Pillows

When I was a 13 year-old with blond hair and blue eyes and imperfect Spanish, I took up selling pillows door-to-door in Mexico to people too poor to have beds. For most of the people a bed was like social justice: something they knew about but didn’t expect to ever find in their lives. Pillows were accessories to a fantasy. Still, the job seemed like the best way to help solve a problem my family had.
         
The ways of the pillow game were explained to me by a man named Oscar, a genial car thief who sold pillows when he thought the police were too close.

Oscar considered pillow sales to be emotionally therapeutic for his customers. He said, “You tell them pillows come first, then they’ll have one when they get a bed. People will never get beds, but at least they will have pillows to dream on for the beds that will never come. A dream is something nobody can take from you.”
Oscar sold the bliss of self deception.

One of the problems with pillow sales is that you carry your inventory with one hand grasping the top of a large burlap sack, with the rest of the sack slapping along your back. I went canvassing for dreamers, up the hilly part of Colonia Independencia, the shantytown neighborhood that included my assigned sales area. No one disputed the benefits of the pillow-before-bed premise, but most didn’t have money for that crucial first step that I offered. Most had the price, ten pesos, already committed to an unavoidable purchase, like food. They were left to dream about the day they could dream on a pillow.

Still, I worked the neighborhood hard and made a few sales. The first to a very old lady, bent forward at the waist. I almost bounced into her tiny backyard propelled by laughing neighborhood kids who were prancing behind me on my rounds, all of us wondering what the gringo boy was doing. I think she was taken by all the excitement more than whatever sales pitch I bumbled out. She held her pillow close as she slowly went down on the reed mat where she slept. Then she hugged the pillow, closed her eyes, and judging from her serenity, she thought about something beautiful.

Logic is the enemy of dreams, so why be hobbled by logic? It seemed to me that very poor people in Mexico preferred dreams. If they had studied life with cold analysis they might have turned to generalized looting or suicide.

My family also needed the balm that can come with betraying the truth. I had yet to hear the sentence, “The truth will set you free,” but I didn’t agree with the concept. In our family the truth was a demon. That was why, I thought, our parents kept us safe from it.

Our family was lying to itself, my parents, my two sisters and me. Like my customers. We were lying to ourselves about why we were in Monterrey,  Mexico. We didn’t acknowledge that we were there because something very dangerous was chasing us in the United States. I didn’t know what was after us, but I knew my parents were not telling the truth when they said there was nothing. So, I decided to believe their lies. It felt safer to believe them.

Decades later, I would research my parents’ history and find the truth about our lives as fugitives. There are themes of deep love, shame and complicated family secrets behind my parents’ fears. All that, and the panic that ran across McCarthy –era America,  when government officials terrified the public and made people believe things that were not true.

My father dreamed that he would start a business in Mexico. In the meantime he was a door-to-door salesman of room additions and house repairs. He worked in south Texas and came to see us about every other weekend. Then, for several  weeks he was AWOL and we had no money. I thought I had to earn some, somehow, and I remembered Oscar and pillows.

Like Oscar, Dad treated his selling as charitable. He was not really selling, he told me, he was only helping get people home improvements that they needed. He liked that term, home improvements.  But I had gone on sales calls with him and I knew his job was to convince them they wanted something they might not need. We lived from the profits of those conversations.

About three weeks after I went into the pillow business my father returned from Texas with excuses and enough cash to pick us up again. Maybe his explanations were true, I told myself, hopefully. I did deceive him, one of my first big lies to my parents. I didn’t tell them that I’d been selling pillows or that I had sneaked the small earnings into mom’s purse.

I learned that we could not count on Dad. In a few months I had another secret job. I was a guide for American men who wanted to meet hookers in Monterrey’s red light districts. There were lies in that world, too. The difference was that everyone knew that everyone else was lying about something. No illusions.

But my family kept up the dreaming that the reason we were in Mexico was that we would become rich when Dad became an international entrepreneur.

Reprinted with permission from Author Mike O'Connor

About the Author

Veteran journalist Mike O'Connor has spent most of a lifetime reporting for television, NPR and The New York Times. He's covered - and uncovered - the malfeasance of domestic politicians and public servants. Read his riveting new book at http://www.mikeoconnor.com