Always Running (29 page)

No direct threats. All threats had to be carried out. This served as a warning. The uneasiness in the place could be cut with a blunt knife.

“All right! We got better things to do than waste our time with this
pedo,”
Puppet declared. “So if it’s all right with Chin over here, we move on Sangra tonight.”

Puppet looked at everybody and there was approval. He looked at me and there was silence.

*
Here I stand / in the street without money. / Nobody knows my name / and nobody cares.

I go to my woman’s house / but she stands there just staring. / I speak to her with my soul / but the door is closing.

**
In the county jail / with all my crazy passion, / I place your name on a cell wall / and with this thought / I suffer my disgrace.

“You don’t have solo rights to anything anymore, not even your crazy life.”—Letter to me from a Jewish teenager after a youth conference in 1972

A
LOW, PRIMERED 1968
Impala idled in front of a beige-white, Spanish-style stucco house in a cleanly-lit section of San Gabriel. Music spilled out of open windows along with laughter and the talk of young people. A party! The car pulled into a spot near the house. Yo Yo and Hapo jumped out the front seat while Coyote clambered out of the back and looked around. The swirl of Santa Ana winds cooled the summer heat, clearing away the eye-burning smog which has smothered the valley for days. Chava stepped out from behind Coyote.

“Let’s check out the
borlote,”
he declared, and the four marched toward the pulsing beat.

They entered the front door without invitation and surveyed the scene. A row of girls sat around with beer cans and cigarettes in their hands. The intruders could not make out the handful of guys scattered among them; they looked cool, but not
barrio.

Coyote eyed a pretty
ruca
by a coffee table topped with bowls of chips, salsa and onion dip. Yo Yo indicated he had to go to the head. Chava and Hapo shuffled through the kitchen and out the back door; outside, a few people danced near a carport lined with trash cans brimming with ice and beer.

“¡Sangra Rifa!”
Hapo yelled, by impulse really, perhaps thinking it will keep the dudes at a distance. Chava looked annoyed at him, but it was too late.

Eight dudes stepped out of the darkness beneath the carport. Chava immediately recognized them: Eight Ball, Fuzzy, Enano, Topo, Lencho, Toots, Bone and Puppet—from the Hills!

Hapo backed into the house. Coyote and Yo Yo sensed something was wrong. Hapo looked at them, terrified.

“Trucha—
run!”

“What?”

“I said run—it’s Lomas!”

Coyote, Yo Yo and Hapo flew out the door toward the Impala. But Chava did not run, could not run; he stood alone in the back yard as the legion of shadows approached, yelling back, shadows which surrounded their prey and pounced in a deadly pantomime, steel blades penetrating flesh. Chava did not cry out.

He toppled to the ground, touched the wet sweet-smelling blades of grass, and it was these simple, slight odors, sensations and sounds which gripped his attention: the peal of chimes near the back door, moths colliding into a light bulb—a treble pressing out of woofers and tweeters from dual stereo speakers. Eight dudes, eight punctures into sides, the abdomen, the ribs.
No more, no more!

But there was more.

Somebody picked up a rusted tire rim from the cluttered driveway, raised it high, and thrust it down on Chava’s head.

“No more, please, no more!”

But this was not Chava’s voice. Somehow his voice sounded only as an echo in a canyon inside his body. This was a woman’s voice, Rita’s voice, as she jumped over Chava’s prone figure and pleaded with the shadows standing over him to stop.

The shadows backed off. Rita turned Chava’s barely-breathing body onto its side and somebody nearby screamed, like the wailing inside a black dream, into all the screams ever screamed, as the grass blended into crimson from wounds in his body and his head, a soaked mass of hair, eyes and jawbone.

Chicharrón pulled up in front of Mark Keppel High School. “Hey, Chin—want to hear a joke?” he asked.

“Only if it’s a good one.”

“Knock, knock …”

“I said a good one.” With him was a year-old baby. Chicharrón and Shoshi weren’t together anymore, but he held the legacy of their brief relationship in his arms. They named him Junior. Having a baby didn’t seem to fit Chicharrón, but he looked proud as Junior took in the surroundings, full of unknowing.

I stood in front of the gnarled tree among students sitting in the grass, talking and relaxing in the sun. Chicharrón, as usual, started in on me.

“I see you still got them potato shoes.”

Chicharrón poked fun at my brown shoes which I wore until the leather withered, looking like a spud. He also made fun of the fact I peed a lot, especially when I drank. He once handed me a picture he drew of me with a tiny piss sac and potato shoes—underneath he wrote: The Chinmunist.

In my senior year, I became ToHMAS president. The club had succeeded in obtaining a Chicano Studies class with a powerful and engaging teacher, Mr. Sosa. I also became the student council’s Speaker of the House and a columnist for the school’s newspaper, which the journalism teacher offered after he liked my response to an anti-Chicano editorial. I called the column “Pensamientos.”

In one column I wrote: “It’s important that Chicanos feel this is their school too. It’s about time we became part of America.” And once I did an article about how Lomas Dukes held a car wash to benefit an elementary school where the children had no money to buy milk or lunch. Somebody on the newspaper staff asked why the Dukes didn’t use the money to clean the graffiti off the school walls. I told him: “It’s a lot better to feed some hungry kids than to clean up your fuckin’ walls, that’s why!”

As we sat around, making the baby laugh, Cha Cha, a leading member of ToHMAS, came up behind me, a tremor in her voice.

“Louie, I need to talk with you.”

“What’s going on Cha Cha?”

“You know Mr. Humes, the history teacher, he just threw me out of his class for being late—but not before he called me a chola whore!”

“What?”

“It’s true. I told him I had to take my little brother to the babysitter’s because my moms is sick. But he got real mad and cursed me out—in front of the whole class!”

“Who does he think he is? Let’s see about this.”

I went into the school. A few of the students on the lawn, including Chicharrón and the baby, walked in behind me. I ran up the stairs to the second floor. Cha Cha pointed across the hallway to a classroom in session.

When I entered, Mr. Humes, with graying hair, short-sleeve striped shirt and tie, stood in front of the blackboard, addressing a scattered row of students.

“Young man, you have no business barging into my class like this, you better leave …”

“No, I won’t leave. What’s this about calling Cha Cha a chola whore.”

“I don’t have to answer to you!” Mr. Humes yelled. “I’m tired of this dictatorship of students we have here.”

Oh, I see—you want to be able to call somebody a whore and get away with it. That’s over with, man. We refuse to take any more abuse.”

“And I won’t take this abuse,” he countered. “I want you out of my class—now! If not, we’ll see Mr. Madison about this.”

“Well, you’re just going to have to see Mr. Madison.”

Mr. Humes stalked out the class. As he slammed the door, the students in the room and in the hallway broke into cheers. It was far from over.

Mr. Madison called Cha Cha and me into his office.

“You can’t go around disrupting classes,” he said. “This conduct has got to stop.”

“Nobody should get away with what Mr. Humes called Cha Cha,” I said.

“But there are other ways to resolve this. There are channels. There’s me—why didn’t you come to me first?”

“We’re taking this into our own hands. We have no way to control the outcome if we don’t. We just don’t trust how anything gets resolved around here.”

“But I have the authority, not you,” said Mr. Madison. “I can’t have students interrupting classes whenever they feel like it.”

Then Cha Cha spoke: “Listen Mr. Madison, you’ve forgotten that Mr. Humes called me a whore. Who cares about us ‘disrupting’ a class. What are you going to do about Mr. Humes? It’s my life here. It’s the lives of others like me. What are you going to do?”

It was far from over. Other students found out what happened. Again the anger held inside boiled over. Somebody slashed Mr. Humes’ car tires.

Later a group of Mexicans beat up some Anglos in the gym. This escalated to fights in the cafeteria and parking lot. Cha Cha’s encounter served as the catalyst for that year’s Tradition.

The student council called a special session. Daryl, the student president, proposed a “Communicators” group which would consist of leaders from among the Mexican and Anglo students. Mr. Madison approved the suggestion and provided a meeting place for the group. A list of 60 names were drawn up; I was on the list.

The Communicators were to stifle any rumors. Stop any fights. Resolve any differences. The Communicators wore red armbands. We were excused from classes and allowed to roam the hallways and talk with students. The fights ceased after two days as the Communicators walked up and down the school espousing calm.

On the third day, the 60-member group met in the auditorium to determine how to deal with disruptions. I proposed they take affirmative steps for people to talk out their problems, to address the inequities, and allow more power to fall into the hands of students. This led to a wild debate. As we argued the finer points, a teacher ran into the auditorium.

“They’re at it again!” she yelled out, her hair disheveled. “They’re fighting in the halls!”

“Okay, everyone,” Daryl said. “We’ve got to go out there and stop this.”

The Communicators poured out of the auditorium to where a knot of students gathered near a stairway. Screams and shouts greeted us. I saw one dude jump in crazy anger from the top of the stairs onto the crowd of students below.

I rushed up to the melee and tried to pull apart a couple of students on the ground. But as I got a hold of one guy, I looked up and a crumpled soda can filled with sand smashed against my mouth. The jagged edge and weight of the sand burst open my bottom lip; blood streamed out as if it were a waterfall. Others stopped fighting as I stood there in a daze. A student and a teacher grabbed my arm and escorted me to the nurse’s office.

When we got there, a number of students were already sitting around with various injuries. The nurse looked at my mouth. The crumpled can had sliced the lip and chipped off a piece of tooth. She suggested I be taken to the medical clinic.

“You’re from Keppel, right?” the doctor said as she came into the operating room where I lay holding soaked towels to my face.

“We’ve been getting a lot of you guys this past week,” the doctor said. “Let’s take a look.”

I removed the towels. The doctor looked stern, but not alarmed.

“Ain’t no big thing,” she said. “We’ll get you some stitches, and you’ll be good as new.”

I liked her already. She prepared the cat-gut while I lay back.

“I’m not using any anesthesia,” she declared. “You seem like a tough dude. I’m sure you can take it.”

I hated her guts. Yet I didn’t say anything. I let her sew up the lip without any painkiller; I felt the needle enter in and out of skin, stitch after stitch. I didn’t wince or complain. I just tightened my grip on the bedsides so the doctor wouldn’t see.

After the doctor finished, she looked at me with a devious glint in her eye.

“I guess you could take it,” she said. “Not even a whimper. Okay, tough guy—you can go home now.”

But I didn’t go home. I went back to the school with an immense gauze bandage on the lower lip. By then hundreds of students were gathered outside. It was an impromptu walkout following my injury. I walked up to the crowd which roared at the sight of me. Esme addressed them from the top of the front steps. I came up next to her, the gauze and the pain keeping me from smiling.

“Louie, can you say a few words?” Esme asked.

I took my time, but I managed.

“We’ve come a long way in this school. But something keeps coming up to show us we’ve got a long way to go. All I can say is, we can’t stop fighting until the battle’s won.”

The students exploded in a frenzy of clapping. Inside the school doorways, I could see Mrs. Baez was pleased to see me asserting myself. But Mr. Madison, trying so hard to contain the controversy, looked tired.

Not long after this, the school fired Mr. Pérez. Mr. Pérez ran the print shop. It was the most popular class for Chicanos; many meetings were held there. He not only sponsored the ToHMAS club, he was also the school’s best teacher. Mr. Pérez arranged field trips to downtown, the beach, even to Beverly Hills; he wanted us to see the world, see how others lived and know why we didn’t live the same way. But teachers who helped students think were considered radical.

One day Mr. Pérez received a notice. The school claimed he was insubordinate and unresponsive to the students’ needs—the exact opposite of the truth.

I walked into the Chicano Student Center. Esme’s face covered with pain; Amelia, crying. Mrs. Baez held a phone in her hand, although not talking into it.

“This is it, man,” I said. “I’ve had it with these people. Another walkout, man, we’re going out until they bring Pérez back.”

“No, Luis, not this time,” Mrs. Baez said, waving the phone at me. “You can’t walk out every time something isn’t to your liking. The school and Mr. Pérez need to work this out.”

“That’s just an excuse,” Esme said. “They’ve wanted to get rid of Mr. Pérez for a long time. He’s the only teacher willing to take chances, to challenge the way things are.”

“Yeah, Mrs. Baez, I don’t buy it,” I said. “We’re going out.”

“Luis, don’t forget you’re a Communicator,” Mrs. Baez said. “You’re supposed to keep the peace.”

“Not any more—I quit!”

This time, I worked the halls hard, telling as many students as I could about the pending walkout. This time, the school was prepared. For a year or so, Alex, who lived in the Hills, worked with Mr. Madison to diffuse any tension. The day of the proposed walkout, Mr. Madison had a talk with Alex, who then went around the school telling everyone the walkout was off.