Free A Wonderful Life by Victoria Rexroth

looking for a job.”
    “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’m a survivor.”
    She nodded. “Well, if you change your mind, you have our number.”
    “I appreciate it,” he said. “Good luck to you and the rest of the group.”
    With that, he grabbed his laptop bag and headed for the parking lot. This was going to be his last commute home from Fairfield to Stockton, where he lived.
     
    Stockton, California, is one of those weird cities that meets all sorts of criteria for making it a crappy place to live. Often hailed for its lowest literacy rate in the country and its continuous struggle to achieve a national ranking as number one crime capital of the country, it also finds itself a victim to its proximity to the large San Francisco Bay Area metropolitan area. Too far from the Bay Area to be a comfortable commute, it is still too close to be considered completely away from the Bay Area, so prices for everything in Stockton are often comparable to the same prices in the comfortable areas of San Francisco and the East Bay. Because it is about an hour away from Sacramento, Stockton also serves as a hub for higher prices because of potential commuters to the state’s government.
    Yet Stockton itself has really little to offer for itself other than a lot of crime, high prices, a housing market that collapsed upon itself and continues to collapse, and several pockets of civilization in a morass of dangerous locales. The city houses a well known private university and a couple of state universities and city colleges. However, those educational facilities serve as fortresses of safety in a larger metropolitan area of crime and grime. There are constant attempts to “beautify” or advertise the city as a great place to visit, and of course, like every other run down city, there is always an attempt to “revitalize downtown,” which lasts only as long as a politician is willing to spend capital to do so. For a politician, it is political suicide to admit there is anything wrong with Stockton, but in order for a politician to be effective, that politician is required to own up to the fact that there are serious problems that exist in the city. Unfortunately, it becomes a somewhat hilarious conundrum, in which the first person who tries to fix the problem also becomes the first victim of political suicide. Therefore, the problem continues to manifest itself because the solution is more difficult than the status quo.
    This was Robert’s city. He graduated with a master’s degree in communication from the University of the Pacific, and since that graduation, he found it difficult to find actual work. Being in a city with a devastated economy, Robert chose to remain in an area that was not actually of benefit within which to remain, convinced that eventually some type of opportunity would arise. Unfortunately, as might be suspected, no opportunity ever did arise. Robert found himself in one bad temporary job after another, and even the few jobs that offered a longer term prospect of survivability weren’t worth survival if those were their only terms for employment.
    In such a city, it is not hard to find a place where one can feel useful, even if the effort may be seen as somewhat Sisyphus-ian or Quixotic in nature. Robert spent a great deal of time volunteering for a very helpful organization that combined volunteers with young children who were involved in the juvenile justice system. For a few years, Robert worked with a young man named Lester who was mentally challenged, but had been indicted for hitting a foster parent’s son over a disagreement involving toys that were shared between the host family’s biological child and Lester. Lester didn’t understand the juxtaposition of toy distribution, and because he was so much bigger than the other child, he had hurt the younger sibling. As a result, Lester then became a charge under the juvenile justice system, and Robert was chosen as his volunteer advocate.
    The advocate