Estranged land
Today: Zach Rabiroff, a writer on books, comics, and culture living in Brooklyn, New York.
Issue No. 403
An American Man
Zach Rabiroff
Victors of HYDRANYM No. 16
The Editors
An American Man
by Zach Rabiroff
Roddy Pinili grew up in the unremarkable middle-class town of Republic, Missouri, about 15 miles outside of Springfield. In 2004 Roddy’s stepdad, a servicemember in the Army, was called up to serve in Iraq; Roddy, then 16, and his mother, Amy, moved a few miles away to the nearby town of Clever, population 550, with a high school where he was the lone Filipino, among “a bunch of country farm boys.”
“This is where I got into trouble,” Roddy says. He started regularly driving back to Republic, a much bigger town, in search of friends. He met another Filipino kid there—“He looked like me, and he shared the same interests as me”—and he started picking up his new friend’s interests, too, which included breaking into vending machines. The boys were soon caught and Roddy spent 30 days in jail, with the scared teen vowing to his probation officer he’d never do anything like that again, and he didn’t.
After high school he got a job at a local Papa John’s, and through a friend there he met Maddy, born in Hungary, who’d immigrated to the U.S. with her mother and older sisters in the last days of the Soviet bloc. Like Roddy, she’d felt like something of an outsider in Missouri. They were married in 2015 and have four kids together: three boys and a girl, the youngest, who’s turning one this year.
Maddy had started to get her first sense of trouble just before the wedding, when it emerged that Roddy was missing a couple of official documents—his birth certificate, for instance. Or a passport. Or a paper of any kind formally attesting to his status as a citizen of the United States. They wound up holding the ceremony in Arkansas, where document requirements were less stringent, but worries lingered. It wasn’t until Roddy showed up at the Springfield Motor Vehicle Department for a license renewal two years later that the penny finally dropped: Roddy was having trouble proving that he was an American citizen because he wasn’t one. Roddy wasn’t living legally in America at all.
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