Crowds filled the beach area. Chicharrón knew of a place called “the coves,” further down, less peopled and scenic, and he suggested we go there.
To get to it we had to park away from the beach and walk down several rocks and boulders. The water came up to the rocks, a sandy area nearby. Chicharrón buried several six-packs in shallow water to keep them cold. Black Dog began to roll reefer and pass it around. Wilo and Rita placed a blanket in the sand and lay down, beer and chips nearby. The rest of us decided to play a loose game of beach football.
The girls and guys split up into teams. We threw the ball around. A few of us got tackled. Then we threw the girls around, mostly into the water. None of us had bathing suits or trunks. We were just too cool. We had cutoffs, T-shirts, overalls, sandals and such. Some of the guys removed their shirts to reveal teen muscle, and maybe show off a tattoo or two. Chicharrón and Black Dog moved from one girl to the other, except Rita who adhered to Wilo like skin. They picked up the girls as if they were sacks of masa harina and threw them into the bursting waves.
Hermie got thrown in last, mainly because she kept running away and hiding in the rocks. I just watched. Chicharrón, Black Dog and this dude from Mexico named Félix crept up behind her, several-sized hands reached for her arms, her legs—I saw one hand hold up her butt. They took her to the ocean’s frothy edge and threw her in, squealing and kicking. Hermie rose quickly—rivulets of water falling from her once-teased hair, her face a flood. Hermie’s blouse clung to her body, revealing hard nipples through soaked bra and top. She feigned anger, while the others laughed and laughed. Her sister Santita, who had already been dunked, looked pleased.
Strangely, we were all alone there on that short stretch of beach. Black Dog got bold and brought out some mescaline. Félix took a hit and before long he was tripping, falling all over the sand and bumping his head on rocks and shit. Canica and Smiley took some hits too. Before long Black Dog maneuvered Canica over to a cave section of the coves and I knew what he was doing, copping feels and such.
Wilo and Rita lay back on the blanket and enjoyed the sun. The rest of the pairing happened by mid-day. Félix stood beside Santita, or I should say she held him up a lot. Chicharrón and Elaine were together, holding hands and sloppy kissing on top of some rocks. Corina and Hermie sat apart from everybody, as I did. Black Dog, however, left the cave area and took Smiley back there with him. I only guessed what was happening there with all that reefer, mescaline and partying with Canica and Smiley.
Corina sat down near me and started a conversation. She was the least good-looking of the girls who came that day, but she was good to talk to.
It was Hermie who I kept eyeing, whether I was alone or with Corina, as she tried to stay dry. The brownness of her nipples which had shown through her blouse earlier was lost from view as it dried.
By the afternoon, we spied a van of white dudes, looking like surfers, parked above the coves near our rides. They stared in our direction, dressed in sunny beach wear, noticeable by their blonde hair and eye shades. Chicharrón stood up to see them better.
“What’s with the paddies, man?” he yelled out to me.
“¿Qué sé yo?” I responded. “Maybe waiting for a ‘bitchin’ wave’.”
This was a tiny dig into the beach culture that Anglos had created in California. There were constant battles between the barrio people and the beach people, who were mostly whites or engabachados—Mexicans trying to pass as white, even when some were dark as night. As far as anyone could remember, it was “surfers” against “beaners.”
The van didn’t move, nor its occupants. Then after a few minutes, we heard shouting from the parking area.
“Fuck you, beaners!”
“Mexicans suck!”
Black Dog emerged from the cave, shirt off, muscles wet and rippling on mahogany-tinged skin. He looked at the white dudes, and then yelled back.
“Putos … come get some of this,” as he squeezed his crotch. Félix livened up all of a sudden, and in accented speech he yelled out “modder fockers.”
Chicharrón also got into it, shouting out “Animal Tribe” and “¡Qué Viva South San Gabriel!”
The white guys challenged us to come up there. It didn’t take much to get us going. Chicharrón took off his belt, Black Dog picked up a bottle. Soon everyone followed behind them, even the girls.
“I don’t like this,” Corina said. “I don’t like this at all.”
“Híjole, we can’t go anywhere without some pleito,” Hermie responded in disgust.
There were about six white dudes, and as we got closer, we saw they weren’t teens but grown men.
“Come on greasers,” one tall dude said. “Who wants to go first?”
“Fuck you,” Black Dog shouted and then charged at them. But what should have been a good old ass-stomping, to talk about later, turned out to be something completely different.
The white dudes pulled out guns. Then one of them flashed a badge.
“Everyone line up. This is the Huntington Beach Police Department.”
They were chota!
“Puta madre,” Chicharrón said, as the cops turned him around and had him place his hands against the side of the van. Then the rest of us, even the girls, were forced to kneel and keep our hands on our heads. Corina started to sob, but I could tell she tried not to. Hermie looked scared as did Santita. Canica and Smiley swaggered and acted cool, but I knew the mescaline had a lot to do with it.
They separated the guys from the girls. After a quick search, the girls were allowed to stand by the side. But the guys were told to squat on the asphalt and not move. One of the cops radioed in some information. Another proceeded to harass us.
“Tough guys, eh? Gonna take us on. You don’t look so tough now.”
I went to move my leg over to another, more comfortable, position. But the cop yelled at me, his hand still palming a .38 revolver.
“Don’t fuckin’ move,” he said, coming up to my face, eyeball to eyeball. “Did I give you permission to move? Don’t do anything unless I say—you fuckin’ greaser asshole!”
They had us squatting there for five, ten, then fifteen minutes. We couldn’t stand up, kneel or sit. The circulation in my legs felt blocked. The muscles cramped and ached. But we weren’t supposed to do anything but squat. After several long minutes more, one of the cops started throwing sand in our faces.
“Hey!” we all yelled at once.
“Don’t move, I said,” the cop continued. “Don’t understand English or what? I don’t want to hear anything, don’t want to see anyone lift a finger.”
They were getting us to do something stupid in anger, an excuse to knock us around. One of the cops came up to the parking area with Wilo and Rita, who had been down below trying to keep quiet. They brought the beer cans.
“This is a violation,” a cop said.
Then another cop turned around smiling. He had Black Dog’s jacket and had found caps of mescaline and some joints.
“All right, now we got some felonies.”
The cops were ecstatic. They had something good to book us for.
They dragged us handcuffed to the local jail, and took us into a small interrogation room. By now Corina cried. Black Dog talked back, acting up even as the cops poked blackjacks into his ribs. They separated him from the rest of us and took him first.
The police called our parents. Chicharrón’s father said he’d take me home. After several hours, they finally released us. Only Black Dog didn’t go home. The officers transported him to a juvenile facility. Besides the drugs they found, Black Dog had several prior arrests. It didn’t look good for Black Dog.
I said goodby to Corina, and nodded a goodby to Hermie and Santita whose mother came in ranting about us troublemakers and how she’d never let the sisters go anywhere with us again. For a second, in the midst of her mother’s squabbling and hands flying, I thought Hermie smiled at me.
“You have to work, to help us out here,” Mama said
. “You’re a big man now. There’s got to be something you can do.”
We had just moved to South San Gabriel. I was nine years old—a good working age, as far as my mother was concerned; she had picked cotton at the age of nine in South Texas. But looking for work at nine is not easy in a city. We weren’t fruit pickers, which were often children as young as three. In a city, a child had to find people to work for—cleaning up for them, doing deliveries or tending lawns. I did a little bit of everything. Mowing lawns with Rano, picking up boxes and cleaning out people’s garages. I even did housework like my mother had done when we were younger. I vacuumed, wiped windows, scrubbed floors on my knees and used tooth brushes to clean the edges. The homes I went to were in Alhambra, a mostly white area then with some homes sporting swimming pools. I learned how to vacuum the bottom of the pools, and how to use the pumps and the chemicals to keep them clean.
My brother also worked, finally landing a job as a newspaper boy. In those days, it meant delivering papers door-to-door on bikes. At the age of 12, I started working a paper route too. I found an old beat-up ten-speed and delivered around our neighborhood, tossing a local daily called The Post-Advocate. Every day after school, our crew manager dropped off bundles of unfolded newspapers and bags of rubber-bands. On rainy days we used plastic covers.
We had to fold all the papers, place the rubber bands or plastic over them and then stuff them into double cloth bags we draped over the handle bars. Our hands and faces got blackened with newsprint. We had a list of subscribers and we had to make sure they received their newspapers in or around their porches. This was the trick of the trade.
Fíjese: I got good at it. It was the first important accomplishment I remember as a child. I couldn’t exactly talk with any coherency, or do sports, or show any talent for anything. But, man, I could deliver newspapers! I got so good, I built up a route system which at its peak included four different routes. I received awards. I won recognition in the Copley Newspaper magazine (Copley owned the Post-Advocate then). The routes wound around city blocks for several miles and often took until after midnight to complete. On that old ten-speed, I pedaled through street, alley, boulevard and back road, past vicious dogs and hobo nests, past the vatos who chased me for my bike or change. But I made my deliveries, always on time. On the mark.
Selling the newspaper was the other trick. On weekends, the crew manager would take his den of newspaper boys and drop us off in various neighborhoods to sell subscriptions, what we called “starts.” Mainly he had us cover the well-groomed suburban streets because he figured they were more likely to buy subscriptions. Man, I was lousy at it. Door after door slammed in my face. We had free gifts—pot holders, TV trays, things to hang on the wall. But where people had money, this had little effect. They usually received the bigger papers like the Los Angeles Times or the Herald-Examiner. The Herald-Examiner deliverers, in fact, often sneered at us because they took in more pay and the better clientele.
One day the crew manager, at a point of desperation, dropped me off in the Hills.
“Go up this road,” he said, sounding unhopeful of my prospects. “I’ll meet you down below in about an hour.”
I climbed up a sidewalkless street and entered the foliage which shielded the shacks and houses on stilts and cars being worked on. I walked up a cluttered dirt driveway. Children played in and around a mud puddle without shoes. Mexican music burst out of a kitchen window. The porches were old, unpainted, sunken wood planks. I knocked on a torn-screen door nearly off its hinges. A round woman peered from inside. Instead of sofas or end tables, crates furnished her bare living room. There were palm-leaf crosses tacked on cracked sheet rock.
“¿Qué traes tú?” she inquired.
I didn’t believe I’d sell any subscriptions—most of these people didn’t even know English. But as soon as I talked about the free gifts, they signed up. So simple. Shack to shack. Off-hinged door after off-hinged door. I tried to explain they were required to pay a monthly fee. But here they were, watching telenovelas on beat-up TV sets, those who had them, their children running around in rags and bare feet, and still they ordered the Post-Advocate for the free gifts. In time they’d never pay. They’d never be part of anyone’s route. But I got the starts. I became the hero for the day. The crew manager patted my back and announced to everyone the record number of subscriptions I obtained. The people of the Hills vindicated me.
Work took other turns. At age thirteen, I was hired at a car wash with my brother. We were the cleanup crew. We came to work in the evening after the undocumented guys finished washing cars and had gone home. Rano and I swept, mopped, and picked up around the small office, waiting area and parking lot. We picked up all the dirty rags and threw them into massive washing machines. Then near the end of the evening, we hooked up a monstrous hose and watered down the place. Rano, who was 16, actually washed cars during the day and learned to drive almost every make and model.
“You should have seen the Mustang I pulled out today,” he said, excited.
“Oh, listen,” he’d tap my arm. “Then there was this Firebird!”
I came along to help him in the evening to make more money for the family. Everything we made went to Mama—and we always needed more.
But soon after I started working there, I picked up a foot fungus. I often worked in sneakers and I couldn’t help but get them soaked every night in the soap and water we used to hose down everything. Terrible flowery lesions sprang up on the soles of my feet and through my toes. I also had an ingrown toenail that produced a painful redness on my left toe, forcing me to place steaming hot towels on it every night to lower the swelling.
A foot doctor prescribed medication, but nothing lessened the sores. And surgery on my toe was out of the question. I couldn’t even go to gym classes, which I missed for the rest of junior high.
One day, the sores worsened and I refused to get out of bed. My mother dabbed ointments on them but they were of no use. Then Tío Kiko came over. He examined the sores, staring intently at the petals that seemed to be growing from my feet. Tío Kiko knew a little of the Mexican healing arts, the use of herbs and incantations from old Indian traditions used to treat most ailments. In desperation, Mama asked her brother for help.
“This will hurt you,” Tío Kiko told me in Spanish. “But be brave. It will be over soon.”
He pulled up a chair and directed my mother’s hand.
They sliced each of the milky sores. Blood and pus streamed out. I screamed. I didn’t believe in witchcraft or chants or herbs. I felt I would die. Tío Kiko had boiled water and put together some herbs he had brought from a botánica. Mama covered each open wound with leaves and concoctions as Tío Kiko prayed over my feet.
Was there a God for feet? Would the proper words be strung together to wake it from its sleep? Would the magic of the herbs, the spirit evoked, seep into the sores and bring the feet back to me? These were the questions.
Days passed. I lay in bed as the daily rituals worked their wonder. The sores started to disappear. Soon I hobbled around in slippers. Even the ingrown toenail slid back into a somewhat normal shape. Tío Kiko, this border priest, this master of snake and siren, did what the Anglo doctors could not. Who knows if it’s real magic? There was another kind of magic which made me feel special, to look at my Indian-descended mother and uncle and believe in the power of civilizations long since written off, long since demeaned and trampled. Jesus Christ was a brown man. A Mexican Indian. A curandero. Not a stringy blond-haired, blue-eyed icon. He was like me, like my Tío Kiko. He lived in the earth, got drunk, inhabited the leaves and herbs, not a sanitized doctor’s office—or a church of spires and colored glass and elaborate carvings. He lived in my feet, and with the proper calls and enticements, made them whole again. This is the Christ I wanted to believe in.
Through the bars of a cell, I talk to a deputy as he sits behind an immense wood desk in the Temple City sheriff’s station, the station responsible for Las Lomas. He’s Chi
cano like me, but I know how much he hates everything I am, as if I represent all the scorn, venom and fear instilled in him since a child.
“We have a plan here,” the jura says. “We detain every seven-year-old boy in your neighborhood.”
“Detain them for what?” I ask.
“It doesn’t matter. Curfew, loitering … whatever we can,” he replies. “Then we keep their names. Keep track of them over the years. Soon we’ve picked them up for other things—stealing, fighting, mischief …”
“And that’s how you get a hold of ’em,” I continue for him.
“That’s right—hey, you’ve got half a brain, huh?”
“It ain’t hard to figure out that by the time some of the boys do something serious, they have a detention record a mile long and end up hard time—juvey or camp.”
“You guys just don’t know,” he says with a smirk. “You just don’t know what you’re dealing with.”
In the barrio, the police are just another gang. We even give them names. There’s Cowboy, Big Red, Boffo and Maddog. They like those names. Sometimes they come up to us while we linger on a street corner and tell us Sangra called us chavalas, a loose term for girls. Other times, they approach dudes from Sangra and say Lomas is a tougher gang and Sangra is nothing. Shootings, assaults and skirmishes between the barrios are direct results of police activity. Even drug dealing. I know this. Everybody knows this.
Yuk Yuk became one of los cuatro after Clavo disappeared. No one knew exactly what happened to Clavo. There were rumors his parents sent him to Mexico. Others said he was in a youth prison camp, although we couldn’t substantiate this. Chicharrón, Wilo and I went to his house. Nobody there. For Rent signs everywhere. He had already dropped out of school and left no forwarding address.
Yuk Yuk lived in the Hills, in one of the gullies. He had been a member of the Tribe for a couple of years, but spent most of that time in juvenile hall. He had two teardrops tattooed below his left eye, signifying two years lost in the hall. Sometimes the teardrops stood for the members of one’s family fallen in street warfare or the number of people one had killed. Anyway it started off as a Chicano thing, like most of the street and pinto traditions, but later other dudes picked up on it.
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