Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (16 page)

Under the sagging couch, behind the color TV, in the lower shelf of a bookcase, and in a closet were a wide assortment of well-used blankets, comforters, and pillows: the living room was not only for relaxing, it was evidently also a dormitory. Including us, nine men, I would soon learn, slept there most nights. Those who were able paid Martín some rent or bought groceries. Most left during the day; if they stayed around, they helped with the welding. I was a guest at Martín’s Decorative Ironworks and Hostel.

Oso began to bark again, and Martín left the kitchen to see who was at the gate. He returned with Anabel, the laundry girl. This was definitely a step up the ladder: being able to
employ
someone to do the “women’s jobs.” The guys nodded their approval—Martín was doing all right. She stopped and stared at me as she came in.
“It’s okay,”
Martín reassured her,
“there’s no problem with him.”

But apparently that was not her concern.
“What happened to your eye?”
she said worriedly, coming over to take a closer look. I began to explain, but already she had gone over to Luis.
“Where’s the salt?”
Getting punched out was turning out to be a great way to get female attention.

Anabel mixed the salt with a few drops of water in a saucer, and then came and leaned over me.
“I’m going to put this under your eye,”
she said.
“It will keep it from getting black.”
She smoothed it on gently.
“Make sure you put on more if this comes off.”
I promised I would.

As we sat, more of the other residents returned. Some stopped to chat, but others, looking exhausted from a long day, simply nodded, slipped into the living room, found their blankets, took off their shoes, and lay down. By the time we finally said good night to Uncles Cándido and Esteban, there were seven bodies around the perimeter of the living room, and the peaceful drone of slow, heavy breathing. We scrounged some extra blankets, staked out small plots from what was left of the floor, and joined them. I felt curiously at home: though we were strangers here, there was a great feeling of security, of safety in numbers, of the peace of routine and stasis. We weren’t going to be moving for a while; we were in the company of future friends. I slept hard and long.

The next day we showered and hung around, resting, watching TV, and watching Martín work. He had the work habits of America’s first immigrants—up at dawn, to bed at dusk, quick and efficient labor all during the day, which somehow he mixed with constant banter with those around him. He was my age, built like an acrobat, and, until I stood next to him one day, I would have said he was my size—but Martín was in fact two or three inches shorter. The illusion came from his commanding presence, and his dynamism. He had dark hair, over his ears, a black mustache, and glimmering dark eyes, always ready to size up the next task, return a gibe, or make a scandalous remark. His favorite winter shirt was a white turtleneck sweater—at least, it was white at the beginning of the week. That it was white again after the laundry girl visited every weekend was a tribute to another kind of industry.

Though the business didn’t have a name, sign, or telephone listing, the phone was always ringing. Martín’s reputation for good, inexpensive ironwork had spread by word of mouth over the years, first through the Mexican community and then, as Martín learned some English, into black and white areas. As “Dogie,” Martín’s oldest friend and trusted helper told me, they had taken English classes together for a while in the evenings at a local high school. Martín, who had not finished high school in Mexico, had studied furiously for six months. He would have studied a lot longer if the teacher hadn’t made the mistake of telling him how good his English was getting. The compliment, to Martín, was as good as a diploma.
“What I don’t know yet I am sure to pick up,”
he told Dogie.
“Now I know enough for business, so now I know enough.”
Though perhaps three-quarters of the callers were Spanish speaking, Martín always answered the phone with “Hello.” It was a courtesy to his customers-to-be—as well as, perhaps, a first-line defense against La Migra.

Those first few days the guys had little desire to go outside the gates; one of the other young men had told Victor there were
“lots of Negroes out there.”
This caused much murmuring and consternation among the others; Carlos went so far as to verify it with his cousin.
"What's wrong with the Negroes?”
I asked, remembering their suspicions of the Santa Monica Holiday Inn clerk who had helped them out. They all just shook their heads. It had the vagueness of something conveyed, overheard, not the certainty of personal experience. I felt sure it was a superstition that firsthand dealings would dispel.

“Negroes” sometimes passed along the sidewalk outside the big gate and looked in to see what was up; Martín knew some of them, and occasionally waved. It was Friday, and that night Martín said he’d take us out. The five of us, his old friend Dogie, and one-armed Luis, all piled into his ’69 Chevrolet Impala, four in front and four in back. This particular evening, desiring some personal space in the way Americans do, I was a little exasperated to see that, even though there was no need for it—Martín had another vehicle, the truck—we were going the sardine route again. I made some joke, dropped some hints, about the difficulty of breathing or something, but got no response. Deciding to be more blunt, I inquired: “Doesn’t this make the police suspicious, an older car like this filled with so many people?” Dogie answered no, that in L.A. you don’t worry about things like that—in a way that made me wish I had never asked. To the Mexicans, there simply was nothing out of the ordinary about this sort of travel.

We pulled into a McDonald’s drive-in lane and up to the menu board. Martín did all the talking; he was no foreigner here. “Eight Big Mac, eight larch french fry, eight Coke, big.” After a few moments the order taker repeated Martín’s request, but it was all for naught: Martín was already pulling around to the pickup window.

Martín insisted on paying for everything; I was the only one to protest, perhaps because I was the only one with money, perhaps because I just did not understand. "Ted," said Martín in English, "my life is good now. I have lots of money, I have lots of work. Sometime, maybe I don't have money. Then, you buy the Big Mac!" The others laughed as they heard a phrase they recognized, and Martín smiled. "Lots of money," to Martín, was more like poverty level where I came from. His cash flow might be okay, but Martín couldn't have much to fall back on if problems arose. Certainly he didn't have health insurance; probably he would lose everything if the INS were to find out about him. And yet Martín was more generous—generosity considered in relative terms, the most meaningful—than 99 percent of the people I had ever known.

We drove a couple of miles down the boulevard to a crowded parking lot, where we parked and Dogie distributed the food. If you think a sedan filled with eight people feels crowded, try one filled with eight people eating McDonald’s hamburgers, trying to balance their Cokes, trying to find a place for all the used wrappers. I experienced a small wave of claustrophobia, but it subsided. Perhaps it was Martín’s jokes, or the bright
ranchera
music on the AM radio; but probably it was all these guys with uncertain futures, at the mercy of any powers that be, having such an unabashed great time, enjoying each other’s company, possessed of nothing in the world but their hope and their friends, led by one of their own who had made it in this big foreign city. There was a lot to make you feel good in that old car.

Dinner finished, we climbed out of the Impala—not to take a pee, I realized, but because we were at our destination. I was a bit alarmed as we walked toward the squat little bar, with the old neon sign on top advertising “Rita’s Elbow Rest”—there were a couple of pickup trucks in the parking lot, and it looked like a real redneck hangout.

“I thought we were going to the ‘El Paso,’ ” I said to Martín.

“This is the ‘El Paso,’ ” he said. “They just changed the name. Didn’t bother to get a new sign.”

As we entered, I realized that the era of
gringos
in Rita’s Elbow Rest had come to an end. It was rednecks now, not Hispanics, who would be worried upon walking into the dimly lit bar. There was not a blue eye in sight. A full-size pool table dominated the floor, illuminated by a light hanging directly overhead; everything else lay in its shadow: the bar itself, at the end of the room, the assorted stools along the walls, the doorway leading to the rest rooms. With our arrival, the place was very nearly filled.

“
Puros mexicanos?”
I asked Martín, who was at the bar, ordering eight beers.

“
Mexicanos y salvadoreños,”
he answered
. “The owners are from El Salvador, and there are a lot of Salvadorans in Los Angeles. But we’re closer to a Mexican neighborhood.”

Besides no
gringos,
there were virtually no women. Two waitresses helped to take beer orders and collect the empty bottles, but bars, for Mexicans, were places that men gathered, not women. Unless you were looking for a hooker, you met women somewhere else, someplace less sinful.

Carlos and I, leaning by the pool cue rack, assessed the female situation. One waitress was rather heavy, wearing vast synthetic slacks and a blouse of the sort once known as a muumuu. Because of the limited space, she brushed against almost everyone as she parted the sea of men, taking orders. She piqued a certain sort of interest.
“Mucho jamón por dos huevos,”
was all Carlos had to say—lots of ham for two eggs. The other waitress was slender, dressed in jeans and a soft blouse, with a pretty face and hair that looked authentically auburn. Probably, I thought, she was Salvadoran—there were fewer mestizos there and more direct descendants of Europeans, especially among those from the professional classes who had had the wherewithal to escape the civil war. She looked up and saw me watching her.

My friends were my passport, and I had no trouble with other patrons of the bar, though a couple came up just to chat and see what I was all about. Dogie challenged me to a game of pool. I beat him but then lost the next game to Martín. All the while, every time I looked up, it seemed I was meeting the glance of the pretty waitress. This was more than chance, as no one on earth seemed more adept at avoiding men’s eyes than the Mexican and Central American women I had been around in the past few months—and with the men as aggressive as they were, it was a necessary survival skill.

But it presented a problem. The better looking of the two lone women in the crowded bar seemed to find me—an outsider—attractive, and the feeling was mutual. For months I had been walking a sort of sexual tightrope with my Mexican friends. I didn’t want to show undue interest in females they had designs on for fear of awakening macho rivalry. And yet at the same time it was important to show some sort of interest—some wolfish hunger—to reassure them of my heterosexuality. The unaggressive man was likely to be the butt of the next Mexican faggot joke.

The kind of outsider I was—an American—complicated matters too. A Mexican man could be charismatic, physically attractive, influential, and even rich, but still he might not be as powerful—and, therefore, as attractive on the macho scale—as an American with the same qualities. Machismo is obsessed with rivalry, and to a citizen of that proud but very poor country to the south, northern neighbors could be powerful rivals indeed. I enjoyed a degree of acceptance at the bar—but I was worried, just the same, about the insecurities that might be simmering just under the surface of the camaraderie, awaiting a crisis to bring them out. As always, I had to watch my step.

And, of course, the final complication was that, after so many weeks of fraternal living, this woman looked very pretty. I swallowed hard when she came up and asked me if I wanted another beer, but managed a smile and a
“Sí. ”
The next time I looked up she was behind the bar, looking at me again and pointing to a bottle she had placed in front of an empty stool. I took a deep breath, moved to the bar, and took a seat. She had green eyes, wet-looking lips, a nice voice. She asked where I was from.

“
Denver—do you know where that is?”

“
No, but it must be nicer than here. Any place would be nicer than here. ”

“
You mean Los Angeles?”

“
Yeah, Los Angeles, the bar ... I’m so tired of it.”

“
Are you salvadoreña?”
She nodded.
“From the capital?”
She couldn’t have been from the countryside. I had read much about El Salvador, and was eager to learn more. But she didn’t want to talk about El Salvador. She wanted to talk about me.

“
Where did you learn Spanish? You speak it perfectly!”

That was a lie.
“Here and there. In school and in some other countries.”

“
I’d love to go to some other countries! But, oh—my situation... I can’t travel anywhere.”

“
Why not?”

“
Well, uhh, you know
—
documents.”

“
Ahh.”
I looked around the bar to size up the reaction to our little chat. My eyes caught Martín’s as he bent over the pool table to line up a shot. The quick wink and lifting of the eyebrows a couple times quickly was his equivalent of a thumbs-up, a “go for it.”

“
What’s your name?”

“
Ted. It’s short for
Theodore—
‘Teodoro,’ in Spanish.”