Always Running

by Luis J. Rodriguez

  One day, my mother asked Rano and me to go to the grocery store. We decided to go across the railroad tracks into South Gate. In those days, South Gate was an Anglo neighborhood, filled with the families of workers from the auto plant and other nearby industry. Like Lynwood or Huntington Park, it was forbidden territory for the people of Watts.

  My brother insisted we go. I don’t know what possessed him, but then I never did. It was useless to argue; he’d force me anyway. He was nine then, I was six. So without ceremony, we started over the tracks, climbing over discarded market carts and tore-up sofas, across Alameda Street, into South Gate: all-white, all-American.

  We entered the first small corner grocery store we found. Everything was cool at first. We bought some bread, milk, soup cans and candy. We each walked out with a bag filled with food. We barely got a few feet, though, when five teenagers on bikes approached. We tried not to pay attention and proceeded to our side of the tracks. But the youths pulled up in front of us. While two of them stood nearby on their bikes, three of them jumped off theirs and walked over to us.

  “What do we got here?” one of the boys said. “Spics to order—maybe with some beans?”

  He pushed me to the ground; the groceries splattered onto the asphalt. I felt melted gum and chips of broken beer bottle on my lips and cheek. Then somebody picked me up and held me while the others seized my brother, tossed his groceries out, and pounded on him. They punched him in the face, in the stomach, then his face again, cutting his lip, causing him to vomit.

  I remember the shrill, maddening laughter of one of the kids on a bike, this laughing like a raven’s wail, a harsh wind’s shriek, a laugh that I would hear in countless beatings thereafter. I watched the others take turns on my brother, this terror of a brother, and he doubled over, had blood and spew on his shirt, and tears down his face. I wanted to do something, but they held me and I just looked on, as every strike against Rano opened me up inside.

  They finally let my brother go and he slid to the ground, like a rotten banana squeezed out of its peeling. They threw us back over the tracks. In the sunset I could see the Watts Towers, shimmers of 70,000 pieces of broken bottles, sea shells, ceramic and metal on spiraling points puncturing the heavens, which reflected back the rays of a falling sun. My brother and I then picked ourselves up, saw the teenagers take off, still laughing, still talking about those stupid greasers who dared to cross over to South Gate.

  Up until then my brother had never shown any emotion to me other than disdain. He had never asked me anything, unless it was a demand, an expectation, an obligation to be his throwaway boy-doll. But for this once he looked at me, tears welled in his eyes, blood streamed from several cuts—lips and cheeks swollen.

  “Swear—you got to swear—you’ll never tell anybody how I cried,” he said.

  I suppose I did promise. It was his one last thing to hang onto, his rep as someone who could take a belt whipping, who could take a beating in the neighborhood and still go back risking more—it was this pathetic plea from the pavement I remember. I must have promised.

  It was a warm September day when my mother pulled me out of bed, handed me a pair of pants and a shirt, a piece of burnt toast and dragged me by the arm toward 109th Street School. We approached a huge, dusty brick building with the school’s name carved in ancient English lettering across the entrance. Mama hauled me up a row of steps and through two large doors.

  First day of school.

  I was six years old, never having gone to kindergarten because Mama wanted me to wait until La Pata became old enough to enter school. Mama filled out some papers. A school monitor directed us to a classroom where Mama dropped me off and left to join some parents who gathered in the main hall.

  The first day of school said a lot about my scholastic life to come. I was taken to a teacher who didn’t know what to do with me. She complained about not having any room, about kids who didn’t even speak the language. And how was she supposed to teach anything under these conditions! Although I didn’t speak English, I understood a large part of what she was saying. I knew I wasn’t wanted. She put me in an old creaky chair near the door. As soon as I could, I sneaked out to find my mother.

  I found Rano’s class with the mentally disabled children instead and decided to stay there for a while. Actually it was fun; they treated me like I was everyone’s little brother. But the teacher finally told a student to take me to the main hall.

  After some more paperwork, I was taken to another class. This time the teacher appeared nicer, but distracted. She got the word about my language problem.

  “Okay, why don’t you sit here in the back of the class,” she said. “Play with some blocks until we figure out how to get you more involved.”

  It took her most of that year to figure this out. I just stayed in the back of the class, building blocks. It got so every morning I would put my lunch and coat away, and walk to my corner where I stayed the whole day long. It forced me to be more withdrawn. It got so bad, I didn’t even tell anybody when I had to go the bathroom. I did it in my pants. Soon I stunk back there in the corner and the rest of the kids screamed out a chorus of “P.U.!” resulting in my being sent to the office or back home.

  In those days there was no way to integrate the non-English speaking children. So they just made it a crime to speak anything but English. If a Spanish word sneaked out in the playground, kids were often sent to the office to get swatted or to get detention. Teachers complained that maybe the children were saying bad things about them. An assumption of guilt was enough to get one punished.

  A day came when I finally built up the courage to tell the teacher I had to go to the bathroom. I didn’t quite say all the words, but she got the message and promptly excused me so I didn’t do it while I was trying to explain. I ran to the bathroom and peed and felt good about not having that wetness trickle down my pants leg. But suddenly several bells went on and off. I hesitantly stepped out of the bathroom and saw throngs of children leave their classes. I had no idea what was happening. I went to my classroom and it stood empty. I looked into other classrooms and found nothing. Nobody. I didn’t know what to do. I really thought everyone had gone home. I didn’t bother to look at the playground where the whole school had been assembled for the fire drill. I just went home. It got to be a regular thing there for a while, me coming home early until I learned the ins and outs of school life.

  Not speaking well makes for such embarrassing moments. I hardly asked questions. I just didn’t want to be misunderstood. Many Spanish-speaking kids mangled things up; they would say things like “where the beer and cantaloupe roam” instead of “where the deer and antelope roam.”

  That’s the way it was with me. I mixed up all the words. Screwed up all the songs.

  Eventually I did make friends. My brother often brought home a one-armed Mexican kid named Jaime. Sometimes we all hung out together. Jaime lost his arm when he was a toddler. Somehow he managed to get the arm stuck in the wringer of one of those old washing machines which pulled the clothes through two rollers. It tore his arm off at the socket. But later he made up for it with soccer feet and even won a couple of fights with his one good arm.

  And then there was Earl. I didn’t really know him until one day when we lined up following recess, he pulled the trenzas of a Mexican girl in our class named Gabriela. We all liked Gabriela. But she was also quiet, like me. So Earl pulled on her braids, the girl wailed, turned around and saw me standing there. Just then the teacher ran out of the classroom. Gabriela pointed in my direction. The one who never says anything. Because of this, I suffered through an hour’s detention, fuming in my seat the whole time.

  Later that evening, Earl came to my sister’s house where we were visiting. Seni answered the door and looked askance at him.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to know if the boy upstairs can play?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t think so.”

  “Tell him I got some mar
bles. If it’s okay, I’d like him to play with me.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t think so.”

  I looked down from the attic window and saw the tall, thin boy in striped shirt and blue jeans. Under an arm was a coffee can. Inside the can, marbles rattled whenever Earl moved.

  But going through Seni was becoming a chore. Earl looked past her to a large, round woman in a print dress: My mom. She looked at the boy and then yelled up the stairs in Spanish.

  “Go and play, Grillo,” she said. “You stay in the attic all the time. Go and play. Be like other boys. ¡Ya!”

  Earl waited patiently as the Rodríguez household quaked and quavered trying to get me downstairs and into the yard. Finally, I came down. Earl smiled broadly and offered me the can of marbles.

  “This is for taking the rap today, man.”

  I looked hard at him, still a little peeved, then reached out for the can and held the best marble collection I had ever seen. I made a friend. Desert winds swept past the TV antennas and peeling fences, welcome breezes on sweltering dry summer days when people came out to sit on their porches, or beneath a tree in dirt yards, or to fix cars in the street.

  But on those days the perils came out too—you could see it in the faces of street warriors, in the play of children, too innocent to know what lurked about, but often the first to fall during a gang war or family scuffle.

  103rd Street was particularly hard. It was the main drag in Watts, where most of the businesses were located, and it was usually crowded with people, including dudes who took whatever small change one might have in their pocket.

  On days like that Rano, Jaime, Earl and I ventured out to the “third,” as 103rd Street was called, or by the factories and railroad tracks playing dirt war with other kids. Other times we played on the rooftop and told stories.

  “Did you ever hear the one about the half-man?” Earl asked.

  “The what?” Jaime replied. “What’s a half-man?”

  “Well, he’s a dude who got cut in half at the railroad tracks over there by Dogtown.”

  “Yeah, go on.”

  “So now he haunts the streets, half of him one place, the other half in another place—and he eats kids.”

  “Man, that’s sick,” Rano said. “But I got one for you. It’s about el pie.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Pie means foot in Spanish … and that’s all it is! One big foot, walking around.”

  Gusts of winds swirled around the avocado tree branches as the moonlight cast uncanny shadows near where we related our tales.

  “And you heard about La Llorona, right?” Rano continued.

  “Oh, yeah, sure …”

  “She’s an old Mexican lady—”

  “You mean Mrs. Alvarez?”

  We laughed.

  “Nah, this lady once got all her children and cut them up into tiny pieces.”

  “And …”

  “And then she went all over the neighborhood, sprinkling bits of their bodies everywhere.”

  “And then …”

  “So then God saw what she did and cursed her to walk the world, looking for her children—weeping—for all eternity. That’s why she’s called La Llorona, the weeping woman. And you know what, she picks up other kids to make up for the ones she’s killed.”

  The leaves rustled, giving out an eerie sound. All of us jumped up, including Rano. Before anyone could say good night, we stumbled over one another, trying to get out of there, climbed off the roof, and ran through bedsheets and dresses hanging on a line, dashing like mad as we made our way home.

  We changed houses often because of evictions. My dad constantly tried to get better work; he tried so many things. Although he was trained as a teacher, graduated with a degree in biology and had published Spanish textbooks in Mexico, in Los Angeles everyone failed to recognize his credentials. In Los Angeles, he was often no more than a laborer.

  One day a miracle happened. My dad obtained a substitute teaching job in the San Fernando Valley, at Taft High School in Woodland Hills, teaching Spanish to well-off white children.

  My dad must have thought we had struck oil or something. He bought a house in Reseda. In those days, this made us the only Mexican family around. It was a big house. It had three bedrooms, which meant the boys could have their own room, the girls theirs and my parents could be alone. It had two baths, a large, grassy yard and an upstanding, stucco garage.

  I went to a school on Shirley Avenue which actually had books. I remember being chased back home a lot by the Anglo kids. But we were so glad to be in Reseda, so glad to be away from South Central Los Angeles.

  Even my brother enjoyed success in this new environment. He became the best fighter in the school, all that he went through in Watts finally amounting to something. The big white kids tried to pick on him, and he fought back, hammered their faces with quick hands, in street style, after which nobody wanted to mess with him. Soon the bullies stopped chasing me home when they found out I was José’s brother.

  My dad went nuts in Reseda. He bought new furniture, a new TV, and he had the gall to throw away the old black & white box we had in Watts. He bought a new car. He was like a starving man in a candy store, partaking of everything, touching whatever he couldn’t eat. He sat on a mountain of debt. But his attitude was “who cares?” We were Americans now. We were on our way to having a little bit of that dream. He was even doing it as a teacher, what he was trained for. Oh what a time it was for my father!

  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 pa
st 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.