At the station, kids shrieked playing tag in the lobby as their solemn Mexican parents sat stone still in molded yellow chairs clutching bundles tied with string. They had swarthy complexions and broad faces, with serapes and sandals and white cotton peasant pants. “Next? Next?” The teller peered at us. “Fill out a shipping tag with name and address.”
We handed him the box to weigh it and Marcos took a pen from the coffee can on the counter and was writing when two guys cut in line behind us. A voice came from behind me. “Boy, you guys stink of weed.” I turned around and one flashed a wallet badge: Narcotic Agents. “We’d like to look in that box.” He used a box cutter to open it and found the weed. I put my head down, ashamed, as they led us through the lobby handcuffed, past those people who looked like my grandparents, people who worked hard all their lives and earned their money honestly.
The next day we pled guilty to a misdemeanor and were sentenced to thirty days. Marcos had never been in jail before, but I told him not to sweat it. Sitting on a bunk and playing poker, I told him I’d been in jail a few times and then gave him the unwritten jail rules. Bum a smoke but tell the guy you’ll catch him on the rebound on commissary day. Don’t join guys in a circle talking unless you’re invited. If a guy mad-dogs you, never back up. If shit comes down, I’ll take care of it. You watch my back, I watch yours. We spent most of our time in an open common area with five stainless-steel tables where we ate, played checkers, dominoes, cards, sat smoking, and shot the breeze. Marcos was too friendly at first, so when a guy named Flyer, a tall, ex-All-American collegiate basketball star turned pimp, gave Marcos a carton of Camels, I took them back and told Flyer to quit playing Marcos for a punk.
A few days later we sat down to eat and Flyer told Bluebird, this faggot he was bunking with, to take Marcos’s orange. Bluebird hit Marcos when Marcos tried to take it back, and immediately Raven and Squeaky, two guys I played poker with, and I were on them. Marcos was scared but I kind of shielded him during the fight, placing him behind me in a way that nobody would think Marcos was chicken. Raven was nobody to mess with, a Chicano from Oakland. He had showed us all what he could do when a big guy named Mac-Daddy stepped on his Stacy Adams and Raven tore him up. Marcos was scared after the fight. Things didn’t get better when Raven and Squeaky were given their walking papers. It was tense, and Marcos and I stayed on guard in case the other guys tried to jump us. Marcos didn’t mellow out until he started writing another inmate’s sister in Los Angeles. He taped her picture on his bunk and was always responding to her perfumed letters full of romantic dreams of their living happily ever after when he got out. He was playing along with her just to fill the time.
The days dragged on monotonously as Marcos busily wrote love letters. For cards and dominoes I partnered up with a guy named Tecolote—Spanish for Owl, because he could see DEA agents in the dark and run drugs right under their noses. I had been on the jail-house phone talking to a chick and heard Tecolote next to me, speaking rapidly in a language I’d never heard. He must have called ten people, using avid gestures as if the party he’d called was in front of him. Later I asked him what language he was talking, and he said it was Pig Latin. In fact, he could repeat anything I said backwards, sounding like an auctioneer. When he wasn’t on the phone or playing cards, he was figuring out stuff, showing me a legal pad with numbers on it, saying, ‘That’s what I make in a month.” It was a five-figure digit. After visits he came back and drank salt water and threw up a balloon of hash his wife had tongued him in a kiss. Smoking from a pipe made from a toilet-paper cylinder with a screen made from the tinfoil from a cigarette pack, he suggested Marcos and I might make a little money and start selling hash and weed for him. I told him it sounded like a good idea but that Marcos and I were leaving within days. We had work and housing vouchers the jail counselor had given us. After our last experience I wanted to avoid drugs. I was looking forward to life again without having to be looking over my shoulder or worrying about being thrown in jail.
On the last night, when the lights went off, Marcos tossed and turned in the bunk above me. I finally asked what the problem was. “You usually sleep like a log, dude, what’s up? Squeezing that turkey of yours?”
But instead of joking back as he usually did, he said, “I want to thank you for being my friend.” I felt a little embarrassed by his admission because it just wasn’t done; loyalty and friendship spoke for itself in just hanging out. And because no one had ever thanked me before for being a friend, I was kind of lost for words. I told him he was the best friend I had ever had, too, my voice sounding forced, like a child saying he liked to eat vegetables to please the grown-ups. He said he was wondering about the game plan once we got out. “What’s to wonder?” I responded. “We’re getting out, man: freedom, chicks, and party time.”
‘Things gonna be the same?”
“It’s never changed,” I said. ‘We’re partners until the wheels fall off that car of yours. Go to sleep, Marcos. Good night.”
The police had had Marcos’s car impounded so we took a bus to our old apartment, but the landlord had put our belongings in storage and wouldn’t return them until we paid him back rent. We bussed over to the hotel for which the jail had given us vouchers. We were feeling good about being free, staring out the window at chicks, until we arrived at our “hotel” to find a squalid dope fiend’s den and seedy whorehouse with ex-cons sitting on lumpy, ragged sofas watching soaps on television in a foul-smelling, dingy lobby. We wanted to turn around and walk out but we had no place to go. We handed the vouchers to a wrinkled, hunch-backed man at the desk, who was puffing on a cigar and playing poker with a floozy in a red miniskirt, pink fish-net stockings, and black stiletto heels. He tapped a coffee-stained black book, “Sign it,” he said, coughing. “Room six, first floor. Ruby, your turn.” The woman batted her false eyelashes at Marcos, her makeup crumbling in chunks at the smile lines. Beneath her black wig, gray strands stuck out.
We walked up the creaky steps into a narrow hallway rancid with the stench of decay and bleach fumes so strong I had trouble breathing. The rooms had no doors, hot electrical wires stuck out from wall outlets, gashes gouged the wooden floor, water dripped from cracked toilets and sinks. In one room a woman was passed out on the floor, her dress above her waist. In the next, two guys and a chick were cooking up heroin in a spoon. My stomach soured. I counted the rooms from the front of the hall and went into the fifth. A haggard-looking couple with shrunken cheeks and puffed-out eyes, scabbed faces, and blood-caked hair looked at us, and the guy said, “Sorry, man, sorry,” and they scurried out to the hallway and into another vacant room. Marcos read my thoughts when he whispered, “This is where they send them to rehabilitate?”
To get us the hell out of the dump as quickly as we could, I called Tecolote and set up a deal. It wasn’t like we were going to be big dealers or anything, it was a temporary but convenient jump start, to help us get on our feet. The judge had sentenced us to a couple of months of community service, but this ended up by helping us sell more. We reported to a Ms. Gonzalez, who met us outside a cinder-block green-tarpapered pitched-roof house, converted into a social service office. She made us wait outside on a dilapidated porch with warped boards and peeling paint. A huge ponderosa pine flanked the smooth-grooved steps leading to the door, its milky oval window cracked and repaired with duct tape. Ms. Gonzalez, a cordial heavy-shouldered Chicana with graying hair, led us into a room where we shot pool on a beat-up table until the crew boss, Luke, came in. He was a big guy, barging in from the back, roughly kicking the screen door open. A retired cop, he coached a basketball team comprised of ex-gang members at the Boys’ Club. The rest of the guys filed in and after a while Luke announced that the truck had arrived and we all went out the back door to begin our deliveries of food staples to welfare food banks. At every stop, while we unloaded boxes of macaroni and block cheese, all these black and Chicano dudes would line up in the back of the racks and shelves and we’d sell quarter and half ou
nces.
Using the welfare delivery system as our front was a great cover. We were not going to make the same mistake and get drunk and high or use the buses when we could be cabbed all over San Diego and Ocean Beach, compliments of the city, doing our business. Our clients were generally depressed and down on their luck and needed something to lift their spirits. Site to site, on the truck bed, waving to women, whistling, yelling, and making happy eyesore spectacles of ourselves, we’d reach one food bank and while the guys unloaded commodity cereal, powdered milk, and other stuff, Marcos and I’d be in the back of the warehouse doing our thing. And what better way to package our product than in generic macaroni boxes? We’d drive down the road a bit, unload, sell our weed, and drive on and unload at another food-bank site. We went all over San Diego, joking and laughing, rolling in dough, our pockets brimming with stamps; we pointed out different houses we were going to rent, shops we were going to buy clothes in, chicks we were going to take out. We reveled in the ocean air and warm sunshine; life couldn’t have been better. We got the car out of the pound, paid our back rent, got our stuff back, and rented a nice pad facing the ocean with a walkway down to the beach.
After our community service work was done, Marcos and I resumed living the life we’d had before jail. We’d wash and wax his car and then hang out at Pub and Pockets, a sports bar with shapely waitresses carrying trays of food and beer pitchers to college kids watching TVs suspended from the ceiling showing different games. I was racking another pool game when these two lovely Chicanas took a table next to ours. Marcos shot me a glance. The more beautiful of the two reminded me of Theresa with her caramel complexion; in a yellow skirt and off-rose silk blouse, black mane of hair, red lips, she glowed with a sensual sweetness. She chalked her stick and bent over to break, the stick caressing her breast with each stroke. She didn’t get a ball in and abruptly turned to me and said, “Almost.” I blushed and looked down because she kept looking. Marcos missed, teasing me, “Jimmy, it’s your shot; make it count, dude; don’t let a beautiful woman distract you; come on, concentrate, I’m giving you a little mercy, dude.” He purposely set the cue ball on the side closest to them. I stepped around the table, trying to think of what to say to her, taking a long time eyeing the balls for an angle. Then from behind me, she asked, “Are you going to shoot?” Caught by surprise, I hurried my shot and missed the cue ball, smacking my stick against the stained-glass umbrella lamp hanging over the table. Embarrassed, I returned to my chair to sip my rum and Coke, wanting to say something but lost for words.
We ended up playing teams, and later followed them to their hangout—Surf’s Up, an open-air watering hole jamming with a beach band and a rowdy crowd. Attached to bamboo in the palm ceiling, Chinese paper lanterns came on at dusk, illuminating red roses painted on the shades, swaying slightly in the breeze. Marcos and Clara split in her car and left Lonnie and me drinking margaritas. After we drained the last one, she kissed me, long and passionately. She was the first woman since Theresa who made me believe that I could love again, and from that first kiss we were inseparable.
The next morning I took her home to change clothes. She lived with her parents in an older upper-class neighborhood in a beige two-story clapboard-and-brick house. Lofty palm trees lined the shrub-bordered street, and the lawns and hedges were geometrically perfect. Her father was in the two-car garage, tinkering with his Cessna plane. I waited in the car, and after a while Lonnie came out of the house wearing jeans and a red shirt. She had a carefree air about her that made her seem like a little girl skipping squares at hopscotch. She went to the garage to kiss her father good-bye. He turned on her angrily, ordering her to stay and commanding her to get rid of me. She had words with him, but they only made him more demanding. When she came to the car, I leaned over to the passenger side and suggested, “Maybe you should stay. I can come back later.” But she got in and said, “Don’t let it bother you, he’s always mad.” She was on the verge of tears. She looked at me, eyes wet. “I’m okay. I just want to be with you.” I downshifted, turned a corner, and sped under trees whose shade and sunlight glimmered off the windshield. We had not planned for her to leave home only after one night with me, it just happened that way. It felt like a new beginning, though I was afraid I might not be the man she thought I was.
On the freeway, going to the beach, I said, “I heard your father back there. You don’t have a home anymore. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to mess things up.” She scooted over and squeezed my hand. “I love you.” I looked at her and asked, “Are you sure you want this?” She answered by giving me a long kiss until I pulled away and veered to avoid hitting a guard rail. I wanted to say much more to her, but I didn’t have the words.
The three of us hung out, and I became as comfortable with Lonnie as I was with Marcos. To get our relationship more grounded, and being tired of looking over my shoulder for narcs, I told Marcos we should stop selling weed. I reminded him that we were just doing lightweight dealing to get on our feet; it wasn’t like we wanted to become millionaires in drugs and make it our life.
“I’m with you all the way, long as we don’t end up back at that grungy hotel.” With Marcos, it was never a question of whether it was right or wrong—friendship was more important to him. He swiped his hair from his face, looked at me, and added, “So where do we go and how do we get by?”
I told him I’d gone to an employment agency, where I had leafed through a magazine about Arizona in the waiting room. I pulled the pictures I’d torn out from my pocket and showed them to him. “Don’t look too bad, do they?” He studied the magazine pictures and asked, “Did you get a job?” I said that the counselor asked me in the interview if I knew what the word tangible meant. I imagined a jar of Tang. “It’s a drink,” I told the counselor. “Athletes drink it on commercials.” Marcos broke out laughing. “Tangible ain’t got nothing to do with Tang.” And then I told him, “Yeah, I know that now. I figured it out when, after my answer, the jerk walks me to the door with a strange look on his face as if I’d just farted in church or something.” Marcos said, “We go to Arizona, then.”
My life hinged on the precarious belief that sooner or later I was bound to fall into step with life around me if I continued to move and try out new things, new places, meet new people. If I opened myself to enough new experiences, I was bound to hit on the right one sooner or later.
The next day, three hundred miles later, Marcos, Lonnie, and I were driving into a town that wasn’t what we’d expected from the magazine pictures. Yuma, Arizona, was no oasis in the desert; we didn’t see the Colorado River glimmering between green fields or any friendly faces under a Chamber of Commerce sign welcoming newcomers. We drove in at dawn, startling crows from stick fences lining the dusty roads damp with night dew. We jostled on the outskirts over rutted roads, gradually winding into residential areas. It was a small-enough town that we could cover it in an hour. The morning was cool and minty as cedar berries, and lunch-pail workers drowsily trucked their way to work. We found the tracks dividing whites and Mexicans and drove through the Mexican barrio, where jeans hung on clotheslines and chickens nested under wrecked cars. Outhouses lay on the edge of small cornfields and a goat stood licking the drip puddles from hand-pump water spigots in a weedy yard. Here and there gardens of squash and chile grew beside shacks built from tin and timber scraps. We saw a young boy taking a bucket by the front door to haul water; at another house, melons and green beans were piled by a ravaged screen door; from nearby came the faint strains of Mexican music. Hoes and rakes and shovels clustered together by the east wall near clay pits to mix mud and repair the adobe cracks. I’d grown used to big-city noise, and here a silence lay over everything like an invisible spirit invoking memories of the past that made me realize how much my life had changed in a few years. It reminded me of Estancia, and maybe because of the promise it held for a new life, I talked about my brother and sister for the first time, and told my two friends about how my parents abandoned us. Close
r to me than my own family had ever been, Marcos and Lonnie brought out the best in me and were the most accepting people I’d ever been with. They’d come to see me as someone they could rely on, who was strong, with a clear idea of what we should do. But I didn’t trust myself, nor did I tell them that I was searching for something to make me feel more a part of the world, and while they helped me in that search, I couldn’t share with anyone the pain that still drove my exploration to find a place to stand comfortably in my skin.
That afternoon we rented an old clapboard house in the Mexican section, where most of the families worked in fields surrounding their houses. Mr. William Purvis, a doddering, bow-legged, weathered old cowboy, met us at the house and gave us the do’s and don’ts, scanning us with his one good eye while his lifeless glass eye stared off askew. We gave him a hundred-dollar damage deposit and a hundred dollars for the first month’s rent, then handed him the rental sign which had been nailed to the tattered screen door. We used a hammer to take off the plywood nailed over the door. I was excited about moving in but it was strange and I felt like an actor with a domestic role to play. I rolled up my sleeves and started in with the box of cleaning and repair supplies we’d picked up at a hardware store. Lonnie swept, dusted, and scrubbed. I hung the door I found in the back bedroom, nailed loose porch planks, and oiled kitchen drawer runners. Marcos, smoking a fat doobie and blasting his boom box, put on his mechanic’s overalls and repaired window screens, tarred and papered roof holes, and replaced rotted wood on the side of the house with wood scraps he found out back in the decaying chicken coops.
A Place to Stand Page 7
