The Madonnas of Echo Park (4 page)

If you don't have a choice, like these men out here in their sixties who still wear cowboy-style straw hats with brims instead of baseball caps and long, dark dress slacks coupled with funeral dress shoes instead of jeans and sneakers, you risk what's left of your body. You know it's not worth much to a white man who needs a roofer, but it may be worth something to a Chinese lady who needs her lawn weeded. Slow and feeble,
“los hombres del país viejo”
can't be picky.

“Tenant pick up his first crew?” Diego asks.

“About a half hour ago.”

“First sunny day we've had in a while.”

“He said he'd be back.”

“Man of his word,” Diego says. “Bad trait in a
gringo.
”

“I don't mind a man who's honest.”

“Hate honest bosses. Honest men are bullies.” He motions to the old men hunched around the SUV with his coffee. “Look at that,” he says. “Why do they still come out here?”

“They're not that much older than I am,” I say.

“You look young, though. You can lie about your age.”

“Too many lies. I can't keep track.”

“I'm lying less these days,” Diego says, “but I don't want to make
it a habit. When was the last time you got something for telling the truth?”

Tenant's pickup truck rattles into the parking lot. Diego taps my shoulder, and we walk (never run, Diego says, and never look too eager or out of breath) over to the gathering crowd, twice as large as before.

“Who's here to work?” Tenant shouts.

“Me,
señor
!” we shout back. It's a revival out here, and we let the spirit of potential employment move through us. The young men bounce up and down pogo-stick style while the older men wave their arms back and forth in the air, swooning as each man is chosen. Diego and I move to the front as Tenant picks his men. Both of us are careful not to jostle or ram up against the younger men, twenty-year-olds who will punch an old man in his remaining teeth if they think a boss will see them better, nor do we huddle with the older men, who cluster together to protect themselves from the more aggressive guys. Tenant picks Diego, and as I try to follow into the flatbed behind him, Tenant waves his arms and shouts,
“No más!”
As we shamble away, one of the twelve men in the pickup starts coughing. Diego mouths for me to wait. The man throws up on himself, coating his jeans and his shirt with a sticky pool of undigested alcohol and tendrils of bloody vomit.

Tenant leans over and pats him on the shoulder. “Can you stand up? Adam, come here and help this man out.”

Adam hefts him out of the pickup. Tenant looks at the greasy pool and then down at me. “If you don't mind sitting in vomit . . .”

The site is a teardown in Angelino Heights, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and overlooks Echo Park Lake. Rows of three- and four-story Victorian-era homes, restored to turn-of-the-century condition, have been selling for a couple million dollars each, while those houses that are too far gone are torn down and rebuilt
from scratch to resemble “old” houses using a mix of new materials and relics salvaged from other gutted teardowns. Three historic Victorian mansions that could have fit thirty homeless families have been demolished for a new modern, Victorian-style house, a potential several months of steady work if the bank's financing doesn't fall through. Diego gathers this information for us piecemeal. Any of the men on the site could have passed on all the information, but no one here wants anyone else to know too much about a job site out of fear it could give them an advantage in getting attached as a regular.

Some of these men resent me sliding into another man's spot, though that spot's covered in vomit; they shift away or don't look at me. A couple of young boys who tell us they're from Jalisco say that they've never seen anyone get picked for a job like that before. It's a bad sign, and one of them crosses his chest, saying either the Virgin Mary or the Devil must be looking out for me.
“¡Tiene que ser la Virgen María!”
Diego shouts,
“Pucha, ¿qué hace sentado en su mierda?”
The rest of the men laugh until Adam's fist on the glass divider shuts us up.

We're ordered out of the truck at the dead end of a street that fetal-curls into a construction lot near a large Victorian house on the opposite corner, which will be dwarfed when, or if, this new house is finished. The lot pours onto a jagged hillside that men are excavating with pickaxes and shovels. Tenant talks to his black foreman, Adam lays out the tools, and we spend more time standing and waiting for others to make up their minds about where they want us, and for how long. Debris from the old houses has been hauled away, and we're sent to different parts of the new house's foundation outlines—prepping plywood, digging trench for pipes, mixing concrete—to begin.

I'm given rolls of nine-gauge chain-link fence to enclose the job site. I take some measurements, then gouge deep holes into the ground with a posthole digger, a mixture of what Tenant calls “soft” and “hard” work that allows me to float between Tenant's men and the
trabajadores,
earning me the nickname
malinchista
—traitor.
Diego leads off some teasing (“Mexicans are supposed to cut through fences, not build them!”) that helps the men feel more comfortable about me being trusted with such a specialized (no heavy lifting) and suspicious job. It's a tricky thing to build a fence around a site of
trabajadores;
I make my calculations away from the other men—they hate anyone who uses pencils and clipboards—and when I set down the marking stakes and line posts, I stand on the inside of where the galvanized fence will be. It's more difficult this way, but I do it to demonstrate that we're working on the same side of the land.

The posthole digger slides in and out of the softened ground with ease. Diego, who's cutting sheets of plywood, jokes for me not to get a hard-on. The men laugh, and as Adam hovers around the different areas, tossing us tools like fastballs or rolling the command
“Rápido, mojados!”
off his tongue, we find the rhythms of an unusually cool summer's day. It's slower than restaurant work but much more exhausting, because the tasks here are repetitive without requiring the same sense of timing or orchestration with other men. A man working with you today could be arrested or deported or move on tomorrow. We work independent of each other, careful not to move too fast or too slow because no matter what our level of speed or competency, the wage is the same at the end of the day. Bosses like Tenant love a square deal, as long as all four sides of the square are theirs. If he has a deadline to meet, Tenant may bargain on a task-by-task basis. Finish off this stack of plywood before you leave and you get an extra ten dollars. Stay here until 8:00
P.M.
and you get a twenty-dollar bill. There's a rumor that as a bonus Tenant takes the occasional man out to many rounds of drinks followed by a hearty dinner in a sit-down “American-style” restaurant where the plates are as big as hubcaps, but neither Diego nor I has had what Diego would call a
“una trampa de maricón.”

During the lunch break, Tenant calls me aside to do some additional calculations for a temporary path we're building up to the house's entrance. It's off-the-clock time, but I'm relieved for the task
because I can't make a great lunch on my hot plate. That means I rely on whatever takeout's nearby, the “roach coaches” that troll job sites, Mexicans serving subgrade meat in slapped together tacos and burritos. I could cook meals in these trucks that would put these grill slappers (I won't call them cooks) to shame, but where would I get the money to buy a catering truck? How could I file for a license, permits, and insurance when I don't have a green card? And how could I apply for a green card without being deported? Or ask for help getting a green card without being scammed?

I don't know where to begin. What else can I do?

When I get to where I think the front door will be, I'm turned around at an awkward angle, away from the street, and I don't know whether I'm going in or coming out of the house. There are muddy paw prints on the ground, tufts of brown and white fur dancing with the wind, and a strong, musty dog odor. It makes my eyes water, a sour pungency that thrived in my first American apartment, where I decided to cheat on my wife and abandon my child.

She was the fourth prettiest Mexican girl in Echo Park, behind Silvia Morales, Liz Chacon, and Marisol Soto, but she was the only one you had a guarantee of seeing every day. All it'd cost you was a quart of milk. Or a stick of butter. Or a sack of flour. If you were a married man, you'd time your trips to Pilgrim's Supermarket so she'd be the first thing you'd see before breakfast and the last thing you'd see after dinner. Her winter's morning sky blue smock with a lace tie string cradled her breasts like newborns. Her black bob and ivory mestizo skin, her high cheekbones and pillowy Popsicle lips, and those fine patches of blond arm hair were such an attraction men would fistfight each other to cut in her line. And forget about buying ice cream—it'd be a sticky puddle by the time she rang you up.

Cristina Alarcon was a twenty-five-year-old checker when we met in 1972. I was eighteen, living with my wife, Felicia, our baby girl,
Aurora, and Felicia's dog in a one-room apartment with no furniture except a used bed and a folding card table from the church where we ate our meals, changed diapers, and kept our television set and her Bible. Cristina complimented me on being the rare husband (“So young and already a real man!”) who accompanied his wife shopping and paid for the groceries while she told Felicia her secret for stretching a bushel of bananas when they changed color.

When we came home, I could hear the babysitter, our nine-year-old neighbor whose parents were never home, cooing words to our daughter, who screamed whenever the front door opened. Then that dog scent hit me. It was nauseating, oppressive. How could I be a “real man” if my life wouldn't have any more surprises or new opportunities, only a swelling of what was in front of me—more kids, more bills, more fat on Felicia's body? I'd memorized every stretch mark and lumpy ass-dimple. My life would be a series of a thousand more trips to the grocery store watching other pathetic husbands leer at Cristina and seeing the pictures forming in their heads: having wild sex (wild for a Mexican man is a woman on top) in an open field of white dandelions; seeing her breasts pop out of her bra for the first time. Then I got those pictures in
my
head. Before I'd finished putting away the groceries, I knew I was going to cheat on my wife.

I asked Felicia to change Aurora, then went back to the grocery store with a lightness that had vanished the day Felicia told me in church that she was pregnant. (She'd underlined a verse in her Bible and shoved it in my ribs: “If a man comes upon a maiden that is not betrothed, takes her and has relations with her, and their deed is discovered, the man who had relations with her shall pay the girl's father fifty silver shekels and take her as his wife, because he has deflowered her. Moreover, he may not divorce her as long as he lives”—Deuteronomy 22:28–29.)

In line with a cold beer I wasn't old enough to drink, I made a long list of reasons (call them lies) why what I was about to do was okay. When a man cheats on someone he's made a vow to love, honor, and
obey for the rest of his life, that list protects him, gives him courage, helps him reach the one lie that makes all deceit possible: I
deserve
this. In bed with that new woman, you feel your head, and a sensation dangling between your legs, swell. This lasts until morning, when your sensation is the size of a flea and your only possessions are the lies you told to get into bed. You guard those lies with your life, because to admit the truth is to admit how weak you really are.

“You're not old enough to buy this beer,” Cristina said.

“I have a wife and a child. Why can't I have a beer?”

“Don't be such a typical man.”

“The beer's ruined. It got warm waiting in line. Now will you sell it to me?”

Cristina laughed. “Where's your wife?” she asked.

“I lost her,” I said. Cristina smiled and nodded her head. “Have
you
lost something, too?” I asked.

“A fearless brown-skinned man,” she said. “What I wouldn't give to have that back again for a while.” She looked at the warm beer on the conveyor belt. “My icebox doesn't work. Can you fix it?”

We drank warm beer and made love on balmy Sunday mornings when I skipped church and long afternoons when Felicia took Aurora out in her stroller. Cristina's apartment was a young woman's home, full of mystery, thrift, and unblemished promise. We had bedspread picnics on cornflower china purchased with books of Blue Chip stamps. She taught me the names of famous people from a collection of black-and-white photos that hung on the walls in cheap frames, including someone named Louise Brooks whom Cristina modeled her hair on. “These are my saints,” she whispered before we climbed into bed. “I pray to them to get me out of this shitty neighborhood.” It was Cristina's idea for me to try my hand as a busboy or a back waiter in a fancy restaurant, perhaps in Hollywood, she said. “Maybe you'll return Ryan O'Neal's lost wallet for a reward or serve Robert Redford a meal he finds so wonderful he leaves a thousand-dollar tip.”

Then came a pregnancy scare. It was time to go home to my own
family, not start another one. I begged Felicia to take me back, thinking her silence over my blatant adultery meant a brief exile. For me, there was the practical matter of citizenship. Felicia was a citizen and I wasn't. You needed to be married to a citizen for two years before you could apply for residency; we hadn't reached our first anniversary. Felicia wouldn't dream of seeing me, the father of her child, deported, but what a man doesn't understand is that a woman has an infinite capacity for love and generosity no matter how long she's been debased and abused—until she decides she is out of love.