Living in Paradise
San Raimundo, my fictional city and county, is inundated by tourists. Gleaming steel and glass skyscrapers, luxury condos and hotels, tower over the waterfront, facing sparkling sandy beaches and perfect curling waves. It's the sort of place people with enough money flock to from their mundane lives and those whose lives are too mundane for travel dream about. The weather along the coast never burns or freezes and every night parties spill onto the streets. Those lucky visitors thank the smiling man handing them a towel, drop a few dollars in the tip jar of the smiling barista, take their keys from the smiling valet.
Of course they're all smiling, the tourist thinks. They're living in Paradise.
Except, of course, they're not. Those smiles are paid for with pittances, enforced with threats against livelihoods and lives. The pool attendants and the baristas and the valets don't live in the luxury condos by the waterfront. Just like the sand and the glass and the steel, those smiling faces, so often a different skin color than the people they're serving, are imported from a productive and impoverished hinterland. When they finish their eight or ten or twelve hours of unpaid overtime, they're hurried out the door. Some get on the busses and make three or five or seven transfers; some walk more than ten miles; a lucky few recover their beaten-down 2003 Nissan Altima, the one with the puke-green paint and the orange door and the mildly-troublesome rattle and three hundred thousand miles, and drive twenty miles through soul-grinding traffic.
When they're safely ensconced in a working-class shanty town no tourist has ever heard of, when they're at a second job at an understaffed Taco Bell, selling two dollar burritos to a long line of other frustrated and bellowing workers who want just a taste of sugar, just a taste of salt and fat, maybe then they can frown. It's safe to frown at the customers here: they want someone to fight, too, and neither of them, worker or customer, can yell at the franchise owner who decided they only needed two cooks on night shift, not four, because the city added an extra lane on Tulip Street so the drive-through line can back up as far as it needs to. Of course they can't yell at him. He lives in a luxury condo on the coast.
He's living in Paradise.
The next day, the pool attendant, the barista, and the valet walk to the beach, or ride the bus, or fight against the traffic hordes. They clip on a nametag to make sure the tourists know whose career they hold in their hands. They smile as the sunburned man with the wife-beater tans screams about how he only forgot his room card this one time, just give me the goddamned towel, I don't care what the policy is. They smile as the dyed-blond crinkled woman with a suspicious mole on her shoulder drops two pennies and a nickel into the tip jar, revenge for the broken milk steamer, the one that's been broken since December but management doesn't have the budget to fix. They smile as the tech bro in the dirty Stanford sweater and board shorts sets his Tesla to valet mode then complains about how long it took to retrieve from the outer lot three miles away, since the multi-billion dollar hotel chain can't find room in its budget for on-site parking.
They smile and they think about their daughters, their sons, their elderly parents. They think about hospital bills and the rising cost of eggs. They think about the two hundred dollar a month hike on their apartment. They think about how that rattle on their Altima seemed worse this morning, so they turned up the radio. They know they should be worried about how this summer was hotter than the last, and colder than the next. They should think about which city council candidate to vote for, but a quick google only shows that both are against Bad Things We All Hate and support Good Things We All Want. Anyway, they work back-to-back eight hour shifts on election day. No time to vote, no time to think about the future. If they think about the future, they might not smile.
So maybe they think about sports, about the cute coworker with the silky hair, about how two more paychecks will mean enough money for a new tattoo, about the pills their cousin stole from his mother's cabinet, about the dog they might adopt some day, if only their apartment allowed pets. They think about how, in ten years, the old man who calls them "boy" or "señorita" or "girl" will be dead. They think about absolutely anything they can to put a smile on their face. Because they have to smile.
They're living in Paradise.
