Always Running (16 page)

I kissed her on the neck.

I went to the dining table where Gloria sat, stuffing her mouth with food. I pulled out a chair and looked down at a plate resting on a tablecloth.

“Hey—do these eggs have anything to do with me?”

“It is the violent poetry of the times, written in the blood of the youth.”—Linda Mendoza, Chicana poet from South San Gabriel

T
HE ANIMAL TRIBE PRACTICALLY
died with the death of one of its last presidents: John Fabela.

Seventeen-year-old John—whose girlfriend was pregnant with his infant daughter—succumbed to a shotgun blast in his living room as his younger brother watched from beneath a bed in an adjacent room. About 13 members of the Sons of Soul car club, made up of recent Mexican immigrants living in East L.A., were rounded up by the police.

By then Joaquín López was already in prison for a heroin beef. Many of the older Tribe members were also incarcerated or hardcore
tecatos.
As the Tribe’s influence diminished, Lomas initiated Tribe members into the various sets based on age groupings: the Pequeños, Chicos, the Dukes and the Locos. Lomas was reorganizing and recruiting. No longer could one claim Lomas just by being there. Chicharrón invited me to get in.

“They beat on you for about three minutes—that’s all,” Chicharrón urged. “You get a busted lip. So what? It’s worth it.”

So later I decided to go to a party in the Hills, fully aware I would join a Lomas set. Like most barrio parties, it started without any hassle.
Vatos
and
rucas
filled every corner in the small house; some ventured outside, smoking or drinking. The house belonged to Nina, this extremely pretty girl whom everyone respected. Nina’s mother shuffled in the kitchen, making tacos from large pots of meat and beans simmering on low flames.

The dudes were polite; dignified.
Señora
this,
Señora
that. You couldn’t imagine how much danger hung on their every breath.

As the night wore on, the feel of the place transformed. The air was rife with anticipation. Talk became increasingly louder. Faces peeled into hardness. The music played oldies we all knew by heart, and
gritos
punctuated key verses. Fists smashed against the walls. Just as the food simmered to a boil, the room also bubbled and churned. Weed, pills and hard liquor passed from hand to hand. Outside, behind the house, a row of dudes shot up heroin. In the glow of the back porch light, they whispered a sea of shorn sentences.

A crew of older, mean-eyed
vatos
arrived and the younger guys stacked behind them. Nina’s mother showed concern. She pulled Nina into the kitchen; I could see her talking severely to her daughter.

I didn’t know these dudes. They were
veteranos
and looked up to by the homeys. They had just come out of the joint—mostly Tracy, Chino or Youth Training School, known as YTS, a prison for youth offenders. Chicharrón pressed his face close to my ear and told me their names: Ragman, Peaches, Natividad, Topo … and the small, muscular one with a mustache down the sides of his mouth was called Puppet.

I then recalled some of their reputations: Natividad, for example, had been shot five times and stabbed 40 times—and still lived! Peaches once used a machine gun against some dudes in a shoot-out. And Puppet had been convicted of murder at the age of 16.

“Who wants in?” Puppet later announced to a row of dark, teenaged male faces in front of him. Chicharrón whispered something in Puppet’s ear. Puppet casually looked toward me. They designated me the first to get jumped.

Topo walked up to me. He was stout, dark and heavily tattooed. He placed his arm around me and then we marched toward the driveway. Chicharrón managed to yell: “Protect your head.”

I assumed when I got to the driveway, a handful of dudes would encircle me, provide me a signal of sorts, and begin the initiation. Instead, without warning, Topo swung a calloused fist at my face. I went down fast. Then an onslaught of steel-toed shoes and heels rained on my body. I thought I would be able to swing and at least hit one or two—but no way! Then I remembered Chicharrón’s admonition. I pulled my arms over my head, covered it the best I could while the kicks seemed to stuff me beneath a parked car.

Finally the barrage stopped. But I didn’t know exactly when. I felt hands pull me up. I looked back at everyone standing around the driveway. My right eye was almost closed. My lip felt like it stuck out a mile. My sides ached. But I had done well.

Hands came at me to congratulate. There were pats on the back. Chicharrón embraced me, causing me to wince. I was a Lomas
loco
now. Then a homegirl came up and gave me a big kiss on my inflamed lip; I wished I could have tasted it. Then other homegirls did the same. It didn’t seem half-bad, this initiation. Later they invited me to pounce on the other dudes who were also jumped in, but I passed.

As the night wore on, Puppet, Ragman and Nat had the initiates pile into a pickup truck. I was already quite plastered but somehow still standing. Puppet drove the truck toward Sangra. Elation rasped in our throats.

“Fuck Sangra,” one of the new dudes chimed in, and other voices followed the sentiment.

We came across a cherried-out 1952 DeSoto, with pinstripes and a metal-flake exterior. Puppet pulled the truck up to the side of it. There were four dudes inside drinking and listening to cassette tapes. We didn’t know if they were Sangra or what. We followed Ragman as he approached the dudes. One of them emerged from the passenger side. He looked like a nice-enough fellow.

“Hey, we don’t want no trouble,” he said.

I knew they weren’t Sangra. They looked like hard-working recreational lowriders out for a spin. But Ragman wouldn’t have it. He punched the dude down. A couple of other guys came out of the car, and they too tried to salvage the night, tried to appeal for calm.

“Listen, man, how about a beer,” one of them offered.

Nat grabbed his neck from behind and pulled him to the ground, then beat on him. Ragman looked at the other guys who were clearly scared.

“Who don’ like it?” he demanded. “Who don’ like it … you?”

Ragman hit another guy. By then the dudes in the truck had climbed out and bashed in the car, breaking windows and crunching in metal with tire irons and two-by-fours which had been piled in the back of the truck. One dude tried to run off, but somebody chased him down with a wine bottle and struck him on the head. The dude fell down and I saw the wine bottle keep coming down on him, as if it was supposed to break, but it wouldn’t.

The driver of the DeSoto tried to pull out, but somebody threw a brick at his head. For a long time, I observed the beatings as if I were outside of everything, as if a moth of tainted wings floating over the steamed sidewalk. Then I felt a hand pull at my arm and I sluggishly turned toward it. Puppet looked squarely into my one opened eye. He had a rusty screwdriver in his other hand.

“Do it, man,” he said. Simply that.

I clasped the screwdriver and walked up to the beaten driver in the seat whose head was bleeding. The dude looked at me through glazed eyes, horrified at my presence, at what I held in my hand, at this twisted, swollen face that came at him through the dark.
Do it!
were the last words I recalled before I plunged the screwdriver into flesh and bone, and the sky screamed.

Within a year, the local headlines’ business boomed:

“Gang Violence: Teen Wars Bring Death To Two”

“Valley Teen Gangs Flourish”

“Three Wounded By School Intruders”

“Youth, 17, Murdered: Victim Shot In Chest”

“Five Hurt, Two Arrested In Rosemead Party Crash”

“Three Still Held In Gang Deaths”

“San Gabriel Teenager Shot In The Face”

“Rosemead Youth Gunned Down: Murder Said Gang Related”

“Shooting Victim Critical”

“Fired From Car: Four Wounded By Gunshots”

“Rosemead Boy, 17, Shot By Deputy, Dies”

“Deputy Escapes Sniper”

“Slaying Suspect Bound Over To Superior Court”

“Sheriff Moving On Gangs”

Committees, task forces, community centers, born-again storefront churches and behavior guidance counselors proliferated in response. Rosemead’s South Side, South San Gabriel and San Gabriel’s barrio became targets of programs, monies and studies. Local reporters drove along with law enforcement officers through Lomas and Sangra to get “the feel” of these misaligned and misunderstood communities. Gang members were interviewed and news photographers worked the Hills to depict the poverty—usually of children playing in mud next to rusted cars, trash cans and pregnant mothers peering out of makeshift sheds.

La Casa Community Center served the needs of Sangra; Bienvenidos Community Center and its John Fabela Youth Center covered Lomas; and the Zapopan Center catered to the southside of Rosemead. The centers offered dropout programs, welfare assistance, federal job placements, teen mother day care and places for young people to hang out.

The people who worked at the centers put in 80-hour weeks, covered weekly funerals and had to enter the doors of domestic conflicts armed with nothing but a prayer. Some were ex-gang members who ventured back to help. Or they were the first wave of minority college students who entered institutions of higher learning through special scholarships and economic opportunity grants.

At La Casa and Zapopan, community activists made the payroll. The triumvirate of community centers began to play a leading role in the struggles which emerged out of the Mexican sections here. Besides the gang killings, there was widespread drug use. Police beatings and killings became prominent. And the battles in the schools for decent education intensified. Because the three centers were dealing with similar crises, their staffs often met together to consult on strategy.

By 1970 I felt disjointed, out of balance, tired of just acting and reacting. I wanted to flirt with depth of mind, to learn more about my world. My society. About what to do. I became drawn to the people who came to work at the community centers; they were learned. Full of ideas and concepts; they were, I realized, similar to my father, this former teacher and biologist, who once labeled all the trees and plants in the backyard so we would know their scientific names.

Amid South San Gabriel’s hottest summer, the Bienvenidos Community Center hired Chente Ramírez. His credentials included a lifetime in the White Fence barrio in East L.A.—known as the oldest “street gang” in the country. But Chente managed to avoid gang involvement, went to school, worked in industry, helped his father with his trucking business and pretty much took care of his mom, six sisters and a brother while his dad traversed the land in a tractor-trailer rig.

Chente, in his late 20s then, had already gone to a university, been a founding member of the United Mexican American Students (UMAS), helped organize the East L.A. school walkouts of 1968, participated in forming MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán) and the Brown Berets. Later still he put together a number of East Los Angeles study groups engaged in revolutionary theory. He was also a martial arts expert.

I had certain yearnings at the time, which a lot of us had, to acquire authority in our own lives in the face of police, joblessness and powerlessness. Las Lomas was our path to that, but I was frustrated because I felt the violence was eating us alive.

Chente impressed me as someone I could learn from. He was calm, but also street enough to go among all those crazy guys and know how to handle himself. He didn’t need to act bad to operate. He could be strong, intelligent, and in control. He was the kind of dude who could get the best from the system—education, karate training—without being a snitch or giving in. I wanted to be able to do this too.

I was in my mid-teens and Chente was about twelve years older. I looked up to him, but not as a big brother. He was someone who could influence me without judging me morally or telling me what to do. He was just there. He listened, and when he knew you were wrong, before he would say anything, he would get you to think.

The cue ball rolled across the tattered green felt and struck an odd-numbered striped ball like a firecracker, the violence sending it twirling into the corner pocket. Smoke curled through the luminance of the fluorescent light hanging by wires over the billiard table. Puppet gazed momentarily at the remaining balls which lay scattered on the playing field as he contemplated the next move. Across from him stood Toots, aware of Puppet’s every gesture. Puppet placed a well-worn piece of chalk and twisted his cue stick into it for several seconds, all the time deducing the trajectory of the cue ball for his next stroke. Next to him in leather blouse and tight denim jeans stood Pila, Puppet’s squeeze.

Puppet’s forearms were a canvas of extremely elaborate, interwoven and delicately-pinned tattoos that danced on skin with
cholo
images, skulls, serpents and women’s faces. On his neck was a stylized rendering of the words
Las Lomas.
At 20 years old, he was a
veterano
and just out of YTS.

Along with a handful of other
pintos—
like Ragman, Peaches, Natividad and Topo—Puppet ruled the ’hood with fear. Soon the
veteranos
took over the John Fabela Youth Center, along with its pool and ping pong tables.

Puppet bent low, closed an eye, and with the other followed the length of the stick, which rested on the skin between his thumb and forefinger, all the way to the cue ball.

“Eight ball in the corner pocket,” he announced, as if he had sawdust in his throat.

He waited, breathing easily, then he pumped the stick, the cue ball sliding toward the side of the table, then back down in an angle and striking the eight ball into another corner pocket. The game belonged to Puppet.

Pila placed her arms around Puppet’s shoulders. Toots pulled out some bills from his pocket as his
jaina,
Lourdes from Mexico, looked hard in Pila’s direction.

“What you looking at,
puta tijuanera?”
Pila responded.