The Madonnas of Echo Park (2 page)

 

Here. I want you to have this.
It's an opening, and you're welcome.
It's a city, and in the palm of the city
is a lake. In the heart of the lake is a wing.
All the people, all the exhaust & sprawl:
it's perfect. Let them sleep in you
when you sleep. And wake with you,
that you might know them and their streets,
and the light that makes them fall in love,
the light that has always been your light.

—J
EFF
G. L
YTLE

Author's Note

Bienvenidos

The Blossoms of Los Feliz

Our Lady of the Lost Angels

Rules of the Road

Yo Soy el Army

The Hustler

Cool Kids

La Luz y la Tierra

Gracias

 

They thought I was a Mexican, of course; and in a way I am.

—Jack Kerouac,
On the Road

I wish I was born Mexican, but it's too late for that now.

—Morrissey

It's no fun to pick on Mexicans. You guys got a country.

—Richard Pryor

T
his book was written because of a twelve-year-old girl named Aurora Esperanza. In the 1980s, before I knew I was Mexican, Aurora and I were in a sixth-grade class of American-born Mexicans and first-generation Vietnamese immigrants, both groups segregating themselves into clusters on opposite sides of the room. This was an awkward arrangement for me, because though I felt I belonged to neither group, my Mexican-ness would peek out every so often from under the shadow of my stepfather's last name when I rolled a vowel too long in my mouth, or grew coarse tufts of premature facial hair. Emphasizing my “in between” status, a desk chair shortage placed me alone at an oversize table with an obstructed view of the chalkboard and my back to the American flag.

There was a constant tension in the classroom, each group suspicious of the other for conspiratorial hushes peppered with strange, foreign-sounding words that shared jokes, kept secrets, plotted insurrections. We were, however, still kids, and our hunger for the latest fads led us to break ethnic ranks and whisper in a common language of desire. We wanted Garbage Pail Kids and Pac-Man sticker trading cards, packaged with sticks of bone-hard bubble gum you could rub against the pavement to write out your name in pink zigzagged letters, a scent of hot caramelized sugar lingering on the concrete. We wanted futuristic digital watches that blinked out the time in a blood-red neon LCD phosphorescence, as bright as a sparkler strapped to your wrist.

And, of course,
we wanted our MTV.

It was the rare child in Echo Park whose family could afford something as frivolous as cable television. Most families had one or two parents working a spread of jobs to support both their kids and their in-laws living under one roof. My family had a different arrangement, but I was as astonished as any of my friends would have been when one afternoon I found MTV installed on my very own television in my room, a present for getting a part-time job as an after-school ESL tutor. I sat twelve inches away from the screen, transfixed for the next seven hours, leaving it on when I went to bed with the sound off like a night-light. The next morning, I spread its legend in Ms. O'Neill's class, watching the tale jump from Mexican to Vietnamese and from boy to girl, just as difficult a bridge to cross at our ages. You could watch music on television?
Yes,
and every song has a story, and every story has a happy ending. You could watch Michael Jackson dance whenever you wanted?
Yes,
and when he walks, each step he takes lights up the sidewalk. Here was a way you could see how the music on our cheap transistor radios
looked,
these popular songs that throbbed with glamour, desire, and plastic gratification—a reimagining of the American Dream in bright pastels. Our parents didn't comprehend the words and were fearful that the songs
they
had fallen in love with growing up would be attached to a language we'd never speak and a country we'd never see.

Right before lunch, Ms. O'Neill intercepted a note I'd written to a table of Mexican boys outlining everything on MTV the night before: girls in short skirts dancing down a street in a conga line; girls with shorter skirts dressed as cheerleaders forming a bright Day-Glo pyramid; girls in bikinis dancing by an open fire hydrant. Ms. O'Neill asked how many of us thought MTV was “cool,” and thanks to my classroom gospel, everyone's hand shot up. MTV was now our mutual language.

The next day, Ms. O'Neill announced plans for an “MTV Dance Party” in our classroom on the Friday before spring break. There
would be those expensive Soft Batch cookies that got gummy and elastic like rubber bands if you left them out for more than a day (making them an impractical purchase for most of us because junk food had to
last
in our houses), two-liter bottles of Coke and Pepsi (not the generic, white-label, noncarbonated sludge with
SODA
stamped on its side that we drank at home), and Domino's pizza. In a neighborhood where takeout was considered extravagant, this was the equivalent of a Roman bacchanal. There would also be music. Each of us was to bring in a record and play it. A number of hands shot up in confusion. What if we didn't have any records of our own? Borrow them from your brothers, sisters, or parents, Ms. O'Neill said. What if they didn't have records either? Buy a record you'd want to play. What if we can't afford to buy one? Buy a single, she suggested, they cost the same as two packs of those gross Garbage Pail sticker cards you're so fond of. All but one hand went down. Aurora Esperanza's pink fingernails sparkled as her white cotton blouse sleeve fell back down her arm and curled up against her bare shoulder.

“Will we be allowed to dance in the classroom?” she asked. “Will there be dancing?”

“It's a dance party,” Ms. O'Neill said. “Yes, there will be dancing.”

Dancing? The boys didn't like the sound of this. Were we expected to dance with
girls
? And were Mexican boys to dance with Vietnamese girls? What about Vietnamese boys—would they dance with Mexican girls? Then a more terrifying thought arose: Who would
I
dance with? By the end of class, I had formed a pact with two Vietnamese boys I had never spoken to before, not to dance with any girl, even if we were asked. There were many other treaties of convenience made that day, as boys and girls who had segregated themselves by race and language throughout the year became unexpected allies in an effort to outsmart our teacher, who was white. Who, we wondered, would
she
dance with?

*   *   *

In the short weeks between the announcement and the party, every classmate had seen or at least stolen a peek of MTV. Was this because I did the charitable thing and invited friends over to my house to watch? Hell, no. Part of the fun of being a kid comes from having things other kids don't have and lording it over them. On the playground, I recounted the videos' story lines with such relish, anyone overhearing me would have thought these on-screen adventures were my own experiences, and in a way, I felt they were. What I hadn't counted on was my classmates' determination to see these videos for themselves, no matter the cost or inconvenience. Distant and more prosperous Vietnamese relatives, who lived in actual houses (not one-room box apartments) as far away as El Monte, had their remote controls hijacked. Mexican girls took the bus together to the Valley, racing through the Glendale Galleria to the electronics section of JCPenney. With each passing Monday, the MTV circle widened, and with it my reign as the “MTV King” diminished until the day of the party, when the two poorest boys in the class, twin brothers who alternated their clothes in an effort to project a larger wardrobe (the stains gave them away) were what remained of my empire.

The bare turntable wobbled in slow circles like a drunk uncle at a
quinceañera
in search of a young girl's ass to grope. Hands rustled in peeling vinyl backpacks, plastic supermarket bags, and cheap store-brand three-ring binders, a
shassh
of ripped-open Velcro fasteners as 45 records poked out from snug butterfly folders. While I had agreed not to dance, I didn't want to fail an assignment, so I bought Michael Jackson's
Thriller.
Its $9.99 price tag embarrassed me, the large record sitting on my desk like an arrogant boast; many of the other students had brought ninety-nine-cent, seven-inch singles from
Thriller,
each priced with a distinctive blue El Tocadisco sticker. El Tocadisco was a local discount
barateria
that sold Spanish music but reserved a small section at the front of the store for American pop stars. (It had occurred to no one to bring in a Menudo album, or any other kind of music. There was a tacit understanding among Mexican and
Vietnamese kids alike that MTV music meant
American
music, and American music meant English men with keyboards, white women with big hair, or Michael Jackson.)
Thriller
had been out for over a year, but kids here didn't have a lot of disposable income, meaning pop culture filtered through in spurts. Our teacher grimaced as she collected copies of “Beat It” and “Billie Jean.” The boys nodded to each other in smug conspiracy—there would be no dancing today.

When Ms. O'Neill asked Aurora where her record was, she pulled from a torn grocery store bag a rainbow-sequined vinyl record case. A velvet sash strung around a plastic rose clasped the top of the box, which flipped open to reveal an alphabetized selection of 45 singles. Ms. O'Neill unsheathed each record from its wax paper sleeve with delicate fingertips, the girls ooohhhing and aaahhhing over the case's delicate satin lining and the number of singles the case contained. Ms. O'Neill counted over fifty, plenty for an afternoon dance party. She asked the class to give Aurora a round of applause for sharing with us something so important to her. Girls both Mexican and Vietnamese burst into squealing chant-cheers, something you'd hear on the playground before a fight, while the boys smacked their hands together like we were trying to smother fires in our palms.

“Aurora,” Ms. O'Neill said, “why don't you pick the first song?”

She walked across the room in an outfit that matched her record case—a tight red fringe blouse with poet's sleeves and a tie-string bow across her budding chest along with tapered black jeans that hugged her curved thighs (up to that point, girls had been stick figures, straight lines wrapped in corduroy) and matching black platform sandals. Her face had a thin dusting of powdered-donut-white foundation to cover her chicken pox scars; her eyelashes were etched into her face like fiery black sunsets. I was attracted to her, though I didn't know what attraction was yet, and because I could think of nothing we shared in common—not one friend on the playground, not a single family acquaintance who shopped or did laundry with an acquaintance of her family's—I hated this feeling.

When she approached the record player, the boys fire-drill sprang out of their chairs. The girls, sensing some sort of new, significant moment, skirted the edges of the classroom and formed a rigid semicircle, cutting off any chance of escape. My two coconspirators had sandwiched themselves with about ten other boys into a far corner, leaving nowhere for me to stand but right in front of a firing squad of giggling twelve-year-old girls.

Aurora slid a 45 out of her case and in one graceful motion popped a plastic yellow “spider” in the center of the record and threaded it onto the turntable's spindle. When you play a record, there's that brief anxious moment of silence when the needle crackles but the music hasn't started. This was the kind of silence you could tear apart by making an obscene noise, setting off a laughing seizure so uproarious that Ms. O'Neill would lose control of the class, or by doing something catastrophic like wetting your pants, but that meant you'd risk being the object of a ritualized humiliation so vicious, moving to the next grade level wouldn't stop it. The boys waited in anticipation of who would be brave enough to make that fart noise or trickle “fear piss” down his legs.

Madonna's “Borderline” began to play. This was a
new
song, Aurora bragged, which, along with her opulent record case, meant that her parents must have been as “rich” as my parents. (There was a real low bar for “rich” in Echo Park.) I recognized the song from MTV. Part of the video for the song had been filmed in the neighborhood, and because of its story line (Mexican break-dancers, Latin boyfriend, Madonna's girlfriends dressed in retro
chola
girl outfits complete with drape coats, baggy pants, and hairnet caps), I believed Madonna was a Mexican.

The girls swayed their hips to the soft, synthesized tinkle that opens the song, then nodded their heads an inch to the left, an inch to the right (the way the Muppets dance on TV) to the syncopated beat, before singing along with the chorus. The circle on the girls' side tightened in anticipation of the first dance. Ms. O'Neill leaned down
to Aurora, and after a quick consultation both nodded their heads in agreement. Aurora strode across the circle and placed her hand on my shoulder.

“This is Madonna,” she said. “Come and dance with me, Brando.”

There was an audible gasp as her fingers traced a line down my shirtsleeve and clasped my hand. Was it too late for me to make an obscene noise or wet my pants? The girls leered with confidence; Aurora's boldness had made them aware for the first time how powerful a girl their own age could be. So much change was possible in so short a time. I looked to the boys for some sort of help, an intervention, one good idea to get me out of this. They stared back hypnotized in defeat, the way men look when they have played their last, failed excuse. I could sense the walls of the room sliding together, two sides of a V closing shut, our bodies interlocking, our differences now irrelevant. It was simple as following Aurora's lead.