It was pretty shitty. I used to deliver caskets on the South side and West side of Chicago. I’ve actually had a huge resume of crazy and weird jobs. I’ve been a locomotive engineer, slaughtered pigs, and delivered caskets. When I was 21 I used to manage a head shop, selling bongs and dongs and stuff like that. Also lots of service industry jobs and shit work, some construction. But I didn’t really learn anything, I’ve just done a lot, but not for long enough. A lot of them I came in and did for like a month and was like ‘Fuck this.’
Driving a train wasn’t too bad though. When I was a locomotive engineer, I did that at quite a few different places, but one of them was a yard job. And those are restricted speed, which means they want you to do under five miles an hour. It was just long cuts in the yard where I’d go into the track and tie up, and then the conductor would have to walk down 30-40 cars and pull the pin so that I could drag all the cars out. And we’d do this all day. So it got to the point where I’d just lean back in my chair – my sudoku in one hand, my radio in the other – driving the train with my foot because I could just kick it up one notch.
But I never got my shit together. A couple years ago, I was suffering from depression and basic ideation almost. I was also living with my mother who suffered from a series of strokes and was bipolar. I had a shitty job working at the slaughterhouse for a long time, and I got really bad depression, which made me suicidal. So when some shit went down one day, the police showed up and I got shot twice by a SWAT team. They missed the other four times. Apparently they just have really bad aim. Statistically they only hit about 30% of the time, so that’s right on the mark.
After all that, how I view the world changed and that’s why I’m in a different country. I’ve been on disability and I can’t afford to live in the United States. I mean, I could, but I would be in housing projects and all kinds of other programs. So why not just pack up and move to Mexico?
As soon as I got off the airplane here and was driving down the street in the cab, it just felt like home. Like, at night there’s these stray dogs running around, all these chain link fences and potholes. The traffic sucks and there’s spray paint everywhere and it’s a little bit chaotic. And that just felt like home. It’s been comfortable since the first night I got here.
—James from Indiana, USA
[photo: x-ray of titanium plate in arm, product of bullet strikes]
Interview by MJ, Ari, E and Jack