Always Running

by Luis J. Rodriguez

  While on spray I yelled. I laughed. I clawed at the evening sky. I felt like a cracked egg. But I wouldn’t stop.

  Then another time Baba, Wilo and I gathered in the makeshift hideout we had alongside the Alhambra Wash, next to the drive-in. We sat ourselves down on the dirt, some blankets and rags nearby to lie on. We covered the entrance with banana leaves and wood planks. There were several cans of clear plastic—what we called la ce pe—around us. We each had paper bags and sprayed into them—and I had already dropped some pills and downed a fifth of Wild Turkey. I then placed the bag over my mouth and nose, sealed it tightly with both hands, and breathed deeply.

  A radio nearby played some Led Zeppelin or Cream or some other guitar-ripping licks. Soon the sounds rose in pitch. The thumping of bass felt like a heartbeat in the sky, followed by an echo of metal-grating tones. I became flesh with a dream. The infested walls of the wash turned to mud; the trickle of water a vast river. The homeboys and I looked like something out of Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer. With stick fishing poles. The sparkle of water below us. Fish fidgeting below the sheen.

  Dew fell off low branches as if it were breast milk. Birds shot out of the tropical trees which appeared across from us. Perhaps this trip had been the pages of a book, something I read as a child. Or saw on TV. Regardless, I was transported away from what was really there—yet it felt soothing. Not like the oil stains we sat in. Not like the factory air that surrounded us. Not this plastic death in a can.

  I didn’t want it to end. As the effect wore thin, I grabbed the spray and bag, and resumed the ritual. Baba and Wilo weren’t far behind me.

  Then everything faded away—the dew, the water, the birds. I became a cartoon, twirling through a tunnel, womb-like and satiated with sounds and lines and darkness. I found myself drifting toward a glare of lights. My family called me over: Seni, Mama, Papa, Tía Chucha, Tío Kiko, Pancho—everybody. I wanted to be there, to know this perpetual dreaming, this din of exquisite screams—to have this mother comfort surging through me.

  The world fell into dust piles around me. Images of the past pitched by: my brother tossing me off rooftops, my mother’s hearty laughter, my father’s thin and tired face, the homeboys with scarred smiles and the women with exotic eyes and cunts which were the churches I worshipped in. Everything crashed. Everything throbbed. I only knew: I had to get to the light, that wondrous beacon stuffed with sweet promise: Of peace. Untroubled. The end of fear. Don’t close the door, Mama. I’m scared. It’s okay, m’ijo. There’s no monsters. We’ll be here. Don’t be scared.

  No more monsters. Come to the light. I felt I would be safe there—finally. To the light. The light.

  Suddenly everything around me exploded. An intense blackness enveloped me. A deep stillness. Nothing. Absolute. No thinking. No feeling. A hole.

  Then an electrified hum sank its teeth into my brain. Hands surrounded me, pulled at me, back to the dust of our makeshift hideaway.

  A face appeared above me. It leaned down and breathed into me. Images of leaves, crates, stained blankets came into view. Wilo pulled back and looked into my eyes. A haze covered everything. I felt dizzy. And pissed off.

  “Give me the bag, man.”

  “No way,” Baba said. “You died Chin—you stopped breathing and died.”

  I tried to get up, but fell back to the ground. A kind of grief overwhelmed me. I was no longer this dream. I was me again. I wished I did die.

  “You don’t understand,” I yelled to the homeboys. “I have to go back.”

  I crept toward a paper bag but Baba kicked it out of my reach. Later I found myself stepping down a street. Baba and Wilo had pointed me in the direction of home and I kept going. I hated being there. I didn’t know what to do. God, I wanted that light, this whore of a sun to blind me, to entice me to burn—to be sculptured marble in craftier hands.

  Wilo’s sister Payasa liked me and told him. She was okay, I guess, a real loca when it came to the ’hood. She had the high teased hair, the short tight skirts, the “raccoon” style makeup and boisterous presence. I ended up going with her. Mostly for Wilo’s sake at first.

  After I got expelled from school, Payasa and I spent time together during the day since she refused to go to classes herself. We’d walk to Garvey Park. She would hand me some colies which I’d drop and soon start to sway, talk incoherently and act stupid.

  “Oh, you’ll get over it,” Payasa said. “Eventually.”

  She always said that.

  After a time, whenever a car crashed, a couple argued or somebody tripped and fell, we’d look at each other and say at the same time: “Oh, you’ll get over it … eventually.”

  When Wilo and I sniffed aerosol spray, sometimes Payasa joined us.

  “Why do you let your sister do this?” I asked.

  “That’s her,” Wilo shrugged. “I can’t stop her.”

  Payasa was always high. The higher she got, the more bold she became. One time we were sniffing in the tunnel beneath the freeway. I started tripping: Snakes crawled from the sides, as well as melted faces and bolts of lights and a shower of shapes. She brushed up to me and pulled off her blouse. Erect nipples confronted me on firm breasts. I kissed them. She laughed and pulled me away.

  “Oh, you’ll get over it,” she said. “Eventually.”

  I was too fucked up to care.

  One time in the park she said she wanted to take her pants and underwear off.

  “Right here? Right now? … in front of everybody?”

  “Yeah, why not?” she responded. “You dare me.”

  “Sure—I dare you.”

  She did.

  Sniffing took the best out of her. Sometimes I’d walk through the tunnel and she would be there, alone, with a bag of spray, all scuffed up, her eyes glassy.

  Payasa became a loca because of her older brothers. They were Lomas veteranos, older gangsters. Because Wilo and Payasa were younger, they picked on them a lot; beating them to make them stronger.

  Payasa fought all the time at school. Whenever she lost, her older brothers would slice her tongue with a razor. She wasn’t ever supposed to lose. This made her meaner, crazier—unpredictable.

  As a girlfriend Payasa was fun, but she couldn’t be intimate unless she was on reds, spray or snort.

  I had to break with her. I loved the spray and shit but Payasa became too much like the walking dead. So I told her I didn’t want to see her anymore. She didn’t say anything, just turned around and left. I faintly said to myself, “Oh, you’ll get over it … eventually.”

  She was later found in a daze, her arms with numerous deep cuts all the way to her elbows. Nobody would let me see her after she was taken to a rehabilitation hospital for teenage addicts. Wilo suggested I let it go.

  “That’s Payasa, man,” Wilo said, and shrugged his shoulders.

  I sank against the wall, my naked back splattered with grit. A razor glistened in my hand. A pail of water sat next to me. The room was stuffed to the top with junk I had accumulated, including stolen stereos and car radios which Yuk Yuk had stashed there for safekeeping.

  The blade touched the skin and each time this song became louder in my head, a song which wouldn’t let up, as the melody resonated through me and the emptiness inside compressed into itself. Soon I filled up with a sense of being, of worth, with a clarity that I belonged here on this earth, at this time. Somehow, some way, it all had meaning. I made sense. There in the garage. Alone but alive. I barely made it. I almost got to the light. And somehow I knew the light wasn’t all the great feeling, hope and desire I thought at the time it would be. I stumbled upon the blackness; I had dared to cross the light, to enter the other side, beyond the barrier, into the shadow. But I had been yanked back just in time. Wilo and Baba for some reason were able to respond fast as I lay unconscious, unbreathing, there by the wash.

  I put the blade down, peed into the water and fell asleep.

  In my mother’s kitchen, I tried to recall the song of the night bef
ore, the one which stopped me from wasting myself, that said it was all right, but I couldn’t. I walked up to Mama. She refused to turn around and face me, although she knew I was there.

  “Can I stay here and eat this morning?” I asked her in Spanish.

  She turned around, hard eyes encircled by wrinkled skin. Then a smile filled her face and she became like a young woman again.

  “Of course, m’ijo,” she said as she turned back to the stove to toss over a tortilla. “When you’re ready to visit, with respect to our house, you can come to eat.”

  I kissed her on the neck.

  I went to the dining table where Gloria sat, stuffing her mouth with food. I pulled out a chair and looked down at a plate resting on a tablecloth.

  “Hey—do these eggs have anything to do with me?”

  Chapter Five

  “It is the violent poetry of the times, written in the blood of the youth.”—Linda Mendoza, Chicana poet from South San Gabriel

  THE ANIMAL TRIBE PRACTICALLY died with the death of one of its last presidents: John Fabela.

  Seventeen-year-old John—whose girlfriend was pregnant with his infant daughter—succumbed to a shotgun blast in his living room as his younger brother watched from beneath a bed in an adjacent room. About 13 members of the Sons of Soul car club, made up of recent Mexican immigrants living in East L.A., were rounded up by the police.

  By then Joaquín López was already in prison for a heroin beef. Many of the older Tribe members were also incarcerated or hardcore tecatos. As the Tribe’s influence diminished, Lomas initiated Tribe members into the various sets based on age groupings: the Pequeños, Chicos, the Dukes and the Locos. Lomas was reorganizing and recruiting. No longer could one claim Lomas just by being there. Chicharrón invited me to get in.

  “They beat on you for about three minutes—that’s all,” Chicharrón urged. “You get a busted lip. So what? It’s worth it.”

  So later I decided to go to a party in the Hills, fully aware I would join a Lomas set. Like most barrio parties, it started without any hassle. Vatos and rucas filled every corner in the small house; some ventured outside, smoking or drinking. The house belonged to Nina, this extremely pretty girl whom everyone respected. Nina’s mother shuffled in the kitchen, making tacos from large pots of meat and beans simmering on low flames.

  The dudes were polite; dignified. Señora this, Señora that. You couldn’t imagine how much danger hung on their every breath.

  As the night wore on, the feel of the place transformed. The air was rife with anticipation. Talk became increasingly louder. Faces peeled into hardness. The music played oldies we all knew by heart, and gritos punctuated key verses. Fists smashed against the walls. Just as the food simmered to a boil, the room also bubbled and churned. Weed, pills and hard liquor passed from hand to hand. Outside, behind the house, a row of dudes shot up heroin. In the glow of the back porch light, they whispered a sea of shorn sentences.

  A crew of older, mean-eyed vatos arrived and the younger guys stacked behind them. Nina’s mother showed concern. She pulled Nina into the kitchen; I could see her talking severely to her daughter.

  I didn’t know these dudes. They were veteranos and looked up to by the homeys. They had just come out of the joint—mostly Tracy, Chino or Youth Training School, known as YTS, a prison for youth offenders. Chicharrón pressed his face close to my ear and told me their names: Ragman, Peaches, Natividad, Topo … and the small, muscular one with a mustache down the sides of his mouth was called Puppet.

  I then recalled some of their reputations: Natividad, for example, had been shot five times and stabbed 40 times—and still lived! Peaches once used a machine gun against some dudes in a shoot-out. And Puppet had been convicted of murder at the age of 16.

  “Who wants in?” Puppet later announced to a row of dark, teenaged male faces in front of him. Chicharrón whispered something in Puppet’s ear. Puppet casually looked toward me. They designated me the first to get jumped.

  Topo walked up to me. He was stout, dark and heavily tattooed. He placed his arm around me and then we marched toward the driveway. Chicharrón managed to yell: “Protect your head.”

  I assumed when I got to the driveway, a handful of dudes would encircle me, provide me a signal of sorts, and begin the initiation. Instead, without warning, Topo swung a calloused fist at my face. I went down fast. Then an onslaught of steel-toed shoes and heels rained on my body. I thought I would be able to swing and at least hit one or two—but no way! Then I remembered Chicharrón’s admonition. I pulled my arms over my head, covered it the best I could while the kicks seemed to stuff me beneath a parked car.

  Finally the barrage stopped. But I didn’t know exactly when. I felt hands pull me up. I looked back at everyone standing around the driveway. My right eye was almost closed. My lip felt like it stuck out a mile. My sides ached. But I had done well.

  Hands came at me to congratulate. There were pats on the back. Chicharrón embraced me, causing me to wince. I was a Lomas loco now. Then a homegirl came up and gave me a big kiss on my inflamed lip; I wished I could have tasted it. Then other homegirls did the same. It didn’t seem half-bad, this initiation. Later they invited me to pounce on the other dudes who were also jumped in, but I passed.

  As the night wore on, Puppet, Ragman and Nat had the initiates pile into a pickup truck. I was already quite plastered but somehow still standing. Puppet drove the truck toward Sangra. Elation rasped in our throats.

  “Fuck Sangra,” one of the new dudes chimed in, and other voices followed the sentiment.

  We came across a cherried-out 1952 DeSoto, with pinstripes and a metal-flake exterior. Puppet pulled the truck up to the side of it. There were four dudes inside drinking and listening to cassette tapes. We didn’t know if they were Sangra or what. We followed Ragman as he approached the dudes. One of them emerged from the passenger side. He looked like a nice-enough fellow.

  “Hey, we don’t want no trouble,” he said.

  I knew they weren’t Sangra. They looked like hard-working recreational lowriders out for a spin. But Ragman wouldn’t have it. He punched the dude down. A couple of other guys came out of the car, and they too tried to salvage the night, tried to appeal for calm.

  “Listen, man, how about a beer,” one of them offered.

  Nat grabbed his neck from behind and pulled him to the ground, then beat on him. Ragman looked at the other guys who were clearly scared.

  “Who don’ like it?” he demanded. “Who don’ like it … you?”

  Ragman hit another guy. By then the dudes in the truck had climbed out and bashed in the car, breaking windows and crunching in metal with tire irons and two-by-fours which had been piled in the back of the truck. One dude tried to run off, but somebody chased him down with a wine bottle and struck him on the head. The dude fell down and I saw the wine bottle keep coming down on him, as if it was supposed to break, but it wouldn’t.

  The driver of the DeSoto tried to pull out, but somebody threw a brick at his head. For a long time, I observed the beatings as if I were outside of everything, as if a moth of tainted wings floating over the steamed sidewalk. Then I felt a hand pull at my arm and I sluggishly turned toward it. Puppet looked squarely into my one opened eye. He had a rusty screwdriver in his other hand.

  “Do it, man,” he said. Simply that.

  I clasped the screwdriver and walked up to the beaten driver in the seat whose head was bleeding. The dude looked at me through glazed eyes, horrified at my presence, at what I held in my hand, at this twisted, swollen face that came at him through the dark. Do it! were the last words I recalled before I plunged the screwdriver into flesh and bone, and the sky screamed.

  Within a year, the local headlines’ business boomed:

  “Gang Violence: Teen Wars Bring Death To Two”

  “Valley Teen Gangs Flourish”

  “Three Wounded By School Intruders”

  “Youth, 17, Murdered: Victim Shot In Chest”

  “Fi
ve Hurt, Two Arrested In Rosemead Party Crash”

  “Three Still Held In Gang Deaths”

  “San Gabriel Teenager Shot In The Face”

  “Rosemead Youth Gunned Down: Murder Said Gang Related”

  “Shooting Victim Critical”

  “Fired From Car: Four Wounded By Gunshots”

  “Rosemead Boy, 17, Shot By Deputy, Dies”

  “Deputy Escapes Sniper”

  “Slaying Suspect Bound Over To Superior Court”

  “Sheriff Moving On Gangs”

  Committees, task forces, community centers, born-again storefront churches and behavior guidance counselors proliferated in response. Rosemead’s South Side, South San Gabriel and San Gabriel’s barrio became targets of programs, monies and studies. Local reporters drove along with law enforcement officers through Lomas and Sangra to get “the feel” of these misaligned and misunderstood communities. Gang members were interviewed and news photographers worked the Hills to depict the poverty—usually of children playing in mud next to rusted cars, trash cans and pregnant mothers peering out of makeshift sheds.

  La Casa Community Center served the needs of Sangra; Bienvenidos Community Center and its John Fabela Youth Center covered Lomas; and the Zapopan Center catered to the southside of Rosemead. The centers offered dropout programs, welfare assistance, federal job placements, teen mother day care and places for young people to hang out.

  The people who worked at the centers put in 80-hour weeks, covered weekly funerals and had to enter the doors of domestic conflicts armed with nothing but a prayer. Some were ex-gang members who ventured back to help. Or they were the first wave of minority college students who entered institutions of higher learning through special scholarships and economic opportunity grants.

  At La Casa and Zapopan, community activists made the payroll. The triumvirate of community centers began to play a leading role in the struggles which emerged out of the Mexican sections here. Besides the gang killings, there was widespread drug use. Police beatings and killings became prominent. And the battles in the schools for decent education intensified. Because the three centers were dealing with similar crises, their staffs often met together to consult on strategy.