Life at the D-Home was as predictable as it had been at the orphanage. New kids came and went. We woke up at the same time every day and went to bed at the same time every night. Every weekend visitors came and visited their loved ones for an hour. And just as I had done at the Boys’ Home, every night, before falling asleep, I’d imagine my mother’s voice whispering good night to me. I’d think of my father and brother; I’d see in my mind the carefree kids at school, older than at the Boys’ Home but laughing and playing the same, and gradually I’d fall asleep, pretending that tomorrow would be the day when everything was going to turn out well in my life.
Coach Tracy pulled me out of class one day and took me over to the gym. In his office, he sat behind his desk and said he was concerned because I was failing every class. At that time, I’d close up anytime an adult asked me questions; I didn’t trust them. And though Coach Tracy was different, I stared out the window, thinking of my brother and resenting the coach’s intrusion. He should have just been a coach and not worried about me or my grades. So what if I was failing? I was out of place here. The students were not from my world and I was not part of theirs.
I knew Coach Tracy was trying to be a good friend, so I said I’d try harder. He smiled. “Just give it a shot, that’s all I’m asking.” But after that he sought me out when I was going from class to class, asking, “How’s it going? Keep at them books, Jimmy, it’ll pay off.” Sometimes, expecting a response, he’d pause, but I never said anything. He’d prod. “Everything okay? Something bothering you?” I played him off, saying I was doing fine, but it was a lie; I wasn’t studying at night.
I hated books, I hated reading, I hated everything about school except football. So far we were undefeated. I was a fullback, trampling opponents with relish; on defense I was headhunter, roaming behind the linemen and following the ball carrier, whom I demolished. I was also the extra-point kicker. I kicked the ball so far one time that the refs had to stop the game to go and find it, over the fence in the weeds. We were on our way to becoming city champs.
After one important game, Coach Tracy surprised me by announcing I was staying at his house for the weekend. He was taking me to his home to meet his family.
I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a trial run for future adoption. I met his wife and two sons, ages five and eight. They lived in a moderate-sized red-brick house down a street bordered with elm trees in a middle-class neighborhood. He took me in and showed me the bedroom where I’d sleep that night. I felt detached and confused and anxious. Was this a ploy to get me away from my father and brother? Was I being taken away again, this time by myself? Ever since I was seven I’d been boarding in a state rental, and now at fourteen I was being offered my own bedroom. I forced a smile of appreciation but I was self-conscious about being regarded with such attentive courtesy. Over supper, the kids innocently questioned me, while his pretty wife stacked pork chops and string beans and mashed potatoes on my plate. Coach Tracy was telling me that if I could get a handle on the books and keep a good grade average, it’d be no problem getting a college scholarship for football. I didn’t want to go to college. I ate stiffly, feeling constrained by their deference, so unfamiliar. These were the kind of people I had a grudge against; if they knew that, they wouldn’t be so nice to me. These were the people I’d assumed didn’t care about us street kids. They were a part of the white world that had helped to destroy my family, made my father suffer, made my grandpa and grandma work in their fields dawn to dusk. If I lived with them, wouldn’t I be betraying everything I had been taught to believe in? I’d be going against my father and brother. I was sitting in the living room with the enemy, and yet in my heart I liked them; they were not harming me in any way. The fact that they were so generous made me feel worse for my bad thoughts. In my world, they represented everything bad, and yet they were not prejudiced, mean, greedy, or money-hungry. I decided that not all white people were the same, but it still didn’t make my stay any more comfortable.
I’d begun to feel early on that the state and society at large considered me a stain on their illusion of a perfect America. In the American dream there weren’t supposed to be children going hungry or sleeping under bridges. In me, the state—and society by extension—had yet another mouth to feed, another body to clothe. I felt like a nuisance; I suspected that if basic human decency didn’t warrant it, society would gladly dismiss me. Yet there were people like Coach Tracy and his family who went against the grain. And while I didn’t want to hurt them and was willing to go along for a while, there was no way I could let myself be adopted into a white family. It just couldn’t happen. I’d be like my mother then, turning my back on my people—my grandparents, my father, my brother and sister—and living a lie about who I really was. I was not going anywhere. My grandpa had always prided himself in his loyalty to his customs and traditions and people. I’d rather live on the streets and keep my loyalty, my memories and stories, than take on the gringo’s way of living, which tried to make me forget where I came from, and sometimes even put down my culture and ridiculed my grandparents as lazy foreigners.
Friday night I’d had bad dreams of my brother dying, and Saturday morning, after breakfast, I decided to walk to the park up the street. I took the younger kid with me. When I stopped to light a cigarette, cradling him in one arm, a floating ash burned his cheek and he screamed. I don’t know why his scream affected me so deeply. Perhaps it echoed the sentiments of my mother and the nuns, who insinuated that I was the cause of all the pain and hurt in my family’s life. Perhaps, it was the same chilling scream that was buried in me and never came out, the hot cry I stifled throughout my mother’s departure, my father’s violence, my brother’s absence, my terror of being alone in the world. I was not able to put my feelings or thoughts in words, but feeling guilty as hell, I sat on the street curb and kept telling the kid I was sorry, I didn’t mean to burn his cheek, it was an accident. He wanted to go home so I carried him back, thinking the whole time I belonged in the D-Home.
Coach Tracy and his wife begged me to tell them what was wrong. My silence aggravated their confusion, and they appealed all the more for an explanation, imploring me to say something. Even if I could’ve expressed myself, I was confused about what I was supposed to say or not say, and my response to any question was always “I don’t know.”
That’s exactly what I told Coach Tracy and his wife: I didn’t know why, I just wanted to go back. On Sunday afternoon, Coach Tracy drove me down. We said very little. His eyes were red, his face drawn from exhaustion. I was tremendously sad when I said good-bye and shut the car door and walked to the entrance of the D-Home. I thought I had spoiled everything for him and I wanted to apologize, but I didn’t know how to explain myself. I wasn’t strong enough to admit that I felt worthless and was nothing but a troublemaker. I quit school the next day.
I lived at the detention center for a few months more until one cold December morning when Mieyo came by on a brand-new motorcycle. I was so excited to see him that I begged Nestor, the D-Home director, to let me go with him for the day. I told him that Christmas and my fifteenth birthday, January 5, were around the corner, and that spending a day with Mieyo would be all the Christmas and birthday present I would ever want. Nestor sensed my elation and kindly agreed to let me go for the day, warning me to be back by supper. Mieyo had brought extra gloves, a coat, and a beanie cap. I put them on, and we roared out of the D-Home parking lot. I knew I was not coming back.
It didn’t take me long to graduate to the kind of jails where the bars were meant to keep me in. Fortunately, I was never there for very long. I was still a juvenile, and the charges never got more serious than disturbing the peace, vagrancy, or petty theft, none of which they were very good at proving. I’d be held for a while, have a few conversations with child welfare authorities or a probation officer, and then be released into the custody of my father, who was supposed to be taking care of me but whom I never saw.
My father had
lost his job with the DMV and now got his drinking money selling shoes. He spent his nights at cantinas and hardly ever came back to the shack in Albuquerque that Mieyo and I were calling home. I couldn’t believe he was still searching for my mother. She still haunted him. He even questioned us to see if we knew where she was. When he did show up he’d be drunk, and if Mieyo and I were around we’d keep our distance, because we might get beaten up.
We stayed in a gardener’s shack, more or less like the one I’d grown up in, converted into sleeping quarters for the three of us. Mieyo and I would eat at friends’ houses, and we roamed around town with a group of like-minded kids with equally unsavory pasts. Mieyo was fifteen and trying to go to school and sometimes worked as a hotel bellboy; I was fourteen and worked occasionally, but school wasn’t for me. Mostly we cruised, looking for something to do, any kind of action. We’d steal a bicycle or a tire and resell it, or earn enough—digging ditches for a plumbing contractor, cleaning yards, washing windows, or painting—to put something in our stomachs and then party. When my brother had picked me up at the D-Home, I was surprised that he had already started drinking. I followed suit. Soon there were other things: LSD, pot, harder stuff. We’d get high, cruise around, maybe get in a fight, stoke up again, and then crash wherever we could—abandoned shacks, someone’s car, or on a bench or under a tree in the town square. Occasionally, I would wake up in jail.
I don’t know when the process of criminalization began for any one of the kids I hung out with or woke up with in a prison cell. For me, it was when my mother first dropped my brother and sister and me off in Estancia; it was reinforced when Mieyo and I were driven through the gates of Saint Anthony’s, and it started to take on a more antisocial reality at the detention center. It was at the detention center that I first learned how to intimidate others with my stare, how to lie to the authorities with a smile, how to join a group and think of myself as me against the others. It was at the detention center that I first came in contact with boys who were already well on their way to becoming criminals; whose friendship taught me I was more like them than like the boys outside the cells, living in a society that would never accept me, in a world made of parents, nice clothes, and loving care. You could see the narrowing of life’s possibilities in the cold, challenging eyes of the homeboys in the detention center; you could see the numbing of their hearts in their swaggering postures. All of them had been wounded, hurt, abused, ignored; already, aggression was in their talk, in the way they let off steam over their disappointments, in the way they expressed themselves. It was all they allowed themselves to express, for each of them knew they could be hurt again if they tried anything different. So instead they refined what they did know to its own kind of perfection.
I watched and listened and learned in the detention center. I understood that if I was to get by on the streets I would have to do it by fighting. If only through my experience on the football field, I knew I had enough frustrated anger in me to funnel into destructive behavior. But it wasn’t until Mieyo told me that he’d been raped during our separation that my world suddenly shifted from passive observer to violent engagement. I was not going to let the world trample my brother and me down like dogs in the street. My faith in the goodness of people began to tremble around the edges until it shattered like glass subjected to a high-pitched sound. My hope that society would one day invite us in was gone. The world was against us. Rather than let the world beat us down, I had to fight back, and I did, on the day Mieyo finally came to get me.
He fetched me on his new motorcycle, and we went over to where he was living. He told me that when I was taken to the detention center, the nuns had located our father and released Mieyo into his care. Father was living in a small shack with barely enough room for two people. He drank all the time. There was never any food, and Mieyo was sometimes beaten. So he left and was living on the streets until one day two older white men picked him up and treated him to a big meal, bought him some clothes, and invited him to their house when he didn’t have a place to stay. He thought they were simply being kind, but they raped him and used legal jargon to threaten him. He would go to prison for breaking and entering, they said. They would accuse him of robbing them. Besides, who would believe a young Chicano kid anyway—certainly not over the word of two successful white men with good jobs, a nice house, and social standing.
I had known boys who had been raped before, both in the orphanage and in the detention center. But this was my brother. I found his shame excruciating to bear. I wanted to protect him—I was willing to do anything to protect him—and I began to lash out at every opportunity. We had a kind of gang going; no colors, no rules or rituals, just a bunch of us boys who had already been cast off and who didn’t have much else to do but cruise around together and get in trouble. We fought other gangs, white kids mostly, and more and more I would step out and be the point man in any fight situation.
I was good at it, just like my father had said I would be on those nights when he drank and we watched the Gillette fights, or at Grandma’s when I was small. Crouching down and protecting my face and ribs, I’d lash out with jabs and kicks on street corners and in alleys; the difference was that now my fighting was fueled by my rage at the world. I wouldn’t stop until I was panting with exhaustion as I stared at my opponent bleeding on the pavement. I fought for my brother because I knew that inside him he was hurting in a way that only someone who gets raped can hurt. I wanted to take his hurt away by hurting others, but it never seemed to work. When I finished a fight and we were alone again, he would explode. To vent his anger, he berated and demeaned me, and then he beat me, and I let him. I knew it wasn’t right, but in all the confusion of my life I felt this one thing was helping him live. And somewhere along the line I started fighting just for the sake of fighting, because I was good at it and it felt good to beat other people up.
Fighting, drinking, and getting high, driving around, this was my life for three or four years. We’d rent a cheap apartment in a bad section of town, get drunk, burn down the apartment, and take off, a bunch of wild kids in cars prowling affluent white neighborhoods, looking to steal something or break a car window just for something to do. We’d hang out at a burger joint looking to fight other gangs or we’d cruise around to score some drugs, get off, sleep it off until late in the afternoon, and then start all over again.
I’d ride out to Estancia sometimes to visit Grandma, but it didn’t feel right. La Casita made me think of my mother and father and the few good memories we had. Her being with me at the park, us lying in bed and talking, but mostly of her at the window, worried and waiting for my father. I never did hear from her after she dropped us off, and I wondered bitterly whether she thought of us and, if so, in what way. With remorse? Gladness? Or, living a carefree life in California, had she completely forgotten we were ever born? Grandma was shrinking with age. She was blind but still caring for Refugio, who came in drunk each night. Martina married at fifteen, a guy from another village, and lived in a trailer in Albuquerque. Jesusita, Julian, and Carlos came on weekends to visit, but Santiago still lived in Estancia, caring for Grandma and working at Grandpa’s old job as janitor at the high school. When Grandma asked about my father and brother, I lied and said they were okay. I didn’t tell her that occasionally, late at night, I’d see my father stumbling down the sidewalk on his way to the next cantina. I’d be in the backseat of someone’s car, and I’d swing my head to the window to catch the expression on his face as we cruised by. It was always the same, but even through my stoned haze I’d feel the same welling of contempt with a weird measure of satisfaction that I had already surpassed him. I was going farther than he’d ever dared.
My brother and I were alone in the world. I was fifteen and he sixteen, and we were accountable to no one. All I had to do was not get caught doing petty crimes, and I could continue to wander with no direction, going along on a day-to-day basis with any suggestion or impulse a friend might come up with. It wasn’t s
o bad. Each day was a new adventure. But there were hard times, too—waking up on the ground with nothing but a stubbed-out cigarette, a half-finished beer warming in the morning sun, and a full, absolutely empty day before me. I felt as lost and useless as I ever had before or have since.
Mieyo got tired of our poverty because he liked money: having nice clothes and new Converse sneakers, eating out, buying things. He was always looking for one job or another, and still trying to go to school, but he had to quit to put food in his stomach. For a long time he had a job at the Desert Sands Hotel on Central as a bellboy. I’d go by and he’d give me tip change to buy burgers or we’d eat together. He got to see another side of life while working there, meeting people who traveled and stayed in hotels. Their exciting lives made him dream of achieving the same. He talked a lot about being a millionaire and buying a house and car.
A Place to Stand Page 4
