Pecked to death by ducks (29 page)

"Fuck . . . vegetables," Party Boy said, and Bernardo was off again about the cars. You want true spoke wheels ($600), and little tiny, thin tires with about half an inch of whitewall on them, the 560s or 520s ($150). And you'll need to get rid of your twenty-inch stock steering wheel and replace it with an eight-inch chain, welded into a circle and chromed ($20). Then there's your

stereo and tapes ($200) and when you have $1,000 together, you'll want your ride painted to your design. A diamond-tuck crushed-velvet interior job goes for about $500 in town, half that in Tijuana. Of course, you'll lower your car, but that causes problems on sloping driveways and over speed bumps, so when you have about $800, you can put in hydraulics—lifts, juice— and make your car do push-ups.

Engines are not modified for speed. That's for the Anglo kids who run the other side of town in cars that say Trans-Am on the side with the back end all jacked up. "Roadsniffers," Bernardo called them.

"Lowriders," he said solemnly, "are slow riders."

Bernardo saw the scene in the parking lot as a gigantic party for mechanical artists, a place where lowriders could display their work. The key word, he said, was unity, Chicano unity.

"Unity," I said, "Jesus, what about that?"

There was another fight in progress not forty yards away. "Hey," Bernardo said, "if a vato gets bad with you, you don't want to turn away with your tail between your legs." A couple of police materialized out of nowhere—they were bareheaded, no provocative riot gear—and the fight disintegrated. Party Boy was stumbling around in the vicinity, and I wondered if he had enough sense not to ask them if they were Catholic.

Okay, Bernardo said, I was here on a bad night. Sometimes there are no fights at all. But even when there are, they are one-on-one, no organized shit like East L.A. where the car clubs are sometimes more like war clubs. Their operations are planned with maps and CBs and walkie-talkies—the whole enchilada. The object is to take a tire iron to some car belonging to a rival club and make off with the plaque in the back window. Then you fly the plaque with the vanquished club's name on it in your back window. Upside down. Then someone burns down the president's house. Then the guns come out. It's West Side Story on wheels.

In San Jose car clubs have gotten big again in the last few years, and there is a central council designed to keep them at peace. On weekend nights there may be thirty-some clubs repre-

sented in this parking lot, perhaps the world's largest regular gathering of lowriders.

"And you want to write about KJ," Bernardo snorted. "Okay, some vatos deal to get money to cherry out their ride. But how many dealers can there be? Most lowriders I know have jobs. A lot are married, with kids. And they're not going to go getting all kristalized, man. One KJ costs twenty-five dollars. You do four a week, that's a hundred dollars you can be putting into your ride.

"Mira, I'm no hypocrite. I smoked KJ, everybody has. It's a good high. But everybody knows that it burns your brain cells. I don't like to be around people who smoke KJ, man. One vato poked me in the back with a knife behind KJ, man, I went to the hospital. And you know what else? People who smoke KJ all the time are ashamed, man. You talk to them when they're straight, they're ashamed. They don't want anyone to know that they're burning up their brains."

The two cops came by again, hurrying a guy in handcuffs toward the squad cars parked on the periphery of the lot. The guy was dressed like Party Boy, but you couldn't tell from the distance.

Bernardo said that what I ought to do is find someone who had his ride together—anyone, my choice—and cruise around with him for a day. "See if he talks about KJ or cars. Give the lowriders a chance."

"Yeah," I said, "maybe I'll do that."

"Make me a promise," Bernardo said, and he kept at me until I finally did.

I was cruising on Saturday afternoon with Huero when he decided to show me some placas, those walls of stylized graffiti you see around Tropicana. Huero's personal favorite was several feet high, written in spray paint on the back of the McDonald's near Welch Park, a prime cruising spot. The script had that peculiar Aztec-style Chicano graffiti artists strive for, and it read "Huero of Sa Jo." For good measure he had added a "14," which means northern California, as opposed to southern California, which is "13."

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 250

Huero got arrested because of that particular placa. The police took him off to court. They argued that Huero was something of a flamboyant and well-known character in the barrio, that everyone knew him as Huero, and that he had even modified the grill-work of his extremely noticeable car to read ''Huero."

Huero, for his part, said that many people in the barrio share his street name, which refers to lightly complected Chicanos or Mexicans. Literally, the name means white man, and for all Huero knew, maybe some white guy came down to the McDonald's near Welch Park and wrote "Huero" on the wall in Aztec script.

Perhaps the judge agreed. Maybe he took note of Huero's wounds. He had been hit fifteen times in Vietnam. One of his legs and one of his arms don't work so well, and just at the outside corner of one eye there is a bullet-sized groove that runs back to an ear pretty much chewed away. Huero earned a Congressional Medal of Honor in 1969, and the judge might have taken this into account before deciding whether he was going to put a thirty-one-year-old man in the slammer for writing on some wall with spray paint.

Then again, Huero's luck may have had something to do with the rifa. It is sometimes written, sometimes it appears like this: = r=. The word means quarrel, and a rifa on a placa means "Don't mess with this, because anything you write on my placa reflects back on you." The rifa is a spell, a little bit of magic, and as much as anything, it might have been the rifa that brought Huero through his big graffiti bust.

Cruising with Huero on a warm afternoon is a little like being handed the key to the barrio. First of all, he has sunk over six thousand dollars into his '75 Chevy Monte Carlo, jacking it up to the really florid heights of the baroque lowrider style. From the chrome grillwork, reading "Huero," back, the car is all color and splash. The basic color is star-burst bronze, and brown and amber tendrils snake through the long, off-white side panels. These tendrils are interspersed with vertical blue and light blue flames that look a bit like desert plants in some lights. Indeed, the trunk sports a representational desert scene with cacti and an otherwise naked girl wearing a sombrero. Under that scene are the words

"Mi Vida Loca," —my crazy life. On both rear fender wells are the words "Lowrider's Dream," and on both opera windows, painted in white, is the suggestion "Let's fall in love."

We were cruising through Tropicana—down Havana and around Florida and through Sumatra—and people on their lawns would shout, "Hey, Huero, man," and Huero would pull over. People stepped to the car, alert for any new changes.

"Hey, Huero, man, when did you throw crush into your ride?"

Just last week as a matter of fact. The light blue diamond-tuck crushed-velvet interior covers the doors, the rear seat bench, and extends into the rear window well. The front buckets have been replaced with padded swivel seats, and they are covered in shiny bright blue vinyl with silver metal flake, and that same material covers the ceiling. The little glass sunroof Huero installed is tinted a gentle purple, and the sun streaming through on the crush and the metal flake, on the silver brocade scarf hanging from the rearview mirror, gives the interior the stained-glass atmosphere of a Mexican church. The hood ornament is a very substantial swooping silver eagle.

Still, the most important thing about Huero's ride is his wife, Babe. She rides to his right, and on the dash, just in front of her, are four golden letters reading babe. She is a good deal darker than Huero, and they laugh about this a lot. They laugh about everything. They are so much in love it is simultaneously delightful and embarrassing: always stealing quick kisses, always tickling and touching one another.

Babe works as a counselor in the high schools. She reads Margaret Mead and uses words like "ethnocentricity," words that send poor Huero into paroxysms of laughter.

For Huero, everything and everyone is wonderful. I was wonderful because I was in San Jose spending my own money to find out about lowriders. Well, not exactly. I explained that I was getting expenses and being paid on top of it. No matter, Huero was happy to have me with him.

And it is at this point that many a lowrider might fire up a joint of Columbo and just cruise at fifteen, twenty miles an hour with the purple streaming through the roof onto the silver brocade

scarf and the willow trees swaying in the breeze outside—watch it here, the intersection, you have to take them at a diagonal so you don't bottom out—and El Chicano or Malo blasting out of the stereo, all horns and drums, or maybe that all-time lowrider slow dance classic, Santo and Johnny's "Sleepwalk," and here comes another lowrider, fifteen, twenty miles an hour, taking the intersection on the diagonal and you should shift into neutral and blast the pipes in greeting and maybe, while the road ahead is clear, give Babe a kiss.

On any given Saturday afternoon about half the car clubs will be meeting. Members drive to the president's house, and if a car is dirty, or dented, or riding on a spare wheel, fines will be given out. I was not really sure of Huero's position. He said that he was a member of the National Lowriders, but he'd dropped out. Now, for photos of his ride, he'd like to be flying a plaque. We stopped at the president's house. He was a bright young guy named Jesse, and I overheard him tell Huero that "you got a dent man, I can't let you fly our plaque." Time passed, and more cars arrived, but we didn't seem to be invited to the meeting.

We cruised over to Disco East where some of the Street Escorts were hanging out. The Escorts have thirty-six cars, while the National Lowriders have fourteen. They seemed to be a better disciplined, more organized club. A few of them commented favorably on Huero's ride, and somewhere along the line there was a misunderstanding. We got the impression that just for today we might be able to fly the Escort's plaque in Huero's ride. Following the Escorts to their president's house, Huero commented on what a bunch of good vatos they all were. We socialized on the front lawn for a time, and someone asked Huero to please move his ride. It was parked in the middle of a long line of Escort cars, and it stood out like a giant ink stain on the flag. The Escorts favor solid-color paint jobs—they like 1963 Chevy Impalas with skirts. Their interiors are stark, dark leather. No Escort would even think of installing a hood ornament.

So they wanted Huero's car out of the way, and he moved it, still smiling but clearly hurt. The meeting started, and we were told that it was private. We stood for a time on the front lawn

253 A OTHER PEOPLE'S LIVES

with maybe half a dozen other hopefuls. Huero went back to sit in his ride. His limp seemed more pronounced, and Babe talked softly to him all during the long shuffle back to the Lowrider's Dream.

"Why did they have to be so hostile?" Babe said. There was a quaver in her voice. "The vibes were so bad."

"What did you say, Honita?" Huero asked. She was speaking on the grooved side of his face where he had no hearing at all.

"Shh, baby," she said, "you're not supposed to hear." Then, softly, to me, she said, "He was hurt in the war. He shouldn't have to conform."

And maybe Babe meant the car with its splashy paint job and the silver eagle on the hood. Maybe she meant Huero himself, all the time displaying his embarrassing love for her, for all lowriders, for people in general. Maybe she meant that great, happy, goofy smile he usually wore, and maybe she meant his desire to help, his sincerity, his need to be loved in return.

"He shouldn't have to conform," Babe said. Her eyes glistened. "It isn't fair, is it?"

"No," I said, "it isn't."

"He deserves better, doesn't he?"

"Yes," I said, "he does."

In mid-'77, in the midst of San Jose's PCP blizzard, Project DARE, a private, nonprofit drug-education and rehabilitation program, introduced a PCP treatment center, and in the spring of this year I spoke with some clients there, chronic KJ smokers trying to dump the habit. Sitting to my immediate left was a twenty-one-year-old woman with small black tear-shaped tattoos falling from the corner of her left eye. This is a style sometimes seen in the barrio, and it is called "Sad Eyes." Originally, each black teardrop was supposed to represent a year spent in jail, and quite often the tattoos were self-inflicted with a ballpoint pen during a bad downtime in some cell. Less frequently, you may see men wearing sad eyes. In some cases the teardrop has nothing to do with prison, but is, instead, something of a statement about the condition of the soul.

And my friend to the left had them, for whatever reason. Her hair was dyed a darkish blond and teased into an elaborate bouffant. She wore high-heeled boots, very tight bell-bottoms, and a tight, dark, knit halter top: all very much of one particular lowrider style. Women who adopt this style often have street names: Spider Woman, Dancing Lady, Sad Eyes. The woman to my left did not call herself Sad Eyes, but since I have changed names and places and descriptions of many of the people and cars throughout and because my friend seemed so bewildered, because her large brown eyes echoed such pain, because one agency or another took her child from her after she fell into a serious KJ habit, I have decided to call her Sad Eyes.

She was trying to quit. All the Project DARE clients were. During the first few weeks they come into this large, comfortable room every day. Depression, sometimes suicidal depression, follows withdrawal from a chronic habit, and the temptation is very great to spark up a KJ and kick back. So they come in for moral support, to be reminded of how clearheaded, how fresh and alive, they feel without KJ.

Most of the clients I talked to had been clean for days, even weeks, and they were clear-eyed and articulate. Except for Sad Eyes. It took her nearly half an hour to complete the simple form —name, address, signature—giving me permission to talk to her. Her soft eyes refused to focus, and they moved in slow, short arcs, like a trapped nocturnal animal staring into a light.