Always Running (19 page)

Later that morning Smokey came by and invited me to a house across the street, situated on top of another one. We climbed a section of unkept stairs. Smokey knocked, said a few words to the door before it opened and we entered. The place had no electricity or gas. Candles were situated around a kitchen table. Hypodermic needles, spoons, matches and bags of powder were on the table. I looked around and saw about five people, including two women. They had dark circles beneath their eyes, tattoos like old
pachucas,
and collapsed veins along the inside of their arms.

Smokey was also a
tecato,
although he looked fit and muscular; if you know what you’re doing you can actually live well on heroin for a while.

My head swarmed with tortuous thoughts of Roberta in somebody else’s arms, but it was also my fault. I fell in love with a prostitute. Although she never asked me for money, indicating perhaps I was special, I still felt hollow inside. Smokey prepared a kit while I tightened a belt around my biceps. I watched the needle enter a bulging vein that Smokey brought up through the skin by slapping it with two fingers. I saw the tinge of blood enter the needle, indicating it had punctured the vein, then watched the liquid get pushed into the bloodstream. The sensation began like a pinhole glow at the inner pit of my stomach and then spread throughout my body. There was nothing like it, this rush, and here I was on the edges of a new fraternity which crossed barrio and sex lines, this fellowship of
la carga,
so integral to “la vida loca.”

“There are choices you have to make not just once, but every time they come up.”—Chente

I
T STARTS WITH A
dream. This dream creeps beyond others of sinuous ordeals, beyond demons throwing side-glances, beyond falling out of the bed and into an abyss of molten stone, beyond slipping in traffic and being unable to get up as headlights swim toward me. Then one night, a variation of the dream:

I’m in front of a house situated in a clearing among tall, moss-infested trees. The house is enormous, Gothic in style. I see myself walking toward it, leaves and branches lightly scraping the sides of my face.

I step up a creaky set of stairs with marble railings and emerge on a large empty porch. Through a walnut door, which opens without my assistance, I go through a dimly-lit hallway, the walls breathing. There are rooms on either side of me, but I venture on, ignoring them. I continue past a row of doors without doorknobs. Out of a smoky haze, another room comes into view. The door of this room opens, slowly, as I stand transfixed in front of it. The breathing walls now follow the cadence of a heartbeat.

I enter the room, a chill dampens the beads of sweat above my brow. In the center of the room is a baby’s bassinet, washed in orange-red and draped in lace with ruffles along the edge, like something out of a Sears catalogue. I move toward the bassinet, deliberate, as if rehearsed. Lying there among the lace is my long-dead sister Lisa in a white baptism dress, her face in tranquil sleep like the way she looks in a picture my mother keeps in an old album.

This is where the dream usually ends, with Lisa in a deathbed of bliss.

But this time, the dream advances. This time I keep looking at the child. This time Lisa opens her eyes, so suddenly I jerk back. Only blackness stares out of them. Then the baby’s mouth opens and a horrendous scream fills the room, distant yet distinct. The scream echoes through the walls, the hallway, the doors. I wake up with my hands to my ears. I enter consciousness. But the scream does not stop. It isn’t in my head. It comes from the next room, where my sister Gloria sleeps.

I get up from bed and stagger into Gloria’s room; she is screaming in spurts and talking nonsense. I wake up Mama, who’s in the living room asleep. Soon Dad is rushing about, looking for the car keys. Gloria is dangling in Mama’s arms, fading in and out of delirium. My brother Joe and sister Ana are also up, Ana in tears.

“What’s wrong with her?” she cries.

No one offers an answer.

My parents take Gloria to the hospital. I look out into the early morning dark as the car speeds off. A call later informs us Gloria had ruptured her appendix and the poison had begun to invade her body. The doctors say if she were brought in only minutes later, she’d be dead.

Mama gazed out of the back porch window to the garage room where I spent days holed up as if in a prison of my own making.

She worried about me, although not really knowing what I was up to; to protect herself from being hurt, she stayed uninvolved. Yet almost daily she offered quips and comments about me not attending school.

Mama called on the former principal of my elementary school in South San Gabriel to talk to me. This was the same school where Mrs. Snelling performed seeming miracles for my brother. While Joe amounted to something, to Mama I turned out to be a smudge on this earth, with no goals, no interests except what got puked up from the streets.

Bespectacled and bow-tied, Mr. Rothro wore unpressed suits which hung on his tall, lean frame. Mama knocked and I invited them in. Mr. Rothro ducked under the doorway and looked around, amazed at the magnificent disorder, the colors and scrawl on every wall, the fantastic use of the imagination for such a small room. Mama left and Mr. Rothro, unable to find a place to sit, stood around and provided an encouragement of words. Some very fine words.

“Luis, you’ve always struck me as an intelligent young man,” Mr. Rothro said. “But your mother tells me you’re wasting away your days. I’d like to see you back in school. If there’s anything I can do—write a letter, make a phone call—perhaps you can return at a level worthy of your gifts.”

I sat on a bed in front of an old Underwood typewriter with keys that repeatedly got stuck and a carbon ribbon that kept jumping off its latch. My father gave me the typewriter after I found it among boxes, books and personal items in the garage.

“What are you doing?” Mr. Rothro inquired.

“I’m writing a book,” I said, matter-of-factly.

“You’re what? May I see?”

I let him glimpse at the leaf of paper in the typewriter with barely visible type, full of x’s where I crossed out errors as I worked. I didn’t know how to type; I just punched the letters I needed with my index fingers. It took me forever to finish a page, but I kept at it in between my other activities. By then I actually had a quarter of a ream done.

“What’s the book about, son?” Rothro asked.

“Just things … what I’ve seen, what I feel, about the people around me. You know—things.”

“Interesting,” Rothro said. “In fact, I believe you’re probably doing better than most teenagers—even better, I’m afraid, than some who
are
going to school.”

He smiled, said he had to go but if I needed his help, not to hesitate to call.

I acknowledged his goodby and watched him leave the room and walk up to the house, shaking his head. He wasn’t the first to wonder about this enigma of a boy, who looked like he could choke the life out of you one minute and then recite a poem in another. Prior to this, I tried to attend Continuation High School in Alhambra—later renamed Century High to remove the stigma of being the school for those who couldn’t make it anywhere else. After the first day, they “let” me go. A few of us in Lomas fought outside with some dudes from 18th Street who were recruiting a section of their huge gang in the Alhambra area. But Continuation High School was the last stop. When you failed at Continuation, the only place left was the road.

Then my father came up with a plan; when he proposed it, I knew it arose out of frustration.

It consisted of me getting up every day at 4:30 a.m. and going with him to his job at Pierce Junior College in the San Fernando Valley—almost 40 miles away on the other side of Los Angeles. He would enroll me in Taft High School near the college. The school pulled in well-off white kids, a good number of whom were Jewish. My father felt they had the best education.

I didn’t really care so I said sure, why not?

Thus we began our daily trek to a familiar and hostile place—the college was located near Reseda where the family once lived for almost a year. The risk for my father involved me finding out what he really did for a living. Dad told us he worked as a laboratory technician, how a special category had been created at Pierce College for him.

My father worked in the biology labs and maintained the science department’s museum and weather station. But to me, he was an overblown janitor. Dad cleaned the cages of snakes, tarantulas, lizards and other animals used in the labs. He swept floors and wiped study tables; dusted and mopped the museum area. Dad managed some technical duties such as gathering the weather station reports, preparing work materials for students, and feeding and providing for the animals. Dad felt proud of his job—but he was only a janitor.

I don’t know why this affected me. There’s nothing wrong with being a janitor—and one as prestigious as my dad! But for years, I had this running fantasy of my scientist father in a laboratory carrying out vital experiments—the imagination of a paltry kid who wanted so much to break away from the constraints of a society which expected my father to be a janitor or a laborer—when I wanted a father who transformed the world. I had watched too much TV.

One day I walked into the college’s science department after school.

“Mr. Rodríguez, you have to be more careful with the placement of laboratory equipment,” trembled a professor’s stern voice.

“I unnerstan’ … Sarry … I unnerstan’,” Dad replied.

“I don’t think you do, this is the second time in a month this equipment has not been placed properly.”

I glanced over so as not to be seen. My dad looked like a lowly peasant, a man with a hat in his hand—apologetic. At home he was king,
el jefito—
the “word.” But here my father turned into somebody else’s push-around. Dad should have been equals with anyone, but with such bad English …

Oh my father, why don’t you stand up to them? Why don’t you be the man you are at home?

I turned away and kept on walking.

The opportunity for me to learn something new became an incentive for attending Taft High School. At Keppel and Continuation, I mainly had industrial arts classes. So I applied for classes which stirred a little curiosity: photography, advanced art, and literature. The first day of school, a Taft High School counselor called me into her office.

“I’m sorry, young man, but the classes you chose are filled up,” she said.

“What do you mean? Isn’t there any way I can get into any of them?”

“I don’t believe so. Besides, your transcripts show you’re not academically prepared for your choices. These classes are privileges, for those who have maintained the proper grades in the required courses. And I must add, you’ve obtained most of what credits you do have in industrial-related courses.”

“I had to—that’s all they’d give me,” I said. “I just thought, maybe, I can do something else here. It seems like a good school and I want a chance to do something other than with my hands.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” she replied. “I think you’ll find our industrial arts subjects more suited to your needs.”

I shifted in my seat and looked out the window.

“Whatever.”

The classes she enrolled me in were print shop, auto shop and weight training. I did manage a basic English literature class. I walked past the photography sessions and stopped to glimpse the students going in and out, some with nice cameras, and I thought about how I couldn’t afford those cameras anyway:
Who needs that stupid class?

In print shop I worked the lead foundry for the mechanical Linotype typesetter. I received scars on my arms due to splashes of molten lead. In auto shop, I did a lot of tune-ups, oil changes and some transmission work. And I lifted weights and started to bulk up. The one value I had was being the only Mexican in school—people talked about it whenever I approached.

One day at lunch time, I passed a number of hefty dudes in lettered jackets. One of them said something. Maybe it had nothing to do with me. But I pounced on him anyway. Several teachers had to pull me off.

They designated me as violent and uncontrollable; they didn’t know “what to do with me.”

After school, I walked to Pierce College and waited for Dad to finish his work so we could go home, which usually went past dark. I spent many evenings in the library. But I found most books boring and unstimulating.

I picked up research and history books and went directly to the index and looked up “Mexican.” If there were a few items under this topic, I read them; I read them all.

Every day I browsed, ventured into various sections of shelves; most of this struck me with little interest. One evening, I came across a crop of new books on a special shelf near the front of the library. I picked one up, then two. The librarian looked at me through the side of her eye, as if she kept tabs on whoever perused those books.

They were primarily about the black experience, works coming out of the flames which engulfed many American cities in the 1960s. I discovered Claude Brown’s
Manchild In The Promised Land,
Eldridge Cleaver’s
Soul On Ice,
and the
Autobiography of Malcolm X.
I found poetry by Don L. Lee and LeRoi Jones (now known as Haki R. Madhubuti and Amiri Baraka, respectively). And later a few books by Puerto Ricans and Chicanos: Victor Hernández Cruz’s
Snaps
and Ricardo Sánchez’s
Canto Y Grito: Mi Liberación
were two of them. Here were books with a connection to me.

And then there was Piri Thomas, a Puerto Rican brother,
un camarada de aquellas:
His book
Down These Mean Streets
became a living Bible for me. I dog-eared it, wrote in it, copied whole passages so I wouldn’t forget their texture, the passion, this searing work of a street dude and hype in Spanish Harlem—a barrio boy like me, on the other side of America.

I didn’t last long at Taft High School. My only real friend was Edwin, a black dude who lived at the Pacific Boys Home. During lunch hour, we “worked” the neighborhood: breaking into the nearby fancy houses. Edwin eventually got popped stealing a car and ended up in youth camp.