrow the money. He was seventeen, just out of high school and totally idle. No job, no plan for college, no money; nothing but time on his hands. Now, to be away for so long and indefinitely from everything familiar, to be a total stranger everywhere he went, he felt as if he was just in a dream and that he would wake up soon and be back home, back with his brothers and sisters, mother and father.

He was the youngest of eight children. Five girls and three boys. He had lived at home all his life and never did anything for himself. He was a total dependent of his parents and oftentimes, not officially or legally, his siblings. Mostly the three oldest, all girls: Aurelia, Estrella and Consuelo. Finding himself alone in a foreign land, living in a ten-dollar-a-week room in a house where he shared a bathroom and kitchen with strangers, suddenly he was staring at some of life’s realities he never had to face before: getting up on his own in the morning and doing everything himself to go to work, coming home and taking care of everything all by himself, and then doing it over again the next day. Everyday!

Slowly, it dawned on him how others had taken care of his needs without him even asking them for it, what his mother had to do to take care of him, and the rest of her eight children! How she managed this, he would—as he matured into middle age and especially since his mother died seventeen years later—wonder about, endlessly, for the rest of his life.

It was like a nightmare he was having not while he slept but one he awoke to, and there was no escaping from it—setting the alarm clock at night (he finally thought of buying one a few days after starting work in Eagle Rock Avenue, West Orange, a forty-minute commute on Bus No. 144 including the wait at the bus stop at Main and Grove Street, South Orange where he roomed), getting his clothes ready to wear the next day, feeding himself.

He was forced to think for himself by his basic needs as they arose one after another. Years later, he would look back to this and liken himself to a species of the wild at the weaning stage from its mother. He was totally unprepared, had no idea what it took to get through it and didn’t even know there was a