Текст книги "Painted Cities"

Автор книги: Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 11 страниц)

DISTANCE

Chano says he’s never seen the wall open, but I know it’s a lie. It’s one of those things you never pay attention to, it happens so many times, like the sunrise, or a freight train running across your neighborhood. I pay attention when I see the wall open. You see things out there, the horizon, tiny stone islands like miniature castles. “Water-pumping stations,” the professor says. “Not castles. We don’t have castles where we live.”

The professor tells me the wall was first built to keep the Indians out, then the Russians. He throws up his hands. “It’s a relic,” he says. “A piece of machinery left over from an age of fear, fright. Things are different now.” Still, the wall stays closed, except to let the ships in. Those we sit and watch.

We walk along the piers with the professor. He is old and decrepit, so he has to hold on to my shoulder. The others walk ahead. Chano, Sylvia, Suzie. I can hear them talk, sometimes about girls, boys, sometimes about movies. Sometimes they make fun of me, call me an old man. They turn around and giggle. Mostly, though, I pay attention to the professor.

“All the time we used to go up there,” he says, looking to where the pedways used to span over our heads. “We used to fish and swim down here on the docks, then walk up the ramps just to sit. We’d watch the sun travel across the sky. We’d see birds, peregrine falcons, hawks. Sometimes they’d swoop down and pluck a fish from the lake with those huge talons. Ah,” the professor says. “It’s great to see birds in the distance.”

I look to the abutments, the ramps leading to nothing, and try to imagine bridges, pedways, crisscrossing over my head, the view that must have been afforded. All that’s left now are the rebar innards of the reinforced concrete, which bristle from the ends of the abutments like things to hold on to when you’re falling over a cliff. Layers of multi-colored graffiti cover the walls, and from one abutment a lone metal handrail just out of scavengers’ reach dangles and reflects the sun.

I seem to have a memory of looking over the wall. I seem to have a memory of watching the sunrise, seeing the pastel pink-and-blue shades of the horizon. I have a memory of fins in water, dolphins or sharks. And I have a memory of birds gliding, sometimes diving steep, bombing dives, and pulling up large flopping fish, only to lose them as they tried to carry them away.

DAMASCUS

“In Damascus they wear long robes. In Damascus they have white, pointy beards and they all look like the guy from Hills Bros. drinking a big cup of coffee.

“In Damascus they cut off your hand if you steal something. They blind you if you look at another man’s wife. They cut out your tongue if you tell a lie.

“In Damascus there are people with milky gray eyes who can see into the future, and you can sit by them in the marketplace during your lunch break and ask what crimes you will commit.

“In Damascus the fortune-tellers are walled in by carpets, tall, bright carpets that vendors hang on high rods. Everywhere you turn there is a wall of carpet, and it makes you think of flying carpets, like you can pull one down, start it up, and fly away.

“In Damascus the women hide their beauty. If they are married, they wear long black sheets; if they are engaged, they wear light blue; and if they are neither married nor engaged, if they are old maids, they just wear plain white. You never see their faces in Damascus. In Damascus the only things you see on women are their eyes, dark and Chinese-looking, and this is what men fall in love with, eyes. See, this is how Damascus is different.

“And they have camels. In Damascus they have many, many camels. And the camels crowd the marketplace, chewing their gums like old men, like Willy who sells the newspapers on Leavitt Street. And they smoke, oh do they smoke – the people, not the camels – they smoke night and day, like crazy. At any time you can smell the cigarettes, burning, rich and powerful, like a fog, sweet and damp. And they sit in their doorways, the people. They sit beneath their arched doorways that lead into their deep, dark apartments, and they smoke, exhaling thick exhaust into the tiny, twisted streets.

“In Damascus, when the sun goes down, all you see are shadows. Those buildings with the arched doorways, those that are built tight into each other, those buildings that form the streets, twisting and turning – at night, in Damascus, those buildings become lit from the inside, and crescent-moon-shaped windows, star-shaped windows, cast patterns on the white walls of the buildings across the way. In Damascus at night, no one speaks, and if anyone walks, his footsteps can be heard echoing down the corridors of street, scraping and shuffling. And the streets are so narrow that someone walking miles away can be heard just as clear as someone right around the corner.

“See, this is how it is in Damascus. I know. I have been there.”

SNAKE DANCE

Papo stepped to the DJ. He cocked his arm. He had that flair in his eyes. The same flair I had seen hundreds of times when Papo was drunk and he was about to kick someone’s ass. I held Papo back. I don’t know where I had him, maybe I just pushed back on his chest. I could feel Papo’s arms – that’s it, I had him by one arm. When I pushed back I had his biceps in my hand, in my palm, his long, thin biceps, like Bruce Lee’s biceps, defined, like the contours of the fenders he Bondoed together when we crashed our cars. Papo was a mechanic.

“What are you, a fucking Indian?” Papo said over my shoulder. I took a quick glance behind me, at the DJ, hoping he wouldn’t say anything back. I’d analyzed the situation. I’d anticipated everything. When the DJ showed up, I took a look at him, judged him: Goatee, a little chubby, doesn’t look like he’d start a fight, doesn’t look like he’d back down. He won’t get drunk. I looked at the DJ again, there, later, made eye contact with him, right after Papo asked him if he was a fucking Indian. I saw a smile, a placating smile, a back-down smile, an “I don’t want any trouble” smile, a “But why do you think I’m an Indian?” smile. I wondered the same thing. Where did Papo get that?

“It’s all right, Papo,” I told him.

“But he’s not doing it right.”

“What?” I asked him. I could still feel his biceps. He was still straining. The fibers of his muscle were fine and hard. “He’s not doing what right?”

“ La vibora, the snake dance, he’s supposed to do it right after the dollar dance.”

“It’s all right,” I told Papo.

“No, bro, it’s your wedding. He’s supposed to do the snake dance. Fucking Indian,” he said to the DJ, this time louder. I could hear the clink of beer bottles. Someone was tapping on the side of a glass with a knife, kiss the bride, they were saying. This was a Mexican wedding. I didn’t know where my wife was.

I turned around and looked at the DJ. “It’s okay,” I told him. “Just go on with the dance music.” The DJ nodded.

I gently pushed Papo back toward the tables, toward the bar packed with people I hadn’t seen in years, friends I’d felt obligated to invite, people I could never not love.

“I just want it to be right,” Papo said. It sounded as if he was about to cry. I thought of Papo’s little girl, Crystal, his wife, Bernadette, who’d left him two years before, the cocaine habit that had him running to the restroom every hour, the.25 automatic he kept tucked under the armrest of his Cadillac Brougham.

“I want it to be right for you,” he said.

Papo turned and headed toward the bar. I put my arm around his shoulder.

“It is right, bro,” I told him. “It is right.”

Hours later I was in the banquet hall parking lot saying my last goodbyes. Most of the party guests had left, my in-laws, my father, my uncles. Only Papo was there, in the dim light of the streetlamps, and two other friends, Danny Boy and Mario, friends from many years past. Just to my left, sitting in the passenger seat of the car I had rented, was my wife. I could see her silhouette, the outline of her hair, the white shoulder of her wedding dress. I was anxious to leave, to start my new life.

“Go be fucking married, then,” Papo said. He was smiling, he shook my hand. “Good luck,” Mario said. Danny Boy gave me a hug like I was leaving forever.

“Go be fucking married, then,” Papo said, this time a little louder. “Motherfucker.”

He was standing behind me. I could feel him there. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look.

Danny Boy pulled at Papo’s arm.

“Mother fucker!” Papo said. He stepped toward me.

Mario got in front of Papo.

“Just go, bro,” Danny said.

“ Motherfucker!”

I climbed into the rental car and shut the door. I could smell my wife. All night she had smelled beautiful.

“What was that?” she asked me.

“That was Papo,” I answered.

In the rearview mirror Danny Boy and Mario were struggling to hold Papo back. I turned onto Damen Avenue. The three of them started fighting, there in an empty parking lot, on the South Side of Chicago.

MAXIMILIAN

Iwant to tell you three memories of my cousin Maximilian. Two of them involve his fists.

My cousin was a short man. He was, however, like everyone else on the Mexican side of my family, built like a brick two-flat. Maximilian was heavy and hard. He was a cannonball, the way my grandmother on my mother’s side was a cannonball, the way my uncle Blas was a cannonball. They were all skull, they were impossible to hug, but they were warm-blooded, steaming, like just standing next to them could get you through a winter’s day. My mother was like this. I miss her terribly.

But Max, my cousin, Maximilian, was young. He was sixteen or so when my memories of him first begin. It was at his sister Irene’s cotillion, in the basement of Saint Procopius church on Eighteenth Street and Allport. I don’t know much about the planning. I was eight years old. But I know my sister, Delia, stood up in it. She was a dama, and my cousin on my father’s side, Little David, was her chambelán. They were off doing their own thing, dancing, waltzing, the way they had been practicing for weeks, my sister constantly fitting and refitting her dress, me calling her Miss Piggy because she was chubby and more quedathan the rest of us darkies.

That night I sat with my mother and ate cake and people-watched. My father, done with his shift at the basement door, was at a side table sharing a bottle of Presidente with his friend Moe. My cousin Chefa was dancing with my uncle Bernardo. My aunt Lola was on the floor dancing with her only son, my cousin Maximilian. The music fit the moment, balladas, slow, sentimental. It was all beautiful, all quite nice. Then Stoney showed up.

I am not sure my uncle Blas would’ve allowed any boyfriend of Irene’s to attend the cotillion, but Stoney didn’t have a chance. He had issues, most noticeably the tattoo on his neck that said ALMIGHTY AMBROSE.

No one had been at the door, not at that moment. So Stoney and his four partners simply burst into the basement. They had to be high. My father and Moe walked up to the four. There was wrestling, chair throwing, screaming. There were two gunshots, pops that sang off the basement’s polished cement floor, the massive concrete support columns. Then the police showed up. Arrests were made – three paddy wagons’ worth. But the moment I remember most, right before my mother pulled me under the table, was catching sight of my cousin Max, on his knees, his fist jackhammering over and over straight down into Stoney’s limp head. I couldn’t see Maximilian’s face, his head was bowed, but I could see his thick shoulders, his biceps bulging within his dress shirt. Behind him my aunt Lola was pulling at Irene, my uncle Bernardo was reaching for Max, and my father had one of the gangbangers up by his collar. All of them were staring down at Max. All of them had looks of horror.

Maximilian ruptured something. His arm and fist were in a cast for months. I don’t know what got worked out, but Irene kept seeing Stoney. Eventually they married. Stoney never had a cross word for Max, not that I ever heard.

Memory number two happens a few years later, when I was eleven. By that time Maximilian was eighteen and he had just graduated from Juarez High School. He had joined the army and we were having a going-away party for him in the yard behind his father’s house.

I had lived in this house, back when my parents were split up over my father’s cheating. I had spent nearly a whole summer there, holidays included. I had my own bed, the bunk over Maximilian’s. Where other houses were hard to find, my uncle Blas’s house was simply forgotten. The Kennedy Expressway rumbled within yards of the back door. Out the front door the South Branch of the Chicago River turned. There were neighbors to either side, but still my uncle’s house was lost.

His party was a year or two after I had moved back in with my parents, and though I had seen Maximilian nearly every weekend since I’d left his house, at the party he seemed aged. He had grown a thin mustache. He had on shorts and a Dago-T. His muscles looked thicker than usual. His skin was dark, worn even.

Maximilian was never a big talker. But as the afternoon progressed and he continued to draw from the keg, he spoke more freely, eventually calling out my name like I was a friend of his from the street. “Jes-se!” he would say. “I love you, bro.” And then he would start laughing.

Late into the party, the adults were drunk and I remember Maximilian putting his head under the tapper and chugging beer right from the keg. He was smiling, laughing as he gulped. He came up choking, spitting suds. He stumbled around the gravel yard trying to catch his footing. He seemed momentarily blind, lost in his spinning head. We were laughing. My mother had her arm around my shoulder. My father had his arm around my uncle. When Maximilian fell on his ass we doubled over in laughter. We were roaring. And at that moment we seemed really together, my father, my mother, my aunt and uncle, my cousins Irene and Chefa, Stoney, my sister, even my cousin’s dog, Princess. For a moment there, we were a real family. Behind us traffic droned on the Kennedy Expressway. And just out the front door, the South Branch flowed.

My last memory of Maximilian is from a couple of years later. I was thirteen. Maximilian was in his twenties. He was home from Germany, on leave because his mother, my aunt Lola, had died.

As sick as my aunt Lola had been, her death was mostly unexpected. In just a few weeks her cancer had gone from manageable to terminal. The last time I saw her was two days before she died. She was back in St. Luke’s Hospital and when I said hi to her she could only look in my eyes. Her look scared me. It was the kind of look that needed a voice to explain itself.

My aunt Lola was a generous woman. The months I lived with her she always had a steaming bowl of frijoleswaiting for me when I came home from school, two or three thick tortillas waiting to be dipped and sucked from like summertime paletas. My aunt’s most remarkable feature was her bridge, which she would pull from her mouth and set on the armrest of her La-Z-Boy as she sat and watched TV. When she dozed off I would try to put the bridge in my own mouth. As my months of living there wore on, I used to steal her bridge and move it to some other location, in her bedroom or on the kitchen table, then wait for her to wake and be forced to speak, her pink gums showing through her fingers as she asked if anyone knew where her bridge was.

Her wake was held at Zefran Funeral Home, on Damen and Twenty-Second Street. There were masses of people there, cousins I didn’t know I had. Though I loved my aunt, and loved the frijolesshe used to leave me, at the wake I felt no need to cry. Flowers were placed on her chest, blessings delivered to her open casket. At one point a boy standing next to me, a boy who had been introduced to me as my cousin, began to cry. He turned and gave me a hug. I wasn’t sure what to do. So I patted his back. “I know,” I said to him. “She was a good woman.” The kid raised his head and looked at me like I was at the wrong wake.

After the viewing we packed into cars and lined up for the funeral. The procession was long, too long for our family. My uncle and his daughters were behind the hearse, riding with my father in his black, windowless work van. A few cars back, Maximilian and I rode alone in his Chevy Celebrity.

We were silent as we drove down Pershing Road. Maximilian had placed our orange FUNERAL sticker on the top of the passenger-side windshield, and for me it was like a sun visor even though the day was overcast. The tick of the Celebrity’s hazards matched our engine speed, lagging as we braked, then racing when we sped to catch the car in front.

At Oak Park Avenue we slowed for a red light. Our hazards were on. Our orange sticker displayed. We followed the car in front of us into the intersection. Suddenly a red pickup took off from the crosswalk. The pickup broke through the procession just in front of us, then continued south down Oak Park. There was a short pause. Long enough for me to consider what an asshole the pickup driver was for cutting off the procession. We were on our way to a funeral. I had that much in my head when Max threw the Celebrity into a left-hand turn so sharp my temple knocked against the passenger-side window.

We chased the truck for three blocks, the Celebrity’s hazards clacking so loud they seemed about to explode right through the dash. Finally the driver of the pickup pulled to the curb.

Through the rear window of the cab I could see the man jerking around. He looked out of his mind, yelling to himself. As we pulled up behind him his shoulder heaved and he threw the truck into park. His taillights flashed to full red. He kicked open his door.

We were in front of a bank parking lot. It was the middle of the day but the lot was empty. Black screens covered the plateglass windows as if the bank was closed for good. Trees lined the street. I felt a million miles from home.

The truck driver slammed his door shut as Maximilian was stepping out of the Celebrity. The truck driver yelled something. He was a big man, white, potbellied. He was wearing a flannel shirt. His neck seemed like one big chin and his jeans seemed too tight at the waist. Each one of his steps had a little bounce to it, as if he had learned to walk on his toes.

The man continued yelling as Max moved forward. Maximilian didn’t say a word. He simply continued to close in, his feet looking small, his shoulders broad, his tight waist neat with his tucked-in dress shirt. His tie was draped over his shoulder.

As Max got within arm’s reach the truck driver raised his hand and pointed to my cousin’s face. The man’s mouth was still going. He was looking down at my cousin. He was giving him a deep, mean look, eyebrows pointed in, teeth showing as he screamed. I think he thought Max was going to stop and start yelling himself. Max simply kept on moving, and just as the man was ending a word, drawing his mouth shut, my cousin lit into him with a flush right hand that sent the man staggering backward. Even in the car, over the now practically dead heartbeat of the blinkers, I heard something snap, the man’s jaw, his neck, my cousin’s wrist. The man fell to a seated position and Maximilian bent over him and hit him three more times, solid, deep-looking punches to the left side of the man’s face. The man fell sideways and was out cold. His short arm flopped over his thick side and landed palm up on the street. Maximilian turned and started walking back to the car. His face was red now, swollen. He was crying. He looked like he wanted to yell, to scream, but couldn’t get anything out. The Celebrity’s hazards had stopped dead. The car had died. I wished we were back in the procession. I wished there was somewhere, anywhere, for us to go.

GOD’S COUNTRY

Ask him where he learned to do that stuff and he’d say, “Sonora, God’s Country.” Chuey had never been to Sonora. He spent every day of his life right there in Pilsen, just like the rest of us, playing ball, jumping the freights. We thought maybe he’d resurrected some witch doctor’s memories of being in Sonora. I mean, he resurrected everything else: dead cats, dogs, finally a human being. So when people asked us how he learned to do the things he did, we said, “He learned it all in Sonora, God’s Country.” There seemed to be no other explanation.

He was fifteen when he found out he had the gift of life. It was one of those mornings we skipped school. It was early, right around the end of first period.

“Poor fucks,” Alfonzo said, looking to the high school, the kids transferring classes. “I’d be in algebra right now.”

“English,” I said.

“I’d be in gym,” Marcus said.

“ Booo,” me and Alfonzo answered.

“No, man,” Marcus said. “Gym this early is a drag. All sweaty afterward. All sweaty for Brenda Gamino second period.”

“Damn,” Alfonzo said. “You have Brenda Gamino in a class?”

“Second period,” Marcus said. “History.” He pulled out the joint he had in the inside pocket of his leather. We were standing in front of the Pilsen YMCA, just across the street from Juarez High School.

“We’re going to get busted,” Alfonzo said. He said this as a matter of fact. That year, our freshman year, we’d been caught skipping three times by December. The limit was five unexcused absences per year. Our parents had been called. We’d been reasoned with by Mr. Sanchez, the school social worker: “So if you get expelled, what kind of job are you going to get?” We didn’t know. We didn’t care. The only thing that seemed to matter was that the thought of school made us literally, physically ill.

Marcus pulled out his tiny Bic lighter. He lit the joint and took a deep, early-morning drag. He passed the joint to Chuey, who hadn’t said a word all morning. Marcus exhaled.

“Want to walk to Speedy’s?” he asked.

Collectively, we began to move.

It was cold out that day. Alfonzo and I had on our hooded sweatshirts. Marcus had on his black leather. Chuey had on that brown, crusty leather jacket he always wore, the same one he had worn all summer. An heirloomhe had called it that first day he showed up with it on. “It was my great-grandfather’s.”

“Looks like it,” Alfonzo had said.

“The fuck’s an heirloom?” Marcus asked.

“Something special,” Chuey said.

For weeks after that everything was an heirloom, a quarter someone had for a video game, a last piece of gum, a last cigarette in a pack. Some people called them “luckies.” We called them heirlooms. “I only got one left, that’s my heirloom,” we’d say. Chuey just continued to wear the jacket.

We walked down Twenty-First Place. The street was empty. All the factory workers had left for work, all the cleaning ladies, the secretaries, had taken their L’s downtown. Twenty-First Place was the only street in our neighborhood that had any trees, tall, full trees that lined the sidewalk for exactly two blocks. On summer days Twenty-First Place smelled good, fresh; birds sang and fluttered in the branches. Out of habit, on winter days we stuck to Twenty-First Place as well, even though by that time the birds were gone, and Twenty-First Place was just like any other street, cold and gray.

We kept our hands stuffed deep in our pockets, reaching out only to toke and pass the reefer. As we neared the corner of Paulina Street a beat-up white Cadillac pulled around the corner. The car jerked to a stop, seesawing in the middle of the intersection. Heavy bass rattled the trunk lid. The four of us stood still, ready to bolt down a gangway, jump fences. At the rear window a hand came up and rubbed out a hole in the steamed-over glass. Someone peered through, directly at us. Then the hand came up again, this time wiping with a blue piece of sleeve. The person looked through. We saw the face, dark, thick eyebrows, wide, flat nose. The person smiled, then held up the Almighty Ambrose hand sign. Then the car took off, tires screeching, tailpipe sparking as it knocked against the uneven street.

“Capone,” Marcus said.

“I know,” Alfonzo said. We all knew. Capone was someone we could recognize from a block away. Pilsen seemed like it would be a better place if he’d never been born.

Capone was an addict. He did everything: coke, heroin, happy stick. His favorite pastime was cornering kids in gangways. “What you be about?” he’d demand, a crazy, mindless look in his eyes. “ Am-brose Love,” the kids would stammer out. They all knew the routine. Capone liked to bum cigarettes. When taking one he’d say, “Let me get a few more for later.” If you protested he’d say, “Want to fight about it?”

One time he asked Chuey for a cigarette and Chuey said no. Capone punched him so hard in the chest that Chuey lost his breath. There should’ve been payback. Chuey’s family were all Two-Ones. Chuey could’ve said something and all four of his brothers, a few uncles even, would’ve been out hunting for Capone – and they would’ve found him. But Chuey never said anything. “It doesn’t matter,” Chuey said. “It’s not like that fucker will ever learn.” Chuey was right. Once or twice a year Capone was beaten, bloodshot eyes, cut-up face, casts over broken limbs; even looking like that he’d be out gangbanging. Still, it would have been sweet to know Capone’s ass had been kicked yet again, and that Chuey’s brothers had done it.

“Just remember that car,” I said.

The Cadillac peeled off onto Twenty-Second Street.

“If they come back around we’ll meet up behind the Farmfoods.”

We continued walking.

We passed the old funeral parlor, the large, arched doorway that was once the entrance to a barn at the back of the building. We passed beneath the stone horse’s head, the words FUNERAL PARLOUR embedded in color tiles in the arch. Now the building was just another place to live, like so many other storefronts in our neighborhood, boarded-up plateglass windows, marquees covered with plywood, everything washed in a deep maroon as if to match the dirty brick of the neighborhood.

We turned north and headed toward Speedy’s corner store. Our joint was running short. Chuey passed what was left to Marcus. “We should get some more weed,” Marcus said. He pinched the lit joint and brought it to his puckered lips.

Chuey took a breath.

“I can bring things back to life,” he said.

I turned.

“What did you say?”

“I can bring things back to life,” he said again. “I did it this morning, a dead bird.”

Chuey was staring down at the sidewalk. His hair hung low over his brow. His arms were locked at the elbows, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

Alfonzo and Marcus turned.

Marcus was trying to position the roach in his fingers.

“You can bring things back to life?” Alfonzo said.

“Yeah,” Chuey said. He lifted his head. He gave a jerk to get the hair out of his eyes. “I don’t know how. It was an accident. I was walking by Wolcott and I saw this thing in the alley. It was green, a parrot, with a red beak.”

“We don’t have parrots,” Marcus said. “Too cold.”

“I know,” Chuey said. “That’s why it was weird. Then I went over there and just touched it. And the thing woke up and flew away.”

I wondered if Chuey had been smoking earlier. He did that sometimes, got high alone. I looked at his eyes. They weren’t glossy like they usually were when he smoked too much. They weren’t lit-up either, as if he might be telling a joke. But then Chuey wasn’t one to tell jokes. Generally what he said was serious – even if it was funny, like a story, it was always true.

“Maybe the bird just got knocked out,” I said. “They fly into windows and shit.”

Chuey shrugged.

“Why would you touch a dead bird, anyway?” Alfonzo asked.

“For real,” Marcus said. “That’s fucking gross.”

“Show us where you found it,” I said. And Chuey took the lead. He headed down Cullerton Avenue. We were high. At that point we really started to be high. For some reason I remember snow falling, but I don’t remember any snow being on the ground. In any case, things suddenly seemed to be happening, more things than I could register, and all I recall about the rest of that day is the burnt-orange leather of Chuey’s jacket, and Chuey talking fast and pointing things out in the middle of an alley.

Chuey was a hippie; at least that’s what everybody in school called him. I’m not sure they even knew what a hippie was. Chuey was more a rocker. He’d introduced us to Rush, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin. Chuey gave us our first taste of reefer, back in the seventh grade – he’d stolen it from his cousin Rom. Even then everyone called Chuey a hippy, wecalled Chuey a hippy, but back then it was because of those crazy shoes he wore. He didn’t start wearing that funky leather jacket until high school.

White-boy shoes, that’s what they were. Black, brushed suede. None of us would’ve dared to wear such things. They were Herman Munster boots, and if it wasn’t for Chuey’s long brown hair we might have called him Herman Munster instead of Hippie. Herman Munster or White Boy, one of the two. Chuey never tied his boots. They looked like they would get left behind if he ever had to run anywhere. Of course, Chuey never ran anywhere. Which was one of the reasons we hung around with him. We never ran anywhere, either, spending our lunches instead on the Thomas Cooper Elementary School steps, trying to look cool for the girls, trying to believe we were anywhere but school, trying to ignore the fact that a school bell dictated our lives so completely.

By high school, though, Chuey had adopted at least part of the Pilsen uniform: black Converse All Stars. He still wore straight-leg jeans. The rest of us wore Bogarts – baggy pants with sixteen pleats cascading from the waist, tight cuffs at the ankles. It was strange that Chuey didn’t adopt more of the neighborhood style. He had grown up in Pilsen, just like the rest of us. In fact, Chuey’s roots were deeper in the neighborhood than any of ours were. Our parents had come straight from Mexico. Marcus, Alfonzo, and I were first-generations. Our parents worked in factories, didn’t speak English. Chuey’s parents were gangbangers, old gangbangers, sons and daughters of immigrants. Chuey seemed a step ahead. Like if we ever had kids they’d come out like Chuey, a little more worldly than we ever were. We were jealous of Chuey for who his family was, people who had tattoos, people who had served time in jail, men with names like Hustler, Shyster, Red, women named Chachie or Birdie. These were the people a child growing up in Pilsen heard stories about, people who gave someone from our neighborhood life, history. Chuey never seemed to care. He didn’t walk with pimp. He didn’t magic-marker gang initials on the white soles of his Converses. He didn’t tattoo things on the backs of his hands. Rather, Chuey just seemed to be drifting.