I passed the Salt Lake City punks at the Crossroads mall downtown and walked right into the food court, got a cheese steak sandwich and sat down. Once I unplugged the earphones, I heard Portuguese. A group of four, to the right. Cariocas from Rio or paulistas from Sao Paulo.

"Opa? Brasileiros?" I asked. I joined the table and told them my recent story. I had just arrived a couple of months ago, was taking ESL (English Second Language) classes at the University of Utah, to further my education in the States. I was a child psychologist in Brazil, working with children with autism. Decided to take a sabbatical, go to a far land, learn another language, and live in other culture for a year or two. Life was about to settled in Brazil, and I wanted to give one last peak at the world. I was going to Germany. I had German friends who had stayed with me, and they were going to return the favor. But the Berlin Wall came down. Eastern Germans took out the jobs in the Western Deutschland. I have family in Utah, could stay with my uncle and aunt for a while. But had underestimated the cost of life, and was 40 bucks short of broke.

Brazilians have a roguish and slick character, a cultural icon, in the "malandro", which in the US would be equivalent of the pimp (some malandros are actually pimps). It fits with the Robin Hoodish idea of the antihero, the system doesn’t work (and didn’t work in Brazil back then), so let's pervert it - the same rationale that leads to corruption, bribes, crossing red lights, etc. And growing up under a right wing dictatorship made small acts as petty theft seem like important civil disobedience statements.

Within minutes of meeting my new found Brazilian friends, I had a plan: go to a small Social Security office and request a card. With SS # I could get a job. You don't suppose to. It is not for employment purpose, said the back of the card. But I only had my U i.d., and with a SS # and a work permit number...One of the Brazilian guys married a Mormon girl and was on his way into a green card. He had a work permit. I mimic the letters and digits order and came up with my own.

At the SS office, when asked why I needed a card, I replied that I didn't know, the UofU had said I needed it to register for my class, I said with puppy eyes.

It didn't take long. Actually, it only took a few hours. I really wanted to work at the music store down a few blocks, but they were not hiring. First stop MacDonald’s, got the job. Second stop, Sizzler, got the job. Sorry, forgot the work permit, but I know the number by heart; will bring it when I start. I would keep forgetting it, and the manager knew why. Everybody else was this forgetful in the kitchen

I went for Sizzler: bus boy, carrying huge and heavy plastic containers full of other people's leftovers, the worst for an obsessive compulsive like me. My English got better, not with ESL, but with David Letterman, every night, joke by joke, until I started laughing. Moved to the dishwashing room: dishwasher was kind of cool, hose pointing to the dishes prior to going to the machine, playing imaginary shooting games.

Some of the guys were here for years, decades, but they were all illegal, all monolingual. Once I started speaking English, I moved to the hot side, as a cook. There was only one American kid, everyone else were either Mexican or Thai, all illegal aliens. The waiters were almost all Mormon blondes, high school girls, with very little patient for the brown guys. Hey, you, the Brazilian, you speak some English, right? Tell this guy that this plate supposed to come out before the other one in the order, this is the appetizer for gosh's sake. In weeks, the American kid and I were running the kitchen.