The Subprimes (7 page)

There were a few takers, lured by unkept promises of trees and schools, but sold because of complicated and usurious financing that was ultimately judged to be the fault of the borrower. If those subprimes had been so witless as to be unable to read a damn contract, then whose fault was that? Not the banks'. Blaming the banks would be like blaming the weather. Sure, they were greedy and ruthlessly profit-driven and served no other master but shareholder returns, but that's what they were
supposed
to be. Banks acting any other way would be like rain falling upward.

There had been, for a few precious months before the defaults and the foreclosures and the repossessions, the first stirrings of what might be called a community: Mrs. Villablanca walking her dog and waving to her nearest neighbor, Mr. Gonzalez, who lived four yet-to-be-sold houses away. It seemed that it was only a matter of time before those houses in between filled in and a little town would flourish. There would be block parties, families sitting around, having tamales and
carne asada
. A few residents even planted trees, stunted, barren ficuses and acacias, forlorn-looking in the dry, sandy dirt next to the concrete foundations.

Long before there were developments and highway systems, those hardy, misguided pioneers who wandered through this territory on spindly horses choking on chalky sand would have shuddered at the thought of even bedding down here, miles from water, miles from shelter, miles from shade. Yet here they were, the first few dozen of what the developer promised would be a community of many thousands, hooked up to the grid, stealing aquifer water from farmers upstate. There would be a school bus coming through every morning to pick up little Juan and Maria
and deliver them to a fine K-through-12 just sixty miles away. It was a version, however dry and withered and sand-choked, of the American dream.

SARGAM, OF COURSE, HAD ARRIVED
long after the Villablancas and Gonzalezes had moved out, loading what they could into their listing minivans and pickup trucks and making their way south and east, to try their luck in Arizona or New Mexico or Texas. They were probably picking fruit, Sargam imagined, and maybe they were even thinking of their time in Valence as the finest of their lives, when they almost had a home in an almost-community. That may well have been the last time when almost was good enough, when almost middle class, almost happy, almost satisfied, and getting almost enough sleep and almost having the car you wanted and the spouse you dreamed of was enough to get you an almost decent life. That era had closed. Now there were only those who had everything, and the rest of us who had nothing.

Sargam came to Valence on a battered white Yamaha with clanking saddle cases and a creaky seat. The bike was coated in dust and leaking oil from the crankcase and fluid from the rear brake lines. Sargam had coasted down the off-ramp from the highway on fumes and parked in the first driveway she saw, a cracked, paved spit that fronted a boarded-up three-bedroom. She slipped off her helmet, shook her black hair loose, and studied the row of similarly abandoned houses; she knew she wasn't alone. She heard a dog barking. Heard a hammer banging a nail. Could sense in the too quiet that others had paused mid-task and were watching her.

She leaned her bike on its kickstand and slipped a water bottle from one of its cases. Took a drink, poured water over her face,
and whipped her hair sideways to see from the corner of her eye a little girl peering at her from around the corner of the next house.

When she turned to look directly, the girl was gone.

Sargam had been to a hundred abandoned exurbs like this. Most of them had become the refuge of meth cookers, krokodil mixers, their customers, and those who didn't mind being in their company: smugglers, illegals, fugitives, subprimes who had given up. But other exurbs became inhabited by those who wanted communities, subprimes who didn't have the credit score required to pass a job screening, to rent a proper apartment, subprimes whose bad credit had driven them out of the world and who now were subsisting on the fringes of the economy, on cash and barter, on propane tanks, illegal solar rigs, wood fires, purified water, and canned food. There was a distinctive pattern of habitation: one house was kept up while the surrounding ones were gradually stripped, the wood to be burned for fuel, the fittings sold as scrap.

“If you're looking for crank, keep riding,” she heard a voice behind her.

She turned to see a man in dusty black leather high-top sneakers, jeans, a flannel shirt open over a hairless chest and flat stomach. He wore a baseball cap with a UPS patch. He had a stubbled face, thin lips, a pronounced upper-lip apron, and a long nose. His eyes had a surprised, almost humorous quality, and as he gave his warning, he managed to be welcoming.

Sargam shook her head. “Never tried it, never want to.”

The man scratched the bottom of the right side of his chin. “And you won't here. We're trying to keep it civil. If you want to stay a while, why don't you ride your bike down off of Bienvenida—that's what they named this street—and find a squat off the main drag. It's quiet here, and we aim to keep it quiet.”

A few more residents had emerged, hands held over eyes to block the sun. They studied Sargam with expressions verging from hostility to warmth to curiosity to lust, the range she elicited everywhere she went.

“Where you from?”

She lunged her bike off its kickstand and backed it down the driveway, bracing her slight weight against the heavy machine.

“Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm riding around,” Sargam said. “I'm trying to see what I can see.”

“And what are you seeing?”

“I'll tell you when I see it.”

She pushed her bike down the street, the small crowd parting for her. Sargam sensed that the individuals cohered into a few families, the men and boys linked to the women and girls. She liked that idea of families settling in a place that, at some point—if anyone had thought things through beyond slapping up drywall and getting signatures on loan documents—was intended for families. Or was meant to tempt families.

“There's a few houses unlocked on Chapala. Second street down,” the man called.

SARGAM PUSHED OPEN THE FRONT
door; it gave silently on its still-oiled hinges into an entrance with an alcove on which still sat an opened can of eggshell-white paint with dried drippings running down its sides. The interior had been this optimistic white, but previous squatters had left their impressions in pencil, paint, and urine stains on the walls. “Subprime and Proud,” read one typical graffito; “National Debt Holiday NOW,” read another; and “I Want A Woman With A Juicy Box” read yet another. To the right of the living room was a kitchen with a center island stripped of its stone, and counters
with cavities where appliances belonged. A row of double-glass doors opened onto a backyard of bare dirt—no one had bothered to plant anything back there.

Sargam guessed the house had never been lived in by an owner, just squatted in by successive subprimes looking for a place to crash. She preferred this to houses that still bore traces of actual owner-occupiers: stickers pasted by kids onto closet doors, a basketball rim over the garage, recipes tacked up inside cabinet doors. In those former homes she felt the void, all the emotions the home once had held gone like vanished spirits, leaving only the looted soulless shelter.

She rolled her bike up over the threshold and into the living room, flipping open the saddle cases. The house did not smell too bad; some faint pissy odor was detectable but she had experienced worse. She knew better than to look in the bathrooms. She packed a spade she used to dig a latrine trench wherever she stopped. She guessed the living room was the safest spot to camp, enjoying, as it did, good visibility of the backyard and the front door.

The pressing need was water. She guessed there had to be a water source, otherwise this community of subprimes would not have settled in. She did a quick scan of the yard and house for fuel but failed to find any and removed a can of Sterno from her the bike box, unscrewed the top, and lit it, then opened a can of vegetarian chili. She would eat first and then go looking for water. She still had two liters left.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in.”

It was the man in the UPS cap. “I never properly introduced myself.”

He removed his cap, stringy brown hair falling over his craggy, stern face. “Darren.”

She stood up, leaving her spoon in the chili can. “I'm Sargam.”

“We're all subprimes here, but we're honest. No drugs. Trying to keep out the criminals and keep the good folks safe.”

“I can appreciate that. How long you been here?”

“Four months. We have it pretty good. There's water, that's what I came to tell you about, an aquifer well down the end of Yucca. You need a bucket or a pot or something to haul it out. But it's good water, clean.”

Sargam thanked him.

“How long you plan on staying?”

“I don't stay anywhere too long.”

“Are you looking for something? You're not the law, are you? Or working for a credit agency?”

Sargam shook her head.

“You don't look like it, but I had to check.”

“Like I said, I'm just riding,” Sargam said. “Looking to see how we're all getting by.”

“If you like, if you're not too tired from the road, we have a couple folks here who can deejay a little, they've got their turntables, some records, and we've got a kid who's pretty good with the drums and another who can pick a little on the guitar. Tonight's a dance. We only do it once in a while, lest the noise attracts too much attention. You never know when the banks or the owners or whoever holds the note might wake up and run us all off.”

SHE WASHED UP WITH WATER
from the aquifer and then napped for a few minutes before a rooster crowing woke her up, and then she heard the music. At first, Sargam listened for the rumble of a generator, but then she realized they must be running outlaw power—solar energy, which big oil had gotten banned through the National Energy Independence Act. Someone had managed to haul in a bunch of old house and R&B albums, some
artists Sargam recognized: Massive Attack, Tricky, and one of her favorite old-school jams, the Sam Cooke classic “Bring It on Home to Me.”

She followed Sam's plaintive voice to a crowd gathered on a driveway that served as a dance floor. The turntables were set up in a garage, the door swung open, the power cables snaking down from out-of-sight panels. There were two aluminum cone lights clipped to each bottom corner of the opened garage. The light cast stark, jerky shadows far larger than the dancers, who were clapping and stomping their feet.

Darren saw Sargam and approached her, handing her a cup, which she sniffed. It was beer, a little warm.

“Homebrew,” Darren shouted over the music. “Strong.”

She sipped.

The DJ, a biracial man in his twenties, pale skin but with kinky hair, nodded into his headphones as he faded out the R&B track and kicked in Primal Scream's “Come Together,” the crowd waving their hands in the air. Most of those dancing were in their twenties and thirties, while around the edges stood a few middle-aged and older folks, smiling, chatting, a few passing hand-rolled cigarettes back and forth. There were kids snaking their way through the dance floor, until a few of the younger, prettier women began shaking their skirts at the children to make way for the real boogying.

Sargam was intentionally ignoring the studied looks she was getting, the whispers. How many young, pretty women just show up on motorcycles in subprime squats? Not many, Sargam knew, but she was used to explaining herself and allaying suspicions. And she was careful to keep her eyes off any of the attached men.

But this Ryanville was different from the others she had passed through. Here they seemed to have created some order in their lives, organized enough to have a little party, and tough
enough to keep out the tweakers who could be relied on to ruin such affairs.

“You wanna dance?” Darren asked.

“Not yet,” Sargam said. “How many of you live here?”

“About a hundred,” he said and explained that the core was a group of about a dozen families with children. After running off the meth heads who had been there when they came, they figured out where the aquifer was capped and drilled a tap into the valve pipes at the end of Yucca. As more subprimes arrived, the first families made up the rules: no hard drugs, no criminals. Nobody wanted the law to come sniffing around, and so far, there had not been any incidents.

“The closest supermarket is forty-five minutes away and we make two runs a week. But we're also growing beets, carrots, radishes, onions. With water anything is possible. We have a few goats. You probably heard the chickens. Hard to keep the coyotes off them.”

Later, there was a bonfire in the backyard while a Latino man strummed his guitar and sang quietly in English. He wore a leather vest over a white T-shirt, faded jeans, and white high-top sneakers. His lidded, black-olive-colored eyes gave him a sleepy look, and even when he sang, he seemed weary as he enunciated the lyrics.

I got a letter from the government the other day

I opened it. It said they were suckers

You think a free man would give a damn

About their taxes or whatever?

 

I got a letter from the creditor the other day

I opened it. It said they were rerating me

You think a broke man would give a damn

About their FICO or whatever?

 

I got a letter from the banker the other day

I opened it. It said they were repossessing me

You think a subprime man would give a damn

About their underwater or whatever?