Always Running (23 page)

A deputy pushed me into the back of a squad car. Somebody lay next to me, his hair oiled in blood. I didn’t want to look in case his brains were coming out. I gave him a piece of my favorite shirt, soon to be soaked.

The first round of arrestees were crowded into a holding tank for hours in the East L.A. jail—the same jail where in a year’s time, seven prisoners reportedly “committed suicide.”

Later that night, we were piled into black, caged buses and taken to the Los Angeles County Jail, the largest in the country, then to juvenile hall and again to the county jail. At one point, officers sprayed mace into the windows of the bus while we sat chained to one another. Our eyes and skin burned as we yelled, but no one could hear us.

There were three other young dudes with me: another 16 year old, a 15 year old and his 13-year-old brother. In the county jail, deputies placed us in with adults—with murder, drug and rape suspects. We weren’t old enough to be incarcerated there, but they didn’t care about this. There was an uprising in East L.A. and we were part of it. One black guy recalled the Watts rebellion and shook our hands. I watched deputies come into the cells and beat up prisoners—breaking the arm of one guy.

At one point, the four of us juveniles were hauled to the Hall of Justice jail, known as the Glasshouse. The deputies threw us into “murderers row,” where hardcore offenders were awaiting trial or serving time. I had a cell next to Charles Manson.

They threw me in with a dude who had killed a teacher and another who had shot somebody in the Aliso Village housing projects. One of the dudes pressed a stashed blade to my neck. But I knew, no matter what, never show fear. I stood up to him, staring without blinking. Then he backed off. Soon we played cards, told jokes and stories.

That night, we heard the “East L.A. riot”—this is what the media was calling it!—had escalated throughout much of Whittier Boulevard. Stores were burned down and looted. Police had killed people. Fires flared in other Chicano communities such as Wilmington and Venice.

Then a radio reporter announced that sheriff’s deputies had killed Chicano journalist Rubén Salazar. Salazar had been a lone voice in the existing media for the Mexican people in the United States (he was a former Los Angeles Times reporter and KMEX-TV news director). At word of his death, the tier exploded into an uproar. Inmates gave out
gritos
and cell bars rattled; mattresses were set on fire.

The next day, Manson, who stayed in an enclosed cell with only a small glass-and-bar opening to see him through, had to attend a hearing. Early that morning, guards woke up everybody and made us face the walls of our cells. Some protested. The dude next to me said it was at Manson’s request.

“Fuck this,” I said, but we were forced to comply.

At midday, they allowed us to roam the tier. I talked to inmates from the other cells, most of whom were black or Chicano. For the most part, the four of us young dudes from the unrest were treated with respect. When it was time for Manson to walk the tier, however, the guards made everyone else go back into their cells. Manson emerged from his enclosed box. He ranted and raved about “niggers and spics,” about how whites should kill us all. The other inmates yelled back, threatened his life, but Manson knew the guards wouldn’t let anyone get to him.

I disappeared in the criminal justice system. I was being held without a hearing. Whenever one was scheduled, my parents would show up and then the courts canceled it. Dad and Mom searched for me everywhere. They checked for my name in court records and arrest sheets. They fell into a maze of paperwork and bureaucrats. At least once, I was being pulled away in chains while my mom and dad sat confused in a hearing room. Days built up on days while they waited word about my release.

Finally in the middle of the night, a guard awakened me, pulled me out of the cell and led me down brightly-lit corridors. Through a thick-glassed window, I saw my mother’s weary face.

They brought me out in my old clothes, caked with dirt and blood. Mama forced a smile.

“I ain’t no criminal, ma,” I reassured her.

“I know,
m’ijo,”
she replied. “I know.”

The Watts Rebellion of 1965 changed forever the civil rights struggle in this country. The fires that swept through my old neighborhood that summer swept through me, cutting deep lines, as it swept through America, turning it toward its greatest fears and hardest questions; demarcating the long-glossed-over class and national differences which have historically divided the country.

A trajectory from Watts converged with the more-than-century-old fight of the Mexican people for their own freedoms to ripen into the Chicano Movement as manifested in East L.A.

And what a time it was to be in East L.A.!

In 1968 several thousand junior and high school students walked out of the Mexican east side schools to demand quality and accountable education. Students in schools throughout Los Angeles followed suit—in South Central, the Harbor, the West Side and San Fernando Valley.

A handful of us at Garvey School joined with the East L.A. school “Blowouts,” as they were called, when we walked out of the school yard. Led by a girl named Norma and myself, our walkout turned out as a solidarity gesture. The students didn’t have enough cognizance of the issues to carry it to the heights taken by those to the west of us. Still it became my first conscious political act—I was 13 years old—for which I received a day’s suspension from school.

Around this time, Chicanos formed various defense organizations. The Brown Berets followed the example of the community-based Black Panthers. MEChA, the Chicano student association, had chapters in all the major campuses. La Raza Unida Party, founded in South Texas, became the arm of the movement’s burgeoning political campaigns.

In prisons, where a disproportionate number of Chicano males ended up,
pinto
organizations and publications flowered into existence.

East L.A. also birthed artists, musicians and writers out of the wombs of conflict. Art centers sprouted up such as Mechicano, Goez Studios, Self-Help Graphics and Plaza de La Raza. East L.A. boasted more murals per square mile than any other place in the world. Residents of federally-subsidized housing projects—once designated as havens of crime, drugs and gang warfare—covered up the bland pastel walls with bold-colored, message-laden works of art.

Over the years, bands like El Chicano, Tierra, Los Lobos, Con Safos, Los Illegals and Califas carried forth the people’s message through Latinized jazz-rock compositions, and later in punk and traditional
corrido
forms.

Publications arose such as
La Raza
which chronicled through photos and prose the ongoing developments in the movement. Also
Con Safos,
a
caló-
tinged street-oriented magazine (and a forerunner of later magazines such as
Lowrider, Q-Vo,
and
Firme
); Regeneracíon, the rebirth of a publication founded during the Mexican Revolution by the Flores-Magon brothers; and
ChismeArte,
a literary and art publication.

A result and impetus of all this activity became the Chicano Moratorium Against the War. It was one of nine major disturbances in the barrio between 1970–72.

And for a time, for a most productive and wonderful time, gang violence stood at a standstill. For a time it appeared the internal warfare had given way to the struggle for land, language and liberty—when we had something more important to fight for.

St. Anthony’s Church sponsored a teen dance soon after my ordeal in the Los Angeles County jail system. I came, not knowing what to expect. The place swarmed with perfumed-and-preened young women, and dudes with plastered down hair and oven-heated shined shoes. The women danced with so much verve, so much music. Sometimes, I preferred standing on the sides to observe the stream and tide of their motion, their gyrations, the fusion of feet and fingers with the fever from some dark, tribal, ancestral homeland.

I noticed one woman with long, luxurious black hair, embracing cinnamon-colored skin, who danced as if she were outside by herself, in the rain or beneath a starry sky, just for me. She closed her eyes and let the band’s beat press through her, fingering her flesh and sprouting in violent plumage across the dance floor.

Entranced, it took a while before I realized she was Viviana from Sangra.

Even though we had not seen each other for two years since we met during the Mission’s Fiesta Days carnival, I felt compelled to confront her. Viviana turned slightly in my direction when I tapped her shoulder. Then after a few seconds’ glance, she did a full body turn and looked straight into my face. She remembered. We both remembered—and it was as if no time at all had passed between us.

“You look and sound so different,” Viviana later said, as we held each other following a couple of slow dances and some kissing.

“I’ve been through some hard times lately—I was just in jail.”

“Somehow, I could tell. Something about being in jail changes a dude’s expression, his voice; how he feels to touch.”

“You’re still nice to talk to,” I said.

We spent the rest of the evening catching up. Viviana had kept herself pretty much out of trouble. But her brothers were getting crazier and deadly. The three oldest were hardcore members of Los Diablos; one of them, called Coyote, became Chava’s right-hand dude. As she talked, a sparkle from her eye reflected a light on the dance floor and it appeared to be a warning: I would fall for this woman; I would fall hard.

I rode a ten-speed bike late at night to visit Viviana. I tried to look nondescript, with an oil-stained coat over un-pressed denim pants. I had to enter Sangra territory to see her. But I wouldn’t let that stop me; Viviana was worth the risk.

Beneath the porch light of her house, Viviana and I talked, caressed and endured. One time Coyote came up the walkway.

“What’s up, sis?” Coyote said as he shot me a look that could have cut glass, like a diamond.

“Nothing,” she replied.

Coyote stopped at the steps. I didn’t look away from his gaze. With weight and boxing training, I looked like I could hold my own. And I had the look from
la torcida.
He figured I had to be from somewhere.

“¿De dónde eres, ése?”
he finally asked.

“Oh Eddie, let him be,” Viviana intervened. “He’s here with me—and I don’t want no hassles from either of you, understand?”

“¡Aquí para Sangra—y qué!”
Coyote/Eddie said before he entered the house. I was safe, for the time being.

“I hate this shit,” Viviana said. “You’re not the first dude who has to go through my brothers just so I can have a friend. But I’m sick and tired of it.”

“Thanks for backing me,” I said. “But this can’t go on forever. Someday they’re going to find out I’m from Lomas.”

“I know,” she said looking away, distressed.

Viviana taught me poetry. Not the words or forms of it. The feel of it: The soul-touch she gave me, the way her words clutched at some dark and secret place inside of me. She had a way of saying almost nothing but when she did speak, her words radiated with truth and power. I looked forward to the visits. I didn’t even mind the dudes I had to go around or ride past in silence to get there. Or her brothers. For Viviana, I would have done anything.

One night we kissed and kissed, then found ourselves unable to stop. Until then, we did nothing more than fondle and linger in easy talk, but something snapped between us; this unseen barrier which often kept us at a distance, despite being so close there, appeared to break. Our inhibitions were freed and my hands groped her supple body as her tongue freshened the inside of my ear.

I gently pushed her down on the porch and she followed willingly, eagerly. Her rising rate of breathing gave way to moans and sighs and woman-sounds that culled forth a measure of something sweet and taut within me. My hand moved to the top of her pants, where a button had been loosened, and I pushed my hand through and found I could go all the way to the stem of her pleasure, to the silkiness of her vagina, while she squirmed and tightened and squeezed as I felt myself swimming, drowning, in the ocean of our lovemaking.

The moments dripped, then Viviana exploded in a rush of orgasms; I rocked next to her like a baby in a cradle. Suddenly the porch, the trees, the walkway and row of houses became intruders. An uncomfortableness crept around us. Viviana sat up, buttoned her blouse and pants, then placed her hands to her face and sobbed.

“What’s the matter, baby?” I whispered.

“You have to leave,” she said between her fingers.

“Why?”

“I can’t explain, just leave—please.”

“I don’t see why. Let’s just sit here and …”

“Louie, you don’t understand nothing, do you?” she said, her attitude a sharp contrast to the moments before, almost as if those moments were just dust from dreams, which often appeared real, but only dust.

“All right, baby, all right, I’ll go.”

I stood up and pulled the bike up from the grass. I felt so dumb, unable to find words, some sentences which could ease the pain. Anything.

“I’ll be back, Viviana,” I mustered while on my way out. “Don’t ever forget what happened here tonight.”

She laid her head on her arms, which were on top of her knees, as she sat on the porch steps.

“Go, please—just go,” were her last words.

Viviana failed to return my calls. Deep, hoarse voices answered the phone and said: “She’s not here.”

I wrote Viviana letters, but doubted the wisdom of sending them. At night, I woke up suddenly, after dreaming of her coming to me, embracing me and dancing, and when I sat up I struck the walls, grasped the pillow and cried out her name.

Some nights, I rode my bike to her house and stared from across the street. Windows darkened. Porch light out. I felt like running up the steps and banging at the screen door and yelling for her to come out, but I could never do this. I hoped she would slide open the curtain, feel me near her. That she would let me in.

Viviana never looked out that window; she never opened the door.