Always Running (11 page)

One day the crew manager, at a point of desperation, dropped me off in the Hills.

“Go up this road,” he said, sounding unhopeful of my prospects. “I’ll meet you down below in about an hour.”

I climbed up a sidewalkless street and entered the foliage which shielded the shacks and houses on stilts and cars being worked on. I walked up a cluttered dirt driveway. Children played in and around a mud puddle without shoes. Mexican music burst out of a kitchen window. The porches were old, unpainted, sunken wood planks. I knocked on a torn-screen door nearly off its hinges. A round woman peered from inside. Instead of sofas or end tables, crates furnished her bare living room. There were palm-leaf crosses tacked on cracked sheet rock.

“¿Qué traes tú?”
she inquired.

I didn’t believe I’d sell any subscriptions—most of these people didn’t even know English. But as soon as I talked about the free gifts, they signed up. So simple. Shack to shack. Off-hinged door after off-hinged door. I tried to explain they were required to pay a monthly fee. But here they were, watching
telenovelas
on beat-up TV sets, those who had them, their children running around in rags and bare feet, and still they ordered the Post-Advocate for the free gifts. In time they’d never pay. They’d never be part of anyone’s route. But I got the starts. I became the hero for the day. The crew manager patted my back and announced to everyone the record number of subscriptions I obtained. The people of the Hills vindicated me.

Work took other turns. At age thirteen, I was hired at a car wash with my brother. We were the cleanup crew. We came to work in the evening after the undocumented guys finished washing cars and had gone home. Rano and I swept, mopped, and picked up around the small office, waiting area and parking lot. We picked up all the dirty rags and threw them into massive washing machines. Then near the end of the evening, we hooked up a monstrous hose and watered down the place. Rano, who was 16, actually washed cars during the day and learned to drive almost every make and model.

“You should have seen the Mustang I pulled out today,” he said, excited.

“Oh, listen,” he’d tap my arm. “Then there was this Firebird!”

I came along to help him in the evening to make more money for the family. Everything we made went to Mama—and we always needed more.

But soon after I started working there, I picked up a foot fungus. I often worked in sneakers and I couldn’t help but get them soaked every night in the soap and water we used to hose down everything. Terrible flowery lesions sprang up on the soles of my feet and through my toes. I also had an ingrown toenail that produced a painful redness on my left toe, forcing me to place steaming hot towels on it every night to lower the swelling.

A foot doctor prescribed medication, but nothing lessened the sores. And surgery on my toe was out of the question. I couldn’t even go to gym classes, which I missed for the rest of junior high.

One day, the sores worsened and I refused to get out of bed. My mother dabbed ointments on them but they were of no use. Then Tío Kiko came over. He examined the sores, staring intently at the petals that seemed to be growing from my feet. Tío Kiko knew a little of the Mexican healing arts, the use of herbs and incantations from old Indian traditions used to treat most ailments. In desperation, Mama asked her brother for help.

“This will hurt you,” Tío Kiko told me in Spanish. “But be brave. It will be over soon.”

He pulled up a chair and directed my mother’s hand.

They sliced each of the milky sores. Blood and pus streamed out. I screamed. I didn’t believe in witchcraft or chants or herbs. I felt I would die. Tío Kiko had boiled water and put together some herbs he had brought from a
botánica.
Mama covered each open wound with leaves and concoctions as Tío Kiko prayed over my feet.

Was there a God for feet? Would the proper words be strung together to wake it from its sleep? Would the magic of the herbs, the spirit evoked, seep into the sores and bring the feet back to me? These were the questions.

Days passed. I lay in bed as the daily rituals worked their wonder. The sores started to disappear. Soon I hobbled around in slippers. Even the ingrown toenail slid back into a somewhat normal shape. Tío Kiko, this border priest, this master of snake and siren, did what the Anglo doctors could not. Who knows if it’s real magic? There was another kind of magic which made me feel special, to look at my Indian-descended mother and uncle and believe in the power of civilizations long since written off, long since demeaned and trampled. Jesus Christ was a brown man. A Mexican Indian. A
curandero.
Not a stringy blond-haired, blue-eyed icon. He was like me, like my Tío Kiko. He lived in the earth, got drunk, inhabited the leaves and herbs, not a sanitized doctor’s office—or a church of spires and colored glass and elaborate carvings. He lived in my feet, and with the proper calls and enticements, made them whole again. This is the Christ I wanted to believe in.

Through the bars of a cell, I talk to a deputy as he sits behind an immense wood desk in the Temple City sheriff’s station, the station responsible for Las Lomas. He’s Chicano like me, but I know how much he hates everything I am, as if I represent all the scorn, venom and fear instilled in him since a child.

“We have a plan here,” the
jura
says. “We detain every seven-year-old boy in your neighborhood.”

“Detain them for what?” I ask.

“It doesn’t matter. Curfew, loitering … whatever we can,” he replies. “Then we keep their names. Keep track of them over the years. Soon we’ve picked them up for other things—stealing, fighting, mischief …”

“And that’s how you get a hold of ’em,” I continue for him.

“That’s right—hey, you’ve got half a brain, huh?”

“It ain’t hard to figure out that by the time some of the boys do something serious, they have a detention record a mile long and end up hard time—juvey or camp.”

“You guys just don’t know,” he says with a smirk. “You just don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

In the barrio, the police are just another gang. We even give them names. There’s Cowboy, Big Red, Boffo and Maddog. They like those names. Sometimes they come up to us while we linger on a street corner and tell us Sangra called us
chavalas,
a loose term for girls. Other times, they approach dudes from Sangra and say Lomas is a tougher gang and Sangra is nothing. Shootings, assaults and skirmishes between the barrios are direct results of police activity. Even drug dealing. I know this. Everybody knows this.

Yuk Yuk became one of
los cuatro
after Clavo disappeared. No one knew exactly what happened to Clavo. There were rumors his parents sent him to Mexico. Others said he was in a youth prison camp, although we couldn’t substantiate this. Chicharrón, Wilo and I went to his house. Nobody there. For Rent signs everywhere. He had already dropped out of school and left no forwarding address.

Yuk Yuk lived in the Hills, in one of the gullies. He had been a member of the Tribe for a couple of years, but spent most of that time in juvenile hall. He had two teardrops tattooed below his left eye, signifying two years lost in the hall. Sometimes the teardrops stood for the members of one’s family fallen in street warfare or the number of people one had killed. Anyway it started off as a Chicano thing, like most of the street and pinto traditions, but later other dudes picked up on it.

Yuk Yuk’s real name was Claudio Ponce. But he had this funny laugh, see, and this is why we called him Yuk Yuk. Barrio names usually came from the obvious. Chin came from my deformed jaw. Chicharrón because he had skin the color of Mexican pork rinds. Clavo because he was thin and hard, like nails, and Wilo because he was skinny as a pole. The girls had similar designations. In the Hills there were
rucas
called Seria (serious) or Chatter (because she talked too much). Sometimes the
placas
came from corruptions of real names: Chuy from Jesus, Chi Cho from Narciso, Nacho from Ignacio, Yogi from Olga, Beto from Roberto and Nando from Fernando.

And then there were names that were simply made up: Fuzzy, Toots and Baba.

Tribe members carefully placed as many names as could fit on a wall, a means to identify individuals, not just the group. More and more the lists would end with “Animal Tribe/Lomas.” Lomas became increasingly prominent. There were dudes like Yuk Yuk coming out of juvey, the youth camps, or prisons who insisted Lomas, the barrio, be on every marking, on every wall.

Then there were dudes who didn’t even claim the Tribe anymore. Just Lomas.

Yuk Yuk got us involved in organized stealing. Up until then, we stole here and there without much planning or thinking. At seven years old in Watts, I remember going into corner grocery stores every day after school and stuffing my Roy Rogers Lunch Box with toys and candy. I took the loot home and hid it in the closet. Mama eventually found some, carved into my flesh with a leather belt, and made me return it. I remember throwing it over a bridge which crossed a sewer tunnel.

At 13 years old, a record shop owner caught me stealing records. Rano had stolen some records earlier and bragged about it. I decided to try it myself. I went back to the same store, a stupid thing to do, and stuffed a few 45s into my jacket. But a store guard stopped me as I walked out of the store, pulled the records out of the jacket and dragged me back in. My mother had to come get me.

Later various combinations of
los cuatro
stole food, vodka and beer from markets, and gas from service stations so we could cruise in Wilo’s
carrucha.

Once we decided to rip off the
gabachos
leaving a Kentucky Fried Chicken stand. Chicharrón, Wilo and I waited outside the joint. As some dude came out with a bucket or two, we ran up to him and snatched the buckets from his arms, then took off like we were ravaging coyotes on
yesca,
chicken parts flying everywhere.

Another time, after a night of heavy-duty drinking and partying, hunger called out to us. Wilo waited in the parking lot of a 24-hour market nearby, the car running and in gear. The rest of us scurried through the store and packed our pockets, coats, shirts and jackets with chips, baloney, soda cans, bread, and canned hams. Then bursting with merchandise, we walked out at the same time. It was harder to catch three of us than just one.

Clavo was still with us then. I managed to make it to Wilo’s car. But one of the store employees ran up behind me and insisted I come back with him—they had spotted me stealing food. I discreetly placed the food under the car seats and walked back in. Of course, they had no evidence of stolen food and had to let me go. But the commotion around me allowed Clavo and Chicharrón to walk out with the items they took.

When I finally left the store, I saw Clavo running across the parking lot as store employees chased him. The
pendejo
couldn’t find Wilo’s car! Clavo ran down the street, through some alley, dropping packages of lunch meat as his long legs loped over the asphalt, four or five store employees at his heels. Wilo came by and picked me up and then sped off.

Later we roamed the streets looking for Clavo. Sure enough he evaded his would-be captors and we found him hiding behind some trash cans in an alley—an opened can of tuna in his hand and a huge grin on his face.

But this was all lightweight.

Yuk Yuk introduced us to two key figures in the stealing business. One was Jandro Mares, a 30-year-old budding entrepreneur. Jandro owned a large Victorian-style home in Alhambra. He had a large driveway and a huge garage. He “commissioned” teenagers like us to steal certain cars he needed, on order, then drive them to his garage. He taught us how to strip them down in a matter of minutes. With
un chingo
of dudes, this was easy to do.

“De volada,”
as Yuk Yuk always said. Just do it without thinking; on impulse.

The other guy was Shed Cowager. He was a junk man who had a huge building on Garvey Boulevard full of metal, antique, and wood items. Shed usually sat in the back of the shop and you had to get through a long stretch of metal files, TVs, chairs and desks, and every hubcap known to humanity, to get to him. He didn’t tell us what to do or not like Jandro. He was just a guy who bought bikes, TVs, stereos, cameras, guns—whatever we could bring to him—and paid us cash on delivery.

Yuk Yuk had us walk around the malls scanning for bikes, good bikes, ten-speeds mostly. Many of the
gabacho
kids used to lay them down without locks when they entered a store. We walked up cool, got on the bike, and then took off. Wilo or Yuk Yuk followed near us in a car as we rode the bicycles to Shed’s business. The bikes were probably worth several hundred dollars. Shed gave us between $15 and $25 each.

Soon Yuk Yuk had us scoping out the good homes in Alhambra, some of which I cleaned when I was younger. He showed us how to find signs of nobody home. He also had us spot ways to enter them. For example, a lot of the homes had louver windows in bedrooms, kitchens, or bathrooms, which were easy to remove from the outside.

We were told to take only things we could walk out with, such as money, jewelry and guns. For bigger jobs, we’d pull up in a VW van Yuk Yuk had borrowed and then we’d take bigger items like TVs, cameras and stereos. Before long, Yuk Yuk started to hijack trucks, mainly from warehouses or appliance stores, and then sell the electronic equipment in parking lots and drive-ins. The, truck stops leading into L.A. were particularly lucrative. Yuk Yuk would pull a gun out on a driver, force him out of the truck, take his money, and if the truck was maneuverable enough, his keys too.

From there, armed robberies included the newly-sprouting convenience stores we called “shop and robs”. If we worked in teams, somebody stayed in the car, another held a gun, and another walked the aisles loading up on whiskey and food.

Placing a gun to a man’s head took some doing at first. We often took turns because Yuk Yuk didn’t want any
lambiches
going with him. If you could pull a gun on someone, with only a heart pulse holding the trigger, than you can do just about anything, Yuk Yuk reasoned.
De volada.