Always Running (6 page)

My mother, I could tell, was uncomfortable with the whole set-up. She shied away from the neighbors. The other mothers around here were good-looking, fit and well-built. My pudgy mom looked dark, Indian and foreign, no matter what money could buy. Except she got her false teeth. It seemed Mama was just there to pick up the pieces when my father’s house of cards fell. She knew it would.

When it happened, it happened fast, decisively. It turned out Taft High School hired my father to teach Spanish on a temporary basis. Apparently the white kids couldn’t understand him because of his accent. He wrote letters to the school board proposing new methods of teaching Spanish to American children so he could keep working. They turned them down, and Taft High School let him go.

We weren’t in Reseda very long, less than a school year. Then the furniture store trucks pulled into the driveway to take back the new sofas, the washing machine, the refrigerator—even the TV. A “For Sale” sign jabbed into the front lawn. The new car had been repossessed. We pulled out of Reseda in an old beat-up Dodge. Sad faces on our neighbors were our farewell. I supposed they realized we weren’t so bad for being Mexican. We were going back to an old friend—
pobreza.

We moved in with Seni, her husband, and their two daughters. They were then occupying an apartment just outside East Los Angeles. Seni’s girls were about the same age as me, my brother and sisters, although we were their uncles and aunts. They also had nicknames. Ana Seni was called
Pimpos,
which doesn’t mean anything I know of. But Rano called her “Beanhead” and that took. Aidé was called
La Banana
because as a baby she had shades of blonde hair. They later had another daughter named Beca, also
güerita.

Like most Latinos, we had a mixture of blood. My half-brother Alberto looked Caribbean. His mother came from Veracruz on the Caribbean side of Mexico which has the touch of Africa. The rest of us had different shades of Spanish white to Indian brown.

Uprooted again, we stuffed our things in a garage. The adults occupied the only two bedrooms. The children slept on makeshift bedding in the living room. My grandmother Catita also stayed with us. There were eleven of us crushed into that place. I remember the constant fighting. My dad was dumped on for not finding work. Seni accused her husband of having affairs with other women. Mama often stood outside alone, crying, or in the garage next to all our things piled on top of each other.

Rano and I sought refuge in the street.

One night, we came home late after having stocked up on licorice and bubble gum. We walked past police cars and an ambulance. Colored lights whirled across the tense faces of neighbors who stood on patches of grass and driveway. I pushed through low voices and entered the house: Blood was splattered on a far wall.

Moments before, Seni had been brushing Pimpos’ hair when, who knows why, she pulled at the long sections. The girl’s screams brought in my sister’s husband. An argument ensued. Vicious words. Accusations.

Seni then plucked a fingernail file from the bathroom sink. She flashed it in front of my brother-in-law’s face. He grabbed for her hand. The nail file plunged into his arm. Mom and Dad rushed in, ramming my sister against the wall; nail file crashed steely bright onto the linoleum floor.

Soon after the incident, the landlord evicted us all. This was when my mother and father broke up. And so we began that car ride to the train station, on the way back to Mexico, leaving L.A., perhaps never to come back.

We pull into a parking lot at the Union station. It’s like a point of no return. My father is still making his stand. Mama looks exhausted. We continue to sit in our seats, quiet now as Dad maneuvers into an empty space. Then we work our way out of the car, straightening our coats, gathering up boxes and taped-over paper bags: our “luggage.” Up to this juncture, it’s been like being in a storm—so much instability, of dreams achieved and then shattered, of a silence within the walls of my body, of being turned on, beaten, belittled and pushed aside; forgotten and unimportant. I have no position on the issue before us. To stay in L.A. To go. What does it matter? I’ve been a red hot ball, bouncing around from here to there. Anyone can bounce me. Mama. Dad. Rano. Schools. Streets. I’m a ball. Whatever.

We are inside the vast cavern of the station. Pews of swirled wood are filled with people. We sit with our bags near us, and string tied from the bags to our wrists so nobody can take them without taking us too. My father turns to us, says a faint goodby, then begins to walk away. No hugs. He doesn’t even look at us.

“Poncho.”

The name echoes through the waiting area.

“Poncho.”

He turns. Stares at my mother. The wet of tears covers her face. Mama then says she can’t go. She will stay with him. In L.A. I don’t think she’s happy about this. But what can a single mother of four children do in Mexico? A woman, sick all the time, with factory work for skills in a land where work is mainly with the soil. What good is it except to starve.

“Esta bien,”
Dad says as he nears my mother. “We will make it,
mujer.
I know it. But we have to be patient. We have to believe.”

Mama turns to us and announces we are not leaving. I’m just a ball. Bouncing outside. Bouncing inside. Whatever.

“If you ain’t from no barrio, then you ain’t born.”—a 10-year-old boy from South San Gabriel

O
NE EVENING DUSK CAME
early in South San Gabriel, with wind and cold spinning to earth. People who had been sitting on porches or on metal chairs near fold-up tables topped with cards and beer bottles collected their things to go inside. Others put on sweaters or jackets. A storm gathered beyond the trees.

Tino and I strolled past the stucco and wood-frame homes of the neighborhood consisting mostly of Mexicans with a sprinkling of poor white families (usually from Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas).
Ranchera
music did battle with Country & Western songs as we continued toward the local elementary school, an oil-and-grime stained basketball under my arm.

We stopped in front of a chain-link fence which surrounded the school. An old brick building cast elongated shadows over a basketball court of concrete on the other side of the fence. Leaves and paper swirled in tiny tornadoes.

“Let’s go over,” Tino proposed.

I looked up and across the fence. A sign above us read: NO ONE ALLOWED AFTER 4:30 PM, BY ORDER OF THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. Tino turned toward me, shrugged his shoulders and gave me a who-cares look.

“Help me up, man, then throw the ball over.”

I cupped my hands and lifted Tino up while the boy scaled the fence, jumped over and landed on sneakered feet.

“Come on, Luis, let’s go,” Tino shouted from the other side.

I threw over the basketball, walked back a ways, then ran and jumped on the fence, only to fall back. Although we were both 10 years old, I cut a shorter shadow.

“Forget you, man,” Tino said. “I’m going to play without you.”

“Wait!” I yelled, while walking further back. I crouched low to the ground, then took off, jumped up and placed torn sneakers in the steel mesh. I made it over with a big thud.

Wiping the grass and dirt from my pants, I casually walked up to the ball on the ground, picked it up, and continued past Tino toward the courts.

“Hey Tino, what are you waiting for?”

The gusts proved no obstacle for a half-court game of B-ball, even as dark clouds smothered the sky.

Boy voices interspersed with ball cracking on asphalt. Tino’s lanky figure seemed to float across the court, as if he had wings under his thin arms. Just then, a black-and-white squad car cruised down the street. A searchlight sprayed across the school yard. The vehicle slowed to a halt. The light shone toward the courts and caught Tino in mid-flight of a lay-up.

The dribbling and laughter stopped.

“All right, this is the sheriff’s,” a voice commanded. Two deputies stood by the fence, batons and flashlights in hand.

“Let’s get out of here,” Tino responded.

“What do you mean?” I countered. “Why don’t we just stay here?”

“You nuts! We trespassing, man,” Tino replied. “When they get a hold of us, they going to beat the crap out of us.”

“Are you sure?”

“I know, believe me, I know.”

“So where do we go?”

By then one of the deputies shouted back: “You boys get over here by the fence—now!”

But Tino dropped the ball and ran. I heard the deputies yell for Tino to stop. One of them began climbing the fence. I decided to take off too.

It never stopped, this running. We were constant prey, and the hunters soon became big blurs: the police, the gangs, the junkies, the dudes on Garvey Boulevard who took our money, all smudged into one. Sometimes they were teachers who jumped on us Mexicans as if we were born with a hideous stain. We were always afraid. Always running.

Tino and I raced toward the dark boxes called classrooms. The rooms lay there, hauntingly still without the voices of children, the commands of irate teachers or the clapping sounds of books as they were closed. The rooms were empty, forbidden places at night. We scurried around the structures toward a courtyard filled with benches next to the cafeteria building.

Tino hopped on a bench, then pulled himself over a high fence. He walked a foot or two on top of it, stopped, and proceeded to climb over to the cafeteria’s rooftop. I looked over my shoulder. The deputies weren’t far behind, their guns drawn. I grabbed hold of the fence on the side of the cafeteria. I looked up and saw Tino’s perspiring face over the roof’s edge, his arm extended down toward me.

I tried to climb up, my feet dangling. But then a firm hand seized a foot and pulled at it.

“They got me!” I yelled.

Tino looked below. A deputy spied the boy and called out: “Get down here … you greaser!”

Tino straightened up and disappeared. I heard a flood of footsteps on the roof—then a crash. Soon an awful calm covered us.

“Tino!” I cried out.

A deputy restrained me as the other one climbed onto the roof. He stopped at a skylight, jagged edges on one of its sides. Shining a flashlight inside the building, the officer spotted Tino’s misshapen body on the floor, sprinkled over with shards of glass.

After the aborted trip to Mexico, a poverty agency helped our family find a rented place within our means: a square, one-bedroom clapboard house on La Presa Street in an unincorporated part of the county called South San Gabriel.

The living room served as sleeping quarters for my mom, sisters and dad. My brother and I had the only bedroom to ourselves, along with piles of stuffed boxes. On hot nights, Rano and I slept outside under the openness of the desert sky. It was similar to Watts, but at least it was a home of our own again.

Incorporated towns like Monterey Park, Rosemead and Montebello surrounded South San Gabriel. The area was located in the San Gabriel Valley, which for years consisted of incipient industry, farmland and migrant camps until Los Angeles stretched out fingers of suburban sprawl to the furthest reaches of the valley.

There used to be a corn field not far away from our house on La Presa Street. I remember playing there with my friends. Once, though, a farmer came at us with a loaded shotgun while we swerved and pivoted out of his range through the stalks of corn.

By the early 1970s, this area was torn up and office buildings, and parking lots replaced the rows of stalks which once swayed free in the wind, which once held our imaginations afire with war play, clod-throwing contests, and majestic worlds of conquest. By then, with the farmlands and many of the Mexicans of Klingerman Street removed, the City of Rosemead annexed this part of South San Gabriel and it ceased being unwanted county territory.

Unincorporated county territory was generally where the poorest people lived, the old barrios, which for the most part didn’t belong to any city because nobody wanted them.

Most of Watts and a large section of East Los Angeles were unincorporated county territory. Sometimes they had no sewage system or paved roads. They included hills, ravines and hollows. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department—known as the most brutal of the local law enforcement agencies—policed these areas.

In the mid-60s, South San Gabriel included both flat areas and what we called the Hills, or
Las Lomas.
The Hills were made up of tiny houses patched together by weathered wood, chicken wire and creaking porches that buckled and swayed like a boat on an open sea. Cadavers of rusted cars filled up yellowed yards. Torn sofas, broken lamps and threadless tires were strewn about in vacant lots. The roads turned and twisted every which way; they were dusty, curbless streets that might have served as goat trails at one time. Coming down one of the dirt roads, you could encounter chickens, wild dogs or pigs. Some back yards held the wood-and-wire sheds of fighting cocks, or the copper pipings of a backyard still.

The Hills were unseen. Unvisited. Cars flew past north of here on the San Bernardino Freeway into Los Angeles, but most of the drivers never imagined such a place existed, a place you could have found in the Ozarks or the hills of Tijuana.

Bruja, Bruja.

Whispers of morning, whispers of night, children without faces tormenting with a word, descending like a torrent of leaves, like the blaze of dawn. A never-ending litany.

Bruja, Bruja.

The conspiracy of voices greets the old woman who lives in an almost toppled, unpainted house next door; her back yard dense with overgrown weeds.

They say she is a witch. The children hide in bushes or behind fences and taunt her as she lumbers outside to put out trash or water her grassless yard.

“¡Bruja, Bruja!”

They sling dirt clods at her feet, tease her to tears, dare her to strike away at this cancer of childhood that makes her last days alone in this clapboard cottage feel like the hell fires she herself condemns the voices to.

The old woman grabs a trash-can lid or a broom and pursues the children who scamper out of the way, laughing and jeering as she creaks in her bones.