Always Running

by Luis J. Rodriguez

  A few East L.A. people who moved into the Hills brought the East L.A. style with them. There were federally-subsidized housing projects not far from here called Maravilla. It was so-named in the 1920s when Los Angeles city officials rebuilt the downtown area and got rid of the Mexicans in the inner core by offering land on the far outreaches of town for a dollar. When the Mexicans got wind of this they exclaimed “¡Qué Maravilla!”—what a marvel!—and the name took.

  My first love at 12 years old was a girl from Maravilla named Elena, a chola, who came to Garvey all prendida. She didn’t just know how to kiss, but how to take my hand through sections of her body and teach a pre-teen something of his own budding sexuality.

  At Garvey, the dudes began to sport cholo attire: the baggy starched pants and suspenders over white T-shirts, the flannel shirts clipped only from the top button, the bandannas and small brim hats. It was hip. It was different. And it was what the cholas liked.

  This is what I remember of junior high: Cholas who walked up the stairs in their tight skirts, revealing everything, and looked down at us, smiling at their power. Bloody Kotexes on the hallway floor. Gang graffiti on every available space of wall. Fires which flared from restroom trash bins. Fights every day, including after school on the alley off Jackson Avenue. Dudes who sold and took drugs, mostly downers and yesca, but sometimes heroin which a couple of dudes shot up in the boys’ room while their “homeys” kept a lookout.

  Yet most of the Mexican girls weren’t cholas; their families still had strong reins on many of them. Mexicans were mostly traditional and Catholic. Fathers, mothers or older brothers would drop off these girls and come get them after school so no perceived harm would come their way.

  One of them was Socorro, from Mexico, who was straight and proper, and tried to stop me from being a cholo. I asked her to become my girlfriend when word got around she liked me and Elena had left me for Ratón, a down dude from the Hills.

  “They’re trash,” Socorro would often say in Spanish about the cholillos. “If you keep hanging out with them, you can say goodby to me forever.”

  I liked her, but we didn’t last too long as a couple. I didn’t want to be straight and proper. My next girlfriend was Marina, a girl from Lomas who had one of the highest, peroxided teases on her head with blonde streaks that accentuated her dark face.

  It was at Marina’s urging that I obtained my first tattoo. A dude named Angel charged $5 for an hour’s work beneath the school’s bleachers. They were crude, unadorned, hand-etchings. Angel used sewing needles, sterilized by placing them over a match flame. He then tied a tight wound of sewing thread on the end. Enough of the needle’s point stuck out to penetrate below the skin. Angel dipped the needle into a bottle of black India ink, allowing the thread to soak it up. Then he punctured the skin with quick up and down motions, filling the tiny holes with ink from the thread.

  I got the tattoo on my upper right arm. It was an outline of a cross beneath the words “Mi Vida Loca.”

  We drove teachers nuts at Garvey. A number of them were sent home with nervous breakdowns. We went through three teachers and five substitutes in my home room my first year at the school.

  One of my teachers was a Cuban refugee named Mr. Enríquez. We made him wish he never left the island. He could hardly speak English. And when he spoke Spanish, it was a sure sign we were in trouble.

  Every morning Mr. Enríquez entered the class and got bombarded with spit balls and jelly beans. Sometimes he’d turn around to write something on the chalk board and everyone would drop their books all at once.

  Often you could find Mr. Enríquez with his head on his desk, cursing into folded arms.

  Then there was the science teacher, Mrs. Krieger. She must have been 80 years old or more. It took her half the class period to walk up the stairs and down the hall to her classroom. By that time most of the class was gone. Once, as she creaked around to write something on the chalkboard, we threw her rain-stained, beat-up encyclopedias, which were as ancient as she was, out the windows. Then we threw out the desks and chairs. Before long, most of Mrs. Krieger’s classroom was scattered across the front lawn—and she didn’t realize it until a school official ran puffing up the stairs to investigate what the hell was going on.

  There were many good teachers, but some of the others appeared to be misfits, such as the gym instructor who looked like a refugee from the Marines. He shouted commands even in normal conversation, was always dressed in shorts and never failed to have a stainless steel whistle hanging from his bull-neck. The shop teacher was Mr. Stone, who acted exactly as if he were carved out of a thick piece of gray granite. He dealt with us harshly, always on his guard. But one day we broke through his defenses.

  The shop class was inside an old bungalow at the back of the school. The front door had “Las Lomas” spray-painted on the outside followed by the words Con Safos, the cholo term that signified nobody should mess with this—if they valued their life. Mr. Stone was inside showing our class how to cut a piece of wood on a rotary saw.

  Then Elías, one of the vatitos, started a racket from the back of the room. Mr. Stone turned around to discipline him. But he forgot to turn off the saw. It sliced away at the board … then his finger. Man, what a mess! Mr. Stone turned a sickening pale color as soon as he realized what had happened.

  “God damn it!” he yelled, “God damn it!” as his face wrinkled with every throb of pain.

  An ambulance came and rushed Mr. Stone away. School officials shoved everyone else into another classroom until they could hold meetings to determine who to blame. But Elías and I sneaked out and returned to the wood shop bungalow. The door was still open. We foraged through the piles of sawdust and wood pieces and found Mr. Stone’s finger. It looked purplish with dried blood and bone chips on one end. Elías carefully placed it inside an empty cigar box.

  For weeks we kept the finger in Elías’ locker. He’d bring it out to scare some of the girls and to show it off to incoming students until it shriveled away, like a dried sliver of old fruit.

  “You can’t be in a fire and not get burned.”

  This was my father’s response when he heard of the trouble I was getting into at school. He was a philosopher. He didn’t get angry or hit me. That he left to my mother. He had these lines, these cuts of wisdom, phrases and syllables, which swept through me, sometimes even making sense. I had to deal with him at that level, with my brains. I had to justify in words, with ideas, all my actions—no matter how insane. Most of the time I couldn’t.

  Mama was heat. Mama was turned-around leather belts and wailing choruses of Mary-Mother-of-Jesus. She was the penetrating emotion that came at you through her eyes, the mother-guilt, the one who birthed me, who suffered through the contractions and diaper changes and all my small hurts and fears. For her, dealing with school trouble or risking my life was nothing for discourse, nothing to debate. She went through all this hell and more to have me—I’d better do what she said!

  Mama hated the cholos. They reminded her of the rowdies on the border who fought all the time, talked that caló slang, drank mescal, smoked marijuana and left scores of women with babies bursting out of their bodies.

  To see me become like them made her sick, made her cringe and cry and curse. Mama reminded us how she’d seen so much alcoholism, so much weed-madness, and she prohibited anything with alcohol in the house, even beer. I later learned this rage came from how Mama’s father treated her siblings and her mother, how in drunken rages he’d hit her mom and drag her through the house by the hair.

  The school informed my parents I had been wreaking havoc with a number of other young boys. I was to be part of a special class of troublemakers. We would be isolated from the rest of the school population and forced to pick up trash and clean graffiti during the rest of the school year.

  “Mrs. Rodríguez, your son is too smart for this,” the vice-principal told Mama. “We think he’s got a lot of potential. But his behavior is atrocious. There’s no
excuse. We’re sad to inform you of our decision.”

  They also told her the next time I cut class or even made a feint toward trouble, I’d be expelled. After the phone call, my mom lay on her bed, shaking her head while sobbing in between bursts of how God had cursed her for some sin, how I was the devil incarnate, a plague, testing her in this brief tenure on earth.

  My dad’s solution was to keep me home after school. Grounded. Yeah, sure. I was 13 years old already. Already tattooed. Already sexually involved. Already into drugs. In the middle of the night I snuck out through the window and worked my way to the Hills.

  At 16 years old, Rano turned out much better than me, much better than anyone could have envisioned during the time he was a foul-faced boy in Watts.

  When we moved to South San Gabriel, a Mrs. Snelling took a liking to Rano. The teacher helped him skip grades to make up for the times he was pushed back in those classes with the retarded children.

  Mrs. Snelling saw talent in Rano, a spark of actor during the school’s thespian activities. She even had him play the lead in a class play. He also showed some facility with music. And he was good in sports.

  He picked up the bass guitar and played for a number of garage bands. He was getting trophies in track-and-field events, in gymnastic meets and later in karate tournaments.

  So when I was at Garvey, he was in high school being the good kid, the Mexican exception, the barrio success story—my supposed model. Soon he stopped being Rano or even José. One day he became Joe.

  My brother and I were moving away from each other. Our tastes, our friends, our interests, were miles apart. Yet there were a few outstanding incidents I fondly remember in relationship to my brother, incidents which despite their displays of closeness failed to breach the distance which would later lie between us.

  When I was nine, for example, my brother was my protector. He took on all the big dudes, the bullies on corners, the ones who believed themselves better than us. Being a good fighter transformed him overnight. He was somebody who some feared, some looked up to. Then he developed skills for racing and high-jumping. This led to running track and he did well, dusting all the competition.

  I didn’t own any talents. I was lousy in sports. I couldn’t catch baseballs or footballs. And I constantly tripped when I ran or jumped. When kids picked players for basketball games, I was the last one they chose. The one time I inadvertently hit a home run during a game at school—I didn’t mean to do it—I ended up crying while running around the bases because I didn’t know how else to react to the cheers, the excitement, directed at something I did. It just couldn’t be me.

  But Rano had enemies too. There were two Mexican kids who were jealous of him. They were his age, three years older than me. One was named Eddie Gómez, the other Ricky Corral. One time they cornered me outside the school.

  “You José’s brother,” Eddie said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Wha’s the matter? Can’t talk?”

  “Oh, he can talk all right,” Ricky chimed in. “He acting the pendejo because his brother thinks he so bad. Well, he ain’t shit. He can’t even run.”

  “Yea, José’s just a lambiche, a kiss ass,” Eddie responded. “They give him those ribbons and stuff because he cheats.”

  “That’s not true,” I finally answered. “My brother can beat anybody.”

  “Oh, you saying he can beat me,” Eddie countered.

  “Sure sounds like he said that,” Ricky added.

  “I’m only saying that when he wins those ribbons, está derecho,” I said.

  “It sounds to me like you saying he better than me,” Eddie said.

  “Is that what you saying, man?” Ricky demanded. “Com’ on—is that what you saying?”

  I turned around, and beneath my breath, mumbled something about how I didn’t have time to argue with them. I shouldn’t have done that.

  “What’d you say?” Eddie said.

  “I think he called you a punk,” Ricky agitated.

  “You call me a punk, man?” Eddie turned me around. I denied it.

  “I heard him, dude. He say you are a punk-ass puto,” Ricky continued to exhort.

  The fist came at me so fast, I don’t even recall how Eddie looked when he threw it. I found myself on the ground. Others in the school had gathered around by then. When a few saw it was me, they knew it was going to be a slaughter.

  I rose to my feet—my cheek had turned swollen and blue. I tried to hit Eddie, but he backed up real smooth and hit me again. Ricky egged him on, I could hear the excitement in his voice.

  I lay on the ground, defeated. Teachers came and chased the boys out. But before Eddie and Ricky left they yelled back: “José ain’t nothing, man. You ain’t nothing.”

  Anger flowed through me, but also humiliation. It hurt so deep I didn’t even feel the fracture in my jaw, the displacement which would later give me a disjointed, lopsided and protruding chin. It became my mark.

  Later when I told Rano what happened, he looked at me and shook his head.

  “You didn’t have to defend me to those dudes,” he said. “They’re assholes. They ain’t worth it.”

  I looked at him and told him something I never, ever told him again.

  “I did it because I love you.”

  Along the spine of the night, through the shrubbery, on the coarse roads, past the peeling shacks, past the walls filled with the stylized writing that proclaimed our existence, past La India’s shed where boys discovered the secret of thighs, in the din of whispers, past Berta’s garden of herbs and midnight incantations, past the Japo’s liquor store, past the empty lots scattered around the barrio we called “the fields,” overlooking Nina’s house, pretty Nina, who lavished our dreams, there you’d find the newest and strongest clique. There you’d find the Animal Tribe.

  We lingered in the dust: Clavo, Wilo, Chicharrón and I. We walked through these streets in pairs with a rhythm, slow, like a bolero. I had on a T-shirt, cut off at the shoulders, with “The Animal Tribe” in old English lettering on the back written in shoe polish and a long pair of county-jail pants, called “counties,” over a couple of black Tijuana sandals.

  Clavo, Wilo, Chicharrón and I. We picked up cigarettes at la marqueta. We strutted, like soldiers, and stopped for a while to look into the small, store-front church where Spanish-speaking holy rollers squirmed and shouted in their seats.

  Clavo, Wilo, Chicharrón and I. We were los cuatro del barrio, the younger dudes, 13 and 14, who got swept up in the fast, tumultuous changes between the cliques and clubs in the area. The Animal Tribe was taking over everything: It did it through war, through a reputation, through the strong leadership of two key families: the López brothers and the Domínguezes.

  The five López brothers got hooked up with the two Domínguez brothers and their four sisters. Lydia Domínguez ended up marrying Joaquín López, the Tribe’s president, and this continued to pull the various groups into one, huge clique.

  Thee Illusions and Mystics were gone. The other clubs also disappeared as The Animal Tribe consolidated them in as well. Even Thee Impersonations vanished; Miguel Robles joined the Tribe and later became one of its generals.

  The Tribe, although based in the Hills, pulled in dudes from all over South San Gabriel, even from areas east of the Hills like Muscatel Street, Bartlett Street and Earle Avenue which had long-running feuds with Las Lomas.

  Joaquín López was the leader, el mero chingón, as we’d say. Clavo, Wilo, Chicharrón and I were the peewees, the youngest set, who stood outside the Tribe meetings held in the fields or in the baseball diamond of Garvey Park, looking in until we could collect more experience and participate wholly with the others. Sometimes we were allowed to witness “the line.” This is where new initiates were forced to run through two rows of Tribe members, absorbing a storm of fists and kicks. Inevitably, somebody used brass knuckles and some dude would end up with cracked ribs.

  We tried being “the Southside Boys
” for a short time while we were in Garvey school, getting brown-and-gold jackets and crashing parties and dances. But we got into trouble with dudes from Sangra who objected to us embroidering the term “South Sangra” on the jackets.

  “There’s only one Sangra,” Chava from the Sangra Diablos told us one night at a quinceñera. He had a small brim hat and leaned on a silver-inlaid, porcelain-tipped mahogany cane. He looked Asian, like Fuji in the movies.

  Next to him were Tutti, Negro and Worm, with scars and tattoos on their arms and faces, and extra-baggy pants and muscled torsos. Then they chased us down a number of streets and alleys. It was the death of the Southside Boys.

  Miguel got us banging with The Tribe. It was during a dance at Garvey Park. The gym was opened one weekend for the local teenagers. Lowrider cars filled the front parking lot and side streets. Girls from barrios all over converged on the bungalow-type gym. That night I noticed there weren’t the usual knots here and there of different club members with their own unique jackets and colors. Only a few still carried proud their old club insignias, including the few of us in the Southside Boys.

  “¿Qué hubo, ése?” Miguel greeted as he walked up to me. It had been about two years since we were partners in Thee Impersonations. But this time he had on a black jacket with gold lettering on the back that read: The Animal Tribe.

  I introduced him to the remaining Southside Boys. Miguel was kind, courteous, and invited us into the dance for free: This was a Tribe party; we were his guests.

  Inside, the place was almost pitch black and reeked of cigarette and marijuana smoke. Although no alcoholic beverages were allowed, I could see outlines of dudes and their girlfriends drinking from bottles of cheap wine they had sneaked in.

  A local band played some mean sounds, one of a number of street bands which were popping up all over the valley and east side of the county.