Always Running (9 page)

Miguel talked to Joaquín and Ernie separately for a while about us coming in. Gregorio and the others stayed with us. I looked over to one side where I thought I heard a girl’s muffled voice. There seemed to be a figure on top of somebody, going up and down on a body laid out on the ground, moaning with every motion.

Gregorio eyed me. Just staring. Finally he spoke: “She’s being initiated into the Tribe.”

Then he laughed.

“You
cholos
have great stories about climbing fences.”—a barrio boxing coach

T
HE HILLS BLISTERED BELOW
a haze of sun and smog. Mothers with wet strands of hair across their foreheads flung wash up to dry on weathered lines. Sweat-drenched men lay on their backs in the gravel of alleys, beneath broken-down cars propped up on cinder blocks.
Charrangas
and
corridos
splashed out of open windows.

Suddenly from over a hill, an ice cream truck raced by with packs of children running beside it. A hurried version of “Old McDonald Had A Farm” chimed through a speaker bolted on the truck’s roof. The truck stopped long enough for somebody to toss out dozens of sidewalk sundaes, tootie-fruities and half-and-half bars to the children who gathered around, thrusting up small, dirt-caked hands that blossomed open as their shrieks blended with laughter.

Then the truck’s transmission gears growled as it continued up the slope, whipped around a corner and passed a few of us
vatos
assembled on a field off Toll Drive. We looked over toward the echoes of the burdensome chimes, the slip and boom of the clutch and rasp of gears as the ice cream truck entered the dead-end streets and curves of Las Lomas.

“Orale, ése, ¿qué está pasando?”
a dude named Little Man asked while passing a bottle of Tokay wine to Clavo.

“It’s Toots and the
gaba,
you know, Axel,” Clavo replied. “They just stole an ice cream truck on Portrero Grande Drive.”

“¡Qué cábula!”
Little Man said. “They sure is crazy.”

We continued to talk and drink until the day melted into night.

Little Man and one of the López brothers, Fernie, all Tribe, were there in the field with me and my
camaradas
Clavo, Chicharrón, and Wilo. The four of us were so often together that the list of our names became a litany. We spray-painted our
placas
on the walls, followed by
AT
for Animal Tribe or
SSG
for South San Gabriel.

Everyone called me Chin because of my protruding jawbone. I had it tattooed on my ankle.

We sat around a small roasting pit Chicharrón made from branches and newspaper. Around us were ruins, remains of a home which had been condemned and later ravaged by fire. We assembled inside the old cement foundation with its scattered sections of brick and concrete walls splattered with markings and soot with rusted re-enforcing bars protruding from stone blocks.

We furnished the lot with beat-up couches and discarded sofas. Somebody hung plastic from a remaining cinder-block wall to a low branch so homeboys could sleep there—and miss most of any rain—when there was nowhere else to go. It was really a vacant lot but we called all such lots “the fields.”

Even as we talked, there was Noodles, a wino and old
tecato,
crashed out on the sofa.

“Get up Noodles, time for some
refín,”
Chicharrón exclaimed as he placed stolen hot dogs and buns on the fire. Wilo threw a dirt clod at the sofa and Noodles mumbled some incoherent words.

“Orale,
leave the
vato
alone,
ése,”
Little Man said.

But Noodles got up, spittle dripping from his mouth.

“Hey
ése,
Noodles is awake, and man is he pissed,” Wilo said.

“How can you tell?” Chícharrón asked.

“When he moves fast and you can’t understand what he’s saying, then he’s pissed,” Wilo answered. “When he moves slow and you still can’t understand what he’s saying, he’s all right.”

Noodles staggered toward us, his arms flailing, as if boxing—huffing, puffing and dropping mucus from his nose.

“Get the hell out of here,
pinche,”
Wilo said as he stood up and pushed the wino aside.

“You thinks youse are tuss dues … you ain’t so tuss,” Noodles said, throwing sloppy left hooks and uppercuts into the air.

Wilo placed his hand over Noodles’ head, whose wiry body looked like a strand from a dirty mop. Wilo was also thin and slippery. The rest of us laughed and laughed at the two
flaquillos
goofing around.

“Ah leave the
vato
alone, homeboy,” Clavo suggested. “Let’s break out another bottle.”

As we cooked, shared wine and told stories of
jainas
and the little conquests, of fights for honor, homeys and the ’hood, a gray Mercury sedan with its headlights turned off crept up the road. Wilo was the closest up the slope to the street. He looked over at the Mercury, then frowned.

“Anybody recognize the
ranfla?”
Wilo inquired.

“Chale,”
Chicharrón responded. “It looks too funky to be gang-bangers.”

“Unless that’s what they want it to look like.”

Wilo moved up the slope from the field, followed by Clavo, Chicharrón and Little Man. Fernie stayed back with Noodles and me. Wilo and Clavo were the first ones to hit the street as the Mercury delayed a turn around a curve.

Clavo moved to one side of the Mercury, its occupants covered in darkness. He stretched out his arms and yelled out: “Here stand The Animal Tribe—
¡y qué!”

The Mercury stopped. A shadow stepped out of a bashed-in side door, a sawed-off shotgun in his hands. Another shadow pushed an automatic rifle out the side window.

“Sangra Diablos!
¡Qué rifa!”
the dude with the shotgun yelled out. Then a blast snapped at the night air.

Wilo and Chicharrón fell back down the slope. Automatic gunfire followed them as they rolled in the dirt. The bullets skimmed off tree branches, knocked over trash cans and ricocheted off walls. Wilo ended up face-down; Chicharrón landed on his butt. Noodles knelt behind the sofa, whimpering. The cracking sounds stopped. The Mercury sped off, its tires throwing up dirt and pebbles behind it.

I could see the car speeding down another hill. I ran up the slope, slipping and sliding toward the road. On the street, Little Man kneeled over Clavo, who lay sprawled on the ground and trembling. Half of Clavo’s face was shot full of pellets, countless black, steaming round holes; his eye dripping into the dirt.

Wilo and the others climbed up and rushed up to Little Man. Fernie began jumping up and down like he had been jolted with lightning, letting out
gritos.
I kept looking at Clavo’s face, thinking something stupid like how he was such a dummy, always taking chances, all the time being “the dude.” Then I squatted on the ground, closed my eyelid and let a tear stream down the side of my face.

Windows flung upwards. Doors were pushed aside. People bolted out of their homes. Mothers cursed in Spanish from behind weather-beaten picket fences.

As Clavo was taken to the hospital, Fernie talked about getting all the Tribe together, about meeting later that night, about guns and warfare and
“ya estuvo”—
that’s it. A war, fought for generations between Lomas and Sangra, flared up again.

Later, as I walked down the hills on the way back home, sirens tore across the sky and a sheriff’s helicopter hovered nearby, beaming a spotlight across shacks and brush, over every hole and crevice of the neighborhood.

I mounted a fence which wound around a dirt embankment, hoping to get out of the helicopter’s sights. I looked over the other side and there overturned at the bottom of the gully, to be ravaged by scavengers for parts, to be another barrio monument, lay an ice cream truck.

A few years after our family moved to the L.A. area, other family members followed: cousins, aunts, uncles, grandmothers. Members of my mother’s family in particular stayed with us for various periods and some later found work and their own places to live. I remember my cousins Lilo, Rafas, Bune, Miguelito, Alfonso and La Maye—later Gloria, Ninfa and her Anglo husband (both of whom later died in an auto accident while on a highway in Arizona). Then Tío Kiko, his wife Agustina and their four children decided to stay and relocate to an apartment on Muscatel Street.

And there was Tía Chucha, the one everyone called crazy. Oh sure, she once ran out naked to catch a postman with a letter that didn’t belong to us. I mean she had this annoying habit of boarding city buses and singing at the top of her voice—one bus driver even refused to go on until she got off. But crazy? To me, she was the wisp of the wind’s freedom, a music-maker, who often wrote song lyrics, told stories and recited dirty jokes. She would come unexpected—and often uninvited—and burst into our home with a guitar across her back and a bag full of presents, including homemade colognes and perfumes that smelled something like rotting fish at the tuna cannery.

I secretly admired Tía Chucha, the most creative influence in my childhood, while others talked holier-than-thou about her irreverence, her eccentricities, as if the craziness didn’t threaten to thunder out of any of us at one time or another.

But the first one of the family I remember coming to visit us in South San Gabriel was my cousin Pancho. I was about 10 years old, Rano was 13, when Pancho entered our lives.

In his late teens, Pancho was muscular, darkly handsome with fine features and tightly-woven hair. Pancho traveled throughout the country: working in Texas, staying in a Tucson flat with other immigrants, visiting girlfriends in Denver, or spending a night in an Oakland jail. Every time Pancho came, he recounted a new adventure, with a smile and dimple which softened his otherwise hard look.

Fiercely independent and loud, he yanked my brother and me into his world of James Brown, Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke, of barroom dances, Old English 800 Malt Liquor Beer and weight lifting. He seemed to have seen it all before his 20s.

“Please, please, please … baby, please don’t go,”
he sang to a James Brown classic. On James’ quicker-paced record cuts, Pancho would imitate the man’s steps, forcing Rano and me to loosen our feet and try it. Pancho taught us soul, from the ruptured streets of Ciudad Juárez to every city ghetto he ended up in. He tutored us to the latest “hip” songs, the latest dance craze, the coolest what-to-say.

My mother and father tolerated Pancho, the son of my mother’s only sister Chila, although I guessed they weren’t too sure about what he was teaching us. But Rano and I were ecstatic whenever Pancho sauntered through the door. We tried to soak up Pancho’s leanness, his half-smile and tight eyes that made him look so knowledgeable, unafraid and wary.

Right away he detected how skinny we were.

“You guys could be runned over by spaghetti,” Pancho said.

One day Pancho came to the house with a set of weights. He coerced my brother and me to pump them day after day, eating loaves of bread for bulk and tons of eggs for protein. I strained and pulled and heaved and hauled the weights with my ten-year-old’s body, until one day in school I felt a sharp pain below my abdomen. The nurse checked it out and then had me taken to a doctor for more exams. It turned out I had ruptured myself, the sac that held my bottom intestine had a slight rip and threatened to spill its contents, and my life along with it.

My parents took me to White Memorial Hospital in Boyle Heights where surgery had been scheduled to repair the rupture. While they were at it, they decided I should get circumcised.

In one of those peculiarities of life, the ritual circumcision was somehow overlooked at Saint Joseph’s Maternity Hospital in El Paso where I was born. Being born to a non-citizen, I could see how. They threw the illegals over the border as soon as the babies emerged. Mama apparently thought of taking care of it later, but there wasn’t much time—what with moving to L.A. and all. Just one of those things that got missed, I guess.

I could survive without the circumcision, of course, but I wasn’t doing a good job of cleaning myself and had developed some sores. So the call was “off with the foreskin.”

The hospital could have been a medieval castle, filled with shrieks, broken bodies, smells of illness and medicines and grim, cruel faces everywhere. At the children’s ward, there were kids worse off than me, with horrific diseases, defects and traumas. The crying all night, the hurried staff, the worried parents—I thought maybe I had died and this was hell.

One night after the surgery, a pain crept up in my newly-rearranged member—a slow throbbing at first, soon it became intolerable. I hollered and evoked my mother’s name. Nurses swaggered in, bothered and tired. They looked at the wounds, the stitched flesh below the abdomen—then my penis. A shadow seemed to cross their faces. They muttered something to themselves. Somehow the circumcision had gone wrong. What? I exclaimed. Isn’t this a hospital? Weren’t these trained doctors?
How difficult could a simple circumcision
be!

Later orderlies pushed my bed into a surgery room; someone gave me a local anesthesia with a shot to my penis that seemed to penetrate my spine. A doctor came and began to undo the stitches, then cut and pull. I could see everything. Blood sprayed onto the front of his white coat.
I’d
never
be a man now!

Days later, I came home in a wheelchair, unable to move or even sit on a toilet. Eventually all would turn out okay, though, including my manhood. Pancho was there as Rano maneuvered the wheelchair up the steps and through the front screen door into the living room. Pancho flashed me a dimpled smile, called me a “dish rag,” then shook my hand.

“Get better,
trapo,”
Pancho said. “When you get rid of the machine, we’re going dancing.”

Clavo healed pretty well after the shooting, but he lost an eye, and I’m sure his nerve. The pellets, some unable to be removed, left unsightly scars on the right side of his face. Chicharrón and Wilo sensed he wanted out. We understood his dilemma, yet we didn’t want him to leave us. We couldn’t be
los cuatro.
It wouldn’t be the same. So the first real good weekend for Clavo, we decided to organize a trip to a “real” beach.