by Ryan Gattis
DAY 6
MONDAY
THERE WERE FIFTY-TWO DEATHS.
WE WERE LOOKING SERIOUSLY AT SIXTY AND AGAIN THERE WASN’T A WHOLE LOT OF INFORMATION.
JUST BECAUSE SOMEBODY DIED DURING THE TIME FRAME DOESN’T MEAN IT WAS DIRECTLY RELATED TO THE RIOT . . .
WHICH BROUGHT UP AN INTERESTING POINT.
ARE ALL GANG SHOOTINGS AT THIS TIME RIOT-RELATED?
WE HAVE GANG SHOOTINGS EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR.
WHAT WOULD SET THESE APART FROM BEING RIOT-RELATED? . . .
WHAT WAS INTERESTING WAS ONE OF THE CASES I WAS LOOKING AT WAS IN
HOLLINGBACK [SIC] DIVISION. HOLLINGBACK IS EAST L.A.
THEY DIDN’T HAVE ANY RIOT-RELATED DEATHS IN EAST LOS ANGELES.
SO, UM, ONE GUY WAS FOUND, UM, I CAN’T REMEMBER IF HE WAS STABBED OR SHOT
INSIDE OF A DRAINAGE PIPE, AND THEY SAID NO, IT WAS DEFINITELY NOT RIOT-RELATED.
I DON’T KNOW WHETHER IT WAS A LOVERS’ QUARREL OR . . .
OR A BAD DOPE DEAL OR WHAT, BUT THEY SAID IT DEFINITELY DIDN’T HAVE ANYTHING
TO DO WITH THE RIOTS, IT WAS JUST ANOTHER HOMICIDE.
—LIEUTENANT DEAN GILMOUR, L.A. COUNTY CORONER
JAMES
MAY 4, 1992
9:00 A.M.
1
Everything’s been burning in Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels. Even people. This camper, somebody lit his ass on fire while he was sleeping and you don’t live through that. Sonofabitch, you sure don’t. You give up your ghost is what you do. You go to your heavenly rest.
I saw that smoke going up yesterday. A bridge north of me on my same riverbank. Only I didn’t know it was his smoke yet. It went up after two black trucks drove the riverbed like they owned it. Went right past my pipe. Big and fast but too quiet for their size. When I saw that, I did my sign for heavenly protection and turned around twice.
Normally when I’m all set up in my pipe I pull my curtain. I got a rod for it and everything. I got a chair too. Anyhow, I pull that curtain and the world can’t see me, not even trains going by on the far bank. It makes me disappear. But that day I didn’t pull it because I saw smoke. I didn’t know what it was at first.
Our Lady says to me then: You knew what it was.
I scream right back at her. I tell her I didn’t know what it was till I walked up and saw him a black little skeleton on his bedroll. I smelt gas-soaked dirt too, and what hurt was watching campers divvy up his things. His name was Terry. I don’t know no last name. Just Terry. I stared on his bones while these other campers took his last good belongings. They didn’t even pay his spirit respects first. Goldarn sons of bitches. They picked him clean. His dog he tended to, gone. His good pants hung up on his fence, gone. Every last person on earth is trying to steal from you or wanting to beat on you and take and take.
I asked around how Terry died and got it told simple. Puppet did it. I asked how we knew and got told we knew because we knew. Campers know faces. Campers talk. We find out things we want to. And campers know somebody calling himself Puppet walked down into the camp with a gas can and emptied it on old Terry where he slept and then he lit him. Nobody knows why.
When I heard this, I let Our Lady have it. I said to her: You’re a goldarn black city! You’re a black city with a black heart and black ash blowing around your black asphalt streets. That’s what you’ve been. What you are today. What you’re always going to be. And your river’s the only good thing about you.
And she said back: That’s not true.
I yelled at her more after that. I told her she couldn’t tell me how to feel when I stood next to the ashes of a dead man that somebody burnt up for no good reason while campers picked his stuff clean and walked away without one good word for the man.
Campers are meant to be better than bums. I don’t like the word bums, or homeless neither. They don’t hardly describe the life. None of them say what we do, except camper does, because we camp. We like sky so much we need to see it every night. We don’t lock ourselves in anywhere. We’re free. And this is the Land of the Free! And we need to feel where we are, the most elemental city on earth.
It’s true too. Our Lady gets forest fires. She gets Santa Ana winds. She has ocean too, and her earth’s always a step away from quaking. With a makeup like that, you’re gonna need to shake the bad out sometimes. You have to, because it builds up.
She interrupts me how she does then, she says: I do?
And I say back to her: Yes, you do. It’s nature.
She’s quiet after that, but just because she’s not saying anything doesn’t mean she’s not with me. She follows me everywhere I go, always coming into my head with the questions. Like now, when I’m hungry, when I’m walking the street called Imperial that don’t have anything magnificent about it.
But there’s no better way to know her than with your own two feet. You need Our Lady at your eye level. You need her beneath your soles, feeling her heat. You need to be breathing her in, smelling her. Taking her goldarn atoms in and making them you. No better place to do that than at the river. You can walk for miles in the bed and find everything you need. And I know too.
I’ve been around rivers my whole life. The Mississippi. The Colorado. The Mekong. Rivers protect me. Keep me safe. I don’t feel right if I’m not near one. I lose focus. I lose my center and do bad things like the drink. But not at her river I don’t. Her river’s ancient. Back when Our Lady was a tiny pueblo on a mound of dirt, the Messican-Indians knew the Arroyo Seco was a sacred well of power with spirit-juice so powerful that one day a goldarn great city with too many people would rise up of it. That’s how powerful her river is. It gave birth.
And this thing is teenage now and alive and angry and it’s tearing itself apart. I’ve seen fires just about everywhere and red flashing fire trucks going up and down her black streets. I haven’t just seen Terry. I’ve seen a body with almost no face on it in the street, no ear even. I’ve seen trucks on fire, buildings, and a house too, one that might’ve taken the whole neighborhood if neighbors hadn’t put hoses on their own roofs to wet them down. Sure shows what they thought of that one house though.
I say to the city people when I see what I see, I say: I’ve seen this city taking itself to heaven in pieces.
Because that’s what fire does. It takes. It’s the prettiest and ugliest mathematical division there ever was. City fire is the worst of its kind though, because it takes more than it should. City fire don’t know how to care. It punishes everybody. It gets at the innocent, like at Terry. City fire’s greedy that way. But it’s just fire being fire. It has to reset everything as close to zero as it can, so it burns things down into the smallest bits. Bits the winds can carry. Those are the remainders. But we can’t hardly see them unless they’re stuck together in a stack of smoke. That’s how the littlest pieces add up together, you know? It’s a big black fact.
MIGUEL “MIGUELITO” RIVERA JUNIOR,
A.K.A. MIKEY RIVERA
MAY 4, 1992
9:00 A.M.
1
When my alarm goes off, I wake up with the beat of a Specials song in my head, so I kick my sheets off, go find the tape of it, and put it in the deck. I’m pressing play on “A Message to You Rudy” as my dad knocks next to the space where my door would be if I had one. We’re redoing the house. Actually, he’s redoing the house—again.
Where my wall used to be is a wooden skeleton of support studs that I stuffed with books because it looked like an empty bookcase sitting there on its own, but also because it makes it more private, at least a little. Still, I can see him looking at me past the spines of my Richard Allen pulp novels.
My dad is a contractor. He got his degree in drafting from Santa Monica City College, but he doesn’t do much with it. Mostly, he sells tile and does installations—bathrooms, kitchens, that kind of thing. His claim to fame is that he did both bathrooms in Raquel Welch’s guesthouse in Italian marble. There’s a framed, autographed picture of her on the wall of
his store, Tile Planet. It’s on Western, in this little strip of Palos Verdes that cuts into San Pedro. You can see all of L.A. from up there. You can look down on it. I think that’s one of the reasons why my dad likes it. He likes looking down on things, especially people.
“You don’t need to knock,” I tell my dad, but I don’t press the stop button on my music. “The wall’s open.”
He doesn’t get the sarcasm. He steps into my room a little and says, “You want breakfast or what?”
I eye him for a moment as the ska bops along between us. My dad hates this music. It gets on his nerves, which obviously makes me love it that much more.
“No?” My dad crosses his arms at me. “I made some, and you don’t want any?”
“I’m thinking,” I say.
“Well,” he says, irritation in his voice, “think faster.”
When my dad uncrosses his arms, it means I’m taking too long to answer him. Six years ago, this would’ve meant something bad was about to happen because he didn’t get his way, but he just balls his hands into fists. The scar on his left hand tightens and goes purple when he does this. Just seeing it turns my stomach. For the longest time, it meant the worst was coming. Purple meant I’d be bruised soon. He sees me looking at it and unclenches both fists before saying, “I asked you a simple question.”
“Fine,” I say so he’ll stop bothering me. “I’ll have some.”
I watch him go through the spaces in the beams, over the tops of books and around them. I only see the black wave of his hair slide past Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Terkel’s Hard Times from my Great American Books class. When my dad enters the kitchen on the other side of the house, I lose track of him, but I hear him clinking, moving around, shaking plates and cutlery.
Things have been bad between us for a long time. He’s been different the past few days though. He’s actually been paying attention. Still, why is he making me breakfast? I figure he wants something.
My dad has always taken being a member of the Beat Generation literally. When I was younger I thought for sure that I was in that generation too, because I got beat all the time. Put it this way, on the days I was lucky, it was a belt strap. On the days I wasn’t, it was the buckle. My back is pretty scarred now. A white ex-girlfriend once asked me if I’d ever gotten hit with a grenade. She wasn’t entirely kidding. My dad has always been short-tempered, and I’m the only child, so that was how it went until I turned thirteen and pulled a knife on him when he tried to hit me. That was the day it stopped for good. The weirdest thing was though, instead of yelling at me, he smiled and told me he was proud to see me stand up for myself like that, and then he walked away like maybe I’d finally stopped disappointing him.
That messed with me for a long time because it made me think back to every time he ever hit me and I wondered how much of it was on purpose and not out of anger. It was worse to think of it that way, so now I just try not to. It wasn’t the end of him being disappointed though. Since then he’s just found other things about me not to be proud of, like how, on the first night of the riots, Kerwin and I did acid and went out and rode our choppers.
He wasn’t happy to hear we’d been looking for fires to stare at. There was no way to explain to him that it was worth it, that I saw birds and dragons rising from the flames and flying up into the air, thousands and thousands of them turning black and becoming the night sky. He almost took my bike away after I told him that and I don’t blame him. You can’t bring an unconscious girl home without explaining every single step about how she got there, not to my dad.
2
I’ve got a Vespa bike, P-125 model. We call them choppers because we chop them down. If I ever wreck one, it’s easier to chop it than get a new one. I kitted the engine on mine. I chopped down the cowlings, extended the forks. That took it from a 45-mile-per-hour max to over 90. You can hear its whine for miles. It’s practically a Road Warrior bike.
That’s what I was riding when coming home from Kerwin’s the next morning and right as I was going up our street, I saw this twitchy guy chuck a flaming Molotov cocktail right through Momo’s front doorway. I couldn’t believe it. There’s this kid, younger than me probably, dressed all in black, but he’s got this white square of napkin on his hairline, held there by dried blood. Next to him was this van parked on the lawn. I cut my engine and coasted in when I saw him because I didn’t know what he was going to do. For the longest time he just stood there, with the bottle burning in his hand.
I thought for sure it was going to explode on him. It looked like he was talking to himself, whispering, all the while not noticing how serious the situation was, and it must have gotten to the point where it burned his hand because he screamed and threw it as hard as he could through the front door. Right after, he turned to the van, and looked at me like he wanted to do something about me sitting there on my chopper, but he took off instead.
I went to the door after that because I wanted to see if there was anything of Momo’s that could be salvaged quickly, but the second I looked in, I saw a girl lying facedown on the living room floor and any thought I had before that just evaporated.
Next to her, a giant rippling triangle of orange fire climbed the wall, like in the movies, except louder, and so hot. Just getting a few feet from it made all the hair on my right arm shrink down to little black nubs and all I could think to do was grab the girl’s ankles and drag her out the door. Doing that, I scraped her chin and cheek pretty bad on the porch concrete before I got her onto the lawn and flipped over. She was bleeding and unconscious as I panicked and searched for a heartbeat.
In my room, I hit stop on the Specials. It’s a good thing I think showers are overrated, because our water is off again—something to do with the plumbing being worked on. I don’t even question it anymore. I swipe some deodorant on, grab a blue Fred Perry, do the collar up, and put on some red bracers. After that, it’s just bleach-stained jeans with a rollup high enough that you can see every inch of my black Docs. My dad sees me this way every morning and rolls his eyes. He’s had it explained to him so many times, but he still doesn’t know what a mod is, or why his Mexican American son would ever want to be one.
He doesn’t get that culture is different for my generation, that we get to choose. It’s not about whatever it was when he was my age. It’s about cholo stuff now. Gang stuff. It’s selfish. He doesn’t get that music saved me. The ska, Two-Tone stuff, Trojan records, it keeps me out of that world. Sometimes I think my old man would be happier if I was out banging, though, because maybe that’s closer to how he grew up, even though he never talks about it—even though he’s got other scars that can’t be from learning construction work even though he says they are.
My mom gets me though. She’s happy I’m not involved. In fact, she’s the reason I’m still living at home, even though I’ve been graduated from high school for a year. She’s already at work by now. She got a call last night that the accounting office she works at would be opening back up today after being closed last week for the riots, so she left early, before I woke up because she was afraid of the reports she’d been seeing about snipers on the news. When she’s gone, it’s tougher for my dad and me to talk to each other without it sounding like we’re fighting.
