The Five Acts of Diego Leon (15 page)

An old man in a straw hat asked, “Is this your first time north?”

“Yes,” Diego responded.

The man in the suit chuckled. “Be careful. Some of them hate us. Won’t serve you in restaurants. Won’t rent rooms or houses out to you.”

“No dogs or Mexicans allowed,” the old man responded. “That’s what the signs will say.” He coughed then spit into a rag stained with yellow spots.

“Say you’re European,” said the first man. “Most of them can’t ever tell the difference.”

“You’re fair-skinned,” responded the old man, placing the rag
back in his pocket. “Hair’s light enough. You’ll pass. Look at me.” He pointed a crooked finger at his face. “Me? I’m much too dark. Too indio.” He chuckled. But Diego didn’t want to have to lie about who he was, ever again. Still, what other choice did he have?

The plant was in a brick building on the American side of the bridge. Inside, the men were separated from the women, and they were led into a giant room with tiled floors and warm wooden walls. They lined up along the wall and were told to hold up their passports, which were inspected. They were then told to undress and to leave everything behind. They would then take their clothing to the laundry where they would be washed and disinfected. Naked, the men were taken into a cavernous room with large drums full of white powder. One by one, they were asked to step forward. Guards with masks over their faces scooped the powder out with small trowels and doused their bodies.

“Cover your mouth,” shouted a guard to Diego when it was his turn. “Make sure not to breathe any of this in,” he said. Another guard came around and ordered Diego to lift his arms, to turn around, to spread his legs. Diego closed his eyes and his mouth, yet the powder still burned his eyes and made him sneeze.

Then they were led down a long, narrow hallway into a room with wooden stalls along either side where inspectors waited. They looked inside his mouth and behind his ears, and they raked his hair with a metal wand while they asked him a series of questions:

How old are you?

Where are you going?

Have you ever had lice?

It was humiliating, and his clothes smelled awful, and the powder dusted his skin, and he coughed and coughed until his eyes watered, until his chest hurt. He sat, catching his breath, and waited, relieved to be through with it, grateful that he was no longer standing in a crowded room full of naked men. Once outside a guard told him where to find the train station.

Arriving now, he was informed that the train to Los Angeles would be arriving the next morning. He sat down, frustrated, tired, his skin dry and itchy, white powder still in his hair and eyelashes. What would he do? He rose and left the station and wandered
around the city, down avenues lined with shoe stores, meat markets, and bars. Next to a small church, he came across a movie theater with a blinking marquee and a ticket booth. The movie playing was called
It
. The banner stretched over the theater’s entrance featured the black silhouette of a curvy woman and, written in big, bold lettering, Diego read:

Betty Lou Spencer, played by Bow, is a beautiful and poor, yet spry, shop girl working at “Waltham’s: The World’s Largest Store.” In the opening scene, Betty catches a glimpse of her new boss, Cyrus Waltham Jr., played by a Spanish actor named Antonio Moreno. Betty instantly falls in love with the handsome, sophisticated man. Unbeknownst to her, Cyrus is already romantically linked to blond socialite Adela Von Norman. Through cunning, wit, humor, and a healthy dose of “It,” the spunky, poor shop girl manages to win over her wealthy boss and live a happy life. “IT,” the film had explained, was “that quality possessed by some which draws all others by its magnetic force. With IT you win all men if you are a woman—all women if you are a man. IT can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction.”

Did he have “It,” he wondered? Would he find “It” when he arrived in California?

He was forced to spend an uncomfortable night on a cold station bench, so when the train bound for Los Angeles arrived the next day and he boarded, he was relieved to be able to stretch out over his cushioned seat. Soon, he grew drowsy as he stared out the windows. On the north side, the new country passed before him—the wide deserts with their blooming wildflowers, the jagged peaks of the hills and mountains, the rolling sand dunes and the packs of roaming coyotes. Looking south, past a ring of low mountains, beyond a wide field, was Mexico. Everything was passing before him in quick, frantic explosions of light. That world, the one he’d known, was now composed of amorphous figures with no real definition or purpose,
uncomplicated and simple. The houses and animals, the very trees and rocks and mountains flattened out, became one-dimensional, as if that whole country was one giant prop, a mere imitation, as if that soil and the people bound to it were made of cardboard, like dolls. He remembered the dead men hanging from the telegraph poles and the passengers on the other train, their hands punching the glass windows or swatting the flames that jumped up and licked their skin away. He imagined dead priests and nuns, the fragments of their bones and tissue seeping out of their skulls and mixing with the dirt and grass and wildflowers of that ancient and pastoral land. The rocking of the train and the sound the wheels made as they brushed over the metal ruts was bliss. It was the sound of erasure, he knew, of things disintegrating and decomposing, of things fading away and returning to the earth and all its elements.

Los Angeles, California

March 1927

D
IEGO FELT EMPTY ON THE DAY THE TRAIN PULLED INTO THE
station alongside a simple building made of wood and plaster in downtown Los Angeles. He had made it safely, his feet touching the fertile soil of the great wide west. That new city looked out across the ocean, hanging there like a trembling raindrop at the tip of a leaf, its face staring out to the edge of the world. The past, Mexico, the life he would have lived had Diego stayed—it all felt worlds away now. Was this what his father experienced when he left San Antonio for Morelia? Empty? Ready for something new to come and fill him up? Diego took a deep breath as he followed the rest of the passengers through the glass doors that led to the street.

There was all manner of commotion around the train station. Boys held newspapers up in the air, their voices shouting over the honks and roars of cars. People shoved past him, nearly knocking Diego down. There were sailors in black-and-white uniforms, street preachers shouting out from paper bullhorns, and prostitutes soliciting men on the corners across the street. Everywhere there was the stench of automobile exhaust and oil and dust. It was a big city with grids of wide avenues flanked with concrete buildings rising many stories high, expansive parks where pedestrians strolled under shaded walkways and paths, a ring of low hills in the distance dotted with houses perched on their steep cliffs. Far off, past the city grid,
where the streets and avenues ended, was the ocean, the salt-scented air, the end of the earth.

“Just arrived?” a heavy man with big hands shouted at a girl in a pink dress and a cloche hat. “Need a place to stay?”

The girl said something then darted off, passing through a crowd where other men shouted at her.

“Looking to make it in pictures, honey?” one screamed.

“Sign up here for free screen tests!” cried another. “Free screen tests!”

“Clean beds and hot meals at the Rancho Hotel,” shouted a skinny man in a green vest. “Close to all the studios.”

Each girl that left the station was accosted, told about immediate screen tests and free rides to the homes of movie directors and producers. They all looked alike, all of them thin and dressed in plain skirts and blouses, wearing cheap furs dyed to look expensive, their hair neatly coiffed or marcelled, a quick and panicked feel to their steps.

“Clean rooms at the Ruby Rose. Close to MGM, Paramount, Pioneer, Frontier. Daily, weekly, and monthly rates at the Ruby Rose.”

He remembered his school English lessons and the practicing he would do with Carolina during their rehearsals. “Excuse me?” Diego spoke slowly, tapping the man on the shoulder. “You have rooms?” he asked.

“Do
we
got
rooms
?” The man turned around. “Only the best and most comfortable rooms in all the city.”

“I need one,” Diego said. “I haven’t got a lot of money.”

“Don’t you worry about that, son.” He led him to a truck with wooden sideboards and a tattered front seat. “Get in,” he said. “I’ll take you there.”

They drove down Broadway Avenue, lined with pawnshops and penny arcades, theaters and diners. There was noise, all manner of noise, and there were people everywhere. They passed a section where trucks with massive tires flattened out the land and hauled piles of dirt, and men in hardhats and overalls climbed like ants around and atop the great square base of a mammoth structure and
up toward its metal skeleton. That would be the city hall, the driver explained. He eyed Diego curiously.

“Say,” he said. “You foreign?”

“Excuse me?”

“I noticed your accent. You ain’t Mexican, are you? Because if you are, the Ruby Rose won’t rent to you.”

He recalled the conversation he had with the men when they were on their way to the disinfection plant. He would have to lie again. “No,” Diego said, remembering the lies his grandparents forced him to rehearse and memorize. “I’m French. I was born near Nice. My father was from—”

“I don’t need your life story, kid,” he said, interjecting. “As long as you ain’t Mexican, it’ll be fine.”

Diego stared out the car window. He found, as they drove down the street, the sun shining through the cracks between buildings, a sense of newness, of opportunity, of rejuvenation that was palpable, as if one could simply reach out and grab this and hold it for some time. The driver, who introduced himself as Mel, pointed things out. The palm trees. The San Gabriel Mountains, and, he said, “It’s a sight when they’re covered in snow while, down here in the city, it’s sunny and seventy-six degrees.” He pointed out the citrus groves and oil derricks along Wilshire Boulevard, the steel pumps bobbing their heads up and down like a herd of magnificent beasts. There was the beach, Mel said. The intricate and scenic highways threading throughout the Southland, perfect for long Sunday drives. There were the Big Red electric cars that would take you to the farmlands of San Fernando, the walnut groves in La Puente, the mission in San Gabriel. There’s a lot to do, Mel said. You’ll have fun. There’s everything, he told him, right here in Los Angeles. You won’t ever want to leave. He told him that the majority of the tenants at the Ruby Rose were actors and actresses. Hell, he said, chuckling. There were even a few circus sideshow performers.

“Performers?” Diego asked.

“Sideshow freaks,” he said. “You know?”

They worked around the studios, taking bit parts in films here and there whenever someone with special talents was needed, he
told him. “So don’t expect a warm welcome, sonny,” Mel said. “That lot doesn’t take kindly to outsiders.”

He said they were a suspicious group, very guarded, not likely to open up much unless they got to know you. Two of the units were currently occupied with circus folks. There was Aldo the Strongman and his wife, Mary, the tattooed lady, and their daughter, Anabelle. The other unit was occupied by Kristof, the contortionist.

“Are you an actor too?” Diego asked.

“Me? Nah,” he said. “I get a cut of the first month of rent for each person I bring in. It ain’t much, but every little bit helps, you know?”

The boardinghouse was owned and operated by two sisters named Ruby and Rose. “Identical twins,” Mel told Diego as they parked and got out of the car. “They were really big in the vaudeville circuit. ‘The Dancing Deere Sisters’ is what they was called.”

They came out to Hollywood, determined to make it in films and instead ended up buying and running the boardinghouse. Quarreled over what to name the place and settled on the Ruby Rose. ’Course, Mel said, Ruby’s name came first on account of she was three minutes older than Rose.

Inside, the place was dark and shabby with imposing wood furniture, smudged plaster walls, and thick faded drapes. A thin old woman in a sequined outfit stood behind a large desk reading a newspaper.

“Hiya, Mel” she said, looking up. “How’s tricks?”

Mel removed his hat and shook his head. “Hi. Ruby?”

“Rose,” she snapped back, rolling up her newspaper and looking up at them. Her face was gaunt and tinged unnaturally yellow. Her eyelids were dusted bright white, her lips painted a vibrant red. She wore her hair pulled back in short pigtails. “Well, hello,” Rose said, regarding Diego.

“Hello.” He reached his hand out, and they shook.

“Friend here’s looking for a room,” said Mel.

“You’re in luck,” she said. “I got some empties.” She leaned in and beckoned Diego to come closer. He stepped forward and she lowered her voice. “One next to me’s free, handsome.” She chuckled
and slapped her knee. Rose wore thick stockings and shiny black tap shoes that clicked as she moved about.

“Rose,” shouted a voice. “Quit harassing the clients.” Ruby stepped out from behind a thin curtain draped across a doorway. She wore the same sequined outfit as her sister, the same color of makeup, and her hair in the same style. They looked so much alike it was unsettling and, as he watched them mill about, bickering with one another, the sight of the two of them made Diego uneasy.

“You okay?” the first twin asked.

“Yes,” he said, hesitating before answering. “Just tired. Thank you. Rose?”

Rose jabbed her elbow into Mel’s side. “Kid’s here but fifteen minutes and he can tell who’s who. You known us for fifteen years and
still
can’t tell the difference.”

“We’ll get you settled,” Ruby said, reaching for a key. “You just hang on.”

Mel put his cap back on. “Good luck, kid.” He turned and left.