Always Running

by Luis J. Rodriguez

  “Are the arresting deputies in there?”

  “Yes, they’re there and looking for a kill. Don’t mess with this. Take the plea.”

  “Okay, okay … I’ll do it.”

  Licha swung her arms around my neck. She smiled and kissed me on the cheek. The PD went away to work out the deal. Inside, my nerves jumped up and down. At the same time, I felt somewhat relieved. I wanted out of this mess. I had no choice, but I would never forget what the deputies did to me—the humiliation, the pain, the indignities—I would never forget.

  We were called into the courtroom. On the side were the officers in uniform. The public defender addressed the court, saying I would accept guilt for the lesser charge of drunk and disorderly. I looked over at the deputies, who exhibited a tinge of disappointment.

  The judge didn’t take much time. He had the letters on his desk. He remarked to me about the break he was giving me in consideration of my support and new-found objectives. Although Licha didn’t have the same support, he gave us both a break. My sentence involved a fine and few months incarceration in county jail.

  The PD shook my hand. Licha hugged me, real tight, as tears streamed down her face. She had to do her time at Sybil Brand.

  “As soon as we’re out, let’s get together, all right?”

  “Licha, I’m sorry it worked out this way—but with everything bad, something good usually comes along with it.”

  The day I left county jail, Licha came for me. Again, she looked radiant, although she was almost 10 years older than me and a single mother of three.

  “Come with me to Riverside and stay a few days?”

  “It’s not going to be like the last time, is it?”

  “No Louie, I told you that wasn’t my fault—man, you don’t forget nothing do you?”

  “Okay, let’s start over, that’s what I want to do—just start over.”

  By then, I was so far out of it that I forgot about Camila, my art, and the book—I was back to the way of the ’hood.

  We drove the long stretch of Interstate 60 to Riverside. When we arrived in town, she took me to the bar where she worked to pick up an old check they held for her.

  I entered the bar, although I was 18 years old and this was a 21-and-over joint. But nobody questioned me. Besides, for years I looked older than my actual age. Licha directed me to the back room; I lingered next to a time clock as she rummaged through a drawer to get her check.

  “Stay here, I’m going to get it cashed.”

  When she returned, Licha stood by the time clock and filled out a time card.

  “I got my job back—man, I’m so happy.”

  As she turned toward me, I pulled her near me and our lips touched, a light contact, but driven by sensuous quest. We kissed again, this time long, deep and smothering, something we both desired for a long time, neither of us wanting to stop. “Louie,” Licha finally took a breath. “Let’s go home.”

  I left Riverside with images of the weekend etched in my mind: Milk dripped from Licha’s breasts as the nipples puckered with excitement; tremors rumbled throughout our bodies; me crumbling beneath her fingers. Before I left, Licha went into the house and gave me a record, “Daddy’s Home,” by Shep and the Limelighters.

  But a month later as I tried to negotiate a time to see her again, she said I was too young for her—the relationship would never work. I tried to argue against this. One day in the mail, Licha sent me another record: “You’re Still A Young Man,” by Tower of Power. There were no more arguments from me.

  Chapter Ten

  “I GLIMPSE IN THE distance certain roads, clearings silent in the morning after the night’s demons have fled: the future, the ageless future, where there is always time to create.”—Maurice Sachs

  Alone at a bus stop in the first hours of a day, I wrapped myself in a long, black trench coat—no longer used for jambas or jales. “¡Qué jodida!—it’s cold,” I stammered out loud, to no one in particular. Trucks rumbled by and an occasional lowrider, sweet salsa sounds radiating from outside speakers; I jumped to the beat inside the trench coat as a breeze played havoc with my insides.

  I reflected on writing and art, on class struggle, on family and a woman’s touch—what mattered to me then.

  I stopped attending Cal State after my release from jail; I’d been set back too far. Besides, I ran out of money. I now worked full-time on the graveyard shift of a paper factory. I also realized sitting in a classroom didn’t work for me; it revived images of what I endured as a child and something within me blocked against it. I preferred my own inquiries, reading everything I could when I needed to.

  The incidents of violence continued. A week before, a dude from Sangra strutted down Mission Boulevard when a carload approached and someone opened fire; the dude dropped to the ground and rolled over beside a mail box. But the car turned around and somebody stepped out with a shotgun and blasted him again; it was at such close range, the wadding from the shell embedded in his stomach.

  I now looked on these matters with different eyes. I recalled when this first happened. Chente and I had been at his house, talking about the Hills and how I had to defend it, whatever the cost.

  “That’s exactly what the rulers of this country want you to do,” Chente said. “Instead of directing your fury at the real source of the problem.”

  “But this is my ’hood—there’s so much to be done here.”

  “There’s much to be done everywhere. You need to broaden your experiences—find out what the rest of the world is all about.”

  “I understand, but I can’t leave now; Lomas is everything, it’s my family—it’s my world.”

  Chente then placed a small globe in my hand and twirled it once.

  “Okay, “Luis, tell me: Where is Las Lomas on this globe?”

  I gazed at the revolving sphere: the colors, the place names, the lines of mountain ridges and contours of islands and nations. I stopped the globe from its spin and found the United States. I turned it slightly to California, then cast down to a dot which claimed “Los Angeles.” But there was no Lomas. No South San Gabriel.

  “You see—Lomas is so tiny, nameless, it doesn’t even warrant a dot,” Chente explained. “The vatos defend a land which doesn’t even belong to them. All the death—for what?”

  I thought about the globe. Chente was right. A bigger world awaited me. But I also knew: Once you’re in Las Lomas, you never get out—unless you’re dead.

  “Chente, I thank you for all you’ve done, but I can’t leave,” I said. “I have to try and reason with the homeboys, to stop the killings in my own way.”

  I spent a few nights pacing up and down the Hills, talking to the vatos; they listened and appeared as if maybe, just maybe, I made sense. When this happened, I wanted to stick it out. They would understand, I thought, if they were willing to learn, if they had the proper leadership.

  One night in the fields, I stood among a line of dudes against a wall. Somebody passed around a Super Kool, a cigarette laced with “angel dust.” Every one before me inhaled it; but when it came to me, I refused.

  “Come on, ése, just a toke,” said the guy in front of me.

  “Chale, I don’t go that way no more.”

  “Fuck it—you take it then,” the guy said to someone next to me. But to our surprise he also refused. Then the next guy. And the next. Nobody wanted the Super Kool after me! As soon as somebody took a stand and turned it down, the others did the same.

  I arrived at a point which alarmed even me, where I had no desire for the internal night, the buoyancy of letting go, the bliss of the void. I required more, a discipline as bulwark within which to hold all I valued, a shield against the onslaught.

  I figured I could help the homeboys become warriors of a war worth fighting, convinced they would let go of the intoxications—even heroin—if they had something more meaningful in their lives; if only …

  Just then, a 1955 Bel-Air came toward me. I recognized the car. It belonged to Enano.
I looked closer at the occupants inside: Peaches, Topo, Enano and Fuzzy. Three of them had blue bandannas above fierce, dark faces. I smiled, gave them the Lomas hand sign. The bomb stopped in front of me.

  Topo, the first one to initiate me into the ’hood, sat on the passenger side with a small-brim hat on his head. He looked straight at me, returned the smile, then picked up his hand to reveal a handgun.

  My face flushed. For seconds, time stood still. For seconds, my mind raced, trying to figure out what was going on. Thoughts promenaded back and forth, telling me to drop down, to protect myself, at the same time denying everything in front of me.

  Topo pulled the trigger and a familiar blast burst forth, sharp and furious. I fell in that instance, popping noises blasting about my ears.

  I heard the car screech away while I crawled as fast as I could behind a brick wall. They would come back, I thought; if they knew I was alive, they would come back!

  I leaned heavily against the wall, breathing hard and sweating la gota gorda. Through a window, I could see an illuminated painting of La Virgen de Guadalupe. Around me were an array of trash cans. An alley cat emerged from the garbage—scared, as I was scared.

  For a long time nothing transpired. Nobody came. The bomb did not return. There was just me, a mangy cat, a bench full of bullet holes and Mother Mary, perpetually smiling.

  I slowly rose to my feet. None of the bullets had struck me. My eyes burned with fury, with sorrow. I wanted to yell, I wanted to cry—I didn’t know what I wanted.

  In thinking back, I realize if they’d wanted to kill me, they would have. These were warning shots, as if to say: “Next time you’re dead.”

  The homeboys tried to kill me, vatos whom I had known as brothers, with whom I scurried down muddy streets and slept next to in jail, with whom I partied and hung out in front of courthouses and the fields; they were dudes I fought for and with whom I shared a taste of la carga.

  I would have died for them.

  There comes a moment when one faces the fresh features of an inner face; a time of conscious rebirth, when the accounting’s done, the weave in its final flourish, a time when a man stands before the world—vulnerable, nothing-owed—and considers his place in it. I had reached such a moment.

  “I’m ready to leave, Chente. There’s nothing for me here anymore.”

  Chente arranged for me to hide out in a federally-subsidized housing project in San Pedro. I spent two months there trying to clarify the issues before me. During spare moments, I played street football with others from across the country who were also there, some from kindred conditions.

  Before I left for San Pedro, I closed the doors of my garage room for the last time; my books and papers packed in boxes, my few belongings stashed away until I could reclaim them. I said goodby to my mother and father, who looked old and drawn out.

  “I never liked the walkouts, the revolutionary talk and the books you read,” Mama said. “But you stuck by what you believe in—and I respect you for that.”

  This meant much to me, hearing it from my mother. I gave her a sustained and sad-filled embrace. My father didn’t say a great deal. He gave me a brief, awkward hug and then shook my hand.

  “If you need anything—money, a place to stay—you have it here.”

  “That’s good to hear, Dad—thanks.”

  Although my father had been jailed and falsely accused like me before he left Mexico for the United States, we never related our experiences; he was a man of few words, and I stopped expecting more. As I drove away from the house, I swung by the Hills, everything eerily quiet. It felt strange to leave such a place and such a time in so much silence.

  I visited the Resurrection Cemetery, passing through the large, ornate gates, and parked. I strolled across the sheen of wet grass and up easy slopes, sprinkled here and there with marble headstones; flowers everywhere. A small boy in a wrinkled suit raced past. Nearby, a family stood around a recently-covered burial spot.

  There wasn’t much to see that day compared to the times when cars stretched for miles, winding around the curves of cemetery roads as they led to a casket next to chairs, wreaths and a mound of red dirt.

  I recalled the old people who came here, the men in brown suede hats and canes, and black-shawled women with rosaries clutched inside vein-streaked hands. I recalled the mothers who had to be restrained as they lay across the casket, beseeching to be buried with their son or daughter. I recalled the working men with their calloused palms and sun-beaten faces whose hardened eyes were forged from the heat of foundries or from under the sun’s gaze—and I remembered the stream which emanated from those dense eyes, how it pulled something raw and smoldering from every one of us.

  I recalled the young people: dudes in long-sleeve shirts and pressed pants, and girls with harsh makeup and, sometimes, infants against their shoulders. The deafening yells, the wet-stained cheeks, the touch of a trembling hand—I remembered it all.

  I left before the teardrops fell—for fear they’d never stop.

  In South San Gabriel, as elsewhere, events crashed into each other. A jury found Fred Coates, the deputy responsible for Miguel Robles’ death, innocent of all charges—as they had done for virtually every deputy ever accused of maiming or killing an unarmed person of color. The sheriff’s office assigned Coates to another part of the county. Soon we heard reports he faced an investigation for beating up a black youth.

  Even Puppet failed to escape the transitions. A couple of Mexican immigrants shot him when he chased them following a minor argument. He lived, but I later learned he accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior.

  The scourge of PCP—“angel dust”—had begun to grip almost every facet of barrio life. Whole neighborhoods became like ghost towns as increasing numbers of young people were hooked into this overpowering narcotic, easily manufactured in back-room laboratories and distributed widely and cheaply. Although PCP preceded the crack epidemic, it was enough to make blabbering idiots of once-vigorous boys and girls.

  La Casa Community Center became a major casualty of PCP. I once visited Sal Basuto who showed me around so I could see the devastation: pieces of pool table on the floor of the youth center, torn mattresses where runaways hid to snort, shoot up or smoke “angel dust”—anything of value gone, as if everything around Sal, all he had fought for, caved under PCP.

  In a matter of a year or two, the murals I painted through the Bienvenidos Community Center were whitewashed; the backlash against them proved swift and extensive. Only one mural survived, the one I finished on Chicano History for the inside of the Del Mar Children’s Library. Once in a while, I’d wander in there and sit down to gaze at the panels, without saying a word; one of the few remaining “shrines” of that tumultuous period.

  Mark Keppel High School continued in crisis—including undergoing a major confrontation the following year after I graduated. The police attacked a group of students on the lawn—at one point smearing the face of a pregnant girl into the ground and yanking students from the hallways. About 20 young people were taken to the police station and booked.

  A meeting was immediately called in which the police responded to inquiries about the incident. I returned to attend and saw fathers and mothers—people who paid taxes, who obeyed laws, who came to this country to work and better their lives—approach the police representatives as if they were going to pluck out their eyeballs. The police got flustered and had to promise to return all the mug shots to the parents and remove any statements of wrongdoing from the students’ records.

  I also learned the Movimiento Bookstore shut down when the body of Al “Pache” Alvarez was found in Garvey Park with a bullet hole through his head. His murder was never solved.

  But the most critical blow came with the closing of the Bienvenidos Community Center. According to some insiders, a prison gang had taken over various community centers across the county. There also appeared to be a move to take over Bienvenidos.

  Mrs. Baez, who chaired the bo
ard, figured the only way to keep the center out of their hands was for the board to disband—a sort of “scorched earth” policy.

  Although the Food Co-op continued on its own for a while, even opening up a separate storefront, the center’s programs, the John Fabela Youth Center, the dropout school and day care, all closed their doors—leaving Las Lomas with what it had once before: Nothing.

  Along with all this, the neighborhoods also changed. What I had unknowingly conjured up in my teatro productions came to fruition as land developers, along with county and city officials, tore up whole streets to build new townhouses, malls and expensive condos.

  One year, I visited my mother and father who still lived in the house in San Gabriel. By then the house had been stuccoed over, another bathroom added and a second house filled the back yard. My old garage room had been repainted and now served as storage.

  My mother explained how many more Asians had moved into the newly-constructed areas. One day, a new mall opened where the drive-in used to be; Mama and my sister Ana walked over there to check it out. But as soon as they got there, they slow-walked through the crowd, feeling out of place. There were hundreds of Chinese, newly arrived in this country, talking only in their language. None of the items in the stores were marked in English or Spanish. Mama didn’t mind the Chinese people—in some ways their culture recalled her Mexican-Indian upbringing—but it was evident the mall had no place for the Mexicans remaining in the area. There were no efforts to reach out, no means of inclusion—something our family had long experienced.

  This wasn’t about being Asian. Money talked here. Big money. Similarly a good part of the Hills found itself swept away with the massive land deals and influx of investments during the 1970s and 1980s. Between the police, Pacific Rim money and developers, the Hills didn’t have much of a chance.

  After San Pedro, I traveled to Chicago with Chente and a few others to attend a meeting with people from throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico.