The Many Lives I’ve Lived

I have traveled to 47 states in America. I have taken dozens of road trips and zigzagged this country 10 times. I have stayed in big cities, small towns, rural communities and all along my travels, I have seen blatant, in your face, racism. I have seen segregation and oppression in middle America. I have seen loud, proud deep south racism and I have seen up close and personal bigotry and downright horrid things happen in my suburban hometown in the Northeast. It exists… everywhere. People often say news media is to blame for the division in America and that the people, when you meet them or get to know them are kind, loving and accepting. I vehemently disagree.

If you are a minority who hasn’t experienced racism firsthand, congrats, but as a white man, I can tell you, it’s there. Growing up as a white man in Long Island, you are surrounded by people who say racist things about minorities to other white people but would never repeat these things in front of the minorities themselves. The judgement exists. The fair chance you might think you’re getting is not fair at all. I believe the majority of racism happens behind the scenes, but I have seen many instances where that racism has been bold enough to show up on people’s doorsteps. Below are a few examples I saw when I was between the ages of 14-18 years old.

It was the Summer of 1996, July to be exact; I was 14 years old. My mom, siblings and I had just returned to our quiet suburban Long Island neighborhood from picking up two exchange students who were coming to live with us for 3 weeks. Tomas and Roman, both from France, were the same age as me and had come to America as part of a foreign exchange student program through my French class, except there was no exchange. My siblings and I didn’t go to France, our family just accepted French students who were to come to America and see our way of life, attend our schools or summer camps with us and tour New York City.

Just as we showed them to their room in our 6-bedroom home in Farmingville, NY, a breaking news story flashed across the tv screen. TWA Flight 800 which was headed to Italy with a layover in Paris, France, had blown up over the Atlantic Ocean, 20 miles south of East Moriches. The exchange students had just arrived on a TWA flight from Paris and were shocked in horror. It was rare for a plane to blow up midair and immediately everyone suspected foul play. I suspected foul play because my dad ran a construction company out of West Hampton Beach, 7 miles from where this happened, and used to tell us stories of military aircraft shooting things out of the sky for practice. All of the initial reports from eyewitnesses say they saw a streak come up from the ocean and explode upon impacting the plane and then a second explosion when the gas from the plane itself blew up. But, that’s a story for another day…

Before we had a chance to grasp the number of lives lost and just how close it was to where we lived, a loud explosion happened that shook the windows of my home. Everyone ducked in fear. We heard metal crashing onto the roof of our home and various pieces of metal and wood falling to the street out front. Was it another plane?  

When we looked out the window, we saw smoke coming from the area where my neighbor’s mailbox used to be and saw a younger, hooded figure running up the street away from the blast. It turns out that someone had stuck a half a stick of dynamite in my neighbor Ryan’s mailbox and sent pieces of it flying 120ft away onto our two-story home. The French kids were both terrified. Their first five hours in NY and already they’ve heard the news of a plane crash and now a small bombing outside our front door. No one knew what to think.

Just as we were about to walk outside, my neighbor Ryan, whose family lived diagonally across the street from us to the left, came out to his driveway with a mag-lite flashlight to inspect the damage and figure out what happened. Ryan was a man of Jewish faith who lived at home with his wife and two daughters, the oldest of which, Ariel, was my age and was a close friend. 

In the next few moments, almost every neighbor on our block either came outside or was glued to their windows. One of those neighbors, Lester, lived to the left of us directly across the street from Ryan, with his wife and 3 boys. Lester was a postal worker and was known to be a bit of a nut job. He was of German descent and was known to be a bit of a racist. He was also known to be a gun fanatic and had taught all 3 of his boys how to fight. Lester was a bit of a fighter himself and would often whoop his kids and even his wife on occasion. He came out to see what the commotion was about and went up to Ryan who was irate at this point and started blaming Lester’s kids for the damage. Quite frankly, we all did. No one else in that neighborhood would even know where to get a half a stick of dynamite, let alone have the gall to set it off in someone else’s mailbox.

Lester didn’t take kindly to that accusation. He proceeded to walk right up to Ryan and get in his face as they began bumping chests in anger hoping the other one would swing first. Before you knew it, they were rolling around on the ground throwing fists and trying to pummel each other. Right in the middle of the fight, Lester yelled to his wife “Maggie, get my gun! I’m going to shoot this mother fucker!”. Fortunately, for Ryan, Maggie did not go retrieve Lester’s gun for him.

We all knew then, in our hearts, that Alex, the middle boy in the family who was the same age as Ariel and me, was the one who did it. He was the only one who fit the build of the runner we saw and years later he would later confirm it was him.

It was obvious to us then, that this happened because Ryan’s family was Jewish and Lester taught his boys to hate anyone who wasn’t white and Christian. Seeing a menorah every holiday season when he walked out his front door must have driven him nuts. Every other family in the neighborhood got along well with Ryan and his kids. My sister Meg was best friends with Ariel’s little sister. Lester’s family were the odd sheep on the block. They put up a wall of hedges 8ft tall around their property and kept secluded, like they lived in some sort of compound. Things in my neighborhood were never the same after that. It seemed like the perfect picturesque American neighborhood had a dark side that we were all just beginning to learn about.

Alex was a good friend of mine and would grow up to be a stand-up guy from what I can tell. I hope he left that hatred that his father taught him behind and doesn’t pass it on to his kids. Kids are so impressionable and a 14yr old boy looks to his dad as his hero. Alex was no exception. Lester could have taught him great things, could have prepared him for a life of inclusion and love, but chose instead to fill his young boys with hatred. Fortunately for Alex, no one was injured, at least not physically.

The 1990’s in Long Island were a major turning point in race relations and demographics. A 2002 story by the New York Times would later rate Long Island as the most segregated suburban community in America, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/05/nyregion/study-calls-li-most-segregated-suburb.html but that was beginning to change.

An influx of undocumented immigrants to the small town of roughly 10,000 mostly white residents was not well received. About 10 houses away from me, a group of day laborers rented a two-story house and shared the costs of living and maintaining the house, while going down to Home Depot or 7-11 every morning to look for work. These were hard working men. They took any job that someone offered them if it meant they could end the day with more money in their pockets than they started with. Nothing was beneath them, which meant a lot to local contractors who needed labor to complete difficult tasks on job sites that required a lot of physicality. My father was one of those contractors. He would continuously hire day laborers to work jobs, that quite frankly, American workers were too lazy and unmotivated to do. I know this because when I turned 18, I went to work for my dad and watched the migrant workers skate circles around us while getting paid less than us and never complaining.

These guys never bothered anyone. They worked long hours and would come home and remain in their houses until work the next day. This house had about 11 migrants crammed into a four-bedroom home at 1345 Waverly Avenue. That is, until the night someone lit the end of a gasoline-soaked rag that was sticking out of the end of a gasoline filled bottle and tossed it into one of the windows. Who the hell still makes Molotov cocktails?? Apparently, racist white people do. The men scattered out of various windows and ran away in horror as they watched everything they owned burn to the ground. These men didn’t have bank accounts. They didn’t have savings. They lived a cash life which meant everything, including their money was gone. Farmingville, NY has a volunteer fire department which means that firefighters must respond to sirens blasted throughout the town and rush to the fire house before hopping in trucks to go battle blazes. Unfortunately, most homes don’t make it as response times are often slow.

This was a hate crime. Residents from the area were incensed that day laborers were moving into homes previously occupied by white families and someone decided to take it upon themselves to remove them. I remember hearing students on my school bus yelling racial epithets at them as we drove by. Some threw drinks and food at them. It was disgusting. This was not uncommon for Suffolk County. Residents looked at the migrant workers as roaches who were infesting their lily white towns.

Race relations would only go downhill from here. On Sept. 17, 2000, Mexican day laborers Israel Perez and Magdaleno Estrada Escamilla showed up to 7-11 like they did every morning looking for work. When two men pulled up and offered them a job, the two laborers jumped at the opportunity and hopped in the car with Christopher Slavin and Ryan Wagner. What they didn’t realize was that Chris and Ryan didn’t have work for them.

Slavin and Wagner drove the two workers to an abandoned factory in Shirley, NY about 20mins away from where they were picked up. They were told the job required them to help clear out the debris from the factory and they proceeded to take the two men to the basement of the factory where court documents explain the details of what happened next:

 “When they arrived, Petitioner [Slavin] and Wagner directed Pérez and Estrada to clean the basement of an abandoned building.  A few moments later, [Slavin] and his accomplice brutally attacked the two migrant workers; [Slavin] hit Estrada in the back of his head with a metal post-hole digger and Wagner stabbed Pérez with a folding knife. As [Slavin] continued to beat Estrada, Pérez attempted to escape but slipped while running.  While Pérez was on the ground, [Slavin] attempted to hit him with a post-hole digger; however, [Slavin] was not successful, and the digger only scraped Pérez’s head.  Eventually, the two victims managed to escape onto the Long Island Expressway.  A passing motorist called 911 after noticing the two victims covered in blood and standing in the way of traffic.”

Fortunately, Perez and Estrada survived the attack, though, had it not been for fast thinking motorists and a quick response time from EMT’s, it is doubtful Perez would have made it due to the loss of blood from his seven stab wounds and a sliced wrist. Slavin and Wagner would eventually be convicted and receive 25yrs in prison for the attacks. Over the 12 months surrounding these attacks there were 5 dozen other such abductions and beatings of day laborers.

These abuses led to protests and picketing at 7-11 and Home Depot on Horseblock Road in Farmingville for months, much of which can be seen in Farmingville, a 2004 documentary film that won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. These events split the town into two. You either supported the laborers as human beings who just wanted to support their families, or you joined one of several hate groups that popped up in the area to sway legislation to have them permanently removed. Farmingville is only one such location where things like this happened in America. It happens to be the town I grew up in.

If you visit Farmingville today, these same divides still exist. When I went back in 2019, I visited a restaurant, FaxChix, located directly across the street from the 7-11 where these events started. When I walked in, I was the only white person in the entire restaurant of about 50 people. Everyone stopped and looked at me. White people didn’t frequent the Mexican spots in Farmingville and Mexicans didn’t frequent the white owned restaurants. It’s the way it always has been, and I don’t see it changing anytime soon. I like Mexican food, and I love Mexican culture. My girlfriend is 100% Mexican, born in Mexicali. So, for me, I eat where I want to eat and socialize with everyone. Fortunately, I grew up more open minded than most of the people in my town. I have learned, in life, that experiencing various cultures and loving everyone as equals is the only way to live a completely full life. I really wish people would put hatred and prejudice behind them and take advantage of all the amazing things we have to offer each other while we are here together.