Los Angeles Noir 2

by Denise Hamilton

  If you wanna take over a place, you’ve got to piss all over it. And the first thing we did is fuck with Chico’s head by crossing out all the C-4 tags and get a graffiti war started. Warming up. It was too easy, almost. We got the finest taggers here in the Lobos.

  In the clikas, you got your warriors and you got your taggers. Taggers are usually third-raters cause they’re the little bow-legged stubby locos that can’t fight good. They got spray cans instead of pistols and go on their midnight tagging missions like they’re ninjas. A Lobo tagger will paint our set up on the buildings, on the storefronts, on the stop signs, so that everybody knows who we are. You’ve seen it. ECHO PARK! in thick black blocky letters ten feet high blasting on down from the freeway signs. Our taggers have got their names painted proud all over town, and that’s their black zebra stripes crossing out the lemon yellow C-4 tags on the walls. Around here, crossing out a homeboy’s set is serious business. If a gangster walks by and sees your big old black line drawn through his name, he’s gonna start hunting for you. He has to do something or else he loses face. Getting crossed out means somebody’s slamming on your manhood. And rebels think that if they don’t got their respect, they don’t got nothing else either.

  Well, that never used to matter to me none. That was all scratching and crowing, a waste of my time. “See how many tags I got, homes?” the tagger vatos would say to each other, and there’d be red and black and blue all over their hands. “I got me twenty-three last night, ése. I’m doing firme, you know what I’m saying.” Stupid roosters. What did I care about that? The only thing that matters to me is money and my ladies. But I can play these boy games if I need to. The rules are real simple. You got to tag your territory or else it ain’t really yours.

  “Go out to Garfield and cross out all the C-4 you can see, eh?” Beto told the vatos, with me standing behind him quiet. Now that Hoyo was dead—there’s this big rip hoyo tag up by the 101—the main Lobo taggers was Tiko and Dreamer. Tiko, he knew how to butcher streets ugly by running down the sidewalk with his thumb on the spray-gun trigger. Dreamer, though, he’s the best tagger in L.A. The number-one paint boy. A short dude, with this jailbird buzz cut and a slow buffalo walk, but he had these mile-a-minute hands. He was so fast with his can that even the cops knew his name. He’d tagged every big wall between here and Edgeware three times already.

  Those two tagger boys started crossing out C-4 sets regular. They’d do it at night, dressing in black jeans and sweater, black cotton cap on to cover up. Dreamer would lead, and him and Tiko would sneak on down to Garfield quiet and careful with their black backpack full of cans, scope out all the C-4 sets, and then cross them out with a long black line and write up LOBOS after. They sprayed the whole school as black and red as a ladybug, and after a couple nights of missions there wasn’t an inch of yellow anywhere in sight.

  We had some bad rumblas then. The taggers was dog-fighting bloody over walls and right-hand vatos from both sides was circling Garfield, not even doing coke deals now but trying to jump in the junior high babies. “Hey, ése, you come over here a minute?” Gangsters would run on down after school’s over and all the niños was walking home dressed in their sweaters and white scuffy sneakers. “You with us now, hear it?” the vatos would say, slapping them around a little. Most of them little boys would try and tough it out, but sometimes they’d be crying and looking around scared with their mouths hanging open. It didn’t matter. Either way they swore they’d go with whatever clika was beating them.

  Even I started to get some grouping done. About a month after Star Girl got shot, me and Chique went down to Garfield with Beto’s boys looking for a couple of fresh-meat chicas to rough. Now that Girl was gone it was just the two of us, and I wanted a whole crowd of cholas under my feet. I wouldn’t set my sights on just one or two. I’d get myself a dozen, twenty, and they’d all be scrappy and mean-hearted. Not at first, mind you. I wouldn’t expect nothing of them pigeon-toes at first except some bawling and thumb sucking. But after I got through with them they’d be as tough as leather.

  “Hey, cholita, pretty girl, you come right on over here, wanna talk to you,” Chique was calling out to the sixth graders, watching out for a good one. My old homegirl Chique, she was the best jumper I ever saw. She cornered this little thing with a swingy ponytail who was walking home, later we called her Conejo because she was a round-faced bunnyrabbit-looking girl, her nose and eyes getting all pink. “Yah, I’m talking to you, ésa,” Chique hissed at her, getting in her way on the sidewalk and then reaching down and grabbing her skinny arm. “You’re a Lobo now, ain’t you?”

  “No, I ain’t nothing,” I heard Conejo tell Chique, making up this street voice, but she knew it wasn’t no use.

  I was standing right there in front of them and giving Chique my proud eyes, but in my head I saw how it was when I jumped in Star Girl. How we’d been warm and laughing there on the cold grass after, looking at the sky and feeling like familia.

  “Yah, chica, you is,” I heard Chique saying now, her breath coming up fast.

  I looked off, over where a couple Lobos was messing with the little Garfield boys. They was the same as us, crowding and pushing and buzzing around like hornets. I could make out Rudy and Montalvo twisting around some scrubby-headed niño and Beto laughing at them on the side. Chevy was standing around with his hand in his pocket and hooting, “Chavala!” Even Dreamer was there, with his black shades on and arms crossed in front like a big head now that he’d done all them tough tagging jobs. And far out, outside them, there was my old tired man. He was peeking his head over the vatos and then sloping back and watching them quiet same as me. Oh yah, that’s good, I’m thinking. I see you, Manny. Loser boy. And looking at him then, it seemed like so long since everything. Wacha me, right? I got what I wanted. Here’s me jumping in a chola and there’s him, way gone.

  I’d heard that Manny was crawling around here already, that he’d started walking the junkie streets just a few months after the rumbla even though he’d got hurt so bad. I have to say he’d healed up pretty quick, cause he looked almost as strong as he used to even though you could still see how his shoulder was bent in and hunched some from Beto’s knife. It almost made me sorry to see him outside, cause I know how cold that life is. He’s got this sheepdog face on like he wants to help out with the Lobo jumping, but the vatos was turning their eyes from him and butting up their shoulders so he can’t squeeze on in the circle. The homeboy looked poor too. He was wearing this raggedy old shirt and black wool cap pulled down to his eyes. I heard he was sometimes crashing at Chevy’s and making his ends by doing little stickups at liquor stores, pushing his guns in them bodega ladies’ faces the same as any old third-rater’s gonna do. I knew he was hoping like hell to get back on in with la clika, that’s why he’s standing over there like a scarecrow. But it couldn’t happen. Once you’ve been a jefe, that’s it. You get a stink on you.

  “Why don’t you just head your ass on home, ése?” I screamed at him over the sound of Chique banging Conejo around, and the little one’s crying now. “Go on back to your mama!”

  I don’t know if he heard me. Maybe he turned his eyes over my way to see me standing over my cholas and watching him hard. Maybe he don’t wanna see me cause he knows he’s just a beggar-looking Mexican wearing hobo clothes now. All I’m thinking is, Things sure are different, son, and I almost get softhearted there remembering how he used to be. But it don’t last. When I’m listening to them jumping sounds I start seeing that same picture again, there’s Star Girl on the grass, smiling up at me with the fog of her breath twining up in the night air with mine. And then there’s that woman sitting in her chair, and I see again how the dark sky’s coming. Yah, things are different now, I think on over to him again, but colder.

  I turned back to look at Chique doing her work. “Beat her good if you have to,” I tell her. “Cause this little chola ain’t going nowhere.”

  The Lobos grew bigger and spilled over with all of that new ju
nior high blood. Soon we had almost double the number of vatos scamming the streets and fighting any C-4 they lay eyes on. Beto was strutting around with his bluffy big talk and his hitman swagger, but instead of a fedora he’d wear a Stetson. “You know you chose good,” he’d say, making a muscle and then trying to give me his weak-mouthed French kiss. Well baby, either way it don’t matter, I’d think on back to him. You could be anybody. You’re worse than anybody. With me too busy dreaming on the C-4’s blank face and with Beto playing king, the Lobo business had shrunk up and almost died. Now that Manny was gone Mario wasn’t coming by no more, and the locals had heard we’d run out of supplies. But so what. I’ll deal with that thing later, I told myself. I still had my own job to finish.

  I’d got together a whole posse of chicas by then. I called them my Fire Girls. Hey, you’re on fire now, girl, I’d tell them after they got jumped in and they’d look over at me with their wet eyes and scuffed-up faces then try and give me a smile. We got that Conejo, she was a big crybaby at first, a second-generation Sunday school chavala chewing on her nails and running home, but she warmed up quick enough once I showed her how good gangbanging can be. After that we snatched Payasa. I named her that cause she’s clown funny with some big curly Bozo hair. And then Sleepy, this heavy-lidded cholita, and Linda and Thumper, these two sisters from Jalisco. Thumper banged her leg on the chair when she’s happy and Linda didn’t want no new clika name, so we let her stay the way she was. That was us, the Fire Girls. They was only twelve and thirteen years old but you want them young ones cause they can be the meanest. You just gotta kick that girlie out of them. It ain’t so hard, once you scratch their dresses off and give them baggies and lipstick and taks, they take to it real nice.

  A woman’s clika does it different than the men. And not how you’d think, neither. I don’t got no pink-dress lunch club, there ain’t no softies in my gang. After we jump in a chica, she acts as wicked as a snake. She’ll take on a vato if we tell her to, smack him right over the head with a lead pipe if that’s what I want. No, a woman gang’s different than a man’s cause women need more love. The locos swing around Echo Park thinking they don’t need nothing. They’ve got their clika brothers, right, but a man can just stand alone if he’s got to. My girls, they’re looking at me for something they don’t got at home. Their daddies are whoring around and Mama’s crying in the closet or wiping up the kitchen sink and gritando ugly if their niña misses a confession. Everybody’s looking at the brother like he’s the man of the house and who cares about little sister? Well, I do, I tell them. I’m gonna care for you good, girl, you’ll be special here. You should see them open up, a woman’s gonna bloom like a cut rose in water if you talk to her special. And once you hook a chica like that, she’ll throw down worse than any man you’ll ever know. They can be some vicious kick-ass bitches if you work them right.

  That’s why just after we’d jump them in by beating them down on the street and calling out, Take it bitch, I’d change from a wolf to a kitten so fast that all their hurt and scared would crumple right into my hands. “We’re your familia now, ésa,” I’d tell my little girls, touching them soft on their shoulder like I’m their mama. “And you ain’t never gonna be a sheep, all right? Now you’re acting like you got some respeto. Don’t forget it. I take care of my own, you hear that.”

  I’d say all the right words that they wanted to hear and then they’d look up at me with their flashlight faces, those sunny smiles, but I didn’t feel their heat. I was saying the same things I told Star Girl and Chique all that time ago, but now I was talking through a cold wind. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get that feeling like before, like when I was just a little loca myself, jumped in and brand new under them stars.

  But you do what you do. Me and Chique got them started off picking pockets on the downtown streets at six o’clock when all the businessmen are walking home fast and hungry for dinner. Conejo and Linda would bump the gabachos and Sleepy and Thumper would dig down and snatch the wallets then come running back home to me flashing dollar bills. I even got my own big head meetings going, with Chique standing right by my side and my Fire Girls bringing me the money then sitting down in my living room. Hushed, watching me. They was listening to everything I’d say, lined up in a row and looking like sparrows waiting on a wire. “Do it like this, ésas,” I’d tell them, showing them how to flick open a zipper on Chique. It almost made me feel like my old self, cause I could tell I hadn’t lost my touch.

  But the main job I had for my girls was for them to keep their eyes wide, their ears open. They was my lookouts. I had them scooting around the westside and even the sidelines of Edgeware and Crosby, watching out and listening hard for anything I might wanna hear. “Check out for the C-4, eh?” I told them. “You keep quiet and you’ll hear some loco bragging sooner or later.” Those girls was perfect spies cause they get dark in the shadows, go green around grass. They’re invisible to men. If a chica stands around quiet long enough, a man just forgets her. He’ll let forty cats out of their bags before he turns around and sees her watching him, her ears as big as jugs.

  Well. Maybe. Even though I had them chicas, it still took me months before I got my payback. That C-4 hid out from me so tricky that even with my girls poking around after him night and day all I got was ghost stories, nothing I could sink my teeth into.

  “Hear he’s some C-4 big head, way up top,” Thumper told me, hooking her thumbs in her pockets and poking her beak out at me. Or there’s Linda, kicking the sidewalk with her sneaker and not looking me in my eye. “Lupe told me he was some C-4 vatito who moved away, jefa. Back to Arizona or something.”

  No, it took me months. My babies was coming back home with rumors and empty hands, and that blank-face C-4 was just teasing me with a sawtooth smile. I was dreaming about him every night then, his shadow creeping over the park, the sounds of the shot ringing, the feel of that cold wet grass over and over and the yells and screams of the rumbla while I’m racing away with wings on my feet. And Star Girl with her white cheeks out on the bench, her dry mouth like a pale flower and her eyes staring out the window. It almost got me shook up again, cause things wasn’t fixing fast like I needed. Chasing that vato made my blood thin and my eyes cloud over, and that llorona started fighting me down harder than before. She’d raise up in me bigger and blacker and grin out from the mirror on late nights when I couldn’t sleep good. I wanted that C-4 boy so bad I could taste it bitter on my tongue.

  So when my Fire Girls told me they can’t find nothing, when they’d scrape their shoes on the street and mumble into their hands, it got real hard to stay still. It got almost more than this chica could take. I’d pull out my pack and light up a Marlboro nice and slow, breathing in that black smoke deep to keep my hands from shaking the same as two leaves, to keep them from reaching out at my girls like biting snakes. Watch it, woman, I tell myself inside. Keep it cool.

  “I don’t wanna hear that,” I’d say, slitting my eyes at them, my voice getting dark like the dusk before a bad fight. “You find him, eh? You go on out there and find out who my man is.”

  But a woman don’t die from waiting. I’ve looked enough at the viejas around here to learn a lesson or two about long life. You’ve got to sit down on your ass sometimes and let the devil wander your way. And that’s when you catch him. When he ain’t looking.

  I got my payback in the chilly autumn after a long hot summer of Lobos and Bomber rumblas. The enemies was busy hoofing up and down their turf and naming their streets, and the drivebys got random and cold blooded, even worse than before. The locals started hiding in their houses behind window bars and double-bolt locks, so the streets emptied and the air cleared of most everything except for the sounds of racing cars and shootouts and the once-in-a-while crying of a siren. Beto was getting himself a vato loco name even down in East L.A. from all the craziness, and I was grouping big too. Me and Chique and my Fire Girls jumped in five new fresh babies that winter, and they kept me rolling in
pickpocket money and gossip news. Still. It seemed like my C-4 was gonna get the better of me, the better of my Star Girl. The Lobos and my cholas never stopped crawling around the Park and trying to sniff him out, but for a while there it looked like he’d hid out too good for even this mean perra.

  I never forgot him for one day, though. I let all that fire-and-brimstone feeling sink down deep inside of me, so I’m swimming in it. I was looking up at the sky from the bottom of a lake, through all this black water. And it got so that I could see that llorona in the mirror and not feel scared no more, even if she jumps out and tears me with them wicked teeth. Well, chingado. I’m the one biting bloody now.

  It was a cold California Saturday, the kind when there ain’t no rain or no clouds but the air’s sharp blades sticking you when you’re outside, that they saw what I could do. Don’t you mess with me or my own, I showed them. Cause you won’t wanna pay my price. I can hurt you in the soft little place you didn’t even know you had.

  I remember every minute like it was yesterday. It’s a late foggy morning and I’m trying to cool out by kicking my feet up on my table and rolling Marlboro smoke rings off my tongue like Dolores Del Rio. I’m all alone just the way I like it. I don’t got to make nice to no jefe or landlord over chicas. I had a spell to sit there thinking my own thoughts. It was peaceful almost, a cigarette in my fingers and time on my hands, listening to the leaves rustle outside my window and the far-off holler of morning TV, but it don’t last. I’m not dreaming there ten minutes when I get jangled by these vatos who start screaming down the street.

  Hey man! I hear them outside. Órale! some loco yells, and it sounds like he’s real close by. Their noise makes me sit up straight and bend my ear so I can hear better. Chique rushes me then, banging down my door with her two fists like the war’s coming. “This better be good,” I say when I open up, and she’s standing there looking chistosa, her permed hair funky twisted from the wind and her big red lips yelling at me how we got to go down to Garfield now, that she found out my shooter man.